by Dan Simmons
“Yeah, that it,” Louis whispered huskily. “But the honky monster with her too.”
“You sure it was him?” snapped Leroy. “Yeah, I sure,” said Louis. “And George seen him before, remember. Skinny dude. Long, greasy hair. Weird eyes. How many dudes like that walking around with old lady not be Voodoo Lady and honky mofo?”
There was a loud laughter from the twenty-five people in the room. Natalie thought it sounded like the laughter of anxiety release.
“Go on,” said Marvin. “We followed ’em, man. They go to an old house. We follow them, man. Setch say, get you, but I say let’s see what’s going down. George he go up a tree on the side and see the Voodoo Lady sleeping. I say, let’s do it. Setch say OK, he get the lock open, we go in.”
“Where the house?” asked Marvin. “I show you, man.”
“Tell me,” snapped Marvin and grabbed Louis by the collar.
The heavier boy whimpered and held his throat. “It be on Queen Lane, man. Not far from the Avenue. I show you, man. Setch and George be waiting.”
“Finish the story,” Marvin said softly. “We go in quiet,” said Louis. “It only four o’clock, you know? But the Voodoo Lady, she be asleep upstairs in a room full of dolls . . .”
“Dolls?”
“Yeah, like a kid’s room, you know? Only she not exactly asleep, more like she do too much dope, you know?”
“In a trance,” said Natalie.
Louis looked at her. “Yeah. Like that.”
“Then what?” said Gentry.
Louis grinned at everyone. “Then I cut her throat, man.”
“She’s dead?” said Leroy.
Louis’s grin got wider. “Oh yes. She dead.”
“What about the honky monster?” asked Marvin. “Setch, George, and me, we find him in the kitchen. He be sharpening that big curve blade of his.”
“The scythe?” said Natalie. “Yeah,” said Louis. “And he had a knife, you know? That what cut me, when we took it away. Then Setch and George cut him. Got him good. Cut his fucking throat, man.”
“He dead?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Fuck yes we sure. You think we don’t know when somebody dead, man?”
Marvin stared at Louis. There was a strange gleam to the gang leader’s startling blue eyes. “This honky motherfucker killed five good brothers, Louis. Muhammed, be six-two, mean dude. How come you an’ Setch an’ little George take this motherfucker so easy?”
Louis shrugged. “I don’t know, man. When the Voodoo Lady dead, the honky no monster. Just a skinny little white kid. He crying when Setch cut his throat.”
Marvin shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Sounds too easy. What about the pigs?”
Louis stared. “Hey, man,” he said at last. “Setch say bring you right away. You want to see them or not?”
“Yeah,” said Marvin. “Yeah.”
“You’re not going,” said Gentry.
“What do you mean I’m not going?” said Natalie. “Marvin wants photographs taken.”
“I don’t give a damn what Marvin wants,” said Gentry. “You’re staying here.”
They were on the second floor in the curtained alcove. All the gang members were downstairs. Gentry had carried his suitcase up and was changing to corduroy slacks and a sweater. Natalie saw where blood had soaked through the ban dages above his ribs. “You’re hurt,” she said. “You shouldn’t be going either.”
“I have to see if the Fuller woman is dead.”
“I want to see too . . .”
“No.” Gentry pulled a goose-down vest over the sweater and turned to her. “Natalie . . .” He raised one huge hand and touched her cheek gently. “Please. You . . . you’re important to me.”
Natalie moved gently against him, careful not to brush against his side. She raised her face to kiss him. Afterward, nestling her face against wool, she whispered. “You’re important to me, too, Rob.”
“All right. I’ll be back as soon as we see what’s going on.”
“But the pictures . . .”
“I’ll use your Nikon, OK?”
“All right, but I don’t feel right about . . .”
“Look,” said Gentry and shifted into his thickest drawl, “this here Marvin fella ain’t no fool. He isn’t going to take no chances.”
“Don’t you take chances.”
“No, ma’am. I gotta go.” He pulled her to him for a long, full kiss that made her forget about his ribs as she put her arms around him and held on tightly.
Natalie watched from the second-story window as the group set out. With Louis went Marvin, Leroy, the tall youth named Calvin, a sullen-faced, older gang member called Trout, twin boys Natalie did not know, and Jackson. The ex-medic had shown up just as the expedition was departing. Everyone was armed except Louis, Gentry, and Jackson. Calvin and Leroy carried sawed-off shotguns under their loose coats, Trout carried a long-barreled .22, and the twins had small, cheap-looking pistols that Rob had called Saturday Night Specials. Gentry had asked Marvin for the Ruger, but the gang leader had laughed, finished loading the heavy weapon, and slid it into the pocket of his own army jacket. Gentry looked up and waved the Nikon at her when they left.
Natalie sat on the mattress in the corner and fought the urge to cry. She went through all of the possibilities and permutations in her mind.
If Melanie Fuller was dead, they might be able to leave. Might. But what about the authorities Rob had talked about? And the Oberst?
And what about Anthony Harod? Natalie tasted bile when she thought about that lizard-eyed little son of a bitch. The memory of the fear and hatred of women she had sensed during those few minutes under his control made her gorge rise. She wished that she had kicked his ugly face in when she had had the chance.
A noise on the stairs made her stand up.
Someone was emerging into the dim light at the head of the stairs. The second floor was empty except for her. Taylor had been left in charge, some of the gang members had gone off to alert others, and Natalie heard laughter from the first floor. The person at the top of the stairs moved hesitantly toward the light and Natalie caught a glimpse of a white hand, pale face.
She looked around quickly. No weapons had been left upstairs. She ran to the pool table, brilliantly lit under the single, hanging lamp, and lifted a pool cue, swinging it slightly to find the balance of it. She held it in both hands and said, “Who is it?”
“Only me.” Bill Woods, the minister who supposedly ran Community House, stepped into the light. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Natalie relaxed her posture but did not put down the pool cue. “I thought you were gone.”
The frail-looking man leaned over the table to play with the white cue ball. “Oh, I’ve been in and out all afternoon. Do you know where Marvin and the other boys have gone?”
“No.”
Woods shook his head and adjusted thick glasses. “It’s terrible the discrimination and exploitation these children suffer. Did you know that unemployment among black teenagers in this area is over ninety percent?”
“No,” said Natalie. She had moved around the table from this thin, intense man, but she sensed nothing in him but a burning desire to communicate.
“Oh yes,” said Woods. “The shops and stores along the Avenue are owned almost exclusively by whites. Mostly Jews. They no longer live around here, but they continue to control what business remains. Nothing new there.”
“What do you mean?” said Natalie. She wondered if Rob and the group were there yet. If the dead woman was not Melanie Fuller, what would Rob do?
“The Jews, I mean,” said Woods. He perched on the edge of the pool table and tugged his pant leg down. He touched his little mustache, a fuzzy black line that looked like a nervous caterpillar on his upper lip. “There is a long history of the Jews exploiting the underprivileged in America’s cities. You are black, Miss Preston. You must understand this implicitly.”
“I don
’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said Natalie just as an explosion rocked the front of the home.
“Good heavens!” cried Woods as Natalie ran to one of the windows. Two abandoned automobiles along the curb were burning fiercely. Flames leaped thirty feet into the air and illuminated empty lots, abandoned row houses across the way, and the railroad embankment to the north. A dozen gang members ran into the front sidewalk, shouting and brandishing shotguns and other weapons.
“I had better get back to the Youth Center and call the fire department,” said Woods. “The phone here was not working earlier when . . .”
Natalie turned to see why the minister had stopped talking. Woods was staring at someone standing at the head of the stairs, just at the edge of the circle of light.
He was young and thin, almost cadaverous, dressed in a torn and stained army jacket. His gaunt cheeks glowed whitely and long, tangled hair hung down over eyes set so deeply that they seemed to burn out of pits in a fleshy skull. The mouth was wide and open and Natalie could see the stub of a tongue moving like a small, pink, mutilated creature in a dark hole. He held a scythe taller than himself and when he stepped forward his shadow leaped ten feet high onto the patched and plastered wall.
“You don’t belong here,” began the Reverend Bill Woods. The scythe actually whistled as it completed its arc. Woods’s head was not completely severed. Rags of tissue and a shred of spinal cord connected it loosely as the body slowly toppled over onto it. There was a soft thump and blood pumped across the green felt top of the pool table, pooling in the nearest pocket. The silent, long-haired figure jerked the scythe blade from the body and turned toward Natalie.
Even as Woods had said his last, absurd words, Natalie was using the pool cue to shatter the window. There were metal bars on all of the windows. She screamed as loudly as she could, the hysteria she heard there surprising her, bringing her back to herself. The flames and shouts outside masked her screams. No one looked up.
Natalie flipped the pool cue so the heavy side was farthest from her and she ran toward the table. The thing with the scythe edged to its right; Natalie edged to her right, keeping the table between them, glancing toward the stairway. There was no way she could reach the stairs in time. Her legs went weak, threatening to drop her to the floor. Natalie screamed, yelled for help, swung the heavy cue, feeling the adrenaline beginning to pump inside her. The longhaired nightmare shuffled quickly to its right. Natalie shifted, keeping the table between them, moving ever so slightly closer to the stairs. The thing lifted the scythe, breaking the glass shade on the hanging lamp and setting it swinging.
There was the sound of water lapping. Natalie looked down and realized that it was blood still pumping from the neck of the corpse on the table. Even as she watched, it stopped. The swinging light threw incredible shadows on the wall and changed the color of the blood and baize from red and green to black and gray with every swing. Natalie screamed just as the thing across the table leaped, seemed to fly over the top of the pool table, and brought the scythe down in a wide arc.
She jumped in under the blade and staff, flipping the pool cue and bringing it up like a spear, feeling the point bury itself in the thing’s jacket even as he crashed down on her. The base of the pool cue hit the floor as she went to one knee and the stick acted like a lever, vaulting the figure over her.
He landed on his back with a thump and swung the scythe at her legs as he lay there, the blade rattling along the boards. Natalie jumped high, clearing the blade by two feet, and ran for the stairs even as the jacketed shadow rolled to his feet.
She threw the pool cue at him, heard it hit, and did not wait to see the result. Natalie went down the stairs three at a time. Heavy footsteps clattered behind her.
She crashed into the hallway, bounced off Kara at the entrance to the kitchen, and kept running.
“Where the hell are you going, girl?” called Kara. “Run!”
The staff of the scythe came through the kitchen doorway and caught Kara solidly between the eyes. The beautiful young woman went down without a sound, her head striking the base of the stove. Natalie slammed through the backdoor, vaulted the railing, landed and rolled on the frozen ground four feet below, and was up and running before the door crashed open behind her.
Natalie ran through the cold night air, across the tumbled wasteland behind Community House, down a pitch black alley, across a street, and down another alley. Behind her the footsteps grew heavier and closer. She heard heavy breathing, an animal’s raspy panting.
Natalie put her head down and ran.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Germantown
Sunday, Dec. 28, 1980
Tony Harod was only half aware of what Colben and Kepler were talking about as they drove him back to the Chestnut Hills Inn on Sunday evening. Harod was half reclining in the backseat of the car, holding an ice pack in place. His attention seemed to slip in and out of focus with the tides of pain that ebbed and flowed through his head and neck. He was not sure why Joseph Kepler was there or where he had come from.
“Pretty damn sloppy if you ask me,” said Kepler. “Yeah,” said Colben, “but tell me you didn’t enjoy it. Did you see the look on the passengers’ faces when that bus driver floored it?” Colben barked a peculiarly childish laugh.
“Now you have three dead civilians, five injured, and a crashed bus to explain.”
“Haines is handling it,” said Colben. “No sweat. We have backing all the way to the top on this one, remember?”
“I can’t imagine Barent is going to enjoy hearing about it.”
“Barent can go fuck himself.”
Harod moaned and opened his eyes. It was dark, the streets almost empty. Every bounce on the bricks or trolley tracks sent spasms of pain up through the base of his skull. He started to speak but discovered that his tongue seemed too thick and too clumsy to function. He decided to close his eyes.
“. . . important part was keeping them in the secure area,” Colben was saying.
“And what if we hadn’t been there as backup?”
“We were there. Do you think I’m going to leave anything important to that putz in the backseat?”
Harod kept his eyes closed and wondered who they were talking about. Kepler’s voice came again. “You’re sure those two are being used by the old man?”
“By Willi Borden?” said Colben. “No, but we’re sure the Jew was. And we’re sure that these two were involved with the Jew. Barent thinks the kraut’s up to something bigger than settling Trask’s hash.”
“Why would Borden go after Trask in the first place?”
Colben barked his laugh again. “Old Nieman baby sent a few of his plumbers to Germany to terminate Borden. They ended up in body bags and you saw what happened to Trask.”
“And why is Borden here? To get the old woman?”
“Who the hell knows? All those old farts were crazy as cockroaches.”
“Do you know where Borden is?”
“Do you think we’d be dicking around like this if we did? Barent says the Fuller broad is the best bait we have, but I’m getting goddamned tired of the waiting. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to keep the local cops and city authorities out of all this.”
“Especially when you use city buses the way you do,” said Kepler. “They way we do,” said Colben and both men laughed.
Maria Chen looked up in surprise as Colben and a man she did not know half carried Tony Harod into the sitting room of the motel suite. “Your boss bit off more than he could chew to night,” said Colben, dropping Harod’s arm and letting him drop to a sofa.
Harod tried to sit upright on the edge of the couch, swayed, and fell back into the cushions.
“What happened?” asked Maria Chen. “Tony baby got caught in a lady’s bedroom by a jealous boyfriend,” laughed Colben.
“We had the doctor at operation headquarters look at him,” said the other man, the one who looked a little bit like Charlton Heston. “He thinks it m
ay be a mild concussion, nothing more serious.”
“We have to get back,” said Colben. “Now that your Mr. Harod has fucked up this part of the operation, all hell is ready to break loose in spade city.” He pointed at Maria Chen. “See to it that he’s down at the command trailer by ten o’clock in the morning. Got that?”
Maria Chen said nothing, showed nothing by her expression. Colben grunted as if satisfied and the two men left.
Harod was fully aware of only parts of that evening; he distinctly remembered throwing up repeatedly in the small, tiled bathroom, he recalled Maria Chen tenderly undressing him, and he remembered the cool slide of sheets against his skin. Someone applied cold cloths to his forehead during the night. He awakened once to find Maria Chen in bed next to him, her skin brown in white bra and pan ties. He reached for her, felt vertigo rise in him, and closed his eyes for a few more seconds.
Harod awoke at seven A.M. with one of the worst hangovers of his life. He felt for Maria Chen, found no one there, and sat up with a groan. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and wondering what Sunset Strip motel he was in when he remembered what had happened. “Oh, Christ,” said Harod.
It took him forty-five minutes to shower and shave. He was reasonably certain that any sudden movement would send his head falling to the floor, and he had no interest in crawling around on all fours in the headless dark to find it.
Maria Chen entered loudly just as Harod shuffled out to the sitting room in his orange robe.
“Good morning,” she said. “Bullshit.”
“It’s a beautiful morning.”
“Screw it.”
“I brought some breakfast from the coffee shop. Why don’t we have something to eat.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
Maria Chen smiled and set the white carry-out sacks on the counter at the far end of the room. She reached into her purse and pulled out the Browning automatic. “Tony, listen. I’m going to suggest once more that we have breakfast together. If I get another obscenity from you . . . or the slightest hint of a sullen response . . . I’m going to fire this entire pistol-load of bullets into that refrigerator. I would guess that the noise would not be helpful to your precarious state of health at this moment.”