The Beauty of Destruction (34 page)

‘I don’t think we feel like real people any more,’ she had told her brother. ‘How can I have done that and still function? We’re too old, too dislocated.’ He thought she was right. He had been thinking a lot about all the people he had killed. It was a problem with perfect recall.

They had skirted the saline lake that was the Salton Sea. They had caught sight of Los Angeles as they had come over the San Jacinto Mountains. It looked a little darker than du Bois remembered it being. He could see the faint glow of distant flames in some areas, but the streetlights were still on, spreading out before them like a strangely regular constellation of stars. Some of the smaller sources of light seemed to be flickering on and off. Du Bois knew that was the muzzle flashes from gunfire, but from where they stood the city looked to have weathered the storm pretty well.

It was a different story when they finally made it into the city proper. In the daylight they saw broad avenues lined with palm trees and crucifixions. They saw pimps with prostitutes on leads with stigmata, piles of naked corpses at intersections, oily black smoke curling into the air accompanied by the smell of burning fat.

Behind the walls of gated communities with armed guards, micro-societies based on atrocity were being born. The highways seemed like a separate city, fighting its own war with itself, either at speed or in gridlock. In the poorer areas apartment blocks, streets, and neighbourhoods were all fortified. The American Civil War had broken out again.

The brutality had come out of the alleys and spilled onto the streets. It was in the open now. LA was revelling in its past misdeeds, putting them on display where once it had kept them coyly hidden. It wasn’t titillation any more, it was self indulgence. Screaming was the city’s ambient soundtrack.

The Los Angeles Police Department was mobilised and militarised, though it was difficult to imagine what laws they were enforcing. Du Bois had seen an
LAPD
armoured car pulling a line of chained-up prisoners. He couldn’t shake the feeling they were slaves for auction. The
ECV
was reflected in the blank mirror-shade eyes of the police as they passed but it seemed they respected a well-armed, armoured vehicle enough to leave it alone.

Bloody street religions were breaking out on the corners vacated by the drugs trade. The dealers had moved into more respectable premises now: shops, bars, markets, warehouses and churches.

Du Bois watched as a bloody, naked man was chased down in the street, past the oblivious and uncaring. He all but knocked over a man dressed as Jesus carrying a cross. The naked man’s pursuers knocked him over and started to carve his flesh. Jesus shuffled past. There was something faintly amphibious about the penitent.

‘I always wondered what this place really looked like,’ Alexia had muttered quietly from behind the steering wheel. Du Bois knew she’d seen some bad times in the city during the late forties, early fifties, and then again in the eighties.

Du Bois, Alexia and Beth were all running blood-screens, replacing the lost matter with sips from the high-energy drinks they carried with them. They had time to release the nanites slowly, through their pores. It was more than just the attack on the communications network that was affecting the city. They had detected the Seeder spores in the air. Du Bois knew they must have come from Kanamwayso. The nanites were sweeping in across the Pacific Rim, penetrating further and further into the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Eventually they would be carried across the world.

Du Bois’s blood-screen had analysed the Seeder spores. Each of them was a tiny biological nanomachine. They were smarter, and more sophisticated than the spores from the Seeder in the Solent. They weren’t simply about consumption and creation. The Seeders were reshaping the city, and eventually the world, in the form of humanity’s own twisted reflection seen through the filter of vast, unknowable, alien minds long since driven irrevocably insane.

There had been killing. No matter how hard they tried to avoid it. How often they had tried to speed away. Bodies came apart when hit by the kinds of weapons the
ECV
was carrying. Their constituent parts splattered to the pavement as bullets tore through cheap tract housing. Du Bois was more than sick of it now. Though if anything there had been a lot less of it than he had expected. It seemed that the extreme social Darwinism of the city was respecting their show of strength. For a moment du Bois had wondered if the city somehow knew they were apex predators. Then he suppressed the thought as disgusting.

They had decided before entering the city that it was going to be unlikely that they would be able to reason with anyone who might know where La Calavera was. Du Bois had concentrated, programmed some of his blood, and then dripped it into a syringe before eating one of the high-energy bars. They could use the nanites in the syringe to try and compel one of the insane to talk, if they could find someone who had the information they needed.

They had found themselves in a tangled warren of hilly streets and narrow canyons. Many of the rundown houses had small cliffs in the garden, or were supported by stilts. Naked children ate road kill in the streets, while armed men and women in gang colours kept watch from the rooftops of apartment buildings. They had found someone wearing gang colours on their own. After a chase, du Bois had thrown himself out of the moving
ECV
and taken the gang member down. Alexia had parked up, bullets from the rooftops bouncing off their vehicle’s armour. Tracers had drawn lines of light from the barrel of Beth’s minigun to the rooftops. Devastatingly accurate suppressing fire ate through lowest-bidder building material and spread gunmen across the rooftops.

LAPD
did not respond.

They’d only had to do it three more times before they found someone who knew where to find La Calavera. He might have been king of the city but he had moved out of the barrio.

The studios were still running. Du Bois didn’t want to think about what kind of films they were making. They headed up Mulholland Drive. There seemed to be a party, bacchanal, or orgy going on in each of the huge houses set back from the road. The Hollywood sign was still intact as they made their way through the Hollywood Hills, skirting the Los Angeles basin, and once again looking down on the lights of the city. The road was very dark. Occasionally they saw terrified people in the headlights as they darted across the road in front of them, trying to escape the parties in the big houses. They had seen well-armed private security personnel patrolling the area. One of the security operator’s four-wheel drive vehicles had a badly bleeding young man tied to the bonnet. Du Bois suspected it was one of the escapees.

They were still travelling in silence. Beth had said very little since she’d repeatedly kicked him in the balls. The silence had become more and more tense as the road wound down into Laurel Canyon. Du Bois kept on glancing over at his sister. He wanted to ask her about her time in LA but he didn’t.

Compared to the rest of the city, Laurel Canyon was very quiet. Du Bois wondered if that was because everyone was dead. Side roads ran up between quirky homes built into one side of the canyon, and they could see very little movement or light. That changed when they found the castle.

The whole place was lit up, an aggressive hybrid of Latino rap and extremely heavy metal booming from a PA somewhere. Bodies hung from the windows and faux battlements. Heavily tattooed, armed guards sporting gang colours patrolled the battlements and the area in front of the ‘castle’. The building even had its own drawbridge, which was currently down. Du Bois guessed it was supposed to be a Norman castle. It had a courtyard filled with muscle cars, pickup trucks and
SUV
s, many of which were currently having crude armour plate welded to them. Du Bois even caught a glimpse of a 6
×
6 military transport vehicle in the courtyard, but the whole thing, to his eyes, as a Norman, looked a lot more American than any European castle. Still, its defensive qualities were slightly better than the average house, and it provided a commanding view down the canyon.

‘What do you want to do now?’ Alexia asked.

‘Are you okay?’ du Bois asked, hearing the tension in his sister’s voice. He got the feeling that she didn’t want to look around at her surroundings. They were parked a little way from the castle.

‘I don’t like being here,’ she said. ‘What do you want to do now?’

‘Drive up slowly, they start firing, back away. If they don’t open up on us then turn the
ECV
around so we can get away quickly. Beth, I’ll need you to cover me.’ He took the absence of a reply as an affirmative.

The guards seemed confident despite an armoured and armed military vehicle creeping up the hill towards the castle. The guards by the drawbridge turned to watch them as they approached but they didn’t level their weapons. One of them did run into the courtyard, however. Du Bois climbed out of the patrol vehicle. He had his carbine slung across his chest but no weapons in his hands. He walked carefully towards the closest guard. The guard laughed at his approach. Du Bois could see it in his eyes, in the piercings that pinched the flesh running up his bare, tattooed arms, arms that looked like the product of prison yard weights and steroids. The guard had answered his phone. This wasn’t a person standing in front of him. This was the madness given human form, a platform for atrocity.

‘You’re brave,’ the guard said in Spanish.

‘I want to speak to La Calavera,’ du Bois replied in the same language. The guard’s laughter was little more than a humourless bark.

‘See, people say things like that, friend, then they get to speak to him.’ He shrugged over-developed shoulders. ‘He’s talkative. Then they realise they’ve made a mistake.’

‘Please, help me?’ It was a female voice. She sounded broken. The guard backed away, keeping his eye on the
ECV
. Du Bois turned to the figure walking across the drawbridge towards him with what he initially thought were two large dogs on leads. Du Bois’s experience with the tech notwithstanding, it was one of the strangest figures he had ever seen, and he had a talking serpent living in the cellar of his home.

The figure was short, squat, hugely muscled, almost unnaturally so. It had very broad shoulders for its two heads. One of the heads was male, shorn of hair, the skin covered by a full-sized skull tattoo. The other head was female, a dishevelled, attractive brunette with tears running down her cheeks. She looked as though she could barely understand what was going on. Du Bois’s eyes widened. It wasn’t making much sense to him either.

‘Help me.’ Her eyes were pleading with him. The creatures on leads weren’t dogs. They were people, in ragged, torn business suits, their physiology changed to enable them to move on all fours better. Their teeth and jaws had been surgically altered. They had tattoos of red open mouths on their faces, running down onto their necks to make them look more predatory. The two-headed figure held the chains of his mutated human pets in one hand, in the other, a ball gag.

‘You remember her from TV?’ the skull-faced head asked. Du Bois just shook his head, though his neuralware was telling him who she was. He assumed the male head was La Calavera. The woman was somehow this monster’s victim.

‘Please …’ she started, and then the ball gag was placed in her mouth, her eyes still begging for release. Du Bois found he couldn’t speak. La Calavera yanked on the chains of the two surgically altered humans, bringing them to heel.

‘You grow attached to dogs, even the cocks, but studio execs? I wanted some properly vicious animals. And they like it,
esé
, I mean they really like it. These are some hungry motherfuckers.’ The skull wasn’t grinning at him. Du Bois was calculating how to kill everyone here. In some ways he was impressed that even now he could still be appalled. La Calavera leaned towards du Bois, who had to resist the urge to step back. ‘Nothing’s changed, people have just lost some inhibitions.’ There was nothing alien about the madness in the strange two-headed man’s eyes. Du Bois did not know where La Calavera came from, how he’d got hold of the tech he had – the neck thing was something that du Bois had never even heard of – but his viciousness, his cruelty, was human-born. And he had his own blood-screen. It was more sophisticated than du Bois’s own.

‘The Do As You Please Clan,’ du Bois managed.

La Calavera leaned back and pointed at du Bois.

‘I know who you are. You famous,
mano
.’ He seemed to be waiting for a reply. Du Bois didn’t trust himself to do so. The woman’s eyes. ‘You know I was hired to kill you.’ Now the skull-tattooed head had his full attention. ‘Oh yeah, you listening now.’

‘Who?’ du Bois snarled.

‘Relax, I don’t need your kind of trouble and I have everything I want.’ Du Bois opened his mouth. ‘Now, don’t spoil it all by being disrespectful up in my crib.’

‘What do you want?’ du Bois asked, barely controlling himself.

‘Left alone, like I said. I don’t need your kind of trouble.’

‘Who hired you to kill me?’ du Bois demanded.

La Calavera smiled. ‘Tezcatlipoca,’ he said. The Smoking Mirror, the obsidian god in Aztec mythology.

‘Mr Brown?’ du Bois asked.

‘I told you what I know.’

‘The
DAYP
?’ du Bois all but demanded. La Calavera was shaking his head. ‘Don’t …’ he started angrily, but La Calavera stepped towards him.

‘Don’t bark at me,’ his voice low and dangerous. ‘You don’t want me wearing your head.’ Du Bois swallowed hard. He wanted to break this creature with his bare hands, but La Calavera’s body looked so hard he wasn’t sure he could. He didn’t like being this close to him. ‘We had dealings. I was a middle man, nothing else.’

‘Who for?’

‘Russians, down in Long Beach.’ He reached into the pocket of the chinos he was wearing and pulled out a matchbook. He smiled as though it was a personal joke. Du Bois’s skin crawled as they almost touched when he took the matchbook, checking it. There was an address scrawled on the inside. He turned and walked away. ‘Hey, want to hang out some time?’ La Calavera called as he walked away. ‘You’re welcome to the dogfight any time you want! It’s a thing to behold.’