stand on airport tarmacs at night, using powerful flashlights to guide planes into their berths.
He heard a low crunching, crackling sound like splintering plywood coming from overhead, looked up, and saw the photon pistol had drawn a long slit in the kitchen ceiling. Gardener staggered to his feet. Incredibly, his jaws cracked and wavered in another large yawn. His head clanged and echoed with the grassfire alarm of Bobbi's thoughts
(gun he's got a gun tried to shoot me bastard bastard tried to shoot me gun gun he's got)
and he tried to shield himself before he went mad. He couldn't. Bobbi was screaming inside his head and as she lay on the floor, pinned for the moment between the table and the overturned chair, she was trying to bring the gun to bear on him for another shot.
Gardener lifted his foot and shoved the table again, grimacing. It overturned, beers, pills, and boom-box radio all sliding off. Most of the stuff fell on Bobbi. Beer splashed in her face and ran, fizzing and foaming, over her New and Improved transparent skin. The radio hit her neck, then the floor, landing in a shallow puddle of beer.
Flash, you fucker! Gardener screamed at it. Explode! Self-destruct! Explode, goddammit, ex
The radio did more than that. It seemed to bulge, and then with a sound like rotten cloth ripping along a seam, it shattered outward in all directions, belching small streaks of green fire like bottled lightning. Bobbi screamed. What he heard with his ears was bad; the sound inside his head was infinitely worse.
Gardener screamed with her, not hearing himself. He saw that Bobbi's shirt was burning.
He started for her, not thinking about what he was up to. He dropped the .45 as he did so, without even thinking. This time it did go off, sending a slug into Jim Gardener's ankle, shattering it. Pain blew through his mind like a hot wind. He screamed again. He took a shambling step forward, his head ringing with her horrid mental cries. They would send him mad in a moment. This thought was actually a relief. When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore.
Then, for one second, Gard saw his Bobbi for the last time.
He thought perhaps Bobbi was trying to smile.
Then the screaming began again. She screamed and tried to beat out the flames that were turning her torso to tallow, and that screaming was too much, far too much, too loud, far too loud; it was unbearable. For them both, he thought. He bent, found the triple-damned pistol on the floor, and picked it up. He needed to use both of his thumbs to get it cocked. The pain in his ankle was bad - he knew that - but for the moment it was lost to him, buried under Bobbi's shrieking agony. He pointed Hillman's pistol at her head.
Work you goddam thing, oh please, please work
But if it worked and he missed? There mightn't be another cartridge in the mag.
His motherfucking hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He fell to his knees like a man struck with a sudden violent need to pray. He crawled toward Bobbi, who lay shrieking and writhing and burning on the floor. He could smell her; could see black shards of plastic from the radio's case bubbling their way into her flesh. He almost overbalanced and fell on top of her. Then he pressed the .45 against the side of her neck and pulled the trigger.
Another click.
Bobbi, screaming and screaming. Screaming inside his head.
He tried to pull the slide back again. Almost got it. Then it slipped. Snick.
Please God, oh please let me be her friend this one last time!
This time he got the slide all the way back. He tried the trigger again. This time the gun went off.
The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardener's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect. He turned his head upward. A bright stripe of sunlight from the unzipped roof fell across his face, bisecting it. Gardener shrieked.
Suddenly the buzzing stopped and there was silence.
Bobbi Anderson - or whatever she had become - was as dead as the pile of autumn-leaf corpses in the control room of the ship, as dead as the galley slaves which had been the ship's drive.
She was dead and Gardener would have gladly died then, too ... but it still wasn't over.
Not yet.
2
Kyle Archinbourg was having a Pepsi at Cooder's when the screams began in his head.