by Jon Land
Chalmers’s words concerned the events of 1979, but the fragments of her life before that time were returning as well. There were five of them in all, friends from the sixties who missed the fire of those times and decided to bring it all back. The raw, untempered violence that had been expected for a time, even condoned. Where had it gone? Vietnam was finished, along with the cause and the rationale it brought. But who needed a rationale when you came right down to it? Revolution was revolution. You didn’t need a cause; you needed a desire.
Hedda and the others called themselves the Storm Riders, after the song “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors. They planned to ride herd on the storm, sweep the nation away in its vortex and show it that God might be dead, but His wrath sure the fuck wasn’t. Their group was spawned from the remnant waste of the Weathermen and SDS, fringe dwellers who had almost remade society and got buried for it in the end.
They took their names from famous songs from the times that had spawned them. Hedda was Lucretia McEvil from Blood, Sweat and Tears. Bob Calhoun was the Reaper from me Blue Oyster Cult tune. Frank Webb was Major Tom courtesy of David Bowie. Ian Swenson was the Sandman from the song of that name by America. And Paula Rebb became Eleanor Rigby, who was buried along with her name.
The Storm Riders took themselves seriously. Maybe it had started as a game, but it hadn’t ended up that way. They’d robbed banks, depositories, even a casino once. Their specialty, though, was kidnapping. At first they chose their victims politically. Before long politics changed to economics. Only the facade of activism remained.
The boy had been thirteen years old, Hedda remembered now. His name was Ricky Baylor. They’d grabbed him after school while he was waiting for the bus. Son of a rich Washington lawyer who had actually defended a number of fringe dwellers back when revolution was more fashionable. Hedda had just walked right up and snatched him, shot up the bus a little to discourage anyone from playing hero.
Though a woman, she was actually the tallest of the Storm Riders and equally as strong as the men. Naturally attractive she deliberately worked against her good looks, for the Storm Riders didn’t care about how they looked. That was buying into the system. Thinking products from Revlon or Max Factor could change your life was bullshit. You wanted change, you went out and did it, went out and made it.
The Storm Riders weren’t really changing much, except maybe themselves. If Calhoun and Webb couldn’t transport themselves back to the sixties, maybe good old LSD could. They started eating the stuff and seeing zoo animals everywhere. Paula went sex crazy, fucking everything in sight, including, perhaps especially, her .44 magnum. She chambered a single bullet once and played her own version of Russian roulette. Spun the cylinder and stuck the gun up into herself, pulled the hammer back and fired.
Click.
Said it was the best come she ever had. Ian and Hedda stayed clear of the drugs and the weird stuff, and through it all, somehow, they fell in love. They would lie in bed hugging while in the next room Bob would be freaking out over some inside-out acid dream where the world changed color and only he could see it. And next door down Paula was screaming in ecstasy with God knew what jammed inside herself.
It was all coming apart, but none of them could see it. They made up their own rules, and if the rules changed that was okay, too. The Baylor kid would make everything all right for a while. They needed to disappear, burrow underground to recharge the fringe batteries that had drained dry on excessiveness. Make themselves a cool mill on this one and ride into the sunset on a horse with no name.
But Bob the Reaper fucked up. Got himself IDed buying groceries; never even saw the FBI man who was one of five hundred showing pictures around the Washington area where their van had been found. Goddamn Frank was supposed to torch it, but he forgot the detonators and just drove it into a ditch instead.
“This is the FBI. Come out with your hands in the air. We know you’re in there. The house is surrounded.”
Hedda was the only one who heard this first challenge over the bullhorn. Ian was asleep, Bob and Frank were tripping, and Paula was painting the inside of her vagina with cocaine. Hedda reached the window just as the spotlights came on, the house hit by a sudden patch as bright as day. They were everywhere, more guns than people, barrels attached to figures lost to the night.
“What the fuck?” Bob wondered, as he stumbled down the stairs with a pair of pistols in hand.
“Wow,” Paula said, emerging from painting class in the kitchen.
“We’re fucked,” Hedda heard Ian say.
“I repeat. We have the house surrounded. Come out with your hands up, surrender the boy and—”
“Ah, fuck you!”
Frank’s booming voice shattered the night, rising even over the bullhorn. Automatic fire from one of the upstairs windows followed, and one of the cops’ windshields exploded. Instantly the fire was returned, peppering the house and chewing it apart.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Hedda was conscious of her own screaming, and for a brief time nothing else. But then something happened. The Storm Riders got their collective sense back. The five terrorists who at that time occupied five slots on the FBI’s most wanted list coalesced once more into a fighting group. Bob took charge.
“Sandman, back up the Major upstairs. Rigby watch the back. Lucretia, get the kid from the basement. He’s still our ticket out of this!”
They grasped rifles from closets and corners first, and then went for grenades and belt-fed machine guns. The house continued to shake under the fusillade of bullets pounding it, but now the fire was being returned in kind. Death had already knocked. Thing was to trip it up after you opened the door.
Hedda held her hands cupped over her ears as she descended into the basement. She found the boy tied up and blindfolded where she had left him, undid his bonds with her knife and replaced them with a powerful arm around his chest.
He fought for breath, unable to speak. Hedda dragged him along with one hand while the other tightened on an M-16 turned to full auto. Upstairs the feds had tried tear gas, but Reaper had already passed out gas masks, even one for the kid. On the second floor, Major was firing forty-millimeter grenades from his MK-19, blowing the shit out of the cop cars and laughing through all of it. A few of the feds crashed through an attic skylight and turned the Major into a pin cushion. Hedda heard it and charged up the stairs, pulling the trigger as she rounded the top and carving the two of them up.
“We got the kid!” Reaper was screaming to the feds outside. “Just back away and leave us the car. You fuck with us, he dies!”
And he would. Lucretia McEvil had no doubt about that.
Outside the firing stopped.
“All right, you got it,” the bullhorn voice came back. “Just don’t hurt the kid.”
It took ten minutes before the arrangements were set to Reaper’s satisfaction. He turned to Hedda.
“You take the kid, Lucretia.” He handed her a pistol. “Keep it against his head. It’s my Colt special, just for you. Rest of us will bring up the rear.”
“Wow,” Eleanor Rigby muttered. “Wow.”
Her hands had seemed to find the bloody splotch in her midsection for the first time. It had soaked her shirt and was dripping down the crotch of her khaki pants.
“Wow,” she said one more time, and crumpled dead.
“We’re coming out,” Bob the Reaper screamed. “Don’t fuck this up!”
Hedda went first into the spill of bright lights, the boy held in front of her with the barrel of the Colt special against his head for all to see. She had to squint to make her way. Sandman and Reaper followed closely behind, both cradling M-16s.
“Take it easy,” the bullhorn voice said.
The car was parked on the lawn, as ordered.
“Kid comes with us,” Reaper yelled. “Try anything ’fore we get where we’re going and he’s gone.”
Of course they didn’t know where they were going, not yet. Maybe to a pizza joint. Rea
per was the brains. The planning was up to him.
Hedda took the steps gingerly, feeling her way, the boy a shield before her.
“Get the fuck back!” Reaper shouted to a few stray cops looming in front of their bullet-ravaged patrol cars. “Get the fuck—”
Pffffffft … Pfffffft …
She heard the silenced gunshots an instant before Bob groaned. The next burst pinned Ian against the porch post, his face gone and limbs twitching horribly. Sandman! … She swung back to the light, shaking.
And her gun went off.
The hair trigger on Bob’s Colt special was to blame, a cruel accident. The Baylor boy’s brains smashed into her and blew her backward. His blood was all over her, and what saved her in the end was the fact that the feds thought she had been shot and not the boy. Only when they rushed forward did they see the truth. The boy’s face was miraculously intact, but the rest of his head was gone, showered over the dazed Lucretia McEvil.
Page-one news. A media trial. Yes, it was all coming back… . She would have been sentenced to death, had not the death penalty been recently overturned by the state supreme court. As it was, four one-hundred-year terms to run sequentially eliminated any possibility of parole. She would be in prison for the rest of her life.
Yet here she was now, no clear memories of prison at all, and no idea of how she had been taken out for service with The Caretakers as part of what Pomeroy had called Renaissance. The memories she did have hurt, hurt physically. Within the pain, though, there was relief. Questions at last answered, gaping holes at least partially filled in.
Her rescue of Christopher Hanley had stirred her mind to recall the Baylor boy in fits and starts, one incident triggering another similar one. She had glimpsed parts of that final shootout in the street in which her gun had gone off and showered her with the boy’s brains. But the blocks had kept her from seeing it all as anything more than an unpleasant lingering dream. Now Hedda supposed similar memories would be given life by other associations. The blocks August Pomeroy had implanted were eroding, washed away by the actual life she had led before The Caretakers.
Chalmers’s words had evaporated into wheezing. He had spent himself, couldn’t summon the energy to make the words emerge anymore there in the woods. Hedda sat facing him as the rest of her past filtered back. The ground dirt stuck to her wet clothes. The day’s midsummer warmth did nothing to relieve the chill surging through her.
Something new fluttered through her head. Something more about that last day of the Storm Riders, about herself. She searched for the memory, but it eluded her. Not blocked by August Pomeroy, blocked by herself. Something that would hit her like a blade to the belly if she found firm hold.
What? What was this last fragment she couldn’t recapture? In all that pain, could there have been something beyond what she was now facing?
“I was convicted. Sentenced to prison for life,” she said finally, hoping to distract herself from considering the answer. “What happened?”
“We came and … got you,” Chalmers managed to get out through his speaker. “You … fit.”
“Fit what?”
“The profile. You … could kill. You did … kill.”
Hedda looked at Chalmers’s lips as he nodded and began to speak again. She imagined that the words were emerging from his mouth with each gurgled rasp through the speaker.
“You were all … proven killers. No … conscience. No … hesitation. We … wanted that, needed … that.”
“The island,” Hedda muttered. “Pomeroy mentioned an island.”
Chalmers nodded. “Devil’s Claw … Where you and … the others were … taken. Where you … were born. Where … we must go.”
“You and I?”
“And oth-ers.”
“Who?”
“The rest of … The Care-tak-ers.”
“They’re alive?”
Chalmers’s tired eyes drooped. He sighed. “I wouldn’t give … the others up to him … after Deerslayer… . I couldn’t. I hid … them because … I saw what had … to be done.”
“The island …”
“It must be … destroyed … He is there. The … rest are there.”
“Rest of what?”
“An army, all like … you. His army.”
“Whose army, damn it!”
Chalmers looked at her closer. “Name would mean nothing to you.”
“But he has Hanley’s poison, doesn’t he? And he’s going to use it.”
“Not if we … stop him at … the island.”
“We … How many?”
“Seventeen and … me.”
“Against an army, as you put it. An army that will be expecting you now.”
“No,” Chalmers said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m … dead.”
The Sixth Dominion
Tiny Tim
Wednesday, August 19; 8:00 P.M.
Chapter 23
KIMBLERLAIN NEVER REMEMBERED the long drive to Captain Seven’s from the scrap yard; he barely recalled Winston Peet easing him into the backseat and driving off. He came to sporadically over the next eighteen hours. Pain rocked him everywhere. The pounding in his head drove him back into oblivion each time he reached for consciousness. When he at last managed to keep his eyes open, Peet was there by the bed, his massive bulk squeezed into one of Captain Seven’s patchwork armchairs.
“How?” he mouthed more than said.
The giant grasped the intent of his question without further words. “I came to your friend because I felt you were in trouble. He sent me to the scrap yard.”
Kimberlain’s mouth was sandpaper dry. “At the cabin, you said you couldn’t help.”
“I could not help you in your pursuits because doing so would mean crossing over again into the dark world I have abandoned and forsaken. But what we face now, what you faced in the scrap yard, threatens to reach out and drag me back. That is what I felt, and it left me no choice but to intervene.”
“The ninth dominion,” Kimberlain followed. He explained that its goal was for misfits and madmen to take over the world under the guidance of Andrew Harrison Leeds.
“The hints were there when you visited me,” Peet said when the Ferryman was finished.
“But you didn’t say anything.”
“Because you weren’t ready to hear.”
“And now you think Leeds is prepared to make the ninth dominion a reality.”
The giant shook his head. “Not think. I am sure.”
“How?”
“I felt him.”
“Felt him?”
“Before we left the scrap yard, I felt him watching me through one of the cameras. In that instant I touched his soul and all was clear.”
“Not to me, Peet.”
“The lack of clarity is Leeds’s greatest advantage. You see the ninth dominion from your perspective, not his. It is real because he sees it as real. And if I do not help you stop it, I will be drawn into its domain.”
“A world inherited by the mad, the violent, and the depraved,” Kimberlain elaborated. “What happens to everyone else?”
“Washed away. Plowed under and lost forever. I feel it about to happen, Ferryman. Leeds has the means to bring it about. I felt his confidence through the camera.”
“You’re sure he saw you?”
Peet nodded. “I felt him reach out his hand. Part of me wanted to take it, Ferryman.”
“That’s behind you, Winston.”
“Only if life were linear. But it is circular. From one perspective, behind is actually ahead. The swirls are everywhere. Order is tenuous. If the ninth dominion is not stopped before Leeds finds me, I lose everything I have gained these past few years.”
Kimberlain’s thoughts were a jumble now, and it hurt his head to think. Too much pain. Too much pounding.
“How, Winston?” he wondered out loud. “How could Leeds have come up with a means of destruction that spares his chosen lot?”
&n
bsp; “Good question,” Captain Seven said from the doorway. He was wearing a ragged bathrobe and holding a bag of Cheez Doodles in his hand. “I don’t have the answer yet, but I’ve learned some things that might help us find it.”
Leeds ran the tapes again in slow motion. His cameras had caught extraordinarily little of Winston Peet’s battle with the two-tonner. In fact, the only clear shot of the bald giant was the one where he gazed at the camera after raising Kimberlain upright. Leeds stopped the tape there and zoomed in. Peet’s head, turned slightly to the side so only one eye was completely in view, filled the entire screen.
Leeds imagined Peet was actually there in the room, ready to join him. If anyone was made for the ninth dominion, it was Peet.
He would have to find him first, though, and Andrew Harrison Leeds was certain he knew just how to go about accomplishing that.
“You sure you don’t want any, big fella?” Captain Seven offered, holding his bag of Cheez Doodles out to Peet.
The giant shook his head.
“Sorry, boss, can’t offer you any till I’m sure you’re ready to hold food down.”
“How bad is it?”
“Does it hurt to sit up?”
“Yeah.”
“That bad. Seriously, you’ve got a slight concussion, bruised ribs, six alcohol ounces worth of cuts and lacerations. Fuck, I always preferred blowing people up to putting them back together.”
“What’d you find out?” Kimberlain asked.
“Been able to confirm that starting five years ago at least seventy-five maximum security prisoners have disappeared without a trace and another sixty apparently died. Add to that count another fifty or so who came out of you-know-where.”
“The Locks?”
“Bingo.”
In the chair between them, Peet had stiffened.
“What is it, Winston?” Kimberlain asked.
“I should have known all along… .”
“Known what?”