The Scream (18 page)

Lenore leaned forward earnestly. Her lapel pin sparkled in the dim light of the room. Jesse saw it clearly, recognized it at once as a symbol of allegiance. Like a cross. Or a swastika.

Or a pair of tiny, golden feet . . .

"
Where are my clothes?
" she hissed.

"Jessica, please-"

"Fuck you. Where are my goddamned
clothes?
"

Jesse stood bolt upright, the paper smock rustling violently around her. Her ass had goose-pimpled from chill and weirdness. Lenore grabbed her shoulder. Jesse wrenched away.

"We want to help you!"

"GET
AWAY
FROM ME!"

"Jessica,
please!
It has a
right
to live!"

"Fuck off!"

"Jesse. I
understand
-"

"You understand NOTHING!"

Jesse pulled away and stormed toward the outer door. The monitor showed a woman crying and clutching her stomach. Jesse grabbed the cart and flung it as hard as she could across the room. It careened sideways for five feet before tipping to dump its load in an explosion of sparks and glass.

She slammed into the undressing room, yanked open the locker door, and pulled her clothes out in a heap: dressing frantically, sobbing with rage and frustration. If she didn't get out of there in the next twenty seconds, she was going to kill somebody. It was that simple.

The nurse heard the commotion and started in from the outer room. Jesse roared and grabbed the vase of fake flowers, heaving it straight at her head. It missed by half an inch, smashing against the door jamb. The nurse fled, screeching, but not before Jesse picked up the glint of gold on her breast.

It's like
Invasion of The Body Snatchers! she thought hysterically, half expecting to burst into a room full of pod people chewing through their sacs. She fought back the pounding in her temples, the urge to just pass out on the spot. An involuntary cramp racked her, the fist in her belly squeezing tight, too tight. She needed to get out of there, she needed air, she needed her purse,
where was her fucking PURSE!

She spotted it, squashed down onto the bottom of the locker. She leaned over to grab it . . .

. . . and in the last seconds before she blacked out, she saw the contorted opening of the bag twist: as if the leather had reanimated, becoming skin again.

Changing.

Into a gaping, toothless grin . . .

It only lasted a couple of seconds; a fleeting moment of unguarded oblivion and black black space. But it was enough. Time enough to comb through the chaos, to find the seed. Time enough to plant it deep in the soft folds of her brain. A thought. A tiny cry.

It has a right to live!

It has a right . . .

Jesse awoke with a start. She was slumped awkwardly in the space between the locker door and the wall. Her left leg was entangled in the wreckage of the table that had so recently held the vase.

Lenore Kleinkind and the ersatz nurse were hovering at a safe distance, like a bomb squad stalking a piece of unexploded ordnance. Visions of lawsuits danced in their heads. When they saw her eyelids fluttering open, they leaned in slightly, looks of vast relief washing over their faces.

"Just lie still, dear," Lenore said, speaking in slow, loud syllables. "The ambulance will be here in a moment." She smiled and stepped, eggshell-light, a little closer.

Jesse looked at them with an unveiled disgust. Their compassion was self-serving and as two-dimensional as the puppies on the waiting room walls.

She sat up and saw her purse lying where she'd dropped it: harmless, inert. The Pocket Planner was sticking out, half on the floor. Jesse scooped it all up, grabbed her boots, and pushed past the mock-nurse, who whooofed air like a ten-cent squeeze toy.

"Miss Malloy! Jessica! Please!"

Jesse walked faster, shaking her head. The opaque glass of the waiting room door was two steps away. One step.

"
Jessica!
"

Jesse burst through the door, scaring the hell out of the women that were waiting. Two of them were teenagers; one looked to be Jesse's age. "This place is a lie," she spat. "They don't do abortions here, they trick you and try to talk you out of them!"

They all stared at her, dumbstruck. One of the younger ones' eyes opened wide with recognition.

"Did you hear what I just SAID? This place
lies
to you!"

The door opened again; Lenore Kleinkind stood there, huffing and puffing. "No," she said. "This place gives you the
truth
."

"
You wouldn't know the truth if it smacked you in the face!
" Jesse shrieked.

Then she was out the door, running, the sunlight blinding as it burned into her eyes, and the eyes of the world upon her. . .

". . . and the next day's headline read, 'ARTIE CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR AT SAFEWAY'!"

Hempstead beamed, all too pleased with his lame joke. Everyone else in the cockpit groaned: Jake pausing over his lapload of papers to shake his head remorsefully; Junior, the road manager, smiling against his better judgment; Bob and Bob making loud retching noises in the back.

Even Jim cracked a grin, though the bulk of the joke failed to make it past the muffled throb of the rotors and the garbled barks of static-tinged information blaring through his headset. Didn't matter. He'd heard it before. In fact, he'd probably heard
all
of Hempstead's jokes at some point or another and was probably destined to hear them all again. And again.

Still, he enjoyed it. And everyone else seemed to as well.

With one possible exception.

"Yo, Space Shot," Hempstead said, nudging Pete. "Whassamattah? You seem less than your usual bundle of joyous self today." Pete remained oblivious, staring, nose semismushed into the window glass, out at the rolling terrain. The outskirts of Philly were looming on the horizon. The mountain lay far behind.

The concert was dead ahead.

And Pete was elsewhere entirely.

"Yo! Earth to Pee Wee!" Hempstead nudged him again, harder. "Earth to Pee Wee!"

"Wha . . . oh. Sorry." Pete shrugged and sniffled, looking chagrined, and his attention drifted right back to the window. "I'm just a little out of it, that's all."

"You don't look 'out of it,'" Hempstead offered. "You look
dead
."

"Lay off him," Bob One said. "He's emotionally distraught."

"Yeah, I'll say," Bob Two interjected. "Somebody was up late last night, fighting tooth and nail with somebody who is noticeably absent."

"That's none of your business," Pete muttered. The words scraped out like a line drawn in playground dust. "I was up working on a new tune, is all."

"Ye-e-eah," Hempstead said expansively, chiding him. "It's called 'Gotta Hose Up My Nose.' Been hearin' a lot of it lately."

"Piss on you," Pete tossed back a little too quickly, as though the customary acid-tinged pregig banter were anything but expected. Everybody knew it was S.O.P. It was practically tradition, a way of pumping up for the ego-rush of being scrutinized by thousands of people, when every tick and twitch of your personality could either work for or against you. It usually did the trick.

Usually.

Not today. Jesse wasn't here, and Jake might as well not be, and Pete's dourness was a little out of character. The balance was thrown off; in some vaguely perceptible way, the delicate sense of fraternity was disrupted.

And that was not good.

Not good at all.

"C'mon, Petey, what's up?" Hempstead asked. A big black hand clomped on Pete's shoulder. "You been kinda lumpy all mornin'-"

"Hey, just fuck off, okay?" Pete spun around in his seat, shoulder harness pinching into his side.

Telling Hempstead to fuck off was not the act of a rational man. Neither was the sudden physical gesture. The chopper lurched with the unexpected motion. Jake looked up, startled. So did everyone else. The guitarist remained in his defiant, awkward twist, locked in an eyeball war with the sax player.

Then Hempstead smiled, a tactical move. "Whoa, blood," he said, not moving his hand. "Just chill out a second-"

"I don't want to chill out. I want your hand off my fucking shoulder, okay?"

"Hey, Petey, we just playin'."

"Yeah, well, it's no
game
," he hissed, jerking out from under the grasp. The chopper lurched again.

"Oh,
chil
-dren!" Slim Jim called over his shoulder. "This bird is quite hard enough to fly as it is, without all the creative weight redistribution. PIA is less than twenty minutes away. Can we hold off on the festivities until our scheduled ETA, or would you like me to crash us into the Haverford State Mental Hospital?"

"Might not be a bad idea," Jake said.

He had been hip-deep in data the whole way in: Cody's news updates, Junior's revised lighting schemata, a million other piddling details that needed his attention,
now
. Things were wired enough without this shit.

And judging from the pile of papers in his lap and the document in his hands, there were plenty worse things to be worried about . . .

. . .
like the fact that the latest articles in
Time
and
Rolling Stone
showed that people were pretty much burned out on compassion, fresh out of helping hands to lend. Jake wasn't terribly surprised: the mood of the whole damned country had turned volatile and snappish of late, like a household pet with its legs in a steel trap. What with the Age of Reagan sputtering out and the inheritors of the legacy making over the nation in their own image, everybody was starting to feel the hurt.

Besides, a concert to benefit poor little rich and famous rock stars wasn't worth its weight in noble sentiments like the myriad This, That, and the Other Aids that had sprung up in the wake of the original. Never mind if over half of the "rich and famous" stars in question made less than your average computer hacker per annum; never mind that many of those involved in the show were under either Congressional scrutiny, actual litigation, or both. And never mind the fact that the juggernaut of Right-thinking Decency was chugging full speed ahead.

Never mind all that.

People wanted to see the blood on the sands. People wanted their bread and circuses. They wanted heroes.

And even more, they wanted scapegoats.

And if you couldn't be the one
. . .

Jake stared back and forth, from Junior to Pete to Hempstead to Bob to Bob to Pete to Junior, who just shrugged and riffled his lighting charts. They stared back: all but Pete, who sniffled and slumped back down in his seat.

Jake sighed and shook his head.

A bark of static sounded from the cockpit; final clearance for landing from the PIA control tower. They were nearing the airfield, which lay just to the other side of the I-76 bridge and the industry-clogged banks of the Schuylkill River.

The chopper banked to the south.

And JFK Stadium was directly below.

"Do a lap around it, wouldja?" Jake asked.

Jim nodded affirmatively. "Check it out, kiddies."

The arena sprawled beneath them like a gargantuan, multi-tiered concrete horseshoe, the stage sealing off the mouth in a labyrinthine mass of plywood platforming, electrical cables, and steel scaffolding. Twin towers of heavy-duty sound reinforcement bristled on either side, as well as a pair of huge, multifaceted Diamondvision screens that would broadcast close-up images to the unfortunate thousands seated at the very back of the amphitheater. The dozen-odd trucks and vans on hand for sound, video, and satellite uplink were scattered across the neatly carpeted sod of the football field like a jumbo toddler's Matchbox toys.

There were maybe fifty people visible in a space that tomorrow would hold upwards of fifty thousand; from the copter's-eye view, they looked like ants. Another swarm milled outside the gates and in the car-, camper-, and minibus-speckled parking lots. Some of them held aloft placards that looked like specks of confetti . . .

. . . then the chopper was out of range, floating over the gracefully arcing Schuylkill bridge. Everyone had grown suddenly quiet in the realization of the enormity of what they were about to face.

"I only want to say this once, people," Jake began quietly. "So listen up.

"In a very few minutes we will be touching down. A limo will be waiting to pick us up and take us, one and all, to the hotel. On the way we'll pass back by the stadium, where you'll get a close-up view of the crowds. Most of them are just waiting on line and trying to have a good time.

"But let us not forget that there are also protesters there, and rumor has it that the two camps don't much care for each other. The temperature is inching toward ninety-three, and the humidity is high, and it's apt to stay that way. The long odds are saying that there might be violence this weekend. A lot of people are very nervous. They should be.

"And so," he added, "should we.

"So when you step out of this bird, I really hope that you leave whatever's going on here behind." His attention was leveled at Pete and Hempstead. "Cause if we fuck up out there, they might just eat us alive."

The portent hung uncomfortably in the air for a few moments, then sank like a stone. Bob and Bob just rolled their eyes.
Oh, boy, more threats
. Hempstead gave him a very cool, cryptic nod. Junior sighed and went about his business.

Pete stared purposefully at his shoes; a man caught red-handed at being an asshole and yet completely unable to let it go. His anger was like that, Jake knew: it could never roll over, it could only recede.

But
, and Jake knew this equally well,
a lot of damage could be. done, in the waiting
.

The airfield was directly below. Slim Jim spoke into his headset and then tilted the cyclic imperceptibly; the helicopter responded in a smooth, steepening spiral.

"Hang on, boys and girls," he called back, grinning. "'Cause we be goin' down."

By three-fifteen, Jake and Hempstead were sweating like pigs in the sleek new chromed and mirrored expanse of the Hilton's Holiday Spa. They were three quarters of the way through a practiced, killer workout; running, abs, jump rope, and a full three times around the Universal weights, followed by a slow bake in the sauna.