by Alan Rodgers
When the last of them had come and gone, the creature stood to leave, and Ron went to pay the check. Before he could even lift it from the table the old man had picked it up himself, and he refused to let Ron have it. He’d invited them, after all, the old man said. So Ron let it be, and the old man paid for them.
Almost everyone who’d been in the restaurant followed them as they walked to the far edge of town. For a while Ron began to wonder if they’d all be coming with them, but when they’d passed the last house the creature turned back and looked at them, and suddenly there wasn’t any doubt in anyone’s heart, not even Ron’s, that the three of them had to travel on alone.
Over the heads of the townspeople Ron could see that the helicopter was still on the far hill, watching them. Trouble, he thought. What did those people want with them? Were they going to keep following them?
As he watched, the helicopter took off and began to move toward them.
It was only a moment before it was passing low overhead; as it passed Ron saw a video camera mounted on its side swivel to watch him. And then it just kept going, northward, over the horizon.
³ ³ ³
NEW YORK CITY
Luke and Andy ate in a place that called itself a café, too. But the place where they ate was a much more expensive one — even if the food was not one whit better — and there was no one volunteering to pick up the check for them. Not that it mattered; Luke had plenty of money. By Andy’s lights, or anyone else’s, damn near. All his life Luke had worked, and worked hard; he’d never spent money as quickly as he’d made it. Even young as Luke had been when he’d died, he’d left two full years’ income in the bank.
Not that Luke understood what he had. All he knew was that the money he had in his pocket was plenty as far as the prices on the menu were concerned.
They ate in the restaurant that called itself the Bistro Café, a strange place with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced out onto a concrete grotto of some kind; from where they sat and ate it almost seemed like a giant aquarium, filed with air. That’s what Andy said, anyway: he told Luke that it reminded him of the Brooklyn aquarium, out at Coney Island — only instead of watching a bunch of fish swim around, you got to watch people shopping at the tables they had set up, or watch them staring at the fountain that spattered water all along the far wall. In winter, the boy said, the whole place outside there was a great big ice-skating rink.
Toward the end of the meal the boy disappeared for a long while — he had to go off in search of a men’s room, finding which, apparently, was no small matter — and Luke was left alone at the table for most of twenty minutes. When half the wait had passed, Luke remembered the pamphlet that the strange, vile-smelling old woman had given him, and because there was nothing else to do he took it from the pocket where he’d put it and began to read.
It was strange stuff; fascinating and vile all at the same time. A comic book about the end of the world, and at the same time not a comic book and not about the end of the world at all. It was identical, in fact, to the comic book that the same old woman had given to Ron Hawkins several days before and thousands of miles away. Even as off balance as Luke was, he could see the . . . derangedness of the pamphlet’s author. Of course, he had an advantage that the comic book’s intended audience could not have had: he’d already died, and lived through it, and he knew that death wasn’t something he had to live in fear of. He thought about that a little more, and decided that it was exactly true: the comic book was playing on the fear of death in its readers. Took the idea one step farther . . . and almost began to wonder if all religion was playing on the fear of death. Maybe it was, in fact. And yet . . . there was something wrong in that thought, too. There was a deep feeling about God in Luke’s gut, a reverence, and he didn’t think that reverence had anything at all to do with death, or with being afraid of it.
“What you reading?” Andy asked him, plopping himself back down into his seat.
“Uh?” Luke blinked, pulled himself up out of his fugue. “Comic book. Something someone gave me while I was waiting for you back at McDonald’s.” He tossed it to the boy.
The boy opened the pamphlet, flipped a few pages. “I’ve seen these before,” he said. “Those cross-and-circle people are always handing them out. Or trying to sell them to you.” Handed it back to Luke as though it were nothing at all. “So,” he said, “let’s go get you some clothes. You can’t wear my Daddy’s shirt forever — not just that one, anyways. You’re going to start to smell like a derelict if we don’t get you something to change into soon.”
Luke thought of the way that the old woman smelled, and shuddered. He didn’t want to smell like that — didn’t want people thinking about him the things that the smell made him think of the old woman. He picked up the check, stood. “Do I take this up to the counter?”
Andy looked around. “Yeah, looks like it. Don’t forget to leave a tip.”
“Tip. . . ? Oh, yeah — a tip.” Luke took out his wallet, opened it.
“Figure twice the tax.”
“Right,” Luke said, as though he’d known it all along, even though he hadn’t. He took two bills from his wallet, dropped them on the table; walked across the room and paid the woman who stood behind the register.
Andy led him up to street level, to a shop that looked and felt too expensive. It wasn’t, though; the money in his wallet bought him shirts and slacks and underclothes, and when he’d paid for it all there was still plenty left over.
“What now?” he asked the boy. They were standing outside the door of the clothes shop; the plastic shopping bag under Luke’s left arm was bulging and almost uncomfortably heavy.
“I don’t know. You want to do a little window shopping, maybe?” Andy started walking north along Fifth Avenue; Luke followed him.
All around them were shops filled with fur coats and jewelry and chocolates too expensive to eat. “You want to buy a window? Is this really the place to buy it?” Even if they could find a shop that sold window glass, he thought, if they bought it here they’d pay three times what it was worth.
Andy sighed; exasperated. “Not shop for windows. Shop at them — window shop. Like wandering up and down the street, looking in the windows at things you want to buy but can’t afford. And sometimes wondering why people who have money spend it on things like they have in some of these places.”
“Uh.” Luke looked out toward the far end of the street; there were tall, full trees up ahead. The Avenue seemed to lead into a park a few blocks from where they stood. “Does that mean we can’t buy anything?”
Andy shrugged. “You can if you want. Shouldn’t, probably. Spending money sort of goes against the spirit of window shopping.”
Luke thought about it for a while; it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Was the boy joking with him again? Maybe. And maybe not. He sure looked serious. He always looked serious. Luke decided that he’d play along, or play it straight, anyway; it was a good response to a joke, and if Andy wasn’t joking, then maybe window shopping was something he could learn to enjoy.
They went four blocks before the boy actually paused anywhere long enough to get a good look inside any of the store windows. The shop that finally did catch his eye wasn’t one of the expensive-looking ones; just the opposite, in fact. The place was worn and tacky-looking. It had a big, dirty five-color plastic sign that read UPPER MIDTOWN CAMERAS and below that $AVE! BE$T PRICE$ ON FIFTH AVENUE! The store’s two windows were crowded floor to ceiling with cheap computers, adding machines, radios, tape recorders, typewriters . . . even cameras, but not many of those. There were little hand-written signs all over the place, describing the merchandise — all of them said sale!, but not a one of them had a price on it.
Off to the left there were televisions, three of them all playing to the same station — what? There, on the screens, what. . . ? Luke recognized the face of that man . . . from somewhere. And
that, that — creature beside him. . . ! Luke didn’t know why, but the sight of the thing, even just seeing it there on the screen . . . gooseflesh, all over his back, his neck, his upper arms. Luke knew that man. And something in his gut was certain that it knew the creature, even though the truth was that he’d never seen anything like it before. They were standing on top of a hill surrounded by forest, and the man looked angry and belligerent — furious, in fact. Looking at the man’s expression, Luke was glad that he was nowhere near him.
A piece of the image on each screen cut away, and suddenly there was a man dressed in dark robes in the screens’ lower corner, speaking to him like a newscaster. The man looked nothing like a newscaster.
Andy was watching the screens now, too, from over Luke’s shoulder. “What’s he saying?”
The boy looked up at him indignantly. “How am I supposed to know what he’s saying — I can’t hear through that glass any better than you can. Do I look like I can read lips?”
Luke felt himself blush. “Sorry. I guess you don’t.”
“Well, I can, but that’s beside the point. He’s saying something about . . . about some kind of a beast, and a revelation . . . ‘voice of Armageddon’ — I don’t know. Weird stuff. I think he’s saying that the Beast from Revelation has showed up on earth. You know — 666, tattoos, everybody has to have his own credit card, all that stuff. It looks like he’s saying something about a radio station, too. And he wants everyone to send them all the money that they got.”
“Really?”
“Well — not exactly. He does want people to send him money, though. As much as they can possibly afford, and then maybe some more, too.”
The man Luke thought he recognized was looking right into the camera, now, and shaking his fist at it. Luke thought he might attack the screen, but then suddenly the creature put his arm on the man’s shoulder, and before anything else could happen the image on the screen changed completely, and they were watching the man and the creature walking into a small town. The people of the town seemed . . . terrified when they first set eyes on the creature, but after just a moment in its presence the creature seemed somehow to enchant them. Worn, tired-hearted people seemed almost to glow under the spell of that enchantment; one gnarled old woman, Luke would have sworn, seemed to grow younger as she looked at the goatlike thing.
And as each of the people in the town fell under the enchantment, numbers would appear on his forehead:
666
They weren’t real numbers; Luke could tell that just by looking at the screen. The numbers were something that someone in a television studio had superimposed over the faces of the townspeople. Even still, they chilled Luke’s heart.
“The man says that the creature there is the Beast from Revelation. He says it’s the next sign that we’re living through the end of the world.”
Luke stared, agape.
“Do you believe him?”
Luke shook his head. “What?”
“Do you really believe that that thing’s the Beast from Revelation? Do you really think we’re all going to die?”
“Uh —” Luke didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you?”
“Nah.” Andy kicked the ground with the toe of his sneaker. “My Momma knows all about God and all of those things. She taught me pretty good. And she always told me, ‘Don’t you never trust nobody who wants to sell you God. God don’t charge admission — God loves you for free, or He don’t love you at all.’ And God loves wicked people, too, so it don’t make any difference at all.”
“What has that got to do with the Beast? I can see the thing with my own eyes. Even if the man just wants money, it doesn’t seem to me that he’s necessarily wrong about the facts.”
The boy shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe so. My Momma’s been talking about the end of the world a lot lately, too. But this guy — I don’t make a habit of believing what anybody has to say when what they really want is my money.”
The scene on the television screens changed again: they were walking away from the town, now, and the camera was zooming in on the creature and the man Luke thought he recognized.
“What’s he saying now? What are they doing?”
The boy stared hard at the screen. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit.”
He looked up at the street sign on the corner, grabbed Luke’s hand and dragged him away. Running. Around the corner and down a long, tall, canyonlike block.
“What? Why?”
“They’re crazy. Crazy.” Jogged to one side to avoid a thick-wet pile of dog droppings. “They’re taking over ABC. The television network. He’s telling everybody who’s watching to go to the ABC building and help take it over!”
ABC? Television network? It sounded familiar, but not familiar enough to make sense of. Taking it over how?
“I don’t get it. What did the man say?”
The boy cursed again. “He said that they were ‘commandeering the ABC television network in the name of God for the duration of this earth.’ And that the network would ‘henceforth be known as the Voice of Armageddon.’ The man’s saying that because the Beast is here, they can do whatever they think they have to. Something like that, anyway — hard to follow all that, just reading lips. Can you understand that?”
He couldn’t, of course. Not that Luke’s pride would let him say so.
He began to understand when they got to the end of the block, though; what he saw there was almost self-explanatory. Buses. Buses everywhere, so many of them parked in front of the dark-stone building with the black abc sign that there was no room for traffic to get by around them. Thirty, forty, maybe even fifty busses. And people carrying protest signs, and television cameras — none of those said abc; instead they all had a strange monogram with a cross and a circle and a dove.
And there were people with guns, too. The cameras stayed away from those people. In fact, the cameras were very careful to avoid the real violence — the shooting. The bodies heaped in the building’s courtyard. The man near the door who was gouging out the eyes of a security guard with the handle of his placard.
“Oh my God,” Luke said. The sound of breaking glass somewhere high up above, and a moment later there were bodies flying down onto the pavement, spattering unrecognizable a few yards away from the corpses of the security guards.
And suddenly he was afraid for his own life. And for the boy’s.
Luke put his arm around Andy, backed the two of them away from the carnage, crossed the street, all the while not even looking at whatever they were backing toward. Eyes transfixed by the violence and the death and the spectacle. Far across the way the cameras were focused on a screaming mob of fundamentalists who played to the camera, charging toward a part of the building where there were no doors nor any real fighting. Backing away, charging again.
Then someone came out the door of the building, and he shouted, “It’s done! We’ve got those heathens all cleaned out of here,” and the mob cheered and the cheer broke off of a sudden as the door of the nearest bus opened and a man came out of it.
A man in black robes.
The same man Luke had seen on the television a few moments before.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Luke said.
Murder. They were killing people for no good reason at all, and now the man was smiling self-righteously for the cameras. Luke had lost a lot of himself, but he sure as God knew that murder was a crime — not just a crime but the worst possible sort of crime. Not that there was a whole lot Luke or the boy by themselves could do about it — except get themselves killed, maybe. Luke had already lost enough of himself, just dying once; he wasn’t eager to lose any more.
The sound of sirens, coming toward them. Police, finally. How could they get through all this traffic? Luke heard the sirens turn, and start moving toward him. He turned to look around the corner
and saw dozens of blue-and-white police cruisers moving too fast toward him —
— saw with the corner of his eye that the ONE WAY sign on the post beside him was pointing in the other direction, that the police cars with their flashing lights and bleating sirens were moving the wrong way on a one-way street. Not that it mattered; there wasn’t any traffic getting by the crowd of busses any more.
And the cameras swiveled to watch as the mob surged out onto the Avenue to overwhelm the police. All but two of the cameras, anyway; those two focused on the man in black as he marched triumphantly into the building.
The sound of screeching brakes and gunfire, coming from the Avenue, and Luke looked up and saw a policeman wielding nothing but a nightstick get his head blown off by a fundamentalist’s machine gun, and Luke’s body suddenly unfroze itself, and he grabbed the boy’s arm and ran back the same way they’d come —
And one last thing happened as he turned to run: his eyes passed over the bus that the man in black had emerged from. Luke saw another face there, staring out at him wide-eyed and horrified.
Luke knew that face. Knew it, and knew it was trouble in the worst possible way.
He tried to put a name to the face, and failed. Then something strange happened: a name welled up from somewhere deep inside him, from a place that he knew wasn’t memory.
Herman Bonner.
And something else, even more cryptic and unsettling, from the same place:
Herman Bonner wants to kill the world.
By the time Luke heard that he was halfway down the block, running for his life and for the boy’s. Running was the only thing he could do, he told himself. The whole idea that a man wanted to kill the world was silly. How could a man want to kill the world, and even if he could want to, how would he actually do it? He couldn’t, of course. Luke told himself that at least half a dozen times, even said it half out loud, under his breath so quiet that he hoped the boy might not hear him.