later to all of the bad publicity and to a welter of lawsuits. A few
thousand people lost their jobs.
And Mrs. Ledderbeck had a nervous breakdown, though Jeremy figured it
was part of her act, pretending she had actually loved Tod, the same
hipocracy he saw in everyone.
But other, more personal repercussions were what shook Jeremy. In the
immediate aftermath, toward morning of the long sleepless night that
followed his adventures at Fantasy World, he had been out of control.
Not when he killed Tod. He knew that was right and good, a Master of
the Game proving his mastery. But from the moment he had tipped Tod out
of the Millipede, he had been drunk on power, banging around the park in
a state of mind to what he imagined he’d have been like after chugging a
six-pack or two. He had been swacked, plastered, crocked, totally
wasted, polluted, stinko with power, for he had taken unto himself the
role of Death and become the one whom all men feared.
The experience was not only inebriating: it was addictive; he wanted to
repeat it the next day, and the day after that, and every day for the
rest of his life. He wanted to set someone afire again, and he wanted
to know what it felt like to take a life with a sharp blade, with a
gun,with a hammer, with his bare hands. That night he had achieved an
early puberty, erect with fantasies of death, orgasmic at the
contemplation of murders yet to be committed. Shocked by that first
sexual spasm and the fluid that escaped him, he finally understood,
toward dawn, that a Master of the Game Dot only had to be able to kill
without fear but had to control the powerful desire to kill again that
was generated by killing once.
Getting away with murder proved his superiority to all the other
players, but he could not continue to get away with it if he were out of
control, berserk, like one of those guys you saw on the news who opened
up with a semiautomatic weapon on a crowd at a shopping mall.
That was not a Master. That was a fool and a loser. A Master must pick
and choose, select his targets with great care, and eliminate them with
style.
Now, lying in the garage attic on a pile of folded dropcloths, he
thought that a Master must be like a spider. Choose his killing ground.
Weave his web. Settle down, pull in his long legs, make a small and
insignificant thing ……. and wait.
Plenty of spiders shared the attic with him. Even in the gloom they
were visible to his exquisitely sensitive eyes. Some of them were
admirably industrious. Others were alive but as cunningly still as
death. He felt an affinity for them His little brothers.
The gun shop was a fortress. A sign near the front door warned that the
premises were guarded by multi-system silent alarms and also, at night,
by attack dogs. Steel bars were welded over the windows. Hatch noticed
the door was at least three inches thick, wood but probably with a steel
core, and that the hinges on the inside appeared to have been designed
for use on a bathysphere to withstand thousands of tons of pressure deep
under the sea. Though much weapons-associated merchandise was on open
shelves, the rifles, shotguns, and handguns were in locked glass cases
or securely chained in open wall racks.
Video cameras had been installed near the ceiling in of the four corners
of the long main room, all behind thick sheets of bulletproof glass.
The shop was better protected than- a bank. Hatch wondered if he was
living in a time when weaponry had more appeal to thieves than did money
itself.
The four clerks were pleasant men with easy camaraderie among them
selves and a folksy manner with customers. They wore straight-hemmed
shirts outside their pants. Maybe they prized comfort. Or maybe each
was carrying a handgun in a holster underneath his shirt, tucked into
the small of his back.
Hatch bought a Mossberg short-barreled, pistol-grip, pump-action 12
gauge shotgun.
“The perfect weapon for home-defense,” the clerk told him. “You have
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