The child, in tow, scratches at an invisible menace plighting his tangle of hair, and bares his teeth in Paul’s direction. Though ostensibly a voiceless abductee from prehistory, the boy paroles a few words of caution: “Just rats, Whitney.”
Paul quietly descends the remaining stairs. At least they don’t have infrared shades, although they undoubtedly have a sixth sense for fear.
Turning his wrist outward, as if in a Kohanic blessing, the ringleader suggests the non-importance of the gun, trigger finger uncurled. “S’okay, see?” he lies to Paul, still crouched in ambush.
Paul sees right through the bullshit to the sadist’s burgundy worm pies. Paul is judge, and his will, action.
The low-weighted trigger gives to his pull with a whomp. In the blackness of the dilapidated first floor, the revolver rocks back in Paul’s hand. His manic smile, illuminated only for an instant, fills the feral-boy’s head with more fear than he can shut his mouth around.
Paul fires again, pressing his way through the broken door and into the square behind his .44 Anaconda. The sonic snap waves up the hollow, ejecting hybirds from their nests and ushering misshapen voyeurs to their balconies. Screech Owl drones and news probes whizz down, capturing the violent pornography for the defensively entombed.
In competition with a cacophonic choir of PIT dogs starting to bark, the wraith-like woman eulogizes: “Whitney, no!” She steps forward, miming absolute terror at the sight of her perforated captain.
Screaming, the feral child bolts down the alley into fuzzy-orange orbs carved by lamps into the grey exhaust.
Paul shoulders past the wounded ringleader. At the head of the alley, he annihilates the small marauder with a double-snap. The boy somersaults uncontrollably into a cruciform pose.
The tall wraith, strangely shocked by another’s brand of savagery, drops the trodes onto the mangle of bodies. She sidesteps the carrion, palms flat and hands high in defeat.
Paul bolts to the centre of the square, and takes aim.
“Ease up! You don’t need your cannon, boy,” the wraith says, scouting a seductive tonality. She forces a smile. “Sekkle. Let me be one to your own.”
Paul shakes his head. His sight outlines the woman’s shaved dome. He pulls the trigger.
Empty.
She winces at the impotent click. Paul pulls the trigger again, but to no effect. The convict tilts her head as he announces another empty chamber.
“Dead hoods get no special treatment,” she says, brimming with confidence. “We’ll be back for you.”
Paul takes a step forward, displacing her Cheshire-cat smile into the darkness. The tick of her boots against the pavement echoes, intensifying to a clamorous boom. Paul tells himself she’s not worth the sweat or the ammo.
Discordant caroling begins above as the hive resumes its dysfunction. The ash and embers from one-thousand rushed cannaberettes flake to the floor. Paul’s lost his audience. Thanks for all of your help.
Mulling over loose ends, Paul pivots to the sound of a metallic crack. The sadistic ringleader, gurgling upright, alludes with an index point to the shotgun at his feet, tarnished by a Fibonacci curl of vitals.
Paul strides over to face the ringleader, still standing. Noticing Paul, his teeth wall up into a red smile.
“I and I,” he says. The syllables stain his chin red.
“Save it.” Paul sticks his finger into one of the craters in the ringleader’s chest. “The both of you’re going to burn.”
Doubting his mortality, the sadist paws at his breast with a shaking, limp hand, only to find Paul’s arm spearing him. With what sensation his fingers still report, he reads Paul’s extrajudicial verdict. He shakes his head in disbelief. Paul steps back, leaving him to sway.
Staged between his coat’s waist flaps, the thug’s stomach strains with parts missing, parts out of place, parts surrendering to the earth. He glimpses one last sight of the inverted hell he leaves behind, and his eyes retreat into their fleshy folds, as if looking for a solution. With a thud, he crumples to the ground, without one.
Cannon empty, Paul salvages the double-barrel and some shells from the former ringleader’s bandolier, and heads back for the briefcase.
“Where the hell is it?” Paul mumbles to himself.
Ah-ha. He spies it, half-buried under one of the bodies, and hunches over to grab it. Paul pauses to pay a moment’s respect to the disfigured shapes. He can tell by the scrubs that the nearest form belonged to Emily: a sweet lady who got wasted, wasting time rehabilitating wasted people.
“Jeeze,” Paul sighs, acid staining the invocation.
In the fold of her torn blouse, an ID card spells out her empty signifier: Emily Bishop; just another nice kid who’d promised serenity to rain-outs suffering withdrawal. Someone who offered reality in the place of pleasure circuits, nirvana, data flows… the CLOUD. Should’ve known you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to get better.
Paul can barely make out the freckles on her face, yanked back from the incision like a latex mask. Cringing from the sight, Paul notices her windbreaker—shiny, black angel’s wings fanned out over cracked pavement. He lifts her arm to pull it free, and enshrouds her with it.
Constance is worse-off. Unrecognizable as an individual or a human being. The only reason Paul knows it’s her is by the simple math. A bloody shame.
He pulls the briefcase free, and unlatches it. The case is bullet riddled. Egg-foam flowers indicate at least three penetrations. One round clearly decimated Katajima’s deck, evidenced by the countless shards of silicon and plastic.
“Damn-it!” Paul yells. He sends the deck flying through the holovert sunset.
The fragmentor is tucked away in the foam padding. Paul pulls it out carefully. It’s still good, at least.
Paul quickly sandwiches the fragmentor in foam, and tucks it away. He smashes the girls’ trodes, making sure no one benefits from their murders. Once again finding himself surrounded by death and destruction, he pauses to lament his involvement and the hell consuming his world. A modicum of perseverance finds him. Anything for Pythia and Angela. Anything.
Chapter 25: GLITCH MOB
PAUL’s SURROUNDED by four bodies. Two that mattered, de-animated before their time. The other two? Scum to muck.
With Q’s fragmentor tucked away in a pocket full of shells, Paul presses on. At the alley’s end, he shoulders one corner for cover. Outside of this labyrinth, there’s more than one monster.
The alley contributes to the PIT’s asphalt river: Interstate 210-x. Unregulated and unpoliced, the 210-x runs through the PIT, blocked on both ends by the post-war partitions. It’s hugged on either side by pock-marked and grid-cast buildings that feed the peak-time smog with plumes of steam. Ahead, a few-hundred shadows zombie the highway in the penumbral cast of an LED baldachin, running myriad holoverts, abstracted by the haze. Little fires fuming along the surrounding-buildings’ bases key-light and silhouette the specters.
A holographic commercial overhead for workers’ PILOTs cuts to an Outland Security PSA, projecting an image of Paul. It’s an old render, taken back before he settled into his post-termination, Grizzly-Adams look. Projected beside it is a more recent image of him taken at the UtilMart. In a robotic voice, another dimension is lent to the decree:
“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? HE IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND DISTURBED. IF YOU ENCOUNTER HIM, DO NOT APPROACH HIM OR MAKE ANY CONTACT. CALL O.S. OR THE LAPD WITH TIPS. SUBSTANTIAL TIPS WILL BE REWARDED WITH CLOUD BENEFITS.”
“Dangerous,” Paul chaffs through a broken smile.
He cracks his adopted shotgun, and thumbs the yellow eyes. Latching it on his forearm, he intuits-on his Monocle. Higher ground… The Monocle reveals a fire-escape that ascends a good forty-storeys or so on the other side of the Interstate. He tries hailing Oni, but the signal is too weak. He sends a message with his coordinates attached anyway.
“Hey, I’ve got the fragmentor. Deck’s gone. Going to try to make my way to the rooftops. I have a
sneaking suspicion it’s going to get ugly…”
With a grudging brush at his shirt pocket, Paul produces a cannaberette. He awkwardly lights it—still juggling his gear—and pauses, letting the smoke rip through him. The hell I care about paranoia when everything is out to get me. His frame- and heart rate drop off. He’s taking everything in on a different scale, according to a different meter.
Above the LED net enshrouding the 210-x are hanging towers—huge, peopled stalactites—and multi-story bridges, twinkling out of reach of the vermin, the thugs, and Paul. If she doesn’t show...
Destabilized one step further, Paul locks the shotgun and struts into the street. If he was a fetcher, he could retire off this foray into the abyss.
Irises blossom in the darkness, alerted by the looped Outland summons to fresh blood, their hopeful nutrient.
Paul scans the asphalt horizon. It’s littered with forms: burnt-out cars, shopping carts, bodies, and abandoned luggage. Unlike the crammed and bustling streets he’d first crossed, this one’s dead.
“Come on, come on…” he says, hoping for a reply from Oni.
“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” prompts the Outland announcement.
The sound of syncopated boots on gravel behind him propels Paul further into the Interstate. He waves his adopted gun around like a blind man’d his stick. Whispered arguments and hisses answer from the pockets of humanity surrounding him. More footsteps, somewhere nearby, force the singed hair on the back of his neck erect.
“Ahí está!” shouts a gruff Judas. “Otra mosca en de tela de arana.” The faceless accusation is cocooned by laughter and shrill agreement.
Paul’s Walrus, canoed with ash, beads embers past him. Prompted by the warmth on his lips, he flicks it forward, its dying red observed by the circus ranged ‘round.
The intensifying footsteps are close enough to be his own. Paul can’t afford to bluff or negotiate. He offs a volley into the charge. The instant wet, crunch of bones is the only indication he’s made his point.
Incensed cries spread from specter to specter. The inarticulate, antagonistic shouting grows in uniformity.
“Ah shit.” Paul feeds the shotgun another shell.
A behemoth appears against the fires beyond, just out of range of Paul’s salvage. “You’re going to wish you stayed home today, hombre,” it barks.
As if replicating, Paul’s dark foe is joined by a dozen others. Spearheading the opposing advance is the wraith-like woman, this time brandishing an electrified scythe.
Paul clenches his teeth and flexes those muscles his body can remember. Encircled, he spins, exchanging glances with the brutes closing in. He can’t help but laugh. Did Emily or Constance, with friends crying and options absent, laugh? Blood trickles out of his mouth as he grinds his teeth to daggers. What’s my family worth? Paul wonders. Three lives? One hundred? A genocide?
Paul snarls behind the double barrel, filled with a sudden rage. He bellows: “You don’t have enough friends, asshole.”
He fires a shot, cleaving the head off the one who’d addressed him. Paul fires a second load, and throws the defunct weapon into the crowd. The bodies pile forward, eclipsing Paul with their murderous guarantee. His fragmentor is safely tucked away, but he can’t say the same for his body.
His flesh—pressed, pinched, cut, and twisted—is indistinguishable from the rest; his person’s being assimilated into their pain, which now shoots up his spinal column, wreaking havoc on his shoulders, head, and neck. Everyone wants a tip for their reward. Everyone wants a souvenir.
Among the little pre-death insights flaring before Paul’s mind’s eye is the realization that Hell’d never been that far away. It’d been smuggled into his Outland utopia, undetectable thanks to his pride; suffered by the guinea pigs he’d lost; discovered, industrialized, and interfaced by those who’d melted his wings; and loosed on humanity by a so-called humanist. It was loneliness in a crowded room, cold beside a fire, society abstracted to the heavens. The CLOUD: his greatest achievement, and humanity’s ultimate damnation.
Suffocating in the binds of the mob, Paul resigns to his fate. I’m sorry, Pythia…Angela. I’m so sorry…His unspoken apology is interrupted, as he is lifted above the scrum by his neck. Paul’s head feels heavy, his body light, and all his hope, wasted.
Oni’s wristband blinks, lighting up the demonic faces squeezing the life out of Paul, as well as Paul’s motionless form.
Horns, horns, horns, in the dark, congested slums of Old Pasadena.
Halogens wax over the hump, actualizing all the shapes lingering on the sidewalks and pooling in the Interstate. The buildings hemming the lynch mob climb above their shadows, stretching and exposing hybrid pueblo and metal elements.
The demonic rainout holding up Paul’s torn body like a ragdoll turns to the magnificent echo, receiving and becoming the message: his face is pulled through the back of his skull. A high caliber round. Oni.
Paul falls to his knees, gasping for air.
Oni, hanging out of a hover-van’s passenger window, sprays bullets from her compact assault rifle.
Still recovering his vision, latent behind a wall of blood, Paul’s localized by the sound of fabric catching depleted uranium and the jangle of death and dying. He fumbles over fell bodies, and mucks through the muscle of the tough-guys who, a moment ago, had his number. He plots his hand in small puddle. Ripples guide his eye to a reflected jig-saw of a face: the wraith, sans Cheshire-cat smile.
The transport carves through the massacre, and air-brakes hard beside Paul. Paul feels the heat waving off its reaction jets, melting the corpses piled beneath them.
Father Ed, whose torn clerical collar shows through his horned lapels, kicks open the rear hatch. Edmund’s angry yowl to the mob is pierced and thinned by his litany of cannon-fire. He hemorrhages .50 Action Express from his modified Eagle into the shadow league’s chaotic retreat.
Paul crawls towards the thunder, clink, and gas smell of the preacher’s deliverance.
Atop the herd’s slower victims, Edmund commands Paul over. “Let’s go, son. Enough time messing around in Gomorrah.”
Paul fights to nod, but his neck, chaffed and lacerated, is too badly strained. The old priest tugs him to his feet, and helps him into the back of the transport.
Oni signals to Gibson who’s piloting the van. He bashes a button on the dash, closing the hatch behind Edmund and Paul. Gore pelts the sides, as the stabilizers ignite and spin the transport. The thrusters flare, melting the past and tunneling the future.
In a faint whisper, Paul grunts, “Quite the service, Father.”
Edmund laughs. “Should have seen my ten-o’clock.” He corrects his collar.
The transport rolls on a magnetic bulge, and accelerates towards the Partition.
Chapter 26: HARROWING HELL
THE HOVTRAN’S a basic commercial job. Metal chassis, sliding side-door, rear-hatch, built-in workbench, and a cooler containing liquid courage. Pretty much an old work van with maglev stabilizers and a quad-vented jet engine.
“Good to see you, Paul,” Oni monotones from the front. “Smelling you, on the other hand…”
Paul crooks a riven, bloody smile. “Didn’t think I’d be worth the trip.”
Gibson, yells into the rear-view mirror, “Emily? Constance?”
“They’re gone. I’m sorry.” He takes off Oni’s wristband. “Here.” He throws it up to her.
“And Katajima’s deck?” Oni asks, clasping-on the wristband. She doesn’t really need to ask, though. Defeat is marked on Paul’s brow.
“Got the fragmentor, but the deck…I’m going to have to break my rule, after all.”
Gibson looks to Oni, and raises an eyebrow. Oni pantomimes receiving an implant in the back of her head.
Paul observes this silent summary, and feels the darkness inside ebb. It’s fed well today. He closes his eyes, and sinks into lonely fantasy.
“EDDIE, if you lose any more blood…” Oni says, concern weighting each
syllable.
“I’m fine.”
Paul slumps forward and opens his eyes. The rescue wasn’t a dying illusion, thank God.
“Can’t say the same for him.” Edmund’s voice disentangles from Paul’s subconscious, growing warmer and clearer. “You gonna be alright, son?”
Paul, balancing himself, makes a tinny, raspy sound only he could intuit to be a laugh. “Should’ve seen me after the divorce.”
Edmund gives him a knowing and directed nod. Paul mirrors Ed’s eyes’ focus, and brushes off the undammed blood on his upper lip in broad strokes.
“Thanks.”
“They went and ripped my handy-work? Do they have any idea how much a good skin-print costs? Those godless monsters…”
“He’s alive,” mumbles Gibson. “Could have gone a whole other way.”
Edmund nods. “Paul, try to get some rest. It’ll be a while until we’re back at Camp Mud. Gibson’s avoiding the checkpoints. Going to try to buck over the wall.”
“Make sure the countermeasures are good to go, Ed,” Gibson blares from the front. “No use holding back.”
Oni laughs to herself, likely still in shock. “We’re one big, broken, and unhappy family!”
Paul’s too tired to disagree. He lights up a Walrus, and rolls his eyes. It sits defiant in its groove, completing his preferred look—the one invented by grain-fed luddites from an earlier time: the dirt-eating, skull-stomping, bad-ass trailblazer, programmed to fight to the death…for justice! Those silver screen cowboys never seemed to get cold. Never cried out for respite.
Without looking up, Edmund coughs. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Holding in a toke, Paul tilts his head “Huh?”
“We’ll each get a contact-high. Besides, those things’ll make you psychotic.”
“Yeah? Katajima said the same thing, and I outlasted him.” Squinting his blood-shot eyes, Paul draws deep. A current of warmth sweeps over him—through him—mutating the twinges in his bones and frayed flesh into a more-tolerable tingling. His heartbeat resets to the dictate of his Monocle’s internal clock, and he leans back against the enclosure’s cold steel.
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