Our defense was pure instinct at first, hand — and footwork, dirty, minus intellect or any emotion but fear. Our minds hadn’t functioned since Micky made That Noise.
Here’s a little redhead coming at me, knife held low and pointed up. Kick him before he gets too close, kick him anywhere. Groin’s good. Get him under the chin and break his neck, but he’ll probably cut your leg before he does. And don’t just hurt him, kill him. Pain doesn’t stop these kids. Watch it! There’s another.
They came in waves ten feet apart, and they didn’t stop coming. Death was all they wanted — ours or theirs. Mortal wounds and broken bones only slowed them down a little. Kids’ bodies lay heaped three feet high around us like a wall. All of us were bleeding. This went on and on.
And all this bitter time they yelled shrill ferocity in glass-cracking, searing, mind-crushing, impossibly unending ultra-treble tones more agonizing than knives and more shuttering than fear — a million-throated irresistible loud cry of driving madness. Even their voices were weapons.
The first one to snap out of it was Harriet, our group’s outstanding lover of children. Suddenly she remembered that we didn’t have to do it this way. She swept the charging wave with submachine gun fire, and did it again and again. Her face was soaked with tears.
The rest of us remembered. Now we attacked with terrible weapons. And we got them all. We made darn sure of that.
But when it was finally over, we couldn’t find Little Micky’s body.
27
I THREW the last small body overboard and it didn’t splash. Our starboard corpse pile now rose well out of the water — quite impressive — and our portside pile rose even higher. I hadn’t realized we pacifists could be such dangerous animals.
I rather liked being dangerous. A taste for it was growing in me.
The operation we’d just finished — the kindergarten kamikaze horror — had left the grass on the Tripsmobile roof in a sorry state. It was all bloody and scruffy, but especially bloody, and I wondered whether I should send the grass out to be dry-cleaned or just sit back and pray for rain. I mean, I was glad to know that the beautiful children we’d been slaughtering weren’t Earth kids at all but two-hearted aliens with incomprehensible genitalia, but that didn’t ease my bloody grass problem. And I’d always been so proud of The Tripouts’ touring sun deck, too.
That nice warm chemical euphoria — quite depleted by the last campaign — was beginning to rise in me again.
Otherwise there wasn’t much going on. That is, nothing was trying to kill us just then. On the other hand, Sean was making butterflies again, far superior to his Saturday productions, and Sativa was wreathing them in enriched and augmented rainbows, all of which spoke well of Sativa and Sean.
I wondered — this was a time for wondering — what was going to become of our heaps of unearthly cadavers. Not a chance in the world they’d escape being noticed, jutting bizarrely up in the middle of what ought to be a plain, uncluttered New York City reservoir. And the moment anyone at all saw just what kind of bodies we’d collected in these monster midden heaps of ours, every breed of entertaining hell would pop loose from Manhattan to Helsinki — a prospect I looked forward to with blandly anarchistic glee. (All of which was based upon the rattletrap assumption that the lobster gang would not complete Phase Two.)
And then I regrettably wondered what effect this interstellar carrion was having on our water. Some days it just don’t pay to wonder.
Michael the Theodore Bear and the rest of our jolly band were nervously trying to reconvene the interrupted strategy meeting. Michael was peevishly enduring mild administrative hangups.
“Sean,” he sighed, “Sativa: can’t you let that wait till we get home?”
I thought they were rather pretty, but I guess Michael was right. The Reality Pill seemed to have some unexpected aphrodisiac effects.
“Gary,” with theatrical patience, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Fishing?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. In fact I… Andy! How in God’s name can you sleep at a time like this?”
“Sleep? I wasn’t asleep. I was only…”
“…resting your eyes,” Mike completed wearily.
I might as well join the party. “Dear friends and fellow killers,” I proclaimed hoarsely, “henceforth the only water I shall drink is bottled spring water. This city water’s just too rich for my blood. Otherwise, what’s happening?”
Michael shrugged. “Nobody’s attacking us,” he conceded.
“Groovy! Let’s attack.”
And so much for strategy meetings.
Mike pulled the bus up on the beach and cut the motors. Hush! Suddenly the world was a very quiet place. I had forgotten quiet.
I could feel my ears stretching out to catch the nice, informative little noises they had been deprived of for so long. From the poleaxed look on Kevin’s face, I gathered that the stretching effect was moderately visible.
“What are you staring at,” I inquired pro forma.
“Me? Oh — nothing. I’m not staring at your… I’m not staring. Honestly!”
“Bigot.”
The beach had undergone some monumental changes. It had been brutally plowed over by countless extraterrestrial catastrophes. The tail of my quick-frozen friend, the Sensitive telepathic snake, cut diagonally across it to pass out of sight among the battered willows. Little Micky’s forgotten cannons had churned the sand up with too many pounds of futile high explosives. Ktch’s grab bag E.T. army had decorated the beach with scattered chunks of totally inexplicable litter. Unimaginable violence had scrawled its complex signature on what, a mere few hours ago, had been a paper-smooth and more or less deserted little beach, leaving it looking very like the children’s sandbox in Washington Square.
And Michael, like a mother hen in master sergeant’s clothing, was trying to maneuver our courageous band of flipped-out volunteers into something approximating orthodox platoon formation. But chemicals euphoria was having comically disastrous effects on martial discipline.
Everyone was suddenly exclusively concerned with his own Thing. (Come to think of it, so was Mike.) Andrew Blake had conjured up what could pass for the ghost of Henry James — barring unsuspected gaps in Andy’s memory — and was trying to get it to teach him how to write dirty books in pure 1890’s florid high style; but the ghost of maybe Henry James, concerned more with the subject than the style, insisted on asking blunt, unflorid questions that made Andy blush from beard to brow and rendered him extravagantly useless for Mike’s purposes.
Gary the cupiditous Frog and Harriet were happily projecting millions of enormous diamonds — but Gary’s looked suspiciously like paste. Consistency is such a charming accident!
Sativa was walking insecurely fifteen feet up in the air and looking unsure whether to enjoy the sport or cry. Karen was building a scale model of the Pyramid of Cheops in vanilla halvah. Sandi was assembling separate but equal layettes in dusty pink and blue, suggesting she might well be pregnant after all.
Leo was also constructing a scale model, Rodin’s “The Kiss,” out of a greenish-brown substance that looked like Persian hashish. Pat and Stu were removing gobs of this strange substance just a bit less quickly than Leo could put it on, while arguing in unknown tongues both seemed to understand.
Sean and Kevin were playing a lively game of anti-anti-missile missile, using genuine miniature anti-anti-missile missiles, with the score, while I watched them, pretty loudly tied.
What the hell? I put up a double of the Wanamaker organ and tossed off a few bright choruses of The Carman’s Whistle. Like they say: if you can’t run your tongue across them, merge with them.