Shocker

by Randall Boyll

  He chuckled miserably. Haunting his house. See what they could scare up. Har-de-har.

  That left Rhino’s apartment, a good eight miles from here. Hitchhike there? Get real. Nobody hitchhikes in the city. Taxi? No dough. Sleep at the college? Locked by now. Steal a car? What, and go to jail?

  Pinker ended his dilemma by suddenly turning into the other end of the alley, headlights blazing, siren rising from nothing to a scream. The tires screeched as Pinker laid on the gas, barreling straight for Jonathan. The big police-custom Chrysler barely fit; at times Pinker shaved paint and metal off the sides with shattering explosions of orange sparks. Jonathan gaped at it, blinded by the light, thinking dully that he should move before the car and the rough brick wall made hamburger out of him.

  Groaning, he pulled himself hand over hand up the ladder, which creaked and muttered against its rotted moorings, threatening to collapse. Pinker’s car howled past just as Jonathan pulled his feet out of the way, the Chrysler sucking a scatter of trash and old leaves behind it. Pinker sent the car into a tire-smoking spin, knocking the tail hard against a dead streetlight. The motor roared insanely, and he was charging forward again. In the backglow of the headlights Jonathan could see him, barely recognizable now as Don Parker at all, a grinning white moon for a face, a specter with wildly tattered hair and eyes slitted down blankly.

  Almost out of energy, drenched with sweat, Jonathan hauled himself up the last rung to the fire escape proper, where rust-eaten steps zigzagged upward to blackness. He paused to look down; Pinker had brought the Chrysler to a tire-cooking halt by the ladder and was trying to open his door. It gave only a few inches before thudding into the opposite wall. He howled and threw the car into reverse. The open door caught in the bricks and, with a crunching groan, buckled and folded. The rear tires shot hot tornadoes of smoke, spinning in a blur while Pinker screamed at God and the world and Jonathan Parker.

  The door gave up the ghost with a metallic crunch. The car shot backward. It crashed into the same dead streetlight, which gave up and toppled over sideways, spraying streetlight glass to both curbs. Pinker hopped out. He fiddled with the pistol while Jonathan crawled up the steps on all fours. He fired, and sparks jumped off the wall beside Jonathan’s head. He fired again in a frenzy, chewing holes in the dirty brick and making bright-metal streaks through the rust of the steps. Jonathan scrambled faster, ducking and dodging an enemy he could not see.

  Pinker dashed to the ladder and began hoisting himself up, moving fast for a man with a dead knee. The pistol was clamped between his teeth, dead center in the middle of his snarl. He came to the landing, reloaded, and began shooting upward. The stairway rang like a large tuning fork while sparks jumped off the steel. Jonathan imagined the agony of being shot through the bottom of his foot. That would end this little race fast. But he was nearing the rooftop, and Pinker was reloading again as he took the steps two at a time.

  Jonathan rolled himself over the lip of the flat tar roof, got to his feet at a speed that would win him no trophies, and struggled gamely on. Rainwater had collected in places on the sagging roof, and he splashed through these while noticing that he had nowhere left to go. This was not good news. Pinker knew it, too.

  “Dead end, asshole!” Pinker shouted as he pulled himself up to the roof.

  Jonathan looked around in desperation. The roof was about the size of a tennis court, but there was nowhere to go. Dead end, cul-de-sac, end of the road. Finished and finis. He turned and shouted. “Dad! Fight him! Use your will!”

  Dad wasn’t in an accommodating mood tonight. He laughed and began popping off more shots from his seemingly endless supply of ammunition. Jonathan ducked behind a squat sheet-metal ventilator of some sort, some ancient thing that was putting out the aroma of rot and decay from the bowels of the building. Jonathan grimaced at the smell. Obviously a wino or two had croaked here. What an undignified place to die, both for the winos and himself.

  A bullet punched easily through the aged sheet metal, making a large pencil hole beside Jonathan’s face. This was not good. He knew he might as well have hidden behind a pile of feathers. He looked around while Pinker drew closer and his fear threatened to close in on him like a shroud.

  There was another building behind him. It was fully two stories taller than this one. A single ladder climbed its wall. On the roof there was an Erector Set construction, a miniature Eiffel Tower topped with a large dish antenna. One baleful red light near the top winked on and off to scare the airplanes away.

  The jump was easily ten feet, hard to do on the ground, harder yet up here in the sky. Jonathan let his overloaded mind debate the issue while Pinker came inexorably on, dragging his foot like Boris Karloff as the Mummy, only moving three times as fast. He punctuated his uneven footfalls with periodic pistol shots. The ventilator sprouted more holes.

  Jonathan’s mind handed him the decision: go for it. He did. He sprang up and barreled straight for the far lip of the roof, aiming himself at the ladder so far, far away. Adrenaline put him back into top form momentarily, but would, as usual, take its toll later. His feet found the edge. He catapulted himself off, arms and legs spread wide like the limbs of an oversized flying squirrel, watching the ladder come closer, knowing that bullets were hissing past his ears, knowing that the rungs of the ladder were blurring upward, which meant he was falling.

  He smashed onto the ladder, hurting everything at once. His hands reached up to grab at the rungs, but they slipped past his fingers with a sound like an old-fashioned washboard being scrubbed. His forward momentum was gone, no longer needed, but gravity was obeying its own law, and he was falling.

  He took the outer bars of the ladder in a bear hug, hooking his feet around them like a man determined to climb a greased pole. Rungs thunked against his chin and heels. His eyes were squeezed shut. Friction burned his hands and turned his Reeboks into smoking torches. He slowed. And stopped. And thanked the god of lost causes for another reprieve.

  He climbed. This ladder was not rusted very badly; apparently it was still used by whoever owned the antenna, who knew and who cared? He climbed as fast as his overtaxed body would allow, realizing he had been in free-fall for nearly two stories, a tale his burned hands would tell for the next four days.

  Pinker screamed obscenities above him, firing down into darkness at a target he could no longer see, Pinker a small and raging shadow under the light of the moon. It came to Jonathan that he should just stay here, wait Pinker out, hang on to this ladder for dear life until he went away. The idea had a certain attraction to it. Only, Pinker would never go away. If Jonathan stayed, he would go down that building and come up this one. If Jonathan went up, Pinker would have to face the ten-foot plunge. He was the World’s Most Determined Man, but if Pinker died, Don would die. If Don’s body fused from the strain and became a useless husk, Pinker would simply find someone else. He always did. So Jonathan climbed toward the top and the telling moonlight, his mind full of ifs, somehow hoping to run the energy out of Don while keeping him alive.

  He was about to enter the upper zone where darkness ended and moonlight began, wary and full of a creeping sort of terror, when he noticed that Pinker was gone. He looked around, not surprised. Not being able to see him, Pinker had opted for a trip down the fire escape and a chance to kill Jonathan from below. That was fine. Pretty soon Jonathan would be on the roof of this higher building, and Pinker could peddle his wares to death somewhere else.

  He was twelve rungs into the light when a bright, piercing scream shot through the chasm between the first building and the second. Jonathan stopped, glancing over his shoulder. Nothing was unusual except the strange scream; nothing was amiss. He thought he saw a ghost of a shadow falling to the street at the edges of his vision, but it might have been a bit of trash, a leaf. He climbed, glad that Pinker had made the wrong decision.

  He was almost at the top, ready to scramble onto the roof of this stunted mid-America skyscraper, when the ladder jerked as if hit by a wreckin
g ball. Jonathan stopped, hanging on tight, new fear blooming in his brain. Pinker was on the ladder below, impossibly on the ladder below. No wrecking ball, then: one plummeting Pinker catching the ladder by sheer force of will. It was a miracle that their combined weight did not pull the ladder from the wall.

  Jonathan was still looking down when an orange blossom flashed into existence below. It was followed by the loud ping of a bullet hitting the ladder. Jonathan felt like throwing himself into the abyss and ending this whole impossible survival scene. He had youth on his side, and little else. Pinker had the demons of hell backing him up.

  He came to the end of the ladder. The red light above the small-scale Eiffel Tower flashed red, off, red, off. Beacon to air travelers. Beacon to the bums and derelicts of Maryville. Here you have a safe haven, it seemed to signal, but only if you are willing to pay the price.

  Jonathan was. He stood on the top rung of the ladder, for a moment almost losing balance, and then he was clawing his way onto the roof.

  It was not much different from the other one, save for the tower thrusting up near the left edge. There were shallow puddles of stagnant rainwater pooled wherever a depression in the old and buckling tar had formed; the roof itself was two times the size of a tennis court, big brother to the previous one. Jonathan ran to the opposite edge as Pinker clanged up the ladder. Jonathan’s burned Reeboks slipped in a huge puddle and he felt himself skidding to the edge. He dropped down on his butt and cut creases in the tar with his fingernails, sliding to a stop. One foot dropped over. Jonathan took a wondering breath, amazed that a young man named Jonathan Parker could be doing this wild and ridiculous thing, sliding around on a twelve-story building like an amateur ice skater. He scooted back and got to his feet.

  Pinker had risen from the ladder and was wrestling himself onto the roof. His breath pumped up and down as fast as a panting dog’s. His clothes were mottled with giant spots of sweat. The gleam in his eyes would barely pass for a burned-out penlight. But he could still shoot, and shout.

  “You son of a bitch! Die! Die, you rotten little—”

  He aimed the gun with spent and shaking hands. He grimaced as he pulled the trigger, his eyes lighting up a bit in anticipation of the kill. His face became a sudden mask of bewilderment.

  The gun did not fire. Instead it dropped to the tar of the roof with a thump. Pinker slammed both hands against his chest, near the center. “Ooog,” he said quite distinctly.

  Jonathan felt a twinge of relief. The chase had exhausted Don and his unwanted guest. Jonathan walked toward him.

  “Don? Are you back, Don?”

  Pinker’s grotesque leer came back to the face that had been twisted with pain. He lunged at Jonathan, botching it only at the last moment when Jonathan sidestepped him as neatly as you please. Jonathan thanked the gods once again for the years he had spent in training, surveyed his options briefly, and knew what he had to do.

  Keep climbing. Pinker was almost spent.

  And by the by, a snickering inner voice suggested, so are you!

  Jonathan ran for the tower, which now seemed to loom upward fifty feet against the sky and the fat half-moon that peered down without caring. He jumped for all he was worth, and his questing fingers found cold steel.

  He willed his hands and feet to do him one more favor before signing off the air. He willed them to carry him upward where there was no sureness of escape, no sureness of an end to this. He simply asked them to do their best.

  They did. He saw the ghostly outlines of his hands as they grabbed one steel bar after another, pulling him up. His feet were doing things he had no awareness of. His legs had become an entity of their own, driving him up and up to a destiny that might well stink worse than the current one did.

  Pinker worked his way up, too. Without his big pistol he was no more menacing than a white shark. Jonathan climbed faster. So did Pinker.

  Someone shouted from below. Both Jonathan and Pinker peered down, dumb with wonder.

  “What’s with you idiots?”

  Pinker growled. It was only a security guard coming up the ladder onto the rooftop, a rare thing in this screwball part of town. Maybe his only task in life was to aim the antenna dish at the nearest satellite every two or three hours. Maybe his only task in life was to die right here. None of it mattered to either Jonathan or Pinker. One life had no importance anymore when weighed against the fifty that had gone before.

  The guard shouted again as Jonathan resumed climbing. “Hey! If you get in front of that dish you’ll be fried alive! It bounces fifty thousand volts of microwave television transmission from God knows where! It’s a giant microwave oven!”

  Jonathan stopped and shouted down to him. “Shut it off and call for help!”

  The guard emitted a nervous little laugh. “Are you kidding? Shut off the basketball game? About a zillion people will be out to fry your ass. If the dish doesn’t fry it first, that is. Ha-ha.”

  Yeah, ha-ha, Jonathan thought as Pinker reached out to grab his foot. He jerked it away and went back to climbing. The red light affixed to the tower, the one that had seemed so tiny from far away, was a gigantic beacon about the size of a tire. It shone off and on in a steady beat. Jonathan had to keep his eyes closed as he passed it, and still he saw brutal red flashes behind his eyelids. He bonked his head on something, some kind of wobbly steel, and opened his eyes. He was amazed to see a catwalk above the dish, one final place to stand and fight and die, a thick wire mesh that went around the top of the tower in a semicircle above the antenna. No doubt for the convenience of the dish-aimer, since falling fifty feet to a tar roof was nobody’s idea of fun, and aiming any kind of dish (especially one twenty feet in diameter) was not work to be performed without having firm footing.

  The stairs angled up and backward, leaving Jonathan clinging to the handrails like an acrobat while all of Maryville snoozed peacefully below, down where the sparkling city lights ran in even squares and nothing was wrong. His feet, still damp, slipped, and for a second he was hanging on to the ladder’s sides with his feet pedaling the blackness of the air. Pinker was grunting along like a pig below, snorting his victory to this limited audience.

  Jonathan found his footing again. The three steps up with his back nearly parallel to the roof were more exhilarating than anything an amusement park had to offer. He dragged himself up to the catwalk and scooted across its unforgiving cold mesh, mentally giving up acrobatics for life, as well as football, basketball (in which he was notoriously lousy), and walking. Things were just getting too dangerous these days.

  Pinker was panting, a worn-out steam engine signaling overload with every tortured breath. Jonathan got himself on his feet and walked to the far side of the catwalk. The microwave dish was humming below his feet like a nestful of wasps. Jonathan walked the slim circumference of the catwalk, his heart thumping, his breath screeching in his lungs. He wiped his forehead with his hand and flipped the drops away. They fell in front of the dish, dancing in free-fall and popping as they cooked in the unseen heat. Jonathan jerked back, realizing now that he could hear the voice of the basketball announcer as it was beamed on fifty thousand volts, crackling and nearly unrecognizable in the invisible stream of microwaves. He squatted and lowered a hand to the dish, feeling it. Hot, humming. Hot enough, maybe, to cook Pinker out of Don’s body without killing him.

  Pinker came up. He grappled his way up onto the catwalk. Sweat was shining on his face, looking blood red under the flashing beacon. He was jittering and shaking with fatigue.

  They played a slow and exhausting round of catch-me-if-you-can, circling around on the narrow catwalk, Pinker lunging again and again while Jonathan danced away. One time Jonathan felt his heels slip over the edge of the slick mesh floor, and for an excruciating moment believed it was all over, that his madly pinwheeling arms were doing nothing at all for his balance. But then it was there again, and he nearly fell forward. The absurdity of this situation struck him, but there was no humor in it. Here he was
on top of a twelve-story building, performing the dance of death on a catwalk the size of a child’s swimming pool, fifty feet up on a television tower. Sometimes life is just plain strange.

  Pinker clutched his chest again, his leering face shifting suddenly into a huge frown. He seemed extraordinarily baffled. He gurgled something and fell to his knees.

  Jonathan stopped, nearly ready to collapse along with Pinker. Only … now he didn’t seem to be Pinker anymore. His face was twisted up with pain. He looked at Jonathan with eyes that no longer glowed, eyes that registered pain and a curious brand of remorse. His mouth fell open and he spoke: “Oh my God. Jonathan—my heart!”

  Jonathan stepped toward him, too familiar with Pinker’s tricks. “Dad? Is that really you?”

  He nodded once, doubling over with pain. “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned. “What’s happening?”

  Jonathan stayed back while the breeze gusted hard and cool against his face, tattering his soaking hair. He wondered if this was the real thing, this newest trick. To his knowledge Don had never had heart trouble.

  Don (Pinker?) fell forward on his face and rolled to the rim of the catwalk. Jonathan took another step, wild with uncertainty, wanting to help but not wanting to die in the process.

  Don rolled again. He plunged out of sight, soundless. A moment later the tower swayed back and forth as if hit by a huge invisible hammer. Jonathan went down on his stomach, nearly petrified with shock, and looked down at the huge antenna dish. His breath caught in his throat.

  Don had managed to grab hold of the top of the dish. The ghostly announcer shouted something about Wildcats smashing Detroit. Jonathan reached down for his hand, able to scrape it with his fingernails. He smelled burning hair then, and realized with a burst of horror that Don was hanging in front of the dish, his body engulfed in microwaves. Don wrenched his mouth open and screamed, eyes squinched shut, his whole body twisting and flopping as the invisible rays soaked through him. He opened his mouth again, and this time it was the thin, reedy voice of the basketball announcer snapping and sizzling out of his mouth, trailed by a puff of smoke. Don seemed to glow a hellish, unnatural green.