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"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best all lack conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-W.B. Yeats
"My energy's spent at last
And my armor is destroyed.
I have used up all my weapons
And I'm helpless and bereaved;
Wounds are all I'm made of –
Did I hear you say that this is victory?"
-Blue Oyster Cult
"Your ghost's in every room. I am not afraid."
-Too Much Joy
In the end, he saw Billy. Of course. He hadn't expected to see anyone else. I watched you kill yourself, he thought. A small part of him was mildly surprised that he was still capable of lucid thought.
"Maybe I'm not," he croaked in a voice that no longer sounded like his own. "Maybe... did you kill yourself? I don't really remember."
"No," said Billy. He pulled a chair across the floor – Len heard the whffff as it scraped the carpet – and sat down beside Len, hands resting on his knees. "Suicide's a sin, Len. God kicks your ass if you kill yourself, you know that. Kicks your ass and hands you over to the Prince of Darkness to keep kicking it for all eternity." He laughed then, a loud, booming laugh that filled Len's tiny, sick-sweet room.
"But you... I saw you. You died."
"I never said I didn't, Len. Use your head." Billy's gaze was far-away, fixed. Len wished his friend would look at him, just once. "You know who killed me? It was Private Frank D. Bruce. May as well have been. That guy's getting a thorough grilling in the sulfurous fires of Hell right now, you can count on that. Killing a superior officer? That's worse than suicide, in the Lord's eyes."
Len coughed, grimaced. It seemed he was always coughing, and every time is felt like some overenthusiastic chef was using a meat mallet on his ribs. "We did a bad thing, Billy," he blurted.
"A bad thing," Billy echoed. Len could not tell if it was a statement of agreement.
He barreled on. "It didn't have to be that lethal. Yeah, we wanted something perfect, but that..." He coughed, a huge racking fit that put screws into his temples. A clot of mucus landed on his already coated bedspread like a dead slug. Billy waited patiently, poised, his hands still resting lightly on his knees. There was something wrong with those hands, Len thought. "It was too perfect. We made something evil, Billy. We let evil run riot and now --"
"It wasn't evil," said Billy. Len thought of interrupting, but his years in the military were impossible to ignore. Interrupting a superior officer is worse than suicide in the eyes of the Lord, he thought wildly. "A man who shoots another man is evil; the bullet that strikes his heart is blameless." Billy paused, a slight smile curving his lips. "Do you know the name Paul Tibbetts?"
"He was the pilot of the Enola Gay," Len said.
Billy's smile grew. "Gold star!" he crowed. "Did you know he named that plane after his mother?"
Len did. "Wonder how she felt about that," he muttered.
Billy's look of surprise was genuine. He slapped the arms of his chair, and Len again focused on those hands. Still something wrong with them...
His thoughts were drowned out by Billy's burst of laughter. "You're what my old man would call 'a caution', Len. Yes, I wonder that, too. I wonder how she felt. But my point, Len – you mention the Enola Gay, and people react. You display it, some of them jeer and spit. But you say the name Paul Tibbetts, and they blink at you. They hate the plane and ignore the pilot. He had no moral qualms, by the way. Would've done it all over again, if he'd needed to. Slept like a baby the rest of his nights. There's a man I envy, Len." His voice was soft, musing. "Yes, I envy him like hell."
Len's head was whirling. Billy wasn't making sense anymore, and that frightened him more than anything had since the outbreak of the
(tenth plague o hallelujah)
superflu. "So... you're saying that Paul Tibbetts was evil?"
"I'm saying that evil is in the eye of the beholder, like truth and beauty and who gives a good blowjob. Are the scientists evil? They were just following orders. Was Vic Hammer evil? He married my daughter and treated her like a queen." Billy leaned forward, finally looking at Len. Len stared back, hypnotized. "Was I evil, Len?"
"N-no," Len spluttered. "Never you, Billy."
"There are those who would disagree with you," Billy said, still holding Len's gaze. "Prince, for instance. Our Mr. Redman. They would disagree violently. They would say that I caused millions, even billions, of deaths, whether by orders or by negligence. And here's the thing, Len, here's the ever-Christing kicker – they would be right."
Len could feel tears behind his eyes and was amazed at their existence. He thought he'd cried all the tears a body was capable of, but no, here they were, running down his temples and dripping into his ears. "But you're not evil," he said. Almost blubbered. God, he hated to blubber, he would not do that in front of his
(best)
superior
(friend)
officer.
"You are not evil. I'll blame the scientists and Vic Hammer and the germs, but I will not blame you or betray you." He shook his head, snapped it back and forth like a man in the throes of a seizure. "NO – I WILL NOT BETRAY YOU."
Those hands, those wrong hands, grasped his face. Len, his eyes closed, could feel the cool press of Billy's West Point ring on his left cheek and Billy's wedding band on his right. "Wait," Len said. "I gave those to Cindy. You can't have those rings, I gave them to your daughter. After you... after Private Bruce..."
He opened his eyes and was alone. The armchair was in the corner of the room, not beside the bed, and Billy was gone.
"Gone?" Len heard himself say. "Of course he's gone, he was never there."
That was a quote from something, wasn't it? Some old movie. That's going to bug me for the rest of my life, Len thought, and laughed shrilly. Suddenly there was nothing in the world as important as remembering the name of that movie, back from the days when the worst the world had to worry about was a crazy man with a pussy-tickling mustache and another man with a name that sounded like a kind of pasta, when even those slanty-eyed fishermen and the Enola Gay and Paul Tibbetts were far in the distance, where the superflu wasn't even a twinkle in the Devil's eye, that rough beast, as Yeats would say, or was it Yeets, slouching off to O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee die –
"The Philadelphia Story!" Len Creighton cried, hectic roses on his swollen, tear-streaked cheeks. And then, in what would prove to be his last words on planet Earth: "Fucking Katharine Hepburn!"
(On the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, Nick Andros awoke with a silent scream in his throat. In a sleeping bag in a New Hampshire meadow, Harold Lauder rolled over with a moan and an erection. And lying motionless in the Arizona desert, a man who was calling himself Randall Flagg smiled and stretched and had no dreams at all.)
Katharine Hepburn was likely dead. Len imagined that Paul Tibbetts was as well. More victims of the superflu, the science-fair project from hell. I'm going to join them soon, he thought with no real regret. But Billy... it didn't get him. He went his own way. There's that, at least. He took a deep breath, as deep as he could, and smiled a savage smile. Billy would have been proud of that smile.
By the time the sun rose in the morning, the breath was gone, but the smile remained.