In a place that has no name, a place indefinable in spatial or temporal terms-or for that matter, any terms that might apply to organic matter, let alone life-something vast and inimical and unknowable stirred.
Something was calling to it. Something had made a small fracture in the world. A tiny imperfection, to be sure, but one that could be worked upon. Something that could be forced further apart, with time. If time had any meaning, of course, for this vast and inimical and unknowable thing, which it didn’t. It had an eternity in which to operate, after all.
It would be a mistake to believe that the subsumation and destruction of all we know would be anything more than a light snack to this vast and inimical and unknowable thing. The equivalent of a quick pack of potato chips between real meals.
Then again, potato chips come in a variety of interesting flavours, and a pack of them is just the thing to hit the spot. When you’re feeling peckish-as the vast and inimical and unknowable thing decidedly was.
For the moment, though, it was in the position of having worked the pack open just enough to insert a finger. Just enough, if it inserted the smallest extremity of itself into the world of men, for a small taste. And this it had proceeded to do…
Half-blinded and gibbering with terror, Eddie Kalish scrambled through the junk piles, trying to catch his bearings. Things had shifted around, of course, during the time he had spent away, but Little Deke’s had never been what you might call a roaring concern. Things, for the most part, had tended to stay where they were put; Eddie still had some idea of the layout. That was an advantage.
That was, in fact, the only advantage he might have over the people out here in the dark. People and, of course, the… thing out here in the dark.
“Oh yes, there’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto had said, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted light, “and I’m going to do it now.”
She had ripped her hands from the hole in her stomach, trailing strings of some viscous substance that hadn’t quite seemed even organic, let alone something that a human body could produce. A mass of this stuff seemed to have clotted in her wound, tendrils of it forming and intertwining and pulsing of its own accord.
The hands had seemed bigger-impossibly bigger, like those anatomical models where the limbs and extremities are distorted to a size comparable to the area of the brain controlling them. The nails had elongated to the point of talons.
Trix Desoto had run one of these claws down her face-for an instant Eddie had thought that she was trying to claw her own eyes out in agony, but instead the tip of a talon had run gently down the side of her face, cutting a slit from the inside of which something glowed like embers in some long-banked fire.
“Run,” she had told him, face deadly serious and positively demonic in the light from the slit she had made. A talon had jabbed in the direction of the pale form of the comatose old guy. “Take him and run.”
All reasonable thoughts about armed NeoGen troops waiting out there in the junk years had vanished-indeed, it was as if all reasonable thought had shut down. The monster snarls and you just run for the tree line or the cave. He had leapt from the van without question and headed for the junk piles.
It was only after the explosion had washed over him, miraculously failing to spear him with flying debris, that he realised that he had unthinkingly followed Trix Desoto’s order and taken the body of the old guy with him. It must have been her tone of voice.
Now, Eddie Kalish decided, the old guy was just dead weight. He left the inert form sprawled by a pile of rotting tyres, gently seeping from the punctures left from being unceremoniously hauled from the med-units.
Off to one side, through the junk, there was a single muzzle-flash and the complete lack of sound from an expertly silenced gun-though any sound of gunfire would have probably been drowned out, in any case, by the high-pitched scream and the sounds of tearing flesh. Whatever it was that Trix Desoto had turned into, it was having a ball.
Or possibly two, Eddie thought, and then really wished that he hadn’t.
Eddie moved on, crept around a vaguely familiar heap of panel-sections-and ran straight into one of the surviving NeoGen troops.
Eddie Kalish would never know how lucky he was, in that instant-luck that had been brought about by the confluence of three main factors. The first being that the trooper was currently packing hi-explosive shells into his big MultiFunction Gun.
This would have been singularly unlucky, of course, had not one Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler ordered that minimum necessary force be used until the object of their operation be secure. A single hi-ex round fired into the van would have exploded it in much the way that it just had, so the MFG was currently slung over the trooper’s shoulder and out of instant reach.
The second factor was that, unlike that produced by conventional explosives, the detonation of the van had released a variety of localized electromagnetic pulse that had knocked out the trooper’s infrared night-sight. He was in the midst of tearing it angrily from his face and blinking his eyes to acclimatise to the sudden darkness when he caught the moving silhouette of Eddie.
This lag in reaction-time gave Eddie Kalish the bare second he needed to let out a yip of fear and lurch back-and this was when the third factor came into play, in the form of the heap of panel-sections that Eddie himself had somewhat inexpertly stacked some years before.
These had come, predominantly, from the hulking shells remaining from automobiles of the 1950s and 60s-from before oil embargos and the like had made sheer weight an issue. They were good, solid steel plate as opposed to membrane-thin aluminium that turned to lacework at the first breath of an oxyacetylene torch.
They were an incompetently stacked accident waiting to happen, basically-and now they came crashing down on the trooper.
The screams before, and as, they hit sounded a little odd to Eddie and it was a moment before he worked out why. For some reason, Eddie realised, he’d had trouble imagining a quasi-military stealth-killer as a girl, for all that there was no reason in the world why not.
From the image that terror had etched onto his eyes, though, he now recalled that the shape under the combat-fatigues had been undoubtedly female, and damn well-built at that.
Of course, any shape she might be in now would be decidedly unattractive and quite beside the point. This was the first person Eddie had actually killed in his life, whether by accident or design. He really didn’t know how he felt about that.
There was another explosion of sound and light. It seemed that it was coming from beyond the compound wire, and that was just like as to fine with Eddie Kalish. Too much had happened. His reflexes were shot.
All he wanted to do at this point was crawl away somewhere and hide and let the world go to Hell in any way that it liked.
Thomas Marlon Drexler slapped at the inert monitors bolted onto the dash and said: “Fuck you you piece of shit!”
This was, in actual fact, the longest single string of expletives he had ever used. He had simply, somehow, never seen the point or felt the need, even in the heat of combat. He was a little surprised that he even had it in him.
The EMP from the explosion within the targets’ RV had knocked out the HumGee’s electrical systems. MIRA “herself” was probably still alive-or, at least, sentient-grade self-aware-since her housing was rated as shielded for anything up to a pony-bomb nuclear blast.
The secondary systems that would make her being alive and aware of any actual use, however, were blown.
These included the door mechanisms. Drexler had remained here, trapped, while things had exploded outside. He had attempted to work out what was happening in the junkyard compound beyond the wire, but the loss of Klieg-illumination had left him with nothing useful to see.
It was the sense of disassociation from the world that was the worst thing, he vaguely realised. MIRA might have snidely called him a robot, but the fact was that a large proportion of Thomas Marlon Drexler’s self-image resided in the fact that he considered himself, basically, a tool.
He was a part of something larger and more important than himself. He was the strong right hand-no, rather the hammer in that strong right hand-when his NeoGen masters required the application of direct force.
This was his function, and he performed it without ego or self-congratulation, without compunction or remorse. Taking out the ringleaders of a labour-dispute, removing some intracorporate rival together with his wife and kids, it made no odds. It was his function. This was the core of his being and his life.
Now he was stuck here, sealed off from the world and unable to affect it in any way. He was about as much use as a spare dick-and the sensation was maddening.
This was not, quite simply, what the world was and how it worked. It was almost enough to make him take the ten-gauge from where it was stowed under the dash and use it to just switch the world off.
Something big and heavy thumped into the HumGee outside, rocking it on its suspension and flinging Drexler forward to smack his head against the padded crash-cage which-had the electrics been working-would have ordinarily racked itself down on servos to cushion the impact.
This direct evidence of a world outside galvanised Drexler and his basic impulses took over. Now he grabbed the ten-gauge, pulling it free from its snaplocks with no thought in his head save to aim it at the HumGee’s windshield and blast his way out.
The fact that the shot would have almost certainly rebounded from the impact-tempered glass and shredded him where he sat was beside the point-the mindless need to simply act, overwhelming as it was, had burned away any last vestige of rational thought.
Thus it was that when the entire top of the HumGee split open under a claw and inhuman strength, Drexler was already in the process of bringing up the gun and unloading both barrels.
The shot tore into the thing beyond, opening up a hole within which internal organs gave off their own pale glow.
In this light-or for that matter any other-these organs looked like the insides of nothing on or of this Earth.
For a moment, the creature recoiled, eyes rolling down to regard the wound and jaw yawning open in a moment of imbecilic, even comical, puzzlement.
“Got you, motherfucker,” Drexler snarled, thereby increasing, again, the number of times he had sworn in his life by an actually measurable percentage. “Fuckin’ hurt your ass!”
The moment of incongruous puzzlement passed. The skin of the creature liquefied and flowed over the hole and knitted.
The creature brushed at itself momentarily, and somewhat fussily, with a claw.
Then it reached in, clamped its talons around Drexler’s head and hauled him out of the HumGee, snapping his neck in the process.
This was probably more fortunate than otherwise for Thomas Marlon Drexler, since it meant that he could not feel what the creature did next.
From his immobilised point of view, past the foreground spray of various fluids as the creature went to work with a vengeance, Drexler could see the night sky. The stars burned brightly, in a wide range of colours due to suspended atmospheric pollutants.
The last thing Drexler saw was one of the stars visibly move and expand. Something coming.
Big light coming down.
“Oh shit,” Eddie muttered, increasing the number of times he had sworn in his life by no particular increment at all. “Here comes the backup.”
Hunched up in the lee of a caterpillar-treaded hoist, which he had operated years before under the instruction of Little Deke, life had become quite simple, containing a grand total of two possibilities. Either the thing that had once been Trix Desoto would tire of amusing itself with the NeoGen troops and come sniffing after him, or NeoGen reinforcements would arrive to shoot him in the head.
The latter, it seemed, would be the case.
The big VTOL carrier hung in the air stitching fire into the junkyard. Eddie had scrambled for cover before realising that the VTOL was merely firing tracer-flares to provide snapshot-illumination, maybe for some variety of photosensor-system. This inference gave him no impetus to come out from cover, though, on account of (a) a direct hit from a tracer-flare wouldn’t do him much good, and (b) the little fact that if NeoGen saw him they were gonna shoot him in the head.
As the carrier banked and descended, however, Eddie caught sight of the illuminated logo on its side: GenTech
This wasn’t reinforcement for the bad guys, Eddie Kalish realised belatedly. This was the cavalry.
A drop-hatch opened and a score of impact-armoured troopers hit the dirt. Each of them toted a big MFG, and it would have been more to Eddie’s taste if they hadn’t looked more or less identical to the NeoGen operatives he had seen, but then you can’t have everything.
One of them, presumably the squad-leader, carried a small flatscreen readout, which he was busily consulting.
“ Primary target is forty metres south-southeast,” he ordered through a miniature amplifier. “ Carter and Trant, secure the package. ”
A pair of troopers peeled off and headed in the direction that Eddie vaguely remembered leaving the comatose old guy.
”Track-and-tranque detail, see if you can’t find the silly bitch. Try to take her alive. Try and shock her into latency. The rest of you clean up the area. Standard track and pop…”
Eddie decided that, on the whole, it would probably be better if he made his presence known rather than wait for the troops to come across him. Moving slow and trying to make himself look as unimpressive and unthreatening as possible, which wasn’t hard, he walked from the cover of the hoist and gave the troops a small wave. “Hey, guys..?”
Those of the squad who remained here, maybe ten in all, swung their MFGs toward him instantly.
“ You! ” the squad-leader bellowed. “ Give me your clearance! ”
“What?” said Eddie.
“ Security key-code clearance! Now! ”
“What the fuck?” said Eddie.
Automatic fire from maybe three sources stitched into him, and that was the last thing Eddie Kalish remembered.
Second Quadrant: Section in the Sky
From behind me a roscoe belched “Chow-chow!” A pair of slugs buzzed past my left ear, almost nicked my cranium. Mrs Brantham sagged back against the pillow of the lounge… she was as dead as an iced catfish.
“Veiled Lady” Spicy Detective October 1937
Supplementary Data
The conurbation that would eventually become known simply as the San Angeles Sprawl was built on the processes of overexpansion and of dying back, both happening simultaneously.
That isn’t the oxymoron it might first appear. Population-pressure had been well along the way of thickening up the developments along the routes forming an irregular and somewhat elongated triangle formed by Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego, turning any last vestiges of natural landscape into an urban-landscape, when the ultimate collapse of petrochems as a global source of power had forced human populations to collapse and congeal in a specifically structural manner.
The vast majority of the urban population now subsisted in what were basically corporate hives-fortified and monolithic compound-blocks, resource-regulated and microclimatically controlled, amongst the rubble and wreckage of what was almost literally, now, an urban jungle.
It was, in a sense, as if humanity itself had split itself in two. Those with the ant-like temperament to survive in corporate-controlled culture had holed themselves up in these arcologies; those who were essentially nomadic, or indeed bandits, took to the roads… but when the world splits in two, whatever the sense, there are always those who fall through the cracks.
Sometimes these people gravitated toward settlements, like the ill-fated Las Vitas in New Mexico, and eked out a living on sufferance, servicing those who truly lived out in the wide-open spaces on the simple basis that there has to be somebody who does.
For the most part, though, they ended up crawling through the tenebrous wreckage of cities cannibalised and consolidated into the corporate hives, living in the ruins of the No-Go Zones. Living the best they could, like maggots on the rotting corpse of the old world.
Of course, even amongst the society of maggots on a corpse, or any other parasite or scavenger, there were differing degrees of devolvement and ferality.
There are some who wax fatter than others… and some who don’t.
These had once been the tunnels of the Los Angeles Transit Authority Subway. Never particularly well-regarded or frequented when they had been operational in the first place, years of dereliction had left them choked with the recycling detritus of the ruins and their punctuating corporate compound-blocks above.
Things lived down here in the mix of garbage and toxic sludge, some of them human, some of them not.
A variety of okapi, for example, released by animal rights activists years ago from the Los Angeles City Zoo, had managed to gain purchase here. Turned nocturnal in this endless subterranean night, surviving while all manner of other released creatures died, subsisting on the fronds of a similarly incongruous fungus that had proliferated through the tunnels on escaping from some or other biolab in the world above. Such coincidental survivals might give the more thoughtful pause for thought on the indomitability of biological life.
Not in the case of this particular okapi, though. As it delicately finished its fungus-frond meal and prepared to leave, a meticulously sharpened blade that had once served as one half of a pair of garden shears sliced through its neck and it fell.
Dogboy Who Waits yanked the blade back on the nylon lanyard knotted to the little hole on the tine, which had once served to secure a polypropylene handle. The lanyard itself consisted of woven lengths of fishing line. Dogboy Who Waits, of course, had not the slightest idea of what the origin of these items was; putting them together like this had just, somehow, felt right.
Dogboy Who Waits wasn’t even his real name. Indeed, he had only the barest rudiments of conceptual language. He merely knew, in some basic nonverbal sense that he was a Boy, that he felt akin to what he knew as a Dog, and that Waiting was one of the things he did most of. He had been lying patiently in wait for his prey, under the cover of a discarded maintenance pallet, for what those who reckon time in the usual sense would reckon more than thirty-six hours.
Such people who reckoned time would also consider Dogboy Who Waits as maybe fourteen years old, but of course he didn’t think in those terms. He was simply there and alive in the faintly fungus-phosphorescent dark that was all he had ever known.
Now the time had come for movement and speed, even urgency. It would not be long before others sensed and smelled the kill.
Working quickly with his blade, Dogboy Who Waits gutted the okapi, identified those lights that were best to eat by touch and wolfed them down. This was the quick nutrition that needed no cooking. Then he began the less hasty business of jointing the carcass and laying up the choicest cuts of hock and haunch in his salt sack.
The kill had been an adult, and large enough that Dogboy Who Waits could countenance leaving some proportion of it for others; the impulse to claim it all and defend it to the snarling death was surmountable. And this was fortunate, because torchlight was winding its way cautiously through the debris strewn through the tunnels.
As the torches drew closer, Dogboy Who Waits recognised those who were holding them: three boys of roughly his own age, a slightly younger girl trailing behind. A stable and viable breeding-group-insofar as stability and viability had any meaning down here in the tunnels. An actual tribe.
And to the extent that he could know anybody, Dogboy Who Waits knew them, and knew their rituals.
The leader of them-of middle-size, but with the alert look of one who led by resource rather than by means of sheer, mere physical bulk-grunted in what passed for the sub-language peculiar to his tribe, and gestured with his torch to the small pile of entrails which Dogboy Who Waits had, with some consideration, left to one side when butchering his kill.
It is possible that some practices and rituals are basic to human beings, ingrained and dormant in the backbrain and only resurfacing when some imposed and overall patina of “civilization” is absent. On the other hand-and far more plausibly-people just do stuff. All kinds of stuff.
People do certain things in the past and then, quite by chance, they’ll do something similar a thousand years later. It’s just what people do.
In any case, it just so happened that this particular tribe had evolved an interpersonal ceremony in common with that of plains-dwelling Indians from several centuries before. The leader of the tribe planted his torch in the accumulated mulch of the tunnel floor.
Dogboy Who Waits picked up the entrails, and slowly drew them through the flame. The partially-digested fungus within cooked with a strangely pleasant small, like frying mushrooms.
Dogboy Who Waits and the leader of the tribe hunkered down, facing each other. Each took an end of the length of cooked intestine in their mouths, and then they began to swallow. And swallow. And swallow until their faces were no more than inches apart.
Now would come the actual test of strength-and Dogboy Who Waits had the uneasy feeling that he didn’t have it in him. Or, rather, that he had too much. He was beginning to wish that he hadn’t filled up on fresh lights after making his kill.
Dogboy Who Waits risked a glance at the other two members of the tribe, the boy and the girl, who were watching the contest expectantly, hungrily. They might fall on him in anger if they saw him cheat-but it was certain they would fall on him, and tear him limb from limb, if he lost.
Dogboy Who Waits decided to risk it, and do what the leader of the tribe, immured in ritual to the point where doing so would never so much as occur to him. He bit down hard on the length of cooked intestine in his mouth and heaved…
And later.
Dogboy Who Waits clambered over a twisted mass of scaffolding and swung himself up onto the sagging remains of what had once been a maintenance gantry. From here it was a clear run to the place he called, in his nonverbal way, home-a ruptured and ketone-reeking tank that had once fuelled the electrical back-up generators of a Transit Authority depot.
The tribe had tracked after him, angrily, for the better part of half a mile, but there had been a sense of squabbling half-heartedness about the pursuit. Their leader had, after all, suffered a lapse in authority-he might have lost the ritual contest by way of trickery, but he had still lost. He might not end up with the others falling on him and tearing him limb from limb, in much the same way as they would have done to Dogboy Who Waits, but the sense of dissention had given Dogboy Who Waits the edge he needed to escape.
Now Dogboy Who Waits made his way along the gantry, senses alert for the slightest evidence of movement or danger-and all unaware that others were hunting, waiting in a manner that would put his own skills to shame…
The explosion set Dogboy Who Waits on fire and knocked him from the gantry to fall thirty feet and hit a loose pile of garbage and concrete scree crumbled from the tunnel walls. Free hydrocarbons, produced over years by the decomposing garbage, briefly and fitfully ignited under the body’s immolation.
The pain was immense, impossible to bear-and then it was simply gone. It had reached the point of overload, where the neurosystem could not recognise it as such. Dogboy Who Waits lay sprawled on the rubble and smouldering garbage, breathing in flame. The mucus in his lungs converted instantly to steam, expanded catastrophically in his lungs and burst them. In the salt-sack slung from his body, choicest cuts of nocturnal okapi meat roasted merrily alongside his own.
“Aw, fuck! ” came a somewhat irritated voice to one side. “Why’d ya have to use an incendiary round, Karl? Is there any way we can at least save the fuckin’ head?”
Radio None
“This is WWAXZY News, every hour, on the hour-sponsored by Balls of Joy Premium-brand Profiteroles. Mm-mm. Just taste that creamy biotextured soy-milk goodness! Balls of Joy is a property-division of GenTech Industries SA and Creamy Goodness is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.
“And our top story is, of course, that Freak-E has officially announced her split, both romantically and professionally, from manager, Slee-Z. In an official statement she said: ‘You nothing but a scrub, Slee-Z. All you ever done is cash in on my talent, motherf____________________ r. Well you can kiss my round black a__ if you think you ever gonna make another cent out of me. I’m Big Master X’s b____________________ h now. Word to your motherf____________________ g mom!’
“The rest of Freak-E’s statement is unfit even for broadcast on this station but highlights included allegations that Slee-Z has one of the world’s largest collection of porcelain teapots and isn’t adverse to the use of a strap-on when it comes to bedroom fun.
“Big Master X is CEO of Big Black Beats Inc and a self-made multi-billionaire. Born in the Brooklyn No-Go in 2007, Big Master X-real name Justin Jones-overcame the combined handicaps of having a pronounced stutter, being massively obese and hitting every branch of the ugly tree when he fell out of it, to record his first number one single by the time he was nine. The following year he set up his own record label and within six months accepted an eight-figure offer from Eidolon Corp to buy out Big Black Beats. Freak-E is the latest in a string of female recording artists signed to BBB with whom Big Master X has been romantically linked following high profile affairs with Russian teen rap sensation Ivana Sukayov and all three members of Afghan agit-pop trio, Bombs Not Burkas.
“Slee-Z was unavailable for comment but sources close to the music, clothing and prostitution mogul have told this station that Slee-Z is unlikely to take Freak-E’s defection, especially to his biggest rival, lying down.
“In other news, aspiring Independent presidential candidate, William Hicks, has announced that he has proof that the information linking the Democratic Confederation of the Congos with the Basque Reunification cell who took out the Washington Memorial last spring to be entirely fabricated.
“What kind of President, asks Hicks, could be so addled and opportunistic as to confuse two entirely different and separate world powers purely on the basis that he considers them both to be dangerous foreigners with guns?
“A White House source, speaking off the record, sez: ‘William Hicks might once have had a first-class mind, but these latest statements show that he’s now completely delusional-delusion evidenced by his belief that he could ever become President in any real world.’
“And if the independent candidate is delusional then it looks like these things are catching. We here at WWAXZY have been receiving some very strange reports today.
“In Tokyo, more than a hundred subway commuters have spontaneously developed symptoms consistent with that of a Sarin attack. Physical traces of any kind of contaminant has yet to be found.
“The images of ghost-like and gigantic women have been glimpsed floating over several of the world’s most isolated communities, variously described as resembling the Angel of Mons, Winged Victory of Samathrace and, in the New Hegonomy of Bangkok as that of Rati, Ragalata the vine of love, Kelikila the Shameless, Mayarati the Deceiver-a multiple deity currently appearing in her aspect of a huge-breasted woman who drives all who might behold her mad with carnal lust. To which, all WWAXZY can say, is that some godless savages get all the luck.
“And speaking of massive goddesses who drive all who might behold them mad with carnal lust, we now return you to our back-to-back marathon of Freak-E hits. Here’s the hot new mix of ‘Be My Pimp’…”