Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  Holy rolling gunfight at the O.K. Corral, there had been no time for anything but reaction, and Ramon found mercy in that. Swamped, wading upstream against a sea of Dawson devotees. Time only for the burn of adrenaline and the controlled panic that gave an all-crucial edge. Fear bred survival.

  But now he wanted to cry. He really did.

  Struggling in the aisle, his travails were like trying to walk up a down escalator, clumsy serpentine arms and legs making every step gained the effort of ten, and he could only watch as the blond gunner resumed his terrible mission. Treading steps to the stage, stancing wide over the body of that beautiful singer he had felled…

  And continuing to fire down into her.

  It was slaughter, it was obscene, it was a violation of the dead. Rolling crack of gunshots in steady cadence, such cold methodical brutality, and with every single one her body gave another jerk. An arm, a leg, a shoulder, a hip, twitch of bludgeoned nerves.

  A greater madness still to come, inexplicably, as this hulking killer turned back toward an abandoned camera, staring into its lens as if that would provide all the answers that were sorely lacking in a life of impossible questions. His thick-featured face wrenched with confusion and utter incomprehension.

  “Her face didn’t change!” he bawled in accusation. “Her face didn’t change a lick!”

  Ramon lost it entirely, could tolerate this no more, and with no one behind the bloodthirsty imbecile and his bottomless well of bullets, so what if Ramon missed with his first shot, or the second, firing two-handed as people around him cried out anew and shell casings pinged off heads, and by the third shot he had a bead on this asshole, who didn’t do a half-bad job of twitching and bleeding himself.

  The guy fell hard and heavy, with finality. And Ramon rolled his head back with a sob, as the crowd swept him like a tidal wave.

  She was his one way beyond this, the last tenuous grasp on something good in a life gone to bleakness and despair, Laurel Pryce, dear gift from God…

  And Paul watched her disintegrate in the passage of a moment.

  Eruption of chaos, everything had happened so quickly, his mind still trying to assimilate the appearance of Amanda and that guy from last night. Her friend — what kind of friend, was this guy fucking her or what? — and then came the gunfire and Paul realized he was screaming, slumping boneless into the pew while greater cowards around him went on full-alert scramble.

  He saw nothing but Laurel bleeding on the stage, heard the snowballing avalanche of chaos only secondhand as he slid to the floor, legs gone to rubber as he tried to cross the distance, Heal her I can heal her, knowing even as he floundered with punctured equilibrium that he could do no good. She had been dead before she hit the stage and hadn’t even had time to look his way for the final glance with dimming eyes.

  They had both been robbed.

  He was knocked back to the floor by a random wild shot from Dougie Durbin, the bullet through his chest like a hammer blow, ow, no worry, it would self-correct. He watched from the floor in shock as Dougie stood over her and it would not end, this assault, why, WHY? Oh don’t do that to her, it’s only more I’ll have to fix, trying to puzzle out motives, then Dougie was screaming nonsense to the camera or the control room or the world, and then Dougie was dead and Paul could feel no vindication, only disappointment that he’d been unable to do the job himself.

  Crawling past the pulpit with its pathetic trio, he was barely aware of them — nasty bleeder, that leg — and the sudden lack of gunfire became loudly conspicuous by its absence. Plenty of shrieking to fill the gap, though, and he knelt over her.

  Laurel.

  The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

  But no, Paul couldn’t accept that. A God of love would never so savagely take away one so lovely while she was so compellingly singing His praises. Which left only human hands, human hearts, and whatever moved them.

  Laurel, so still, so inanimate. He held her hand, and if there had been moments near the end when he’d hated her, it was only because he had given her cause to feel the same way. Looking at her bare feet, pantyhose only, blown right out of her shoes. Such small, delicate feet for a woman her height. Holding tight to one hand, with his other trying to plug all the holes, prolific and warm and wet beneath his fingers, remembering last night’s twisted fantasy: If I killed her, could I bring her back again? He had the answer now, and it was just as he had feared.

  Paul felt his soul weeping from a thousand prior cuts, bleeding anew from a thousand more this morning. Bursting like a brain embolism under pressure. And he knew, as few had been either so privileged or cursed to know, what it was like to fear so much and hurt so much that you emerged through the tunnel of anguish on the other side…

  To find complete apathy.

  Which the old Paul might have found the most frightening thing of all, that he didn’t even care about the world anymore.

  Within his body, rebellion, a throbbing of lower abdomen, as if flesh and bone, nerve and gristle, had begun to run themselves. He doubted he could shut down even if he wanted to. Oscilloscope in the control room going berserk, amplitude and frequency of what Gabe had coined the omega waves nearly blanking out the entire screen. Brain and belly, white-hot burn, and any previous backfire of infection and infliction had been prelude to this moment of moments.

  Before the eyes of four thousand and the scrutiny of millions at home, he had evolved.

  Paul rose on newly strengthened legs to stand before these minions of weakness and deception, and just look at them all. They had come to see him? They had come to witness miracles? Then miracles they would have. And how he hated them all now, they had brought on this blasphemy with their insatiable appetites, heal me, teach me, feed me — parasites and leeches all. He had such scorn for these sheep in search of the nearest shepherd of demagoguery. They needed a leader? Then here he was, he would lead them into the grave. He would stand before them and wear a crown of thorns, and rule them from a throne of nails.

  Exits choked with the fallen and trampled, the sanctuary still held a crowd some twenty-five hundred strong. They were the first to feel the brunt, because of sheer physical proximity. Wall to wall, front to back, a noticeable wave rippling through the crowd. Men and women and children were stricken where they stood, where they’d fallen, where they struggled. No pattern, no reason, this unbiased death skirling through their ranks. Some untouched while neighbors succumbed, immunities and susceptibilities as randomly distributed as ancient memories.

  Righteous and unrighteous alike, falling to seats or the floor, feeling the stirring of something vast and dark. Their hands clawed frantically at their clothing while the flesh fell victim to ruin and decay. The vicious caress of malignancies, the self-betrayal of somatic breakdowns.

  He would teach these to all who hungered for his truth.

  Outside, a continent of suffering was made even worse in minuscule increments, a hot spot here, hot spot there, triggered by a flickering pulse of brain wave that found soft tissue and gave it rupture. Green Bay, a woman running in tears from her TV with a sudden case of viral meningitis. Chicago suburb, a jogger brought down like a stag by a pack of neighborhood dogs and torn apart in the middle of his driveway. New Jersey teenager dripping rabid foam, slaughtering his family at the breakfast table. Toronto zoo animals hurling themselves into glass partitions and cage bars to get at the day’s first visitors. Tucson, a man developing emphysema as easily as a cold virus…

  And in Donny Dawson’s own back yard, beloved pets, two Irish setters whirling into a snapping frenzy, until each was but a twitching heap of ginger fur.

  Lying on the stage over his wife, he experienced a final moment of pride restored. Becoming Amanda’s shield, without hesitation — but too little, too late.

  Donny felt the same nauseating stirrings within as so many of his congregation did. The gunfire had ebbed, no danger to her now, so he pushed away from Mandy, then rose to his knees beside his pulpit and gazed out ov
er the chapel. A moaning, weeping sickbed of true believers.

  His empire was in ashes, this he knew. No amount of verbal footwork and histrionics could fix things now.

  Such a relief, in a strange way, and perhaps, if he was charmed, he might yet reel his discount-priced soul back from its destined abyss. It was, after all, the only thing he had left.

  He began to feebly shake the nearest shoulder, this stranger whom Amanda had kept from him. Questions and recriminations abounded, who was he, but there would be time for that later. Or maybe not. But he was now, at the end of all things trivial and profound, an ally.

  The pain, above all, roused Mike from stupor. Some weak hand jostling his shoulder, same spot the guard had swatted with the billy club, tag you’re it, kill me if you can.

  Mike’s eyes focused from the blur of insensibility, and found Donny. The man’s face nearly as white as his suit, speaking some babble to him, and Mike pushed his hand aside. No more from this whore of deceit, get the fuck away, and Mike left Amanda to him long enough to look out over the congregation.

  What the…? So many of them out there were suffering from something he could not begin to comprehend, no obvious cause. Malaise of unknown origins, and Ramon was out there someplace, where was Ramon—

  Mike spotted him midway up from the back, coming up a right side aisle this time, a path of lesser resistance. Only now his feet trod upon a carpet of the dead, the dying, and what was happening in this place?

  Paul.

  Paul. Standing near the edge of the stage, now lowering to one foot and one knee, to cradle the murdered singer as he might a lost child. A moment of private anguish made public, and somehow this ravaged backdrop of pestilence had to be laid at his feet. It was the only explanation.

  Mike felt the weight of the gun in his hand, considered it, lights out for Paul, and maybe it would stop before things got even worse. Wishful thinking, though, as he recalled last night, seeing Paul take a head shot and come up laughing. He wanted nothing to do with this guy, this freak, because above all, Mike still wanted to live.

  His gaze fell upon something hanging out of Paul’s collar, wiring of some sort. Flash, Amanda’s sketchy information about Gabe’s lunatic plan, patching the guy’s head into the outgoing satellite transmission.

  Jesus God, if it really worked, and who was to say what could and couldn’t anymore…

  He couldn’t think it through. Such devastation was too huge to comprehend.

  “Ramon!” Mike shouted, dragging himself farther out to see if his friend could hear him. “Ramon!”

  No good, too much distance, too much pandemonium, too little lung power. Mike peered up at the pulpit microphone, dismissed it. The thing had cut out after Amanda’s first words. His roving eye lit upon the lavalier microphone clipped to Donny’s lapel, and he stumped over and snatched it away with a rip of material.

  “RAMON!” he shouted into it, voice rolling from a dozen speakers with razor treble. “KNOCK OUT THE SATELLITE DISH!”

  Mike swatted Donny’s beseeching hands away once more, crawling back right again to watch as Ramon came running, hundred-yard dash through hell. He looked as if his first impulse was to stop, give aid and comfort for that horrid mangle of agony Mike called a leg, and Mike instead waved him on, back, that way, the satellite, I’d do it myself, but look how I’ve spent my morning, and Ramon nodded with the dismal understanding only a friend could share, and disappeared through a doorway near the choir loft.

  Fresh gunfire, fucking hell, what now? Mike had to see, had to witness everything this morning was throwing at him.

  The dead lived again, or so it seemed at first glance. Some monstrous apparition who looked to be a doppelganger of the first gunner, coming up from the rear firing blindly, screaming the name Dougie, Dougie, Dougie — good lord, how many of these clones were there? Such determination about him, eyes front as he stormed for the choir loft, and somehow this guy knew who had killed the first assassin, and was taking it personally.

  Mike fumbled with his pistol, dexterity gone in a slippery film of his own blood, and then he saw that the thing’s slide was locked open, oh shit oh shit empty clip, and he was groping in his jacket pocket for another one when the sound of heavy feet came clomping close closer closest and rumbled across the stage and this blond twin with Ramon’s scent in his nose gave Mike a swift kick in the head with one booted foot, “I’ll be back for you,” and was past like a speeding train—

  and Mike rolled

  and he bled

  and then Donny was reaching across to seize him by the collar and point at Amanda. Saying, with breath that stank of the grave, “Please. Get her out of here.”

  Corridors, too many corridors — if he lived through this, Ramon really wanted to find the dickhead who designed the place and give him a rap in the nuts. Running as frantically as a starving rat in a maze, How the hell do you get OUT of here?

  He rounded one corner while cramming a new magazine into his pistol. Caught sight of a choirgirl on the run, moussed hair and blue silken robe billowing as she sprinted down an intersecting hallway. When in doubt, follow the leader.

  She galloped along the corridor, around a corner at its end, and Ramon was gaining on her when he realized that heavy footsteps were approaching from behind. Had to be that sporadic gunfire on his tail. He poured on speed, nearly overtaking the girl as she skidded around another corner into a wider hallway with floor and wall decorated with the blood of some uniformed body lying in the rubble of what must have been one intense little fight.

  At this new corridor’s end, twin doors and morning light.

  The footsteps from behind were closing fast, and he and the choirgirl were neck and neck when Ramon knew by pure instinct that their pursuer had reached the same hall. He and this girl still ten feet from the double doors, might as well have been a mile, and damned if he would let another of these innocents fall victim.

  Ramon spun, veering left to crash into her from behind. One of her high heels snapped and she buckled toward the floor, and he raised his pistol, meet this asshole on his own terms, and this couldn’t be, he’d already killed this guy once, and that element of surprise was all the bozo needed. The TEC-9 opened up while the guy was still on the run.

  The bullets missed the choirgirl by a yard’s margin, and she cried out, and Ramon was staggering to regain his balance when he was hit. Three seconds, four, and his chest and gut were so full of holes he may as well have been a strainer. The impact swept him off his feet and into the crash bars, both doors bursting open as he flew out in a blizzard of flying glass. Misted blood wheezed from the holes in his chest when he slammed back first onto the sidewalk, the world at once grown too fuzzy, too red.

  He lifted the pistol while rebounding from concrete in a torturous skid, aiming by instinct and hope and faith and the uncanny heightened senses that sometimes descended on those who knew they were going to die.

  One chance to make this right, one shot. Atonement for a life of too many hesitations? Maybe, and he let it go, his killer’s face imploding a second after appearing in the doorway. Never repeat that one even if he had thirty years for practice.

  As it was, he figured he had maybe thirty seconds.

  And it wasn’t so bad, really.

  Ramon shut off the chaos of the outer world, it no longer applied. Concentrating solely on the enormous looming disk of the satellite uplink, rolling onto his belly, whoa, mistake, wounds and hands and knees alike crunching fragments of glass. Stained glass, newly so.

  He crawled. And crawled. And crawled. Until he lay gulping down the occasional swallow of his own blood beneath the dish, then rolling onto his back, raising the pistol in two shaky hands. Every shot pounding the spikes of torment just that much deeper.

  The first ones missed, sailing harmlessly into the sky. He zeroed in by the fifth, and did not let up. Multiple bull’s-eyes, emptying the magazine into the feed horn, the cylindrical unit suspended by braces before the dish. It sparked, th
en its housing cracked, the thing finally disintegrating into a clatter of metal and plastic that rained down into the dish.

  He tossed the gun aside with a weak flip of an aching wrist.

  Clouds and sky, and then a face, she was standing over him and looking down. Choirgirl, kneeling beside him as one hand touched his cheek. It seemed only fair that she had a tear to share for him. It’s okay, he wanted to tell her, but could not, because he needed air and had none.

  I’m scared, he mouthed. Lips still working. For now.

  “It’s okay,” she said, angel with messy hair.

  He’d never shared a moment of intimacy with a woman without knowing her name, without her knowing his. Proud of that.

  What a time to start.

  The dead and the dying, the whole and the fleeing, had woven themselves into a shifting tapestry of suffering such as Gabe had never seen. Such mortal terror in those cries, a fear he could never share, for the rapture was his alone.

  He traversed over them slowly, without impediment. Forsaking the tidal unpredictability of an aisle passage, instead beginning at the back row and crabbing toward the front over a horizontal ladder of seatbacks.

  Gabe had shed his clothes on the way down from the master control room. A trail of vest and jacket, slacks and shirt, shoes and socks and underwear, strewn along like a reminder to find his way back upstairs. He had no more need of clothes than he had of hair; his pubic growth he’d shaved away last night. Wearing only his body of scars, still circled by the loops of barbed wire and streaked with the crusted residue of his striving for purity.

  Inner man, outer man — they were finally able to merge as one on this day of days. He shed years of armor and repression with every row that passed beneath him. A crooked path, perhaps, bypassing those who’d fallen back to their seats to suffer and die, and he would disturb them not. They at least deserved that much in this hour of communion with inevitability. To mingle with the miasma of their decay was intrusion enough.