A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 26 The Blue Fairy

Then abruptly we broke through and the world was blue again. We looked at each other in dazed surprise as the lemon sunlight poured through the cabin windows. We felt suddenly clean. We had risen into a fresh new sky, leaving behind everything that had happened in that other terrible pink place. I looked around and saw nervous smiles. Like me, they wanted to giggle at the wonder of it all-we were still alive.

"We got away, didn't we?" Valada whispered.

The question didn't need an answer. I put my hand on the glass and gazed out at the beautiful new sunlight. It was so easy to be grateful for little things.

Below, the world was a vast pink carpet, spreading out in gentle puffs toward a crisp horizon. Directly below us, though, there was an unholy orange glow coming from deep beneath the surface. Even as it cleansed, it looked evil.

How far would it spread? It didn't matter. That world was dead already. Think of it as an interesting ecological experiment and put it out of your mind-it's just another weapon to use against the pernicious Chtorran infestation.

We floated up to the top of that incredibly bright blue sky. I checked my watch. It was barely nine-thirty. It was all happening much too fast

The plane made two passes. The first time, the pilot didn't like the angle and circled around to catch us from a different direction. The second time he caught us. The skyhook snagged the cable, slid up to the connecting harness, clicked into place, and triggered the release of the lifters. The cable tightened and we were yanked across the sky.

It took them a while to reel us in. The pilot had to stay high above the clouds, keeping his air speed as slow as possible, while he tried to avoid buffeting us like a sack of potatoes dragged across a cobblestone road. Mostly, he succeeded-but we were still grateful when we finally thumped into the belly of the plane and the cargo doors closed beneath us.

The voice in my ear said, "Welcome aboard, Cap'n. Glad to have y'all here. Hope the ride up wasn't too rough. We did our best to keep it gentle. The rest of the ride, I can promise ya, will be a whole lot more gentle-and we'll have y'all safely on the ground in just a little less than an hour. Sorry, we can't take you all the way in to Houston town today. We'd like to oblige, but that's jest a mite out of our neighborhood-but we'll put you down in San Antone, and you'll catch a chopper from there, and you'll all be home for supper. And that's a damn sight better'n we'll do. I hope y'all don't mind staying in the pod fer the rest of the trip. It's easier that way, for all of us. But you'll find the usual selection of goodies in the munch box. Uh-almost forgot; anybody need any medical attention?"

"No, we're fine," I reassured him. "Thanks for the pickup. Who are you?"

"Ah, you really don't wanna know that, do you-?" It was more of a statement than a question.

"Yes, I do," I said directly.

"Well, I could tell ya," he replied in a slow, laconic tone. "But then I'd also have to hit the big red switch here that opens up the cargo doors… and that would purely drop the pod right out the bottom of the airplane again. And y'know, those things hit the ground a lot harder when there are no chutes attached. Tell ya what-why don't we just say you were picked up by the Blue Fairy… ?"

"I get the picture," I said. "Thanks."

"Yer welcome, I'm sure. Over and out."

Siegel looked at me, eyes wide. So did the others. I returned their curious stares with a noncommittal shrug and a grim shake of my head. "I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine-"

"Boy!" said Siegel, with exaggerated respect. "Those fairies can be mean!"

-actually, my guess was a whole lot better than theirs. I just wasn't going to voice my suspicions aloud.

We fell silent then, each of us lost in our own private thoughts.

Mostly, we thought about Reilly and Willig and Locke. Valada began weeping softly, Lopez put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close; she comforted Valada the best she could, even though she still looked pissed as hell herself. Siegel just curled up inside the shell of his own frustration and sulked: I thought about other things. I'd handle my grieving later. In private.

There was a thing I'd learned in the Mode Training. What you resist, persists. If you don't let yourself experience something, you stay stuck in it. You drag it around with you. It's incomplete. If you let yourself experience it-truly experience it, not just take it out and process it and play with it and tell the story one more time, but truly experience it-then all the energy you've invested in it is discharged, and the whole thing is finally over and done with. It stops chewing at your consciousness and just disappears into the past.

I didn't understand what Foreman was talking about for the longest time, but when I asked him to explain it, he just said not to worry. "In life, understanding is the booby prize. Just sit with it-" he said. "You'll get it."

So I sat. Later we did an exercise, a process, an exorcism, call it what you want. Whatever. There wasn't any wrong way to do it. All you had to do was be in the room and listen to the instructions. The instructions were to think about all the terrible things that everybody had ever done to you. Think about all the betrayals, all the frustrations, all the rejections, all the manipulations and con games, all the times you'd been dominated and controlled and abused-all the times you'd been beaten up and beaten down.

Foreman and his assistants had prowled up and down the aisles, whispering, cajoling, stroking, murmuring, suggesting, prodding. "Who hurt you?

"Who struck you? Who injured you? Who knocked you down and held you down and made you cry? Remember the moment? Remember what it felt like?

"Think about the employer who made all those promises to you, the one who always knew all the right things to say, the one who turned out to be a hypocrite and a bully and a vindictive coward-wasn't he just the same as the school-yard bully who used to harass you every day, picking on you and teasing you until you didn't even want to get up in the morning and go to school? Remember what your crime was? You were funny-looking or stupid or wearing the wrong clothes or just not one of the in-crowd

"Oh, here's one. Think about your lover. The one who hurt you so badly. The one who left you for someone else because he or she liked fucking someone else more than he or she liked fucking you. Think about all the people who have left you. Think about all the times you never got a chance to say good-bye-or get even.

"And what about your mother and father? Don't you have some feelings about them? Some unfinished business perhaps? Some anger or grief? Something you still can't forgive?

"Think about all the crimes that have been committed against you-and all the crimes you've committed in response. You've been holding all that anger in for how many years now? And when it does come out, doesn't it explode in your face? Doesn't it come out at the wrong time? Isn't it always aimed at the wrong person? You know why? Because you've been suppressing it all your life-all the anger, all the fear, all the grief

"Do you know how much energy it takes to hold it in? It takes all the energy you've got. It takes your whole life. Well, right now, I'm telling you to let it out. That's right. Let the tears flow. Let them come. Let it all come up. Just let it flow and flow and flow. Now's your chance to express everything you've been resisting all your life-"

And we did. I did. I surprised myself. I didn't think I had that much pain in my life. I thought I had handled it all. I thought I was handling everything well. Only here and now, in the middle of the of the Mode Training, the incredible emotional whirlpool of tears and rage, it all came flooding up like the dark oily blood of the shambler nest. Everything was soaked, drenched, submerged, and ultimately drowned in the all-pervasive goop. The noise of all that energy releasing, all that pain and sorrow and madness-it was what Dachau must have sounded like.

There was more to the exercise, a lot more. One by one, as we reached the peak of our emotions, we were led forward to a great empty place-I was handed a club and given a chance to bash away at a huge towering mannequin. At first I felt silly and embarrassed, but then the mannequin started speaking to me. It was crudely animated, and its lip movements didn't even match the voice that came bellowing out of it. But then it started saying those terrible things, all those terrible words. It spoke with both a man's voice and a woman's voice, it was all the voices at once of all the people in the world, and it was saying all the hurtful things that had ever been said. "You're not good enough. You're not big enough. You're not strong enough. You're not good-looking enough. You're not talented enough. You're not smart enough." And I took the club and bashed and smashed and thrashed, I went at it like something possessed, obsessed, so furious with rage, I didn't know what I was doing, my mind was gone somewhere else, and all that was left was pure, the physical elemental spark of being, expressing the one thing it truly felt-the urge to kill-and I beat upon the mannequin until it collapsed weeping on the floor, and I collapsed weeping too, spent and drained and sprawling. helplessly across it, then the next thing I remember, I was being helped to my feet by the nurturing team and sent gently into the next part of the process, a mindless circling walk, a herdlike emptiness, all of us together, as each of us finished the violent part of the process, exercise, exorcism, call it what you will, we were sent here to circle and walk it off, sent to come down on our own, parachuting into pink mindless bliss, circling like vacant madmen and madwomen shambling through bedlam. Circling until we recovered our verbal selves enough to smile helplessly, tears still streaming down our cheeks, eventually, somehow, recoveringbut feeling different, changed, transformed.

Later, much later, after this part of it was over-after we were feeling clean and whole and deliciously new and empty, I asked Foreman, "What happens now?"

"Now?" he asked. "Now you start filling yourself up again with new problems. Only now, because you've enlarged yourself, they're going to be much larger problems-and you'll handle them and grow to handle the next set of problems, which will be even larger."

"It never ends, does it?" I protested feebly.

"Yes, it does," he said.

"Oh, good-when do I get to that state?"

"When you die." He laughed. We all did. Even I laughed. The joke wasn't just on me, it was on everybody. But he was right. It never ends, it just goes on and on and on, until you die. And that's the most frustrating and angering thing of all-that it doesn't matter how many goals you score, the game of life is still called on account of darkness. His phrasing, not mine.

But I remembered-later on, after the training was completedhow easy it had been to let it all out. I remembered how good it felt to be empty. I wondered if that was what enlightenment felt like, or just exhaustion. It didn't matter. It was a different place to be, and it was one that didn't hurt.

So one night… we'd had an argument, Lizard and I. It was a stupid argument-we'd started quibbling about what to do with all the money we were going to win in the lottery, and somehow the discussion had gotten into, "That's just like you-" and from there, it had progressed to, "You know, that's the thing you do that drives me so crazy-" Soon we were lashing out crazily at each other and saying terrible things and it didn't matter who was right and who was wrong-we both were wrong and the argument was so stupid, so petty, we should have both been thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. Only neither would admit it first. She'd gone into the bedroom to rip the sheets into shreds, and I'd gone into the bathroom to stand in the shower and swear, still wearing my clothes. After a bit, I peeled them off and threw them at the locked door, where they thumped and slid wetly to the floor. I lay down in the tub and let it fill around me with water so hot I could barely stand it. I turned lobster red, stewing and simmering and still burning with frustration. And then I remembered the power of the breakthrough process, exercise, exorcism, call it what you will-and without thinking, I began to rage, lying in the tub, I began to slap the water and scream. I forced it up from my gut, a wave of physical violence, I forced it out my throat, forced it all out through my whole body as hard as I could. I was amazed at how small a channel my body was, at how long it was taking to funnel all that fury through such a tiny orifice into the world. I kicked my legs and flailed with my arms, splashing and thrashing in the water, making as much noise as I could-as well as tidal waves of foam and suds and hot water. There was more water on the walls and floor than there was in the tub when Lizard finally came breaking through the door, alarmed and frightened and crying, running to me. She'd thought I was having a seizure-and I was in a way-but this one was voluntary. But by the time she'd battered down the door, it was over, and I collapsed spent into her arms, too exhausted even to explain what I had been doing. I held on to her, and she to me, and I got her thoroughly wet, she ended up climbing into the tub with me, and I apologized for scaring her, and she peeled off her clothes, and we refilled the tub, and I explained that I was raging-and then I had to reassure her that I hadn't been raging at her, but at myself for being so stupid and so blind and so bullheaded, and I begged her forgiveness, and she begged mine, and then we laughed together at how silly we both were and we began washing each other and . . and one thing led to another, and we put our heads together and our arms together and then the rest of our bodies fit together naturally too; and finally we put our souls together again the way we were supposed to be in the first place. I nearly drowned in that bathtub. It was okay. I would have died happy.

I smiled, remembering. I liked making up with Lizard Tirelli better than anybody.

But I'd learned something that night. I'd learned that I could handle my grief or rage or fear or whatever other pain might come along. I could handle it alone, by myself, without help, if I had to, in the privacy of my own bathroom. All I needed was a mop and a bucket.

I hadn't really thought about the set of luggage I'd collected in the past few days. Not really. I'd just carried it about, with a mental note to check it with the first bellboy who came along. Only nobody had come. I knew what I was going to have to do when I got home. Either the bathtub or-that was a thought. I could go down to the gym. They had mannequins there. I could program a couple to act like a general and his pet sycophant. After that… well, I didn't know what I would do after that, but at least I'd be in a place where I'd be much better able to handle it, whatever it was.

I had a pretty good idea who the Blue Fairy was-or at least, who had sent him. The Uncle Ira group had to be patched into the circuit somewhere. I didn't think I was likely to find anyone who'd answer the question truthfully, but it was a question I had to wonder about. Why did the Uncle Ira group consider us-me?-important enough to rescue? Or maybe it wasn't me. Maybe Uncle Ira had some reason to be interested in the specimens we were carrying.

That was an uncomfortable thought. Hell. It was something else to be angry about-that the specimens in our cases were more important than our lives. Except-I had made the same decision myself not more than an hour ago. I had decided that these specimens were more important than the lives of Reilly and Willig and Locke. And I had seen the consequences of that decision close up.

I was going to be a long time in the bathroom. I had a lot of crying to do.