SAVAGE GLEN AND OTHER STORIES
by Ron Sanders
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright 2010 by Ron Sanders
cover art by the author
also from this author:
Freak. Signature. Carnival. Microcosmia. Elis Royd
and now for the good stuff:
Common Denominator
Rage
The Depths
Savage Glen
Alphanumerica
Hell’s Outpost
Why I Love Democracy
(writing as Enrique Batsnuwa LaCszynevitch McGomez)
A Deeper Cut
Norm
Horizon
Remembering Jack
Lovers
Empire
Yogi
ScanElite
Elaine
Home Planet
Bill & Charlie
The Book Of Ron
More
Benidickedus
Piety
Now!
Boy
Why Did You Kill John Lennon
The Other Side
Justman!
Snapdragon
and . . . Thelma
Common Denominator
Everybody in this country knows the feeling.
Televised events are imprinted on the subconscious—a photogenic president was assassinated, a bunch of half-witted miscreants burned and looted a great American city, some Third-world lunatics used jets . . . and the unsuspecting public . . . as propaganda tools.
These occurrences were not just news, they were Time-Life spectaculars, a dead century’s standout stories.
But there’s a difference between a) hearing about it from your buddies, b) mourning over popcorn and Betamax, and c) actually observing these events, in real time, with no foresight, no hindsight, no insight . . . You—Were—There, if only electronically, and so were somehow as much participant as observer.
That’s exactly the soul-deep memory engendered by The Happening On Fifth Street. You remember—don’t you . . . the talking head breaking in over Oprah—a major event in itself. The cams and copters all humping—I think it was Channel 2. But this wasn’t a slow-speed pursuit. Five drunken idiots were loitering in the drive-thru lane at a Burger King in L.A.—standing there, indifferent to the decent customers attempting to duly edge their vehicles along. They were screaming, shouting, giggling, guffawing. At a honk from a little green Aspen, one, the biggest, spun and flipped off the elderly female driver.
“Fuck you, man!” he bellowed. “I’ll kick your goddamned fucking ass, you ugly old whore motherfucker!” His friends shrieked with hilarity. One of the women—there were two, I recall—lifted her dress, yanked down her panties, and began thrusting her pelvis at the driver. The whole creepy knot just howled and howled.
But that’s all incidental, contextually; just another clip of typical Americans having fun on a hot summer’s night.
What happened next is the part we’ll never forget.
The big guy hollered, “You got me, bitch? You want a taste of—”
And reset!
“You got me, bitch? You want a taste of—”
“You got me, bitch? You want a taste of—”
His friends, no less exuberant, were equally caught up. The obscene woman raised and lowered her dress—over and over—her laugh ringing: “Ah-haha-ha! Ah-haha-ha! Ah-haha-ha! Ah-haha—” Her friend fell all over her giggling, hauled herself back up, fell all over her giggling, hauled herself back up . . .
The other two males, having appreciatively high-fived and butted their heads, high-fived, butted their heads, high-fived, butted . . .
At this point it was really funny, okay? I don’t think there’s a cat out there who wasn’t halfway to upchucking. It was Saturday night fun, man. Nobody knew until later that the live action was spliced with footage taken by some guy with a videocam in the parking lot: there was no reason for the media hoopla until it got freaky. And that’s when we all stopped laughing.
The police responded first, of course. These five misguided merrymakers had to be on angel dust or something. But the situation couldn’t be controlled with manpower. The Five were spilling all over one another, rhythmically repeating their shared sequence, and it wasn’t humorous at all. Their faces grew red and contorted as they gasped against an unnatural clockwork, their limbs were seizure-stiff, their eyes bugged and desperate. It was all a mad implosion of thrashing arms and melding voices: “You got-ha taste of bitch me-ha. You got-ha taste of bitch me-ha—”
By the time the paramedics arrived the street was a sea of rubbernecks. The cops had to escort the ambulances in. And these guys were no less useless: injections didn’t work, restraints were a mess; they couldn’t even apply oxygen through that tussle. The Five were gasping and streaming, frothing and vomiting . . . in rhythm. The two high-fiving males’ skulls were cracked wide and gushing, and still their arms jerked up feebly in unison, still their lolling heads begged to collide. And the cops, the paramedics, the bystanders; nobody could hold ’em down—wild stuff, man, wild stuff. And it was the looniest form of entertainment imaginable to pick it up on that live feed, as the BK5, as they came to be known, were wheeled in on gurneys, strapped down and muzzled by oxygen masks, their purple faces trying so hard to spew as their soaking heads banged up and down and side to side, up and down and side to side, up and down and up and down and up and down and a story like that gets a brief, but very thorough, run. You learn all about the vitals—nicknames, dogs and hos, probation officers, favorite slash films, etc.—because the heroic BK5, thank our merciful God in all His infinite wisdom, survived.
Nature is the ultimate physician. When their bodies could jerk and foam no longer The Five simply went comatose, woke to an awkward celebrity, and, once they were proven lousy commercial investments, gratefully slunk out of the spotlight.
The initial focus was on ingested pathogens. That Burger King was shut down so the Department Of Health could pose importantly without being interrupted by autograph hounds, by lowriders in limbo, or by any more damned honking old ladies in little green Aspens. Other agencies wanted to know if rap music or the Vice President was the culprit, or if perhaps the Devil Himself, paid seven and a half bucks an hour to hang out a window in a paper hat, was surreptitiously pulling the BK5’s strings.
The whole thing would definitely have blown over, if not for an uncannily similar episode, four days later and not two blocks away.
Rival groups of gangbangers had spilled onto an indoor miniature golf course at the new GotchaGoin’ Mall. Terrified shoppers stampeded concentrically while a couple of furheads duked it out over a vital piece of plastic turf of no importance at all only thirty seconds prior.
One beady bozo bit another’s tattoo.
The second creep screamed and flailed his fists.
The first furhead bit.
The second sphincter screamed.
A bite and a scream, a bite and a scream—and both arms of the human cesspool broke on their champions like opposing waves.
That, again, was the amateur part—caught streaming by a teeny bopper fledgling reporter with a broadband Blackberry. A local news crew, covering the grand opening of Thundergirl’s Dine-And-Disco, picked up the action as the looping gangs cussed and whaled in what director’s-chair psychologists term staggered sync; an erratic-yet-redundant vacillating pattern wherein one group appears to react viciously to the other’s retreat, and vice versa. But this, as I stated, is an apparent motion. With so many close-knit individuals involved, the action comes off as almost choreographed, especially on video, when in reality a seeming cohesion is deceiving the anxious observer’s eye.
Even the late-night standups didn’t joke about this one. It took a riot squad to contain the madness, a major law enforcement presence to control the perimeter. Tear gas only made the repetitively kicking and wheezing combatants labor for breath as they grappled and rolled about. The course was smashed to rubble in the frenzy.
But officials had learned from the fast food episode. Emergency crews and disaster specialists created an on-location makeshift hospital. SWAT teams sealed the area. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, and blood donors were whisked into a giant ring around the action, where they simply stood stunned, like a tribe of pacifistic Indians round a knot of drunken cavalrymen.
Because in the end that’s all anybody could do: stand there with their jaws hanging while thirty-seven spasmodic malcontents jerked and wailed and gasped and spewed into the sweet embrace of unconsciousness.
By this time it was humongous news. Even though no one really expected it to happen again, there were individuals, aching for their fifteen minutes, motoring around the area, videocameras in hand. Some of these guys were hooked up with community web sites utilizing a nexus called Retard Watch, stationed somewhere in New Zealand, if I remember correctly. The Board Of Health taped off the Mall for analysis, and got the same reams of nowhere-data as their cronies at the now-famous hamburger slop, but it was all a great giggle for a while there; watching these lugs in space suits lumbering around a sealed-off parking lot with little bitty beakers in their big dufus gloves. Yet we weren’t really all that into the aftermath. By now we were glued to the news—ratings-sweepers on all channels, across the board—as we perched on the edges of our sofas and bar stools, stocked up on drinks and munchies, waiting wide-eyed and wondering, like children on the night before Christmas—waiting for the mostest unlikeliest, for the unpromised third strike, for the boggler that blew away ’em all—waiting, waiting, waiting . . . waiting for The Next One.
Gilbert Flemm had it all worked out.
In a 9 to 5 suckass yellow-light bug stampede, he’d determined, as an electronics grad nauseated by the prospect of applying his talents to some soulless applications firm, to make his living online, at home, in private, at odds with the bigger picture.
He’d been inordinately successful.
At thirty-two he was, both virtually and literally, master of his own domain.
The shades were always down in Gilbert’s tiny roach motel of a Boyle Heights apartment. One side of this groovy bachelor’s pad was a garage-heap of miscellaneous electronics hardware, patched in to nowhere. Extension cords hung like streamers from hooks hammered into the ceiling, plugs were tangled up in power strips leading to God knows what. The little bathroom and kitchenette were badlands, practically unnavigable due to years of tossing shipping crates, obsolete appliances, and pizza delivery cartons every which way.
The other side of the room is where Gilbert lived. His home/office was a massive cluster of milk crates, monitors, drive housings, and patch bays, all squeezed into a work console produced by a series of squared components casings made perfectly level by a broken desk top. Gilbert had achieved this console environment not by being an artisan or handyman, but by being a burrower. The console came about through the constant jamming and shoving and hammering of stuff into place; the space for his legs was effected by repetitively pushing and kicking and kneeing until he’d made stretch room. Grease, dirt, fly cadavers, and dead skin cells made a perfect mortar. His work chair/bed was a ratty old recliner with a floating horizontal frame, allowing him to recline full-out whenever the pixel pixies had overdusted his eyes. His personal urinal was a funky old pee jug, one of many, crammed, rammed, and jammed under the desk to make room for his naked, malodorous, scratched-crimson legs. Something of an inventor, he’d devised a peeduct out of a punctured condom wired to a quarter-inch polyvinyl tube trailing into the current jug’s punctured-and-wired cap. This way he could take care of vital business without having to ford the lavatory horror.
Gilbert had lots of girlfriends.
Linda Lovelace and Candy Samples were two of his favorites, bygone sweethearts now; looped into some miscellaneous folder or other to make room for recent files. Jenna and Busty and Ginger and Christy; they all came and went, but a techie’s heart is not programmed to be long-broken. A man has work to do.
That work involved the remote debugging of programs, the defragmenting of drives, the importing and cleaning up of desktops. Viruses were Gilbert’s best pals. Smoking out these little virtual critters made a good living possible, working from home, with mouse of steel in one hand and foggy yellow pee tube in the other. Gilbert had never met his clients—transfer of funds was electronic. In this way Gilbert also made payments; to the bank, to Pink Dot, to his landlord and various electronics outlets. And in this way he drifted along; a retired, sedentary commander in a fetid space capsule, passively sucked into the giving black hole of ever-imploding data, umbilically attached, metaphorically speaking, to a daisy chain of RGB viewscreens, battling aliens for points, trading services for digits, making long, hot, electronic love.
But lately he’d been consumed by a game called Common Denominator. “Lately” could mean any amount of time; Gilbert had no idea of, or interest in, the hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century . . . the game could be played singly or with friends, but “friend” is one of the F-words, and anyway a man has work to do. The concept behind Common Denominator is deceptively simple: the gamer sequences characters, sites, and situations; all contributing to perfectly plausible scenarios with perfectly credible culprits and conclusions—which splinter and evolve into slightly less credible culprits . . . into ramifications of feathered conclusions . . . into rationale forks and logic back roads . . . the butler never did it in CD; the butler’s just a butler. But for drifting retired commanders willing to go the distance, the game’s an intoxicating mindfuck; a master finds the common denominator in abstractions, in subtleties—in qualities rather than appearances. It’s not for extroverts.
Gilbert was so wired in he could follow the game on one of six desktop monitors while simultaneously earning a living, ordering Chinese delivered, downloading porn and avant garde music, shopping on ebay, and monitoring streaming news.
That news, of late, was a major draw, even for a carpal gamer like Gilbert. Those public seizure episodes had been increasing, both in frequency and fury, for some weeks now. Huge rewards went unclaimed, talk shows hosted prescient callers determined to stammer themselves into oblivion. Scientists, theists, and theorists rolled the dice—but all these players, posers, and pontificaters were sooner or later shut down by their own verbosity. Nobody had a clue.
Some of those episodes got really intense. Certain fighters had been seriously hurt, a woman and her daughter, innocent bystanders, critically injured in a fray. Collateral damage. Unrelated skirmishes and spot-looting were reported. Also, one participant, seizing in deep shock while impaled on an upright sprinkler, had drowned in his own puke. That very dramatic death, amazingly, was repeatedly broadcast on regular TV as well as over the Internet, to the wailing bereavement of congressmen, televangelists, and suffering soccer moms everywhere. The BK5, dragged out of retirement to plea for peace, were getting plenty of airplay with their ubiquitous rap single, already in the running for Best Song Lyrics. A Christmas album was pending.
Gilbert was singing along right now, partitioning CD clues with one hand, balancing his bank account with the other: “Brothahs an’ sistahs,” he croaked, “don’ play da foo’. Homeys an’ hos, ya gots t’ be coo’.” Catchy little fucker. True talent surfaces in the unlikeliest of ponds. And genius will never die: new applications, new technology, new faces were emerging. Art evolves: that booty-shaking finger popper was the natural extension of rap’s brilliant violation of vinyl; but now digital looping was applied—studios had cleverly used the BK5’s epileptic claim to fame—the tight instrumentless vocal harmonies, satirized by the straight community as aw, crappela, were electronically broken up and repeated as phasing backing vocals: “Brothahs an-play da—homeys ya gots t’. . .” until it was almost as good as Being There.
Gilbert Fucking Flemm had an epiphany!
While the rest of us were grooving, grousing, and googling, he’d subconsciously cross-referenced a number of sources in real time.
1. The BK5 were on a loop.
2. The CD characters were repositioning in sync.
3. The televised image of the latest oddity was crackling in and out due to a glitch in one of the news vans’ transmitters.
4. Said televised image was a melee involving blowhard bikers and barroom boneheads. The location was only a few blocks from Gilbert’s.
5. His police broadcast receiver was cycling; whining, grinding, reacting to some kind of pirate signal. 5a. The signal and melee were related. 5b. The signal’s source was close by, but receding.
And, of course, 6. “Yo Homey Yo,” the BK5’s celebration of the creative spirit, just had to be the most godawful piece of crap ever recorded.
Gilbert patched the streaming feed to the police broadcast. The resultant scream almost blew out his speakers. He patched the combined input to an equalizer and manually cut out audible traffic until he had a fairly steady audio line, then adjusted it to screen. It was all white noise. In a dream, Gilbert used his joystick to move the CD players intuitively, his other hand tweaking the bastard signal. God in heaven, he’d triangulated! He gaped at his wall monitor for a minute, then, terrified he’d lose the signal, mapped and saved it to disk. He printed this out as a straight hexadecimal graph: every particular was established and tabulated; Gilbert didn’t need to research the results—he’d found the common denominator.
He sat straight up. The streaming newscast contained a throbbing hyperlink for civilian-police intercourse. Almost without thinking, he control-clicked on the link. His condenser mic’s icon came up. A canned voice blurted from his house speakers. Gilbert switched to console mono.
“You have reached the Los Angeles Police Department, U-Tip, We Talk Division. This thread automatically links to the State Of California’s Wireless Web Archive, and the call may be monitored for your protection. A live operator will be with you shortly. If you are an English speaker, please press 1 now. Yo tengo caca en la cabesa para todos no mas por favor—”
Gilbert impatiently pinkied the 1 on his keyboard.
Almost immediately a bored voice came in, “Detective Cummings, LAPD. U-Tip, We Talk. If this is an emergency situation, please dial 911. If this is a non-emergency situation, please dial 1-800-LAPD. If this is an earthquake-related call, please dial 1-800-OHNO. If there are communists under your bed or gays in your closet, please dial 1-800—”
“ASSHOLES!” Gilbert broke in.
There was a tight pause. “Take a look in the mirror sometime, buddy.”
“No! You don’t understand! He doesn’t like assholes!”
“I’m not crazy about ’em either, okay? Especially when they get on an official line and interrupt police business!”
“Listen to me! I play this game called Common Denomi—”
“Well, don’t—”
“—nator and I was—”
“play games—”
“—watching the news.”
“—with me!”
“On the side. It’s not food poisoning or drugs or anything like that. Forget the lab stuff. That’s all bogus. Rudeness is the common denominator. Obnoxious behavior in public. Selfishness. Immaturity. No pathogen can single out poor ethics in people! This is a case, or cases, of affronting. Somebody is revolted by these creeps and he’s lashing out.”
A faint click. Now it was like talking in a tunnel. Detective Cummings’s voice came back carefully. “Who’s revolting?”
Gilbert ground his teeth and clenched his fists. It was too late; he was already in. “I don’t know who it is. All I know is, like I said, the human factor’s undeniable.”
“And how does your friend accomplish this feat?”
“I just told you I don’t know who it is! He’s using alpha over the ether. I just picked it up. Or maybe it isn’t a male. Maybe he’s a she; I don’t know.”
“So tell me, does your shemale friend have a name?”
“I’m trying to be of assistance, for Christ’s sake, as a private citizen!”
The gentlest ping, as hollow as the night. “I want you to understand that the U-Tip, We Talk Hotline is completely confidential. You don’t know me, I don’t know you. Every aspect of your identity is private, and will remain private. So now that we’ve got all that out of the way, Mr. Flemm, maybe we can talk.”
Gilbert’s thumb jabbed the Escape button. Sweat was creeping from his hairline. His right hand danced on the keyboard while his left rolled the mouse. The streaming live inset expanded to full screen. He punched out a sequence and a MapQuest graphic became an overlay. Gilbert reduced the opacity. “Damn.” He transferred the feed to the wall monitor. The resolution was diminished relatively, but that didn’t matter; once he’d configured his GPL to Random, the active elements in the grid translated to pixel groupings very much like churning dot matrix asterisks. The news scene was a mess. But there were isolated right-angling pixel blotches, like Ms. Pacman in slo-mo, that moved along the streets-grid with mathematical certitude. Order was the common denominator. Gilbert was looking for the anomaly.
There.
One asterisk was chugging along oddly; crisscrossing street sides, doubling back, pausing, moving along, pausing again. Gilbert tagged it: Eleventh and Willoughby. Four blocks away. He popped off his peter pal, pulled on his shirt and pants, slammed on his boots, jammed out the door.
Deep twilight. Emergency vehicles were zooming for Seventh, and plenty of cars were turning in pursuit. It was obvious everyone in the vicinity knew what was up. Gilbert dashed across alleys and yards, hopped fences and cut across drives, finally blowing out onto Eleventh and Willoughby. His emergence must have been a noisy one; lots of pedestrians found it interesting enough to turn from the lights and sirens. One in particular, a man in dark pants and jacket, immediately made for a leaning tenement.
Gilbert ran puffing and wheezing; wanting to meet him, wanting to warn him, wanting to praise him, wanting to stop him. He saw the old door swing shut and pop open. It was a fire exit; abused, infested, a rundown hallway for beggars, taggers, hookers, dealers . . . Gilbert slipped inside and the door slammed behind him. The hall wasn’t lit, so he cracked the door. Only an amber street lamp provided any illumination, and that was all of a dim narrow wedge and broken pool. He paused to let his eyes adjust and to catch his breath.
“Before you take another step, I want you to know that I am armed, and that I will not hesitate to take you down.”
It was impossible to make out features in the dark. There was a strong dab of light on the right earlobe, soft crescents and planes at the hairline. Gilbert addressed that area beside the lobe.
“Look, I’m not a cop, I’m not a stalker, I’m not a bounty hunter. I know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and I want you to know I’m not your enemy.”
A pause.
“What am I doing?”
Gilbert blew out a lungful of stress. “With the device. With the obnoxious people. I don’t blame you . . . I don’t hate you for what you’re doing . . . I . . . I admire you.”
The figure took a step back. He was now completely obscured by darkness. “Then your timing couldn’t be more impeccable.”
“What do you mean?”
The dark blew out a sigh matching Gilbert’s own. “I mean this whole thing is moving faster than me. If you’ve latched on, the authorities can’t be far behind. And I really don’t think they share your admiration.” Another pause. “I’m burned out, man. Or sated; I don’t know which. So . . . how’d you find me?”
“I’m IT,” Gilbert mumbled. “I’m hooked in so deep I’ll never get out. There’s a game I’ve mastered called Common Denominator. It kind of forces the gamer to think outside the box. My brain cross-referenced, and I put two and two together.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“Once. On impulse. It was a mistake. Don’t worry; I got out of there right away.”
“You sound like a bright lad. So you know all about W.T.T.”
Gilbert fidgeted. “Maybe. Initials are all over the place.”
“Wireless Trace Technology. A War Department development passed down to the police. If you tapped in for a nanosecond you’re tagged. Home, phone, credit, friends . . .”
Gilbert swallowed guiltily. “That’s a new one.” He licked his lips. “Sir, I want you to know . . . I want to make it absolutely clear that I took great pains . . . I’m certain I wasn’t followed. And as far as anything electronic goes, I’m clean. So, unless they can put a trace on a man’s heartbeat. . .”
“Not just yet, they can’t. How much do you know about my operation?”
“I know you’re working in alpha. I know you’re jamming autonomic activity over the ether. I know the signal cycles in the human brain. I know it’s directional. I know the field’s variable. I . . . I know . . . I know the wavelength.”
A casual movement, and an arm rose out of the darkness: brown suede jacket and black leather glove. Nested in the gloved palm was an object not much larger than a thumb drive, plump in shape, with an inch-long bulbed antenna. A red diode blinked twice. “Catch.”
Gilbert caught. It was disappointing, somehow: a crude thing of tin and staples. He slipped it into his trousers pocket.
The arm vanished. “Take that toy and tear it apart when you get home. I know you will; you’re already dismembering it in your mind. I’m out of here.”
“But what you’re doing,” Gilbert tried. “I think . . . I think maybe people will get the picture. About ethics. About morality. About public comportment in general. Respect for strangers . . .” he mumbled. “For decency . . . manners . . .”
The pause was so long Gilbert began to feel he was alone. Finally he whispered, “Sir?”
“Now is not the time,” the darkness replied, “to wax philosophic. The world is pumping out idiots as we speak. We’re tagged, you and I. That thing in your pocket’s a joke; an ethicist’s objection in a hedonist’s courtroom, a forgotten blush in a government-sponsored whorehouse.” He sucked in a huge breath, let it out with a long sigh. “Right now people are being assaulted, insulted, raped, robbed, ridiculed.” The voice faded down the hallway: “Swindled . . . betrayed . . . rejected . . . abused . . .”
Gilbert stood in the dark forever. He could hear his heart pounding; one knobby little traveler in the great human stampede. When he could bear it no longer he eased open the door and slipped out the night.
“Hello, Mr. Flemm.”
Gilbert didn’t look around. “You’re wasting your time. He got away.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t. He is, as of right now, in custody, and if all my years as an official witness have taught me anything, he’s looking at life without parole.”
Gilbert’s jaw dropped. He turned. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about assault and battery.” Cummings grabbed Gilbert’s wrist and swung him about. “I’m talking about lying in wait.” The cuffs were snapped tight. “I’m talking about reckless endangerment and carrying a concealed weapon.”
The cuffs bit deliberately. Gilbert snarled with the pain. “What weapon?”
Cummings patted him down with his free hand, tore the unit out of Gilbert’s front pocket. “I believe it’s called Exhibit A, asshole!”
Gilbert’s whole face shook with horror. “No!”
“Yes!” Cummings slammed him against the wall before dragging him around the building’s side to the ticking unmarked car. “That could have been my wife in that crowd, dickface, that could have been my daughter!”
“I’m the wrong guy!” Gilbert gasped. “I was just talking to him, for Christ’s sake, but he took off. I don’t know where he is!”
“That’s okay. What’s important is we know where he isn’t. And where he isn’t is in the apartment of one Gilbert Going-to-Hell Flemm, whose transmitted signals were tracked by specialists hired by LAPD, whose computers and peripheral equipment were just seized as evidence, whose hard-copy files are even now being pored over with attitude. You see, Flemm, your victims could’ve been those specialists’ wives and daughters too. I sure do hope you like it doggy-style, Gilbert.”
“Wait!” Gilbert dropped to his knees. Before they hit the cement he was dragged back up by the cuffs, almost separating his arms from their sockets.
“I won’t wait!” Gilbert’s face was slammed against the rear windshield. “Motherfucker, I can’t wait!” Gilbert felt the cuffs unlocked, heard them drop on the asphalt. He turned, shaking head to foot.
Cummings had the unit in his gloved right hand. “You know what, Flemm? Sometimes even a predatory prick can get careless. He could be trying to zap a detective, let’s say, and not realize he’d accidentally pointed the zapper the wrong way; right back at himself! And if there weren’t any witnesses, and no prints but his own, there’d be nothing other than that poor detective’s sworn testimony. After all, it’s just a little tube with a button in the middle; easy mistake to make. And that would be a shame, man, a crying fucking shame. Raise your arm!”
“But I . . .”
“Raise your arm! That’s right. Now hold your thumb up above your hand. Good. Bend your thumb, at a right angle. Feel familiar, Flemm?” Cummings aimed the unit right between Gilbert’s bugging eyes. “Say goodnight, cocksucker, over and over and over.”
Rage
The night rears, and I sag.
Seize and recover, seize and recover. Headlights burn my eyes, but I don’t dare close them; no way. Got to stay upright.
There’s Oscar loitering in the half-shadows. I know he sees me: his left eye gleams and drops. But there are no unnecessary movements, no increased tension. We’ve dealt before.
Oscar gives a discreet toss of the head, and I follow him down the stairwell, where a pool of pitch obscures us from the sidewalk above. Oscar glares.
“Like I told you, S.A., don’t come shuffling around here like the walking dead. Put on some decent clothes, wear something casual. Jeez.”
“I need a dime,” I mumble. “Just a roll.”
“Yeh, yeh, yeh. You need a dime, I do the time. Don’t play with me, dog. Make this worth my while.”
I grip the twisted steel handrail. “I need a dime. I’ve got to stay awake. Got to.”
Oscar backs off, sneering. “Then do some espresso, man. Get off my turf.”
“Please . . . if I fall asleep it’ll happen again. My rage . . . will escape. I can’t keep letting it happen.”
“Shit, homey. What do you mean, your ‘rage’? Are you gonna start on me again? We all got rage. You keep that stuff at home where it belongs.”
I hang my head. “No, man. I can’t control it. If I fall asleep again, I’ll go off again. It’s that simple.”
Oscar backs away melodramatically. “Simple? That’s some heavy bullshit, brother. And it’s the same crap you ran by me last time. Read the papers, man, we got enough nut jobs around here. You don’t need no more whites. What you need is a good headshrinker.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you too, bitch! Get your homeless ass out of here. Don’t you be disrespecting me, chump.”
I cling to the rail. “Please. I’m sorry. Just this once.”
Oscar appears to seethe. Finally he says, coldly, “Where’s my dime?”
I stuff my free hand in my left front pocket, pull out a few crumpled bills and a mess of change. “Eight dollars and thirty-nine cents. It’s all I could manage. I’ll make it up to you next time.” In a moment I feel the handful scraped away and the slim foil-wrapped roll take its place.
“There ain’t gonna be no next time,” Oscar mutters. “Now split, fool.”
I climb the steps like an old man and stagger down the sidewalk, streetlight to storefront. My mouth is caking dry, but it doesn’t matter. Tear open the roll. Pop the little handful of pills without washing them down. Next thing I know I’m sitting on the curb, gagging, tears squeezing from my eyes. Saliva rushes into my mouth but I refuse to vomit. The bitter, bitter mouthful dissolves and peristaltically works its way down my esophagus.
The sound of brakes. A spotlight’s beam hits my eyes. The officer’s voice is icy.
“Are you all right?”
I wince and turn my head, nodding. “Something,” I manage, “caught in my throat.”
“Do you need medical assistance?”
I shake my head and make a great show of swallowing. “Better,” I say, and open my mouth wide.
The beam breaks from my face, searches the curb and gutter. The light is switched off. “Move along.”
I stand and raise a grateful hand, walk down the sidewalk with forced aplomb.
But now the night’s an iron heel. How much longer before the uppers kick in . . . the cars hum a sick street lullaby, the library steps dribble and pool. Stumbling, cinching, weaving—sit down, motherfucker, or fall down. An alley, dark and rank. A plywood slat, leaning against the wall. The amphetamine will work; it must, if only I can rest. Sit.
Tucked behind the plywood is a bed of flattened cardboard, stained by booze and pee and God knows what. A bum’s crash pad. My arms tremble uncontrollably, a burning flash takes my chest. Recline, behind the wood, out of sight. Close your eyes or they’ll fry right out of your skull. Just for a minute, just for a breath.
Just rest.
There he is, on the move. I must have slept, and well: my juices are flowing, my mind sharp. We’re creeping down the alley, one shadow after another. He’s intent and resolute; he doesn’t know I’m on him.
I follow him over a sagging fence; a fence that fights me, like everything else. He’s looking, looking. And now he’s far ahead, inching around a corner to study the street. I can sense what he wants. He’s found a man walking alone; a man in a nice suit, tapping a silver-knobbed birch cane. His excitement rises with the sound of the approaching cane. Can’t reach him, can’t stop him; my limbs are in a web. I can only scream silently as he grabs the man and drags him headfirst into the alley, bashes his skull repeatedly against the cold brick wall, chokes him to death and hurls the body back down. I holler for him to stop, and he seems to glance up for a second before bending down to frantically root through the dead man’s clothes. He leans back on his haunches, analyzing something important in the fractional glow of streetlamps. He peers around, and his blank eyes squint when he looks my way. But he can’t, or won’t, see me. In a minute he drops back out of sight, ravaging his prize as the night caves around us.
A bed. An unlit room. A smashed-out window framing a dirty false dawn. I must have broken in, must have sleepwalked here. Dank and smelly, but familiar.
The uppers didn’t work; that son of a bitch Oscar. Still, there’s a residual effect: jazzed jaws and fingers, teeth grinding for the pulp. My eyes burn like snapping embers . . . this is an old abandoned hotel; rats on the floor, cobwebs in the corner. A half-memory challenges me, and I reach under the mattress to pull up a billfold stuffed with cash and credit cards. The driver’s license reveals a distinguished, elderly gentleman smiling pleasantly for the D.M.V. Just a face in the crowd. But he knows me, and he fears me. I cram the bills into my trousers pocket and my palms begin to sweat. My fingers itch like crazy. Who am I?
Outside are scrub-peppered hills. A strange landscape, yet I feel I’ve known it all my life. Climb out into an overgrown alley—this section has been going to sod for years, but once I’m on the road there are plenty of small businesses, even some nice homes. And I glimpse a pursuing figure just to my left—a raggedy, disgusting creature who looks like he just crawled out of a cave. Christ, it’s my reflection in a waking storefront window. The image is so disturbing I refuse to look again.
An open doughnut shop; only a few customers before the morning rush. The amphetamine must still be circulating: the thought of food makes be want to puke. I smooth my wad of bills before purchasing a large black coffee. The clerk and customers regard me strangely, but is it only my wild appearance? The coffee is burnt motor oil—I have to get it down, have to keep it down. I can’t allow myself to faint.
On a tabletop covered with crumbs, the local paper’s banner headline screams up at me:
Canyon Killer
Half-memories swirl like falling leaves: a jogger . . . a wandering bard . . . a young photographer. Victims mangled and mutilated. Tension razzles my nervous system in little electric waves. Dirty whites. Have they found the old man yet—the bills are burning in my pockets. Wolf down the coffee, ignore the pain. Too paranoid to order a refill. But I’ll have to do some more caffeine; anything that will help me stay awake.
Dawn is breaking as I grope along the sidewalk. I’m gonna swoon, man. What is it that makes a man fall asleep on his feet? Oscar won’t be out until dark. Even assholes have rhythm.
Helicopters sweep the hills in the semi-darkness, their searchlights’ beams jerking this way and that. You can make out the call of their rotors as they move between crests.
To my left, an old woman sits slumped against a market wall. She raises a languid arm and smiles gummily. What does she want: money . . . company . . . sympathy? I blow her off until I see a sheriff’s car climbing the hill, then instinctively sit behind her, away from the road. She grabs my hand and jabbers her psychedelic whatnot while I peer around her, see the car slow and continue up the road. My mind refocuses.
“I read you,” she’s saying, gripping my hand with passion. “Sleep. Sleep is your problem.” I try to pull away but she only clings tighter.
“What do you want, man? Money?” I pull out a twenty and hold it in her face. She snatches the bill like a bullfrog catching a gnat, shoves it in her bra with one claw, takes my paused hand with the other.
“You are hiding,” she drones. “You are on the run.”
“Fuck you, lady. Let go of my hand.” I push myself upright. She’s trying to haul me back down when her eyes shoot open and her jaw drops.
“No! It’s you!”
“I said,” I snarl, “let . . . go!” Pull myself free, bang around the wall and slump down the bricks, my head brimming with sleep’s cement. Pedestrians pop out of nowhere. Traffic picks up. It’s all a buzz, man, I can’t stay awake. Feel my way around the shop . . . a space behind garbage bins. Don’t close your eyes, jerkoff, stay awake! Don’t close your eyes.
He’s slinking ahead, but not so hazily, not so irresistibly. I could reach him, if only I could break free of this mucus. And I know where he’s going; I can feel his want.
He moves like smoke, seeping between buildings. Just a shape: a head and torso impelled by four liquid limbs; a spectral spider. He doesn’t look back, though I scream myself hoarse.
Down a broken walkway to a gutted cottage, stripped black by wildfire. I’m almost on him when he reaches the sleeping old woman, but my arms and legs lock into a slow-motion spacewalk, my long howl of protest splinters and fades.
He has her by the throat now, he’s lifting her up the wall and choking her for all he’s worth. I can’t stop him, but for one crazy moment he pauses to look behind. I’m drifting back out of reach, my fingers cramping, as the woman’s head bobs and bounces, as her arms slap left and right on the wall. Then, with one final, impassioned squeeze, the nosy old witch is silenced.
Kicked in the bathroom door in the hotel’s lobby. Shaved and hacked off hair by the handful. A little pomade and a found baseball cap and I look almost human.
The sporting goods store provides striped jogging sweats and running shoes. More important: I’ve purchased a programmable alarm device. Once I figure it out, I’ll set it to vibrate at ten minutes, before rapid eye movement can take hold.
Everybody’s staring at me. Or am I just paranoid; everybody’s staring at everybody. How long before they discover the old lady’s body.
Christ, I’m swooning. Coffee does nothing, NO-DOZ is no help at all. I almost passed out leaving the store. It’s coming on dusk; got to hang on for Oscar. I’ll buy the cocksucker out. The whole wad, man, for just one long, electric white, bitter rush into night.
This time that savvy eye glints rather than gleams. Oscar, leaning insolently on the railing, drops and sardonically wags his head.
I shuffle up with my hand patting the running brick wall, trying to not stumble.
“What did I tell you, fool? Didn’t I say you wasn’t to come around here no more? Now split.”
I show him a handful of bills. “I want quantity this time.”
“What did I just say, asshole?” Oscar shows his silver caps. “I told you to split. You ain’t welcome, you ain’t wanted. We don’t do business no more. I don’t know you.”
“Listen, man. I can barely stay on my feet. You don’t understand. I can’t keep falling asleep. I just can’t.” I start down the stairwell.
“You go down those steps, boy, and you won’t be coming back up. You hear me?”
I whirl and climb, my rage rising with me, but the moment’s passion leaves me drained. “Please . . .” A loud burring comes from my left pocket. You can see the fabric vibrate.
Immediately Oscar is a live wire. “What’s that!” A hand finds his back pocket and I hear the characteristic click of a switchblade. “You’re one dead narc, motherfucker.”
“No, no. It’s an alarm. I’m still learning to program it. I keep telling you—I can’t let myself fall asleep.”
I feel the blade’s tip poking my belly. “Back off,” he says.
“Please. Just this once.”
“Back off, Sleepy, and I don’t want to see you no more. If I catch you on my street again I’ll kill you.”
I backpedal down the walk, turning to see a police cruiser nosing around the corner, recovering in time to force a shuffling jog. The spotlight’s beam hits me before swinging onto Oscar, now leaning casually on the railing.
At the corner I stop to look back. Oscar is talking jocularly with the officers, who haven’t left their car. It’s obvious they’re looking for something bigger than pissant dealers. The car moves along.
Slip back into the alley. There are more official vehicles about tonight, and the helicopters, as always sweeping the hills, appear closer to town.
Passing out. I’m going, man; I know it. Dead on my feet. Pull out the alarm. The LED winks cheerily. Set it for ten minutes, and for five-minute repeats thereafter. Back in the pocket. Clinging to a fire escape ladder, the rust breaking off in my fingers. Letting go. Slipping like silt, as the black ground rushes up to meet me.
Through the alley and across the road, between the parking lots to the main street—I know where he’s going. One deep shadow in the lesser darkness, he flits in and out of the streetlights, makes straight for the railing and stairwell. The web has me again, and it’s too late anyway—he has Oscar in a chokehold and he’s fighting him, dragging him back to the walk between lots. He drags him right through me, Oscar struggling and gagging all the while.
There’s a strong sound beneath me—a hum and vibration. He turns and looks all around, flagging in the dark. And I’m being pulled out of sleep’s murk like a fish on a line. The vibration ceases; rapid eye movement is renewed. He drags Oscar’s body all down that bisecting walk and across a haunted road, frantically bashing the skull on asphalt. I’ve almost caught up. And now he looks back, arches like a cat, and redoubles his efforts.
I’m making headway, closing in. He hauls the body down the alley, snarling back at me.
Another burring of the alarm, somewhere on the line between grogginess and complete insensibility. Five minutes have passed; it seems like five years. He collapses with the body. After a pause he pulls himself upright, grabs the corpse and, with gathering ferocity, repeatedly smashes its head on the ground.
When I cry out he stops and turns like a cheetah at the kill. His eyes, two white holes in the night, widen with mine. He grabs Oscar by the hair and drags him along, weaker now, slamming back and forth down a reeling alley bordered by leaning buildings.
Another burr and he collapses, just outside the old hotel’s window, then drags himself inside. I haul myself along the brick wall, yelling in a vacuum, as Oscar’s body passes through the frame.
Pulling myself into the room is like fighting quicksand. He looks up, rips his nails out of Oscar’s eyes and goes for mine, even as the alarm shocks us back into alignment. I tear a sheet from the bed, wrap it around his neck and squeeze my way out of slumber. His hands find my eyes, but I have leverage: enough to stand on the bed, enough to loop the sheet round an old wall fixture, enough to use my body weight to draw the sheet tight. I sink back down until we’re face to face. And my mouth spews a mantra while I watch his black lips writhe in sync:
Die, you son of a bitch, die. Die, you son of a bitch, die. Die, you son of a bitch.
Die.
All data regarding the Canyon Killer Murders point conclusively to derelict Owsley Martin as the perpetrator and sole concerned party. Martin was a vagabond living since his late teens in the hills of Laurel Canyon, drifting down to the populated areas when he required sustenance: one of those hit-and-run relics of the hippie era known colloquially as “coyotes.” He was discovered hanged by his own hand in an abandoned hotel room off of Deep Ridge. The instrument of his demise was an old sheet taken from one of the ground room’s beds. The body of a petty drug dealer, one Oscar Benecito, was also discovered in the room, but forensic analysis shows he expired before Mr. Martin, and was therefore not a party to the actual hanging. This was a murder-suicide.
Long-time Canyon residents remember Martin as intense and highly antisocial, prone to bizarre behavior and empty nights spent talking to himself while walking the hills. According to several locals who had spoken fleetingly with Martin during the three weeks of murders, he had complained of an inability to stay awake, and these witnesses received the distinct impression that Martin suffered from acute narcolepsy.
However, the autopsy reveals that Martin was a victim of pineal gland damage involving the body’s circadian regulator—that aspect that controls the sleep-wake cycle in healthy beings. Blood sugar and serum albumin indicators demonstrate that Martin was not a narcoleptic—that he had in fact functioned without sleep for an astonishing twenty-six days. The tax on his mind and body must have been incredible, producing delusional psychopathia and a complete inability to differentiate between reality and fancy. Owsley Martin was a man who, paradoxically enough, only dreamt he was asleep.
One major footnote demands appending in this case. Although fingerprints, DNA analyses, and hair-and-clothing vestigial evidence prove beyond contest that Owsley Martin was the sole culprit in the Canyon Killer Murders, there were two additional deaths in the city, and three in the hills and canyons, that have been attributed to a so-called Copycat Killer, due to their striking similarity to the Martin slayings. The victims—a tourist, a shopkeeper, a hitchhiker, a deputy sheriff, and a deep canyon squatter—were murdered and mutilated with Martin’s trademark ferocity, and were forensically determined to have been dispatched, one by one, in an erratic line leading from the city to the hills. No indications of a perpetrator, outside of the immediate signs of struggle, exist to cast light on the identity of this mystery figure.
A massive operation was undertaken in the depths of Laurel and Topanga Canyons. Some two thousand squatters and derelicts were rounded up, fined, and physically expelled through the highly commendable efforts of Los Angeles County Sheriffs, CalTrans, L.A. Firefighters, various citizens groups, and, eventually, one regiment of the 43rd National Guard out of nearby Santa Monica.
Over a period of two years the entire area was segregated by electrified fence, in the locally famous Hands Helping Hands project, a County-funded enterprise that, ironically, provided strong temporary employment for those very evicted squatters.
The Canyons are now indigenous plant-and wildlife sanctuaries, rigidly protected by officials and citizens alike. They are off limits to all civilians, and are rigorously patrolled by County inspectors and by periodic helicopter runs. No unauthorized person has ever entered the sanctuaries.
Yet there are scores of residents, still shaken by the grisly murders, who whisper of an odd nightly phenomenon. It’s just human nature: urban legends are born in the imagination rather than in fact. Still these dwellers lock their windows and doors, still they clamor to congressmen and councils, still they swear of a black figure roaming the hills, raving to the night of an elusive slumber, and screaming at the moon of an insurmountable, of an unknowable, of an unimaginable rage.
The Depths
“All passengers prepare for emergency landing!”
Every nerve in Mason’s body was a live wire. There wasn’t a damned thing left to try, but he couldn’t let go. Even though he knew the jetliner was out of control, even though the ground was rushing at him with all the visual impact of a tsunami, even though he knew he was about to die a death beyond imagination. “Everybody out of the aisles! Seatbelts fastened! Heads down between your knees!” He switched off the cabin speakers.
“God in Heaven!” the copilot screamed. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh Jesus Oh God! Oh Jesus oh God oh God oh God oh—”
“Ground, this is AAL-7. We are going down. We are going down. Beth I love you, I love you. Kids, I love you I love you I lo—” His throat seized. Blood filled his eyes, his arms locked, his entire body went into shock. To port and starboard, black smoke billowed and wheeled, racing its orphan wisps in dark tendrils that swept the glass like loose wipers. Now the smoke passed as though cleared by a gigantic lung, and the visual window blew out to a rocketing, reeling panorama of fuzzy landscape and crystal clear details—ancient cacti, gutted cars, weeds and rocks so sharply defined they might have been etched into canvas—as his head jerked back, as his mouth shot open, as his airways broke wide for one riveting, endless, mindblowing scream.
The smoke and dust were terrific, all but obscuring the crash site. Flames shot through the plane’s corpse, danced and raged overhead, lit the windows and passed. The smell of jet fuel was everywhere. A trough the length of three football fields had been ripped out of the land, ninety feet wide at its broadest. Nose, cabin, and tail were in three distinct sections, buried, rather than scattered, due to the dramatic incline of descent. The right wing had detached completely, the left was a black crumpled ruin. And the real-time concussions, the aftershock of impact, still sang in the earth, still sent small stones tumbling.
And the rifts in the desert appeared as tiny sand pools. And the dirt spilled round as the hot dusty creatures burst aboveground at full tilt and maniacally charged the wreckage. Their pecking order was evident; the fastest and toughest were the first inside—the first-pickers of cufflinks and fountain pens, of ribbons and bows. Seat belts and oxygen masks were savaged in the rush, the carnage completely ignored. One squealed, and there was a sudden frantic pile-on of hairy bodies. In a minute the victor came up grasping a cheap patent leather billfold. After a short, brutal flurry, this little monster used his teeth to tear out a photograph of a sweetly smiling family. He snatched it with his paw, pressed the treasure to his chest, and threw the billfold, with its cash and traveler’s checks and credit cards, to the losers.
Crash investigators have one of the toughest jobs on the planet. You never really adjust to it—ever—though it’s imperative to develop a steely exterior, and to always treat it as just a job.
Crash investigators for major airlines have upped that career ante considerably. Analytical and technical aspects aside, it’s not just a matter of noting and recording the dead—angles, impetus, collateral consequences—it’s a matter of cataloguing torsos, mutilated faces, miscellaneous body parts; many burned beyond recognition. A museum display in Hell: the plane’s great black ruptured body, split open like a ripe pomegranate, the horror of charred corpses duly strapped in for the unbelievable, some cut right in half by those very seat belts . . . the nauseating stench of a charnel house, the hundreds of wild fixed expressions that not even death, not even flames, not even formaldehyde can repair.
This job description, and the once-sanguine men and women who complement it, provides for a sober on-site experience. Those who try to survive by alleviation—through camaraderie and inappropriate or disrespectful behavior—don’t last. They’re not tolerated by the professionals who have built up the fortitude to take nightmares in stride, to break down only in the womb of family, and to regularly come to work with a set of gonads that would humble a daredevil.
Deale got through it with an air of iron efficiency. An amazing man, able to consider the trajectory of a mutilated child with the emotional detachment of a chemist at his microscope—even if that innocent cadaver happened to be a dead ringer for his own beloved blonde daughter. His men were fellow travelers, treated with complete seriousness, no matter how deep or trivial their issues. Deale could get along with almost anybody, in a business sense, so long as that anybody behaved with mutual respect.
One person he couldn’t get along with was the by-the-book, automaton type; the type that uses rank and connections as wedges to override authority. So when the tall ponytailed brunet in worker’s protective goggles, black form-fitting jumpsuit, and narrow steel-toed boots flashed her I.D. he automatically became a different creature, the kind of man his crew secretly admired. Deale glanced at her credentials with an air of surly indifference. Marilyn Sharpe. Yeah, pretty sharp all right, and way too good-looking to be taken seriously. Colder than dry ice. Didn’t know her place in a man’s world: started off expecting to be taken seriously, then had to show she wasn’t soft, then had to show she was the baddest bitch in the litter. Lipstick lesbo, waxing bull. Eyes deep and cool, mouth soft and wide. But that voice would wilt a satyr:
“You’re Deale? I’ve been assigned to manage this site; those bodies are not to be moved by anyone, not without my okay.”
He looked away. “We’re pristine here, Sharpe.” Deale hiked a leg up on a bumper for his watching men’s sake, adding with thinly veiled condescension, “Is there anything we can help you with, agent?”
“I want absolutely nothing removed from these victims. Every ounce of personal belongings is to be meticulously accounted for.”
Deale stomped over and got right in her face. “Agent Sharpe. If you’re implying . . . if you’re hinting for a nanosecond that one of my men is some sicko stealing off the dead then you’re going to find yourself with real problems here. Meaning, with me.”
She met him chin-to-chin. “Inspector Deale. My department isn’t accusing anybody of robbing the dead of cash and valuables. What’s pertinent, and this obviously has nothing to do with you or your men, is property of sentimental value. Relatives of victims of three of Southern Nevada’s last major air disasters have reported articles missing—articles of great personal, rather than monetary, dearness; objects naturally overlooked by investigators, but worth gold to the next of kin.”
Deale smirked and backed off. “So old Dickey Riley still gets around, huh?”
“Riley?”
Deale blew her off. “The Columbia pilot. Don’t play innocent.”
“Not familiar.”
Deale considered her askance. “Richard Riley was pilot of the 747 that took down three hundred and forty-eight fares and a crew of eleven just shy of Vegas way back in October. The only survivor, if you can call it that. When they put him back together he started raving about ghouls in the desert, stealing spiritual items off the dead.”
“Transients? Campers?”
Deale smiled wryly. “No, Agent Sharpe. Real ghouls. Things that go bump in the night. None of this is classified; it’s just the stuff that trickles down the airmen’s grapevine.” He bowed for effect. “Maybe I could set you two up.”
She pulled on her mask and surgical gloves and made for the plane. “First things first.”
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