Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  The church’s wall was directly ahead of me, perhaps a hundred yards away, its curving roof arching upward from my left to right. Farther right and lower were the Lemmings and their leader. I wondered what Festus was thinking, with his electrifying announcement—the climax of his seven-yearlong campaign—only an hour or two away. Nothing much fun, I imagined.

  I wasn’t able to hear his harangue, but there was no doubt he was haranguing. His arms went up, out, down, up again. Then I saw his small figure turn, he swept an arm around to point at the church—and at last I heard a sound, not words, just sound, a kind of sigh or moan that came from the crowd.

  I wondered.

  Since arriving here, and during my brief stab at the parking lot as well, I had not seen hide nor hair of a real girl. One of my chill apprehensions had thus been laid to rest, for I had half-expected to view with dismay the sight of ten naked beauties gamboling on the church green. But if the girls were gone, why were the Lemmings not in the church, not in their house of worship, especially on this night of nights?

  Scattered on the grass sloping up toward the church steps were bits of whiteness. Squinting, I was able to see what they were. There were ten of them, ten signs, the placards and posters the girls had been carrying, still affixed to their sticks but discarded. One was only a short distance from the edge of the grass, another a few yards up the green slope. Then half a dozen, scattered about. Finally, one near that bed of flowers I’d seen last night, and one more—the last—on the church steps themselves.

  Lemming swung that arm again, turning to point, and again I heard the crowd sound. Not a moan or a sigh this time, a bit sharper and louder, more like a bark with some growl in it. I moved back into the trees, walked left a hundred feet, started down the sloping hillside. With the eucalyptus grove behind me, I bent over and scuttled along with pretty good speed—there was no cover here. Farther down, the side of the hill dipped below the crest of that green mound atop which the church sat, and the mound itself would conceal me from the Lemmings’ view. But that concealment was two hundred feet from the trees.

  I made it. At least there were no blood-clabbering shouts or hoots or shrieks. When I could no longer see the Lemmings and vice-versa, I straightened up and ran to a door near the left-rear corner of the church, the door through which I had last night escaped. This time instead of opening it to get out I broke it to get in, which ordinarily would have made no sense at all. But I had to break it. The door was locked. So I slammed a foot against the wood near the knob and the lock sprang open, the door flew inward and hit something with a crash.

  I heard screams.

  Even if the assembled Lemmings had noticed the noise I’d made, which was doubtful, it would hardly have disturbed them sufficiently to set them screaming. So I felt sure I knew who had screamed. And was—or, rather, were—still screaming.

  I leaped past the sagging door and ran through the cavernous and shadowy room where I had met Festus Lemming, skirted the up-circling stairway near which we’d stood, pounded ahead to the aisle where I’d gotten stuck so many times last night. I couldn’t help thinking my speed had improved greatly since then.

  But that was the last thinking backward I did for a while. Because as I flew past those thick curtains hanging behind the elevated pulpit and my feet hit that carpeted aisle, the sight smacking my eyes grabbed even more of my attention than the sound smacking my ears—a result I would have thought totally impossible, considering the sound, had I not been seeing the sight.

  For there were ten girls, and each of them was screaming, and each screamed with unique pitch and intensity, with a volume and tone all her own. It was as though the best sound tracks from television’s entire library of late-night horror movies had been selected and blended and amplified, and then thrown like New Year’s Eve confetti through the air.

  If all ten of those ladies of Citizens FOR—needless to say, that’s who they were—had been standing still and aiming their mouths at a man it would at the very least have made a eunuch of him, a fate to be classed at such a moment as the unkindest cut of all. But they were not standing still. No, they were running in every direction there is. Running with astonishing speed.

  Maybe I imagined it, or maybe the gals were getting short of breath, but it seemed to me there was a definite Doppler effect warp in the air, individual screams either rising or falling depending on whether they came toward me or moved from me, the way horns go on the freeway when cars speed past you lickety-split while honking, the sound rising on approach and dropping on departure. Thus parts of the bone-cracking blast edged from flat up to sharp in piercing counterpoint to others sliding sharply to flats, and its was such an unbelievably marvelous noise that I couldn’t help thinking it belonged here. Here it must feel at home. Indeed, perhaps only here in the Church of the Second Coming could it have happened at all.

  It was still happening. What made it even more interesting was the inescapable conclusion, which did not escape me, that all ten of those girls were naked as jaybirds. No … not jaybirds. Naked as—ten girls, which is pretty naked. In fact, I found myself thinking, it’s about as naked as you can get, especially with all ten of them running lickety-split like that.

  Actually, they hadn’t been running long. I had experienced the oddly unnerving combination of gorgeous sight and hideous sound for no more than a second or two, but it was a lifetime of second-or-two, and though I had already cranked my jaws open for a yell it seemed to be taking a while to get yelled.

  As a second second-or-two stretched past, one scream Dopplered away from me flatting, another raced toward me sharping, and a third bounced sideways from bench to bench in a fetchingly jiggling obligato—but what caused me most concern was not those three, but the three winged fannies flying up the aisle and heading screaming for the doors. Heading outside. Heading into Lemming-land.

  “HEY!” There it came.

  “Hold it! STOP! Do you idiots want to get KILLED?”

  At last, a bellow from my chops had filled the church—again. And bounced from the walls and boomed against the ceiling—again. And caused heads to swivel, eyes to stare at me—again. Was history repeating itself? Was my needle stuck on a crack in time? No, I thought, eyeing the girls, not exactly.

  It took a while for all that movement to end—actually, it never did end completely—but the screaming stopped almost instantly. In silence that made me wince, I heard the confusing pat-pat-pat of bare feet on carpet as the three flying fannies flew toward the exit. Then slowed. And stopped. And turned around. And were no longer fannies. They had become stationary girls, and not a tick too soon; the fleetest of foot was no more than a yard from the doors.

  Now that the gals were facing me, I was able to recognize them despite the distance between us. Almost out the door was tall white-blonde Britt, long of leg and thigh, and very speedy. Ten feet nearer, black-haired and busty Ronnie, breathing like a long-distance runner, and even from here a sight to warm the blood in an Eskimo’s toes. Several yards closer, smaller and shorter of limb than the other two, and thus bringing up the rear so to speak, Yumiko of the soft face and sweet lips and sparkling eyes.

  It was she, Yumiko, who ended the silence. “Why, it’s Sherr!” she cried. “Herro!”

  She started trotting down the aisle, Ronnie and Britt close behind her, then—all of a sudden, it seemed—the three of them plus seven others were grouped around me giggling and cooing and talking as one. They seemed, so far, to do damn near everything together, planning, marching, stripping, screaming, running, giggling, cooing, and talking. It was an intriguing thought.

  The whole gang—and it was the kind of gang I’d like to think of, if I had a gang, as “That Old Gang of Mine”—stood in a curving, and I mean curving, line before me, a wobbly semicircle that would wake a man up grumbling if he dreamed it, but was the dream of dreams to a man wide awake. And I knew—as I gazed upon Thérèse and Yumiko and Britt, Lula and Leonore and Emilie, Margarita and Silvia and Ronnie and Dina�
�I would forever cherish this time with the Ten as one of my life’s most blessed moments. Except for one thing.

  Why did I have to get blessed in church? What kind of blessing was that? Especially with the congregation outside, waving their arms and beating their gums and getting ready—I’d have bet a million dollars on it—to charge in here and spoil the fun. It was inevitable, fated; I knew it, I just knew it. When that was the Lemmings’ whole purpose in living—to take all the fun out of life—how could it possibly be otherwise?

  In the first seconds after the gals gathered near me, there were almost simultaneous comments from several of them.

  “Mr. Scott, what are you doing here?”

  “We heard that awful noise and thought it was them.”

  “The Pastor heet me. He noked me down!”

  Softly, from langorous Leonore, “Hi, there, Shell. I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”

  And from sexy, swinging Emilie, “We never dreamed this would happen, all of us nude, can you forgive us?”

  I tried to answer, saying groggily to Emilie, “Yeah, I forgave you a while back. Bless you all.”

  To Leonore, “What’ll you bet?”

  And, “You heard an awful noise?”

  And, “I’ll let you know the minute I figure it out.”

  Plus a few remarks apropos of nothing in particular: To Yumiko, “What’s a Nisei girl like you doing in a place like this?” and to Britt, “Mmm, how Swede it is!” And I had just turned to lay wide-awake eyes and a casual comment on Lula when she shook me up by saying:

  “Crazy. You don’t have any pants on.”

  “Wha—oh, them. Yeah. No, I guess I don’t.”

  “Where in the world are they?”

  “Why, they’re on the Santa Ana Freeway, where else?”

  “Shell, really. Why don’t you have any pants on?”

  “Are you practicing to be a Lemming? I could ask you the same thing,” I said stiffly. “But there are more important matters to take off—up. Girls.…”

  I paused to collect my thoughts.

  How, I wondered, could I keep forgetting I didn’t have any pants on? It wasn’t an easy thing to let go of mentally. Of course, I still had my shorts on—if I’d lost them, you can bet I’d have known it all the time. But I wondered if my thinking was as sharp as it should be.

  There was Cassiday’s gunk circulating around in me, too. Hadn’t killed me yet, but it couldn’t be doing me much good. Had to keep in mind the possibility that thin blood swirling through my brain might cause me to think thin when fat thoughts were needed. But I felt remarkably good considering the shape I was in.

  “O.K.,” I said. “You may not realize it, and it may not even be true, but if it is, we could all be in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. So I’ll take charge now.”

  Red-haired, brown-eyed, plump-breasted Dina said, “What?”

  No one who has not experienced the same thing—and who could that be?—can possibly know how difficult it is for a man, especially a hot-red-blooded—even with gunk in it—man, to think logically, plan, decide upon a swell course of action, when confronted by a million distractions inches from his nose. With only one woman there are lots of distractions to consider, especially if she’s bare as an egg. But when you get up to three or four at once, the distractions increase geometrically, which is to say by leaps and bounds. Thus when you’ve got ten on your hands, or merely within reach, the distractions become practically infinite and the difficulties prodigious.

  Besides, when it came to what we’re talking about, these gals had far and away the best and most I’d ever seen. And it was not far and away. So I forgave myself for experiencing some small difficulty in thinking a complete thought about anything for a while, and for being unsure if the difficulty was because my brain might be bleeding, or merely a bit too much of my usual trouble, girls.

  One of my troubles—wild-honey-blonde and Capri-blue-eyed Silvia—said, “We were all so terribly confused—and frightened. I’m so glad you’re taking charge, Shell.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good thing. O.K. Well, all right. Girls … what happened?”

  I got ten answers and understood none of them.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “Choose a spokesman.”

  “You’re our spokesman.”

  “A spokeswoman, then. Wel’ll ah, form a little sex republic here. You select a representative—of your sex—to speak for all of you. I’ll speak for all of me. That way we’ll clear everything up. And, incidentally, prove women should have the vote.”

  “But we’re all of our sex.”

  “This isn’t going to work, either. Which, incidentally proves men should rule. Lula.” I turned to the brown-skinned, velvet-eyed lovely who had seemed to be leading the noon nudity discussion at Cassiday’s, and later headed the march of Citizens FOR. I gazed at the black-is-beautiful black of her eyes, at the astonishing high-heavy thrust of her breasts, at the sharp inswoop of waist and flatness of middle, at—

  “Yes?”

  “Yes? Yes, what?”

  “You said, ‘Lula.’”

  “So I did. Ah, we’re not going to vote after all. I select you, Lula, as the representative of your sex, to be the mouthpiece of all the other sexes standing around here. Is that all right with you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Is everybody cracked in here except me? I want you to tell me what happened! How come you’re in the church, where did your clothes go, whither went the television cameras and horny reporters, why did you scream with such frenzy, what are you all doing tonight—”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Lula shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, resting a hand lightly on her interestingly thrust out left hip. “Well, we all mached down Filbert and up here in front of the church. I started to take off my sweater—did you know about that?”

  “I’m hip.”

  “We’d decided all of us were going to march nude in front of Lemming’s church. Form a picket line, you know? Everybody else does it. Not just unions, but school kids, professors, farmers, PTA’s, poor folks, rich folks, everybody. They do whatever flaky thing they feel like doing, and some of it’s ugly, but nobody ever bothers them much. So why couldn’t we do a simple little fun thing like taking our clothes off? At least, it wouldn’t be ugly, it wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Your points are impressive. But you forgot the most hairy rule of all. You can march, picket, take over universities, blow up buildings, burn down banks, shoot policemen and firemen, do any creative thing you desire—as long as it’s for the good of all mankind—but only if it isn’t sexy. If it’s sexy, it’s immoral. And you’ve got to admit, you gals are pretty sexy even with your clothes on.”

  “Well, I should hope so—that’s the idea. We want to be sexy. That’s why we marched here in the first place—we’re demanding the right to be sexy, the right to have Erovite if we want it. We’re all members of Citizens FOR—we’re for Erovite, for sex, for health, we’re for life—”

  “There’s where you went wrong.”

  “Anyway, I started to take my clothes off. But they wouldn’t let me. Not right then, anyway. The cameraman stopped taking pictures, and some fellow there running things told us we’d have to keep our clothes on or we couldn’t be seen on television. It would be bad, and they couldn’t show bad things on television. Hundreds of people would send millions of letters and he’d get fired. The network would crumble. The government would fall. The world would be reduced to chaos.”

  “He probably meant well.”

  “I’m sure he did. He said after he checked in at the studio he’d try to come back, and if we still wanted to do it, he had something on the president of another network and—”

  “I knew it! That’s what I told Ed.”

  “Then Pastor Lemming came down—he was already in the church when we got here—and made a terrible fuss. Said if everybody didn’t leave immediately, didn’t get off the sacred gro
und—and his own private property—he’d have everybody arrested and put in prisons and fired and even cast out. Cast out, I don’t know what he meant by that.”

  “I do. Same thing he meant by ‘fired.’ Actually, it should be cast out and then fired, but—it’s not important.”

  “Well, that worried the men. Pastor Lemming does have an awful lot of power and influence, I guess.”

  “Not as much as he’d like us to think.”

  “They were about ready to leave anyway, and then they heard about the fire. Isn’t that funny, you just said ‘fired’—”

  “Maybe it’s funny. Something was burning? Besides Festus?”

  “A movie theater in Los Angeles. It was showing a double feature, Do Your Thing with Your Thing and Hump the Bump advertised as, Sauce for Geese and Ganders and Beavers. I don’t know what either of them was about.”

  “I don’t think I want to know.”

  “It was on fire, all aflame.”

  “It was? What was?”

  “I just told you. The theater. About a hundred members of the west-L.A. Eden of the Church of the Second Coming had marched inside and yelled holy things at the audience earlier. There were even some fist fights. The Lemmings were picketing the theater when it started burning, but I don’t suppose they lit it.”

  “I don’t suppose. Probably started by lightning.”

  “It was going up in flames and firemen were there, and policemen. And all those Lemmings were yelling, ‘Burn, Sin, Burn!’ and singing hymns and blocking traffic. That fellow in charge told us about it, and he explained they had to go cover the story. Especially, they wanted to get human-interest pictures of the Lemmings, because they’d been in the news so much lately.”

  “See? They had their clothes on.”

  “Everybody left. Except the Pastor. Well, I was mad by then, and when I get infuriated I get mad. So I told that mother to go take a flying … well, I said we’d come to picket and we were going to picket, and I stripped, and then all the other girls took their clothes off, too.”