Slaughtermatic (12 page)

Elsewhere in the McKenna Square Assembly Hall the Magic Bullet contest was again cause for dispute due to ‘unfair use of technology’ such as radio-guided smart projectiles as participants tried to reproduce the Oswald shot. Ted Jellicoe’s popular session ‘Awaken Your Inner Lout’ competed with the knockabout seminar on ‘Pointblank Gunfire for Fun and Profit’, given by Jonah Dervish. The main screening room was host to heist shows - in exasperation at the poor quality of surveillance footage, criminals had begun shooting their own exploits with top-of-the-range equipment. Shootists argued over the source of the quote on the programme cover: ‘A sniper is like a genius - it’s not enough to be one, you have to be one
at
something.’ Delegates’ bags were bomb-checked on the way out of the building.

Minor stars were present - Hammy Roadstud, Dino Harmaline, Early Del Mar, Ted Revenant, Addison Fenway, Leo Struction, Mena Whitewash, Hillary Clambar, Craw Duke, Sally the Gat, Belly the Whump, Rex Camp, the Caere Twins, Sam ‘Sam’ Bleaker as mindless violence representative for the mob and Heseltine Finn the cokehead, who appeared on Wanted posters as a blur with eyes. Finn’s image had resulted in the repeated arrest of Marzipan Chad, who was famous for his ability to spontaneously generate a digital anonymity blob over his face. Chad was here to confront Finn and a fight had broken out between the two indistinct figures. Trying to pry them apart was Chewy Endeavour, a guy so into the notion of a second skin that he’d had his skin removed and his musculoskeleton bound in leather, then his own skin restored on top. Unanchored and bloodless, the human skin had soon worn away and left him a creaking leatherman.

But the big star was the Carny, exterminating clown extraordinaire - and he was in a broom cupboard, bound and gagged with emergency cordon tape.

Dante Two approached his apartment building. His car, the Smokebelch, was still concealed behind trash in the alley. Entering his apartment, he found everything in place. He removed the Eschaton rifle from its wall cavity and loaded up, making a list in his mind.

1. Leave town by east side and circle.

2. Hit the airport from north side.

3. Boost jetfoil.

4. Locate Rosa and Dante in Alaska by rumour trail regarding damn near impossible sexual escapades.

5. Claim supremacy over Dante in mindbendingly cunning chess games which last for months, evenly matched Dantes guessing each other’s moves to a T.

6. In the fifth month, have Dante kidnapped and subjected to a course of neuro-linguistic self-improvement which actually alters his submodalities and thereby his very personality. Thus faced with an unequally adjusted Dante at the chessboard, don a boxing glove and punch his lights out.

7. Seal Dante in indestructible floating arborium fitted with world library and riches beyond imagining, wherein his every thirst may be satisfied. Set perfect environment adrift in Bering Strait, disguised as iceberg.

8. Reconsummate love for Rosa in quarter-mile jacuzzi brimming with priceless dinosaur DNA and broadcast images via satellite mirror on to roof of White House.

9. Release a macro virus which changes everyone’s name to Micky Dolenz, wrecking the tax system. Declare the western hemisphere the Dolenz Free Lands and set up a new multipartite democracy in which charm and nervous tension prance hand in hand through the meadows, blinding one and all with the beauty of life.

10. Crown self with replica of universe formed by ozone sky-lens focusing ten years’ cumulative focal data down 3,200-mile refraction shaft into earth’s core, solidifying image in pure magma diamond a metre thick. Declare that all is well and all shall be well. Explode.

He had pocketed a handful of anodyne cloakers at the party and now swallowed them in preparation for the ramble. Then he stuck a kingsize ego patch over his belly wound and sat there wondering why the room hadn’t ignited. All this stuff belonged to Dante, didn’t it? And Dante Two was a fugitive from reality. What was on TV?

This last thought informed Dante Two that the anodynes had kicked in, halving his IQ. He primed the Eschaton and left the apartment, diligently repeating the list in his mind.

1. Take the time to say a long goodbye to everybody. Take a final look at those landmarks. Don’t get a ticket driving that car.

2. If pursued by cops, nearly collide with fruit truck, causing it to shed its load across street.

3. Mount sidewalk for no reason and plough through dozens of trash cans.

4. While driving, have a shave in preparation to beg for mercy.

5. If windscreen smashed by gunfire, run car into store front.

6. Drop gun.

7. Run down blind alley, stumbling over dozens of trash cans.

8. Hit tall wire fence and clamber frantically upward.

9. Mindlessly climb fire escape to roof, wrestle on edge and fall, landing amid dozens of trash cans.

10. If arrested, call attorney - more expensive the better!

When Olympus Dump was fifteen storeys high they had built a ski slope over the bodies. It was decreed both pleasant and educational for denizens to skim down the bleak decline. Rosa Control passed through the Dump perimeter by the toll-booth entrance, leaving the moneytaker with his future round his ankles. She skirted the Dump, kicking through rats and birds, a ski-mask shrouding her against clouds of flies and effluvia.

The wetware rifle started to throb as she approached the Dump’s front gate from behind - this was where the dead were checked in. About to press the rifle to the back of the sentry’s head, she was surprised when he turned and put the prow of a Mag-10 shotgun against her forehead. ‘Think of it,’ he said. ‘For just a few years the dead were finally a minority - now this.’ He tossed a glance at the Dump. ‘Let’s go.’

They started up the slope, sliding. ‘He’s not on the register, Miss Control. You here to dig up Danny or to bury him?’

‘
Bury him.’

‘
I don’t believe you, Miss Control.’

Gulls exploded upward with applauding wings. Rags of stuck flesh flapped from Rosa’s boots.

‘
Very swank gun, Rosa. Look at this.’ They stopped on a plateau and she looked around at him - he was flexing his left arm, which glistened like the skin of a snake. ‘It’s like a drug.’

‘
But can it shoot?’ asked Rosa, and continued up the slope before he had replied.

Toward the peak the Dump surface was mainly bare bone, picked clean and smooth as ice. Ribcages caved under the climbers’ weight. Chalky powder became the order of the day. At the summit, Rosa turned to see Specter holding a patchy head. ‘It’s Jerry Earl,’ he said. Grey soup spilled out of the skullbowl. ‘I defended him on the rap he got here for.’ And he smiled like a gashed throat.

‘
Why are we up here, dickwad?’

Specter ditched the head. He went and leant against the rear of the ski hut, then gestured with the Roadblocker. ‘Take a swatch at the city, Miss Control.’

Calculating the moment to shoot, Rosa gazed over gutted blocks, little fires and sparse insect cars on the distant freeway.

‘
Look at the dupes - the husk of reality they work to finance and which they spend their leisure hours believing. Oppression evolves.’

‘
I hope your monologue evolves beyond the obvious.’

‘
Now don’t make a scene. This crass menace is just the traditional prelude to a shot in the back around here.’

‘
That’s oldstyle murder, Mr Specter.’

Specter stepped toward her. ‘Isn’t it though.’

But when she spun to shoot, Specter already stood with his hands in the air, the Roadblocker on the bleached ground. Brute Parker had a slimline armani gun trained at the lawyer’s smile. ‘You shouldn’t oughta shoot a lady in the back, Harpoon Specter.’

‘
I didn’t, did I?’ asked the lawyer.

‘
I don’t like you,’ stated the hitman, his face expressionless.

‘
Well, you can see I’m real choked up about it,’ Specter remarked as Rosa pitched his rifle into the abyss.

‘
You wearin’ beige pants,’ stated Parker.

‘
You looking for Cubit too?’

‘
Tell me what you know about that.’

‘
Not a Lazarite hope, Parker. In this boomtime for horror the cost of clarity’s a burden no one can afford. Tell you what, though. You answer a simple question, I consider it.’ He held up four fingers. ‘How many fingers I holding up?’

Parker shot one away. ‘Three.’

7

THE BIG ACT

The big act had the main auditorium filling to the brim as the previous speaker wound down. ‘. . . and have demonstrated beyond a doubt that as an outlet for snipers capitalism has been indistinguishable from the agrarian commune. Thank you.’ To barely polite applause the speaker departed the lectern and, after a pause, another figure strode on, swaddled in clownwear. The attendant snipers greeted the Carny with respectful applause.

Keyed up on smarts, the Entropy Kid whipped off a jester mask he’d boosted from Jones’s basement and, speaking in a strong, clear voice, addressed the assembly with a level of audacity and charm rarely endured in this neck of the world.

‘
Yes, it was I, all this time, who fooled every bastard here by dressing up as a clown. And why. By God, you can ask? Where’s the evangelical carnage that made this city the mayhem capital of America? Where are the nervy programmes of priceless pandemonium we used to take for granted? Where are the Panaceas, Diesels, Atoms? The crime studio’s become a home to remakes and retrospectives. Look at you - shoring up your shopworn machismo with gimmick munitions and postfuturist generalities. You’re redundant. Yeah, the lot of you and I’m here to tell you. Right now, June 17 - redundant.

‘
What you do, that’s not art. Firing officiously from on high ’cause you don’t know the meaning of honourable exchange. Assuaging your guilt through your pacific generosity with a single boast - that you can die with the best of them. What does that mean here? What can anything mean in a world where life and death are decided by the gambler’s throw of your pisspoor shooting abilities? I’m not here to help you pretend you’re any different than the brotherhood. I’m the skeleton you strain to conceal in your own body. Your make-believe ethics don’t cut any ice with me, I assure you. Infantile anti-state platitudes - “Pageantry is the stage for the unexpected shot” - so what? You can take your trite tribal arithmetic and ram it up your ass. I’m head clown among those condemned for what they’ve inherited - this fool’s paradise of drab transgressions, cookie-cutter villains, ballistic incontinence and headshot trivia. The causes are so deep they’re drowned and undone. If a single one of you beef-armed midwives of meaningless demise grew your own mind you’d end everything in a barn, but you’re stopped by the self-importance of your petty mob dynastics. You and the whole crime-lite generation can go take a running jump at the shitpool of your mediocrity.’

The Kid was suddenly wearing a red carnation of his own meat. He looked down at this with slow understanding, and a constellation of bullet-holes began jabbing him open. He took a step backward, launching Peckinpah streamers of blood at a chart stand. A shot exposed the calligraphy of his brainfolds. Something like cheesed milk spat out of his head, hitting the back wall. The audience was on its feet, a medley of shots articulating its response. Gunblaze strobed parched faces and sparks clouded the air like sawdust. Empty housings clinked across the floor like tideshells. The lectern splintered in half. The Kid was slammed against the wall and fell to rest in a crimson pool the shape of Florida State. Peace broke out all over his face.

The gunfire died from the rear of the auditorium forward, as a figure strode down the central aisle trailing scraps of cordon tape. The attendant snipers fell silent as it dawned on them that the new arrival was the Carny, stripped to his antishocks, and letting rip at the dead imposter.

Dice ‘Killer’ Agnew, the Kid’s former cellmate, stepped on to the stage and continued firing at the body. As the Carny, he knew nothing of his own previous persona and was something more or less than human. He’d modified his Kafkacell Cannon so that the victim’s point of view was transmitted even after death - when he killed he got a mesmeric hit of the afterlife.

But as he shot and re-shot the Kid’s shredding corpse, he received nothing but grey static. He kicked the pulp with his black bulb-boots. This interloper, whoever he was, had already moved on, suiciding through the next level. The Carny had been used.

And he’d only come here to shoot the audience.

Blince slammed the phone. ‘Trouble at the gun bores meetin’, Benny. Every goddamn year. I’ll have you know better than I do them astro-monkeys take their one dumb idea and run with it to finely crafted extremities. You know they’re sellin’ ammo clips with little paper umbrellas? The whole nine yards. And they call it crime like they own the notion. Goddammit I’d give my punchin’ arm to see some real crime round here - not a peep outta anyone since the shit in the Mall, the heist on Deal and that explosion that wiped out the downtown precinct. Over twelve goddamn hours of styrofoam coffee, doughnuts, drawn blinds, shoutin’ “You’re off the case” to maverick cops and other routine duties - them ain’t the reasons I joined the brotherhood, Benny, I got violence to supervise. Like the Loveless massacre few years back, remember? That guy knew how to throw a punch.