Then Gilbey said, ‘Watch it!’
Mingolla glanced up, saw figures silhouetted against the stars, looming above him, and one, cowled, its face an oval of darkness, swung at him with something long and crooked. He twisted away, but the club struck the side of his head, sending white lights shooting through his skull, and he fell on his back. Gilbey hauled him up, dragged him onto the sidewalk, and he had a dizzy glimpse of hundreds of people choking the street, shuffling forward, making no sound other than the glutinous passages of their breath. Eyes like holes cut in dirty sheets, and weapons at the ready.
Glass shattered.
Gilbey jerked him around to face the store. Jack was smashing the window with his crowbar, clearing away hanging icicles of glass. Gilbey dragged him through the window, into the mirrored showroom. He kept blacking out, floating back to consciousness, seeing himself in the mirrors. Open-mouthed; a black forking of blood from his hairline. Behind them, the army converged on the broken window, pressing inside, unmindful of the spears of broken glass that pierced them. Mingolla tried to strike at them with his mind, but couldn’t focus and was pulled past his floundering mirror images and down a narrow corridor toward the back door. The knob turned in Gilbey’s hand, the door gave a little, but was stuck. Gilbey dropped his machete and wrangled with the knob.
Mingolla leaned against the wall, looking down at the machete. It was a long way off, spinning, receding, and he wasn’t sure he could reach it. But if he could reach it… well, he knew about machetes. Yes, indeed! He bent at the waist, swayed, and in righting himself, managed to scoop up the machete. The hilt was greasy with Gilbey’s sweat, the rust and blood on the blade gleamed in the light from the transom. Its heft stabilized Mingolla, and he turned to face the army.
The corridor was just wide enough for two abreast, and the army surged into it, grunting, bumping into each other, unable to master the tactics of two-at-a-time. Mingolla swung at the first to come within range, slashed a chest, a belly, drawing lines of blood in gray flesh. Two of them fell, then a third. He chopped at the shoulder of an old woman whose shawl had slipped down to blind her, he spitted a young man and kicked him away. With a screech, the door came open, and Mingolla backed into an alley almost as narrow as the corridor. Blocked at one end by a high brick wall, at the other by more of the army. Gilbey took a stand beside him, wielding a two-by-four, and Mingolla, retreating toward the brick wall, slashed the gut of a shirtless man whose skin hung in folds about his waist. He should be feeling something, he thought. Fear at the least, because he likely was going to die: there were too many of them, their heads bobbing, eyes slits of ebony, pale skin showing through rents in their clothing. And regret at killing his ex-patients. Surely he should feel regret. But it was as if the blow to his head had reduced him to their state, to an emptiness empowered by a command, swinging the machete, a little faster and more accurate than they, yet equally singleminded. No shudders flowed along the blade—their lives weren’t stubborn enough to produce such phenomena—and when their blood spattered him, it dripped from his arms with the slowness of heavy machine oil. Flesh Dummies with Real-Life Organs. There was a sweet brainless appeal to cutting them down, a muscular pleasure in a stroke well conceived and nicely executed, and Christ, was he ever doing a good job! Piling up the bodies. They slipped and flailed as they clambered over the pile. Easy to pick off. He swung, connected, biting to the bone. Swung, connected, swung, connected. Should be a work song to sing while he chopped. Well, I’m gon’ take dis machete… Jesus fuck! The alley snapped into horrid focus for Mingolla. He saw his last victim writhing as slow as an earthworm at his feet, shoving guts back into his belly. Once again he tried a mental assault, and as he did, this time succeeding, he realized that in hiding his power from the families, he had hidden its true extent from himself as well.
He felt a sun was inside his head, a heavy black sun shedding lines of force, and he sensed the minds of the armies, those in the alley, those in the store and on the street, sensed them in the way a constellation might know the fires that comprised its shape. Sensed their fragility and vacancy. Some of those near him fell, others staggered and leaned against the walls for support. He had no pity for them. They were unimportant, incidental, and he had wasted too much time with them as it was. A feeling of grim righteousness stole over him, so profound an emotion that it seemed a physical condition, a cellular affirmation of the need to strike back at whoever had tried to kill him. He exulted in the feeling and imagined himself confronting his enemy.
Ruy.
Oh, yeah! Had to be Ruy!
The army rustled, stirred by the wind of Mingolla’s anger.
He pushed through the men and women in the alley, shouldering them aside, unconcerned by their proximity… although he didn’t like touching them, subject to an irrational fear that bits of their substance would flake off and cling to him. He weaved through the motionless dark figures thronging the store, catching sight of himself among them in the silvered mirrors, a man hiding among mannequins. He’d forgotten about Gilbey, but as he moved into the street, he noticed him missing. He turned to the store. Gilbey was kneeling next to a body that lay half-in, half-out of the shattered window. A crowbar beside the body’s outflung hand.
‘C’mon, Gilbey,’ he said.
Gilbey’s hand fluttered over the body; he might have been searching for a switch with which to reactivate it.
‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ said Mingolla, laying a hand on Gilbey’s shoulder.
‘Leave me alone!’ Gilbey knocked away his hand.
His eyes were glistening, and Mingolla wondered at this, at tears from Gilbey.
‘I…’ Gilbey looked at Mingolla and said his name a couple of times in a quizzical tone as if it meant something rare and unfathomable.
‘What is it?’
Gilbey shook his head, smoothed Jack’s rumpled shirt.
It was useless to continue their charade of friendship, Mingolla realized; it had been a sentimental mistake to distinguish Gilbey from the others, to pretend he was alive and well. There was no room for sentiment here. He walked away from Gilbey, resisting the impulse to say goodbye, and, using his reflection in a store window, he set about cleaning the blood from his face and arms. Around him, the dead stood stockstill like statues in a street scene by De Chirico. He could almost hear the vibration of their emptiness, their longing for purpose, and he knew how to ease that longing, he knew the purpose for which they had been made.
Anger had always been big in him, but what he felt now was anger come to fruition, anger that seemed a separate shape walking in his body, a glittering man of furious principle. His anger spread to infect the army, and as he hurried toward the palace, shadows pushed themselves up from the curbs and doorways and fell into step behind him. The moon was up, and the walls of the buildings glowed with such brilliance that he could make out the gray patches where the whitewash had flaked away. More than ever, the narrow streets reminded him of canyons, and with their ragged hair and primitive weapons, the army might have been cavedwellers on their way to engage a neighboring tribe. Their skin looked as pale and crumbly as cheese, and their eyes had the reflective blackness of the window glass.
When he reached the street that opened onto the parking lot in front of the palace, he divided the army into two forces, sending one on a circuitous route in back of the palace toward the barricade and instructing the others to wait in the shadows until summoned. Walking across the parking lot, he felt calm in the midst of anger, as if the core of his personality had separated from the rest and was observing the goings-on. Parked by the steps were a number of jeeps, and he was pleased to see that most had keys dangling from their ignitions. Inside, the party was in full swing, the atmosphere more drunken than when he had left. Madradonas and Sotomayors tripping the light fantastic to the strains of a jazzy dance tune; the storytelling robot stood unmoving in a comer, switched off. Probably past Izaguirre’s bedtime. As he worked his way through the dancers, Mingolla smiled and nodded to whoever caught his eye. ‘Lovely evening,’ he said. ‘Wonderful party.’ And then, pitching his voice so low that they couldn’t be sure what they had heard, he would add, ‘You’re gonna die,’ and smile more broadly. Debora was hemmed in against a table by a group that included both Ruy and Marina, and Mingotla insinuated himself into the group, stood next to her. ‘Where’s Tully?’ he whispered.