The Plant (31 page)

“What kind of spic has blond hair and blue eyes?” he asks. “What—”

He feels the moth-flutter of Carlos’s hand against his thigh an instant too late. Before he can draw back, the designated spic has grabbed his testi-cles and crushed them in the iron grip of one who is fighting for his life and knows it.

“
YOWWW
!” Hecksler cries, and for just one moment the armlock on Carlos’s throat weakens. It isn’t the pain, enormous though it is, that causes the death-grip to weaken; Iron-Guts has devoted years to living with pain and through it. No, it’s surprise. The D.S. is being choked, the D.S. has been slashed, and still he is fighting back.

Carlos throws himself to the left again, slamming the General’s bony 230

shoulder against the doorjamb. Hecksler’s grip loosens a bit more, and before he can re-establish it, Zenith—more in the spirit of puckish good humor than anything else—takes a hand.

It’s actually the General’s
feet
the ivy takes, wrapping a loose green fist around both and yanking backward. Although the branches are still new and thin (some are pulled apart by Hecksler’s weight), Z’s grip is surprisingly strong. And surprise, of course, is the key word. If Iron-Guts had expected such a cowardly sneak attack, he almost certainly would have kept his feet.

Instead, he thumps heavily to his knees.

Carlos whirls in the doorway, gasping and gagging and hacking for air.

He still feels that band of heat across his belly, and it seems to be spreading.
The bastard shocked me
, he thinks.
He had one of those things, those illegal laser things
.

He has to get back to Kenton’s office, where he has foolishly left the Sakrifice Case, but when he starts forward, the General slashes his knife through the air. Carlos recoils just fast enough to keep from losing his nose.

The General bares his teeth at Carlos—those that have survived the Shady Rest Mortuary, at least. Bright color blazons his cheeks.

“Get out of my way!” Carlos squalls. “
Abbalah! Abbalah can tak! Demeter can
tah! Gah! Gam!
”

“Save your spic gabble for someone who gives a rip,” the General says.

He makes no attempt to get off his knees, simply sways from side to side, looking as mystic (and as deadly) as any snake ever piped out of a
fakir’s
basket. “You want to get past me, son? Then come on. Try for it.”

Carlos looks over the old man’s shoulder and sees there are still green boughs of ivy looped around the old man’s ankles.

“
Kadath
!” Carlos calls. “
Cam-ma! Can tak
!”These words mean nothing in themselves. They are invocatory in nature, Carlos Detweiller’s way of shap-ing a telepathic command. He has told Zenith to yank the old man again, to pull him right down the hall into the main growth and crush him.

Instead, the knots around the General’s ankles untie themselves and slither away.

“No!” Carlos bawls. He cannot believe that the Dark Powers have deserted him. “No, come back!
Kadath! Kadath can tak!
”

231

“Better take a look at yourself, son,” General Hecksler advises slyly.

Carlos looks down and sees that his sand-colored suit has turned bright red from the coat pockets on down. There’s a long, tattered rip across his midsection; the end of his tie has actually been lopped off. He can see something shiny and purple in the slash and realizes with disbelieving dismay that those are his guts.

While he’s distracted, Hecksler lunges forward and swipes with his knife again. This time he opens Carlos’s shoulder down to the bone. “
Olay!
”

Iron-Guts screams.

“
You crazy old fuck!”
Carlos screams back, and lashes out a foot. This sends a terrible dull cramp of pain through his belly and a freshet of blood down the front of his pants, but the shoe catches General Hecksler square in the skinny beak and breaks it. He goes flopping back. Carlos starts forward but the evil old bastard is up on his knees again in a goddamned flash, slashing everywhere. What is he made of, iron?

Carlos dodges back into Sandra’s office, panting, and slams the door just as Hecksler curls the fingers of his free hand around the jamb. Hecksler utters a howl as his fingers are crushed, and it is music to Carlos’s ears. But the old son of a bitch won’t stop. He’s like a robot with its selector switch frozen on KILL. Carlos hears the office door bang open behind him as he staggers across Sandra’s office with the left arm of his jacket turning crim-son and one hand on his slashed midsection, trying to keep those purple things in where they belong. He hears a harsh, doglike panting as air rushes in and out of the madman’s old lungs. In a moment the robot will be on him again. The robot has a weapon; Carlos has none. Even if he had his Sakrifice Case, the robot would give him no time to work the combination.

I’m going to die
, Carlos thinks wonderingly.
If I don’t do something right away,
I’m actually going to die.
He has known that death was coming, of course, but until this minute it has been an academic concept. There is nothing academic about having a crazy robot after you while blood pours down your arm and legs, however.

Carlos looks at Sandra’s desk, which is a cluttery, paper-strewn mess.

Scissors? A letter-opener? Even a damned nail-file? Anything—

232

Good Demeter, what’s that?

Lying beside her blotter, partly obscured by a framed photo of Sandra and Dina taken on their trip to Nova Scotia two years before, is a large silver object which looks like a gunshell. Sandra, her mind full of books and plants and manuscripts and tales of elderly Rhode Island zombies, has forgotten to put the gunshell in her purse when she left on Friday afternoon.

Also, it’s now easy for her to forget: the plant has given her a new sense of security and well-being. This object no longer seems so vital to her.

It’s vital to Carlos, though.

Carlos has spotted Sandra’s Rainy Night Friend.

11:27 A.M.

“What’s the matter, Aunt Sandra?” Dina asks. A moment before they were been walking down the boardwalk together, eating the delicious grilled franks you can only get at Cony. Then Sandra stopped, gasped, and put a hand to her stomach. “Is your hotdog no good?”

“It’s fine,” Sandra said, although a sudden pain had, in fact, just ripped through her belly. It wasn’t the kind of pain she associated with food-poisoning, but she turned and deposited the remainder of her dog in a trash barrel just the same. She was no longer hungry.

“Then what is it?”

It was a voice in her head, calling. But if she told Dina that, her niece would probably think she was crazy. Especially if she told her it was a
green
voice.

“I don’t know,” Sandra said, “but maybe I ought to take you home, hon.

If I’m going to get sick, I don’t want to get caught all the way out here.”

11:27 A.M.

John Kenton has been scrambling eggs in his little kitchen, whistling “Chim-Chim-Chiree” from
Mary Poppins
as he stirs with his whisk. The pain comes 233

like lightning out of a blue sky, ripping across his middle, there and gone.

He cries out and jerks backward, the whisk pulling the frypan off the stove and splattering half-congealed eggs on the linoleum. Both the eggs and the pan miss his bare feet, which could almost qualify as a miracle.

The office
, he thinks.
I have to get to the office. Something’s gone wrong
. And then his head suddenly fills with sound and he screams.

11:28 A.M.

Roger Wade is already headed for the door of his apartment when the unearthly yowl of Sandra’s Rainy Day Friend fills his head, threatening to burst it open from the inside out. He drops to his knees like a man who’s had a heart attack, holding his head and uttering screams he can’t hear.

11:28 A.M.

On the edge of the Sheep’s Meadow, the little cluster of Saturday morning gamblers watch the fleeing man with bemused surprise. He was cleaning them out, righteously and in record time. Then, suddenly, he gave a scream and lurched to his feet, first clutching his gut and then slamming the heels of his hands against his ears, as if assaulted by some monstrous sound. As if to confirm this, he had gasped “Oh God,
turn it off!”
Then he fled, staggering from side to side like a drunk.

“What’s up with him?” one of the crap-artists asked.

“I don’t know,” said another, “but I know one thing: he left the gelt.”

For a moment they simply look at the untidy pile of bills beside Bill Gelb’s vacated spot. Then, quite spontaneously, the six of them begin to applaud.

April 4, 1981

Somewhere in New Jersey

Aboard the Silver Meteor

234

11:28 A.M.

In his seat by the window, Riddley is asleep and dreaming of other, younger days. He is dreaming, in fact, of 1961. In his dream, he and Maddy are walking to school hand in hand beneath a brilliant November sky. Together they chant their old favorite, which they made up themselves: “Whammer-jammer-Alabammer! Beetle Bailey, Katzenjammer! Gi’me back my goddam hammer! Whammer-jammer-Alabammer!” Then they giggle.

It is a good day. The Cuban stuff, which scared everybody near bout to death, is over. Rid has drawn a pitcher, and he thinks Mrs. Ellis will ask him to show it to the rest of the kinnygarden. Mrs. Ellis likes his pitchers.

Then, suddenly, Maddy stops. From the north comes a rising rumble.

She looks at him solemnly. “Those are the bombers,” she says. “Hit happened. Hit’s World War Three.”

“Naw,” Riddley says. “Hit’s over. The Roosians backed down. Kennedy scared em honest. Bald Roosian fella told his boats to turn around and go home. Mama said so.”

“Mama’s crazy,” Maddy replies. “She sleeps on the riverbank. She sleeps with the copperhaids.”

And as if to prove it, the Blackwater air-raid siren goes off, deafening him—

11:29 A.M.

Riddley straightens up and stares out at New Jersey: stares, in fact, at the exact swampy wasteland he will that night be visiting.

The man across the aisle looks up from his paperback book. “Are you all right, sir?” he asks.

Riddley cannot hear him. The air-raid siren has followed him out of his dream. It is filling his head, bursting his brains.

Then, suddenly, it cuts off. When the man across the aisle asks his question again, this time with real concern, Riddley hears him.

235

“Yes, thanks,” he says in a voice that’s almost steady. In his head, the old rhyme beats:
Whammer-jammer-Alabammer
. “I’m fine.”

But some folks are not
, he thinks.
Some folks most definitely are not.

490 Park Avenue South

5th floor

11:29 A.M.

In 1970, a large number of American brass were celebrating at a Saigon bar and whorehouse called Haiphong Charlie’s. Word had come down from Washington that the war would certainly continue for at least another year, and these career soldiers, who had gotten the ass-kicking of their lives over the last twenty months or so and wanted payback more than they wanted life itself, were raising the roof. The miracle was that something in the bomb the anonymous waiter planted was defective, and instead of spraying the whole room with nails and screws, it only sprayed those soldiers who happened to be near the stage, where it had been hidden in a flower arrangement. One of those unfortunates was Anthony Hecksler’s aide-de-camp.

Poor sonofabitch lost both hands and one eye while he was doing the frug or the Watusi or one of those.

Hecksler himself was on the edge of the room, talking with Westy Westmoreland, and although a number of nails flew between them—both men heard their whining passage—neither suffered so much as a nicked ear-lobe. But the sound of the explosion in that small room was enormous. Iron-Guts hadn’t minded being spared the screams of the wounded, but it had been nine full days before his hearing began to come back. He had about given that sensation up for dead when it finally returned home (and still for a week or so every conversation had been like a transatlantic phone call in the nineteen-twenties). His ears have been sensitive to loud noises ever since.

Which is why, when Carlos yanks the pull-ring in the center of the silver thing, setting off the high-decibel siren, Iron-Guts recoils with a harsh grunt of surprise and pain—”
AHHH?
”—and puts his hands to his ears.

236

All at once the knife is pointing at the ceiling instead of at Carlos, and Carlos doesn’t hesitate to take advantage. Badly hurt as he is, as
surprised
as he is, he’s never gone more than half a step over the edge of panic. He knows there are only two ways out of this office, and that the five-story drop from the windows behind him is unacceptable. It must be the door, and that means he must deal with The General.

Near the top of the screaming gunshell, about eight inches beyond the pull-ring, is a promising red button. As The General lunges forward again, Carlos thrusts the gunshell gadget at him and pushes the button. He’s hoping for acid.

A cloud of white stuff billows from the pinhole in the very tip of the gunshell and envelops the General. Hi-Pro gas isn’t acid—not quite—but it isn’t cotton candy, either. The General feels as if a swarm of biting insects (Gnats from Hell) had just settled on the wet and delicate surfaces of his eyes. These same insects pour up his nostrils, and the General suspends breathing at once.

Like Carlos, he keeps control. He knows he’s been gassed. Even blind-ed, he can deal with that, has dealt with it before. It’s the
siren
that’s really screwing up his action. It’s bludgeoning his brains.

He falls back toward the door, pressing his free hand against his left ear and waving the knife in front of him, creating what he hopes will be a zone of serious injury.