Everybody Scream!

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Better call Max down,” Del told Sophi. Max Schenkel was their attorney. Tonight would keep him busy for months, but the carnival had never lost a case.

  “Okay, more lab results,” Dingo went on. “No print match-ups to police files. The only blood in the Colon car was from Colon. Nothing from Fawn Horowitz–a good sign. On the floor of the Colon car we found a red shocker tablet but none on him or in his system. No shell casings. No report yet of gunfire, but people might mistake it for firecrackers or even ignore it. With all three vehicles the shots were not fired through the glass. The doors must have been opened for Sundry and Colon. For Habash the windows were open. No one even drew a gun in defense. Maybe it was someone they all knew. However…”

  “Yes?”

  Dingo sighed. “Habash and Gross were killed with a different gun, and had been dead for two hours in their car before the other three were killed.”

  “Great,” said Sophi.

  “So that’s where we stand. The town boys have arrived, they’re at the morgue. You might wanna go talk to them.”

  “Would it be dangerous to page Fawn Horowitz?” Sophi asked gravely.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does that Cookie kid or the others have a picture so we can start a search?”

  “They’ve gone–sorry. Zalkind’s people came right out and got her.”

  “Mitch must have gone over to see Pearl. Do you know how she’s doing?”

  “Good, I guess. Okay.”

  “What about Noelle Buda?” asked Del softly.

  “She’s lying down–they gave her a sedative or whatever. She’s pretty shook. I guess she’s stranded for now too but we can worry about that later. I don’t know if she’s called her people.”

  “Let her rest. Thanks, Dingo, you’re doing a good job.”

  “Some last night, huh?”

  “Mm,” Sophi grunted in bitter agreement.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  The face hovering high over her was washed with wave after wave of colored light. A sliding red light would pool into the eyes of the face and then pull itself up and out and slide off the other side of the face. The black helmet on the head of the face was a seething mass of swirling nebulae of light, and myriad glints were stars. The expression was harsh.

  “Let me see your hand.” Someone took her wrist, twisted her arm. Vacantly she looked. There was a dark mark on her hand, which looked so far away and didn’t feel like part of her, her nerves not reaching that far. The face was satisfied with this mark, nodded. Let go. “Go on.”

  She stumbled along, her body only a dragging string dangling from the balloon of her head. She was pushed along by those swelling behind her, until she washed onto a small patch where she stood watching the tides and eddies all around her. She swayed. She lifted her head and stared at a machine rising above some trees nearby. It had long arms that rotated, dipping up and down, and in each palm twirled a little box, like some octopus juggler. It was a glossy black with green lights running along the arms, dispensing a green glow to the foliage of the trees and to whatever or whoever else was near. And above this pirouetting monster hung a full moon. It bled tatters of ectoplasmic clouds. A violent shiver went through Fawn. She hugged herself, turned sharply away and blundered into the ocean again.

  She shot a glance over her shoulder. It was following her.

  She collided. Hands shot out and gripped her. Her heart was jolted as if a cattle prod had been touched against it. Whipping her head, she bugged her eyes into a new hovering face. It was darkish-skinned. The beginnings of a beard. Long filaments of flesh were being pinched away from the face like stretched strings of bubble gum until they snapped and new strings were drawn out. Fawn’s eyes lowered to a white shirt. Strings were also being pulled out of this reflective mass. Fawn saw colors that she had never seen before in opalescent swirlings on that white surface. Much of the shirt, though, had been darkened–mostly about the shoulders–with thick dried stains. The man shook her by the arms so that she would look at him again. He didn’t seem to be really any older than she. Maybe she could appeal to him, in that light.

  “Watch where you are going, Satan’s whore!” A violent shake. Her arms hurt. She heard laughter and saw others like this young man close at hand.

  “Help me,” she said. Her voice sounded absolutely alien to her and yet, also, the only familiar and reassuring sound in this loud place. “I’m…I must be drunk…”

  “She is on drugs,” sneered a voice close at hand.

  “You knocked my drink on me–look!” A hand had switched to her hair, clenched it. Her head was jerked low and she whimpered. She was meant to see a stain amidst the opal swirls but only saw the dark dried stains–was that what he meant? She did see a cup and spilled ice on the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” Fawn mumbled, wanting to cry. But tears would never be able to climb up out of this smoke-filled abyss. Her head was lifted for her. Now red sparks were leaping out of the man’s glaring eyes and she recoiled in his grip, horrified, afraid that if the hot sparks lighted on her face they would sear her. She saw his mouth form as if to speak but a liquid thing leaped from it, a glowing red projectile of lava. It struck her face.

  Fawn screamed, thrashed. The agony was unbearable. The flesh of her face bubbled, hissed, spat like frying bacon. She clawed the man’s shirt. People passing glanced at her, she noticed through her shrieks. A hand struck her face. Wasn’t it afraid to be burned on her skin? She fell, and hitched with sobs, the pain beginning to subside. Didn’t severe burns stop hurting once the nerve endings were destroyed? Multiple hands hoisted her roughly back to her feet.

  A half dozen passing black boys smiled at her. They wore black graduation robes, open over their street clothes, and mortarboard hats with red tassels–the next fad, maybe, when the rubber swimming caps and clear ruffled shower caps died out. A brown and white mottled mollusk with eight heads and one thick tentacle floated by, a few of the heads seeming to regard her for a moment.

  The man wouldn’t let go of her. Were he and his companions going to rape her? A rogue memory slithered inside her in many small broken worm-like pieces and she shivered violently. She retched. The man held her farther out from him.

  “This is a typical female infidel,” said the man who held her. “Look at her. They are all like this. You see this?”

  Fawn looked toward where he was directing his voice in particular. Three figures in black robes, their hair and lower faces hidden. At first Fawn took them to be nuns. Dark eyes solemnly staring. She felt on trial.

  “Someone will see us,” said a voice behind her. “Let her go.”

  “She spilled my drink on me. I want her to pay me for it!”

  “She isn’t worth the trouble. Look how drugged she is.”

  “They would have our women become like this wretched thing.” A twist of her arm. Fawn staggered, groaned. The young man regarded her, and now grinned. His teeth gave off white sparks…cool, but they smelled. “You have taken more drugs than you had intended, haven’t you? Does it make the colors brighter and the rides faster, to take your poisons? How much brighter the colors are now, eh? And the rides must surely be faster eh? Well–we must help you! We can help you have fun!”

  The others laughed, but for the grim women, and the one dissenting voice behind her. “We mustn’t make trouble for ourselves.”

  “She has made her own troubles.” The man looked around him, settled on something. “Over there–that looks fun. Eh?” He tugged Fawn by the arm and she stumbled after him. Another man took her other arm to help her along. The rest trailed behind.

  This machine stood out through the fog in the swamp of her mind. It was a great wheel, with many individual open cells along its outer edge, facing in. The fetus of a memory stirred in her. They approached a glum, wordless operator. Someone gave him tickets. A few tongues of electricity played between the two hands as the tickets were exchanged. The glum man had a dim blue aura and blue sparks spilled out
of his nostrils, bouncing down his shirt and bouncing on his shoes until they faded.

  “I’ll put her on,” offered the man who held her arm. “She’s a little sick.” She was escorted to a cell. Electricity from her contact with the metal mesh floor coiled vine-like around her legs. Ahead there was someone already in a cell. Two purplish, gaseous beams were being shot from this person’s eyes. Or drawn from its eyes. Long, dim, stretching off high into the black sky until they were lost.

  Her escort locked her restraining bar in place. He had, it seemed, purposely chosen the cell next to the being with the beaming eyes. Cool sparks from his teeth, again–smelly. “Have a nice ride.” Then he clanged away, electric tongues lapping his legs.

  There were a few others on the wheel but their eyes didn’t beam. Shortly, the wheel began to turn…

  She tried to make out the faces on the people across from her. Did she know them? It seemed that she did. Names hopped like grasshoppers away from her grasping hands. Cookie? Cookie. That was someone’s name…

  And to her right the cell was empty, though she thought sure that someone had been there before…

  “And I love you!” a voice cried out remotely from that cell.

  She felt a pain inside. Not of loss, because she hadn’t really lost anything. It was the pain of fear. Because she had opened the door to a nightmare and was locked in its cell, like a prisoner in a burning prison unable to escape, no one to rescue her. The flames of unknown carnival color leaped and lapped all around her.

  The wheel spun faster. It began to tilt at an angle. It tipped more and more and seemed it wouldn’t stop until it was fully vertical, but did stop just short of that. Lights like tracer bullets whizzed all around her, pierced through her. She hurtled at the ground, a flesh meteor. Faces down there stared up at her from the bottom of the ocean. She hurtled at the sky, at the stars. Veered. She was plunged to earth, reborn, whisked to heaven again, reborn again, an endless cycle of reincarnation, life after life lived out in seconds.

  But tattered memories of her previous lives would bob to the surface and float like dead fish.

  “Can I pin it on you? A medal of honor,” said a disembodied voice.

  “For what?” her own voice echoed.

  “For being so gorgeous.”

  “You’re too cute to shoot.”

  “I can’t believe this!” her memory laughed.

  “I’ll make you feel good. You’ll be so high you won’t come down for a week. You might not be the same person when you do, but that might not be so bad, and better to be changed than dead, right?”

  “Please,” her memory sobbed.

  “Don’t beg me. You’re lucky enough already. You should see your blonde friend.”

  “Please, please, God…”

  “Ha. You must have bought this eye from us, huh?”

  “Can I pin it on you? A medal of honor.”

  “Please,” Fawn said aloud, and gazed down at the eye on the front of her denim jacket above her left breast. It was red-irised, with a goat-like oblong pupil. It glared at her. Red sparks were whipped out of it by the wheel’s spinning but the air took them safely away. Some bounced off the floor of the cage like an arc welder’s torrents of sparks. The eye was alive, hateful, drilling. Fawn screamed.

  She looked away. The ground rushed up at her. Faces. Figures. They watched her. The men in the stained white shirts, their three nun-like women. Others. One figure, not a human, glowed with a purple aura. It was insect-like. It was watching her. She plunged toward it. It invited her. At the last moment she pulled out of her dive…up and up.

  She rocketed toward the full moon. It had the harsh glowing face of the security guard. Its edge rippled, shot flares into space. There was a great thing across the face. It was not actually the moon which regarded her, but this thing that sprawled across its cold cratered mattress. Fawn howled, shrieked, rattled her restraining bar. She was flung down at the waiting insect thing. Shot up at the moon. Again and again bounced between the two.

  All this time those two smoky purple rays had beamed from the eyes of the being in the cell to her left, strafing the people below and then plunging off again into the sky. When they raked across the moon the flares from its rippling edge leaped further, shone more brightly. Now Fawn leaned forward to see into the next cell and beg for help. Maybe they could escape together.

  The smoky beams emanated from empty skull sockets. Vomit rained on people below. Someone cried out, pointing. The glum worker touched a keyboard blandly. The wheel began to slow and lower.

  The Red Jihad disappeared. So had the insect thing.

  Two uniformed men clanged up into the wheel. They unlocked the restraining bar and lowered the flopped figure to the mesh floor delicately. One rolled it over while the other called first for a med emergency unit and then to the carnival security headquarters.

  The med team arrived first. Dingo, Del and Sophi came after.

  “Let me see her wallet,” Sophi droned, and took it.

  “Dead,” said one of the med team.

  “What was it?” Dingo asked.

  “Drugs. She had a half dozen kaleidoscopes in her, I’d say. Hallucinogens. And some red shockers, too. Bad combination. Brain damage–she blew her fuses. It was a miracle her heart didn’t give out first.”

  “Great,” said Dingo. “Fucking great. And her mother’s here with her lawyer.”

  Del stared down at the splay-legged corpse in horror. He had seen this girl tonight. Alive, vivacious, without the open-mouthed expression of terror, the thick blood from her nose. He had been flirting with a group of teenage girls. One had told him to blast off and the others had laughed, including this one. Heather Buffatoni must have also been one of them. He hadn’t viewed her body–would he have recognized it with the eyes shot out?

  “Do you think she was overdosed on purpose?” Sophi asked.

  “I don’t know that,” said the med team member, crouched by the body still.

  Del felt a tremble at the horror in the corpse’s open eyes. They stared up at the star-littered sky. They were afraid.

  The gold-dust was inside an oversized toy bumble that Pox had won. It now sat beside Bern Glandston on a bench at a sticky picnic table where the two men drank beer. Pox had just lit a black-papered herb cigarette and squinted out of the tent-covered area at the throngs of living beings. They had heard gunshots a few minutes ago but someone had told them that it was a demonstration of police dog training, hostage situations, and the like, and the shots had been blanks. Not that they had really been concerned, just curious. Bern said, “There was a lot of activity at the security trailer; somebody killed a bunch of people in the parking lot.”

  “Drugs,” said Pox, as if in disgust.

  “Probably.”

  Bern had made it safely to security headquarters and paged Pox several times. Finally a teenage boy Bern had never seen came to bring Bern here. Pox had then paid the boy for the errand and dismissed him. Bern had felt somewhat safer coming here with the boy, at least less alone, and now that he was with Pox he felt so relaxed, so relieved, that all his bitterness was forgotten. He hadn’t exploded at Pox as he’d planned lately–he couldn’t really afford that anyway, could he? But he had told Pox about the Torgessi. Pox had chuckled. In his relief, Bern had chuckled, too.

  He didn’t like sitting with his back open to the passing throng, though, and glanced over his shoulder once in a while, half consciously.

  “Hear about The Head?” asked Pox.

  “The Head?”

  “The Head.” Pox pointed his cigarette.

  Bern twisted to glance over his shoulder. “No–what?”

  “That giant critter they found on it?”

  “No–what giant critter?”

  “You can’t see it? It covers the whole fucking face.”

  “Is that...that’s an animal?” There was a shadow, like a dark hand over the carven jack-o’-lantern face.

  “They sent some scientists and soldi
ers out tonight to see what happened to those security guards.”

  “Something happened to some security guards?”

  “Yeah. Lost contact. So they sent some probe ships–guess they didn’t want to teleport just yet. Well, on the way down here I heard on my car radio they’ve lost contact with two of those and so the other two turned back.”

  “Holy stools.”

  “I don’t know what they’re doing now, but I’ll bet they’re gonna be ready to fight next time. But from here, look how far away and quiet it is. Who knows what’s going on.”

  “Just blow the whole thing up.” Bern swigged his beer, smacked his black-painted lips. “Well, I got what I came for. I’ve had better days at carnivals. Guess I’ll be heading home.”

  “I’m not sticking around, myself–got a few other appointments yet tonight.” The mobbie polished off his beer. “Don’t let that lizard turn you into a pair of shoes, boy.” Chuckle.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “I can walk you to your car, if you’re scared.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  Some of the bitterness was on the way back. “Positive. I’m gonna have another beer,” Bern grunted. He hadn’t really intended to, but…

  Chuckling, Pox rose and clapped Bern on the shoulder. “Let me get it for you, Bernie. Sorry to keep you waiting tonight. I’m a busy man, though, you know that.”

  “No problem,” Bern sighed.

  With a new beer in front of him and the stuffed bumble beside him and Pox gone and the moon behind his back, Bern sat.

  Outside, Eddy found Sneezy Tightrope standing at the edge of their camp, gazing at The Head. Cod and some other teenage boys were passing a bottle of pink milky wine and an iodine joint back and forth with a batch of teenage girls. Eddy intercepted and squashed the joint, hissing to Cod, “Are you crazy, after what happened with Mort?” Cod muttered an apology. Eddy moved past him to Sneezy.

  “Maybe you should take some detox pills, Sneeze.”