Seeing Red, page 20
Budget security as well, Jack thought.
The curtains were still moving, wafting as if in an unfelt, warm breeze. There was a faraway, crackling-paper kind of noise.
When the dude swung the bat against the back of Fatigue Coat's neck, it made a sound like five pounds of raw steak smacking a linoleum floor. Jack felt a sympathetic local jab in the area where his backbone met his skull, and the black guy did a forward roll to slump out of sight between the seats. They bent to lift him, and he came up as slack and limp as an abused mattress.
Another roach zigzagged across the back of Jack's hand. It was gone before he could see it, his reaction coming days too late. When his hand shot out to brush it away, he hit the curtain. Three of its mates fell to the floor and scurried away. The crackling paper sound, like hundreds of tiny, drumming fingers, was noticeably louder.
Fatigue Coat was being laboriously dragged toward the orchestra pit. Each Omicron worker had hold of a leg. In their wake a dark, erratic smear shined up from the concrete slope of the aisle. This place was probably hosed down nightly; the stain was something the regular patrons would never notice anyway.
The drumming sound was like light rain in the hush and made Jack think of the Chicago fleapit being silently invaded. He cut the edge of the curtain back a bit further and caught movement within the orchestra pit. The liquid motion resolved in his vision into a roiling whirlpool of scuttling brown bodies. Not rats. Roaches. Millions of them, swarming over each other inside the dark, containing maw of the pit. Not killer cockroaches, those three-inch-long monsters that could fly; merely the tiniest household vermin multiplied a billion-fold before Jack's awed eyes. They moved toward the pit, across the stage floor, around his feet, in a quietly scratching, brittle brown mass like a shoe-sole deep tide of sentient mud. He thought of them detouring up his plastic leg, antennae probing. The hairs on his good leg prickled. He held. The scorpions and paddy leeches had been far worse. Charlie had whittled pungi sticks designed to puncture the sides of the thickest combat boot, and tied goddamn banded kraits to the ceilings of caves, fangs down. Dealing with jungle rot or having fire ants sting your balls was more nightmarish than standing in the center of an American metropolis watching a multitude of cockroaches march like an army. This was civilization, what the short-timers who scrawled their DEROS on their steel longed for.
Deeper now. You have to handle it, Jack thought. Thou shalt deal. The .45 auto, polished to a dull sheen by the pea coat pocket, came out now, shaking in his hand. The shaking pissed him off.
He thought of them living in the seat cushions, the curtains, the cracks in the floor, the moldy planking and rafters, the termite-hollowed superstructure. More than enough breeding room, even if one did not count the snack bar.
The dude and the new employee heaved Fatigue Coat over the lip of the orchestra pit into the riotous, churning sea of chitinous bugs. He seemed to hinge at the waist, like one of those backward-jointed dummies used for the big jump in the cheapest films. He did not look real. Neither did the sheer mass of waiting roaches—at least three vertical feet of them, swarming nearly to the rusted brass rail of the pit. They embraced the body hungrily. The last part of him to submerge into the attack of brown, bullet-like forms was his foot, toes protruding from a demolished sneaker wound with dirty friction tape. Then he was gone, gobbled up, and quickly.
The hammer of the quivering .45 was cocked now. The display below forced Jack to grip the gun tightly in his fist and cock it with his free hand. That was when he fumbled the cane. It dropped away, missing his grab, and hit the edge of the stage, somersaulting into the open, its rubber street tip bouncing it off the orchestra pit rail. It clattered to the bare concrete floor. Loudly.
The EXIT door was still at hand, but Jack did not try to stump toward it. He had heard it being chained shut from his hiding place.
They came for him behind the Omicron screen, clumping in cadence up the exit steps like a two-man funeral procession, and found him backed against the wall, pistol rigidly thrust out before him, a scepter of power, a talisman against evil.
"No closer." His voice did not quaver. The gun was now steady; the threat was defined. His good leg held him locked to the stone wall.
The new employee's voice croaked in monotone: "Excuse me, but you . . . have to leave now . . ." It was speech without vocal cords, without breathing. The glassy jade eyes stared at the dead space between Jack's head and shoulder.
"No." The response Jack's single syllable won surprised and repulsed him. He could not trust the light, but was almost certain the elder Omicron drone smiled at him—a dry and lifeless, skin-cracking grin. It was a manipulated, puppeteered thing, horribly matching the phoniness of the store-bought eyes and Jack's memory of fragile, cured, dead flesh. Grin fixed, eyes fixed, onward they came, purposefully.
Second warnings were for bad movies, too. Jack cut loose his bonus cartridge.
The boom of the shot knocked more dust out of the curtains. It resonated inside the girderwork and made the steel cables securing the screen vibrate. Jack flinched. What even an unmodified .45 bullet could do to a human skull at medium-close range was something seldom depicted in those movies, either. Basically, it made a little hole going in and a huge hole coming out. Frequently it could decapitate the aggressor. That was how Teller had bought it.
A perfect black dot appeared on the dude's forehead just over the right eye. The hair on the back of his head flew apart violently, followed by a cloud of brown, metallic chaff, like pulverized cardboard. It glittered in the air and settled. Then roaches began to boil out of the forehead hole. The grin stayed. The dude took another step forward.
Jack fired convulsively after that.
An eye exploded like a zircon struck with a steel hammer. Dead chalk stubs of shattered teeth were blown east. The head disintegrated into flaking quarters. Roaches flooded out from the neck stump.
Jack swung, dropped sights, and put a slug through the new employee's outstretched hand. No grimace of impact, but it spun him, and he lost balance and tumbled through the curtains headfirst, into the orchestra pit. His buddy, sans head, was still tracking mindlessly toward Jack. Jack squeezed off, and the point-blank blast tore away everything below the screen dude's left kneecap and sent it flying through the movie screen. He crumpled. Freed bugs scattered for cover.
Hurdling along, pole-vaulting, actually, click-thump, he made it to the exit door without falling on his face. Roaches were crawling up his legs now. The case-hardened padlock hasp and tempered chain were no match for the bullet that kicked them apart, and Jack shoved the door, doubling it back against the outside wall with a crash. Outside the paving was slick with rainwater; puddles gleamed back at him in the trapezoid of dim light surrounding his elongated shadow. Good. They hated water. He limped out into the alley.
He never saw the new employee, flailing pathetically in a waist-high quicksand of chewing insects, struggling to stand. Nor did he see the new employee's seams burst, to feed the floodtide now cascading over the fallen walking stick, testing, tasting, analyzing. Angrily.
The .45 burned in his fist. The loss of the cane pushed him into overexertion. At least you've fought your last battle, soldier.
Some guardian angel had abandoned a split haft of broomstick in a garbage dumpster, and that helped him get home. He stopped often, to slap at himself, and after about ten minutes he heard sirens.
The bottle of George Dickel's finest on the countertop was thoughtfully notched so a potential drinker might view how much stock remained. Of the eight ounces inside when Jack burst into the apartment, four vanished before he even sat down.
His leg relaxed at last, and might have screamed. His breath whooshed out and he bolted down another shot straight and neat, letting his gut warm. Sweat dumbed up his clothing with dampness. He rested the .45 on the table, next to the open bottle, and in a few silent minutes he felt better, more relaxed. The gun had cooled.
Bam, he thought. Bam, bam, bam, and the dude popped open and there they were, a hive intelligence, like the Cong, thriving under our noses, living off our garbage, our human garbage, and good old Jack Daniels Stoner had found out.
He took another pull from the bottle. A slower-killing slug, he thought, looking again at the gun.
A hair was stuck to it.
Absently he moved to pluck it front the metal. It moved.
His insides jumped. It was protruding from the barrel, brown and thin and wavering, and it was not a hair.
He thought he saw a madly scurrying roach speed out of the mouth of the gun. Quickly, he slapped at the bare table surface and strained to check the underside. Nothing. It was his imagination dropping into overdrive, fueled by the octane of whiskey. Nothing. The gun was clean.
But those little suckers sure run fast.
He did last rites for the bottle and shuddered. Then, grimly, he started on the leftover beer. Soon he fell asleep on the sofa of his neat, ordered, vermin-free apartment.
And when he woke he knew they had found him. He had ferried their scouts home with him, and now they had him.
His good leg ached horridly. He remembered the aluminum crutch, ugly and unused, still in the foyer closet. Before being fitted with his plastic leg, he had learned to use the crutch as a surrogate. He tensed before jerking open the closet door, and something tiny and brown dashed out of sight behind the jamb. He was certain he had seen this one. He grabbed the crutch, and again his peripheral vision noted quick, dark movement, but by the time it took to turn his head and focus, it was gone—hidden, out of the light.
The countertop! Leaning on the crutch, he humped feverishly across the room. More nothing.
"Damn it!" Frustration and panic lay in wait.
The pistol was still on the table, but not as he thought he had left it. Now its barrel was pointed at the chair where had sat drinking. He knew there were at least three slugs still in the clip, minimum, and never in his life gotten bombed enough to leave any weapon idly aimed at himself, loaded or no.
From the cabinets, the spaces beneath the counter tiles, the interior of the stove, he could feel them monitoring him. They knew where he was. He knew they were there. He stopped the childish bullshit of trying to catch them and started to proceed methodically.
He smacked a spare clip into the gun and reloaded the exhausted one before sliding everything back into the pea coat. He pocketed all the change he could scrounge up. To leave became imperative—not to return to the Omicron, oh, no, not unless one wanted to spend a few months posthumously helming the snack bar, but to get clear of the apartment before they had an opportunity to catch him napping. The quiet walls unnerved him now, pressed against him with the weight of a million tiny, impatient bodies. Most likely they were right above his head and he could not see them, like Teller.
On his way to the door he thought he'd spotted one on the tabletop, maybe the one from the gun. He ignored it. He would never be fast enough to get the little mothers. But he could be fast enough, sharp enough, still, to get out, to survive.
The night was still black and wet. Droplet patterns from the A.M. mist accreted on the metal of his crutch. He walked. He proceeded methodically, with nowhere to go but away.
He was in the crosswalk at La Brea and Santa Monica when the headlights nailed him. An oilslick-black Buick Regal, filled with the resplendence of a coked-out pimp pilot and a pair of chromed hookers, stopped with its front tires over the white line. The riders were pretty jolly for three o'clock in the morning. Jack stared at them through the tinted windshield, realizing they had no idea of what was happening. They celebrated the bliss of their ignorance; they toasted the world in which they moved. To Jack it had always been the place where there was respite from battle. It was a place he had never been allowed, not even after he was back in the world.
An angry black face bared teeth through the open driver's window. "Goddamn hands off the car, muthafuckin bum!" He floored the pedal. Jack jumped as the engine roared and the Buick ran the red, swerving across the lane, ass-skidding like a slot car. Gibes, in high, ridiculing feminine voices, echoed behind.
He stood in the crosswalk, unchallenged, shouting no at the receding taillights. They had thought he was some derelict, more of the human garbage that washed up onto the streets of Hollywood every night. Like the winos in the Omicron, like the Boulevard misfits, like Fatigue Coat. He shouted that they were wrong, and his voice bounced off the Thrifty's and the Burger King and the car wash, and not even the bag lady snoring on the RTD bus bench paid him any mind.
He was just another loon, yelling in an intersection at three in the morning. He felt the crushing weight of his need to tell everyone the truth. But nobody gave a damn about his story from the git.
The light changed. That got him moving; training kept him in uniform motion. As one of George's patrol mavericks, his job was to make practical decisions fast and act instinctively. That was what kept the patrol alive. People he could not see counted on him, while an enemy he could not see tried to kill him. At the curb he thought he saw a stray roach struggling up his pant leg in the wet neon glow of the DON'T WALK sign. His fist swooped down to smash it, faster now, and his plastic leg resounded with its characteristic, drumlike thunk as the bug was flattened into nonexistence. He felt the reflex tremor from leg nerves that no longer existed either.
His body skipped a breath and he froze. The sound his fist had made against his plastic leg was subtly deeper than usual—the difference in pitch between an empty glass and a filled one.
Jack's mouth dried up with amazing speed. His plastic leg was hollow, like the leg of a Ken doll. Lots of empty space down there, where he could not see. Or feel.
He tore open his pea coat and jerked loose the straps that held the prosthetic limb buckled fast to his ruined flesh. From somewhere down there another roach free-fell to land on its back, legs wiggling. Jack pivoted on the crutch and stomped it into the sidewalk cracks.
Keeling madly forward, he grabbed the leg by its jointed plastic ankle and heaved it in a clumsy cartwheel toward a litter basket next to the stoplight pole. He did not see it crash-land; he was watching another roach scurry into the sewer grating, wondering if it had come from him.
He left the leg there, jutting crookedly out of the litter basket, looking like a vaudevillian joke. By dawn some bag lady would scavenge it. Under the chancy light of the mercury-vapor lamps he had no way of telling whether the bugs he now saw scuttering about on his abandoned leg were from within the leg itself or from the garbage already stinking in the overfilled basket. They swarmed and capered as though cheated.
Using his crutch, rather proficiently he thought, he moved purposefully on into the slick, black night. His pant leg fluttered crazily because it was empty, and for that very reason he paid it no mind.
THE EMBRACING
After Tillyard and Althea were injected with the drug, they were released into the labyrinth and no one ever heard their names again.
"I love you—oh please; I can sense you're here with me. Please be with me. Make love to me. Now; quickly, love me."
"Yes," Tillyard managed slowly. His voice, clogged and ragged with disuse, served him reluctantly only because the speech part was important. His nose prickled; his eyes, though sightless, darted about. "Yes. I want to make love to you so badly. It's been so long; I've been so alone." His voice cracked into a sob. "Touch me. Take me." He stretched his left hand out into the darkness. "Love me."
At the second of contact, Tillyard jacked his right arm savagely around, putting his weight and the piston force of his biceps behind the strike. The blunt, bullet-shaped stone in his fist impacted where he knew a skull to he; the wet crunch was amplified by the cathedral acoustics of the cavern. The thing that had briefly touched his arm had time for a single liquid squeal before its reflexes were severed. Tillyard knew how to time the swing, how to place the blow to kill instantly and properly. The thing collapsed to the stone floor, its blood and brains rivuleting away into moist crannies of rock. Tillyard sensed where the corpse had fallen and straddled it, his legs registering the tingle of residual body heat. He cast quickly around and, assured that he was alone (in this chamber of the labyrinth, at least; and for the time being), he knelt and used the stone to puncture the chest of the creature on the floor. Its heart was warni and slick. Tillyard slipped the heart into his bloodbag; he could eat it later. The cavern here was too open and dangerous, and he had to get to close walls and narrow tunnels.
All that was in his mind was her face. The last thing he had ever seen was her face.
A burly pair of Stockboys had whipsawed her against the courtroom wall to restrain her. She had always been more visceral in her reactions while Tillyard—ever the artist, therefore removed from the fantasy existence most people thought of as the real world—was defeated by his limitless capacity for rationalizing even the outrageous. He came to his feet but could not move; his very senses were stunned by the impact of the verdict. Across the room—they had not been permitted a single moment together since their apprehension—Althea was up and moving before Tillyard reacted.
On reflection, Tillyard found woe even in his loving admiration for her more basic expression of humanity. She had known instantly the verdict would doom them both, while Tillyard's mind had to eliminate loopholes first, convincing itself. He stood frozen, thinking. She determined immediately, so fast that perhaps it was on a subliminal level of instinct or chemistry, that since they were doomed, the removal of a single Adjudicator from the world could not damn them any more seriously. She had leaped from her berth in fury, twisting around the guards dogging her, and went for him on the dais.
Of course the Stockboys intercepted her; that's what they were there for. She thrashed as they restrained her and the Adjudicator smiled tolerantly.
