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| | ==Text 2== | | ==Text 2== |
| − | | + | *Blond = Dayna, Xenia, Ohio |
| − | The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State
| + | *Kent State = Susan Stern, tötet Ronnie mit Kopfschlag (Shotgun) |
| − | sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun's
| + | *Crouch Grabber = Patty Kroger, 17, schön |
| − | crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest,
| + | *2 Überlebende = Shirley Hammet (alt, vor Dayna dabei, Pointblank verfehlt) + unbekannt (katatonisch, Mitte 30, Archbold) |
| − | Dayna said, was Shirley Hammet. They didn't know the name of the other woman,
| + | *3 Tote: Rachel Carmody (mit Susan zusammen), Helen Roget (von Ronnie erschossen) |
| − | who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al,
| + | *Dayna mit Richard Darliss und Damon Bracknell, 8. Juli; bei Williamstown geschnappt |
| − | Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days
| + | *Susan und Rachel Carmody 17. Juli bei columbus |
| − | before.
| + | *Patty (zusammen mit Mann ~50) 22. Juli |
| − | The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just
| + | *getötet: alte Frau, 16jährige mit Strabismus für Katatonische getauscht, |
| − | west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and
| + | *29. Juli: sehen Stu und Co, Garvey will Fran (wäre Ersatz für Shirley gewesen) |
| − | Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned
| + | *Dayne und Helen beschließen Wagemut (Helen jedoch Pille) |
| − | pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer
| + | |
| − | like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high
| + | |
| − | and still wet from the previous night's rain, had soon soaked their pants. White
| + | |
| − | butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with
| + | |
| − | moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-
| + | |
| − | eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn't made it yet; it was a
| + | |
| − | bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from
| + | |
| − | horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already,
| + | |
| − | wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and
| + | |
| − | their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought
| + | |
| − | dazedly. If we don't watch out, they'll peck us right off the face of the earth.
| + | |
| − | Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that
| + | |
| − | they were.
| + | |
| − | Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the
| + | |
| − | melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid
| + | |
| − | morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her
| + | |
| − | mind. The woman's face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. ,Stu falling
| + | |
| − | over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man
| + | |
| − | crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold
| + | |
| − | plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man's
| + | |
| − | pistol. Susan Stern's primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of
| + | |
| − | her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.
| + | |
| − | Glen walked beside her, his thin, rather sardonic face now distraught, his
| + | |
| − | gray hair flying wispily around his head as if in imitation of the butterflies.
| + | |
| − | He held her hand, and he kept patting it compulsively.
| + | |
| − | "You mustn't let it affect you," he said. "Such horrors . . . bound to occur.
| + | |
| − | Best protection is in numbers. Society, you know. Society is the keystone of the
| + | |
| − | arch we call civilization, and it is the only real antidote to outlawry. You
| + | |
| − | must take . . . things . . . things like this . . . as a matter of course. This
| + | |
| − | was an isolated occurrence. Think of them as trolls. Yes! Trolls or yogs or
| + | |
| − | affrits. Monsters of a generic sort. I accept that. I hold that truth to be
| + | |
| − | self-evident, a socioconstitutional ethic, one might say. Ha! Ha!"
| + | |
| − | His laugh was half moan. She punctuated each of his elliptical sentences with
| + | |
| − | "Yes, Glen," but he seemed not to hear. Glen smelled a trifle vomitous. The
| + | |
| − | butterflies banged against them and then banged off again on their butterfly
| + | |
| − | errands. They were almost to the farmhouse. The battle had lasted less than a
| + | |
| − | minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by
| + | |
| − | popular demand inside her head. Glen patted her hand. She wanted to tell him to
| + | |
| − | please stop doing that, but she was afraid that he might cry if she did. She
| + | |
| − | could stand the patting. She wasn't sure she could stand to see Glen Bateman
| + | |
| − | weeping.
| + | |
| − | Stu was walking with Harold on one side and the blond girl, Dayna Jurgens, on
| + | |
| − | the other. Susan Stern and Patty Kroger flanked the unnamed catatonic woman who
| + | |
| − | had been picked up in Archbold. Shirley Hammet, the woman who had been missed at
| + | |
| − | pointblank range by the man who had imitated Roger Rabbit before he died, walked
| + | |
| − | a little way off to the left, muttering and making the occasional grab at the
| + | |
| − | passing butterflies. The party was walking slowly, but Shirley Hammet was
| + | |
| − | slower. Her gray hair hung untidily about her face, and her dazed eyes peered
| + | |
| − | out at the world like frightened mice peering out of a temporary bolthole.
| + | |
| − | Harold looked at Stu uneasily. "We wiped them out, didn't we, Stu.? We blew
| + | |
| − | them up. Scragged their asses."
| + | |
| − | "I guess so, Harold."
| + | |
| − | "Man, but we had to," Harold said earnestly, as if Stu had suggested things
| + | |
| − | might have been otherwise. "It was them or us!"
| + | |
| − | "They would have blown your heads off," Dayna Jurgens said quietly. "I was
| + | |
| − | with two guys when they hit us. They shot Rich and Damon from ambush. After it
| + | |
| − | was over, they put a round in each of their heads, just to make sure. You had
| + | |
| − | to, all right. By rights you should be dead now."
| + | |
| − | "By rights we should be dead now!" Harold exclaimed to Stu.
| + | |
| − | "It's all right," Stu said. "Take her easy, Harold."
| + | |
| − | "Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his
| + | |
| − | pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the
| + | |
| − | wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both
| + | |
| − | hands like a lollypop.
| + | |
| − | They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively
| + | |
| − | as he ate his candybar-had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very
| + | |
| − | sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet
| + | |
| − | himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high
| + | |
| − | gear.
| + | |
| − | | + | |
| − | - - -
| + | |
| − | | + | |
| − | Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some
| + | |
| − | picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely
| + | |
| − | beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched
| + | |
| − | herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammet
| + | |
| − | sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.
| + | |
| − | Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell.
| + | |
| − | How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had
| + | |
| − | seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked
| + | |
| − | the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about
| + | |
| − | "having business in the desert."
| + | |
| − | By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad
| + | |
| − | dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten
| + | |
| − | the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He
| + | |
| − | had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other
| + | |
| − | three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for
| + | |
| − | Rich's sanity. He called the dreamman "the hardcase" and said he was getting an
| + | |
| − | army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west
| + | |
| − | and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of-the
| + | |
| − | world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of
| + | |
| − | slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own
| + | |
| − | dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion.
| + | |
| − | In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a
| + | |
| − | large dump-truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a
| + | |
| − | station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.
| + | |
| − | "We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna.said, crumbling a graham
| + | |
| − | cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we
| + | |
| − | were supposed to think."
| + | |
| − | They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dumptruck, and
| + | |
| − | that was when the four hardcases-to use Rich's word-opened up from the ditch.
| + | |
| − | They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the
| + | |
| − | fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the
| + | |
| − | harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammet, who at that
| + | |
| − | time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped,
| + | |
| − | sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said,
| + | |
| − | "when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into
| + | |
| − | the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from
| + | |
| − | her rectum for three days."
| + | |
| − | "Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?"
| + | |
| − | "The man with the shotgun," Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish he
| + | |
| − | was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again."
| + | |
| − | The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and
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| − | Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the
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| − | flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemism
| + | |
| − | for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on
| + | |
| − | to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and
| + | |
| − | hanging looters who didn't. By the twentyseventh of June, Doc had told them, the
| + | |
| − | chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their
| + | |
| − | own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the
| + | |
| − | citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks
| + | |
| − | and jewelry stores.
| + | |
| − | By June 30, the unit was gone-its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and
| + | |
| − | Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they
| + | |
| − | had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of
| + | |
| − | July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar
| + | |
| − | little club to further memberships.
| + | |
| − | "But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said.
| + | |
| − | Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammet who spoke to this.
| + | |
| − | "Pills," she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the
| + | |
| − | fringe of her graying bangs. "Pills every morning to get up, pills every night
| + | |
| − | to go down. Ups and downs." Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely
| + | |
| − | audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.
| + | |
| − | Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women,
| + | |
| − | Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the | + | |
| − | party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the
| + | |
| − | wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or
| + | |
| − | to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the
| + | |
| − | pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks
| + | |
| − | for travel; reds for recess.
| + | |
| − | "I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc
| + | |
| − | to hand out the pills," Susan said matter-of-factly. "The daytime pills, I mean.
| + | |
| − | By the third day I had abrasions on my . . . well, you know, my vagina, and any
| + | |
| − | sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because
| + | |
| − | all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm.
| + | |
| − | Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn't seem to matter after you got yourself
| + | |
| − | wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your
| + | |
| − | hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap
| + | |
| − | and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey
| + | |
| − | got mad because this one girl, she couldn't have been any more than twelve, she
| + | |
| − | wouldn't do. . . well, I'm not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey
| + | |
| − | blew her head off. I didn't even care. I was just . . . calm. After a while, you
| + | |
| − | almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was
| + | |
| − | those blue pills."
| + | |
| − | Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.
| + | |
| − | But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said.
| + | |
| − | When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been
| + | |
| − | traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of "the
| + | |
| − | zoo" for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been
| + | |
| − | picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot
| + | |
| − | and left in a ditch. "Doc used to joke about it," Patty said. "He'd say, `I
| + | |
| − | don't walk under ladders, I don't cross black cats' paths, and I'm not going to
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| − | have thirteen people traveling with me.' "
| + | |
| − | On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first
| + | |
| − | time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the
| + | |
| − | four of them passed by.
| + | |
| − | "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie
| + | |
| − | shuddered.
| + | |
| − | Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clear
| + | |
| − | whose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at
| + | |
| − | Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers. | + | |
| − | "That poor woman," Frannie said.
| + | |
| − | "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Or
| + | |
| − | maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party-both she and Helen
| + | |
| − | Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit
| + | |
| − | overconfident about the trailer-overturned-in-the-road bit. Doc would just act
| + | |
| − | like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met-when there were men-
| + | |
| − | just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm."
| + | |
| − | "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on.
| + | |
| − | "They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and
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| − | we knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into the
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| − | road and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it were
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| − | Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget . . . one of the girls Ronnie shot back there.
| + | |
| − | And me, of course. Helen said, `If they catch us trying to spit the pills into
| + | |
| − | our hands, they're going to kill us.' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway,
| + | |
| − | sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that
| + | |
| − | was tine. So we did it."
| + | |
| − | "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It was
| + | |
| − | starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked at
| + | |
| − | Dayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she was
| + | |
| − | so slow."
| + | |
| − | Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie
| + | |
| − | uneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella."
| + | |
| − | "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time I
| + | |
| − | will." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You. know, that's half
| + | |
| − | of what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting."
| + | |
| − | Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had
| + | |
| − | no right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's much
| + | |
| − | prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she's
| + | |
| − | pregnant.
| + | |
| − | "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die."
| + | |
| − | Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt
| + | |
| − | a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went
| + | |
| − | and did it, I went and waited too long.
| + | |
| − | She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded
| + | |
| − | way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief.
| + | |
| − | She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold,
| + | |
| − | and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.
| + | |
| − | Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!
| + | |
| − | Never?
| + | |
