As Howards screamed at him, eyes rolling in pure terror inches away, face to face, hate to hate, Barron felt himself turning cold—the cold logic of light years of electric-circuit-insulation distance, the kinesthetic horror of the things sewn into his body becoming phosphor-dot images of death on the screen of his mind. He scrabbled for purchase and found it in the reflexive satellite-network interface forming between his consciousness and the phosphor-dot mosaic-image of madness in Benedict Howards’ eyes.
Cool it, he told himself, you’re kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, and you’re alive. And knowingly, he conned himself, sucking up the vidphone-TV-screen-interface anesthetic reality, forced himself cold.
Gotta stop him, kill him, finish him, is all. Got the muscle to do it, got murder tapes, Bug Jack Barron hundred million Brackett Count pipeline, GOP insurance; you got him cold.
But glands in your body like green slime crocodiles dripping blood of murdered babies to keep you alive…
He saw that Howards too had retreated to a more bearable level of reality. “So you see, I got you right where I want you after all. Murder, yeah, legally it’s murder, and it’s gonna take some doing before I can change the law. Before we change the law—’cause you’re in just as deep as I am, Barron. Your contract… I’ll bet you didn’t read all the fine print, the part where you agree to accept full liability for any results of the treatment. Thought that was just to cover us in case you died?
“That contract was drawn up by some mighty high-priced lawyers. It’s ironclad, and it’s a signed legal admission to accessory to murder in any court in the country. It’s a confession, and if you blow the whistle on me, I’ll buy twenty witnesses who’ll swear you knew all about the treatment when you signed it. We’re in this together, Barron. You want to stay alive, you take your orders from me.”
A blind berserker flash erupted through Barron: Ruined bodies soft slimy gland-slugs drip-dripping their eternal vampire-slime filling his veins with the blood of broken babies crocodile mouth of Howards’ madness chewing gobbets of cancer forever, so long as he was alive, so long as Howards was surrounded by guns by fifty billion dollars by Freezer Bill by bought President (bought with what?), Congress, safe forever, immortal vampire monster going on and on and on…
“You really think that matters, Howards?” he howled. “Think that’ll save you? With… with (scrunching his body in anguish) these things inside me, you so sure I want to live? I’ll get you, Howards, there’s not a thing you can do about it. I’ll get you even if it does cost me my life.”
“Not just your life,” said Benedict Howards. “You don’t like immortality, okay, you got a right to be crazy. Who cares? You feel rotten, want to die, that’s your business. But if finding out did this to you, what’ll it do to your wife?”
“Sara—”
“You’ve got a short memory, Barron. Your wife signed the same contract too—makes her an accessory to murder just like you. There’s any murder trial, it’ll be a triple trial, she’s in it with us. And she never knew what was coming off, did she? You got her into it, and if you don’t play ball it’ll be you killing her. Don’t hand me any crap about murder. You’re a murderer too, Barron, whichever way you turn.”
“You… you’ve told her…?”
“Do I really look that dumb?” Howards said. “You’re a lunatic, who knows what you might do, even with your own life on the line. But Miss Sara Westerfeld, or Mrs Jack Barron—whichever the hell it is—we know what she’s like, don’t we? Of course I haven’t told her. Why should I, that’s my final insurance. I don’t tell her a thing, so long as you play ball. That’s how I know I’ve got you. And I do have you now, don’t I, Barron? Come on, say it, I want to hear you say it.”
Shit, Barron thought, he does have me. He knows it, I know it, he knows I know… I’m trapped! Can’t tell Sara, she’d… worse than leave me, she’d freak out altogether. Gotta… gotta… what? What the fuck can I do?
“All right, Howards, for the moment we’ll play it your way.”
“For the moment! That’s good, that’s real good, Barron. For the moment. For the next million years! And you know something, friend? Sooner or later you’re gonna thank me, you’ll see what I mean. You can’t help wanting to stay alive, can you? Immortal… fifty years or so, and you’ll understand it’s worth anything to be immortal, anything… eviscerated nigger bodies in heaps of… You’ll thank me, Barron. You’re immortal, you’re more than a man, your life’s worth a million of theirs. Give it time. You’ll learn to like it, my guarantee.”
And from Howards’ mad eyes Barron sucked a fear, a mortal fear the like of which he had never felt before: fear that Howards might be right, fear that in fifty or a hundred or a thousand years the things inside him would rot him to a gutted hulk, fear that someday he might stare into those paranoid monster eyes and see—himself.
18
No way out, such a goddamned neat trap, Jack Barron thought as he paced the patio under the gray, overcast New York sky, feeling the damp chill of the lull between down-pours through the upturned collar of his sportjac. The setting sun painted the cloud layer with ugly smears of dirty purple, and the waning rush-hour street noises seemed to have been made more savage by the wet black mulch (compounded of rain and good old New York filth) like in the onrushing dusk twenty-three stories below.
Tuesday night. Yeah, soon it’ll be night, and then morning, and then dusk again, and then 8:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And then… what, man, then what? What the fuck you gonna do? What can you do?
Inside, Sara was playing one of the scratchy old Dylan albums she had brought up from her pad, and the grating old ricky-ticky voice from the simple funky past mocked him with a random moment of worn-out irony:
Poor old Dylan should be alive now, get a charge out of how close to the nitty-gritty he comes twenty years later. Poor paranoid bastard was just a little too early for real Paranoiasville, is all. Knew then where it’s at now, and wouldn’t it be cool if it could be that simple, the good old Samson-smash schtick, get in that studio chained to the satellite network and bring the whole fucking schmear down around everybody’s ears.
And you could do it as easy as playing the tapes, riffing on Bennie and giving that hundred million Brackett Count audience the straight scam on slimy green glands drip-dripping the vampire life-blood of broken babies forever and ever into your veins, and how they got there, who put ’em there and why, tear ’em out bleeding and dripping and throw them in the faces of a hundred million dumb slobs and let ’em see just what a fucking hero their kick-’em-in-the-ass Black Shade Jack Barron really is, foam at the mouth and rip Howards and his Foundation and all his flunkies to little bloody pieces… All you gotta do is reach out and push, and all those stone walls come smashing down, pounding everything to pieces, you got the balls to stand there screaming and do yourself in, do Sara in…