Pandemonium (5 page)

“I want to go back to the car accident,” Dr. Aaron said.
We sat at a table by the window, only a table away from the traditional yellow chair. Even Borders kept a yellow chair, as if the Fat Boy might burst in and start demanding lattés. There were maybe twenty people in the café, and at least half of them seemed to be seventy or older. We’d both ordered bottled water. Not usually my thing, but I’d had enough coffee this morning and I was feeling jittery.
“At any time during the crash,” she said, “did you go unconscious? Maybe you struck your head?”
“Are we back to that theory?” I said. “I bonk my head, start hearing voices, wackiness ensues.”
“Please, bear with me for a minute.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I didn’t hit my head—nothing like what happened in the pool. I mean, when I first hit the rail everything went black for a second—but just a second. I remember right after the air bag hit me, the car filled with this stuff like gray smoke. I found out later that it was the cornstarch they packed the air bag in to keep it from molding or something. Then I went through the rail and bounced against the air bag a few times, but afterward my forehead wasn’t bleeding or anything. I didn’t even get a black eye.”
“When you say everything went black, you mean you blacked out?”
“No, I didn’t go unconscious—I just couldn’t see anything. I don’t think I was knocked all the way under—it happened too fast. I just…saw black.”
“Like ‘a black well’ opening up?”
Heat rolled up my chest, made my ears roar.
“Del, after we talked yesterday, I looked up my old notes from our sessions. When you first visited me, we spent a lot of time talking about your near drowning. You talked about a ‘black well,’ a deep hole that you saw at the bottom of the pool. You could feel it sucking you in.”
“I did?”
“Do you remember that?”
“Not really.” The shiver had passed. I pressed my palms into my knees. “Some.”
“And this time?”
“Some.” I looked up, smiled, but couldn’t hold it. “There was something like that. Like a well. When I hit the guardrail I kind of lurched forward, and for a second there I saw it, this blackness, and I felt like I could…like it was sucking me in. But I held on. I stayed awake, and then I was getting whipped around inside the car. A second later I was at the bottom of the ravine.” I shook my head. “You think that means something?”
“Del, both times after you saw this well, the noises came back. Some people when they have near-death experiences, they see a tunnel, and perhaps—”
“The tunnel, the light, and Grandma and Jesus at the end of it with their arms open to greet me. I’ve read about this. That’s just oxygen starvation.”
“That’s one theory—oxygen starvation and endorphin release. But say that the Jungians are right, and there are outside archetypes or memes that the brain is receptive to. One way to think of this black well is that it’s a gateway—a gateway that opens when you’re most vulnerable.”
“So I’m near death, and the demon jumps back in.”
“Maybe.” She pursed her lips; it was killing her to agree with
demon.
Dr. Aaron liked things agnostic. But she nodded. “Maybe. It explains a lot. Each time the well opened, it came after you. It’s like an opportunistic infection. But the good news is that you’ve fought it off before. And if the current exercises aren’t working, that just means we’ve got to try new ones.”
“It’s a really good theory,” I said flatly.
She blinked. “But you don’t think so.”
“I wish you were right, Doc. A couple of months ago I would have bought it.”
“A couple of months ago—when you were hospitalized?”
I breathed in, breathed out. Cleansing breaths. “See, it’s not just the noises now. I developed this sleepwalking problem.”
She frowned, and I laughed. “Okay, that’s not the right word,” I said. “Sleep-
raging,
maybe. Wolfing out.”
Her head tilted a fraction. This was what she used to do when I was fourteen. A little tilt, the right bit of leverage, and she could open me like a bottle.
“It didn’t start until a couple months after the car accident,” I said. “The noises had grown worse, but I was hanging on. I was getting to work most days. Then on a Thursday night I woke up, and my downstairs neighbor was pounding on my door.” I smiled, remembering how it had taken me a few seconds to realize that the pounding wasn’t coming from inside my head. “Anyway, I was on the floor in the front hallway, tangled in the bedsheets. I didn’t know why I was in the hall, but I was furious at my neighbor for waking me up. I yanked open the door, and he told me I’d been screaming my head off for fifteen minutes. So, a nightmare, right? What do I know.
“It happened again a few nights later. I woke up in the kitchen this time, the phone ringing. I’d gone through the refrigerator, pulling out everything and breaking bottles and ripping open packages. I thought, Jesus Christ. So I started putting chairs in front of my bedroom door, turning my bed around—little obstacles to trip me and maybe wake me up. It didn’t help. So I went to see that doctor in Colorado Springs I told you about. He started me on Ambien, but that didn’t do anything for me, so he switched me to Nembutal. The attacks kept happening, though, and that’s when I checked into the nuthouse. They kept watch on me, doped me to the gills, and I went a string of nights without any adventures. Of course, it was right about then that the insurance ran out.”
“So you came back home. And it started happening again.”
“It’s still happening. Every night I—”
I started to say, Every night I chain myself to the bed. I could tell her everything: the bike chains, the combination locks (because keys could be lost thrashing around, or could be found by whatever was running my body at night), the whole Lawrence-Talbot-at-Full-Moon melodrama. But not yet. Not here in the coffee shop.
She waited for a long time, then said, “Del, tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m a little slow,” I said, “but even I figured it out eventually. The Hellion, the demon that possessed me when I was five?”
She nodded. She knew I was stalling, and wasn’t about to interrupt.
“He hasn’t been seen since. Okay, a couple reports in the news when kids acted strange, but those were just guesses, they weren’t confirmed possessions. And then, even those rumors died out. There’s been nothing reported about the Hellion since the eighties.”
I leaned forward. “Doctor, the Hellion didn’t
come back
when I was fourteen. It didn’t
come back
after the car accident.” I made a noise that was something between a sigh and a laugh.
“It never left.”
Dr. Aaron didn’t move. I looked around at the quiet people quietly sipping their lattés and fruit smoothies.
Finally she said, “You know this.”
“I can feel it in my head, Doctor. It’s pissed off. Somehow when I was a little kid I…I trapped it. I think my mother helped me lock it down the first time. And you helped me the second time—we just thought that the exercises were helping me keep the noises out, when they were really helping me keep them
in.
”
“Oh, Del. I’m so sorry. If you feel I’ve—”
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. I didn’t mean it that way.” I stood up, and pulled my jacket off the back of the chair. “You helped me a lot, got me through a really tough time. You were great.”
“Del, you don’t have to do this alone. I can help.”
“You got your scrip pad with you?”
“Del, I’m talking about therapy. We can start meeting again, work on this together.”
“I don’t want to
work on this,
Doctor. I don’t want to lock it down anymore.” I yanked my arms through the jacket. Fuck the prescription. “I’m done with exercises. I need an exorcism.”

Lew and Mom were in the kitchen, Lew talking on his cell phone and pouring a cup of coffee.
“I’ll be ready in a second,” I said, and moved past them quickly. They’d be able to read how upset I was from my face. “I just need to pack up.”
“No way, no way it should be that slow,” Lew said to the phone. “Did you ping it? Run a trace route.” There were crumbs in his beard. “Hey Mom, your ‘Self Clean’ light is blinking.”
“I put your laundry on the bed,” Mom called after me.
“Thanks.”
“If it’s self cleaning, why’s it just blink at you? Shouldn’t it just clean itself?”
My duffel bag was still zipped. My clothes were on the bed, folded and stacked with retail-quality precision. She’d made the bed, too. Why hadn’t I done that? I closed the door behind me, and kneeled down.
I reached under the bed frame and up, feeling for the hole in the batting that covered the bottom of the box spring. I couldn’t find it at first, and my heart raced.
Jesus, if Mom—
My hand closed on the stubbled pistol grip. I pulled out the gun and the oilcloth, and quickly rewrapped it, resisting the urge to look at it.
I kept my back to the door as I unzipped the duffel bag. The loops of sheathed chain were coiled like snakes. I pushed them to the side and tucked the gun into the top of a pair of jeans. The pill bottle was still in its spot at the bottom of the bag.
Three pills. Three fucking pills.
I packed the newly cleaned clothes around and on top of all the incriminating evidence: the bottle, the locks and chains and manacles, the gun. I felt like a terrorist. A Mama’s Boy terrorist, though; my mother had buttoned the collared shirts, double rolled the socks, and even folded my underwear.
I looked around at the room, checked under the bed again, and slung the bag onto my shoulder. It was suspiciously heavy.
My mother was in the hallway, coming toward me.
“Do you have everything?”
I glanced back at the room. “I think so.”
“You can always pick it up when you get back. You’re coming back before you leave, right?”
“Oh yeah. I’ll see you in a couple days.” I tried to make it sound casual.
We went into the kitchen. Lew was just putting away his phone. I carefully set down the bag—I didn’t want to drop it, in case it clanked—and put an arm around Mom. She was still taller than me—no shrinking yet. “She folded my underwear,” I said to Lew. “My mom folded my underwear.”
“Big deal. She irons mine.” He looked at me. Last night I’d told him about why I wanted to go into the city, but there was something else in his expression. “You ready now?” he said.
Ah. Mom must have told him I’d been with Dr. Aaron.
“I’m waiting on you,” I said.
Mom pulled me into her, hugged me. “Drive safe. I’ll see you in a couple days.”

DEMONOLOGY
THE CAPTAIN

SRINAGAR, JAMMU AND KASHMIR, INDIA, 2004
The first vehicle in a four-vehicle U.S. Marine convoy had almost reached the west end of the bridge when the IEDs detonated. The four vehicles—three Humvees trailed by an M113 armored personnel carrier—were crossing the Fateh Kadal, one of nine two-lane bridges that crossed the Jhelum River in downtown Srinagar. It was 2:15 p.m., fifty degrees but sunny, the pavement still wet from the spring squall that had moved through a half hour before.
Private First Class Peter Gruen was driving the third vehicle in the convoy. He was squinting into the sun through the Humvee’s narrow windshield when the vehicle in front of him suddenly catapulted into the air on a fountain of flame and broken cement. The shockwave was like a punch to the face. Gruen stomped on the brakes and twisted the wheel. His Humvee hit the cement wall and stopped dead, throwing him into the steering column. The hummer he’d been following came down on its side to Gruen’s left, wheels burning. The circular hatch at the top of the vehicle bounced free, slammed into Gruen’s door, and rolled to the other side of the roadway. Chunks of cement thundered down onto the hood and roof.
A ragged hole almost as big as his Humvee had been opened in the roadway between Gruen and the two lead vehicles. Twisted steel rods jutted up from the edge of the hole. Below was the black water of the Jhelum.
Sergeant Stevens, in the seat beside him, shouted into the radio, “Out! Out! Covering fire!”
Gruen felt like his lungs had flattened against the steering wheel. He wheezed, trying to suck air. Covering fire. His sidearm was on his hip, but his M-16 was stowed next to his seat, wedged between ammo boxes on the high hump that covered the drive shaft. The two marines in the back, Koslow and Mack, were carrying their assault rifles across their laps. Mack moved first. He kicked open his door and pulled himself out.
A sound like a shriek and a whistle. Gruen turned his face away, and the rocket-propelled grenade hit with a tremendous bang that rocked the Humvee up on its driver-side wheels. Gruen smashed into the door. The vehicle teetered for a moment, then fell back onto its wheels with a jolt.
Koslow yelled something Gruen couldn’t make out. He could hear nothing but an intense ringing.
Blood covered the backseat, the front of Koslow’s uniform. In the front seat, the sergeant slumped against the dash, almost on the floor, dead or unconscious. Where was Mack?
Gruen yanked on his door, and it opened with a squeal. He grabbed the sergeant under the arms and heaved backward, dragging the man into his lap. Through the ringing, he heard a distant percussive stutter. The .50-cal on top of the APC behind them had opened up.
Gruen dragged the sergeant out of the car and onto the pavement. He laid the man down on his back, his helmet propping up his head. They were out of the crossfire for the moment: the wall of the bridge against their backs, the overturned and burning Humvee blocking fire from the west, Gruen’s Humvee blocking fire from the east. His vehicle was tilted oddly, the back right tire folded under it like an animal with a broken leg.
The sergeant’s hand was bloody, the sleeve soaked. Gruen lifted the arm from Stevens’ chest, and the man groaned. The hand felt pulpy, boneless. Gruen laid the arm on the ground, and ripped the sleeve open. “Koslow! Grab the medic kit!”
Koslow was still in the back of the Humvee. The man didn’t seem to hear him for a moment, but then he ducked down to where the kit was bolted to the floor and came up with the metal box. He opened the door and stepped out. Bullets pinged the metal next to his head, and he squatted next to Gruen and the sergeant.
“Mack’s dead,” Koslow said loudly. He popped open the kit, and Gruen grabbed a roll of bandages and a roll of white medical tape. “Is the sarge hurt bad?”
“He’ll be fine,” Gruen said, but it was for the sarge’s benefit; Gruen had no idea how bad he was hurt. He’d gotten first aid training like everybody else, but he was no medic. He put a pad of bandages into the man’s palm, eliciting another grunt from him, and started wrapping the hand and wrist. The sergeant mumbled something, looking dazed. He was going into shock. “You’re going to be all right, sir,” Gruen said. Then to Koslow, “Where are they at?”
Koslow was peeking through the windows in the cab of the Humvee. “Both ends of the bridge, I think. Jesus, probably under us, too—I thought I saw water taxis down there before we crossed.”
“Nazis,” the sergeant said in a low voice.
“Uh, I don’t think so, sir,” Gruen said. That’s all he needed, Sarge freaking out on him. Though really there was no telling who was shooting at them: Al-Fatah Force, PFL, LeT, any number of Pak-supported ultras. It could even be India-backed counterinsurgents. Everybody in the city—everybody in the entire J&K—wanted the marines out of there. He yanked off a length of tape, pressed one end to the bandage, and wrapped it three times around the sergeant’s wrist like a cowboy roping a calf.
“We’ve got to get Mack and Sarge into the APC,” Gruen said to Koslow. “Then go forward and find out who’s alive ahead of us. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Gruen, they’re building barricades.”
Gruen stared at him. What the fuck?
He got into a crouch, then raised his head over the hood of the Humvee. The rear APC was still upright. It was a boxy, slab-sided thing on tracks, more heavily armored than the Humvees. More important, there were only four men in it, and room for eight more.
One of the APC’s occupants was on the roof-mounted .50-caliber gun, firing back the way they’d come. Two other marines were on their bellies by the tires, firing as well. The fourth man was probably behind the wheel.
A hundred feet away at the end of the bridge, a jumble of car tires maybe three feet high had appeared like a magic trick, spanning the width of the bridge. More tires were being thrown onto the pile every second, even though the marines were filling the air with bullets. Locals swarmed out of the nearby buildings—five-story wooden shacks leaning into the river—and ran down the sloping streets toward the bridge, carrying tires, furniture, sheet metal. Like the entire city had been saving up junk in their backyards, waiting for this opportunity to personally fuck Private Gruen.
“The shooters are lining up back there,” Koslow said. “Plenty of AK-47s, sounds like. They have us pinned down, at least until air support arrives. If we can get a gunship to clear—”
Gruen looked at the man with disgust. “Air support? We don’t have time to camp here, Koslow. Forget the rifles—they’ve got RPGs. We’ve got to move
now,
before they frag us.”
“Nazis!” the sergeant said. He was staring at the bridge wall behind Gruen. Gruen followed his stare. On the cement wall, a spray-painted red swastika. But that was like a holy symbol here, wasn’t it? A Hindu thing or something.
“Go up front,” Gruen said to Koslow. “See if you can get around the hole and find out what happened with the lead vehicle. We’re going home in the APC.” The M113 was Vietnam-era technology, slow and cranky, but it was armored to hell. “Get back here quick, okay?”
“Shit,” Koslow said. He rose into a crouch, then moved into the smoke to the west.
Gruen turned back, and Sergeant Stevens was up, squatting on his haunches, the helmet off and on the pavement. Stevens tore a strip from the roll of medical tape and pressed it to the front of the helmet. Gruen wouldn’t have thought that right hand was functional.
“What are you doing, Sarge? You need to get your helmet back on.”
The sergeant ignored him. He pressed a second piece of tape onto the helmet, making an upside down V, and tore another strip from the roll.
“Sergeant, please…”
Stevens thumbed the third strip into place and suddenly jumped to his feet, all trace of shock gone. Spine straight, shoulders back, he looked half a foot taller. Bullets ripped through the air around his head, but he ignored them. He gazed down at Gruen with a confident smile. Gruen had never noticed how blue the man’s eyes were.
“Oh, shit,” Gruen said. He felt sick to his stomach. “I need you to sit down, Sergeant.”
“Not Sergeant,” Stevens said.
He placed the helmet firmly on his head. The tape on the forehead formed a blocky letter A.
“It’s Captain.”
Stevens stalked across the road to the steel roof hatch that had come loose from the overturned Humvee. He gripped the inside handle with his left hand and lifted it like a shield. It must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, but he held it easily by that one awkward handle.
“Round up the men,” Stevens said. There was no arguing with that voice. “I’ll clear the barricade.”
And then he ran toward the end of the bridge, into a hail of bullets. Gruen stood up, shouting, “Sarge! Sarge!” He’d never seen a man run so fast, so beautifully, covering the length of the bridge in what seemed to be a series of still frames. Stevens raised the makeshift shield in front of him, and bullets sparked off the steel and whined away—once, twice, and then a hailstorm. Several times rounds seemed to strike his legs and arms, causing a barely perceptible stutter, but if anything his speed increased.
Ten feet from the barricade he leaped, legs spread in a V, his shield in front of him like a battering ram, his bandaged right fist outstretched. Two gunmen went flying, another three collapsed under him. And then he was gone, vanished behind the wall of smoke and tires, into the mass of attackers.
Gruen looked around wildly. Koslow came back through the smoke, his arms around another marine, and two others followed. One of the followers carried a dead man. “Let’s go!” Gruen shouted. “Go, go, go!” He ran around the hummer and picked up Mack’s blood-soaked body. Mack’s left arm was missing, but Gruen didn’t see it anywhere on the pavement. The overturned hummer was still burning. There was nothing they could do for the bodies inside.
The marines ran toward the only remaining vehicle, the APC. The soldiers had stopped firing. Automatic gunfire still crackled from the west end of the bridge, but no one on this side seemed to be firing anymore. The driver opened the hatch from the inside, and the marines clambered into the rumbling vehicle, stepping on one another. It seemed to take minutes to load and get situated. Gruen sat on the bench seat, Mack cradled in his arms. The APC slowly backed up and swung around.
“Hold on,” the driver said. The engine whined, and the tracks scraped and squealed. The APC jerked into motion, picked up speed. Through his window slit Gruen could see the ground moving past them. The vehicle jolted as it went over something—a tire, a body?—and then they were into the barricade.
The APC struck the wall of tires, sending debris exploding away from them. Gruen gripped a handle above his head with one hand and held on to Mack with the other. The nose of the APC went up, banged down hard. The vehicle stopped. Gruen pulled himself off the floor, then bent to peer through the windows, looking for the sergeant.
There.
Stevens stood in the middle of an unmoving pile of bodies, the circular hatch still on his left arm. The edge of the shield was stained a solid stripe of red. His uniform hung in tatters. The flesh above his waist had been torn into red ribbons, as if he’d taken several rounds directly to the chest. There was nothing left of his right arm below the elbow.
Gruen couldn’t understand why he hadn’t bled out by now.
Stevens grinned, his teeth impossibly bright, and raised the stump of his arm into the suggestion of a salute. The marines stared at him through the windows. No one spoke.
Then the shield dropped from his grip. Stevens fell to his knees, and pitched forward.