Slayground (1971) – Random House

A Parker Job (#14)

___Spiders and bats and other things hung from the ceiling on thin black wires, some of them dipping and rising in regular motion, others just hanging in one place, turning lazily. Caliato, a neat man, almost finicky, found this passage almost nauseating, and when one of the bat figures brushed his forehead with its furry wings, he recoiled as though from an electric shock.
___The end of the passage was a black curtain, vaguely repellent to the touch, as though made of snake bellies. Caution was replaced in Caliato with disgust,the need to get away from here, out of this rotten place. He pushed through into another room, and suddenly saw himself a dozen times. He saw the long—barreled .44 in his right hand, the unlit flashlight in his left. Over and over, a dozen times.
___The strange thing was, he had a white circle on his chest every time.
___His senses were being battered from too many directions, the noise and the lights and the crazy room with its tiled floors and then the place with the bats and spiders and now himself in endless repetition in dozens of doorways. He wasn’t rattled completely, the way O’Hara and Dunstan had been outside, but he was just rattled enough to take a second and look down at his chest, as though expecting to see a white circle there. There was none, and when he looked up, there were a dozen other men in the room with the dozens of himself. Those other men had guns too, just as all his own selves had guns.
___He knew it was all up, he knew he was going to die in here, and his thought was What a waste. The future he had, the potential he had, all gone. What a waste. Who would have thought his story would end like this?
___He raised his gun, even though he knew it was useless. Still, he was the first to fire, shooting at one of the men in front of him at random–they were all identical–and that one suddenly disappeared in a cascade of crashing glass.

___Parker shot the chest without the white circle on it. All the overcoated men in all the mirrors staggered back, their guns and flashlights falling. They fell against a mirror, and leaned there for a long second, and then toppled forward, only to bounce their heads against other mirrors and wind up crumpled over and over again on the floor.

Buy it here:

Random House , 1971 (HC)
Berkley, 1973 (PB)
Allison & Busby (UK), 1991 (PB)
University of Chicago Press, 2010 (PB)
IDW (Graphic Novel), 2019 (HC)
E-Book, 2010
Audio Book, 2013
Slayground (Thorn-EMI), 1983