by Alan Rodgers
Something hard and dense hit bottom in Graham’s gut. He looked away from the window, toward the floor, and covered his eyes. And maybe they’re right. Maybe I am to blame. As soon as he’d thought it, he wanted to shout No! I’m not to blame! It’s not my fault! I didn’t elect that man — you did! Still: he didn’t shout, he didn’t even open his mouth, because he knew he’d had his place in bringing Paul Green to power.
The sound of hard-metal cylinders clanking together, inches away from Graham’s ear — so sudden, so unexpected in a moment so tense that he nearly screamed in surprise. Clenched his teeth, to keep his quiet, to keep from completely losing his self-control. Turned his head, too fast, too hard, and saw that the Secret Service man beside him was holding a machine gun.
They all had machine guns.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
It was going to be a bloodbath. People — hundreds of people — were going to die horribly. Because of him. In front of him. Graham pictured them, bodies burst by machine gun fire, bones and sweetbreads open to the air, blood all over everything oozing. Gushing.
A bloodbath.
Their blood would be on his hands, he realized. Literally. So much of it would get on everything.
The car was moving more quickly, now — grinding and thumping over the bodies of the people who’d been in front of them. Even with the car’s windows closed, even with all the other noise, Graham could hear their screams as the weight of the car crushed the life from them. It wasn’t clear up ahead, though. There were plenty more people to replace the ones that the Toyota’s tires crushed.
How, he wondered, could he live with himself after this? How could he show himself in public?
He couldn’t, he realized. Even if he got out of this alive — and he was going to, he was pretty sure of that — his career in politics was over. He couldn’t live with this. He didn’t want to live a life that could ever bring him to this ever again.
The man beside him unhooked the latches that held the Toyota’s sun roof, began to stand.
My God. He’s going to start shooting people. Wasn’t it bad enough that they were crushing people wholesale under the car’s tires? Bad enough they were killing people with the car, but there was no need, no call for gunfire.
“No,” Graham said. “Don’t do that.”
The Secret Service man ignored him.
“God damn it, stop.” Graham grabbed hold of the man’s belt, tried to yank him back down into his seat. For all the difference it made he might as well have been trying to force a bronze soldier to sit; the Secret Service man was in much better shape than he was.
The sound of the machine gun was deafening. The man fired at the rioters all around them, but most of all he fired at the ones in front of the Toyota, and they picked up a little speed as that part of the crowd fell more easily under their tires.
Tiny spatters of blood began to land on the car’s windows as the bullets sprayed out into the mob.
A scream welled up, somehow, from directly beneath Graham’s feet.
No more killing, please, God. Just let me get out of here without killing anyone else.
The man who’d been standing through the sun roof ducked back into the car.
“The road is blocked up ahead,” he said. “Looks like a big pile-up, maybe an accident that brought the mob here in the first place. We’ll have to go around to the shoulder.”
“Right.”
The driver bore gently to the right; a moment later the man beside Graham was standing up through the sun roof again, blasting away at the crowd with his machine gun. The shooting seemed to Graham to go on forever, and while it was obvious that they were moving, if they made any progress Graham couldn’t see it. Eventually he began to feel numb and out of phase with the horror around him. The only event that stood out in all of it was the once when the man with the gun came down to change ammunition clips.
Then, suddenly, it was almost clear up ahead of them. They were at the shoulder of the highway, which wasn’t much of a shoulder at all — six, maybe seven feet of gravel, and then the land seemed to sheer away from them. Almost more a grass-covered cliff than it was a slope.
Off to what was now their left, beyond the wrecked cars, Graham could see that the highway was clear — wide open and empty of chaos. A moment, now. Just another moment and we’ll be free. Praise God.
Then, just as they were getting around the smoldering Dodge that jutted furthest out into onto the shoulder, both of the Toyota’s right tires lost their grip on the cliff-edge of the shoulder, and suddenly they weren’t moving at all any more. The driver floored the accelerator, shifted into reverse, and floored it again, but it barely even caused the Toyota to budge.
We’re going to die, Graham realized. There was a tiny, guilty part of him that was resigned to the fact — that part of him almost welcomed dying. But the loudest thing in his heart was a desperate need to live, to let out the scream of horror that he kept sealed inside him.
In that moment, if Graham had had a gun in his hand, he’d have rolled down the window beside him and started firing out into the crowd.
And he would have enjoyed it.
The driver was cursing, trying and trying to rock the car into motion. It made no difference, and it was even making matters worse; each time the driver tried it, the car seemed to rock a little less than it had the time before. The man beside him was on a cellular telephone, calling for help that couldn’t posibly reach them in time.
Up above, the man who’d sat beside Graham was still shooting out into the crowd, almost but not quite managing to keep them at bay. When he ducked back down into the car to refill his clip again, the mob surged forward — so many of them, so fast, so hard that just the weight of them was enough to tilt the Toyota so that it balanced on the cliff-edge.
A moment later the man beside Graham was standing, blasting away at the crowd again, but by then it was already too late. The mob could see what it had done. In spite of the gunfire they pressed the car further off balance. It didn’t make any difference that they were dying; the ones behind huddled with the dead before them, shielding themselves and pushing.
The Toyota tipped, and tipped, lost balance and fell down the almost-sheer slope. It landed hard, upside down, crushing the head and torso of the man beside Graham.
His blood was everywhere, thick and wet and warm all over Graham, who hung by the waist from his seat belt. Blood in his hair, his face, soaking through his shirt and jacket, plastering them to his skin. Worst was the blood that kept seeping into his eyes. He tried to blink it away, but when he did the stuff dried so quickly that it glued his eyelids to themselves, and wiping away the blood with the backs of his hands only made things worse because there was gore on them, and something rough and gritty, too, and he had to pull his hands away because the gritty stuff burned the delicate skin of his eyelids, and scraped them like sandpaper. It left his eyes sealed shut completely, and Graham couldn’t see at all.
A moment; two, and then the sound of the front doors opening. A breath after that and there was gunfire again — from the two men who’d been in the front, Graham assumed. The seat belt cut into Graham’s waist terribly, but blinded as he was he didn’t dare try to release it.
Not that it mattered. It was only a few moments later that the sound of machine guns went silent, and then the mob was yanking off his seat belt and dragging him out through the open driver’s side door.
He forced his eyes open in spite of the burning and the tearing of dried blood.
And saw people, furious people, crowding all around him. Pounding on him. Someone had found a rope somewhere — no, not a rope, a thick, strong nylon cord. And someone tied a loop and a slip knot in the rope, and wrapped it around Graham’s throat.
They dragged him back up the hill by that rope, strangling him with his own weight and with the friction of his clothes against t
he grass. Deep into the soft flesh of his neck as the cord dug, it didn’t dig deep enough to black him out. Because the tightness of the cord pressed and crushed away his voice, he watched and listened in silent horror as they finished hauling him up the hill. Threw the loose end of the cord up into the air three times, until it caught on a spike that protruded from high up on a concrete pillar. And used that spike as though it were a pulley.
To hang him.
What kills a man quickly and mercifully when he’s hung from a noose and scaffold isn’t the choking and strangling of the rope. Even a heavy man suffocates from his own weight so slowly that his death is cruel and long and hard. No — compassionate headsmen make great effort to avoid that sort of execution. The thing that actually kills a hanged man is the snapping of his neck as he drops and then his fall stops sudden as the rope and the fine bones beneath his skull absorb the full impact of his descending bulk. It’s a fast death, and a kind one, as executions go.
Graham Perkins was not a heavy man. Just the opposite, in fact — he was a spare man, and his bones were especially fine and thin. It would have needed a skillful executioner and a high scaffold to hang him properly. And the men and women who hanged him were not experienced, and even had they known of the need to use a scaffold, there was none available for them to use.
Which was why Graham Perkins died one of the most horrible deaths imaginable, dangling from a spike at the edge of the highway for three hours, struggling, eyes wide open. Screaming a scream that came from his throat as a faint hiss that no one could have heard four yards away.
After three hours, the exertion and the lack of air finally stole his mind away from him. The last half hour of his life, at least, was filled with gentle black oblivion.
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Chapter Fifteen
MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE
Late that afternoon — about the time that the nation’s Vice President was finally strangling to death at the edge of a highway — something collapsed in the deep basements of the ruin that had been the Mountain Institute. And when that basement gave way, the rubble that crushed the bodies of Ron Hawkins and the Beast sifted down into the void.
And left the corpses unburdened.
And the peculiar infection in their dead flesh set to finishing the task it had already begun: recreating life from the dead.
By midnight the work was half finished. And on Sunday morning Ron Hawkins woke from the dead in a dark hollow deep inside the ruin. And yawned and stretched as though he’d never died.
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BROOKLYN
Recreating Luke Munsen was a task at once simpler and more complex than the rebuilding of the dog, the creature, or Ron Hawkins. After the fire inside the bus had finally died away, his body had been set out on the grass inside the cemetery, and it had been left undisturbed. The infection had been deep inside him, even before he’d died, and because of that there were parts of Luke that had been rebuilt almost as quickly as they’d been destroyed.
The problem with remaking Luke was that he hadn’t just died — he’d died and then his flesh had cooked long and slow inside the smoldering bus.
Most of him the microbes could rebuild from the DNA blueprint inside all his cells. If that were necessary. What it couldn’t do, what it couldn’t find anywhere in the blueprint or in Luke’s corrupted flesh, was the chemical memory that had been Luke Munsen. His character. The mind that the fire had cooked away from his brain. Some of it was still there, of course; the fire didn’t roast him thoroughly enough to destroy it all. Long stretches of memory and desire remained inside him, still intact. And the deepest, most important facts about Luke — the ones so essential to his nature that they permeated every iota of his being — those were indestructible.
Indestructible or not, the Luke inside Luke Munsen was violated by the fire, and violated more horribly than the weathered junkie who killed him could ever have violated his physical self.
And because his deepest self had been so violated by death, Luke Munsen was alive and whole physically long before he was able to wake from the dead. What he did instead of waking was dream — dream long and hard through the memories that still remained to him as his unconscious struggled desperately to reconstruct some semblance of itself.
And the thing he dreamed most clearly of all was the day of his grandmother’s funeral.
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He was sixteen that year. He remembered the day clearly, and in detail, in spite of the destruction of his mind, in spite of the fact that it was a day he’d rather have left behind him forever. His mother had cried and cried that day, but she’d cried most of all when there were people around to see her grief. And those times when she thought that there was no one to see her, her eyes had been dry and predatory.
Luke Munsen had loved his grandma, and the idea that she wasn’t anything but food for the worms had made him deep and quietly sad. And seeing his mother turn Grandma’s funeral into an opportunity for theater had made him ashamed for his mother and for himself.
Then the funeral service was over, and everyone was in black limousines, twenty of them, and they were riding across three counties to the cemetery where his grandpa was buried, and the now-open grave beside it, meant for her.
The ride took forever and a year, and all the way what Luke wanted was to be alone, to be alone and cry where he wouldn’t have to be theater. He couldn’t be alone because the only way out was to demand that the driver stop the car and let him off, and that would have been a scene worse than anything his mother could do, and he knew it. He never minded making scenes, not at that age, not if he had a mind to make them and thought he was right, but he loved his grandmother and he respected her, and he wasn’t about to shame her, not even if she was already dead.
So he sat there as the limousine rolled across three counties, ashamed and grieving to himself, listening as his mother talked about his Grandma’s will in a hungry tone she couldn’t quite disguise. Luke’s mother went on about all the time and care she’d lavished on Grandma these last few years, and he thought how maybe that was true, but even then, young as he was, he thought it was repugnant to want money because you’d given someone your time and love.
Then they were pulling through the gates of Grandma’s cemetery, and he thought at first that it was an incredible relief because at least he could get far enough away from his mother that he wouldn’t have to listen to her or see that look in her eye any more.
It wasn’t better. It was worse, much worse. The limousine drove slowly for five minutes through what looked like bare fields of sickly, short-mown grass — no graves, no shrubs, almost no trees, just sun-scorched green-brown grass — and then it pulled to a stop beside three old trees that looked almost grotesque against the dead meadow.
The Hearse was parked in front of them. Fifty yards away there was a red and yellow tent pavilion planted in the field. Beside it was a folding mechanism made of canvas straps and aluminum poles, just the right size for Grandma’s coffin.
Where are the graves? he thought as he got out the door of the limousine, faster than was polite but not fast enough to be rude. And then he saw them.
They were flat, all of them, all of the headstones were flat and set into the ground so that a lawn mower could pass over them with out damaging its blade. No careful trimming, just mechanized eternal care.
It was cheesy cheap and petty in the worst possible way.
The priest who’d given the funeral service saw him standing there, looking lost and sick and appalled, and he must have thought Luke was confused because he stopped to speak to him.
“Her grave is over there,” the priest said, pointing to the pavilion. His voice was gentle and quiet, with the smallest hint of an Irish brogue. Luke wanted to talk to him, because he needed to talk to someone, especially someone with a voice that gentle and that sane. He didn’t dare. Not that day. He knew if he did he
’d make so much noise, make such a scene that he’d be a disgrace. It was Grandma who was dead; it wasn’t a time for Luke to be demanding attention. Not then.
So he nodded, and he thanked the priest, and he crossed the narrow gravel road and walked toward the pavilion.
And that walk was the worst horror, right then — worse, even, than twenty minutes later when they finally lowered Grandma into the ground. The graves were so close together that Luke could picture the dead holding hands without stretching as they rested, and the soil was set so badly above each grave that as he walked his feet could feel the outline of each coffin in the earth. And he knew that if he could ever bring himself to visit what was left of Grandma in this place, his heels would feel her coffin, too.
He didn’t watch as they lowered Grandma into the ground. He tried to relax and let his eyes focus on the grass. He was numb enough by then that he could have watched if he’d decided to make himself, but he didn’t want anything more to remember from that funeral than he had to have. He heard the sound of the rope and pulley as it lowered her, and he heard the sound of dirt and other things spattering on the sleek black-painted wood of her casket.
As soon as he heard people moving away from the grave Luke turned and started to leave himself. Before he got three steps he felt his mother’s hand on his forearm, stopping him, taking his attention. Luke looked up from the uneven ground and back at his mother, over his shoulder.
“You should know,” Mom said. She pointed off to her left, at half a dozen unused graves with smooth, uncarved granite markers. Luke turned to look at them more closely. “Your grandmother bought those for the rest of the family, back when papa died. If you ever need them, they’re in the family.”
And Luke couldn’t help himself any more; he didn’t scream and he didn’t shout, but he yanked his arm away from her and ran from there for all that he was worth. He didn’t even run to the limousine — he went for the nearest open gate and left the cemetery on foot. Late in the afternoon he took a bus back to town, and when he got home he went to his room without saying a word. And no one said a word to him about it, not a single word.