Waiting for the Galactic Bus (19 page)

“— can feel that these are indeed the last days of a dying regime. Here in the teeming downtown streets, a drama is being enacted, one that may be fraught with significance for Below Stairs tomorrow — indeed, may be that tomorrow.”

Music up with telegraphic urgency as the news continued with voice-over. A street, soldiers in White Paladin fatigues and swastika armbands straining to hold back the screaming crowds.

“We’re here in the main thoroughfare, which you can see is packed with the largest crowd since the arrival of Lord Byron. In a moment — yes, here they come! — in a moment we’ll see the massed demonstration and its dynamic new leader, Roy Stride. This demonstration follows by less than twenty-four hours the threat of a raid on black and Jewish homes by Paladin squads. The government’s failure to make any effective answer to this threat may be seen as a death rattle. There’s our camera truck.”

The open truck came into shot and passed beyond; as it did, the view on Charity’s set cut to a dolly from the truck itself. She sat bolt upright. “Hey-y.”

There was Roy striding along in precise step with the ranks of Paladins behind him, head high, confident and flushed, the star of his own drama at last.

“Roy!” Charity bounced up and down with delight. “Roy!”

ROY! STRIDE! ROY! STRIDE! ROY! STRIDE!

“... and here he comes. Roy Stride, the youngest political contender in the long history of Below Stairs. An American from the Heartland, the first candidate to be endorsed by the Prince and Topside alike. Even as we speak, the messengers from Topside are said to be on their way with formal ratification.”

“Gol-lee, Roy.” Charity melted back on her pillow. “Even angels. Oh, wow!”

“We’re trying to reach Judas Iscariot for comment,” the telereporter informed her. “The most reclusive of all Below Stairs citizens, Judas has always been distrusted by the popular vote, particularly the Christian Identity groups and the Paladins, who consider him a dangerous adversary. Certainly he has never allied himself with any party.”

“Well, he shouldn’t.” Charity put the TV on hold as Simnel entered with a bed tray bearing champagne, coffee, strawberries and whipped cream, setting it across her with a flourish.

“Strawberry Decadence, mum. One of my specialties.”

“Super.” Charity dipped a plump berry in the mound of whipped cream and munched it. “Mmm... Do you know Judas?”

“Quite well,” Simnel said.

“No, I mean the man who —”

“I’m familiar with the case.” Simnel poured her coffee. “Very good company, Judas. Sharp mind. Mean chess player.”

Charity frowned over her coffee. “You could like a person like that?”

“One man’s meat, you know. There are celebrities I avoid out of self-preservation. Beethoven, for example. The personality of a chain saw. Yes, I like Judas for an evenings chat now and then. When he condescends. Not very gregarious.”

Charity turned on the TV again. The same reporter had just poked his microphone in the face of a clearly disinterested man leaning against a car door, cigarette dangling from lips curled with an ancient, bitter joke. As the camera went to close-up, Charity choked on a swallow of champagne.

“That’s Jake,” she wheezed after a coughing spasm. “I know that guy. Honest, he drove me here in his cab.”

“Best service in town,” said the imperturbable Simnel. “More coffee, mum?”

“We’re here with Judas Iscariot on the fringe of the delirious demonstration for Roy Stride. Judas, can you comment on the meteoric rise of Stride and the White Paladins?”

Judas reached through the cab window and fetched his cap. “I’d say the hopeless shmucks have found the kind of government they deserve. Always do.”

The reporter pressed for more. “And his rapid rise?”

“So
nu?”
Judas shrugged. “He’s taking their own fear, frustration and anger and selling it back to them with a new ribbon around it. Easy answers, easy targets: out with the Jews and blacks, down with the intellectuals, which means anyone who’s better off or disagrees with them. Slogans, marching bands and the promise of blood. How can he miss?” Judas flicked away his cigarette and opened the cab door. “Buzz off, I’ve got a call.”

Still the reporter persisted. “Could your views be construed as a class-oriented remark?”

“Look, these clowns need a messiah because the truth of the world always goes down easier with a few miracles and a lot of blood. It’s a very old game, the rules don’t change. I’d say Stride is a flaming, fourteen-karat folk hero. Look at this crowd; you’re not talking about contented, mature people. You ever see a happy man who needed to conquer the world?”

Judas/Jake got into the cab and drove out of shot.

“So that’s the evilest man in the whole world ever.” Charity pondered the screen. She dunked a strawberry in champagne. “Talks mean about folks.”

“With considerable authority,” Simnel said. “A true believer at one time who would do anything to make need into truth. Now he watches the rest of them doing the same thing over and over again one way or another.”

“He talked like he was real angry, only just at himself, you know? Funny”
 
—
Charity considered it
 
—
“I couldn’t hate Jake.”

Charity missed Simnel’s approving glance. “No, mum. He does that for himself.”

“Well, I’m real happy for Roy. I guess. This is a neat breakfast Can you make eggs like McDonald’s?”

“There is no such franchise here yet,” Simnel informed her coolly. “Though I’m sure Mr. Stride will insist on one. As Judas remarked, a ray of hope to the benighted. Good morning, mum.”

    20   

The late, late show

Charity woke in the dark. Randy wasn’t beside her in the bed; that didn’t bother her at all. Outside of sex, he wasn’t much company. Everything he said sounded like a commercial.

Just... she felt creepy and more alone than she ever had since dying. She rang Simnel and heard only the quiet intermittent buzz. Randy gone, Simnel out. She was alone and couldn’t sleep. She tried the outside phone: nothing, still out of order. From habit, she reached for the TV remote and turned on the wall set.

The screen sprayed garish color and flickering shadows over the dark bedroom, resolving to a night scene with a telereporter’s voice-over —

“— just an hour ago the peace of these black and Jewish homes in a quiet neighborhood of Below Stairs was shattered by devastating White Paladin raids led personally by Roy Stride, new head of the Paladin party.”

Cut to Roy himself standing in an open car, leather-coated, whip in hand, black peaked cap perched at a cocky angle, and —

Cut to a black family being dragged from their front door by huge Paladin guards. Husband, wife, three children being hustled ungently toward a waiting van. When the father broke away and resisted, one guard simply shot him. The action was brutally graphic: two guards slammed the man up against the van and a third opened fire with a submachine gun. The gunfire went on and on, his body disintegrating in sharp detail and color.

“No...” Charity recoiled from the scene, tried to change channels. They were all the same but someone was playing tricks with the camera. The black man fell and fell with his head coming apart — and then Roy again, standing in the open car. He turned to Charity as the camera came in close, and looked directly at her, found her, his mouth twisted in a smirk of macho triumph and pride.

“Hey, Charity, that you? Where are you? Look: I told you how it would be.”

And once more the scene cut to another home, smoke and flame spurting from a shattered window, Paladins sprinting out of the front door. A man and woman lay crumpled on the front steps. The camera zoomed in on them. It looked to Charity as if someone had cut every artery in their bodies.
You wouldn’t think there was that much blood in just two bodies.

“The general feeling in the political air,” the telereporter’s voice-over went on dispassionately, “is that these raids have the tacit assent of the White Christian populace.”

“Who said?” Charity blurted.
“I
didn’t.”

“— certainly no government troops or police have made any move to intervene, as though quietly allowing political force of gravity to take its course. This act is seen by some as a definite referendum. It is increasingly clear that the confidence of Below Stairs at large is with Roy Stride’s party rather than the Wembley administration.”

Only half listening, Charity couldn’t take her eyes from the bodies.
Dummies,
she thought.
They look like doll-dummies sprayed with red paint.

“Charity!”

Roy again in huge close-up with that twisted grin. “Where are you? I told you how it would be.”

“NO!”

She jabbed desperately at the remote control but each channel was the same, not even a lag in the film.

“Simnel-l!”

“— how it would be.”

Charity screamed silently at the vicious grin on the screen
. No, I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe it would be like this —

— as the camera caught a little girl darting around the corner of the house, shrieking in terror. She turned to see the Paladin guard trotting after her, not even hurrying. The child ran blindly to the natural place, the bleeding sack of offal that had been her mother, screaming for help.

“My God,” Charity writhed. “Don’t hurt her. She’s just a baby. Don’t.”

The Paladin guard loomed over the tiny child as the camera came in tight on them —

“These Jewish homes were the first target,” the voice-over stated with no emotional color. “The black homes were hit a few minutes later in an apparently coordinated attack.”

Something was happening to the film. Somehow it went to slow motion as it focused tight on the face of the blond, blue-eyed child. Hypnotized with horror, Charity let the irrelevant thought skitter through her mind —
I didn’t think Jews could be blond.
But they could; she’d seen plenty that weren’t anywhere near the picture conjured up when somebody said Jew. She’d just never connected images, never thought beyond the stock picture. This little girl was very fair and —

Very familiar. More than familiar.

“Jesus, that’s —”

The child was
her
at age ten. She remembered the picture her new parents took when they adopted her, before her hair darkened to brown. But undeniably her in the picture, screaming for help from her dead mother.

And then not screaming at all.

The child looked up at the guard, mute. The only sound came from Charity herself, a wordless whine of empathic terror as the Paladin pointed his pistol at the tiny face. Her own child face but changed forever. More than horror in those wide eyes, a terrible knowledge that there was no help anywhere, no pity or escape. For those few slow-motion seconds, the child was not mad but her eyes knew madness, swallowed it whole and recognized it as the truth of existence. Knew it as her head disintegrated and spattered blood and brains over the twisted flesh bag of her mother, and —

Charity wanted to be sick and couldn’t. You couldn’t be sick after death, but the nausea rolled through her stomach, all the more exquisite torture since she couldn’t even retch with it. She fled the bedroom to splash her face with cold water, but the bathroom screen was on as well — the same film repeating and repeating — Roy standing in the car, the camera zooming in on that dirty, mean grin of his that she hated —
always hated it. Why didn’t I ever realize then?

“— are you? Look! I told you how it would be.”

For the first time in her life, Charity Stovall snarled. “You get away from me. YOU GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU... SIM-NEL-L-L —”

She ran out of the bathroom and stumbled downstairs. As she hit the bottom step,

all the screens went on — kitchen, living room, guest rooms; a repeating loop, the child running to the butchered sack of her mother, screaming in slow motion, then not screaming but looking up with Charity’s own eyes at the pistol barrel with that obscene knowledge in her eyes.

“— told you how it would be.”

“Stop.
Stop,
you son of a bitch.”

“— how it would be.”

Her instinct was to bury herself deep in the pillows of the sofa, blot out the sight and sound, but as the loop repeated, shorter and shorter now — Roy’s leer, the words, her own eyes staring not at death but a sudden understanding of life — something else began to counterbalance the horror in Charity Stovall. The fruitless nausea passed, replaced by a wholly alien emotion more powerful than she’d ever felt. Detached, from a long distance, she turned her gaze back to the screen, to Roy’s gloating face and swaggering words, and the nightmare of her own violent child death.