Slaughtermatic (16 page)

‘
Shavin’ my jacket.’

‘
Well now we’re gettin’ someplace,’ roared Blince, then stopped, frowning. ‘Is this what you consider rational behaviour, Rose? In a jam like this one here today? I hate to be a stickleback for details -’

The door opened behind Blince and the guard stood aside - Blince turned in his chair and peered down in surprise. ‘Well looky here - it’s a spinny chair.’

In came a guy who looked like a fist in a hat.

‘
Get a loada the chair, Terry - it swivels.’

‘
Fine, Henry.’

‘
This here’s Terry Geryon, Rose.’

‘
How do you do, miss.’

‘
Take your hat off, Terry. Terry’s the armourer round here and does a little interrogation if he has the time. Trained at Benning though he don’t make a song about it. Tattooed on the other side of his skin - eh, Tell? Keep yourself to yourself, I right?’

‘
That’s right, Henry,’ said the armourer, bored. ‘Now listen Henry there’s a situation out back, we need you in the compound.’

‘
You boys in trouble findin’ the target again?’ Blince coughed with laughter. ‘What’s the tattoo of?’

‘
Tiamat, the primal dragon.’

Blince exploded with hilarity. ‘He’s full o’ that shit. Okay Tell, I’ll bail y’out. You’ll have t’excuse us, Rose - me an’ Tell’ll maybe play good cop/bad cop with you later on. ‘ He stood and picked up the ammo bucket. ‘But we ain’t guaranteed to remember who’s which.’

Broken up with laughter, he left with Geryon - the slabhead guard followed, slamming the heavy door.

‘
Tried these?’ asked Blince, brandishing a burger at Geryon as they strode to the compound. ‘Bilderburgers. Grey-coloured - they make ’em in secret - what you don’t know, you know? Takin’ over the market.’

‘
That’s fine, Henry. Listen, Garnishee ain’t checked in – the boys checked his deadlurk and you would not believe what they found there. Books - a whole mess of ’em. Guy’s a sicko.’

‘
I always knew it, Tell.’

‘
They never could stand takin’ orders off Choke Chain.’

‘
Put out an all-points on the bastard - shoot to kill. And gemme a soda. And baguettes. And take this goddamn bucket. So was this all you wanted to tell me?’

‘
No, Henry - it’s the artillery train. Came in with some extra freight.’ They arrived at the observation deck. ‘See for yourself.’

Blince looked down at the compound where the armoured train stood hissing. The grilled plough at its prow had accreted something like a bug on a windshield. It was a metal bedhead, upon which a naked, broken man was dazedly crucified.

Benny approached the Mall bunker wearing a beard he’d shaved from a struggling hiker and a Nazi accent he’d heard on a Texan. He presented the sentry with a document bearing enough specifics to last a lifetime. It seemed natural to Benny that this document had run out of the copnet at a touch of the keyboard. He’d just hit
//rw.panacea.escap.mall.

The slabhead couldn’t have thought slower if he’d been decaying. Finally he looked up. ‘Dis looks to be okay, Mistah Kurtz.’

‘
Doctor Kurtz - please.’

They were like autumn leaves around a park bench. Parker passed three burning copcars and walked through the vivid dead surrounding Rosa’s railcar. Nearby stood the roller she’d boosted, torn open on one side. The railcar itself was a wreck, warped by multiple impacts. Hecklers, Mag-10s. Panic shots.

He entered the carriage. Shredded leather curtains wafted and draped like seaweed. Light flared little details of damage. A floor of glass, a bed of blood. One wall scorched black. Her soul filled the air like solvent.

Behind a melted jawchair he found a chainsaw - and a guncase which he opened tenderly. An antique .38 special.

At the front of the twentieth century, Southern anti-drug campaigners had stated that drugs were making the black population bulletproof and the cops upped their calibre. The result was the issue of this gun as standard. He chuckled fondly.

And what was this? A slimline Ingram M20 with a topped magazine - a 1,000 rpm room broom, still in its thigh holster.

Parker stroked the holster slowly, the demolition ball of his brain going to work. He put the gun muzzle to his nose and inhaled. Fired recently. Parker got an ecstatic rush - closely followed by self-disgust. She’d be revolted to see him here, doing this.

He shut the guns away and returned the box to its place. On the bed he placed a 20mm Heavy Duty drillbit, tied with a ribbon. Greater gift has no guy, he thought, than the death of his rivals. Dante and Dante. Then he’d take her to the Creosote Palace for antifreeze in tall glasses and a skin-from-bone stripshow. They had rubber chandeliers and that classy stuff - she’d see what kind of a man he was. He’d make an impression no one could hammer out.

Leaving the railcar and walking through the war zone, Parker drew up short at the sight of a hog tank standing on a dirt knoll in front of him. A dead cop lay on the hood, an ace of hearts in the middle of his face. The hatch flung open, bouncing. Dante Cubit emerged, and stared at him without a flicker of expression.

Parker made a noise at the back of his throat like the click of a trigger.

Eddie Gamete stood at the window and watched the city at work. Near Betty’s Fort there was tracer fire and rippling firepools of red gold. A bigot lattice obstructed the thoroughfare. Dozens of cop rollers were drawing fire outside the McKenna Square Assembly Hall. The fuselage of a downed plane was being stripped to the girders by antlike speed urchins. The imploding road off Scanner roiled darker than dark. A bomb zombie event - some kind of small carnival - ended in a detonation which sent a firestorm flashover through the Portis Thruway into the Triangle. Gamete hoped it wouldn’t be too hard for the boy - he’d seemed almost lively at the end, a real firebrand.

It had made Gamete feel old, talking to Cubit and remembering. He’d been here so long the plastic flowers were wilting. Quarried his cynicism for something edible and starved like a pup in a vault. The joke was on him - his viewpoint coincided with the facts.

Did the city have anything new to show him? Time to go?

Billy Panacea was driving his luminous cartoon car down a Mall reproduction of Prod Street when the world blew up in his face and he was lying on a metal slab in a bare white room. Benny the Trooper was slapping him round the chops and telling him to walk. The boredom was starting to fade. Sirens were blaring to beat the band. Billy had a headache which could write its own biography. And it grew fleetingly worse when he realized this moron had gotten his message.

5

THE CROWDPLEASER

The crowdpleaser wheeled through diced rubble and skulls dry as pistachio shells, sniper fire winging off scarred armour. Inside, Dante was perusing an account of civilization’s end in
Reality Scare
:

Dante threw the book down, his hands tingling. He was feeling as sick as a lab rat and found that the type of several pages had transferred on to his palms. Re-examining the book, he discovered that the pages he had read moments ago were now missing entirely. Cobalt-blue pain began shooting up his arms.

He’s the one all right, thought Parker, casting him a glance from the driver’s seat. Look at him staring at his own arms like they’re a mystery. That’s not the Danny we all know.

The Dante they all knew would inflate the head of a captive mime and burst it with a stick. And this guy here had put on a pair of surf shorts - not the garments of a man who wished to stay alive.

So how to ventilate him safely and completely? Parker wondered. He could perform a meticulous stabbing or grab the cop rotaries the target had acquired as part of the tank package, but loose ends required a thorough taking apart with a Scatterat or flamethrower. There was nothing in the storage bustle but copperhead shells and antishock jackets - and the jackets were beige.

Parker knew enough about gore-belly street tanks to guess he was spitting blanks. The Malacoda was a snubbed-down Paladin with tenth-generation Chobham armour, the boast projecting showily from a bump turret. This was an M109 155mm Enigmatic Crowd Cannon, a fairlike gun of the type he deplored. Some demonic wiseacres had taken the Zero Approach principle of etheric consent and introduced a randomizer into the gridpulse - when the cannon let rip at a crowd a few people would get it who didn’t deserve it and vice versa. By a tortuous route, artillery technicians had created a gun which accomplished by precision engineering what other guns did by chance.

Parker had once test-fired a portable variation - the semi enigmatic rifle leavened the payload with smokescreens and scattershot inaccuracy and was dubbed the Patbue Cannon. But this was all academic as far as he was concerned – not only was the 155mm Enigmatic on a gridpulse but it let rip by an onboard fire-control computer and must have been newted with everything else.

He’d never botched a job before. The target didn’t seem suspicious - they were just headed for the den to rescue Rosa like she was some blonde in a print dress. Like hell. The urgency he felt was nothing to do with rescue. Probably she got caught for fun. Sure, to make the crime rhyme.

‘
I know you’re busy, Rose. I’ll keep the rest o’ your life conveniently brief.’

Blince was flushed with hilarity when he returned to the yelling-cell. The slabhead guard hauled Dante Two inside on the iron frame and propped him against a wall, slamming the door and assuming his post as Blince sat down.

‘
Don’t look now, Rose, but I think we found the guy who broke into your place and bled on it.’ Blince bellowed with laughter.

Dante Two groaned like an opera-goer, trying to focus.

‘
Speakin’ o’ which,’ said Blince, calming down, ‘you got a wound we ain’t noticed?’

A patch of purple blood was spreading at Rosa’s chest.

Rosa took up the Dartwall gun and fired a single armourpiercing flechette through Blince’s shoulder, the guard’s midsection and the door’s lock housing. Blince was still spinning in his chair when she fired the second flechette pointblank through Dante’s handcuff chain. Dante Two fell into her arms.

Outside they ran slam into Terry Geryon, Harpoon Specter and a handful of laughing cops. Specter reacted like a rag doll when Rosa grabbed him and backed down the corridor, pressing the cell guard’s gun to his head. ‘Hold your fire or the lawyer gets it!’

The air exploded with ammo and cordite.

As the public face of Beerlight justice, the uptown den’s lobby was polished, clean and pacifically spacious. As a practicality it was fronted by a metre-thick wall of rocketproof plexiglas and no door. The reception desk was unmanned and designed for use as a trench barricade.

Trailing a razor-wire fence, the tank trolled up and jerked to a stop. It was twenty feet from the den front and sat there.

In a fine show of equality, Harpoon Specter bled from both entry and exit wounds and tried telling everyone about it. But he had bitten off his tongue which lay, slick and forked, on the floor. ‘Quiet down,’ snapped a medic, slapping him.

As Specter was stretchered past, Blince gave him the thumbs-up. ‘You’re actin’ real creepy, Harpo - and I like it.’

‘
How you feelin’, Henry?’ asked Geryon.

‘
Little dizzy for a while, Tell, but the doc’s patched me up here. Cornered the bastards?’

‘
Holed up in the system room, Henry - ain’t doing any harm, everything’s down - we got another thing. Take a swatch.’ Geryon gestured to the second-floor window and Blince looked down at the silent tank. ‘Just came in - gun’d maybe scratch the glass.’

‘
That’s a Malacoda hog tank from downtown - musta boosted it from Deal.’

‘
Well, we’re safe as houses anyhow, Henry - cannon works on a pulse grid so it’s outta action.’

‘
That a body on the hood? Kinda messed up?’

‘
I guess.’

The turret lid popped like a ringpull and a guy climbed out in shorts and a black coat. He walked over the hood and jumped down.

He stood looking at his reflection in the den front.

‘
Twin brother?’ asked Geryon.

Dante Two sat against the wall like a scandal-drained mayor. Hecklers hammered at the door. He wondered if the rhythm of such fusillades varied among differing cultures.

‘
There it is, I
told
you the timelock was a dumb idea,’ Rosa shouted.

‘
What are you so upset about? It worked, apparently - there’s one of me out there who got the spice.’

‘
Bet your bitter life there’s one o’ you out there - with a hog tank.’