The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  The storm had puffed up a while back, scouring the tarmac with its violence. The Bronco's wipers strobed erratically in the splattering pellets of rain, which rendered the roadway nearly invisible.

  By comparison, the desert night had been too warm, arid and stifling, making him sweat profusely, making his pores weep from exhaustion and depletion and the fear he hated to see in himself. Dehydrating him spiritually as well as physically. Never had the security of his cabin seemed so out of reach as it had the evening of the 'Gasm concert, when the foremost thought in his brain had been-

  I've finally lost my mind, I've slipped all the way down the trough into gibbering madness.

  Sometimes time defies its own rules and elongates. For one achingly clear second, the Kristen nightmare had not only come back, it had become real and true. As the tale spun out, he watched it like some vagrant astral spirit dispassionately monitoring the hell suffered by its recently vacated physical shell. In that cruel moment, he had looked up-and seen himself strafing 'Gasm to shreds with a machine gun. And that sight had scared the marrow right out of his bones.

  But it had not been himself. Of course. That would be… well, crazy.

  It had been someone else, another man with another mission. An insane mission. Lucas remembered thinking, Why, that nut is trying to scrag the whole bloody band!

  Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz's smoking white Fender Strat hits the stage and bounces, the screech of its feedback blanking out the popping report of automatic weapons fire. Band members Reichmann, Hartz, and Hicks get chopped down one two three. His own finger is still stalled on Dragunov's trigger after picking off Fozzetto. He sees gouts of yellow-white fire spitting from the muzzle of another weapon on the catwalk level, even with himself. In the flashbulb light of the discharges, he registers a single image of the attacker, legs splayed atop a girder, sweeping his weapon back and forth. Then his own feet move him from the scene, pronto. 'Gasm never gets to perform "Cock Knock."

  Had he actually seen Kristen in the crowd? No… that had to be dismissed as a hallucination.

  He runs, fast yet cautiously, and through the catwalk grids he sees, in a blur, dozens of faces turning from the stage to the ceiling of the Arena. Almost at once comes the cattle panic of bodies compelled to flee and meeting the resistance of fellow bodies in the lethal illogic of the mob. He only has a second to think of this before he is tearing away the mesh screen of the duct through which he invaded the amphitheater. Then a brief, furious period of crabbing awkwardly along on hands and knees, needing more speed and feeling the panic he had felt in Denver when Brion Hardin had almost refused to die. The fear tries to wrap him up in its arms and squeeze. The riot noise behind him cycles down as he gains distance. Blindly, he shoves away the curling flap of metal that served as his breach point. He gashes his palm and hits the graveled tar of the roof. The Dragunov skids ahead of him like a broomstick as he rolls. It doesn't discharge from impact, as he fears. He is gasping now, terror sliding in and out of his lungs and rawing them with the hot, dry air of the Arizona desert.

  A deep, murky puddle exploded upward on the left as Lucas plowed the Bronco through it. It was not much of a distraction from the pain of his wounds and the infuriatingly slow countdown of green posted mileage signs. There were still twenty miles to traverse. He was alone on the road.

  Yesterday, the problem had been too much traffic.

  Below the fire escape ladder are maybe ten cops, milling around, just beginning to ask what has occurred inside the Arena. In ten more seconds they'll catch the drift. He yanks his grapple and climbing line from the nylon slipcase and runs full-tilt for the opposite end of the roof. Less light there. If a police whirlybird has been called in, its spotlight can still nail him like a butterfly on a board. Like Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz. He hears push-bar exit doors crash open below. A stream of shouting and running people is unleashed. Most will remain inside to bungle the cops, to gape, to face part of the Event. He thumbs the release, and the tri-clawed grapple snaps open. He slips it through a square rain vent and unfurls the thin nylon line over the side. It hangs straight between two pools of diffused lighting from decorative standards at ground level. He sleeves the Dragunov in its black pouch and digs for his gloves. They aren't there.

  At first he had thought, Oh, yes, the gloves weren't in the dream, that's why. Perhaps his alter ego on the opposite catwalk had borrowed them. Then he realized those notions were crazy, too.

  No time for panic. He zippers the pouch shut and loops the strap over his shoulder. He kicks his leg over the lip of the roof, into the void, and begins to rappel down the coarse brick surface of the wall without looking. And without gloves, on the thin nylon cord. People are beginning to fill up the parking lots in the distance as he hangs heavy on the line. He is a vague shadow against a dark wall. The stiff toes of his boots brace agreeably against the abundance of toeholds on the wall. He feels a tiny spark of relief that this might not be impossible after all. Not that he really has any choice. He who hesitates is busted.

  The damned gloves were probably still up there on the catwalk. They'd dropped out of the pouch while he was fiddling with the rifle in the gloom. It made him feel sloppy and stupid; here was his first accidental clue for the sleuths. The gloves were leather, traction-palmed and calf-lined. They'd carry finger oil but no prints. It wasn't good enough. Two successes had made him careless, and it had taken no time at all for him to-

  Slip.

  His foot misses a perch, and he yaws heavily to the left after only five downward steps. The line yanks taut and skins his palm like a wire cheese cutter, laying wide the incision made by the ducting just a moment before. A bark of pain dies in his throat, and he clamps both fists shut on the line. Three feet greases through and comes up dark red before his plunge is aborted. He hangs dumbly, legs splayed to keep him from twirling, since the line is not belayed from below. With slices of flesh and pattering droplets of blood he buys several more crucial feet, then his friction checks out for the night. Agony flares in both hands, and he releases the line, lurching vertiginously out from the wall, into space. Picking up speed. The ground gets bigger. About the same amount of time as a dive from the high board. Air rushes past his ears as he plummets. He tries to tuck and roll as his boots thud into the turf. He hears the fresh carrot crunch of his right knee dislocating on impact. This time he screams into the crook of his arm. Nobody notices him. He scrambles into the darkness, back against the wall, terror oiling him from top to bottom. This is no time for wimping. The adrenaline is making him ill; his breath speeds in and out. He grits his teeth and kicks out to reset the kneecap. This time the sound is the crack of dry kindling. The pain is utterly fantastic; it makes him forget his bleeding hands for a second, and, weirdly, he hears the jingling of the two spent cartridge casings inside the box taped to the Dragunov.

  He had tossed his knee out several times in his life. Each time it was about ten days before he could stop walking funny. Now his leg was bitching that gas pedal duty was just too goddamned much to ask. The cure for the hurt had been an even worse hurt. His knee was black and swollen. Before the storm, he had tried to glean some information from the radio news. He had seen the face of his alter ego last night, on Tucson's News on Nine, thinking perhaps he should sue KGUN-TV for defamation of character.

  The only person he encounters while limping back to the hotel is a wino, loitering on the tiled patio of a mercantile adjunct to the Holiday Inn called La Placita Village. It is a short walk from here to the Community Center, something Lucas had factored into his plan. The wino looks exactly like the ones he had ignored in Denver. He sits with his feet in the pool of a novelty fountain that only operates during business hours. He has pissed in the pool, and his coat front is caked with vomit. He stinks of sour alcohol and hydrochloric acid. He laughs at Lucas and mumbles something in Spanish.

  He recalled thinking that he probably looked worse than the wino, and even though his vision was spotting and he could barely stand, his universe
fuzzing apart, then reestablishing in near-total blackout, he could not let any of the hotel employees see-and remember-his state.

  The wino laughs as he gimps onward. Come back and shoot the motherfucker later, he thinks. Later. He peeks through the patio entrance to the hotel, then edges through the glass door with his rifle bow-slung, shapeless in its sleeve. He whangs into the door and draws a few fazed titters from the lounge. There is a stairwell door that permits him to bypass the lobby and any more questioning glances. He feels like Sisyphus, clopping up seven flights of stairs one by one, acrid bile crawling up his throat at the same pace. In the room he stays on his feet long enough to gobble painkillers-the same ones he'd given to Cass -and wrap his hands in damp hotel-issue towels. He wakes up facedown on the bed five hours later, rolling over and staring into the recap of the ten o'clock news. The towels have grown pink with juice.

  The Bronco's cab windows seemed to melt under the onslaught of the high-velocity rainfall. Beyond them, the ocean seethed and swirled, inviting fast death, anxious to wash over its borders and come to a boiling point. Ten more miles… then Cass could nurse him, for a change.

  His original plan had been to shovel out a final resting place for the Dragunov on the roadside somewhere between San Francisco and Point Pitt. The storm and the uselessness of his hands had erased that idea. It was too agitated out there to stop at El Granada and heave it off the jetty. Disposal of the evidence would have to wait. It seemed an acceptable risk, more sane than his previous slips. Even if they noticed the difference in caliber between the slugs that holed Fozzetto and those that took down the rest of the band, the guys hunting for the mystery gun would be a time-zone distant. Perhaps they weren't bothering to search or to mess with lab workups, since they thought they had the killer in custody. His alter ego. Perhaps they wouldn't see the gloves or consider their importance.

  But there was still the nylon line, dangling from the north end of the arena, stiff with Lucas' blood. He'd had to ditch at least five blood-saturated towels (they weren't dry and were too many to burn discreetly). People had taken notice of his injured hands. Even innocent notice was too much attention. The Holiday Inn staff would remember that "John Case" had slipped away without officially checking out, the day after the tragedy. Maybe the predators clogging the hotel's lounge would recall the man walking headfirst into the closed glass door. Maybe they had seen blood.

  A double baker's dozen slips, on this job.

  The color on the room TV is cockeyed. The hawkfaced man on the screen has a chartreuse face and dayglo orange tufts of ear hair. His American Gothic go-to-meetin' suit is obviously black, but it swims with poisonous rainbow patterns, like the moire of an oil slick. With the suit he wears combat boots. An aging urban middle-class country punk? He flashes the video news crews a peace sign from within a ring of six Pima County sheriffs who aren't laughing. The cuffs, linked to a steel waistband, restrict the man's reach as he is escorted away. The voice-over labels him a ''right-wing fundamentalist." His story, told by robotic, blown-dry news mannequins (one for each local station) is "a simple one."

  Eldon Quantrill, of Clifton, Arizona, enthusiastically noted for the record that he was a close personal friend of both the ghetto-blaster pastor who'd engineered the abortive book burning on the patio of the Tucson Community Center and of the voodoo-obsessed Falwell clone Lucas had seen on the same TV screen the previous night. Each of these worthies disowned Eldon with hot blushes of embarrassment when a TV camera was shoved into their faces for comment. This upset Eldon's kilter not a particle. Such rejection, he said, was another facet of his lifelong penance.

  What penance? he was immediately asked. Lucas thought old Eldon was a lot more canny than he let on. He played the news media like a fiddle from the first.

  God, it seemed, had instructed Eldon. God had told Eldon what needed to be done. God had told him to do it using his trusty M-16 and home-loaded mercury-tipped ammunition-poison bullets left Satan that much less leeway. Eldon did as he was told. Any devout man would have, but Eldon was eager to atone for his past. He obeyed God because it was God who had marked him with a large, ungainly facial mole that sprouted thick white bristles as punishment for having carnal knowledge of his farm mother at age fourteen. "Knowing her," as Eldon put it. Now, at age fifty-two, he was still trying to make up for that sinful goof… or rather, those eight sinful goofs over a one-month hell of gracelessness. Since that grand yet troublesome time, in the final year of the Second World War-(Eldon's father had bitten the big one at Anzio Beach, thus his mother's distress)-Eldon had tried to keep himself pure and await a Sign. The Sign had finally come via God's instrument on earth, television, in the divine form of the Old Time Gospel Hour, which Eldon watched religiously. It had been Father Dunbrille's words less than twenty-four hours prior to the 'Gasm date that snapped everything into focus, and Eldon did not hesitate to exercise his Second Amendment rights and mow down that godless zoo of pagan troglodytes who suckled the Devil's bilious teat, unquote and exclamation point! His path was clear.

  Police, attorneys, and professional interrogators would unearth reams of such trivia during Eldon's intense and protracted debriefing. The investigation would ultimately consume a six-figure sum in man hours and squandered taxpayer dollars, all because one of the cops had asked Eldon if he had any knowledge of the similar incidents in Denver and San Francisco.

  "Why, certainly, shorty," Eldon said with a grandfather's jaunty grin. "His will be done. You just tote that microphone back over here, and I'll tell you all about God's plan to eliminate that Gabriel Stannard guy, next."

  Eldon Quantrill remained a darling of the media for about two weeks before the truth became known, the ratings dropped, and audiences moved on to seek other diversions.

  And Lucas was a free man.

  Stannard was the Whip Hand member in whom Lucas had the most interest. His plan had been to let the singer wilt on the vine, mulling over the deaths of his former comrades for a long, destructive time. Let paranoia erode his life. Let him fear imminent death for years; poke him, prod him regularly, keep Eldon Quantrill's devout fear of a god singing high in his veins. Eldon's holy inspiration had come along at just the right moment to make Lucas consider altering his plan. Call it luck, he thought. Call it divine intervention.

  It had been common sense, not a magnificent constitution, that had denied Lucas the services of T-doctors. His blood, on the nylon rope, would be discovered eventually. It had been luck that had let him choke down enough room service protein to permit his damaged body to catch his outbound flight on time, with bandaged mitts and a noticeable limp and another suitably opaque alias. All luck.

  His muscles burned mordantly, particularly the hamstrings behind his knees and the bundles on the inside thighs connected to the groin-pectineus, adductor longus, gracilis. The tension of maintaining uncomfortable, stressful positions on the roof, in the air vents, and on the catwalks for hours had caused sweat to flood out of him. He had lost seven pounds last night, and today he hurt. He hoped the pain also meant that he was on the mend.

  Despite the slithering lime chips and rainstorm mudslides, the Bronco valiantly billygoated its way up the slope to the cabin. The idea of stumping up the hill in the storm and the dark held no attraction. When his lights finally splashed across the face of the cabin, he tooted the horn twice and dismounted carefully. Icy sleet stung his face. But he was not in pain anymore.

  ***

  She almost started shooting out the front window without thinking at all, like an Al Capp cartoon hillbilly filling a trespassing "revenoor" full of rock salt. If Lucas' former wifey and her bulldog-faced lawyer wanted to harass her in the dead of night, let them swallow some lead hospitality. She had major problems to solve before she could be sociable, or even snide.

  Thank Christ or Allah or whoever was in charge for this good storm, she thought. Rain could rinse away so much.

  She had fled. She had run as fast as she could downhill, toward the coast road, because
her body needed to flee. It had been straining to run ever since Reese had come axe first through the cabin door like the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Hi, puss. That awful whisper of his had been the charnel sound of graves and gallows. It could make snakes shudder.

  Run!

  At the bottom of the hill, back in the real world, her brain had decided to check back in. She found Reese's Datsun, hidden in a stand of brush and camouflaged to be undetectable from the road. She smashed the driver's side window to silver-faceted dust with a stone. There was no way in hell she was going back to the cabin to dig through Reese's pockets for keys. The monster might open his eyes and seize her wrist with his teeth.

  Her saddlebag purse was still in the back, most of its contents mingled into the sleeping bags and camping gear. Reese had sacked it, taken fifty in cash, and ignored the rest. Her favorite hairbrush was MIA. Damn-of all things, he would have to lose that…

  What astonished her the most was not dropping the gun after she and it had sung their duet. Horrified heroines always dropped the gun, especially after it fired. She had clutched it as she ran, a heavy metal throttle to steer her mad flight. Its solidity, its presence would make returning to the cabin a lot easier.

  She found Reese still capsized in a wide pool of tacky blood, his position unchanged. Maybe he did not require a stake through the heart. She stood and looked at the corpse for a long time, as day shaded into twilight.

  It was hours before she actually crossed the room, to touch it.

  She had been certain that Reese would be gone. That she would return to find a pool of blood and no body. It's Friday the thirteenth, and Jason Voorhees never dies, not really. And now that she saw the body, she was equally certain that it would roll over, grinning and hungry, capture her in a rape both physical and spiritual, and drain away her life force like some weird paranormal leech.