But now they were getting lean, and it was time to haul ass, move on. This whole thing had been one sorry drag, ever since he’d been called up on active. He’d been minding his own, doing the insurance salesman thing, saving for that SUV for Maria and the kids. Man just couldn’t get a break, that was the gospel truth. And now that order had just come down about not using your weapon under any circumstance, what kind of fucked-up shit was that?
At his nod, Private Halloran closed up the back of the wagon. Corporal Fontana grasped the reins of the two big Clydesdales they’d commandeered from a circus in Jersey.
Seeing they were about to pull a Houdini, the crowd surged forward. Rodriguez, Halloran and Villanova closed ranks, blocking them from the wagon, rifles held loosely but brooking no nonsense.
Rodriguez raised his arms. “That’s it, folks.”
“What’re you talking about?” That came from some red-faced Irish guy. “You still got boxes!”
“Yeah, for other destinations.”
“Lies!” Irish pointed toward the two privates. “I heard ’em say we’re the last on your slate.” He turned to the crowd. “They’re black-marketing it!”
Rodriguez shot Halloran and Villanova a look that scraped paint. Then he glared back at the crowd. “Back off! Now! Understand?”
“We understand you’ve got our food!” Irish loved the sound of his own voice. Jesus, he’d like to clip that asshole, just to make a point.
The crowd pushed forward dangerously as the soldiers held position, twitchy, rifles aimed. Then a voice shouted over the tumult. “Forget it! You’re nothing to them!”
Startled, the crowd turned to the man behind them. Rodriguez stretched to see over their heads. A little bald guy stood twenty, thirty feet back from the crowd. Even from this distance, Rodriguez could see he was different from the others. He stood stock still, cool as gun metal.
“They’d kill you for a dime,” the little guy said.
The crowd was focused on the little guy now, and Rodriguez saw his opportunity. He motioned to Halloran and Villanova. The three jumped into the wagon. Fontana gave the reins a shake, and the Clydesdales broke into a heavy stride, the wagon rattling down the street. Several people, empty-handed, chased after them a few steps, then gave it up.
The others closed in on the little man.
“So what are we supposed to do?” a dark woman in a sari demanded of him. “Starve?”
“No,” he replied calmly, “you learn.” He beamed reassuringly at them. Had they been especially discerning, which they were not, they might have noticed that his eyes were unreadable, opaque as stones.
“Stop whining for handouts,” he continued, “waiting for the ATMs to open. What are your bellies telling you? Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse! And they’re gonna get worse yet. .
“Gather ’round, folks.” Sam Lungo gave them a knowing smile. “We’ve got things to talk about.”
You’ll have to kill them, you know.
Fuckin’ right I will. In his dream Sonny Grimes sat in the Copper Kettle Cafe and everybody was eating but him.
He didn’t see the person at the table with him. Every time he looked across the table, someone was there, all right, but he couldn’t get a clear look at them. Sometimes it just looked like a spot of darkness, like the pupil of an eye with no eye there, not even an iris. Just a dark that went straight back into his brain.
A dark that drank everything into it.
Sometimes there was nothing at all.
Just that voice.
Looking sulkily around at the other people in the restaurant, Sonny recognized nearly everyone he knew, everyone he couldn’t stand, from his mother-young, as she’d been when his dad was alive, and knocking back Johnny Walkers with that creep who’d been her boss when he was a kid, the one who’d send him out of the house when he came over in the afternoon-to Hank Culver, the No-Smoking Nazi. As if it was any of his or anybody else’s goddam business whether he smoked or where he smoked.
And all of them were eating except him.
Waitresses undulated between the tables, saucy little high school girls or chicks out of Penthouse and Hustler, with tight little asses and perky tits and big bedroom smiles: Can I get you something else? A little more coffee? Would you care for a blow job with that? He kept trying to catch their attention-they hadn’t even given him a glass of water, for Chrissakes! — but they looked through him as if he weren’t there.
Bitches, all of them. Assholes.
Over at the next table he saw that slob Arleta Wishart and her two geek sons, chowing down on a banquet that would have embarrassed that old Henry VIII guy who threw chicken bones on the floor in the movies. Roast chickens and bowls of chili and steaks so big they hung over the edge of the plate. .
In his sleep Sonny Grimes twitched, his nose wrinkling in the darkness, for he’d gone to sleep hungry.
Pigs, whispered the voice to him out of the darkness. Yes, pigs.
A pretty waitress came by and smiled at him. KITTEN said the nametag on her size-D boob. He wanted to ask her what the other one’s name was. “Can I get you something?” she asked, widening sympathetic blue eyes.
“Miss,” whined Fred Wishart from the next table. “Miss, get over here right now and get me some more coffee!” He was waving a twenty-dollar bill. There was still coffee in his cup.
Kitten glanced back and forth between Sonny and the bill.
“Get over here now,” yelled Arleta, “or we’ll call the manager and have you fired!”
The pink lip tucked painfully between little white teeth, “I’m sorry,” whispered Kitten. “It’s my job, you see, and I have my mother and grandma to support.”
She left him, stomach rumbling, alone at his dark little table, and Fred and Bob Wishart elbowed one another in the ribs and pointed to him, doubled over with laughter as they gave poor Kitten all kinds of orders to take this back and take that back, and get them this and that. .
You’ll have to kill them, said the Voice softly in Sonny’s heart, and Sonny thought, Yeah.
That’ll suit me just fine.
Chapter Twenty
OUTSIDE D.C.
As Shango and Czernas drew closer to Dulles Airport, the wrecks became more frequent, splattering the green countryside. Sweating, exhausted, Shango had a vision of the United States spread westward like some mammoth counterpane, strewn with burned wreckage, with scarred earth and ruined buildings, with smoking fields of metal and seats and burst luggage and charred rubber and soggy, crusted, fly-swarming fragments of people’s parents, spouses, children, friends. He dreaded Dulles as a child dreads the coming of nightmare when the first premonitory stirrings of fright invade a dream. This is going to be bad.
He was right beyond his grimmest imaginings.
On the some ten thousand acres of Dulles Airport’s run-ways, half a dozen pilots, those whose planes had already extended their landing gear, had managed to bring their planes in at a glide. Others, when their consoles went dark and their engines stopped, tried anyway, without the hydraulics or electrical signals to lower the gear, without instruments. One of these, an American Airlines DC10, had come down on top of an El-Al flight that was trying the same thing and the two planes had rolled, skidded, slid onto the next runway and into a third plane, a Lufthansa. Again-curiously-there was very little evidence of fire, only patches of blackened grass.
The moaning reached them first, like the outcry of hopeless ghosts, and as they came nearer, the growing stink of human waste, like a warning of still more terrible things to come.