Slaughtermatic (10 page)

The Kid was trying on the perspex beard. ‘I think the necessity of being dead increases,’ he whispered.

Corey the Teller stood on Dive, the epicentre of the Beretta Triangle, and watched a pasty-faced guy mime the further unfolding of his ear. Then he funneled his hand against it and listened with exaggeration. Clearly astonished by what he had heard, he began to bend-walk on the spot. Corey pulled her Hitachi pistol and put the guy down with one shot. Right there was what she hated about this neighbourhood.

Straight off she regretted it. Out of Saints Street sauntered a dozen deathers with ill-matching hardfloor guns, alerted by the pistol crack. They got a fix on her and started down the street. She fired five times when they were too far off, dropping two. The others began running toward her. She put her last round into the downed mime and turned to flee.

And came face to face with a gaunt, grinning wreck. ‘An accident isn’t the opposite of anything,’ he said, his teeth clenched - gripped between them was a ringpull. Corey looked down at the grenade in his palm. Bomb zombie.

An armoured car screeched up, its door flung open. Corey got in and slammed as the vehicle blasted off. ‘Need a ride,’ said the driver without inflection - behind them the zombie had his moment, the explosion blunting the edge of a corner block. The car hit the deathers without slowing, wipers smearing window gore into arcs. The driver threw a switch and the hood flipped over, leveling a row of rocket bloopers. ‘How far you going.’ he said tonelessly.

Corey looked at this little guy, his eyes set on the road, and glanced around the car’s interior - the floor and seats were littered with take-out trash, drugbags, ammo and snuff magazines. Corey felt suddenly nervous of the booted eighty large in her pants. ‘You a cop?’ she asked the driver carefully.

‘
My name’s Benny,’ said Benny. ‘But they call me . . . Benny.’

4

YOU FOUND TIME

‘
You found time to shoot Galt the Finger yet?’ shouted Meese into the phone, then realized there was someone standing in his office. ‘I’ll call you back.’ He hung up as a vision in newsurvivalist antishocks stepped into the light. He knew who this was - a shootist he’d wanted on his books for years. The Rose, with her wraparound dark side. Meese hoped his mental adjustments were externally undetectable.

Rosa Control seated herself opposite. Meese’s mouth slithered into a smile. ‘Miss Control. Can I do somethin’ for you, or are you offerin’ your services to me today?’

He waited for the Rose to ask what he had in mind. When she didn’t, he continued for a while, talking shop. ‘. . . And Webley never made a more charming weapon. I’ll have you know as well as I do. Better.’

Rosa studied the growth-inhibited, steel-plated nails of her left hand.

‘
So,’ Meese struggled, ‘you goin’ to the convention?’

Rosa raised her right arm and leveled the wetware gun at Meese. ‘Are you beginning to see what I mean?’

Meese’s face turned white.

‘
Call off the hit or I sponge the wall with your brain.’

‘
Oh, the,’ said Meese, watching the gun breathe. ‘The Cubit hit, yeah? I just, Miss Control, I just wonder if you know how difficult that is, see even normally, but this is Parker’s hit - Brute Parker, understand?’

‘
How endlessly interesting.’

‘
Hey, now listen,’ shouted Meese, offended and angry. ‘You try stoppin’ him once he’s off - threatenin’ Parker’s like threatenin’ a bomb. And this here’s a double hunt.’

‘
Explain.’

‘
It pays high ’
cause there’s more at stake. Hell, the whole town’ll blow if one of them Cubits don’t get evaporated.’

‘
So they’re both still alive. Who staked the hit.’

‘
Guy by the name of Tredwell Garnishee.’

‘
Don’t play games with me, Mr Meese.’

‘
I’m tellin’ you that was the guy’s name. Drop the squidgun, Rose. The hitter’s out, I can’t stop him. This is hard for me too - think this is easy for me?’

‘
Your ease is a matter of indifference to me. Pick up the phone.’ Meese picked it up, watching her warily. ‘Contact Parker.’

‘
You won’t shoot me, lady.’

‘
Prove it.’

Meese dialed a number and Rosa fired, hitting off the crest of his head. He regarded the ceiling in astonishment, the air aswirl with blood pollen.

Rosa took the phone from Meese’s hand and listened to the gunsel on the line - it wasn’t Parker. Parker never took calls while out on a job.

She put up the phone and walked around the desk to swatch Meese’s datafiles - what she found made her question her perceptions. The desk was filled solid with meat, an extension of Meese’s body attached by a bundled ganglia of gristle. The wooden exterior of the desk existed solely to conceal this flaw in his personality.

In the Deal Street Highrise, his face uplit by dataflow, Dante experienced the hunting of Dante Two. He could see from his lateral vantage that the Tolerance gun was a toy against Parker, who was utterly indifferent to external acknowledgment. The question of whether Dante could warn him, whether Dante Two was himself, whether this was fact or fiction, never germinated from a seed in his mind. If Dante Two was shot in the laughing gear, it was mere logistics.

Dante was unaware of the figure standing in a corner of the warehouse, arms folded, watching him.

Don Toto the barman shoved the final felon on to the street and closed the Reaction for the day. He’d had to give a mime a haymaker to the belly earlier for the fool’s own protection. The clientele had been appalled by the mime’s reaction to the blow - not a sound, just an exaggeratedly glum expression and those cowing eyes. The last he’d seen of him he’d been walking against the wind in the direction of Dive.

Toto extinguished a small fire, stacked the seats on the tables and swept away a few spent shells. The ballistic jukebox had broken down again, encouraging the clientele to provide their own deafening amusement. Walking to the rear wall, Toto detached the jukebox front and knelt at the works with a nerve-jumper. An entire junction of the circuitboard’s fuses was corroded. He tested a strip with the needle and the jukebox exploded with Sauer fire. The idea was to isolate which selections were still available and which were lost - the latter were causing a shutdown when selected.

The next tweak of the board seemed to produce a deafening explosion and a kind of animal yell as, behind him, the door to the Reaction evaporated and Dante Two skidded inside on his belly. Frowning, Toto hit the circuit again to produce what he could have sworn was a blast from a Scatterat - an Ithaca 40? He re-jumped the point - Ithaca for sure. Then here was something sounding like a misfiring Tolerance gun, segueing with a sort of yell of despair. He’d had no idea these selections were available.

Parker stood in the doorway rapid-firing the Scatterat as Dante Two ditched the useless Tolerance and dived over the bar to raid Toto’s riot-response gear. Parker had overturned a table and ducked behind it when Dante Two, standing from behind the bar with a .44 Harry Magnum in one hand and a Redhawk in the other, blasted away with both. Parker discarded an empty Rat clip and pulled a flatline flechette gun to cover the reload. The table was being bitten down like a cookie.

‘
Technology,’ thought Toto. The circuitpoint which had just provoked Scatterat fire now produced a mix of two .44 Mag stoppers and the shriek of some kind of flatsuit barb pistol - making zero sense. He needed a hardware troubleshooter like Download Jones. Then he remembered Jones was cod-eyed in the copden rubble. Boy, Parker would thank him for that.

Toto scraped at the component as though removing lead from a statuette. The air ignited with ballistics.

Dante Two was standing on the bar tilting at Parker, who stood suddenly with the reloaded Scatterat and fired, blowing the bar out from under him. Every single glass in the bar exploded as Dante Two rolled and hit the doorway, bolting out. Parker followed, letting rip. Toto stood, threw down the nerver in disgust and turned to the wasteland of his establishment.

Specter’s cell phone went off as he entered the Triangle, but since he had lost an arm to Tredwell he had to stop the car to answer. His secretary informed him his entire legal staff had been flattened in some kind of aircraft disaster. Specter was an expert in fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other. Somebody would pay.

He looked down Aphex Street, empty. He wasn’t telling Blince this, but he knew Dante Cubit, had misrepresented him when he was a mere underwolf. It was a personality offence - you could catch ideas just by looking at the guy. This was in Chicago, where Specter had been waiting on a few forged papers. He’d tried to demonstrate to the court that Illinois was packed full of individuals - this meant coaching a number of witnesses in isolation for a fortnight. Sick as dogs, they reedily requested TV privileges and, when refused, withdrew into media-starvation coma. Specter had to inject a second group with a choline-arcalion centrophenoxine hydergine piracetam ID-frame booster chased with milacemide grail speed. An hour after the drug was administered the witnesses began to sneer, saying if Specter thought they were sticking round here for a lousy grand a day he was off his lid - then they punched his face, each taking turns to do this and then neigh with laughter while prancing out of the perjury room. A mistrial was only averted by Specter’s instantly pulling a revolver and leveling it at his own bonce while standing side-on to the jury and chirping, ‘Brains in your lap? It ain’t pretty!’ The case continued until Specter lost it due to a show of childish petulance during which he pelted the judge with dung. Dante was convicted and slipped custody disguised as an escaped criminal.

Specter thought fondly of the days when he’d tear off the eyebrow of a witness and blow it toward the jury like the seed-head of a dandelion. Where were those days now? And where was the money in those days?

He felt for the cybersurgical porting stump at his left shoulder. After the Tredwell encounter he’d called his redphone surgeon on Orbit Heights and been fixed up with an autograft arm of undifferentiated reptile tissue. This was designed to inhabit the etheric after-image of the missing tissue and fill it out, fleshing the ghost limb. It flowed into the damaged form and whatever was absent was speedily replaced.

Maybe Specter’s man did it as a joke but no ethical surgeon would have given fillerflesh to a lawyer. Specter opened the case on the passenger seat, removed the limb, unsealed one end of its transparent packaging as per instruction, opened the port valve at his shoulder and applied the arm - alert to absence and tendrilling in search of the vacuum to be filled, the reptilian presence streamed immediately into his soul.

Dante Two ran into Aphex Street, a gutted grey thoroughfare parked with a single armoured executive car - as he sprinted past this he became wired with recognition. Parker skidded around the corner to see his quarry standing staring at a studcar. Wary and suspicious, he approached the figure and brought his gun to bear. Then he saw that Harpoon Specter was sitting in the car, convulsing.

Specter’s left arm was a rippling cylinder of guacamole, and a similar substance was squirting out of his ears. He was yelling incendiary abuse which was inaudible to Dante Two and Parker as they stood in frank appreciation of Specter’s performance, their concerns forgotten. This was what Dante Two loved about this neighbourhood - catching up on old associates and seeing what they were doing. For Parker’s part, he knew that whatever Specter was up to, there must be money in it.

Then the two spectators glanced at each other, recalled the full weight of their differences, and resumed hostilities while bolting in the direction of Olympus Dump.

At the same moment Benny and Corey blasted through the border checkpoint and roared into Terminal state.

5

MEANWHILE

Meanwhile the media had detected the rudiments of the heist on Deal. Diligently shaky news footage showed cops laughing fit to burst amid wreckage. Handball Weyrich, Mayhem Correspondent for the
Daily Denial
, commented that ‘the bank never seemed so unintimidating as after the fire storm hit. There was an air of celebration uptown as one of Beerlight’s oldest traditions was upheld.’ The Mayor took swift action with his arms and lower jaw as he said ‘Nothing but a fundamental change will prevent these acts of animosity. Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised.’ From an armed airship circling the globe Leon Wardial, the technobooster, remarked that the heist showed great promise - the perpetrator had created an expensive mess which was not a mere ‘artifact’ of decadent aesthetics but a true reflection of the city’s nature. Pat Logan agreed: ‘It blends so perfectly it may as well never have happened. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t simply the camouflage for a more interesting crime.’

Henry Blince skimmed these last remarks in the
Parole Violators’ Bugle
while eating hotdogs at the counter of the Nimble Maniac. ‘Hey Dobey!’ he yelled. Dobey came out of the back. ‘Dobey - gimme
another
hotdog!’

‘
You had enough, Chief,’ said Dobey, shaking his head slowly.