Cheating at Solitaire(111)

He pushed at the crowd and made progress. Determination, concentration, and the conviction that a live person needed help ramped up his progress. He saw Stewart Gordon maybe four feet ahead of him, moving and pushing as well, that bald head bobbing and weaving among the dark-haired ones around it, tall enough to act as a beacon. Gregor pushed. Stewart pushed. Suddenly, he seemed to pop right out of existence, and the next thing Gregor heard was his deep, classically trained actor’s voice saying, “Get the bloody hell away from her.”

It was a deep voice, and it stopped time, if only for a moment. Gregor was just able to push through a few more layers before they started agitating again, and everybody started yelling again, but it was enough. He didn’t have far to go to the front. They were crammed against a doorway; that was the problem. He could see now that what he had thought was a wall was a doorway. He grabbed at the jacket of the man immediately in front of him and pulled him back. He hooked the leg of the next man up and pulled him to the side. There was the doorway and what seemed to be a single layer of men to go, and in a second he was past it, into the stairwell, into the center of the mess.

And it was not empty. There was no space. The people here were thicker than they had been outside. Flashbulbs were going off at a rate that Gregor was sure must make it impossible for any film to come out. Stewart seemed to be in the process of socking somebody in the jaw. A small woman—Leslie? Gregor had met her before; she was a nurse—was lying on the floor near the stairs, splaying her body over something Gregor couldn’t quite make out, and openly crying.

“Stop,” Leslie kept saying. “You’ve got to stop.”

Nobody was stopping, and Stewart couldn’t knock out enough of them to cause any serious dent in the insanity. Gregor was pinned in place. He squirmed and kicked and tried to maneuver, but he’d gotten as far as he could get for the time being. There were so many people in the small space, it was hard to breath. There were people all around him and there were people above him, on the stairs, snaking up into the second floor. For all Gregor knew, they might have come from above.

Two pairs of hands came out of nowhere and lifted Leslie up off the floor. She was flailing and screaming, and the hands were not gentle. They tossed her to the side, into the crowd, against the wall of men stuck in that corner there, and suddenly Gregor saw whateverybody was trying to get to. The body of Kendra Rhode was lying on the floor, its neck broken clean through, its head, yes, almost slightly backward. There was no way the woman was alive, but there was no way to know when or how she had died either. She could have been dead when Marcey Mandret found her or she could have died since, at the hands of these people, these people who seemed to want nothing and to care about nothing except the picture, the picture and the person who was not a person, the person who was—

Going to be torn apart, Gregor realized, with alarm. The photographers weren’t just taking pictures of the body. They were grabbing at the body, tearing at it. Somebody came forward and ripped a huge length of material off the front of Kendra Rhode’s dress. Somebody else pulled at the parka she was wearing until it came all the way off. Gregor was close enough to realize that Kendra Rhode had not been wearing underwear. Her legs were wide open and they were taking pictures of that, too, over and over again. Stewart Gordon was bellowing. Gregor could barely hear him over what had become the crowd’s droning roar.

Somebody grabbed at Kendra Rhode’s arm and pulled it. Somebody else grabbed at her leg. There was suddenly a tug of war going on, people on one side with the left arm and people on the other with the right leg. Hands kept coming out of the crowd and grabbing more and more clothing, more and more clothing, so that Gregor was sure that at any moment there would be no clothes at all. There would be just the naked body and maybe not all of that, because it wasn’t impossible to pull a body apart if you had enough people and they were willing to go ahead with it. A hand came out of nowhere and went up between Kendra Rhode’s legs and then up into her, all the way inside her, as if this were a snuff film and they’d gotten to the part where the actors got to sexually assault the dead body. Stewart Gordon saw it too, and lunged forward. Gregor saw the hand and arm jerk away from Kendra Rhode’s body as if they were a light plug being pulled out of a socket.

“Goddamn it to bloody hell,” Stewart Gordon said.

And that was when they first heard the sirens.

3

There weren’t as many sirens as there had seemed to be. Gregor and Stewart would find that out in no time at all. In the circumstances, it didn’t matter much, because the sirens acted like heat on ice cream. They melted the crowd away. It happened so fast, Gregor could not tell anyone, later, just what the sequence of events had been. One moment, the stairwell was crammed tight with people. Stewart was holding on to the photographer who had put his hand into Kendra Rhode’s body and was getting ready to hit him. Gregor had pushed all the way to the body itself and was knocking back other people who were grabbing, poking, kicking, snatching, anything to get a piece of her, anything to touch the dead flesh, anything to take away a souvenir, although by then there were no souvenirs left. Then the sounds started and suddenly, it was over. Done. Finished. The crowd had ceased to exist. There was no way to tell where it had gone. There was only Gregor, and Stewart, and Leslie on the stairs, sobbing. Kendra Rhode’s body was stark naked and bent in ways no live body ever could be.