Stone Shadow Read Free Page B

to be any more heroes. (Of all the ridiculous damn excuses!) Stop and think—from the time the big mushroom cloud billowed below the bomb bay of the Enola Gay we hadn't had too many heroic images. The post—Jack Armstrong years of atomic comic television had seen the last of the heroes.
    Even real heroes and media darlings like the vegetable hero Chavez, or the fire hero Adair, they'd never been elevated to the status of the heroic personas we once believed in as a nation. Remember the old war heroes like Stillwell and Chennault and Audie Murphy? Imagine a heroic image coming out of the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. We wouldn't be checking out any movies called Huey Doorgunner over Ben Hoa or Danang Diary . The closest we could get was Stallone or Norris in some Mittyesque/Revenge/Guilt-for-the-MIAs scenario. Good night, Chesty.
    Why was it so all-fired important that the heroes had vanished? The astronauts, the last legitimate hero personas, they seemed to evanesce in the dissipation of Skylab jokes. Who did kids look up to—some faggot rock star with about a gram of snort shoved up each nostril? A pro athlete with one hand on his scrapbook and the other on his $497,000 contract? The heroes had vaporized in the shock waves. And Eichord's core, filled with the detritus of midlife, covered with the eluvium from the Force 17 hurricane of time and technology, fought for air and went down for the third time.
    “Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room ... “Lee had chastized him, “You're still on the job. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent?"
    I got news, Jimmy old darlin'. Check it out. A hundred fucking percent of zero is zero. Besides that, you wily little Oriental son of a bitch, you scrutable old bastard, you shouldn't hang around me if you can't take a joke, Eichord thought, and reached for the comfort of the half-pint of black Jack he now carried with him. It'll all work out, he thought. Or it won't.

Dallas
    O nly one of the first three got a look at him. Yolanda de la Cruz never saw him. She was worrying about her long black, shiny hair looking terrible and windblown when he took her out. She was twenty-two. Formerly Miss Watermelon of Dilly, Texas, where watermelons are no joking matter, and by any standards quite gorgeous. Schlepping her books around the agencies in the Dallas area, getting a good deal of midrange work. Modeling Conventions. The usual stuff. This could be good. It was a call from MG GRAPHICS. Mark Gold to do this print thing for Patio Foods. It was one of Mark's three biggest accounts and she had her fingers crossed as always. This could be the biggie.
    “Do we gotta have the window shot, honey?"
    “We gotta have the window shot,” he assured her, climbing out the window and his assistant uncoiling cable and handing him the camera carefully as he squatted down on the hot rooftop. “Anything for the Patio account. Now, gimme the face, please, angel."
    She stuck her kisser out the window, at which point the wind blew a hunk of the long mane into her mouth as she said, “Maaaaarrrrrrrk! AAAAHHHH. SPAAAAAWWWW.” Spitting hair out and Mark fighting back a laugh as the young assistant left the corridor heading for the rest room, and the spitting sound the last audible noise Yolanda de la Cruz—workname Yolie Dale—would make prior to the moment of her neck being snapped. She was thinking a thought, cursing cocky little Mark Gold and his queen assistant and trying to spit the hair out of her lovely mouth when she felt herself unhinged. Yes. Unhinged. Dislocated. And suddenly her brain was feeding the oddest signals to her body, and her eyes were seeing from the strangest perspective as she blacked out and the killer picked her up as if she weighed five pounds instead of ninety-five and hurled her through the open window, which is all Mark Gold saw—a blur of woman flying out at him like Supergirl—and he was going