Second Chance (48 page)

Woody sat on the floor next to the body, and took the head into his lap. He looked into the still face, and pressed down upon the eyelids until they remained closed. Then he looked at the others standing around the room, trying to pretend they were anywhere else but there. Woody had to bring them together again, for only then could they make their return.

"He was our friend," he began. "No matter what he did, no matter how twisted and bent his ideas became, he was our good friend once. I loved him like a brother, and the first time he died I cried." He looked at his wife, whose chin was quivering. "I cried for Tracy. But I cried for Keith too. He didn't mean to hurt people, not then. But something went wrong inside of him." He pushed back the hair from Keith's forehead. "Everything that . . . that
Pan
ever did was because he loved the earth, and because he didn't want to see it die. He did terrible things, and this last was the most terrible of all.

"But he didn't do it out of evil. He thought that the ultimate end justified those dreadful means. I think he was wrong. But he never had any doubt that he was right.

"Being with him now," Woody went on, "doesn't mean that we approve of what he did. All it means is that we were his friends once, and that only by being his friends again can we take him back to what he was before, and right the wrongs he felt he had to commit. Yeah, this is Pan, this is the assassin and the terrorist and the genocide . . ." He struggled to hold back the tears, but his voice shook, broke. "But it's
Keith
too! And I'm sorry for what happened to him, and I want all that blood to be off his hands—and off
our
hands.
Help
me. Sit with me. Make our friend what he was—not
this
. Please . . ."

Tracy, softly crying, was the first. She sat next to her husband, and took his right hand. Dale sat on her other side, followed by Eddie. Then Curly sat on the other side of Keith's body and took his left hand. Frank sat next to him, and his expression was dreamlike, faraway.

Only Diane was left standing, and while the line of her mouth stayed firm, Woody saw the muscles of her jaw throbbing. Then her eyes closed, her left arm hugged her body, and her right hand went to her mouth, where she pressed the knuckles of her fist against her mouth, and her whole body shook with the effort of holding in her cries. A high whining like the keening of mourners escaped from her, and the harder she pressed her eyes shut the more freely the tears ran. No one touched her. No one said a thing. They just let her cry it out, until the cries were nothing but silent pulses, the sobs a series of heavy breaths. Her fist came away from her mouth, she breathed in deeply, and let it shudder out again.

Then she opened her eyes, nodded, smiled with tight lips, and sat between Eddie and Frank, clutching their proffered hands. "I love all of you," she said, looking around the circle until her gaze came to Keith.

"
All
of you," she repeated, and Woody believed her.

The music played on, and they held each other's hands, until Curly took from his pocket a box of wooden matches and a joint as thick as his thumb and as long as a pen. "Break on through," he said, echoing the lyrics of the song that filled the room. "The other side's waiting."

Across Keith's body, he handed the joint and the matches to Woody, who took them and looked at them, knowing that there was no stopping now. He had thought that when the time came, he would not be willing to return Tracy to that time from which she had come. He had envisioned taking her hand and leading her from the room, down the stairs, into the darkness, and home.

But going home would truly be going into the darkness. They were all dead now, and his children would be orphans for the little time it would take for the virus to reach them, if it had not already. And then they would be dead too.

Dead. Non-existent.

No. There was nothing to lose.

Then he thought his way back along the route that had brought him to this place, now and the first time. He thought about the sweet scent of tobacco in the dimly lit studio, the riff from the Doors' song that had gone through his head, the memories it had resurrected, and the desire, the
need
those memories had brought. It had been a need great enough to not only take him back, but to take his friends too, a need strong enough to bring back the woman he needed.

And to bring back a nightmare.

"Remember them," he said. "Bring them back. Take them back."

He put the joint between his lips, struck a match, breathed deeply, ignoring the pain as the hot smoke surged down his windpipe and into his lungs, breathed and breathed until his chest seemed filled with the smoke, held, eyes closed, held, until he felt tendrils wriggle like tiny worms down his veins and nerves and arteries, down all his limbs to the ends of fingers and toes, to ears, penis, hair, all. And still he held, and when at last he opened his eyes and breathed out, nothing visible drifted from his mouth and nose.

"Keith . . ."

"Keith . . ." the others replied.

Woody passed the joint, and after an infinite time heard Tracy whisper, "
Sharla
. . ."

And he whispered with the others, "
Sharla
. . ."and it blended with the music, the throbbing of the drums, felt rather than heard, the erotic drone of the organ, the dying scream of the guitar, the shaman's voice singing
Sharla's
name, and when Woody turned to look, the joint was a joint no longer, but a torch that Tracy passed along, and Tracy was glowing, gleaming like a burnished bronze statue, hollow and heated from within. And when Dale took the torch she offered, he breathed in red flame, and Woody watched with half-closed eyes as the fire went through Dale, burned from inside so that Dale's body gleamed. He was Dale no longer, but another bronze statue, heated in the crucible of time. The statue breathed the fire out then, but only enough to relight the torch. The rest of the flame he kept inside, and Woody knew that if anyone mortal were to touch Dale or Tracy, they would burst into flame, that the divine heat would turn them to ash in seconds.

Then he held his hand in front of his face and saw that he too had become a fiery statue, and he could hear the hiss of steam and the crackle of flame as his fingers moved, and he knew that he and his friends were becoming a Great Engine, fired and stoked and ready to . . . do what? Go back in time, like some complex Victorian machine, fueled by mind-coal, churning into life one cylinder at a time until soon all eight would be ablaze with power?

Now Eddie burned, and Diane . . . and now Frank's eyes were wide with the searing exhilaration of the flame, and Woody heard names and repeated them, but they were no more than the rushing of a mighty furnace in his head. And now Curly had the torch, and now he burned with its fire, and Woody looked around the circle again, and now they all were huge, massive colossi joining bronze hands, fusing together at fingers and palms, and the music had taken on the tones of madness, organ shrieking from pipes scalded by steam, guitar fretted by fire-tortured fingers on burning strings, drumsticks flailing into tubs of molten iron, and the shaman in black leather screaming now, hair ablaze, no words, only shrieks of agony.

And Woody realized what they all were.

They were not statues. They were not parts of a machine. They were demons.

And they were going to hell.

He heard, through the screams of the flames, a laugh, high and frenzied, coming from below him. Then he looked down, as from a great height, and saw what he held in his flaming lap.

Keith
Aarons's
face was bubbling, and a harsh, wet laugh arose with every pop of the boiling flesh. Woody closed his eyes, but his eyelids had melted away, and he saw Keith's own eyes open, alive now, filled with terrible knowledge and power, and Woody knew that if they were demons, here was the Devil, here in his arms.

Now the flames began to rise higher, and Woody's first thought was that Curly must have dropped the torch, and that the apartment, and perhaps the world itself, was on fire. For everything was
fire
now, and Keith's laughing, pitchy face vanished behind a curtain of red and orange, and in only a moment the flames devoured until there was nothing more to burn, and they faded and died and the heat dissipated, and everything was black, and cold, and silent.

Then, impossibly, Woody saw blackness against blackness, forms of darkness in the dark, saw piles of bodies strewn across an ebony landscape, tossed like dead leaves in a fatal storm. He flew on the wind over the dead earth, and saw the faces of the corpses on the piles, and though in blackness they were white and yellow and brown, all dead.

Among the millions he saw Tracy's face, dead, and Peter and Louisa, dead. Curly and Frank and Eddie and Dale and Diane and Curly, all dead. And Keith's face, dead, smiling.

All the faces, all the world. Dead. Dead.

Dead.

And there among the millions, the billions, was his own face, eyes open, mouth open, still, a dead face like all the others, and the wind let him drift down upon his body, and he sank into its infinite stillness and silence, and knew that he was dead.

Eternity followed.

Chapter 48

A thought came:

If he was dead, why did his blood sing?

If he was dead, why was his flesh tight and his muscles strong?

If he was dead, lying on the surface of a dead world, why then was he a young man sitting on the floor of a shabby apartment, with his young friends stirring into life around him, and familiar music playing in the corner?

My God, he thought, forcing his eyes open all the way. My God, we're here.

His hand was clutching Tracy's, and both hands were smooth. The flesh above the wrists was not cross-hatched with years, and the fine hair on his knuckles was still transparently pale. When he moved, the
concho
belt felt loose around his waist.

"We're here," he said through a throat thick with the haze of dreams. "We're back."

"Yeah. But it was definitely
not
a good trip," a voice said, and Woody recognized it as
Curly's
, though with the higher pitch of youth. "What about Keith? Is he . . . ?" He left it unfinished.

Woody looked down at the man—the boy—whose head still lay in his lap. The flesh of the cheeks above the black beard was pink again, and the chest rose and fell beneath the blue work shirt. The hair was long and dark, and curled around Keith's shoulders. His eyes were still closed, and he looked as though he was sleeping peacefully. Woody lifted his head, felt the back of it. There was no wound.

"He's alive," Woody said. "Alive again."

"Okay," said Curly. "Is everybody else with us?"

Woody looked around at his friends, their flesh untouched by the years. They were all conscious, younger eyes open, wide with the horror of what they had just seen, individually and with a single mind, and one by one they nodded.

"Then let's get out of here, okay?" Curly took another fat joint from his shirt pocket. "Return ticket. The music's still playing, so let's say goodbye to our resuscitated buddy here and smoke a little."

Curly took Keith's legs, and Woody his shoulders, and they moved him out of the circle, lifted him up onto the couch. They had just sat back on the floor, when Woody noticed Dale getting to his feet.

"What are you doing?" Eddie said. "Sit down."

"No. I'm sorry. I'm staying too."

Over the confused babble of the others, Eddie shouted, "What?" and leapt to his feet on young, strong legs.

"I didn't tell you before. I couldn't." Dale took Eddie's hand and looked at Woody. "Is there time?" he said. "Can I talk to him alone?"

Woody nodded, and Dale led Eddie around the corner and into the kitchen. "Woody?" Tracy said, and he noticed her face had grown pale. "What is it?"

"Dale's sick," he told all of them. "Leukemia. He told me he was thinking about staying behind. It's . . . an escape."

There was nothing else to say, and new sorrow aged their
unseamed
faces. Woody thought he had never seen eyes so old peering out of faces so young.

In a few more minutes, Eddie and Dale came back into the room, their arms around each other. Eddie's eyes were wet, and he turned and embraced Dale and cried some more, while the others looked away, giving them what privacy they could.

"Goodbye," Eddie said, and sat between Tracy and Diane. He didn't look up again, and Dale turned and walked into the darkness of the hall.

"Light it up," Curly said, passing the joint to Woody. Woody struck the match, ignited the tube, and drew in, drew as hard as he could, until his lungs felt close to bursting, then exhaled, and passed it on to Tracy.

But there was no sensation other than a slight giddiness, and he pressed his eyes shut, waiting for the rush to hit him. After a moment he opened them, expecting to see Tracy handling a torch or a ball of fire or bolt of lightning, drawing it within her and changing, transforming into something unexpected and awesome.

But she stayed Tracy. And the joint stayed a joint, shorter now. Tracy passed it on, and when she turned back to Woody, he saw confusion and disappointment in her eyes. But most of all he saw fear.

She looked at him, saw him looking back at her, concerned, puzzled, and anything but stoned, and she gave her head a quizzical shake. He shook his head back, as if to say no, nothing. Then they both looked at Eddie. Then at Diane. And at Frank, who passed the joint to Curly. None of them seemed affected.