by Jack Yeovil
Her aim was perfect, but that didn’t do her any good.
“… South…”
The bullet exploded, but the tyre didn’t burst.
“… East…”
She didn’t even feel any better.
“… and WEST of the Pecos!”
The cruiser came at her like a wildcat, inching forward slowly, engine rasping like a buzzsaw. She couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but the car looked somehow different. For some reason, she was reminded of Spanish Fork. The sun glinting on the tinted windscreen made exactly the same patterns it had when reflected in Elder Seth’s mirrorshades as he tried to kill the panzergirl who had robbed him.
The demons were back.
She could run again, but she thought she was dealing with an intelligence akin to an attack dog. It would be more likely to tear her apart if she made a dash for it, if she showed her fear. She tried to stand tall, legs slightly apart, and holstered her gun. It wasn’t Mexican, but it was a stand-off.
“Stop right there you miserable rebellious freakin’ cyberpsycho sonofabitch death-on-wheels hearse!”
It rolled to a halt, and the sun-sensitive windows became fully transparent. Behind the cruiser, Tyree could see the gas station taking fire. Black smoke swept up into the cloudless sky. In the back of the vehicle, Kling was tearing at his clothes. She realized the internal cooling-heating system was going insane. Kling’s suit was smoking, and bullets of sweat popped from his pores. He struggled, and pulled his gun.
The idiot!
The shot was completely muffled, but she could imagine it ricocheting inside the cruiser until it lodged in something soft. A seat, or Ken Kling the Killing Machine.
If he had shot himself, he had not put himself out of action, because he was still convulsing. For the first time, Tyree felt sorry for the man.
And sorry for herself. She wished she’d had more than N-R-Gee and recaff for a last meal. She wished she hadn’t dumped Nathan Stack. She wished she hadn’t let Elder Seth walk away from Spanish Fork without at least trying to bring him down. She wished… Hell, there was no point in wishing…
The rear side door hissed open, and Kling fell out, screaming and shouting. He’d holed himself through the thigh. His expensive clothes were a mess. His hairstyle was lumpy and melting.
What would Ms H think?
“Get back, Kling,” she said. “Slowly.”
He couldn’t hear, or didn’t care. He still had his gun. He fired a wild shot. She realized the T-H-R man was aiming at her, blaming her.
“We’re not responsible, Kling,” she shouted. Kling stumbled forwards, and fired again. He missed again, but was getting closer. She pulled her gun and brought it up.
“Kling,” she snapped, feeling stupid, “don’t make me shoot you.”
His face was ugly with pain and rage. He was bleeding like a burst leech. His wounded leg was trailing useless as he pulled himself along the side of the car, leaving a smear.
Tyree could have sworn the blood sank in like water into sand. The polished and painted metal was clean now. She imagined something licking vampirish lips.
The cruiser just sat there like a machine, as if it had nothing to do with anything.
Kling was only a few feet away. Even he couldn’t miss at this range. He raised his gun, and she shot him. In the remaining three minutes of her life, she would tell herself several times she had no choice but to make a head shot, that there hadn’t been time to wound Ken Kling. Then, she would call herself a liar.
Stack was out from under, and running towards her.
The cruiser’s right headlamp winked, and she felt her shin sting as the beam holed her leather boot. It passed through flesh and bone.
She was dead already, she knew. There was just going to be a little more fuss before it was all over.
VIII
Stack couldn’t figure it. Leona had just shot Ken Kling. The cruiser was on automatic and killing people. The gas station was burning, and due to go up like the Fourth of July in moments. This wasn’t a routine patrol anymore. The peace was over.
He drew his gun, not liking where this was leading.
“Leona,” he said. “Drop your weapon. Maybe we can sort this out.”
She fell to one knee, wounded somehow, and looked at him. He saw hurt in her eyes, not at the physical pain, but at his instinctive assumption she was behind all this.
But, damnit, she had control of the cruiser! She had just shot a T-H-R man!
She had dropped her gun, and was holding her leg with both hands.
“Leona?”
She opened her mouth to speak, and the cruiser lurched forwards. It must have hit a stone as it started, because it lifted up off the ground. The front bumper struck Leona in the chest, forcing her backwards, and the ve-hickle drove clear over her.
Stack screamed, and automatically fired his pistol, emptying it in the air. It got hot in his hand, and he threw it away.
The cruiser drove off, leaving Leona sprawled in the sand, half-buried already, leaking black blood. Stack ran to her, and took her in his arms. There was a fresh tyre track across her chest. Her hair was loose, and thick with blood, grit and oil.
She was still breathing, but he knew there was no hope. He took a squeezer of morph-plus from his belt-slung medkit and shot it into her arm. As he depressed the syringe, an eye snapped open in her soot-blacked face.
He had something to tell her, but he couldn’t get it out.
She gripped him with one hand, clutching a fistful of his shirt, scraping skin off his chest. She was shaking as the drug killed her nervous system. There wouldn’t be any more pain, at least.
“Leona?”
Blood came out of her nostrils and mouth.
“Le… oh…”
The cruiser was coming back. Stack disentangled himself from the corpse, and ran. He ran towards the burning house, the cruiser swallowing the ground between them in instants.
There was a voice coming from the car. “Cum-a-kay-aye-yippie,” it shouted, “yippie-yippie-yippie-aye, cum-a-kay-aye-yippie-yippie-ay!”
He felt flames as he ran past the house, through the already burning rubble. He was surrounded by heat. Behind him, the cruiser’s engines gunned. The gas tanks exploded, and he was at the centre of a fireball.
IX
Duroc’s chest was as good as new. Better, even. Thanks to the Zarathustra treatment, designed by GenTech’s finest and available only to the very wealthy, Duroc’s body became more durable, more healthy, with each hurt overcome. “Everyday, in every way,” he muttered, “I am getting better and better.”
The woman at the desk was plastic. She could have been a sexclone with a voice-activated set of automatic responses. She smiled at him, and buzzed him through. There weren’t many people who could be admitted as easily to the Central Lodge in Salt Lake City.
The two tall, bearded, barrel-chested men stood aside, and Duroc went through the double doors into Elder Seth’s personal office.
The Elder sat with his back to the door, looking up at nine inset television screens on the wall, each showing a different channel. There was a soundtrack babel. Lola Stechkin read the news on ZeeBeeCee. A bionic bobby doffed his nipplehead helmet and beat up a scruffy French terrorist in a black and white British police series. President North emphatically made a point. A Spanish-speaking lady aristocrat with remarkable cheekbones struggled on a soap to come to terms with her daughter’s romantic attachment to a dobermann pinscher. A cartoon Op chased Mohawk-headed renegades on a kiddie show with more violence to the minute than Hitler’s home movies. Petya Tcherkassoff, in an open-fronted white shirt and unpleasantly tight culottes, seduced a teenage girl with a song called “My Heart Bleeds Love for You” in a Russian musickie video. And the Josephite Tabernacle Choir raised money on Salt Lake’s own network.
Seth swivelled around on his chair, and smiled. Duroc was reminded vaguely of a piranha. It was a smile designed purely to show off sharp teeth. It wouldn’t extend to the eyes currently c
oncealed behind dark glasses. The office was bare apart from the screens. Everywhere else in the City, there were crosses and portraits of Elder Seth and the original Elder Shatner. Here, no trimmings were needed.
The Elder stood up, and extended a hand. He wore a conservative black suit, anonymously tailored in a style that hadn’t changed for two hundred years.
They shook hands. As always, Duroc was surprised the Elder’s skin was warm, normal. Such a great man should have ice-cold flesh and a grip like a vise.
“It is done?”
Duroc nodded.
“It is as well.”
The Elder was the titular head of the Josephite Church, a protestant sect founded in 1843 by the American visionary Joseph Shatner. By the sheer force of his will, Nguyen Seth had rallied many followers, and persuaded the United States to turn over sovereignty of the wilderness of Utah to him. He had renamed it Deseret, he had brought the first motorwagons of resettlers to the region, he had supervised the irrigation and fertilization projects that had made crops grow where science said none could, and he had built a power base unmatched in the mid-west. Now, having unified and fortified the Josephites, he was actively seeking gentile resettlers to bulk out the population.
It was not a bad roll-call of achievements for someone who barely qualified as a human being.
Seth flipped his desk intercom. “Saskia, would you bring in a kid and the ceremonial knife?”
He looked at Duroc. “Blood must be spilled, Roger. There must be a seal on the mission.”
The Frenchman was unable to hide his distaste.
“You will understand, Roger. When the time comes, you will understand.”
The doors opened, and the plastic woman led in a young goat.
Part Two: Who Was That Masked Woman?
I
The US Cavalry had no idea how to treat her, and so she had spent the morning being given a tour of Fort Apache and its environs. Captain Lauderdale, the spare officer Colonel Younger had ordered to keep her out of trouble, had taken her outside the perimeter walls and shown her London Bridge, the red British telephone boxes, and what was left of The Old Dog and Duck Pub. Lake Havasu had sold itself as a tourist attraction before the Colorado River dried up. Chantal understood it was a typical ghost town, its residential area turning gradually to desert as the sand drifted in and the houses collapsed. In a thousand years, you would never know there had been a community here.
The bridge, transported stone by stone from England, was really falling down now. Lauderdale attempted a joke about it, and called her “my fair lady,” but she didn’t respond. She thought there was something creepy about the captain, and her training had taught her to trust her intuitions. She didn’t have any measurable psi abilities, but she had spent so much time swapping synapses with the datanets that she had her moments, her occasional flashes of extranormal insight.
Spanning a channel of rancid mud and cracked, dry earth, the bridge did not look special. It was rather a bland design, with nothing distinctively British about it. There were wrought-iron lamp-posts, mostly twisted into half-pretzel shapes.
“The story goes that the people who bought it got the wrong bridge.” Lauderdale said. “They wanted the one that goes up and down…”
“Tower Bridge.”
“That’s right. Tower Bridge.”
Chantal examined shared heart graffiti etched into the stone, and looked towards the remains of the town.
“Does anybody live down there?”
Lauderdale looked both ways, as if afraid his superiors were listening. “Not officially, but there’s a large detachment of men and women at the Fort, with no way to spend their pay and not much to do in their off hours…”
“So?”
“I am given to understand that there are… um… camp followers, and a bar or two, where they have… um… gambling.”
A tumbleweed rolled lazily by. There wasn’t much wind, so the things must mainly lie and rot.
“The place looks completely deserted.”
“They come out at night, Ms Juillerat, and sleep during the day.”
“Like vampires?”
“Yes, exactly like vampires.”
From the look of distaste curling about his thin lips, Chantal guessed that Captain Lauderdale had little use for camp followers and gamblers. Perhaps he subscribed to one of the many repressive protestant doctrines running rampant here in the United States? She found it hard to keep them separate in her mind—Mormons, Josephites, Scientologists, Moonies, Seventh-Day Amish, Hittites, Mennonites, Danites, Disneyworlders, The Bible Belt—and imagined they themselves had the same problem. Being a Catholic was a lot easier since Vatican LXXXV loosened things up.
“Where did the people go? The ones who lived here?”
They had found a skeleton dressed as an English policeman, half-buried in rubbish and sand, but few other signs of previous habitation.
“The nearest PZ, if they could afford it. If not, there are squatters’ towns around most conurbations. Some take to the roads, like the okies in the ’30s. They’re the problem.”
“I don’t understand?”
“It’s difficult to drive around the burned-out vehicles. Defenceless citizens should keep off the interstate.”
From the outside, Fort Apache looked more like a medieval castle than the wooden stockades of the Old West. Its windowless walls were stone and steel, and the structure was tiered like an old-fashioned wedding cake. A few sensors, tiny at this distance, revolved on the roof, and the Stars and Stripes flew, hanging stiff from a rod. It was one of a chain of identical forts dotted throughout the Western States.
There was a noise, and Lauderdale drew his sidearm. It had been another stone falling from the bridge into the mud. The captain grinned without humour and holstered his weapon.
“You have to be alert,” he explained.
“It’s too quiet out there, you mean?”
“Huh?”
“In the films, that’s the cavalry catch-phrase. Just before an Indian attack, someone says ”it’s too quiet out there“ and an arrow sticks in him.”
Lauderdale didn’t crack a smile. Their senses of humour were noticeably out of sync. “I never liked Western films much, Ms Juillerat. Never liked films, really.”
“Then what are you doing dressed up like John Wayne?”
The revived US Cavalry wore outfits modelled exactly on the 1870s styles. Lauderdale had a blue tunic, a modified stetson with the cav insignia and carried a Colt .45.
“It’s just the uniform. I’m here to serve my country.”
Most of the personnel Chantal had met at Fort Apache said something like that. They were proud that the US Cav was still an arm of the US Government, especially since it fought off the last privatisation plan. However, the organization was mainly involved in keeping the interstate routes clear for GenTech and the other multinats. She guessed that private citizens, like the modern okies Lauderdale had complained about, were mainly considered to be a nuisance. This was no era to be an innocent bystander.
From the bridge, they could see the approach road. A column was nearing the fort. Motorcyke outriders, a couple of cruisers, and a triple-jointed tanker.
“Here comes the water and the gas,” said Lauderdale. “Supplies for a month.”
“You really are cut off here?”
“That’s right. Where there’s no water, people don’t live. This is not a natural community. We had pipelines, but the Maniax trashed them during the first days of the joint action.”
“Ah yes, the Maniax. In Rome, I saw on the teevee about them. Children, were they not?”
Lauderdale spat, “savages!”
“They have been… pacified?”
“If you mean killed, mostly they have. The rest are in Readjustment Camps, or on the offshore penal colonies. You have the same set-up in Europe, I believe. You dump all your human garbage on Sicily.”
“The European Community does. I’m not a Eurocitizen.”
“Their average age, I hear, was fifteen.”
“Maybe so, you don’t ask for a birth certificate when you’re hand-to-hand with a genetically-engineered homicidal psychopath.”
The Maniax were only the largest of the gangcults, Chantal had heard. By no means, the worst. She had been briefed back in Rome by her superiors on the groups she might come across. She had a special dispensation to commit suicide if captured by The Bible Belt, the fundamentalist crazies who viewed the world as a large-scale Sodom and Gomorrah and saw it as their duty to bring down the Wrath of God upon all sinners. She wasn’t worried. She had been trained—in the language of the States, she was a “Proper Op”—and she could deal with most eventualities.
A bugle call sounded on the tannoy, and gates appeared in the hitherto seamless walls. The column crept into the fort like a maggot crawling into an apple. Barked orders carried on the still air. The last vehicle in the convoy was an open truck. People stood up on the flatbed, shackled together.
“More Maniak stragglers. Captain Badalamenti has the mop-up detail. We’ll be bringing them in for months.”
The prisoners were dragged off the truck and led into the fort by guards. One Mohawk-haired giant shouted defiance, and a Trooper struck her with something. There was a crackle and the Maniak fell to her knees, screaming.
“Cattle prod,” Lauderdale explained. “It’s the only thing they understand. Pain.”
As the Maniak twisted in agony, the prisoners she was chained to were pulled off their feet. They fell badly, leg and wrist irons clanking. The grossly fat Sergeant in charge of the detail took the prod from the Trooper and touched it not to any particular prisoner but to a length of the chain connecting them. Sparks flew, and sixteen men and women screamed in unison.
“Pain, Ms Juillerat. They’re experts at inflicting it. It’s our job to turn things round.”
“O brave new world…”