“But, Willy, the water was too hot, and the soap was too strong. You are inconsiderate in so many ways.”
“And you are always perfectly considerate yourself?” Willy McGilly asked, cocking an eye-brow like a soaring hawk.
“Always,” said Hodl. And he studied his hands with their deep Heart Lines passing through the Mounds of Rectitude and Magnanimity and Piety and Sympathy and Generosity and Gentleness and all the Virtues.
Dean R. Koontz is another of the younger generation of science fiction writers. Here he proves that the alien among us may not necessarily come from a far and distant star...
NIGHTMARE GANG
Dean R. Koontz
Cottery was a knife man. He carried six of them laid flat and invisible against his lean body, and with these half dozen confidence boosters giving him adequate courage, he challenged Louis to a fight, for he envisioned himself as the leader of the gang. It was over inside of two minutes. Louis moved faster than he had any right to. He avoided Cottery’s blades just as if he already knew from which directions they would be swung. He delivered several punches to Cottery that looked like a small boy’s blows in a playful bout with his father, but he crippled Cottery with them as surely as he would have wielding sledgehammers. The knife man went down and threw up all over his own shoes.
It was an object lesson.
One was all we needed.
Louis had many holds on us. Although he did not look it, the fight with Cottery proved that he was somehow our physical superior. Of course, there was also the fact that only Louis knew who we were; none of the gang members could remember any past, beyond joining the gang. I’m sure that all of us, at one time or another, tried to find out who we were, but beyond the moment when we were enlisted by Louis, our memories ended at a tall, obsidian wall that could not be breached. Indeed, it was mentally and physically painful to try to remember. Ask
Louis? He would only smile and walk away, and that just made us twice as curious.
And only Louis knew our future.
It seemed that there was some purpose to the gang, to the slow growth of our numbers, though no one could fathom what it might be. But leave the group and make our own futures? Butch, our barbarian giant, tried that. He had driven his cycle only a hundred yards on his break for freedom when the cramps hit him and he took the spill at thirty-five miles an hour, skinning himself real bad.
Louis was our jailer; the gang was our prison; and the heavy, black cycles were the bars that contained us.
Then came the run down the Atlantic coast, the pounding of the cycles in the super-heated air, nights on the beaches buffeted by the sound of the waves as we slept, plenty of beer that Louis bought for us (he was the only one with money). On that run, I found out what I was. And what Louis was. And what was going to happen to all of us...
Cruising the ocean roads to take in the tourist trap towns like White City, Ankona, Palm Beach, and Boca Raton, we made a wild sight. Flowery-shirted tourists and their matronish wives always pulled off to let us go by, their faces white, the men wiping sudden perspiration from their brows. There were twelve of us in the gang, plus Louis. As in any group, there were those who stood out. Butch was six and a half feet and three hundred pounds, another twenty-five pounds for boots and chains and levis. There was Jimmy-Joe, a stiletto thin little bastard with skin like candle wax and wild, red-rimmed eyes like the eyes of a hunting hawk. He giggled and talked to himself and did not make friends. Yul was the weapons nut. His glittering head (even the eyebrows gone, yeah) distracted your attention from the bulges on his clothing: the pistol under his left arm pit, the coiled chain on his right arm.
The rest of the crew ranged along similar lines, though each seemed a weaker parody of those three. Except for me. I was a natural standout. Although I could be no more than twenty-five, my hair was pure white—eyebrows, chest, pubic, everything. They called me Old Man Toomey.
Then there was Louis.
Louis (you could not call him Lou; it would be like calling Jesus Jess) did not belong in the gang. You could see that in the fine lines of his facial bones, the aristocratic look and bearing that indicated a good private schooling in manners and carriage as well as mathematics and grammar. He didn’t have the constitution for the rugged life either, for he was small—five eight, a hundred and twenty pounds, no muscle on him. Yet he was the undisputed leader, the one who had brought us together and was planning what to do with us next.
It was two o’clock on the third day of our coast run, and we were just outside of Dania, Florida, when things began to change. Ahead, a souvenir shop loomed out of the sand and scrub, announced by huge hand-painted signs decorated with pictures of alligators and parrots. Louk raised his arm and motioned us off the highway. We followed him, thumping onto the berm and crunching across the white gravel between half a dozen parked cars. When the clatter and growl of our engines died, Louis dismounted and stood before his cycle, skinny legs spread wide.
“We’re casing it,” he said. “Don’t cause any trouble. We’ll be back tonight.”
We had never cased a place before. This was the changing point in our existence. Somehow, I knew it was a change for the worse.
We moved inside the shop, fingering the stuffed alligators, carved coconuts, shell jewelry, and genuine Indian thatchwork. The patrons stayed clear of us, their faces pale, their voices lower, more strained than the voices of people on vacation should be. The gang always garnered this sort of reaction from the straight citizens who came into contact with it. We all got a kick out of the sensation of power our appearance gave us, even though most of us must have sensed the basic psychological sickness in such an attitude.
Louis pushed past the sales counter at the back of the store and moved toward a thick, beaded curtain that closed off another room. The clerk, a tanned and wizened little man with gray hair and a prune’s share of wrinkles, grabbed him by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked. His fear quaked down in the bottom of his throat like a wet frog.
Louis didn’t answer. He turned and stared at the clerk, then down at the hand that held his arm. After a moment, the clerk let go and stood rubbing his cramped fingers. I could see dark bruises on his hand, though Louis had not touched him. His face had gone totally white, and there was a tic beginning in the comer of his left eye. His finger seemed paralyzed; he rubbed them frantically as if to restore circulation.
Free now, Louis continued to the beaded curtain and lifted some of the strands to peer through. I was near enough that I could see what was back there: an office of some sort, small, stacked with boxes of trinkets, containing a single desk and chair. Louis seemed satisfied, dropped the beads, and came back past the clerk who made no attempt to stop him this time.
“Let’s go,” Louis said, walking for the door.
We went.
Two miles from the souvenir shop, we found a secluded section of beach and settled down for the evening. I was still upset about the sudden change of atmosphere, the “casing” of the store. My gut churned, and I felt cold and hollow, afraid of the future simply because I had no idea what it was going to be. Butch and a Spic cat named Ernesto went into Dania for some beer, and a celebration ensued. It was obvious that all of us shared the realization that something big was going to happen, something irreversible.
Louis stayed away from us, walking the beach, stopping now and then to watch a whitecap peel along and spill its froth onto the wet sand. Several times, he threw his head back like a wolf and laughed, high and shrill, until he made his throat hoarse. Several times, when the moonlight limed his chalky features, he looked like one of those small glass animals you can buy in old fashioned curio shops; the illusion was so real that I thought of stoning him, trying to break him. Then I thought of Cottery and the object lesson.
Half an hour after the sun had set and the first heavy waves of mosquitoes were buzzing out of the shoreline foliage, he came up the beach, kicking sand, and stopped before us. “Let’s go back,” h
e said.
I rode up front, just behind Louis. It might have been my unreasonable terror that made me try, in desperation, what I did. I could close in on Louis, I thought, take my cycle into the back of his fast enough to leap over him before we both fell. I might be hurt and hurt badly, but Louis would get his head broken sure as hell. And then we would all be free. Whatever was about to happen would not happen.
I leaned into the bars and was about to accelerate when I felt a hand close over my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I jerked my head about, could not shake it loose. I could see no hand, only feel it. When I was beginning to grow dizzy and the cycle was wobbling under me, the hand departed, allowing me to breathe.
Louis had won again.
We roared into the parking lot and stopped our cycles behind four cars, dismounted and stood there dumbly, waiting for Louis to tell us what to do. He climbed slowly off his Triumph Tiger and turned to face us. The large orange and green neon sign that blinked and rippled overhead cast eerie shadows on his face, illuminating a wide, toothy grin that split his face like an axe wound. Then he spoke to us. Two words. There is no way to convey the manner in which he spoke the command. He did not use his lips or tongue. Instead, the words came across the front of my mind like teletype print, burning into the softness of my brain so that I squealed. There was no denying that order. No denying it at all.
Kill them!
Almost as a single organism, we moved forward, the stones making brittle protests beneath our boots, into the flourescent brightness of the souvenir shop.
There were eleven tourists in the shop, plus the clerk, the same little man who had tried to stop Louis from going to the beaded curtain that afternoon. They looked up as we came in, offered us the same timid reactions we were used to receiving. But that was not going to be enough to pacify us this evening. Not nearly enough.
Kill them!
Louis said it again. He stood by the door, grinning, watching, one foot crossed over the other and his hands shoved in his jean pockets.
We moved forward, taking out the hardware we carried.
Butch moved in ahead of me, surprisingly fast for the ox that he was, and swung a huge fist at a banker type in a loud yellow shirt and dark blue Bermuda shorts. He drove the man’s nose back into his skull, splintering it into the fleshy gray of his warm brain. The banker did not even have time to scream.
Yul wrapped that steel chain around his fist, moving in on some of the women. His muscular arms, hanging bare from the sleeveless tee-shirt he wore, rippled and flowed like the stalking legs of a cat.
Jimmy-Joe had his hands full of knives. The one in his right was dripping something red.
Kill them!
I took my pistol out. It felt cold and unmanageable in my hand, and I wanted to drop it. I could not. It was as if my hand moved independently of the rest of my body.
A tall man with eyebrows that grew together over the bridge of his nose pushed past me, making for an open window on my right. I fired point blank into his chest. He looked startled, as if he had thought the bullets were blanks and the flowing blood was ketchup, then choked. His eyes watered, and tears ran down his cheeks. Then he fell over on the floor, pulling down a display of post cards.
I dropped my pistol and grabbed onto the sales counter for support. My stomach flopped. I gagged, bent over the counter and brought up my supper of cold chicken and beer.
The rest of that time was hazy, like a sun-ruined section of film. There were shots and screams and pleading voices, blurs of color. I heard a child crying, maybe a little girl. The crying stopped abruptly. Then we were moving out, following Louis, boarding the cycles and leaving the lot.
We went down off the shoulder of the highway, back along the sand to where we had eaten. I fell off my machine when it was parked and rolled over in the sand, face down, trying to think. Sometime later, Butch tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a beer. I declined, then rolled on my back to see what was happening among the rest of them. It was not what I had expected. Jimmy-Joe was standing in the center of the group, playing the part of a woman whose throat he had slit, alternately taking his own role in the affair. When he reached the point where he skewered her throat, the gang laughed and other stories began being exchanged.
Someone broke out several bottles of vodka when the beer ran out, and the party got noisier. I stood up and pushed my way through the gang, trying to reach Louis where he sat next to the tide line. I passed Yul who had droplets of blood spattered across his bald head like freckles. Jimmy-Joe was honing his knives on coral. Butch, his eyes very round and wild, was licking an unknown victim’s blood from his hands.
When I reached Louis, he turned and shook his head to let me know he would not talk with me. I tried to say something anyway, but there was an invisible hand in my throat that stopped the words from forming, much like the hand that had almost smothered me when I had thought of killing him. I stood, watching him for some time. He was reading a newspaper, the Miami Herald. After a long time, he carefully tore an article from the front page, folded it, and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Standing, he called to the gang and explained that he would be gone until morning and that we were to enjoy ourselves. Then he was on his Tiger, moving across the sand, gone.
Everyone was silent for a moment, for we all knew what this meant. The only times Louis left us was when he was going to recruit a new gang member. When the idea had sunk in, the revelry began again, slowly at first, then picking up speed and becoming boistrous and jubilant.
I went to the edge of the water and picked up the paper. There was no way to tell what the story had been about, for he had removed all of it. Then I remembered the Gulf station a quarter of a mile back the road. It was highly possible the station had a vendor for the Herald— or at least that the attendent had a copy of his own. Somehow, the story in the paper tied in with the new recruit. I guess I had some idea that it would shed some light on my own past too. Without thinking of the cycle, I struck out along the beach, crawled up the embankment to the highway, and walked to the service station.
There were two copies of the Herald left. When I was about to buy one, I remembered I had no money. Luckily, a car drove up, requiring the attendant’s attention, which left me free to steal. I ran all the way back to our camp, fighting the urge to look at it.
On the beach, I spread out the mutilated paper that Louis had been reading, then opened my whole copy and compared them to see what had been torn out. I read the article twice to make certain I was not wrong. Then I threw both papers into the water and went back to my cycle. I did not sleep that night.
In the morning, when Louis came back, I was awake, my eyes stinging, but my mind alert. He brought the new recruit with him, a fellow by the name of Burton Kade. He was the same Burton Kadc that had beeu the focal point of that newspaper article. He matched the front page picture in every detail. Eleven months ago, Kade had used a shotgun on his mother and father while they had lain asleep in bed. Then he had gone on to systematically beat to death his two young brothers, one eight and one ten. He had been executed yesterday morning.
There was a very ugly thought in my mind, one that I did not want to face up to. To avoid it, I began thinking rapidly of other things, of Louis and what he might be. A demon? That seemed unlikely. Why would a demon have to summon up a dead maniac to commit violence when the demon himself could do far worse with his own powers?
No, not a demon, not a devil. I began to remember things about Louis, things that started fitting together in an unpleasant way. There had been the time he had defeated Cottery with childish blows. The time Butch had gotten cramps and wrecked because he was trying to leave the gang. The bruises on the clerk’s arm, though Louis had not visibly touched him. The invisible hand smothering me when I tried to kill him. These were examples of . . . what? Mind-over-matter—one of those extrasensory perceptions you hear so much about? In that last instance, there had been a case of telepathy, for the lousy kid had known what I was t
hinking, had known I wanted to kill him.
This skinny little monster did not seem like the first of a new race: the first esper, the first man able to warp the realities of life and death to recover a body from the grave. Yet ... he was. The first of a new race . . . and tainted with madness. Maybe that is the price to be paid in this new evolutionary step; maybe all espers will be monsters like Louis. Or perhaps Nature will correct this mistake and make them benevolent. I don’t really care. All I know or care about is that Louis is a beast, and it is Louis who is here now, Louis who shapes my future.
And what was my past? What did I do that was so horrible as to turn every hair on my body white, even though 1 am only twenty-five?
I do know what is going to happen to us. There have been two massacres since that first, there will be many more. We will never be caught, for Louis uses his psychic powers to search for clues before we leave a scene, uses them to wipe the minds clean of anyone who accidentally sees us.
I am afraid we are immortal: we will go on killing until even the sun is black and hard and dead. We have been brought back from the grave, an even baker’s dozen of ghouls. We are the Nightmare Gang that sweeps, gibbering, out of the night and lays waste to whatever comes before it.
We are the Nightmare Gang. We kill while Louis watches, laughing, clutching his sides with his skinny arms.
And the worst thing, the very worst thing is that I think I am beginning to enjoy myself.
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