The Scream (44 page)

"
But how much is 'too much'?
"

Derisive snickers rippled through the room. Junior muttered, "Too much is never enough!" and ceremonially clinked bottles with Bob Two. Hempstead fingered his sax and blew a short, rude
blaaat!
It was defensive posturing at its finest, but Jake couldn't bring himself to join in.

". . .
and increasing numbers of people are wondering just that, in the aftermath of an event that was supposed to bring a generation together . . . and wound up tearing it apart
."

The frozen image animated then, Tara exhorting the crowd to madness. Jake stood up. He suddenly decided that he couldn't sit through another ten seconds, no less ten minutes, of this. Cody was taping, if he needed any of it. What he needed much more, right then, was fresh air.

He walked over to the back door and stood at the screen. It was twilight on the mountain: a magical time, eerily beautiful. The sun going down in flames, streaking amber and orange and gold through the descending canopy of night. The Susquehanna River snaking like a ribbon of fire to the west.

Standing there, breathing in the night, it was almost possible to believe that this entire thing was going to blow over somehow; that Pete would wander in eventually, wasted and disheveled, and Jake and the band would take turns kicking his ass and razzing him about it for the next six months or so, but otherwise let it slide; that the enormity of the disruption and destruction would eventually disperse, like a monsoon rain that goes for days and days on end, only to yield to the sun.

Fat chance. It's monsoon time, now and forever, amen
. Jake cursed the dour sullenness of the thought, but he couldn't shake it. And though it was bad enough that he felt crazy himself, both Hempstead's rap and Slim Jim's proposed solution were entirely over the edge.

Jake stepped outside. Jim was out there, dangling his feet off the end of the porch, puffing on a meerschaum pipe. He walked up and sat down beside the chopper pilot, who exhaled a long, philosophical trail of vanilla-scented smoke and squinted into the sunset for a while before he spoke.

Finally, "Well, bossman, whaddaya say?"

"Don't know, man. It's too complicated. Too weird."

"Ain't nothin' complicated about it. These people are what's weird, and when they find out whoever torched Rock Aid, I'll betcha my bird there's a trail of bread crumbs leadin' right back to The Scream. Them and their spook manager." He spat into the dirt. "Oughta just ice the little fuckers."

Jake shook his head.
Ice the fuckers
. He made it sound so easy. Maybe it was, a long time ago. As for now . . .

"I don't know if I can do that."

"So call a professional."

Jake looked at Jim, slightly annoyed. "You've just got an answer for everything, don't you?"

"Yep. Phone numbers, too."

Jake looked at him. "You're serious."

"Yep."

"That's murder."

A pause. A sigh. "Yep."

Neither man looked at the other; Jake stared at the ground, Slim Jim at the receding sun. A scant twenty-four hours had passed since Rock Aid blew up. In that time Jacob Hamer had come in contact with more carnage than in the preceding twenty years. And here he was thinking, however speculatively, of coming even closer. A lot closer. Too close for comfort or sanity or maybe even survival . . .

It was stupid, he decided. Stupid. He wasn't some wacked-out war vet creaking under the weight of his own emotional scar tissue. He'd busted ass to build a dream and make it real. He had a home and a family he loved, a career he loved, and a community that damned near depended upon his viability for its very existence. He couldn't risk all that on the basis of a few weird dreams and some scraps of decades-old memories. They had no proof. They had no probable cause. He couldn't even safely say that Walker was the same guy; and so what if he was? So fucking what.
Lots
of guys torqued out over there, but they readjusted to The World just fine, thank you very fucking much. Contrary to the popular myth, not everybody ended up as fringe-element junkie psychopaths or road-warrior rejects, shouting out their rage from the dark edge of the world. Some of them went on with their lives. Becoming lawyers or truck drivers or doctors. Or rock stars even.

Such were the thoughts racing through Jake's mind. They were cool, solid, rational: the stuff that clearheaded game plans were made of. Jake believed them with all his heart. And he was about to tell Jim exactly that.

When the shouting from the Twilight Zone began.

It lasted for no more than three seconds.

They were the longest three seconds of her life.

"Oh, my God." Jesse whispered, not wanting to accept the image on the screen, unable to deny it. She stood in Rachel's living room and stared helplessly at the
60 Minutes
concert footage, taken from the Spectrum press box.

It was footage from Friday night's Scream performance.

And Pete was there.

Pete was there
. The knowledge pummeled her with fists of lead, slid through her nerves like mercury. She watched his face pop in and out of the picture: not the focus at all, a peripheral detail sandwiched in with the rest, its significance utterly unspoken. Harry Reasoner made no comment about the missing rock star, his surprise appearance there, the fact that he had not been seen by anyone since.

But suddenly, Jesse couldn't hear what Harry Reasoner was saving at all.

Because Pete was there. Smiling. Wasted. Less than three hours after their final meeting in the lobby of the Penn Towers Hotel. Poking out from behind a corpulent Bedlam Record exec, cigarette in hand, laughing inaudibly. Disappearing for a moment. Reappearing to bounce up and down in his seat to the rhythm of the thundering music from beyond in typical Pete-like fashion.

And then he was gone.

In the next room Natalie was noisily resisting dinner. Rachel could be heard over the prattle on the tube, saying. "C'mon, Boobie. You
love
your yummy Spaghetti-Os! Eat up. dammit! Go ahhh . . . ahhh . . . MMMM!" It was a combination of sounds that threatened to drive Jesse mad.

"I gotta get out of here," she told herself, the room at large. Her belly came alive with sudden pain. Tension. Dread. Terrifying suspicion. She stood, moved unsteadily toward the kitchen. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she whined, low in her throat, staggering into the doorframe with a mute thump and leaning there for support.

"Jesus," Rachel said. "Are you okay?"

Jesse turned to look in the direction of the voice. Both Rachel and Natalie stared back at her. The overhead light in the kitchen was piercing. It borrowed some of the pain from her belly and placed it squarely behind her eyes. She could feel the blood leaching back from her flesh, feel herself grow faint and pale.

"No." It was only partially in answer to the question. She had only partially heard it. There was a void at the core of her, and it was sucking her toward it, pulling the outside in. "No," she repeated, and her eyes pinched shut.

In the sudden darkness she heard the back door open.

And heard Rachel mutter his name . . .

"LADIES!" boomed the voice from the doorway, jerking Jesse's eyelids open. "IT'S SO GODDAMN GREAT TO
SEE
YOU!"

Natalie began to scream then, cringing back instinctively in the tight confines of her high chair. Rachel had the baby up and in her arms within a second, backing rapidly away. The bowl of baby Spaghetti-Os clattered noisily to the floor. All this went on in the periphery of Jesse's vision.

Her gaze was fixed upon the dead man in the doorway.

"EEYAAOW! YOU IN
PARTICULAR
, JESS! GOD, ARE YOU A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES!"

He laughed, and it was all wrong: a high-pitched trilling, like a gale wind blown through a rot-clogged pipe. There was a burble at the back of it that sent the taste of bile to her tongue.

"Pete, no," she croaked. She wanted to back up as well, but her back was already to the wall. There was nothing to do but look at him while the weakness in her body intensified, magnified, consumed her.

Pete laughed again, in the flesh. His flesh looked bad: pasty-white and blotchy, like a loaf of molding, uncooked dough. His teeth, exposed, were yellow and brittle as Indian corn. Silver shades concealed his eyes.

"Yes," said another voice from behind him. "Believe me. All the way here, he's been talkin' about nothing but you."

Two more Screamers came in. The speaker was older, tall and thin. He looked like Keith Richards and talked like Bruce Dern. He was the only one who appeared even remotely alive. The other one was just a kid and looked even worse than Pete.

Rachel had retreated to Jesse's side at the far end of the kitchen, her screaming daughter tight in her arms. "What's going on here, Pete?" she said, her voice taut to cracking. She was scared. She was trying very hard not to show it. She took another step back. "I mean, wh-what are you people doing here?"

"
Well, shoot, Rachel!
" Peter howled, stepping forward. "
Just about anything we WANT, I guess!
"

Rachel bolted and ran. The littlest Screamer started after her. For the first time, Jesse noticed the knife in his hand. She shrieked, pressing against the wall as they hurtled past her. For one lunatic second, she thought about running too.

Then she stared into the black gaze.

Of the barrel.

Of the gun.

"You stay right there, little missy." Kyle said, "Mr. Peter would like to share a moment with you."

Upstairs, Rachel began to scream.

And Natalie, suddenly, stopped.

If not for a defective soldering iron, Cody never would have seen them at all.

He was down at the shack; the lodge had gotten too weird. Until the boys settled down, he didn't want to be near them. They were putting out some scary vibes.

Dinky-dow
, as Hempstead said. Vietnamese for
crazy shit
.

There was, of course, always work to be done. It made a great excuse. It was also excellent therapy: there were very few things in Cody's life that couldn't be cured by a couple hours of zen and the art of circuit board maintenance.

Which he would have happily gone on with forever.

Had the iron not fritzed out.

It was a budget Radio Shack model; and when it went, it took the lightbulb over his work bench and everything else on that circuit with it.

Including all the other lights in the shack.

Including the VCR feed to the lodge.

"
Shit
." He sat there like a fool in the sudden darkness. He cursed several more times before he found and fired up his flashlight. Then he put down the board and made his way over to the circuit box to trip it back. His glance through the window by the box was strictly casual.

It was the movement that caught his eye: out in the woods, furtively menacing, like a pack of stalking wolves. The shadows rapidly consumed them as they moved up the hill, but not before Cody sighted three: two skulking Screamers in black leather and longcoats and a big guy carrying what very much looked like an assault rifle
.

"
Holy hell
," Cody whispered, clicking off the Duracell. It was the afternoon's paranoia made flesh; whatever these people were doing, it was not likely to involve the spread of world peace. "
They were right
."

And then he started thinking. Fast.

It was roughly three hundred yards from the shack to the big house, most of it a steep incline; they would have a precious few minutes grace. Cody felt his way through the darkness to where the intercom mike was sitting and keyed it on.

"Jeezuz, I hope you guys are nearby," he said by way of prayer. "Preferably armed."

". . .
'cause we sure as shit got company
."

Cody's voice crackled through the intercom in the lodge, rupturing the media silence that had come when the big TV shut down. That silence had lasted for fifteen seconds, leaving a load of confusion in its wake.

That confusion was almost fatal.

"CODY!" Jake yelled. "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

There was no answer. Junior and Bob Two stood frozen by the pool table, cues in hand. Hempstead was already moving toward the closet where the rifles were stashed. Jake looked over to the doorway. Slim Jim was nowhere to be seen.

"CODY!" Jake repeated. "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN?"

"
Shut up
." Hempstead hissed. He had chambered a round in the Kleingeunther by the time Jake started to turn toward him.

And then the Screamer stepped into the doorway.

He was a big greasy fucker with a face like hamburger and a crudely rendered mohawk. He had a True Value Woodsman Special hatchet in one hand. "EEYAAOW!" he howled. "BOOLA BOOLA!"

And charged.

Hempstead turned toward him, aimed, and fired twice.

The Screamer went out the door backward, minus the hatchet and about five pounds of the flesh below the solar plexus. The 140-grain boat-tail spire point was a big bullet, better suited to bringing down elk or caribou: the sheer shock of impact blew a crater-sized hole in the Screamer, pitching him violently onto the redwood porch.

"Get your fucking gun," Hempstead said, moving toward the door.

Jake didn't need to be told twice. He raced toward the closet, got his weapon in his hands, ran to where Hempstead was standing, and stared at the Screamer.

Who should have been dead.

But wasn't.

The Screamer lay in a long skid mark of gore, twitching and flailing. His spinal column had been sheared away between the fourth and sixth vertebrae; his lower half dragged uselessly behind him, connected only by tendrils of ruined muscle and skin. The white fluted ends of his shattered spine jutted out into the cool night air.

There was obviously pain: that much had, clearly, not been stripped away. But the lunatic sound that spewed forth from his lips was somewhere between a laugh and a howl, as though this whole thing were somehow insanely funny.

Then Jake heard the windows begin to crash in from behind him.