Part 12 (1/2)
He grabbed her hand and led her through the maze of unused products. Little voices whispered to them, advised them, soft-sold them. They leaned too heavily against a column of canned fruits, sent it cras.h.i.+ng into another column of gla.s.s containers full of heavy syrup. Gla.s.s shattered, sending syrup splattering the walls and other boxes. Syrup oozed out of the carton, spread across the floor, a quarter of an inch of it. A half inch. An inch.
”Let's get out of here,” she said.
”Agreed.”
They made their way through the cartons, bottles, plasti-containers to the living room. With their new perspective, they could now see that it was a room crammed with far too many couches and chairs with walls far too cluttered with art prints, many of them exactly the same. The woman was still on the floor, still unconscious but beginning to moan her way out of darkness.
”What do we do?”
Mike ran his hand over the arm of the chair. ”We get into the aura and wish ourselves somewhere else.”
”But now that we're out, can we use the nether world to teleport? We didn't wish ourselves there. We Faded Out and ended up in it.”
”We can try. Maybe now that we've used it once, now that we've been through the other dimension-”
”Back to the Appalachian shelter?”
”We can always do that later,” he said.
”Where, then?”
He pulled her into the chair with him. ”To Show studios,” he said. And they were gone.
Chapter Eight.
The technicians in the shelter studios listened carefully to their instruments and watched-with awe-as the two ghost figures on the stage, the two, almost invisible smoke forms, continued to broadcast hate even though they seemed to have no body or brain to use. People were still turning off. The huge board was mostly dark. And the ghosts went on, hating...
Chapter Nine.
The aura s.h.i.+mmered brightly in the corner of Andrew c.o.c.kley's office. He had just stepped from under it. His face was white as a fish belly. ”Someone is jamming it!”
”The viewers are tuning out,” one of the intent young men at the makes.h.i.+ft desk reported. ”By the millions!”
A gray-haired man stepped forward from the bookshelves. ”There's no telling how much mental damage this self-hate thing has done already. There will be many people, raised on self-love by Show, who will collapse under it. And those who do survive it with their minds intact will never tune into Show again. If they think the Performers really hate them so violently, they will lose confidence in us.” There was no particular desperation in the man's voice, merely resignation.
”It is the Appalachian shelter that's broadcasting,” one of the young men said firmly.
”Very bright,” c.o.c.kley scowled. ”I know what's causing it. Find that d.a.m.n shelter!”
”We're trying, sir.”
And they were.
The van moved more swiftly now. The studios were only a few blocks away. They would ram down the stage door with the reinforced front of the bus, pull inside before disembarking. Every man in the line was wearing a seat belt. Every man in the line was afraid.
Pierre looked across the aisle at Nimron, winked. Nimron looked back, turned to the other men. ”We'll teach them a few lessons tonight, boys. You are in on the making of a new world. There was a book once called Brave New World Brave New World, but it was a bad world. Most of you are familiar with it. We are creating a Brave New World of our own. But I promise you it will be a good world. d.a.m.ned good!”
Pierre admired the speech. Nimmy was good at that. Nimmy would make their mission a success.
Success and failure.
There was a thin line between those two things. He was bathed in thoughts of a girl lying in a casket. A closed casket. Then the casket was being shoved into a flaming mouth that ate it. The ashes were few. A small bottle. It was in the pocket of his fatigues right now.
”Arm straps!” the driver shouted back at them.
They grabbed for the loops of leather, slid their arms through them, hanging like so many crucified Christs against the metal wall. Pierre looked out the front window. The door was directly ahead. It appeared to be simu-wood. They veered to the left, flashed around shrubs, wobbled back to the right again. They hit the door. Wooden slabs sprayed to the left and right. The van kept moving through the lower floor of the building, cras.h.i.+ng through racks of props and onto a broadcasting stage where technicians and two Performers were fighting to overcome the jamming.
The doors of the bus opened. They went out, guns drawn, before any of the Show people could think that a van full of armed men did not belong there. Pierre held a vibra-beam in one hand, a stunner in the other. The technicians and Performers were stunned. Little narco-darts filled the air, biting into thighs, arms, chests, b.u.t.tocks. The effect was almost instantaneous; they began dropping like flies, collapsing across machines and one another. A guard stepped around the corner of the main transmitter, fired. The shot took the face off the Revolutionary next to Pierre. Pierre fired back, had the satisfaction of seeing the other man spill intestines and undigested dinner onto the floor before he toppled forward to lie in his own mess.
After only a few moments, there was no more action, no more shooting. A half dozen corpses lay on the floor, three of their own men and three of the Show guards. Bad odds. They had to do better than man-for-man. The enemy outnumbered them to begin with. The stage, however, was secured. The unconscious bodies of technicians and Performers were scattered about, the slight rise and fall of their chests the only indication they had not been slaughtered.
”Floor by floor, according to plans,” Nimmy said.
Floor by floor, upward. Sealing off all escape.
Pierre led his group of four men to their appointed sector. Their job was to clean out the left wing of the building, moving from floor to floor via the left wing elevator. On the first floor, they narco-darted more than they killed, for their victims were merely young men and women, future executives who were scurrying this way and that on errands for their respective bosses in an effort to please so that they might not be swallowed by the monster called Show but ride, instead, upon its shoulders. He hated them for Rita. But the orders were to kill only those with weapons, only the guards.
When the elevator doors hummed open at the third floor, there were two Show guards waiting to go down. Their silver and black uniforms were spotless, the silver braid over the right shoulder sparkling under the wash of the ceiling lights. Pierre fanned his vibra-beam at them before they could draw their own. One had both his arms torn off, his chest seared and cracked. The other went spinning, round and round, losing little parts of himself-a finger, a hand, and one eye. The remains, a jigsaw man with missing pieces, crashed to the floor, wiggled a moment, and lay very still.
”Oh, my G.o.d!” one of the men gasped.
”They would have done worse to you,” Pierre snapped. ”They have have done worse to many!” done worse to many!”
They lost a man on the fourth floor.
Every fifth floor, there was a rendezvous of groups at the central elevator. Nose counts on the fifth floor showed that five had been killed. They were now an even dozen, since three had been wiped out in the initial landing. An even dozen. With twenty-five floors yet to go.
”Don't worry,” Pierre said. ”Those who were killed so far were the softest ones. Survival of the fittest is the law here. The rest of us are better fighters and will have a much better chance of making it. In fact, I should be surprised if we lost another man before we reach the last floor.”
They all knew it was hogwash, but they all agreed.
”Okay,” Nimmy said, ”see you in five floors.”
They moved up.
Mike and Lisa popped out of the aura of a monitor's console resting on a platform slightly above and to the right of the main stage. What they saw below a.s.sured them that the Revolution was going on, that Nimmy and Pierre and all the others had been here and moved on, were, indeed, somewhere overhead fighting their way to the uppermost story.