Paul Levine
Ballistic
BOOK ONE
The Prophet, the Sergeant, and the Shrink
-1-
Are You Ready for the Apocalypse?
The young man who calls himself Zachariah blinks against the neon of a megawatt Manhattan night. Cocks his head and hears dueling symphonies in his brain. A thunderstorm of Wagner on the port side, a cannonade of Tchaikovsky to starboard. Schizophrenia in stereo.
Zachariah steps off the curb and pulls up the collar of his trench coat. Rain pelts him. Cleanses him, he thinks, as clueless tourists and scummy gutter rats surge by on both sides. Yokels and locals. Sinners all.
Hookers in halter tops, goosebumpy in the wet chill. Gangbangers in leather, pimp-rolling, toe-walking, trash-talking skull crackers. Corn-fed, name-tagged conventioneers, heehawing across the big city, checking out the bars, Singapore slinging watery drinks at nine bucks a throw.
Lifting his face to the rain, eyeglasses steaming, he splashes through a puddle. Stops at a kiosk filled with filthy magazines. The devil’s own diaries. Creamy breasts and pouty lips. Who will save them?
Splashing through a puddle, wagging his finger at Bernie behind the counter, telling him, “All the animals come out at night.”
Bernie looks at the young man through rheumy eyes. “You’re telling me.”
Zachariah sweeps his arm across a panorama of lustful sinners. “Some day a real rain will come and wash this scum off the street.”
“How many times you seen Taxi Driver? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, Zack, it’s making you even weirder, if that’s possible.”
A radiant light amps Zachariah’s mind, a divine glow inspired by the Truth and heavenly doses of mescaline. He reaches into his trench coat and hands Bernie a pamphlet. On the cover, a drawing of an ornate temple exploding, pillars shooting into the air like flaming spears. Zachariah levels his gaze. “Pilgrim, are you ready for the Apocalypse?”
“Hell yes.” Bernie tosses the pamphlet aside. “But to tell the truth, I thought it already happened.”
Outside the store, the neon flashes “Adult XXX.” Inside, the pot-bellied clerk with the retro sideburns hacks up a wad of phlegm, cursing the weather and his own clogged sinuses. He empties an ashtray, counting the butts, and curses himself for his three-pack a night-shift habit. He switches channels on his seven-inch black-and-white, then looks up to see a clean-cut young man stroll into the shop, trench coat spotted with rain. Wiping raindrops from his wire-rim glasses with his tie, another accountant or salesman copping a cheap thrill.
The clerk glances at the bland, nothing face. Always check them out, watch for a thug with an attitude and a Saturday night special. Trench Coat tries to flip through “Salt and Pepper Studs,” but it’s stapled shut. Peeper doesn’t even know the rules. He loops around a free-standing display of dildos and cockstraps and approaches the counter.
“If you’re looking for the video booths, they’re in the back,” the clerk says.
“My visions need no video,” Zachariah answers.
“So whadaya want, buddy?”
“Salvation for all eternity.”
The clerk shrugs. “Eternity’s expensive. We charge a quarter a minute for video. Fifty cents for live peeps. Ten bucks for the live sex theater.”
“Sodom and Gomorrah are upon us, and you, sir, are the gatekeeper of hell.”
Ah, one of those. The clerk hacks again, then spits into the trash can. For minimum wage and no health plan, why put up with this shit? “Hey, buddy, if you wanna buy… buy. If you wanna look… look. If you wanna preach, haul your ass out to the street corner.”
Zachariah pulls two quarters from a pocket. “I shall buy. But, as it is written in Revelations, ‘I know where you live. It is the place where Satan has his throne.’”
“You got that right, fella. I live in the Bronx.”
A whorish red sign with a flashing arrow points to “Live Peeps.” Hallucinating now, Zachariah feels as if his feet are slogging through a wet slime, the vomit of hell. He enters a dark booth the size of a toilet stall. Latching the door, his senses hypertuned, he inhales the tang of disinfectant barely masking the ocean saltiness of semen. Through tinny speakers, he hears the Red Hot Chili Peppers urging, “Give it away now!”
He slips the quarters into a slot. A shutter slides up and light streams through a window from the miniature interior stage where a bored stripper bumps and grinds, her backside facing a booth directly across from him. She chews her gum and pastes on a smile of slutty sincerity, smacking the other guy’s window with her mushy ass. Naked except for her red spiked heels, she dances across the stage toward Zachariah.
Come to me, Jezebel. The angels screech her name in his ear.
He steeples his fingers under his chin, studying her. A scar, fibrous and purple, jags across her belly. She is pale under the glare of the lights. Her hair is dyed a coppery red, top and bottom. Shaved into a design down below, what is it? A cross! Blasphemous bitch. She will pay. They will all pay.
She wiggles and pouts. Then, boom! The music stops, and so does she. Stands there a moment, hip shot, then points to the tray in the window, waiting for her tip. He folds a pamphlet over twice and places it in the tray.
On the other side of the glass, she picks up the pamphlet and unfolds it, her eyes going hard as she read aloud in a Southern twang. “‘Are you ready for the Aypo-ca-lipsee?’ You think I can pay the rent with this shit?”
She looks up, ready to shame a couple of bucks out of him, but he is gone.
Zachariah climbs the stairs to the second floor. Two middle-aged men pass him on their way down, averting their eyes. Confront your sins, heathens!
He hands a ten-dollar bill to a burly Hispanic man with a ponytail and the tattoo of a snake wending across his knuckles, then enters the small theater. Four geezers are spread out, one to a row, hands disappearing into their laps, watching the stage where a naked punk is slipping it to a skinny woman on a soiled mattress.
The woman’s bare, dirty feet are wrapped around the punk’s pimply back as he listlessly pumps away. Neither makes a sound, though the mattress is wheezing, and one of the scuzzbags up front is breathing so hard, he might go into cardiac arrest.
Zachariah heads down several steps and hops onto the stage. The heavy breather in the front row huffs out a “Hey!” The couple untangles, the punk’s pecker hanging forlornly at half-mast. “It ain’t amateur night! Get outta here.”
Zachariah turns to the audience of disgruntled whackers and lets his voice slip into the sing-song of his beloved Brother David. “Babylon, mother of prostitutes, abomination of the earth, hear the Word!”
“Aw, shut up!”
“Chingate!”
“What a meshuggeneh!”
Forgiving the fools who know not what they do. “Behold a pale horse!”
The door bursts open and Snake Knuckles hauls ass toward him.
“And his rider’s name was Death!” Zachariah unbuttons his suit coat and extends his arms. Jesus on the Cross. A battery pack hangs from his belt, and packets of Semtex are taped to his waist.
Snake Knuckles leaps onto the stage but Zachariah sidesteps and calls out, “And Hell followed him!”
He pushes a switch on the battery pack…
At his kiosk, Bernie sees the orange flash before he hears the thunderclap. An explosion that spews glass and plaster across the street, barely missing him. Pedestrians duck and run as the shrapnel rains down, and where there had been a tawdry little porn shop, now there is a gaping crater of flame. A hot wind sucks piles of magazines from Bernie’s counter, tumbling them down the street, plastering them against windshields, and inhaling them into the inferno.