Robert R. McCammon: The Collected Stories Part 9

"She's right," Ques told him. "Listen, it's crazy to go in there. You don't have a gun or anything."

"The Green Falcon," he said adamantly, "never carries a gun."

"Yeah, and the Green Falcon's only got one life, fool!" Gracie didn't release her grip. "Playtime's over. I mean it. This isn't some old serial. This is real life. You know what reality is?"

"Yes, I do." He turned the full wattage of his gaze on her. "The reality is that... I think I'd rather die as the Green Falcon than live as an old man with a screwed-up bladder and a book of memories. I want to walk tall, just once more. Is that so terrible?"

"It's nuts," she answered. "And you're nuts."

"So I am. I'm going." He pulled loose from her and got out of the cab. He was scared, but not as much as he thought he'd be. It wasn't as bad as indigestion, really. And then he went up the front steps into the building, and he checked the row of mailboxes in the alcove.

The one for apartment D had BOWERS on it.

Apartments A, B, and C were on the first floor. He climbed the stairs, aided by a red-shaded light fixture on the wall, and stood before apartment D's door.

He started to knock. Stopped his hand, the fist clenched. A thrill of fear coursed through him. He stood there facing the door, and he didn't know if he could do it or not. He wasn't the Green Falcon; there was no such ent.i.ty, not really. It was all a fiction. But Julie's death was not a fiction, and neither was what he'd been through tonight to reach this door. The sane thing was to back off, go down those stairs, get to a phone, and call the police. Of course it was.

He heard a car's horn blare a quick tattoo. The cab, he thought. Ques, urging him to come back?

He knocked at the door and waited. His heart had lodged in his throat. He tensed for a voice, or the sudden opening of the door.

The stairs creaked.

He heard the cab's horn again. This time Ques was leaning on it, and suddenly the Green Falcon knew why. He turned, in awful slow motion, and saw the shadow looming on the wall.

And there he was: the young blonde, dark-eyed man who'd slashed Julie's throat. Coming up the staircase, step by step, not yet having seen the Green Falcon. But he would, at any second, and each step brought them closer. The Green Falcon didn't move. The killer's weight made the risers moan, and he was smiling slightly-perhaps, the Green Falcon though, musing over the feel of the blade piercing Julie's flesh. And then the Fliptop Killer looked up, saw the Green Falcon at the top of the stairs, and stopped. They stared at each other, standing not quite an arm's length apart. The killer's dark eyes were startled, and in them the Green Falcon saw a glint of fear.

"I've found you," the Green Falcon said.

The Fliptop Killer reached to his back, his hand a blur. It returned with the bright steel of the hunting knife, taken from a sheath that must fit down at his waistband. He moved fast, like an animal, and the Green Falcon saw the blade rising to strike him in the throat or chest.

"IT'S HIM!" Gracie shouted as she burst into the alcove and to the foot of the steps. The killer looked around at her-and it was the Green Falcon's turn to move fast. He grasped the man's wrist and struck him hard in the jaw with his right fist, and he felt one of his knuckles break, but the killer toppled backward down the stairs.

The man caught the railing before he'd tumbled to the bottom, and he still had hold of the knife. A thread of blood spilled from his split lower lip, his eyes dazed from a bang of his skull against a riser. The Green Falcon was coming down the steps after him, and the Fliptop Killer struggled up and backed away.

"WATCH OUT!" the Green Falcon yelled as Gracie tried to grab the man's knife. The killer swung at her, but she jumped back and the blade narrowly missed her face. But she had courage, and she wasn't about to give up; she darted in again, clutching his arm to keep the knife from another slash. The Green Falcon tensed to leap at the man, but suddenly the killer struck Gracie in the face with his left fist and she staggered back against the wall. Just that fast, the man fled towards the front door.

The Green Falcon stopped at Gracie's side. Her nose was bleeding and she looked about to pa.s.s out. She said, "Get the b.a.s.t.a.r.d," and the Green Falcon took off in pursuit.

Out front, the Fliptop Killer ran to the parked cab. Ques tried to fight him off, but a slash of the blade across Ques' shoulder sprayed blood across the inside of the winds.h.i.+eld; the Fliptop Killer looked up saw the man in the green suit and cape coming after him. He hauled Ques out of the cab and leapt behind the wheel. As the cab's tired laid down streaks of rubber, the Green Falcon grasped the edge of the open window on the pa.s.senger side and just had an instant to lock his fingers, broken knuckle and all, before the cab shot forward. Then he was off his feet, his body streamlined to the cab's side, and the vehicle was roaring north along serpentine Jericho Street at fifty miles an hour.

The Green Falcon hung on. The killer jerked the wheel back and forth, slammed into a row of garbage cans, and kept going. He made a screeching left turn at a red light that swung the Green Falcon's body out from the cab's side and all but tore his shoulders from his sockets, but still the Green Falcon hung on. And now the Fliptop Killer leaned over, one hand gripping the wheel, and jabbed at the Green Falcon's fingers with the knife. Slashed two of them, but the Green Falcon's right hand darted in and clamped around the wrist. The cab veered out of its lane, in front of a panel truck whose fender almost clipped the Green Falcon's legs. The killer thrashed wildly, trying to get his knife hand free, but the Green Falcon smashed his wrist against the window's frame and the fingers spasmed open; the knife fell down between the seat and the door.

Beachfront buildings and houses flashed by on either side. The cab tore through a barricade that said WARNING-NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT.

The Green Falcon tried to push himself through the window. A fist hit his chin and made alarm bells go off in his brain. And then the Fliptop Killer gripped the wheel with both hands, because the cab was speeding up a narrow wooden ramp. The Green Falcon had the taste of blood in his mouth, and now he could hear a strange thing: the excited shouts of children, the voices of ghosts on the wind. His fingers were weakening, his grip about to fail; the voices overlapped and intermingled, said, "Hold on, Green Falcon, hold on..."

And then before his strength collapsed, he lunged through the window and grappled with the Fliptop Killer as the cab rocketed up onto a pier and early-morning fishermen leapt for their lives. Fingers gouged for the Green Falcon's eyes, could not get through the mask's slits. The Green Falcon hit him in the face with a quick boxer's left and right, and the killer let go of the wheel to clench both sinewy hands around the Green Falcon's throat.

The cab reached the end of the pier, crashed through the wooden railing, and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean twenty feet below.

10. Nightmare Netherworld The sea surged into the cab, and the vehicle angled down into the depths.

The Fliptop Killer screamed. The Green Falcon smashed him in the face with a blow that burst his nose, and then the sea came between them, rising rapidly towards the roof as the cab continued to sink. The last bubbles of air exploded from the cab. One headlight still burned, pointing toward the bottom, and for a few seconds the instrument panel glowed with weird phosph.o.r.escence. And then the lights shorted out, and darkness claimed all.

The Green Falcon released his prey. Already his lungs strained for a breath, but still the cab was sinking. One of the killer's thras.h.i.+ng legs. .h.i.t his skull, a hand tearing at his tunic. The Green Falcon didn't know which way was up and which was down; the cab was rotating as it descended, like an out-of-control aircraft falling through a nightmare netherworld. The Green Falcon searched for an open window but found only the winds.h.i.+eld's gla.s.s. He slammed his fist against it, but it would take more strength than he had to break it.

... Cut, he thought. Panic flared inside him, almost tore loose the last of the air in his lungs. CUT! But there was no director here, and he had to play this scene out to its end. He twisted and turned, seeking a way out. His cape was snagged around something-the gears.h.i.+ft, he thought it was. He ripped the cape off and let it fall, and then he pulled his cowl and mask off and it drifted past him like another face. His lungs heaved, bubbles coming out of his nostrils. And then his flailing hands found a window's edge; as he pushed himself through, the Fliptop Killer's fingers closed on his arm.

The Green Falcon grasped the man's s.h.i.+rt and pulled him through the window too.

Somewhere below the surface, he lost his grip on the Fliptop Killer. His torn tunic split along the seams, and left him. He kicked toward the top with the legs that had won a gold medal in his junior-year swim meet, and as his lungs began to convulse his head broke the surface. He shuddered, drawing in the night air. People were shouting at him from the pier's splintered rail. A wave caught him, washed him forward. The rough surface of a barnacled piling all but ripped the green tights off his legs. Another wave tossed him, and a third. The fourth crashed foam over him, and then a young arm got him around the neck and he was being guided to the beach.

A moment later, his knees touched sand. A wave cast him onto sh.o.r.e and took his last tatters of his Green Falcon costume back with it to the sea.

He was turned over. Somebody trying to squeeze water out of him. He said, "I'm all right," in a husky voice, and he heard somebody else shout, "The other one washed up over here!"

Cray sat up. "Is he alive?" he asked the tan face. "Is he alive?"

"Yeah," the boy answered. "He's alive."

"Good. Don't let him go," Cray snorted seaweed out of his nostrils. "He's the Fliptop Killer." The boy stared at him. Then shouted to his friend, "Sit on that dude till the cops get here, man!" It wasn't long before the first police car came. The two officers hurried down to where Cray sat at the edge of the land and one of them bent down and asked his name.

"Cray Fli..." He stopped. A piece of green cloth washed up beside him, was pulled back again just as quickly.

"Cray Boomers.h.i.+ne," he answered. And then he told them the rest of it.

"This guy got the Fliptop!" one of the kids nearby called to his friend, and somebody else repeated it and it went up and down the beach. People crowded around, gawking at the old man who sat in his pajamas on the sand. The second police car came, and the third one brought a black go-go dancer and a kid with a question mark on his scalp and a bandage around his shoulder. They pushed through the crowd, and Gracie called out, "WHERE IS HE?

WHERE'S THE GREEN FAL-"

She stopped, because the old man standing between two policemen was smiling at her. He said, "h.e.l.lo, Gracie. It's all over."

She came toward him. Didn't speak for a moment. Her hand rose up, and her fingers picked seaweed out of his hair. "Lord have mercy," she said. "You look like a wet dog."

"You got that sucker, didn't you?" Ques watched the cops taking the Fliptop, in handcuffs, to one of the cars.

" We got him," Cray said.

A TV news truck was pulling onto the beach. A red-haired woman with a microphone and a guy carrying a video camera and power pack got out, hurrying towards the center of the crowd. "No questions," a policeman told her, but she was right there in Cray's face before she could be restrained. The camera's lights shone on him, Gracie, and Ques. "What happened here? Is it true that the Fliptop Killer was caught tonight?"

"No questions!" the policeman repeated, but Gracie's teeth flashed as she grinned for the camera.

"What's your name?" the woman persisted. She thrust the microphone up to Cray's lips.

"Hey, Lady!" Ques said. The microphone went to him. "Don't you recognize the GREEN FALCON?!" The newswoman was too stunned to reply, and before she could find another question, a policeman herded her and the cameraman away.

"We're going to the station and clear all this mess away," the officer who had hold of Cray's elbow said. "All three of you. Move it!"

They started up the beach, the crowd following and the newswoman trying to get at them again. Gracie and Ques got into one of the police cars, but Cray paused. The night air smelled sweet, like victory. The night had called, and the Green Falcon had answered. What would happen to him, Gracie, and Ques from this moment on, he didn't know. But of one thing he was certain: they had done right.

He got into the police car, and realized he still wore his green boots. he thought that maybe-just maybe-they still had places to go.

The police car carried them away and the TV news truck followed.

On the beach, the crowd milled around for a while. Who was he? somebody asked. The Green Falcon? Did he used to be somebody? Yeah, a long time ago. I think I saw him on a rerun. He lives in Beverly Hills now, went into real estate and made about ten million bucks, but he still plays the Green Falcon on the side. Oh, yeah, somebody else said. I heard that too.

And at the edge of the ocean a green mask and cowl washed up from the foam, started to slip back into the waves again.

A little boy picked it up. He and his Dad had come to fish on the pier this morning, before the sun came up and the big ones went back to depths. He had seen the cab go over the edge, and the sight of this mask made his heart beat harder.

It was a thing worth keeping.

He put it on. It was wet and heavy, but it made the world look different, kind of. He ran back to his Dad, his brown legs pumping in the sand, and for a moment he felt as if he could fly. Copyright 1988 by Robert R. McCammon. All rights reserved. This story first appeared in the anthology Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow and published by Dark Harvest in 1988. Reprinted with permission of the author.

SOMETHING Pa.s.sED BY.

1.

Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a gla.s.s of gasoline in the December heat, when the doomscreamer came. Of course, doomscreamers were nothing new; these days they were as common as blue moons. This one was of the usual variety: skinny-framed, with haunted dark eyes and a long black beard full of dust and filth. He wore dirty khaki trousers and a faded green Izod s.h.i.+rt, and on his feet were sandals made from tires with the emblem still showing: Michelin. Johnny sipped his Exxon Super Unleaded and pondered that the doomscreamer's outfit must be the yuppie version of sackcloth and ashes.

"Prepare for the end! Prepare to meet your Maker!" The doomscreamer had a loud, booming voice that echoed in the stillness over the town that stood on the edge of Nebraskan cornfields. It floated over Grant Street, where the statues of town fathers stood, past the Victorian houses at the end of King's Lane that had burned with such beautiful flames, past the empty playground at the silent Bloch School, over Bradbury Park where paint flaked off the grinning carousel horses, down Koontz Street where the businesses used to thrive, over Ellison Field where no bat would smack another softball. The doomscreamer's voice filled the town, and ignited the ears of all who remained.

"No refuge for the wicked! Prepare for the end! Prepare! Prepare!"

Johnny heard a screen door slam. His neighbor in the white house across the way stood on his own porch loading a rifle. Johnny called, "Hey, Gordon! What're you doin', man?"

Gordon Mayfield continued to push bullets into his rifle. Between Johnny and Gordon, the air s.h.i.+mmered with hazy heat. "Target practice!" Gordon shouted; his voice cracked and his hands were shaking. He was a big fleshy man with a shaved head, and he wore only blue jeans, his bare chest and shoulders glistening with sweat. "Gonna do me some target practice!" he said as he pushed the last sh.e.l.l into the rifle's magazine and clicked the safety off. Johnny swallowed gasoline and rocked in his chair. "Prepare! Prepare!" the doomscreamer hollered as he approached his end. The man was standing in front of the empty house next to Gordon's, where the Carmichael family had lived before they fled with a wandering evangelist and his flock on his way to California. "Prepare!" The doomscreamer lifted his arms, sweat stains on his Izod, and shouted to the sky, "O ye sinners, prepare to-" His voice faltered. He looked down at his Michelins, which had begun to sink into the street. The doomscreamer made a small terrified squeak. He was not prepared. His ankles had sunk into the gray concrete, which sparkled like quicksilver in a circle around him. Swiftly he sank to his waist in the mire, his mouth open in a righteous O.

Gordon had lifted the rifle to put a bullet through the doomscreamer's skull. Now he realized a pull of the trigger would be wasted energy, and might even increase his own risk of spontaneous combustion. He released the trigger and slowly lowered his gun.

"Help me!" The doomscreamer saw Johnny, and lifted his hands in supplication. "Help me, brother!" He was up to his alligator in the s.h.i.+mmering, hungry concrete. His eyes begged like those of a lost puppy. "Please... help me!" Johnny was on his feet, though he didn't remember standing. He had set the gla.s.s of gasoline aside, and he was about to walk down the porch steps, across the scorched yard, and offer his hand to the sinking doomscreamer. But he paused, because he knew he'd never get there in time, and when the concrete pooled like that, you never knew how firm the dirt would be either.

"Help me!" The doomscreamer had gone down to his chin. He stretched, trying to claw his way out, but quicksilver offers no handholds. "For G.o.d's sake, hel-" His face went under. His head slid down, and the concrete swirled through his hair. Then-perhaps two seconds later-his clawing hands were all that was left of him, and as they slid down after him, the street suddenly solidified again in a ripple of hardening silver. Concrete locked around the ex-doomscreamer's wrists, and his hands looked like white plants growing out of the center of the street. The fingers twitched a few times, then went rigid.

Gordon went down his steps and walked carefully to the upthrust hands, prodding his path with the rifle's barrel. When he was certain, or as certain as he could be, that the street wouldn't suck him under too, he knelt beside the hands and just sat there staring.

"What is it? What's going on?" Brenda James had come out of the house, her light brown hair damp with sweat. Johnny pointed at the hands, and his wife whispered, "Oh my G.o.d."

"Got on a nice wrist.w.a.tch," Gordon said after another moment. He leaned closer, squinting at the dial. "It's a Rolex. You want it Johnny?"

"No," Johnny said. "I don't think so."

"Brenda? You want it? Looks like it tells good time."

She shook her head and grasped Johnny's arm.

"It'd be a waste to leave it out here. First car that comes along, no more watch." Gordon glanced up and down the street. It had been a long time since a car had pa.s.sed this way, but you never knew. He decided, and took the Rolex off the dead man's wrist. The crystal was cracked and there flecks of dried concrete on it, but it was a nice s.h.i.+ny watch. He put it on and stood up. "Happened too fast to do anythin' about it. Didn't it, Johnny?"

"Yeah. Way too fast." His throat was dry. He took the last sip of gasoline from the gla.s.s. His breath smelled like the pumps at Lansdale's Exxon Station on deLint Street.

Gordon started to walk away. Brenda said, "Are you... are you just going to leave him there?" Gordon stopped. He looked down at the hands, wiped his brow with his forearm, and returned his gaze to Brenda and Johnny. "I've got an ax in my garage."

"Just leave him there," Johnny said, and Gordon nodded and walked up his porch steps, still testing the earth with the rifle's barrel. He sighed with relief when he reached the porch's st.u.r.dy floor.

"Poker game at Ray's tonight," Gordon reminded them. "You gonna make it?"

"Yeah. We'd planned on it."

"Good." His gaze slid toward the white hands, then quickly away again. "Nothin' like winnin' a little cash to take your mind off your troubles, right?"

"Right," Johnny agreed. "Except you're the one who usually wins all the money."

"Hey, what can I say?" Gordon shrugged. "I'm a lucky dude."

"I thought I'd bring J.J. tonight," Brenda offered in a high, merry voice. Both Johnny and Gordon flinched a little.

"J.J. needs to get out of the house," Brenda went on. "He likes to be around people."

"Uh... sure." Gordon glanced quickly at Johnny. He darted another look at the white hands sticking out of the street, and then he went into his house and the screen door slammed behind him.

Brenda began to sing softly as Johnny followed her into their house. An old nursery song, one she'd sung to J.J. when he was just an infant. "Go to sleep, little baby, when you wake I'll give you some cake and you can ride the pretty little poneeee... ."

"Brenda? I don't think it's a good idea."

"What?" She turned toward him, smiling, her blue eyes without l.u.s.ter. "What's not a good idea, hon?"

"Taking J.J. out of his room. You know how he likes it in there."

Brenda's smile fractured. "That's what you say! You're always trying to hurt me, and keep me from being with J.J. Why can't I take J.J. outside? Why can't I sit on the porch with my baby like other mothers do? Why can't I? Answer me, Johnny?" Her face had reddened with anger. "Why?"

Johnny's expression remained calm. They'd been over this territory many times. "Go ask J.J. why," he suggested, and he saw her eyes lose their focus, like ice forming over blue pools.

Brenda turned away from him and strode purposefully down the corridor. She stopped before the closed door to J.J.'s room. Hanging on a wall hook next to the door was a small orange oxygen tank on a backpack, connected to a clear plastic oxygen mask. Brenda had had much practice in slipping the tank on, and she did it with little difficulty. Then she turned on the airflow and strapped the hissing oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. She picked up a crowbar, inserting it into a scarred furrow in the doorjamb at J.J.'s room. She pushed against it, but the door wouldn't budge.

"I'll help you," Johnny said, and started toward her.

"No! No, I'll do it!" Brenda strained against the crowbar with desperate strength, her oxygen mask fogging up. And then there was a small cracking noise followed by a whoosh that never failed to remind Johnny of a pop top coming off a vacuum-sealed pack of tennis b.a.l.l.s. Air shrilled for a few seconds in the hallway, the suction staggering Johnny and Brenda off balance, and then the door to J.J.'s room was unsealed. Brenda went in, and lodged the crowbar between the doorjamb and the door so it wouldn't trap her when the air started to leak away again, which would be in less than two minutes.

Brenda sat down on Johnny Junior's bed. The room's wallpaper had airplanes on it, but the glue was cracking in the dry, airless heat and the paper sagged, the airplanes falling to earth. "J.J?" Brenda said. "J.J? Wake up, J.J." She reached out and touched the boy's shoulder. He lay nestled under the sheet, having a good long sleep. "J.J, it's Momma," Brenda said, and stroked the limp dark hair back from the mummified, gasping face. Johnny waited in the corridor. He could hear Brenda talking to the dead boy, her voice rising and falling, her words m.u.f.fled by the oxygen mask. Johnny's heart ached. He knew the routine. She would pick up the dry husk and hold him-carefully, because even in her madness she knew how fragile J.J. was-and maybe sing him that nursery rhyme a few times. But it would dawn on her that time was short, and the air was being sucked out of that room into a vacuum-sealed unknown dimension. The longer the door was left open, the harder the oxygen was pulled into the walls. If you stayed in there over two or three minutes, you could feel the walls pulling at you, as if they were trying suck you right through the seams. The scientists had a name for it: the "pharaoh effect." The scientists had a name for everything, 'like "concrete quicksand" and "gravity howitzers" and "hutomic blast," among others. Oh, those scientists were a real smart bunch, weren't they? Johnny heard Brenda begin to sing, in an oddly disconnected, wispy voice: "Go to sleep, little baby, when you wake I'll give you some cake... ." It had happened almost two months ago. J.J. was four years old. Of course, things were crazy by then, and Johnny and Brenda had heard about the "pharaoh effect" on the TV news, but you never thought such a thing could ever happen in your own house. J.J. had gone to bed, like any other night, and sometime before morning all the air had been sucked out of his room. Just like that. All gone. Air was the room's enemy; the walls hated oxygen, and sucked it all into that unknown dimension before it could collect. They both had been too shocked to bury J.J, and it was Johnny who'd realized that J.J.'s body was rapidly mummifying in the airless heat. So they let the body stay in that room, though they could never bring J.J. out because the corpse would surely fall apart after a few hours of exposure to oxygen.

Johnny felt the air swirling past him, being drawn into J.J.'s room. "Brenda?" he called. "You'd better come on out now."