The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (18 page)

I slink through the street with
my dick in my fist and fireworks up my ass. It’s Friday night on the Protein
Delta, and the cold cuts are queuing up for inspection. Can’t sleep on this
shit, son. When you’re an old ho of fourteen like Skowt, you gotta work it.

And work it I do.

The sun comes up, blue on
chrome, pushing away the moon and its huge blinking billboard hawking vaccines
and tooth creams. Could use some of those myself. My gums taste like rust. I
had this one jerk around four a.m., into blood. Fucking pervert, all of
seventeen. Give me a tired old jerk any day. I’ll pop him like a balloon and
send him on his way, twenty bills and a teaspoon lighter.

My head screams for naptime,
but I know I can’t. Naps cost paysa—paysa for a room, paysa you’ll get rolled
for, paysa you’re not out making.

Plus, I got a mission to
complete. It started the day I was born. It ends the day I die.

I have to tell the world about
Skowt.

My old name is Oso, but you’d
better call me Skowt now, bitches. If you need a reminder, I’ll burn it on your
ass. Or you can just check for my tag. You won’t have to look hard. My paint’s
everywhere. I’m nationwide, coast to coast. Or at least I’m working on it.

I take last night’s paysa and
head east of the Delta, across the crap swamp and blacktop frizzy with
waist-high weeds. I make it to Wowoyo Market before noon. I stop by the Datra’s
and make arrangements for later. Then it’s time to stock up on the regular
supplies: krosi, plague shots, and chem-drops to purify my piss for drinking
water.

Oh, yeah, and paints. Gotta
have my paints.

You’ll never know what it’s
like to shake them cans of paint and feel the ball bearings clang around like
planets. I rip my tag across brick walls and bed sheets drying on the line.
“Behold: Skowt!” Then again. And again. Andagainandagainandagain. “BEHOLD:
SKOWT!” My tag is bright like a peacock, crazy like a spider web. Honed by
centuries of sharpening it against the skulls of dumbfucks. No cop ever caught
me. I suck and spray, suck and spray, and they don’t get the time of day.

“Fo waka, Skowt!” It’s Erl.

“Fo waka, Erl.”

Erl is all right.

“You tagging today?”

“The fuck you think?”

“I dunno, man, I thought you
might be down for a dunk in the canal.”

I laugh my ass off right in
Erl’s fat face. “The canal? Are you real? You’ll catch more crud in that canal
than you will in some old jerk’s olo.”

Erl sniffs. I forgot to take it
easy on him. He’s pretty big for eleven, but still, he’s just a baby.

“Hey, Erl! It’s good, it’s
good. We’ll hit up that canal. But let’s go tag some first, huh? You with me?”

Erl’s face lights up. “I’m with
you, Skowt.”

I’ll be straight: It was no
accident I ran into Erl. I knew where he was gonna be, when he was gonna be
there. Erl’s predictable. Not like me. You never know which way my dick is
gonna be coming at you. Ha!

Mostly I tag alone. That’s kind
of the whole point. It’s just me, my paints, and an empty space crying out to
get filled. Sometimes the vids in Wowoyo show old stories, ones about fucking
for love. Fucking for love! I don’t get it. But I bet it feels like tagging.

Today, though, I need Erl. I
need a sidekick, a pack mule. A lookout.

Some big shit, you understand,
is about to go down.

You’d think hustling on the
Delta, busting ass, dodging cops and pimps would be plenty of ambition for a
young businessman like myself. But I got something no one else around here
does: the tonton of a cheetah. I came into this world with no one. None of that
mama and papa crap, as far as I can scope. I had a little brada once, Imi, but
he didn’t last on the Delta too long.

That’s when I knew I had to
make it. Not just make it: fucking
triumph
.

Babies like Erl, they’re good kids.
Strong kids. But they don’t have
vision
. That’s where Skowt comes in.

It squats there like a castle
in the dark. See, I’m smart. I can read. I seen books and lifted handhelds.
Castles used to look just like this: big and blank and beautiful.

Oh, the fucking tagging I’d
give this place. I can see it now: “Behold: Skowt!” Each letter as tough and
sharp and tall as me. But I got bigger jerks to fry.

This particular castle has
razor wire instead of a moat and some skinny old fuck in a blue suit for a knight.
Me and Erl sit scoping it out in the bushes, eating crispy roach and using the
red-specs I got when I went back to the Datra earlier. That woman can rig
anything, fix anything, for the right price.

I blew a whole roll of paysa at
the Datra’s today. She finally finished building my virus. It took her months
and cost me plenty, lots of overtime on both our parts.

Her disc I put in my pocket
along with a couple other vital pieces of hardware. The rest of the shit I
loaded up into Erl’s rucksack like he was a burro. Poor Erl. Then we headed out
from the Market for the castle, where we now crouch like hyenas with nothing to
laugh about.

Leaping from the leaves, we
time everything just right. We use the old stopwatch and the metal-cutter we
got from the Datra’s junk pile. It’s not like it’s that hard to break in
anyway. No one has the paysa to do shit right anymore. Not even the kings of
the cocksucking castle.

We’re through the moat, past
the knight. Then another one of the Datra’s toys—a scrambler—gets us in the
door. Dressed in black and humping shadows, I want to roar at the sky.

I’m a fucking dragon. I feel
like a fucking dragon.

“Skowt. Skowt, I’m scared.”
Erl’s been quiet so far. I should’ve figured he’d get spooked. “They won’t even
bother giving us to a judge if they catch us. A couple of Delta rats. They’ll
just torch us.”

“Erl. Too late. We’re in. We’re
in!” I have a hard time keeping my voice down. “The moment is at hand. We’re
dicking the moon in the earhole, Erl. We’re skull-fucking that bitch!”

Erl starts to whimper. I drag
him into the maze of dark hallways, scrambler in one hand, the Datra’s map
burned into my brain.

Deeper we go.

Finally, the door.

I stand there for a second, and
for that second I feel little Oso inside me. I hear him. I hear him whining in
the alleys, licking garbage, slurping out of puddles. Puking. Snot all over. A
jerk takes him, hard, and soon he figures out he can trade one end of himself
for the other.

It’s not easy. What is? But
none of that matters anymore. Oso is Skowt now, and Skowt is an ice-hard
bastard of the street. Skowt
is
the street. Stone. A Protein dragon.
Long, black, scrawny. Scales made out of footprints and burnt rubber. I spit
fire, and my fire fucks all.

With a final blast of juice
from the scrambler, I blow the door open.

Fuck! I’m blind.

It’s a room of crystal. Cables
dangle from the ceiling like cave rock. Vids blink like lizards’ eyes. Smoke
and greasy steam pours out of everywhere. Erl runs back down the hall like a
fat tapir, but I don’t care. I made it. And I have a mission.

My eyes get used to the
sparkles, and I head for the first terminal. I pull out my handheld, a gift
from some old jerk who fell asleep on top of me and never woke up. I’ve run
through the Datra’s instructions a hundred times, but it’s different when it’s
real. Trickier. I slip the disc, Datra’s virus, into the handheld and hook the
handheld up to the terminal.

The terminal starts sucking it
down.

I move from terminal to
terminal, plugging and tapping, plugging and tapping. The keys are little gems,
cut-glass barnacles. It’s a mess of light and color in there. The Datra used to
know someone who programmed here, and she told me all about it: The system’s a
total scavenge job, held together with jizz and paperclips. Steaming pistons
spin the disc drives. Oil sizzles. It’s hard to breathe. And it’s fucking hot,
hot as the blacktop in summertime.

Even worse, I figure, I’ve only
got a couple minutes. I was stupid to bring Erl. I just figured out where he’s
running.

An echo rings down the hallway
outside. That fat little shit is faster that I thought.

“Down here! You’ll tell them,
right, mister? You’ll tell them that I told you?”

I keep tapping away like crazy
at the last terminal. Erl sticks his head in the doorway. The skinny old guard in
the blue suit is right behind him.

It’s funny the shit the Delta
will make you do. Sometimes you hurt yourself so other people can’t. Sometimes
you just hurt them first. I don’t blame Erl. I know he’s just a kid, a baby. He
shouldn’t be out there queuing up every night, nothing to anyone but a slab of
cold cut. Some kids ain’t made for that. Erl ain’t. Imi wasn’t.

I am.

I take the old guard’s bullet
in the armpit just as a last rush of juice gushes from my handheld and into the
terminal. Steam jets out of it, scalding me. I slump to the floor.

The guard’s head turns into a
puff of red mist as I pull a one-shooter out of my back pocket and fire it at
his eyes.

I yell at Erl. Stuff comes up
in my puke. My lungs make a sucking noise, like this:
foko
foko
,
foko
foko
. Erl is crying, a dry cry, and he starts to pull me out of the
hissing machinery.

“No!” I yell. “Leave me here!”
Erl won’t listen, which is good, ‘cause I don’t know what I’m saying. I catch
one last look at the control room’s vids, but it’s all steam. Steamsteamsteam.

When I wake up I’m outside in
the bushes, flat on my back. Alarms are going off. Erl is blubbering and saying
sorry. The cool night air is pouring in through my ribs.

I look up.

The moon is orange, swirly,
like a drop of blood in a glass of water. Huge. A hole punched into the night.

In the middle of that hole is
the billboard. But there aren’t any commercials for vaccines projected on it
tonight. No ads for tooth creams in letters a hundred miles high and visible
from the deepest alleys of the Delta, from all the other alleys of all the
other Deltas, from sea to shitty sea.

Instead it’s a tag. Bright like
a peacock, crazy like a spider web.

I grip Erl. “It’s okay,” I say.
“Take me to the Datra,” I say.

Like I told you already: I’m a thunderbolt
in heat, a fucking rocket manned by a panther astronaut.
Ancient
. My
mission started the day I was born, and it ends the day I die. But Skowt ain’t
nowhere close to being dead yet. All the world knows is my name, my tag,
hanging there in the night sky like a black eye all purple and yellow on the
ugly blue face of the moon.

That’s a lot. But it’s just a
start. Skowt’s still got plenty to learn you bitches.
Plenty
.

Behold, motherfuckers. Behold.

Shaded
Streams Run Clearest

Geoffrey W. Cole

Your wife will keep
cheating on you, at least until the world ends,” Calais said. The young husband
seemed resigned to his fate. Calais led him to the door, and flipped the sign
to ‘Closed’.

Calais ordered a
pizza from the Italian place at the other end of the mall while he shut down
the temponeural coils of the amplification array. The machine powered off, but
he remained in the un-amplified future that always hummed at the edge of his
percept
i
on. So many
intertwining streams. There was a chance the
cheated husband would leave his wife, a chance she would reform her ways, but
these days no one had any impetus to change, not when every licensed precog saw
the same mushroom-clouded future.

A knock on the door
drew Calais out of the trance. The pizza boy? It would be a first if he were
early. Calais unlocked the door.

“If you’re closed, I
can come back tomorrow,” the Independent Senator said. She hid behind oversized
sunglasses, a copper wig, and a Seattle Aquarium T-shirt.

“Of course not,”
Calais said. “Please take a seat.”

He switched the
amplification array back on.

“I’ve never used
your profession’s services before,” she said.

“Then you’re unique.
A wise politician. Most are foolish enough to keep precogs on their payroll.
The process is simple. Ask what you’d like to know, and I’ll trace the flow for
probable answers.”

She placed her
sunglasses on the desk between them. “The Presidential candidates have both
asked for my endorsement. I’ve heard the rumours on the street, what your
colleagues see coming. I try not to believe them, but in that I might also be
unique. I want to know what our country will look like under both candidates.”

Calais sighed. He
didn’t need the array for this, but the Senator would require more than just
his word. He dove into that part of his mind that never stopped muttering, the
intertwining streams that led to the future.