Armageddon Crazy

NINE

Winters

WInters was coming back from the showers. the marks on his body had not completely faded, but after being buffeted around in front of the building all day, he needed to wash the smell of the mob off him. He had decided to drape a towel over himself and take the chance that no one would notice the welts. The new prudery had dictated individual shower stalls when the center had been designed, but a lot of the men were inclined to share a naked, towel-snapping camaraderie. Winters had never appreciated that kind of horseplay and tended to keep to himself. If anyone had noticed, they had not reacted. He had washed quickly, dried himself and dressed in his sweat suit with the logo of the Twenty-first Street Gun Club on the back and his English Reeboks and started out for a cup of coffee and something to eat. After his shower, he was in a considerably better mood and he was even looking forward to checking out the C As in the commissary.

The particular section of corridor was deserted. It was still as brightly lit as any other part of the complex, but the emptiness was eerie. So when the figure came around the corner like something supernatural, Winters was startled. For a fleeting instant, he thought he was confronting the Black Knight. The man was built like a defensive end and wore full assault armor and a command helmet with the neck ring computer. His visor was down, and not a single insignia or identifying symbol could be seen anywhere on his uniform or equipment. He was carrying a large and very elaborate hand weapon down by his side. As he came closer, Winters saw that it was one of the legendary, state-of-the-art Taidos, calibrated for heatseekers. Its plastic shielding gleamed as the figure walked by. It was in mint condition. Winter had not thought there was a piece like that outside the Japanese military.

He had walked about three paces when a voice called out from behind him.

"Hey, you!"

Winters froze. The voice was coming through one of the same distortion devices that had been used in the basement of the whorehouse. Winters slowly turned.

"Me?"

"You dropped this."

The figure was holding a small folded slip of paper in one of his thick armored gloves. Winters blinked.

"I did?"

The figure held out the slip of paper. "Take it, it's yours."

Winters took the paper. The figure turned on its steelshod heel and walked away. Winters stared after it. It made no more sense than a visitation from Mars. Without thinking, he unfolded the paper.

Call from a pay phone.

Winters could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise. It was the signal. The Magicians wanted him. He was not sure why it had been delivered with such a splendid show of force, but he was completely impressed and not a little scared. He quickly refolded the paper and, concealing it in his hand, hurried for the locker room and his street clothes.

He walked three blocks from Astor Place before he started looking for a pay phone. Somehow calling from right outside the CCC complex did not seem appropriate.

The first phone he came across was broken. It had been smashed by vandals. The slogan "There will be a cleansing of the temple " had been scrawled across the coin box. He walked on and found a pair that looked as if they were in working order by the entrance to the subway on Lafayette. A couple of drug-addict types were lurking by the phones. They seemed to be waiting for one or both of them to ring. As Winters walked up, they looked at him suspiciously, held a fast, muttered conversation, and moved off. Winters quickly keyed in the number. It rang four times and then a machine answered.

"Repeat this phrase for voice identification."

Winters waited for a few seconds before realizing that that was the phrase that he was supposed to repeat. He felt a little ridiculous as he mouthed the words into the mouthpiece. "Repeat this phrase for voice identification."

There were a series of pulses on the line. His voice must have passed the test, because a second tape was activated.

"Be on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street at four forty-five a.m. tomorrow. Wear dark, serviceable clothes. You will be picked up."

The message repeated once and stopped. Winters slowly hung up. He was in. They were going to kill Carlisle, and he was to be part of the team.

Kline

It was five-fifteen in the morning and the phone was ringing. Cynthia Kline jerked awake with the reflexes of someone trained to expect trouble at all times. She snatched for the handset from inside the cocoon of blankets. Harry Carlisle muttered in his sleep.

"If it's for me, I'm not here."

"Hello." Her voice was neutral and tentative.

"Cynthia?"

"Who's this?"

"It's Laura at C86. We're having a panic here. Can you come in?"

Cynthia groaned. "Do you know what time it is?"

Laura did not sound too pleased with Cynthia's response. "I know what time it is. I've been here all night. This is important."

"Okay, okay. I'll get there as fast as I can."

She sat up in bed but hesitated before she turned on the light. She had to do something about Harry. She was not comfortable with the idea of leaving him alone in her apartment. She was confident that there was nothing glaring that would give her away in a routine search, but it was a different matter having a trained detective hanging around there. They got impressions from random patterns, things that other people did not even see. No matter what she felt about him, he was still a cop.

As she shook him gently by the shoulder to wake him she felt bad. He had looked so exhausted when he had finally showed up around one-thirty, and even now he had been asleep for less than two hours.

"Harry, wake up. The office called, and I have to go in."

Harry Carlisle blinked. He did not seem to be quite sure of where he was. "What office?"

"I just got a call from C86. They're having some sort of emergency and they want me to come in."

Harry yawned. "C86 doesn't have emergencies. It's just a bimbo pool for the deacon brass."

Cynthia glared at him. "That's a fucking sexist remark."

"That's probably the first time the phrase 'fucking sexist' has been heard south of the Canadian border in a coon's age. Besides, you told me yourself that it was a bimbo pool, or as good as. I think you were being a little more ladylike at the time."

Cynthia didn't know whether to blush or go white. She'd made a bad slip. Only someone who had recently been out of the country, where they still used phrases like that, would call something 'fucking sexist'. His mention of the Canadian border was too close to home. The best she could do was to give him a defiant look. "Sometimes I revert."

"I'm glad to hear it."

He did not seem to want to pursue it. She lit a cigarette.

"Listen, Harry, I guess I ought to get going."

"And you figure that I ought to get going, too?"

"I didn't say that. Really, if you – "

"Nobody wants someone else alone in their apartment."

The more he came awake, the more he seemed to grasp the situation. He started to climb wearily out of bed. Cynthia felt bad.

"You don't mind?"

"Hell, no. I need to go back and get a clean shirt."

"You want some coffee?"

Carlisle shook his head. "Just give me a cigarette. I'll go straight to bed when I get to my place and sleep until somebody demands that I get up."

He was gathering his clothes.

Winters

Winters was on the corner of Twenty-sixth and Broadway fifteen minutes before the appointed time. He was all but dressed for a commando raid in a black nylon windbreaker, a black rollneck, black sweat pants, and running shoes, not his expensive Reeboks but a pair of beat-up Converse All Stars. All he had in his pockets was a compact 9mm automatic and a hundred dollars. He had left all of his identification back in his room, just to be on the safe side.

There was a definite chill in the air, but the way that he jogged on the spot, like a fighter warming up for the ring, was more from nervous energy than cold. A helicopter – it sounded like a Cobra – rattled overhead. Winters stepped lightly back into a doorway. He did not want to be seen by any kind of authority. He looked too much as if he was on his way to commit a crime, which, in some respects, he was. As the sound of the chopper faded, he emerged onto the sidewalk again. He peered anxiously up Broadway, but the early-morning streets were deserted. There were just the cardboard boxes in which the vagrants nested. One had a small garbage fire going in front of it.

There was the tiptap of high heels behind him, coming down.Twenty-sixth Street. It was a woman, walking unsteadily. At first, he could only see her in silhouette, but when she came into the glow of a lighted street lamp, her spandex pants, sequined tube top, and exaggerated shoes told him immediately that she was a prostitute, probably one of the bottom-rung street women who tried to scratch a living among the cardboard-box people. Her makeup was smeared, and she was having trouble focusing her eyes. It was obviously the end of a long evening. When she saw Winters, she increased the swing in her walk.

"You're up late."

Something really had to be done about the number of whores in the city and the shamelessness of their behavior, Winters thought. It seemed that, each time he looked, there were more of them, in more blatant states of seminudity. A serious crackdown was needed.

"What's the matter? Lost your voice?" She stopped in front of him. "Feel like a blow job to go to bed with?"

Winters eyes bugged out of his head. "I – I'm not going to bed."

It had taken him a second to gird his moral authority around him.

The prostitute shrugged. "So call it breakfast. Only cost you fifty."

There was a car coming down Broadway. Winters hissed at the woman. "Go away."

She planted her hands on her hips and looked drunkenly belligerent. There was a flower painted on her right cheek. "It don't cost nothing to be polite."

The car was close. The headlights were just two blocks away.

"Will you get out of here!"

Still she did not move.

"Who in hell do you think you are?"

The car went straight past. It was the wrong one. The prostitute was on a roll, her voice rising in pitch and volume.

"Think you own the street or something? What gives you the right to tell me what to do?"

A couple of vagrants were peering from their boxes. Winters wanted to tell the whore that if she did not shut up, he would arrest her. Of course he could not do that. He considered pulling out his gun and shooting her, but that would create its own set of problems. With the Magicians due at any minute, he had to content himself with vague threats.

"If you don't get away from me, you'll regret it."

"Oh, yeah? Who's gonna make me? You some kind of big shot, or do you just have fun threatening women?"

"I'm warning you…"

"Don't be warning me, Jack. If you're so fucking righteous, how come you're out here at five o'clock in the morning?"

"You tell the bastard, Bernice."

Now the vagrants were joining in. Winters took a step toward the woman. At precisely that moment a black van came wheeling into Broadway out of Twenty-eighth Street, running the lights in a shriek of tires. It came straight at the corner where Winters was waiting and squealed to a stop. The side rear door slid open and an electronically distorted voice echoed from the dark interior.

"Get in."

The face of Bernice took on a look of horror. "It's fucking Dracula."

Winters scrambled inside. The door slammed, and the van accelerated away.

"What were you doing, Winters? Hiring on a little entertainment while you were waiting?"

The distorted electronic laughter was reminiscent of the sounds in an old-time video parlor. There were four other men in the back of the van, sitting on bench seats. They were dressed pretty much like him, except their heads were encased in the same visored helmets that had been worn at the first meeting. Their voices came through the same distorters. They all had.60 Mossbergs cradled in their laps. The nearest man indicated that Winters should sit down on an empty stretch of bench. Another Mossberg and a helmet were passed down to him.

"Take these, Winters."

The helmet was identical to the others except that it was a dull gray. He was clearly the novice on this job. He put on the helmet and dropped the visor.

"Test the distorter."

"One, two, test."

He sounded like the others. With the visor closed and the heavy Mossberg gripped in his fists, he experienced a sense of power greater than anything he had ever known. This was why he had joined the service. He was an anonymous and vengeful angel dispensing justice and death. These really were the final days.

There were no introductions. "Okay, Winters, listen up. I'm only going to say this once. This is your first mission, so you keep quiet and strictly run backup. You understand?"

"I understand."

He was cut down to a very junior avenging angel. The Magician went on.

"We are going to park outside an apartment building on Thirty-eighth Street. The woman Kline lives there. In ten to fifteen minutes, Carlisle will come out and we will take him. Alive. We want him alive. That is crucial."

"What about Kline?"

"We leave her alone, for the moment."

The driver was in a separate, partitioned front section. The partition was also used for racking a redscope and a heat surveillance scanner. The Magicians seemed to be able to get the best and most advanced hardware. After driving for about ten minutes, the van pulled over to the curb and stopped. The Magician in the blue helmet turned on the redscope. It showed a wide-angle view of a deserted street. "Now we wait."

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle let himself out of the front door of Cynthia Kline's building, wondering about his chances of getting a cab so early in the morning. He had left before Cynthia, giving her a few minutes alone to get ready for work. He could not imagine what they were up to at Astor Place, calling her in at this hour. At first, he did not notice the black van. There was no reason why he should – it was just one more in the line of parked cars at the curb. It was only the sound of the rear door being wrenched open that made him turn and look at it. When the five armed men jumped out, his first thought was that it was a particularly elaborate mugging. Then he saw the visored helmets and the weapons that they carried, and he realized that it was something much more sinister and much more exclusively directed at him. He was still warm from Cynthia's bed and a little sleepy. He clawed for the.357 under his arm, but his reactions were slow. His fingers touched it, but suddenly there were five Mossbergs pointed at him. The voice was like that of a robot.

"Take your hand away from the gun, Carlisle, or we'll blast you where you stand."

The fact that they knew his name confirmed his worst suspicions. It was a deacon death squad. Pure terror clutched at his guts as he raised his hands.

They were all around him. The Magnum was removed from its holster. Hands grabbed him and threw him headfirst onto the hood of a parked car. His hands were pulled roughly behind him and a pair of old-style steel handcuffs were clamped onto his wrists. They were locked too tight, and the metal cut painfully into his wrists. With his arms immobilized, he was carried to the black van and thrown inside. He finished up on his knees on the floor of the van. The interior was loaded with high-tech snooper equipment, but he was given no time to look at it. They were far from finished with him. One of his captors grabbed the chain that linked the cuffs and pulled his arms hard up behind his back. The chain was clipped to hook into the roof of the van, and he was left hanging, knees bent and head thrust forward. The pain was excruciating. His hands were going numb, and his shoulders felt as if they were being dislocated.

The pain became even worse as the van started to move. He had no way of stopping himself from swinging from his wrists each time the van braked or made a turn. Five blank black visors looked down at him, masking the wearers' expressions. All he could see was his own reflection, made grotesque by the curve of the visor. He could not even tell from which of them the robot voice was coming.

"We're going to mess you up, Carlisle. You've caused a lot of trouble, but now we're going to mess you up. There's no one to help you, and no way that you're going to crawl out of this."

One of them pushed him with a booted foot to set him swinging even more. His arms felt as if they were on fire.

"Yes, Carlisle. We are going to mess you up very profoundly."

Winters

Since no one had told him, Winters had no idea where he was or where he was going. At one point the sound of the tires had changed briefly. He had assumed that they were going over a bridge, probably to Queens or Brooklyn. They had taken Carlisle very easily, and now Winters' hated enemy was hanging in front of them, handcuffed and helpless. There would be no more of his smart mouth and subversive attitudes. All the small humiliations that Winters had suffered at his hands would be paid for a hundred times over. The best part was that Carlisle did not have a clue as to who was doing it to him. Winters laughed silently behind his visor. I'm going to watch you die, you bastard, he thought. I'm actually going to watch you die.

They drove for just over a half hour, then made a turn and started bouncing on an uneven surface, probably a dirt road or a parking lot. Sweat stood out on Carlisle's face. The idea that the man was in pain and no doubt terrified out of his mind filled Winters with a deep satisfaction that was almost a sense of freedom. He was free to go all the way with his hate. Previously there had always been limitations. He had only been a small component in the machine that dispensed justice. Here it was an angry, face-to-face justice, a cruel ancient justice where a righteous man could relish the hurt and the death of his enemy. There was a power growing inside him. Jesus Christ, he was looking forward to this.

The van stopped and the door was opened. They were in a parking lot, long abandoned, overgrown and full of potholes. It was empty but for the remains of a long-dead tractor trailer rusting away amid dark weeds and drifts of garbage. They seemed to have come to an industrial wasteland in the depths of God knew where. Rotting skeletons of buildings were on three sides of them, and the air stank of black water, decaying chemicals, and clogged drains. A drab, gray, overcast dawn was just breaking. Winters smiled to himself. He thought that to Carlisle it probably looked like one of the outer circles of hell – and, indeed, it might prove to be exactly that. They undipped Carlisle from the hook and manhandled him out. One of the Magicians had walked away across the derelict parking lot. He was opening a door to one of the more substantial ruins. A light shone out, orange amid the general gray. They carried Carlisle toward it.

The interior of the ruined factory was a place of towering shadows, collapsed gantries, and loops of impossibly thick steel chains, red with rust. The first pale light of the day was creeping through the holes in the roof. Rats scuttled in the twisted falls of masonry. The massive bulks of forgotten machinery were scattered, as if by the hands of some giant child. There was a pool of bright electric light, and within that luminous circle everything had been made ready in advance. There was a single, low stool set directly under the light. On a table to one side, surgical instruments had been laid out beside a small hand-cranked generator. There were also undisguised instruments of torture: a metal and plastic reverb helmet; a length of steel cable, frayed at the end, that could be used as a whip; a number of clamps; an electric branding iron. Above the stool, there was a pulley system of ropes and chains. A large rubber sheet covered the floor of the area. A single helmeted figure presided over the ad hoc dungeon. As the men from the van entered, he greeted them with a strange finger and thumb hand signal.

Even the torturers' creature comforts had been taken care of. On a second table there was a coffee machine and a tray of plastic-wrapped sandwiches. Three robot camcorders were standing silent, waiting to be activated to record the event for posterity.

Carlisle was placed on the stool under the light. He made no sound, but his eyes were closed and his hands were an ugly mottled red. There was something strangely anticlimactic about the moment, a lull in the ceremony before the next act got under way. The Magician in the gold helmet, who once again seemed to be in control of the proceedings, nodded to the prisoner.

"Take off the handcuffs."

The Magician in the blue helmet moved forward and unlocked the manacles. Carlisle gasped as his wrists were freed. He started to massage his hands. To Winters' surprise, the Magician unfastened the straps of his gold helmet, pushed back the visor, and eased the whole thing over his head. It was Senior Deacon Spencer.

"Remember me, Carlisle?"

Carlisle said nothing. Spencer pushed his fingers through his hair. He took a pack of cigarettes from his field jacket and lit one. Very deliberately, he walked to the table and poured himself a cup of coffee.

"We have a lot of time. You're going to die very slowly, Carlisle. When they find you, I want you to be a major example to the others."

One by one, the other Magicians took off their helmets. Winters' surprise continued. There was Rogers, Gleason, Proxmire, and a man that he did not know. Their faces were smug, as if they shared a secret. Winters was the last to reveal himself. He was not sure about the way the others looked at him as he took off the plain gray helmet. He was very conscious that he was the rookie and that they were waiting to see how he would make out on his first job. They probably hoped that he would make a fool of himself, that he would break down or throw up or something.

Spencer seemed to be aware of his nervousness. "Winters."

"Yes, sir?"

"Strip the prisoner."

Winters stood rooted. The idea of taking off any other man's clothes revolted him. The fact that it was Carlisle made it ten times worse.

"Did you hear me, Winters?"

The others were starting to smirk.

"Yes, sir."

He took a deep breath and advanced on the seated Carlisle. Carlisle did not resist him, but he also did not do anything to help. As Winters was unbuttoning his shirt, his eyes opened and he muttered in a rasping voice, "Are you enjoying this, boy?"

Winters did not think. He simply lashed out in a flash of discharging tension and slapped Carlisle open handed, hard across the face. Carlisle swayed on the stool.

"I told you to strip him, not beat him up," Spencer snapped.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry."

Spencer looked at the others. "You all better remember this. I don't want his face damaged. He has to be recognizable."

Carlisle's clothes were finally removed. Winters stepped back.

"The prisoner is naked, sir."

Spencer nodded. "So I see."

He turned to Rogers. "I think we'll put the reverb helmet on him."

"Yes, sir."

The reverb helmet in its primitive form supposedly had been invented by the Chilean secret police during the Pinochet era and had quickly spread to law enforcement agencies in South and Central America and even ones as far apart as Haiti and Iran. Originally it had been a simple steel headpiece that caused the victim's own screams to ring deafeningly in his ears. The modern version was a good deal more sophisticated, using miniature electronics to amplify the sounds way past the pain threshold.

Rogers lowered the helmet over Carlisle's head and snapped it shut. Carlisle looked like the Man in the Iron Mask. The weight of the helmet bowed his head forward.

"We'll start by suspending him from his ankles. Replace your helmets and run the cameras."

Carlisle

The amplified sound of his own breathing roared in his ears. He could see nothing, and the noise was the whole world. Harry Carlisle had never known that it was possible to be so afraid. This was it. The unthinkable was starting. The worst part was that he was angry with himself. Back there on the street, he should have pulled out the gun and forced them to blow him away. He would have been spared what was coming. But he had not pulled the gun. The immediate, moment-by-moment impulse to self-preservation was formidable, and now it was too late. Something was being looped around his ankles. His feet were jerked upward. He toppled from the stool and grunted as he hit the floor. The sound inside the headpiece was like a thunderclap. He was being pulled up by the feet until his dangling fingertips cleared the rubber sheet. He could feel himself slowly turning. He had no idea where the pain would start and from what direction it would come. His whole body cringed.

Winters

Spencer seemed to take an absolute delight in what he was doing. He selected the first man. "Proxmire, we'll start with you. Is the branding iron fired up?"

Proxmire had the look of a man who had been through it all before. He nodded. Spencer smiled and closed his visor. Winters prayed that he would never see that smile directed at him.

"Confine your work to the skin around his armpits."

"Yes, sir."

"Activate the cameras."

Proxmire seemed in no hurry. He inspected the heated tip of the iron and walked slowly to where Carlisle hung upside down and naked like a side of beef. He put a hand on Carlisle's chest to stop the slow rotation of the body. Then there was a crack, and Proxmire's head burst in a spray of bloody mist.

They seemed to come out of nowhere. The first Winters saw of them was the muzzle flashes of their guns. Spencer went down, and less than a second later, Rogers was hit. There were dark figures rappelling down from the rusty overhead gantries, the chatter of automatic weapons, and indistinguishable yelling. The light over Carlisle shattered, leaving only the gray dawn to see by. Maybe a dozen of them were moving in the gloom. There was an explosion and smoke. Winters, under hostile fire for the first time, could not believe it. He froze. The chaos did not apply to him. The bullets would go around him. Then bullet spurts stitched the rubber sheet at his feet. He looked desperately for cover. He attempted to sprint to safety behind a corroded megalith of a machine, but he was cut off by another seam of bullets. He swerved and then realized that he could not go back. In terror he dropped to his knees. A figure – ski mask, night goggles, flak jacket, bare arms – was running at him.

"We're the Lefthand Path, motherfuckers!"

Winters raised the Mossberg and pumped the trigger. It stuck. The godforsaken safety was still on. He had never checked. He frantically flicked it. A rifle butt was coming at his head. The world exploded and was gone.

Carlisle

The pain still did not come. How long were they going to play with him? His muscles were starting to twitch uncontrollably. He was shivering. Then something warm spattered his body.

"What?"

His exclamation was almost a shriek, deafening him. There seemed to be noise beyond the headpiece, but he could not tell because his head was ringing so hard. Still nothing happened. Then hands touched him. He shuddered. It was the roar of the surf. He was being lowered, gently lowered, to the ground. His neck muscles could not support the headpiece, and it banged on the hard floor. He was in a nuclear explosion. Someone tried to remove the helmet without first turning it off. Triple nuclear explosions. Then they did it correctly, and the howling was only in his head. The helmet was lifted off. A face in a knitted ski mask was looking into his. He could scarcely hear the words.

"Just be calm. We're getting you out of here."

A hand was holding a syrette.

"We're going to give you a little shot."

A second face in a ski mask entered his field of vision. The first ski mask questioned it.

"Did we leave a witness?"

The second ski mask nodded. "Just one. We greased the rest."

"Good. Get something to wrap this guy in. He'll be out in a second."

Carlisle sighed. He was out now. He was drowning in a warm black lake, and he didn't give a damn.