Fantasmagoria (27 page)

“Can you stop her?”

Jack paused. “I don’t know.” He jiggled his useless arm.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I got a few surprises left inside me. Besides, I’m not doing it for you. Right now, you’re my best chance of getting Pimpernel.”

Gilbert nodded.

“Take this.” He handed Gilbert the key. “And don’t worry about cover. Just run as fast as you can. Get the hell out of the Arcade. And see if you can’t wash that suit. It smells like a sewer.”

“Sorry.” Gilbert flushed red.

“My guess is, that’s how she’s tracking you. Ready?”

“Um.”

Jack opened the gate and walked out into the courtyard. Gilbert ran for the street.

Lette turned. She sauntered back down the stairs toward the metal gunslinger. Jack had a new face. His right arm swung limp. He dragged his left foot.

The Fury and the gunslinger stopped twenty paces from each other.

“You’re Blackjack.”

He nodded.

“My name is Lette.”

“That short for something?”

The Fury smiled. “No. Just Lette.” She walked forward. “You wouldn’t know, but we’ve already met. Sort of.”

Jack scowled.

“In the dog’s office. You were unconscious, strapped to a gurney. And you had a different face.”

“Right.”

Lette stopped. “I like this one better. It suits you. And the stitching.” She traced the thick, twisting wire that peeked above the collar of his shirt. She smiled at him.

“What about it?”

“You’re beautiful.” Her smile faded. She stepped closer still. “Like a monster.”

Jack could feel her breath. Her black eyes were impenetrable.

Lette struck his chest with great speed. There was a resounding clang like the chime of a church bell, and Jack flew back, cracked two metal braziers full of incense, and splintered a black stone column. The doors to the temple swung open. There were torches and shouting.

Jack stood. His mind was already charging the flywheel, and he felt his body fill with strength, more than he’d ever had. He felt his chest. The flesh had been crushed, but his breast plate had held.

Lette walked toward him over the black stone. “Whatever you’re made of, it’s very strong.” She stopped. “I like strong.”

“Lady, you don’t know the half of it.”

Jack swung with his good arm and missed—Lette was too fast—but it was a feint. Jack guessed she hadn’t seen too many mechanoids, and just as he’d done in the battle with the wereninjas, Jack pivoted his torso 360 degrees and struck the Fury in the jaw on his second pass.

Lette flipped end over end and crashed through the spiked, vertebral wall that separated the temple grounds from the promenade. She stood and turned as Jack walked through the hole left in her wake. A crowd had gathered on the temple steps, and another on the street, but no one dared disturb the dark dance.

Lette’s jaw was cracked and dangling. Black blood dripped to the ground and sizzled on the pavement. She licked the vicious wound with her tongue.

Finally, a little pain.

Jack watched her put her jaw back in her face. The tendon started to reform.

“Fuck.”

Lette half-smiled like a corpse. She walked to him and brought her mouth close to his. Her voice was a mere rasp. “That was a good trick.” Her breath smelled of wild flowers and decay.

Jack didn’t move. Every moment gave Gilbert more time to get away. Jack wasn’t sure what to do anyway. He hadn’t been this close to a woman in a long, long time.

The white woman stared at him with burning black eyes. She licked her black lips. “You might be the only creature in the whole world who’s killed more people than me.” Her mouth opened as she exhaled death.

Jack scowled. “What do you want?”

Lette pulled his head down and whispered in his ear. “
Everything
.”

(TWENTY-NINE) A Song to Dismember Me By

Jack watched Lette brush her white hair next to him in the bed. “You’re not going to dismember me now, are you?” The light of morning crept in from the window. Gilbert had to be good and gone by now.

“Don’t worry.” She tossed her head back and threw the brush away. “I just had a bath.”

“What does that mean?”

Lette smiled and stretched thick, black lips across her teeth. “It means the voices aren’t so strong. For awhile.”

“Voices?”

“It’s more like a song actually, a black chorus, urging me on.” Lette noticed his confusion. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“And you might not wanna look in the bathroom.”

“I got no use for it anyway.” Jack stared into her obsidian eyes. It was easy to get lost. They never ended. Behind was the bottomless pit.

“What?” She blinked.

“What are you doing here?”

Lette smiled and ran her hand over his broad, stitched chest. “What do you mean?” Her voice was too coy.

“I mean in the city. Why aren’t you, ya know . . . home?”

She kissed along an abruptly cut tattoo, half of a half-naked woman drawn in pale pinks and blues. Her name was obscured. “That’s a complicated question.”

“Simplify it. For the dumb mechanoid.”

“The word back home is the Empire’s going to invade the Aminal Kingdom.”

“War? Why would the Empire want to start a war?”

“They think the Kingdom is weak. The new king is a monkey, after all.”

“And the Emperor is a geriatric mouse. What difference does it make?”

Lette laughed and kicked her feet back and forth in the air.

Jack shook his head. She was like a different person.

“What?”

“Nuthin’. It’s just the way you said it.”

“Said what?”

“Monkey.”

“How did I say it?” Her breasts stretched across his stomach.

Jack had never felt anything like it. “You don’t really believe all that crap, do you? Amazons as the Master Race and the rest of it?”

“Don’t I?”

“What would they say about me back home?”

“That you’re a soulless machine. Nothing more than a tool. To be used when and how we please. And you please, Jack. Such stamina.”

“Ha.” Jack looked to the window. “You and Erasmus have a lot in common.”

“I saw it, you know.”

“Saw what?”

“How your people are treated.”

“My people?”

“The sex workers, down in the go-go quarter. Before I killed LaMana.”

“You bit his dick off.”

“I was gnawty.” Lette flashed her teeth. “He deserved it. The Butcher of Battle Street.”

“I didn’t realize they were my
people
.”

“You know what I mean. It’s sad. They knew I wasn’t one of them. No one said anything.”

“After awhile you learn it doesn’t help anything if you speak up, so you just keep quiet.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing all these years, Jack? Keeping quiet? Waiting for your time?” She ran her hands up to his neck.

“I’m not all that complicated.”

“Yes, you are.” She smiled at the big man. “You should tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What you’re planning.”

“Is that what this was about?” He nodded to the bed where they’d consummated their battle. He didn’t bother to ask whose it was, or why there was a large blood stain in the middle. Everything they’d done seemed so awfully, disgustingly natural.

“No. Well . . .” She thought for a moment. “Not only.”

“What are you about, lady?”

Lette smiled. “You don’t trust me.”

Jack shook his head. “A race of all women.”

“That’s your answer?” She sat up. “You’re a pig, Jack.”

“So, I’ve been told.” Jack squinted. “I still don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Where do you come from?”

“Where do any of us come from? You’re a mechanical man.” Lette pulled out a cigarette.

“It’s not the same thing. I’m mechanoid. At some point my parents built me from a mix of their parts. No mystery.”

Lette smiled and blew smoke. “I think you’re missing the big picture, Jack.”

“Am I?”

“Why don’t you ask what you really want to ask?”

“Which is?”

“The same thing as all the other people who are too polite, or too afraid, to ask.”

Jack waited.

Lette leaned into Jack’s ear and whispered, “How do you all breed?”

Jack hadn’t thought of that any more than he’d thought about how unicorns breed, or rabbits. Amazons were just part of the world. “What’s the answer?”

“Brilliantly.” Her black eyes beamed.

Jack scowled.

Lette stood up and wrapped the blood-specked sheet around her pure white skin. “You have no idea what a crime this is, Jack.”

“Sleeping with me?”

“You grow up in the compound and--”

“You mean New Amazonus?”

She nodded. “Deep in a savage jungle, locked away in exile behind fifty-foot-high walls, to keep the monsters out, and there’s nothing but each other. We grow up and learn all about how the gods made us perfect. How we’re all pure and our bodies are a temple of superiority, stronger than men—both physically and emotionally—but kinder, wiser, less violent.” She looked out a crack in the blinds at the street below. It was raining. “So, naturally, there’s a thriving black market for pornography. If you get caught with it, you’re put to death. Did you know that? Unless you’re royalty.”

“Amazonian porn? With real men?”

Lette nodded. “Well, sometimes it’s with mechanoids. That’s the really perverted stuff actually, worse even than being with an aminal. But usually it’s Therian men.”

“But I thought if the seed of a man enters--”

“If the seed of a man touches any part of an Amazon, she retreats from the world and forms a chrysalis. And a few weeks later, you get someone like me.”

“So how does it work?”

“It’s not actual Amazons, silly. They get tall Therian women to dress like us, fuck some guy, take pictures. I even saw a film once. The man was whipping her. Then he forced himself on her; sometimes three or four men at a time are in on it. It’s always like that, actually. The Amazon is always subordinate. Isn’t that funny? My people believe they’re so powerful, the natural rulers of the world, and yet what they fantasize about is being dominated by an inferior life form.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Does it?” Lette turned and walked in front of the bed. “I don’t know about such things. We lead a very sheltered life in the compound. And I didn’t get to be very old before,” she motioned up and down herself, “this happened.”

“Wait.” Jack frowned. “How old are you?”

Lette smiled and exhaled her cigarette. She swayed her hips as she walked toward Jack. “How old do you think I am?”

Jack shook his head.

Lette leaned in and kissed him. “I’m fifteen, Jack.” She smiled.

“Fuck . . .” Jack’s head dropped.

She stood up. “Don’t worry. I mean, I’m not really fifteen. Not anymore. I was. But as you can see . . .” She let the sheet drop and spun around, showing Jack her naked, full-figured body. “A Fury is timeless, Jack.” She moved a hand in front of her breasts and smiled at him, flashing her black eyes. “Just like vengeance. So don’t worry. This doesn’t make you a pedophile.”

“Great.” Jack put his feet on the floor and his hands on his gut. “That’s exactly how I wanted to start today.”

Lette crawled onto the bed. She felt his back, tracing her fingers along the ragged line of sewn pseudoflesh. The skin of his back was tattooed, but, as at his neck, the art—intertwining rose vines, complete with thorns—was abbreviated by the stitching. Lette traced the keyhole. She rubbed it in circles. “Tell me, mechanical man, what do you want most in the world?”

Jack looked down at his empty hands.

Lette waited for an answer. “Tell me.”

“To kill Erasmus Pimpernel.” He said it without thinking.

Lette smiled. “Really? Is that all?”

Jack shook his head. “You act like it’s easy.”

“Why do you want to kill him?”

Jack thought for a moment. Maybe it was for the kids. Maybe for himself. Didn’t make much difference.

“What about your new friend, Gilbert? Is he going to help?”

“I told you. I just met him.”

“I could make you a deal, Jack.”

And here is where the truth comes out, he thought. Jack tried not to feel disappointed. He’d never been with a woman before, not fully. He was ill-equipped between his legs, and there hadn’t been time at Elsa’s for the finer details. The pair had had to improvise.