Bullets of Rain

by David J. Schow

  Coffeed and dressed, holding his own against the fury outside, he felt three steps closer to civilized. Blitz refused to do his doggie business outdoors, and under these conditions, Art couldn't blame him. He provided a spread of newspaper in the garage and cleaned up after his buddy, flashing back to the puppy period, and the endless regimen of housebreaking. Then he decided to fill some of the haunted air in the kitchen with music from a boombox formerly shelved in the office. Something by Holst or Mahler; something cosmically weighty.

  Only the gods, seated around their breakfast plinth in Olympus, knew how Price's party was handling the storm this morning.

  It seemed a week since he had actually eaten, even though his steak blowout was still in transit through his GI tract. He assembled a ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat, not accustomed to eating this early in the day. It seemed tasteless, mere fuel, and chewing it was a chore. Time was blurring. The bloc of processed ham still had a mouth-size chunk bitten out of it. Art regarded it as if some stranger had done it. It was messy. He finally sliced away the section to square the stack. Better. He took care not to wolf his snack. Blitz's expression said etiquette did not faze him. He was rewarded with a skinny strip of 98 percent fat-free meat with a bite out of it.

  Art could not help wondering at the current status of all the people he had just met. Twenty-four hours ago, none of it had happened, except for Derek's visit, followed by Suzanne's. Was Dina still holed up in suicidal despondency? Was Suzanne's maniac boyfriend turning a new leaf, even as Suzanne herself was schizzing out? Were there Zebra People aprowl somewhere on the beach right now, as oblivious to the weather as Green Berets, or cliqua on crack? Was Shinya, the little Japanese girl, still on the lookout for her lost date-that-wasn't-a-date? She had seemed so young and open that the thought of her being manipulated by Price caused Art's heart to ache. This was the sort of drama Art had tried to subtract from his life.

  He sipped his extra-strong coffee and let one hand float down to rub Blitz's skull. The dog was sticking close by while the storm was afoot, unsure of the elemental chaos, looking to Art for solace and normalcy. There was an abundance of same-old in this house; Art disliked change. Perhaps that was a problem.

  He considered the world beyond his walls, specifically Price's party, since it was the freshest input. Predators and prey, all in display or retreat, bridging the gulf between what had been "normal'' forty years ago and the modern incarnation of Homo Psychopathical. People fed one another the same lines and suffered the same malfunctions, and Art had witnessed banality and exoticism in equal measure, a jostling crowd brandishing edginess and attitude in order to hide their self-doubts. Images were being shot down, then propped up, then disqualified, as Price deconstructed his guests. It was a passion play repellent in its nakedness, the kind of thing that had forced Art to lock himself into his fortress and ignore his phone, shred his documents, and find more simple humanity in his dog.

  The people at the party house wanted to be nomads, rootless hunter-gatherers. Responsibility was the tough part; it was the thing that had helped Art and Lorelle to marry in a world that had decreed wedlock outmoded. When two people decided to become a couple, the responsibilities piled on. On Derek's one-through-ten scale, a couple had to deal with six, seven, eight, the lovely commitment of "in sickness and health'' advising that, eventually, one partner would have to tend to the death of the other. The willingness to accept this responsibility, Art thought, was a good way to perceive who was special, and who was transient. Another clue was the sensation that you just weren't whole without your partner; you became literally incomplete, and the landscape became a bleaker place to survey. For people to meld in this fashion required time and tolerance, but when such an essential part was removed, the loss was not to be ignored or glossed over. When devices lost critical parts, they ceased to function, so the heartbreak that had incapacitated Art was not so strange. It was easy for people to leave, and often safer-no obligations, no commitment, wipe the slate, back to one. It was wrenching enough, when you left them. It was intolerable when they were torn out of you.

  The swing of the weather did not become important until you stuck in one place.

  It occurred to Art that he was just elaborately restating the tenets of the note he had discovered on the beach. I heel tom between the things I heel I should do, it read, versus the things I know I must do. The inadequate nourishment in his gut did a queasy Immelmann turn as the identity of the note's long-lost author suggested itself. Art had paper of this grade in the office. All manner of inks, pens, nibs. I'd very beware of all the ways in which love can become a lie. Wasn't that was a good, all-purpose warning against the things that had happened once he had dared to leave his home and take a chance on Price's party?

  He tried to pace his breathing, not ready to admit that he might have written this, and tossed it into the sea. A page of his makeup, torn out and discarded, relegated to the elements; a cunning edit of his own personality, shunned… but determined to come back to him all the same, therefore, undeniable. True fact overwhelmed willful ignorance the way paper wrapped stone in rock-paper-scissors.

  In an extreme structural crisis, the vent network on top of Art's house could be louvered to deflect the wind dynamically so as to actually hold the building down rather than batter against it. That was another backstop advantage of his basic plan, not yet required, because everything seemed to be nominal. When he peered out through one of the horizontal shutter slits, all he could see was rain blur against the Plexiglas, which pulsed subtly to accommodate the morphing flow of pressure. His revolutionary triangular pane design caused the emplacement to function like a snake's shifting, overlapping scalework. Presumably the superstructure would coast through an earthquake just as adroitly; Art wondered if and when that test might come.

  Nice, in a tilted way, it would be to have the high-strung presence of that guy Luther around, if just to shoot the shit about guns and have another voice to react to. Art had done more talking to strangers in the last day than he had spent across the previous month.

  He had slept with a loaded gun on his night table-the one he had been positive was in the Jeep, but turned out to be in the gun safe all along. Now it seemed paranoid and stupid. Unbidden, the joke rose-the one about the sleepyhead who keeps a revolver next to his bedside phone. When the phone rings, he picks up the gun and blows his brains out. Hello? Bang.

  Sitting on the bed, he thought about unloading the weapon and checking it unnecessarily. Pointless busywork, that-another practice to fuel the mechanism of denial. When he spotted Lorelle's Egyptian box nearby, he remembered the capsule inside, the drug variously referenced as "party favors" (by Suzanne) and "house mix" (by Price). He dissected it on the granite countertop in the kitchen.

  He suspected the white, plastery powder to be coke, but his palate did not recognize the sting. It contained black flecks, like pepper polluting salt, at a ratio of about one to twenty. The particles were not greasy, like hashish, or clotted like dark heroin. They were inscrutably enigmatic. If Art pondered them long enough, he'd feel mocked. Or he could just swallow it and see what happened. What harm? Most of the people at the party had downed them, according to Price's manner about the dose he'd termed a "mild accelerator." On the other hand, Suzanne had taken them, and Art still could not figure out what had gone wrong with her yesterday.

  Art decided he could probably use a mild accelerator today.

  Impulsively, he scooped the grains together and dumped them into his mouth, where they lay on his tongue like sea salt, mildly acidic. He washed them down with coffee and they burned all the way to his stomach.

  "What the fuck," he told Blitz. "If I get obnoxious, you have permission to bite me." He felt a cheesy thrill, as though he was a teenager preparing crash space for an acid trip. "It's not like we have anything else to do right now."

  There was no rush, no metabolic shift, no plunging vertigo, no impact jolt at all. Just a fulminating undertow that made him thirsty a
nd sent him to the fridge for seltzer. His vision and balance were fine. He realized that the grandest gag of all would have been for Price to supply a talked-up placebo to his suggestible guests-something that would excuse them from the responsibility of being even more suggestible, when Price started talking. Art sat for several minutes watching the clock, letting his blood cycle. Nothing strange happened.

  On calm days it was possible to walk far out on the jetty of tombstones, near the Sundial dish, and peer into the deeper parts of the ocean. The jetty terminated about where the sand shelf began to drop away beneath the water; under the right conditions, land creatures could stand dry and look down into a murky world of sea life. Presumably, the life-forms down there peered up at you at the same time, enjoying the inverted fishbowl effect. The microwave dish always loomed solid, its immobile tonnage like some Aztec relic, never moving when you looked at it, though you always had the sense it was abuzz with data, sending and receiving, coordinating satellites or tracking missile platforms or zeroing in on some space station. Then, when you were distracted, and looked back after looking away, you'd find the dish had tilted, sometimes so indistinctly that the sight nagged at you, insisted you were seeing things. From this vantage, on clear nights, you could watch the clarion lights of approaching planes, northbound, stacking up for landing patterns at San Francisco International. The days were often calm but rarely clear. Too moist, this far north.

  The burn had nested in Art's stomach, reminiscent of a double shot of liquor. Apart from craving an antacid, he noticed no change in the room, the walls, the colors, or the spider-headed tittle men coming out of the walls-just kidding.

  He still had his eye on the sweep of the clock's second hand when Blitz started barking. It was ten-fifteen in the morning.

  "Oh, what is it?" He teased the dog. "You're gonna get all jiggy now? You think you hear something? You're just seeing a doggie mirage. You're seeing a gigantic Monster Dog approaching out of the ocean. Dogzilla is coming, and boy, is he pissed."

  It stopped being fun. This was Blitz's intruder bark, for certain, and Art's hand sought his pistol while his ears tried to pierce the cacophony of the storm.

  You are completely in control, he told himself. You are ready for anything. That was the whole point, wasn't it?

  Then the alarms tripped as somebody drove a car through his locked garage door, making the day more interesting in a big rush. The battering-ram impact shook the whole house.

  It was logical, in a skewed, Bizarro-World way. Art had protected himself with dead bolts, alarms, shutters, fail-safe systems, armament, supplies, and a floor plan intended to defy the fury outside. He was inside, not coming out. Anything that happened had to come to him. At first crash, his assumption was that the northeast corner of the house had collapsed due to the storm, but standing in the kitchen, the garage a single secure door away, above and past the hellish buffet of wind and bulleting rain, he could hear a big-block car engine strain to reach high revs, then die all at once.

  Art had bypassed the house's few security cameras to save the batteries, and the little screen matrix for observing zones in sequence was powered down anyway. Screw it; he had a backup-a wide-angle peephole port in the garage door. The glare of the lights in there was harsh, and something black and hugely indistinct was shoved near enough to the obverse of the door to cause a large cataract of black on the lower left of the field. Art could perceive everything else with clarity.

  The prow of a large black car was jutting through the lower right side of the garage door. The strutted metal of the door was peeled back like foil. Miraculously, the heavy-duty door track and horizontally shot bolts had withstood getting rammed; Art guessed an impact speed of twenty-five miles an hour, practically pokey. Factoring in a stranger not used to the convolutions of the drive, the slick surface, and the current conditions, twenty-five per was probably about the best that could be mustered. Automobile industry impact tests were carried out at that speed. Baby seats and airbags and seat mounts were approved for hitting cinderblock walls at that speed. The velocity had been good enough to punch a corner out of the garage door and rear-end the Jeep, shoving it diagonally to scrape the Jag's dusty finish, jostling the fancier car into the mobile tool rack, scattering the tools, its right headlamp denting the doors for the generator mount. The panoramic peephole view was partially blocked by the broadside of the Jeep. When Art squinted to figure out what was what, he saw the pilot-side door of the intruder car open. A large man rose from the car. The door was so long that it chocked with a squeal against the garage frame and the man was forced to step over it. The window had burst from the collision and pieces of it glittered like quartz in the hot light from the floods. The man had a baseball bat.

  No worries, as Art had said once or twice before. The house door had a cross-braced aluminum core, like a webwork of little girders, and the hinges were on the inside of the sandwich. The frame into which it was mounted was completely unbreachable. The only way anything was coming through that door would be if Art opened it. The instant he saw the ballbat, and perceived the intended threat, Art opened the garage door.

  Because: He was calm. The person who had just landed was not. He was seething with violent intent and brandishing a club, ready to yell and bash. Art already had a gun in his hand, feeling that if this was more blowback from Price's party, what was about to happen lacked even the thrill of a new experience. He could clip this one if he misbehaved. Art opened the door because he was utterly, almost uncannily at ease with whatever the storm decided to toss at him today. He wanted to unplug the Little Leaguer in the garage before the guy realized there were useful tools sitting right in front of him, or perhaps damaged the generator with his Louisville Slugger. He was similarly expecting to power his way into the house. Art had surprise and distance to his advantage. Reach out and touch someone, hard enough to knock them down. That's what guns were for. That's what he had always been told.

  He didn't say a word. Banging back was sufficient to catch the attention of the intruder. The large man in the water-speckled leather jacket cut loose a long, vowel-rich howl and tried to charge with the bat, but the Jeep blocked his trajectory. Art sniffed, and squeezed off rock steady. The hardball round caught the man in the right biceps and spun him as if he'd run full speed into a fence post. He dropped the bat and jackknifed across the hood of his own car.

  He slid, then stuck halfway to the floor, dangling. As Art picked his way across the garage, he could hear the man making tiny gasping noises, hyperventilating.

  There-Art had just shot another human being with a gun. Rubicon crossed. Lorelle's arguments decomposed to hash. The difference between talking and doing, demonstrated. A threat handily abated. No need for a pump-up of anger, a trade of insults, or a stairstep series of escalating warnings. Just open the door and shoot the guy. Hello? Bang. Done deal. At last.

  Art's heart was thudding triple time and his neck felt hot and prickly. His hands were sweating.

  The car was the black Buick Riviera Art had noticed parked at Price's. The driver was Bryan, the Bry-Guy. A nasty triangular curl of sundered metal from the garage door had impaled one of his sculpted pecs, and he hung bleeding like a hooked fish. The gunshot had caused plaster dust to sift down from the ceiling. There was no need for another round; Bryan 's hitting arm was thoroughly wrecked.

  As unexpectedly as love at first sight, Art's anger grew a full hard-on. "You dumb piece of shit," he said, grabbing Bryan 's good arm to flip him over. The spear of metal ripped free and Bryan howled again, this time for real, as his prospects turned to cowflop and he fell, gracelessly, onto his face.

  "Suhn… of a… bitch…"

  Kick him in the stomach to shut him up, Art's feverish new attitude suggested. That worked pretty well, too.

  Bryan woofed and curled, trying to go down fighting, failing.

  What was with this egregious, machismo programming? This strut and preen, these bad-motherfucker muscles and hairy-armpit jerkoff had bee
n obsolete a thousand years ago, and counted for nothing when one was beaten without a fight.

  Helpless before Art was a caricature of every cliched masculine trait he loathed. Bryan attempted to hoist himself using his left arm. Art pegged him in the ribs with another kick and dumped him onto his back. Bryan tried to contract, then swooned.

  This felt sort of… good.

  When Bryan 's pain yoked him back to consciousness, his head dipped as though he was fighting off a serious nod. He gradually registered the duct tape securing his wrists to a bolt-anchored rack. When he perceived the plastic sheeting spread around and beneath him, panic zipped to and fro in his eyes, and Art was glad to see it.

  "Pretty embarrassing, isn't it, tough guy?"

  There was blood on Bryan 's mouth, from where he'd bitten through his tongue. "My arm," he managed, through clenched teeth.

  "What about my garage?" said Art, leaning in, placing the muzzle of the Heckler-Koch between Bryan 's eyebrows. "You know what a rolling door like that coats? No, of course you wouldn't. You ever have to pay for anything, you fucking imbecile?"

  During Bryan 's unscheduled nap, Art had backed out the Buick and whanged the garage door with a rubber mallet until the lower bolt could be roughhoused into the slot. If the bolt was drawn, the door edge would explode loose like a catapult. The car was crippled, the radiator trash-compacted into the engine and frothing coolant; after wheezing six feet in reverse, the motor shuddered, died, and would not restart. Then, methodically, Art had returned to the house, reloaded his gun to full capacity with 124-grain Federal Hydra-Shok hollow points, trussed Bry-Guy to the rack, finished his sandwich, calmed Blitz down, and donned a fur-ridged weatherproof parka.