The Armageddon Rag

  “My…I haven’t done…” Morse winced, looked away.

  “That’s it. Pretend you don’t understand. Pretend you don’t see. You’ve done it all along. You were willing to pay the price for the visions, but I was the only one willing to pay the price for the revolution. I was the one to do what the music demanded.”

  Sandy rose from his chair and faced Ananda, feeling very cold inside, as if something deep within him had just died. “It was you,” he said with iron certainty. He had suspected it, he realized, had suspected it for…how long? Too long. But he had loved her, and she had been all that was left him, and so he had denied it, even to himself. “It was you all along, wasn’t it?”

  Ananda thrust out a hip, planted a hand on it, assumed a mocking exaggerated, provocative pose, ran her tongue across her lower lip. “Lil’ ol’ me? Why, I’s just a hot-pants hippie chick. You think I could do something violent?”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Sandy said.

  “You know your problem, Blair? You think with your cock. Just like Jamie Lynch. Getting to meet that fucker was the problem. Once I did, it was all real simple. He was so hot to get me out to his place that he almost came in his pants.” She glanced over at Morse. “Blood sacrifice, Edan. Someone had to do it.”

  Morse said nothing.

  “And the Gopher Hole?” Sandy asked.

  “Slozewski had to have his mind changed, had to become the Ash Man. Locking the doors… the blood made it easier. So many deaths, it made all the rest go down smooth and simple.”

  Her voice was ice cold. “You don’t care,” Sandy said accusingly.

  “Of course I care. That’s why I’m doing this!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Edan Morse said wearily. “Not now. Don’t you see? If we don’t stop, it won’t…it won’t be like we want. Too much blood. It will just go on. On and on. No…no resurrection, that’s the lie. Armageddon forever.”

  “You’re just scared to die, Edan,” Ananda said.

  “Maybe,” Morse said. “But I’m right.”

  “We’ll see about that, right?”

  “No. We won’t. I’m stopping it. I told you. Stopping it.”

  Ananda smiled. “How are you going to do that, Edan? Look at you. You going to call up all the soldiers one by one and give them the news? I’m your mouthpiece, you stupid motherfucker. I give your orders. What the hell makes you think they’d listen to you anyway? They listen to me. Mirrors, Reynard, Gull, Beca, we been through the wars together. They’re mine. And I say go ahead.”

  Edan Morse pushed himself up higher. It was an enormous effort. “They listen to Gort, too,” he said. “Gort, give the word. Sandy, set up that press conference. Cancel West Mesa. Cancel it. You hear?”

  Sandy nodded.

  Ananda sighed. “You suckers give me no choice,” she said. “There’s too much at stake here for me to let you screw it up. The Armaggeddon Rag is beginning to play, and none of you can stop it now. Sorry.” Her hand moved quickly. Snuggled against her palm was a strange small silvery gun. “I guess no one here gets out alive.”

  “That only shoots darts,” Morse said confidently. “Gort, take it away from—”

  Ananda’s finger jerked twice. The gun made a tiny spitting sound. Morse shrieked and his hand went to his face, covering his eyes. His body jerked wildly, spasming, feet kicking on the bed, and a terrible stench filled the room as his bowels let go.

  Sandy scarcely had time to think. No sooner had she fired than she’d dropped the gun and whirled to face Gort. The big man was strong and fast. Ananda was faster and better trained. They met at the foot of the bed. Gort got a hand on her briefly. Then she spun and broke his precarious hold, and his wrist. Slammed back the big square chin with an open palm, dropped him with a devastating kick to the kidneys. He grunted as he fell, tried to roll away from her, but he was too slow. She came down on his back, hard, wrapped her hands around his head, jerked back. Sandy heard the neck break. Gort went limp, and blood trickled from his open mouth. She let his head sink back to the carpet.

  Sandy had taken two uncertain steps forward.

  She was rising, quickly, ready for him.

  He scooped up the dart gun she had dropped, stepped back as fast as he could.

  They were alone in a room full of corpses. He trained the gun on her with both hands.

  “That only shoots darts,” she said, smiling crookedly. “Drugged, yeah. But they won’t stop me in time. They couldn’t have stopped Gort, either.”

  “You killed Morse with it.”

  “Sure. I put a dart in his eye. You that good a shot, lover?”

  She swept her dark hair out of her eyes. Her face was flushed with excitement, exertion. She looked beautiful; beautiful and deadly.

  “Jesus,” Sandy muttered. “I loved you!”

  For a moment, a sad look flickered across her face. “I was getting sort of fond of you myself,” she said. “Not at first. At first it was all fake. When Edan told me you’d be a part of all this, and that we had to have you, I read your books quickly, got ready. You put all your wet dreams in your books, you know. So I became just what you wanted. Worked great, right?” She grinned. “Later on, though… you are a nice guy, Sandy. I’ve got nothing against you. In a better world, maybe I could have loved you. As it is, love is impossible. It’s a tool of oppression. A soldier can’t love anyone while the war’s on. Love makes you weak. Look at you. You still feel something for me. If I come for you, you won’t be able to pull that trigger.”

  “But you could, correct? You could kill me easy.”

  She smiled ruefully. “Edan and I went all the way back to the Days of Rage.” She gestured to the bed. “We’re all expendable. Him, you, me.”

  Keep her talking, Sandy thought wildly to himself. Keep her talking and you’re safe. “Wasn’t he committed enough for you?”

  Ananda shrugged. “When it came to rhetoric, to passing out money, to making big plans, sure. But deep down, he was just another damn candy-ass liberal. Like you. God save me from the idealists with no stomach for the battlefield.”

  “I’d think his goddamned war record would be enough even for you,” Sandy said.

  Ananda laughed. “Sandy, you’re so innocent I could kiss you. His war record! Hell. You ever wonder why they couldn’t pin any of that old stuff on him?” She shook her head. “Edan liked to pretend he was a people’s executioner, to take credit for all kinds of stuff. I didn’t mind. It worked out real well for me.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sandy blurted. “You. It was all you—Sylvester, Maxwell Edison, Victor Von Doom. Morse just let the rumors—”

  “He did have his gifts. The visions made him very useful. He saw the power in Music to Wake the Dead and he saw how we could use it. He saw it all coming. Sometimes it was hard to make sense of what he saw, and sometimes the visions were contradictory, and sometimes they were just wrong… but not often. He paid the price and he saw all of it, hazily. You, too.”

  “Me, too,” Sandy repeated.

  “Right.”

  “So you set out to recruit me.”

  “Wasn’t too hard, either.”

  Sandy ignored that. “Why?” he demanded.

  “Maybe we needed you to do our public relations.”

  “Media flacks come cheap for someone with Morse’s money. There’s more to it than that.”

  She grinned and taunted him with a slow lascivious glide of tongue across lip. “Maybe he saw what a stud you’d be.”

  “Cut the fucking games. Give me the truth!” He made what he hoped was a menacing gesture with the gun.

  “Listen to the music,” she said.

  “The Nagzûl? You mean I’m in there, too?”

  She nodded. “The visions were never completely clear. But Edan felt you’d be a key player somehow. He was right. You stirred up a lot of memories, got things moving. And Edan saw you at the end. You’d come down one way or the other, he said. No telling which, or how it would affect things. So I flirted you up
and you warmed quick enough. Remember when we got to Malibu, and I gave Edan a weather report on our trip? If the weather had been less promising, we would have offed you then and there. Instead we drugged you. Gave you a taste of what was coming down. That always hits them hard. And the next morning I told you that we’d made it. I knew from your books that you’d feel that as a bond between us, and that it would weaken your other bonds. And it worked, right?”

  Sandy wanted to rave at her, curse her, blast her with words, but for once none of them would come. “I ought to shoot you right now.”

  “You ought to, but you won’t. I know you. Can’t shoot a bod you’ve fucked as often as mine, can you?” She took a step toward him, slowly, confidently.

  “Stop right there,” he said.

  Ananda smiled. “You don’t believe in violence. Shoot me, kill me, and you’re just the same as I am, right?” She took a second step, a third.

  “Stop,” Sandy said. His hands shook.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. A fourth step, a fifth, and her hand came up quickly and took the gun from his grasp. She sighed. “I told you so.”

  Sandy’s stare was cold and angry and bitter. “So now you kill me, too. Well, go on. Get it over with.”

  Ananda cocked her head to one side. “Death wish? Sandy, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now. I don’t stand around chatting up the enemy. Maybe it’d be safer to off you, but I can’t take the chance.”

  A wave of relief washed over him. He felt dizzy. “Chance?” he repeated weakly.

  “It’s all so murky, your part in this. But one thing Edan was clear on. You’re there at the end, for good or bad. I don’t dare eliminate you. Charlie is the joker in the deck, and we do need a full deck, right?” Her finger jerked; the gun spat once, twice. Sandy felt a brief small pain in his shoulder, another, higher, biting into his neck. Numbness spread outward from where the needles had penetrated. “Goodnight, sweet prince,” she said lightly. Then she leaned forward and gave him a quick, soft kiss as the world ran with kaleidoscope colors and his legs turned to silly putty beneath him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  But my dreams they aren’t as empty/

  As my conscience seems to be

  Night. The cobbled street is slick and wet. He walks, endlessly, restlessly, without a destination. The street is thick with flowing gray mist. There is no traffic, no noise. Even his boots do not ring on the cobblestones as they should. To either side he glimpses the flashing light of neon signs calling to him, but the mists cover them so he cannot read the lettering. He does not know how long he has been walking this long, straight, dark street, but he is tired. Still, he walks on. The damp chills him, right through to his bones, and he turns up the collar of his coat, but it does not help.

  Someone is walking beside him, with footsteps as silent as his. He looks over. Through the mist, he perceives the figure dimly. It is a young woman. She wears a short skirt and a halter top. Long tanned legs flash as she matches his stride. The chill does not seem to bother her. She is very attractive, he thinks, though he cannot see her clearly. Her long, straight hair falls down to the small of her back. A flower is tucked behind her ear, a rose, its vivid redness shocking in this damp gray world. They walk together for a while, and finally he asks her where they are going.

  “To San Francisco,” she tells him. Her voice is joy and music and innocence. “Why don’t you have a flower in your hair?” He recognizes the voice now. It is Maggie’s voice, Maggie the way she sounded a long time ago. “We’re going back to the things we learned so well in our youth,” she tells him, “to the days when we were young enough to know the truth.” It’s Sharon’s voice, sleepy after lovemaking, full of affection and the playfulness of newborn love. “Come on the rising wind,” she urges, “we’re goin’ up around the bend.” It is Donna speaking to him, big-eyed and serious; it’s Alicia’s soft shyness, it’s Becky’s dry, self-deprecating wit, it’s Barbara who he had the crush on in junior high but never dared to date. It’s Ananda who walks beside him, young and smiling and vital, and up ahead of them is the Summer of Love, where the skies are a deep cerulean blue and the sun is always shining and the dope is good and the girls wear flowers in their long blond hair.

  “Ah, my friend, you’re older but no wiser,” another voice says. “For in your heart the dreams are still the same.” Froggy is walking on the other side of him now, grinning, wearing a bright-red dinner jacket, a vest, a bow tie. His face is painted green, and his teeth are yellow. “Sander m’boy, that ain’t the green, green grass of home waiting up ahead of you, and not only is your date the ugliest broad I ever laid eyes on, or laid anything else on for that matter, but in her eyes I see nothing. Nothing at all.”

  He does not understand. The woman is beautiful, was beautiful, has always been beautiful. He looks over at her again. But now the red that pierces through the fog is not a rose but a raw, open wound, still pulsing with fresh blood. It is a tall dark youth who walks beside him, his temple laid open by a nightstick. It is Bobby Kennedy, empty-eyed and broken. It is a slim black girl killed in a riot. It is Martin Luther King, his dream shattered. It is a shambling hulk of a man in a uniform, his face half blown away by a mortar, intestines spilling out of a gaping red hole in his belly. He holds them in with his hands and walks on blindly, toward the fog-shrouded distance. Others, dimly seen, are following behind him. A platoon of them, a company, an army.

  “Who are they?” he asks Froggy. “Where are they going?”

  Froggy waltzes in circles, holding a phantom partner in his arms, grinning. “Oh, can’t you hear the drumming? To the battleground they’re coming. Why, they’re playing their song, they are, they are.” He snaps his fingers. “What’s the title of that album again? Slipped my mind, it did, it did.”

  “Music to Wake the Dead,” whispers Sandy.

  Froggy winks at him broadly, jerks a thumb at the stumbling dead. “It’s gotta be rock ’n’ roll music if you wanna march with them.”

  Edan Morse walks among the dead now. Even in death, he still bleeds. His bare feet leave dark red footprints on the cobblestones as he walks. He is coughing, dragging himself onward in a halting, pained, jerky shuffle, coughing. He sees Sandy. “Stop, stop, stop all the dancing,” he cries out, pleading, “give me time to breathe.” He clutches for help, his hand covered by a fine mist of blood, but Sandy is suddenly afraid and he lurches away, runs from the parade.

  The side street closes in, growing narrow and crooked. Sandy is alone now, lost, frightened. Huge, tortured, familiar faces leer at him from shadows and come rushing out of the rain. He cries out, runs, stumbles and falls. When he pushes himself up again, his hands are raw and scraped.

  A doorway looms in front of him. It is brightly lit, a haven in the choking dark, spilling the most wonderful radiance, a shining translucence that draws him closer. Bambi sits in the doorway in the lotus position, a dozen wide-eyed children at her feet. She is huge with child, and smiling with a deep inner peace, and she speaks in a soft, contented voice of what lies beyond that door. He has to hear what she is saying, hear the words of wisdom, learn the answers. He pushes through the children, into the light. Bambi looks up at him, smiles, opens her mouth. “Oo ee oo ah ah,” she says, “ting tang walla walla bing bang. Oo ee oo ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang.”

  “No!” he shouts, shying away. Around him, the children turn savage. They pull at his ankles, pelt him with chocolate cupcakes, with incense sticks, with crosses, with tiny cups of grape Kool-Aid. Wild and afraid, he kicks at them, breaks free, runs back into the dark, away from the false light.

  The shadows grow deeper all around him. The street becomes a mere footpath now, pressing in, turning and twisting. He moves through a misty labyrinth. The brick walls are wet, slimy, and covered with graffiti, mocking slogans in strange tongues. He cannot read the words. From darkened doors to nowhere, brightly painted whores call out to him. They wear mini-dresses in Day-Glo colors over huge breasts and meaty
thighs, but the darkness makes the colors repellent, and their faces are skeletal, eyes hungry and worn under all that green eyeshadow.

  Ahead, another light is flickering. He runs to it, gasping, and emerges in a great square full of people. Tall black buildings tower on all sides, blotting out the sky. Huge electric billboards flash insistently. The crowd is chanting, bowing, kneeling in worship to the signs. They are singing advertising jingles, offering money. Fights break out as the billboards compete for attention, turning sections of the crowd against one another. The atmosphere crackles. Slogans and cartoons loom impossibly large and threaten to fall on him. Neon tubes sizzle everywhere, blinking, stabbing, beckoning. He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns. Lark smiles at him and begins to speak, but no sound comes from his mouth. Sandy backs away. Again the dark closes around him.

  For hours he stumbles through blind alleys and wicked streets that loop back upon themselves, until finally he emerges on the main thoroughfare again, the long, straight avenue with its tall iron street lamps haloed in the fog. But the street is empty now and he has lost all sense of direction and does not know where to go. He wanders to the middle of the street and stands there, baffled, helpless, looking first in one direction and then in the other, afraid to move, the blank gray walls of fog growing solid all around him. Around and around and around he turns, in dizzy circles.

  Then the fog parts a little and the Nazgûl are there. They are carrying their instruments, playing them as they walk, and others are walking behind them, an army of shadows, an army of memories, an army of good intent. Sandy walks with them for a while. “Where are you going?” he asks Gopher John, Maggio, Faxon. None of them will answer. Faxon bleeds from old wounds, and only the songs will salve his hurt. Maggio’s body is a ghastly thing of skin and bones, running with open sores. Gopher John beats on a big bass drum as he strides, and his eyes are far away. But Hobbins walks in front, sure-footed, laughing, and he draws Sandy aside. His red eyes are burning, pinpoints of fire in the fog, and his mouth twists in grim amusement. “C’mon now,” he says, “we’re marching to the sea,” and then he whirls and leaps out on ahead. The Nazgûl follow, and behind them the long, long column winds, but Sandy is no longer sure. He moves to the side, huddles in a door. The door has been bricked shut and he finds no refuge there; eventually the column passes, and he is alone again.