The cruiser had been here. Stack could recognize the signs by now. Burning buildings, wrecked ve-hickles, dead people. But his tracer was down. An hour ago it had cut out and gone cold. He had been on a mountain road that only led to this place, so he hadn't had any trouble keeping on the track.
The sign at the town limits said "Welcome, Ariz" and there was a statue of a grinning Indian with his arms outstretched by it. But nobody was in a welcoming mood when Nathan Stack showed up on his requisitioned hog.
There were a few people in the streets, dragging corpses and extinguishing fires. This looked like the aftermath of a fair-sized firefight. Walls were scarred with fresh bulletmarks. The smell of cordite was in the air.
Most of the activity seemed to focus on a saloon. The Silver Byte. There was a row of motorsickles chained to the hitching rail. The machines bore the Gaschuggers' colours. Not a few of the citizens mopping up wore the distinctive overalls of the 'chuggers, patchworked with the badges of dozens of car and gas companies. Slack hoped the gangcult would be too busy binding their wounds to blame him for the mess his cruiser had made.
A dark-skinned man with a Zapata moustache and a gold tooth was directing the salvage operation. The wounded were being triaged. One group were carried into the saloon for medical aid. The other were being hauled to the local Boot Hill, presumably for a merciful bullet.
Stack parked his motorcyke, and addressed the foreman.
"Did a driverless Cav cruiser do this?"
The man sneered and spat. "Si, Trooper. Thees ees so."
"Where is it now?"
He nodded fiercely. "Thee chorch. Eet keell thee padre."
Stack pulled off his borrowed helmet. His ears were tired of Wagner. He was coming down from all the juju he had been shooting, and was beginning to feel his lack of food, drink and sleep. This was the end of the trail for a while.
"Is there anywhere to get a meal and a bed around here? The state will pay."
The man grinned bitterly. "Wee do not accept loncheon vouchers or cashplastic, Trooper. Seelver dollars or pesos."
"I have metal money."
"Een that case, I serve you best cheellee you have in your life. An' yiu can get a room over at Tiger Behr's motel. I am Pedro Annindariz. Seence Meester Cass lose hees head thees afternoon, I guess I am Mayor of Welcome, Areezona. Thees ees my saloon."
"Trooper Nathan Stack, at your service. Out of Fort Apache."
"Yiu a long way from home, yellowlegs."
Stack stretched, trying to dislodge the pain from his lower back.
"You're telling me. It's been a hell of a patrol."
"Theengs ain't been so good roun' here thees week, neither."
Shots rang out. Permanent anaesthetic they called it on the Cav training courses. Stack had never had to apply the treatment, but had seen it done. It wasn't pleasant.
"Start your chilli boiling, Pedro. I guess I better check out the church."
"Yiu can't meess eet. Jost follow thee holes een thee houses."
He could see what Annindariz meant. The cruiser had ploughed through the whole town. One family were standing around, looking at half of their perfect home, salvaging pots and pans from the rubble. Stack followed the tyre tracks through the town to the church.
After he had checked out the scene there, he should try to find a phone or a radio and report in. He knew Major General Younger would be having Siamese kittens over this patrol. He wouldn't be surprised if a Cav helicopter gunship were combing the mesas looking for them. If tradition was anything to go by, Tyree would get a posthumous medal, and he'd be quietly court-martialled out of the service. He needed some explanations.
St Werburgh's was a little way out of town. It stood in its own plot of land. There were people digging in the graveyard, and a pile of bodies stacked against a fence. A Gaschugger with his right forearm replaced by what looked like a giant iron lobster claw was scooping earth out of a shallow grave.
"Looks like the well's up for grabs," someone said. A couple of Gaschuggers were emerging from the church with sloshing buckets of water slung peasant-fashion on wooden yokes.
He climbed the ruined steps and went into what was left of the church. There were people there, standing still, but they weren't praying. They were staring.
The cruiser was there, bellied up to the altar, and between them was a crushed priest. He had been a big man, but he was a broken doll now, his head lolling at an angle. The car had grown some sort of spear and stuck it through him.
"How are we gonna get him loose to bury him?" someone asked. It was a skinny old man in shorts and a string vest. He had metal plates in his chest, his skull and stomach. His entire left arm, his lower right arm and hand, both his knees, his left foot, his right shoulder and his right eye were gone and replaced. Lights flashed and wheels revolved inside him. He had been rebuilt with durium-laced plastic, now badly scuffed, and old-fashioned robo-bits. He would have been chinless but for a sharp jawguard. Half his skull was metal, the other half still sprouted clumps of red hair.
"Yup, that's right, Trooper," the composite said. "Surf city radical, ain't it? There's still some of me in here. Behr's the name. Tiger Behr."
"You own a motel?"
"Yup. That I do. I used to be an angel."
That sounded unlikely, especially in a church.
"Hell's Angel. Albuquerque chapter, 1965 to 1993. It was a life."
"I'm sure."
"We was macho men then, not faghaggs like these Maniax and 'chuggers and such."
A couple of overalled youths muttered darkly. Behr laughed, opening his mouth. He was toothless but for four metal prongs that replaced his eyeteeth.
"Now, there's more doodads than flesh 'n' blood. But I kin still lick anyone in the house. Anyone."
"Consider me registered, Tiger. Now, stand back. I'm going to check this out."
Everybody eagerly stood back. This was one of those rare occasions when civilians were only too glad to obey orders. Stack warily approached the cruiser. It seemed to be dead, but he didn't trust the thing to stay that way.
He had his gun out, safety off and one in the chamber.
There was a sudden creak, and his finger tightened on the trigger. He fought the trembling shudder that ran through him. The rear door of the cruiser, bent and buckled out of true, fell off. Inside, the upholstery was unmarked. Kling's silvery jacket was bundled up, a scatter of powdered glass spread over it.
Stack touched the car with his gunbarrel. It didn't move.
"Careful, Trooper," Behr said. "That there thing is mucho dangeroso."
He tried to feel any vibes that might be coming off it. He remembered how it had seemed back at Slim's. It had been animated, exuding evil and viciousness, spitting venom from the exhaust pipe. Now it was just another beat-up wreck.
"I think it's dead," he said.
"I don't care what frequency your brainwaves is on," spluttered Behr. "I saw Carl Cass spread over a wall this afternoon. And I'm seeing poor ole Padre Burracho pinned to his altar like a butterfly in a case."
He exposed the doorlock, and tapped in his personal entry code. Nothing. The electronics were down. The plastic keys were blackened and cracked.
"Give me a hand," he said.
"I ain't messin' with that bring-down city jazz, Trooper."
Stack levelled a grouchy stare at the half-machine old-timer. "Then shut up and stand back."
Stack kicked the lock with a steel-capped heel. It caved in. The door swung open with a horror movie sound effect.
The cruiser was empty. The dashboard lights were dead. Stack clambered over the rubble, getting too close for comfort to the stiffening priest, and slipped into the driver's seat.
Leona's keys still dangled from the ignition. There was an Aztec figurine on the ring. Stack had given it to her in Managua. He reached across to take the gift back. Maybe he would need a keepsake, to remind him who Leona Tyree was…
The steering column thrust forwards, pinning him to the seat. The synthesised voice crackled to life.
"Hi there, Trooper, here's a present."
An electrical discharge came up through the steering wheel and hit him in the sternum.
"Did that shock you? Here's another."
Stack twisted, and the seat broke. He slithered backwards. The shock hit him in the legs, and he had to pull himself free by his hands and arms.
Everybody else had got out of the church in treble time.
The remaining hood lase was up and swivelling. Scrambling away, Stack found he had plunged his arm into a bucket of water. Without thinking, he picked it up and hurled it, bucket and all, at the lase.
The effects were surprising, to say the least.
The cruiser screeched like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, and the lase exploded. That shouldn't have happened. Stack knew the system was fully insulated. The car was supposed to be completely submersible. It said so in the owner's manual.
The show was over. The audience came back.
Behr crossed himself, and said "Freakin' A!"
Someone else prayed in a loud mumble; The dead priest's hair stood up like the Bride of Frankenstein's, and Stack's nostrils caught a strong tang of electrical discharge. Stack got the impression there was a point being made and that he was sorely missing it.
"It's dead now," the old man said. "Deader'n John Brown, Buddy Holly and my marriage prospects."
Stack shook his head. "But…"
"Holy water, you see. The Devil cain't take no shower in holy water."
The Drying-Up of America in the Great Droughts of the Mid-70's left Salt Lake City adjacent to a literal lake of salt. Witer was being pumped in from the North, through a pipeline guarded by good Josephites. The old superstitions were wrong, Duroc knew now. Salt had no power against the Devil and all His works. Nor against Angra Mainyu, Loki, Pluto, Nyarlathotep, Ba'alberith, the Great God Boga-Tem, Pan, Damballah, the King in Yellow, Susanoo, the Deathbird, Aipalookvik, Baron Samedi, Nurgle, Pazuzu, Zalmoxis, Huitzilopochtli, Mosura, Anubis, Set, Quetzalcoatl, Vbdyanoi, Rawhead, Hiranyakasipu, Lukundoo, Yog-Somoth, the Yama Kings of the Chinese Hell, Ramboona, Klesh, Damballah, Khorne or the others. All the demons, all the Gods of Death and Evil, all the cast-out angels. All would walk soon upon this white expanse, trampling the old saws, the old religions, the pale and sickly Gods of milky feebleness, under their clawed, leathery, horned, scaly, slimy and hairy feet.
Roger Duroc stood now on the lakebed, mingling anonymously with the crowds. There was white salt under his boots, and he drank occasionally from a hipflask of water. He was shaded from the cruel sun by a wide-brimmed black hat identical to those worn by almost every other man in the congregation. There must be close to a million standing together here. They had all turned out to hear Nguyen Seth preach, and stood quietly, calmly, waiting for the Elder to appear on the huge stage that had been constructed in the vast natural arena where the lake had been.
Duroc had been in crowds before. In Paris, he had been part of the riots that followed President LePen's decision to send the troops in to put down the provisional government that had sprung up on the Left Bank. "We may have lost Algeria," he had said, "but, by God, we're not going to lose Montmartre." Duroc had thrown the first molotov cocktail when the CRS marched down the Champs Elysees. He had attended with pleasure the mass sterlings of Teheran, when the faithful ritually turn on their outcasts. And he had been at Ken Dodd's thrd farewell concert at Castle Donnington—he was there to assassinate a member of the audience, not to listen to the music—and been swept up in the surge that followed his climactic rendition of the song that inaugurated the "Mersey Beat," "Tears for Souvenirs." Duroc had left the dead diplomat standing up, kept on his feet by the press of the fans. Nobody had noticed the slaying for hours.
But this gathering made all the others seem like meetings of the Richard M. Nixon Appreciation Society. It was different. The silence of the multitude was eerie. The Jospehites had turned out in full. There were perfect couples, with matched toothy smiles and corn-blonde hair. Perfect families with two children and an unnaturally quiet dog. Chipper and upright old folks in black, with their spade beards and bonnets. Everyone was dressed alike. Most people looked alike. Their eyes were dead.
The Path of Joseph was thorny, Duroc knew. He was the only gentile for miles. He was not a Josephite himself, could never adjust to the discipline, but he must follow the path. There were many parallels along it. The Josephite Church was merely one of the routes, his own family was another. Since childhood, it was all he had been trained for. Like his uncle before him, he was bred to do the bidding of Nguyen Seth.
The Elder came upon the stage. Duroc expected cheering, but there was none, just a giant gasp, a massed intake of breath, enough to suck all the oxygen out of all the air in Deseret. Seth extended his arms, and the Josephite Tabernacle Choir began to sing.
"Tis the gift to be simple…"
According to Duroc's uncle, Seth never changed. The contract had been made between Seth and the family during the 16th Century—this wasn't possible, but Duroc believed it now— and Marc-Ange Duroc, an ordinary footsoldier, was elevated to a position of power in the Inquisition during the suppression of the Knights Templar and the Albigensian Crusade. Later, in the aftermath of the French Revolution another Duroc served on Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety. Jean-Louis Duroc had lived through the Terror, would live through Napoleon, and his grandson would survive the Paris Commune and the Great War. Duroc's uncle's father was a high-ranking Gestapo officer during the occupation, and a similarly well-placed civil servant after the Second War. Wars, revolutions, bloodbaths and atrocities would come and go. There would always be a Duroc among the victors, among the spillers of blood, and there would rarely be a Duroc among the fallen. Duroc's uncle liaised with Seth in Indochina in the '50s, walking away from Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to join the Viet Minh, and Duroc himself had been with the Elder when he chose to play Warlord of the Khmer Rouge in the '70s. Duroc's uncle was dead now—Duroc had seen to that himself—and he was the sole disciple of the creature who wore the face of a man but had lived down the centuries unchanged, working towards his peculiar ends.
Sometimes, blasphemously, Duroc wondered what it would be like to be Nguyen Seth. Seth the Eternal, Seth the Unchanged, Seth the Summoner.
The song ended, and Nguyen Seth spoke to his followers. His words didn't matter. Few could ever remember anything specific he might say in his sermons, but the tone of voice, the gestures, the expressions—congregationists standing up to three miles away swore they could make out precise expressions in his eyes—were spellbinding.
Duroc was luckier than his forebears. He knew he was destined to be in at the end of it.
The Josephite Church was founded in 1843 by Joseph Shatner, a drink-sotted pimp and occasional beer buddy of Edgar Allan Poe's. An angel made itself manifest in the backroom of a Boston bar and handed Joseph a testament written in letters of fire, along with a pair of mirror-faced glasses that enabled him to interpret the otherwise impenetrable writings. The testament and the shades remained to this day prize possessions of the church, locked up in a safe in Seth's stronghold. The 1840s were great days for protestant sects in the United States. The Mormons—who had their own angel and their own glasses—the Mennonites, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Danites, the Agapemonists, the Adventists, the Dancing Fools, the Sons of Baphomet, thirty-five breeds of Baptist and numberless Hellfire and Damnation merchants were thriving. The Mormons got to Salt Lake City first, while Joseph Shatner was dodging fraud charges in Massachusetts and building up his first following.
Duroc knew that the shadowy figure referred to in Joseph's memoirs, whom he names "The Ute" (never having been West of New England, he had no idea what a Plains Indian looked like) and who had bankrolled the early days of his sect was none other man Nguyen Seth, who was today taken by most people for either an Egyptian or a Vietnamese. Joseph had attracted followers by allowing all manner of liberties and excesses barred by other denominations, and then withdrew all allowances for everybody except himself. He died a martyr, hanged by the Massachusetts authorities under anti-sorcery laws that had lain unused on the statutes since the Salem witch trials. Led by "The Ute," his followers had made their way West to settle the wilderness. Joseph's brother Hendrik Shatner—rumoured to be the only man of the American garrison to step out of the line drawn by Davy Crockett at the Alamo in 1836 and decorated by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna for services to Mexico during the siege—took command, and his colourful career later included leading the Josephite forces during a brief war with federal troops in the 1850s.
Like the Mormons, the Josephites out West allied with the Indians when it came to resisting the encroachments of other settlers and Hendrik had personally led a joint Josephite-Chiricahua raid against a gentile community called New Canaan in Southern Utah. That had been one of the bloodiest days of the Old West, and Hendrik, war-painted and wearing the black hat that had him named Bonnet-of-Death by his allies, was supposed to have personally lifted thirty scalps. Now, Duroc could appreciate the history better. Now he knew of the need to spill blood constantly, in defiance of the Biblical word, and as a seal on the charms of Invocation. Hendrik Shatner had lived to be 97, and died amid great wealth attended by the several mistresses he maintained until the last. Duroc planned to do better for himself.
Seth finished his speech, and the choir began again. This time, they joined voices in the Josephite anthem, "The Path of Joseph." As a single throat, the multitude joined in.
It was quite possibly the. loudest human sound ever heard in history.
Roger Duroc clamped his hands over his ears, looked down at the salt, and relished the prospect of the End of the World.
When it was all over, there would be few winners and many losers. He would be in the former category. Indeed, after Nguyen Seth, he would be the big winner. All the suckers in the world, all the suckers in the crowd, were placing their bets on the wrong side, the losing side. To only a few had the correct result of the last battle been revealed.
He knew who would inherit the Earth, and it wasn't the meek.
He knew who would ascend to the throne of Heaven, and it wasn't the pure in heart. The seven-thousand-year snowjob was about to be blown out of the water.
The hymn rose up to the Heavens, but Duroc's thoughts stayed below. The news from Welcome was good. He felt an almost sexual excitement, the thrill of being part of somethng vast that would affect the entire human race and of being one of the few people—perhaps the only person—with the knowledge to appreciate just what was, in the vernacular of the Americas, going down.
Things were coming to a head.
"The Path of Joseph" was nearly over.
"In the Name of Joseph," the multitude sang,
"In the Name of the Lord," Duroc joined in…
"…HALLELUJAH!"
Federico the Ferrari took care of most of the driving, but Chantal liked to keep the manual override. She had no ambition to become a cyborg, but she loved the feeling of communion with the machine. She had no bio-implants, had always found the idea somewhat distasteful, but there was an undeniable attraction in this temporary fusion. With her helmet on, she was in harmony with the car's system. It was a cyberfeed, but the terminal rested against her shaven hackles rawer than jacking into a skull-socket. Sometimes, she could feel the road under the wheels. She and Federico took turns to select musics from the Ferrari library of non-Russian pop. It answered her choice of Jim Morrison's "I'm a Believer" with Don Gibson's "Sea of Heartbreak."
The country was unfamiliar, but the Cavalry's maps were detailed, and there had been no problems. She had never been to this part of the US before. However, she thought she recognized some of the table mountains and cracked mesas from Western films. This was John Wayne country. The cactus were gone, and the Indians absorbed, but the US Cavalry still rode, and there were still outlaws, varmints, gunslingers and border raiders. More than one Trooper back at Fort Apache, including a Navajo scout, referred to rogue gangcultists as "injuns." Federico pulled out Roy Rogers' "A Cowboy Needs a Horse," and she snapped back with Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Three Wheels on My Wagon."
She had company on the road. Three bikers were trying to impress her with their fancy machines, keeping level and jeering at her. It wasn't so much a sexual display as it was a flirtation with the car. The windows were sunscreened black, so they wouldn't even know she was a woman. She ran their colours through the onboard files and tagged them as strays from the Satan's Stormtroopers, out of Houston, Texas. With their chopped Harleys, banana seats, beerguts, Viking beards, cossack shirts and pickelhaubes, the whole crew were textbook Motorsickle Crazies. They were just joyriding thugs, not real gangcult specimens. They didn't have a Philosophy, like the Daughters of the American Revolution or The Bible Belt. She didn't feel a pressing need to put them off the road.
They bounced a couple of beercans off Federico without even scratching the paintwork, and did wheelies, thumping the Ferrari's bodywork as they came down. It was time to burn them off. She flicked the overdrive, and let the car do the rest. She pushed 200 miles per, and the cykemen were choking on dust, already out of shouting range.
"So long, boys," she said, smiling, selecting Pat Boone's "Speedy Gonzalez" for the in-car sound system.
They were sore losers, evidently. Men usually didn't like to be shown up for half-horse feebs. One of the Stormtroopers must have a little hardware on his motorsickle, because Federico cut into Pat and told her, in Italian, that there was a heat-seeking missile coming after her, personally tailored to the warmth patterns of the car.
She tutted. These Americans displayed an incredible combination of humourlessness, insecurity and lack of imagination.
She took the laptop SDI console from the dashboard, and established provisional contact with the missile's one-track mind. Its directives weren't even encoded. She wiped Federico's smudgy patternprint from its three-minute memory and programmed in a "Return to Sender" package.
"Ciao," said the car. Chantal fed in Dean Martin's "Volare," and sang along. She didn't even hear the explosion.
Otherwise, the roads were clear.
Until the Tonto Basin, when suddenly her music went down, and a voice came at her through all her speakers.
"SISTER," it shouted, "HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED?!!"
When the Reverend Harry Powell, sole owner of the Word of the Lord Broadcasting System, was informed that the aches and pains his faith healing guest stars had been unable to ease were, in fact, inoperable and extensive cancers of the bone marrow, he found himself faced with a choice. As a Good Christian of long-standing who had raised, over his twenty-seven years as a leading televangelist, over three hundred billion dollars for the Lord, he could kill the pain with morph-plus shots and wait his Just Reward in Heaven. On the other hand, as a sin-loving decadent who had used the greater portion of over three hundred billion dollars to indulge himself in luxurious excesses undreamed of by Caligula, he could expend the remainder of his considerable resources staving off the inevitable.
He took some time to assess the health of his business ventures. WLBS was still the top-rated televangelical crusade, beaming the Word of the Lord into perhaps seven hundred million homes worldwide. Royalties were still coming in for his best-selling testaments How to Get Through the Eye of the Needle, Checking Into Motel Heaven, and My Pal, Jesus, not to mention the popular gospel hits he had had ghost-written for him in the '60s by a talented but otherwise unsuccessful young man called Paul Simon, "Little Bitty Orphans in Africa," "Jesus in Blue Jeans" and "I'm Not Ashamed to be a Christian."
He had diversified into the stock market, foods, theme parks, computer software, motion pictures, armaments manufacture, law enforcement, pharmaceuticals, energy resources, marital aids and souvenirs. He was in the Top Forty of the World's Richest Men, and climbing…
Still, there was nothing that could be done for his body. He had been able to pay for a half-hour of Dr Zarathustra's time at GenTech BioDiv, and the Doc had assured him that no amount of bio-implant and replacement doodads would do anything to help. Muscles, nerves, individual organs, limbs, eyes and skin, you could do something about. And you could replace individual bones—even your skull if you so wished—with durium robo-bits. But you couldn't dispense with your whole skeleton and still survive. It had something to do with blood. Powell didn't understand, but Zarathustra had patiently explained it all to him as if guesting on a kid vid teevee show before returning, substantially wealther, to his important research.
Powell's body was out of the business. But he still had a brain.
Zarathustra had referred Powell to W.D. Donovan, BioDiv's top brain-man, and, eager to be divested of his deadweight walking corpse, he had submitted to the Donovan Treatment. He had joined the other disembodied brains in their tanks, thinking their deep droughts, sinking into their pools of biofluid. Unfortunately, while Donovan could take your brain out and keep it alive, he hadn't yet perfected the technique for putting it back into another body so it worked. That, presumably, was what all the other multi-billionaire prisoners on GenTech's Cerebellum Row—Nelson Rockefeller, Howard Hughes, Charles Foster Kane, Walt Disney, Ken Dodd, Don Michael Corleone—were waiting for. And that was what Powell was expecting, a few years of contemplative thought and resurrection in a young, fresh, ready-to-wear body.
However, his lawyers had not considered the legalities of the Donovan Treatment. Once his brain was slipped from its cranial cradle, the Reverend Harry Powell found himself declared legally dead, and his assets devolved to the Word of the Lord Mission for Christ, parent corporation of the Word of the Lord Broadcasting System, and also of the Word of the Lord Electronic Information Service, the Word of the Lord Chain of Christian Health Food Restaurants, the Word of the Lord Summer Camps, the Word of the Lord Law Enforcement Agency ('Let Christ Be Your Cop!'), the Word of the Lord Publishing Consortium, the Word of the Lord Moral Reassertiveness Centres and the Word of the Lord Graveyard Redevelopment Conglomeration. The board of directors found themselves rather embarassed to have on their hands not only the worldy wealth and temporal holdings of Harry Powell, but his still-functional brain as well.
It might not have gone so badly for the late Reverend if he hadn't made the cardinal error of appointing Genuine Christians to executive offices within his organization. Anyone else might not have been quite so upset to discover that the Word of the Lord Drug Rehabilitation Program was actually a highly successful franchised operation peddling narcotics, hallucinogens, psychoactives, and other forms of ju-ju to teenagers, or that the popular Word of the Lord Crusade for Morals Drop-In Centres Powell had set up in the NoGos surrounding several major PZs were actually omnisexual brothels staffed by runaway youngsters Powell had, in many cases, personally welcomed into the fold.
Once Powell's yakuza-trained accountants had been eased out of the boardroom, only the Genuine Christians—the Honest-to-God Suckers, as he had been wont to call them in life—remained. They had sat around the oval table, looking at the preacher bubbling away in his Self-Contained Environment, and had pondered the ethics of pulling the plug and burying the gray matter along with his literally rotten bones in the gaudily ostentatious cenotaph Powell had designed for himself.
But there was always a use in the church for brains.
"…SAVED BY JEEEY-ZUSS! SAVED BY THE LOWWW-UD! SAVED, SAVED, SAVED.''
Chantal braked to avoid slamming into the tanklike vehicle blocking the road. She'd have swerved off into the sand to get round the obstacle, but she didn't want to gum up Federico's wheels without checking the terrain. It didn't matter what kind of hot machine you had, if you tried to drive on soft sand you'd bog down. The desert was full of abandoned vehicles slowly sinking in alkali pits.
"HAVE YOU SINNED? HAVE YOU BEE-YUN SINFUL? HAVE YOU TAKEN CARNAL LUST, BODILY FILTH AND THE DAY-UVV-VILLE INTO YOUR HEART?"
She tried to turn down the volume, but the broadcaster had a lock on Federico's sound system. It was coming from the machine up ahead, that much was certain.
"Do me a search," she said. "Find out what that thing is."
Federico hummed as it went through the files. The voice changed pitch, was joined by a kitschy angelic choir and the kind of string backing the British '60s pop star Ken Dodd favoured on his more unbearable singles, and began to sing.
"Little bitty orphans in Africa
Need a heap of change from you,
Little bitty orphans in Africa
Make ole Jesus feel downright blue
Skies may be gray, skies may be sunny
But them pore little orphans need all your money…"
Her central screen lit up, and flashed at her. MINIMUM DONATION: $1,000. THE PREACHERMOBILE WILL ACCEPT CASH, CASHPLASTIC, NEGOTIABLE BONDS, GOLD, SILVER, RADIUM, PRECIOUS AND SEMIPRECIOUS STONES, VALID STAMPS, ELECTRICAL GOODS, MOTOR VEHICLES, STOCK TRANSFER CERTIFICATES, VALIDATED WORKS OF ART, SIDE-ARMS, MILITARY ORDNANCE, DRUGS, WATER AND REUSABLE HUMAN ORGANS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CHRISTIANITY.The singing stopped.
"PRAISE THE LOWWWUD! HALLELUJAH! CLEANSE THYSELF OF THY SINS BY DONATING THY WORLDLY GOODS TO THE CHOW-UCH! HELP THE CHOW-UCH HELP THE LITTLE BITTY ORPHANS IN AFRICA!"
Federico had taken stock, and gave her a read-out on the vehicle. It was built like a tank, with ten-inch armour plating and caterpillar tracks. There was a miniature power plant in there somewhere and, in all probability, a human brain.
That was good news. Whoever the machine had been, it was a cinch that he wouldn't be a match for Federico's cerebral capacity if it came to a shooting war. Even Israel had stopped putting Donovan brains in its military hardware five years ago. They might have the initiative a machine lacks, but their reflexes are slow. Plus, they tend—as was now obvious—to crack up and go crazy.
"I HAVE BEEN CHARGED WITH A MISSION FROM GOD! I AM REQUIRED TO RAISE THREE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS TO EXPIATE MY MANY SINS! YOU WILL KINDLY MAKE A DONATION!"
"What if I don't?"
"YOU WILL BE SMOTE AS THE LOWWW-UD SMOTE AGAG! THY BODY WILL BE RENT INTO THREE PIECES, AND THY UNHOLY MACHINE WILL BE BROKEN DOWN FOR SPARE PARTS AND SCATTERED ACROSS THE FACE OF THE LAND!"
"I gave at the office."
"MAKE THY DONATION WITHIN TEN SECONDS, LEST THOU SUFFER THE WRATH OF THE LOWWW-UD!"
Federico was scrolling through the specs. It had located the three prototypes on which the Preachermobile was based. An Israeli tank, a GenTech Undersea Explorer and a Saisho Warrior Robot. The car suggested thirty-seven points of weakness.
"THY TIME IS UP, HEATHEN HARLOT! DOST THOU WISH TO REPENT, AND MAKE A CASH OR CREDIT DONATION?"
"I'm on urgent government business…"
"THE LIGHTNING OF THE LORD OF HOSTS WILL DESCEND FROM THE SKIES AND BLAST THEE WHERE THY FOUL AND PESTILENTIAL FOREIGN-MADE AUTOMOBILE DOST STAND ON GOD'S OWN AMERICAN HIGHWAY!"
An electro-cannon crackled. Chantal reversed Federico, and withdrew five hundred yards instantly. The Preachermobile's arcs fell on the road, cracking the hardtop. The electrical discharges left streaks on her retinas.
"HELLFIRE AND BRIMSTONE WELL REIGN DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS AND THOU SHALT BE CONSUMED BY THE FERES WHICH BURN NOT WITH THE CLEANSING HEAT OF THE LOWWW-UD BUT WITH THE ICY COLD OF THE DAY-UW-VELLE!"
Cannisters of napalm exploded in the air. Chantal took the chance and drove off the road. The surface of the desert was rocky enough to get a grip. Part of the hood was on fire, but the windshield squirt took care of that. The paintwork would heal overnight.
"THE UNRIGHTEOUS WILL BE SMOTE UNLESS SUBSTANTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS ARE MADE TO THE WOWWW-UD OF THE LOWWW-UD MISSION FOR FAMINE! THANK YOU FOR BEENG A CHRISTIAN!"
"Federico," she said, "no more messing about, take him down."
"Molto bene."
The car took out the Preachermobile's treads first, exploding an armour-piercing shell in its side. Now, the thng could only go round in circles. Then, it located the weapons guidance computer, inadvisably placed at the rear under a flap for easy manual reprogramming. A surgical lase burn put it out of commission, and the cannonades stopped.
Chantal drove back to the crippled hulk.
"ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ARE ACCEPTED EN HEAVEN, SISTER! THY WORLDLY RICHES MUST BE PASSED INTO THE HANDS OF THE LOWWW-UD!
MAKE THY GENEROUS DONATIONS, LEST THE GODFEARING CHRISTIANS OF THE WORLD VANISH UNDER A TIDE OF HEATHEN PAPISTS, RAGHEAD MUSSULMEN…GODLESS COMMONISTS, INSCRUTABLE ORIENTALS…GRASPING JEWS…MELON-EATING…NIGRAS…AND…"
The voicebox was running down.
"Intolerant bigots," she suggested.
"REPPPPPPPPR…ent…rep…"
She got out, and walked over to the Preachermobile. It was quiet. The lases had opened it up like a tin-can, and the jerrybuilt robo-innards were spilling out. It was constructed like a centaur, with a robotic torso and head protruding from a conning tower. Its arms were still waving. The head was a sculptured, stylised representation of a handsome Nazi, with blue eyes and a blonde helmet of hair. She didn't recognize it. The face was cracked, and biofluid was dribbling from one cheek.
"Are you in there?" she asked.
"Rep…ent?"
"So long, preacher."
"REPENT! THOU ART ACCURSED OF THE LOWWW-UD, JEZEBEL OF THE INTERSTATE! THOU SHALT BE BURNED ALIVE FOR A THOUWWW-SUND YEARS! THY CHILDREN AND THY CHILDREN'S CHILDREN SHALT BE AFFLICTED BY A PLAGUE OF MUTANT BOILS!”
She got back in Federico and drove round the thing in the road. It continued to shout. The voicebox would be the one thing unaffected by their showdown.
Within half an hour, the predators emerged from the desert with their spanners and minilases, and, while it raved against them, the Preachermobile was stripped for parts. Then, the coyotes, alerted by the whiff of biofluid, came for the brain.
Tiger Behr's wasn't the worst place Stack had seen in his days on the road. The Roach Motel outside of Austin, where fee US Cav had busted The Cannibal Cookpots, was several degrees seedier, and he still sometimes had nightmares about the dead and dusty things they had found in the fruit cellar of the Bide-a-Wee Nook in Medicine Bend. Great. That made Tiger Behr's the third grungiest, most disgusting, least comfortable, most infested deathhole in the South-Western States.
The former gangcultist—did he think of himself as a fallen Angel?—gave Stack the pick of the chalets, and raised an eyebrow—his only remaining eyebrow—when he asked for a place with a shower. "You must be a wealthy dude, Trooper," he had said.
"The State pays," Stack had replied, pretending not to be uncertain about it.
"You understand," Behr had told him, "that the management is not responsible for any loss of personal property, life and limb or mental stability you might sustain while on the premises." That told Stack all he needed to know about Tiger Behr's.
There was piped-in Mexican porno on the teevee, but the central dish was skewed and the participants in the current orgy were stuttering visually. Pornovideo was the Gideon Bible of the '90s. No hotel or motel room came without one. He looked at it for a few minutes, trying to figure out the plot. From the clothes on the floor, he guessed it was a period piece, but they had modern leather underwear. A wrestler in a full-head mask and nothing else was trying out some interesting holds on a wild-haired vampire woman whose plastic teeth kept coming out of her mouth, while a creature with huge breasts and male genitalia sang of the Revolution. This must be an Art Movie, Stack figured. Occasionally, a pirate station would cut in with foggy black and white picture of an endless sermon from a man in combat fatigues and a dog collar who called himself a Survivalist Preacher, tapped his Bible with a Magnum .44 and called upon the Faithful to a) give all their money to him and b) skin a commie for Jesus. The Survivalist Preacher's backing group knew only two tunes, "Gimme Dat Ole Time Religion" and "The Horst Wessel Song," and sometimes got them confused. The offswitch was gone, and so Stack had to turn the set's sound down and picture to the wall before he could get any sleep.
He dreamed about Leona. How she had been when they had been Troopers together at Fort Valens, how they had been together on their trip to Nicaragua, how they had broken up, how he had watched her die…
Waking up, sweaty and disoriented, he found it was after nightfall. The ju-ju he had popped earlier had completely worn off. His chest ached where the cruiser had electroshocked him, and the crinkled, red patches on his legs and forearms from the explosion at Slim's were still raw. Someone had been in while he was crashed out, of course, and gone through his things. They hadn't gone for the gun, knife, cashplastic and medkit he had laid under his pillow, but they had taken the kish, the dead cykeman's stash and the walletful of assorted business cards and receipts he had left out on the bureau for the Tooth Fairies. If he hadn't made some kind of offering they would have tried to cut his throat and he'd have had to kill them. Right now, he didn't need the paperwork.
Stepping carefully around the dead bugs on the floor, he made his way to the en-suite bathroom. He didn't know whether Behr used some extra-strength poison or whether life in this place was so damn unhealthy even scorpions couldn't stick it, but there were plenty of chitinous little corpses on the carpet. In the bathroom, water dripped steadily from the showerhead and discoloured the enamel tub. Cigbutts floated in the John. There was no soap, no towels, no toilet paper and the mirror had bullet holes. He put his key into the wallhole and turned on the shower, tested the water—some places out here had an intolerably high radiation level—and stepped under quickly. It was over in thirty seconds, and would cost him more than a week's stay in this dump, but it helped a little. He rubbed the water that clung to him into his body, paying especial attention to his wounds. The red badges of courage smarted. He took a tube of salve, and smeared the worst of the burns and abrasions. There were a few morph-plus poppers, but he resisted the temptation. He might need them later, and he might need a clear head soon.
He checked his watch. It was nearly eight. His priority now must be to find a phone or a radio and call his position in to Fort Apache. He didn't want to risk his Overdue turning into an AWOL. Also, he still hadn't got round to sampling Armindariz' chilli.
He pulled on his thermal union suit, and climbed into his uniform. In the wonky mirror, he looked like he had taken a walk through an active volcano.
He shifted the bed over, skinned back the carpet and pulled up the loose floorboards he had prised free earlier. In the cavity under the floor, he had stashed the two pump shotguns from the motorsickle and his US Cav tracer. He hoped someone was homing in on him, but he was taking no chances.
He left the chalet, and found the cyke chained to a post. He had rigged the battery to give a nasty shock to anybody who tried the chain. There were blackened fingerprints on the durium links.
Score one for caution.
He deactivated the joy buzzer, holstered the pumpguns, and straddled the hog.
Then he headed back to the Silver Byte Saloon.
It was a shame the ossobuco would have to be put off until Ms Juillerat had finished her sandside mission, but Brevet Major General Younger could wait to try out the recipe. He was in the nerve centre of his gleaming, white-surfaced kitchen now, directing the preparation of fillet of sole crepes with lemon-parsley butter. Everything in the room was top-quality GenTech standard, requisitioned through his government contacts. The toasters, blenders, ovens, freezers, creamers, processors, burners and broilers shone like brass buttons. Younger observed his reflections in the row of dangling blades that hung before him like a deadly percussion instrument. Straight-edged, curved, serrated, two-action, spiked and plain knives were there, each in place, each ready for use.
He overrode all the hardware and took a whisk to his batter himself. No machine could get the precise texture he favoured for his crepes. The fish-head, its backbone and tail still attached, stared at him from the work-surface. Fish always looked surprised when you were about to cook them. Younger hadn't served on the roads since his days with the highway patrol in the '60s, but he remembered seeing that expression on men's faces. Just before and after they were shot, they got exactly the same round-eyed look.
He ran his fort like he ran his kitchen, Younger hoped. Eternally vigilant, eternally in a harmonious balance, ready for anything.
His computer-assist menumaster gave him a choice of peppers with this dish. The list of appropriates came up on his terminal screen. He selected cayenne, which ranked fairly low but which he hadn't used recently. He couldn't remember exactly what cayenne pepper tasted like. It was always human touches like that which made for a great dish.
Younger would have preferred to be remembered as a master chef than a master strategist.
The screen disrupted, the ingredients of his dinner giving way to a face. It was Captain Finney, from the Ops Centre. Odd, she had been on duty this morning, it should be her downtime now. Her hair was loose, and her tunic not quite buttoned-up.
"Sir, Cat Finney here. We have a datanet problem. I thnk it requires your attention."
Younger paused in mid-whisk.
"Surely not."
Finney paused. "Lenihan couldn't handle it, and called me back to the console…I was playing squash…"
Younger whisked again.
"Get to it, captain. What's the problem?"
"There's a massive power source somewhere out on the grid. We've not tracked down the precise terminal yet, but it's as if a major system had downloaded somewhere in Arizona. Half the screen burned out at once, and we can't keep track of everything. We've lost contact with a lot of outposts."
"Where's Vladek?"
"He's here, sir."
"Put him on."
Younger set his batter carefully on a neutral surface, and sat down at the console. Vladek Rintoon eased Finney aside. He had hoped to keep the Colonel out of any crises for a while, but there was no avoiding it.
"Your opinion, Vladek?"
Rintoon was flustered. "I'm not sure, sir."
"Hostile action?"
"It…could be."
"Maniax? Some other gangcult?"
"No. The resources used are vast. Only the multinats would have the capability to mount such an action. And they're supposed to be on our side. It's the general datanet that's been hit, not just the Cav links. We'll all suffer if anything goes down."
"Natural disaster? Act of God? Lightning?"
"We're checking that out. It's a remote possibility, I think."
There was a commotion in the background as Rintoon was talking. He was having to keep looking over his shoulder. People were shouting at each other. Younger glimpsed Captain Lauderdale and another officer gesturing wildly as they argued in front of a flashing screen.
"Keep discipline there, Vladek."
Rintoon turned and talked sternly. There was a hush. Lauderdale and the other man, Lenihan, broke apart.
"How badly are we hurting?" Younger asked.
"Difficult to say, sir. What we're losing is input. Finney is shutting down all systems contiguous to those affected. We may be able to seal off our own database that way, but that doesn't tell us any more about the nature of the enemy or the situation in the field. We're just drawing in and readying for a siege. I've alerted Faulcon, Badalamenti, McAuley and Doc King, and they're being recalled to duty."
"Have you asked around the datanet?"
"Finney has had provisional exchanges with the night operators at GenTech and ITT in Phoenix and the Winter Corporation in Tucson. They've got the same problem, and are trying to put up the same blocks."
"El Paso?"
"Nothing yet."
"Well get on it, man, that's the railhead. If El Paso goes down, we'll blank half the United States."
Finney was talking to Rintoon.
"Sir," he said, "we just lost ITT. They've cast us adrift."
"What?"
"We're it, sir. Phoenix and Tucson cut us loose. The disturbance is in the shared datanet, but it's concentrating on us. The corps are disengaging from the shared line. The private sector is out of it. It's just us now, and the federal information exchange, and the Roman Catholic Church and a few other minor leaguers."
"The Winter people slammed the door behind them," said Finney. "They've blown all the links and burned out their interfaces. They must have had them mined. My guess is that they know something we don't. They just shot sixty or seventy million dollars out the window, and will have incurred more than that in fines for damaging government property and violating interstate information passage laws."
"Will their action limit the damage? Are we the only people on the line?"
"Temporarily," snapped Rintoon. "Arizona is sparsely netted. It's easy to get out of it. But El Paso is a computer interface jungle. It would take years to dismantle all the connections."
"And what's between the input and El Paso?"
"We are, sir. The only major node between the disturbance and El Paso is us, Fort Apache. We've got to entrench and stop it…"
Finney cut in, "…it's like a tidal wave, building up out there in the desert and coming our way."
Rintoon said, "We have to break it."
"I'm coming right down."
Finney, headset pressed to her ear, "here it comes. Computer holocaust. ETA twenty seconds."
Younger punched the door controls next to the elevator.
"…fifteen…"
Nothing was shaking, there were no alarms.
"…ten…"
Lenihan handed Rintoon a note. The colonel turned to the screen and said, "we've isolated a point of origin, sir."
The elevator indicator showed the cage was climbing up towards the kitchen. It seemed to take forever.
"…five…"
"Welcome, Arizona. Say, isn't that where…"
"…three…two…"
The elevator was outside. It pinged like a microwave, and the down arrow lit up.
"…one…"
"…that Swiss woman went?"
"It's here."
The elevator doors didn't open.
Finney asked, "Has anything changed?"
Younger stabbed some buttons.
"I don't think so," said Rintoon. "It must be a monitor error."
The elevator doors wouldn't open.
"Cat," said Rintoon, dripping relief. "Don't ever do that to us again. I just shat the World Trade Centre."
Younger turned back to his screen. Rintoon was smiling, but Finney had deep lines between her brow and was punching buttons.
"It doesn't make sense, colonel. It's not registering, but it's here. I've a bad feeling. This is one smart bug."
Behind him, in his perfect kitchen, a rack of electric carving knives buzzed into life.
Younger barely felt the first blade vibrate its way through him.
It must be MOR night down at The Silver Byte. Liberace's version of "Glad to Be Gay" was burbling on the jukebox, and an imbecilic old man in a bathchair was nodding along to it while playing dominoes with a nine-year-old hispanic girl. Stack walked the length of the bar, laid one of his shotguns down, and asked Armindariz if the chilli was still on.
"Sure theeng, Trooper. Commeeng right op. Hey, Pauncho, rustle op a cheellee dog for thee nice man."
A seriously fat individual with a cook's hat perched on his head agreed with Armindariz and spooned out a bowlful of meat stew with beans and peppers. There was a sign over the bar. "WARNING—CHILLI HOT." Stock crumbled his crackers, and stirred them in with his spoon. He hesitated.
"Say, Pedro, just how hot is this chilli?"
Armindariz showed his teeth. His gold fang shone.
"Yiu remember thee A-Bomb tests een thee feefties?"
"Not personally, but I've heard of them?"
"Well, there ees a place op in Nevada where they let off too manee beeg ones, an' now no one can ever leeve there again."
"Yeah?"
"Well, Pauncho's cheellee ees hotter man that."
"Which is cheaper here, whisky or water?"
"Whisky, Trooper."
"I'll have that then."
Armindariz poured him a shot. Stack lifted the spoon to his mouth…
"Before yiu eet, thee government eet say wee have to geeve yiu thees card." Armindariz shrugged and handed over a much-battered oblong the size of a cashplastic.
"The Surgeon General has determined that coronary heart disease is the major cause of death in this country, and you are strongly advised against consumption of foods containing red meat, saturated animal fats, irradiated salts and growth-enhanced vegetables. Have a nice day."
Stack gave Armindariz back his card. They shrugged at each other. Stack shoved a spoonful of chilli into his mouth, then took a drink. He swallowed the combination, and gripped the bar as his entire oesophagus took fire.
Armindariz and Pauncho laughed.
"That's freakin' hot chilli, Pedro."
"Wee got a reputation to ophold, Trooper."
Stack finished his chilli, taking sips of the rotgut between mouthfuls. His teeth were heating up, and his tastebuds would probably be burned clean away, but it felt good to have something in his stomach again. A little more of this treatment, and he would probably feel like a human being.
The chilli over, he ordered himself a treat. "Water."
"That ees expenseeve."
"I don't mind. I've had a bad day."
Armindariz pulled a plastic carton out from under the bar, and filled Stack's glass. He sipped it.
"Why, you cheating sonofabitch," he shouted. "You've been doctorin' this water with your lousy whisky!"
Armindariz cringed. "No, no, Senor Trooper, yiu jost dreenk both from thee same glass. Eet ees natural meestake."
Stack laughed, and finished the water.
"Tell me, Pedro, you got a phone?"
"Si."
"Where is it?"
"Out on thee garbage domp. Eet don' work so good seence thee Gaschoggers reep eet off thee wall and jomp on eet."
"Shame. Radio?"
"AM or FM?"
"Two-way. I need to call in."
"There's a…what yiu call eet? There's a germeenal een thee chorch."
"Terminal."
"Si, a termeenal. Eet may be broke. Thee ronaway car smash eet op a leetle."
"That's just great. Thanks, anyway."
"No trouble, Senor Trooper."
Stack would have to go back to Tiger Behr's, and light out in the morning. He wasn't sure what the nearest real town where he could make a call was, but he'd find it before his borrowed cyke ran out of gas. Meanwhile, he had best look after himself.
"Another whisky?"
"Sure theeng, Senor." Armindariz poured again.
Stack sipped his drink. He held it up to the light, and gave a silent toast. To Leona Tyree…
Leona. She had been a hell of a woman. Cav all the way.
"Senor?" Armindariz butted into his reverie.
"What is it?"
"Would yiu mind payeeng for your cheellee and dreenks now?"
"No, why?"
Stack realized he wasn't alone at the bar.
Armindariz leaned forwards confidentially. "I theenk maybee thee Gaschoggers keell yiu later on thees evening, then I no get my monee for thee goods I geeve yiu, and that ees bad for beesneess."
A hairy hand fell on his arm, forcing it to the bar. His drink spilled.
"Plenty sloppy, ain't ya?" sneered a tattooed heavy. His breath stank of gasoline.
The Gaschuggers got their name because of their drinking habits. They had all had their bladders souped up so they could drink gas and whisky and piss high-grade fuel into their cykes' tanks. None of the gangcultists the Cav had ever brought in had been able to explain the appeal of the practice, but there you were…
"Maybe the yellowbellied yellowlegs needs some lessons in etiquette, Exxon," somebody said.
"Yeah," said the tattooed guy, Exxon. "Maybe he does. Maybe his yeller streak runs up the side of his legs and goes all the way up his back too."
"Stand down," Stack said. "I've got no quarrel with you."
Armindariz was down the other end of the bar, paying close attention to some stains he was wiping up. The game of dominoes was heating up, and Pauncho was kibbitzing. Stack was on his own. He judged there were five or six 'chuggers. Exxon would be the big chief. That was the tag the leader of the pack always drew.
Slowly, be turned round on his stool. He had guessed right. Five guys, counting Exxon, and one girl. All stinking of gas.
"You're Cav, ain't ya?" asked Exxon.
Stack nodded, his hand resting on the butt of the pumpgun. It would be awkward to prime and fire it from the stool. He'd never drop them all before they got him. Maybe they would all explode. With their lifestyle, spontaneous combustion must be a a regular health hazard.
"Well, the Cav is always always always down on the 'chuggers for no reason. And you represent the Cav, so we're mixing it with you."
Shit, he was going to die.
And he hadn't figured out what the buzz was with the mad cruiser and Leona and the impaled priest yet.
"Mobil," Exxon said, "get the man a drink. Not that piss-poor firewater he's been abusing himself with all evenin'. A real drink."
Shit, shit, shit. He was going to die, but first he was going to have to drink gasoline.
Mobil was the runt of the litter. He jumped up and sat on the bar. He took Stack's glass and threw the whisky onto the floor.
"Sorry, Pedro," said Exxon.
"That's okay, boys," replied the bartender. "Jost clean op after."
Mobil took a canteen and poured pink liquid into the glass. Paraffin. He sniffed the bouquet, said "a very good year," and knocked it back.
"After a good drink," he said, "what better than a relaxing cigarette?"
He produced a pack and a fliptop lighter.
"Me, I prefer the cool, mellow taste of Sandino's, the cigarette with a longer-lasting tang and that macho muchaco whiff."
He lit the lighter, and beamed across the flame.
Stack flinched backwards as his eyebrows were singed by the fiery cloud Mobil had exhaled. It went out in an instant. Stack's face felt hot, but it was nothing compared to Slim's Gas 'n' B-B-Q.
"Caramba," said Mobil, finishing off the ad, "but dat is some wild cigarette."
"Looks like we got us a blackface entertainer," said Exxon. He used his stubby forefinger to smear the soot into Stack's face, especially around the lips and eyes. "One thing you have to say about nigras is that they sure can be entertainin', eh amigos?”
The Gaschuggers laughed in unison.
"Remember how them Voodoo Bros danced for us…"
Exxon was smiling wistfully now, remembering the good times.
"…when we strung 'em up."
Mobil had another shot of parrafin poured. He lifted it to Stack's lips, and tipped. Stack gulped, hoping the chilli had permanently done for his sense of taste. He got it down without spluttering. Mobil was waving his lighter around near his face, flicking the flame on and off.
"What kind of entertainin' do you reckon Sidney Freakin' Poitier here'd be best at, chugbuddies? Singin', dancin', acrobatics, sleight o' hand, tellin' them funny stories, mind-readin'?"
Mobil put his head uncomfortably close to Stack's and said, "no, I reckon we gots us one o' them meat-packin' pore-nographic superstuds. Them nigras 's always at it, jus' like rabbits 'r somethin'. I'll jus' bet Al Freakin' Jolson here rakes in the big bucks stickin' his tubesteak into dawgs and hawgs and French ladies and just plain dumb ole greasy holes in the wall, that's what I figger."
Mobil was getting excited. Good, that might make him careless. That might give Stack a chance.
"Mobil's a pervert, you know," said Exxon. "It's a shame, but there it is. A man can't help the way he was brung up."
Mobil was double-dyed redneck from way back—the Ozarks or somewhere—but Exxon's sneer was a put-on. Slack reckoned he might have done some time at Harvard or Yale. This was an educated panzerboy.
"My guess is that you're not a porno stud. Who'd pay to sec a skinny little thing like you pumping in the bunk with some fat whore? No, you're something more sporting. Like a jockey."
Stack didn't move.
"No? Maybe a basketball player. A lot of your tinted ethnic types bounce the ball pretty fair, I hear. Nah, you're a shortie. And you've got no coordination."
The pumpgun had been eased out from under his hand and passed to the back of the saloon. The lone 'chugger girl—a fourteen year-old with ancient eyes and a plumed pompadour was cradling it like a child.
"Does your mother know where you are?" Stack asked her.
"Freak off, faghagg!" she spat in a high, vicious, little voice.
Exxon hardballed a fist into his gut. His burns flared up, and the chilli and paraffin shifted in his stomach.
Shit, shit, shit. He was going to die with vomit in his mouth.
"Don't talk to white ladies, nigra. That's a hanging offence in this county. Why, we don't cotton much to darkies talking to dawgs. If n they start pesterin' the womenfolks, who knows where it'll all stop?"
One of the Gaschuggers—the one with the robo-claw—was black, but he wasn't upset by Exxon's speeches on racial subjects.
"I know what you are, boy. You're a fighter, ain't ya? Bare knucks, one on one, two guys bloodying each other's titties. Maybe you wear a couple of sharp rings to cut deeper."
Exxon shadowboxed in front of Stack's face, occasionally tapping him lightly on the chin or the cheeks.
"You could'a bin a contendah, Sugar Ray, instead of a bum, which is what y'are."
The big one was coming. Stack tensed his aching stomach, and gripped the bar. Mobil held his shoulders, fingers positioned like a masseur's but ready to dig in, and one of the other 'chuggers had his arms behind him. Exxon danced and punched the air.
"You see Rocky VIII, boy? I just love it when ole Sly puts Whoopi Goldberg down on the canvas and sticks it to the bitch? That's my idea of a fair fight."
Stack grit his teeth. Exxon drew his fist back and took a good shot. Stack's jaw popped, and he felt rather than tasted his mouth fill up with blood. He tried to roll with it, but he was held so that only his head could move. His skull rolled on his neck like a punchball. Everythng was shaking. His lips were mashed against his teeth, his cheek was squeezed against the bone. Blood was trickling from his nostrils.
"Ouch, that hurt," Exxon complained, holding up his hand. His knuckles were red and black with blood and soot.
"Well, looky looky looky here comes cookie, what have we got here?"
He wiped his hand on his overalls, then took an oily rag from his pocket and rubbed Stack's face. The soot came off.
"Pardonnez-moi, Trooper Damfool. We've been labourin' under a misapprehension, ain't we boys? You sure ain't a person of the negroid jungle bunny persuasion after all. You're as white as they come."
The 'chuggers laughed. The black 'chugger caressed his claw and gave a slow-burning grin. One of his teeth was inset with black dots like a die. He snapped the air with his robobit. It looked like expensive workmanship. GenTech, maybe, or Sony. He clacked his claw like a lobster.
"Such a shame. We got laws here in Welcome, Trooper. Don't you know it's an offence to impersonate a nigra? We gonna have us a trial."
The 'chuggers whooped and cheered.
"Mr Persecution?" Exxon asked.
"Yes, your honour," replied Mobil.
"Sum up the case for the State of Arizona versus Freakin' Zeroid Ratskag, here?"
Mobil shoved his thumbs under the lapels of his overalls, and strutted up and down. "Well, Your Judgeship, it seems to me that what we have here is a plain case of violation of the law. The accused ain't no nigra, that's clear as can be. But he certainly was attemptin' to deceive the good folks of this township. I calls me a witness. Call Mr Shell…"
The lobsterman stepped forward. "Present."
"Mr Shell," began Exxon, "do you promise to tell the whole truth, the only truth, the truthiest truth and nothing but the Big T truth or else Gawd come down and rip your gazebos off?"
"Ah do," Shell said in a rich bass, holding up his claw.
"Have you anything to say?"
"Yeah, Ah'd like a babycham!"
"Objection!" shouted Mobil.
"Suss-stained," said Exxon. "Witness will keep to the point."
"Sorry, your dealership," said Shell. "But it's as clear as the day is long. Honky moonfaced motherfreakin' pig whiteboy cracker candy-ass citified whelk-lovin' yellowlegs old cowhand from the Rio Grande scumsuckin' geek here is guilty as Judas and twice as dead."
"Yeah," agreed Mobil, "an' he's got a charge sheet as long as my dick."
"First offender, huh?" said the girl. Everyone except Mobil laughed. Mobil sniffed the air, his face reddening, and backhanded Stack across the mouth.
"Mr Persecution, Mr Persecution, I request that you respect the honour o' this court or else I shall be compelled to have you removed from here to a place of animal husbandry and forcibly washed until you are clean."
"I apologize, Mr Judge."
"Apology suss-stained. We will hear from the Council for the Fence. Miss Unleaded?"
The girl stepped forwards, tears starting from her eyes, and waved Stack's pumpgun dramatically in the air.
"The quality of mercy is not strained," Unleaded began. "It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed…"
The 'chuggers quieted down. Shell kicked the jukebox, and it shut up too.
"…it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown; his sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above the sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute of God himself, and earthly power doth then show likest God's when mercy seasons justice. But, in this case, my client is guilty as a fatcat in a fish tank and it is the recommendation of the Fence that you shoot the freaker's head off tout de suite."
"Thank you for your eloquence, Miss Unleaded. Members of the Jury, have you reached a verdict?"
Everybody roared in the affirmative.
"And is it the verdict of you all?"
Another roar.
"How do you find the accused?"
"GUILTY!"
Exxon took a black handkerchief from his pocket, folded it into a sailboat, and perched it on his head. Then, he pulled a revolver out of his waistband. It was a Wildey, one of those class tools they made a lot bigger than they needed to.
"Looks like we're gonna have to execute you on the spot, Mr Accused. Sorry, chum, but that's the way it's gotta be. We don't have no choice in the matter. It's the laws that made this country great."
He pulled back the hammer and cocked the gun. If he fired it one-handed, he was going to break his wrist. If he fired it now, the ScumStopper—he just knew Exxon would be packing SS balls—would make an inch-wide hole going in below his nose and above his mouth, and take off the entire back of his head. The frags would probably kill Mobil and the 'chugger holding his arms.
But maybe Exxon didn't care. Whatever, it wouldn't make any difference to Stack.
Exxon shut one eye, and exerted pressure on the trigger. He was showing off, and didn't have the strength in one hand to apply the pull. He took a two-handed grip, and shimmied a little to get a good stance. The gunsight scraped Stack's bloody nose.
Mobil and the other 'chugger got out of the way.
"Do you have any last words, convict?"
Stack couldn't think of any, so he spat blood and said "freak you."
"Time will pass, Troopie, and seasons will come and go. Soon, summer with her shimmering heatwaves on the baked horizon. Then, fall with her yellow harvest moon and the irrigated hills growing golden under the sinking sun. Then winter with its biting, whining wind and the land mantled over white with snow…"
This had the feel of a learned-by-rote speech. Golden hills were a long time ago.
"…and finally, spring again with its waving green grass, and heaps of sweet-smelling flowers on every lull…"
The hammer went back. Exxon's fingers began to squeeze.
"…BUT YOU FREAKIN' WONT BE HERE TO SEE NONE OF THEM, PECKERWOOD!"
A gun went off. A skull exploded. A body stood for a moment, strangely relaxed, men fell like a bag of laundry, sprawling on the barroom floor.
Stack, still shaking, looked from Exxon's corpse to the saloon doors, and the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life walked through carrying a smoking gun.
If she had been three foot ten, weighed four hundred and ninety pounds and wore a goatee beard, she would still have been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.