The Brain Eaters

Chapter 11

A full week had gone by since Hank Stransky came to his spectacular end in Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern. In those seven days the world continued much as it always had, with events great and small fitting into the ever-changing pattern. Yet another threat of war had surfaced in the Middle East. A Cleveland left-hander just up from the minors had pitched a no-hitter against the Brewers. A popular singing star had died on stage in Melbourne of a drug overdose. And two members of Vic’s bowling team had missed the Thursday night match with Eagle Auto Parts, claiming illness.

With all those possible subjects of conversation, topic one at the tavern remained Hank Stransky’s Friday night freak-out. To judge by the number of people who now claimed to be eyewitnesses, Vic’s Tavern would have to hold about the same-size crowd as County Stadium. Oddly, had anyone been taking a count, many of the regulars who had actually been on the scene would have been found missing on that Friday a week later.

Vic Metzger sat on a tall stool, uncharacteristically silent, behind the bar. He had felt crummy most of the week. After the slash he got from Stransky’s beer bottle, there had been the two-day flu, or whatever it was. Now there was this headache.

He scowled out at the roistering drinkers. Who the fuck were they? He didn’t know but a few of them. And why were they so goddam loud tonight? The argument at the pool table was more piercing than usual. And the jukebox boomed like summer thunder. He should never have gotten the damn thing fixed after Karl Gotch kicked it to pieces. He would have the fucker taken out the next day.

And the women. Females had never been barred from Vic’s, but they weren’t exactly encouraged, either. A few years back, the only women to come around would be some wife looking for a missing husband or a hooker who had gotten out of her territory. They were no problem. You just told the wives that the husbands hadn’t been in all day, and you told the hookers to get lost. The good old days.

Now more and more of them were coming in, giggling and squealing in their shrill little voices and acting for all the world like they belonged there. It was the damned women’s lib; that’s what it was. This last week had been the worst. It seemed that ever since Hank Stransky did his death dance, the broads had been swarming into Vic’s place. Bunch of ghouls. Ruined a good tavern is what they did.

“Come on, Vic, cheer up,” somebody said. “You look like you lost your last friend.”

Vic glared at him. Some fresh kid he didn’t even know. College punk, most likely. Who the hell did he think he was?

“You want something to drink?” Vic said.

“Well, sure, gimme a beer. Jeez, you don’t need to be so touchy.”

“If you don’t like it, go drink somewhere else.”

Jesus, he hated these punks. Drink beer until they puke and think they’re men. Between the punks and the women and the strangers, this place was going to hell fast.

“Hey, can we get some service over here?”

Vic looked down the bar at the jerk in the Heileman’s T-shirt and the fat-faced woman with him.

“I think you had enough.”

“What are you talkin’ about? We just got here.”

“Then you had it somewhere else. I don’t serve drunks.”

Vic let his hand drop below the bar. He touched the knurled butt of the revolver he had stashed there after the business with Stransky. It was a.357 Magnum and would put a real effective hole in anybody who tried to make trouble in there. This guy looked like a troublemaker. Vic halfway hoped he would start something.

“Come on, Barbara, let’s get out of here,” the guy said. “This yahoo is crazy.”

Vic watched them walk across the floor and out the door. He let go of the Magnum reluctantly. He would just as soon have blown the two of them away.

Goddam this headache.

Norman Hastings sat cramped into a seat in the coach section as the jet waited on the runway at JFK to take off on the flight for Dallas-Fort Worth. It seemed as if they had been stuck there for hours while every other lousy plane in the world was given clearance to take off. When he got home, he would get off a letter to the president of the airline that would blister his ears. It was the last time they would get Norman Hastings into one of their tin cans.

You’d think that at least they could get the cabin pressure right. It was playing bloody hell with his headache. He massaged his pounding temples and shivered.

“Would you like a blanket, sir?”

He looked up at the smiling face of the young man wearing a blazer with the airline’s logo. Boy stewardesses. Flight attendants, they liked to call themselves now. Fags is what Norman Hastings called them.

“A blanket, sir?” the young man repeated.

“No. But you can get me a drink. Wild Turkey. With ice.”

“The drink cart will come around after we’re airborne,” the young man said, grinning, as if he were doing Norman Hastings a great big favor.

“When the hell is that going to be, next Tuesday sometime?”

“We’re next in line for take-off. It will only be a few minutes.”

A few minutes … Oh, sure, Norman Hastings believed that. Like he believed in the tooth fairy. The pilot was probably boffing one of the girl stewardesses up in the cabin and would get the plane off right after he got his rocks off.

The smiley young man moved away up the aisle before Norman Hastings could tell him.

This headache was a bitch. He had the beginning of it when he was checking out of the hospital. He was not about to mention it, though, or they’d want to keep him there another week. As long as he had a medical plan that was paying the bills, the hospital would like to make him a permanent guest. Norman Hastings was not having any of that. He was mostly healed, except for a few raw spots that were still bandaged, and he was not going to spend five more minutes in that shithole city of New York than he had to.

The pitch of the idling engines changed as the plane taxied around into the take-off pattern. About fucking time. The flight attendant made a last trip down the aisle to see that everybody’s seat belt was fastened. Norman Hastings unhooked his as soon as the fag had gone past.

His head was killing him.

The greaseball in the next seat looked over as though he wanted to talk. Norman Hastings glowered at him and turned toward the window. The last thing he wanted to do was to listen to a lot of pidgin Spanish gibberish from some bean eater.

The plane surged forward, gathering speed as it roared down the runway. The blue ground lights outside raced by in a stream that stabbed deep into the head of Norman Hastings. He could not remember anything that ever hurt as bad as this.

Jason and Nancy Dahlberg sat in the living room of their house in Seattle’s Green Lake district and tried to concentrate on “Dallas.” They had not missed an episode since the show went on the air. If they had to be out of the house, as they were the Friday before when they went out to dinner at the top of the Space Needle, they made sure to set the VCR so they could watch “Dallas” on tape when they got home.

Actually, the events at the restaurant the previous Friday had been so exciting that the Dahlbergs did not get around to viewing their tape until the next night. The sight of that girl running crazily through the tables waving a steak knife and screaming was something they would never forget. They hadn’t known until it came out in the papers the next day that the young man she left bleeding to death at their table was her husband of only a few hours. Then the most horrible part had been watching in horrified fascination as the girl hurled herself out through the heavy plate-glass window. It took her three runs at the thick double pane to do it. The first time she hit it, only the inner pane cracked. Then, when she did manage to break through, she got hung up on one of the shards of glass and had to rip off one of her breasts before she could fall to the ground six hundred feet below.

During the week that followed, both of the Dahlbergs had been a little under the weather. And that night neither of them could concentrate on “Dallas.” The sound was too loud, or the picture was blurred, or the color did not hold, or there was too much noise out in the street. They were both suffering from headaches that were growing rapidly worse.

“What’s wrong with the set?” Nancy Dahlberg demanded of her husband.

“Nothing’s wrong with it. You must be fooling with the controls while you watch those idiot daytime shows of yours.”

“I never touch your precious controls. Besides, I don’t have time to watch in the daytime. Don’t you think I have anything to do around here?”

“You have plenty to do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you do it.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said.

Jason Dahlberg turned in his chair to stare at his wife of twenty-one years. Language like that was simply not a part of her makeup. He decided that she had changed in many ways while he was not paying attention. What a sloppy cow she had become.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“What the hell do you think, you cow?”

Nancy Dahlberg gripped the arms of her chair. She turned a bared-teeth look of hatred on her husband such as he had never seen on a human face. That was not all that was wrong with her face. Even as he watched, her skin grew blotchy and swollen. God, she was ugly.

Jason Dahlberg’s headache threatened to explode inside his skull.

Vic Metzger groaned aloud, but nobody heard him. What with the racket those assholes were making at the pool table and the shit that was booming out of the jukebox, it was a wonder he could hear himself. No way anybody could stand it, especially not with the headache he had.

He planted both hands on the bar and leaned forward. “Hey! Shut the fuck up over there!”

The pool players looked at him in surprise. “What’s the matter, Vic? You talkin’ to us?”

“You goddam right I’m talking to you. Shut the fuck up or get out of here.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

That did it. Vic groped blindly under the bar for the gun. He found it and levered himself over the top of the bar, heedless of the drinks he spilled in the process. Holding the revolver out in front of him, he marched toward the pool table.

“I warned you!”

He started shooting.

The screaming began.

Norman Hastings clamped his teeth together to keep from crying out. The agony inside his head had grown worse since take-off. Undoubtedly, the plane was not properly pressurized. Why didn’t anybody else complain? When he had suggested to the fag boy stewardess that something was wrong, all he got was some standard bullshit about how the cabin pressure was exactly at its proper level. Then how come his head was exploding?

And the greaser in the aisle seat next to him, sitting there belching tacos and trying to start a conversation. Did he think Norman Hastings had nothing better to do than listen to some wetback’s broken English?

He had tried to find some relief by plugging in a pair of those little plastic earphones and turning on some of that stupid music they play on airplanes. All that did was make his head hurt worse. Now he tore out the earplugs and threw them into the aisle.

He must have yelled, too, because everybody turned around to look at him. Stupid idiots. And here came the fag trotting down the aisle to hand him some more airline bullshit. Too much. It was too much!

Umberto Olivares had been uncomfortable with the guy in the next seat since they had got on the plane. The guy didn’t want to talk, okay. Umberto generally liked to pass the time in conversation, but he didn’t need this guy. For sure.

What ticked him off was the way the guy kept complaining to the kid flight attendant — real nasty and for no reason. When they finally got into the air, the guy kept holding onto his head and moaning and making faces as if something were tearing away little chunks of him. When the kid asked if he was sick, the guy just got nastier. If there had been an empty seat on the plane, Umberto would have gotten up and moved. Just his luck that every seat was taken.

Jesus, what was happening to the guy’s face now?

Mike Endersbee had looked forward to the flight. He liked his job a lot, but he liked the Dallas flight best. Dallas was where Lisa lived. He had a week’s layover after this flight, and they would have all that time just for themselves. The flight figured to be an easy one. But Mike had reckoned without the passenger in 43A, a Mr. Hastings.

The man had been trouble since the minute he boarded. Clearly, there was something wrong with him, but he had refused any kind of help. Mike had spoken to the captain about 43A, but as long as he was not causing a physical disturbance, there was nothing to be done. Now, at forty thousand feet somewhere over Arkansas, it looked as though the physical disturbance was starting.

The man in 43B, a Mr. Olivares, let out a yell as 43A started to climb over him. Mike hurried down the aisle but slowed suddenly when he saw what was happening to Mr. Hastings’s face. The man was pounding crazily at his seat mate as he fought his way out into the aisle. Mike stepped in front of him but was thrown to the deck by a wild backhand blow.

Screaming incoherently, Norman Hastings ran up the aisle, setting off a panic among the passengers, many of whom had been dozing. He reached the emergency exit, threw aside the people who were sitting in the adjacent seats, and began clawing at the release lever.

Mike was not worried about Hastings forcing the door open; there was a fail-safe interlock to prevent that when the plane was airborne. However, the man was clearly insane and quite likely to do harm to himself and other passengers. Until he got help from up front, it was Mike’s responsibility to restrain him. He ran forward and seized the man’s shoulder.

Norman Hastings whirled toward him, his face a mass of angry red boils. Before Mike could speak, Hastings smashed him with a fist, breaking his nose and knocking him across the aisle. He fell back against the people sitting over there who were trying to scramble out of the way. As he struggled to regain his feet, Mike saw the crazed man use unbelievable strength and pull loose the safety lever on the emergency door.

The sound was like an explosion. There was a sudden rush of icy wind. Norman Hastings disappeared as though snatched through the gaping doorway by a giant hand. Mike Endersbee’s last impressions were of the rush of pillows, carry-on bags, blankets, trays, papers, and human bodies flying out through the opening into the night sky. Then his fingers were torn loose from the metal seat braces he had been holding on to. His body was banged across the empty seat, an ankle shattered against the edge of the open door, and the night sucked him out.

It was difficult to say which one of them attacked first. Jason and Nancy Dahlberg, quiet, seemingly happy, married twenty-one years, came up out of their chairs at the same instant and leaped at each other. They fell to the floor ripping with fingers and teeth at any part of the other’s flesh they could reach until they writhed together on a carpet that was soggy with their mingled blood.

On the flickering television screen, J. R. Ewing went about his weekly villainy with no one there to watch.

Vic Metzger, Norman Hastings, and the Dahlbergs were not the only ones to go suddenly, violently berserk that night. Beginning early Friday evening and continuing into Saturday morning, more than a score of normal-seeming citizens exploded into mindless mayhem. The toll of dead and injured mounted steadily. As the reports flashed over the nation’s news wires, a terrible pattern began to emerge.