Book of the Dead (38 page)

Leonard comes up beside him. “Took one with him,” Bill observes.

They do not see Deke’s body stir behind them.

“Lot of guh-good it did him,” Leonard replies.

They do not hear it regain its feet and begin to slouch toward them.

Leonard maintains a respectful distance from the morbid X of the carnitrope. “So… w-what should we duh-do now?”

Bill never answers, because Leonard’s shoulder is grabbed. He turns and finds himself face to face with Deke. At first he is relieved: They made a mistake and Deke is not duh-duh-dead after all. But realization floods in: Deke is wall-eyed and slack-faced. Thickened blood stains his chin. Sand clings to the right side of his face, to his eyelashes—Leonard can even see grains in his eye. But Deke does not blink. He does not breathe. He does not have any light of life in his eyes. His cold fingers curl on Leonard’s shoulder, and pull. What do you want to say, Deke? What are you trying to tell me? Nuh-nuh-nothing. His mouth opens. Bill is shouting something, but Leonard is so fascinated by the sight of Deke back from the dead like some redneck Jesus that he doesn’t really hear Bill. Deke the Resurrected pulls him nearer, and Leonard knows he ought to do something, but all he can do is stare. The rifle is a piece of wood in his hand.
Flesh of my flesh, good buddy
. That’s what Deke would say if the front part of his brain was still working.
You gonna be baptised now! You gonna get the faith! The Holy Spirit gonna enter you! Whosogoddamnever believeth in me shall not perish, but shall dwell in the House of the Bored forever
.

But Deke the Saviour stops. He stares at Leonard in a kind of open-mouthed sorrow, a wistfulness like a child denied a sugary cereal on a trip to the grocery store with Mom. The hand still holds his shoulder, but no longer clutches with need, no longer pulls imploringly. A dog-like, questioning look enters the dull eyes. Leonard feels a kind of stupid disappointment. He feels a sudden compulsion to reason with Deke, dead or no, to ask him just what the heck is going on here, good buddy, you gonna eat me or what? But the enormously long, black barrel of a pistol enters the scene and taps Deke on the temple. Leonard sees the hand curled around the handle, bite-nailed index finger curved over the trigger, hammer cocked. Bill to the rescue. Bill who nightly yearns for rabid dogs, broken-legged horses, mortally wounded soldiers in a platoon pursued by enemy soldiers. It is the proof of your grit to shoot your own dog; it is the token of your humanity to put a thing out of its misery. Bill has wanted to put something out of its misery for as long as he can remember. An unnatural and unsanctified reanimation stands between Deke and his heavenly reward; Bill as God’s agent shall liberate his spirit.

The finger squeezes, the hammer descends, the bullet flies, the locker of Deke’s being sprays onto the sand. Father forgive them.

Marly ducks back behind the tree. Jesus Christ, they
killed
him; they shot Deke—

No. No. Think. Piece it together. Deke was dead already.

All right. Then maybe Bill and Leonard knew what was happening here, what this madness was all about.

Sweating in the artificial subtropic night, she steps out from behind the tree. She lowers her rifle and waves. “Hey,” she calls.

Bill whirls and fires. The .44 magnum goes off like a cannon. Behind her she hears the bullet slam into the tree. A splinter strikes her arm.

She drops, rolls sideways, and ends up prone with the butt of her carbine against her right shoulder, left eye sighting. “It’s Marly,” she calls. “Drop your gun.”

“Marly—” Bill heads toward her.

“Drop your gun, or Deke’s gonna hold the door for you on his way in.”

He hesitates, possibly thinking about the independent clause of Marly’s sentence, but drops the gun. His left hand goes to his wrist.

“You, too, Leonard.”

“Listen, Marly, there’s muh, muh,
more
of those things around here. I don’t think it’s such a g-g-good—”

She pulls the trigger. The rifle doesn’t buck nearly as much as she thought it would. A plume of sand kicks up behind Leonard’s right leg, and he drops his rifle. Marly stands and heads toward them. “Now what the hell’s going on?” she demands as she approaches.

“Someone’s b-b-broken into the station,” Leonard says from the beach.

“Infiltration,” adds Bill. “Carnitropes for distraction. Behind enemy lines. Liberating the soles in limbo. Tactical incursion, hit and run, select firepower for multienviron-ment guerrilla warfare. Strategic placement, Staff on alert.” He is breathing heavily. His right wrist is swelling.

Marly looks at Leonard, who shrugs and looks momentarily worried. Bill, he seems to be indicating, is playing poker with a pinochle deck.

“Grace is dead,” says Leonard, and Marly feels something with blades unfold in her chest. Not because she cared especially for Grace, to be quite honest, but because their hermetic group is irretrievably reduced. Change has been introduced into the system; ripples will spread from this splash. About fucking time.

She indicates the corpses on the sand behind Leonard. “One of them?”

He nods. “Huh-Haiffa, too, we think.”

“I saw what happened with Deke. Why did he stop? He had you, but he just stopped.”

“Because I liberated him,” replies Bill. “I freed him, I cast him from limbo. Because I blew his goddamn brains out.”

“Why did he stop attacking you before Bill shot him?” Marly firmly directs her question to Leonard, who shrugs.

“I don’t know. One m-minute he was all over me, and the nuh, next it was like he’d smelled bad muh-muh-
meat
, or someth…” He stops.

Marly frowns.

“B-b-bad meat,” says Leonard. “Oh, my God. That’s it. Culls from the herd. Cellular awareness.” He looks at Marly. “Jesus Christ, that’s it.” His stutter is much slighter.

“It’s an extremely good pistol, actually,” says Bill.

Marly ignores him. She is uncertain what to do. Now Leonard seems to be popping his excelsior, too.

“Hodgkin’s disease,” says Leonard, and thumps his chest. For a moment Marly thinks it’s another
non sequitur
, but then she realizes.

“You son of a bitch,” she says. “You never said—”

And the lights go out all over the Ecosphere.

[17]

Bonnie sits in lotus on her bed.
Om mani padme om
.
Om mani padme om
. She uses the litany as a kind of squeegee to wipe away the karmic scum she feels she has accumulated tonight.

She is just beginning to feel relaxed when the lights go out. She sits in darkness for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

She hears a faint noise like popcorn popping in the distance.

She debates whether she should stay in her room. What decides her is the realization that the air vents probably aren’t working if the power is out. She’ll want to be outside.

But… outside? The men are stalking each other, and probably Marly playing their adolescent army games along with them. Outside? No; let them get it out of their systems. Of course there are carnitropes out there, the reanimated corpses, but Bonnie feels no superstitious dread whatsoever toward them. They didn’t
ask
to be what they are, and what they are is really not very different from plants. Hungry plants, mobile plants, but plants all the same. And Bonnie feels a kinship with plants. She certainly does not feel
threatened
by them, just as she does not feel threatened by the carnitropes. You could outrun them, outsmart them, out-anything them.

She gropes around her modular dresser until she finds a miniature Tekna flashlight. She twists the ridged section ringing the lens, and the light comes on. She slides the circle of light around her room and is reminded of a germ under a microscope. Light is the only weapon she needs.

She fixes the circle of light on her door and makes her way toward it.

“This is it.” Dieter opens the power-room door and begins to enter.

“Stay right there. Turn on the light.”

“I can’t stay where I am and turn on the light.”

“Turn on the light, asshole.”

Dieter leans in and turns on the light. He takes short steps as he is prodded in. The door is shut behind him. He turns to look at his captor for the first time and is unsurprised to recognize the long-haired young man who came begging last week. Was it last week? He’s not sure how long ago it was. Time flies.

“Yeah, it’s me,” says the young man. “You just stay right there. Lace your fingers and put your hands on top of your head. We’re playing charades and you’re a sequoia, got it?”

Dieter doesn’t get it, but he nods anyway and does as he’s told.

The man keeps the submachine gun trained on him as he shrugs out of a nylon daypack. He bends and unzips it, keeping the gun on him, then pulls out a box about the size of a cardboard pencil case. The box is olive-drab and curved like a hip flask. In upraised letters one side reads FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. He carries box and backpack toward power-converter controls, circuit breakers, generator controls, voltmeters, regulators, and stacked banks of power-storage batteries. He sets the box face-down on a bank of controls, pulls out a little white box with square buttons that looks like a portable radio, connects it to the curved box, and trips a toggle switch. He sets another curved box against the battery bank. “Nice little ratbox you people have here,” he says conversationally as he goes about his work. “All the comforts of home. Air conditioning. Barcaloungers. MTV.”

“What do you want from us?” Dieter asks.

“Nothing.” He glances at him. “Really.” He shrugs. “Used to want a hamburger or two, but hey, that’s life in the big city, now, isn’t it?”

“Look, man,
I
wanted to give you some food. I
told
them we should, that it was only the right thing to do. But they wouldn’t—”

The man waves him to silence. “Water under the bridge,” he says. “Let the dead past bury its dead, I say.” He indicates the row of circuit breakers. “Main power switch?” he asks.

Dieter shrugs. “I’m a marine biologist,” he says.

“Mmph. Chust followink orders, huh?”

Dieter says nothing. The man rises and goes to the row of circuit breakers. He throws a knife switch. Nothing happens. He pulls another one. Nothing. Another.

“ ’S awright,” he says. “They’re doing something somewhere.” He continues throwing switches.

The lights go out, and Dieter makes his move.

Sailor waits until he hears the door latch jerked down and the door snatched open. He fires a burst on full auto, sweeping the barrel in a tight crescent. The clip is empty in seconds. He thumbs the release, pulls out the empty, drops it, pulls a fresh one from his back pocket, and slaps it in. He bends and gropes until he encounters the backpack. He pulls out a penlight and switches it on, then attaches it beneath the squarish gun barrel with electrical tape and plays it around the room.

The body props open the door. Bulletholes in a slight diagonal to either side of the door frame. Sailor shoulders his pack and steps over the body. “One duuumb fucker,” he says. He trains the penlight beam down. All back shots, a whole bunch of them. They don’t count for shit in the long run, but that’s all right. It’s Sailor’s party. The more, the merrier.

Flashlight beam guarded with one hand, he steps past the body and makes his way down the hall.

Bill doesn’t waste a second: He knows where his gun is, and when the lights go out, he bends, scoops it up, and runs. He doesn’t need light to find his way. Hyperacute kinesthesia. Night sense. Geared to register motion. Under siege. Trojan horse. Marly and Leonard calling, but he keeps running. Charlie’s out there. In the bush. In the desert. In the marsh. In the fields. In their own back yard.

Gotta deploy. Gotta recon. Stay low. Hit and roll. Hit and run.

He reaches the screen door easily and negotiates the access corridor in a westerly direction. He emerges in fresher air and croplands. Out there. Waiting.

Footsteps. Running toward him. Breathing, low, from the ground.
Crawling
, sneaky sons of bitches. Pale figure coming toward him on hands and knees. He raises the magnum and fires. Pain stitches his sprained wrist. Tough shit. Gotta be tough, son. No pain, no gain.

Squealing, labored breathing. Stubby, flailing legs in front of him. A goddamn
pig
, for Christ’s sake!

Wrist throbbing, he stalks the cornfields. There,
there
, two of the fucks. Zip, zip, good as dead.
Good as dead
— hah! Better soon.

He stalks. Three shots left? Let’s see: one that liberated Deke, one that missed Marly, one for makin’ bacon. Yep: three left.

They’re turning for him now. Stupid bastards, not even brains enough to hide. Couldn’t sneak up on a goddamn slug. He walks right up to the nearest. Gun against the nose. It grabs the barrel. “Say goodnight, Grade,” he says, and pulls the trigger—but the sonofabitch has grabbed around the
back
of the gun, and the hammer won’t cock back. Bill tugs the gun and the creature merely follows. The other one is pretty close now. Bill puts a foot on its stomach and shoves. The gun slides free. Bill steps back. Too close to take time to aim. Head a hard target. Policeman crouch, good form, squeeze…

Boom!
and the fucker slams backward like it’s been sledgehammered by God himself. In the muzzle flash the T-shirt reads
SAVE THE WHALES
.

Bill ignores the pain in his wrist as he takes aim and fires at the second staggering figure.
Boom!
EAT ME
, reads the shirt.

Bill laughs. “Eat
this
, shit-for-brains!” He waves the magnum. His wrist is on fire. He is alive.

He runs for the staff HQ. Ten feet in front of it, the door is flung open. He fires automatically: last bullet, quick on the draw, and right in the goddamn
forehead
, yeah! What’s her T-shirt say? He bends, pulls a flashlight from the twitching fingers, shines it down.