Outside the window, three firemen were constructing a bunker from a pile of sandbags. Occasionally they glanced nervously in the direction of the classroom. Two policemen with drawn revolvers stood guard.
So that was the plan, Eddy decided. He was supposed to ask Plakker to go outside and drop the grenades in the bunker. Eddy shivered.
“It won’t do any good to harm the children,” Eddy said. “I’ll admit anything you want. By now, there are plenty of reporters here. They’d have monitored the police calls. I’ll hold a press conference. I’ll say anything you want me to say.”
Plakker’s eyes glittered. The flesh around his eyes and mouth had taken on a greenish cast.
“That will do for a start,” he said. “You can start right now. You can walk out that door and start talking to the people out there.”
“Where will you be?”
“Right here. That way we’ll both be certain that you put on a good performance. You’ll have to keep your promise. I want you to make it real good.”
“No. You come out with me. I’ll keep my promise.”
Plakker raised his arms. Eddy sucked in his breath and shook his head feverishly. The scab on his lip cracked open, splashing blood on his wrist. He knew he should have known better than to try to bargain with a madman.
“All right,” Eddy said. “For God’s sake, all right.” He paused to catch his breath and press his jacket sleeve against his lip. “If I go out there and say the right things, you’ll follow me out and drop the grenades behind those sandbags?”
“Of course. All I want is your public announcement. I want your father to read about it.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your promise?”
“You don’t know, but you’re in no position to bargain. I think you know I’m not afraid to die. I’ll drop these grenades if you don’t go out. You have no choice, you see.”
Eddy hesitated. He could feel the sweat pouring from his body, pasting his clothes to his skin. How could he leave a classroom full of children alone with a maniac? Yet, if he didn’t, they would be killed anyway.
“I’ll do everything you say,” Eddy said evenly. “I’m going. You just keep a tight hold on those grenades.”
“I’m waiting!”
Eddy dropped his eyes and found himself looking directly into the face of the blond-headed boy with the braces. The boy stared back at him, his child eyes wide and trusting.
Strange, Eddy thought as he turned and headed toward the door, I hadn’t even had a chance to ask the boy his name.
“Run, Reese! I want to see you running out of here! Run!”
Eddy froze; something tore at the fabric of his senses, paralyzing his muscles. His reflection on the glass panel of the door stared back at him. Something was wrong, and he could feel twenty-seven pairs of eyes boring into his back as he struggled to discover what it was.
Run, Reese, run! Run, Reese! Run!
Plakker was obviously mad, but he was not stupid. He had said that he did not care about dying, and Eddy believed him; the only thing keeping Plakker alive was the hope of vengeance for the death of his son and his own humiliation. Why, then, should Plakker accept a lifetime in prison—or a mental hospital, where he would have nothing to do but dwell on the very thoughts that had driven him mad—for a statement that Plakker could not even be sure he, Eddy, would not qualify and explain away the moment the children were out of danger?
Run, Reese! Run, Reese! Run, Reese!
Then it came to him, and the enormity of the realization rose up and choked him. Eddy then slowly turned to face Plakker.
Plakker looked stunned, unable to comprehend the change in the other man. Eddy walked across the room and stopped a few paces away from Plakker.
“What’s the matter with you, Reese?” Plakker’s face was livid as he danced up and down on the balls of his feet, clicking the grenades together. “Get out of here! Run! I’m going to drop these grenades and blow this whole room to hell!”
“No, you’re not,” Eddy said, wrenching each word from deep inside himself, digging his nails into the palms of his hands.
“Please leave, Mister Reese.” It was the blond-headed boy. His voice shook uncontrollably and his face was wet with tears “Please, Mister Reese! The man will hurt us if you don’t leave!”
“You won’t drop those grenades as long as I’m in the room,” Eddy said, wrenching his eyes away from the boy’s. “You see, I know that the only way you can be sure of getting the kind of publicity you want is by blowing up the room after I leave. You want me to live while you and the children are killed. That’s the only way it would work.” Eddy paused. Plakker’s mouth was working rapidly, but no sound emerged. “I’m staying. The only thing you’ll get by killing me is a martyr.”
“Get out!” Plakker screamed, pushing Eddy with one hand-grenade fist. “I’m going to drop them!”
“Give them to me,” Eddy said, holding out his hands. “It’s all over now. We want to help you. Please give me the grenades.”
Plakker’s eyes opened wide and he made sounds deep in his throat as though he were gasping for air. The saucer-wide eyes and the bunching of the muscles in Plakker’s neck and arms were warnings that cascaded over Eddy just long enough to show him that he had been wrong. Time stopped. Children sobbed. Please leave, Mister Reese. Please, please …
Plakker’s hands came together, then flew apart. The grenades flew through the air in opposite directions. There were two sharp, obscene clicks as the levers were released.
ONE:
Click, click. The first grenade hit the blackboard at the front of the room, then fell onto a bookcase and off onto the floor. The second landed in the rear of the room, caroming off the wall and coming to rest against the leg of a chair.
TWO:
Eddy leaped to the front of the room, skidding across the floor on his belly. He reached out and grasped one of the grenades in his hand.
THREE:
Eddy rolled over on his side and came up on his feet. He brought back his arm to fire the grenade through the window and found himself staring into the confused, terrified faces of a group of police and firemen. Eddy knew that could serve no purpose anyway; there was still the second grenade.
FOUR:
Eddy’s fall had smeared blood from his lips into his eyes, and Eddy saw everything through a hazy red curtain. He tucked the grenade firmly into his side and raced toward the rear of the room, knocking Plakker and the children in his path to one side.
FIVE:
Eddy was afraid for a moment that he would not be able to find it. Then it was there in front of him, ugly and bloated, resting on the shining tile. He had always said that one day the war would come home. Eddy tucked the first grenade into his belly and fell on the second.
SIX:
“Don’t be a fool, Reese! Get up and run! Save your life! Run, damn it, run!”
SIX:
It was the waiting. The waiting. He wondered if he would scream when the jagged slivers of metal tore through his body, and he wondered how long he would feel the pain. He could hear himself making grunting sounds, and he supposed he was choking on his own blood.
SIX:
Somewhere, a thousand miles away, glass was breaking and men were running.
SIX:
Flapping on the ground, like a shattered bird.
SIX
SIX
SIX
SIX.
“Eddy, can you hear me? Get up, Eddy! It’s all right now!”
Someone was daubing at his face with a wet cloth that reeked of antiseptic. Eddy writhed on the floor and pressed his fists into his belly.
The grenades were gone.
He slowly rolled over on his back and found himself looking up into Brokaw’s sweating face. Brokaw was holding the grenades.
“Deactivated,” Brokaw said, juggling the pieces of metal in his hands. “Plugged up with cement. He must have picked them up in a war-surplus store.”
Eddy blinke
d and looked around him. A policeman came into the room and walked over to Eddy.
“That was really something you did there, pal,” the policeman said, apparently embarrassed by his own emotion. “You had no way of knowing they were no good.”
Eddy nodded dumbly. The policeman walked away.
“Plakker?” Eddy asked Brokaw.
“They took him away ten minutes ago,” Brokaw said. “We got the grenades away from you, but we couldn’t get you to open your eyes.”
“The children?”
“Out playing on the fire trucks. I heard one of the girls say she thought you were ‘real cool’. How does it feel to be called ‘real cool’ by a fifth grader, Eddy?”
Eddy sat up, and his head spun. Brokaw pushed him back.
“They’re sending an ambulance for you,” Brokaw said. “Do you think you’ll be ready to come back in two weeks? I don’t think your students will let me keep you out much longer than that.”
“I don’t have that much sick time,” Eddy said stupidly.
“It’s on the school board. When you come back, you’ll have to tell me what this was all about.”
Eddy nodded, and almost passed out from the exertion, but he had seen the look of awe and respect on Brokaw’s face.
“Eddy,” Brokaw said, “welcome to the teaching profession.”
THE TOWER
Pam’s scars burned. Although the wounds had been inflicted more than two decades before, the stripes of puckered flesh on her back and belly still stung when she was stressed, which was certainly the case now as she looked down from the window of her fourth-floor office on the scene below her. On the grass quadrangle in front of the Pinnacle of Prayer, where Horace Cassady had been in seclusion for almost exactly a week, the plastic wreaths and black bunting marking off the site for the proposed monument to Joseph, the savagely murdered son of the former mining engineer and televangelist up in the tower, had been trampled by a throng of reporters and camera crews. The media had been milling about for almost two hours, hoping for an interview with, or at least a glimpse of, the mysterious businessman who had pledged one million dollars to help keep Horace Cassady’s Creation Park going up, and his college for fundamentalist, Charismatic Christian youth from going under.
Now it seemed their patience was to be rewarded, for a long, gray limousine suddenly appeared around a bend in the driveway, pulled over to the curb at the walk leading to the tower’s entrance. The door on the passenger’s side opened, and a tall, rangy man got out. Although it had not rained for weeks, and was quite warm, the man wore a raincoat with a large, floppy collar he had drawn up around his face to hide his features. He pushed his way through the crowd of reporters, hurried toward the door to the Pinnacle of Prayer, which was being held open for him by two fresh-faced students. When he was a few steps away from the entrance the man stopped and, as if sensing Pam’s gaze on him, turned and looked up at her.
Pam gasped when she looked down into the familiar face with its firm jaw, high cheekbones, piercing dark eyes, and thick black hair. The man, the collar of his raincoat still hiding his face from the people on the ground, grinned at her and winked, then abruptly stepped into the marble tower.
“Damn him,” Pam murmured, clenching her fists in frustration and rage as she quickly turned away from the window. “He has no right. Damn him.”
She strode stiffly back to her desk and began returning the complex questionnaires she had been working on back into her briefcase. It wasn’t working anyway, she thought, and winced as pain flashed along the network of scars on her body. The conditions that had enabled her to carry on her research were threatened by the emotional chaos pervading the campus. The ritualistic murder of Joseph Cassady in the desert north of Creation Park, combined with the dramatic ascent of the college’s aged founder to his Pinnacle of Prayer to await dollars or death, had plunged virtually the entire student body into a state of religious hysteria, altering the Charismatic Christians’ body chemistry as well as their perceptions, hopelessly skewing Pam’s data. She had not yet gathered sufficient data to satisfy her research design, and if she did not complete her project on time, it was unlikely that she would receive any more of the meager grants that had kept her going this long. She would be rejected for tenure in the fall, her academic visa would be revoked, and she would have to return to South Africa.
She would rather die than be forced back to a homeland, where there were no uses at all for a cultural anthropologist, and life itself was a wound.
She started and wheeled about at the sound of a single, sharp knock on her office door. Before she could say anything, the door swung open. The Reverend Richard Cassady and his wife, Rita, strode into the room. They stopped just inside the entrance and stared at her with the mixture of hostility and suspicion to which Pam had grown all too familiar during her one-month stay on the campus of Cassady College. Now she thought she detected something else in their eyes, and in the set of their pinched features: triumph. It made Pam decidedly uneasy.
“Hello,” Pam said, and smiled tentatively. The Cassadys had always seemed to Pam more like twins than husband and wife. They dressed alike, always in stark combinations of somber colors and white; they had the same thin, almost gaunt, bodies, the same tension in their faces, and the same kinds of pale eyes she had never seen reflect either warmth or humor.
Unlike his father, Pam thought, Richard Cassady displayed almost a total lack of charisma, which probably explained why the son had failed so miserably at carrying on the televangelism and fund raising for the college when Horace Cassady had retired to devote all his time and energies to the construction of Creation Park, a planned educational and entertainment complex, that now lay sprawled, incomplete, across 15 acres of desert to the north, reminding Pam of nothing so much as fossil bones of the great dinosaurs these people denied could be more than a few thousand years old.
“You needn’t bother packing up your briefcase, Dr. Marishee,” Rita Cassady said coldly, arching her neck slightly. “You’ve already harmed our students enough, abusing them with your blasphemous questions, and even asking them for blood and urine samples. Your work is disgusting and obscene, and it stops now. You came here under false pretenses; you fooled my father-in-law, but you can’t fool us. You’ll be leaving now, and you may not take any of the fruits of your exploitation with you.”
“False pretenses?” Pam asked quietly.
It was the man, in Pam’s estimation the weaker of the two, who answered. “Dr. Felikan was supposed to be welcomed at your university. That was the agreement you made with my father. Dr. Felikan was rejected from your campus, so now we have to ask you to leave ours.”
Pam slowly shook her head, willing herself to continue speaking in a soft, deliberate tone, fearful that her normal speaking voice could quickly soar out of control into shouting. “I did not come here under false pretenses. I asked your father if I could come here to continue my studies, and he granted his permission. The exchange was his idea, not mine; he appealed to the chancellor of my university, and the chancellor agreed to accept Dr. Felikan on campus for the semester. I was here as a kind of academic experiment. He thought it might be interesting to have a ‘Creationist scientist’ on campus for a semester. I thought from the beginning that it was a bad idea, and I said so.”
“He was thrown off the campus!” the woman snapped.
“No, Mrs. Cassady. I’ve been in touch with my colleagues, and I know what happened. Dr. Felikan agreed to accept a post as a visiting lecturer in the philosophy department. His courses in Creation Science were listed in the catalog, but nobody signed up. You cant force students to take courses they don’t want to take, and which aren’t required.”
“Their minds were poisoned!”
“No, ma’am. My university accepts only top students, and those students’ days are filled preparing for careers in medicine, engineering, and the sciences. Some might have taken his courses if they thought they had time for fun and games, but they didn
’t. I predicted that would happen.”
“That’s blasphemous!”
“It’s the truth. You can’t just declare something to be scientific because you want it to be, Mrs. Cassady. Creation Science isn’t about science at all; it’s about faith.”
“You’re prejudiced,” Richard Cassady said.
“No, Reverend. The simple fact of the matter is that Dr. Felikan couldn’t attract students to his courses because they don’t share his faith in Creation Science.”
The man raised a trembling index finger, pointed it at her. “You’re a humanist!”
“I’m an anthropologist. My religious faith—or lack of it—has nothing whatsoever to do with my purposes here, which involve studying fundamentalist Christians as a group.”
The woman raised her eyebrows slightly. “That’s what you told my father-in-law, Dr. Marishee, and he believed you. But you lied when you said you were neutral in your feelings toward religion in general, and our faith in particular.”
Pam felt the anger rising in her, threatening her control. She balled her hands into fists and pressed them in hard against her stomach, resisted glancing over her shoulder at the papers that were so important to her. “I’m a respected authority in my field, Mrs. Cassady, and that field is comparative religion. I’ve traveled all over the world, studied more fundamentalist groups than you can name—the Dakwah Islamic movement, Sikhs, Hasidic Jews, movement Catholics. I’ve asked the same kinds of questions of all these people, taken blood and urine samples when it was permitted. I haven’t always been successful in gaining access to the groups I’ve wanted to study, but my good faith has never been questioned.”
“Perhaps those people weren’t aware of some of the things you’ve written,” the woman said, her mild tone belied by the hard glint in her eyes. She withdrew a sheet of paper from her purse, unfolded it and held it out for Pam to see. “Do you deny that you wrote this, Dr. Marishee?”
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