The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (28 page)

The technician activated a second screen, sweat trickling down his brow. The image that came up was a floor plan of level four. A signatured heat blob was visible near the stairs, slowly edging toward Monk’s last known position. Stubble, Max realized. Then he and the others saw another smudge of heat, moving swiftly on an intercept course. “Stubble!” the technician screamed. “He’s coming straight for you!”

“Where? Shit! Where, dammit—I don’t see a damn thing!”

Max stared as the two heat blobs merged.

Stubble was shrieking in terror. “I don’t see! Where, fuck, where—aaghhh!” Again a burst of machine gun fire, then nothing but static.

In the security room, Max and Penny and Annie and the technician watched in horrified silence as the blob made its way to the stairs, entered, and disappeared from the screen.

“Find him again!” Annie screamed.

But the technician shook his head. “Budget restraints,” he said. “We had the overall IR network set up for levels six to four, but then we ran out of money. He’s taking out the cameras, too. We’ve lost him.”

“My God,” Penny whispered. “And he’s on his way, and there’s not a thing we can do to stop him!”

From outside a bell gonged.

Annie cast Max a frightened glance, then straightened. “The show must go on. There’s only one of him. I’ll be right at the front. The minister’s guards are there, behind the curtain—you, too, Penny—we’ll be safe.” She looked at Max with pity in her eyes. “Sorry, Max.”

He shook his head, already resigned. “At least I’ve been warned,” he said, “and that’s more than anyone else can say out there.”

“Good point,” Annie said. “Keep your mouth shut, and you should be all right, just get ready to, uh, run, I guess.”

“Right.”

They quickly left the security room, leaving the technician furiously trying to track the intruder—with no chance of success.

Max found his seat, then sat and watched as Penny and Annie appeared on the stage and seated themselves behind the long table where they joined the minister, Andy, and the top of Lucy’s head—which is all that was visible even from Max’s vantage point. The assembly hall was packed, voices filling the air in a droning murmur.

A burst of applause greeted Brandon Safeword’s approach to the podium. He inclined his prodigious head and smiled out at the guests. “A wonderful evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “in which to celebrate the achievements of this city’s talented, brilliant artists, all of whom saw their start as recipients of funding from Culture Assessment Promotional Support services—which we affectionately know as CAPSs. Not that such funding is a prerequisite to the receipt of tonight’s awards—most certainly not, hah hah, ho ho!—rather—” He leaned forward on the podium. “—it is indicative of CAPSs’s remarkable percipience at finding and supporting artists of exceptional ability, no matter which university they might have attended!

“Now,” he continued, smiling broadly, “first a word or two about the panel of peers, who for the past eight months have struggled with the difficult task of choosing tonight’s award winners. Each judge in his or her own right is an artist of renown and admiration. Since you all know them, I’ll simply recount the List of Lists using only their first names. The position of chair, this year, hath been held with honor by dear Margie, who was a student who knew Donny and in union begat six grants and four major awards; whereupon Margie was gifted with a suitable post at the university, and came in time to know Chuck, Samuel, and Peter, and in the knowing thereof begat nineteen various awards and grants. In Chuck, knowing in time Elizabeth and Sally—though in each knowing an interval of time doth exist between the two, allowing for lawful propriety in the knowing thereof, was begat in twin succession twenty-two awards and grants; and in the gathering thereof, Chuck came to know Donny who begat funding for Samuel, who knew Sally and begat funding for Elizabeth, who knew Margie once more and begat funding for Peter, who then knew Donny and begat funding for Margie, who came in knowing to Lucy, and so knowingly doth Lucy begat Peter who, in begatting with knowing Elizabeth, begat Chuck, who remained at this time in the knowing with Samuel, Margie, and Donny, thus allowing in proper prescription the gathering of those in knowing, mainly these being the panel of peers who in all knowing begat the awards on this here night on behalf of nameless donors, a multitude of taxpayers, a slice of lottery funding, minus administrative fees and the knowing task of begatting, which in itself is known to be a costly thing; thus minus said trimmings these awards nevertheless being nearly a month’s salary for said peers in their knowing universities and tenure and so worthy of sustaining an artist or two for a year maybe longer, we all begat in knowing the knowingly known, though some may not be known as yet by this night’s end all shall be known at least in knowing circles of import and sacred truths, of which there are many and by swearing loyalty shall remain unwritten and so unopposable in the eyes of the public. Amen.”

“Amen!” the crowd murmured.

“And now,” Brandon continued, “for your unrestrained enjoyment, Professor Lucy Mort shall read an excerpt from her most recent work,
Mommy Mommy Mommy
. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Lucy Mort…”

The crowd roared. The crowd was on its feet—not in ovation, but in an effort to discern the tiny creature that scurried up to disappear behind the podium. Brandon quickly adjusted the gooseneck microphone until it, too, was out of sight. The crowd slowly sat back down, and silence fell.

A moment later a tiny voice cleared its throat, and the words followed.

I shun you and him and her and them

for not giving me the golden pen

I shun rivals for the almighty dosh

and the critics who despise my success

I shun for not giving me attention

I shun, too, because it’s fun!

There followed a silent moment; then one of the critics at the front shouted out, “What the hell has that got to do with mommies, Lucy dear?”

The crowd gasped.

Lucy jumped out from behind the podium, her head no bigger than an apple. She shrieked, “I’m not finished! That’s why! Wait!” She jumped back to the microphone, and the sound of her desperate breathing echoed through the hall, then,

I shun, too, because it’s fun!

…

Isn’t it, Mum?

Everyone cheered wildly, applauded frantically. Max stood with them, bashing his hands together and watching, along with everyone else, as Lucy climbed the tablecloth and stood up on the table in front of her chair. She reached down and hauled up her purse, which she unzipped, pulled out a tommy gun, and spun to the row of critics seated in front of her, and let them have it. The critics exploded in a messy expostulation of flesh, bone, blood, guts, and a few bits of brain, along with upholstery and clothing bits and pieces of shoes and notepads and rotten tomatoes previously stored in paper bags. Smoking cartridges spun wildly from the tommy gun as Lucy—visibly struggling under its weight and getting smaller by the second—continued pumping rounds into the amalgamated, sliced, diced, and ground-up critics, some of whom kept raising their hands to ask piercing questions revealing their sly, cynical erudition—but the gesture was wasted, and didn’t in fact last much longer, as even the hands were pummeled into little bits. Then the gun was empty, and fell clattering onto the table in front of minuscule Lucy Mort.

At this moment the minister’s six bodyguards were flung bodily through the curtain to flop and sprawl and roll and thump in blood-spewing messes onto the long table, knocking over every single pitcher of lemon water. And behind them appeared Sool Koobie, his sleek lithe body painted in frightening patterns, a hafted hand ax in one hand, his spear in the other, and wearing as his only item of clothing a long, billowy cloak of used tampons.

Annie, Penny, Andy, the minister, and Brandon shrieked in unison, then scattered as, with a weird, terrifying, ululating yell, Sool Koobie rushed the assembly.

Max made no effort to join the stampede for the doors. Instead he clambered over the heads and shoulders of the knotted mob and reached the thick heavy curtain against the wall, which he climbed with the zeal of an ape, still clutching his flower box. Fifteen feet above the surging, screaming, murderously panicked crowd, Max hung on for his life. He tried to shift the box under an arm but the lid opened and the submarine fell out, to land on the churning sea of coiffed heads below, where it slowly rocked and wobbled its way out through the exit. “Shit!” Max hissed. “Doesn’t matter now, though, does it? Holy cow, look at that guy!”

Sool Koobie was slaying with wild abandon, cleaving vegetarians in twain right and left, driving the herd ever forward to the two narrow choke points of the hall’s exits. Max scanned the overturned table on the stage, but saw no one. Meanwhile, the savage leapt everywhere, laying out red ruin wherever he landed and crooning eerily with every killing blow he delivered.

And yet the whole scene since Lucy’s lead-filled refutation of the critics had lasted but a few seconds. All of a sudden Max found himself alone—the crowd had been driven out of the hall—and the screams continued as Sool pursued them. Max looked down, scanned the inert bodies below, seeing a few moaning and writhing in their death wounds, then falling still. Bodies, everywhere, bodies. He turned in his perch as he heard voices up at the front. There stood Brandon and Lucy, looking unscathed.

“There there, Lucy dear,” Brandon was saying.

“I’m out of bullets!” Lucy wailed. “And I can’t even hold up the gun anymore! Oh, Brandon, what am I going to do! There’s commercial artists out there, all more successful than me! I have to kill them! I have to, Brandon!”

“Of course, dear, of course. But you’re in luck—I have a penknife!”

“Give it to me!”

He handed it down to her.

“I’m off!” She leapt down from the stage and raced up the body-littered aisle.

“But where, dear?” Brandon called out. “Where?”

“Chesterton’s!” she squeaked. “Thursday’s Lounge! That’s where I’ll find them! They’re dead! All of them, dead!”

Max watched her pass beneath him, then slowly climbed down. That savage would likely be back, collecting trophies, finishing the last ones off. He had to get out of the Pyramid. But something made him pause at the exit and turn back to where Brandon still stood.

“Hey!” Max called, knowing the jig was up, the entire jig, and not giving a damn anymore. “Hey, Brandon!”

The major macrocephalic man looked up. “Maximillian! Well done!”

“I know all about your brother, Brandon!” Max yelled gleefully. “He’s a big star back East! Bigger than you’ll ever be in this squat little piss-hole! Hah hah ho ho!”

Brandon froze, the veins bulged, the head swelled and swelled, and then, as he screamed his white rage, the head exploded, spraying Styrofoam chips everywhere. The body staggered, the hands groped, found the curtain, swept it aside; then the body ran away, disappearing from sight.

Max grinned, feeling better than he’d felt in years.

10.

from on high

Wild Bill Chan and Jojum had tied themselves up into an immovable knot that lay against the engine’s back hatch, forcing John Gully to grunt with great effort as he pushed his way inside. He swiftly scanned the scene, his gaze coming to rest first on the broken controls, then on Joey.

Joey “Rip” Sanger shrugged. “An accident. Told you ya shoulda left me alone, or doused me right at the start. And now we’re barreling along, outa control who knows where—”

“I do,” Gully said. “We’re heading into the city. We’ll never make the turn before the station. There’s gonna be one hell of a mess.”

Joey shrugged again. “It was bound to happen, Gully. Screwing with the laws of nature, you’ve been, and now the piper’s called you due.”

“The laws of nature?” Gully sat down on the floor, his back resting against the control sleeve. “What on earth are you talking about, Mr. Sanger?”

“There’ll always be poor,” Joey growled. “Y’can hide ’em, y’can squirrel ’em away and get slipped the cool green by the powers that be, y’can pretend yer doin’ good with this here housin’ scheme a yours, but it’s all pissing in the wind, Gully. Y’got the ones that have, and the ones that ain’t, but want. Every now and then they have a set-to, at each other’s throats—the ones that have defendin’ territory, the ones that ain’t trying t’carve out a piece for themselves. And maybe it turns right over, the faces switchin’ right around, but you know what? Nothing changes. I figured you for a smarter buck than that, Gully, but you’re just fooling ’em all, yourself included.”

Gully sighed. “You missed the entire point, Mr. Sanger. Missed it by a mile. I’m not interested in getting my people to change places with those on high. My plans, which you have succinctly ruined this night, were far more profound, far more potentially devastating. I lead the Fruitful Church of Disobedience, Mr. Sanger—”

“Oh, hell, anarchists!”

Gully shrugged. “People—all of us—got messed up in the ’50s, and we’ve been thinking and trying to get back to those days ever since. But it was a sham back then: the prosperity was singular, a blip in history’s miserable line. It was false—the economy, even the society with all its icons shoved on us by television. Nuclear families? Mom, Dad, the kids, and the dog? Oh, really. Look at the history of our species. Kids were meant to be raised communally. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. No single woman—or man—was ever considered to be wholly responsible. Tack on a nine-to-five job, then two of them, and you’ve got one royal fuckup that burned itself out within a single generation. Hence the ’60s, and now the ’90s, with that artificial construct all falling apart under immense, unreasonable pressures and unrealistic expectations. Single mums, single dads, screwed-up kids—it’s all falling to pieces. And everyone walks around blaming each other, blaming the neighbors, the crackpots, the criminals, the strangers down the block. Tougher on crime, tougher on panhandlers, tougher and still tougher, keep breeding the paranoia, keep making isolated entities of us all, divide and conquer, divide and divide and divide, until we all feel powerless, dependent, until dignity disappears from the common tongue. Today’s leaders—politicians and businessmen—have pulled off what kings and emperors and high priests only dreamed of in the back when. At least in the old days people knew when they were just meat, gristle, muscle, and bone and nothing else. Now, everyone still believes they count for something, even when they know that that something is one big lie. And so we keep trudging on, trying to make sense of things, trying to achieve the unachievable, sticking to the rules—most of us—and thinking that it all serves something important, but what it serves is the cronies on top and no one else.”