Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  Had it ever?

  And finally, as they came on in that horrible silence broken only by the drumming of their cloven hooves, I yelled—though already moving backward while yelling at the Beast—“STOP, you sonsofbitches! You blithering lovers of all mankind wouldn’t crucify me, too, would you?”

  Sure, they would.

  You can just bet your sweet ass they would, if they could find a piece of me—when they got through with me—big enough to stick on a nail. The thing rushed on—up to the cross and against it and over it—eyes glittering like two thousand pieces of broken glass, its two thousand feet trampling, scarring, splintering the cross and the wooden Christ, its two thousand lips stretched and twisted in a sadist’s smile, and I turned and fled from the Beast as if Satan himself were pursuing me, Satan or a thousand Saints—and at that moment, given my choice of pursuers, the Devil would have won pants down.

  I had been scared, damn well scared, for all of this last half-minute or minute since the church door boomed shut behind me, but it was only when I turned and fled—from them—that the fright grew into something closer to panic, became cold ugliness churning in me, a faintness in my flesh and darkness in my mind. And for a warped but real, a very real, moment I was racing over the surface of a miniature Earth that spun too slowly beneath my feet while all of Earth’s horrors flew languidly after me—formless things that cast no shadow and lived by devouring the brain and drinking the body’s blood—flying as fast as I was able to run, though they did not exert themselves or hurry, knowing I would slow and fall back to them, as soon as I tired.

  I glanced over my shoulder, only once. Once was enough.

  There was a single encouraging thing in view. Whatever I had seen or thought I’d seen in or out of my mind must have given me unprecedented incentive to run, because I had moved with such leaps and bounds and superchurning of feet that my pursuers were fifteen yards to the rear and losing ground. But not all of the Lemmings were pursuing me now.

  Well beyond and to the right of those nearest me Festus Lemming was standing, arm thrust out and pointing, but not at me. He was gesturing to his left and up, toward the hill down which I had earlier come, the hill atop which were eucalyptus trees and my Cadillac, the hill on the side of which were visible—I got a quick blurred glimpse of them—the moving figures of some Little girls. At least from here they looked like little girls.

  Several—fifty or a hundred—of the people who’d been charging after me had split from the mass and were loping toward Festus, not bunched but scattered out, and not all moving in the same direction. Two or three were already veering to run toward the hill. Or, rather, toward the little girls; for not even Lemmings would have run with such enthusiasm toward a bare hill.

  I had run on an angle away from the church in order to lead the pursuing congregation away from the girls, and in that I had largely succeeded. But an incidental result was that I would now have farther to run if I hoped to catch up with the lovelies before any of those galloping Lemmings caught them.

  It struck me as an impossible task, but I changed course sharply and sprinted toward the rear of the church anyway, pouring all the strength I had left into my legs and feet, and the task turned out not to be impossible after all. It damn near killed me, yes, but it wasn’t impossible, and the reason was not so much that I outdistanced the Lemmings as that they simply couldn’t keep up with me, and might not even have been able to keep up with lead-footed Ronnie racing on the flat.

  Maybe I wasn’t at my absolute best, but ordinarily I am as healthy and full of snorts as a bull being led to the cow pasture, while most of the Lemmings were less lively than the very-recently deceased. I had temporarily forgotten that, when I first lamped these citizens in the Church of the Second Coming, my impression was that a great many were so full of years another month or two might fill them up, and most of the rest, even including the younger members, appeared to have been laid out for viewing. So it was only when I was well up the hill and took another peek back and below that I realized, for the moment anyhow, there was little for me to fear from the flock.

  A few dozen were still in staggering pursuit, but only a handful were actually working their way up the sloping hillside. The rest had either stopped or collapsed upon the grass, and their still bodies formed a long ragged line that began a few yards past the trampled cross and continued in a wobbly curve on around behind the church.

  Of those pursuing the girls, only one man was ahead of me—apparently bound and determined to capture a lone fanny disappearing among the eucalypti. A dozen more men were almost as high up the hillside, but I ignored them temporarily and chased after the one man above me. He was determined, but his hot pursuit had cooled considerably, and I caught him just as he reached the trees, grabbed him from behind, and sort of threw him toward the loosely bunched group of men not far below.

  He hit two of them and knocked them quite a distance. The rest stopped in their tracks and looked at me, wearing sweaty expressions ranging from concern to perplexity, and even returning sanity. Very likely none of them had seen people knocked sprawling by a flying Lemming before.

  The nearest pursuer was only fifteen feet away, breathing through his open mouth and with his tongue hanging out two, maybe three, inches. The nine or ten others were scattered over the fifteen yards or so beyond him. I faced them, fists balled on my hips, chest heaving. My insides felt like a large, hollow ache, and my skull seemed to expand and contract every time I gasped for air.

  I said, “Well, here I am. Come and get me. As soon as you darlings kill me, any survivors can chase the girlies some more.”

  I suppose I was a little bit short of noodles right then. But so were they, apparently. At least, not one of them came up and killed me. They all just stood there. I didn’t. After a few more seconds I turned and headed for the trees. For the trees and my Cad and the girlies.

  I didn’t look back. And I walked the rest of the way.

  It seemed to me I’d run long enough from the Christians.

  25

  Maybe I should have run. Not from the Christians but to the girlies.

  Because, by the time I got to the spot where I had earlier parked my Cad, my Cad was no longer parked there. It was zooming away down the road.

  I watched it zooming away, feeling sick. There went my Cadillac, filled with girlies. Ten of them. All naked as eggs. And here I stood, beginning to sag, quaking in every limb, with nowhere to go and without even transportation to get there.

  I had suffered from anticlimaxes before, but seldom had I suffered so much.

  Never again, I mentally cried, will I expect gratitude from a girl! They’re all ingrates. They don’t give a hang. Just use a man, then toss him aside like an old shoehorn—or shoe, that’s what I felt like. An old shoe, scuffed and worn and half-soled and bent out of shape and with my tongue hanging out two, maybe three, inches.…

  There was the screech of brakes.

  Distant girlish squealing.

  Zoom, back toward me came the Cadillac.

  Damn near knocked me down as it skidded to a stop, but I didn’t care. Smiling, I said, “Playing a little game with me, eh? For a minute … half a minute … for half a second I thought you’d tossed me aside like an old shoehorny—horn—old shoe—”

  “What are you wheezing about?” That was Lula, crammed behind the steering wheel. Scrunched next to her, on Leonore’s lap, Dina was saying, “Get in, hurry, get in, hurry up!” And in the back seat, her head poking out from among a bewildering collection of arms and jugs and heads and knees, Emilie was crying, “Yes, hurry, before they catch us.”

  “Catch us?” I asked. “They? Who?”

  “The Lemmings, you dummy,” Emilie yelled. “The dummies chasing us, that’s who!”

  “Oh, them.” I gave my hand a little flip through the air. “Relax. I took care of them.” But then I scowled. “You may call them dummies if you so desire. But please do not, in the very same breath, refer to me—”
/>   “You rearry took care of the Remmings?” The voice was muffled and faint—in fact, I couldn’t even see her—but I assumed it had been Yumiko speaking. “Are you purring our regs?”

  Boy, there were sure plenty of them to purr. The Cad’s top was still down, naturally, and in a way it was a good thing, since in order to get ten gals into it at once—something I had never tried to do before—they had to be crammed together in a sort of flesh pyramid that stuck up into the air higher than where the Cad’s top would have been if it had been up.

  I said, not speaking directly to any place in particular, “If those citizens were going to show up and attack us, I imagine they’d have got here by now. Probably they’re straggling inside, scrubbing the church with bleach, getting ready for tonight’s services. At least, I don’t see any approaching at the moment.”

  Lula spoke again. “As soon as Ronnie was in the car I drove down the road a ways, so we wouldn’t be sitting ducks if those men …” She paused, looking at my face. “You didn’t think we were leaving without you, did you, Shell?”

  “Well.…”

  “Did you?”

  “Why, it didn’t enter my mind. Well, it hardly entered—”

  “The idea was, get far enough away, then wait and see if you made it. If you didn’t get killed, that is.”

  “Of course. Ah, I suppose we might as well be on our way. Better let me drive.”

  “Sure. Climb in.”

  So I climbed in. That is the easiest way to say it—skipping the incredibly complex movements, shiftings, further squashings, and astonishingly interesting rearrangements required before I could do it.

  I climbed in, consumed approximately fifteen seconds getting the gearshift into drive, and then did nothing. “Maybe if I worked the steering wheel,” I said to Lula, so close on my right she was rupturing my appendix, “and you did the gearshift if necessary, and Dina stepped on the gas, we could really get cracking. How did you manage to drive away so fast?”

  “It wasn’t this damn crowded. We didn’t have a big ape driving.”

  “Big—you can say that to me after—I presume, Lula, you’re hinting you’d like to walk the rest of the—”

  “No, I lost my mad money, you big mother. You’re just like all the rest. You want me to move to the back of this bus—”

  “How can you joke at a time like this? Isn’t it enough that Britt and Yumiko—hey, I didn’t see or even hear Britt in this mess. Did we leave her behind?”

  “No, I brod it with me. Ain’t you the luggy one?”

  I groaned, shook my head, gnashed my teeth. “Well, here we go,” I said. “Pretty quick, we go. Ah, there it is, we’re off!”

  “That’s my foot you’re stepping on,” Leonore said faintly.

  “Would you move it just a weeny bit so I can get my goddamn foot on the goddamn gas? I—maybe somebody better look and see if any Lemmings are coming at us. There, now if we move, kids, it means I’ve got everything figured out.”

  We moved. There was as much squealing and whooping as if I’d picked up the car and was carrying it on my shoulders. “All I did was find the goddamn gas pedal,” I said.

  “We go! We go, ’ere we go!” sang out Thérèse.

  “Yeah, here we—hey. Where are we going?”

  “Don’t you know?” Silvia asked from somewhere, in a disappointed tone.

  “Yeah … I mean, I figured we’d go to a jazzy cabin I know about. But …”

  In my mind’s eye were streets, freeways, intersections, cars—all with people on them or in them. And police cars with policemen in them. Insurmountable obstacles to surmount.

  “But …” I finished, “it’s like that old joke—you can’t get there from here.”

  I was wrong. We could get there, and we did. Oh, we experienced a few little adventures. At one red light that I couldn’t run because a diesel truck blocked the intersection, a three-year-old Chevrolet pulled up on my right, middle-aged chap wearing horn-rimmed glasses at the wheel, ferocious-looking middle-aged babe seated next to him. Both of them stared and gasped, but the old boy opened the door and leaned toward us, leaned farther and farther as though drawn by some force beyond his power to control, and when I started moving into the intersection he fell smack out of his car onto the cement. He’d left the Chevy in gear, and when he fell out, naturally his foot left the brake, and then some.

  So the Chevy started chugging slowly ahead, and the gal, presumably his wife, slid behind the wheel, but—since she was a woman driver—she did not grab the steering wheel or do anything with brakes and other machinery, but instead stuck her head out the window and yelled at Henry—that’s how I know his name was Henry—“Henry, you fat old fool! Get back in the car!”

  Well, Henry tried to. At least, I thought he was trying to. Because he got up and started running like a maniac, short legs whirring like those little wheels on sticks that spin when the wind hits them, only he ran up to his car and right on past it, and was picking up even more speed when I tromped on the gas pedal and dashed his mad hopes forever.

  There were other little adventures, of course—there would have been fewer if I could have put the Cad’s top up—but we did indeed make it to the cabin, with none of the numerous screaming sirens ever really close to us, and I even felt reasonably certain nobody followed us up the little road leading to our destination. Felt so with reason, for in our first ten minutes there nobody else showed up, not even Henry, and if we hadn’t been safe the gang would have arrived in much less time than that.

  We trooped down the three steps into the living room, first the ten girls and then me, and I stopped a few feet inside the door aware of ordinarily lovely Regina Winsome, who’d obviously had to let us in, waggling her head slowly, a dumb look on her face.

  “Ah!” I cried. “Ah! Regina. Forgot you were—I mean, just for a minute, I forgot you … uh.”

  “Forgot I was here, didn’t you?” she said icily.

  “What makes you think that? Now, look,” I said. “Look, this isn’t what it … looks like.”

  “No? What is it?”

  “Why, it’s—ah, don’t be like that, Regina.” She was giving me a stony look from cold eyes, freezing eyes, eyes that were practically Bird’s-Eye eyes, and I knew I had better change the subject. “My,” I said impulsively, “you look funny with your clothes on.”

  “You look a lot funnier.”

  “Me? Damn, did it again! Dear … Regina … Miss Winsome … the hell with it.”

  The girls started talking, some walked over to Regina, a couple sat down on a divan, one swang in the living-room swing.

  I began, “Girls, this well-bundled-up lady is Miss Regina Winsome,” and proceeded to introduce all my ten nudists by name. They didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to me. When I’d finished introducing everybody I said, “Well, I’ve got one or two more very important things to do, so I have to go—SO I HAVE TO GO.” They kept milling around, yacking at each other, even making a few comments about what a swell house or cabin it was.

  “I HAVE TO GO, DAMMIT.”

  Dina, whose ear just happened to be nearest my mouth, said, “So, go. I don’t even know where the bathroom is.”

  I went to the front door, kicked it, opened it, looked back at all that gorgeous, ungrateful stuff.

  “Well, au revoir,” I said. “Toodle-oo. See you later. A bientôt. Hasta la vista.… A dios?”

  They didn’t even say good-bye.

  The pain was bad by the time I reached the buildings comprising the offices and plant of Cassiday and Quince Pharmaceuticals, in west L.A. Half of my left thigh was a purplish-blue ugliness, and there was a bruised darkness the size of a cantaloupe on my right side. The inside of my right arm, between wrist and elbow, was heavily mottled with puffy dark smears and bruises, probably from rubbing against the heavy cross when I’d run carrying it. There was a deep tearing ache in my arms and legs, side and chest, and all my muscles seemed to be tightening painfully, as if very slowly beg
inning to knot and cramp.

  I’d driven from the cabin in Hal Prince’s sports car, but before leaving I’d taken two items from my Cad’s trunk. One was a set of pick locks in a soft leather case, the other an old but still serviceable, and loaded, Colt .45 automatic I’d inherited from a hood who’d missed me with it.

  The picks opened a padlock on one of the gates in a chain link fence surrounding the square block of Cassiday and Quince property, and also the back door in the low white office building. Whether I would have need for the pistol or not depended on the value, or lack of it, of the hunch that had brought me here.

  I knew Dave, and Ed Loeffler, would no longer be at Cassiday’s Beverly Hills home—not with me on the loose and presumably at least half-alive. While wondering where they might have gone, I recalled one of the phrases I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, when coming up out of unconsciousness. Dave had been saying something to Ed about their lying low for a while at “See and Cue.” That’s the way it had sounded then; but very likely he’d been saying “C and Q.” Dave had thought I was unconscious, or he wouldn’t have been talking at all, and he might casually have used his verbal shorthand for “Cassiday and Quince.” If nothing else, the plant was a reasonably logical place to look for them, and I’d know if my hunch was right in a minute or two more.

  I knew in less than that. Only seconds after I eased the door shut behind me and started walking slowly along a polished corridor, I heard a man’s voice saying, “… no goddamn point in beefing about it anymore, Ed. What’s done’s done.”

  “Yeah, well.… The sonofabitch did say they was bareass nekkid on the television. He did, Dave. The whole bunch of ’em. Only thing I done was take a little quick peek, just barely rolled my glimmers—”

  “Will you shut up? He lied to you. I’ve been trying to tell you, the bastard tricked you—”

  “Tricked me, did he? Tricked me, did—”

  “—and you fell for it like a prize saphead. None of them were stripped then. Later, yeah, there at the church, all ten of the broads wound up naked as the day they were born. Craziest damn—and who wound up with those goddamn dumb broads? Shell Scott, the fink you let get loose. In the church, yet! The bastard probably lined them up and banged ’em all, one right after—”