The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  Cody looked at Slim Jim, shrugged, and loaded up another one. He took aim, said, “Puttin’ it in at three o’clock,” and squeezed the trigger. The bolt flew out; Hempstead squeezed off a shot a split second later.

  And blew the bolt out of the air not five inches from the target.

  “Whoa,” the voice behind them said, “nice shootin’ thar, Tex.”

  They all turned. Jake smiled wanly as he stepped off the trail. “Nice day, huh. You boys rehearsing for World War III or something?”

  They all grinned and kicked at the dirt. Cody lit a joint and passed it on to Slim Jim. “Could be,” Hempstead replied, “given our current situation, it’s not the worst idea in the world. You joining us?”

  He nodded toward the Cordura bag slung across Jake’s right shoulder. Jake shrugged and laid it down on the rough-hewn balance beam, unzipped it, and withdrew a lever action Marlin .30-06, also scope-mounted.

  “Just thought I’d do a little target practice, is all.”

  “Uh-huh. Looks like you’re not the only one.”

  “Looks like things are getting a little tense around here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Jake was staring at Hempstead quizzically when he heard the metallic claack of a machine-gun bolt pulling back. Every hair on the back of his neck went static-upright. He turned around to face Slim Jim, who cradled an Uzi in his arms.

  “I do believe,” Jim said, “that we need to do a wee bit more than talk.”

  Walker felt the shadow fall across his face like an ink-black pillow, threatening to smother the life out of him.

  “Walker,” Momma hissed in a voice like rope twisting in a high wind.

  “WALKER!!”

  He sat up, rumpled and sweating. Beads of perspiration trickled into the indentation in the leather upholstery of the couch, where his shirt could better absorb them. His neck hurt. It had not been a nice dream: short and violent and born of sleep not deep enough to ease the fatigue. His scars throbbed. He looked across the office.

  The drapes sealed out ninety-nine percent of the afternoon sun, but several valiant beams had weasled through a slit in the drapes to shine across the ancient carpet; dust motes floated langourously in the swaths of golden light.

  “Get up.”

  The dust swirled turbulently. The sunbeams halted in midair, sliced off and swallowed by the blackness that loomed toward him. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “Trouble.”

  “Great,” he spat, sitting fully upright. “What, specifically?”

  Momma told him what she knew. It was limited. He was still her eyes and ears, and her “other sources” operated on much more obscure levels of perception. But they were usually right, and it could indeed be dangerous.

  Walker ran a hand through his hair; he was exhausted. “Can it wait?”

  “I think not.”

  “So what should we do?”

  “Take care of it. Make a call. Head ‘em off at the pass.

  “Just fix it.”

  “All right.” He sighed, standing and walking to the desk. The number was already loaded into the phone’s memory. The arrangements were made in less than three minutes.

  Walker sat back in the big leather chair. The shadow was a jack-o’-lantern slit in the middle of the floor. “I had a dream. It was about—”

  “I know what it was about,” Momma said. “Remember the old saying, Walker: Be careful what you dream . . .”

  Yeah, he thought.

  It just might come true.

  * * *

  TWENTY-NINE

  It was the Symphony of Life: her own soul-music, sweetly redefining the air itself with sound. Jesse let it flow over her, catch her in its rhythms, propel her as she rose and fell and ground and writhed and rose to fall again upon the sweet hard love inside her.

  And Pete was beneath her, smiling up at her, then closing his eyes and making little Pete-noises. They mingled with her own, the sound from the speakers, feeding life back into the symphony.

  Just as the electrodes attached to them fed living pulses back to the master translator.

  Back to DIOS.

  She rode him, with heat and deliberate abandon, anticipating the flood within her that would signal his release, anticipating her own wild ride’s conclusion. It was building now, and she picked up her pace, giving herself over more fully to the pull of the waves.

  For that was the essence of the cosmic dance, the fabric underlying all creation. That moment of release and abandon.

  When all of the barriers break down.

  And the mysteries reveal.

  On the subatomic level there are no barriers. On the subatomic level even the binary code is subsumed. No more on or off, yes or no, life or death. Just an endless continuum of being, neither isolated as a particle nor undifferentiated as a wave. Quantum theory calls them wavicles; and they join all things together into one infinitely multifaceted Whole.

  Within that Whole, all things are contained. Every choice. Every option. If it exists anywhere in the universe, it is there. If one can imagine it, it is there.

  The only difference is in the rate of the vibration.

  And that rate of vibration determines everything. Determines shape. Determines sound. Determines density and the characteristics thereof. Determines, even in dreamland, what is bed and what is bedded, what is solid and what is gas, distinguishes between vagina and penis and the chemical structure of the lubricants between.

  If one could listen in, at the subatomic level, one could hear the infinite timbres come together in exquisite song.

  The music of the spheres, as Pythagoras dubbed it.

  The Symphony of Life . . .

  It was that symphony that she moved to, as the moment came near. It choreographed the rise and fall and grind and writhe, drove her closer and closer to that moment of ultimate merger when she was Pete and Pete was she.

  And then she saw the cervical cap—not in her at all, but off to the side, torn and bubbling and sinking into the pillow beside Pete’s head—and panic jolted through her like a shot of methamphetamine. She tried to pull off of him. He held her firmly at the hips. It’s already too late, he said.

  He smiled.

  And it was true, not because he’d come, but because she was already pregnant. How could she have forgotten? She was so fucking big . . .

  . . . and as she watched, her belly swelled and burgeoned, as if his cock were a faucet turned on full and she were a water balloon, her flesh distending like rubber . . .

  . . . and the music changed, subtly at first, then faster and faster as harmony mutated into dissonance and major shifted to minor, beauty turned to slavering beast . . .

  . . . and there was no pain, there was only the horror, filling her belly and frying her mind as the first red spritzing cracks appeared and she felt the growing thing begin to claw her, claw her from within . . .

  . . . and in the last moment before she burst, she saw that Pete was crying, big viscous tears, like egg whites surging out of a fractured shell . . .

  . . . and then she was screaming into her pillow, with the warm light of morning burning into her open eyes.

  The time was 11:34.

  Time to face the music.

  Everybody steered clear of her when she emerged from her room: Pete’s Gram, Bob and Bob, all the guys from the crew. It was as if they could feel her pain coming, an invisible buffer zone that preceded her by a good twenty yards. She could feel their embarrassment for her. It simply drove the wedge in deeper. Like a ghost, she moved through the corridors, down the stairs, past the rehearsal room, and out the front door.

  The first thing Jesse noticed, as she hit the great outdoors, was the sound of gunfire. It hadn’t really registered from inside for some reason. Maybe because she didn’t expect it. Maybe because her head was already full of cotton and cacophony.

  The second thing she noticed was the absence of submoronic singing
. It was the first time in seemingly forever that the day hadn’t greeted her with a round of holy, ho-lee. She glanced, unsmiling, in the direction of the gate. No assholes. Amazing.

  Jesse started down the hill, away from the gate, in the direction of the shooting range. The odds were good that they wouldn’t even notice her, whoever they were; their backs would be facing the trail. The odds were good that they were shooting at the targets, not each other or some unnamed thing. If she was wrong, so what. A bullet in the head might be an improvement. . . .

  No, no, no, she told herself. This is not healthy. This is not sane. She got a flash of the Jesse to whom she was accustomed: a strong woman, not at all self-destructive, willing to stare down any obstacle until it shied away.

  She could not seem to find that Jesse within her.

  The dream came back, and with it the despair. Her hands came to her stomach, confirming the relative flatness. No, she was not bursting her seams. At least not abdominally. Whatever was taking form in there, it was still very small: more like a tadpole than a human being. . . .

  “Shut up!” she yelled, and stopped in her tracks. The sound of her own voice startled her. She had not meant to say it out loud. The fact that she had done so meant that, yes, she was really fucking losing it now. Which meant that there were no holds left to bar, and control was history out the window gone . . .

  The face of Lenore Kleinkind appeared: kindly, condescending, genuinely compassionate as a yellow-faced HAVE A NICE DAY sticker. It has a right to live! she insisted, waving an open quart jar of pig’s blood before her for emphasis. . . .

  Pete, then: loaded out of his mind, red eyes wrestling themselves into focus. You’re talking about a human life here! he bellowed. In one hand he held an empty vial of coke, in the other a loaded and dripping condom. . . .

  “Leave me alone, God damn you,” Jesse muttered, forcing her legs to move again, forcing herself onward. The trail wound downward; she followed it, barely looking. The external was largely a matter of course.

  It was the internal that owned her attention now.

  There was no other way to view the grande dame of the Susquehanna Women’s Services Center, that miserable treacherous twat; but her assessment of Pete wasn’t fair, and there was no way around that, either. Lumping them together only twisted things worse than they already were.

  Pete—whatever else could be said about him—was at heart a beautiful man.

  And he had loved her. In his own way, he had. He wasn’t all that good at it—it wasn’t the kind of thing you auditioned for, after all—but insofar as his immature, dashing, unspeakably handsome, funny, charming, and prodigiously gifted little weenie ass had been capable, he had dedicated himself to her in a way that he clearly had never dedicated himself to a woman before. He had admired her talent. He had admired her work. He had admired her worldview. He had admired her body. He had gone to her often, in open admiration of all of the above, and rarely come away with less than a satisfied and utterly Pete-like grin.

  He had even said, on more than one occasion, that he loved her. . . .

  God damn it! she howled at herself. Why am I thinking about him in the past tense?

  The answer to that one was simple.

  Pete was fucking dead.

  And, of course, there were only a couple of dozen problems with that hypothesis. Most of them had to do with the issue of subjectivity. He’s not here; therefore he must be dead. It sounded like one of Eugene lonesco’s syllogisms: All cats die, Socrates is dead, therefore Socrates must have been a cat. It made for nice absurdism, but it had about as much to do with reality as a David Lynch film. Logic made stupid.

  Logic made irrelevant.

  But it didn’t change the fact that Pete had no reason to disappear. He was not the kind of person who ducked and ran. Maybe for one night, one brainless liaison with an equally brainless chippee. That was very likely, in fact.

  But he would have been back for Rock Aid.

  And he would have been back for her.

  So that narrows down the options, she continued. Either he’s dead, he’s been kidnapped, or he’s in a coma. Maybe even all three. This was not a cheerful realization to come to. It took a chunk out of her, made her steps falter.

  She was even with the shootists now, and she had been correct: they were shooting at the targets, and they hadn’t noticed her at all. Knowing that she wasn’t being watched enabled her to look at them: Jake, Cody, Hempstead, the copter guy. They seemed to be deep in intense conversation, punctuated by gunfire. Make a point. POOM! Make a point. POOM!

  She thought about going to talk with them, find out what’s going on; from the look of it, they weren’t exchanging recipes for Sunday Delight Supreme. Then Hempstead fired, and it made the fillings in her teeth rattle, changing her mind rather abruptly. Whatever it was, she could discuss it with them later.

  Maybe later she’d be able to think.

  She continued down the hill, toward Jake and Rachel’s house and the woods below. It was probably best that she not speak with anyone right now, after all. It was probably best that she be by her lonesome. The things she had to work out, nobody could help with. The trees, maybe. The birds.

  The trail was simply worn-down grass with sporadic pools of rock and soil. It had a nice down-home wilderness feel. Injuns, no doubt, had traipsed along it back around the birth of the nation, back before they traded their rings and beads for anthrax-smothered blankets, that is. . . .

  “Nice,” she muttered, shrugging it off, letting one foot fall after the other. Another shot rang out; it was almost as if the shock wave of it pushed her forward, away from them, further down the hill.

  And that was when the bug began to scuttle across her path.

  It was a big black ugly sucker: a beetle of some sort, awkward and clunky and roughly the size of her thumb. She froze in her tracks and stared at it, while something primordial tugged at the muscle strings in her chest. It was the same low-grade revulsion that had always seized her when she turned on the lights in her New York kitchen and watched the roach Rockettes rehearsing in the sink. Insect-loathing: cornerstone of civilization.

  The first impulse, of course, was to squash the bastard. Better yet, to get somebody else to do it. She’d always disliked the moment of impact: the feel, the sound, the fact that she was actually killing something, no matter how repulsive it was.

  Then, of course, came the guilt. It was alive, after all. It had a right . . .

  And that, of course, was the end of the line; and before she knew it she was running, sidestepping the goddamn beetle and making a beeline for the woods, barely watching where she was going because her eyes were filling with tears, brimming over with tears for the baby Jesse and the baby within her who would never get to be, never get to be because she didn’t want it, she couldn’t deal with it now, Pete or no Pete there was no man to support her while she took a year or two off that she didn’t even want to take off, she didn’t even want the man, but now there were all these people trying to make her feel guilty for making her decision, setting her up for fake abortions, throwing blood in her face on national TV, saying it has a right to live when she felt it had no rights at all, since when did kids ever get to vote on anything their parents did, and besides that it wasn’t even here yet . . .

  . . . and she ran, and she ran, but she couldn’t shake the knowledge that she could abort a fetus but she couldn’t step on a goddamn bug, which just made the tears flow all the more because it told her something about herself that she didn’t want to know, several things about herself, and one of them was that she was surely a selfish bitch, and another was that she had to be, because God and Nature and Fate had all conspired to turn her into her mother if she did not remain absolutely fucking resolute as to what she would or would not allow to happen to her body, and the simple fact was that she would not have to raise and support and protect that bug, and that nobody was going to help her raise or support or protect her baby either so they had absolu
tely no right to talk, but it didn’t change another, equally simple fact, which was that there was a budding human being inside her that she was going to kill before it even knew what hit it, and when you killed a human being they called it murder, because that’s exactly what it was . . .

  . . . and as she came up even with Jake and Rachel’s house, Natalie began to crawl out from around the back, and Jesse looked for just the split second that it took for her left fool to hit the half-buried rock, smashing the three biggest toes and sending the rest of her careening down, face-first, into the dirt and stones, hands coming up to catch the brunt of it as she landed, the flesh tearing open and skinning back in dozens of tiny places as she shrieked out her frustration and rolled onto her back, hands coming up so she could dimly survey the damage, other hands coming down to hold her, help her up, take her by the shoulders as she fell forward into Rachel’s embrace and cried and cried and cried . . .

  “Jesus Christ,” Rachel muttered. “I didn’t know . . . I mean, I had no idea it had gotten that weird.”

  “Well, it has,” Jesse countered. “And Jesus—”

  “—had precious little to do with it,” Rachel said, finishing the sentence. “That’s for sure.”

  The two women sat across from each other at Rachel’s kitchen table, a vase of fresh-picked flowers between them and just to one side. The baby was down, and so they were alone: not so far apart that they could not touch, though they abstained from it for the moment. All myths of instant feminine intimacy aside, they did not know each other all that well; and none of this was easy.

  It was 1:05 in the afternoon, but they were sharing the day’s first pot of fresh-ground Columbian blend while the high sun shone through the windows and danced through the many fine crystals dangling in the light. That same light sparkled in the tears on Jesse’s cheeks, filtered through the cigarette smoke that emanated from her free hand.