Rage (richard bachman) Read online

  During the second week of April they sent me back to school with the warning that my case was still under consideration and I would have to go see Mr. Grace every day. They acted like they were doing me a favor. Some favor. It was like being popped back into the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

  It didn’t take as long to go bad this time. The way people looked at me in the halls. The way I knew they were talking about me in the teachers’ rooms. The way nobody would even talk to me anymore except Joe. And I wasn’t very cooperative with Grace.

  Yes, folks, things got bad very fast indeed, and they went from bad to worse. But I’ve always been fairly quick on the uptake, and I don’t forget many lessons that I’ve learned well. I certainly learned the lesson about how you could get anyone’s number with a big enough stick. My father picked up the hardhead take, presumably planning to trepan my skull with it, but when I picked up the hatchet, he put it back.

  I never saw that pipe wrench again, but what the fuck. I didn’t need that anymore, because that stick wasn’t big enough. I’d known about the pistol in my father’s desk for ten years. Near the end of April I started to carry it to school.

  CHAPTER 30

  I looked up at the wall clock. It was 12:30. I drew in all my mental breath and got ready to sprint down the homestretch.

  “So ends the short, brutal saga of Charles Everett Decker,” I said. “Questions?”

  Susan Brooks said very quietly in the dim room, “I’m sorry for you, Charlie.” It was like the crack of damnation.

  Don Lordi was looking at me in a hungry way that reminded me of Jaws for the second time that day. Sylvia was smoking the last cigarette in her pack. Pat Fitzgerald labored on his plane, crimping the paper wings, the usual funny-sly expression gone from his face, replaced by something that was wooden and carved. Sandra Cross still seemed to be in a pleasant daze. Even Ted Jones seemed to have his mind on other matters, perhaps on a door he had forgotten to latch when he was ten, or a dog he might once have kicked.

  “If that’s all, then it brings us to the final order of business in our brief but enlightening stay together,” I said. “Have you learned anything today? Who knows the final order of business? Let’s see.”

  I watched them. There was nothing. I was afraid it wouldn’t come, couldn’t come. So tight, so frozen, all of them. When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It’s the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside. But they had gone so far…

  And then Pig Pen looked up from his pencil. He was smiling a small, red-eyed smile, the smile of a ferret. His hand crept up into the air, the fingers still clenched around his cheap writing instrument. Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.

  So then it was easier for the rest of them. One electrode begins to arc and sputter, and-yoiks!-look, professor, the monster walks tonight.

  Susan Brooks put her hand up next. Then there were several together: Sandra raised hers, Grace Stanner raised hers-delicately-and Irma Bates did likewise. Corky. Don. Pat. Sarah Pasterne. Some smiling a little, most of them solemn. Tanis. Nancy Caskin. Dick Keene and Mike Gavin, both renowned in the Placerville Greyhounds’ backfield. George and Harmon, who played chess together in study hall. Melvin Thomas. Anne Lasky. At the end all of them were up-all but one.

  I called on Carol Granger, because I thought she deserved her moment. You would have thought that she might have had the most trouble making the switch, crossing the terminator, so to speak, but she had done it almost effortlessly, like a girl shedding her clothes in the bushes after dusk had come to the class picnic.

  “Carol?” I said. “What’s the answer?”

  She thought about how to word it. She put a finger up to the small dimple beside her mouth as she thought, and there was a furrow in her milk-white brow.

  “We have to help,” she said. “We have to help show Ted where he has gone wrong.”

  That was a very tasteful way to put it, I thought.

  “Thank you, Carol,” I said.

  She blushed.

  I looked at Ted, who had come back to the here and now. He was glaring again, but in kind of a confused way.

  “I think the best thing,” I said, “would be if I became a sort of combination judge and public attorney. Everyone else can be witnesses; and of course, you’re the defendant, Ted.”

  Ted laughed wildly. “You,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Charlie. Who do you think you are? You’re crazy as a bat.”

  “Do you have a statement?” I asked him.

  “You’re not going to play tricks with me, Charlie. I’m not saying a darn thing. I’ll save my speech for when we get out of here.” His eyes swept his classmates accusingly and distrustfully. “And I’ll have a lot to say.”

  “You know what happens to squealers, Rocco,” I said in a tough Jimmy Cagney voice. I brought the pistol up suddenly, pointed it at his head, and screamed “BANG!”

  Ted shrieked in surprise.

  Anne Lasky laughed merrily.

  “Shut up!” Ted yelled at her.

  “Don’t you tell me to shut up,” she said. “What are you so afraid of?”

  “What…?” His jaw dropped. The eyes bulged. In that moment I felt a great deal of pity for him. The Bible says the snake tempted Eve with the apple. What would have happened if he had been forced to eat it himself?

  Ted half-rose from his seat, trembling. “What am I…? What am I…?” He pointed a shivering finger at Anne, who did not cringe at all. “YOU GODDAMN SILLY BITCH! HE HAS GOT A GUN! HE IS CRAZY! HE HAS SHOT TWO PEOPLE! DEAD! HE IS HOLDING US HERE!”

  “Not me, he isn’t,” Irma said. “I could have walked right out.”

  “We’ve learned some very good things about ourselves, Ted,” Susan said coldly. “I don’t think you’re being very helpful, closing yourself in and trying to be superior. Don’t you realize that this could be the most meaningful experience of our lives?”

  “He’s a killer,” Ted said tightly. “He killed two people. This isn’t TV. Those people aren’t going to get up and go off to their dressing rooms to wait for the next take. They’re really dead. He killed them.”

  “Soul killer!” Pig Pen hissed suddenly.

  “Where the fuck do you think you get off?” Dick Keene asked. “All this just shakes the shit out of your tight little life, doesn’t it? You didn’t think anybody’d find out about you banging Sandy, did you? Or your mother. Ever think about her? You think you’re some kind of white knight. I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a cocksucker.”

  “Witness! Witness!” Grace cried merrily, waving her hand. “Ted Jones buys girlie magazines. I’ve seen him in Ronnie’s Variety doing it.”

  “Beat off much, Ted?” Harmon asked. He was smiling viciously.

  “And you were a Star Scout,” Pat said dolorously.

  Ted twitched from them like a bear that has been tied to a post for the villagers’ amusement. “I don’t masturbate!” he yelled.

  “Right,” Corky said disgustedly.

  “I bet you really stink in bed,” Sylvia said. She looked at Sandra. “Did he stink in bed?”

  “We didn’t do it in bed,” Sandra said. “We were in a car. And it was over so quick…”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  “All right,” Ted said. His face was sweaty. He stood up. “I’m walking out of here. You’re all crazy. I’ll tell them…” He stopped and added with a strange and touching irrelevancy, “I never meant what I said about my mother.” He swallowed. “You can shoot me, Charlie, but you can’t stop me. I’m going out.”

  I put the gun down on the blotter. “I have no intention of shooting you, Ted. But let me remind you that you haven’t really done your duty.”

  “That’s right,” Dick said, and after Ted had taken two steps toward the door, Dick came out of his seat
, took two running steps of his own, and collared him. Ted’s face dissolved into utter amazement.

  “Hey, Dick,” he said.

  “Don’t you Dick me, you son of a bitch.”

  Ted tried to give him an elbow in the belly, and then his arms were pinned behind him, one by Pat and one by George Yannick.

  Sandra Cross got slowly out of her seat and walked to him, demurely, like a girl on a country road. Ted’s eyes were bulging, half-mad. I could taste what was coming, the way you can taste thunderheads before summer rain… and the hail that comes with it sometimes.

  She stopped before him, and an expression of sly, mocking devotion crossed her face and was gone. She put a hand out, touched the collar of his shirt. The muscles of his neck bunched as he jerked away from her. Dick and Pat and George held him like springs. She reached slowly inside the open collar of the khaki shirt and began to pull it open, popping the buttons. There was no sound in the room but the tiny, flat tic-tic as the buttons fell to the floor and rolled. He was wearing no undershirt. His flesh was bare and smooth. She moved as if to kiss it, and he spit in her face.

  Pig Pen smiled from over Sandra’s shoulder, the grubby court jester with the king’s paramour. “I could put your eyes out,” he said. “Do you know that? Pop them out just like olives. Poink! Poink!”

  “Let me go! Charlie, make them let me-”

  “He cheats,” Sarah Pasterne said loudly. “He always looks at my answer sheet in French. Always.”

  Sandra stood before him, now looking down, a sweet, murmurous smile barely curving the bow of her lips. The first two fingers of her right hand touched the slick spittle on her cheek lightly.

  “Here,” Billy Sawyer whispered. “Here’s something for you, handsome.” He crept up behind Ted on tippy-toe and suddenly pulled his hair.

  Ted screamed.

  “He cheats on the laps in gym, too,” Don said harshly. “You really quit football because you dint have no sauce, dintchoo?”

  “Please,” Ted said. “Please, Charlie.” He had begun to grin oddly, and his eyeballs were shiny with tears. Sylvia had joined the little circle around him. She might have been the one who goosed him, but I couldn’t really see.

  They were moving around him in a slow kind of dance that was nearly beautiful. Fingers pinched and pulled, questions were asked, accusations made. Irma Bates pushed a ruler down the back of his pants. Somehow his shirt was ripped off and flew to the back of the room in two tatters. Ted was breathing in great, high whoops. Anne Lasky began to rub the bridge of his nose with an eraser. Corky scurried back to his desk like a good mouse, found a bottle of Carter’s ink, and dumped it in his hair. Hands flew out like birds and rubbed it in briskly.

  Ted began to weep and talk in strange, unconnected phrases.

  “Soul brother?” Pat Fitzgerald asked. He was smiling, whacking Ted’s bare shoulders lightly with a notebook in cadence. “Be my soul brother? That right? Little Head Start? Little free lunch? That right? Hum? Hum? Brothers? Be soul brothers?”

  “Got your Silver Star, hero,” Dick said, and raised his knee, placing it expertly in the big muscle of Ted’s thigh.

  Ted screamed. His eyes bulged and rolled toward me, the eyes of a horse staved on a high fence. “Please… pleeeese, Charlie… pleeeeeeeeee-” And then Nancy Caskin stuffed a large wad of notebook paper into his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but Sandra rammed it back in.

  “That will teach you to spit,” sire said reproachfully.

  Harmon knelt and pulled off one of his shoes. He rubbed it in Ted’s inky hair and then slammed the sole against Ted’s chest. It left a huge, grotesque footprint.

  “Admit one!” he crowed.

  Tentatively, almost demurely, Carol stepped on Ted’s stockinged foot and twisted her heel. Something in his foot snapped. Ted blubbered.

  He sounded like he was begging somewhere behind the paper, but you couldn’t really tell. Pig Pen darted in spiderlike and suddenly bit his nose.

  There was a sudden black pause. I noticed that I had turned the pistol around so that the muzzle was pointed at my head, but of course that would not be at all cricket. I unloaded it and put it carefully in the top drawer, on top of Mrs. Underwood’s plan book. I was quite confident that this had not been in today’s lesson plan at all.

  They were smiling at Ted, who hardly looked human at all anymore. In that brief flick of time, they looked like gods, young, wise, and golden. Ted did not look like a god. Ink ran down his cheeks in blue-black teardrops. The bridge of his nose was bleeding, and one eye glared disjointedly toward no place. Paper protruded through his teeth. He breathed in great white snuffles of air.

  I had time to think: We have got it on. Now we have got it all the way on.

  They fell on him.

  CHAPTER 31

  I had Corky pull up the shades before they left. He did it with quick, jerky motions. There were now what seemed like hundreds of cruisers out there, thousands of people. It was three minutes of one.

  The sunlight hurt my eyes.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “God-bye,” Sandra said.

  They all said good-bye, I think, before they went out. Their footfalls made a tunny, echoy noise going down the hall. I closed my eyes and imagined a giant centipede wearing Georgia Giants on each of its one hundred feet. When I opened them again, they were walking across the bright green of the lawn. I wished they had used the sidewalk; even after all that had happened, it was still a hell of a lawn.

  The last thing I remember seeing of them was that their hands were streaked with black ink.

  People enveloped them.

  One of the reporters, throwing caution to the winds, eluded three policemen and raced down to where they were, pell-mell.

  The last one to be swallowed up was Carol Granger. I thought she looked back, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Philbrick started to walk stolidly toward the school. Flashbulbs were popping all over the place.

  Time was short. I went over to where Ted was leaning against the green cinderblock wall. He was sitting with his legs splayed out below the bulletin board, which was full of notices from the Mathematical Society of America, which nobody ever read, Peanuts comic strips (the acme of humor, in the late Mrs. Underwood’s estimation), and a poster showing Bertrand Russell and a quote: “Gravity alone proves the existence of God.” But any undergraduate in creation could have told Bertrand that it has been conclusively proved that there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.

  I squatted beside Ted. I pulled the crumpled wad of math paper out of his mouth and laid it aside. Ted began to drool.

  “Ted.”

  He looked past me, over my shoulder.

  “Ted,” I said, and patted his cheek gently.

  He shrank away. His eyes rolled wildly.

  “You’re going to get better,” I said. “You’re going to forget this day ever happened.”

  Ted made mewling sounds.

  “Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll go on from here, Ted. Build from this. Is that such an impossible idea?”

  It was, for both of us. And being so close to Ted had begun to make me very nervous.

  The intercom chinked open. It was Philbrick. He was puffing and blowing again.

  “Decker?”

  “Right here.”

  “Come out with your hands up.”

  I sighed. “You come down and get me, Philbrick, old sport. I’m pretty goddamn tired. This psycho business is a hell of a drain on the glands.”

  “All right,” he said, tough. “They’ll be shooting in the gas canisters in just about one minute.”

  “Better not,” I said. I looked at Ted. Ted didn’t look back; he just kept on looking into emptiness. Whatever he saw there must have been mighty tasty, because he was still drooling down his chin. “You forgot to count noses. There’s still one of them down here. He’s hurt.” That was something of an understatement.

  His voice was instantly wary. “Who?”

  “Ted Jones.”


  “How is he hurt?”

  “Stubbed his toe.”

  “He’s not there. You’re lying.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Philbrick, and jeopardize our beautiful relationship.”

  No answer. Puff, snort, blow.

  “Come on down,” I invited. “The gun is unloaded. It’s in a desk drawer. We can play a couple of cribbage hands, then you can take me out and tell all the papers how you did it single-handed. You might even make the cover of Time if we work it right.”

  Chink. He was off the com.

  I closed my eyes and put my face in my hands. All I saw was gray. Nothing but gray. Not even a flash of white light. For no reason at all, I thought of New Year’s Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days in this best of all possible worlds. I have always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic overslop of the crowd’s lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular.

  I began to cry.

  When Philbrick stepped through the door, he glanced down at the drooling Tedthing and then up at me. “What in the name of God did you…?” he began.

  I made as if to grab something behind Mrs. Underwood’s desktop row of books and plants. “Here it comes, you shit cop!” I screamed.

  He shot me three times.

  CHAPTER 32

  THOSE WHO WOULD BE INFORMED IN THIS MATTER DRAW YE NEAR AND KNOW YE THEN BY THESE PRESENTS:

  CHARLES EVERETT DECKER, convicted in Superior Court this day, August 27, 1976, of the willful murder of Jean Alice Underwood, and also convicted this day, August 27, 1976, of the willful murder of John Downes Vance, both human beings.

  It has been determined by five state psychiatrists that Charles Everett Decker cannot at this time be held accountable for his actions, by reason of insanity. It is therefore the decision of this court that he be remanded to the Augusta State Hospital, where he will be held in treatment until such time as he can be certified responsible to answer for his acts.