His father demonstrated a dozen methods per day for weeks at a time, sometimes months. John came to realize that women withstood pain better than men, and children took the longest to die. From the age of seven, John watched every demonstration without fail, and learned.
* * *
John looked at his watch. Any second now, and he’d hear the beep.
The African woman marched along like she didn’t have a care in the world, and although John resented her peace of mind, it was much better than the alternative. If she were the toy-poodle-type, the jittery look-over-her-shoulder-who-the-fuck-are-you? type, this would be much harder since her paranoia would protect her. But she wasn’t jittery, she was joyful, and her joy would make killing her easy.
The woman took long flowing steps in her African-print housedress as her bodyguards tried to hustle her along. Their body language said it all…move your ass, c’mon, move your ass. But with respect, of course. They were the help and their heads would roll if she went down, but it wouldn’t do if they pissed her off and lost their jobs that way either, so they each gripped her gently by the elbows and tried to guide her, to hurry her up, but it was like wrangling a creature made of pure light, unfettered by the concerns of the world. Her expression beamed, and her eyes darted this way and that, taking in the sights of this foreign airport, a shithole by any standards, but her manner told him that she was the type who appreciated the new simply for being new.
She took a few steps more when it seemed, suddenly, that she did have a care in the world. Her eyes fixed on the little boy with the green helium balloon. In the swirling crowd, she’d noticed that no adult stood by him long enough to be a parent. Her face sagged in concern, and then she stopped beside him, mid-stride. Motherfucker, she stopped, nearly screeched to a halt, stopped so fast she even faked out her bodyguards. They stopped a half-step later, What the fuck is it now?! dripping from their faces.
John sucked a breath. Didn’t this bitch have enough cocksucking to do at the U.N. without saving lost kids? Her idiotic concern could throw off timing. Ruin everything. And there was precious little he could do about it. She was only fifty feet away now, well within striking distance, but if the plan were blown, it wouldn’t matter one fucking bit.
The woman knelt and spoke to the little boy, rubbing his arm as she did. The balloon tethered to his wrist bobbed from side to side as people hurried by. Where are your mommy and daddy? the woman asked. From this distance, he could read her lips. Where are they, honey? Are you lost?
Fuck this bitch and her fucking country and her fucking useless visit to the U.N.
The little boy stared at her, mesmerized, and then looked around the airport, at the thick crowd of people, his eyes following one, then another, then another with a lost blank look on his face before he turned his head and looked directly at John.
Don’t look at me! John tried to send the thought into the little boy’s head with the force of a .38 slug. Don’t push her attention my way! Don’t you fucking do it!
The woman kept asking, Where are your mommy and daddy, Where are your mommy and daddy, not letting the kid go. John took a step forward, moved for the first time since the African woman made her entrance, and by doing so was already taking a risk. Motionless, you’re nearly invisible to the human eye unless you’re in direct line of sight. But the eye is calibrated to movement, and sure enough, no sooner had John taken that step than one of the bitch’s bodyguards zeroed him. He was hoping the guy would be like the worse-than-useless X-ray screeners, but this dude had training and locked onto him like Bill Clinton peering into a teenage girl’s bedroom window while the woman yammered away clueless, trying to save the fucking world one-kid-holding-a-balloon at a time.
Time was short, John could feel it. Too short.
The woman wasn’t moving, and now he’d have to perform the strike himself, fuck, do it himself, up close and personal and fast. He was ready to do it, of course—he was a fucking professional, educated in torture and killing—but he hadn’t wanted to resort to Plan B. He’d been hoping for success just as his father had hoped for success when he’d shown him the ropes by giving that naked man in Bolivia a ground-glass smoothie.
He fingered the hypodermic needle in the pocket of his long coat, kept walking. The syringe was filled with plant extracts—the mixture unique, impervious to antidote, purchased from a Nazi octogenarian in Argentina—that would scream through her blood and burst her heart like the meat balloon it was in record time and without trace. Pretend to bump into her, that was his plan, bump into her and jab-push the syringe into her bicep, not the best place to jab since the skin was tough there and the needle might break, but it was the most exposed part of her body and would have to do. In less than a minute she’d start seizing, and by then he’d be deep in the crowd and away.
He controlled his pace, not walking slow but not walking fast either, and popped the plastic stopper off the needle, releasing its point. Fifty feet, forty feet, thirty-five, and the woman still chattered at the lost-looking boy. Now John wanted her to keep talking, keep saving the fucking world so she’d stay distracted and he could do what needed to be done.
At thirty feet away, the bodyguard that zeroed him made it his business to act. He moved in front of the woman and little boy, stood fast. His face said it all: I don’t know who the fuck you are or if you’re really a threat, but if you are, you gotta get through me.
Motherfucker, John thought. Motherfucker.
He’d have to angle around the wall-man, maybe pretend like he was coughing and lunge and hope he’d strike the target. His likelihood for success had gone from ninety-eight percent at first to seventy percent when the black bitch decided to save the kid, down to what it was now, fifteen percent if he was lucky. But he couldn’t abort the mission, he never could, once he committed to a job, he committed to it. He could not deviate from the plan, even if it meant capture. He could not. He could not.
John closed on the guard, sweeping around wide to get a last glimpse of the target before he angled his shoulder and bulled his way past the man, and that was when he saw the boy point. A chubby finger protruding from a chubby fist at the end of a chubby arm. Following the trajectory of the finger, John realized the boy was pointing at the men’s bathroom. My daddy’s in there, the finger proclaimed, don’t worry about me, lady, my daddy’s taking a piss and will be out directly, so don’t worry, go to the U.N. and save the world, don’t worry about me.
The woman’s face relaxed and she smiled, but not all was beaming and bright. There was a slight furrow in her brow, one that clearly said she didn’t approve of a father who left his little boy alone in a crowded airport no matter how close he might be, but she stood regardless, conscience eased, or maybe not wanting to create an international incident over some strange kid, who gave a shit? What mattered was that she stood and started to move again. The bodyguard that blocked John’s way must have sensed her movement because he fell back and took his place by her side.
The African mayor became a free-flowing spirit again, a creature of light, bodyguards at either side with the little boy left behind in the swirling, seething crowd, maybe just an afterthought to her now, and in the next moment, in the very next moment, in the nick of time just like in the movies…John heard the beep.
* * *
John knew memories had impact. He was very fucking aware. Growing up, the first time he touched a woman—really touched a woman and elicited a reaction—was when he was twelve years old and his father invited him to kill one with a power drill. He could not say no. He always did what his father asked, the command burrowing into his brain, compelling him to act, compelling him, compelling him. After witnessing so many of his father’s demonstrations, after seeing his father’s power over others, he was driven to perform such an act when ordered. He could not say no. He could not. His father had been teaching in Syria, and the woman had been accused of talking to a man other than her husband in public, so her honor-bound siblings—older sis
ter and two brothers—brought her to his father, who had her stripped naked, hogtied, and placed in a ceramic tub with claw feet. His father plugged the drain and filled the tub two inches deep with battery acid before asking John to join in. John thought about that woman whenever he talked to or saw any other woman since: her red, stretched-open mouth as the acid burned her naked flesh, her wide-eyed disbelief that a child was about to murder her, the whir-bite-whir as he pushed the drill into her ear. He thought about her as he thought sometimes about the officer in Bolivia with the thin dark eyebrows and yellowed teeth who wouldn’t dare look, wouldn’t dare look.
But as deep as the memory of the Syrian woman ran, it didn’t run nearly as deep as the effect Susan used to have on him. Susan. He’d met Susan in Chicago, in Wicker Park, on one of those cold crisp days that makes your cheeks just as cold and just as crisp, but somehow, even though your cheeks are that cold they warm right up when someone gently lays their hands on them. It was one of those cold crisp days, years after his father had died peacefully of a stroke in his sleep, and John had moved on from what he was taught to a worklife in construction. Framing and drywall and welding, he was good at his job, good with his hands because of what he’d been taught, but what had been systematically forced into his psyche, the precise application of torture and assassination and horror, had slipped under and away, like a shark into dark water, and incredibly never once broke the surface until the Japanese man came.
But before the Japanese man there was Wicker Park, and John was drywalling a two-story walk-up, and Susan was the new assistant to the contractor who’d come to check the crew’s progress. They weren’t talking ten minutes before he leaned forward and kissed her, laying his cold hands on her cold crisp cheeks, making both hands and cheeks warm and inviting and soft because it was precisely that kind of day. Susan had dark eyes and chestnut hair and held such pure beauty that his memories of the Syrian woman were pushed away almost immediately, and forever after, too.
Six months later, he and Susan were married on a grassy hill overlooking a lake. Six years after that, a year ago today, John was visited by a slight Japanese man, no taller than a step-stool, who came to his worksite and told him to lay down his tool belt. Do I know you, John asked, and the Japanese man who had cruel, thin eyes and soft hands and dragged his N’s the slightest bit said no, John, you don’t know me, but I knew your father. John told the Japanese man to get the hell away, that he had a good life now filled with love and glory and light, but the Japanese man said, you work for me now, John, you are the apple that drops close to the shrub, that is the expression, yes? You are the apple and will do what I say, and John could not say no when ordered like that, he could not, he could not, he could not. The Japanese man said, you work for me now, John, you work for me right now, and I want you to start with your wife right now, but I want you to spare your son.
* * *
John heard the beep, but only because he was listening hard, and even then, it was almost lost among the voices and loudspeakers and rolling luggage clatter of the disembarked herd. It was a tinny sound, nowhere as richly luxurious as the beep of this father’s watch, but it was the beep from a watch just the same. The black woman took another step, and then John saw her slap the back of her knee like a scorpion had stung her. She whirled to see the source, but the crowd seethed around her, bucking and flowing, making everyone and no one a suspect—the exact reason he liked to hit targets in the airport. The crush of people rushing to this gate or that beat the hell out of a fifth-floor depository window. John looked on with satisfaction as the bodyguards scanned the crowd with her, knowing in their guts that something terrible had happened.
The woman was still rubbing the back of her knee when her skin, which was blacker than black, the black of tar, the black of space without stars but somehow not empty in that blackness but poignant and full, paled, turning the color of campfire ash. She turned ash-white, the color of a true spirit as her spirit drained away, and then she collapsed hard, face-first onto the tile, her mouth constricting like a hooked fish, issuing noiseless yelp-yelps.
John looked at the convulsing African woman and saw the hogtied Syrian woman there instead and felt his stomach clench like he was seven years old again, as it always did when he pulled off a job he was ordered to perform, and he couldn’t banish the image of the African woman or the Syrian woman with memories of Susan because the last time he’d seen Susan, he’d decapitated her with an ax.
As the bodyguards rushed to the collapsed African woman’s side, John walked backward slowly, smoothly, fading into the crowd in case the bodyguard who’d spotted him before got desperate for a suspect, or wise. He made his way to the door of the men’s bathroom and waited until the little boy who’d almost been saved rushed up, green balloon bobbing. John leaned over and pressed a button on his smiley-face watch—beep—and said, That’s a good boy, son, nice and quick and precise, the part where you pointed here, toward the men’s bathroom, was very very good, that’s how it’s done. That’s how it’s done. The boy dutifully handed over the hypodermic needle, plunger depressed like John had made him practice a hundred times over, jab-push, jab-push into the back of the knee; his son was a smart boy for one so young and caught on fast.
John slipped the used hypodermic into his coat pocket where it lay with his own. That’s a good boy, John said again, and now it’s time to go. He took his son by the hand and led him away from the crowd gathering around the dead African woman and her wailing bodyguards. John tried to tell his son more about what he’d done right and what he’d done wrong, but his son would not look at him, would not look. Instead, the boy stared at the fallen woman, still noble in death even though her spirit was gone, stared at her like the young officer with the dark thin eyebrows who couldn’t bear looking at all the red. John hoped that someday he’d have the courage to look away himself, someday, someday, before his son was pulled in too deep, before his son was given an order he was old enough to understand and could not disobey, someday he would have the strength not to do as ordered, not today, but someday soon, he hoped, someday soon.
Next Stop, Babylon
by John Mantooth
She watched as the bus crested the hill and cut a silver blur across the burnt landscape. Her name was Tamara, and she had survived when the rest of her family had passed into eternity or oblivion, whichever came after death. Her husband, Terrance, had died in the fields, toiling to bring forth fuel from the red earth. Her mother and father had died in one of the subway attacks—a bomb or a terrorist or a derailing—she could no longer remember which. Her brother disappeared with the wind, and her sister died last winter giving birth.
Tamara shuddered as the bus drew closer. When Terrance had been alive, they’d had a car, and he had taken the bus, but she had sold the car months ago for next to nothing. Now she saved her money for bus fare, and waited in the South Alabama heat for a bus without air conditioning. But that wasn’t all. She could tolerate the heat. What she hated, what she dreaded, was the bus itself. The driver. He frightened her most of all.
Once Tamara had asked her seatmate if she thought the bus driver was strange.
“Strange?” the woman, whose name Tamara did not know, said. “No. Just broken down. All of ours talk gibberish. I’ve heard up in New York that those things are spit-shined and polished every day. I’ve heard those robots never say anything that isn’t interesting.” The woman had nodded her head vigorously before falling silent again.
But Tamara knew the difference between gibberish and something, well, something more sinister.
She took a deep breath as the bus slowed and the air brakes hissed and locked. The door creaked open wide, a sideways leer, inviting her in. The robot’s head swiveled on his neck and he gazed at her through slits that weren’t eyes as much as razor blades, cutting her skin, peeling her open like a husk of corn, laying her wide with sharp strokes and exposing her naked center. She wanted to turn and run back to her house, but that meant certain
death. The sweepers would come and take her temperature and find her healthy but useless, vigorous but lazy, unworthy of breathing the oxygen, consuming the fuel, or riding the bus.
So she kept her eyes down and stepped onto the bus. She did not look as she placed the coins in his slotted hand. As the robot shut his hand over the money, sucking it down into his belly, a silver fingertip grazed her hand and she felt sick inside. “Welcome,” the bus driver said, “to the last stop.”
Tamara hurried past, sliding into the first available seat. She closed her eyes and counted slowly, until she convinced herself that it was only her imagination, and that if Terrance were alive, she wouldn’t even be worried.
“The damn government will be by today,” a voice next to her croaked. Tamara opened her eyes and saw she was seated next to Missy Faye. “Be by today to take my check and slit my neck. The damn government will be by today to feel my cooter and bug my computer.”
Tamara looked to see if any other seats were available, but the bus driver announced that they should fasten their belts. “Next stop, nowhere.”
She glanced around the bus to see if anyone else noticed the ominous words. The man across the aisle from her slumbered, a shiny coat of drool sparkling on his chin. In a seat in front of her sat a woman and her baby. The baby, mercifully, slept. Tamara couldn’t bear to think of babies awake. It always made her feel better when she saw one sleeping rather than languishing in this world. The mother was silent, her head lolling from side to side in the rhythm of the road, though the bus had not yet started to move.
No one but me, Tamara thought. It is only my fear.
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 7