The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  “They got this great fuckin’ song, man. It’s called ‘Saigon Lullaby,’ and the lead singer sets himself on fire an’ shit when they do it. It’s really wild, man. EEYAAOW! You know?”

  Mark didn’t know anything but the sudden pain in his ankle as he slipped, the slowly dawning realization that things were going to get worse, much worse, in a matter of seconds.

  The Screamer was reaching for the #5 Premium No Lead nozzle. “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM THERE!” the driver hollered, but the Screamer just smiled and kept on reaching.

  “He just goes like this,” the Screamer said, and then the nozzle was in his hand, and the lever went down, and the nozzle was over his head, pointing downward like the finger of God.

  “No,” Mark whispered.

  The Screamer pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  In the next ten seconds too many things happened. Mark Schimmel saw them all, saw them all too clearly.

  He saw the fierce Premium No Lead jet stream plow into the crown of the Screamer’s head, spitting spray in the air, sending curtains of sheer and combustible fluid down the face and either side. He saw the Screamer’s mouth open wide to emit another animal “EEYAAOW!”—garbled and gurgling this time . . .

  . . . as Mark found himself thinking, Why doesn’t he scream, I got gas in my eyes once, I screamed for a half hour . . .

  . . . and the Screamer’s sunglasses washed off his face in the high-octane torrent, revealing sockets black with emptiness and stunted, lingering decomposition . . .

  . . . and pools of tiny worm-things oozed, gleaming red, from out of those sockets and onto the Screamer’s cheeks, then flopped like squirming confetti down to the pavement below . . .

  . . . and the back tires of the van began to squeal as the driver yelled, I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS! and kicked into gear, peeling away with the #3 nozzle still attached . . .

  . . . and the hose ripped away, a literal geyser of gasoline spewing out to puddle then pool an area that was ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet wide . . .

  . . . and the numbers on the gas pump spun . . .

  . . . and the severed hose caught, and the nozzle yanked out, and the cold steel clattered to the pavement . . .

  . . . and the numbers spun . . .

  . . . and the worm-things fell blindly off the curb . . .

  . . . and the numbers spun . . .

  . . . and the Screamer pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket, held it aloft with jittering fingers . . .

  . . . the ring finger of which was missing . . .

  And Mark Schimmel began to run then, even though his left ankle was screaming pain and his mind was completely fried. He didn’t run toward the tiny little BP office building, because he knew that it was already too late to throw the emergency cutoff switch, much less the circuit breakers in the back. He could see gawky Big Joe Glandular and the new manager staring slack-jawed, inches from the switches. They would not get to them in time either.

  There simply was no time.

  He ran, instead, toward Queen Street. There was a steep embankment on the other side. It would shield him, he knew, from the explosion to come.

  And the explosion was coming, oh yes, without a doubt. He didn’t need to see the Bic flick, see the Screamer come alight with bright gyrating frenzy. He didn’t need to see the spilled gas catch, then spread its flaming tongues of death back to the pumps . . .

  . . . then down into the tanks . . .

  . . . the subterranean tanks that supplied the thousands of gallons that supplied the hundreds of satisfied customers each day . . .

  He was still running when the #5 tank blew, setting off the inevitable chain reaction. The exploding sound muffled the rasp of his breathing as he reached the center of the northbound side of Queen Street, paused, and stared straight into the blank headlights of the Mack truck roaring toward him.

  And then the station and the parking lot and the houses behind it, the north and southbound lanes of Queen Street, the truck, every other car chain-reacting in the intersection, and Mark Schimmel, all joined together in that cleansing white light. . . .

  * * *

  SIX

  “Hello, friends in Jesus,” Furniss began as the canned music started up, “And welcome to Triumph Tonight. I’m Pastor Daniel Furniss, your host, and today we’ll be sharing the Good News of our blessed Savior, as we continue our discussion on the effect of rock music on our young people.”

  It felt good to be back on his own set, minus adversaries and a volatile studio audience, many of whom numbered amongst the godless. He knew Bobby, Kelly, and Clarence, the three guys behind the cameras. He knew Daryl, the sound man. He knew Stacey, the gal who ran the lights. He was on his own plush executive chair, behind his own sturdy desk, asserting his own control, with his own fake plants surrounding the seats that he provided for his guests, and net the other way around.

  And, best of all, he had an array of the least-challenging guests that a man could ask for: a handful of the kids from Liberty Christian Village. Every one of them well-behaved, not a one of them contrary in the tiniest way, the boys in their crisp haircuts and shirts and ties next to the girls in their demure skirts and blouses. It was a gravy show, absolutely free of conflict.

  It was exactly what he needed after this morning’s encounter.

  “As you know,” he continued, “this program’s focus over the last few weeks has been Satan’s desperate grab for the souls of our teenagers through the device of rock music—or more accurately, murder music. In the past weeks we’ve had authorities like Joel Wenker and Jacob Aranza; we’ve had concerned parents like Esther Shrake of Morality Over Music and Muriel Slate from the PMRC. We’ve had a veritable outpouring of people, from all walks of life, come on and witness before us about the terrible dangers that rock music, with its emphasis on absolutely the worst, most foul kinds of sin, have posed for decent Christian parents and their young.

  “We’ll also be going up to Brother Paul Weissman in the parking lot, where we’re going to be burning some more filth—that’s just a little later on in the show—and we’ll be taking calls from our listeners and answering questions, and we’ll be having our altar call for some of our newer members here at Liberty Christian, but right now I’d like to speak with some of the youngsters themselves. Specifically, some of the fine young men and women that our beloved Saviour the Lord Jeezus Christ has delivered to us here at Liberty Christian Village. Let me tell you, they have suffered every kind of temptation that the Devil has to offer: from drugs to occultism to sexual promiscuity, they’ve done it all. They really know the score. And they’re here to tell you the truth about rock music, and Satan’s very real plan to steal the souls of our youth.”

  They were all clumped together on his right: the three girls spaced evenly across the couch, the boys (except for Dwight) cross-legged at their feet. Dwight, of course, had the chair next to the desk; it was the stage manager’s idea of a funny har-har.

  That’s right, Dwight, Furniss found himself thinking. Drool a little for the camera. And though he chastised himself instantly before God for the thought, a whiff of the sentiment lingered on. Dwight was, after all, not quite as clever as a clothespin.

  “Let’s start with this young fella right here on my right,” Furniss began aloud. “Dwight’s been with us since the very beginning of Liberty Christian Village . . . that’s been, uh, six years, hasn’t it?”

  “Yessir,” Dwight said. He had a Dudley Do-Right chin and an overbite to his narrow puckered slash of a mouth. His eyes were tiny and set back in his head, as close to the brain as possible. His Adam’s apple bobbed and jutted like a fat man on a trampoline above the compulsory stricture of white shirt and black tie. Furniss often wondered what God had been thinking when He invented Dwight; but the phrase there but for the grace of . . . often came chillingly to mind.

  “We’ve done everything we can . . . leaving him by the side of the road and what have you . . . but he keeps finding his way back somehow
, God bless his heart.” Surely God wouldn’t object to a little gentle teasing. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Yessir.” No hint of understanding glimmered in those deep-set eyes.

  “But seriously, folks, Dwight’s a good kid, and we’re jus’ tickled pink to have him here at the Village.” He turned to the boy, who had just last week turned twenty, and addressed him fully. “Now, you say you were raised in a Christian home, right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And your parents went to church every Sunday?”

  “Yessir. They did.”

  “But still there was something missing spiritually from your household, isn’t that right?”

  “Yessir. There was. I mean, um . . . they would always make us, um . . . taking us to church and, uh, they would say their prayers and, um . . . well, like they said that they believed in God, but then, um, like, my daddy, he would, uh . . . drink alcohol, and there would, um, using curse words, and . . .”

  “And you said that often your parents would allow you to listen to rock music on the radio, is that right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And your mother herself would sometimes put it on when she was doing housework?”

  “Yessir.”

  “So it wasn’t really a Christian home, then, was it?”

  “Nossir.”

  “I should say not,” Furniss concluded, rather hurriedly. “And then, moving right along, we have these three lovely ladies on the sofa here. That’s Cathy on the end there, looking so pretty in her new fall dress.”

  Cathy smiled. She didn’t look all that pretty, if one wanted to be honest: she was chunky as a side of beef, her teeth were painfully crooked, her hair was bland, her skin was pale and troubled, and her horn-rimmed glasses made her eyes look hardball-huge. But at least she could speak in coherent sentences.

  “Now, you, Cathy, you could pretty much read us the riot act in terms of your life before the Lord led you to Liberty Christian Village. Disobedience to parents, rebelliousness at school, drugs, sexual permissiveness, and an actual attempt at suicide: you pretty much ran the gamut. Can you tell us—and it’s hard for me to imagine, viewers—but can you tell us what happened, where your life went wrong?”

  “Well,” Cathy began, a slight blush rising to pinken her mushroom pallor, “it was the kids at school, mostly. You know, they said that you were square unless you got high and messed around—”

  “By that you mean sexual promiscuity.”

  “Yes.” Cathy blushed more deeply. Furniss suppressed a sudden image of what it might be like to have known Cathy in the biblical sense; it was easily dispatched to the hell where it belonged. “And the thing was, everything was set up to make me believe that it was the right thing to do. I mean, all the songs said that it was beautiful, it was cool, it was where it’s at—”

  “You’re referring to the rock music you listened to.”

  “Yes.” Cathy’s conviction was strong; that much was clear. It lent her a kind of beauty that her body didn’t have. “And that was the problem. I guess I had a real low self-esteem at that point. I didn’t know that Jesus loved me. So I guess I just went along ‘cause I hoped that people would love me if I did all the cool stuff.”

  “Okay.” Somehow, that kind of testimony always got to him. No matter how many times he heard it—and it surely numbered into the thousands by now—the terrible vulnerability of youth found a way to slice through the callousness that his own age and experience had necessitated. Here was a girl who had suffered, suffered grievously, before finding Christ. Here was a girl who stood a fine chance of being a good Christian, a good wife, a good mother to her children; and she had been polluted, swept into corruption by Satan and his worldly minions. Now all she wanted in her life was to be forgiven.

  And lo, the Lord had led her unto to him.

  “Thank you, Cathy.” Only a second of pause had passed. “Jeezus be praised, your life has been turned around completely, hasn’t it, thanks to God’s mercy and Liberty Christian Village.”

  “Yes, Pastor. It has.” Cathy’s smile was uninhibited now, free of shame. “I know now that Jesus is my personal savior, and I have no need to fear. I’m so grateful to the prayers and donations of the people who have given to Pastor’s ministry. A lot of times I think that if it weren’t for coming here to the Village, I’d already be dead.”

  “And you’re how old, Cathy?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Furniss snorted, smiled, and shook his head ruefully on behalf of the folks at home. “Shocking, isn’t it? I’ll tell you, people. Some of the stories these kids come in with are enough to curl your hair. Every day, more and more young people from all over the country tell me about the traps that Satan has laid for them, and most of them have barely escaped with their lives.”

  He glanced at the girl to Cathy’s left: the new girl, with her straight blond hair and her angular good looks and her terrible haunted eyes. She was the saddest case Furniss had seen in many a moon; and looking at her now, raveling into herself like an unwound tape, he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to drag her story out of her again. Not just yet.

  “And this cute little fella here is Tommy.” He pointed instead to the dark-haired young whippersnapper at Cathy’s feet. “He’s four foot ten and full of beans, and I’ll tell ya, Tommy has known more suffering at the hands of some of these so-called cult he-roes than any right-thinking person could imagine.”

  Tommy grinned shyly, while the cameraman focused in on him with camera three. Furniss took the moment to sneak one more furtive glance at the new girl . . . what was her name?

  Mary.

  Mary Hatch . . .

  In the black space behind her eyes it was happening again. The pastor’s words had triggered it, ground it back into her skull like a drill. She was back in the hedges, staring through the branches and the white gnarls of her hands at the fogbanked slaughter, with the howls of the dead and the dying in her ears.

  And it was so hard not to scream, not to betray the terror that sizzled blue-white through her filament nerves. It was so hard to hang on, to remain hidden from the horror, to strangle down the screams so that nothing but the tiniest high-pitched whines escaped. She kept thinking about the electric fence behind her. She kept thinking about her nakedness. She kept thinking about the stuffed animals in her cozy bed and how unlikely it was that she would ever see them again.

  And she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see. That was the most horrid, and the saving grace. Spared, on the one hand, from intimate clips of the size of the gash; like an ostrich with its head in the sand, on the other, hoping to God above that because she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. . . .

  “. . . hard to believe,” the pastor was saying, “that this little fella could have heard a song that told him to stab a schoolmate when he was only twelve years old . . .”

  Again the words jolted hen back to the studio, with the lights in her eyes and the safety of Christian fellowship surrounding her. It was jarring, slamming her squarely back into her place: on the sofa, between Cathy and Lorraine, the former drug-crazed runaway. Close to Furniss, almost close enough to touch.

  She met Lorraine’s gaze . . . sympathetic, sad . . . and knew that she was being seen now. Seen in her torment, her struggle with the face of the demon.

  It was not an exchange that she could hold. The outside was too threatening, the inside too compelling. The vision had been triggered, and it would not be denied.

  Not until she had seen it through.

  Not until the end . . .

  And then the carnage had moved inside, the screams fainter and the killing motion no longer even suggested by the fog. There was a voice in her head that kept saying, Get out of here, get out of here now, but she couldn’t obey, there was paralysis in her limbs, paralysis born of wisdom and absolute terror.

  And the moments ticked on and on and on. And the screams grew fewer, farther away, while the goose bumps lingered under their sheen of hot/co
ld drying sweat. And she found it harder and harder to disobey the voice, the voice that said, run, the voice that said, it’s safe now.

  But there was another voice, separate from the paralysis or the urge to bolt, and the voice said, wait. The voice said, you will know when it’s time. It was not her voice. It was not a voice she knew. It was a voice that contained a calm she was incapable of, an inner clarity that she would never know with the world outside.

  You will know when it’s time, the other voice repeated.

  As the seconds ticked past.

  As the last of the screams, like the lives they bade hearty farewell to, gave way to a silent unknown. . . .

  “. . . and these kids are the living proof,” the pastor continued. Mary could see the intensity with which he directed it at camera one. “Satan is alive, and there’s nothing that makes him happier than the corruption and death of somebody’s son or daughter. When another young woman dies on the abortionist’s table, or when another young man strings the noose in his bedroom and climbs up on that chair, when another teenager goes to a rock concert and hears the message that hell is some kind of great party where all the cool people are, and it doesn’t sound so bad as the pastor says, well, you can bet the rent that Satan will be laughing!

  “But why put your money on a losing bet? Pick a winner, people. Jesus Christ is the winner. Jesus Christ is the way. Jesus Christ is the only one to put your money on!”

  The camera zoomed in on a full-screen close-up of Fumiss’s intense features as he stood and walked away from his desk. “Jesus Christ is the only security you need. Make an investment in eternity, people.

  “Invest in Jesus!

  “When the Lord held up a denarius, much like this one”—Furniss brandished an obviously ersatz gold-foiled coin—“he asked, ‘Whose inscription is on this?’ and when they told him it was Caesar’s, well, he said, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.’” He paused for effect, then held up a mint-condition silver dollar. “Bobby, can I get a close-up on this?”