“Let’s go,” Louis said, walking for the door.
We went.
Two miles from the souvenir shop, we found a secluded section of beach and settled down for the evening. I was still upset about the sudden change of atmosphere, the “casing” of the store. My gut churned, and I felt cold and hollow, afraid of the future simply because I had no idea what it was going to be. Butch and a Spic cat named Ernesto went into Dania for some beer, and a celebration ensued. It was obvious that all of us shared the realization that something big was going to happen, something irreversible.
Louis stayed away from us, walking the beach, stop
ping now and then to watch a whitecap peel along and spill its froth onto the wet sand. Several times, he threw his head back like a wolf and laughed, high and shrill, until he made his throat hoarse. Several times, when the moonlight limed his chalky features, he looked like one of those small glass animals you can buy in old fashioned curio shops; the illusion was so real that I thought of stoning him, trying to break him. Then I thought of Cottery and the object lesson.
Half an hour after the sun had set and the first heavy waves of mosquitoes were buzzing out of the shoreline foliage, he came up the beach, kicking sand, and stopped before us. “Let’s go back,” he said.
I rode up front, just behind Louis. It might have been my unreasonable terror that made me try, in desperation, what I did. I could close in on Louis, I thought, take my cycle into the back of his fast enough to leap over him before we both fell. I might be hurt and hurt badly, but Louis would get his head broken sure as hell. And then we would all be free. Whatever was about to happen would not happen.
I leaned into the bars and was about to accelerate when I felt a hand close over my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I jerked my head about, could not shake it loose. I could see no hand, only feel it. When I was beginning to grow dizzy and the cycle was wobbling under me, the hand departed, allowing me to breathe.
Louis had won again.
We roared into the parking lot and stopped our cycles behind four cars, dismounted and stood there dumbly, waiting for Louis to tell us what to do. He climbed slowly off his Triumph Tiger and turned to face us. The large orange and green neon sign that blinked and rippled overhead cast eerie shadows on his face, illuminating a wide, toothy grin that split his face like an axe wound. Then he spoke to us. Two words. There is no way to convey the manner in which he spoke the command. He did not use his lips or tongue. Instead, the words came across the front of my mind like teletype print, burning into the softness of my brain so that I squealed. There was no denying that order. No denying it at all.
Kill them!
Almost as a single organism, we moved forward, the stones making brittle protests beneath our boots, into the flourescent brightness of the souvenir shop.
There were eleven tourists in the shop, plus the clerk, the same little man who had tried to stop Louis from going to the beaded curtain that afternoon. They looked up as we came in, offered us the same timid reactions we were used to receiving. But that was not going to be enough to pacify us this evening. Not nearly enough.
Kill them!
Louis said it again. He stood by the door, grinning, watching, one foot crossed over the other and his hands shoved in his jean pockets.
We moved forward, taking out the hardware we carried.
Butch moved in ahead of me, surprisingly fast for the ox that he was, and swung a huge fist at a banker type in a loud yellow shirt and dark blue Bermuda shorts. He drove the man’s nose back into his skull, splintering it into the fleshy gray of his warm brain. The banker did not even have time to scream.
Yul wrapped that steel chain around his fist, moving in on some of the women. His muscular arms, hanging bare from the sleeveless tee-shirt he wore, rippled and flowed like the stalking legs of a cat.
Jimmy-Joe had his hands full of knives. The one in his right was dripping something red.
Kill them!
I took my pistol out. It felt cold and unmanageable in my hand, and I wanted to drop it. I could not. It was as if my hand moved independently of the rest of my body.
A tall man with eyebrows that grew together over the bridge of his nose pushed past me, making for an open window on my right. I fired point blank into his chest. He looked startled, as if he had thought the bullets were blanks and the flowing blood was ketchup, then choked. His eyes watered, and tears ran down his cheeks. Then he fell over on the floor, pulling down a display of post cards.
I dropped my pistol and grabbed onto the sales counter for support. My stomach flopped. I gagged, bent over the counter and brought up my supper of cold chicken and beer.
The rest of that time was hazy, like a sun-ruined section of film. There were shots and screams and pleading voices, blurs of color. I heard a child crying, maybe a little girl. The crying stopped abruptly. Then we were moving out, following Louis, boarding the cycles and leaving the lot.
We went down off the shoulder of the highway, back along the sand to where we had eaten. I fell off my machine when it was parked and rolled over in the sand, face down, trying to think. Sometime later, Butch tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a beer. I declined, then rolled on my back to see what was happening among the rest of them. It was not what I had expected. Jimmy-Joe was standing in the center of the group, playing the part of a woman whose throat he had slit, alternately taking his own role in the affair. When he reached the point where he skewered her throat, the gang laughed and other stories began being exchanged.
Someone broke out several bottles of vodka when the beer ran out, and the party got noisier. I stood up and pushed my way through the gang, trying to reach Louis where he sat next to the tide line. I passed Yul who had droplets of blood spattered across his bald head like freckles. Jimmy-Joe was honing his knives on coral. Butch, his eyes very round and wild, was licking an unknown victim’s blood from his hands.
When I reached Louis, he turned and shook his head to let me know he would not talk with me. I tried to say something anyway, but there was an invisible hand in my throat that stopped the words from forming, much like the hand that had almost smothered me when I had thought of killing him. I stood, watching him for some time. He was reading a newspaper, the Miami
Herald.
After a long time, he carefully tore an article from the front page, folded it, and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Standing, he called to the gang and explained that he would be gone until morning and that we were to enjoy ourselves. Then he was on his Tiger, moving across the sand, gone.
Everyone was silent for a moment, for we all knew what this meant. The only times Louis left us was when he was going to recruit a new gang member. When the idea had sunk in, the revelry began again, slowly at first, then picking up speed and becoming boistrous and jubilant.
I went to the edge of the water and picked up the paper. There was no way to tell what the story had been about, for he had removed all of it. Then I remembered the Gulf station a quarter of a mile back the road. It was highly possible the station had a vendor for the
Herald—
or at least that the attendent had a copy of his own. Somehow, the story in the paper tied in with the new recruit. I guess I had some idea that it would shed some light on my own past too. Without thinking of the cycle, I struck out along the beach, crawled up the embankment to the highway, and walked to the service station.
There were two copies of the
Herald
left. When I was about to buy one, I remembered I had no money. Luckily, a car drove up, requiring the attendant’s attention, which left me free to steal. I ran all the way back to our camp, fighting the urge to look at it.
On the beach, I spread out the mutilated paper that Louis had been reading, then opened my whole copy and compared them to see what had been torn out. I read the article twice to make certain I was not wrong. Then I threw both papers into the water and went back to my cycle. I did not sleep that night.
In the morning, when Louis came back, I was awake, my eyes stinging, but my mind alert. He brought the new recruit with him, a fellow by the name of Burton Kade. He was the same Burton Kadc that had beeu the focal point of that newspaper article. He matched the front page picture in every detail. Eleven months ago, Kade had used a shotgun on his mother and father while they had lain asleep in bed. Then he had gone on to systematically beat to death his two young brothers, one eight and one ten. He had been executed yesterday morning.
There was a very ugly thought in my mind, one that I did not want to face up to. To avoid it, I began thinking rapidly of other things, of Louis and what he might be. A demon? That seemed unlikely. Why would a demon have to summon up a dead maniac to commit violence when the demon himself could do far worse with his own powers?
No, not a demon, not a devil. I began to remember things about Louis, things that started fitting together in an unpleasant way. There had been the time he had defeated Cottery with childish blows. The time Butch had gotten cramps and wrecked because he was trying to leave the gang. The bruises on the clerk’s arm, though Louis had not visibly touched him. The invisible hand smothering me when I tried to kill him. These were examples of . . . what? Mind-over-matter—one of those extrasensory perceptions you hear so much about? In that last instance, there had been a case of telepathy, for the lousy kid had known what I was thinking, had known I wanted to kill him.
This skinny little monster did not seem like the first of a new race: the first esper, the first man able to warp the realities of life and death to recover a body from the grave. Yet ... he was. The first of a new race . . . and tainted with madness. Maybe that is the price to be paid in this new evolutionary step; maybe all espers will be monsters like Louis. Or perhaps Nature will correct this mistake and make them benevolent. I don’t really care. All I know or care about is that Louis is a beast, and it is Louis who is here now, Louis who shapes my future.
And what was my past? What did I do that was so horrible as to turn every hair on my body white, even though 1 am only twenty-five?
I do know what is going to happen to us. There have been two massacres since that first, there will be many more. We will never be caught, for Louis uses his psychic powers to search for clues before we leave a scene, uses them to wipe the minds clean of anyone who accidentally sees us.
I am afraid we are immortal: we will go on killing until even the sun is black and hard and dead. We have been brought back from the grave, an even baker’s dozen of ghouls. We are the Nightmare Gang that sweeps, gibbering, out of the night and lays waste to whatever comes before it.
We are the Nightmare Gang. We kill while Louis watches, laughing, clutching his sides with his skinny arms.
And the worst thing, the very worst thing is that I think I am beginning to enjoy myself.
Two tired telecast beams crossed at a point in space. In time, a drifting plasmoid passed through—enveloped— the intersection. The plasmoid would have ignored either alone but the stereotaxic tickle wakened it out of its sub-dreaming state. The plasmoid scanned the signals dreamily.
In mid-leap Aamm grew aware of himself leaping. Moving while trying to find the logic of his movements, he braced himself for the jolt of landing. Low-energy messages in his fibers . . . fibers? . . . triggered high-powered operations. His weary muscles . . . muscles? . . . were lifting him, pushing him, pulling him. Logic told him that the emotion arising from these bodily changes was fear. All in a flying split second he knew danger lay ahead. His long run had stitched him for a helpless moment to the valley floor, had held him in naked view. He had to—and was moving to—take cover.
He landed in a crouch behind a clump of eess. The eess quivered in its sleep at his nearness, but to him the eess itself was the nightmare; that was what the quivering of his own body told him. Taking care not to touch any eess, he stretched slowly to look ... look? Let light strike his eye surface? ... up and around.
Nothing. So much for logic. Then a slight stir on the verge of the slope caught his eye by the tail. Someone crept forward there, carefully parting the growth fringing the overhanging rim of the valley. The glearn of a fluted muzzle. A sniper. And at a point in line with the beckoning tip of Mount Stij beyond. And so between Aamm and what he suddenly knew to be his goal.
Aamm pulled back out of sight and out of seeing but he could feel the sniper looking down. Feel? No, deduce. Logic told him the sniper was looking down ready to aim the fluted muzzle, ready to fire the water-slugs that would leach out Aamm’s marrow. Marrow? No matter, he had gained cover in time.
But his tenseness told him he could not hide long. The blades of eess would come out of their midday sleep, would unsheathe and take leafy wing to impale flying insects—and stab anything in their way.
Too, his whole form-pattern-set said Mount Stij summoned him. And here was a thing to wonder about: how did he know names, that eess was eess, that a mountain was a mountain, that that mountain was Mount Stij, that his own name was Aamm? Had memory diffused onto his very skin? He didn’t know. But he knew that before dark he had to reach the hubble-bubble of refuge atop Mount Stij, that its name was Viipoy, and that it was an obsidian city doming a volcanic pipe.
To build strength for that last run he rested in the narrow shade of the eess. He lay back as if to dream he already breathed the smoke of forgetfullness.
He stiffened. His eyes opened wide. Belu’s sun—Belu was the name of his world and it spun in space about a star—had shot ten degrees lower. A snuffling behind him had wakened him, one peril saving him from the others. His time had narrowed and the blades of eess were already loosening in their sheaths. Soon the air would be dark with daggers. But the snuffling itself pointed the nearest peril