Boyd blinked, squeezed the extinguisher, and foamed the scene into a white blur, kept spraying until he was aware of someone hitting him and yelling. "You stupid son of a bitch! Bring it back! Bring it back!"
But the doors were closed again, dripping foam, and the elevator was groaning down its shaft.
Chapter 9
Well, you’ll never strut your stuff again, Herbert thought, wiping the blood from his face.
Before him lay the waste of what had been a beautiful girl, never to be beautiful again. Oh, she might turn a few heads in the near future, but it was hard to be beautiful when your face was missing. She’d run out of the Gingerbread House in front of him, all bouncing blond curls and ass, and he’d put a bullet through the back of her head.
He squatted under the marquis, squeezed the dead girl’s breast, and groaned. Jesus. Still warm.
Opening his backpack, he moaned again. Such toys!
From inside the Gingerbread House came a glorious symphony: screaming, smashing glass, the thuds and crashing of toppled furniture. Through the glass of the front door, Herbert saw a meathead humping a girl. As he watched, a cocktail waitress appeared and yanked a mouthful of flesh from some asshole’s shoulder.
"Tsk, tsk," Herbert said, "somebody was drinking on the job." Then he let go a high-pitched titter. Everything was going as planned!
Oh, how the meatheads wanted to kill him! Initially, they’d charged from all sides, but he’d been too quick for them, laughing as he punched holes in their foreheads. It was risky, sure—fucking-A-right it was risky—but what a rush!
Turmoil churned all around him. Fights raged. Meatheads ran and screamed and killed each other. They boiled out of bars and restaurants. Nearby, a pair of crazies reveled in the messy remains of what had once been the parking lot attendant. One looked up, grinning green, and ran at Herbert. He didn’t make it far. Herbert snapped off a quick, center-mass shot and dropped him. The other one, seemingly oblivious, buried his face in the attendant’s entrails.
At any moment, Herbert knew, a whole crowd of meatheads could rush him, and if enough of them got pointed in his direction, he wouldn’t be able to fire fast enough. He’d empty the clips and work with his knives, but if there were enough of them, they’d eat him alive.
Let them try.
Through the glass doors, the mad humper turned his attention to the girl who’d bitten a chunk out of him.
Get some while the getting’s good, Herbert thought, then turned his attention to the pipe bomb.
Professor Dougherty told incoming honor students that every chemist entered the major for one of only two reasons: drugs or bombs. Either they wanted to make drugs or make bombs. Then, after an appropriate pause, the handsome professor spread his arms and said, "Good news is, there’s money in both!" Herbert heard the joke as a freshman and again in every section he TA-ed, every semester, every year since. Always the same line, always the same delivery.
He’d long doubted Professor Dougherty’s aptitude.
Dougherty was a showman first, a scientist second. Maybe third. Maybe even fourth. The guy sure did love his Porsche, and he took handball awfully seriously.
Herbert never shared Dougherty’s distraction and didn’t feel limited by the Professor’s adage. Herbert was here for bombs and drugs. Tonight was his self-administered final examination, and so far, he was acing everything. As far as drugs went, it was his own pharmacological experiments, shit he’d made—Phineas Gage and the Amygdala Hijack Express!—causing all this craziness. As for his bombs, well, he’d test those soon enough.
He reached inside the pack and withdrew a simple, anti-personnel grenade. These were a cinch to make, and fun, too. It just took a little know-how, and Herbert had plenty of that. He’d started with twenty pounds of graveyard dirt—Graveyard dirt, can you dig it?—rendered half a cup of wood ash, and picked up a gallon of rot gut whiskey, and he’d been halfway to saltpeter, what the improvised munitions handbooks call potassium nitrate. Once he’d prepped the saltpeter, he was halfway to nitric acid, and that’s what he’d used, mixed with oil of mirbane, to fill the pipes before setting the caps and waxing the ends. Finally, using packaging tape, he’d nail-wrapped the charges, then dipped them in glue and rolled them in broken glass. Glass doesn’t show up in x-rays.
Herbert lit the 12-second fuse then squeezed four rounds into the glass door beyond which the cocktail waitress appeared to be getting the best of the humping meathead. The glass shattered, and Herbert tossed the pipe bomb into the bar.
He had just enough time to get out of the way before the explosion walloped the air. Windows burst; flame and debris shot from the door, and the fierce, fiery push of flame and heat almost knocked Herbert from his feet.
He turned and was in love.
Flames gushed from windows and door, scaled the outer walls, and covered the Gingerbread House in a glaze of fire so beautiful that it took Herbert’s breath away. Alerted by a scraping sound, he watched a charred meathead who’d blasted clear of the restaurant struggle to stand, clothes and hair still aflame. "Barbecued asshole," Herbert said, and plinked the scorched meathead with his trusty peashooter. The meathead dropped. One shot, one kill.
His dick was hard as hell.
No time for that now. This was it, the big deal, the moment of which he’d been dreaming since he was ten and switched over to middle school. He’d told his parents what happened there, told them what the kids there put him through, begged them to home school him or send him to private school—even Catholic school, for Chrissakes!—but they ignored him, told him to make the best of it, told him the experience would make him strong. What it had made him was pissed the fuck off. High school had been even worse—same assholes, only bigger—and college had proven little better.
"Well," he said, loading fresh clips of ammunition, "if you can’t beat ‘em, kill ‘em!" Cackling, he walked north toward campus. Crossing College Drive forced him to start shooting with both hands, cowboy-style. Crazed meatheads covered in blood wove between smashed cars. Alarms squealed. Meatheads screamed and laughed and bellowed. Herbert targeted green, smashing bullets through emerald grins. He stared in fascination as one meathead leapt from a hotel rooftop, laughing and flailing his arms in a wriggling four-story belly flop onto the spikes of the black metal Victorian fence surrounding the inn.
Herbert headed up the cement path that led toward the main quad, the chem building, and the car he’d parked there. He fired and reloaded as he walked, finally stopping when he saw the girl blowing the dead guy.
She had a great ass. Perfect. Perfect legs, too. She leaned over the dead guy, who was sprawled across one of the park benches lining the pathway. Her head bobbed up and down in his lap, and her skirt was hiked up all the way, giving Herbert full view of those shapely legs and that heavenly ass, all curves and black thong.
"I see London, I see France," Herbert chimed.
The girl lifted her head and turned, her face a red and green mask, the eyes wide and hungry, the mouth chewing on something raw and…
"Now that’s just wrong, sweetheart," Herbert said. "If there’s one thing worse than blowing a dead guy in public, it’s eating his dick in the process."
The girl started for him.
He popped her in the forehead with the .22, and she dropped on the spot.
"Sick-o," Herbert said, and started walking again.
He’d nearly made it to chem building when he saw the meatheads mobbing the BMW.
Chapter 10
The door to the second floor stood half-open, held by the world’s most morbid doorstop: a dead kid staring from a twisted set of wire-rim glasses.
"Dylan," Steve said, feeling numb. "His name was Dylan." Nice kid…deferential, always inviting Steve over for a party, Steve hardly ever accepting, except that one time, around Halloween, and even then, Steve had left early, following the Elvira chick upstairs and—
"Come on, Steve," Cat said. "We can’t help him."
They hurried
down the stairs but jerked to another stop halfway down the final flight.
At the base of the stairwell, Steve saw long, pale legs, an arm, and the top of a head, the long, dark hair of which spread away like spike-lines from the head of an anxious cartoon character. Not that this girl felt any anxiety now. Her glazed eyes did not blink.
Another, smaller girl hunched over the dead girl, obscuring most of her torso. She turned and snarled at Steve and Cat like a dog defending a bone, and Steve saw the blood on her face and hands. Red to the elbows, she held something ropey and glistening…
Oh God, Steve thought, she's eating her.
Grinning, she tugged a coil to her mouth and took a big, snapping bite. Her teeth severed the bluish intestine and dark sludge ran from both ends. She lapped at it like a kid drinking from a garden hose. Bad smells filled the stairwell.
That’s shit, Steve thought, feeling oddly detached. She's sucking shit out of that thing. From beside him came a gagging sound, and in a distant way, he understood that Cat was puking. His own gorge rose. What he saw and smelled, what he heard, the awful smacking, growling sound the girl-thing made as she chewed guts and slurped shit, it all came together, hard and heavy as a sledgehammer, and plowed him in the gut.
He puked.
"Here she comes," Cat said.
The girl snarled, a bright green bubble ballooning from one nostril, and rushed up the stairs.
"Wait," Steve said and stuck out his palm like a traffic cop. He wasn’t finished puking. The girl coming at him like this, when he needed to spit and wipe his mouth and maybe puke some more, pissed him off. It was stupid, sure, but it did; it pissed him off so much that as he shifted into a batter’s stance and aimed at the snot bubble, he thought, What a bitch!
The charging girl reached out, and Steve scored a homerun. The bat took her not in the snot bubble but the side of the head. Something cracked loudly, and impact jolted through the bat into Steve’s arms. He felt her head give, and then she toppled, head over ass, and lay motionless at the base of the stairs.
They jumped over her and went out the door into the night, Steve hoping to God he hadn’t killed her.
"Come on," Cat said and drew him into the shadows behind the apartment dumpster. They crouched, catching their breath, and talked in whispers about what they should do now that they had escaped the fire. Steve suggested they head out of town, but Cat thought it unwise, knowing so little about the situation. Overhead, flames guttered out of upper story windows, and dark smoke billowed into the night sky. Down in town, a loud explosion boomed. As the sound of it died away, laughter fluttered across the parking lot.
From all directions came the sounds of chaos: screaming, laughter, gun shots, alarms, car horns.
"Let’s go to my place," Cat said.
Steve asked where she lived, and Cat pointed toward the West End. "Shartle Street."
Above them came the sound of shattering glass. Something big plummeted off a balcony, hit the parking lot with a resounding clang, and bounced over a row of cars, spraying foam and winking in the lamplight.
A beer keg. Some asshole had thrown a full beer keg off a balcony.
"Come on," Cat said. "We can’t sit here, waiting. What if that cop, the one shooting everybody, strolls by?"
"Cut across town now, all this crazy shit going on?" He let out his breath, running a hand through his hair.
"We don’t have to go through town," Cat said, "Not through the center. We’ll cut across campus and come in from the back."
That still meant cutting across town. Steve cast a glance in the opposite direction, off into the shadowy streets beyond the dumpster. "That’s the way to go."
"Look, Steve, do what you want. I’m going home. Those backstreets, they have all the same risks: crazy people, cars, shit, what if dogs are crazy, too? Did you think about that? But out there, we’ve got no place to go. At least this way, we go to my place, we have a roof over our heads and doors that lock and food and running water and a toilet, you know? Shit, I’m going. You coming?"
Steve felt an impulse to just peel the fuck out of there. To hell with her A+ ass and the way her body felt so tight and warm under his hands and how cool she was and how she had guts…
Aw, hell.
"Hold on," he said. "I’m coming."
They cut through the darker side of the lot. Cat kept slipping ahead of him, and he kept sprinting back out in front of her. Maybe it was macho bullshit, but he liked this girl, and if some nut jumped out, Steve wanted first swing.
He didn’t have to wait long.
The guy stepped out from behind an SUV. He was skinny, lost in a baggy brown t-shirt that read I might be fat, but you’re ugly…and I can diet. His big, shit-eating grin oozed green.
Steve didn’t slow. Pushing the bat out horizontally, he ran straight at the guy, giving the bat a little shove at the last moment so that it nailed the guy in the neck and sent him off his feet. That was great, but then Steve’s foot caught the tumbling lunatic. For a brief, wild moment, Steve thought he was going to eat pavement, but he caught himself on the hood of a car and got turned around in time to see the crazy coming onto all fours.
As the guy labored to his feet, Cat drove a kick into his balls. The force of the blow lifted him a little, and he staggered backward a step, but the pain didn’t seem to bother him. He grinned, stepping toward her, and Steve brought his bat around hard. Maybe too hard. On impact with the skull, the bat made a loud crack-pop sound, and the guy dropped, just dropped, like the bat had knocked all the bones straight out of him. Or the life, Steve thought. Shit.
He stood and stared at the guy sprawled facedown at his feet, and tried to know how to feel about it all. Just a moment ago, this guy would’ve liked nothing more than to eat Steve and Cat alive, but still…was he dead? Steve jammed there, not really thinking, just staring, still feeling the jolt of impact where it had leapt out of the bat and run up his arms, like electricity.
"Steve!" Cat yelled. She’d already started away.
Steve started running again.
They passed a pair of crazies fucking missionary style in the grass. The guy was thrusting away and screaming for all he was worth. Steve glanced their way and understood the screaming at once; the girl had her thumbs buried in the guy’s eyes. The ruined orbs drained from their sockets, but he kept pumping away, and so did she. Then he pried one of her hands free, shoved it into his mouth and bit down hard.
Steve and Cat kept moving.
A little further along, Steve asked Cat to slow it down. "If these assholes keep coming at us, I want to have the wind to fight."
They slowed to a jog and stuck to the dark alley. Steve had been meaning to quit smoking for years but had never quite gotten around to it, and now his lungs burned so bad he almost smiled when the fat girl charged out of the darkness, howling and spluttering and flailing her arms.
"Wait," Steve said. "Let her come at us."
Cat stopped, and Steve fought to catch his breath, thinking just how crazy this was, standing here and waiting for one of these freaks like they were waiting for the 3:30 bus. The fat girl didn’t look dangerous. She looked soft and clumsy. Stupid. Funny.
She hurried toward them, a big, crazy smile on her face. "Pleeee-hoo!" she shouted.
Steve held the bat out like a spear, figuring he’d let her knock the wind out of herself, watch her drop, maybe kick her a couple of times, and be on his way; but then, just as she reached him, however, she ducked low and drove hard into his legs like a football player making a tackle. Steve staggered and almost fell, the girl hugging his legs. He reached for her head, but it whipped back, the green-stained mouth wide open.
"No!"
The girl’s head snapped forward. He twisted, and she sunk her teeth into his upper thigh. White-hot pain exploded as she bit down. Steve yelped and tried to struggle free, but the girl moved fast, jumping up and sinking her teeth into the meat of his left forearm.
"Fucker!" Steve yelled and hammered the pom
mel of the bat down one-handed, nailing the top of her head, once-twice-three times, until she popped free and fell back on her ass, laughing and spitting out green slime and red blood…his red blood. He slammed his knee into her face and sent her sprawling, and then Cat was over her, stomping. Steve joined in. A minute later, the girl lay still on the patchy asphalt of the back alley.
"I jabbed her when she tackled you," Cat said, displaying the bloody knife. "She didn’t even feel it."
"I feel this," Steve said, gripping his forearm.
Cat knelt, tore a strip of fabric from the fallen girl’s skirt, and wrapped it around Steve’s injury. "I was afraid she was going to bite your dick off."
"You were afraid? I was terrified," Steve said.
"We get to my place, I’ve got plans for that thing," Cat said, and she started once more into a light jog.
Steve followed, the pot easing his nerves but taking his head to bad places. Shadows loomed. Noises—and there were plenty, in all directions—echoed and resonated. And his mind, picturing the green shit leaking from the crazies’ mouths, took him back to Banjo.
The summer of Steve’s fifteenth year, he had moved his stuff into the basement and declared it his new bedroom. It was sweet. He could sneak out at night without getting caught, and as long as he slipped back in before his mom woke, it was cool. His mom would come home for lunch and find him down there, middle of a beautiful summer day, playing video games. That never failed to piss her off.
One scene came back to him, his mom standing on the steps, saying, "Come upstairs and join the world", trying to play it off like a joke when it really meant, Get your ass up here. I want to yell at you.
He had finished the level and gone up.
She was opening a can of soup. She put it down hard on the counter then eyed him as she worked the opener. "I saw Jerry Timmerman down the block, mowing yards," she told him. "He's probably been up all day, probably on his third yard. You know what that means? He's probably made thirty bucks...and all that time, what have you been doing? Sleeping and playing those stupid games."
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