Dead-Bang (28 page)

For there were ten girls, and each of them was screaming, and each screamed with unique pitch and intensity, with a volume and tone all her own. It was as though the best sound tracks from television's entire library of late-night horror movies had been selected and blended and amplified, and then thrown like New Year's Eve confetti through the air.

If all ten of those ladies of Citizens FOR—needless to say, that's who they were—had been standing still and aiming their mouths at a man it would at the very least have made a eunuch of him, a fate to be classed at such a moment as the unkindest cut of all. But they were not standing still. No, they were running in every direction there is. Running with astonishing speed.

Maybe I imagined it, or maybe the gals were getting short of breath, but it seemed to me there was a definite Doppler effect warp in the air, individual screams either rising or falling depending on whether they came toward me or moved from me, the way horns go on the freeway when cars speed past you lickety-split while honking, the sound rising on approach and dropping on departure. Thus parts of the bone-cracking blast edged from flat up to sharp in piercing counterpoint to others sliding sharply to flats, and its was such an unbelievably marvelous noise that I couldn't help thinking it belonged here. Here it must feel at home. Indeed, perhaps only here in the Church of the Second Coming could it have happened at all.

It was still happening. What made it even more interesting was the inescapable conclusion, which did not escape me, that all ten of those girls were naked as jaybirds. No … not jaybirds. Naked as—ten girls, which is pretty naked. In fact, I found myself thinking, it's about as naked as you can get, especially with all ten of them running lickety-split like that.

Actually, they hadn't been running long. I had experienced the oddly unnerving combination of gorgeous sight and hideous sound for no more than a second or two, but it was a lifetime of second-or-two, and though I had already cranked my jaws open for a yell it seemed to be taking a while to get yelled.

As a second second-or-two stretched past, one scream Dopplered away from me flatting, another raced toward me sharping, and a third bounced sideways from bench to bench in a fetchingly jiggling obligato—but what caused me most concern was not those three, but the three winged fannies flying up the aisle and heading screaming for the doors. Heading outside. Heading into Lemming-land.

“HEY!” There it came.

“Hold it! STOP!
Do you idiots want to get KILLED?
”

At last, a bellow from my chops had filled the church—again. And bounced from the walls and boomed against the ceiling—again. And caused heads to swivel, eyes to stare at me—again. Was history repeating itself? Was my needle stuck on a crack in time? No, I thought, eyeing the girls, not exactly.

It took a while for all that movement to end—actually, it never did end completely—but the screaming stopped almost instantly. In silence that made me wince, I heard the confusing
pat-pat-pat
of bare feet on carpet as the three flying fannies flew toward the exit. Then slowed. And stopped. And turned around. And were no longer fannies. They had become stationary girls, and not a tick too soon; the fleetest of foot was no more than a yard from the doors.

Now that the gals were facing me, I was able to recognize them despite the distance between us. Almost out the door was tall white-blonde Britt, long of leg and thigh, and very speedy. Ten feet nearer, black-haired and busty Ronnie, breathing like a long-distance runner, and even from here a sight to warm the blood in an Eskimo's toes. Several yards closer, smaller and shorter of limb than the other two, and thus bringing up the rear so to speak, Yumiko of the soft face and sweet lips and sparkling eyes.

It was she, Yumiko, who ended the silence. “Why, it's Sherr!” she cried.
“Herro!”

She started trotting down the aisle, Ronnie and Britt close behind her, then—all of a sudden, it seemed—the three of them plus seven others were grouped around me giggling and cooing and talking as one. They seemed, so far, to do damn near everything together, planning, marching, stripping, screaming, running, giggling, cooing, and talking. It was an intriguing thought.

The whole gang—and it was the kind of gang I'd like to think of, if I had a gang, as “That Old Gang of Mine”—stood in a curving, and I mean
curving
, line before me, a wobbly semicircle that would wake a man up grumbling if he dreamed it, but was the dream of dreams to a man wide awake. And I knew—as I gazed upon Thérèse and Yumiko and Britt, Lula and Leonore and Emilie, Margarita and Silvia and Ronnie and Dina—I would forever cherish this time with the Ten as one of my life's most blessed moments. Except for one thing.

Why did I have to get blessed in church? What kind of blessing was that? Especially with the congregation outside, waving their arms and beating their gums and getting ready—I'd have bet a million dollars on it—to charge in here and spoil the fun. It was inevitable, fated; I knew it, I just
knew
it. When that was the Lemmings' whole purpose in living—to take all the fun out of life—how could it possibly be otherwise?

In the first seconds after the gals gathered near me, there were almost simultaneous comments from several of them.

“Mr. Scott, what are
you
doing here?”

“We heard that awful noise and thought it was
them.”

“The Pastor heet me. He noked me down!”

Softly, from langorous Leonore,
“Hi
, there, Shell. I'll bet you don't remember
me.”

And from sexy, swinging Emilie, “We never
dreamed
this would happen, all of us
nude
, can you
forgive
us?”

I tried to answer, saying groggily to Emilie, “Yeah, I forgave you a while back. Bless you all.”

To Leonore, “What'll you bet?”

And,
“You
heard an awful noise?”

And, “I'll let you know the minute I figure it out.”

Plus a few remarks apropos of nothing in particular: To Yumiko, “What's a Nisei girl like you doing in a place like this?” and to Britt, “Mmm, how Swede it is!” And I had just turned to lay wide-awake eyes and a casual comment on Lula when she shook me up by saying:

“Crazy. You don't have any pants on.”

“Wha—oh, them. Yeah. No, I guess I don't.”

“Where in the world are they?”

“Why, they're on the Santa Ana Freeway, where else?”

“Shell, really. Why
don't
you have any pants on?”

“Are you practicing to be a Lemming? I
could
ask you the same
thing,”
I said stiffly.
“But
there are more important matters to take off—up. Girls.…”

I paused to collect my thoughts.

How, I wondered, could I keep forgetting I didn't have any pants on? It wasn't an easy thing to let go of mentally. Of course, I still had my shorts on—if I'd lost
them
, you can bet I'd have known it all the time. But I wondered if my thinking was as sharp as it should be.

There was Cassiday's gunk circulating around in me, too. Hadn't killed me yet, but it couldn't be doing me much good. Had to keep in mind the possibility that thin blood swirling through my brain might cause me to think thin when fat thoughts were needed. But I felt remarkably good considering the shape I was in.

“O.K.,” I said. “You may not realize it, and it may not even be true, but if it is, we could all be in a lot of trouble. A
lot
of trouble. So I'll take charge now.”

Red-haired, brown-eyed, plump-breasted Dina said, “What?”

No one who has not experienced the same thing—and who could that be?—can possibly know how difficult it is for a man, especially a hot-red-blooded—even with gunk in it—man, to think logically, plan, decide upon a swell course of action, when confronted by a million distractions inches from his nose. With only one woman there are lots of distractions to consider, especially if she's bare as an egg. But when you get up to three or four at once, the distractions increase geometrically, which is to say by leaps and bounds. Thus when you've got ten on your hands, or merely within reach, the distractions become practically infinite and the difficulties prodigious.

Besides, when it came to what we're talking about, these gals had far and away the best and most I'd ever seen. And it was not far and away. So I forgave myself for experiencing some small difficulty in thinking a complete thought about anything for a while, and for being unsure if the difficulty was because my brain might be bleeding, or merely a bit too much of my usual trouble, girls.

One of my troubles—wild-honey-blonde and Capri-blue-eyed Silvia—said, “We were all so terribly confused—and
frightened
. I'm
so
glad you're taking charge, Shell.”

“Yeah, it's a good thing. O.K. Well, all right. Girls … what happened?”

I got ten answers and understood none of them.

“This isn't going to work,” I said. “Choose a spokesman.”

“You're our spokesman.”

“A spokes
woman
, then. Wel'll ah, form a little sex republic here. You select a representative—of your sex—to speak for all of you. I'll speak for all of me. That way we'll clear everything up. And, incidentally, prove women should have the vote.”

“But we're
all
of our sex.”

“This isn't going to work, either. Which, incidentally proves men should rule. Lula.” I turned to the brown-skinned, velvet-eyed lovely who had seemed to be leading the noon nudity discussion at Cassiday's, and later headed the march of Citizens FOR. I gazed at the black-is-beautiful black of her eyes, at the astonishing high-heavy thrust of her breasts, at the sharp inswoop of waist and flatness of middle, at—

“Yes?”

“Yes? Yes, what?”

“You said, ‘Lula.'”

“So I did. Ah, we're not going to vote after all. I select you, Lula, as the representative of your sex, to be the mouthpiece of all the other sexes standing around here. Is that all right with you?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Is everybody cracked in here except me? I want you to tell me what
happened!
How come you're in the
church
, where did your
clothes
go, whither went the television
cameras
and horny
reporters
, why did you
scream
with such frenzy, what are you all
doing
tonight—”

“Why didn't you say so?” Lula shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, resting a hand lightly on her interestingly thrust out left hip. “Well, we all mached down Filbert and up here in front of the church. I started to take off my sweater—did you know about that?”

“I'm hip.”

“We'd decided all of us were going to march nude in front of Lemming's church. Form a picket line, you know? Everybody else does it. Not just unions, but school kids, professors, farmers, PTA's, poor folks, rich folks,
everybody
. They do whatever flaky thing they feel like doing, and some of it's
ugly
, but nobody ever bothers them much. So why couldn't we do a simple little fun thing like taking our clothes off? At least, it wouldn't be
ugly
, it wouldn't
hurt
anybody.”

“Your points are impressive. But you forgot the most hairy rule of all. You can march, picket, take over universities, blow up buildings, burn down banks, shoot policemen and firemen, do any creative thing you desire—as long as it's for the good of all mankind—but only if it isn't
sexy
. If it's sexy, it's immoral. And you've got to admit, you gals are pretty sexy even with your clothes on.”

“Well, I should hope so—that's the idea. We
want
to be sexy. That's why we marched here in the first place—we're demanding the
right
to be sexy, the right to have Erovite if we want it. We're all members of Citizens FOR—we're for
Erovite
, for
sex
, for
health
, we're for
life
—”

“There's where you went wrong.”

“Anyway, I started to take my clothes off. But they wouldn't let me. Not right then, anyway. The cameraman stopped taking pictures, and some fellow there running things told us we'd have to keep our clothes on or we couldn't be seen on television. It would be bad, and they couldn't show bad things on television. Hundreds of people would send millions of letters and he'd get fired. The network would crumble. The government would fall. The world would be reduced to chaos.”

“He probably meant well.”

“I'm sure he did. He said after he checked in at the studio he'd try to come back, and if we still wanted to do it, he had something on the president of another network and—”

“I knew it! That's what I told Ed.”

“Then Pastor Lemming came down—he was already in the church when we got here—and made a
terrible
fuss. Said if everybody didn't leave immediately, didn't get off the sacred ground—and his own private property—he'd have everybody arrested and put in prisons and fired and even cast out. Cast out, I don't know what he meant by that.”

“I do. Same thing he meant by ‘fired.' Actually, it should be cast out and
then
fired, but—it's not important.”

“Well, that worried the men. Pastor Lemming does have an awful lot of power and influence, I guess.”

“Not as much as he'd like us to think.”

“They were about ready to leave anyway, and then they heard about the fire. Isn't that funny, you just said ‘fired'—”

“Maybe it's funny. Something was burning? Besides Festus?”

“A movie theater in Los Angeles. It was showing a double feature,
Do Your Thing with Your Thing
and
Hump the Bump
advertised as,
Sauce for Geese and Ganders and Beavers
. I don't know what either of them was about.”