Everyone's Dead But Us (20 page)

It was long past noon on a New Year’s Day. The rain fell in straight sheets in front of me. I observed the harbor, villas, and Apritzi House spread out below me. The home nearest to me down the slope looked empty. I had no idea which way to go. I’d found a little food in the house. Hunks of cheese and salami in the refrigerator. They were warm, but I wasn’t picky. At least they weren’t spoiled. And as I always say, if I don’t have to cook it, and I don’t have to clean it, then it’s gourmet.

From my position, I could see only the top bit of the burned remnant of the castle tower. The yacht listed far into the water. I could see the top third of the burned-out boat in the castle bay. I couldn’t see the archeologists’ vessel. So Gavin was really gone. I wouldn’t miss her. I could see no one on the paths. Where was Scott? Where was the killer? I leaned my head against the wall. I don’t know what I would do without Scott. He’d been part of my life for a long time now. I would sacrifice everything for him.

I saw a flutter of movement halfway along the parapet about a quarter of a mile away. A trick of the eye? I watched carefully. Moments later the movement came again only closer to me. Someone was crawling along the landward side of the parapet. He was shielded somewhat by the overhang. I couldn’t see who it was. I couldn’t tell if it might be Scott eluding the killer and/or looking for me or the killer eluding Scott and/or looking for me. By this point it was becoming fairly ludicrous with the roles of cat and mouse depending on whose script we were following. Whoever it was had on a yellow poncho. This was not a help at identification as everyone had been issued one of the damn things within hours of the original explosion.

I caught a glimpse of blond hair. No ski mask. Scott.

A second later he was on his feet and running down the parapet toward me. He made no sign that he’d seen me. Then I saw a second movement. Between him and me. I saw a glint of metal in the other person’s hand. Ski mask, wide-brimmed hat. The killer. Scott hadn’t seen him, but I didn’t shout, because I wasn’t sure the one with the gun had seen Scott.

I left my hiding place and began moving toward Scott. From my vantage point, it was over three stories down to the parapet. I raced downstairs. As I ran, at various points I lost sight of both of them. I was still ten feet above the parapet when I saw Scott come to an abrupt halt. The person with the gun stood up. Scott whirled, and dashed the other way.

I heard a gunshot. I saw a bit of parapet two feet from Scott fly off into the sea. My lover was totally exposed to the killer who could keep randomly shooting as he strode forward. There was no way off the parapet for a hundred yards back the other way.

Scott leapt to the edge and scrambled over. I had no idea what was in his head. Maybe trying anything to get out of the way of the gunfire. I remembered there was a sort of ledge about two feet down from the top of the parapet at some points. It was maybe all of an inch wide. After that came a chunk of space eternal with nasty jagged rocks far below.

I took out my gun. Running and firing wasn’t the brightest thing to do, but I had to get to him before he fell and I had to stop the killer. At my first shot, they both turned. I don’t know if Scott recognized me or not, but the killer turned and let off several rounds in my direction. I ran and zigged and zagged and slipped and fell. My gun flew out of my hand toward the killer.

He ducked. I dashed. As I flung myself forward, I could see Scott’s hands gripping the side of the parapet. From my perspective I couldn’t see much between him and the rocks and the sea except several hundred feet of air, after which he would he smash into the ground.

I saw Scott’s hand begin to slip. The killer said, “Die, you shit.” I didn’t recognize the voice. He raised the gun. I lunged forward. I knocked the killer off his feet. I heard a thud. His head was between me and the cement balustrade. His gun flew over the parapet and into space. I saw Scott’s other hand begin to slip.

I could hang onto the killer and pummel him until he was unconscious and see who it was, or I could grab for Scott. The choice was instinctual. I grabbed for Scott. “Hold on!” I yelled. I heard him gasping and puffing. I gripped his hand. I felt him halt then slip slightly. I got to my feet and jammed my thighs and feet against the parapet. I reached my other hand for him and got his upper arm.

I felt a stunning smash against my back. I almost lost Scott, but both of his hands were now on the near side of the parapet. I yanked my elbow back. If I hadn’t still had hold of Scott, I might have done some real damage to the killer’s sternum. As it was, he backed away hacking and stumbling.

I snatched at Scott’s jacket, the sleeves, anything that would give me any kind of purchase. I looked back for the killer. He was on his knees shaking his head.

I focused completely on Scott. I leaned over and pulled. “I’ve got you,” I said. He gripped my jacket and shirt. I heard seams begin to rip. Scott was halfway over the parapet with one foot on the one-inch balcony two feet down when the killer slammed into me again. Scott grabbed the edge of the parapet nearest land. I pitched nearly halfway over. I kicked backward with both feet. I connected with some part of the killer’s anatomy because for a moment, he backed off.

I got myself back on the parapet and turned toward the killer. He was scrabbling at Scott’s hold trying to pitch him into the sea. I could only see shadows. I smelled damp, sweaty human. The ski mask, hat, and hooded sweatshirt concealed his identity.

Scott began to slip backward. I grabbed him. For several moments my face was inches from the killer’s neck. We were in shadow. He didn’t turn toward me.

I pulled at Scott. The killer pushed. Scott slipped some more. Every hour of every workout I’d ever done was in play as I battled the killer in trying to save Scott’s life. The killer shifted his feet in an attempt to get a better grip on Scott. But the move exposed him more to me. I kicked the killer in the nuts. He stopped trying to push Scott. I felt myself losing my grip on my lover. I lunged for him. Grabbed. Pulled. It took a few seconds to get Scott completely over the side and onto the parapet’s cement.

I turned to look for the killer. There was a bent-over shadow hustling toward the minaret I’d been hiding behind. In seconds he was lost to sight. Scott and I were gasping for air. I pulled him to me.

I kissed him. Held him. Felt his arms around me and mine around him. I never wanted to let him go. Maybe we’d engaged in an embrace as fierce before, but I couldn’t remember it.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. I’d have stood in the rain with him for hours. We had to get under cover. I glanced around for my gun. It was in pieces against the parapet.

We got to our feet quickly enough and headed away from the minaret. We got to the shelter of a set of steps that led down to Apritzi House. We huddled under them.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Now I am,” he said. I checked his head wound and the back of his hands. He looked pale and sick.

“We’ve got to get inside.” We could follow the steps into Apritzi House. Following the killer didn’t make much sense. I remembered Henry Tudor’s empty gun cabinet. The killer could have an arsenal.

We entered on the bottom floor. We were in the kitchen. Near the refrigerator a number of empty boxes and cartons were scattered over the countertops. People had eaten here.

The door to the gift shop was open. We grabbed towels. I used three different ones to dry off. I snatched underwear off the shelf. It was trendy black boxer briefs. They were dry as were the socks. I’d seldom felt such comfort in clothes before. We both donned dry everything. We sat on the floor behind the counter and whispered to each other.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I tried following after you. He shot at me.”

I said, “I got shot at, too.”

“There were two of them?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Did someone follow you?”

“For at least a short way.”

“I got followed quite a ways. He could have gone after you for a very short while, then come after me.”

Scott said, “I figured I’d run all the way back around the island and find you.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No. I thought there was some kind of activity down at the harbor. I was afraid to go to Apritzi House or anywhere else.”

I told him about the boat leaving. Then I said, “As long as we’re in here, we should check on Thasos.”

He nodded. I actually felt dry. It was amazing. In a poorly equipped sporting goods section, we found an aluminum baseball bat and a set of golf clubs. We inched our way through the first floor and took the stairs up to where Thasos had been kept. We encountered no one. The door to Thasos’s room was open. Candles guttered in sconces along the walls. A well-muffled figure stood over him with gun raised. We rushed forward.

“Drop it!” I shouted.

The figure turned toward me and began raising his gun. I threw the golf club. The killer ducked. Almost before the golf club landed, we were on him. Scott began pummeling the hand with the gun in it against the bedstead. I heard cracks of board and bone. The killer yelped. Scott grabbed the gun. I yanked off the wide-brimmed hat, the poncho, the ski mask, and the hood of the sweatshirt. Under it all was Barney Crushton.

“This makes no sense.” We’d asked him why, and he had been explaining for half an hour. It still made no sense. His reason for killing Henry Tudor seemed to spring from what I call the “Coors beer” philosophy of gay activism. Some gay activists thought the Coors beer company should be boycotted because some members of the Coors family gave their money to organizations that promoted homophobia. The company according to others, had begun using gay-friendly employment practices and should not be boycotted. The change in policy hadn’t been enough for some. Whichever side was right, in Crushton’s case, it looked like he had engineered the deaths of a whole lot of people. Some of the wealthy gay men, and especially their even wealthier families, had given to groups that had homophobic elements. He was determined to send them a message.

Crushton was tied up on the floor next to the bed with Thasos in it. The investigator had not regained consciousness while we were there. He continued to breathe.

For now, I figured we could simply sit here and wait for help. Feige would have called, the boat would have gotten through, or the staff would arrive in due course.

I asked, “How were you planning to escape?”

“It’s quite simple. You’d all be dead. My means of escape was the first boat out of here. There is no Barney Crushton. He doesn’t exist. I created him as a fiction years ago when I was making bombs in Greenwich Village. Everybody thought all the bomb makers died in the blast. I didn’t. Everybody else did. I created a new identity from one of those who did die and went underground. Using the other identity I became many things. Some I kept secret. One of my public personas was a personal valet.”

I said, “Thasos was pointing to you in that group when you walked in the room, not Oser. You were the dangerous one.”

“Well, it took you a while to figure that out. The key here is that corporate America has gotten away with greed for more than a century. Rich gay Americans have become part of that. I’m determined to put a stop to it.”

I said, “That is absolutely the most moronic thing I’ve ever heard. I’m a good old-fashioned liberal lefty, but that is just stupid. Greed is a century old? You’re an idiot.” I’ve always wanted to say that to a killer.

“And you think corporate America should just get away with doing anything they want? That the rich oligarchical families should be able to act with impunity? Of course, you’re one of them now.”

“You’re just pissed because you don’t have as much money as the rest of them do. What is the point of being that angry? Why the hell bother? Somebody is going to have all that money. It’s protected by wills and family connections and lawyers. Are you going to start beheading all the rich gay people? Or just rich gay people who happen to be conveniently in the way? What’s the point? There’s a lot more rich heterosexual people.”

“You don’t get it. Your type never understands.” “Understanding isn’t the problem. When you say ‘I don’t understand,’ what you really mean is I disagree with you, and you don’t have any logical arguments to present in rebuttal. Or what is it that you think I don’t understand?” I’d buy the talking-killer cliché even though, currently, he was the one tied up.

“You don’t understand the need for action.” “Perhaps we have a different definition of action. Mine doesn’t include murdering innocent people.” “Action can work sometimes.” “Why wait until now?” “You’re presuming I have waited until now.” “You’ve been out killing rich gay people for years?” “There are more causes than just gay causes.” “You’ve been killing all kinds of people for silly causes for years?”

“They aren’t silly causes. They are very serious causes, and some people are very seriously dead.” His voice began to rise as he spoke.

I said, “I wasn’t meaning that you’d made people frivolously dead, you twit. I meant if you’re a serial killer on a grand scale, what precisely have you changed? You’re an unknown terrorist. You haven’t even caused an overreaction on the part of any government. People have died. For what?” My critique of his lifestyle wasn’t likely to endear me to him either. I certainly didn’t care as long as I was the one with the gun.

Crushton said, “Maybe I just feel better. Maybe that’s all it needs to accomplish. On an international scale, I’ve made a lot of people dead. They declared me dead in Greenwich Village forty years ago. Once you’re dead, it frees up a whole lot of options. I’ve done a lot of good.” By this time he was nearly shouting. He’d punctuated his last comments with spasmodic jerks of his tied-up fists.

I kept my voice low and calm as I said, “The louder you get makes you what, more correct? A better debater than I? Makes your points more salient? You’ve been killing for causes. Hooray for you and the horse you rode in on.”

“You think that’s new?” His voice didn’t lose a decibel. “You think that’s unusual. Think Crusades, Christianity, Islam, communism, democracy. People will kill for what they believe in. Why does that startle you?”

“Because killing a lot of people rarely accomplishes more than the killing itself. Because human life has value. Because you don’t make sense.”

“I don’t remember being required to make sense to you being a part of my résumé.”

“Why pick gay causes now?”

“Why pick any cause? Because I care. Because I can do something about it. Because I’m gay. Because they are attempting to put us into concentration camps. No, not the ones with barbed wire fences. No, we’ve learned that you can’t just take people out and kill them. That’s not how it works anymore. Now you create concentration camps of the mind. Now you change laws or amend constitutions. You don’t go to camps anymore, you get sent to some limbo where you aren’t quite as good as everyone else, and it’s okay to discriminate against you. Perhaps you don’t get discriminated against in as blatant a way as African-Americans in the South before the sixties, but it is just as soul deadening. That’s what they want.”

I said, “I agree with a lot of your theory, but why kill rich gay people? What has their deaths accomplished? My soul isn’t less dead because some rich guy is killed.”

“When the news of what happened here gets out, people will take notice. People have got to stop using their money or letting their corporations use money, or donating to campaigns of cronies who want to put us in concentration camps.”

“You schmuck. They’ll take notice that you’re a raving loony. They’ll take notice that even the rich suffer. They’ll take notice that even safe havens for the rich such as Korkasi need armed guards. They’ll take notice for as long as they want more people to be afraid. They’re not going to take notice of your manifestos. You do have manifestos, don’t you?”

“They’ll notice.”

Scott had been quiet through much of this. His wounds, lack of sleep, physical exertion on the parapet when we pulled him back from the brink, all seemed to have taken their toll. He’s usually the debater with people. I don’t have the patience, but I always want to know why. I read history trying to figure out why mankind does mad things to each other. The only conclusion I’ve come to about why we are so rotten to one another, is because we are. Not much of a comfort.

Scott put his hand on my arm. I looked at him. He asked Crushton, “Why didn’t the people on the island stay together in one place?”

“They trust their money. They don’t necessarily trust people. Their villas had been safe so therefore their villas would be safe. Warwick Movado reassured them they would be safe. The ability to hide from reality or to believe the reality you wish was true, is not limited to the rich. Remember the ones who have been coming here are an inbred group.”

“A NFL quarterback is inbred?”

“My dear, he’s been coming since he was a freshman in college. It’s fairly easy to flaunt the NCAA rules on an international scale. That was eighteen years ago. In gay years, that’s forever.”

Scott asked, “Why would they be suspicious of us?”

“You’re outsiders. You’ve only been coming here a few years. You rarely spent time with the others. You were both strong enough to do the killing and move the bodies. You were staying in the tower. You had no witnesses, except each other, to provide alibis for the times when any of the killings took place. The dopes who we were bamboozling easily fell for it.”

I asked, “We who? You had a fellow conspirator?”

His eyes shifted. Somebody else was in on this? He was silent. “Who?” I demanded.

“A friend.” I supposed I could threaten to beat it out of him. I was at an emotional edge that an explosion of violence might soothe, but I was exhausted, and still believed that rationality would triumph in this world, and it was not rational to beat the crap out of someone. And the police would get here eventually. They could beat the crap out of him and get the information.

Scott asked, “How did they know we didn’t have alibis? No one knew exactly when the killings were done.”

“They didn’t have to. They were scared. Remember, you might send someone down to Apritzi House, but then someone else would die. You really didn’t organize yourselves very well.”

“Why be so random in picking victims?”

“Pardon?”

“Why not kill the politicians that voted for the antigay amendment? Or like teenagers who’ve been bullied, why don’t they murder the members of the athletic teams who’ve been doing the bullying? Why randomly kill innocent kids? Or better yet find out which citizens in which states voted for the constitutional amendments in their states and kill them? That’s as logical as the other muck you’re pushing although that last might take you a while. How likely is it that the world is going to notice your reasoning?”

“Our statement has to be big and dramatic.”

Another plural. I tried again, “Who was your buddy?”

Silence for several beats then, “A friend.”

I tried another tack. “Killing a United States senator or two isn’t big or dramatic?”

“They’re too well protected and there’s always another one. No, we had to go after the money. People have to realize that they cannot contribute to actively destroying their own, and that’s what they are doing. Some of the people we’ve killed aren’t Americans, but they give money to causes and people. There are no borders anymore. Corporations and people are multinational. Some in the family of the pretender to the French throne, with his full knowledge, have supported vicious, homophobic right-wing causes in that country. Someone has to point these things out so that the world will take notice.”

“They noticed the Unabomber. Did it help any of his causes?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. You’re a dumb shit who killed a lot of people for causes, most of which I very much agree with, but which you betrayed by killing people for. It might be better if one of your causes was believing in nonviolence.”

“Nonviolence is for cowards.”

Scott said, “You’ve been doing violence for causes for a long time.”

“Haven’t you been listening?”

“You’re old enough,” Scott said. “You’re not a newborn radical. There were bombings in the sixties that were never solved.”

“Perhaps.”

Scott said, “You’ve killed for other causes. You’re just a murderer looking for an excuse.”

“And I suppose you’re afraid that if a gay person is committing crimes, it will make people more prejudiced against us, that I’m not a credit to my sexual orientation? Bullshit.”

Except for the violence part, I didn’t disagree with him much. How many he’d killed in the name of causes probably didn’t equal the number the Christians, Muslims, et al., had killed over the centuries, but I’m not sure it was really helpful to be keeping score.

“Who blew up the tower?” I asked.

“I did. I used a slurry mix, the same thing they use in coal mines. Didn’t take much.”

“Why?”

“Duh. To stop communications with the outside world. We had work to do and it needed time to be done. We’ve waited several years for a storm like this.”

Scott said, “You really figured you could just put on a disguise and walk out of here on the next boat?”

“Sure. If I was the last person left alive, I could just take the last boat out or mingle with the staff from the first boat in. There are forty people coming. They don’t take attendance.”

I said, “Gavin took the last boat. Someone would notice you. They’d have to. The police would take the time to check who was who. They’d count the corpses and who was supposed to be here.”