The Scream (25 page)

But fuckit; invisibility had its own advantages, and tomorrow he'd be onstage again, if only for the nineteen politically correct minutes that scheduling permitted each act. Tonight he could hang out and dig the show with the rest of the crowd.

And afterwards, well . . .

-
You're perfect
-

Well, the world was just full of possibilities.

Pete was so wrapped up in contemplation that he bumped right into another fun-loving couple. "Excuse me . . ." he started to say. And then he stopped.

Because for one thing, he didn't think they'd noticed. And for another, he didn't think that they noticed much of
anything
. The guy was a hyper little runt in filthy denim and shiny shiny Bandits. And the
girl
. . .

The girl was wasted.
Correction
, he amended,
the girl was
beyond
wasted. The girl was to wasted what chum is to Mrs. Paul's fish sticks
. No drugs of Pete's considerable acquaintance could wreak this degree of havoc.

She stank like old road-kill; nothing fresh and heady, just a deep-set taint of steady steady decay. Her hair was matted and the color of stable straw; her skin dry and brittle as the Dead Sea scrolls. At one point in very ancient history she might have been a looker. No more. Her Scream T-shirt was tattered in a dozen places, but what it revealed no one would ever want to see. And her eyes . . .

-
the windows to the soul, you know
-

Her eyes were obscured by cracked Ferrari shades. Pete felt strangely grateful; he very much doubted that he would care to peek through her windows and see whatever had taken up residence there.

The girl looked up to him blankly. Then she smiled a split-lip expression of dimmest cognizance and said, "I know youuuuuu. . . ."

Pete was horrified and dearly hoped she wasn't speaking in the biblical sense. "I'm sorry-" he began.

He was just about to ask what she meant when the first bass drum thudded, and the crowds began to roar.

"C'mon, Cyndi," the runt said, "we're gonna missummm-"

"Wait, I
know
himmmmm."

The bass drum thudded again. "Cyndeee, c'monnnnn . . ." The runt pulled weakly toward the sound like a rummy smelling a bottle. Cyndi acquiesced, and the two stumbled away from him and toward the stairs.

"Jesus," Pete muttered, "whiners from hell." He continued on until he saw the small blue PRESS ONLY sign, flashed his pass, and toddled on in.

In the half hour or so remaining, Pete amused himself by yakking it up with the reporters from the music mags and the local papers, as well as what appeared to be a
60 Minutes
news crew, who were getting some press-box footage to intercut in an upcoming segment. He got his picture taken with some district reps from The Scream's own Bedlam Records and Liza Robins of
Hard Rock Ragazine
, who was busy sucking up to anyone even remotely schmoozworthy.

In the course of it, he learned an interesting thing or two. For starters, tonight's gig was special: the last in a nonstop blitzkrieg 270-day tour for The Scream (another twinge of jealousy: it had been damned near a
year
since the last JHB tour).

More astounding still, though, was the fact (conveniently leaked by Derrick Swillman, of Bedlam) that they would be turning around and launching an all-new, mammoth show, right here in the Spectrum, in a mere three days. Absolutely guaranteed to blow absolutely everyone clear off the map.

"All this time," Swillman insisted, "we've been threatening to let Momma out of the bag. But this Monday night-Labor Day, that is"-and he paused to let the journalists groan-"The Scream guarantees it!"

"If you miss out now," he concluded dramatically, "you'll never know what it is to really raise hell!"

Pete envied them. It was all over his face. And he was just about to say so out loud, when the intro kicked in.

And the show began.

A decibel-crunching blast of brass, drums, and guitar pounded out the intro as the Cobra gunship swooped like some great deadly insect, perilously close to the press box and the throngs of fans below. Spotlights tracked it as a low-frequency synth sequence insinuated itself into the beat. The Cobra arced gracefully and headed out toward the center of the arena, turned, and hovered just beneath the ArenaVision module. Pete did another toot and then hooted with the best of them: he couldn't figure
how
they got that thing airborne, no less controlled. Radio maybe, or Voodoo; he sure didn't see any guide wires in evidence. The Cobra's cockpit lit from within: a hologram of Tara's helmeted face was clearly in evidence, underlit from the control panel like a B-movie psycho. She turned it back toward the stage. Angled down.

And started to fire.

It was a strafing run, straight toward centerstage. The screen backdrop projected aerial footage of tropical foliage reeling under the rapidly expanding concentric shock waves of a hundred bombs. The band pumped in sync as twin lasers in the minigun pods splattered the audience with harmlessly devastating blood-red light. The crowd howled appreciatively. The band wailed back, electric guitar screaming in billion-note-per-second synchronicity. The Cobra dove toward the stage, still firing: flashpot-flak exploded in perfectly synchronized ersatz mayhem.

The Cobra dove . . .

And dove . . .

And just as it seemed that it would smash into the backdrop screen, it veered off . . .

. . . and the backdrop exploded into a napalm wall of fire and smoke, smoke and fire that roiled and split into a hideous, leering horned Death's head grinnn . . .

. . . and the Cobra was gone, and Tara appeared, as the film disappeared and the flak-smoke cleared and the Death's head reared . . .

And the entire band came to with stop-on-a-dime tightness. Switched gears. And started into the first mega-chords of their opening number, "Filet of Soul."

"
Ohmigod
," Pete whispered in awe. No one heard him; he couldn't even hear himself. It didn't matter. Tara was strutting up to the microphone with a presence that all the fan fotos and video clips in the world would never come close to conveying. Her costume was mercenary dominatrix perfection: thigh-high strapped boots and leather gauntlets over a sheer black bodysuit that accentuated every ripple of muscle in her taut feline form, with enough chains to anchor the
Intrepid
. She brandished a very real looking samurai sword, tossed a long rope of ebony hair back over her left shoulder, and started right in:

"I want your body

no bones about it"

Want you to know that

I can't live without it."

She drew the blade casually across a bare forearm: a shimmer of very real looking blood rolled down smooth smooth skin.

"Got to possess you

got to control you

You've got to know that

I bought and sold you."

Pete glanced up at the giant ArenaVision screens: Tara seemed to be staring right at him. Correction: right
through
him. It was a wonder the vidicon tubes didn't melt down right in their portapaks from the sheer intensity of her gaze; Pete wondered vaguely if any-or every-one else staring into those dark eyes saw it.

He wondered. But he didn't care. His heart pounded with excitement and anticipation.
If this is the intro
, he thought,
I may not survive the encore
.

Tara smiled.

And the show rolled on.

Jake was afraid to open his eyes.

He had lain down to play on cool white sheets, with his Strat in his hands, a wicked buzz from too many beers in his head and the moist
shhhhhhh
of the air conditioner filling the room. Now the sheets were gone, the buzz was gone, and the hiss of climate-controlled comfort had been replaced by something far more sinister.

And Jake was afraid.

Because he was once again locked in the dream's dark embrace. He tried to shut it out, wanting not to breathe even for fear of what information each new lungful would bring. He tried to think of Rachel, desperately murmuring her name there in the eye-clenching darkness.

But he could not, for the life of him, remember her face.

That figured, in its own mad way. The dreams were pulling him back: to rob him of any life that stretched beyond their tight confines. To steal his future right out from under him. To get what he owed them. With each passing second Jake sank deeper and deeper into a black hole from which he might not this time have the strength to return.

You're not really here
, his mind whispered, heart pounding out his throat as he scrabbled through the blackness.
You're going to open your eyes and be in your tacky double suite in downtown Phila-fucking-delphia. There's a beer on the bedside table and a gorgeous gloss-black Strat lying on your chest!
He clutched at it in confirmation.

The guitar slipped through his grasp like sand through a fist.

And Jake opened his eyes.

The village was gone.

That much was fairly certain on their retreat, even more evident upon their return. There weren't any
villagers
, either: no crispy critters curled amongst the smoldering thatch, limbs bent back like blackened matchsticks.

But that wasn't all.

Someone had come back in the night and tidied up, just hauled the carnage away. The dead were gone, every last scrap.

It happened, everybody knew it happened. Fucking dinks. They knew that Marines always brought back their dead. Always. They knew it messed up their heads, and their body counts.

So they took 'em
, he thought bitterly.
Sanchez and Natch and Clairborne and Ricechex and Willy from Philly they took my fucking friends they took Duncan they took
-

Jake clamped down, hard. They were gone. Probably for good.

But that wouldn't stop him from looking.

The squad moved up the shallow rise toward the ville, cautious from fear and habit. The new guys looked wired to the max. The air was hot and tainted with the stench of burnt things; Jake expected as much, as they topped the rise.

What he hadn't expected, somehow, was company.

Lurps
.

A Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol was already there: members of the deadly cliques who found their niche on the darker edges of an already murky world. They were the chosen ones in the Nam, the few who excelled in arts that most merely endured.

Jake had actually seen them occasionally in his tour, and he'd heard plenty: outrageous accounts that were routinely guaranteed to beat out the top-this category in the nightly bullshit sweepstakes. Stories of Cambodia, of missions that never happened, executed by men who didn't exist. Lurps sometimes seemed elevated to mythic status; certainly by the pogues in the rear, often by those in the bush. But myth or no, there was no doubt: Lurps played the game by another set of rules entirely.

These guys were no exception.

There were seven of them, clustered around one of the blackened tunnel entrances. Nothing about them seemed even remotely regulation, from their fetish-festooned tiger-stripes to their some-braided, some-mohawked hair. Maybe their ordnance, but even that was customized
in extremis
. They carried Bowie knives and
seppuku
blades, AKs and ARs and shotguns and greaseguns and seven NVA-issue nine-millimeters; hell, in a lot of ways they more closely resembled renegade Montagnard tribesmen or the CIDG or the fucking Pirates of Penzance than they did anything that was weaned on Wonder bread. They were specialists in a war of general practitioners; they were beyond reproach, and they knew it. Everything about them said so.

Especially their attitude: coldly professional, uniformly brutal. There was an air about them that made Jake's scrotum retract; they had that look. Men who killed without compunction, without hesitation, absolutely without remorse. They regarded the squad's approach with disdain, as if they were crashers at a very private party. They were busy.

It wasn't until Jake came abreast of them that he saw what they were busy
with
. . .

It was V.C., and it was still alive, more or less. It took Jake a few seconds to realize why he'd not recognized it immediately.

They'd questioned it, presumably. Then they'd peeled it.

Like a moist, shiny grape.

From head to toe.

One of the Lurps, a tall, rangy man with one side of his head shaved and a long black braid draped across the other shoulder, was casually tacking the strips of flesh to a bit of still-standing fence like little banners to dry.

Jake didn't scream, didn't say a word; familiarity bred contempt, and he had plenty of that. Instead, he turned his attention toward their leader.

The man wore no insignia that denoted his position, but they knew beyond doubt that he was the one. Something beyond his appearance or demeanor, though both set him apart as being older-and appreciably more military-than the others. His hair was clipped and slicked with sweat and grime, and he was the only one in the group that wasn't wearing a necklace of dried, shriveled ears. A black patch ran over a puckered scar that traversed his left eye.

Even so, it was something
else
that said it. Something in his face.

Something in his other eye.

"What are you men doing here?" His voice slipped out low like a snake through saw grass. Jake felt that eye, black as coal tar, scrutinizing the squad.

"That's a damn good question," Jake said. "What are
you
doing here?"

The rest of the Lurps glanced up at Jake in what could only be described as pure amazement, like senior fraternity members hazing a cheeky freshman. Their leader, though, only seemed amused. He took new stock of him; smiling thinly, one eye narrowing to a feline slit, he raised the index finger of his left hand to those sly, humorless lips. "
Shhhhhh
. . ."

It was a gesture. Sinister. Mocking.

And all the more shocking for the missing joints-the upper two on the ring finger-that it emphasized.