Everybody Scream! (37 page)

But tattered memories of her previous lives would bob to the surface and float like dead fish.

“Can I pin it on you? A medal of honor,” said a disembodied voice.

“For what?” her own voice echoed.

“For being so gorgeous.”

“You’re too cute to shoot.”

“I can’t
believe
this!” her memory laughed.

“I’ll make you feel good. You’ll be so high you won’t come down for a week. You might not be the same person when you do, but that might not be so bad, and better to be changed than dead, right?”

“Please,” her memory sobbed.

“Don’t beg me. You’re lucky enough already. You should see your blonde friend.”

“Please, please, God…”

“Ha. You must have bought this eye from us, huh?”

“Can I pin it on you? A medal of honor.”

“
Please
,” Fawn said aloud, and gazed down at the eye on the front of her denim jacket above her left breast. It was red-irised, with a goat-like oblong pupil. It glared at her. Red sparks were whipped out of it by the wheel’s spinning but the air took them safely away. Some bounced off the floor of the cage like an arc welder’s torrents of sparks. The eye was alive, hateful, drilling. Fawn screamed.

She looked away. The ground rushed up at her. Faces. Figures. They watched her. The men in the stained white shirts, their three nun-like women. Others. One figure, not a human, glowed with a purple aura. It was insect-like. It was watching her. She plunged toward it. It invited her. At the last moment she pulled out of her dive…up and up.

She rocketed toward the full moon. It had the harsh glowing face of the security guard. Its edge rippled, shot flares into space. There was a great
thing
across the face. It was not actually the moon which regarded her, but this thing that sprawled across its cold cratered mattress. Fawn howled, shrieked, rattled her restraining bar. She was flung down at the waiting insect thing. Shot up at the moon. Again and again bounced between the two.

All this time those two smoky purple rays had beamed from the eyes of the being in the cell to her left, strafing the people below and then plunging off again into the sky. When they raked across the moon the flares from its rippling edge leaped further, shone more brightly. Now Fawn leaned forward to see into the next cell and beg for help. Maybe they could escape together.

The smoky beams emanated from empty skull sockets. Vomit rained on people below. Someone cried out, pointing. The glum worker touched a keyboard blandly. The wheel began to slow and lower.

The Red Jihad disappeared. So had the insect thing.

Two uniformed men clanged up into the wheel. They unlocked the restraining bar and lowered the flopped figure to the mesh floor delicately. One rolled it over while the other called first for a med emergency unit and then to the carnival security headquarters.

The med team arrived first. Dingo, Del and Sophi came after.

“Let me see her wallet,” Sophi droned, and took it.

“Dead,” said one of the med team.

“What was it?” Dingo asked.

“Drugs. She had a half dozen kaleidoscopes in her, I’d say. Hallucinogens. And some red shockers, too. Bad combination. Brain damage–she blew her fuses. It was a miracle her heart didn’t give out first.”

“Great,” said Dingo. “Fucking great. And her mother’s here with her lawyer.”

Del stared down at the splay-legged corpse in horror. He had seen this girl tonight. Alive, vivacious, without the open-mouthed expression of terror, the thick blood from her nose. He had been flirting with a group of teenage girls. One had told him to blast off and the others had laughed, including this one. Heather Buffatoni must have also been one of them. He hadn’t viewed her body–would he have recognized it with the eyes shot out?

“Do you think she was overdosed on purpose?” Sophi asked.

“I don’t know that,” said the med team member, crouched by the body still.

Del felt a tremble at the horror in the corpse’s open eyes. They stared up at the star-littered sky. They were afraid.

The gold-dust was inside an oversized toy bumble that Pox had won. It now sat beside Bern Glandston on a bench at a sticky picnic table where the two men drank beer. Pox had just lit a black-papered herb cigarette and squinted out of the tent-covered area at the throngs of living beings. They had heard gunshots a few minutes ago but someone had told them that it was a demonstration of police dog training, hostage situations, and the like, and the shots had been blanks. Not that they had really been concerned, just curious. Bern said, “There was a lot of activity at the security trailer; somebody killed a bunch of people in the parking lot.”

“Drugs,” said Pox, as if in disgust.

“Probably.”

Bern had made it safely to security headquarters and paged Pox several times. Finally a teenage boy Bern had never seen came to bring Bern here. Pox had then paid the boy for the errand and dismissed him. Bern had felt somewhat safer coming here with the boy, at least less alone, and now that he was with Pox he felt so relaxed, so relieved, that all his bitterness was forgotten. He hadn’t exploded at Pox as he’d planned lately–he couldn’t really afford that anyway, could he? But he had told Pox about the Torgessi. Pox had chuckled. In his relief, Bern had chuckled, too.

He didn’t like sitting with his back open to the passing throng, though, and glanced over his shoulder once in a while, half consciously.

“Hear about The Head?” asked Pox.

“The Head?”

“The Head.” Pox pointed his cigarette.

Bern twisted to glance over his shoulder. “No–what?”

“That giant critter they found on it?”

“No–what giant critter?”

“You can’t
see
it? It covers the whole fucking face.”

“Is that...that’s an
animal?
” There was a shadow, like a dark hand over the carven jack-o’-lantern face.

“They sent some scientists and soldiers out tonight to see what happened to those security guards.”

“Something happened to some security guards?”

“Yeah. Lost contact. So they sent some probe ships–guess they didn’t want to teleport just yet. Well, on the way down here I heard on my car radio they’ve lost contact with two of
those
and so the other two turned back.”

“Holy stools.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing now, but I’ll bet they’re gonna be ready to fight next time. But from here, look how far away and quiet it is. Who knows what’s going on.”

“Just blow the whole thing up.” Bern swigged his beer, smacked his black-painted lips. “Well, I got what I came for. I’ve had better days at carnivals. Guess I’ll be heading home.”

“I’m not sticking around, myself–got a few other appointments yet tonight.” The mobbie polished off his beer. “Don’t let that lizard turn you into a pair of shoes, boy.” Chuckle.

“Ha, ha.”

“I can walk you to your car, if you’re scared.”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

Some of the bitterness was on the way back. “Positive. I’m gonna have another beer,” Bern grunted. He hadn’t really intended to, but…

Chuckling, Pox rose and clapped Bern on the shoulder. “Let me get it for you, Bernie. Sorry to keep you waiting tonight. I’m a busy man, though, you know that.”

“No problem,” Bern sighed.

With a new beer in front of him and the stuffed bumble beside him and Pox gone and the moon behind his back, Bern sat.

Outside, Eddy found Sneezy Tightrope standing at the edge of their camp, gazing at The Head. Cod and some other teenage boys were passing a bottle of pink milky wine and an iodine joint back and forth with a batch of teenage girls. Eddy intercepted and squashed the joint, hissing to Cod, “Are you crazy, after what happened with Mort?” Cod muttered an apology. Eddy moved past him to Sneezy.

“Maybe you should take some detox pills, Sneeze.”

“I’m not juiced,” the small balding man mumbled, distracted. “I just need the air...”

“Are you getting transmission overload again?”

Many advertisers now bought time on wavelengths which the brain could pick up without a mechanical receiver. As if the commercials breaking into rented vids, into theatrical movies, weren’t enough, commercials were also often run
on top
of the movie on a subliminal, superimposed wavelength and beamed out into the world indiscriminately to be received in a telepathic way beyond the ability to switch off, to escape–though quiet, slipping into the back door of the subconscious, not making their influence known even as you reached for that jar of
Monkey-See Peanut Butter
. But too many voices cramming one radio could create static, clutter, chaos, and especially with someone of Sneezy’s sensitivity. There had been times he had gone into maddened seizures, until doctors began prescribing him blockers. He had eventually found a blocker that kept out much of the open-air transmissions but which didn’t hamper his ability. However, there were those times when he still had trouble.

“I…it’s something like a transmission. It’s like…I can hear Bedbugs…talking through a machine…”

“Bedbugs?” Eddy was interested in this topic. Bedbugs were significant.

“There are a few of them here. It’s…it’s strong. What they’re…” Sneezy trailed off. Just stared at the sky.

“I’m sure it doesn’t concern us. They don’t deal directly with us.” Walpole kept his voice low. “Come on inside, man, take something to sleep.” Eddy didn’t like the way Tightrope’s temples were moving as if he were chewing, though he wasn’t.
Pulsing
. You normally didn’t see that with him. Eddy followed his friend’s eyes to The Head for a moment.

“I need air. I’m going to take a walk.”

“You don’t have anything on you, do you?”

“No, I told you, man, I’m clean.” Sneezy took a few plodding steps out of the camp. “I have to take a walk…”

Eddy grunted, made back for the camper. Bedbugs, huh? They could be up to anything; even those who dealt with them secretly found out little about them. Their strange activities never seemed to hurt anyone, though, except for that one vicious gang, and they appeared to be on their own. Eddy found it hard to believe that Sneezy’s sudden odd behavior had been brought on by anything the Bedbugs were doing. It was probably a kaleidoscope or two, despite what he’d said.

At the camper’s step Eddy glanced back but Sneezy was gone.