The Scream (12 page)

"But why put your money on a losing bet? Pick a winner, people. Jesus Christ is the winner. Jesus Christ is the way. Jesus Christ is the only one to put your money on!"

The camera zoomed in on a full-screen close-up of Fumiss's intense features as he stood and walked away from his desk. "Jesus Christ is the only security you need. Make an investment in eternity, people.

"Invest in Jesus!

"When the Lord held up a denarius, much like this one"-Furniss brandished an obviously ersatz gold-foiled coin-"he asked, 'Whose inscription is on this?' and when they told him it was Caesar's, well, he said, 'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's.'" He paused for effect, then held up a mint-condition silver dollar. "Bobby, can I get a close-up on this?"

He certainly could. "So whose name do you see on this?" he said, softly luring. "What does it say in big, bold letters right on the face?

"IN GOD WE TRUST!" he exploded. "In GOD we trust! Not 'In ROD we trust'! Not 'In JAKE we trust'! Not 'In MICK or HUEY or YKE we trust'!! There's no trashy rock star's name emblazoned boldly upon the currency of this great nation, am I right?"

Silence from the peanut gallery. They missed the cue en masse. Little bastards couldn't do anything right.

"Right!?"

Timid nods of acquiescence. They were all terrified; everyone knew that messing up on the show was inevitably good for twenty-four hours in the Quiet Room. Oh, well. Furniss didn't need 'em now anyway; he was on a roll.

"So stop givin' 'em your
money
, people! Stop givin' 'em your souls! Stop buying their records and going to their shows and believin' their wickedness and their lies. Stop bankrolling Satan, before it's too late." His voice decrescendoed back down to a reasonable level again. He could feel that big old studio audience in the sky, bitin' down collectively on the show's first hook. It was time to start reelin' 'em in. His voice became pure as silk and honey.

"Give your money to God, instead."

"There's a number I want you to call that will put you in touch with one of our Prayer Pals. They're here to help you write a letter to God, beggin' his forgiveness and askin' him to come into your life and save you from yourself, and while they're doing that I believe we have some young people who want to commit themselves over to Christ right now . . ."

. . .
and yes, she could still hear that laughter, even as the car doors slammed and the wheels peeled out on the Wyler driveway. She could still hear the laughter as the monsters disappeared down the hill. It was in her ears now, ringing, forever intermingled with the music and the screams.

Inside, the album played over and over, slicing time into neat twenty-two-minute cycles. It made a nightmare loop of the hours dragging past her shock-scoured consciousness. It was the only thing that changed. It was the only thing that moved.

And still the voice did not return. The comforting voice. The one that knew when it was time. She waited, muscles cramping in terrible stasis, for the word. Her body needed to pee again: it was entirely out of the question. One of the killers might still be there; the slightest movement might betray her.

And she did not want to die.

Not like that.

So she waited, while the music played on and on, and the moon made its way ever so slowly across the ink-black sky. . . .

". . . for God so loved us that he sent his only begotten son to pay the blood price for your sins. That's his promise, people! And the Lord never went back on a promise, for He is the source of all truth and light and beauty. Just when you think that it's all over, and there's nowhere left to turn, Jesus will be there for ya. If you ask him into your heart, He will never fail you . . ."

The first hint of gray dawn had begun to soften the heavens when the convulsions began. They came in an explosive one-two shot of matching charley horses, sent her crashing to her knees in panic and pain. The terror, so rigidly held for so long, forgot itself for a moment. When it regained its poise, it was already too late.

"NO!" she heard herself scream. "OH, GOD, NO. PLEASE!" She toppled over on her naked back in the dew-damp grass, clutching the anguished chunks of rock that her calf muscles had become. She tried to massage the blood back into them, screaming all the while, trying to listen through her own cries and thrashing for the sound of approaching footsteps, the war hoots and laughter of the mad. . .

. . . and she thought she heard something, so she started to scramble on hands and elbows and useless knees: away from the hedges, out into the open expanse of the lawn. Every dragging foot forward brought its own wail of agony; her eyes, already piss-poor, were utterly blinded by tears. She didn't see the pool until she was nearly in it.

She had Betsy Waverly's body to thank for that.

Mary's left hand came down in something cold, wet, and scabby; she didn't guess what it was until the thumb found an empty socket and fell inside. By then, her right was pressed against Betsy's cold and naked breasts. Her vision cleared enough to confirm the horror.

She came up screaming, both hands caked in gore, and fell frantically back. Her head hit the concrete of the pool deck hard, forced bright stars from her forehead and eyes. Something raw and clawlike scraped against her shoulder: maybe Betsy's, maybe not. It didn't matter. That was the end of the line for Mary's sanity.

And she whirled, blind, away from the dead weight smorgasbord bobbing on the surface of the pool, away from her hiding place and deeper into the charnel house yard. She tried to get her oxygen-starved legs to support her. It didn't work. She screamed and fell again, this time face-first. Another body broke her fall.

And she screamed, and she screamed, the slick horror thick in her eyes and nose and mouth now, choking and gagging and blinding her completely. And she crawled over the body, past the head that rolled away at her touch like a bearded volleyball, past the wet fetal curl of another aborted life. Her fingers curled around a blood-drenched bikini top, dragging it along before her.

Until she came upon the foot.

Felt the neat hole in its center.

Dragged her gaze up the pale leg standing before her.

And in the moment before her mind's dark implosion to limbo, found herself staring up into the face of Love
. . .

". . . and that's the whole point," Pastor Furniss concluded. "Once you've seen that face, how can you help but love it in return?

"And how can you help but obey?"

"Holy, Ho-lee, Holy, Ho-lee

Holy, Ho-lee

Lord God Almigh-tee . . ."

There must have been twenty or thirty of them: gathered around the bonfire across the road from the gate, swaying to the endless thrum-dee-dum of a half dozen badly tuned acoustic guitars.

"As we lift our hearts

Be-fore you

As a token

Of our love . . ."

They were, without exception, clean-cut white kids between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five.
Even the black ones
, Hempstead silently noted.
Of which there are three
. In the flickering light of the three-foot flames, their eye sockets were pockets of shifting shadow. It made their heads look hollow as dinosaur skulls, which Hempstead felt was strangely appropriate.

"Holy, Ho-lee

Holy, Ho-lee . . ."

"Holy moley," Hempstead muttered, fingering his sax and watching them as he stood at the top of the long driveway. They were about to start the second verse, and he wasn't sure if he could stand it. In the week since Pastor Furniss's vigil had begun, he had heard that song and a dozen just like it at least five million times. And though the guitarists had pretty well mastered their C and G chords, that pesky ol' F major was still giving some of them major problems.

"Father, Fa-ther

Father, Fa-ther

Father, Fa-ther

Lord God Almigh-tee . . ."

Aaron Hempstead took a long drag off his Camel, exhaled it through clenched teeth, and scratched an itch that the heat had placed beneath one corner of his meticulous goatee. He was a large black man at the tail end of his thirties, with not a discernable ounce of flab upon him. His neatly mohawked head glistened faintly in the bonfire light, as did the arms of corded muscle his sleeveless shirt exposed. He moved with a tiger's fluid power and grace, a predator's deadly precision.

He was a musician, first and foremost. But he was also a warrior.

And a damned scary one at that.

It was 10:45 p.m., and the crowd outside the perimeter had shrunk to less than half. He estimated the number of born-agains at thirty-five, forty max. During the peak hours, there might have been as many as a hundred: waving signs, burning records, making speeches, praying, faith-healing, speaking in tongues, and singing those goddamn songs on behalf of God, Country, and Media Exposure.

"As we lift our hearts

Be-fore you . . ."

Because this was the Big Time, no question about it. Jake had, at long last, gone the full nine yards: from media celebrity to cultural crusader.

And all the way up to Antichrist
. He grinned, shook his head, dragged some more smoke in and out of his lungs.
Shoot, man. An' I thought that your guitar-playing was impressive
. . . .

"As a to-ken

Of our love . . ."

The bulk of the news media was gone, their daily reports long filed. The only ones left were stringers, independents hot on the trail of the story: videotaping the bonfire, interviewing the geeks, waiting for something dramatic to happen.

Burning witches at the stake, perhaps.

Feeding pagans to the lions.

Or maybe just a nice bright explosion . . .

"Jake, man, this has gone too far," he muttered, looking away from the bonfire and up into the starlit Pennsylvania sky. There were no answers there.

But there were no questions, either, and that was the nice part. There were no morons laying claim to intimate knowledge of the method underlying all this madness. Just darkness, occasionally punctuated by pinpoints of light: as fine a metaphor for the full scope of human understanding as anyone was liable to make.

It was not, however, an opinion that anyone was liable to voice. On either side of the fence. Not these days.

Not when there was a war going on.

Hempstead forgot about their lame vocalizations. His concentration was on the heavens, the subtle
phut-phut-phut
of a vehicle so far away that its presence could be little more than intuited.

But he knew it was there. Oh, yeah. No question. One could not spend so much time at the mercy of those big whirling blades and not feel it in his bones.

Somewhere . . . probably just over the next peak . . . a black dragonfly was casting its moonlit shadow over the green green Pennsylvania mountaintops. He could close his eyes and see it clearly: all the beauty and horror, the brutality and grace, the desperation and hope that the image had come to embody for him.

The tenor sax hung flush against his chest. He took another drag of smoke, blew it out, clutched the instrument closer. It had stuck with him through the bright hell and tragic heaven that was Vietnam, given voice to the pain and joy within when words could not even come close.

And it felt like singing now. That much was clear.

Hempstead grinned, then brought the mouthpiece to his lips. They were still plinka-plink-plinking away at the bottom of the hill, still in the key of C. It was an enormous musical challenge, but Hempstead thought he'd take a crack at it. What the hell.

"Holy, Ho-lee

Holy, Ho-lee . . ."

A blistering assault of gravel-edged blues fired out of the saxophone's throat. It took the words right out of half the singers' mouths, ran a quick 220 volts through the entire bonfire battalion.
Don't you fret none
, Hempstead thought.
It's just dem ol' wild coyotes up on Debbil's Peak.

Lord knows they're everywhere these days
.

The bone-white Cadillac sped east along the rolling midnight hills just south of Pittsburgh. The turnpike was desolate at this hour, the darkness broken only by an occasional passing semi throwing long beams down the westbound lanes as it howled toward Ohio.

The top was down. The music was up. Steel City itself was rapidly receding into the background, the afterglow of the evening's melee at the Civic Arena already melding with fractured images of the riots in Cleveland, and Detroit before that, and Chicago before that, and on through the Midwest and the Plains States and the Southwest and . . .

"
Eyaoww!
" cried the Screamer in the front, little Dempsey Whatsisface. He had one arm out the window, hand pounding the door panel arhythmically. He looked decidedly green, even in the meager instrument lights. "Turn it
up
!
Eyaoww!
" His head bounced and bobbed like a cheap dashboard ornament.

The driver, whose name was Kyle, obliged him, cranking the music to the blasting point. Tara's voice poured out of the speakers. You couldn't hear the words. It didn't matter.

"
Eayowww!
" screeched Dempsey, fists pounding the door in whacked-out syncopation. His free hand pulled a Budweiser free from the warming six-pack on the floor, tabbed it open; he tipped his head back, tried to shotgun the entire twelve ounces. Gold carbonation poured into his mouth, only to bubble back and dribble down his chin and onto his ratty garb.

The others spasmed and snickered as the can crunched and pinged back into the slipstream. Dempsey didn't appear to notice. He passed the other cans back and shook his head like a dog after dinner, liquid flecking from the corners of his jaws. He was completely mad. Completely burnt.

Little fucker wont last much longer
, Kyle thought.
Walker was right
.

They never do
. . .

The endless joyride rolled on and on, as the Caddy's ever-changing occupants followed the tour. Outside every coliseum, every arena where the music had played, the finned silhouette had waited-poised, engine warmed and purring-after each show, for the pressing throngs and the thrash of fresh flesh.