The Triggermen - Chapter Twelve

There's something about 95 degree heat and 4.00/gallon gas that just makes it feel like the end of the world, doesn't it?

Just sayin'.

Chapter Twelve

The three-minute song ends and Boone is back in his own hotel room, sitting on the floor with the earphones in his ears. His heart hurts. He remembers reading somewhere how early medical examiners would carry a meat-thermometer with them and insert it into the liver of the corpse to estimate time of death. Whatever the temperature of death is, whatever its numeric value, the room around him is now in possession of that same cold and clammy feel. Outside the sky sprawls gray and slug-colored across the green afternoon earth like something waiting to be scraped up and thrown away.

Boone stares out the window, thinking of the reactor cloud from TMI.

Room 554.

He takes the doorknob and shakes it. It is still stuck shut. Except that these doors don’t lock from the outside. He puts his sock and running shoe back on his bloody foot and kicks it under the knob as hard as he can. There is a crash and the door springs open onto the hallway.

And like that, Boone is out.

The hall runs empty and silent in both directions. He glances at the chair that has been braced against the door from the outside, now lying on its side. The number on his door is 623. This means Andy is one floor down on the same wing. Boone starts walking, then pauses and goes back for the MP3 player on the table, holding it in his hand as he runs. He has no pockets in the running shorts he put on this morning, back when today was just another day to go jogging and play guitar.

The burgundy carpet seems designed for stealth, turning his footfalls into a muffled echo of his own heart. He heads for the EXIT sign, allowing himself only now to think about where he went when he listened to his brother, and what he saw there, the contraption labeled BOMB.

John Bard is using his brother to—

From down the hall, behind his back, a rush of sound: one voice echoing from down below. Without having to think, Boone recognizes Bard’s voice, his rolling, orotund baritone pronunciation and drawing-room diction making him sound like a combination of a preacher and an actor shilling sports beverages.

“…replace the vital fluids and electrolytes that your body has been deprived of and help hydrate you, just in case we do experience a temporary interruption in fresh drinking water. We’ve got enough for everyone, but you should all drink at least a glass to be safe.”

Boone turns and goes back the way he came. He passes the open door and the knocked-over chair and keeps going. Following Bard’s voice, he finds himself at the end of the hall, peering down over a railing and five floors down, into the hotel’s fountain lobby.

The lobby is a huge open space with clouds painted on the ceiling to simulate the illusion of open air. Down below Boone sees people gathered, at least a hundred, possibly two hundred, maybe more, families and business people, hotel employees, maids, hostesses and administrative staff. Boone sees hotel pastry chefs and masseuses, kids in blue jeans, women in cocktail dresses. In front of them, next to the fountain, John Bard is standing next to a large metal urn and stacks of paper cups. His men, the Triggermen—Boone finds he no longer has the slightest mental hiccup thinking of them as such—are lined up behind him at parade rest.

“If you could form two rows, one from the right, one from the left…”

Boone sees Mara and her mother falling in line. He sees Gregory, the security guard that had clubbed him. He sees a guy who looks like Jesus and a woman that looks like a famous fashion model, and a lot of normal people besides. The Triggermen shepherd all of them forward, silently herding the crowd into line as they fill cups with juice from the urn.

“We’ll all meet back here in an hour,” Bard is saying, “to discuss any further news and make plans for their night. I don’t want to create any unrealistic expectations but I will say that, at this point, from what I’ve heard, things seem to be going better than expected.”

There is a mingling of cheers, sighs and chatter from the crowd. Someone said, “God bless you.” With that, Boone watches them fill their cups, beginning to drink. He feels the words coming involuntarily to his lips.

Don’t do it.

Suddenly, Bard jerks his head upward. Whether he is looking at Boone or just a reflection on the high wall in Boone’s general direction, Boone doesn’t know. For an instant he freezes, hidden behind the balcony, awaiting Bard’s order to his men to open fire, but then Bard returns his attention to the group.

Boone turns around and moves back up the hall, passing the closed and silent doors. He passes his open door. He passes the knocked-over chair. He heads for the EXIT sign. The corridor is long and seems to take forever.

Andy.

Andyland—

The stairs are bare cement slabs, the air humid from pipes and climate control conduits running along the ceiling and walls. Boone runs down one flight and out the door through the fifth floor corridor. At the far end of the hall he sees one of the Triggermen standing with his back to him, the squared-off shoulders of the guy’s leather jacket turned the other way as he looks down on Bard and the rest of them in the fountain lobby.

Boone moves toward him, feet whispering. With every step he imagines the Triggerman turning around and seeing him. He finds he knows exactly what the man’s eyes will look like as he pulls out a gun and shoots him. They will be flat and silver, shiny as newly minted quarters, the kind so bright they almost look black if the light hits them at a certain angle. The rest of the face will be narrow and unimportant. It makes no sense that he knows this about a man he’s never seen, yet the visual is so strikingly clear in his head that Boone could describe it to a police sketch artist. It occurs to him now that, except for details of height and hair-color, all of John Bard’s Triggermen are identical.

Room 554 is up ahead to the left. There is no chair blocking its door.

He can already hear the whining noise through the door, and the worst kind of sour sensation fills his stomach, a nauseated cramp of dread. It’ll be locked, Boone thinks, and turns the knob.

It isn’t locked.

Inside, Andy sits in the middle of the room, round eyes unblinking. He is completely surrounded by open laptops. The Triggermen is playing on every one. Their screens blaze with a mosaic of fire and blood, tiling the room with violence in miniature. From every side Boone sees small, animated versions of John Bard at work. Bard is shooting, running, shouting, throwing grenades, the Triggermen behind him every step of the way. On one screen, he leads squads of animated Triggermen as they open fire on a suicide bomber in a city park. On another, they aim grenade launchers at desert training camps. Here, foreigners in homemade biohazard suits stuff anthrax in Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelopes. There, nervous, hollow-eyed Middle Eastern men squat on their haunches, dumping neurotoxin in a public pool. Cars crash into buildings. Planes slam into churches. Guided missiles swerve down school hallways. A man mowing his lawn grabs his throat and falls over coughing up a blood. A man bites into a cheeseburger and his eyes roll back in his head. Tourists on a Carnival Cruise ship cheer as John Bard grabs a canister of poison gas and flings it off the port bow. Grief-stricken widows and fatherless children sob as Bard opens his arms to comfort them. The Triggermen lay siege to Cinderella’s castle in Disneyland while terrorists trapped inside set a doomsday device to release poison gas into the stratosphere. John Bard rides a Harley through a burning mosque. John Bard fires a rocket-launcher through an angry mob. John Bard cuts a man’s head off with a fiery sword the size of a porn star’s cock. A swarthy man in a dingy sweatshirt swallows a condom full of nitroglycerine and jumps in front of a subway. Towers fall. Mushroom clouds bloom. A blinding firestorm sweeps over the Statue of Liberty, and a screaming comes across the sky, like God finally losing all patience with humanity.

“Andy—”

His brother doesn’t hear him. He sits dead-center in the middle of the laptops, big pink hands moving in the air just above his lap as if manipulating the strings of two invisible marionettes. The tiny screams, explosions, gunshots, squealing tires gabble around him from little laptop speakers, seeming simultaneously hold him riveted and not affect him whatsoever. His hands continue to twist and pluck at nothing.

“Andy.” Boone shakes his brother’s shoulder. “Andy.”

Andy shudders and spins around. “Boone? Jeez!”

“Shh,” Boone says, “it’s okay. We’re getting out of here.”

Andy’s face is pale and scared. He stares at the laptop screens as if noticing them for the first time. “I’m helping John Bard! I’m making—”

“I know.” Boone grips his brother’s shoulders, feels how hot he is. The blood from Andy’s face, from his mouth and nose, is dried down the front of his shirt. “I saw what you were doing, remember?”

“He needs me, Boone! When the terrorists get here, John Bard said we’re going to trap them in here and blow it all up.”

“Andy, these guys are the fucking terrorists.”

“But look.” Andy points at one of the laptop screens, where John Bard is carrying two children out of a burning playground. “He’s a good guy, Boone! See? He saved those kids! Look!”

“Where’s the bomb?”

“He’s good! He’s good!”

“Where’s the bomb, Andy?”

“It’s still…you know…” Andy’s eyes float away as if carrying a shameful secret. “That place we go.”

“It’s still there?”

Andy nodded once, almost embarrassed. “It’s not done.”

“How much longer?”

“I dunno.” Andy tried to turn back to the room full of laptops. “I gotta get back to the computers, Boone. I gotta—”

“No way.” Boone takes Andy’s arm and they walk out of the room, into the hallway, Boone limping, waiting for his brother to ask what happened to his foot, but Andy doesn’t say anything.

Outside he scans the hallway. The Triggerman who was looking over the railing is gone. The noise from below has stopped. Every noise has stopped. Boone realizes the whole hotel has fallen silent, except for the faint babble of the fountain in the lobby down below, the sound rattling off the tiles through the open air.

Boone limps back up the hall to the balcony overlooking the lobby and stares down. A slinking, sliding sensation passes through his insides and drops into his stomach with such weight that it makes his groin ache.

The bodies are everywhere.

They lay where they’ve fallen, men and women and children, pastry chefs and waiters and maintenance men, maids, desk clerks, administrative staff. Their bodies cover the lobby floor in what strikes him as a rough herringbone pattern, many of them still grasping the plastic cups that the Triggermen distributed to them.

Don’t look. Don’t look and you won’t see them.

It’s too late. He can’t look away. Not even when he sees the parents who still cradle their children so loosely in their arms. Not even when he sees the baby who looks like it’s asleep in its stroller but it was not asleep in its stroller. Not even when he sees the young husband and wife, her cheek nuzzled against his neck, newlyweds on their honeymoon. Not even when he sees the body of the small girl in the white halter lying next to her mother, eyes staring unblinkingly into space, and remembers how the girl came over to his condo twice a week to learn how to play Beethoven on the piano.

Boone feels punched in the throat. Breathing suddenly hurts, straight down to his lungs. He hears Andy lumbering up the hall behind him, his own gait far from graceful, sounding asthmatic and unwell, “Boone, what is it? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he mutters. He's going to be sick now. He's pretty sure of it. “Turn around, don’t look at it.”

“Why? What is it?”

Meeting his brother six steps from the balcony, Boone reaches up and places his hand over Andy’s eyes. His brother’s forehead feels full of sickly yellow heat. Something in Andy’s breathing is wrong and Boone realizes that it reminds him of how Andy sounded earlier when he was carrying him in the wheelbarrow, that phlegm-rattle that came from deep inside his chest.

“Are you all right?”

Andy doesn’t answer. The color lapses from his cheeks, leaving them a waxy gray, the color of candles nobody would ever buy unless they were a witch. “I don’t feel good, Boone.”

“Come on, we’ve got to go.”

“Where we going?”

“The other way, down the stairs. Hold my hand.” Boone puts his arm around Andy’s shoulder, guiding him to the EXIT sign at the far end of the hallway. Andy’s weight swaggers against him, his chest gasping for air, leaning harder with every stride. By the time they reach the stairs Boone is afraid Andy is going to lose his balance and go hurtling down the cement steps.

“Need a computer,” Andy mumbles, sounding like he hardly knows what he was saying. “I need a computer, Boone. A Blackberry at least. Can you get my computer for me? I gotta get back to the Triggermen. I gotta see…”

He sags and starts to fall.

“Andy. Cowboy up, my man.” Boone hoists up his brother under the arms and drags him down the stairs exactly the way he dragged him downstairs when they were kids. The ratio of weight to muscle-mass has stayed basically the same throughout the years. There are five flights of steps to the bottom. It is hard work and Boone is making himself count the steps before he realizes he has assigned every step a specific musical note. And here without warning is another childhood memory involving stairs. When he and Andy were kids their parents had taken them to the Boston Science Museum and Boone remembers the feeling of pure joy going up and down the musical steps, jogging up three steps and jumping down four, hearing the notes chime out, writing songs with his sneaker-clad feet. Now when he steps down he hears the new song coming to him, not just the melody but the rhythm as well, and with the next flight he hears individual instruments playing variations on the theme. With the next step come drums and harmony, backup vocals, keyboard fills, and that is how he realizes he has written a song in his head without even knowing it.

But he hasn’t really written it, had he?

The song followed him out of Andyland.

That’s where all his songs come from.

That place we go.

Getting to the bottom, the ground floor, he shoulders the door open and drags Andy into the corridor. The only way he knows to get out is through the fountain lobby. He walks backward, dragging Andy’s feet across the carpet, toward the bodies that lay at the far end of the hall. The cover everything and Boone has to step on some of them to get across and it is a terrible sea of clothing and flesh, soft and stiff at the same time, with the fountain gurgling in the middle of it. Occasionally he steps on one of the plastic cups and it gives a crisp little crack.

Through the windows, he sees late afternoon sunlight drifting over the hotel lawn. The light is orange on the grass, thatched with long, cool shadows that remind him of pictures he’s seen of Cape Cod. Seeing it Boone experiences a brief but agonizing pang of nostalgia for his life the way it was yesterday. If it’s possible to compact all the sadness of a lifetime into one moment, he feels that moment now.
He carries Andy toward to the door.

We’re going to get out of here, he thought dizzily. You and me, Andy, we’re going to find a doctor and make you better. I promise.

“Mr. Handler,” a voice says from above. “Hold it right there, if you please.”