The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  The fire was burning brightly when Cody came upon them. He had a bag of prime smoke that he’d saved for a special occasion, and though this wasn’t what he’d hoped for, he figured it qualified.

  Cody sat down, lit up, and passed a joint over to Slim Jim, who grunted thanks and sucked in a man-sized lungful of sweet, musky smoke. He held it in and stared at Cody as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Tell me sumthin’,” he said upon exhaling, voice slum only slightly. “What d’jou do during the war?”

  “Which one?” Cody asked.

  “Fuck you. You know which. Where d’jou go? College? Canada?”

  “College, some. Jail, mostly.”

  Slim Jim snorted. “Jail, huh? What, d’ja get popped dealin’ or sumthin’?”

  “Got caught standing up for my lofty principles.”

  “Hmmph.” Jim belched and took a parting hit off the joint, washed it back with the pint. “Me an’ him did our bit. fightin’ for the damned country.”

  “Yeah, that’s the funny thing.” Cody exhaled a fat cloud of smoke. “That’s what I always figured I was doing, too.”

  “Hrrmmmph.” Jim was reasonably blasted at this point; it lent a well-lubricated verbosity to his feelings. “So what’d we get for it, all our duty and honor and patriotic fucking freedom-fighting?” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “Screwed, is what.” He looked back to Cody with a mixture of braggadocio and remorse, as if explaining the fundamentals of fine wine to a connoisseur of the screw-top set.

  “We were supposed to be the good guys. We were real good at what we did, I’ll say that much. We were trained to go in there and clean up. We believed that we were going to go in there and clean up. And we had the goods to do it, too.” His eyes flashed with the fires of rekindled memory.

  “But by and by, we found out that that’s not what we were really there for. Uh-unh. I don’t think anybody even fuckin’ knows the real reason—one that Nixon or Ho Chi Minh or Dow or the Rand Corporation or God Himself would ever even cop to. Do you know?!”

  Cody shook his head. Slim Jim leaned closer like a great bearded Buddha, smelling of dope and sour mash and Marlboros. “Neither do I,” he said.

  “But I’ll tell you what I think. I think that we were there to raise Hell. Literally. Raise. Hell. Inch by inch. Every day was like a fuckin’ Judgment Day back then. Can you imagine that? I mean, really imagine it??”

  Cody shook his head some more. Slim Jim harrumphed triumphantly. “Course not,” he muttered, “’cause you weren’t there. But it’s the truth. You get past all the moralistic poly-sci crap and that’s all war is.” He sucked back the rest of the and laid the bottle in the flames. “It’s a chance to make hell on earth. We take everything dark and wormy inside us and turn it loose like wild dogs on a long chain. And we always figure that the chain will hold, that it’ll keep the hounds at bay . . .” He trailed off then, as if lost on the track of his own thoughts.

  “You can send a man through hell, you know, and he’ll go singin’ all the way,” he continued almost brightly, switching tracks. “If you give him good enough reasons. Somethin’ worth killing for, say, or dying for. Charlie had ‘em, sure enough.”

  “And we didn’t.” Cody said. The fire popped.

  “Bullshit!” Slim Jim spat. “College boy. Hmmph. We had plenty.

  “But in the long run,” he amended, “Charlie’s were better. And it don’t have nothin’ to do with capitalism or communism or any of that horseshit. It runs a lot deeper than that. It’s personal.”

  Hempstead didn’t say anything, but he was nodding his head. Jim was on a roll now, the mix of alcohol, tetrahydrocannabinol, and leftover adrenaline acting like a verbal diuretic. “Hell, I guess everybody’s experience of it is different, but after a while I just gave up on trying to figure it out and settled for just trying to keep my ass and my crew in one piece. I wasn’t fighting to build anything anymore. But Charlie was. Charlie still believed.

  “Shit, in the end Charlie beat me by outbelieving me.”

  “So why’d you stay?” Cody asked.

  “Try and leave.” He laughed. It was the laugh of the righteous lunatic: sharp and hoarse and fast. “You get caught up in a machine like that and you find out real quick that it’s got a mind all its own, and you’re just along for the ride. And if you’ve got to do all kinds of terrible things, and there don’t seem to be any reason for doing ‘em, other than to survive and avenge and survive and avenge and survive . . .”

  Cody shivered as a breeze stirred through the trees. He tried to teleport the tactile sensations of night and fire and spirit-wind to the other side of the planet, tried to envision the kind of danger that would make you forgo even a small blaze such as this for fear of attracting a midnight mortar round. The whole thing was slopping over the boundaries of drunken, spooky campfire chat. It was starting to get under his skin.

  “. . . well, you just do it. And you learn not to let it fuck you up too bad; you learn not to feel it. But then the very act of not feeling it is what does the worst damage of all. It torques out your soul, man, and it just makes the whole situation more conducive, somehow . . .”

  “More conducive to what?”

  “I dunno, exactly.” Jim sighed as if his entire reality map had caved in on him. “But I swear to God one time we came to within spittin’ distance of it. Something dark, moving through the world. Something evil. Like a scout, a fucking Lurp from Hell. You know what I’m talking ‘bout?”

  Cody realized that the remark wasn’t aimed at him; he turned toward Hempstead, expecting a blast of reason to counter Slim Jim’s dark mythos.

  But Hempstead only stared into the fire; and when he finally spoke a good thirty seconds later, it was as from a distance of years and miles and shadows past. “Yeah, bro’. I know.” Then he looked at Cody, and the floodgates cracked just a hair, and the words came out. He spoke them like a man single-handedly wielding a runaway firehose: tight, barely contained clips. It was as if there were no way he was going to let the feelings wash over his reason, and yet there was no way around it. Finally, he shrugged.

  “Jimbo and I flew together in the Nam, you know, and we mostly operated out of III Corps, in the Highlands ’long the Cambodian border. One time—we was just heading home off a recon—we get this weird priority distress call, far enough over the line to make you wonder who the fuck was out there, you know?

  “Anyway, long story short, we reach the snatch point right near sunset, which is a very nervous-making time to be in the air going anyplace but home, and we spot the smoke coming up. All yellow and black, which is not good—the yellow means trouble for sure, and the black meant somebody else found out the hard way. Sure ’nuff, when we get overhead we can’t even fuckin’ land, ‘cause there’s one bird already downed in the clearing.

  “And bodies. Lots of bodies.”

  Hempstead spoke in low, low tones, staring into the flames like a gypsy reading tea leaves. “There was only one survivor, and he was fucked up, holding on to something that looked a lot like a baby. We figured we’d hook him and hoist him in on the way, so we lowered a cable and D-ringed him the hell up ’n’ out of there.

  “We get him up, no sweat. Weird thing is, he had to hand off the child to me before he could get in. I took it.” Hempstead nodded. “I held that thing in my arms, man, and I tell you true, when I touched it, it was dead. Stone-dead.

  “But when this mystery man gets in and sees it, he freaks out. He’s been wounded, right, his face is all fucked up and his back’s all fucked up and his one hand is bandaged, and he won’t let me check him out. He just grabs the kid and starts babblin’ shit—not incoherent, more like he’s talkin’ to someone, havin’ a two-way conversation all by hisself. He’s leaning against the bulkhead, holding this dead child, and he’s off in his own little world, going, ‘What do you want from me? What do you fucking want??’

  “Then he gets this look on his face . . . I can’t even describe it. Dera
nged, maybe, but willful. Dinky-dao. Head cocked, like a dog does when you talk to it.

  “And next thing I know, he’s ripping the bandage off his hand, and his ring finger’s gone, and he’s holding the stump up to the kid’s lips. Only it’s not bleeding anymore, and he gets really agitated, and he whacks his fucking hand on the bulkhead, sayin’ ‘C’mon! C’mon!!’ and goin’ whap! whap! until it starts bleeding again.”

  Hempstead broke another stick and shoved it into the fire. “And then he touched the blood to the baby’s lips. And it lay there for a minute, and he mumbled some shit. And then it coughed, and it started to cry.

  “An’ he suckled it.”

  The three sat in silence, listening to the fire and the woods and the wind. Cody didn’t know what to say, was afraid to say anything for fear it would sound stupid. He finally gurgled something to the effect of, “Maybe it wasn’t really dead . . .”

  Hempstead shook it off. “No way. I shit you not—I’ve seen dead, and I’ve made dead. I know the symptoms.”

  Slim Jim nodded. Cody shivered. A gust blew across the fire, sending sparks up into the night sky. “He looked at me then, with that one fuckin’ eye, and for a second we had an eyeball war at six thousand feet. Then he went back to his mumbling. And I’ll tell you somethin’ else,” Hempstead offered. Cody wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.

  “We got back to base, and that motherfucker disappeared, kid and all. That was twenty years ago, give or take a day. And I never seen him again.

  “Until tonight. He was on that stage, at the concert.”

  Jim looked at him, eyes akimbo. “You didn’t fuckin’ tell me that!” he blurted. “Who? Where? What the hell was he doing there?!”

  “He’s The Scream’s manager.”

  “He’s what?!!”

  “You heard me. I’ll never forget that face. And that makes a whole lot of things make more sense, and a few things a whole lot less.

  “’Cause all the way back, he squatted there, rockin’ and mumblin’ the same damned word over and over again. It didn’t make no sense at the time.

  “But, I swear to God, that word was ‘tara’ . . .

  An empty Lucky Strike pack was burning in the ashtray, caught from a stray ember off his last butt. Momma was silent. Walker watched it curl and flame, unchecked. He didn’t care. In fact, he cared less and less about much of anything, the closer they got. It would be so easy to toss in a disposable lighter, wait for it to blow and catch the desk like a miniature napalm strike. The desk would go. The drapes would go. Then the rug, and the chairs, and the thick wooden ceiling beams and the oiled oak paneling, and maybe he could pull the whole miserable house down on top of this bullshit operation, maybe . . .

  The puny blaze guttered as a waft of breeze from the opening door blew in. Momma snickered. Walker didn’t look up. He already knew who it was, and he could damned well guess what he wanted.

  And Walker found some small comfort in the fact that he’d soon be able to give it to him.

  * * *

  TWENTY-THREE

  Walker was in there, behind his fatass desk. Conversing with himself, as usual. Rod rap-a-tapped snidely on the opening door as he strode inside, then slammed it behind him.

  “I wanna have a talk with you, mister. Right now.”

  “Okay.” Walker swiveled his chair around to face the doorway. His own expression was weary but otherwise inscrutable. “So talk.”

  “So talk,” Rod sneered in contemptuous mimicry. “Man, you are smooth as baby shit, aren’tcha? Too cool for words. How am I supposed to trust a man who talks like that?”

  “Let’s rearrange the question a little, boy.” Walker gave the last word subtle emphasis. “How much choice do you think you have? How many alternatives? Answer me that.”

  Rod stopped at the front of the desk and thought a moment. He felt much better after his sojourn in the bordello, as always . . . confident, masterful, strong . . . but there was something about Walker that always brought him up short. He hated to think that Walker was simply more powerful. That was too much like concession.

  “I just need to know where it’s going,” Rod began. “I need to know what you have in mind here over the long haul. I mean, all the long-foretold changes are happening hand over fist now: the tour is over; Momma’s comin’ in on Monday night; this whole phase of The Scream is almost over. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is right so far. Right?”

  “Right. On every count.”

  “Now you always said that we should take it as it comes, you wouldn’t know the future until it got here. And I always believed you,” Rod lied. “But now we’re standing at the goddamn threshold, and I still don’t know where it is.

  “If you know, I wish you would explain it to me.

  “I’m getting impatient.

  “And the stakes are getting high.”

  Walker lit a cigarette and dragged on it slowly. From anyone else, Rod included, it would have seemed like an attempt to buy time. But Walker was too fucking cool. He was stretching it, to magnify the discomfort of the moment.

  “So what do you want to know, exactly?” Walker said.

  “Where I stand. Exactly.”

  Walker dragged again, let a thick plume waft. He seemed to think about it, but Rod wasn’t fooled; he knew precisely where everything stood.

  “You’ve already been promised a kingdom,” Walker said at last. “The promise still stands. You’ve seen enough of Momma’s power to know that she’s good for her word.

  “At the same time, everything that’s happening here couldn’t be done without you, boy. You know that. She knows that. And she’s not very likely to forget it.”

  “But once she’s here,” Rod countered, “what’s to stop her from fucking us both over? Have you thought about that?”

  Walker smiled grimly. “What’s the point? She’s still going to need us. It’s a big world, and she can’t be everywhere at once.” He took another drag, blew it out. “You’ve got to understand. This is the physical world, and all the physical rules apply. Once she gets here, she’s just a bigger and better version of us. You know what that means?”

  “She can be hurt.”

  “She can be killed.” Again: the smoke as emphasis. “You think she came all this way just to die in a second? Think again. She needs warm bodies. She needs us to prime the audience, she needs us to pave the way and guard it. We get them to believe in her until she can do that for herself. And then she’s here, and it’s a whole new ball game.

  “Now, you have been loyal to her so far, and it’s been to your advantage. It will remain to your advantage if you don’t piss around and ask too many stupid questions.”

  A smart-ass response leaped to Rod’s lips. He bit it off and swallowed it. There was truth in Walker’s words, God damn it. There always was. How much truth and how much bullshit, Rod was in no position to say.

  Then again, he was in no position to say a lot of things. As Walker pointed out, How much choice do you think you have? He was in over the barrel on this thing, and not just contractually. Walker owned the band, on paper.

  But Momma owned them all.

  “What about my brother?”

  Walker’s deadpan gained a sudden, serious edge. “We’ll get him through this. We have to. Momma can’t make it without him.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. But what happens to him after she’s out?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t promise you anything, because there are no guarantees. My feeling is that, after Monday night, the worst will be over . . . but shit, I really don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s great, isn’t it? That really puts the whole thing in perspective—”

  “Let’s get something straight, boy!” Walker roared, abruptly standing. Rod took an involuntary step back; up close and angry, Walker had that effect on people. “You know as well as I do that you don’t give a damn about your brother. You sold him down the river on this deal, not me. If you didn’t know for a fact that you’d b
e nowhere without him, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck yourself, punk. In fact, don’t bother. I think you already have.”

  Rod felt the hot spark of that one, violently igniting off the cold flint of his heart. His whole being began to coarse with sickening heat, seeping out from the core and down into his extremities. “Wha . . .” he tremulously began, then whipped up the courage to continue. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “I’ll tell you what I mean.” In that instant Walker vaulted over the length of the desk and came to rest within an inch of where Rod stood. Rod tried to hustle backward, but he needn’t have bothered. Walker grabbed him by the throat and forced him back, slamming him into the door and holding him there.

  “I mean that you’ve overstepped your boundaries, little man. You have pushed me just about as far as I care to let you. We put up with your little power trips. We stock your little torture chamber. We cover your ass every step of the way.

  “But you’re in the big leagues now, dipshit, and there’s more at stake here than whether you’re happy or not.” Walker slammed Rod’s head into the door for emphasis. “You step on Momma’s toes . . . or God help you, you step on mine . . . there’s not a thing in the universe can help you. You understand me?”

  Rod, in panic, tried to nod. With Walker’s hands around his throat it didn’t work too well. And no words were forthcoming.

  “We made you big time, you little ass-licker. And we’ll keep you that way so long as there’s any point to it. You just play your cards right, and you will have all the power you can handle. Just do your job, and you’ll be fine.

  “But I’m telling you right now, and I’m not gonna tell you again: you fuck up, you cause trouble, you play one wrong note between now and the time that Momma arrives, and I will personally snap your miserable neck.

  “Have I made a lingering and crystal-clear impression on you, boy?”

  Again. Rod attempted a nod. This time, Walker let come through.