WHEN THE BELL RANG, Trotter made his move. He hadn’t been sure he would. It’s one thing to decide to die for something, it’s another to go do it. Talking, baiting Nelson, had been his consciousness buying time, begging him to think of something else. There wasn’t anything else. He warned Regina, as well as he could, that the air would soon be filled with nastiness, said the magic “Now” before Nelson got tired of the goading and took advantage of one of the extra chances Trotter kept giving him to shoot them both.
Nelson may have been a maniac, but he was still human. He had senses; he had reflexes. Trotter had known the clanging would start, and could be ready for it. Nelson would have to be startled. He’d flinch; he’d look around wildly to see where the sound was coming from. It was the only edge Trotter had.
As soon as the ringing started, Trotter heaved up with his arms, bunched his legs beneath him, and jumped blindly, straight back into the man with the gun. There was a loud noise and a pain in his head, and for a second, Trotter was sure he’d been shot. When his brain kept working, he realized what had happened was that he’d rammed the top of his head into the point of Nelson’s chin. He didn’t know what happened to the gun, and with the noise of the machines, couldn’t know. All he could do was to keep his feet churning against the catwalk, keep driving the man back.
Until they both went over the side. Nelson had hold of him by now—he wasn’t going to go over alone. That was all right. Trotter had figured that was the way it would be. For a few seconds it was like flying, first with an angel, then, when some jolt on the way down broke them apart, solo. Then the floor came up, and there was nothing.
Betrayed, Roger thought as his back leaned against nothing and his feet came up and his head started down. This spy, this Satan, had pushed them over the edge.
The joke would be on Trotter, because he would wake up in Hell, tormented forever. Roger, at last, would share the sweet reward he’d helped so many others to attain, with the Lord he’d served with all his heart, no matter what words the Devil put in the mouths of his servants—
Except.
Except how could this be part of the Plan, how could a Godless killer like Trotter beat him, beat Azrael, kill the Angel of Death?
Suppose.
Suppose Trotter was right, Roger was just a madman, a—a killer no better than Trotter himself, because if he were an Angel of the Lord, would he be facing death with these damnable doubts? My God, my God, why have you forsaken—
No.
No, because in the jumble of images that rose around him as he fell, he found his Salvation, a rush of wind that hummed like a song, above the roaring of the gross inventions of man, a shimmering whiteness that was no solid shape, a light to guide him home, and as Roger let go of Satan forever, and reached out to meet the whiteness, he knew everything was going to be all right. He was going home.
The machines stopped roaring. They gurgled to a stop, as though they’d been stabbed to death. There were voices now, people running into the pressroom. She took her hands from her eyes. The first thing she saw was blood oozing from the paper cuts on the backs of her hands.
Then she made herself look over the edge of the catwalk and saw all the blood in the world. There was an ocean of blood on the floor of the pressroom. With islands floating in it. One of the islands was Allan, lying very still. Another was the right arm, shoulder, chest, and head of the Reverend Mr. Will Nelson, and the last was the rest of him. There was an archipelago of spilled parts scattered among them. Mr. Nelson had come too close to the speeding paper. Allan hadn’t. Allan was intact. She’d warned him days ago about the edge of the web. She hadn’t told him not to throw himself off the goddam catwalk.
She couldn’t look anymore; she turned away and was sick. Each spasm was an expression of hatred for Nelson. That bastard, that bastard. He had made a fool of all of them, tormented her whole family, and now his death was so disgusting she couldn’t even feel triumph over it.
And Allan. He’d known all along this was going to happen, and he did it, anyway. To save her. All the time she’d spent with him, even when they were making love, she wondered how he felt about her. He’d shown her now, and now it was too late.
Voices from down below. “Hey, look at this.” It sounded like Albright.
She looked over the edge and saw Albright and a bandaged Rines standing in the middle of the red ocean, looking at Allan. Rines looked up and said, “Get that thing over here, now.”
There was some kind of mumble in response. Regina couldn’t make it out, but Albright did. “To hell with your shoes,” he said, “I’ll feed you your motherfucking shoes you don’t get over here right away. This guy is alive.”
Regina felt her legs tremble, but she forced herself steady. This was no time to fall. She started to cry, then she laughed when Albright said it again.
“He’s alive.”