Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “I want to be with you,” said Gentry. His own voice sounded slowed down, a 45 r.P.M. record played at 331/3.

  Marvin nodded and stood up. His hand was very strong on Gentry’s arm as he pulled the lawman to his feet, moved him toward the stairway. “What you got to do now, my man, is to go sleep. We call you when something goes down.”

  Jackson woke him at 5:30 the next morning. “Your friend’s awake,” said the ex-medic.

  Gentry thanked him and sat on the edge of his mattress for several minutes, holding his head and trying to get his mind to work. Before seeing Saul he clumped downstairs, made coffee in an ancient percolator, and came back up with two steaming, chipped cups. A dozen or so gang members snored on mattresses in various rooms. There was no sight of Marvin or Leroy.

  Saul took the coffee cup with a heartfelt thanks. “I woke up and thought I’d dreamed everything,” he said. “I expected to find myself in my apartment with a class to teach at the university. Then I felt this.” He held up his ban daged left arm.

  “How did that happen?” asked Gentry.

  Saul sipped coffee and said, “I’ll tell you what, Sheriff. We will do a deal. I will start with the most important information and talk awhile. Then you will do the same. If our stories connect in any way, we will pursue the connections. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Gentry.

  They talked for an hour and a half and then questioned each other for another half hour. When they stopped, Gentry helped the older man up and they walked to a barred window and looked out at the first grayings of dawn.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve day,” said Gentry.

  Saul reached to adjust his glasses, realized that he did not have them on. “It is all too incredible, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said Gentry. “But Natalie Preston is out there somewhere and I’m not leaving this city until I find her.” They went back to the alcove to pick up Saul’s glasses and then went downstairs together to see if they could find anything to eat.

  Marvin and Leroy were back by ten A.M., talking earnestly with two tall Hispanics. Three low-slung automobiles idled at the curb, each filled with Chicano youths eyeing the blacks on Community House porch. The black gang members glowered back.

  The kitchen had become a command center, entered by invitation only, and twenty minutes after the Hispanics left, Saul and Gentry were summoned. Marvin, Leroy, one of the twins, and half a dozen others stared at them in silence.

  “How is Kara?” asked Gentry. “She died,” said Marvin. He looked at Saul. “You told Jackson you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yes,” said Saul. “I think you can help me find the place where I was held prisoner. It can’t be very far from here.”

  “Why should we do that?”

  “The place is a control center for the police that have the area staked out.”

  “So? Fuck them.”

  Saul tugged at his beard. “I think that the police . . . the federal people . . . know where Melanie Fuller is.”

  Marvin’s head came up. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” said Saul, “but based on what I saw and overheard, it makes sense. I think the Oberst tipped them to her whereabouts for his own reasons.”

  “This Oberst be your Voodoo Man?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of the government pigs are on the street. Would one of them know about the Voodoo Lady?”

  “Perhaps,” said Saul, “but if we could get at the control center, ah . . . talk to someone there . . . I think we would have a better chance to find out.”

  “Talk to me, man,” said Marvin. “It’s in an open area about eight minutes’ drive from here,” began Saul. “I think a helicopter has been landing and taking off from there regularly. The structures are temporary . . . possibly mobile homes or the kind of trailers you find on construction sites.”

  Saul wore a balaclava and gloves when he left the house with Gentry and five of the gang members. If Colben and Haines believed he was dead, Gentry had suggested they not disabuse them of the notion. They took Woods’s panel truck for the short drive west on Germantown Avenue, south on Chelten, and then west on an unnamed street into a ware house district.

  “Blue Ford following us,” said Leroy at the wheel. “Do it,” said Marvin.

  The panel truck bounced across a littered parking lot and down an alley, pausing by a sagging, corrugated tin shed only long enough for Marvin, Saul, Gentry, and one of the G. twins to jump out and hide in the shadows of the open doorway. The truck quickly accelerated down the alley and spun east onto the narrow street. Twenty seconds later a blue Ford with three white men in it roared past.

  “This way,” said Marvin and led them across a wasteland of oil drums and metal tailings to a small junkyard where flattened automobiles had been stacked thirty feet high. Marvin and the younger boy clambered up the stack in seconds; Gentry and Saul took quite a bit longer.

  “That it, man?” asked Marvin as Saul crawled the last six feet, finally resting on the precarious, rusted summit and leaning against the panting sheriff for support. Marvin handed a small pair of binoculars to the psychiatrist.

  Saul cradled his left arm in his open jacket and peered through the lenses. A high, wooden fence enclosed half a city block. To the south, a foundation had been excavated and concrete poured. Two bulldozers, a backhoe, and smaller equipment sat idle. In the center of the remaining space, three mobile home units formed an E with the middle segment missing. Seven government-issue cars and a Bell Telephone van were parked nearby. Micro wave antennae bristled from the center trailer segment. In the open field, a circle of red lights had been set in the ground and a small windsock hung limply from a metal pole.

  “Has to be,” said Saul Laski.

  As they watched, a man in shirtsleeves came out of the center trailer and briskly walked the twenty yards to one of three port-a-toilets set up near where the cars were parked.

  “One of those dudes be the one you like to talk to?” asked Marvin. “Probably,” said Saul. They were almost certainly invisible amid the piles of rusted metal, but Gentry and the others found themselves crouching behind axles, wheels, and flattened hardtops.

  Marvin looked at his watch. “About five hours before it gets dark.” he said. “Then we do it.”

  “Goddamnit,” snarled Gentry. “Do we have to wait that long?”

  As if in answer, a sleek helicopter came in from the north, circled the field once, and settled in the circle of lights. A man in a thick goose-down parka jumped out and ran to the command trailer. Saul took the binoculars back from Marvin and caught a glimpse of Charles Colben’s round face. “That is a man you do not want to encounter,” he said. “Wait until he is gone.”

  Marvin shrugged. “Let’s get out of here,” said Gentry. “I’m going to look for Natalie by myself.”

  “No,” said Saul, his voice muffled by the balaclava. “I will go too.”

  “Are you looking for her body?” Saul Laski asked as the two poked through the rubble of yet another half-demolished row house.

  Gentry sat down on a three-foot-high wall of bricks. The last of the day’s cloudy light was visible through gaps in the ceiling above them and holes in the roof above that. “Yes,” said Gentry, “I suppose I am.”

  “You think Melanie Fuller’s agent killed her and left her body in some place like this?”

  Gentry looked down and pulled out the Ruger. It was fully loaded. The safety was off. The action worked smoothly, oiled and reoiled by Gentry that morning. He sighed. “At least that would be a confirmation. Why would the old woman keep her alive, Saul?”

  Saul found a block of masonry to sit on. “One of the problems with working with psychotics is that their thought processes are not easily accessible. That is good, I suspect. If everyone understood the working of a psychopath’s mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.”

  “Are you sure that the Fuller woman is psychotic?”

  Saul spread the fingers of his rig
ht hand. He had pulled the balaclava up until it made a lumpy stocking cap. “By every definition we have now, she is certifiable. The problem is not that she has retreated into a psychotic’s warped and twisted view of reality, but that her power allows her to confirm and maintain that world.” Saul adjusted his glasses. “Essentially that was the problem with Nazi Germany. A psychosis is like a virus. It can multiply and spread almost at will when it is accepted by the host organism and transmitted freely.”

  “Are you saying that Nazi Germany did what it did because of people like your Oberst and Melanie Fuller?”

  “Not at all,” said Saul and his voice was as firm as Gentry had ever heard it. “I am not even sure if those people are fully human. I regard them as faulty mutations— victims of an evolution that includes almost a million years of breeding for interpersonal dominance along with other traits. It is not the Obersts or Melanie Fullers or even the Barents or Colbens who create violence-oriented fascist societies.”

  “What is it then?”

  Saul gestured toward the street visible through shattered window-panes. “The gang members think there are dozens of federal agents involved in this operation. I would guess that Colben is the only one among them who has even a touch of this bizarre mutant ability. The others allow the virus of violence to grow because they are ‘only following orders,’ or are part of a social machine. The Germans were experts at designing and building machines. The death camps were part of a larger death machine. It has not been destroyed, only rebuilt in a different form.”

  Gentry stood up and walked toward a hole in the rear wall. “Let’s go. We can do the rest of this block before it gets dark.”

  They found the scrap of material amid the ashes and charred rafters of two row houses that had burned but were never torn down. “I’m sure it’s from the shirt she was wearing Monday,” said Gentry. He fingered the piece of cloth and used his flashlight to study the carpet of ashes. “Lots of footprints here. It looks like they struggled there, in the corner. This nail could have torn the sleeve of her shirt if she had been thrown up against the wall here.”

  “Or if she was being carried over someone’s shoulder,” said Saul. The psychiatrist cradled his left arm with his right hand. His face was very pale.

  “Yeah. Let’s look for signs of blood or . . . anything.” The two men searched for twenty minutes in the failing light, but there was nothing else. They were outside, speculating on which way Natalie’s abductor might have gone in the maze of alleys and empty buildings, when the youth named Taylor came running down the street waving at them. Gentry held the Ruger loosely at his side and waited. The boy stopped ten feet from them. “Hey, Marvin wants you two back at the house now. Leroy got one of the dudes from the trailer. He told Marvin where to find the Voodoo Lady.”

  “Grumblethorpe,” said Marvin. “She’s in Grumblethorpe.”

  “What on earth is a Grumblethorpe?” asked Saul.

  Gentry and the psychiatrist stood crowded into the kitchen with thirty other people. More gang members filled the halls and downstairs rooms. Marvin sat at the head of the kitchen table and laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I say— What’s a Grumblethorpe? Then this dude, he tells me where the fuck it is and I say, yeah, I know that place.”

  “It’s an old house on the Avenue,” said Leroy. “Real old. It was built when the honkys wore them funny three-sided hats.”

  “Whom did you interrogate?” asked Saul. “Huh?” said Leroy. “Which of the guys did you grab?” interpreted Gentry.

  Marvin grinned. “Leroy, G. B., and me, we went back when it was getting dark. The chopper was gone, man. So we wait by those toilets ’til dude comes out. He got his piece in this little bitty clip holster on his pants. G. B. and me, we let the dude drop his pants before we say hi. Leroy brought the truck up the side. We let the dude finish his business before we take him with us.”

  “Where is he now?” asked Gentry. “Still in Rev Woods’s truck. Why?”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Marvin. “He sleeping now. Dude says he a special agent, video technician. Say he didn’t know nothing about anything. Says he won’t talk to us and we in deep shit, assaulting federal pig an’ all. Leroy and D. B. help him talk. Jackson say dude be all right, but he’s asleep now.”

  “And the Fuller woman is in a place called Grumblethorpe on Germantown Avenue,” said Gentry. “The agent was sure?”

  “Yeah,” said Marvin. “Old Voodoo Lady been staying with another white broad on Queen Lane. Should’ve thought’ve that. Old white broads stick together.”

  “What’s she doing at this Grumblethorpe place then?”

  Marvin shrugged. “Federal pig said she had been staying there more and more this week. We figure that’s where the honky monster coming from.”

  Gentry shouldered his way through the crowd until he stood next to Marvin. “All right. We know where she is. Let’s go.”

  “Not yet,” said Marvin. He turned to say something to Leroy, but Gentry grabbed his shoulder and turned him around.

  “To hell with this ‘not yet’ stuff,” said Gentry. “Natalie Preston may still be alive there. Let’s go.”

  Marvin looked up with cold, blue eyes. “Back off, man. When we do this, we’re going to do it right. Taylor out talking to Eduardo and his boys.

  G. R. and G. B. over at the Grumblethorpe place checking it out. Leila and the girls, they’re making sure where all the federal pigs at.”

  “I’ll go by myself,” said Gentry and turned away. “No,” said Marvin. “You get close to that place, all the federal pigs recognize you and our surprise be shot to shit. You wait ’til we ready or we leave you here, man.”

  Gentry turned back. Marvin stood as the big, white southern sheriff loomed over him. “You’d have to kill me to keep me from going,” said Gentry.

  “Yeah,” said Marvin, “that right.”

  The tension in the room was palpable. Someone turned on a radio somewhere in the house and in the few seconds before it was cut off, the sound of Motown filled the air.

  “Few hours, man,” said Marvin. “I know where you’re coming from. Few hours. We do it together, man.”

  Gentry’s huge form relaxed slowly. He held up his right hand and Marvin gripped it, fingers interlaced. “A few hours,” said Gentry.

  “Right on, bro,” said Marvin and smiled.

  Gentry sat alone on the mattress on the empty second floor, cleaning and oiling the Ruger for the third time that day. The only light came from the hanging lamp with the damaged tiffany shade. Dark stains mottled the surface of the pool table.

  Saul Laski came into the circle of light, looked around hesitantly, and came over to where Gentry was sitting.

  “Howdy, Saul,” Gentry said without looking up. “Good evening, Sheriff.”

  “Seeing as how we’ve been through more than a little bit together, Saul, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Rob.”

  “Done, Rob.”

  Gentry snapped the cylinder back in place on the Ruger and spun it. Carefully, with full concentration, he inserted the cartridges one by one.

  Saul said, “Marvin is sending the early teams out already. In twos and threes.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve decided to go with Taylor’s group . . . the command center,” said Saul. “I suggested it. A distraction.”

  Gentry looked up briefly. “All right.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to be there when they get the Fuller woman,” Saul said, “but I don’t think they understand how dangerous Colben can be . . .”

  “I understand,” said Gentry. “Did they say how soon it will be?”

  “Not long after midnight,” said Saul.

  Gentry set the gun aside and pulled the mattress up against the wall like a pillow. He laced his hands behind his head and lay back. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” he said. “Happy New Year.”

  Saul took his glasses off and wiped them with a Kleenex. “You got to k
now Natalie Preston very well, did you not?”

  “She was in Charleston for just a few days after you left,” said Gentry. “But yes, I was beginning to get to know her.”

  “A remarkable young woman,” said Saul. “She makes one feel as if one has known her for years. A very intelligent and perceptive young person.”

  “Yep,” said Gentry. “There is a chance she is alive,” said Saul.

  Gentry looked at the ceiling. The shadows there reminded him of the stains on the pool table. “Saul,” he said, “if she’s alive, I’m going to get her out of this nightmare.”

  “Yes,” said Saul, “I believe you will. You must excuse me, I am going to get an hour or two of sleep before the revels commence.” He went off to a mattress near the window.

  Gentry lay looking at the ceiling for some time. Later, when they came upstairs looking for him, he was ready and waiting.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Germantown

  Wednesday, Dec. 31, 1980

  The room was windowless and very cold. It was more of a closet than a room, six feet long, four feet wide, with three stone walls and a thick wooden door. Natalie had slammed and kicked at the door until her fists and feet were bruised, but it had not budged. She knew the thick oak must have massive hinges and bolts on the outside.

  The cold had brought her awake. At first the panic had risen in her like vomit, more urgent and painful than the cuts and bruises on her forehead. She immediately remembered crouching behind charred timbers, the world smelling of ashes and fear while the hulking shadow with the scythe shuffled toward her through the darkness. She remembered jumping, throwing the brick she had been clutching, trying to run past the swiftly turning shadow. Hands had closed on her upper arms; she had screamed, kicked wildly. Then the heavy blow to her head, and another blow cutting across her temple and brow, blood flowing into her left eye and the sensation of being lifted, carried. A glimpse of sky, snow, a tilting streetlight, then blackness.

  She had awakened to the cold and darkness severe enough to make her wonder for several minutes if she had been blinded. She crawled from a nest of blankets on the stone floor and felt the roughhewn confines of her stone and wood cell. The ceiling was too high to touch. There were cold metal brackets on one wall, as if shelves had once rested there. After several minutes, Natalie was able to make out small bands of lesser darkness at the top and base of the door, not light as such, but an external darkness relieved by at least the hint of reflected light.