The Scream (29 page)

"I've prepared a book that I feel every concerned Christian ought to have . . ."

He could understand it, of course. They did, after all, serve the Lord from slightly different vantage points. Liberty Christian Village was small and seemingly continually under demonic attack in the guise of hefty interest rates and lagging cash flow and secular humanist network scheduling. Still . . .

". . . for your love-gift of twenty dollars or more . . ."

Daniel felt a need to somehow make his presence known. He prayed for a miracle. He knew that, somehow, the Lord would come through.

". . . with a free set of lapel pins . . ."

The Lord, he knew, sometimes worked in strange and mysterious ways.

Some times, stranger than others.

". . . And who-aside from the puny efforts of this ministry and some attempts by Christian Congressmen's wives and a few other right-thinking, God-fearing people-
who
is standing up to it?"

Daniel knew.

"I'll tell you who . . ."

Daniel waited.

"
Nobody
."

A cheer went up as the imposing figure strode across the sprawling lip of the stage. The chant started almost immediately, a mounting, thrumming cadence.

"WE LYKE YKE!

WE LYKE YKE!"

Yke Dykeburn smiled wide, showing spectacularly uneven teeth, and held his arms skyward in beaming supplication. The rest of the Slabs were already in place, waiting for their point man to finish holding court. It was A-Okay by them; nobody lubed a crowd quite like Yke.

"Whoa, yeah!" he cried. "Welcome to Rock Aid! Hope you're comfy out there, 'cause we got a big, big day ahead. Are you ready to rock?"

Cheers.

"I can't
hear
you!"

Louder.

"What are you,
sick
or something?!" Yke leered. "I said, ARE YOU
READY
??!'"

Louder still.

Yke nodded. "I was hoping you'd say that."

And The Slabs kicked in.

A buzzing in the hive-mind: calling out to the faithful, making the many One. A subterranean rumbling from the tunnel blackness below.

A seemingly infinite patience, winding down to its end.

A word to be spread.

A job to be done.

A time to begin.

The time was now.

"Hey," the fat chick named Andrea whined. It was obvious she wasn't used to moving this fast. It was obvious she wasn't used to moving much at all. "How far do we have to go?"

Dickie grinned. These days, that was getting harder to do. His jaw just plain seized up sometimes. Six months on the other side will do that, even to a Prime.

"You wanna be alone with me, right?" he said.

"Well,
yeah
, but . . ." Her cow-eyes fluttered.

"Yeah but nothin'. Come on."

He was pulling her through the sardine-packed crowd that sprawled like the plastic covering the JFK playing field. Not an easy task in itself. Nobody wanted to budge an inch; there wasn't a spare inch to budge to. This would change, a little later, but now was not the time.

Right now, he just needed to get this heifer down into the darkness beneath the stands. When the signal came, she would come in handy.

Besides, he couldn't wait to pop those baby blues.

Dickie was grateful that he was still strong and lucid. He was grateful to Tara for that. He'd seen too many second-, third-, and fourth-generation Screamers not to be pleased that he was Prime. Motor control and an operative brain made things ever so much easier; he gave thanks as he pushed his way through the unyielding mass, big Andrea in tow.

It was almost like being alive.

And maybe even better.

Halfway through a rousing set by The Pretenders, a ripple passed through the crowd, and at least eighty thousand people turned their gaze skyward to see the tiny silver speck course over the stadium, smoke-jets belching in synchronous rhythm, forming letters of smoke like the world's biggest dot-matrix printer.

R. . . E . . . P . . .
For some it took awhile.
E . . . N . . . T . . .
Others caught on right away. Within moments the basic message was clear.
REPENT
. . .

Hardly anyone would admit to being surprised, even when the skywritten coda took shape.

O . . . R . . . . . D . . . I . . . E

Squarely between Mr. Mister and Madonna, the big screen flashed the RockAid logo (toll-free number superimposed conspicuously), and it was breaktime. After an average of thirty-six thousand hours of viewing experience, the rhythm of commercial interruption was firmly ingrained in the subconscious of everyone present: they knew this would be a big block, maybe eight or nine minutes. Plenty of time to pee or make a sandwich or sit around and bullshit.

At Hamerville, they did all three. Rachel was having a really good time; not being there actually had its advantages. It was a heckuva lot more comfy here, good sound system, no crowds, and she got to kick back with her friends in the big airy room and glom the glamorous side of having a bonafide famous hubby. Nancy and Lauren took it in stride, but Sheri and Madeline seemed to regard it as a big deal; Rachel had to concede that it probably looked that way from a comfortable distance. They hooted every time Jake's face came up, which was often, given that Cody insisted on dissolving between channels every time any network mentioned him.

At least he's good at it
, she thought. And Jake looked great, considering the pressure he was under. It eased her anxiety factor down a couple of points to see that he wasn't a basket case. Not yet, anyway. Nothing she couldn't fix.

Right now nothing much appeared to be happening, as evidenced by the Warner Brothers cartoon that was running. She'd seen it-at the moment Daffy was singing to the Tasmanian Devil-so she bopped off to the kitchen to refill the munchie bowls and brew some more iced tea.

She found Gram in the kitchen and a fresh pitcher already steeping. She swore sometimes that Pete's grandmother had radar. She was a tiny thing who was on the far side of eighty, but she got on just fine. She did all her own cooking and gardening, put up her own preserves, and generally behaved with the sort of stolid self-reliance that Rachel supposed a turn-of-the-century Midwest upbringing just bred into you.

They hadn't ever really spoken much, but Rachel cared about her quite a bit. In the midst of her buoyant mood, it dawned on her that she had yet to ask Gram for word one about how she felt regarding all of this. Now seemed as good a time as am

So she did.

"Ohhhh . . . I don't knowwww," Gram replied in her flat Minnesotan twange. "I sup
pose
they have to
do
what they have to do. When you get to be my age, you don't
worry
about things like that."

Rachel paused to consider that Gram probably greeted every morning as though it were her last, and that one day too soon it actually would be. Her gaze flitted to the tiny set on the kitchen counter. The plug had just been pulled on Daffy's radio. The Devil was getting nasty.

"Do you ever wonder, Gram? About what
they
say, you know, about Heaven and Hell and God and the Last Days and all?" Rachel could scarcely believe she was actually asking Gram stuff like this. She was even more struck by Gram's answer.

"Oh, I don't knowwww." Her ancient fingers moved deftly over the surface of the green beans she'd picked herself. "
They've
been saying the world was gonna
end
my whole life, ever since I was a little girl. And they're
still
saying it.

"I be
lieve
in God. But not like
they
say."

The rinsed green beans went
snap, snap
in the colander. Gram continued working, small and frail and immutable as the sky or the mountain itself. She only looked up once, but it was enough.

Rachel saw the spark. Dim, yes. But there. Definitely there.

Gram, any Heaven that wouldn't take you wouldn't be worth going to.

This she knew.

And as she thought of the Furnisses of the world, who would have you believe that Gram would roast on a spit in Hell for all eternity for refusing to scrape at the feet of their pious constraints, she knew something else.

Like who was truly filled with the Spirit.

And who was filled with something altogether different.

Click

Red as flame, the heavens. Angry clouds, racing blackly past. Lancing beams of brilliance from a tiny, distant, muted sun too far away to warm the lunatic wind that cursed the camera eye.

Panning down, then. And down. And down.

Until the face of the suffering man was revealed in tight close-up: dark eyes filled with pain, creased brow distorting the trails of blood that tracked down from his thorny crown, long hair whipping violently around the harsh wooden beam behind his head.

A slow pan back and away, revealing more and more details of the all-but-naked man, the large wooden cross to which he was affixed, the bleeding wounds, the primitive nails that produced them.

As the voice-over began, cutting deep and low through the banshee wail of the wind.

"
His name was Jesus Christ
."

The camera, sliding backward and down a steepening hill. Bringing into focus, from either side, a pair of seamy-looking men in the same agonizing predicament.

"
He was crucified as a criminal, a heretic and a rebel, for crimes against both church and state. He was hung between a pair of thieves and left to die slowly in a cruel, humiliating public display.

"
The events of that day have changed the course of human history.

"
But the crucifixions had only begun.
"

The camera eye, pulling back now steadily. That ol' Rugged Cross of Calvary, neatly centered beneath the raging sky: the vanishing point from which row upon row of suffering men and women seemed to emanate, each with their own bleeding cross, radiating outward in a tight V-shaped sweep of crimson martyrdom.

"
Because there were always more heretics. More deviants from the norm.

"
There were the troublemakers, the radicals, and revolutionaries.
"

Panning back.

"
There were the fornicators, the pornographers, and the adulterers.
"

Over row after row . . .

"
There were the whores and the homosexuals.
"

. . . after row after row . . .

"
There were the drug abusers and the dabblers in the occult.
"

. . . as Christ receded farther and farther into the distance . . .

"
There were the godless Communists and the secular humanists.
"

. . . until you could barely even see him at all . . .

"
And those who followed the demon beast called rock 'n' roll.
"

. . . and then a sudden, lurching reversal: the camera zooming back the way it had come, racing past the row upon row upon row . . .

. . . and zeroing in to a tight close-up.

On the long-suffering eyes.

Of the Man.

"
Hard to believe
," the voice-over concluded, "
that it all comes back to Jesus Christ.

"
Isn't it?
"

Cut to solid black background, over which the letters read:

ROCK AIDBECAUSE IT REALLY DOES MATTER

As the 1-800 number flashed.

Judas Priest had just cranked up their powerhouse set when Jake found Jerry by the door of the stage manager's trailer. He was busy telling six people what to do and how to do it: they nodded and scurried off in six different directions. Jerry wheeled around.

"How's it going?" Jake yelled over the booming volume.

Oh, just ducky." Jerry sighed. He looked fried. "AT&T estimates the calls at somewhere around four hundred fifty thousand and counting. At an average ten bucks a pop, we'll probably clear a couple of million in pledges, but it's too early to tell. The sun's going down and it's cooling off, so I think we're over the hump. We made it through the afternoon without a riot, there're ten more acts to go-including yours, which is up next-and barring any major catastrophe it looks like I might just make it through the day without having a heart attack."

"We have a major catastrophe."

"Oh, great." Jerry laughed. Then he stopped, because it looked like Jake wasn't kidding. "What's the matter?"

"Missing guitar player."

"What do you mean, 'missing'? Is he lost? What do you mean? What?"

"I mean he's
missing
. As in 'disappeared.'"

"For how long?"

"Since last night."

"Since last
night
you know this and you wait till now to tell me? Are you
kidding
?! Here"-Jerry made a stabbing motion at his chest-"why don't you just stick it in and twist it?"

"Sorry."

"Sorry!
Jesus!
" Jerry shook his head, flinging little beads of sweat, and grabbed the clipboard off the trailer door. "All right, all right. We'll deal with it. Can you go on without him?"

"I'd rather not. Can you bump us?"

"I'd rather not. But I will." Jerry sighed then and scratched out something, wrote in something else. "You owe me,
meshuggener
. . ."

"Thanks, Jer."

"Yeah, yeah." He waved it off, then turned like a kosher whirlwind and snagged his stage manager. "Walter! Set changes." He flashed the clipboard. "Bump the Hamer Band to seven-thirty." He looked over to Jake. "I trust that's long enough?" Jake nodded. "Okay." Then back to Walter. "Switch them with Suburbicide."

"We can't." The stage manager shook his head. "The lead singer's throwing up."

"
Shit!
Well,
some
body's gotta fill the hole." Jerry scanned the chart frantically. Then he nodded.

"Okay, Okay . . . The Scream's up at seven. Put Zipperhead up next."