Only trouble was, He couldn’t seem to decide which side He was on.
Because the enemy had already disappeared in the confusion. Retreating back into their hooch-holes and tunnels, giving up the hamlet as lost.
But not before they found the big, bad M60.
Not before they found Duncan.
It came like a parting shot, tracking in slo-mo: a well-placed farewell lofting out of the smoke and burning debris of the huts and arcing toward the one thing they particularly did not want pursuing them. Jake saw it coming, tried to holler: his mouth complied, but flesh could not possibly move fast enough to meet his needs. He wheeled, like a man dipped in a vat of molasses, toward Duncan.
Duncan stood, hip-firing, a weird shadow playing across his gore-flecked face, unaware of the long, smoky fingers singling him out for doom. At the last possible second, he turned to meet Jake’s cry.
And the rounds caught him square in the chest.
Jake screamed. And he kept right on screaming long after Duncan fell. He screamed as he stared at his dead friend’s face, the glasses bent and blasted and shattered. He screamed as he hunkered over him, ripping open the pressure bandages that would never, ever stop all that blood coming out of all those holes.
But he wasn’t screaming at that anymore. His hands worked by rote as his attention remained transfixed on the burning huts of the ville. He was screaming at the smoke, which rose in greasy plumes to curl and mingle with the canopy of foliage, to flicker and shift as Jake’s screams melded with those of the incinerating villagers ahead, to form what looked very much like an enormous mouth.
And then the mouth suddenly split open to reveal teeth in light and smoke and shadow, which flickered, and glistened, and grew.
And grinned, like a giant Cheshire cat.
The firing broke off, ordnance-echo ringing his ears like cathedral bells. The jungle grew very still for a split second.
And then the shelling walked in.
One-twenty mike-mikes started dropping through the trees, covering Charley’s retreat, going boom boom boom boom like some invisible giant throwing the world’s biggest temper tantrum. There was no way to call in their own fire-support; the radio had been blown clear to shit. The squad had, too. The shells came down in waves, blowing rocks and earth and trees into ten billion spinning splinters.
And there was no time.
To do anything.
But run.
And scream.
And run . . .
* * *
TEN
And then he was in the room, in the clutch of the cool dark air, with nothing but dim shape and shadow to see and nothing but his own scream in his ears.
He stopped screaming, and the pieces fell together.
He was sitting bolt-upright in the bed, covered with sweat, heart thudding from his toes to his temples. He caught a hitched breath, drowned for a moment in the silence that followed it, and then Rachel was beside him, sitting up and staring into his eyes.
“Jake?” she said, her voice a croaking whisper. He couldn’t see her eyes, lost as well in pools of shadow, but he could feel the terror behind them.
Yes, he tried to say, but again his flesh betrayed him. His mouth closed, opened, let out another razor breath. He realized that his whole body was shaking, and that his heart and left armpit were throbbing in unison.
“Oh, God.” The words came out of his mouth before he knew it. His teeth began to chatter, and a rush of nerves-gone-haywire rippled through him. It was the dream, the fucking dream, come back again to rake him and destroy him if it could.
Rachel touched him, and he wanted to recoil, but his body was not his own. It ran itself, and it had programmed itself for another spasm, which came. “Nuh,” he said. It was meant to be no.
Rachel pulled her hand away, and he sensed her click into focus. God, she was great. She was the best. She knew instinctively just what to do.
He tried to think about how great she was when the next spasm seared through him with jiggling hot hooks. It was called anxiety attack in polite circles; he preferred the term nervous breakdown. His kind thoughts about her gave him something to do while his body lost control again and his teeth continued to chatter.
Another breath rasped in. It was shallow and utterly unfulfilling. Another followed. And another. He might as well have not been breathing at all. I could die right now, said a voice in his brain. It was a rational voice. It was more terrifying than the pain. His heart let out a surge of agony and sorrow. His voice began to moan.
“Breathe,” Rachel said. It was not a request. “Breathe deep and relax.”
He tried to laugh. He tried to say the word relax. It didn’t work. He tried to breathe and did a marginal job. Another tremor ran through him, volcanic. “Ah,” he said. Tears began to well in his eyes.
And his chest, his chest was caught in a constricting steel claw, his heart a muscle within a network of muscles that squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, the mectoralis major is connected to the rib bone, an’ hear da word of da Lord. He tried to think about Rachel again, how beautiful she was, the words she was saying. He breathed again, a bit deeper this time.
“Hold it in,” Rachel said. “Count to ten. One, two . . .”
Another rush of pain.
“. . . three, four . . .”
He held the air inside.
“. . . five, six . . .”
He thought of beautiful things.
“. . . seven, eight . . .”
He couldn’t name one to save his life.
“. . . nine, ten.” And he exhaled. The pain was still there. His teeth jackhammered together.
“Again,” she said, taking hold of his right hand. “Breathe in.” She squeezed. He squeezed back and inhaled.
“One, two . . .”
The room was dark, but he could see the details now.
“. . . three, four . . .”
It was his bedroom. The one that they shared.
“. . . five, six . . .”
I’m going to die, the voice said. Fuck off, he told it.
“. . . seven, eight . . .”
His breath wheezed out of him.
“Let’s try it again.” Her voice calm, rational. “Breathe in.”
Another rush. Electric spasm pain.
“I said breathe in.”
“Ih . . . it’s easier seh . . .”
“Don’t fight me, baby.” No change in the tone.
“Said than done,” he completed. The pain was enormous.
He tried to smile, heard the words heart attack. Stroke.
“Take a big deep breath.”
“Uh,” he said, and breathed in. Not too deep.
“One, two . . .”
He breathed out.
“Okay. Breathe in.”
He couldn’t.
“Breathe in.”
“Ah cahn . . .”
The terror was complete now, stunning in its depth. The words Yes, I am really going to die now tried to articulate themselves, couldn’t, left him to deal with the feeling they expressed.
“Yes, you can. Breathe in. Start counting.”
He tried.
It worked.
“One, two . . .”
She needs me, he thought.
“. . . three, four . . .”
She and Natalie.
“. . . five, six . . .”
There’s no way I’m gonna let this kill me.
“. . . seven, eight . . .”
The pain locked into a sudden stasis: there but not active. He held his breath.
“. . . nine, ten.”
He exhaled, felt a little bit better.
“Again.”
He breathed in. It was easier this time. His mind had room to roam as he listened to her count. He was not looking at her, but he could see her in his mind; the image was sharper, clearer, than the dim light would have afforded his eyes.
And as the numbers ticked past and he breathed on command, he got a
flash of role-reversing perfection: of Rachel on the bed, breathing deep as he counted out the contraction times in approved Lamaze fashion. Giving birth, preserving life.
“Ease the tension out of your shoulders,” she said. “Down to your feet and right outta your body.”
He concentrated on his shoulders. Yes, unspeakable tension there. They were hunched almost up to his jawline, like a bag lady huddled against the cold. Funny, perverse: the more you hunched, the colder you got. He wondered why the exact wrong reaction was the most automatic, what the hell God had had in mind, as he concentrated on letting the wire-tightness seep down and out.
“Breathe again,” Rachel said, then paused and added, “How are you doing?”
“I’ll live.” He took another shot at smiling. This time, it worked.
“Breathe in.” She was smiling, too.
Fifteen minutes later, he could start to think about it. The pain had receded to a low drone, a wash of background color. If Anheuser-Busch still knew their stuff, even that would start to vanish in the next twenty minutes or so.
He was down in the living room, which gleamed faintly blue in the light from the TV screen. The volume was kept low, in deference to those members of the household who hadn’t just been dragged to hell in their sleep.
His underwear and robe were damp with sweat, like the dark locks that were pasted and had been pulled away and pasted again to his forehead and neck. The bottle of Bud in his hand was damp with sweat as well. Most of it was down the tubes; the backup was already on the table beside him. He was not a heavy drinker . . . had not been for several years . . . but the old craving for sedation would never ever completely go away.
How could it? Pain was pain. Pain was no fun at all. Pain was something to be alleviated immediately, or at least as fast as possible. You could sit and philosophize about it all you wanted to, talk about the vital function it performed . . . no pain, no gain, and all that . . . but when it had you by the screaming vital mortal organic tissue, you wanted only one thing, and that was for the pain to please please Jesus God just go away.
Blue static pulsed on the TV screen, anticipating the unreeling of the tape in the VCR. It was Cody’s edited-down version of the best of today’s news and views, culled from every available network and slapped onto VHS cassette. Jake had mandated this video accounting of the world several months before, when Rock Aid became official and mandated that he know what the hell was going on. Good ol’ Cody Adams had risen to the occasion, as Jake had known he would: scouring the TV Guide, recording up to five stations at once if need be in pursuit of the up-to-the-minute broad-band perspective.
The remote control was on the table, next to the lamp and the extra beer. Jake picked it up, pressed it into service. A click. A whir. A glitch in the signal.
“Make me feel better,” he said. “Har har har.”
The world, ever-perverse, denied and satisfied.
Fighting in Nicaragua. Fighting in El Salvador. Central America in a tight-cogged military grip. Billions of U.S. dollars already sunk into offensive defensive posturing. Torture, disappearance, assassination. State of terror. State of siege.
That was a comforting comparison: Central America in the late eighties, Southeast Asia in the early sixties. Jake got a clear picture of his little buddy Ted, watching the teeth of flame smile up at him from a dead and burning Panamanian village. It didn’t seem too soon for full-scale U.S. involvement, did it? Not really, no.
His chest twanged discomfort. He finished his beer.
The next story came on.
Evangelical wars, growing ever more sordid, as this minister accused that minister of the next most depraved indiscretion, and the televised Kingdom of Heaven teetered on the increasingly rickety scaffold that held it aloft.
There was no end to it. At least none in sight. The media and the government were coming down on Godscam feet first—it was clear that they’d been waiting a long time for this, were having a field day, in fact—and every time they landed, a little more spew came up. Lot of skeletons in the closets of the Kingdom, it seemed. Rattling louder all the time.
I don’t know, Jake mused. But if I had a multi-million-dollar tax-free empire, with $600,000-a-year “special assistants” working for me, I think I might just send some of those skeletons down to the briny deep. Tie up the loose ends, so to speak. He wondered, for every $254,000 tail-piece, how many other indiscretions had wound up on the pay end of the food chain. Lot cheaper that way. Less noisy, too.
He wondered, briefly, what kind of bones his ol’ pal Furniss clutched, hidden, in the dark.
“One thing for sure, ol’ buddy,” he said, talking to Furniss as he talked to himself. “You play your cards right on this Murder Music shit, everybody will want to know all about you, real soon.”
The amazing thing was that the faithful kept coming back. I Like Nam, like Iranscam, like every other fucking thing on the news, it came and it danced and it went out again. After all the allegations of Hahn-humping and ho-moing came and went, and the Jim-bone connected to the Jerry-bone, and heah da word ob de Lawd!—after all that, the faithful still believed.
They needed so desperately to believe . . .
The next story came on.
Controversy, digging ever deeper into an already controversial administration. Hirings, firings, guns-for-money, or drugs-for-guns, the entire cast spinning like an enormous wheel of fortune that loses, not because they don’t know the answer, but because they lie about it.
No surprises there. He’d already called that tune with the band’s follow-up to “TV Ministries,” a touching ballad called “Just Like Richard Nixon.” Another hit, fer sure. Duplicity forever: past, present, and doubtless future. To expect anything else was to gum the ring pacifier of unheeded history. Santavana be sadly damned; those who learn from the past were doomed to repeat it anyway, just because of all the other dumb fucks who hadn’t.
Jake opened the second beer.
The next story came on.
He tried to watch it. He couldn’t. He got the vaguest hint that it was about a crackdown at the Mexican border, but that only helped to drive him back into himself. The thought of guns and helmets and perimeters held was the last brick in the wall. . .
. . . and then he was back in the dirt, with Duncan’s susurrating chest pressed like a seashell to his ear . . .
. . . and the words Why are you doing this? took shape in his mind: more than a prayer, any answer from God more than welcome. It didn’t make sense that the dreams should be back. There was no reason, no reason to freak out at all.
Unless the dreams were more than just spooky subtexts, more than psychoanalytically significant phantoms. Unless the dreams themselves were some kind of messages, scrawled on the bulletin board of the collective unconscious.
Unless something’s coming.
The words caught him off-guard, sent him ass-backward into the ice-water portion of the soul. Everything looked different: focus intensified, diamond-edged in perfection and precision of cut. It put a thin red line around everything he loved.
It reminded him of just how easily those things could be sliced from his life.
And then it showed him Rock Aid, with Jerry’s foreboding words afloat in the air around him. Violence, it said. All I know is that I’ve been having these very bad dreams lately . . .
. . . and the next clip came up: a video, one that Cody must have picked up off the satellite dish, some obscure program that featured the promos that never made it through MTV’s homogenous muzzle-filter.
It was vintage Scream: their first hit, “Stick It In”: brutal, chillingly precise, compelling as hell even with the sound down low . . .
. . . because the images themselves were so frentic, opening up with some kick-ass animation: of a sunglassed face, skin purpled as night-flesh, turning to meet the camera as flames burning twin holes through the dripping lenses gave way to glowing, smoking pits and the mouth stretched impossibly wide, as though no orifice
could adequately shape the force of what was coming . . .
. . . and Jake found himself inexorably sucked in, as the camera’s point-of-view zoomed closer, closer, then completely inside that horrible stretching mouth and on, down a moist and winding esophageal roller coaster . . .
. . . and the Scream was there, alive and kicking on stage: artfully lip-synching and gesticulating to one of their songs as a spread-eagled and bound nymphet offered herself on a flaming stage, a squirming sacrificial slaughter of the innocent . . .
. . . and Jake stared into the glowing screen, until the rest of the room, the rest of the world, was reduced to background noise nattering in the wings . . .
. . . as the angles changed, and changed: Tara Payne, stalking the stage, extorting the crowd to madness; Alex Royale, imperious and remote behind his wall of keyboards; Rod Royale, whirling around the nymphet with a guitar that was all sharp edges and angles . . .
. . . then ramming the point of its neck straight through her heart, skewering the girl like a puppet on a pencil, punching clear through the back. The shock of the impact was repeated in hitching, hyper blips, getting closer and closer until you could practically feel the blood running down the neck to spatter Rod Royale’s still-moving fingers . . .
. . . and then he jerked himself back to the living room, where Cody’s editing finesse cut to an up-to-the-minute report, pertaining to another riot at another Scream concert in yet another city, this time Pittsburgh . . .
While Jake sat there, thrumming terror.
Fully aware that, if he was right, the dreams were not the only things likely to worsen.
* * *
ELEVEN
Pittsburgh. Six a.m. No trace of sunlight in the sky. Walker lay in the darkness of his hotel room, unable to sleep, listening to the silence breathe and watching previews of the apocalypse in his mind.
It would be soon: that much he knew. All the signs were there. Too soon, perhaps, the end.
And then?
“I don’t know,” he mumbled into the gloom. The sound of his own voice surprised him; he was not the sort of man who often talked to empty rooms.
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