We'd left the Basco Explorer behind. Boone started looking into the flames again. Amy was facing backwards and she let us know when the Whaler took off, headed for the shore. Spectacle Island was looking real big, the line of flames was breaking apart into individual bonfires, and the music was drowning out our motor.
The final approach was not smooth. Pieces of debris kept fouling our propeller. Fortunately it was soft, whatever it was, so the prop just chopped it up, coughed and kept going. Boone was leaning over the back of the motor to check it out when he almost got thrown out of the Zode by a boat's wake. Some jerk-offs had just shot by us in a small boat with a big motor, and now they were swinging around for another pass.
"Hey," Amy shouted, "alright, Chris!"
"Chris is too young for you, and he's actually a jerk," Bart said.
Two or three times a year, I got to hear one of Bart's relationships fall apart.
"Maybe you're too old," Amy suggested. I was watching that fast boat. For a second I was afraid it was Laughlin himself. But asshole pere must have had other items on his dance card this night; Laughlin's awful son had tracked us down.
He'd brought his pals, maybe the same ones we'd seen before. The roar of their motor didn't drown out the sound of their laughter as they saw us wallow around in their wake. That was so much fun they came by for another pass, and another, and another. I could think of any number of ways to inflict injuries on them. For example, the Al Nipper approach: I took an empty Guinness bottle, of which we had several, wound up and drew a bead on Chris's head. But Boone caught my arm as I was about to throw.
"Why throw garbage at them," he pointed out, "when we can steal their motor?"
Within five minutes we were on the decomposing shore, doing exactly that. Laughlin had bought himself a real nice one, a Johnson fifty-horse, and also coughed up a couple of full gas tanks for us. With this rig we could really haul ass. We mounted it on the Zode and then we left our ten-horse sitting in the bottom of Laughlin's boat. They'd neglected to bring their oars. I would have been happy to maroon Dad on this mound of trash, but the son deserved some sympathy.
We did most of this without lights, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. So when I was standing thigh-deep in the water, lifting our old ten-horse off the transom, I could tell that the bottom half of the motor was greasy and slippery, but I didn't know why. When we dumped it into the bottom of the other boat, Boone checked it over with his flashlight and whistled.
Our motor was splattered with a lot of gore that had been thrown up by the propeller. Wet, fishy-smelling gore. Chopped Up fish, as a matter of fact.
Once we got it running, we took the Zode around to a deserted stretch of beach and left it there. No point in allowing
these people a glimpse of a free, fast ride. We went slow, and aimed our lights into the water, which was full of dead fish. HARBOR OF DEATH. It made sense. The fish would get the PCB bug in their guts just like humans did, and they'd get sick and die in the same way.
Boone and I hiked back across the island toward the northern shore, toward the party. Bart and Amy were already there. It would be impossible to find them again, but that was okay. Bart was a survivor.. Finding a way back to Boston would be as easy for him as getting out of bed in the morning.
We walked slow; on Spectacle Island you never knew what was going to poke up through the sole of your shoe. Eventually, though, we crested a junk-heap ridge with a smokey, fiery halo and looked down on the festival.
Three hundred people, give or take, twenty bonfires and a dozen kegs. There was also a garbage party-someone had brought a garbage can and people had dumped into it whatever alcoholic stuff they'd brought with them, creating a mystery punch. And a fire hazard.
And I finally got to see the Satan worshippers. A dozen of them. Their black leather was somewhat more bizarre and expensive than that of the average fan. They were up on the hillside, standing in a circle, working their way through some kind of ritual that involved torches and large knives.
The big knives weren't too dangerous compared to the cheap revolvers that half of the guys on the beach were probably carrying, and a few spells and incantations didn't worry me as much as the Basco Explorer. But we swung around them anyhow, since a few grams of PCP could make anyone feisty.
Sometimes, they said, drugs led to possession. Then you had to get yourself an exorcist. The exorcist would come and call out the name of the evil spirit, and that would scare it away. This was all it took-no surgical operations, no chemicals, not even much of a ritual. I figured I was in a similar business. I stood in front of the TV cameras and called out the names of corporations. I lacked the power to do much more than that, but it seemed to be pretty effective.
Dolmacher had called out fiasco's name earlier today. If I could find some kind of evidence under this barge, it would establish a link in my theoretical chain of events, and I, too, could call out their name. It wouldn't bring down Basco, maybe, but it would probably ruin Alvin Fleshy. And Laughlin would really be pissed.
33
BOONE AND I WANDERED straight through the party and over to the barge. Down by the shoreline, Boone kicked a couple of dead fish out of the way to establish his footing. Then I climbed up on his shoulders and got a handhold on the top of the barge. That got me over the top and then I helped him in.
There wasn't much here. The barge was made to carry some kind of dry, bulk cargo-coal or corn. It was divided up into garage-sized compartments that were open on top, and you could get around between them on catwalks that ran on top of the partitions. The Satanists had been here with their goddamn spray cans and labeled the whole thing with various kinds of nonsense; there was a HEAVEN sign with an arrow pointing toward the bow, and a HELL sign pointing to the stern. Right now we were in the middle, and it was labeled EARTH. Different compartments had been labeled with the names of different demons, or something, and little shrines had been put together in some of them, using household junk gathered from the island.
EARTH or HELL was the place to look. I didn't expect the transformers to be located in HEAVEN. When Basco had dumped them back in '56, they wouldn't have had any reason to drag them way up the slopes of the island. They'd have dropped them at the waterline, or below it, and covered them up. The impact of the barge might have dragged a few of them uphill, but not far.
We gave it a once-over to begin with, walked down all of those catwalks and aimed our flashlights into the compartments. If we were lucky we'd find something obvious. The Poyzen Boyzen cult had made a mess of things, covered up a lot of shit, but this was a big barge and a small cult and they couldn't screw up the whole thing.
A whiff of cool wind came in from the north, bearing that nauseating smell. I hadn't smelled it since we'd landed. Apparently it wasn't coming from the island at all. Maybe it was coming from the reactions going on in the Harbor: rotting fish added to its usual delicacies. There was a strong overtone of putrescine, which I hadn't noticed before; maybe someone had found my cache of the stuff and poured it into the sea.
Actually, it came from the compartment below my feet, where three mutilated corpses were sprawled on the floor.
They'd been there for a few days. The blood was brownish-black, and they looked a mite puffy, about to burst the seams of their black leather pants.
"Boone!" I said. He was with me in a few seconds. We squatted, like archaeologists looking into a burial pit, and observed in totally rude fascination. But after a couple of seconds, he began shining his flashlight on the walls of the compartment.