Ever Onward (24 page)

A song from the long ago
prayer meetings Ma and Pa Pinkton had dragged him to sprang
unbidden into his head. The tune was familiar, but the words, like
the world itself, had changed.

‘Jocco loves me this I
know,

My Baptist background tells
me so.’

God has turned away His
face.

Now Jocco sits in His high
place.’

What had that stupid priest called
him? The Antichrist?

Fool! Jocco had saved the idiot from a
useless life of bland ignorance! Just as he had saved Walter J.
Pinkton from the same fate!

Walter reached again for the wine
bottle. As he did so his eye fell on a book he had picked up in the
Barstow Public Library. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Walter had always wanted to be an actor, a fact that would have
sent both his parents to their guilt-ridden knees
frantically

begging their deaf God just where the
holy-fuck they had they gone wrong.

And young wayward Walter
hadn’t wanted to be just any actor. Lord Almighty no. Walter had
dreamt of becoming a Shakespearean actor, a thespian to the great
Bard himself! In his secret heart Walter already was, knowing many
of the great one-liners by heart.

‘Friends, Romans,
countrymen, lend me your ears!’

‘Out, out damned spot!’ or
the ever popular:

‘To be, or not to be ---
that is the question.’

At Military Collage he had
plucked up his courage and nervously tried out for the school’s
production of Henry V. All his ‘great skill’ had won him was a
nonspeaking part, but at least he had been involved! It had been
the highlight to his otherwise uneventful life. The costumes, the
color, the pageantry, while all around him the great Bard’s words
rang in his ears! Almost breathless with stage-fright, he had been
the one to help the young King Harry up onto the cart when he gave
his famous pep-talk to his vastly outnumbered troops just before
the Battle of Agincourt. Even back then Walter could recite the
monologue at ease --- as long as he was alone in front of a locked
bathroom mirror. Put another living being in front of him and his
traitorous tongue did a swan dive into the crapper. Still, the
golden words lingered in his twisted brain.

‘He that has no stomach for
this fight,

let him depart! His
passport shall be made,

and crowns for convoy put
into his purse.

We would not die in that
man’s company

That fears his fellowship to
die with us!’

Walter liked that! A ‘fellowship of
soldiers’, a ‘band of brothers’, all sworn to win together, or die
together.

As a child Walter had been lonely.
Growing up on a poor excuse for a farm with even poorer excuse for
parents, young Walter had retreated into fantasy. Comics first;
moving quickly through sci-fi and romantic adventures, on to
poetry, the classics; then, finally, the Bard himself. But
grass-root Fundamental Baptists would have no truck with any of the
Devil’s Playthings! Gambling, dancing, rock music --- or acting!
All of them were very high up on the very long and often quoted
‘Though Shalt Not’ List.

When a skinny, bispeckled Walter had
nervously announced that he was going into the army, his mother had
literally fallen on her knees. What followed was a great deal of
wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth. Walter’s father however,
secretly fearing that his puny offspring was a
sodomite-in-the-making, agreed, saying that maybe, with God’s help,
the army could make a man out of him.

Walter left that very next day and
never went back.

Military College, however, turned out
to be somewhat of a disappointment for both Walter and his father.
Though his grades were good, his social skills were in the toilet.
His classmates found him a geek. His instructors found him a geek.
Later, his fellow officers at China Beach found him a geek. Walter
firmly believed that his own father also found him a geek, with a
side-order of closet-queen thrown in.

Walter himself was tempted to agree
with them. Only when he let his mind roam through the glorious
tragedies of Shakespeare did his life seem to take on meaning.
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy of self-doubt:
"To be or not to
be",
fit him like a glove.

Then The Change had
happened.

At first he had been terribly afraid.
He awoke feeling like the mad King Lear left alone on the wild and
tempestuous heath. Demons beset him on all sides. Waving bayonets
and M-16’s instead of swords, but demons none-the-less! Killings,
rapes, and a host of casual cruelties. And Jocco had led them. The
Prince of Darkness gathering his demonic hoard.

But then something
else
very
strange had happened to him. A type of inner awakening or mental
metamorphosis began to take place inside him. With the killing of
the priest in Bakersfield, Walter had suddenly realized that not
only was the World dead, but that God Himself was dead as well ---
if indeed He had ever lived at all!

The revelation shook him to the very
roots of his being.

Right after that Walter had plucked up
his courage and gone to Jocco; had ‘auditioned’ for him in such a
way that he won not only a part in the macabre drama, but a major
role! A part that called for him to do more than act, but to create
as well! To dip into the well-spring of his mind and draw forth all
the gloriously pagan fantasies he had kept locked away since
childhood!

Sitting there in his room
with a naked love-slave chained to his bed, he sipped from a glass
that in his mind’s eye had become a jewel-encrusted goblet, and all
the while the Bard’s words thundered across the dream-scape that
was his demented mind.

‘Tis now the very witching
hour of the night,

When churchyards yawn and
Hell itself breeds out

Contagion to this
world.

Now could I drink hot
blood!

And do such bitter business
as the day would

Quake to look
on!’

Grinning like Yorik’s skull, Walter
turned towards the bed. A golden cascade of hair moved on the
silken sheets. A wanton slut encased in a virgin’s flawless shell.
His. To do with as he so chose. The mere thought of such power made
his head spin!

The wine glass slipped from
his hand, spilling its redness into the plush hotel carpet. Hot
blood turning swiftly cool. The warmth in his groin suddenly
cooling as well. Lust having flown, there remained the lasting
residue of love. Not for the thing on the bed, but for the one that
had put her there.

Jocco.

The Savior.

The Antichrist.

The Dark
Stranger.

To Walter he was all these things and
more!

The boy-king Harry spoke
again in Walter’s ear, only this time with Jocco’s
voice.

‘We few, we happy few. We
band of brothers;

For he who sheds his blood
for me this day

Shall be my brother! Be he
ever so base,

This day shall gentle his
condition.

And gentlemen back home
abed will think

Themselves accursed they
were not here,

And hold their manhood
cheap!

Whilst any speaks, that
fought with us,

Upon this glorious
quest!’

When Walter had first read those words
he had openly wept. Even now they moved him to tears. Getting
drunkenly to his feet, he staggered over to the bed. The creature
waiting there for her Lord, cowered back, but the Lord marked it
not. Instead, the master of all he surveyed, laid down on the bed,
curled up into a ball and slept the sleep of fallen
angels.

Chapter 20
: ‘THE LOST
BOYS’

Los Angeles

California July
12

Jocco did indeed reach Rialto
Municipal Airport the next day, and he brought with him most of the
original China Beach crew. He’d left Bobby-Joe in charge of the new
recruits. Walter was also left behind. Flight Lieutenant Sam
Waterman, however, was not. Indeed, being the only one who could
fly, Sam was the key to the whole operation. The nurse, Shirley
Bates, was also there to make sure Sammy-boy did as he was told. As
a precaution, Jocco also brought two of the newer females as well.
If push came to shove, he could always off one of them and still
have the nurse to bargain with. The second one was just in case
Sammy-boy got a little testy. Clearly Jocco was a man who believed
in planning ahead.

After some searching, they found a
twin-engine twenty seater all gassed up and ready to go. After
clearing one runway, Sixteen heavily armed ‘vets’, including Pam
the Bitch and Pussbag, climbed on board.

By 8:30 AM they were
airborne.

The flight plan was simple. Fly west
ninety miles and circle over L.A. If things looked kosher, they
could then land at Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Beverly Hills
was only a dozen miles north-west on Santa Monica Blvd. It had
always been Jocco’s life-long dream to live there. Not because of
the actors. He knew instinctively he’d have nothing in common with
those stuck-up assholes. Something else besides the ‘big names’
drew him; the pool, the maid, the chauffeur, the fucking ‘works’.
But most of all, the power!

Now it seemed his dream would soon be
coming true.

Half an hour later, Lt. Sam Waterman
banked the plain sharply to the left. A thousand feet below them,
the tangled metropolis spread out in all directions. Jocco, sitting
in the co-pilot’s seat, looked eagerly down on his
kingdom-to-be.

A vast network of concrete veins
crisscrossed the area. L.A., after all, was a city in which the car
was not only a status symbol, but a necessity. Without wheels in
L.A., you got nowhere. Now, looking down at the endless wrecks and
mile-long pile-us, Jocco realized the centre city was lost to him.
A wasteland of rusting metal, accessible only on foot. He told Sam
to fly north toward West Hollywood. Beverly Hills lay just beyond
that. As they flew over the less populated area, they left the
clogged freeways behind. To the left the parched, brown hills gave
way to the greens of the much higher Santa Monica Mountains. In the
far distance the snowy peaks of the Sierra Madres thrust up above
the horizon.

Jocco consulted a detailed map of the
area. The tall buildings behind them, he had Sam drop down to three
hundred feet and cut his speed. His heart gave a little jump as
they passed over the seemingly endless lots of Twentieth Century
Fox Studios. Wilshire Golf Course lay spread out beneath him. Off
to the right the Hollywood Bowl gleamed like a diamond in the sun.
Then they were over Sunset Blvd. Coldwater Canyon led up to the
homes of the once fabulously rich and famous and now the very
fabulously dead and forgotten. Jocco, heir to the suddenly vacant
throne, was about to claim the crown.

Then he saw them. A yellow jeep and a
dark van winding their way down Laurel Canyon Drive. The jeep had
three or four people in it. Grabbing his binoculars, he had Sam
bank around for a closer look. What he saw did not make him a happy
camper.

The jeep did indeed hold four people.
All of them looked like teenagers and all of them were loaded for
bear. The van had a section of the top cut away and what looked
like a machine gun mounted on the top. A quarter mile in front of
the jeep were two motorcycles. Two more brought up the
rear.

“Shit!”, Jocco swore.

Sam turned his way and grinned for the
first time in three weeks. “Looks like you’re not the only one who
wants to take a dip in Madonna’s pool.”

Jocco smiled coldly. “Take
us down, fly-boy.”

Ten minutes later they had landed at
Santa Monica Airport. Half an hour after that they were driving up
the boulevard with the same name. Their vehicles were two large
cargo trucks and a monstrous thing best described as a bulldozer on
wheels. Roy Heller led in a small red pick-up with Rat riding
shotgun in the back. Jocco was heading for the promised land and he
had no intention of going empty handed.

Pam Gliss, affectionately known as
Sergeant Bitch, sat in the back as the open bulldozer wound its way
up into Beverly Hills. Her M-16 rested across her lap; the long, 50
round magazine nestled between her thighs. Looking on in wonder at
the mansions all round her, Pam tuned to Tim Galt.

“Look at that one, Timmy! Sheee-yit!
We could have landed the fucking plain on the front
lawn!”

Tim, grinning like a fool, nodded.
Jocco and his driver, Nathan Height, road up front. Pussbag sat
like a living gargoyle on the hood, just behind the dozers
triangular scoop. Up ahead, Roy’s red pick-up led the way. Rat
stood in the back, a rope holding him upright, his Defender shotgun
clutched in both hands.

They’d been winding through the hills
for over an hour now and hadn’t spotted anyone. Wrecks were few and
far between. A Rolls here, a Jag there. A little while ago they’d
passed a Porsche smashed into a stone wall, but for the most part
the going was easy.