by Jack Martin
And so the circle of self-perpetuating life continued. Hardly powered by the Stone relics of a doomed past. But a living energy that dwells in all that breathes.
He did not hear the screaming so loudly now. It faded away like the momentary diversion that it was.
There are only two screams worth heeding, he decided. The scream that ushers in the beginning of life. And the scream that ends it. All the others in between are useless indulgences.
And so he again took up the fight.
His muscles renewed. His chest expanded and his legs swelled against his ankle bindings. He scrunched down in the chair, but that gave him no slack; it merely served to draw his bonds tauter. The keys in his trouser pocket dug a circle into his flesh.
Keys? He had no keys. His own keys were in his jacket, which had been stripped off him as soon as he was caught.
A circle?
Something round against his leg. In his pocket.
A quarter? Thicker. It had sharp edges and cut into him when he moved.
Then he remembered.
It was the chip. The round Silver Shamrock seal. The one that had come off the mask in Marge Guttman’s room. He had picked it up and put it in his pocket.
The idea of that bloody wafer against his body repelled and sickened him. The Silver Shamrock badge at the back of his neck, of course, embedded in the skull mask on his head, was already in place. But at least that one was for his own death, his own failure and no one else’s. If it came to that. But the one in his pocket had already served its purpose. It had done its work. It had done enough.
He bent his hand back to the point where it almost dislocated from his wrist. Then, starting with his little finger, he burrowed his hand down into his side pocket. It took several minutes.
The nightmare of violence and destruction that was the Horrorthon played out in front of him, only a few feet away. It meant nothing to him. It was about as relevant now as a cartoon is to reality.
Meanwhile, the token in his pocket became a focus for his anger and hatred.
There. Two of his fingers closed around its engraved surface. He read the grooves of microcircuitry, the stone chip backing with his fingertips. If he closed his eyes the weight of the button seemed to conjure visions of needless suffering, the legacy of stone that was its origin. It wore his skin raw.
You can go to hell, he thought, you miserable, perverted piece of technological shit. You’ve earned it. Just get the hell away from me. You and everything you stand for.
He snapped the stone symbol as far away from him as his wrist would allow.
Like a bottlecap, it sailed through the air in a low, spinning curve, until it struck the face of the television picture tube.
Inside the room there was a blinding flash.
The explosion knocked him back and then he was falling, toppling backwards until his head met the tiles. Bolts groaned. Wood splintered.
The chair tore loose from the floor.
I’ll be damned, he thought.
And you, too, Cochran, By God. I promise you that.
Through the folds of the rubber mask he saw the imploded television set, a smoking hole where a few seconds ago Cochran’s maniacal Horrorthon had been playing. He saw the shards of glass sticking out of the cabinet, blown out across the floor.
Very, very sharp pieces of glass.
Like knives.
Crawling toward one, inching his way painfully, dragging the chair behind him, a new emotion guided his moves.
I’m not dead, Cochran, he thought, bucking up against a razor-sharp fragment. And I’m not going to be dead when the clock strikes eight or nine or whatever unholy hour you’ve set all your efforts toward. And with God’s help, and maybe a little of my own, neither will anyone else.
The glass cut the tape on his wrists as cleanly as a blade.
He sized up the room.
The chair. The glass. The demolished TV.
He had been mistaken about one thing. There was another object in the room with him. There it was up in its corner, its turret angled like a praying mantis.
A TV camera.
With one quick, continuous move, he ripped the mask from his head and lobbed it like a Frisbee at the corner. It landed on the camera, covering the lens with a nodding skull-face.
That would give him another minute. One more precious minute.
He noticed the charred Silver Shamrock seal lying inert again on the floor.
That’s the trouble with evil, Cochran, he thought. It plays no favorites. And it respects no one. Well, we may all be living under a sentence of death; we are born into it; that is our fallen lot. But we don’t have to embrace it until the last vital taste of life has turned to dust in our mouths.
There are those whose job it is to make what’s left as free of pain and suffering as possible. And I am one of them.
Slashing away at his leg bonds, Challis set his face in a bold, determined grin.
He had come a long way, but it was worth it. He had avoided it down the nights and the years. But at last he had found it again.
He had a purpose.
And he was alive.
He freed himself, righted the chair and stretched up to tear the cover off the air-conditioning duct in the wall.
Wedged into the cramped ventilation duct, Challis heard a familiar voice.
He crawled on.
The voice was stronger as the gridlines of another air-conditioning panel checkered the tunnel ahead. He elbowed to it.
Light and shadow. A hundred feet away and thirty feet below, Old Man Cochran was rocking in a contour chair, telephone in hand, enveloped by an array of video monitors and patch panels.
“Ahh, thank you,” the snowy-haired man was saying into the phone. “And it’s a pleasure doing business with you, too, so it is! A forty-seven share, you think? How delightful! . . . Good! Hope the little ones will be watching. And don’t forget the Big Giveaway at nine! You and your lovely wife should watch, too!”
A technician detached himself from his post in front of the monitors and interrupted with a click of his heels.
“Sir?”
“Yes, yes, I will. Thank you again.” Cochran finished his call and acknowledged the technician.
“Yes?”
“Malfunction. Camera Seven.”
“What?”
“We’ve lost him.”
Cochran punched up a rapid-fire montage of surveillance views on his monitor.
“Not at all,” he said, unperturbed. “You’ll see.”
He turned the control board over to the technician. Then he made another call.
“Cochran here,” he said. “Is everything ready in New York? Yes, we’re as ready here as we could possibly be! We’ve sold nearly one hundred fifty million masks. It’s quite phenomenal . . . No, not a sales tool, really. Tonight’s just for fun. A sort of ‘thank you’ to all our good customers . . .”
Cochran smiled smugly and rocked, as the technician scanned one corridor after another on the monitor.
Challis kept crawling.
You poor damn dumb bastard, he thought. You’ve got your electronic wet dream all laid out, haven’t you? It’s perfect, as perfect as any mechanical projection of human intelligence can be.
Good luck. You’ll need it. You forgot one thing. This place. The factory was here before you took it over, built not by security machines but by some poor slob years before television was invented. Like any other human being, he was just one more designer of the mothproof closet within which dwells the moth. Why, he didn’t even bother to cement the soft aluminum ventilation screen into place. He probably installed every one in this entire building the same way.
Tsk, tsk.
Cochran, you stupid shit, thought Challis. Nothing can outsmart you. Except that fragile bowl of quivering jelly called the brain. And that’s the “flaw” that’s going to bring it all down around you . . .
He came to a junction in the duct.
Two ways to go. Needles
of light fell across his hands in a pockmark pattern. He raised his face.
A perforated panel above him.
He wormed his way up to it.
A gentle push was all it took.
He emerged onto the roof of the factory under a blanket of low clouds. The air was frigid and gusting across the tarred shingles.
Like a tightrope walker, he made his way to the edge.
He heard a whirring.
Mounted near the rain gutter, a revolving camera.
He stooped under it, duck-walked to an old fire ladder and scuttled down to a secondary roof. Another ladder, a frontage wall . . .
A forgotten access door.
One kick and he was back in.
He dropped down into a corridor stacked with an obstacle course of shipping crates.
The crates, however, provided excellent cover for the passing eyes of two graysuits on patrol.
It took him a while longer to find Ellie.
The graysuit outside her room went into a sputtering death-dance at the first surprising thrust to its soft spot. The same spot, where the diaphragm would be in a human being, an inch or two below the center of the ribcage. Challis remembered well his newest anatomy lesson.
He got the guard’s keys and went in.
Ellie didn’t know him. But she was too drugged to refuse. He had to lead her out of the concrete room as if she were a mental defective.
After he had ripped out the coaxial cable to the camera, of course.
There were footsteps nearby. A lot of footsteps. Growing louder, coming this way. The corridor was short, with tight turns at either end. The echoes made it impossible to be sure.
Halfway down, the elevator.
And, a few yards on, a fire stairwell.
IN CASE OF FIRE OR OTHER NATURAL DISASTER, warned the sign, USE STAIRS NOT ELEVATOR.
Okay, thought Challis, you got it.
He took her hand. Her cold hand.
“Run,” he told her. “Run with me. Now.”
She was barefooted but she didn’t complain. She was feeling no pain.
After a lengthy descent, they came out on the catwalk above the high-tech area.
At first the only thing he saw was the slab, towering in the worklights like a grandiose tombstone in full moonlight. The color of it was that of a human face in the terminal seconds of oxygen deprivation. To see that moribund color on such a sheer mass of surface area made his throat knot up. He led her around it.
“Ready with the final test run, sir,” said a technician.
“Superb,” said Cochran, clapping his hands.
They were relatively safe. No one had been programmed to look up.
They edged past a tall pyramid of packing cartons at the top of a motionless conveyor belt. Challis peeked into one. Mask components.
He kept moving.
Behind him, Ellie said, “Daddy?”
“No!” he whispered. “Ellie, come—”
It was too late.
On the floor below, everything stopped.
Eyes lifted, Cochran’s and many others.
The old man pushed himself up from his chair.
“Why, hello, Ellie!” he said.
He snapped his fingers. A spotlight located her at once.
She was standing on the tongue of the conveyor belt, a cardboard box in her arms.
“Daddy?” she called down. “Can I?”
“Of course you can, my dear,” said Cochran. His words rebounded off the sounding board of the stone. “Come to me, Ellie! Come to me . . .”
Graysuits were ascending the catwalk stairs at either end.
Cochran snapped his fingers again. They stopped in mid-climb.
“Come to me now,” he said. “JUMP!”
Challis swung to the outside of the railing and shimmied toward her. He held out his hand..“Ellie, don’t listen to him. Ellie . . . !”
“Come along now, child,” said Cochran impatiently. He opened his arms to receive her. “Come to Papa. Papa will catch you. Jump now.”
Ellie wavered high above the bright center of light.
She took a deep breath. She chewed the inside of her mouth.
“No, Daddy!” she said. “You don’t understand. Daddy . . . can I let him go?”
Cochran hesitated, baffled but entertained. “Now, now,” he said, “that’s quite enough foolishness for one night . . .”
“Can I let the little bird go?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Cochran.
Around him the eight TV monitors went black, then began to flash with the final commercial test.
“TIME!” boomed the taped announcer’s voice. “IT’S TIME! ALL THOSE LUCKY KIDS WITH SILVER SHAMROCK TOYS, HOLD THEM UP! CLOSE TO THE SCREEN! CLOSE TO ME . . . !”
The camera zoomed in and eight orange pumpkin heads began to strobe in close-up. Faster and faster.
Ellie reached into the box she was holding. She withdrew a small object.
A tiny trefoil the size of a quarter. The Silver Shamrock trade seal.
“Tweet . . . tweet,” said Ellie.
She flung the silver logo into the air. It arced out and down, striking the floor near Cochran’s polished shoes.
It sparked up in a miniature explosion.
Startled, Cochran danced a step.
“What . . . ?” he cried.
“Daddy?” said Ellie. “The others, too! Tweet . . . tweet!”
She scooped her hand into the box again and again, hurling whole handfuls of the logos down like silver rain.
Sparks zipped across the spaces like tracer fire as one screen after another was struck and exploded.
Bursts of blue smoke erupted in the midst of the technicians. Their bodies instantly short-circuited and split open in fountains of squirting silicone.
Challis reached her.
“Yes,” he said, “yes! Do it!”
He hurled handful after handful with her at the war zone below. Fireworks ignited the air.
He took the box from her and upended it, scattering the contents.
“Tweet . . . tweet . . . tweet!” said Ellie.
High voltage cut through the smoke as lightning riddled the artificial storm.
Cochran stood in the middle of it, staring up with an expression that was close to admiration.
Now there was a mighty rumbling.
Something was happening to the rock. A quaking roar emanated from it, thunder from the mountain.
Opposite the stone, the monitors that had not yet exploded strobed in unison until they were joined together by a blinding beam of white light.
The light zapped across to the rock.
The tarp fell away and the chipped face began to glow white-hot.
Bathed in the white light, Cochran turned his eyes again to Challis and the girl. Now he was smiling unashamedly.
He unclenched his tapered fingers and applauded madly.
A fissure appeared in the rock as fracture lines lengthened.
The rumbling became an earth-shattering howl that shook the building to its foundations.
Challis yanked Ellie to safety as the rock split wide and a giant arc of pure energy jumped the distance to the monitors in a long, searing bolt of chain lightning.
The lightning passed through Cochran’s chest, skewering him as he stood there in the center of a white fireball brighter than the sun.
He began to glow with an unbearable brilliance, impaled in the eye of an energy cyclone . . .
As Challis half-dragged, half-carried Ellie up the stairs and out of the blazing factory, a sound like the horrible, laughing wail of a banshee escaped into the sky and rushed out over the world.
Then there were only the explosions as the center of Santa Mira became a pillar of fire pointing through the clouds.
He lifted Ellie’s limp body in his arms and ran from the conflagration, shielding her so that she would not have to see.
Epilogue
Challis drove Ellie’s Cutlass like a madman.
As they sped away from the motel and up the access road, the town behind fluttered into incandescence, then shrank to a tiny point in the rearview mirror, a single glowing eye receding rapidly away down a tunnel, and gone.
Ellie lolled on the seat next to him.
It was curious, the way a great calm was overtaking him with each mile he put between himself and Santa Mira. He was returning to the real world, rushing headlong into it and all that it meant—they both were—and that only served to galvanize his sense of purpose. Whatever it held for him, he was ready now. It might take a bit longer for Ellie, but she would make it.
In one sense it was over.
But in another sense it would never be.
Cochran was nothing new, whatever his latest disguise. He and the dark forces he represented had been around in one form or another since the beginning of time; there was no good reason to believe something so ancient had really been destroyed in a blaze of fireworks in a small town on a cold autumn night.
This year’s dark venture was like a rerun on the Late, Late, Very Late Show, an endless loop re-enacting the last reels of the same relentless stalking of the heart of the American dream.
It had always been so.
Variations of figures like Cochran had come again and again to towns like this all across the country and the world, and would continue to come in endless variety and profusion whenever the days grew short and the true horror of an unburied past returned to haunt the long night of the human soul. He would come to movie theaters and TV screens over and over in untiring replays for as long as people turned away and pretended he was not really there; for that very refusal gave him unopposed entrance to their innermost lives.
Nothing ever stopped his coming and nothing ever would stop it, not for as long as people deferred the issue of his existence to the realm of fantasy fiction, that elaborate system of popular mythology which provided the essence of his access . . .
For now, he was still advancing, merely shifting from one field of view to another, larger one, from a single television screen to the televised psyches of a nation.
Challis shuddered.
He may not win in the end, thought Challis, and this may be only one round. But it’s an important one; it matters.
He floored the accelerator and barreled down the road.