Everybody Scream! (45 page)

Del ran at Johnny Leng. The audience was yelling, screaming.

Mortimer shoved his girlfriend out of his way, broke from the camp in a sprint, his top hat toppling, left behind in the dust. His girlfriend staggered, hugging herself, blinking, head tucked into her shoulders. Roland LaKarnafeaux had slid along the outside of the van, fell to his side, floundered, came up on hands and knees to crawl…

Del tackled Leng, driving the air out of him. As one they crashed back into the open door of the van, Leng underneath. Del brought a fist down. It mostly glanced off a broad, well-defined cheekbone. Del caught the gun as it came up in Leng’s left hand. The gun went off. The silent bullet zipped past his ear. He seized Leng’s wrist in his right hand. With both hands he pounded Leng’s forearm against the edge of the van’s sliding door…again…again. Now the gun flipped over Leng’s hand to dangle just by its trigger guard. One last bash and the pistol was dislodged, disappearing into the van.

Leng’s free hand lunged, caught Del by the hair. Del cried out. He twisted his head to follow the twisting. Letting go abruptly, Leng cocked his arm back close to his body…then drove his elbow out into Del Kahn’s cheekbone below his left eye. Del stumbled backwards away from Leng, unpinning him. Leng pushed himself out of the van’s threshold.

The kick came up into Del’s crotch. As Del folded the punch arced into his temple. His lapels were seized, he was hoisted up and his whole body was swung. Let go. He crashed limply against the side of the camper and slipped down it into a puddle of half-consciousness.

Taking a deep breath, Leng looked around him, and his searching gaze came to rest on the pistol proffered in Dingo’s hand. He didn’t take his time in going to it, but he didn’t hurry either. Despite his fog and the pain pulsing within it, he felt in control again. He stooped (God, his
back
) and curled his fist around the gun. Explosive bullets. Loud, messy, but now there was no time or need for stealth or subtlety. Straightening up, Leng turned…

Del swung Roland LaKarnafeaux’s blue metal baseball bat with both fists gripping the black plastic sheath of the handle, swung it from way back behind his shoulder, swung it with the twist of his entire body, swung it with his teeth gritted and his eyes insane with hunger. Leng’s eyes had held only cold, determined intent. That wasn’t quite enough at this moment.

The bat slammed against the side of Johnny Leng’s head, and either Del felt something within crack or crunch, or else it was the vibration that gong-like traveled along the bat into his arms. Leng was thrown to the ground. His legs curled spider-like under him, his hair gray in the dust. A moan. Still the gun in his hand. Del stood over him. The bat with which Roland LaKarnafeaux had killed his first man–a boy, really…a child–killed his first person at the age of twelve, still rang with its vibration in Del’s fists, his body ringing with its own vibration. LaKarnafeaux’s Excalibur. Del had seized it from its resting place against the camper, had yanked the sword from the stone although he was not the king. Anyone could wield this Excalibur because it was only an old baseball bat, nicked and gouged, not mystical, not mythical.

Dingo’s gun left a groove in the dirt as Leng dragged it toward him, his back arching. His arms pushed. His head left the ground. He was slow and patient; he moaned almost calmly. Del got closer by one more step. Executioner’s sword or child’s toy or vibrating extension of human rage, the bat lifted high and came down hard.

The audience cried out in the thrilled unity of horror, loathing, morbid fascination.

Johnny Leng splayed flat on his face. He didn’t moan now.

Del turned, eyes still hungry, on Roland LaKarnafeaux, who on hands and knees rolled the large corpse of Mendez over onto its back, exposing the bright plastic and metal gun underneath it. LaKarnafeaux gaped up in shocked distress, a fat child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Del covered the few steps toward him, swinging the bat up into the ready position once more.

“Hey–no!
No!
Come on!” LaKarnafeaux blubbered, tumbling onto his back, hands flailing, pushing his body along with his legs away from Mendez and the gun. “Don’t, man, I give up! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

Del quit advancing, stood over Mendez. LaKarnafeaux was sobbing, tears actually running into his grizzled beard, his glasses dislodged, hanging from one ear. His t-shirt had rolled up to expose the hairy planet of his belly. He was too helpless and pathetic a thing to kill. Like the beast called Jonah’s Whale, through whose body people rode, he wasn’t even fully alive. Killing him would be more like pulling the plug on a life support machine. He groveled, whimpered, whined. Now Del carried the scepter of the blue baseball bat.

Over his shoulder, he glared hard and brightly at the Martians. The fiery triumph he showed was splashed with the cold water of fear as he saw the boy with the cigar-or-licorice whip lift his blaster to aim it at him once more.” Hey–
wait!
” Del tossed the bat away. “Wait!”

Purple vortex, the Martian captain had decided finally, was more important than a code of honor…

“I’m unarmed, I’m unarmed!” Now Del was batless and groveled. Things could change so quickly. No one person could ever be the most dangerous, the most powerful. They could just take turns based partly on their skill and boldness, and partly on opportunity and luck. Del’s opportunities and his luck had shifted badly. The deliberateness of the Martian’s aim, the one or two ticks of hesitation, indicating a last vestige of reluctance, were all that saved him. The Martian, in that tick or two, in turn squandered
his
moment of opportunity and luck, of dangerous superiority…

The explosive bullet from Mitch Garnet’s pistol transformed the neck of the Martian captain into a gushing organic volcano, his head obliterating like a shotgunned plaster bust. The pitiful rag of a body crumpled bonelessly. In his crouched firing stance, Mitch merely had to swivel a few inches to reduce the head of the second boy to a shattered clay pigeon.

“Get down, Del!” he roared. “Everybody
scatter!
” He meant that for the audience.

Del understood Mitch’s meaning as he dove behind a display table.

Not everyone understood, or even had time to respond anyway, and most of those who tried collided with each other as the three Martians sprang out from their hiding places nearby and opened fire with their baroque, ridiculously bulky assault engines, bandoliers with grenades clipped to them criss-crossing their narrow chests. One Choom man in the range of fire absorbed an automatic blast of a half dozen ray bolts, and like a lasered St. Sebastian swooned in death. A teenage girl took a hole through her narrow neck. A man had his wrist lanced clean through.

Mitch rolled, came up kneeling, fired. His explosive bullet struck the boy on the gun. But the gun blew up. And the grenades blew up.

He had popped out from behind a trailer which was a dilky stand, and the chain of explosions which shattered the Martian to fragments like a vase blasted with a machine gun (each bullet shattering more, but all so close together that nothing was left for long) rocked the trailer, tore through the metal skin of it. The lights flickered inside. The Choom proprietor had ducked under his counter back when the first of the gunfire began, wiser than the gathered crowd, most of whom hadn’t really fled until now, only moving further back or spreading out a little, confident in their role as observers, as if this were all some holographic VT program. A few pieces of shrapnel struck the proprietor but left only minor cuts.

The shrapnel freed from the grenades, however, was like ten machine gunners standing in a circle wildly spraying…a ravaging locust storm. Many of the frantic audience members went down thrashing, flopping, shrieking. Three would die, and a burly teenage boy would live the rest of his life as a glassy-eyed giant fetus hooked up to a machine.

“Fuck! You fucking
bastards!
” Mitch bellowed in outrage at having been forced by these monsters to himself make the nightmare even worse. You couldn’t even fight back at them. They made you help them kill. Mitch shook with this madness, horrified at himself. He was a protector of the people. He was afraid to shoot again.

One of the remaining two strafed his gun toward Mitch, ripping through a blindly stumbling, shrapnel-pierced man to do so. Though he couldn’t fire again, Mitch was able to dive at the ground, scramble for cover behind the table with its museum display of handcuffs, knives, iodine pipes. The glass shattered, the freed colorful eyes danced exuberantly, crazily, high into the air.

The other Martian moved to a more advantageous position. He saw a form hiding behind a table. A grenade rocket might hurt LaKarnafeaux at this nearness to him. He launched a huge capsule of military-grade plasma from his rifle instead.

The capsule hit Cod on the left of his chest and the quivering gelatinous plasma spread instantly over his writhing, flopping form like a blazing mantle of white light half solidified. It ran into his open mouth; no scream got past it. It poured into his ears, his nostrils, sank through his pores. In moments the quivering blob grew less and less human in outline and shrank away to nothing…no bones, no sludge, no stain.

The strafing Martian, seeing that the enemy was pinned, came running out from his station to close in on a clearer target, circling in to better see those display tables. Too frenzied strafing might hit LaKarnafeaux and they couldn’t have that. Luckily, at last, most of the bystanders had withdrawn or lay dead or immobilized, creating less obstruction.

The Martian, however, ran past Shiv Mofo, who had ducked behind a trash barrel, a black gang boy wearing a hot pink rubber swim cap, who had never much liked the Martians and who was even more offended by having been caught in the middle of one of their gun battles. As the Martian ran past Mofo, ignoring him, Mofo simply extended his arm and shot him cleanly through the skull with two lead bullets.

The Martian continued running for a bit, but weaving as if dodging air fire, before he pitched forward dead across a moaning wounded innocent.

Garnet found a safe spot to peek out of, and maybe to fire from, in time to see the last of the Martian unit die. Two white humans and a Choom were shooting him, standing around him and getting closer as he dropped his rifle. They had decided individually, without the inspiration of Shiv Mofo or each other. This was outer Punktown, but it was still Punktown. The little boy’s inner lining of bullet and ray-proof mesh seemed to be keeping him barely alive, except for some bone-cracking blunt trauma, but some gang boys of similar age dashed in with nunchakus to flail at his head, and finished him off and then some.

Wearily, warily, Del Kahn and Mitch Garnet stood up from behind their shelters. Del saw two scorched ray holes in Mitch’s silver windbreaker but knew he had a protective mesh lining inside. They looked at each other for a moment, then Del saw Mitch scan the battlefield of dead and wounded with a look of horrified despair he had never seen on Mitch’s tight, hard face. Rousing himself from his shock, however, Mitch went to handcuff the cowering, trembling, half insensate blob that was Roland LaKarnafeaux.

Within minutes, almost every weapon (and some wallets) had been stripped from the dead. One of the gang boys tucked away his nunchakus in favor of a Martian’s hand blaster, another lugged away the Martian’s trademark assault engine. Del watched a boy dash off with bandoliers from which a half dozen fragmentation grenades hung like fruit. Del himself bent to retrieve Dingo Rubydawn’s semiautomatic from the hand of Johnny Leng…half to keep a kid from taking it, half for himself should more Martians attack before the inevitable influx of town enforcers.

Tucking the flat gun in his waistband, Del watched a bloodied, disoriented man, apparently struck by shrapnel, stagger away with the assault engine from the Martian killed by Shiv Mofo.

Once again a crowd gathered, a tide coming in, more people than ever…children licking ice cream, teenagers munching corn dogs, and toward the rear a towering, bluish-greenish scaled Torgessi, craning its neck with mild curiosity as it placidly chewed dilkies from a greasy little bag.

Nick Bovino’s arm ached but his pride was more injured…that fucking little monkey had beaten him within a minute. Five feet tall and as skinny as his daughters. He cursed under his breath and rubbed at his arm. At least he’d seen a
human
man beat it, finally. A handsome young man had won against five contenders in a row, had been awarded a trophy…but those who had gathered and remained to watch him didn’t applaud his victory, cheer, or clap his back. They were either too shy or reserved or unemotional or too used to watching life through their VT screens.