Saturday night, the seventeenth of February.
Tomorrow, the weeping lady. and Lord Jack, waiting for her and Drummer.
The baby was asleep, swaddled in his blanket on the other bed. The motel, in Secaucus, New Jersey, was called the Cameo Motor Lodge. It had a cramped little kitchenette and a view of a highway, and cracks riddled the ceiling from the vibrations of the trucks hauling freight in and out of New York City. Sometime before eleven, Mary Terror licked a Smiley Face from her sheet of waxed paper, and she kissed Drummer on the cheek and sat in front of the TV.
a monster movie was on. Something about the dead struggling out of their graves to walk among the living. They came out dirty-faced and grinning, their mouths full of fangs and worms. Mary Terror understood their need; she knew the awful silence of the tomb and the smell of rot. She looked at the palms of her hands. They were wet. Scared, she thought. I'm scared about tomorrow. I've changed. Gotten older and heavier. What if he doesn't like the way I looki What if he thinks I'm still blond and lean and I'll see it in his face oh I will I'll see that he doesn't want me and I'll die. No, no. I'm bringing his son to him. Our son. I'm bringing him light in the dark, and he'll say Mary I love you I've always loved you and I've been waiting for you oh so long.
Everything will be cool, she thought. Tomorrow's the day. Two o'clock. Fourteen hours to go. She held her hands up and looked at them. She was trembling a little. I'm freaking, she thought. She saw the moisture on her palms begin to turn red, like blood seeping from her pores. Freaking. Sweating blood. No, no; it's the acid. Hang on, ride it out. a rider on the storm, oh yes...
Someone screamed. The sound jolted Mary. She saw a woman running on the TV, trying to get away from a shambling, half-decayed corpse. The woman, still screaming, stumbled and fell to the ground, and the monster in pursuit flailed on toward the screen.
The television screen cracked with a noise like a pistol going off, and in a shatter of glass the living corpse's head burst from the TV set. Mary watched in a trance of horror and fascination as the rotting thing began to winnow out of the television. Its shoulders jammed, but its body was all bones and sinew, and in another few seconds it pushed on through with a surge of frenetic strength.
The smell of grave dirt and mold was in the room. The living corpse stood up in front of Mary Terror. a few tendrils of long black hair hung from the shriveled skull, and Mary could see the almond-shaped eyes in a face as wrinkled as a dried apple. The mouth stretched open, a noise of whirring air came out that shaped words: "Hello, Mary."
She knew who this was, come to visit from the dead. "Hello, CinCin."
Cold fingers touched her shoulder. She looked to her left, and there stood another creature from the grave, wearing dirt-crusted african amulets. akitta Washington had dissolved down to a skinny stick figure, and what remained of his once-ebony flesh was now a leprous gray. He held up two bony fingers. "Peace, sister."
"Peace, brother," she answered, and returned the sign.
a third figure was standing in a corner of the room, skeletal face cocked to one side. This person had been a petite woman in life, but in death she had bloated and burst and dark glistening things were leaking from the cavity where her insides used to be. "Mary," she said in an ancient voice. "You bitch, you."
"Hi, Janette," Mary replied. "You look like shit."
"Being dead doesn't do a whole lot for your looks," Janette agreed.
"Listen up!" akitta said, and he came around the chair to stand beside CinCin. His legs were gray toothpicks, and where his sexual organs had been, small white worms feasted. "You're going there tomorrow. Going to be walking on a fine line, sister. You ever think that maybe the pigs planted that message in the Stonei"
"I thought about it. The pigs didn't know about the weeping lady. Nobody knew but us."
"Toombs knew," Janette said. "Who's to say he didn't tell the pigsi"
"Toombs wouldn't talk. Never."
"Easy to say, hard to know." CinCin spoke up now. "How can you be so sure it's a message from Lord Jacki The pigs might be behind it, Mary. When you go there tomorrow, you could be walking into a trap."
"I don't want to hear it!" Mary said. "I've got my baby now, and I'm taking him to Jack! Everything's going to be cool!"
akitta bent his dead face toward her, his eyes as white as river stones. "You'd better watch your back, sister. You don't know for sure who sent that message. You sure as hell better watch your back."
"Yeah." Janette walked across the room to straighten a crooked picture on the wall. She left a dark trail on the brown carpet. "Pigs might be watching you right now, Mary. They might be setting up shop for you. Do you think you'd like prisoni"
"No."
"Me neither. I'd rather be dead than in the slammer." She got the picture how she wanted it; Janette had always been tidy. "What are you going to do about the babyi"
"I'm going to give him to Jack."
"No, no," CinCin said. "What are you going to do about the baby if the pigs are waiting for youi"
"They won't be."
"ah." CinCin gave a ghastly smile. "But let's say they will be, Mary. Let's say you fucked up somewhere, and the pigs squeak out of the woodwork tomorrow. You're going in loaded, aren't youi"
"Yes." She would be armed with the purse-size Magnum.
"So if the pigs are there waiting for you, and there's no way out, what are you going to doi"
"I... don't know... what -"
"Sure you do," akitta said. "You're not going to let the pigs take you alive, are youi They'd throw you in a deep hole, Mary. They'd take the baby from you and give him to some piece of shit who doesn't deserve a child. You know her name: Laura."
"Yes. Laura." Mary nodded. She'd seen the newscasts and read about it in the paper. a picture of the woman had been in Time last week, next to an old snapshot of herself taken on a day the Storm Fronters played Frisbee at Berkeley.
"Drummer's your baby now," Janette said. "You're not going to give him up, are youi"
"No."
"So what are you going to do if the pigs are therei" CinCin repeated. "and there's no way outi"
"I'm... going to -"
"Shoot the baby first," CinCin told her. "Then take as many pigs with you as you can. Does that sound reasonablei"
"Yes," Mary agreed. "Reasonable."
"They've got all sorts of new weapons and shit now," akitta said. "You'll have to kill the baby quick. No hesitation."
"No hesitation," Mary echoed.
"Then you can come join us." When Janette grinned, her dried-up husk of a face cracked at the jaw hinges. "We get high and party."
"I've got to find Jack." Mary could see her words in the air, they floated away from her, outlined in pale blue, like whorls of smoke. "Got to find Jack and give him our baby."
"We'll be with you," CinCin promised. "Brothers and sisters in spirit, like always."
"Like always," Mary said.
CinCin, akitta, and Janette began to break apart. It was a silent breaking, a coming apart of the glue that held their bones together. Mary watched them fall to pieces with the same interest with which she might watch a mildly entertaining TV program. Out of their dissolving bodies came a gray mist shot through with streaks of blue, and this mist roiled toward Mary Terror. She felt it, cold on her lips and nostrils like San Francisco fog. It entered her through her nose and mouth, and froze her throat on its way down. She smelled a commingling of odors: strawberry incense, gravemold, and gunsmoke.
The television screen had healed itself. another movie was on, this one a black-and-white film. Plan Nine from Outer Space, Tor and Vampira. Mary Terror closed her eyes and saw the weeping lady in her mind, torch uplifted over the dirty harbor. The lady had been weeping for a long time, her feet trapped in the concrete of the Mindfuck State, but she had never shown her tears before. The Storm Front had planned to show her tears to the world on that July Fourth in 1972. They had planned to kidnap five executives from Manhattan-based corporations and hold the weeping lady by force until the pigs could arrange television cameras for a live hookup, a million dollars in cash, and a jet plane to take them to Canada. It had never happened. The first of July had happened, but not the Fourth.
It was the eighteenth by now, Mary realized. Lord Jack would be waiting for her at two o'clock in the afternoon.
But if he wasn't there, what was she going to doi
Mary smiled grimly in her purple haze. That was CinCin talking.
But what if the pigs are therei
Shoot the baby first. Then take as many pigs with you as you can.
Reasonable.
Mary opened her eyes and stood up on mile-long legs. She was a walking heartbeat, the roar of blood through her veins like the noise of the freight-hauling trucks. She went into the room where Drummer was sleeping, and she sat on the bed and looked at him. She watched a frown pass over his face: a storm in babyland. Drummer sucked busily on the pacifier, and peace came to his face again. Lately he'd been waking up at three or four in the morning wanting to be fed. Mary was getting efficient at feeding him and changing his diapers. Motherhood suited her, she'd decided.
She could kill him if she had to. She knew she could. and then she would keep shooting until the pigs cut her down and she would join Drummer and her brothers and sisters in a place where the love generation had never died.
Mary lay down on the bed beside Drummer, close enough to feel his heat. She loved him more than anything in the world, because he was hers.
If they had to leave this world together, so be it.
Karma. That was the way things worked.
Mary drifted off to sleep, the acid slowing her pulse. Her last thought was of Lord Jack, bright with beauty in the winter sun, as he accepted the gift she had brought him.