When she finally vanished around a corner, Alice stepped outside into the blaring and barking, and began to resume her life.
Old Europe, filled with ghosts, was touched during Merridale’s early afternoon, at the same time the phenomenon claimed northern Africa, the Hawaiian Islands, and northern Russia via the North Pole. As the circle widened, the rest of the world waited in horror. Beirut, rebuilt, trembled. Japan’s shrines were filled. India recalled its long history, its innumerable plagues and famines, and looked to its ancient gods. China, under its layer of official stoicism toward spiritual affairs, was chilly with fear.
At the moment the sun set in Merridale, the circle closed, populating the world twice over. No country, no continent, no race was spared the sight of its dead. Animals howled and whined and whimpered, adults and older children wept while the young looked on without understanding, often crying only in sympathy for their unhappy parents. For a time the entire planet was mad with grief and fright.
Except for Merridale. And the people who lived, and had lived, there.
“Chewing gum is a poor excuse for a cigarette,” Eddie Karl said gruffly from his bed in Lansford General.
He twisted his head uncomfortably and looked up, but was unable to see any more of the TV screen than a thin slash of blue-white light. “Don’t know why they hadda move us,” he complained to his roommate. “Can’t even see the damn TV. That color’s somethin’, I ain’t got color at home.” He listened to the newscaster for a while, looking out the window over the tops of the nearby buildings to where an early evening moon shone. He was on the seventh floor, too high to see any of the blue forms below.
“The whole world,” he said after a while. “The whole fuckin’ world. Startin’ here and goin’ out and around, like somebody wrappin’ the world up or puttin’ a glove on it or somethin’. Y’know …” He leaned back and turned his head toward his roommate. Their beds were head to head in a line from the door to the far wall. The rest of the room was hidden. “… if I wasn’t a religious man I think I’d become one after this. Now I don’t go to church, but nobody said that don’t make you religious. But if I was a goddam atheist or an aganostic, I’d change my mind fiddle-fuckin’ fast. You just tell me how else you can explain this? And on Ash Wednesday too? There’s some connection there, betcherass. Don’tcha think?”
Eddie was answered by only a low grunt.
“Sorry. I keep forgettin’ that dumb jaw of yours.” He listened to a bit more of the news.
“Panic,” he said at length. “Don’t know why everybody’s so shitless scared. Didn’t back home and I don’t know now. I tell ya, I never done nothin’ to no one that I’d be afraid to see ’em dead, y’know? Guess maybe a lot of people are scared to see people they done wrong to or somethin’. Well, if that makes ’em stop doin’ wrong to other folks, then I say whoopee and welcome. Now you take your countries — they ain’t gonna be so hot to blow each other up, because who the hell wants to live in a place where folks you blew up are all lookin’ at you? Huh?”
There was another grunt that Eddie took as agreement.
“Damn right. Now that ain’t to say people aren’t still gonna kill each other. They still will. People did that in Merridale f’crissakes. But I bet they won’t do it as often, and like with these countries, not as many at a time. Yessir.”
Eddie paused, removed his gum, and dropped it into his water glass. “Hey, we old guys go on, and you can’t tell me to shut up, so if I’m borin’ you, just blink your eyes or somethin’ … no, hell, that’s no good — I gotta break my neck just to see your eyes. Well, I’ll shut up for a minute.”
Actually, it was a few seconds short of a minute.
“I just thought of somethin’. You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That’s Latin. You know what it means?”
The roommate gave a negative grunt.
“It means something like, ‘Remember you gotta die.’ And that’s what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we’re all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we’re here.”
Eddie Karl thought about that for a while, then laughed. “Hell, we always knew that! That’s nothin’ new, is it?
“We always knew that anyway … You don’t got any smokes, do you? Aw hell, I asked you that already …”
Days, weeks passed, and the dogs stopped barking. The tears dried, and those who had fled came home. They returned to Merridale, to thousands of towns and cities over the world, eventually finding their own dead more comforting than those they had not known.
Governments did not topple, kingdoms did not fall. No angels appeared with flaming swords, as the thousands of new prophets predicted. No antichrist arose from the waiting mass of humanity. Siva, Brahma, and Vishnu, though looked for, did not appear. Mohammed remained silent, as did all the gods and avatars, as silent as the hazy dead who shared the earth with awestruck, expectant mankind.
Between the living and the dead lay an uneasy truce that grew easier with the passing of time, a pale blue light that had to darken before it could begin to illuminate.
There was no epiphany, no apocalypse.
But in Africa, a young mother, about to strike her son for accidentally breaking a jar, looked into the peaceful face of her ancient grandmother and stayed her hand, admonishing the boy with a word, impressing it with an embrace.
In the Sinai, an Israeli colonel, craggy and stiff with war, looked over a plain hard-won years before, lost, and won again, and found that there were things more important than land.
And in a tenement in Brooklyn, a machine operator on his way home passed the now familiar forms on the street finally without fear, and for the first time in his life stopped on the corner and spent a dollar for a flower to give the woman with whom he lived.
For the worker, the colonel, the mother, for all who now understood, the blue light blazed with the brilliance of suns.
THE KILL RIFF
By David J. Schow
1
This time he would pull the trigger without blinking. Training permitted him to lock his eyes open so he could watch the face in the crosshairs. As it imploded, blood would flush, brains would splatter wetly backward, two ice-blue eyes would fly violently away from each other. And the equity most people ascribed to an indifferent universe would be demonstrated. Balance would be restored.
That was how it should have gone.
Kristen’s eyes are glittering.
He was sliding into the nightmare again, reliving her death for the thousandth time. His slumbering mind acknowledged that the recurrent dream was purely a product of his brain, neural impulses with nothing to do but spin their wheels, revving aimlessly, juxtaposing bits of data—always the same information, endlessly repeated.
His hair is white blond, floating dreamily.
The dreamer’s knowledge that this was a dream did nothing to dispel or dilute it; he was transfixed, a tiny desert animal trapped and hypnotized by the nova glow of oncoming headlights. There was nothing anyone could do about what was going to happen…except live through the whole terrible sequence one more time.
Encore: one more time!
Behind closed lids, the rapid eye movements characteristic of the dream state tracked avidly along to follow the actions in the sleeper’s mind.
Kristen’s eyes are glittering. It’s encore time.
He had not been there. The expression on his daughter’s face was what his brain deemed correct for the circumstance. Reflected in her upward gaze were equal parts awe, joy, apprehension, confusion…and yes, let’s admit it now, shall we? A taste of lust. Or what passed for lust, in the sixteen-year-old hive mind. She was surrounded by acolytes experiencing the same emotions, swaying as one with the group. Her peers, the sleeper supposed. All their lust was directed at the man on the stage, the one with the power over them. The aggregate desire was as sheer and clean and blameless as honed steel.
His perfect mane of white-
blond hair floating dreamily, the man onstage exhorts his congregation, teasing and beckoning. He makes a flailing, wildman leap and lands precisely on one knee, triceps jumping boldly as he brandishes his cordless radio microphone. It is scepter-like, gleaming like chrome. Sweat has popped forth to decorate his face in animal dots. His pupils are tiny, stopped down and aimed like sniper sights. He genuflects to his people. And they gobble it up. It is a spectacle in the true Roman sense, an onslaught of macho posturing, tribal rhythms and down ‘n’ dirty sexual amplitude, motive energy to spot-weld the musicians into their role as the ultimate Party Band.
Upstage, subordinately placed, the men with the instruments contort through a repertoire of the expected poses, forcing sounds out of their equipment as though in intense pain, white-knuckled, grimacing, all dead black leather and cinder-block chords in four-four time, pushing and reshaping enormous masses of air within the bowl of the arena—sculpting the very atmosphere so that the thump of the bass guitar is a physical thing that punches the diaphragm, and flesh is electrified by the tingle of the guitar solo, keening and soaring.
The percussionist is invisible behind his barricade of drums. His tom-tom lies face flat so that when he strikes it, his accumulated sweat flies up from the taut plastic in a spray. He is battling his drum kit, pummeling his sticks to shards, snatching up replacements without missing a strike, tossing the dead sticks into the imploring, grasping hands of the audience. Fistfights erupt over possession of the blessed splinters, pieces of the true cross of heavy metal. The fights flare and die like the flame of a sulfur match. The pieces are tasted by the crowd, digested, and found to be good. Hands in fingerless gloves and studded wristbands are clenched and raised. Finger symbols entreat the next offering.
Kristen glances to her left as a doubled fist lands hard on a kid’s head. The impact drops his jaw. His eyes vanish into shock wrinkles; his lank yellow hair jerks upward as he is sucked under. The chunk of drumstick wrested from his grasp is held high. Kristen thinks of Neanderthals pounding each other over stinking tidbits from some half-charred prehistoric bird—hey, I want the drumstick, brontosaurus breath! Once again she has the fleeting thought that perhaps she is getting too old for the concert scene. Too often, she winds up next to hippie flotsam whose last bath was at Woodstock or gets vomited on by some thirteen-year-old who ate too many Quaaludes with his Cheerios that morning. She hates festival seating. Open arena floor, no seats, also called “dance concert” seating, seating that isn’t seating at all. How fucking stupid. No room to breathe, let alone dance. As the music and crowd fervor intensify, so does the elbow room vanish. But she is a veteran at these things by now. She can handle not seeing a restroom for the duration of a four-hour, three-act show. From where she stands, she can reach forward and touch the wooden security barricade, just two yards distant from the heroes onstage. That is her compensation. Shoulder to shoulder with the die-hard fans, she dismisses the fight (too gross to bother with) and keeps her attention on the show. Enraptured, she watches.
Too old at sixteen—now there’s a giggle.
The show is so pat that it could offend nobody but a fundamentalist. Bad boys doing the reform school strut, grunting primal lyrics, cranking out the moves as smoothly as millionaire bikers with platinum drive chains. It is harmlessly evil showbiz, a high-volume urban diversion, audience pleasing, good box office. The sleeper knew this. He liked rock, good and loud, an aural assault that could cleanse away tensions and allow you to boogie off the dead ass that came from sitting and working for hours. The music was blameless.
But the crescendo was coming. His body knew but it did not bother arguing with his brain.
The rollicking gusher of music vibrates through their bones and prompts frantic clapping, in cadence. A hand slides up between Kristen’s legs from behind, squeezes, and is gone. The usual crap. She doesn’t even bother to turn around. She is submerged, getting off on the sheer sound. And then—
Whores in Saigon. They did not care what you filled your hand with, as long as you had American money.
And then he looks directly at her, all shimmering white-blond curls and hooded adder eyes, the ice pick stab of a come-hither glance, his glowing ice-blue irises locking on to her brown-green ones. She feels heat at her temples, a surging at her groin. Yum. She imagines his hand filling up with her. The masses feel her up with their closeness, their lemming-like forward momentum. Though she no longer sees them, she is pulled along by their riptide. Her eyes are captured. Green spikes of color in them flare and become prominent, as they do whenever she is excited or happy. Her feet shuffle forward. One step. One more. Two rows of crushed-together people, two thicknesses of human corpus, separate her from the plywood barricade.
He thought of taking those damnable nameless hills at night, a foot at a time. Six hours of fighting to gain a few yards of distance. Toting up the yardage in the gallons of blood you used to buy it. It was never worth it. The flame pots a lot of bands now used in their concert shows shot up columns of fire, like plumes of napalm. One such had fried off Michael Jackson’s hair during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. A trench of gasoline could do a hell of a job.
God, she thinks, he must work out two hours every day, just like Doc Savage. He peels off his sequined gold vest to bare a professionally conditioned physique that is granite hard and as flowingly smooth as dry ice. She watches his pecs pump as he wheels the winking vest around and around overhead, lasso style. The crowd is more vocal now, the herd pressure escalating, a banzai charge in slow motion.
I think he’s going to throw it. Oh, god. He’s going to throw it at me. She has never had a rock star look at her before. Oh, my god….
Rock god. Like the toadish, squatting stone idols in the jungle. Abandoned, forgotten gods, who evaporate for lack of followers. Gods need sacrifices. They rather insist on them. Gods always do. They are immovable in that respect. Like rocks.
Sinews snap into tight relief as the vest is hooked into a flat spin. Kristen’s eyes do not follow it. The crowd breaks with fearsome suddenness, a tidal wave hitting a sand castle.
Despite the floodtide of articles in psychological journals, there is no simple sociological explanation for why such things happen. There is no pinpointed cause for the effect beyond presumed catalysts for the hive mind. These things happen spontaneously. Sometimes fires start the same way.
As in battle, some hazards come with the territory. A simple release clause on tickets for festival-style concerts could solve potential problems. Remittance of purchase price could constitute an agreement to waive one’s right to police protection during a show. Every fan for themselves. The core truth was this: As a solution, all such measures could do was cover asses, not heal fractures, not bring back the dead. Sometimes concerts erupted. Sometimes not. Reasonable predictions could be assigned to a particular band’s appeal.
Whip Hand was an extremely popular heavy metal group.
Concert security is a bad joke. They’re big, and they’re bad, but they’re also outnumbered. They are highly visible in yellow bodybuilding jerseys with broad black horizontal stripes bordered by studs. They want deeply to bull it out from behind the wooden partition, but once they see the charge, they break for the stage level. This is misinterpreted as free license to jump the stage, become one with the performers. The tidal wave back swells for thrust, and then surges forward. The center of the barricade bows inward with an unheard groan; the sides collapse and are stomped down. On his knees at the lip of the stage, one bouncer reaches into the front rank of rock ‘n’ roll commandos, grabs a face, and bangs it into the metal superstructure of the prefab stage. Blood spatters his jersey. The victim goes down and is seen no more. Like army ants, the crowd turns its brief but lethal attention to the bouncer, who is overwhelmed. His backstage pass is snatched as twenty arms pull him from the stage. His tattered shirt flies into the air. Maybe it was the blood that was the catalyst.
Over one hundred strong for the Civic Auditorium show, the sherif
fs are up in the aisles, totally impotent. Bashing with batons toward the center of the arena floor will only reap them a full-scale riot. They are already at the limit of their competence trying to restrain the concertgoers seated at the periphery of the open floor from joining in the melee. Commotion is always a good excuse for working off aggravation against the minions of law enforcement. They represent authority and retribution and are untouchable —except in moments like this. One deputy turns his back to the stage, and a swinging fist crushes his rimless glasses into his face, mashing his nose flat. Blood spurts. Two more badges lay into the assailant with truncheons, and mace mist fills the air. One kid gets his eyes pasted shut from the whack of a baton. The blood dribbling from his nostrils makes him look as though he has a real mustache for the first time in his life.
Whip Hand was a seasoned combat team. They had a preplanned escape contingency for just such a situation as this. By the time the bouncer had been yanked off the stage and devoured by the crowd, the music had stopped and the band was gone, vanished into the labyrinthine convolutions of the Civic Auditorium’s tunnel maze. In an underground garage, they piled into a Datsun station wagon with refectory sun-screened windows. A radio cue dispatched two decoy limousines, diverting the gullible. Back at their hotel, the band could play the game of defeating their own security by sneaking through their chosen sex partners and other privileged hangers-on. There was security, after all, and there was SECURITY.
The audience had gotten rowdy; no problem. Party animals, all. A little healthy teenage catharsis. Three days later the band would be in a new state, on a new leg of the tour.
The heel of someone’s hand smacked into Kristen’s brow, scattering sparks across her vision. She was rudely shoved from behind and stumbled sideways between the two people in front of her. She went down on one knee, in a clumsy mimic of the genuflecting rock star. Her hand found the support of the barricade, now caved in at a forty-five-degree angle to the stage. Abrupt, numbing pain shot through her; people were walking on her legs. Heels dug into her calves. The panic roar of the crowd had drowned out the music. She could not even hear herself scream. Heavy weight bulldogged in on her from behind, and she felt the plywood crack beneath her stomach. She collected splinters in her chest as she slid down, clawing for purchase as the wooden partition collapsed.
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