Always Leave ’Em Dying (21 page)

My hand froze, almost upon his face. I couldn't move. I was stunned, my mind reeling and shock smashing into my brain. For there was no doubt at all, not the slightest question about the man before me.

It was Arthur Trammel!

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

I couldn't think. I knew that Arthur Trammel had been dead, that I had seen his torn, bleeding body, his dead body. But I knew that this man was Arthur Trammel.

I stared at him, at his thin skull and close-set eyes, his teeth and chin and hair and lips. And then I pawed at his face, ripped at the long nose and squeezed his flesh, knowing I wouldn't rip false parts of his face away, that he would still be a dead man come to life.

Only seconds had passed, and through it all the crowd had been numbed by silence. I felt Trammel's hands rip at my own face, pull off my false hair and beard, saw the motion and felt his hands; from the corners of my eyes I saw movement about us, a frantic milling as men and women cringed in fright and horror, some turning away.

Then Arthur Trammel stepped back, raised his left hand, and pointed a long gnarled finger at me. In a voice like the crack of doom, loud and booming in the silence, he cried, "There stands the man who murdered me!"

As his words died away there was a low mutter from five thousand, ten, then fifty thousand throats. It was muted at first, for a long second a nearly constant rumble—and then, with a sudden, incredible violence, the crowd exploded. It was a scream, a throat-ripping cry of fright and hate, like nothing I'd ever heard before.

From the moment when Trammel had pointed at me and spoken till this moment with sound crashing against my ears, no one had made a move toward me. The movement, when it came, wasn't from the crowd, but from within this square. One of the Guardians, a square chunky man, leaped toward me. His hand clutched at my robe and spun me around—and snapped me out of my own shock.

The square and chunky Guardian had spun me around, but long before I'd turned halfway my left arm was swinging from across my middle, hand stretched open. The hard thick edge of my palm thudded into his mouth and I felt his teeth snap beneath his mashed lips.

All around me was a blur of color and movement; no others were yet inside the square, but I knew they'd soon be rushing in. I figured I was dead already, anyway, and what the hell, I'd bat these beggars with my dismembered limbs as long as I could. So I did the one thing that might shock all these bloodthirsty screechers, if they were still capable of shock. One jump took me to him, to the risen Arthur Trammel, and I hit him on the point of the chin as hard as I could, and he was once more unrisen.

I bent over and grabbed him, yanked his limp body over my head, then turned around and charged across the ring, gathering speed and whooping horribly.

These last ten seconds had affected different people in different ways, and many who had been pressed close about the ring had already drawn back or run from the bolts of lightning or sheets of flame that inevitably would be crackling about me, but there was still an appalling number of people straight ahead of me. I had no time to crawl under ropes, so I just sprinted harder and slammed through them, posts going down and ropes flapping, but I went through. And I threw Arthur Trammel as hard as I could at a flock of about fifty ready-to-faint people.

Some of them fainted. Others got the hell out of the way, either afraid of Trammel or afraid of me. And, too, a lot of them already knew I was a maniac, and that helped. There weren't many who cared to tangle with such as I.

All of a sudden, I noticed that, though I hadn't consciously chosen a destination, I had already come uphill about halfway to the funny-shaped bush I'd chosen yesterday. There were still plenty of people between it and me, though most of them weren't looking at me, but behind me at Trammel and the crowd now baying at my heels. I aimed at the bush.

Oh, man, I had done some other running in days gone by, but this was by far the best running I'd done. This time I had incentive. I noticed with a kind of detached interest a guy rolling about and a woman throwing dirt in her face, and I guess there were fits all over. That made the going easier for me, but it wasn't all gravy.

Two guys who loomed before me, either petrified or being brave, turned out to be foolhardy and received a fist in their chops. I gave one other guy a shoulder and, terrible as it may sound, straight-armed a woman. But she was a great big broad-shouldered man of a woman—and she was, after all, in my way.

Only at the very last did I actually start thinking I might make it. Of course, making it wasn't such a hell of a great thing, anyway. You can't be exactly lighthearted about jumping off a sixty-foot cliff.

So I veered away from the cliff's edge in order to get a better crack at that bush. Some people scattered and I dodged whooping around others, and then, when I was almost opposite the bush, I spun right and sprinted toward it.

As I ran toward the edge of the cliff I wondered if I were truly acting in a rational fashion, if this were really what I had so carefully planned. After all that had happened, there was at least a small chance that I was out of my mind. The thought bothered me, but I kept running.

Then I reached the edge of the cliff, leaped from it, flapped my arms, and took off for the sun.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

I flew no better than Lovable, for whom the sun had been his undoing, and I went in the same direction he had gone: down. Ah, but I had planned it this way, I told myself. Because, though I was afraid to look just yet, I knew that somewhere down there, right below that bush, was an open reservoir, with several feet of water in it, which reservoir Lyn and I had carefully cased yesterday afternoon. So all I had to do was keep falling, which was no trick at all, and I would, if my calculations were correct . . . Right then a sickening thought struck me:

My God, was that the right bush?

Suddenly I didn't want to go through with it. That was tough. All these thoughts were going through my mind with lightning speed, of course, because all this time I was still falling. Finally, I looked down, just in time to see water, and also just in time to realize that I must have been yelling, because as I plummeted into the water much of it filled my open mouth. When I hit the reservoir bottom, the impact knocked the air out of my lungs, but I was conscious, and shoving upward with my legs and paddling.

When my head broke the surface, I could hear the roar of the convertible's engine and knew that Lyn must have seen me coming. I hauled myself over the wall and dropped to the ground, ran around to the reservoir's far side, and leaped into the convertible without opening the door. Lyn was gunning the motor in low before I landed.

She didn't say anything, just slammed the accelerator down and started on the route we'd planned. Her face was white and scared, her lips pressed tightly together. At the dirt road two hundred yards out from the cliff she swung right toward the state highway. We'd driven the other way yesterday, and that way the road ended at Hollis.

Lyn glanced quickly at me and spoke. "What happened? I heard the most awful sounds."

"You heard some awful sounds. What do you think I—"

The shrill wail of a siren cut through my answer. On our right, coming like a bat out of hell down the state highway toward us, was a police radio car.

"Go," I said. "Go, baby, go."

A second police car was a hundred yards behind the first one; a third followed it. "Oh, murder," I said. "There'll be a thousand cop cars after us in a minute. There'll—"

I stopped because we were almost at the intersection. We were going to make it ahead of that first police car. But we had to turn, and the way Lyn was driving, I figured we'd turn over instead of left.

"Hit the brakes!" I yelled, but she was already hitting them. We slid, skidded sideways, and swerved on the dirt road as she let up on the brake pedal and jammed it down again, yanking the steering wheel left. When we hit asphalt, the car shuddered and tires shrieked. I could smell hot rubber and brake lining, then I felt the car tip.

I thought we were going over for sure, and as I started to reach for the wheel she snapped it right, whipped it left again as the wheels banged down on the asphalt. We slid clear over the edge of the road, hit the dirt, then veered back onto the highway. A shot cracked out and I glanced over my shoulder to see the radio car behind, so close I could see the bore of a gun held in an officer's hand. His right arm was stuck out the window by him and it looked as if the gun were aimed squarely at my left eye.

I snapped around, shoved my hands down between my legs to the sack of tetrahedrons ready for me on the floor boards, metal gadgets like a kid's jacks, only multipointed and sharp. In the war, they were scattered on roads to stop enemy vehicles. This was war, and right now that guy shooting at me was an enemy.

Another shot cracked out and the slug crashed through the windshield as I swung my arms up, clutching a double handful of tetrahedrons, and threw them over my head and behind the car. I reached down for more, tossed them out onto the road, then jerked my head around for a look.

The officer was just about to fire again and kill me when the car's front tires hit a whole mess of tetrahedrons; and then the back ones hit more. There was one bang from the gun, then four almost simultaneous bangs as all four tires blew out. The car jerked, skidded off the road. For a moment I thought it was going over, but the car stayed upright.

Far down the road behind us there was a mass of cars, part of the rabid fifty thousand joining the chase. I got busy, tossed out tetrahedrons until the sack was empty. By the time I finished, the other two police cars were out of commission, one clear off the road and the other partly on it, turned sideways, and the mass of a hundred or so other buggies was almost upon the beginning of the tetrahedron highway. I couldn't bear to look.

I turned around, stared ahead, trying to think.

Suddenly Lyn cut into my thoughts. "What's the matter? You're white as a sheet. And why do you keep saying that?"

"Saying what? I didn't know I was saying anything."

"You keep saying, 'Trammel is risen, Trammel is risen.'"

I wiped sweat off my forehead. "Baby," I said, "believe it or not, he is."

"Oh, my goodness," she said. "Shell, pull yourself together."

"Ha. That's what he did. He's back there. I wouldn't be surprised if he's back there in that reservoir dancing around on the water."

"It couldn't have been Trammel."

"Damnit, it was!"

"Then he couldn't have been dead."

"He was dead. And now he's alive. I'm nuts, that's all. I'm through. Baby, I'm going to hell. And you know what? I really believe it. I'm going to roast for nine million centuries. Oh, the things I've done! I thought they were worth it, but nine million centuries—"

"Will you stop babbling?"

"Lyn," I said hoarsely, "you haven't been where I've been. You didn't see him. Man, his eyes were like neon tubes, his voice was like thunder."

She took one hand from the wheel and slapped me so hard that little dots danced in front of my eyes. For about five seconds no more was said. Then I grinned at her. "OK, baby, I'll explain later."

The next twenty minutes were frantic. Twice I stole cars, crossed the ignition wires while Lyn drove on ahead, then drove my stolen buggy after her and picked her up. Two police cars with sirens screaming passed us while we were in a Ford; three while we were in a Chevy. I turned the Chevy's radio on and tried to explain to Lyn what had happened. A news broadcast was on the air.

The announcer paused. "Here is a bulletin just handed me," he said. "Ah—" He stopped, then went on. "Arthur Trammel, dead three days, this afternoon arose from the grave . . . Pardon me." There was a short silence. "One moment, please." He coughed. "This is . . . ah, the first report and without corroboration. Arthur Trammel, founder of Trammelism and leader of the Guardians, and, ah, dead three days, this afternoon arose from the grave in the presence of a crowd estimated at one hundred thousand persons. He was assaulted by a prophet alleged to have murdered him, a man whom—who it is reported may have been Sheldon Scott." There was a long pause. "Who, it is alleged, flew? Flew through the air in approximately the same spot where one Prophet Lovable unsuccessfully flew yesterday."

There was a little more, and the announcer got through it, including the fact that I had escaped in a Chrysler driven by a woman. The license number was given. By now the police undoubtedly had found Lyn's car.

I skidded to a stop at the edge of the road. "Far enough," I said. "Now we walk."

It took six hours of the day and maybe a year off our lives, but just before 10 p.m., with the remembered sound of sirens still in our ears, we could see the lights of Randolph Hunt's lodge fifty yards away. I went to it alone, checked with Hunt, and then brought in Lyn.

The following Tuesday, at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, Randy, Lyn, and I sat before logs burning in the fireplace. Jo and Olive, under the circumstances, hadn't been invited. The three of us had read the newspapers, listened to the radio, and watched TV, and Randy had picked up word-of-mouth conversation and whispers that he'd passed on to us.

There had been frenzy in the news before, but now insanity was the order of the day. The word was spreading like hoof-and-mouth disease: Trammel had risen. There were skeptics and disbelievers and men convulsed with laughter everywhere you looked, and the All-High, Trammel himself, had been questioned—ever so politely—by police and other citizens. But nobody could prove he hadn't risen. And everybody was talking about it.

Among the shattered ones, the cults and crackpots, there were rapture and shouting complete with convulsions. All the cults and strange sects were vying with each other, each trying to outflip the next, and it was pathetic the way men hoped for more miracles. All kinds of silly things happened. It was a contagious madness, a galloping dementia, like chain letters or knock-knock; the thing caught on and swept over California like a plague, then headed east.