Avenging Angel

by Frank Rich

  "No, I mean if I ever go to the biblical hell, this is what I expect it to look like."

  He had a point. It was at that ugly time of the night, after the euphoria had slipped away and all that was left was the pain and hollowness. The clientele sprawled on the jumble of mismatched furniture and pillows like torpid lizards stretched out beneath a black sun. Hindu chime music tinkled from tinny speakers, and moans floated from different corners, forming a ragged chorus. Smoke from pipes and incense swirled lazily around the big room, so thick it seemed to take extra effort to move through it. I could smell the despair and hopelessness, and sense the washed-up lives.

  I bought a bottle of the famed winkle wine from a wizened black bartender who could have been a gila monster in a previous incarnation. Joe bought a gram of hashish, and we retreated to a booth with a view.

  I opened the bottle and took a long stiff drink while Joe dug in his pockets for his pipe. The fortified winkle wine burned my throat, and I wanted to retch, so I took another long pull to get used to it. It was the only way to drink the stuff. Like Brutal Hammers, it wasn't meant to be savored from a shallow glass. You sucked down as much as you could stand and tried not to vomit.

  Joe burned a corner of the rectangle of hash with a lighter. He cut off a heat-softened chunk with a pocketknife and put it in his pipe. He took a moment lighting it, then filled his lungs with smoke. He held it for a moment, like a wine taster sampling some new rosé, then blew the thick blue smoke out his nostrils. He broke into a fit of coughing.

  "Bad vintage?" I asked.

  "I never understood why you don't do smoke, Jake," he rasped after he got his breath back. "But if this were all I had access to, neither would I. This is complete garbage, nothing like what we get on the Hill."

  Hard drugs were technically illegal, but so was jaywalking. The SPF still bowed to tradition and issued death warrants on large-scale dealers, but the real reason was that the big drug lords ended up with a lot of money and power, and the Party didn't like outsiders with too much of either.

  I took another pull and looked out the dirty window. Six meters below, the river sludged by, poisoned and apathetic. Joe took a long hit and only coughed a little this time. He clamped the pipe stem in his teeth and settled into the deep cushions of the booth, sinking back into the shadows until all I could see was the burning bowl of his pipe.

  "I used to think you were a brave man, Jake." As he sucked on the pipe, the hash cherried, lighting up the lenses of his glasses like dim suns. "But you're not. If you were truly brave, you'd have killed yourself a long time ago."

  And so it started. The big hideous machine lurched to life, and its ugliness was upon me. I knew I had to counterattack while I had room to maneuver, before Joe started to roll and pinned me down. "Gee, thanks, Joe," I snarled, "you always did have an eye to the brighter horizon. If I ever need a shoulder to cry on, I sure won't come see you."

  Joe erased my tirade with a wave of his hand. "You're out of your times, Jake. You're a gross mistake. You think you're some sort of white-hatted cowboy in a town full of black-hatted bad guys. I've got news for you, buddy. It's not the pusher or pimp or gangster that frightens the people. It's you, the bogeyman. It's your face they fear on dark, lonely streets, your name mothers evoke to frighten their children."

  "But I'm the good guy, the avenging angel."

  "Not to them you're not. There are no good guys anymore. According to the old conventions, everyone is guilty. You haven't wised up to the fact that everybody's wearing gray hats now and you're color-blind. There are no rights or wrongs anymore, no sinners or saints. Everyone is playing by their own rules, just trying to survive. Sin and morality are outmoded concepts."

  I pointed a finger at him. "Talk like that won't get you into Heaven, mister."

  "Heaven! Don't even tell me you think you're going to Heaven."

  "I'm bucking for a slot," I admitted.

  "As many people as you've killed? But oh, I guess you think you're the sword arm of the Lord." Joe leaned out of the shadows and barked laughter at me.

  "It has a nice ring, but I like 'avenging angel' better. I think I'll put that on the next batch of cards I have made up."

  "You fool!" Joe cried, getting excited. "Don't you realize that Heaven is full?" He leaned over the table, and his voice sunk to an intimate whisper. "But there's room in hell, Jake. Always room in hell."

  "That's exactly what the Devil wants you to think!" I said, waving my bottle at him like a whiskey evangelist. The bottle was nearly empty, and I could feel the wine running its mean course. A numbness crept over me like a black fog over an uneasy sea.

  "Don't you worry, Jake. You're going to hell with the rest of us. By degrees, into hell, all of us."

  I snorted and stood up. I tilted the bottle, let the last two inches of fire slide down my throat, then shook the bottle at Joe as if I'd proven a key point. On the way to the bar I threw the bottle into a dark corner and heard it shatter with a satisfying crash. I expected the bartender to give me hell about it when I got there, but he just gave me a sinister, knowing grin.

  "Looks like the spirits got hold of you tonight, big man," he said in a slow singsong voice.

  "Yes. Another bottle of your delightful yet unpresumptuous house winkle, please." I dropped ten creds on the bar.

  "The winkle is powerful hoodoo but it ain't gonna save you from ol' Nick," he said, and his eyes slithered over to Joe.

  "Sure it will. I'll club him with it. Gimme." I showed him an empty hand.

  He winked at me and reached under the bar. He came up with a bottle and pressed it into my hand. "This is the right medicine for you."

  The bottle was small and black and didn't have a label. I held it up to the tiny fluorescent over the register. The contents looked as dark and murky as the river below. "What is this?" I asked suspiciously. "Drugs?"

  The old man hissed, and it sounded a little like a laugh. "No, no. It's an easer of torments, a spirit chaser. A spade to bury dead memories." His voice coiled around me like a lazy snake. "A devil destroyer."

  "Oh, is that all?" I said. I left the creds on the bar and wheeled back to the table. I climbed into the booth, twisted the top off the bottle and sniffed the contents. It smelled like flowers.

  "What's that?" Joe asked.

  I let out a wicked chuckle and thought about splashing some of it on him to see if he'd burst into flame. Lord knew the bastard deserved it. Instead, I took a small swig that graduated into a full-fledged guzzle. The stuff was thick and syrupy, and it went down my throat like a slimy snake. It was also delicious. I slammed the bottle on the table and whooped.

  "You're an anomaly, Jake," Joe said, stuffing more hash into his pipe. "An affront to nature."

  "You're kind of special yourself, Joe."

  He pushed my sarcasm aside with the stem of his pipe. "You're not supposed to be alive. You belong in a mass grave in Houston with the rest of your kind." He lit the hash. "You're a broken disc player, and your laser is going to be reading the same tired track of murder until someone turns you off."

  The bad hash was giving Joe's mind a mean twist. I took another long pull, and the elixir flowed down like gutter sludge through a grate, but Joe still didn't disappear into a puff of smoke. I was beginning to think the old man had lied to me.

  Something Joe had said stuck in my mind. "Why shouldn't I have lived?" I said. "If the mission hadn't been compromised, most of us would have made it out."

  He stared at me for a long minute. "I'm not sure I should tell you. It might make you worse."

  'Tell me. I think it's essential I know." My spine tightened, and I felt reality shift slightly in its moorings.

  "You weren't supposed to live because no one was supposed to live. They sent your Ranger battalion to the butcher's block, and no one was supposed to come back."

  "What?"

  "The battalion was too volatile, a threat to the Party. You remember how it was. It was dangerous times — the corporate wars wer
e only five years over and the World Party was scrambling to stay on top. There was resistance on every continent from those who wouldn't accept a united world government — religious fanatics, ethnics, nationalists, corporate holdouts, fools who hadn't seen enough death and horror during the corporate wars. The Party was slowly uniting all the armies and police forces of the world into a single cooperative entity, the SPF. They knew there'd be resistance to that, especially from elite units. A year before, a parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion went over to the nationalists. They gained control of Marseilles and a large chunk of the surrounding countryside before they were wiped out by nerve gas. With that lesson, the Party tried a new tack. They would send those proud units on suicide missions against entrenched pockets of resistance, killing two birds with one stone." Joe leaned back to puff on his pipe. "Houston was just one of many."

  "Those are lies! Who told you all this?"

  He shrugged. "It wasn't hard to figure out. Listen, when you were surrounded on that football field and called for extraction, what did HQ tell you?"

  "They told us that all the choppers were tied up on other missions, diverted to other sectors."

  "Those were the lies!" Joe exclaimed, leaning forward. "After we dropped you into that hell we flew straight back to the fire base and sat there playing cards the whole time you were getting slaughtered. Confined to quarters. We were told another squadron was going to pull you out. The choppers idled on the pads while the rebels chewed you up."

  Memories of Houston came flooding back, the hellish hours we beat back wave after wave, the corpses stacking up like cord-wood, ears primed for the imminent clatter of rotor blades, the helicopters that would dive from the skies like Valkyries and lift our ragged asses out of the fire. If Joe was right, we were waiting for the birds and they were waiting for us to die.

  "They probably told the rebels you were coming," Joe continued. "Then all they had to do was drop you in there and wait till they ground you up. They knew you wouldn't surrender — it was against your lovely creed. 'Surrender is not a Ranger word. Isn't that what it said?"

  I stared out the window. In the moonlight the waves of the river glistened like the scales of a monstrous serpent slithering by. It struck me that the water was so toxic it wasn't really a river at all. It was merely the passage of deadly liquid.

  Then, with the suddenness of a trapdoor swinging open under my feet, I lost my grip on everything. I shed time-woven beliefs like flaming garments and was left naked and scorched. A huge vacuum sucked at me, a roaring emptiness that could only be filled by just and rightful murder. I could hear the hoarse cries of eight hundred ghosts screaming for vengeance. But in which direction did I focus the burning rage? Who could I kill to make up for the lives of eight hundred murdered men?

  Hostile forces swirled around me. I stood up and grabbed at them, but they slipped between my fingers and tittered at me from dark corners. I shouted at Joe but I couldn't hear what I said; a muffled roar filled my ears. It was the river. I could hear the millions of tons of black sludge pressing against the banks, the low, anguished growl of a trapped beast. I wanted to grab Joe by an arm and leg and pitch him through the glass into the poisoned waters below, appease the beast with his flesh and soul. Joe had resurrected a legion of dead men, and their cries would hound me for the rest of my life. I'd go mad.

  Joe's face stretched grotesquely in alarm, and his mouth opened and closed like a furnace, his tongue a red snake that peeked from behind his teeth, probing at me with its own tiny black tongue. Joe started to rise and I panicked and lunged away from him, tripping over a body on the floor. I gazed at it with horror. Half its face was missing, and it wore a familiar uniform. I looked to a shoulder with a knowing dread. The scroll-shaped patch read Ranger, Airborne, 2nd Bn., 75th Inf.

  I struggled to my feet and rushed headlong for the door, stumbling over moaning bodies that should have been rotting under the sunbaked soil of Houston. I knew I was supposed to lie down with them, but I was afraid to, more afraid than the life of terror that waited. I careened past the bar, and the bartender rolled back his eyes, then his head, and a long hiss-laugh squirmed out of his mouth.

  I tumbled outside and ran down the wooden wharf, chased by the echoes of my pounding footsteps, in absolute horror of the truth and the world that spawned it. The wide black sky shrieked down at me, and I could feel a titanic juggernaut rolling out of the west, bearing down on me with unstoppable momentum. The dock died at a sidewalk, and I stumbled left, hoping to lose the beast that hunted me. I heard the grinding wheels of the howling machine shift course and I knew it was picking up speed. I staggered past apathetic faces who didn't flee with me; they knew it was only I it wanted. I ran and stumbled and ran, and the beast devoured the distance between us. I hit the wall of exhaustion and fell to the concrete sobbing with frustration. I sensed the huge ugly momentum swinging in behind me and I braced for the impact. I knew then it was my mortal soul it wanted; my luck had run out and my soul was forfeit.

  I surfaced in an underground nightclub, standing on the edge of a churning slam dance fuelled by monstrous amps. I shoved my way into the violent swirl, detecting a slow counter-clockwise drift. I channeled into it, pushing and shoving, and the wheel began to turn, the turbulent waters became a whirlpool, and the stationary pogoers and head-bangers fled to the center of the pit or were cut down.

  I stopped moving with the current and turned against it. Bodies rushed at me, and I rolled them off my shoulders and cut into the stream. The weak went down and were picked up if lucky, bloodied by boots if not. My vision tunneled and I cut back and forth, fighting for supremacy. The shoves and hits came harder, the established pit bravos resenting my bid for power. I gave back what I got and more, intensifying the brutality of the chaos.

  I didn't want to run from violence. I wanted to confront it and crush it because I was the more ruthless. Joe was right. It was a gray-shaded world without any good or bad guys. Morality was just another gaudy neon sign, and violence just another energy to be directed and channeled by those smart enough to use it.

  The song ended with a rush, and the panting beast collapsed into a vacuum of silence. Dancers caught their breaths and shifted position. I could feel elements aligning against me, directing their rage my way. The pit was reality and reality was a pit.

  When the music cranked up again, I swept around and hunted my enemies down, focusing my violence. The feverous hate of the pit escalated, but none hated more than I. I looked into the face of my adversaries and hammered them down into the churning boots below. By the time the band finished their set and walked off the stage I felt that somehow, in the directionless anarchy of the pit, I had won.

  18

  The bed was too small and it wasn't mine. It wouldn't have been too small if someone wasn't in it with me. I'd woken under similar circumstances enough times not to be too excited about looking over and seeing what the girl sleeping next to me looked like.

  My head felt like an overheated rock, and my mouth tasted like a desert cave full of bat droppings. I lay still on the mattress, afraid to move. Without turning my head, I could see that the tiny flat was a studio model with the kitchen, bedroom and living room defined by idea alone. The furnishings were sparse and utilitarian. The bedroom windows were open, and the late-morning sun tumbled in like a shabby beggar. I braced myself, then eased out of bed as slowly and quietly as possible. A fire broke out inside the walls of my skull, but I kept the groan inside. A door beside the bed was half-open, and an old-fashioned porcelain toilet leered out at me. I crept inside the bathroom and closed the door quietly.

  The cracked mirror above the sink told me two stories, one old, one new. The old one was that excessive drinking made my face haggard and puffy. Splashing cold water on it for five minutes would remedy that. The new, more gripping story was that I didn't have any hair on the sides of my head. I couldn't immediately think of anything that would remedy that. On a hunch I looked under the sink. In a pink pla
stic waste bin I found a nest of dirty blond hair and a disposable razor. The scene of the crime.

  I brushed my teeth with a pink toothbrush shaped like Silly Sally the Socialist Salamander, a popular Saturday-morning cartoon character. The toothpaste was wild-plum flavored. I splashed cold water on my face for five minutes and checked the effect. The puffiness was gone, but the mohawk was still there. I tried a smile on and pulled back from the mirror. If I squinted, I didn't look so bad. I crept into the bedroom.

  A sheet covered the form on the bed like a shroud. I couldn't see her face but I figured that was probably for the best. I found my trousers at the foot of the bed and pulled them on slowly so the keys and change wouldn't jingle in the pockets. I skulked near the window where my boots lay. I stepped into them and took a look outside. Tall black clouds were rolling in from the west, their bellies fat with radioactive rain. I smiled at the thunderheads. The City needed a cleansing downpour.

  "Am I that ugly?"

  I turned around and addressed the speaker with my eyes. Her face was smooth and unlined, delicately contoured beneath a snow-white mohawk. She sat up, holding the sheet up to cover her smallish breasts. She had big blue eyes, youth-rouged cheeks and was probably still in her late teens.

  "I think you know better than that," I said.

  "Then why are you trying to sneak out?"

  "The wife and kids worry if I'm not home before noon."

  "You don't look like a family man."

  "Must be the haircut. What's with the haircut anyway?"

  "Mine or yours?" she asked innocently.

  "Both. Our haircuts match. They didn't use to."

  "You told me to do it. You said you needed a change."

  "Oh." I couldn't recall.

  "It looks really good on you. It makes your head look narrower."

  "Are you calling me a fathead?"

  "Oh, no. I just like narrow heads."

  "Okay." I hunted around for my shirt.

  "You have a lot of scars."

  "Yep." I found the shirt under the bed. There was a used condom on top of it. Good for me, I thought.