by Jack Yeovil
Addams was back at her monitor. “Needlepoint is down,” she said.
There was fighting in the elevator shaft now. Tozer was dead, and the Suitcase People were abseiling down. Most of the Waltons were finished.
The bunker staff mainly sat quietly at their consoles and waited. There were several fires raging as the Needlepoint circuits burned out.
The big screen cracked across, and sheets of glass fell.
There was water on the floor. Hot, salt water.
Duroc threw away the headset he had been gripping throughout, and left his command position.
It was time to pull out.
“Premier Yeltsin, we thought you should know the Americans have been getting rid of some of their astro garbage.”
“Does this violate any of the treaties?”
“Most of them.”
“Ah well, call up Oliver and give him a bollocking. If he squeals too much, insist on a UN inquiry. What are GenTech… I’m sorry, I mean… what are the Japanese Government doing?”
“Nothing.”
“It is good.”
Raimundo Rex roared out of a pile of rubble, tail whipcracking, and jumped past Shiba into the elevator shaft.
Krokodil signalled the Suitcase People to follow.
Elvis took a rope, and plunged downwards into the fiery dark.
Shiba followed.
“Holy Father,” said Father O’Shaughnessy, “it is happening again. Another major tremor.”
Pope Georgi unconsciously popped his ring into his mouth, and pondered.
“Pray, Declan,” he said, “pray…”
Elder Seth erupted from his isolation tank, still shaking. In the Outer Darkness, the Dark Ones raged at him. Another failure.
Elvis hit the bottom of the shaft, and sprayed gunfire at the Waltons. The fighting was almost over. Raimundo had finished most of the surviving bunker staff off.
There were fires, and water was coming in from somewhere.
“Bye-bye, Gavin,” sang Sonny Pigg, backed in this special commemorative concert by most of The Mothers of Violence and the bassman from Bolt Thrower, “I’m a gonna zap you… ”So long, Gavin, you’re just a piece of crap, you “Won all that cash, but it was gone in a flash…”
Duroc crammed himself into the escape canister, and pulled levers. This should shoot him three hundred yards through a disused ventilation tunnel, and bring him up in the saltmarsh.
He didn’t have time to be angry about the collapse of the Needlepoint Project.
He had to survive, to serve the Summoner again.
Krokodil ran through the corridors, searching, firing into empty rooms.
She was her own self again, the monster receding. There were alarms going off everywhere around her.
At the end of the corridor was a chute of some kind. There was an eggshaped metal pod the size of a man on a pad, and there was someone in it.
Krokodil took aim at the face she had never seen before, and fired…
The ejection system fired, and Duroc felt his entire body slamming against the floor of the pod as it shot through the tunnel. The pain was unbelievable, and he was sure that every bone in his body was broken, every organ ruptured. Grey stone rushed past the faceplate.
… an instant too late. The pod was gone.
But the face of the man inside was indelibly printed in her memory.
There would be another day.
The pod burst through an old iron grille and shot fifty feet into the air, spinning end over end.
The faceplate was overlaid with red. Duroc waited to die.
The pod brushed the tops of some cypresses, breaking branches. Its momentum spent, it fell to the swamp, and settled, bobbing.
There was wetness around him now. Water was leaking in.
Raising a hand that felt as if it had been under a pile driver, Duroc tried to press the buttons.
With the knuckle of his thumb, he hit the right control. Explosive bolts blew off the hatch, and more water flooded in.
Pushing against the seat, Duroc launched himself out of the pod, and hugged a man-sized island.
The pod half-sank and settled. The muddy water was only about four feet deep.
Duroc’s vision blurred…
Raimundo was doing a good job of trashing everything, Elvis thought. The remaining Josephites weren’t resisting, so he ordered the dinosaur not to kill them. He seemed disappointed, but had plenty of machinery to vent his frustrations on.
Krokodil came back into the main command centre. She conferred with Shiba, bending down to talk to the Japanese.
“Okay, guitar man,” she said to him, “the show’s over. Let’s pull out.”
X
Elvis found Krokodil squatting in the blackened area by the collapsed gantry.
“Krokodil?”
She looked up at him, her one eye cold and clear.
“Krokodil, are you still you?”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“I got a whole lotta things to think about, you know. I feel all mixed-up inside. You brought me here, and things have been happenin‘. I don’t know if I can go back to Memphis and pick up. Things ain’t like I’ve been figurin’.”
“Go home, Elvis,” she said.
“Pardon, ma’am.”
“Just get in your Cadillac and go home. Live your life as best you can. We may not have long.”
At the other side of the base, Shiba and Raimundo were seeing to the wounded, and trying to salvage something. Shiba was going off the idea of calling up his superiors in Japan. The Suitcase People needed administrators, he had decided. More were coming out of the swamps every hour. There were the makings of a real community.
“And you?”
Krokodil sighed, and stood up. “Salt Lake City. There’s something I have to do.”
“I could…”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve taken up too much of your time. I have Hawk.”
Elvis felt disappointed. Didn’t she think he had done well?
“I’m sorry, Elvis, I shouldn’t have changed you so much…”
Elvis didn’t understand. The music was coursing through his veins. It was like being young again.
Shiba had released the indentees from their contracts, but most of them, even the unchanged ones, were acting as if they’d rather stay with the Suitcase People than return to their former homes to chance another indenture sweep.
“What will you do with the money?” she asked.
He shrugged, shaking his hair. “That don’t matter. I might buy me a congressman and do something about the Good Ole Boys. There’s lots of things round the South that need changing.”
“That’s true.”
She kissed him, quietly. This time, it was like being touched by a ghost. Then, she walked to the edge of the base, and slipped through a hole in the fence, into the swamp.
Elvis watched her go.
“C’mon, Jesse Garon,” he said. “Work to do…”
XI
Simone found him in the marsh, floating, his face just above water. He wasn’t badly hurt, but he was bruised and bleeding. Struggling with his big body, she eased him to dryish ground.
There were Suitcase People all around. Some were out searching for stray Josephites, but most were just wading towards the base where they could be sure of a welcome.
Roger was trying to say something, but was too badly shocked.
She had found a two-person skimmer by the docks, surrounded by the bloated corpses of Suitcase People who had died trying to make their landing.
It was not going to be easy getting Roger into it without tipping it over. She rested.
The conjure man’s music still reverberated inside her head. She had never heard anything like that before.
Roger shifted, and tried to sit up. He winced, and slumped down again.
Simone didn’t know what she had been a part of…
She slipped her thin arm around his shoulders, and he lolled against
her. She hefted his weight, and he vaguely tried to help, pushing against the grassy island.
She levered Roger against the skimmer, and heaved.
Groaning with pain, Roger Duroc eased himself into the driver’s seat. He was out of breath.
Her feet were deep in the mud at the bottom now. She pulled them up, and heard submarine sucking sounds. The water was up to her chest. Her thousand-dollar dress might as well be a potato sack now.
He had found her in a swamp, and given her a way out. Now, they were even.
And there was the question of her desertion.
The cold started seeping into her body. She put her hands on the side of the skimmer, and pulled herself up.
Roger shifted, and there was a gun in his hand, its barrel against her forehead.
She slipped back into the water, her feet touching the bottom.
Not saying anything, Roger flipped off the safety catch with a shaking thumb. Simone looked up into his muddy eyes.
There were big things nearby, shaking the cypresses.
With his left hand, Roger engaged the skimmer’s engine. A wash began to swirl from the stern, and the craft rose in the water.
Simone bowed her head, her chin dipped into the swamp.
When she looked up, Roger’s skimmer was gone, leaving only a frothy wake and a wave that rocked her in the water.
She slid up onto the island, and waited for the Suitcase People.
Notes
“When I was a boy I was the hero in comic books and movies. I grew up believing in a dream. Now I’ve lived it out. That’s all a man can ask for.”
—Elvis Presley
In case you’re confused by the development of the ‘Dark Future’ cycle focusing on the designs of Elder Seth, here is a definitive order of chronology for the stories published to date: the opening story is “Route 666” by Jack Yeovil, the title story of the Route 666 collection. The rest of the cycle so far comprises two interlinked series, one following the adventures of Sister Chantal and the other Jessamyn Bonney. The Sister appears in Demon Download while Jessamyn features in Krokodil Tears and the novel you’ve just finished. The final volume of both series—and of the cycle as a whole—will be the forthcoming United States Calvary.
As long as you read “Route 666” first and United States Calvary last, it doesn’t really matter which order you take the novels, although it helps if you read the first of each series before the second. For the record, the order of internal chronology of the books published so far is as follows: “Route 666”, Krokodil Tears, Demon Download, Comeback Tour. There, isn’t that easy?
In writing this book, I owe a great debt to the various people who’ve written about Elvis Presley and related subjects. I’d like especially to credit Dirk Vallenga and Mick Farren’s scarifying Elvis and the Colonel (1988), for the low-down on Colonel Parker, Fred L. Worth and Steven D. Tamerius’s Elvis: His Life from A to Z (1988), for everything from details of Elvis’s favourite foods to movies and songs, Luis Valdez’s film La Bamba (1987), for the subtitle, and, especially, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (1977), the best thing I’ve ever read about rock ‘n’ roll. Thanks also to Brian Craig for Dr. Zarathustra, Sandy Mitchell for Logan’s Runners, Myles Burnham for the Blood Banner Society and David Pringle for putting up with how far off the road this series has been getting.
—Jack Yeovil, 1991.
See “Route 666” in the Route 666 anthology. ↩
See Krokodil Tears. ↩
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part One: Dixie
Part Two: The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Part Three: All My Trials
Notes