Part 33 (1/2)

The young vet pulled on his Levi's jacket and settled his steel hat on his crew cut head. ”It's only a few blocks from here. I don't know about you, but I am am gonna do something about it.” He led a rush toward the lift cage. gonna do something about it.” He led a rush toward the lift cage.

Grabowski would have shouted, No, wait, don't go! You must leave this to the authorities-if brother begins fighting brother, the forces of disorder will have won. But speech was denied him.

Because he was as furious as the rest, and fearful, for he alone had seen firsthand the consequences of this revolution revolution everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might. everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might.

His fingers had sunk into the steel as if it were the soft sticky paste Americans called ice cream.

He was himself marked with the mark of the Beast.

Mark pa.s.sed the rest of the day in a strange haze compounded of l.u.s.t, hope, and fear. He missed the word from Kent State. While the rest of America reacted in horror or approbation, he spent the night locked in his apartment with a plateful of cookies, poring through his papers and well-thumbed books on LSD, taking out the acid tablet, turning it over and over in his fingers like a talisman. When the sun was weakly established in the sky a transient surge of resolution made him pop it in his mouth. A quick slug of flat orange soda pop washed it down before nerve could fail him again.

From his reading he knew acid generally took between an hour and an hour and a half to kick in. He tried to slide past the time by flipping from the Solomon anthology to Marvel comics to the Zap Zap comix he'd accrued in his pursuit of understanding. After an hour, too nervous to await the drug's effects by himself any longer, he left his apartment. He had to find Sunflower, tell her he'd found his manhood, had taken the fateful step. Also, he was afraid to be alone when the acid hit. comix he'd accrued in his pursuit of understanding. After an hour, too nervous to await the drug's effects by himself any longer, he left his apartment. He had to find Sunflower, tell her he'd found his manhood, had taken the fateful step. Also, he was afraid to be alone when the acid hit.

Finding Sunflower was always like tracking a flower petal kicked about by the breeze, but he knew she gravitated toward UCB, which had long since replaced the moribund Haight as the locus of hip Bay Area culture, and she worked spasmodically at a head shop near People's Park. So, at about nine-thirty on the morning of May 5, 1970, he wandered into the park-and straight up against the most spectacular confrontation between aces of the entire Vietnam epoch.

For one brief s.h.i.+ning moment, everyone-Establishment and enemies alike-knew the time had come for fighting in the streets. If the revolution was coming, it was coming the time had come for fighting in the streets. If the revolution was coming, it was coming now now, in the first hot flush of fury following the Kent State ma.s.sacre. Bay Area radical leaders had called a mammoth rally that morning in People's Park-and not just the police forces of the Bay Area but Ronald Reagan's own contingent of the National Guard had turned out to take them on.

By a quarter to ten the police had withdrawn from the park, establis.h.i.+ng a cordon sanitaire cordon sanitaire around the campus area to prevent conflagration from spreading. It was just the kids and several deuce-and-a-half trucks spilling National Guardsmen in battle dress and gas masks from under their canvas covers forty meters away. With a loose clattering squeal and diesel chug, an M113 armored personnel carrier pulled to a halt behind the line of fixed bayonets, treads chewing at the sod like mouths. A man in captain's bars sat stiff and resolute in the cupola behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, wearing what looked like a Knute Rockne football helmet on his head. around the campus area to prevent conflagration from spreading. It was just the kids and several deuce-and-a-half trucks spilling National Guardsmen in battle dress and gas masks from under their canvas covers forty meters away. With a loose clattering squeal and diesel chug, an M113 armored personnel carrier pulled to a halt behind the line of fixed bayonets, treads chewing at the sod like mouths. A man in captain's bars sat stiff and resolute in the cupola behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, wearing what looked like a Knute Rockne football helmet on his head.

Students ebbed from the green line like mercury from a fingertip. They'd been shouting to bring the war home; like their brothers in Ohio, it seemed they'd succeeded in doing just that. The Guard was regularly called in to break up demonstrations-but the boxy, ugly shape of the APC represented something new, a note of menace even the most sheltered couldn't miss. The crowd faltered, buzzing alarm.

Into the s.p.a.ce between the lines a single figure stepped, slim in black leather. ”We came to be heard,” said Thomas Marion Douglas, his voice pitched to carry, ”and we're d.a.m.ned well going to be be heard.” heard.”

Behind him the crowd began to solidify. Here was a superstar-an ace-taking his stand with them. Across the bayonet hedge the eyes of National Guard troopers flickered nervously behind the thick lenses of their masks. They were mostly young men who'd joined the Guard to avoid being drafted and sent to 'Nam; they they knew who was facing them. Many owned Destiny records, had Douglas's haughty features staring down from posters on their bedroom walls. It was harder, somehow, to use bayonet or rifle-b.u.t.t against someone you knew who was facing them. Many owned Destiny records, had Douglas's haughty features staring down from posters on their bedroom walls. It was harder, somehow, to use bayonet or rifle-b.u.t.t against someone you knew knew, even if it was only as a face on a record jacket or in a photo spread in Life Life magazine. magazine.

Their captain was of sterner stuff. He barked an order from the cupola. Tear-gas guns coughed, a half-dozen small comets arched down around Douglas and among the crowd surging up to join him. Billows of thick white smoke, CS gas, hid the singer from view.

Taking a shortcut through an alley, Mark had managed to miss the police lines. At this moment he emerged to a perfect sideline view of his very own idol standing with smoke swirling around him like a medieval martyr at the stake. He stopped and stared openmouthed at the confrontation shaping up before him.

The acid kicked in.

He felt reality's collagens dissolve, but the scene before him was too intense for hallucination. As the stiff morning breeze tattered the curtains of gas, a man standing with legs braced and fists raised appeared, auburn hair streaming back from a broad face that somehow flickered, interspersed with the head of a giant cobra, scales gleaming black, hood extended. The Guardsmen drew back; the Lizard King was in their midst.

The King moved forward in a sinuous glide. Uniforms gave way. Someone jabbed at him with a bayonet, or maybe just didn't back off quickly enough. A flick of the wrist, seeming lazy and disdainful but delivered with superhuman speed, and the rifle went spinning away as its owner stumbled backward to the gra.s.s with a yelp of terror. The captain in his iron box shouted hoa.r.s.ely, trying to pull together the fraying strands of his men's determination.

But as he a.s.sumed his Lizard King aspect, Douglas loosed his mind games upon them; their eyes began to wander, seeking visions of desperate beauty or mind-numbing horror, each affected in his own way by the Lizard King's black aura.

The crowd was advancing now, chanting, shouting, menacing. The Guard captain did the only thing he could-his thumb pulsed once against the fifty-caliber's b.u.t.terfly trigger. The gun vomited noise to bust gla.s.s and a Volkswagen flame, streaming tracers over the protesters' heads.

Triumphant an eyeblink before, the crowd came apart in screaming panic. The noise of the shots struck Mark like a giant pillow and spun him backward along endless, twisting corridors. But the scene stayed before him, light at the end of a tunnel, terrible and insistent. No one had been hit by the burst, but the protesters, like Mark himself, had come up for the first time against the reality their prophet Mao had tried to impress on them: where power comes from.

Tom Douglas was standing so close that muzzle-flash singed his eyebrows. He didn't flinch, though the noise struck him with a force a truckload of speakers couldn't match. Instead he met it with a roar of his own that sent Guardsmen tumbling like frightened puppies.

A prodigious leap and he stood on the upper deck of the APC. He bent, grasped the gun's barrel, heaved. The heavy Browning came away from its mounting like a sapling torn up by the roots. He held the weapon above his head, both-handed, then with a single convulsion of shoulders and biceps bent the barrel almost double. Having displayed his contempt for the Establishment and its war machines, he tossed the ruined machine gun after the troopers, now in full rout, and bent forward to pluck the now-terror-stricken captain from the cupola by the front of his blouse. He held the man up before him, legs kicking feebly.

And was struck down from behind by a blow driven with the full awesome strength of an unknown ace.

Mark snapped. With a shriek his soul vanished into swirling dark. His body turned and blindly ran.

Wojtek Grabowski saw the sinister serpent figure in black leap onto the APC and tear the weapon from its mountings and knew it had been the right choice to live.

Only devout Catholicism had stopped him from throwing himself to his death. He'd hurried from the site-already deserted as the workers rushed to attack the demonstrators-and home to his cramped apartment to a nightlong vigil of misery and silent prayer.

With dawn had indeed come Light; and he knew with a warm rush that his ace affliction was divinely sent, a blessing not a curse. Revolution threatened his adopted home, led by those who'd sworn allegiance to the forces of darkness. He had washed, dressed, made his own way to the park with peace in his heart.

Now he was confronted with a beast that seemed to have many heads, knew that he was face-to-face with the hated Tom Douglas himself.

Fury blasted into him. The ace transformation overtook him, bulking his muscles hugely to fill his baggy clothes to the bursting point. The steel hat of his profession was on his head, a yard-long pipefitter's wrench in his hand. Lingering doubts about using his strength against normal humans vanished; here was an enemy worthy of him, an ace, a traitor-a servitor of h.e.l.l.

He raced forward, vaulted onto the vehicle even as the snake-headed creature in black plucked its commander from the hatch. Students cried warnings Douglas didn't hear. Hardhat raised his wrench and struck at the back of a head now bushy-haired, now black and glabrous and obscene.

The blow would have pulped the skull of a normal human, or torn his head from his shoulders. But the constant s.h.i.+fting of Douglas's appearance confused Grabowski's aim. The blow glanced off. Douglas dropped the squirming officer and slumped bonelessly off the vehicle as momentum carried the wrench downward to buckle the aluminum top-armor like tinfoil.

Thinking he had killed him, Grabowski felt strength ebb. He needed rage to stay in the meta state, but all he felt was shame. Desperate, he turned to face the crowd. ”Go home,” he shouted in his hoa.r.s.e, harsh English. ”Go home now, Is over. You must not fight no more. Obey your leaders and live in peace.”

They stood and stared at him with sheep's faces. Morning dew had sucked the tear gas down into it and poisoned the gra.s.s. A few white CS tendrils writhed on the ground like dying snakes. Tears streamed down Grabowski's face. Wouldn't they listen? Wouldn't they listen?

From the rear of the crowd a young man shouted, ”f.u.c.k you! f.u.c.k you, you mother f.u.c.kin' fascist! f.u.c.k you, you mother f.u.c.kin' fascist!”

To have that epithet thrown at him, a man who still carried fascist bullets in his flesh, by some spoiled, insolent, ignorant puppy-anger filled him in abundance, and with it that inhuman strength.

Fortunately for him, because about then Tom Douglas got his wits back, jumped to his feet, grabbed the Hardhat by the ankles, and yanked his boots out from under him. Grabowski's helmet struck the deck like a giant cymbal. Every bit as furious as the man who'd taken him down, Douglas caught him as he fell, slammed him against the side of the vehicle, and began to piledrive blows into him with his own ace strength.

But Grabowski too had more than human durability. He dragged his wrench up between their bodies, thrust Douglas violently away. Douglas's feet slipped once on the wet gra.s.s, he caught himself with serpent agility and lunged forward to the attack-only to check himself and go up on tiptoe like a ballet dancer while a savage two-handed swipe of the wrench whined within an inch of his abdomen.

Douglas dove inside the wrench's deadly arc. He grappled his opponent, slamming punches in under the short ribs. Grabowski took a quick step backward, put a hand on Douglas's sternum, and pushed. Douglas fell back a step. The wrench lashed out, and this time only Douglas's metahuman reflexes saved him from catching it square in the front of his skull.

The tool-steel beak raked his forehead. Blood cascaded. He backpedaled furiously, wiping his eyes with one hand while the other thrashed about in an attempt to ward the following blow.

Hardhat swung his wrench like a baseball bat and took Douglas under the right arm with a sound that echoed through the park like a grenade explosion. Douglas went down. Hardhat stood over him with legs spread wide, raising the wrench slowly above his head like a headsman preparing the stroke. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth. He was berserk, beyond compunction, beyond compa.s.sion, devoid of anything but the need to smash his opponent's skull like a snail on a rock.

But even as the gleaming blood-dripping wrench started down, a golden chain wrapped around it from behind and stopped the blow before it was launched.

With a fighter's reflex Hardhat instantly relaxed his arms, allowing his wrench to travel in the direction the sudden restraint pulled. Then he snapped the weapon forward and down, spinning as he did so to throw the entire augmented weight of his body against the slack. But as he moved, a houlihan rippled down the chain and it loosened, so that the wrench slithered free with a musical sound. Motion unchecked by expected impact, Hardhat spun around completely, staggering forward, continued through another half-turn so that he faced his opponent across five meters of muddy, trampled earth.

A youth stood there, slender and tall, golden hair falling to his shoulders, dangling a saucer-sized peace medallion of gold on a long chain. Despite Bay-morning chill he wore only a pair of jeans. To the short, dark Grabowski, he looked like nothing so much as a figure stepped from a n.a.z.i recruiting poster.