Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts Read Free Page B

one's calling back. That'll impress her.
    Oh, hell, go for gold and let her put you out of your misery.
    "What's your name?"
    Without missing a beat she said, "Lina Wertmuller."
    Not just unfriendly, she thinks I'm an idiot. Well two can play that game.
    Sandy stuck out his hand. "Glad to meet you, Lina. I'm Henry Louis Mencken, but you can call me H. L."
    To Sandy's shock she lifted her head and laughed. He'd made a funny and she'd laughed . What a wonderful sound, even if he could barely hear it over the blasting music.
    And then the name of the group behind the song came to him: the Chambers Brothers.
    Suddenly—other sounds. Shouts, cries, screams, and people stumbling, scrambling past him in a mad rush toward the rear end of the car.
    "It's time now!" cried a voice. "Yes, it's time."
    Sandy turned and saw the Asian in the fatigue jacket standing before the door at the front end of the car. His black eyes were mad, endlessly, vacantly mad, and he clutched in each hand a black pistol that seemed too long and too thick in the barrel. Then Sandy realized they were equipped with silencers.
    Oh, Christ, he thought, shock launching him to his feet, he's going to start shooting.
    And then he saw the bodies and the blood and knew that the shooting had already begun. Images flashed through his instantly adrenalized brain as he turned to run—not everyone from the front of the car had made it to the rear; the first to be shot lay where they'd fallen…
    … like the Korean guy, maybe Sandy's age, with rust-colored hair and a Nike swoosh on his cap, sprawled on the red-splattered floor, facing Sandy with his headphones still on his ears, blood leaking from his nose, and black eyes staring into the beyond…
    … like the heavy black woman in the two-piece sleeveless gray suit over a black polka dotted white blouse with starched pristine cuffs, lying face down, still twitching as the last of her life ran out from under her wig and stained the copy of Rolie Polie Olie that had spilled from her Barnes and Noble bag…
    … or the others who'd hit the deck and now huddled and crouched and cringed between seats, holding up their hands palm out as if to stop the bullets, and pleading for mercy…
    But they were asking the wrong guy, because the man with the guns was tuned to some other frequency as he shuffled along the aisle, swinging his pistols left and right and pumping bullets through the silencers. Phut !… phut !… phut ! The sounds barely audible through the music as slugs tore into heads and tear-stained faces, sometimes right through the supplicating hands. He moved without the slightest hint of urgency, looking for all the world like a suburban homeowner on a sunny Saturday morning strolling his lawn with a can of herbicide and casually spraying the weeds he passed.
    And somewhere up there, up front, someone's bowels had let loose and the stink was filling the car.
    Brain screaming in panic, Sandy ducked and swung around and saw the GPM crouched behind his seat, facing the rear of the car, and he must have lost it because he was shouting something that sounded like, "Doesn't anyone have a goddamn gun?"
    Yeah, asshole! Sandy wanted to say. The guy standing in the aisle has two, and he's coming your way!
    Turning further Sandy came face to face with Lina or whoever she was and knew the naked fear in her blanched face must have mirrored his own. He looked past her at the rest of the screaming, panicked riders crammed like a mass of worms into the rear of the car, the nearer ones wriggling, kicking, biting, clawing to get further to the rear and the ones at the very back battling with all they had to stay where they were, and suddenly Sandy knew what the others had already discovered—that once you got back there you had nowhere to go unless you could find a way to open the rear door and jump onto the tracks at who-knew-how-many-miles an hour and hope that if you were lucky enough not to break your neck when you hit, you