Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

four lights on the roof, and then the only illumination was the orange flickering of the refinery flame and the yellow glow of the snack bar’s interior. Flashlight beams stabbed up from the sea and dappled us with dancing spots.

The Avenger stopped walking. “I want you to die in the dark,” he said. He was looking only at me. The pistol rose to point at my forehead.

Boog charged him, and the Avenger spun and fired. Boog fell, and the crowd cheered.

The Avenger turned back toward me, but shifted his pistol so that it pointed at Gretchen. “Accomplices first,” he said.

The Bonanza was coming in low again, but it would not be low enough to knock the Avenger from the roof.

The Willyites were chanting: “SHOOT-SHOOT-SHOOT—”

The Avenger’s expression changed, as if he wanted to kill, but didn’t want the mob to want him to….

The Bonanza roared overhead. As the Avenger looked up, I felt for the lump of my garage-door remote control in the Moonsuit, found it, and pressed hard.

The aircraft’s starboard door burst open, and a black shape plummeted into the crowd. The Willyites churned and parted, and Ringo, his galvanized chain collar gleaming, leaped up to the snack-bar roof.

He started toward me, but when he saw the Bald Avenger he changed direction and bared his teeth.

The Avenger shot at the Doberman, but the bullet sprayed gravel, and Ringo was on him. The man fell on his side, and Ringo shattered the pistol with one chomp.

Boog sat up, rubbing his chest, and I went to him. He grinned and pulled his crescent wrench from his bib pocket. “Better than a Bible,” he said. The head of the wrench was bent where the slug had hit it.

Pete and Gretchen joined us and helped Boog to his feet. Meanwhile, the Bald Avenger was rolling toward the eastern edge of the roof. Ringo was going along, tearing coat fabric as he went.

“He’s had enough,” I called. Ringo ripped one more strip and then trotted across to me.

The Avenger, however, had not had enough, and he stood and ran toward us with his hands set in claws and his mouth in a rictus of rage. Ringo dashed at him again, but this time the man sidestepped, and the dog went off the roof.

The Avenger’s hands closed on my throat. Stumbling backward, I flailed at his head with my helmet and pried at his fingers with my free hand. We began whirling in a mad waltz, and the faces of Boog, Pete, and Gretchen flashed by in an instant.

Then the Avenger and I fell from the western edge of the roof. My helmet tumbled away like a small white moon.

We landed atop three Willyites, who crumpled. They and the Moonsuit protected me, but the Avenger hit the rocks on his back. He released my throat and stared.

Someone cried, “We have them now, brothers!” and I was hoisted over the heads of the crowd. A hand knotted in my hair and pulled my head back, and I was spread-eagled. A hundred fingernails ripped into the Moonsuit. The world turned upside-down, and I fell into the sky.

The mob swayed and spun, and the sky swayed and spun with them. In an accelerating blur, I saw my friends trying to fight off a swarm of Willyites who were ascending the snack bar. I could not see Ringo anywhere.

The sky spun faster. My tongue and fingers swelled. The glow of the snack bar became a dying sun. The Bonanza’s strobes streaked like meteors. The roar of a tidal wave drowned the voice of the mob, and my vision became suffused with an ochre wash.

Then gravity slammed down like Maxwell’s silver hammer, the lights went topsy-turvy, and an electric jolt spiked into my hips and shoulder. The ochre wash burned away in a white blaze brighter than a supernova.

A primal voice pierced through the roar. “All right, you pithecanthropoid freaks! Get away from him! He’s my client, and you’re all in deep legal shit! I’m a lawyer, and we’re SUING!”

“Oliver!” another voice called. “Are you hurt?”

“Mother?” I croaked.

Someone grasped my shoulders and pulled me up and away from the blaze. When I was standing, her face came into focus: Sharon Sharpston. Beyond her, I saw the angry brown-and-blond-eyebrowed features of Bruce Werter.

The white blaze was the headlight of my Ariel.

Peggy Sue had found me. Her engine raced in recognition, then sputtered and died.

“Goddamn!” Bruce exclaimed.

The mob had retreated a few paces because of Peggy Sue’s raucous arrival, but now several ministers of the Corps of Little David appeared in their midst with slingshots at the ready. The Reverend Willard had vanished, as had the Bald Avenger. Up on the snack-bar roof, five Willyites were approaching Boog, Pete, and Gretchen.

The mob began to close in again.

“You shouldn’t have stopped here,” I told Sharon.

“I didn’t want to,” she said, pulling me toward the snack bar’s open west door. “It was Bruce’s idea. Somehow, he knew you’d be here.”

“Thanks for the reprieve,” I called to Bruce, who was jumping on Peggy Sue’s starter.

“Reprieve, my lily-white ass!” he said. “A reprieve is a postponement of punishment, and you haven’t been convicted of anything!” He snapped down the bike’s kickstand, stood on the footpegs, and addressed the mob. “As a member of the Kansas State Bar Association, I order you throw-backs to cease and desist this pissant vigilantism! Get a writ of habeas corpus!”

The mob kept coming. Overhead, the Beechcraft was diving again, but the Willyites had become oblivious to it.

Bruce took a deep breath and hollered, “Church and state are separate!”

The mob shrieked and lunged forward, knocking Bruce from the Ariel with enough force to throw him against me and Sharon. The three of us fell back against the snack bar’s concrete-block wall, and Peggy Sue was trampled. The Willyites reached for us.

Ringo sprang from the open doorway and positioned himself between us and the mob. His black eye burned with a brilliant blue spark, and his lips were curled back from his teeth. An amplified snarl tore from his throat, and the Willyites hesitated.

“Shouldn’t we get inside?” Sharon asked. As she spoke, three of the Reverend’s flock came flying off the roof and toppled several of their brethren like bowling pins.

I glanced up and saw Boog’s face. He was lying prone on the roof and looking over the edge. “Nobody left here but us heathens! Come on up and we’ll hold them off!”

I looked back at the mob. The Corps ministers were fighting their way to the front, where they would have easy shots at the three of us against the wall. We could enter the empty snack bar as Sharon suggested (and as I had wanted to do anyway), but then they would shoot through the windows because I didn’t have the Reverend for protection anymore. If we went to the roof, though, we could flatten and make ourselves hard to hit. We might even have a chance to survive until the Authorities showed up. If they did.

Bruce and I lifted Sharon to Boog just as a ball bearing chipped the concrete next to my head. Bruce and I both yelped, but when Sharon was on the roof, we each cupped our hands to boost the other.

“You first,” I said. “If I leave you down here and you die, Sharon’ll never forgive me.”

“Are you kidding? A published case study of you could make her famous. If you die, she’ll never forgive me!”

Gravel peppered our heads, and I looked up to see Gretchen’s face next to Boog’s. “Assholes,” she said.

Bruce was about to reply when a ball bearing hit his shoulder. I heard a crunch. His knees bent, but he didn’t fall. Grimacing, he put his right foot in my hands.

Boog and Gretchen were still pulling him up when another ball bearing hit the concrete, and then another, joined by white rocks. I imagined that I was back in Vacation Bible School playing sinners and saints, and I spread my hands to try to catch the next projectile. Then my left knee became as nothing, and I collapsed.

In the moment that I sat dazed, Ringo launched himself at a Corps minister who was reloading. The mob shrank back as he charged, but then they poured ahead like lava, engulfing both minister and dog, and coming on toward me.

I crawled to the doorway and into the snack bar, dragging my left leg after me. Once inside, I slammed the metal door and twisted the button in the knob to lock it, but I knew that wouldn’t do much good for long. For one thing, the east door was still open.

A window beside the locked door shattered, and rocks bounced off the counter onto the grill. I reached up and flipped a switch, but that only killed half the light in the place. The Willyites would still be able to see me.

Faced with imminent destruction, I did as my mother had taught me: I prayed. I didn’t have much time, though, so I just sang the first few lines of “Tell Me How.”

Another window broke, and a shadow filled the east doorway. I crawled for the north wall. There was an inner door there, and no matter what was behind it, that was where I wanted to be.

I opened the door, flopped through, and kicked it shut with my good leg. It was only then that I saw the bright circle of a flashlight.

“Oh, great, just look at him!” a voice said over the noise of the mob outside. “Some rescuers we are!”

The flashlight beam passed over a face that I recognized as that of my next-door neighbor Jeremy.

“Hold still!” he exclaimed. “I can’t see what I’m doing!”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” the first voice said, and I recognized it as Cathy’s.

Strangely, I was unsurprised. “What are you trying to do?” I asked.

“It’s a complicated story,” Jeremy said. “We’re fifteen thousand years old, and we no longer use bodies unless we have to, which we do now, because, well—”

“Your mother spoke with our enemies,” Cathy said.

“Not enemies, Cath. Rivals, perhaps, although that isn’t right either, is it?”

” ‘Enemy’ is the only term the fleshbound understand.”

“And there’s the rub, Mr. Vale. We have one opinion of how far to trust your kind, which is as far as you could throw Andre the Giant, and our rivals have another, which is that you deserve the benefits of what we’ve learned—”

“And in which they are utterly wrong,” Cathy said. “Which isn’t to say that we wish you any harm—”

“Which is why we’re here—”

“Except that we can’t find our cousins—”

I interrupted. “What I meant was, what are you trying to do right now?” More glass broke in the snack bar, and I heard a scream from the roof. “Tell me fast,” I said, crawling toward the flashlight. My eyes were adjusting, and I saw that we were in a cubicle dominated by machines. This was the projection room, where Bill Willy’s show had been piped before being flashed across the lot to the screen. Cold air rushed in through the open window in the west wall.

“You see,” Jeremy said, “we thought that if we could provide a diversion, that maybe you could—”

“Except that Jeremy designed inferior brains,” Cathy said, “and we can’t figure out how to do any of this.”

I was beside Jeremy now. He was squatting over a toolbox and was fumbling with a tangle of cables, a screwdriver, power cords, and a portable AC/DC television. The toolbox was sitting next to the biggest video projector I had ever seen. And I had