The Cleanup

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  "So what," and Billy was trembling as he said it, the faces of the rat-things phosphorescent in the dark grooves of his brain, "am I supposed to do?"

  "You're not supposed to do anything, asshole! I thought I made that clear! This is your immortal soul we're talking about, and the choice is up to you. But I've got a couple of friendly advisements to offer.

  "And the first one is to give up the dreams of the old Billy Rowe."

  "WHAT?"

  "Read my lips," Christopher said, mimicking Billy's voice. "If the old Billy Rowe didn't die in the moment he got the Power; he died in that loading dock off of Little West Twelfth Street. His illusions should have died with him. If you keep them alive, that is your own complete and absolute folly."

  "What illusions? What are you talking about?"

  "Well, for one thing, you might as well forget about leading anything like a normal life. There will be no house in the country. There will be no loving wife with 3.2 smiling children in the yard. And there will be no rock 'n' roll Heaven either. You might as well kiss it all good-bye, because it ain't gonna happen."

  "SAYS WHO?" Billy shrieked.

  "SAYS GOD!" Christopher shouted back, equally as loud. "You wanna argue? You go right ahead! Makes no difference to me! Frankly, I'm getting tired of stating the obvious to someone who doesn't even appreciate what he's got! I wish we could've given the Power to the editors of Soldier of Fortune, because at least they've got some fucking balls!"

  "You want some fucking balls? Okay! Here they are!" The rage grafted neatly onto the fear, making a hybrid that was all too familiar. "If I'm stuck with the Power, I'm stuck with it. Fine. But I'll be God's pal forever if He could arrange to take your scum-sucking face out of my life from now on. Because I don't like you, Christopher. I don't like you at all. I don't like your fucking advice, and I don't like the cutesy-pie radiance of your awe-inspiring presence. If I'm supposed to choose what's right and what's wrong, then my first official choice is that I'd rather lick Satan's balls than look at you for another goddam second! Alright?"

  Christopher stared at him, furious and unquestionably hurt.

  "ALRIGHT?" Billy reiterated.

  "Then you probably will," Christopher said quietly. "Lick Satan's balls, that is. Your choice. He'll be thrilled. I will not. So it goes."

  "Just get out of here," Billy said. "Now."

  The angel nodded once and then vanished. Billy watched him go. The room went silent, save for Bubba's quietly-rasping breath. Billy watched his best friend's unconscious expansion/contraction of lungs, with particular emphasis on the ribs that caged them.

  How easily they could snap.

  Christopher had said quite a number of things, all of them intended to strike the marrow. But the one that stuck with him most heartily said you might as well forget about leading anything like a normal life.

  And that was, of course, when the phone began to ring.

  PART THREE

  THE CLEANUP

  "Some folks make love.

  Some folks make none.

  Some folks too twisted

  To love anyone."

  Billy Rowe

  Twisted Toward Life

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE MONSTER SEED

  The young man's eyes were balls of red-stained glass, shiny and more than slightly mad. The tender flesh around them tended more toward maroon; he'd been rubbing them quite a bit, from the looks of it. Betty Ward was not surprised. She'd seen that look a million times.

  There were twenty-three people in the Emergency waiting room of St. Vincent's tonight. Most of them were wearing variations on the theme. A lot of grief, a lot of pain, a lot of stone terror and stunned disbelief. If she read a dozen sordid romances a week for the rest of her life, Betty Ward would derive one-billionth of the high drama to be found in any given night behind the receptionist's desk.

  There were so many ways to die. She'd never imagined it before. She'd never had any occasion to. Unless you were riding the actual line where life and death lay balanced, with a functional reason for being there, it was a morbid and ignoble preoccupation at best. Or so she had always felt.

  But every night in Emergency featured a cavalcade of punctured lungs and ruptured spleens, common coronaries and switchblade tracheotomies. People got wiped out in their cars and in their beds, by strangers or loved ones, in nearly equal proportions. Scarcely an hour went by when somebody didn't die, somewhere in the neighborhood of St. Vincent's.

  Which meant that the waiting room was always inhabited by at least a handful of anguished souls, either trying to be brave or giving up completely, thereby running the gamut of variations on the Look.

  Which the young man before her embodied at this moment.

  He had a few of the other common characteristics as well, particularly for the one-to-five A. M. stretch: unshaven, disheveled, a kind of I-am-not-awake-yet bewilderment about him. She was accustomed to untucked shirts, unzippered zippers, and wildly tousled hair; she was accustomed to stuttering, rapid eye movements, flickering expressions that were heartbreakingly unconscious.

  But there was something slightly different about this young man: something that she found in one out of a thousand cases or less.

  He scared her.

  "I'm looking for Mona de Vanguardia," he said, voice stressed up into the higher registers. "I understand she's here."

  "Let me look," Betty said, grateful for a chance to get away from those eyes, wondering what it was about him that made her heart beat harder than usual. It was rarely something that a finger could be put on; the human race had a hefty repertoire of subtle gestures that separated the men from the monsters, the boys from the beasts. She would have to watch him closely if she wanted to peg the telltale signs.

  And she didn't want to watch him that closely. Not at all.

  The name in question flickered past her vision as she scanned down the pages of her logbook. She went back up and locked in on it, at the same time remembering that somebody else had been in for Ms. de V: a lovely, Verushka-like young lady with lots of running mascara. The patient had been moved to room 617 when a cursory examination diagnosed her as merely serious. When Verushka'd heard that, she'd left shortly thereafter.

  Maybe that'll cheer him up, Betty thought, and he'll go away, too. Sometimes, even the scary ones reverted to human form when they heard some happy news. She whipped up her best professional smile before returning her gaze to his . . .

  . . . and then she was caught in a rush of white light and weightlessness, of soft fingers probing a mind she could no longer place as resting somewhere above her shoulders . . .

  . . . and she heard a soft voice say I'm not here, you haven't seen me . . .

  . . . and then she was blinking, momentarily dizzy, at the twenty-two people in the Emergency waiting room. The dizziness passed.

  She wondered what it was.

  Room 617 had a drab brown door that was perhaps fifty yards from the nurse's station. Even invisible, he was a bit nervous about opening and closing the door. He did it anyway, with no noticeable ill effect.

  Six-seventeen had four women in it, all separated by white rack-mounted partitions. A quick sensing through the air revealed that Mona was to his far right. He walked toward her, soundless and unseeable, rounding the partition and pausing for a moment of sudden, complete emotional slaughter.

  Oh, Jesus, he silently moaned. Oh, God, please give me strength . . .

  There were no tubes up her nose, thank God. No bleeping monitors of brain wave or pulse. She had an IV hooked up to her, but other than that, she could have been simply sleeping.

  Except that the woman in the hospital bed looked nothing like Mona at all. The face was all wrong: nose flat and misshapen, lips distended and huge, the features puffed out and hideously discolored. She looked for all the world like a Mongoloid child.

  I don't understand why they didn't just kill her! Lisa's voice screamed in his memory. They came so goddam fucking close!

&nbs
p; The voice cut off. Silence flooded his ears, broken only by the quiet breaths of the four unconscious women. The dim streetlight through the blinds was the only illumination; thin strips of light sliced through the broad stripes of shadow draped across her. Billy fought down the urge to scream and cry and tear down the walls.

  As he moved, very slowly, toward her.

  And it was strange, because his own encounter with blood and death had receded to a numb and muzzled portion of his brain. Thinking about it was like remembering an old movie that he'd seen once, long ago. It was shadow. It wasn't real. It held no pain for him whatsoever.

  All his capacity for pain and been directed toward Mona.

  And that was the other thing: he no longer felt bad about killing Bobby Ramos. His only regret was that he hadn't done it to the miserable cocksuckers who'd done this to her. Before it happened.

  Before they were born.

  Oh, baby, his mind whispered silently to her. it's gonna be okay. I'm gonna make it okay. I will heal you.

  And then, so help me God, I will make them pay

  Billy knelt beside her, letting the Power stake over, clearing his mind of everything but the task at hand.

  His fingertips came to rest on her sweat-moistened temples.

  His consciousness merged with the nightmare in her mind . . .

  . . . and she was falling backward, the massive hand around her throat, cutting off all airborne dialogue between her lungs and her brain, heels dragging down the three concrete steps and then into the gutted building. No time to react. No chance to fight back. Just the inexorable strength from behind, hauling her across the broken glass and plasterboard that littered the filthy godforsaken floor. . .

  . . . and then there was a second of freedom, maybe less, really no time at all before the second man was there, driving one fist into her belly, knocking the wind out of her as she fell back and he laughed and held something up in front of her face . . .

  . . . and he said say CHEESE, baby . . .

  . . . and then the light went off, unspeakably bright, lasting only for a second and then flooding the darkness with puke-green polka dots that danced and flickered across the first man's face as he spun her around, features indistinguishable, fist all too clear as it came up to her face and connected with her nose, the shattering of bone and cartilage deafening in her ears, the pain needle-bright and more blinding than the ftashbar, the floor coming up to flatten and slice her before she even knew she had fallen . . .

  . . . and she knew what they were going to do, could taste the red inevitability of it even as her fingers wrapped around the jagged shard of glass and jabbed blindly at the first shadow to fall across her. No use. No go.

  The feel of the huge hand, encircling her own and squeezing. The feel of the glass, sinking to the bone in her fingers and palm. The feel of her wrist, bending backward and snapping like a crisp, gigantic carrot, the sound of it flat and faraway . . .

  . . . while Billy watched, gritted teeth grinding, body thrumming and taut as a knot in a high-voltage cable. It was hard to tell where his own anguish left off and Mona's began. He was seeing through her eyes, feeling through her nerves, experiencing through her heart and mind and soul. He was Mona, living the horror for the very first time while she dragged herself through it again.

  There was a part of him, though, that remained himself throughout. It was a part of himself that he barely recognized; but, once inside, he felt very much at home there. Its gaze was cold as a serpent's eye, detached as the man behind the camera, intent as a predator sighting out its prey. An old Spanish saying ran over and over in an icicle-thin and deadly voice:

  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  Like a mantra. Over and over.

  Revenge.

  As he watched.

  Is a dish.

  And he watched.

  Best served cold.

  As the horror went on and on . . .

  The little one had a knife. He used it to slice her clothes off. Her eyes were rapidly swelling shut, so she couldn't really see it; but she could feel the cold blunt edge of it slide the length of her torso while the blade sawed a lightning-bolt fissure down the middle of her pullover dress. When he got to the leather belt, he hacked his way through it, driving the hilt repeatedly into her belly. She whoofed out air that felt like ground glass in her throat.

  The big man was behind her, pinning her arm, grinding his huge erection against his zipper against the buck of her head. He was the main reason why she didn't scream. He had informed her that, if she did, he would kill both her and whoever was stupid enough to try to help. She was inclined to believe him. He didn't sound like he was kidding.

  But part of her, incredibly, was still being cagey. After the initial onslaught, time had slowed to a snail-like, Sam Peckinpaughian crawl. In that subjective universe, she had plenty of time to think. Maybe too much.

  Maybe just enough.

  I have fucked before, she told herself, to get what I wanted. And right now, what I want is to survive. It wasn't enough to allow her to pretend that she loved it, but it was enough to make herself shut up while she retreated to a private place inside herself, where the fingers that roughly tore off her bikini panties and laid her bare couldn't really touch her at all.

  That was the rest of what kept her from screaming.

  Her semi-closed eyes had adjusted to the darkness now, and the little green dots were gone. She could clearly see the little man as he rose above her and pulled down his pants. She could see his dark skin, his oily black hair, his thin mustache. She could see his eyes, also oily and black. She could see the dull gleam of his unbrushed teeth.

  She could see his puny genitals, the cock standing up like a flesh-colored Magic Marker. The words you are fucking pathetic slipped through her mind and out of her mouth, subjective time notwithstanding, before she could stop them . . .

  . . . and then he landed on her stomach with both naked knees, and time sped up again drastically. His fist was a blur in the instant before it slipped beneath her vision and slammed into her teeth. She quite distinctly felt four from the top and two from the bottom shatter, felt the nerve endings scream in the moment before their deaths, felt the flood of blood and broken bone. She spat in something like a gag reflex, then swallowed involuntarily. Five teeth went out. One tooth went down. She had no idea which ones were which.

  Then the fist came back and flattened into an outstretched palm. He spat into it. She watched it come down as he slid his knees off of her. She felt it sluice against the lips of her vagina.

  The tooth got lodged in her esophagus. She started to choke, helplessly, feeling its sharp edges tear into her muscle meat. The big man lifted her slightly, pounded a fist against her back. The tooth clawed its way back up her throat, flew out into the open air with an escort of blood and saliva that trickled down her chin and spackled her naked breasts.

  And then he was inside her.

  The little man with the little dick set the rhythm. She was barely even there. The part of her that had been pulled back by the pain detached again, retreating back to that private place here the fuckings-over could be measured reasonably, with that modicum of detachment that had enabled her to survive dance teachers and casting directors and potential investors and anyone else who . . .

  . . . ever dragged her into an abandoned building and beat her and ripped her clothes off with a knife . . .

  . . . and that was when the metaphor broke down, because there was no comparison, there was no way to justify this in terms of the other, there was no way to justify this at all. Hatred infused her, numbing and cold. And though her senses were addled, she forced herself to consciousness with all the ferocity of will, at her disposal.

  I can't stop you now hissed a voice in her mind, as she pried her swollen eyes open to take in and memorize every detail of their faces. But I'll get you later. Oh, yes, I will. I'll have your balls on a steaming platter.

  And in that private place, where no one
could touch her, the visions of tactical fucks from the past were replaced by visions of vengeance . . .

  . . . that Billy shared, unaware of the terrible tension in his own body, the mass of sweat and steel he had become. He had, in that moment, no thoughts or sensations but hers . . .

  . . . and then Pencil Dick came, grunting and mewling, and was amazed by how distinctly he could feel the jism squirting, a surprising amount of it, making the last several sputtering strokes slide less painfully in and out.

  I know you now, Billy thought, staring up through Mona's eyes into that narrow, sweating face. I know you by smell, motherfucker. Now all I need is your name.

  As if in answer, the big guy who held her pinned said, "Come on, Rickie Ricardo. It's time for Big Rex to baba-loo . . ."

  The little guy got off her, and the men began to trade places. The knife was back in the little guy's hand; he held it to her throat as he slid behind her, whispering, you love dat, baby, you love dat magic motion while his partner said she ain't seen nothin' till she seen Rex do his stuff, and it came to her in an incredible sickly surge of madness that they were competing, she was the playing field for their little fucking contest, my-dick's-bigger-than-your-dick taken out of the locker room and into the streets. The anger boiled up again, outrage at the sheer mindless atrocity of it. She started to jerk forward, a roar in her throat . . .

  . . . and that was when Rickie Ricardo cut her for the first time, yanking her head back by the hair with one hand, letting the knife trace a thin shallow line of trickling red beneath her chin. He was better with the knife than he was with his cock. The cut was expert. The pain it brought, searing as it was, paled in comparison to the terror it produced. Everything changed when the knife cut her throat.

  Everything.