Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  The easy part was done.

  I made a trip around the big two-story house—very carefully. I didn’t expect there’d be any guards outside, partly because of the foul weather, but mainly because of the wall itself. With that, who needed guards? I nonetheless kept one of the two Colt .45’s I’d brought along ready in my hand.

  At the rear of the house and on the ground floor, at what would have been the left corner if I’d faced it from Willow Lane, there was one room with lights burning inside. Heavy drapes were drawn over the wide window, and I stood for two or three minutes outside it. I could hear voices, but it was merely sound, a mumble, without individual words. No matter. It told me somebody was in there.

  In front again, I went to the window I’d chosen—almost as far from the lighted room as I could get—and using a roll of tape I’d brought for the purpose, stretched strips of it in a crisscross pattern over the surface of the glass. The window was about four feet square, its base nearly four feet off the ground, so I had to hoist myself up and stand on the projecting ledge beneath. It was tricky, but not too difficult. Not for a guy who’d just climbed a telephone pole.

  Then I tapped away at the window. It cracked, slivered, glass clinging to the tape. A couple of pieces fell inside with small tings but I ignored them. I had more important tings to worry about. It required little time to pull enough of the glass free so I could climb through what was left of the window. Inside, I used my flash as little as possible, but had to flick it on occasionally. It was a very old house with long narrow hallways, the walls of raw wood, unstained, without wallpaper. There was a musty odor of age and rot in the air. In a couple of places the floorboards beneath my feet creaked alarmingly. But in two or three minutes I could see light spilling beneath the door of the room I’d been headed for.

  And I could hear the voices from inside.

  Suddenly I got a little weak. I mean, my knees felt limber, the muscles of my thighs and calves seemed to get rubbery, loose. In the space of a couple of seconds, my knees began to wobble slightly, and I could feel the thin film of sweat ooze out on my face.

  Maybe it was everything that had happened tonight piling up on me. Maybe it was overworked glands, giving up and falling by the wayside. Maybe it was those voices. Or that I—still—wanted to throw up.

  Whatever, it wasn’t good. And it didn’t help my concentration a whole lot—when I needed a whole lot of concentration. Wouldn’t it be just great, I thought, if I got this far, right up to the door—to death’s door, so to speak—and fainted? Just keeled over with a big clunk and lay here?

  I could imagine the boys inside coming out to investigate the big clunk and looking at it on the floor and saying such things as, “Lookit that, wouldya?” and “Will wonders never cease?” or at least various things about which I wouldn’t give a hoot.

  I stood unmoving, breathing deeply until my skin felt more normal and my legs were nearly as steady as before. I was thinking more clearly, too. I was pretty sure of that. And thinking clearly was really important at this juncture. For one thing, when I went inside I was simply going to twist the knob and jump in. The simplest logic revealed that there was absolutely no reason for the men in this walled fortress to lock themselves inside a room in the house.

  So I got ready. Both guns were cocked, safeties off. I didn’t know how many men were inside, of course. But I knew they, or at least most of them, would be on my right when I leaped in, because I’d stood here long enough to know several men were speaking, there were several voices, and all of them so far had come from the right side of the room.

  I took one last deep breath and reached for the knob, and stopped. Just in time. I was armed—logically—for battle, with a Colt .45 automatic pistol in each hand. Right for battle; wrong for twisting a doorknob.

  It gave me a little ting of worry, but I shoved the gun in my left hand under the belt holding up my pants, got all set again, stood there, sort of psyching myself up until I felt I was ready and the moment was right—and went in.

  I wasn’t wrong about the door; it was unlocked. The knob twisted easily and I shoved hard and jumped into the room. I jumped a good six feet and landed in a crouch, heart pounding as if it were going to climb right up out of my chest and into my mouth and swell there like a red balloon—but I landed the way I’d wanted to, facing the room’s right, my left hand slapping the butt of the gun in my belt, Colt .45 in my other hand ready and leveled at the tape recorder, and …

  Tape recorder?

  From it was issuing, “It’s a bug! I dropped my smokes and just happened—”

  It was too much. Every time I turned around these days, there was a goddamned tape recorder. I’d already drawn a bead on the thing, and I felt like shooting it. I really did. I wanted to kill it.

  That wasn’t enough. When I’d slapped my left hand against the other Colt’s butt, the one which was under my belt and pointing—well, pointing down—I’d suddenly started worrying if I’d thumbed the safety up, thus locking slide, sear, and hammer so the gun couldn’t go off and shoot me. When you stick a cocked .45 under your belt you’re supposed to thumb the safety on. Unless you just don’t give a hang. But the little lock is on the left side of the receiver, and with the gun in my left hand, my thumb was on the right side, thus I couldn’t have thumbed the safety on. But … had I fingered it on? I couldn’t remember. There wasn’t time to sort of ease the gun out of my pants gingerly, either. I had to leave it where it was, or else give it a helluva yank.

  “—to look under the—Oh, godalmighty, some bastard—”

  I hadn’t even had time to look around at the man behind me. Of course, behind me. But I recognized that voice. Now I recognized it. Frankenstein. Or, Frankie, according to—the hell with it. Frankenstein. Who was dead.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  The word kerplunked in my brain like stones being dropped into a well.

  BLAM!

  A pill whistling by my right ear galvanized me into action. I jumped to my left. Jumped turning, trying to spin halfway around in the air and come down facing the guys I’d come to get. Well, you try that sometime. Unless you’re a ballet dancer, you’ll do pretty well to get even a quarter of the way around. I came down facing those heavy drapes over the windows I’d seen from outside.

  But by twisting my head I could see—on two long couches at the intersection of the walls, and in three big wide overstuffed chairs—Lecci, Reverend Archibald, Lieutenant Weeton, a guy I didn’t recognize but who looked familiar, Ace, Fleepo. And—Bludgett.

  Almost behind me now: “—is on the earie while we’re talkin’—”

  The speediest of the bunch was Ace. He’d just jerked off one shot at me and was swinging his gun around. Weeton was yanking at the revolver on his hip, pulling it free. Fleepo’s Colt .45 was already in his hand, not yet pointed at me. Bludgett’s hand was starting to move.

  The things that happened in the next three or four seconds I didn’t figure out logically. Maybe it’s just as well. I simply acted, or reacted, automatically. I flipped my gun around and fired, practically over my shoulder, yanking the trigger twice and not shooting very near anybody, but spoiling Ace’s aim and making Weeton jerk enough that he missed me by a foot when he fired. Then I was jumping, not thinking of why or where, straight toward those drapes ahead of me, and on the second bound I left my feet and dived right into the drapes and the glass beyond them, and felt cloth against me and over my eyes, the cloth cutting off most of the light but at the same time protecting me from the worst slashes of the glass as I crashed through it and fell, landing heavily and rolling. Rolling, still tangled in the draperies—but outside.

  Then I was free, able to see, not tangled in the cloth and slapping my left hand into the mud, getting up. A face appeared above me in the broken and now uncovered window, and I snapped off my third shot at it, saw the man duck. Then I was up and running.

  Running as fast as I could in the thick deep mud, sprinting in darkness—then in
brilliant light. For a moment I thought it was lightning. But it persisted, brightness flooding the house, muddy courtyard, the high wall. Inside, somebody had thrown a switch, turned on floodlights. I kept running.

  Behind me I heard shouts, knew at least some of the men were coming out that way after me. Others might be racing through the house, heading for the front door. I slid around the corner pumping my legs with every bit of strength in me, heading for the one chance I had of living, that two-foot by three-foot hole I’d made at the bottom of the wall.

  I ran past the front of the house into the open courtyard and a shot cracked out from behind me. Not from the front door on my right. From somebody who’d come out the window after me—not just one somebody, because following that first crack two more shots were fired so rapidly they couldn’t have come from one gun. I kept going, but I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

  Little more than a second after those two shots which blended almost into a single sound, there was another big BLAM from a .45, and this one came from the front door.

  I snapped a glance that way. Bludgett. Next to him, gun leveled at me, Lucky—Lucky Ryan, who had not been in the room just now while that “Jenkins tape” was being played. I didn’t know who was behind me, but it didn’t make any difference. The only way I could get out of here was flat on my belly, wriggling through that hole, and before I could manage even my second wriggle I knew I’d have four or five slugs in my rear end, at least, and then several in my back, and finally a couple in my head for good measure.

  There were too many of them, too close. And too little time. I thought, OK, then we’ll finish it right here if that’s the way it has to be, but I’ll give eight to five I kill at least two or three of those sonsofbitches before I go down, and I started to stop and turn, actually started to stop, when the idea hit me—there was another way.

  Maybe. Maybe there was another way.

  Again, no logic in what I did. No conscious reasoning, at least, even though there must have been some kind of unconscious logic behind it. I just looked at the hole in the base of the wall now not more than fifteen feet from me, and I remembered that while I’d been making my circuit around the wall the laser’s infrared beam had been spraying the stone high above the spot where later I’d bored my hole, and whether I thought or hoped the wall would be weakened enough up there so I could get through it somehow I don’t know and I’ll never know for sure, but I took one more step and then left my feet, giving it all I could, the thrust and drive of foot and ankle and calf and thigh, lying back in the air, flying toward the wall feet first—and at the last moment I gave a kick, either hoping it would somehow help add more to the blow of my body on the stone or in the natural reaction to the fear of smashing into a solid wall.

  I hit.

  My feet slammed into the stone—and it wasn’t like slamming sand or putty. It was a solid jar. I felt the pain in my feet and ankles, had time for the sudden fright to leap up and clutch my throat—and then I was through.

  I mean, through. Clear the hell through the wall, landing on my butt in the mud and sliding, coat ripped and arm stinging, a cut on my face that I knew was bleeding. But through the wall, outside.

  And that did it. That did it for me.

  If I could be that close to death, that close to being shot maybe forty times by as many as seven or eight guys, and still be alive, even if I was sliding on my behind and filled with more cuts and bruises and aches and pains than I could have counted in a leisurely hour, well, by God, nothing was going to kill me tonight.

  I dug in my heels, squirmed around, jumped and clawed my way back to the hole—now one hell of a big hole—in the wall. It wasn’t a gap, from the bottom all the way up, but more like a ragged arch. Three or four feet of stone still formed a bridge over the top, but below was a hole at least three feet wide, more than that in a couple of places, and a good six feet from top to bottom. I slid up into the bottom of that hole—and by that time I’d pulled out the second .45, pressed a finger against the safety. It had been on. I shoved it down and off.

  Even while shoving it off I had the Colt in my right hand leveled and was pulling it left, because there was the nearest man, and it was Lieutenant Weeton, trying to slide to a stop and kill me at the same time. Because that bastard had already fired once as I started pulling the Colt toward him and he was leveling his gun again, his thick face twisted, lips pulled apart, teeth showing.

  I got off my first shot at him before he let go that second one at me. He didn’t let the second one go. Not at me. The heavy .45 slug hit him and spun him as if he’d been smacked by a truck. The gun flipped from his hand and arced through the air, glittering in the light, flying at least twenty feet up and heading for mud at the base of the house. I didn’t see the gun land. There were too many other things going on.

  But, strangely, after I hit Weeton and he spun, reeled sideways and fell, the shooting stopped for a couple of seconds—longer than that, as it turned out—and in the almost shocking silence a voice like the bellowing of a bull getting crushed between two mastodons boomed in the wet air: “Good-God-Christ-Almighty-Damn did you see that? Did you see that?”

  It was, of course, Bludgett.

  He was standing about forty feet away, a few feet from the front door of the house, pointing with a rigid finger at the ragged hole. Pointing, in fact, at me. “He went right through the gawdamn wall!” he yelled. “Right through the wall.”

  And then—I swear it’s true, as true as true can be—Bludgett cried, “I’ll get him, boys!” and got his huge feet and enormous legs moving, got them moving lickety-split, moving with astounding rapidity for a man almost the size of a full-grown male gorilla, and as he ran toward the wall—yes, smack toward the wall, and smack is sure the right word for the way he was running toward the wall—he cried in a voice of thunder, “Shee-it, if that goddamn Scott can do it, I can do it!”

  How wrong he was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Bludgett was truly going to try leaping through a solid stone wall. Just as I had. Well …

  Not exactly as I had.

  Because he was not going through the wall where I had gone through it.

  He wasn’t going through that hole, for one reason, because I was there in it, shooting bullets at people.

  No, he was going to make his own hole.

  At least, there was no doubt that was the thought he had in mind. And I must admit to a little sadness that, though he had few thoughts in his mind at any time, it appeared highly unlikely he would ever have even one again.

  Because you wouldn’t believe the velocity he had attained in thirty feet. Yes, thirty; ten to go.

  I had to see this.

  I knew it would be dangerous, probably extremely dangerous, for me to stick my head out where those other guys—and they seemed to be all over the place—could spot it and take aim at it and blow it off. But I was going to do it anyway. Not often—hell, not once—in a lifetime does a man have the opportunity to see what I was about to see. I simply wouldn’t have been worth my salt if I hadn’t stuck my head out in order to get a really clear view of the impending—now immediately impending—event.

  I stuck my head out.

  Undoubtedly the main reason my head was not immediately drilled from three or four directions was the obvious one. Obvious to anyone there. There, listening to Bludgett roaring, the smack-smuck of his feet tearing through the mud, watching him as he left his feet—

  Yes, everyone else was watching.

  If there’d been just one dirty guy in the whole bunch he could have shot all of us.

  But we all watched. Watched as Bludgett left the ground ten feet from the wall and sailed through space, doing the whole bit as neatly as I—no, doing it even more neatly—those giant legs propelling him as though from a catapult, laying himself back in the air, just as I had. Bigger, of course, a much huger projectile, but doing it all the same way that I had done it.

  Not only I b
ut all the hoods were watching Bludgett with total and absolutely undistracted fascination, perhaps each of them with the same thought in his head that I had in mine: would Bludgett, with his huge mass and bulk, do it? Could his weight and determination and unbelievable speed turn the trick? Would he go through? Would he commit a miracle? Was it possible?

  Nope.

  He had run as I had, jumped as I had, spread out in the air as I had, and at the end he even gave a little kick with his feet, just as I had.

  There, the resemblance ended.

  He didn’t commit a miracle.

  It looked more like suicide.

  His feet hit the wall, and—of course—stayed against the wall. Unmoving. But the rest of him was not unmoving. Oddly, his legs did not bend or buckle, those mighty thighs and sinews holding firm. He did bend in the middle. That was what ruined him. He bent like a well-greased hinge. His great bald head flew forward in an arc like the stone at the end of a sling, and it was moving so fast one would have thought nothing short of a solid stone wall could stop it. Well, that’s exactly what happened.

  Bludgett’s head smacked on stone with a sound which even though heard could not be believed, and for what was only an instant, but an instant that seemed a small eternity, he seemed to stay there, folded in the middle, his feet pressed against the wall, and above his toes—just a little way above his toes—his hairless head, also pressed against the wall.

  Then he fell down.

  He didn’t even unfold, just fell down still folded.

  And in all ears anywhere in the area reverberated the sound of Bludgett’s head.

  For me, it still reverberates, when I listen, intently, in the still of the night. Not only for me, but for all who were there at that incredible moment, and who still live, Bludgett’s great bald head still goes SCHMOCK! That is about as close as English can approach the sound made there at the old King place in the small hours of that Sunday morning.

  It thudded out over the valley, causing citizens to stir restlessly in their sleep, but in the Alps that sound would have echoed and reechoed, perhaps endlessly, getting fainter and fainter but never totally dying, as possibly Bludgett had done. A great SCHMOCK! and then the first echo: SCHMOCK! Followed by more echoes from near and far, SCHMOCK-Schmock! Schmock-mock-ock-ck. Bounding from peak to pinnacle, from Alp to Alp, a blood-chilling, mind-curdling ear-schmocking sound never heard on earth before.