The Five (37 page)

“Jeremy, do you want the wind call?” Chris asked, also feeling the panic.

The kid was going in.

“Shit,” Jeremy whispered. His finger rested on the trigger. He put his eye to the scope and readjusted, bringing his target in for the kill. “Shit shit shit
shit
,” was all he could think to say.

The kid was almost all the way in, almost gone.

Jeremy’s finger did not move. God help me, he thought, and he wanted to weep.

Those IEDs. Those IEDs were cruel bastards, and the people who put them together and the kids who brought them backpacks full of American tragedy should not be allowed to live.

The kid stopped. He was backing out. A strap on his backpack had been caught by a piece of exposed pipe. He reached up to free himself, and that was when Jeremy sent the bullet.

“They don’t know, they don’t know,” Jeremy says to Grandmother America. “What that’s like. They don’t know. They don’t want to know.”

“What…
what
is like?” she asks, because he has voiced none of this.

He draws a long, sad breath, and he tells his captive that he would like for her to go into the bathroom. He would like for her to get on her knees in the bathtub, because the plan has changed. The new plan, he tells her, is that he will have to hit her on the back of the head with his gun, and then he will leave her and go away. He says all this with the gleam of sweat on his brow, and he has begun to fidget with the safety.

She goes, stumbling along in front of him, her hair in her face. On the way, Jeremy gently takes her handbag from her and lets it drop to the blue-covered floor in the unfinished hall. She is sobbing, but not very loud. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” he tells her. “I’m a good guy, really I am. I’m just…you know…in a little trouble.”

In the bathtub, when she is on her knees in the cream-colored tub with her back to him, she gasps, “I’m going to be sick,” and then she shivers and heaves and throws up. “Please,” she says, as she struggles for whatever dignity and hope she can hold onto. “Please, please, please.”

A shadow moves across the mirror. Gunny is standing behind Jeremy; Jeremy sees the reflection, beside his own.

Jeremy aims the gun at the back of Grandmother America’s head. When Jeremy retracts and releases the slide to cock the pistol, feeding the first round into the chamber, Grandmother America suddenly turns toward him with hot rage in her eyes, as if she is condemning him for telling such a lie. The bullet he fires digs a smoking groove across the side of her jaw. She does not scream so much as make a catlike mewling, but she is no meek pussy; in the next instant she comes up out of the tub with a bitter snarl and tries to claw her way past him and out of her death chamber. He shoots her again, somewhere in the midsection, but she keeps going, a desperate woman leaking out her life and trying to get to her sister’s.

Jeremy shoots her a third time, in the back in the hallway on the blue-tarp floor lah de dah de dah la
boom
. She is made of strong stuff, because though she nearly collapses against the wall she still keeps going, and he thinks of himself back at his apartment in Temple, staggering along a hallway between life and death.

Oh, how far we have come.

In the front room, she goes for the door. She is making a high whining sound now, not unlike air escaping a tire at several punctured places. She falls upon the bright blue before she gets there, and yet amazingly—and there are some hardcore members of the Green Machine who could
learn
from this lady—she continues to crawl and reach and wheeze.

At last, so very close to the door yet so very far from who she was an hour ago, Grandmother America flops over on her back and looks up with hateful reproach at Jeremy, who puts a bullet between her eyes.

This is one big mess
, Gunny tells him from the gory hallway.

Jeremy realizes he did not finish his story. He did not tell her that when the bullet was sent, it hit the kid in the side of the neck and the kid had slithered into the hole in the building and out of sight. And that he and Chris had to go through those streets, turkey-peeking over every wall and around every corner, and raghead men and raghead women were gawking at them and screaming like they were from another world. Then right in front of that hole was one of the kid’s blue sandals, a bright blue, a happy blue, unforgettable. Lots of blood, too. And going in after that kid, they’d found his other blue shoe on the broken concrete. And him too, lying curled up. His orange Fanta cap was still on his head and he hadn’t yet left this life, and over in the corner was—would you believe this, lady?—a fucking goat tethered to an iron bar, and a water bowl next to it. And—get this, now—the kid is crying, and bleeding from the mouth and the neck, and somebody—a woman—at the entrance really starts wailing, and Chris says Man, we’ve got to get our asses
out
. So, an order being an order and because I am the
prince
of my profession, I shoot the kid in the head and take his cap, and then we haul ass out but you know the woman, his mother it must be, is silent now, just staring at us as we go past, and she is holding that fucking blue sandal against her cheek like it was the perfect rose of Araby. See what you missed, lady?

And then…and
then
…at the base we get flash-blasted by that captain we don’t know. Done in the middle of the night, in a secure place where nobody else can hear. He roars at us, Did anybody
tell
you to take out any secondary targets?

Secondary targets? Oh…I know what he means. The goat. He’s pissed because after I killed a kid who had gone to feed and water his pet goat, I shot the goat in the head since there was no civilian Christian In Action standing around for me to kill. See, I figure…and I’ve thought about this a long time, I’ve had a
lot
of time to think…that the whole shitbag was about the goat. A feud between families, maybe, or between tribes. Was information about IEDs passed along because I killed a kid who stole another kid’s goat? Or did I kill the kid who stole
back
the goat that some kid stole from
him
? Did I do somebody’s dirty work for them to exchange for info on the IEDs, and I brought back the cap to prove it?

“I don’t know, lady,” Jeremy says to the body on the floor. “They don’t tell you everything over there. They just say some things are fate.”

He sighs deeply. He’s going to miss having someone to talk to. But there’s always Gunny.

In the bathroom, Jeremy looks at himself in the mirror and sees the bones and muscles of his face moving beneath the flesh. A lump comes up on his right cheek and subsides; another rises, squirming, on his forehead. A third bulges up alongside his left eye, and it appears his jaw is trying to break loose from its hinges.

Gunny was right, he thinks. I’m not ready yet for Mexico. Before I get there, I have to—

Shut their mouths
, Gunny says from behind him.
Somehow, they know
.
That video speaks
volumes
,
Jeremy, and all it can do is hurt you and the good soldiers who carry out their jobs
.
Now here is the thing…they have to be silenced, because they’re doing
something that is going to hurt so many, many other people. They don’t even know what they’re doing. That amateur today had his chance
.
But you…you are the professional, Jeremy
.
You have a car now. It’s time to get packed, and get serious.

Jeremy agrees. He will leave the pickup in the garage, right where it is. How long will it be before anybody finds it? How about…a month of Sundays?

Time to get serious. If they played at Stone Church, they might be going on to their next date. The list he wrote down from their website said The Casbah in San Diego, tomorrow night. If not there, then the Cobra Club in Hollywood on Saturday night. He figures he ought to go through Grandmother America’s handbag, check it out for cash. It would be for a very patriotic cause.

Yeah.

Time to get real serious.

Jeremy’s face has stopped moving, for now. He is himself again. He almost sobs, almost lets out a wail that would’ve echoed in this little bathroom and scared him enough to keep him sweating and sleepless every night for the rest of his life, but the feeling of dark despair soon passes. He forces it to pass, because a person can’t live with that kind of feeling inside him. She was collateral damage. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and keep going. And one thing he knows is that after he’s completed this mission he’ll be doing the good guy work against the druglords of Mexico and saving thousands of lives, so it all evens out. It is called fate.

Gunny gets up close, cheek-to-cheek in the mirror, and he says that there is one more thing Jeremy should know. That the new police advancements in computer and forensic science make it possible for them to cut open a victim’s eyeballs and see the face of a killer burned on the retina by the inflamed optic nerves, and maybe it would be wise if Jeremy did something about that.

Jeremy thinks about it, and then he agrees with that too.

Time to get way fucking serious.

TWENTY-ONE.

Ariel had lost her way.

She was wandering in a place unfamiliar. It was a hot thicket of leafy green vines that nearly blotted out the sun. What she could see of the sky was a white glare. She knew only that she had to get from where she was to some other place, that she couldn’t stay where she stood, and so she pushed onward through the wall of vegetation ahead as another closed at her back.

There were thorns in here. They were stabbing her and cutting across her skin whenever and wherever she moved. It was treacherous, this going forward. It was painful and almost unbearable, but she had no choice; she must bear it, to reach the other side.

She smelled earth, and heat, and the raw green growth that surrounded her. She was aware also of another smell, a sweet aroma, a rich scent nearly like wine, perfuming the air. She saw small dark berries hanging from the thorned vines by the hundreds, some wholly black and others touched with red, and she realized she stood in a dense thicket of blackberry brambles that went on in all directions.

The question was: which way led out? Or, another question, and more troubling: was there
any
way out?

She continued onward, in the direction she had chosen though she couldn’t remember making such a decision. It had been made for her, it seemed. She could always stop, turn and go another way, but it seemed to her that sometimes in this world you just have to trust
something
.

She had not gone very far when the man came through the brambles, and stood before her as if to block her path.

Ariel knew him. She knew his face, from a driver’s license picture. She knew what he’d done to two friends of hers, and she knew now what he wanted to do to her.

As she backed away, he followed. He wore no expression. Fear tightened around her heart and hobbled her legs. He came on unhurriedly, with a supreme and terrifying confidence, and as he closed the distance between them his face began to change.

Ariel saw the flesh ripple and move, like clay being reshaped by a phantom hand. The bones began to shift beneath it. With a series of cracking noises the features distorted and destroyed themselves as one cheek swelled outward and the other caved in, as the nose collapsed into a widening fissure and the forehead lengthened like a slab of veined stone. One eye retreated into the dark while the other burst out like the eye of a fish popped by a hook.

All this, while his lower jaw slid forward. Then with a sound like sticks being broken it began to unhinge itself from the upper jaw, and as Ariel backed away through the slashing thorns she put her hand up before her own face to push aside the image of a reptilian mouth yawning open, stretching itself to impossible size, dwarfing even the misshapen head upon which it had grown. The grotesque body lurched toward her, staggering through the brambles, its arms at its side and hands gripped into fists, its single eye wet and gleaming on the edge of the voracious mouth.

Something dark flew out of that gaping hole. It was followed by another, and another still, and then three at a time and five at a time, ten and then twenty, a vomiting forth of dark sleek projectiles that in an instant grew wings and black feathers and spun around Ariel like a living whirlwind.

The crows flew in black swarms from Jeremy Pett’s straining mouth. Some of them came at Ariel, jabbing and clawing, their small red eyes ticking this way and that, but most of them fell upon the fruit, and this they tore from the vines and swallowed in dripping beaks as they fought each other for the next swallow. They tumbled through the black-stained air in vicious struggling knots, their shrill cries nearly human in their expressions of greed, triumph and frustrated anguish.

Thousands of crows blighted the air. They battered themselves into Ariel’s face, they battered into each other and, still fighting and tearing at each other over the sweet pulp, flapped on broken wings in their death spirals. Through chinks in the black walls that circled her, Ariel saw Jeremy Pett spinning around and around, his arms outstretched wide like the cylinders of a bizarre machine, the engine of a carnival ride that has popped its rivets and burned out its regulators and now must spin and spin until it spins itself to pieces or shatters itself in a blast and roar. As the crows streamed out of him, he had shriveled. His clothes had fallen away, revealing a body that had become an emaciated horror of gray flesh. The hideous head with its gaping mouth had darkened like an old wart and was flagging back and forth, boneless, on the spindly neck. It began to implode, and as the last few black feathered things struggled out blinking their red eyes and already tearing at each other, the head collapsed like an airless balloon.

In all this shrieking noise, in all this flurry of feathers and chaos of claws, Ariel watched the skeletal body fall, still locked in its spinning circle, and she thought,
He is a vessel
.

The crows came at her. They tangled in her hair and jammed against her nostrils. They squirmed against her eyes and thrashed across her mouth. But as she staggered back, seeking some place to protect herself in this field of life that had become the province of hell, she realized that they were only coming at her because she was between them and the few vines of fruit that remained unseized, and they would not stop until they had it all, every last bit of it.

Look at me
, someone said.

Ariel turned her head. Standing beside her was the girl.

She looked exactly as Ariel remembered her. She wore the same clothes and the same raggedy straw hat, and she stared at Ariel through ebony eyes that were both serene and impassioned. Her cheeks were marred by scatters of teenaged acne, the same as before.

Walk with me
, the girl said. Her voice had no accent yet it reminded Ariel of a voice she had once heard and trusted, somewhere in the long-ago.

When the girl held out her hand Ariel took it.

The crows continued to swirl around them, but none penetrated the space between.

Whether the girl moved first or she herself did, Ariel didn’t know. But they were walking together side-by-side through the brambles, hand holding hand, as the black curtains of crows flapped in their faces and hissed at their backs. Still, not one entered the space they occupied, and as Ariel and the girl walked forward the crows retreated before them. Speaking in shrill tongues of indignation, the solid walls of feathers and glinting crimson eyes began to break apart like so many crumbling leaves shaken off a dead tree.

Ariel awakened and lay staring at the ceiling. A fan was lazily turning up there, creaking very softly. The sunlight was bright through the pale yellow window curtains. A dog barked somewhere along Benton Place, and a motorcycle went past. She turned her head on the pillow in search of a clock. The one on the bedside table said it was about ten minutes after ten, the hands in a pleasing symmetry. She stretched and heard her backbone pop, and she started to push aside the sheet but she decided she would lie there until ten-fifteen and try to absorb her dream.

She was in bed in the guest bedroom at Berke’s mother’s house, in an area of small but neatly-kept homes in the northeast section of San Diego, perched on a hill above Interstate 15. They’d gotten here last night, after a two-hundred-and-eighty mile drive from Stone Church. When they’d reached the house, they were so wrung out by their experience that all they could do was mumble some pleasantries to Mrs. Fisk and find a place to stow their bags before they crashed. Truitt Allen, though he’d driven the whole distance, had gone into the den with his laptop, cellphone and a cup of coffee and shut the door. Ariel assumed the white GMC Yukon with dark-tinted windows that had trailed them up through the winding streets and parked in front of the house was still there; she would check, just out of curiosity, when she got out of bed.

It was interesting, she thought, how they handled the gas situation. Last night when they needed to fill up, True had given some kind of code over his cellphone. When the Scumbucket had pulled up to the pumps at a Texaco station, the white Yukon and another Yukon, this one a metallic gray, had stopped on either side of The Five’s van and trailer. From each SUV two men dressed like True, in casual slacks and shirts, had gotten out to stand facing the darkness on the far side of I-8. They would have looked like ordinary business travellers stretching their legs except for the weirdly-shaped pairs of binoculars they were using as they scanned back and forth. “Night vision,” Nomad had told her. “Either that, or thermal.”

True had pumped their gas. A third man from both the SUVs had filled those tanks as well. There’d been a brief discussion among the agents and a pair of them went into the gas station and came out each carrying two bags of popcorn and four cups of coffee in a styrofoam tray. True had asked if anybody needed to use the restrooms, and when all the band members said they did, they got an FBI escort who waited outside the doors. Never was there a time when two of the agents did not keep watch with their night vision or thermal or whatever it was. Ariel had the impression that there was a fourth man in each Yukon, riding in the back, just from some movement she thought she detected and from the fourth coffee. Nine men on duty, including True. Ariel figured that had to be a lot of taxpayer money being spent, to safeguard the lives of four musicians whose deodorant had worn off a
long
time ago.
Plus
True had put their gasoline on his own—or his agency’s—credit card. No wonder this country was so deep in debt.

Ariel lifted her head and looked at the other single bed in the room. John Charles was still asleep, tangled up in his sheet as if he too had dreamed of blackberry brambles and the striding specter of Jeremy Pett. His face was turned away from her, toward the window. She hated to see what his right eye looked like today, because last night it had been swollen shut as tight as an oyster and colored a curious mingled palette of black with purple edges and olive-green highlights. The icepack they’d given him at the medical trailer had helped some, she guessed, and so had the supply of Excedrin Extra Strength.

He had saved her life.

She still couldn’t get her mind around yesterday afternoon. It had been just like the cliché: everything happened so fast. When John had stopped singing and the music had faltered, and then John had stage-dived like a lunatic…it was too much to handle. And later learning that the young man—nineteen years old on his California driver’s license, True had told them—had been aiming that gun at her…too much to handle.

The shooter had been taken away very quickly and efficiently. After The Five had gotten offstage and the techs had cleared their gear, Monster Ripper had started setting up about an hour later, but soon after that—past a visit to the medical trailer and brief interviews with reporters from the Tucson TV stations and Brad Lowell from
The Daily Star
—the Scumbucket had pulled out of that particular circus with True behind the wheel. On I-8 West, the two Yukons had gotten into position, the metallic gray in front and the white behind them, and that was how they rolled.

He had saved her life.

It was going to take her a long time to put this gift on a shelf, if ever.

He snorted a little bit, as if reading her thoughts. His hand came up to touch his eye, but even in sleep his brain figured he probably shouldn’t do that and his hand sank back down again across his chest.

True hadn’t told them the young man’s name yet, though he’d certainly seen it on the license. He’d said he would let them know what developed, and that was last night before he’d secluded himself in the den.

Ariel allowed herself to return to the dream, and play it back again. It was so bright and sunny and cheerful in the bedroom. There was the spicy odor of air fragrance, which maybe Mrs. Fisk had sprayed around this morning to counter their need for showers. It was difficult to think of dark things, in here, but now she must.

He is a vessel
.

She remembered thinking that. What did it mean, exactly? She retained the vivid image of the crows, swarming at the fruit and tearing it from the vines. And she retained the vivid image of the girl.

The girl.

Walk with me
.

Ariel was struck with a desire—a need—to see the song. The Kumbaya song, Berke had called it. She leaned over to the floor, where her fringed-leather bag was parked next to her blue suitcase. She opened the bag, removed from it her notebook with its glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors, and then turned to the page upon which she’d written what they had of the communal song. The last song, it was supposed to be. Performed at the last show in Austin, on Saturday the 16th of August. The song that was a testament to The Five, that was written by all of them together, that held a little of their souls in its words and music.

Welcome to the world, and everything
that’s in it
.

Write a song about
it, just keep it under four minutes
.

Got to figure what to keep, and what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy
.

I wish you safe travel and courage when
you need it.

And that was it, so far.

Unremarkable.

A song in progress.

Something
in progress.

Ariel scanned the lines again. What she’d written down, she realized, began and ended—to this point, at least—with words spoken by the girl at the well.

Sitting up on the bed with a pillow at her back, with a dog barking down the street and the sunlight streaming through the yellow curtains, Ariel felt a transcendent truth come upon her, a sense of wonder that had some fear mixed in with it too, yes, but it was like being locked in a tight and exhilarating groove of rhythm and tempo, the knowledge that everything was
right
, was flowing as it should, and that to break this rhythm, this strange and somewhat frightening connection, this forward motion that led to an unknown counterpoint, would not only be unprofessional, it would be tragic.