Oh, it’s fear, all right — it’s just not fear of being the only sane man in the snake-pit. You know the bats are real; you ‘re not crazy and neither is Duke and neither is Moira or Cam Stevens or Janet Brightwood. But something is wrong with this picture just the same . . . really wrong. And I think it’s him. Robbie Delray, housepainter and Savior of His Race. He knew where I was from.
Brightwood called him and told him Duke was bringing someone from the First Merc, Brandon Pearson’s his name, and Robbie checked on me. Why would he do that? And how did he do it?
In his mind he suddenly heard Duke Rhinemann saying, They’re smart . . . they’ve got friends in high places. Hell, high places is what they’re all about.
If you had friends in high places, you could check on a fellow in a hurry, couldn’t you? Yes.
People in high places had access to all the right computer passwords, all the right records, all the numbers that made up all the right vital statistics . . .
Pearson jerked in his seat like a man waking from a terrible dream. He kicked his foot out involuntarily and it struck the base of the window-pole. It started to slide. Meanwhile, the whispering at the front of the room broke up with nods all around.
‘Les?’ Delray asked. ‘Would you and Kendra give me another little helping hand?’
Pearson reached to grab the window-pole before it could fall and brain someone — maybe even slice someone’s scalp open with the wicked little hook on top. He caught it, started to place it back against the wall, and saw the goblin-face peering in the basement window. The black eyes, like the eyes of a Raggedy Ann doll abandoned under a bed, stared into Pearson’s wide blue ones. Strips of flesh rotated like bands of atmosphere around one of the planets astronomers called gas giants. The black snakes of vein under the lumpy, naked skull pulsed. The teeth glimmered in its gaping mouth.
‘Just help me with the snaps on this darned thing,’ Delray was saying from the other end of the galaxy. He gave a friendly little chuckle. ‘They’re a little sticky, I guess.’
For Brandon Pearson, it was as if time had doubled back on itself to that morning: once again he tried to scream and once again shock robbed his voice and he was able to produce only a low, choked whuffling — the sound of a man moaning in his sleep.
The rambling speech.
The meaningless photograph.
The constant little peeks at the wristwatch.
Does it make you nervous? Having so many of your people in the same place? he had asked, and Duke had replied, smiling: No. Robbie can smell bats.
This time there was no one to stop him, and this time Pearson’s second effort was a total success.
‘IT’S A SET-UP!’ he screamed, leaping to his feet. ‘IT’S A SET-UP, WE HAVE TO GET OUT
OF HERE!’
Startled faces craned around to look at him . . . but there were three that didn’t have to crane.
These belonged to Delray, Olson, and the dark-haired woman named Kendra. They had just solved the latches and opened the trunk. Their faces were full of shock and guilt . . . but no surprise. That particular emotion was absent.
‘Siddown, Iman!’ Duke hissed. ‘Have you gone era — ‘
Upstairs, the door crashed open. Bootheels clumped across the floor toward the stairwell.
‘What’s happening?’ Janet Brightwood asked. She spoke directly to Duke. Her eyes were wide and frightened. ‘What’s he talking about?’
‘GET OUT!’ Pearson roared. ‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! HE TOLD IT TO YOU
BACKWARD! WE’RE THE ONES IN THE TRAP!’
The door at the head of the narrow staircase leading to the basement crashed open, and from the shadows up there came the most appalling sounds Pearson had ever heard — it was like listening to a pack of pit-bulls baying over a live baby thrown into their midst.
‘Who’s that?’ Janet screamed. ‘Who’s that up there?’ Yet there was no question on her face; her face knew perfectly well who was up there. What was up there.
‘Calm down!’ Robbie Delray shouted to the confused group of people, most of whom were still sitting on their folding chairs. ‘They’ve promised amnesty! Do you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying? They’ve given me their solemn — ‘
At that moment the cellar window to the left of the one through which Pearson had seen the first batface shattered inward, spraying glass across the stunned men and women in the first row along the wall. An Armani-clad arm snaked through the jagged opening and seized Moira
Richardson by the hair. She screamed and beat at the hand holding her . . . which was not really a hand at all, but a bundle of talons tipped with long, chitinous nails.
Without thinking, Pearson seized the window-pole, darted forward, and launched the hook at the pulsing batlike face peering in through the broken window. The hook drove into one of the thing’s eyes. A thick, faintly astringent ink pattered down on Pearson’s upthrust hands. The batman uttered a baying, savage sound — it didn’t sound like a scream of pain to Pearson, but he supposed he was allowed to hope — and then it fell backward, pulling the window-pole out of Pearson’s hands and into the drizzly night. Before the creature disappeared from view entirely, Pearson saw white mist begin to drift off its tumorous skin, and smelled a whiff of (dust urine hot chili-peppers)
something unpleasant.
Cam Stevens pulled Moira into his arms and looked at Pearson with shocked, disbelieving eyes. All around them were men and women wearing that same blank look, men and women frozen like a herd of deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.
They don’t look much like resistance fighters to me, Pearson thought. They look like sheep caught in a shearing-pen . . . and the bastard of a judas goat who led them in is standing up there at the front of the room with his co-conspirators.
The savage baying upstairs was getting closer, but not as fast as Pearson might have expected.
Then he remembered how narrow the staircase was — too narrow for two men to walk abreast
— and said a little prayer of thanks as he shoved forward. He I grabbed Duke by the tie and hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re blowing this joint. Is there a back door?’
‘I . . . don’t know.’ Duke was rubbing one temple slowly and forcefully, like a man who has a bad headache. ‘Robbie did this? Robbie? Can’t be, man . . . can it?’ He looked at Pearson with pitiful, stunned intensity.
‘I’m afraid so, Duke. Come on.’
He got two steps toward the aisle, still holding onto Duke’s tie, then stopped. Delray, Olson, and Kendra had been rooting in the trunk, and now they flashed pistol-sized automatic weapons equipped with ridiculous-looking long wire stocks. Pearson had never seen an Uzi outside of the movies and TV, but he supposed that was what these were. Uzis or close relatives, and what the fuck did it matter, anyway? They were guns.
‘Hold it,’ Delray said. He appeared to be speaking to Duke and Pearson. He was trying to smile and producing something that looked like the grimace of a death row prisoner who has just been notified it’s still on. ‘Stay right where you are.’
Duke kept moving. He was in the aisle now, and Pearson was right beside him. Others were getting up, following their lead, pressing forward but looking nervously back over their shoulders at the doorway giving on the stairs. Their eyes said they didn’t like the guns, but they liked the snarling, baying sounds drifting down from the first floor even less.
‘Why, man?’ Duke asked, and Pearson saw he was on the verge of tears. He held out his hands, palms up. ‘Why would you sell us out?’
‘Stop, Duke, I’m warning you,’ Lester Olson said in a Scotch-mellowed voice.
‘The rest of you stay back, too!’ Kendra snapped. She did not sound mellow at all. Her eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets, trying to cover the whole room at once.
‘We never had a chance,’ Delray told Duke. He sounded as if he were pleading. ‘They were onto us, they could have taken us anytime, but they offered me a deal. Do you understand? I didn’t sell out; I never sold out. They came to me.’ He spoke vehemently, as if this distinction actually meant something to him, but the shuttling blinks of his eyes signaled a different
message. It was as if there were some other Robbie Delray inside, a better Robbie Delray, one who was trying frantically to dissociate himself from this shameful act of betrayal.