“We have to help him!” Strappado the inscrutable cried.
“Good God,” breathed Jimmy as the suds melted away abruptly. Left in their place was a black, glistening heap of ooze…smooth and amorphous. Little forks of greenish electricity branched out of it like serpent tongues. Center stage, musicians bolted. A female dancer ran too close…
“No!” cried Jimmy as the blob lashed out, caught her ankle, drew her toward it.
A maw opened, lined with dozens of flicking green electric tongues. The woman was swallowed; her shape bucked and thrashed inside the ooze as if under a blanket.
Jimmy reached inside his coat for his Beretta, but Strappado shoved him aside, charged out onto the stage.
“Ricky! Ricky!” he yelled.
A pseudopod formed instantly, back-handed the big man, the blow casting him out several rows into the audience. They roared.
“Help me, damn it!” Jimmy yelled across the stage to Bastinado. “Help me!” And with that, Jimmy stepped out into the multi-colored lights and fluttering strobes.
A moment later, Bastinado followed suit, drawing his own automatic. Jimmy fired into the semi-fluid mass first, then they were both firing continuously as they approached the horror from either side. The bullets lodged in the thing, not passing through or ricocheting off the floor. They seemed to be hurting the creature. The maw opened wide in an ungodly, otherworldly high-pitched wail. The tongues of lightning sought to reach out at first one man, then the other. Jimmy and Bastinado wisely stayed clear and kept firing from a safe distance. The music still boomed mindlessly from computerized equipment, and the vast hall thundered with the rhythm of the audience stamping their feet in unison.
Jimmy had emptied his Beretta but Bastinado kept blasting. The ooze reared up suddenly to a height of a dozen feet. At the top of this pillar of slime was the wailing mouth. Jimmy wanted to flee, but gaped at the towering nightmare, transfixed.
It fell. It fell toward him. A falling tree. A tidal wave. Space itself hurtling down at him. He screamed. The creature turned to foam, and the foam turned to mist, just as it was upon him. The fine wet mist breezed gently across his face, and yet Jimmy still crumpled to his knees and dropped his forehead to the stage. He hadn’t fainted entirely, however. He could still feel the vibration of the auditorium through his forehead as the thousands stomped their feet, though his hearing had abruptly shut off.
The doctors would tell him the damage had come from the high-pitched cries of the monster, but Jimmy would always wonder if it hadn’t been the rapturous chanting of the audience as well.
It was the best concert they had ever seen.
Black Walls
1: RED GLASS
Johnny Belfast’s gun jammed, as if it too were obeying the red light. It gave Heron time enough to pull his own piece, a Glock that had been napping like a guard dog under a jacket on the passenger’s seat. Belfast hadn’t thought Heron would be packing, hadn’t realized Heron was fully aware of the danger he was in, and made the mistake of trying to work the slide of his weapon to clear the round. The Glock started barking, the guard dog roughly awakened. But while Heron was busy shooting wildly out one window, Drake had run up to the passenger side of the car and fired in through another. Belfast and Heron both took one in the head at the same time, but Drake had a sawed-off pump loaded with double odd buckshot, each shell’s nine pellets thick as a rifle slug, so Heron definitely got the worst of it as a firing squad of nine men turned his skull to skeet dust.
Belfast lay on his back in the middle of the street, a light spring rain sprinkling his face. It wasn’t rain water he felt running across his forehead, though, winding into his shirt collar; a creepy sensation almost more troublesome than the pain that spiked his head to the pavement. He saw the stoplight swing like a pendulum in the strong breeze, like a red lantern being waved over him. It reminded him of those red glass lanterns with candles in them in the Catholic cemetery where he had gotten high as a teen. The light had changed that color several lifetimes ago, when Heron pulled his car to a stop at the silent midnight intersection. Drake had pulled up right behind him, and Belfast had been out the door in a blur of black coat, black gun. Now, at last, the light changed green, spring green, but the two cars still sat there and the blood kept flowing down his head, annoyingly into his ear now, too, and he knew
Then, hands on him. He swung his pistol, still gripped, and almost clipped Drake across the temple. Drake pinned his arm and swore at him. “Hey, it’s me! Damn, man…damn! Look at you!” Dogs had begun barking, dark faces must be pressed to dark windows. Drake seized Belfast by the coat front and hoisted him to his feet.
“Get in the car, man, before somebody comes. What the hell, Johnny? You said you didn’t need my help!”
“Jammed,” Belfast mumbled, shuffling along, his arm around Drake’s shoulders.
“You should have used mine. God damn, look at you! Look at you!” And he shoved the bleeding man into the passenger’s seat.
Their car backed up a bit, then surged forward, swerving around Heron’s. Leaning against his door, head tipped against the glass so that blood began running into the corner of his mouth, Belfast saw that Heron’s wipers were still sweeping in a futile attempt to wipe away all the red liquid sprayed on the inside, but only smeared the red-lit water on the outside as the stoplight changed colors again.
2: MAGIC BULLET
Again, they waited at a stoplight. Distantly, the keening banshees of sirens like a growing chorus of the damned. Drake looked over at his partner. “You still alive?” he asked shakily.
From the murk, a soft wet whisper. “Think so.”
“We’ll get you to the apartment. I’ll have Doc Cool come over. Too risky to take you to a hospital. It can’t be in your brain, man, or you’d be toast! I’ll have Doc Cool come over. It musta just like deflected off your skull, man.”
Johnny Belfast did not protest this plan of action, or inaction. He was occupied wondering if the blood he tasted was partially that of their victim, sprayed in his face to mix with his own. There was an alien taste to the blood, as if what little of his blood he had sucked from a sliced finger or busted lip over the years had imprinted its own unique character on his palate.
Yes, he decided, he could taste Heron’s life stuff blended with his own. He became aware that he was rubbing at the wound just at his hairline. At that moment, realizing that he was fingering the bullet hole, realizing he was tasting Heron’s blood, another realization came to him, not as a possibility but as stark naked fact.
Heron’s shots had been close, but none had fully struck him. Belfast dropped his hands to his coat, rummaging through its folds until he poked a finger through a hole that wasn’t made for a button. Lifting his T-shirt, he saw blood oozing from a raw furrow across the outside of his chest, on the left, where a slug had skated along a rib. Heron was no trigger; he had never shot a man before. But Drake had. Drake had stooped down to expertly aim in at their victim’s head. And it was a ball of OO buckshot that had caromed from Heron’s exploded skull, up and out the driver’s window to bury itself in Belfast’s skull. He knew this. It was as though his fingers could feel the shape of that deeply buried ball of lead, like a dark pearl folded in the tender oyster of his brain. It was as if those tissues could taste the projectile, and tell its origin. It had been a miracle that Heron’s several panicked shots had all but missed him at that range. It had been another miracle that a magic bullet had passed through Heron’s brain and into that of the man hired to kill him.
The light changed, the car jumped into movement, Belfast’s head was slung back against the seat by the lurch. He turned arctic eyes on his friend’s tense profile. Drake had been trying to save his ass, but the idiot had fired with him just behind their victim. Belfast was too dazed, too numbed to be enraged. Staring at his friend, his eyes bright in a dark mask of blood, he felt…irritated? Bitter? He felt, most of all, disoriented…
Staring made his head hurt. He closed his eyes. Maybe he should sleep. Maybe he should die.
3: TERROR INCOGNITA
When again he opened his eyes, their lashes heavy with gummed blood, Belfast saw it was snowing. The sky just above the city glowed with its pink night haze like radioactivity, but beyond that where the heavens turned
