Everybody Scream! (5 page)

“Fool yourself. Fool yourself.”

“Same to you.”

Kid Belfast softened, took in deep droughts of air. “Think of the times we’ve made love. We made love last night. Why did you let me? And don’t tell me you gave in, or you felt sorry for me.”

“That was a lot of it, Kid. And I like sex. And like I told you, I do care for you. It wasn’t making love, but it felt nice to be close, and I did like feeling close to you in the past and I’ll always remember that.”

“That’s
love
, Noelle, can’t you see that? You feel it! It’s just that everyone has you confused, they turned you against me!”

“I don’t love you.”

“You do!”

“I
don’t!
Maybe I did, I did, I don’t know! I did, alright? But I don’t, I don’t want to, and you can’t talk me into loving you!”

“They poisoned you with their hate and prejudice. Your parents. Your blasting worthless worm-friends. And you can’t stand to touch me anymore. I used to see warmth in you eyes, a smile just for me, inviting me closer. Now I see the doors are shut and you’re pulling away from me. Because of money and prejudice. You can’t even see it, they have you so drugged. You lost your integrity, Noelle. Welcome to the robot club.”

“That’s all in your mind, Kid.”

“Stools.”

“Please leave, Kid. I’ll call you next weekend, and maybe we’ll go out to lunch if you grow up and learn to calm down and listen to what people are really saying.”

“Oh yeah? Listen to this.” With one jumping step to cover the distance Kid swung his leg in a powerful kick, flipping his music system off its table, the top of it slamming into the wall. Another kick caved in the front of a hip-high expensive alien floor-plant he’d given her last year, Mort they called it, a purplish veiny cylindrical thing. Snatching off her desk the glass angel he’d given her last Christmas (he called Noelle his angel), he cocked back his arm, aiming at a wall.

“…yourself, Kid!” he heard Noelle crying. “You’re only hurting yourself!”

“Yeah? Yeah?” His voice shook. He straightened up, slipped the crystal angel in his pocket. “We’ll see who I’m hurting.”

Noelle was hugging herself, as if cold in her man’s t-shirt. “You succeeded in scaring me, Kid. Is that the idea? Is scaring me your idea of making me fall in love with you?”

“Blast you, you little bitch.”

“Good. Fine. Remember your words, Kid–I will.”

Tears nudged up into his eyes, and they trembled there. “I love you. Remember those words.” And with that, Kid Belfast left the room, shutting the door after him.

Noelle let out the air clenched in her chest. It shuddered out of her. Her eyes dropped to Mort. Poor Mort…

Kid glared into the laundry as he passed it, fists bunched. The naked boy was gone. Lucky for him.

It was a good thing, too, that Bonnie didn’t chance upon him in the hall, to comment on his reddened eyes. Even without his gun he would have killed her instantly, he swore. Yeah, his stomach was soft, but he was muscular and strong, and he’d won plenty of fights with bigger boys in his life. He’d smashed a boy’s jaw and cracked two ribs once for stealing a music chip at his old job. He’d read about the high percentages of males who would have murdered at least one humanoid by such and such an age in Paxton. Of course these things fluctuated–the depression had gotten very bad, until the munit system and other measures picked things up–but even today they estimated that three out of five males would have killed a person for whatever reason by the age of fifty. Kid was only twenty but he felt left out, a bit. He wasn’t afraid to kill. He looked forward to it almost as much as he’d once looked forward to losing his virginity. The two were similar.

He drove. Two boys danced out of his path. They wore slippers without socks, extra-baggy drab-colored trousers, dark ill-fitting sweaters with white shirt tails bulging or hanging out from underneath, expensive colorful silk scarves, their short hair fashionably tousled, one boy with a spidery purple “birthmark” covering one cheek. Actually a tattoo or stencil–wine birthmarks were in. Blasting college worms. One in the rear-view monitor made a gesture but Kid left him alive, kept on driving. So many handsome, happy boys, so many lovely, glowing girls. His hatred made him nauseous. He checked out at the security gate.

The hatred rode with him. Hateful memories drove through his head. He saw Noelle, the photo in her hand. He’d left the room; she’d innocently found it in his top desk drawer where he kept other groups of photos he had shown her. He heard her cry out in horror. Rushed in. Saw her. Realized, as her horrified eyes lifted to his…to his face.

The photo was a school portrait of him, age twelve when toys meant more than girls, crew cut, his plaid shirt buttoned neatly to the top button. He was smiling shyly, the smile, even bashfully restrained, cutting back almost to his ears. Noelle had probably never been shocked before by the face of a Choom.

The music chip was inserted, advanced to a particular song. This was from Del Kahn’s last recording,
Heroes
. The song was titled
Rust
. The only accompaniment was pre-colonial traditional Choom instruments, and at various points in the background a muted Choom chorus chanted hauntingly in the now little-used native language. The listener found the lyrics, which described a true incident and actual individual, stirring.

“Smooth bore musket

Forged before his birth

A proud family symbol

Before the guns of Earth

The barrel itself four feet long

Longer than the growing boy

Who stared at the black-wood carven stock

And went, inspired, to play with the gun toy

Carved by his father from the black-wood

Until the day his father summoned the boy Fen

And put the musket in his hands

To bind them both as men

The Earthlings came, a tide of machines

Small-mouthed smilers selling magazines

The pale soft village folk gave in to their perfumed bribes

But the Earthers were met with musket balls

When they came to push out the desert tribes

Mooa-ki Fen led his people high

In the jagged rocks to resist or die

For six months they eluded the colonist soldiers

Until finally the siege

At their castle of boulders

Fen resisted capture

Climbed ever higher

Til perched within sight of his clan and his foe

Drank death from the barrel of his father’s musket

As hands reached out to catch him

Pulled the trigger with his toe

The sandy rocks turned sunset red

It dried to a bitter crust

Reverent clan folk scooped the sand into cups

Like hourglasses filled with rust

The Earth tribes moved in

As victors must

Fen was there buried

His pride turned to dust

The captain of the Earth soldiers

Awarded himself the long impressive gun

It went on the wall of his beach house

Not to a Choom chieftain’s son

It had existed before Fen

It outlasted his corroded dust

But taken from the desert air

The gun began to rust.”

At the first few notes of the next song, about a woman who was shot and wounded by a security guard while releasing the dogs and primates from a laboratory at night, Fen shut the chip off. He’d listened once to the entire chip but it was pretty boring. He’d heard the song
Rust
on the radio and bought the chip for that alone, though on the strength of that one inspiring song Fen thought Del Kahn was a pretty good artist.

“That was different,” said the young woman driving the hovercar, next to whom Fen sat, having played the tune on her system. She had been asking him what kind of music he liked, and he had demonstrated.

“I like Sphitt, Flemm, the Saliva Surfers,” put in Wes Sundry, from the back seat where he sat beside another young woman.

“What’re your names?” asked the driver.

“I’m Fernando Colon.”

“Fernando.” The driver rolled the word on her tongue jokingly. “Can I call you Fern for short?”

“Yeah, but not for long. Fen, they call me.”

“Fen. Oh, like in the song?”

“You got it.” Fen smiled.

“I’m Wes…but you can call me Wes.” Wes grinned at the woman beside him. He had her charmed already. Wes was tall and baby-faced, with eyes that were twinkly squints when he smiled, his apple cheeks bunched up; he had cultivated a light growth of beard to make himself look older, however. His Outback Colony drawl was ingratiating, also. The women were dismissing the odd smell from the tunnel, assuming it was from a factory or something. “Come on, go to the fair with us,” Wes persisted to his riding companion.

“Sorry, we can’t. I wish we could, really.”

Fen twisted around in his seat, looked into Wes’s eyes meaningfully. “We got things to do anyway, Wes. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” Wes folded a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. His new friend smiled, smitten.

Man–Wes and his goober charm. Fen wasn’t too jealous, though–he knew that the higher quality females who would appreciate his sophisticated superiority over Wes were naturally fewer in number. He untwisted to face forward. He didn’t seem to be doing too badly, anyway, with the driver, though she wasn’t very pretty and dark hair was boring.

“Can we stop for smokes somewhere?” asked Fen. The girls didn’t smoke. It would save them time at the carnival, tonight, to stock up now.

“You eat breakfast?”

“Doughnuts.”

“We’ll stop somewhere and have some. Alright? You can buy your smokes there.”

“Great,” said Wes, chewing, twinkling at his companion.

“When do you guys wanna get to the fair?” asked the driver.

“Not until night,” said Fen. He and Wes had just wanted to get out of that tunnel and closer to the fair once those giant barnacles began emitting that strange, choking greenish gas. Wes had thought that he’d seen one of them slide a few inches down the wall.

“Oh really? Want to come over our place for awhile? We have to run a few errands first, though.”

“Yeah–love to,” said Wes.

Fen twisted around again. His dark eyes were hot. “Do I have a say in this, mucoid?”

“Sorry.”

Fen faced forward again. This was the comrade he might have to entrust with his
life
tonight? God forbid Wes should have to choose between saving Fen’s life and flirting like a goober with some pudgy giggling fourteen-year-old near a candyfloss stand.

“Thanks,” said Fen at the invitation. Maybe blasting these two would be a good idea–it would get it out of Wes’s system at least a bit, to keep him purer for tonight. And Fen, of course, was only human, too.

The rides were empty, quiet, still, dormant–a factory waiting to be thrown into crashing, clanking, slithering, spinning, whirring movement by its many bored operators, the conveyor belts and cages bearing along people, however, rather than bottles and boxes, and the final products were excitement, exhilaration, nausea. Del glanced at a few as he strolled past on his usual morning walk. Like a red-light street of the deep city lined with shops and strip joints, ablaze at night with colorful lights and colorful people, the carnival was drab and melancholy at dawn, gray, the brightly painted surfaces showing their blisters and true fadedness. Trash. Dropped prizes proudly won. Shuttered games and concession stands. People came here for awhile to hide from reality inside the noise and lights, and then went back to their lives; but in actuality, it was they who brought that energy here. Without them, this place was as sad and lacking as their realities.