The Scream (26 page)

"
Shhhhhhhhhhh
. . ."

In another world Jake shivered on the bed, his clothing sweat-soaked in the freon-chilled air, his face twisted into a mask of grotesque fury. His guitar had slid from its resting place on his chest and clattered to the floor, unheeded. His hands reached down to feel crisp white cloth, came up with tiny clods of dirt.

Noooo
. His mind vainly fought.

NOOOOOO
. . .

* * *

He said he was a captain. He said that his team's presence in the sector was classified. He invoked the sovereign immunity of military intelligence. Jake didn't really feel like confirming or contesting it; in fact, he didn't give a flying fuck one way or the other. He felt dead inside; just too cold and too old and bone-stick-stone tired of scary shadowfuckers doing their ghost-in-the-machine shtick. Intelligence. Mission. Whatever.

Captain Classified told him further that he still had a man in the tunnel, and that there was an arms cache down there that they were fixing to blow, and that there was a suspected regiment of ordnance-hungry NVA humping across from the Cambodian border to this very spot, very soon. The information was fresh from the human grape, who had popped out of a spider hole shortly after the Captain Classified's man, Vasquez, had gone in to set the charges. Jake looked over: the grape had mostly stopped moving. Blank eyes stared in horror out of the stripped raw musclemeat of his face. Flies buzzed in the hot morning sun.

And Vasquez was still below.

Oh, well. There was nothing much to do about it, he figured: the whole place would be DX'd soon enough, and this dude and his whole lunatic contingent were more than welcome to it. In fact, Jake was just about ready to order the squad out of there . . .

When he heard the screams.

Definitely plural: a burst of raw shrieking terror followed by the muffled
pop!pop!pop!pop!pop!pop!pop!
of small-arms fire. A whole clip emptied at once. And then, silence.

Deathly. Still.

Silence.

Jake felt that split-second
glitch
again, as if someone had accidentally hit the record button and blanked part of the world's sound track. Something
pinged
in him, and a cold twinge of déjà-vu spiked down his backbone as he turned toward the head Lurp, who was standing tensed with his weapon up and his head cocked at an odd, quizzical angle. He was staring off at the hole worriedly, lips murmuring the tiniest bit, saying something over and over and over.

"Haul him up!" Jake said. The Lurps stared at the hole like a display of heavily armed cigar store Indians, refusing to comply; his own squad stood as if in deference to the other's inaction. "What the fuck's wrong with you people?" Jake said, louder now. "Haul him UP!"

"
No
."

Again that serpentine voice, low and flat and deadly. Jake looked at the man. "What do you mean
no
?" he shouted. "Are you out of your fucking
mind
?!"

"It's too late. He's gone." Captain Classified looked at his men. The first flicker of what could be called fear passed between them. "That's it," he said, turning. "We're gonna blow it in place."

"You can't do that with a man down there."

"There's nobody down there," he spat, then said softer, "not anymore."

"
Bull
shit." Jake reached over and grabbed the nylon tether that led down to Vasquez and pulled and pulled and pulled . . .

It came up readily enough. There was no resistance whatsoever. Jake reeled in the slack. The end came out.

It was bloody.

"MotherFUCKER!" Jake shouted.

He held the end up. It looked chewed.

"NO!!"

He dropped the rope and started stripping off his gear. He held on to his AWOL bag, which was packed with extra medgear, and grabbed a flashlight from the new meat.

"What do you think you're doing?" the captain asked.

"I'm going down there." He could scarcely believe he was saying that. He had claustrophobia, taphephobia, any and every kind of phobia that steered one clear of dark, confining spaces.

But those terrors had seemingly evaporated in the heat and rage of the moment. More accurately, it had been
displaced
, shunted aside by something far more disturbing. Maybe it was guilt, or the fear of standing by and doing nothing. Maybe it was because of Duncan and everybody else who'd died before him. Maybe it was because he was sick of the endless bullshit, because he realized then that that's what they counted on: that you'd just get so tired and numb and jaded and betrayed that absolutely none of it mattered anymore, no matter how pointless, no matter how vile or repulsive or insane.

Maybe that was it. Not that it made the slightest bit of difference.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Captain Classified warned him.

"Thanks for the advice," Jake hissed.

"I mean it. Don't go down there."

"Go to hell." Jake started to turn toward the hole.

That mutilated left hand landed squarely on Jake's chest, stopping him. Captain Classified smiled his humorless, sly grin. Then he dropped his hand. And he backed off.

"You first," he said.

He couldn't really see the walls. But he could feel them.

Oh, yes.

All around him in the damp, smothering blackness, in some places only an inch or two above his head. He could feel the hard-packed laterite clay pressing down; it stank of sweat and darkness and death. He reached forward blindly, dragging fresh rope behind him, feeling gingerly along the trail of intertwined det cord that led to Vasquez. The darkness swallowed the puny light from his flash as he crept closer. He could hear things scuttling all around him. He tried to say "Hang on, I'm coming," but when he opened his mouth, no words would come.

Only air. Hot. Stale. Rank.

He sucked it back in, panting like a lungfish, breath raggedly amplified in the dark till it filled his head. His heart felt as if it would explode, his mind threatened to scream and scream and never stop. But he bit down and pressed on; crawling, probing for booby traps, yard by excruciating yard.

Until he found the head of the wounded man.

"It's OK, buddy, I'm here," he whispered, lightly braille-probing the extent of the injuries. He could clearly discern the ragged, bubbling wheeze of a sucking chest wound. Vasquez was hurt bad, and Jake could tell by the sound that he was in danger of drowning in his own blood.

Jake holstered his weapon, ripped open a pressure bandage, and tried to position the flash so he could see just how bad it was. It was hard; the light threw shadows and distorted contours. He scanned the soaked, shredded cloth across Vasquez's chest. It looked wrong somehow, a series of lacerated punctures that peppered his torso from clavicle to crotch, not like gunshot or shrapnel wounds at all. Strange.

"We're gonna get you outta here, man, just hang on . . ."

He slipped the rope under and around Vasquez's shoulders and clipped the halyard. Vasquez moaned weakly; Jake gave the rope two sharp tugs, signaling the team above to hoist their asses the hell out of there. The rope tightened, and they began inching slowly backward out of the hole.

They hadn't gotten more than a yard when Vasquez screamed. The rope kept pulling.

And something started pulling back.

Vasquez screamed again: a sound unholy in its intensity, all the worse for the piteous, hollow burbling that was all he could manage. There was a wet sliding sound, and the overpowering stench of suppurated flesh. Jake spun the flash around to face Vasquez and the tunnel depths . . .

. . .
and he saw the unwinding coil of small intestine, snicking out and out of the hole in Vasquez's belly like a soft pink-veined rope, sliding out and away into the dark, dank depths of the tunnel. He felt Vasquez go tight in his hands, the howl of his voice a hysterical sucking wind that never seemed to run out of air. He pulled frantically, trying to get him out of there, gripped in an insane tug-of-war with some unseen force, as the coil fed endlessly on and Vasquez shrieked and reached up and grabbed on to him with surprising force, and the pink, wet rope kept on pulling, running out of the smaller and starting with the larger, with its attendant flop and rip and tear; Vasquez shrieked and Jacob joined him, because now he wouldn't let go and his grip dug into Jake with unbelievable desperation, and Jake felt the both of them being pulled now back into the black, stinking depths, and he suddenly wanted more than anything to just get away, get this guy off, get him OFF!

He jerked free of his grasp, felt Vasquez go sucking back into the tunnel, felt the rope spinning back. At the last minute he grabbed hold of it and braced himself against the wall of the tunnel . . .

. . . and the rope spun through his grip, friction-burning raw the skin of his palm as it went taut, then tight, tighter still until it whined from the tension like a guitar string tuned too high. Jake screamed, a high, keening "NOOOOOOOO"
. . .

. . .
and the rope snapped, and the too-sudden release sent him plummeting backward, through the buckling tunnel wall behind him.

And he fell, screaming.

And he fell
. . .

She began with his toes and the soles of his feet; with tongue and finger, she stroked and probed them. Sweet. So sweet. Nerve endings in glee. He could feel them leap as she ministered to them.

He was stripped and strewn across the length of the bed. She was nakedly coiled at its foot, with his. Every taut-fleshed inch of her shimmered in the dim light of the monitors. He wanted to reach out and touch her.

He couldn't.

Because Tara was thorough in every respect, from her mouth's technique to the electrodes on his skull to the knotted silk that bound and spread-eagled his extremities. The only limb not tied down was his cock, which lay hard and long and flat across his belly. There was little chance of its untying him. It twitched helplessly.

He twitched helplessly.

Twice in two months, Pete had been bound up and wired for response. He was beginning to wonder if this was a trend. He could almost see the cover on next month's issue of
Penthouse
: "Those Power Hungry Techno-Sluts of Rock 'n Roll."

Featuring a picture of Tara.

And Jesse
. . .

"No, no," he muttered, pulling his attention back to his feet. What was happening there was too good to despoil with guilt. It was over with Jesse. It was best that they move on. It was best . . .

Oh, Jesus. Bottom line. It was the best toe-sucking he had ever received; and that, more than anything, decided him. There wasn't a nerve in his body that didn't culminate there, at the base of his physical being. Every kiss and caress made him aware of his heart, his lungs, his nipples, the short hairs surrounding them. Every flick of tongue ached languidly in every fluid speck of marrow in his bones.

And it was magnificent. Oh, yes, it was. He could barely lift his head, what with the drugs and the bondage and all; but the glimpses he caught were enough.

Almost too much.

And then her mouth and hands began to track their way up his legs, with her own body dragging luxuriously behind. He could feel perfect breasts glide along his inner thighs as her lips reached and suckled on his slender pelvic bones, the flesh surrounding them, could feel her maddeningly steering clear of his focused desire.

Please stop
, he moaned internally.
Please stay
. But she could not hear him, and she did not obey. When her tongue burrowed into his navel, his desire disregarded its previous demand. Her breasts pressed together, enfolding and kneading him like unbaked Italian bread. His spine coursed with neon light.

"Let me know," she whispered, "when you're ready."

"Right now," he answered, voice husky and harsh as her own.

She pulled up and away from him then; and for the first time since she'd secured him in place, he met her darkly blazing gaze.

"Then you won't mind waiting for me to catch up." Then she smiled, and he marveled at how brightly her teeth gleamed: bright as the monitors that graphed his brain waves and illuminated the back of the tour bus. Almost
too
bright, in fact-as if they were a light source of their own.

Pete felt an angel-hair tickle of dread stroke his soul. It wasn't the first time that had happened tonight. From the moment he'd walked into Tara's private tour bus/playground, there had been glimmers of something amiss.

Like, for starters, her black lace, four-poster canopy bed. It was beautiful, yes, but only in a perversely antivirginal way. High kink indeed, with a very dark slant. And God only knew what weirdness lurked behind those reams of dangling curtain. The Phantom, perhaps. Dr. Caligari.

And then there was the twelve-foot mirror: adjacent to the monitors, overlooking the bed. Though she swore otherwise, it was hard to believe that it wasn't a two-way, and that somebody wasn't sitting there watching them now.

This groundless paranoia was abetted somewhat by the electrodes she had taped to his skull. He'd laughed when she'd brought it up, asked if this wasn't some sinister zombifying technique in disguise. Now he wasn't quite so reassured by the fact that she'd smiled and said yes.

And then, of course, there was the fact that she'd tied him down.

"Why did I let you do this to me?" he asked out loud. A rhetorical question, with a lump in its throat. She answered anyway, still hovering above him, face swallowed in darkness.

"Because you were chosen."

"Ah, right." He chuckled softly. "I
thought
that free will was just an illusion."

"And you were right." She placed her hands, very softly, on his chest. "Like a heart. It doesn't beat on a whim. It beats because that is its reason for being."

He smiled. "And I was born to make love with you."

Her grinning teeth shone out of the darkness above.

"Something like that."

Then she lowered herself upon him, straddling his belly, leaning into his ardent kiss.