They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (28 page)

One of his buddies
pulled his pants down and shouted, "Suck it, son! Come here!"

"Call your sister, she's good at that," the jackhole shouted back to the loud approval of everyone except the
moron
with his dick hanging out. Christ. The three assholes had picked the cream of the fucking crop to bring here.

Back to me, the jackhole said, "The town showed up last night, so everything's fucking wild, man, you know how it is. It was abandoned, so nobody's protectin' their homes
from us
or anything, everything's just old. I'm'a give you
the rest of
this quick, so keep up. If somebody fetches you an' tells you you're needed, you go to that big-ass metal building." He pointed outside of town to a barely-lit
spot
half a mile away. Tents of every kind surrounded a huge beige metal building that looked
big enough to
store a blimp. "If you do not get fetched, you keep yo' ass away from said metal building. Everybody moved their shit to town this morning, so there's no reason to go b
ack there 'less they call you."

He pointed to a school building down the road with a bunch of burnt-out fuck-ups littering the playground with themselves. "Next thing: you get your drugs there. Anything you wanna smoke, snort or shoot is there, fuckin'
gratis
. People been usin' the classrooms to trip out, just be careful which one you go in 'cause turf is already staked out, an' some of it's so small you won't know you stepped in it. Same with any of the apartment buildings, everybody got their
claim
." He pointed to a reddish two-story building. "That's the
place
for drinkin' right there, the cantina. Again,
gratis
, my man. The girls you see around are for everybody but don't be greedy, ain't no harems here. Don't get in with these fucking rape ga
ngs roamin' around, either. Fuckin'
foreigners are crazy an' shit. Don't be an asshole, stay away from 'em.

"Last thing is just watch your ass. Tensions is high as a motherfucker. Three Vietnamese guys beat the shit out of a Cambodian last night; he died this morning and disintegrated half the library where he was hidin'. People gettin' in fights all over, so don't fuck with anybody don't look and talk like you
, which I guess shouldn't be a problem for you, right?
Just lay low and get in line to get your shit when the bosses are finished."

A
black
motorcycle s
hot by us, the throttle wide open. T
he rider popped a wheelie, flipped the bike, and slammed it and him
both
into a rock. The
dude
got up and dusted himself off
with
a triumphant yell in some language that wasn't mine.

"Fuckin' leadskins, man," the jackhole said. "That was that black Ducati, too. I was gonna ride that one later. They better get us some fuckin' new rides soon
, you feel me?
"

No, I did not fucking feel him. But I said,
"That sucks, man," like I gave a shit.
I needed information.
"Hey, you know a guy named
Stagga
Lee?
" I asked him.
"
Black guy from St. Louis? Guy's a friend of mine and I'm trying to track him down."

The jackhole shook his head. "Don't know 'im. You said your friend's a black guy?"

"Yeah."

"Huh, that's--" Then he exclaimed, "
Oh, shit, son!
" Somebody had run up to the fallen rider and cold-cocked his ass. The rider and the new guy got into it, and everybody lost their shit like they had never seen a fight before.

The jackhole left me
to
run to the fight. "You in building number three way down there," he called back. "They're labeled. Ask for Shimbley, he'll tell you what room."

I blew smoke out the side of my mouth.
Shit.

The jackhole
got into the middle of the fight he had nothing to do with and threw a punch at the rider, then yelled because it hurt his hand
because, y'know, the guy was a fucking leadskin
. His buddies cleared the bleachers to join him and throw down, another idiot flew out of the sky to clock the jackhole with a bottle of rum, and somebody used whatever their fucking power was to wrench the red metal tower off its base with their mind. Its top twisted into a sharp spike, but before it could do any damage, some guy jumped out of t
he squabble and grabbed onto it, and
his touch collapsed the whole thing tower to metal pieces that fell on everybody in the mix.

I walked away before the shit spread and got me roped up in it. Fucking
retarded bullshit
.

Walking the streets of Pyramiden felt
a helluva lot
like being walked down the Pib. Everybody watched me and took my measure without really watching me. They could all go to hell
, though, I didn't have the time or the energy for any more pissing contests
. I just needed to find my building and lay low until I could figure out how to get in touch with Lee
. He had Spencer's original hardware in him, I figured, so he could turn
my nanites back on and
keep
Silvy the hell out of my head. Somebody in town was bound to know him.
I kept the opening riff of 'Ice, Ice, Baby' looping in my head, alternating it with the alphabet and the days of the week, like psychic white noise to distract Silvy if she tried to hang around my thoughts. It wouldn't totally work, but it was better than not doing jack shit.

I
finally found building
number five, then four.
Four had been
tagged:
'It is purely illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.' - Pierre Bayle
. The shit was getting really fucking
old.

Next to it, m
y building, number three, looked like it was being guarded by
a lot of angry
white guys. A lot of them. Most had shaved heads.
Many also
had swastikas tattooed on their arms. And someone had spray-painted 'ARYAN' on the door.

"Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me," I said.
I flicked my spent cigarette away.
But
of course
that's where they had put me.
Of course.
I had torched Wilmont Avenue, which was on the edge of a mostly black neighborhood. So, of course, I would get along great with a bunch of Neo-Nazi racist shit heads.
Why the fuck not?

I shoved my hands into the pockets of Red's jeans and kept walking.
Goddammit, I hated those three assholes.
Fucking unbelievable.

People had burgers and sandwiches in wrappers, so I headed the direction they looked to be coming
from to find something to eat. It took a little while to back-track them because they were just about all drunk off their asses, but I found the place. F
ood trucks had been set up in a field ringed by squat buildings that had a bust of fucking
Vladimir
Lenin at one end and a red, blue and green sign with a white polar bear on it at the other.

The quad was packed with people throwing elbows
down on the ground
and shit being thrown out of the windows from the buildings around
us
. Three of the trucks were already on their sides and completely looted out, including the tires and the engine, which, who the fuck
would want
some fucking truck tires in the middle of the desert?
The fuck were they gonna do with them? One truck had been crushed almost
flat and just gushed gasoline that nobody cared they were stepping in. Another
one
had been
ripped
in half and two guys were trying to
pull
the stovetop out of it. They both wore prison uniforms.
As a matter of fact, a
lot of people in the crowd did. Not a lot of steady job holders around.
And more reasons for people with badges to take notice of what was going on here.

Five guys rocked another truck and yelled shit until they tipped it over. When it
hit
, everybody swarmed it like roaches and got everything they could carry because everybody was too drunk and too Post-Human to fucking wait in a goddamn line.

Somebody behind me shouted "
Das Biest
!" and I didn't fucking look, just tried to find which truck had the burgers in it and if there were any left. The
shit heads
in the crowd were trampling as much food as they were carrying away.

Some old guy with a gray and white beard down to his stomach and a beer gut down to his balls came around from behind me and got in my fac
e, waving at me with both hands. He was
buck-ass naked. "Hey,
Das Biest von Feure
," he said happily.

I backed away before he touched me with any p
art of his body.
"The fuck's your problem?" People turned around to get cell phone pictures of him.

"I am a fan," he said. "I am from Netherlands. I see you on TV when I younger. You kill police on TV, very cool."

"I didn't kill any cops in Europe," I told him. "
And the Internet is wrong, I'm not from the Netherlands.
Get the fuck away from me, man."

"You want Ecstasy? I have for you if you need some. It's very cool."

"Dude. Get the fuck back. I'm not playing."

"
Beast
," somebody else said behind me.

I turned to the voice. "Jesus,
what
?"

A
Filipino
taller and wider than me stood there like somebody had carved him out of rock. "You got a meeting," he said.

Shit.

"With who?''
I asked him.

"You are fan of
Das Biest
, too?" the old guy asked excitedly. "What race are you?"

The
Filipino
stared over my shoulder. "That guy's naked."

"Yeah, I know. What's the meeting for?"

"You are very big. Is your power great strength? I have very cool flexible, strong joints."

The
Filipino
's brown eyes gave me nothing. He just said, "Come with me."

"Do you want Ecstasy, brave Samoan warrior?"

I turned around and pushed the old guy back. "Would you get the fuck outta here, man?
Fuck, just go.
" I asked the
Filipino
, "Who's the meeting with?"
again.

He exhaled
hard
and pulled a phone out of his pocket like I was asking him
deathbed
favors. He shielded the screen with his hand so that only I could see it. It just said: SILVY SAYS YOU GOT ME ON YOUR MIND. COME SEE ME. LEE.

Shit
, man. 'Ice, Ice, Baby' would be stuck in my head for fucking days and Silvy had
still
read me.

"This really Lee?" I asked the
Filipino
.

He nodded. I don't know what
the fuck I expected him to say;
I didn't exactly catch him in a brilliant mind game with that question. Having a sit-down with Lee sounded too fucking good to be true, but I needed Silvy out of me and what
other option
did I have than the nanites? My number one fan, Naked Santa?

"All right," I told the
Filipino
. "Give me a minute. I need some food."

He nodded his chin at the newspaper bundle in my hand. "You got some right there."

"This is a piece of a woman's ass."

"I am still your fan, very cool
Das Biest
. I will take mor
e Ecstasy and get a whore now."

I set the old guy's damn beard on fire, and he yelped and threw himself face-down into the grass to put it out. People snapped pictures of his flat, wrinkled ass.

The
Filipino
sighed at me heavily. "Just fuckin' follow me and don't talk."

Lying Tracey's Ass Off

The
Filipino
led me
without another word
to a badly-lit stairwell across town
where we were supposed to wait
.
The outside of the building
was covered in Chinese
letters
or something that
somebody
had scorched
into it
over the spray-painted tag:
'Why is there something rather than nothing?' - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
.
Seemed like a pretty good place to murder a dipshit in a Seminoles jersey.