Slaughtermatic (13 page)

‘
And I ain’t never liked this den. That much rocketproof plexiglas out front’s a goddamn invitation’s what it is. Place is all army - see the armoury compound out back? Credit due to Geryon but six-two-and-even his boys don’t know how to fire them bloopers. And while I’m gapin’ at these pansy uptown computer swatches some idiot interferes with the Carny’s presentation and he flies off the handle, shootin’ the life outta the spectators. Still, I guess it saves us a barrel loada trouble re them snipers - I told you before, every bookin’ offence carries its own antidote.

‘
Arrest the victim, Benny, that’s the bottom line - wrap it up neat as a gift on Christmas Eve. And if the victim’s doll-eyed and deceased our job’s concluded and we can slumber easy. Think like a crook, Benny, and you can’t go wrong - like if there’s two fellas out there identical, same fingerprints and all, how could they use it to cheat and lie? Me, I’d use it to round up and kill dogs but you might have different ideas. Remember that guy went and carved little anti-cop statements into his finger-ends? Had the boys in the print lab hoppin’ mad? Prints otherwise smooth, burnt off if I recall. Then after a time the boys realized the messages contained a kind of veiled respect, first they’d received in years. Took another long while for ’em to notice the terrible spelling and realize it was the work of a cop - remember that, Benny?
Benny
?’

Blince looked about suddenly, aware of an absence.

Right about then Benny and Corey blasted through a cop roadblock in Terminal state and headed laughing for the Mall bunker.

Blood poured down the grand stone steps of the McKenna Square Assembly Hall - the closest Beerlight would ever get to a municipal fountain. The Carny strode out with a smoking rotary cannon and descended the red-carpeted stairway. At ground zero he looked at his watch, which displayed a digital image of a decaying surfer. One o’clock.

A joyrider whooped past and the Carny fired, impacts drumming across the side armour and through the cage - he got a hit of the screaming driver’s view, starstreaks filling the windshield and the car pitching down into blackness, a thread of soul catching and unraveling the driver’s flesh until white knucklebones gripped the wheel. Only a whistling of wind through ribs - the view blinked out.

Well, such entertainments were fine and good but nobody ever made a living going to conventions. The Carny took his rifle apart and put the pieces in a polkadot silk bag, locating his van in the lot and throwing the bag in the rear. Then, slamming a door which said CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINER, he started back to the West coast.

Biting and tearing strips from car fenders like they were bacofoil, Specter had approached Olympus with the blurry optimism which can flow unstoppably from madness. Digging barehanded in stodgy corpses, his hopes had now born sweet fruit. The two shootists, clearly ignorant of the body’s uses, had shown him the spot where Cubit was buried, saying he was welcome to it. What fools these humans were! Soon the slime would part and he’d hit the vein of manipulation he’d sought all his life - just a little deeper. He began gnashing blackened gore aside with his teeth.

Neither of the shooters knew where to find Cubit, and they parted on the understanding that they would follow and spy on one another. Within minutes they were standing next to each other again, grudging and morose. ‘His deadlurk,’ said Parker.

‘
Went there earlier - zip. Danny’s got an Eschaton steamer stashed - hadn’t been touched.’

Working on the principle that personal and cultural history are drawn by an eschatalogical attractor, an endtime which pulls events like a magnet, the Eschaton gun cut out the middleman by invoking the summational condition of the victim - usually a drift of ashes. Now and again, however, depending on a target’s future plans and fortune, it would transform the victim into an all-knowing, all-powerful, floating luminous doughboy. This all-or-nothing quality and the weapon’s flat ammo drum made it known to some as the ‘roulette rifle’.

‘
You understand,’ Rosa added, ‘the instant we find Danny you’re kissin’ your shadow.’

‘
I understan’ it is your duty to try, Rosa Control.’

They were strolling out of Amp Street when they saw a grey sedan with netted windows and soldered doors screeching up Sunday, pursued by cop cars. The sedan mounted the sidewalk and ploughed through dozens of trashcans - Parker saw that Cubit was simultaneously driving and shaving his face. Rosa jolted the Scatterat as Parker let rip and Cubit’s windscreen and cage evaporated, the car slewing aside and plunging into a store front.

Rosa took out a cop car, which hit a hydrant and bounced to a halt, a second roller batting into it. Dante Two had dashed down a blind alley, dropping his gun, and was stumbling through trashcans. At the end of the alley he hit a tall wire fence and began clawing his way upward. Parker aimed at Dante Two and Rosa aimed at Parker, like a puke chain.

A couple of minutes back, in Download Jones’s deserted basement, something activated on a time switch behind the boarded-up door to the disused elevator. Ex-DoD hardware, it was a modified HAARP ionospheric storm cannon which fired a quantum electron charge up the empty shaft and out the roof of a tenement. It hit the sky, inverting the atmosphere’s electron densities. Within minutes an intense electromagnetic flux saturated the city. People’s hair stood on end and every particle of unshielded program data was obliterated. Monitors blanked out. Communication networks took a flap in the wind. Every digitally aided gun in Beerlight fell dead as a rock.

‘
A live gun is death,’ wrote Eddie Gamete, ‘and a dead gun is life - you can put in as much effort as you like, nothing’ll happen.’ A lesson Brute Parker had never learned - even he had allowed chips and datawork to worm into his armoury.

The Scatterat was a fire-by-wire and he threw this aside to reach for the slimline armani. ‘Don’t try it!’ screamed Rosa with difficulty - the wetware gun was unraveling, throwing itself from her arm with a squeal - datafluid smacked against the alley wall and the gunmeat lay flapping on the ground like a landed trout. But Parker’s armani contained a digital trajectory adjustment as a build-in to the fire mechanism - when he squeezed, the whole gun fused and locked up. ‘This is real, Parker, a real gun!’ Rosa shouted, aiming a pistol at Parker’s head. She moved forward, tripping over hardware - including the Eschaton there were four dead guns on the floor, one still twitching. ‘Sauer 226 automatic pistol, 9mm parabellum, fifteen rounds, no grid, no laser pulse, no sight adjustment, no funny stuff - move and you’re history!’

‘
I love you,’ thought Parker, frowning.

‘
Danny, get down from there!’ Rosa yelled - Dante Two had abandoned the fence and begun climbing a fire escape to nowhere. It was a typical anodyne overdose.

When she dragged him out of the alley into Sunday she saw the last of the pursuit cops, bereft of computer guidance, simultaneously blowing each other’s heads away.

Parker strolled out of the alley in time to see her move off in a cop roller, Cubit in the back seat eating fries. Rosa was breathing through her beautiful bruise of a mouth and looking the world’s abyss in the eye. She’d tear out a man’s heart and throw it back in his face. How
strong
that would feel.

He walked absently up Sunday. Cubit - something wrong about him. Parker had gunned loose ends before, and Cubit didn’t fit the bill. He was missing that hunted, haunted look of the supplanted.

Then he drew up short. At the top of the street, where the cop den should have been, was a sort of shadow and some burnt girders. He confirmed his position by looking at the other landmarks. He’d been here countless times trying to destroy this building. And there it was - a smudge for children to caper in.

A smile formed a hundred miles behind his face. The patience of the unfired bullet is vast, he thought, as is its strength.

In the Deal Street Highrise, Dante’s book had cut out, wiped by the Jones event. He sat under the window, half-tranced.

Out of a corner shadow stepped a stranger. ‘Let me help you up,’ the figure said, reaching down for Dante’s hand.

Dante was drawn easily to his feet. He looked about the warehouse. ‘Where’s the Kid?’ he asked, vaguely.

‘
Come away from the window, Mr Cubit. It was a squareshouldered little theft, the sort of pioneering idiocy I thought had gone out of the world. But it’s over - and you’ve a more pressing engagement.’ This was all said quite amicably by the tall man with the ashen hair and amused expression.

‘
And you are?’

‘
Eddie Gamete,’ he said. A white cylinder dropped silently from the ceiling and slid open - it was an elevator. ‘And you, Mr Cubit, are at death’s door.’

1

UNDER THE OVEN

Under the oven of the sky, Rosa’s railroad car sat in dry wasteland and clanked as if it were on its way. It was rocking like a metronome. Windows exploded with the sonic bang of two borderline personalities overlapping. The girl in boots and the boy in bandages. An unequal relationship, thought Dante Two, getting the pleasure and pain. Whatever happened to codependence?

Rosa raked her steelplated nails into his chest and he ripped between agony and glory like a flashbulb. She had fixed him out of the overdose - he was a hundred smarts beyond and the walls were peeling like a pearl, strobing behind Rosa’s tossing head. He sucked a breast and his tongue was lacerated by a nipple flechette, blood spurting. Desperate for leather, Rosa grasped at the nearest curtain and clenched it in her teeth. It tore down and light splashed over crimson-glistening and snow-white skin. His stomach wound opened, the bandage blossoming. Rosa was yelling ballistic technicalities each time she sank on to him, her face gnashy and flushed. Dante Two’s jaw was aching from a bout of oral sex which had left him chemically altered and forensically unidentifiable. Rosa grabbed up two jolt guns and forced one into his hand, pointing the other at his head. ‘Charter Arms undercover thirty-eight special! Cop revolver! Sixteen ounces!’ She was bucking as he tried to keep aim at the exquisite clench at the centre of her forehead. ‘Five-shot cylinder! Three-inch barrel! Metabolic breach modification! Now!’

They let rip simultaneously.

Accelerating upward, they saw through the glass walls the floors folding away beneath them. ‘Sixteen floors,’ said Gamete. ‘Another phoney
office. Storehouse. Armoury. Aquarium. VR
deck - for countryside mainly. Surveillance room. Underwear chamber. Menagerie. Chimps mostly, of course. Thinking of knocking through so the apes and underwear form a single experience. Zen
room. Maze. Brig. Wargames. Here
at any one time I run six famous court cases with a simulation adjustment so that the case proceeds according to reason. There’s the Queensbury case now.’

‘
Workshop. Gallery. Lab - let’s stop off here.’ The elevator slowed and Dante, nauseous with a sense of unreality, shuffled out after him. ‘Elevator doorway’s lined with Zero Approach beams by the way. If your heart weren’t in the right place it’d now be splattered against the wall here. Well done - brave man. Look at this.’

They were in a vast, silver, light-flooded arena of invention. ‘Everything in the tower runs off a Newman engine back there - but look at this shaft running the length of the chamber. Particle accelerator, as I wrote about in
Bomb Biology
. Constructed this with the intention of firing cliches at quantum speed and colliding them to see what sort of stuff they were made of. But of course when it came to it I had nothing to fire, since they’ve no basis in reality. And over here I’m channeling every single TV transmission simultaneously via the surveillance floor to form a single 3-D image.’ Gamete pointed to a transparent holographic drum in which floated something resembling a giant piece of shit. ‘Everything from the fifth floor upward’s electronshielded, incidentally. Oh, you probably don’t know someone’s pulled a prank outside, electromagnetic saturation, wiped everything. Did a similar thing myself when I was younger - put electromagnetic sheets into floppies. Wipes the whole hard drive when inserted - better than a virus.’

Dante had slumped into some kind of electric chair and was nursing his bruised brain.

‘
Neurofeedback rig,’ said Gamete. ‘Thought of it after the NLP riots. But look, this is scarcely appropriate - let’s go to the Cipher room upstairs, and I’ll lay out the entire jamboree in finely crafted detail.’

In the elevator Dante glanced at him - like a dead man, it was difficult to judge his age. But it was Gamete, the man whose head had convincingly exploded and whose body had taken residence underground before that became a fashion for the living.

They slowed and stepped into a booklined sanctuary with rolltop desk, world globe, deep oxblood sofas, surlyguy busts, the whole nine yards. Gamete went and fixed a drink as Dante scanned the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Disks and hardcopy, everything. Here was
A Handbook on Hanging
,
Scarcity Play, The Imitation Fish, The Purple Cloud, Scientific Romances, Disaster Approval, The Year 2440, Zastrozzi, The Sedition Orchard, Walden, Parable of the Sower, The Confidence Man, Swastika Night, Saturn Returning, The Crystal Grenade, Allogenes, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, The Alphabetic Abattoir, After London, Now We Are Six, Hammer Into Anvil, The Situationist Wars, The Ice-Shirt, Small Grays Bore Me, In Watermelon Sugar, Etidorhpa, Forty-Two Million Hot Dry Rocks, The Collected Villon, Against the God Emperor, The First Third, The Castle of Communion, Heiland, Krakatit, Skin of Dreams, Heaven Contaminated
and
The Telephone Book
. Here was Pushkin’s ’36-’37 journal, the Voynich manuscript, the
Hypostasis of the Archons
, the
Diametrics Lexicon
, the Vampire Jesus scrolls and an 1812
Fantasmagoriana
.