Dead-Bang (31 page)

Then I turned my back on all that, and took up the cross.

24

The big crucifix weighed maybe eighty pounds, and by the time I'd labored up that horrendously long aisle, I was kind of tilted over and grunting a bit.

Britt said, “What in the world … what's that?”

“This is—well, it's just to use in case of an emergency. Like, when there's a fire and you break the little glass window—”

There was one hell of a noise outside. From the same place and people, of course, but strangely different from their last effort. Still blood-bleaching, needless to say, but now more like a shout rising from the Coliseum when the game was over and the last gladiator had suddenly stopped wiggling. It was as if something had just ended … or was just beginning.

“Get that door open. Quick.”

Britt turned the key, pushed against the golden handle. When the door was open only inches I glimpsed the mass of men and women a couple of hundred feet away—but narrowing the distance. They were finally moving. Toward the church. Starting to run up the grass.

“Here's the emergency,” I said.
“Shove
that damn thing, get it open!” Then I shouted down the aisle to the back of the church,
“Lula
—GO!”

Britt leaned forward, straining against the heavy door until there was room for me—and my burden—to get through. As I moved past her I said, “Slam the door as soon as I'm out, lock it—
lock
it—and
run
like you never ran before.”

It sounded as if she let out a high and tiny scream, but I didn't look at her. I was starting down the wide pebbled cement steps, when I heard the dull boom as the door thudded shut behind me. That boom seemed to keep on echoing coldly behind my solar plexus as I stumbled down the steps, almost falling but reaching the bottom on my feet, and then it froze in my gut and choked my throat as I lifted my eyes. Because I'd kept my eyes on the steps while going down them, but as I took two struggling strides forward onto the grass I raised my head and saw—racing toward me, still howling and screaming—the Lemmings of the Lord.

They were quite enough to give a man pause even when sitting quietly on their backsides on backless benches, but the sight of them all screaming horrendously and thundering at me, a determinedly unmusical and speedily moving mass composed of a thousand bits and each bit with wide-open mouth—thus presenting the curiously familiar picture of a bellowing monster with a thousand heads and a hole in every head—stopped me. It takes quite a bit to stop me when I've made up my mind to do something. It stopped me. It even made me think seriously about changing my mind, now that it was too late.

The sight of that mass of Lemmings had an extraordinarily paralytic effect upon me, true; but the sight of me also affected the Lemmings. I can't pretend that I was as fearsome a sight to them as they to me; and I have to assume they didn't see me, or else didn't know when they saw me that they'd seen me, until I had maneuvered the steps and taken those two strides; but any unbiased observers, none of whom were anywhere about, would have to agree with me that I won the first confrontation hands down, or perhaps more accurately pants down.

Which must prove, just as surely as every stumbling block is a stepping-stone, that what seems a great calamity can be a blessing in disguise; for you cannot appeal to a mob with reason, and I didn't; and I could not have accomplished more with my pants on, and almost certainly not even half as much, therefore I must be twice as good a man with my pants off; and since I needed to be a genius in order to overpower a thousand Lemmings, it was only by the grace of God that I didn't have them on, for I certainly wouldn't have thought of it all by myself.

At any rate, I unquestionably won—won the first moments of the Battle Against the Lemmings, anyhow—for there were a thousand of them to only one of me, and alone I moved them all. Or, rather, unmoved them.

Because that entire crammed-together crowd of male and female fruitcakes—which had surged forward in response to the words of Festus Lemming and was now leaping over the grass in obedience to his swinging hand and arm, his hand and arm swinging as though with that silent command alone he could move the mass toward me, toward the girls, toward the obscenity of nakedness, toward the evil he would have it destroy—stopped.

It didn't slow, mill, move, gradually settle. Each member of the mob-body stopped moving at virtually the same moment. It was a strange, frightening thing to see. There had been a thousand separate motions blending into the mass that was the body of the Beast, then almost instantly every quiver of that movement ceased, as did the roaring sound. The whole breathing myriad-eyed mass became silent and still.

Still, as the air was still, and quiet. For a little while. A
very
little while.

Because I saw Festus Lemming, apart from all the rest—separate, but on guard like the shepherd as he watches o'er his woolly-headed flock—turning to point at me, and in the clear sweet silence I heard him cry: “JESUS CHRIST, IT'S SHELL SCOTT!”

And right after that with hardly a stutter, “It—er—ah—he—OH, JESUS, OUR LORD AND SAVIOR—it is
he
, there,
there
, the foul and satanic agent of the Antichrist! Yes! THE ANTICHRIST! GOD IN HEAVEN SAVE US FROM HIS EVIL PRESENCE AND—”

Well, I thought, that was a nice thing to tell them.

Especially when every single ding-a-ling was ding-a-linging the same off-key tune on the identical out-of-sight and perhaps even out-of-mind wavelength as were all the other freaks of Festus crushed together in the body of the Beast. Maybe they marched to a different drummer, but all of them marched at the same time in the same place, and the drummer was not even distant because there the sonofabitch stood not fifty feet away, the sly old fox pointing his finger at the gizzard of the goose he had cooked.

I figured there wasn't much more he could do to ruin me. In fact, I figured there wasn't much more
I
could do to ruin me. I didn't even hear what came after the “AND” in “HIS EVIL PRESENCE AND—” because the rest of Lemming's words were ripped, shredded, destroyed by a coarse and horrible cough bursting from the huge throat and rising to a snarling shrieking cry, surely the most God-awful and horrifying sound I have ever heard or will ever hear, and the Beast moved. It slid, flowed, surged toward me; and I knew why it moved. I knew without questioning or doubt that it moved to kill. It had the blood smell in its nostrils and the blood thrist—long and well-nourished by Lemming, by all the Lemmings—in its heart, and it moved without any other purpose, without any real purpose at all except blindly, mindlessly, to destroy.

The Lemmings had seen and recognized me but they hadn't seen, at least not clearly, the cross I carried. I held it parallel to the ground, only its end pointing toward them. So they hadn't recognized the symbol they revered and adored—and sang at the top of their lungs about. But they damn soon were going to.

They'd picked up speed, were running now. And the unearthly howl no longer swe'led in their throats, they were silent, and somehow because of that silence even more horrifying, as they ran—directly at me.

So I ran, myself—at them.

Only not directly. Toward them, yes, but angling left down the slanting lawn, making them turn, so that while they looked at me their eyes would be aimed away from the hill on my right up which, hopefully, ten naked tomatoes were bounding with astonishing speed. Speed much more astonishing, I decided, than my own, even if many of them had fallen down and were rolling back.

To move like a man shot from a cannon while carrying an eighty-pound cross is not a difficult thing to do, it is impossible; it is much more natural to move like a man shot by a cannon, and that describes quite well what I was doing. Not so the giant fruitcake; it had achieved maximum motility and was rising yeastily up the slope with such speed that in seconds it would reach and presumably digest me.

So I thumped to a staggering halt, gripped the giant crucifix tightly in my hands, and swung it out and up, lifting it as high above my head as I could stretch, and then slammed it down on its steel-spike point. The spike sliced into earth and the square wooden base in which it was imbedded thudded solidly against the grass. When I let go of the cross it swayed only slightly, remained upright, outstretched-arms and the figure suspended from them facing—and leaning with the weight of two thousand years upon—the Lemmings of the Lord.

At that moment they were less than fifty feet away. The mass blocked my view of Festus Lemming, but I felt sure he was where he'd been before, standing still, watching, waiting. And if this rabid flock of his would stop for even a few seconds there was a chance I could make him hear me, understand me, and with that booming and long-listened-to voice of his yank them back from the mindlessness in which they now lived and moved, hold them while he herded them back into the fold. If anyone could manage that, anyone at all, it had to be Festus Lemming.

At least, that was the thought in my mind. But it was not there long. Because it wasn't true, and I knew it wasn't when I saw the horde of Lemmings still racing toward me and toward the ten-foot-high crucifix between them and me, though I should have known it long and long before. If the presence by proxy of their Master and Teacher, their Savior, their Lord and very God Of All couldn't yank them back, then their Sainted Most-Holy Pastor didn't have a prayer. Nor, needless to say, did I. There was no point at all in my yelling at them, and I knew it, but I yelled.

I shouted something or other I don't remember and then, pointing at the effigy of Jesus—Jesus, not the Christ—at their Savior's spiritless flesh racked on the Christian cross, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Stop!
Stop
, you blooming idiots, can't you see what's right in front of your
eyes?”

They saw. I had known they would; I know they did. Many of the heads moved quickly up and down, many of the wild eyes stared. They saw, and they were aware, they recognized—how could they not?—their long-loved symbol of pain and blood, suffering and death. It slowed them down, a little. But it didn't stop them. It didn't even begin to stop them.

Had it ever?

And finally, as they came on in that horrible silence broken only by the drumming of their cloven hooves, I yelled—though already moving backward while yelling at the Beast—“STOP, you sonsofbitches! You blithering lovers of all mankind wouldn't crucify me,
too
, would you?”

Sure, they would.

You can just bet your sweet ass they would, if they could find a piece of me—when they got through with me—big enough to stick on a nail. The thing rushed on—up to the cross and against it and over it—eyes glittering like two thousand pieces of broken glass, its two thousand feet trampling, scarring, splintering the cross and the wooden Christ, its two thousand lips stretched and twisted in a sadist's smile, and I turned and fled from the Beast as if Satan himself were pursuing me, Satan or a thousand Saints—and at that moment, given my choice of pursuers, the Devil would have won pants down.

I had been scared, damn well scared, for all of this last half-minute or minute since the church door boomed shut behind me, but it was only when I turned and fled—from
them
—that the fright grew into something closer to panic, became cold ugliness churning in me, a faintness in my flesh and darkness in my mind. And for a warped but real, a very real, moment I was racing over the surface of a miniature Earth that spun too slowly beneath my feet while all of Earth's horrors flew languidly after me—formless things that cast no shadow and lived by devouring the brain and drinking the body's blood—flying as fast as I was able to run, though they did not exert themselves or hurry, knowing I would slow and fall back to
them
, as soon as I tired.

I glanced over my shoulder, only once. Once was enough.

There was a single encouraging thing in view. Whatever I had seen or thought I'd seen in or out of my mind must have given me unprecedented incentive to run, because I had moved with such leaps and bounds and superchurning of feet that my pursuers were fifteen yards to the rear and losing ground. But not all of the Lemmings were pursuing me now.

Well beyond and to the right of those nearest me Festus Lemming was standing, arm thrust out and pointing, but not at me. He was gesturing to his left and up, toward the hill down which I had earlier come, the hill atop which were eucalyptus trees and my Cadillac, the hill on the side of which were visible—I got a quick blurred glimpse of them—the moving figures of some Little girls. At least from
here
they looked like little girls.

Several—fifty or a hundred—of the people who'd been charging after me had split from the mass and were loping toward Festus, not bunched but scattered out, and not all moving in the same direction. Two or three were already veering to run toward the hill. Or, rather, toward the little girls; for not even Lemmings would have run with such enthusiasm toward a bare hill.

I had run on an angle away from the church in order to lead the pursuing congregation away from the girls, and in that I had largely succeeded. But an incidental result was that I would now have farther to run if I hoped to catch up with the lovelies before any of those galloping Lemmings caught them.

It struck me as an impossible task, but I changed course sharply and sprinted toward the rear of the church anyway, pouring all the strength I had left into my legs and feet, and the task turned out not to be impossible after all. It damn near killed me, yes, but it wasn't impossible, and the reason was not so much that I outdistanced the Lemmings as that they simply couldn't keep up with me, and might not even have been able to keep up with lead-footed Ronnie racing on the flat.

Maybe I wasn't at my absolute best, but ordinarily I am as healthy and full of snorts as a bull being led to the cow pasture, while most of the Lemmings were less lively than the very-recently deceased. I had temporarily forgotten that, when I first lamped these citizens in the Church of the Second Coming, my impression was that a great many were so full of years another month or two might fill them up, and most of the rest, even including the younger members, appeared to have been laid out for viewing. So it was only when I was well up the hill and took another peek back and below that I realized, for the moment anyhow, there was little for me to fear from the flock.