Daniel P. Jackson …

  Ultimately, he was responsible. He had been the bigshot in charge of the Conquistador 18 mission. He had been the one who had killed her mother.

  And he was still alive.

  The three soldiers were just outside the door. Eichmann was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. He stank.

  “I’ll escort you back to the lounge, ma’am,” one of the two standing soldiers said.

  “Watch her knees,” Eichmann said in a shrill voice. “She fights dirty.”

  Lieza patted him on the head as she passed by. “Life sucks,” she told him, “and then you die.”

  The secret, she thought as she headed back toward her friends, was to make Life pay for it first.

  As Lieza entered the room, she saw that a ring of soldiers armed with assault rifles surrounded her bandmates. Several of the soldiers were tapping their trigger guards with their index fingers.

  Tycho was on his back on the floor, muttering. His eyes were closed, and Lieza almost had the impression that he was chanting a mantra. What kept this impression from solidifying was the fact that Cherry, Ellyn, Bazz, and Fug had his legs pinned to the floor, while Joel and Dude held down his arms.

  “I’m back,” Lieza said. “You can let him up.”

  “No, they can’t,” one of the soldiers said. “If he moves a muscle, we’ll blow him apart.”

  Cherry smiled up at Lieza. “One of them poked a rifle at him, and he bent it. Among other things.”

  “Dreadful sin,” Lieza said, sitting down on the floor beside them. “How you doin’, Teek?”

  The Viking’s eyes shot open. “My nose,” he said, half-growling. “One of those fricks made a grab for my nose. Said he wanted to hock it.”

  Joel chuckled. “I say, Teek old boy, how are his fingers digesting, anyway? Might we bring you an antacid?”

  Lieza grinned and ruffled the drummer’s wild hair. “No wonder the sojerbwahs are ticked,” she said. “You’re not supposed to bite.”

  A chinless, waxy-faced man wearing a uniform with captain’s bars entered the room and pushed his way in between two of the soldiers. He looked down at Lieza and sneered.

  “Get out of here, bitch,” he said.

  “No, no, that was her mother,” Joel said, making a cross in the air. “She’s the Bastard Child. She speaks for us before the Mother, and before Eddie Dixon, the Great Father Who Has Gone On, Shoo-Wop.”

  The captain ignored him. “And take your pack of freaks with you. Got one of my men near bleeding to death with no goddamn trigger finger.”

  Lieza clicked her tongue in mock concern. “Can’t shoot anybody, huh? What a jagging shame.”

  “Don’t get smart, bitch. Just leave. And if that big fucker causes any more trouble, I’ll say to hell with my orders and give my men permission to turn him into hamburger.”

  “Where are our things?” Lieza demanded.

  “Shut up and move, fishstink.”

  “Oh my,” Joel whispered as they let Tycho up. “I fear there may be retaliation for that, yes?” He looked hopefully at Lieza.

  She shrugged.

  “Perhaps in the next life, then,” Joel said, sighing.

  As the soldiers “escorted” them out of the room, Lieza grasped Tycho’s right arm around the biceps with both hands. The muscle was knotted, and her fingers couldn’t meet.

  She looked up at his face, which was twisted into a snarl. His nose was askew.

  “Don’t do anything,” she said. “It isn’t worth it.”

  The Viking growled. “Don’t worry. Got to piss too bad to think about anything else.”

  “Count your blessings,” Ellyn said, “At least you don’t have a skaggin’ baby pressing down on you.”

  Cherry whistled derisively and said, “Don’t try for sympathy yet, sweetmeat. You aren’t that far along.”

  “Maybe not, but this is an active kid. She’s doing calisthenics. Slam dancing, gymnastics.”

  “I feel responsible,” Dude said.

  “You are,” Lieza reminded him.

  The hallway opened into a circular waiting area at least sixty yards in diameter. The captain and his men were taking Blunt Instrument toward a bank of glass doors directly across the circle.

  The students who had been brought from Concepcion were twenty yards to Lieza’s left, packed behind a cordon of soldiers who were keeping them well away from the doors. Some of the students shouted and surged forward when they saw Blunt Instrument, but they were held back by the soldiers, and their voices were drowned out by a man in a beige three-piece suit who was giving orders through a bullhorn.

  “Please cooperate with the hosts and hostesses who are circulating among you,” the man in the suit was shouting. “We must have your correct names, addresses, and Social Security numbers while another plane is prepared for us. Then we can continue to our next stop—Washington, D.C., and a hero’s welcome!”

  Lieza stopped walking, and the rest of the band stopped too.

  “Get moving!” the captain yelled.

  “Get stuffed,” Lieza said absently. Her attention was focused on the scene going on behind the cordon.

  The students had supposedly been rescued and returned to freedom. But the crowding, the “hosts and hostesses” in their look-alike blue jackets, and the taking of names and numbers all seemed to suggest that the “rescued” Americans were being readied for a trip to a concentration camp.

  Most of the students looked exhausted, but there were twenty or thirty who were bouncing like excited puppies. Now that the man in the three-piece suit had stopped shouting through his bullhorn, Lieza could hear some happy babbling about “Limey gooks” and “retaliatory strikes.”

  There were also one or two shouts demanding to know where they were, but the “hosts and hostesses” weren’t responding.

  Lieza, seeing an opportunity to cause trouble, took a deep breath and yelled, “You’re in Kansas City!”

  The babble ceased abruptly. The man in the three-piece suit looked across the huge room and made a frantic gesture, indicating that Lieza and her band should be gotten out of there.

  “This is the Kansas City International Airport!” Lieza shouted. “Anybody live in the area? Want a ride home?”

  The captain started for her, then paused and glared at one of his men. “Shut her up, soldier,” he said.

  The soldier, with an expression of misery on his face, stepped toward her. Tycho backhanded him so that he collided with the captain, and both went down.

  The other soldiers raised their rifles, and Lieza had a sick feeling that she might have gone too far. She started for the glass doors again.

  As she did so, the captain, bleeding from his nostrils, scrambled to his feet and screamed, “Fire! Fire!”

  The soldiers flicked off their safeties.

  “Oh, dear,” Joel said at Lieza’s elbow.

  “Run!” Lieza cried, and at that moment the man in the beige suit scurried in front of her, forcing her to stop.

  “No, no, no,” he whisper-shouted at the captain. “Not in front of the hostages, that is, the former hostages. What are you trying to do, ruin the press we’re going to get out of this?”

  The captain, a trickle of blood curving down past the left corner of his mouth, looked indecisive for a moment. Then, grudgingly, he muttered, “Hold your fire.”

  The man in the suit leaned toward the captain and whispered, “You can take them somewhere else if you like.”

  The captain’s face seemed to brighten with a heavenly glow.

  Lieza started for the doors again, but the captain stepped in front of her.

  “You’ll get out,” he murmured, smiling. “But slowly. Very slowly. You attacked us, and we had no choice but to defend ourselves.”

  “What a jagoff,” Bazz whispered in Lieza’s ear.

  “Hey!” a high-pitched male voice shouted. “Hey, is this really Kansas City? I thought I recognized this terminal!”

  Lieza turned and saw that the voice belonged to one of the medical students behind the cordon of soldiers. He was trying to get through, but the soldiers were stopping him.

  “I live here,” the student said pleadingly. “I’d prove it, but all my ID’s back at school.”

  Joel touched Lieza’s arm. “I say, Leez, that gentleman is the very one who sat beside you on the airliner.”

  She stared across the circle and saw that the young man from Kansas City had the same perfect brown hair and bruised face as the Jack who had stolen Tycho’s seat.

  She started across the room toward the cordon. “Didn’t recognize him,” she said.

  “He does look rather the generic Anglo-Saxon American Protestant dink, doesn’t he?” Joel said, coming with her. The other members of Blunt Instrument followed.

  “Halt or we’ll shoot!” the captain yelled behind them.

  “Not here,” the man in the suit said again.

  “Grab them, then!” the captain yelled again.

  “No, no, no, no violence in front of the hostages!”

  Lieza heard the soldiers hurry after them.

  “Ah, the pitter-patter of little Hobnailed feet,” she said.

  Fug grunted.

  A few seconds later, Lieza was facing the young man from Kansas City over the shoulder of an armed, helmeted guard.

  The student’s mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was coming out. He seemed startled to be face-to-face with the Bastard Child again.

  “What’s your name, Jack?” she asked.

  “Uh, I, you—” he said.

  “Stupid name,” Cherry observed.

  This seemed to bring him out of his stupor a little. “Bonner,” he said. “Clifton.”

  “Well, come on, Bonner Clifton,” Lieza said. “If you live around here, we’ll take you home.”

  The man in the suit scurried up beside her, waving his finger again. “That won’t do,” he said breathlessly. “It’ll ruin our records. All of the rescued hostages must be processed through Washington for debriefing.”

  Joel gasped. “You chaps are despicable,” he said indignantly. “How dare you claim to rescue a man and then steal his underwear?”

  Lieza reached over the guard’s shoulder and grasped Clifton Bonner’s left ear. “Come on,” she said, pulling him.

  The guard’s rifle knocked Lieza’s arm away. Tycho brought his fist down on the guard’s helmet, and the man crumpled to the floor.

  The crowd of hostages murmured and shifted nervously.

  The man in the suit stepped up hurriedly and pulled Bonner out over the crumpled guard.

  “Take him, take him,” he said, shoving the med student at Lieza. “No more violence, please. This is going to be hard enough to salvage as it is.”

  Lieza grabbed Bonner’s right hand in her left and turned toward the glass doors again.

  “Oh, Cliffie!” a woman’s voice cried from the crowd.

  Lieza looked back and saw a Straight cheerleader-type jumping and waving.

  “Get autographs, Cliffie!” the bouncing woman shouted. “We can sell them!”

  Lieza felt Bonner’s hand tense.

  Blunt Instrument and crew, plus Clifton Bonner, walked past the captain and his knot of soldiers.

  The captain looked furious. Lieza winked at him and ran her tongue over her upper lip. As she expected, he unconsciously mimicked her and got a tongueful of blood.

  Bazz nudged in between Lieza and Tycho and whispered in Lieza’s ear. “What’s with the Straight, babe? He’s not worth the spit it’d take to drown him.”

  Lieza whispered back. “Captain Courageous can’t ambush us if we’ve got Jack with us.” She grinned. “Besides, I think I want him.”

  Bazz looked incredulous and a little nauseated. “That’s sick.”

  Lieza nodded. “Story of my life.”

  The glass doors opened automatically, and the band stepped into the cold night. Their equipment was piled haphazardly on the broad sidewalk.

  “Bert!” Tycho shouted, and charged for the pile. He pulled his ax from its midst and stood looking at it sadly. The handle had been broken in two.

  “Jagging jewbaiters,” Dude yelled, kicking at a smashed amplifier. “Must be a couple thousand bucks worth of damage.”

  “We’ll worry about it later,” Lieza said. “Come on. I think we’d better stick together. I’d hate to leave a guard on this stuff and come back to find him in the same condition as Bert.”

  She led them away from the terminal to a pay phone at the edge of the parking lot.

  “Anybody got a quarter?” she asked.

  Only Bonner did. He pulled it from his pants pocket and stared at it as if surprised that such a thing as a quarter existed.

  As Lieza took it from him, she foresaw some of what was going to happen, as if the coin were a psychic transmitter. She felt cheap.

  The sensation was not unpleasant.

  She looked up at the sky before punching the button for the operator, but the cloud cover blotted out the Moon. She had wanted to ask her mother’s forgiveness for what she was about to do, although she was pretty sure that Bitch Alice would have understood.

  There was nothing more revolting than a Wracker in bed with a Straight, but that was exactly why it happened so astonishingly often. Sometimes it even produced worthwhile results.

  She was living proof.

  I wonder who he was, anyway? she thought as she told the operator to call a hotel for her. You told me he was a Straight, mama, but you never said much else about him.

  She glanced at the shivering Bonner, who looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to faint or throw up.

  Just as well.

  CHAPTER 11

  Good Morning; Who Are You?

  Went to bed last night;

  Don’t recall what happened next.

  Seems to me a witch came in

  And fixed me so I’m hexed.

  How else to explain the state I’m in?

  How else to forgive my mortal sin?

  Why else would I lie with one

  I’d spit on if I saw him in the street?

  At midnight my brain goes away

  To some Dreaming Land,

  And all that’s left is meat.

  —Bitch Alice

  “Waking Up with Godzilla,” 1962

  Thursday, January 3, 1980. King’s Crown Hotel, Kansas City.

  Bitch Alice was in a moonsuit, bouncing across a gray plain with a burlap sack over her shoulder. The sky was an inverted black bowl, sprinkled with pinholes where white light leaked through.

  The Bitch was collecting bright, gemlike stones from the gray dust. She bent down and scooped them up without breaking stride, then tossed them into the burlap sack.

  Lieza was running after her, trying to catch up, but with each bounce Bitch Alice drew farther away.

  Lieza tried to call “Mama,” but her mouth worked soundlessly.

  Then she realized that she was naked. She couldn’t breathe. Her blood would boil, and she would die, and her mother wouldn’t look back because she couldn’t hear her.

  But if Lieza could pick up one of the bright stones before it was too late, the stone in her hand would shout to the stones in her mother’s sack, and her mother would hear and come back for her.

  She looked down at the gray dust, but there were no more gems, only tiny craters. Her mother had gotten them all. Every one.

  Lieza’s lungs sucked frantically, but drew in only the pure essence of cold.

  Just as she felt her chest about to burst, she saw her mother pause and turn slowly, slowly around. Bitch Alice’s gold-sprayed sun visor was down, making her faceless.

  “Lisa,” the apparition said, “you got street sense from my genes and brains from your father’s, the dink. So why are you out here without a jacket?”

  Lieza wondered how she could hear the words when there was no air.

  Then the visor slid up, and the face that grinned out was that of Annabelle Kirk. A greenish gray tentacle slithered from the secretary of state’s mouth.

  Lieza tried to turn and run as the tentacle slithered toward her across the pockmarked powder, but her feet had frozen. She tried to scream, and gouts of slush spewed from her mouth and nose.

  She thrashed and clawed at the sheets, and then Bonner’s arms were around her, holding her still.

  “Bad dream,” he murmured into her ear.

  As the pounding in her chest began to subside, Lieza’s only thought was that Bonner was capable of saying some incredibly stupid things.

  She opened her eyes and saw that the room was filled with cold daylight filtered through blue drapes.

  It was one of the loveliest things she had ever seen, but she couldn’t enjoy it. She felt as though she were on the floor of a dungeon, held down by rusty iron bands.

  “Let go,” she said when she could talk.

  Bonner’s arms were gone so quickly that Lieza felt ashamed, and that in turn made her angry.

  He was so worshipful, so awe-filled, so… so… doglike. He was repulsive.

  Which was why he attracted her. She had begun wanting him on the plane, almost as soon as he had sat down beside her. It was sputzing awful, and it excited her terribly.

  She slid out of bed and walked to the bathroom, feeling him watching her. Her legs felt hot inside her leathers. She closed and locked the door behind her.

  After emptying herself, she stood leaning on the counter and staring at the mirrored wall.

  “You have screwed the equivalent of the youthful Spiro Agnew,” she told herself, and watched her upper lip curl in disgust.

  There was no forgiveness in her eyes, but there was some measure of understanding. It didn’t make her feel any better.

  She turned on the shower, and when the mirrors fogged with the steam, she stripped off her leathers and stepped into the tub. The water was almost scalding hot, but she wouldn’t let herself reach down to turn on the cold-water tap. She had read that some types of cancer could be treated with heat therapy, so maybe whatever was wrong with her could be cooked out as well.

 

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