“Oh, shit,” Gruen said. He felt sick to his stomach. “I need you to sit down, Sergeant.”
“Not Sergeant,” Stevens said.
He placed the helmet firmly on his head. The tape on the forehead formed a blocky letter A.
“It’s Captain.”
Stevens stalked across the road to the steel roof hatch that had come loose from the overturned Humvee. He gripped the inside handle with his left hand and lifted it like a shield. It must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, but he held it easily by that one awkward handle.
“Round up the men,” Stevens said. There was no arguing with that voice. “I’ll clear the barricade.”
And then he ran toward the end of the bridge, into a hail of bullets. Gruen stood up, shouting, “Sarge! Sarge!” He’d never seen a man run so fast, so beautifully, covering the length of the bridge in what seemed to be a series of still frames. Stevens raised the makeshift shield in front of him, and bullets sparked off the steel and whined away —once, twice, and then a hailstorm. Several times rounds seemed to strike his legs and arms, causing a barely perceptible stutter, but if anything his speed increased. Ten feet from the barricade he leaped, legs spread in a V, his shield in front of him like a battering ram, his bandaged right fist outstretched. Two gunmen went flying, another three collapsed under him. And then he was gone, vanished behind the wall of smoke and tires, into the mass of attackers. Gruen looked around wildly. Koslow came back through the smoke, his arms around another marine, and two others followed. One of the followers carried a dead man. “Let’s go!” Gruen shouted. “Go, go, go!” He ran around the hummer and picked up Mack’s blood-soaked body. Mack’s left arm was missing, but Gruen didn’t see it anywhere on the pavement. The overturned hummer was still burning. There was nothing they could do for the bodies inside.
The marines ran toward the only remaining vehicle, the APC. The soldiers had stopped firing. Automatic gunfire still crackled from the west end of the bridge, but no one on this side seemed to be firing anymore. The driver opened the hatch from the inside, and the marines clambered into the rumbling vehicle, stepping on one another. It seemed to take minutes to load and get situated. Gruen sat on the bench seat, Mack cradled in his arms. The APC slowly backed up and swung around.
“Hold on,” the driver said. The engine whined, and the tracks scraped and squealed. The APC jerked into motion, picked up speed. Through his window slit Gruen could see the ground moving past them. The vehicle jolted as it went over something—a tire, a body?—and then they were into the barricade.
The APC struck the wall of tires, sending debris exploding away from them. Gruen gripped a handle above his head with one hand and held on to Mack with the other. The nose of the APC went up, banged down hard. The vehicle stopped. Gruen pulled himself off the floor, then bent to peer through the windows, looking for the sergeant. There.
Stevens stood in the middle of an unmoving pile of bodies, the circular hatch still on his left arm. The edge of the shield was stained a solid stripe of red. His uniform hung in tatters. The flesh above his waist had been torn into red ribbons, as if he’d taken several rounds directly to the chest. There was nothing left of his right arm below the elbow. Gruen couldn’t understand why he hadn’t bled out by now. Stevens grinned, his teeth impossibly bright, and raised the stump of his arm into the suggestion of a salute. The marines stared at him through the windows. No one spoke.
Then the shield dropped from his grip. Stevens fell to his knees, and pitched forward.
4
Half a block from the Hyatt Regency, traffic came to a dead stop. We were on Wacker, just above Michigan Avenue, almost in the shadow of the Hyatt’s black steel and gray-tinted glass towers. Competing mobs of protesters and costumed counterprotesters had overrun their sawhorse-delimited camps on the sidewalks in front of the hotel and were spilling into the street, compressing police officers and unaligned audience members between them. The protesters had signs and bullhorns, but the less organized countercrowd—DemoniCon attendees in trench coats, nightgowns, and red, white, and blue jumpsuits—looked to be having more fun.
“Just drop me off here,” I said. There was nowhere to go except back the way we’d come, or maybe a hard left into the river.
“Hold on,” Lew said. His phone was still plugged into his ear, and for a moment I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. He’d spent half the drive on the cell, interrogating a series of underlings who either couldn’t or wouldn’t install something called a domain controller. It was weird to think of Lew, disorganized geek, as a boss. But it was clearly killing him to be away from the office. “I’ll circle around and come back on Wacker.”
I’d already opened the door. “Just pop the trunk. You can get back to work.”
“It’s just these guys, if you don’t watch them they do it half-assed, and then you’ve got to scrape the servers and start over.”
If you don’t watch them? I laughed. “Lew, Lew. You the man. And I don’t mean, you the man. You the man.”
“Get a job, slacker.”
The Audi’s trunk yawned open. I swung the duffel onto one shoulder, and the weight nearly tipped me off balance and onto the hood of the car behind me. Lew stepped out of the car, careful to keep his door from dinging the SUV next to him.
He shook my hand and clapped me on the back. “So this doctor guy—call me and let me know how it goes. Good or bad, okay? Maybe me and Amra can cancel our thing, come back down, have dinner.”
“No, don’t do that. Seriously.” He’d already apologized for having to do something with Amra’s friends tonight, and even one apology was very un-Lew. “I’m going to get an Uno’s pizza, a beer, watch some hotel porn, and go to sleep.” The cars next to us started rolling forward, and honks erupted from the line of cars stopped behind us. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I got to the sidewalk, and watched the cop wave Lew’s Audi into the opposing lanes and send him back the way we’d come.
“Well shit,” I said. On my own again.
I turned and hiked up the hill toward the hotel, the duffel feeling like a dead body on my shoulder. The frigid wind lashed my hair and ruffled my spring jacket, a nylon, no-name thing from T. J. Maxx. Though I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few hundred yards ahead of me was the lake.
As I reached the edge of the crowd, a huge man wheeled suddenly and I had to put out an arm to avoid colliding with him. He was big, over three hundred pounds. I would have taken him for a Fat Boy impersonator if not for the rest of his costume. He wore the Truth’s broadbrimmed fedora and a black trench coat cinched tight as a sausage casing. He grinned down at me, his face huge as a moon. Maybe he
wasn’t possessed, but there definitely seemed to be more than one person in there.
“Sorry,” I said, and moved sideways, nudging between a teenage boy wearing horns (the Piper?) and a chaps-wearing Lariat. I shifted the duffel to my front and used it like a bumper to plow through a sea of impersonators: a Pirate King; a pair of white-gowned, curly-haired Little Angels; a Smokestack Johnny in pinstriped overalls; a half dozen shield-carrying Captains; two more Truths; a Beggar (pockets stuffed with Monopoly money); a goggle-eyed Kamikaze; a bare-chested Jungle Lord. The religious protesters were outnumbered, but made up for it in noise and passion. They were stacked up behind a row of sawhorses, shouting back at the DemoniCon fans, singing hymns, and waving signs:
t h o u s h a l t n o t h av e a n y g o d b e f o r e m e l e t j e s u s i n t o y o u r h e a r t — n o t s a t a n s i m o n s a y s : n o a m e r i c a n i d o l o t a r s d o n ’ t b e d e m o n i - c o n n e d
The protesters could have been from any number of denominations, from Roman Catholics to Latter-day Saints, but the flavor of the signs struck me as distinctly fundamentalist. Possession was the perfect disease for the postmetaphorical wings of the church. Most Anabaptist strains of Protestantism incorporated possession into their theology, and quite a few used the disorder on both ends of the equation: demons could take you, true, but so could Jesus. “Asking Jesus into your heart” wasn’t just a turn of phrase—he took you. The Pentecostals favored the
