The Scream (13 page)

Every time, they found another stray. Sometimes two. In Kansas City they'd even found twins: fifteen-year-old bimbettes with high little titties and the combined I.Q. of a pair of lead bookends. They squealed like piglets for damned near three hundred miles; and what was left of them eventually got dumped on First Avenue in St. Paul, where Prince first learned to steal Jimi's licks.

To further spread the Word.

Sometimes it was girls, sometimes boys. Always, they were young, drugged, and semidisplaced. The actual technique itself varied only slightly, depending on things like gender, geography, and individual style. But every time, the end result was the same.

It was a marking, like the
ticktickticktick
of meshing teeth on a gear, of the Passage.

Tonight was to be no exception.

There were five of them in the Caddy. Four were veterans of past incursions. Three were full-fledged Screamers. Two were almost spent: too far gone or unstable to rely upon anymore, too dangerous to keep around.

Only one was a neophyte, this evening's sacrificial lamb, plucked from the abundant flock pounding out of the Civic Arena not two hours past. He seemed, from all outward appearances, to fit right in: the hair was right-all starched up to look like black and purple cycle spokes. The clothes were right: all spandex-leather-stud-strapped stupidity. The attitude was right.

He's cocky
, thought the driver of the Cadillac.
And wasted, He's perfect
. The shy ones usually flamed out, and the straight ones couldn't handle the Passage.

Kyle should know by now: he'd chauffeured enough of them. Dozens, over the course of this tour. Of the speeding car's five occupants, he was the only one who'd been there from the first. Which was, of course, exactly as it should be. The entire operation was running more or less as planned; the end of this particular phase was rapidly drawing near.

He greatly looked forward to it.

Kyle's thoughts turned back over the span of the last three months. Many little spuds planted. Much ground covered, as the Caddy chewed up the night miles. He gunned the engine up past seventy; the V-8 guzzler responded with a smooth thrusting rush of power.

The highway hummed beneath them.

He looked into the rearview mirror. The little Wyler bitch wasn't looking too good these days, either. He wasn't surprised; from the moment they'd dragged her limp, shapely buns out of her house in Diamond Bar, he'd had his doubts.
Too stupid to live
, he thought, turning a grim smile inward.
Even after death
.

If that was, in fact, what it was. He'd seen an awful lot of death in his time and had personally administered more than his fair share. But this . . . .

This was different.

He wasn't entirely sure exactly what happened to them
during
the Passage, but he was all too familiar with what happened to them afterwards. They were
all
bad; but this bitch, in particular, was starting to get under his skin. As her baby fat had dried up and her features had grown more gaunt and parched, she'd begun to remind him of the way a girl he'd once knocked up looked after she came out of the body shop: like something had been sucked right out of her, and her body hadn't quite caught on yet.

Kyle thumbed in the cigarette lighter and pinched a Winston between his lips. They were lean and bloodless, like the rest of him; on the whole he bore a marked resemblance to a zombie Keith Richards, resuscitated by voodoo for MTV.

Strictly an illusion. Kyle wouldn't be caught dead on MTV, and was one of the only two beings in that car who could reasonably be called living.

And, most certainly, the only one apt to remain that way.

The lighter popped out. He lit the butt and drew smoke in deeply, expelling it back out into the rushing night air. He didn't like this job.

Screw it
. He white-knuckled the steering wheel into submission.
Life's a bitch, and then you die. Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out
. The dime store philosophy of Kyle Weatherman could be contained on the T-shirts offered in the back pages of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine: the very same source that had run the classified that had called him to serve his destiny.

It was a starkly simple ad: six words and a P.O. box number. They spoke of worlds past, and debts unpaid.

MOMMA SAYS: TIME TO PAY UP.

He knew instantly that it was true. The throbbing knuckle-scar of his missing finger told him so, like a bunion predicting a coming storm. His dreams told him so, every single night until his reply arrived. His sanity told him so, for its own sake.

He answered the ad, all right. Any choice in the matter was long since forfeit.

It brought them all back. People like Logan: spreading the Word randomly in his black van, cruising death and deliberately avoiding the tour path, to further throw off the scent. It brought Kyle: to this night, in this speeding car, to serve as strange an act as The Scream and their even-stranger manager, Walker. And strangest of all, to serve their fans.

Momma's own little kamikazes.

The Screamers.

Tara's voice husked something unintelligible through the speakers. Something moved in the rearview mirror. The tiny hairs on the back of Kyle's neck stood up as if trying to work their way around front, accompanied by an almost involuntary surge of bile as he contemplated what the stud in the back was about to quite literally get himself into. Kyle shuddered slightly.
Jesus, couldn't he smell it?

Guess not. The stud rustled around and said something that sounded like "Ooh, baby." On the passenger side, the Dempsey-thing twitched spastically and delivered another clipped "
Eayoww!
". That was starting to get on Kyle's nerves.

It was their common expletive, after the transformation; and it seemed that, the further along they went, the more that became the most cogent sentiment the little fuckers could voice. It increased in tandem with their instability.

Screamers, bottom line, really were rock 'n' roll kamikazes, with their engines on fire and the conning tower in sight. And the only things they were good for were making trouble.

And making more Screamers.

Cyndi Wyler sat in the back seatwell, hair whipping around her face in a medusan swirl of Rasta-clumped, ropey tendrils. Not bathing for extended periods will do that. Her clothes were similarly ripe with the smell of stale funk, stale beer, stale sweat.

Her head lolled dreamily. The Mylar Band-Its reflected stray oncoming lights of passing traffic, giving the appearance of glowing, shifting eyes. Strictly an illusion. The eyes were the windows to the soul, after all.

She was possessed of neither anymore.

She'd also lost her tan, fourteen pounds, and major portions of her frontal lobes. But she still had her girlish figure, much to the joy of the geek sitting beside her.
What was his name?
She couldn't recall. He leaned closer, smelling of Stiff Stuff, smoke, and poor oral hygiene. It hardly mattered. There had been so many like him: in parking lots and beer bashes, in woods and under bleachers.

It was always the same. They'd drug her, she'd take them. They'd prong her, she'd let them. Grunt and thrust, grunt and thrust. She'd take it. And only then, when they were lost, deep inside, would they meet her Maker.

That alone felt good.

The rest she felt as if from a great distance. There was very little of her left to feel
anything
anymore: decaying shreds hung in the space where her soul had been, ruptured synapses trying vainly to comprehend the full scope of what was going on.

No use. She wasn't in control. She
had
no control. Her body was a bootleg far-removed from the master tape, endlessly churning out fourth-generation dupes as it hurtled toward a blood-red blackness that throbbed in perfect syncopation with the speakers behind her head. She could vaguely discern voices, howling like a pack of joyriding banshees as they pressed her ruined relays to overload. The sound pounding into the back of her skull was the only thing she could seem to key in on; it filled her many empty spaces, gave her the only sense of direction in an otherwise reeling void.

She felt the insistent, brutish probe. Her body responded in kind, heat and moisture pooling up deep within her belly. Something was moving down there; she couldn't say exactly what. It was like trying to decipher stray signals bleeding in from another bandwidth, one that was forever beyond her grasp.

Understanding wasn't important, however.

It was time to spread the Word.

"Give it to me, baby.

Wanna feel you fill the hole.

You gotta giveitomee, bay-bayee . . ."

Stiff Stuff tugged at her jeans.

"C'mon, baby, like the song says," he slurred, "
giveittomee
. . ." She moaned, low in her throat.

Stiff Stuff took this as a positive sign and pressed on. Unbuttoning the last fly-notch on her 501's. Hiking out her paisley bigshirt-tails. Moving in for the kill. He'd never done it in the back of a moving car before, but hey. The chick was a pig, fer sure; but she was into it, man, and he wasn't about to argue.

His pants slid down to his knees in record time; hers came off entirely. He shoved one thick-knuckled hand under the rim of her rancid panties, groping her breasts with the other. Her body felt chill and goose-pimply in the whipping breeze, but he liked it that way. Made her nipples nice and stiff.

She groaned a little louder and writhed beneath his touch. Nobody else seemed to be paying the slightest attention. It was a dream come true.

The music wailed.

The voices grew louder: "
Give it to me, bay-bayee!
"

Stiff Stuff made full contact, pushing deep inside her.

Cyndi pushed back. Something inside her went
snap
!

Blood started to well in her crotch; Stiff Stuff realized that something was amiss. He tried to pull away; Cyndi held him tight.

Snap snap
.

And the real screaming started.

Late summer. Darkness.

And Jake was back again.

Thick scent of exhaust wafting up from the LZ as the choppers finished their drop and made for the relative safety of the bigger base to the south. Jake limped up the hill to his sandbagged bunker, unhitched his rucksack, and heaved his tired self down. He picked up his two warm cans of Bud: today's big treat. His reward for survival.

Yahoo.

In his left hand, gripped by its dusty, sweat-tracked neck, was the battered black market acoustic guitar he'd picked up in Saigon on his last in-country R&R. It was a tiny thing, a Silvertone, with a cheap plate tailpiece and a skinny little string-strap and a Day-Glo sunburst finish that he knew would last about a week back in the bush, and nothing at all like the vintage Strat he'd left back in the World. So what. It was something to hold on to that gave back anything but heat and pain and hurt, and it was his friend. He'd spent the rest of that R&R wacked on Jack Daniel's and Thai stick, singing his Saigon lullaby to the whores, orphans, and cyclo-boys who littered the hot, stinking alleys in the Paris of the Orient.

For three whole days, nobody died.

That was a million years ago, give or take a millennium. Jake was back again. The guitar was dinged and cracked and ugly as ol' buddy Duncan's specks, but it was still here, dammit. It was his friend, the only one he had left.

Much safer that way. It didn't pay to get too close to anything that could draw fire. Duncan taught him that much.
Don't bunch up, Doc. Don't get too close
. Good advice, when you could follow it.

Pity it didn't always work that way.

Jake felt the back of his throat choking up. Too much dust, swirling up in the choppers' wakes. Too many friends going home; too many of them in pieces. When he closed his eyes he could practically see the black rubber sacks that would fill the bellies of the freedom birds, day after day after day. It got to the point where they hardly seemed real anymore; just tag 'em, bag 'em, load 'em up, and move 'em out.
Next . . . Next
. . .

Zip, zip. Snap, snap.

Next
.

It was a factory, a big assembly line of death. It was utterly amoral: progress measured daily in gross tonnage of dead flesh. Every pound counted. Head. Chest. Arms, legs, eyes, balls; alone or in pairs. It was currency, the only one that counted. A hundred times a day. On brush-clogged trails and both sides of the endless miles of can-strung concertina wire. In hooches and hamlets. Buy now, pay later.

And pay.

And pay . . .

He drained the first beer in three gulps and crushed the can, very slowly, in his fist. He was amazed at how calm he was, how strange it felt to
be
back. As if he'd never left at all. He looked out over the darkening fire base, a littered mass of canvas and burlap, steel and tin, and vast, sweating humanity that sprawled across the denuded hillside and flanged out toward the jungle like the hand of Doom. Gun emplacements like thick knuckles, daring anyone to come closer.

They hardly ever did; in person, anyway.

They much preferred for us to come to them.

Twenty klicks north, a detachment of Skyraiders from the 172
^nd
Airborne was doing just that, busily pounding the Ho Bo woods into mulch. He could feel the shock waves running into his ass and all the way up his spine, like God and the devil going one-on-one in the Cosmic Badass playoffs.

At the moment he wasn't exactly sure who was winning.

One thing was certain: he wasn't.

There was nothing
to
win out here, beyond another sixty seconds of surrealistic survival. This was an alternate universe, unto itself. The future didn't exist. The past had never happened. There was only one elongated, screaming present, now and forever, amen.

Besides, the forces moving through this world didn't care whether you understood; they didn't even appear to fully understand themselves. So what.

Understanding wasn't mandatory.