Duke shook his head. He looked puzzled and suddenly a little uncomfortable . . . but maybe not as uncomfortable as Pearson felt.
"Okay, Mac"s got a point," Delray said. "I guess I got carried away, but it feels like a historic occasion to me. On with the show."
He paused for effect, and then whipped aside the blue cloth on the easel. His audience sat forward on their folding chairs, prepared to be amazed, then sat back with a small collective whoosh of disappointment. It was a black-and-white photograph of what looked to be an abandoned warehouse. It had been enlarged enough so that the eye could easily sort through the litter of papers, condoms, and empty wine-bottles in the loading bays, and read the tangle of spray-painted wit and wisdom on the wall. The biggest of these said RIOT GRRRLS RULE.
A whispered babble of murmurs went through the room.
"Five weeks ago," Delray said impressively, "Lester, Kendra, and I trailed two batmen to this abandoned warehouse in the Clark Bay section of Revere."
The dark-haired woman in the round rimless gla.s.ses sitting next to Lester Olson looked around self-importantly . . . and then Pearson was d.a.m.ned if she didn"t glance down at her watch.
"They were met at this point" - Delray tapped one of the trash-littered loading bays - "by three more batmen and two batwomen. They went inside. Since then, six or seven of us have set up a rotating watch on this place. We have established - "
Pearson glanced around at Duke"s hurt, incredulous face. He might as well have had WHY WASN"T I PICKED? tattooed on his forehead.
" - that this is some sort of meeting ground for the bats in the Boston metro area - "
The Boston Bats, Pearson thought, great name for a baseball team. And then it came back again, the doubt: Is this me, sitting here and listening to this craziness? Is it really?
In the wake of this thought, as if the memory had somehow been triggered by his momentary doubt, he again heard Delray telling the a.s.sembled Fearless Bat Hunters that their newest recruit was Brandon Pearson, from deepest, darkest Medford.
He turned back to Duke and spoke quietly into his ear.
"When you spoke to Janet on the phone - back in Gallagher"s - you told her you were bringing me, right?"
Duke gave him an impatient I"m-trying-to-listen look in which there was still a trace of hurt. "Sure," he said.
"Did you tell her I was from Medford?"
"No," Duke said. "How would I know where you"re from? Let me listen, Brand!" And he turned back.
"We have logged over thirty-five vehicles - luxury cars and limos, for the most part - visiting this abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere," Delray said. He paused to let this sink in, s.n.a.t.c.hed another quick peek at his watch, and hurried on. "Many of these have visited the site ten or a dozen times. The bats have undoubtedly congratulated themselves on having picked such an out-of-the-way spot for their meeting-hall or social club or whatever it is, but I think they"re going to find they"ve painted themselves into a corner instead. Because . . . pardon me just a sec, guys . . . "
He turned and began a quiet conversation with Lester Olson. The woman named Kendra joined them, her head going back and forth like someone watching a Ping-Pong match. The seated audience watched the whispered conference with expressions of bewilderment and perplexity.
Pearson knew how they felt. Something big, Duke had promised, and from the feel of the place when they"d come in, everyone else had been promised the same. "Something big" had turned out to be a single black-and-white photo showing nothing but an abandoned warehouse wallowing in a sea of trash, discarded underwear, and used rubbers. What the f.u.c.k is wrong with this picture?
The big deal"s got to be in the trunk, Pearson thought. And by the way, Freckles, how did you know I came from Medford? That"s one I"m saving for the Q-and-A after the speech, believe me.
That feeling - flushed face, pounding heart, above all else the desire for another cigarette - was stronger than ever. Like the anxiety attacks he"d sometimes had back in college. What was it? If it wasn"t fear, what was it?
Oh, it"s fear, all right - it"s just not fear of being the only sane man in the snake-pit. You know the bats are real; you "re not crazy and neither is Duke and neither is Moira or Cam Stevens or Janet Brightwood. But something is wrong with this picture just the same . . . really wrong. And I think it"s him. Robbie Delray, housepainter and Savior of His Race. He knew where I was from. Brightwood called him and told him Duke was bringing someone from the First Merc, Brandon Pearson"s his name, and Robbie checked on me. Why would he do that? And how did he do it?
In his mind he suddenly heard Duke Rhinemann saying, They"re smart . . . they"ve got friends in high places. h.e.l.l, high places is what they"re all about.
If you had friends in high places, you could check on a fellow in a hurry, couldn"t you? Yes. People in high places had access to all the right computer pa.s.swords, all the right records, all the numbers that made up all the right vital statistics . . .
Pearson jerked in his seat like a man waking from a terrible dream. He kicked his foot out involuntarily and it struck the base of the window-pole. It started to slide. Meanwhile, the whispering at the front of the room broke up with nods all around.
"Les?" Delray asked. "Would you and Kendra give me another little helping hand?"
Pearson reached to grab the window-pole before it could fall and brain someone - maybe even slice someone"s scalp open withthe wicked little hook on top. He caught it, started to place it back against the wall, and saw the goblin-face peering in the bas.e.m.e.nt window. The black eyes, like the eyes of a Raggedy Ann doll abandoned under a bed, stared into Pearson"s wide blue ones. Strips of flesh rotated like bands of atmosphere around one of the planets astronomers called gas giants. The black snakes of vein under the lumpy, naked skull pulsed. The teeth glimmered in its gaping mouth.
"Just help me with the snaps on this darned thing," Delray was saying from the other end of the galaxy. He gave a friendly little chuckle. "They"re a little sticky, I guess."
For Brandon Pearson, it was as if time had doubled back on itself to that morning: once again he tried to scream and once again shock robbed his voice and he was able to produce only a low, choked whuffling - the sound of a man moaning in his sleep.
The rambling speech.
The meaningless photograph.
The constant little peeks at the wrist.w.a.tch.
Does it make you nervous? Having so many of your people in the same place? he had asked, and Duke had replied, smiling: No. Robbie can smell bats.
This time there was no one to stop him, and this time Pearson"s second effort was a total success.
"IT"S A SET-UP!" he screamed, leaping to his feet. "IT"S A SET-UP, WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!"
Startled faces craned around to look at him . . . but there were three that didn"t have to crane. These belonged to Delray, Olson, and the dark-haired woman named Kendra. They had just solved the latches and opened the trunk. Their faces were full of shock and guilt . . . but no surprise. That particular emotion was absent.
"Siddown, Iman!" Duke hissed. "Have you gone era - "
Upstairs, the door crashed open. Bootheels clumped across the floor toward the stairwell.
"What"s happening?" Janet Brightwood asked. She spoke directly to Duke. Her eyes were wide and frightened. "What"s he talking about?"
"GET OUT!" Pearson roared. "GET THE f.u.c.k OUT OF HERE! HE TOLD IT TO YOU BACKWARD! WE"RE THE ONES IN THE TRAP!"
The door at the head of the narrow staircase leading to the bas.e.m.e.nt crashed open, and from the shadows up there came the most appalling sounds Pearson had ever heard - it was like listening to a pack of pit-bulls baying over a live baby thrown into their midst.
"Who"s that?" Janet screamed. "Who"s that up there?" Yet there was no question on her face; her face knew perfectly well who was up there. What was up there.
"Calm down!" Robbie Delray shouted to the confused group of people, most of whom were still sitting on their folding chairs. "They"ve promised amnesty! Do you hear me? Do you understand what I"m saying? They"ve given me their solemn - "
At that moment the cellar window to the left of the one through which Pearson had seen the first batface shattered inward, spraying gla.s.s across the stunned men and women in the first row along the wall. An Armani-clad arm snaked through the jagged opening and seized Moira Richardson by the hair. She screamed and beat at the hand holding her . . . which was not really a hand at all, but a bundle of talons tipped with long, chitinous nails.
Without thinking, Pearson seized the window-pole, darted forward, and launched the hook at the pulsing batlike face peering in through the broken window. The hook drove into one of the thing"s eyes. A thick, faintly astringent ink pattered down on Pearson"s upthrust hands. The batman uttered a baying, savage sound - it didn"t sound like a scream of pain to Pearson, but he supposed he was allowed to hope - and then it fell backward, pulling the window-pole out of Pearson"s hands and into the drizzly night. Before the creature disappeared from view entirely, Pearson saw white mist begin to drift off its tumorous skin, and smelled a whiff of (dust urine hot chili-peppers) something unpleasant.
Cam Stevens pulled Moira into his arms and looked at Pearson with shocked, disbelieving eyes. All around them were men and women wearing that same blank look, men and women frozen like a herd of deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.
They don"t look much like resistance fighters to me, Pearson thought. They look like sheep caught in a shearing-pen . . . and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a judas goat who led them in is standing up there at the front of the room with his co-conspirators.
The savage baying upstairs was getting closer, but not as fast as Pearson might have expected. Then he remembered how narrow the staircase was - too narrow for two men to walk abreast - and said a little prayer of thanks as he shoved forward. He I grabbed Duke by the tie and hauled him to his feet. "Come on," he said. "We"re blowing this joint. Is there a back door?"
"I . . . don"t know." Duke was rubbing one temple slowly and forcefully, like a man who has a bad headache. "Robbie did this? Robbie? Can"t be, man . . . can it?" He looked at Pearson with pitiful, stunned intensity.
"I"m afraid so, Duke. Come on."
He got two steps toward the aisle, still holding onto Duke"s tie, then stopped. Delray, Olson, and Kendra had been rooting in the trunk, and now they flashed pistol-sized automatic weapons equipped with ridiculous-looking long wire stocks. Pearson had never seen an Uzi outside of the movies and TV, but he supposed that was what these were. Uzis or close relatives, and what the f.u.c.k did it matter, anyway? They were guns.
"Hold it," Delray said. He appeared to be speaking to Duke and Pearson. He was trying to smile and producing something that looked like the grimace of a death row prisoner who has just been notified it"s still on. "Stay right where you are."
Duke kept moving. He was in the aisle now, and Pearson was right beside him. Others were getting up, following their lead, pressing forward but looking nervously back over their shoulders at the doorway giving on the stairs. Their eyes said they didn"t like the guns, but they liked the snarling, baying sounds drifting down from the first floor even less.
"Why, man?" Duke asked, and Pearson saw he was on the verge of tears. He held out his hands, palms up. "Why would you sell us out?"
"Stop, Duke, I"m warning you," Lester Olson said in a Scotch-mellowed voice.
"The rest of you stay back, too!" Kendra snapped. She did not sound mellow at all. Her eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets, trying to cover the whole room at once.
"We never had a chance," Delray told Duke. He sounded as if he were pleading. "They were onto us, they could have taken us anytime, but they offered me a deal. Do you understand? I didn"t sell out; I never sold out. They came to me." He spoke vehemently, as if this distinction actually meant something to him, but the shuttling blinks of his eyes signaled a different message. It was as if there were some other Robbie Delray inside, a better Robbie Delray, one who was trying frantically to dissociate himself from this shameful act of betrayal.
"YOU"RE A f.u.c.kING LIAR!" Duke Rhinemann shrieked in a voice breaking with hurt betrayal and furious understanding. He leaped at the man who had saved his sanity and perhaps his life on a Red Line train . . . and then everything swooped down at once.
Pearson could not have seen it all, yet it seemed that somehow he did. He saw Robbie Delray hesitate, then turn his weapon sideways, as if he intended to club Duke with the barrel instead of shooting him. He saw Lester Olson, who had shot the batman in the Newburyport barn pop-pop-pop before losing his guts and deciding to try and cut a deal, lodge the wire stock of his own gun against the buckle of his belt and pull the trigger. He saw momentary blue licks of fire appear in the ventilation holes in the barrel, and heard a hoa.r.s.e hack!hack!hack!hack! that Pearson supposed was the way automatic weapons sounded in the real world. He heard something invisible slice the air an inch in front of his face; it was like hearing a ghost gasp. And he saw Duke flung backward with blood spraying up from his white shirt and splattering on his cream-colored suit. He saw the man who had been standing directly behind Duke stumble to his knees, hands clapped over his eyes, bright blood oozing out from between the knuckles.
Someone - maybe Janet Brightwood - had shut the door between the staircase and this downstairs room before the meeting started; now it banged open and two batmen wearing the uniforms of the Boston Police squeezed in. Their small, pushed-together faces stared savagely out of their oversized, strangely restless heads.
"Amnesty!" Robbie Delray was screaming. The freckles on his face now stood out like brands; the skin upon which they had been printed was ashy-white. "Amnesty! I"ve been promised amnesty if you"ll just stand where you are and put up your hands!"
Several people - those who had been cl.u.s.tered around the coffeemaker, for the most part - did raise their hands, although they continued to back away from the uniformed batmen as they did it. One of the bats reached forward with a low grunt, seized a man by the front of his shirt, and yanked him toward it. Almost before Pearson realized it had happened, the thing had torn out the man"s eyes. The thing looked at the jellied remains resting on its strange, misshapen palm for a moment, then popped them into its mouth.
As two more bats lunged in through the door, looking around with their blackly gleaming little eyes, the other police-bat drew its service revolver and fired three times, seemingly at random, into the crowd.
"No!" Pearson heard Delray scream. "No, you promised!""
Janet Brightwood grabbed the Bunn, lifted it over her head, and threw it at one of the newcomers. It struck with a muted metallic bonging and spewed hot coffee all over the thing. This time there was no mistaking the pain in that shriek. One of the police-bats reached for her. Brightwood ducked, tried to run, was tripped . . . and suddenly she was gone, lost in a stampede toward the front of the room.
Now all the windows were breaking, and somewhere close by Pearson could hear approaching sirens. He saw the bats breaking into two groups and running down the sides of the room, clearly bent on driving the panic-stricken Ten O"CIock People into the storage area behind the easel, which had now been knocked over.
Olson threw down his weapon, grabbed Kendra"s hand, and bolted in that direction. A bat-arm snaked down through one of the cellar windows, grabbed a handful of his theatrical white hair, and hauled him upward, choking and gargling. Another hand appeared through the window, and a thumbnail three inches long opened his throat and let out a scarlet flood.
Your days of popping off batmen in barns on the coast are all over, my friend, Pearson thought sickly. He turned toward the front of the room again. Delray stood between the open trunk and the fallen easel, his gun now dangling from one hand, his eyes shocked nearly to vacancy. When Pearson pulled the wire stock from his fingers, the man made no attempt to resist.
"They promised us amnesty," he told Pearson. "They promised."
"Did you really think you could trust things that looked like that?" Pearson asked, and then drove the wire stock into the center of Delray"s face with all the force he could muster. He heard something break - probably Delray"s nose - and the thoughtless barbarian which had awakened within his banker"s soul cheered with rude savagery.
He started toward a pa.s.sage zig-zagging between the stacked cartons - one that had been widened by the people who had already bolted their way through - then paused as gunfire erupted behind the building. Gunfire . . . screams . . . roars of triumph.
Pearson whirled and saw Cam Stevens and Moira Richardson standing at the head of the aisle between the folding chairs. They wore identical shocked expressions and were holding hands. Pearson had time to think, That"s how Hansel and Gretel must have looked after they finally got out of the candy-house. Then he bent down, picked up Kendra"s and Olson"s weapons, and handed one to each.
Two more bats had come in through the rear door. They moved casually, as if all were going according to plan . . . which, Pearson supposed, it was. The action had moved to the rear of the house now - that was where the pen really was, not in here, and the bats were doing a lot more than just shearing.
"Come on," he said to Cam and Moira. "Let"s get these f.u.c.ks."
The batmen at the rear of the room were late in realizing that a few of the refugees had decided to turn and fight. One of them spun around, possibly to run, struck a new arrival, and slipped in the spilled coffee. They both went down. Pearson opened fire on the one remaining on its feet. The machine-pistol made its somehow unsatisfying hack!hack!hack! sound and the bat was driven backward, its alien face breaking open and letting out a cloud of stinking fog . . . it was as if, Pearson thought, they really were just illusions.
Cam and Moira got the idea and opened fire on the remaining bats, catching them in a withering field of fire that knocked them back against the wall and then sent them to the floor, already oozing out of their clothes in an insubstantial mist that to Pearson smelled quite a lot like the asters in the marble flower-islands outside The First Mercantile.
"Come on," Pearson said. "If we go now, we might have a chance."
"But - " Cameron began. He looked around, starting to come out of his daze. That was good; Pearson had an idea they"d all have to be wide-awake if they were going to have a chance of getting out of this.
"Never mind, Cam," Moira said. She had also looked around, and noted the fact that they were the only ones, human or bat, left in here. Everyone else had gone out the back. "Let"s just go. I think maybe the door we came in through would be our best bet."
"Yes," Pearson said, "but not for long."
He spared one last look at Duke, who lay on the floor with his face frozen in an expression of pained disbelief. He wished there were time to close Duke"s eyes, but there wasn"t.
"Let"s go," he said, and they went.
By the time they reached the door which gave on the porch - and Cambridge Avenue beyond it - the gunfire coming from the rear of the house had begun to taper off. How many dead? Pearson wondered, and the answer which first occurred - all of them - was horrible but too plausible to deny. He supposed one or two others might have slipped through, but surely no more. It had been a good trap, set quietly and neatly around them while Robbie Delray ran his gums, stalling for time and checking his watch . . . probably waiting to give some signal which Pearson had preempted.
If I"d woken up a little earlier, Duke might still be alive, he thought bitterly. Perhaps true, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. This wasn"t the time for recriminations.
One police-bat had been left to stand sentry on the porch, but it was turned in the direction of the street, possibly watching for unwanted interference. Pearson leaned through the open door toward it and said, "Hey, you ugly ringmeat a.s.shole - got a cigarette?"
The bat turned.
Pearson blew its face off.
Shortly after one the next morning, three people - two men and a woman, wearing torn nylons and a dirty red skirt - ran beside a freight-train pulling out of the South Station shipping yards. The younger of the two men leaped easily into the square mouth of an empty boxcar, turned, and held out his hands to the woman.
She stumbled and cried out as one of her low heels broke. Pearson put an arm around her waist (he got a heartbreakingly faint whiff of Giorgio below the much fresher smell of her sweat and her fear), ran with her that way, then yelled for her to jump. As she did, he grabbed her hips and boosted her toward Cameron Stevens"s reaching hands. She caught them and Pearson gave her a final rough shove to help Stevens haul her aboard.
Pearson had fallen behind in his effort to help her, and now he could see the fence which marked the edge of the train yards not far ahead. The freight was gliding through a hole in the chainlink, but there would be no room for both it and Pearson; if he didn"t get aboard, and quickly, he would be left behind in the yard.
Cam glanced around the open boxcar door, saw the approaching fence, and held his hands out again. "Come on!" he shouted. "You can do it!"
Pearson couldn"t have - not back in the old two-pack-a-day life, anyway. Now, however, he was able to find a little extra, both in his legs and in his lungs. He sprinted along the treacherous bed of trash-littered cinders beside the tracks, temporarily outrunning the lumbering train again, holding his hands out and up, stretching his fingers to touch the hands above him as the fence loomed. Now he could see the cruel interfacings of barbed wire weaving in and out of the chainlink diamonds.
The eye of his mind opened wide in that moment and he saw his wife sitting in her chair in the living room, her face puffy with crying and her eyes red. He saw her telling two uniformed policemen that her husband had gone missing. He even saw the stack of Jenny"s Pop-Up books on the little table beside her. Was that really going on? Yes; in one form or another, he supposed it was. And Lisabeth, who had never smoked a single cigarette in her whole life, would not be aware of the black eyes and fanged mouths beneath the young faces of the policemen sitting across from her on the couch; she would not see the oozing tumors or the black, pulsing lines which crisscrossed their naked skulls.
Would not know. Would not see.
G.o.d bless her blindness, Pearson thought. Let it last forever.
He stumbled toward the dark behemoth that was a westbound Conrail freight, toward the orange fluff of sparks which spiraled up from beneath one slowly turning steel wheel.
"Run!" Moira shrieked, and leaned out of the boxcar door farther, her hands imploring. "Please, Brandon - just a little more!""
"Hurry up, you gluefoot!" Cam screamed. "Watch out for the f.u.c.king fence!""
Can"t, Pearson thought. Can"t hurry up, can"t watch out for the fence, can"t do any more. Just want to lie down. Just want to sleep.
Then he thought of Duke and managed to put on a little more speed after all. Duke hadn"t been old enough to know that sometimes people lose their guts and sell out, that sometimes even the ones you idolize do that, but he had been old enough to grab Brand Pearson"s arm and keep him from killing himself with a scream. Duke wouldn"t have wanted him to be left behind in this stupid trainyard.