And what’s next? The night is young. He has a story to pursue off in the direction of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, one that got as far as the official Evening News from Hell lineup. Satan seems to be going along with this for now. He turns to the right and rides along with the crowd.
The night streets teem with bodies and screams, though the screamers are different from the screamers before the setting of the sun. These are the denizens with night terrors, taking over from those with the anguish of twilight. There are cars now as well, the automotive technology often retro, the center of the street jammed and blaring with Cords and Fords and Moons, with Vauxhalls and Maxwells and Fiats and BMWs, with Hondas and Renaults and Zims, their drivers and passengers sealed inside, banging on the windows and crying out in rage at the drivers and passengers in the cars around them, and none of them moving, except intermittently to lurch forward several feet to crush a few pedestrians in the eddies flowing around them, only to stall again, while beneath their tires and body frames, the crushed denizens wail away until the next lurch of traffic allows them to rise and reconstitute.
For a time, Hatcher loses his knack for mobility and gets sucked from the margin of the flowing crowd and toward its center. He wonders if this means his Big Boss has now decided this story should be dropped. There are never editorial meetings as such. Things come up. Things get pursued until something — often painful — occurs to stop them. Being crushed in the center of a nighttime crowd would be one of the simpler terminations to a story. Hatcher figures the initial tolerance of the neo-Harrowing item was simply to build false hopes anyway. Even if, as Hatcher’s news nose faintly whiffs, there is some sort of something true behind this, it would involve such a small number of denizens that covering it would have a torturous effect on the vast numbers once again left behind. But it wouldn’t have to be true to be torture. Maybe this was all simply to arrange that public, humiliating disavowal of the story by Carl. And the news nose whiff will be a purely private disappointment.
Hatcher keeps his mind thus desperately occupied amid the multitude of gropers and pinchers and farters and bleeders, the maggoty and the pustulant and the leprous and the Botoxically botulinal. He is worried because he knows they are entering Hell’s tenderloin, and soon all these bodies about him will begin to cast off their clothes and grow desperate with unscratchable itches. As unpleasant as the crush of bodies now is, it will get far worse when they are naked. Is Satan pissed with him? But now Hatcher feels himself twisted by an eddy of the crowd and borne to the margin, and he is dumped flat on his back in the mouth of a side street.
A long-bearded old man’s face appears, hovering over him. The man is clothed in a gunnysack, and he lifts a hand-scrawled sign on a stick and floats it before Hatcher. It once read “Repent. The end is nigh.” But one letter has been scratched out and replaced and a new word has been careted in, and the man now slides away to gyre endlessly on the corner urging the denizens to REPEAT. THE END IS NEVER NIGH.
Hatcher struggles to his feet and faces the Parkway. It is utterly clogged, the crowd ground now to a halt, the air above it filling with the rise and fluttering fall of shed clothing. Hatcher turns around and looks down the side street. It is a dead end leading to splashes of neon on a large building, obscured, from this distance, by the dark. He takes a step toward it, and from the darkness at the top of the building comes an abrupt bright red sparking flare and a clap of sharp sound. Hatcher hesitates, but the flame evaporates and the afterclap subsides, and he moves on.
Soon the building shows itself in the red glow of its neon signs: a wide ground-floor facade of colonnaded arches and two dark-windowed upper floors and minarets at the front corners rising into the night. The neon proclaims: LIVE! NUDE! THE HOUSE OF VIRGINS! YOU’VE MADE IT! 72 FOR U!
And now beside Hatcher is an unmistakable, forced, drawly chuckle: “Heh heh heh. If it isn’t Hatch the Snatch.”
Hatcher turns and finds the ship-anchor nose and narrow eyes and heavy brows of a familiar face. “Mr. President,” Hatcher says, reflexively using the honorific, though he likes the irony now. This was the last president he covered, and for a moment, at the very end of Hatcher’s life on earth, as his heart attack began, he felt his own imminent premature death would be mitigated by not having to live out this one’s full second term.
“Hatch the Snatch,” George W. Bush says.
“Mr. President.”
“Snatch the Hatch.”
“Welcome, Mr. President. I didn’t know you’d arrived.”
George turns his eyes to the House of Virgins. “He’s inside. I got him now.”
“Who’s that?”
“Osama. I got him now.”
From the House of Virgins, a wail begins — a man’s voice — and at first, briefly, it sounds like sexual fervor, but quickly the sound morphs, the voice clearly is crying in intense pain, and around his voice begins the sound of female voices, ululating together, a chorus of trilling excitement — a chorus of seventy-two, no doubt — and then suddenly a third-floor window flares bright with flame and an explosion punches through the air and the flames leap out of the window and carry with them disassembled male body parts — legs, arms, a torso, a wide-eyed head — that fall to the ground before the building. The flames flicker out in the window, the women’s voices fall silent, and the body parts lie motionless for a moment. Then abruptly the parts all rise into the air and reassemble into a naked, darkly bearded young man. As soon as his body is recomposed, he begins screaming again in pain but without a moment’s hesitation he dashes for the front door of the House of Virgins and disappears inside.
“That wasn’t him,” George says. “See, this happens every couple of minutes. Osama’s waiting his turn, like we used to in the back of Spunky’s in Crawford. How’s about that for pointyhead ironicky? My intelligence report says they have to wait in line for the seventy-two virgins.”
“Your intelligence report?”
“Somebody gave it to me when I got off the boat.”
“Who was that?”
“Some guy who met me right there at the dock. He says, ‘Mr. President, here is your intelligence briefing.’ See, I’m back in the saddle here, Hatch. A little heavenly reward.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m just wondering how, if they keep doing the same seventy-two virgins over and over again, then you know, how they’re actually virgins when, like, the second guy does them and so on.”
“You mentioned a heavenly reward…”
“Well now, Hatch, a reward can’t be the explanation. See, that’s Hell you’re looking at there. Inside that Arab looking building. Osama and those virgins and those other boys are all in Hell.”