Slaughtermatic (2 page)

Satisfied, he stood and tucked the book into his pants. He found a fusebox and blinded the bank-floor cameras with a boltcutter. Waiting just inside the vault room, he watched the clock and idly thought of how a jester’s costume of matching halves was a handy guide for sawing. Then he entered the bank floor and pressed the Uzi to the rear guard’s temple. ‘Drop the guzzler.’

The Entropy Kid was nearby gnashing painkillers and messing with an euthanasia form. The guard’s gun clattered to the floor and the Kid looked up, jittery and startled. Dante saw the Kid’s fear in all its polychrome ferment - from the jug of his skull poured a spine of unset jello. ‘This the second time for you, Danny? How’d I do?’

A commotion at the entrance - the front guard had drawn and been grabbed from behind - shots cracked off into the ceiling, blowing lights. Tellers screamed. The guard was knocked cold by the newcomer, who stepped forward and spread his arms casually wide. He wore a full-length coat, three shades of black. Dante again. ‘Hell’s other people, Cubit,’ he said, ‘especially when they’re gassing you.’

Dante raised the Winchester, and hesitated.

Dante Two took another step forward. Alarms were clamouring. ‘Spill, Cubit. We agreed.’

Dante aimed and Dante Two threw an arm across his eyes. The rifle clicked, jammed - Dante Two peeked.

Dante squeezed again and shot him in the belly. Dante Two doubled over and keeled to the floor.

‘
You - Corey, that your name? You’re a hostage.’ Dante dragged Corey the Teller toward the rear exit as the Entropy Kid kept the Kafka on the assembly. The three backed out.

‘
You must be mortified,’ Corey shrieked, chewing gum. ‘You shot your own twin
brudder
?’

‘
Wasn’t Danny’s brudder, miss,’ whispered the Kid as they rushed through the vault room, ‘it was Danny.’

‘
Most guys leave prints on the scene,’ chewed Corey as Dante wired the elevator. ‘You leave a whole body back there?’

‘
We never leave no prints,’ said the Kid. ‘Always quality hand
-brushed originals with us, eh, Danny?’

‘
I’m legally dead, miss,’ Dante explained. The elevator opened and they stepped in. ‘My ma gets the insurance. No music, thank Christ - got any gum?’

Corey handed Dante a stick and they chewed in unison as the elevator ascended. The Kid grabbed a handful of pills from his pocket and banged them into his mouth.

‘
Stay alert,’ said Dante.

‘
Painkillers are the drugs of the future, Danny.’

‘
Sure, but you ain’t gonna see it,’ Corey muttered, and blew a huge pink bubble.

On the third floor Dante used the gum to stick a charge to the console and sent the elevator down. The three started along a hallway and, as the floor thumped with the explosion, Dante stopped short at a wall which shouldn’t have been there.

He and the Kid knew every turn of the place due to virtual walkthroughs - Download Jones had done a beautiful job from a set of architect’s plans off the dredge. But it was dawning on Dante that aside from the bank itself, the simulation was a drooper. It seemed Jones had used the wrong schematic. They’d memorized the wrong building.

2

A CONTAGION

A contagion of squad cars moved between the potholes of Deal Street like roaches prowling a cheap hotel. In Beerlight this was a risk - so many were boosted the authorities had considered replacing them with a monorail. The reflection of code art and graffiti scrolled across a window behind which a figure was bent in thought or indigestion. A random bullet spiderwebbed the window, erasing the image.

It was the last car to pull up in the twilight shadow of the Deal Street Highrise. The door opened and Chief Henry Blince bulged out like a gumbubble which refused to burst. Blince had lost all sense of proportion - each of his chins was registered to vote. His bulk was the only thing standing between justice and chaos, and he had so far kept these conditions innocent of one another. Biting into a doughnut the size of a flotation ring, he surveyed the first-floor bank. ‘How many inside, Benny?’

‘
Twenty-five, Chief,’ sniggered Benny the Trooper.

‘
How many outside?’

‘
Four and a half million, Chief, border to border.’

‘
And ain’t it right that every one of us is essentially bisexual?’

‘
That’s what they say, Chief.’

‘
So us and the folks inside’ll have somethin’ to talk about. Gimme the bullhorn.’ The bullhorn screeched like a stuck pig as Blince aimed it at the bank. ‘Come out and we won’t blow the whistle on your goddamn depravities. Dogs? Cattle? Who’ll ever know? And for those o’you with Oedipal urges, mom’s the word.’

Blince broke off to gasp with laughter. Benny was kicking the car with constricted mirth.

‘
Now why ain’t they emergin’, Benny?’

‘
It’s the sirens, Chief - they know who we are.’

‘
That so?’ Blince raised the bullhorn. ‘Fractal eddies, you sons o’ bitches. Everythin’ influences everythin’ else. You’re goddamn accessories and I got hard scientific evidence.’

‘
Non-linearity’s six feet under, Chief.’

‘
You pitchin’ complexity? Hell with that - all I need’s a bagel and a caffeine drip.’

‘
Nah, disorder theory, Chief - “Every action or inaction may or may not be related to some other action or inaction.”’

‘
By any other dumb name, Benny, and just where in the wide world d’you leap off tellin’
me
what’s the fashion? With your pewter pants. This here’s a clean-up operation, Benny. We’re at the crime face, drillin’ on all cylinders. Stampin’ on the many and varied serpent heads o’ subversion. Born to the job while the smoke o’ creation was still swirlin’.’

Benny giggled and pranced on the spot. ‘I got a good feelin’ about this, Chief.’

‘
You and me both, Benny.’

‘
I’m beefed up.’

‘
Me too, Benny, me too. Get a demographic cannon out here and put it on a broad setting.’

At that moment a figure emerged through the shattered entrance, shuffling and decrepit, hands timidly raised. ‘What’s the point o’ this joker?’ asked Blince. The town and its people were found wanting in the harsh glare of his ignorance. ‘Gimme your guzzler, Benny.’

Benny handed over a snubgun and Blince whirled the chamber, spitting aside like a pitcher on a mound. Then he shuttered and raised the gun. Mr Kraken was cut in half like a credit card.

The Kid went over to the third-floor window. ‘This place, man,’ he breathed. ‘Reminds me what my Pa said on his deathbed.’

‘
What he say?’ asked Corey.

‘
Nuthin’, miss - he was dead. Hey, Danny, there’s cops out here and the sun’s goin’ down.’

‘
Terrific,’ said Dante, peering at the ceiling. ‘Here I’ve taken responsibility for four lives and the brotherhood wants to relieve me of the consequences.’ Dante emptied the Winchester into the ceiling, threw it aside and pulled a desk across the floor. ‘I see Download again, I’m gonna tease a bullet into his head. Easier to pull a hat out of a rabbit than a habit out of a rat.’

Download Jones had a reputation as a practical joker. He liked to put scorpions on people’s seats and look on as these rarest of animals were crushed. Like most socketeers his worldview was small format. He’d siphoned his brain into a mainframe which would have stupid ideas even after his death. He was a youth excited too often by the future.

‘
Download wouldn’t dump us,’ whispered the Kid as the three climbed through the ceiling. ‘Deep down he’s all heart - stab him and the knife’d germinate.’

Dante had the job down to fly-leg detail. The first three floors belonged to the bank and the bank’s elevator rose no further. Above that, according to Download’s sensurround reconstruction, were seventeen floors devoted to scams of every stamp, reached by a bullet elevator up the side of the building. Dante’s little group would hitch the bullet to the roof where Rosa Control would be waiting with a grin and a jetfoil to Alaska - the continuation of Dante’s life and reputation would be assured. He and the Kid were pioneers of the permutation heist, forcing staff to sample small cakes or listen to dismal poetry. They stole trashbaskets, flooded vaults with kelp sludge and staged full-costume drama for nocturnal surveillance cameras. Tonight’s piece was meant to launch the more subtle and mature work for which everyone assured them they were ready.

On the fourth floor they found a warehouse full of hydraulic dictators and other creepy toys. The bullet elevator didn’t show but there was a regular one the brotherhood had taken out with a crowdpleaser. ‘Why’d they run a tank into the elevator?’ gasped Corey.

‘
Didn’t figure we newted the other one,’ said Dante. ‘Guess they know we’re headed for the roof.’

‘
I hate inflatables!’ Corey shrieked, kicking the face of a vinyl Hitler. ‘They’re
historic
!’

Dante was already feeling strange about the caper – about everything. Was it just the screw-up with the building? By guesswork he tried to match his disassociation to the disused words he’d salvaged from a contraband copy of
Vampire Reverse
. Abandonment? jacinth? Shame? Nostalgia?

He seated himself against a wall and breathed deeply. For once he was glad Rosa wasn’t around - she referred to meditation as ‘aspirin on stilts’ and approved less of the shelled ebook he’d boosted from the vault:
The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel
by Eddie Gamete.

He visualized the waters of a pond until the last of the shark fins had submerged. A little clearer in the head, he closed the meditation and scrolled the stolen volume, recalling the story. Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort. He wires up a sophisticated sonic rig to record himself blinking and relay the sound through ten stack amplifiers in the front yard, so that the slightest flicker of an eyelid shatters windows up and down the street. He changes a lightbulb by holding it up and letting the world revolve around him. He writes a history of digitotalitarianism by assigning letters of the alphabet to the varied unreachable itches in his middle ear. He officially nominates a ‘slight, fleeting sensation of nausea’ as a senatorial candidate. He declares a ceasefire with his reflection. Having learned to effect the world in a grain of sand and create heaven in a wildflower, he goes into the larger world with a tortuously amplified causal energy and finds he can switch the world image to negative and positive and back again with the flick of a hand. Told in the first person, the entire scenario proves to be the demented fantasy of a gameshow host who has repented and sits all day at the window wearing a propeller hat. ‘A thought is no different from an act,’ he concludes, ‘especially if your thoughts are of no consequence.’

This was the last thing Gamete had written before his spectacular death. Legend had it the book had been written not with a pen but a bellows.

Dante knew all this from snaffle and hearsay, but now was the first time he’d held the fruit in his paws. Browsing, he saw straight off the story wasn’t central - the spice seemed to be in the speed-of-consciousness rants Barbanel scrawls on the walls and ceiling:

Barbanel’s wallworks reminded Dante of an exercise he’d idly pursued during rehearsal - as an installation piece the job had been organized more like a notion than an act. They’d memorized the upper floors in case the elevator stalled but Dante was faster than the Kid and spent a lot of spare time creating a memory palace. Every hall and corner of the building was used as a signifier, a means of remembering text and images by having them dotted around the walls of the simulation. Strolling through the simulation he could read an entire story and then, by walking through the real thing, be able to recall it.

But this wasn’t the building he’d memorized - similarities triggered flashes of text here and there but in a jumbled order. He’d memorized a favourite Gamete story in which an angel stows away in a hypodermic needle and is inadvertently injected. The girl who receives it feels only the faintest tingle as the being is absorbed.

In this unfamiliar place the story was scrambled so that the girl was injected into the angel, which reacted by becoming a god. Why was the real thing different from the simulation? Had Jones really sold them down the river?

As he sat considering these issues he heard the leper’s bell of an approaching idea - maybe Download never let them out of the simulation. The thought hit him like a car at a stop sign. If they were still hooked in, the heist had been nothing but a wraparound dream.

Virtual reality. That would explain why he felt so bored.

3

ROSA

Rosa strode down Swerve Street, dragging her nails along the wall. Sparks leapt and underscored a graffito saying
Only the expert will realize your exaggerations are true.
In her other hand was a Zero Approach gun identical to Dante’s except for a squeeze adjustment - Rosa had lost a finger in a mood ring explosion. She couldn’t believe she was here when Dante was waiting for the pick-up on Deal Street. Download was up to no good. A guy like that needed a wound bigger than his body.