Vickers (Corp.s.e.)

by Mick Farren

  "Don't you think you ought to give them some sort of order? You seem to be the highest rank around here."

  The captain stood straight up, seemingly without stopping to think. Vickers reached to pull her down but he was too late. She opened her mouth and suddenly a section of her face, just above the left eye, was missing. She toppled backward.

  "Oh Christ."

  Vickers looked quickly over the top of the golf cart and yelled to the crew on the steam hose.

  "Okay, goddammit, let them have it."

  The valve opened with a roar. There were screams from the other side of the barricade. The crew let it run for about thirty seconds and then shut it off again. The steam drifted back past where the four corpses were crouched. Yabu ran a hand over his bald head.

  "That probably wasn't too much of a good idea. We may have cooked a couple of them but the rest will pull back inside. They'll still have their weapons. Steam won't hurt them. They may even build a second barricade."

  "I just wanted to stop them shooting at us."

  Yabu's stone face cracked the faintest of smiles.

  "Always a laudable motivation, but perhaps we should have tried to negotiate first."

  "How in hell could anyone negotiate? Those women know they're all going to be killed."

  "Some would have forced themselves to believe it. Individuals will become exceedingly credulous when the matter in hand is their own deaths. It might seem a cruel deception but it might have also saved a number of lives. As it is, they will fight with the knowledge that they are already doomed. You know the saying."

  "The best killers have already died."

  "Also the most frenzied have already died."

  "Did the Japanese make that up?"

  "I heard it was the Irish."

  As Debbie had predicted, it did indeed take a good deal of time and a number of lives before the barricades were cleared and the uniforms fought their way into the living area. For almost two hours both security and military had held off from the final assault. Nobody in the corridor wanted to take the responsibility for giving the order. It was quite likely that, when all was said and done, Lloyd-Ransom would simply look at the casualty lists and, in a fit of pique, order the execution of whoever had assumed command. In the end, Lamas had arrived in the corridor with apparently enough authority to start something. Quite in character, he had decided that it would be done the hard way. More golf carts were moved up to provide a certain amount of cover. The barricades were hosed down with high pressure steam, pounded with ultrasonics and finished with frag grenades. One grim little major had suggested also using gas but this had been vetoed as far too likely to contaminate the air system of the whole bunker. Grappling hooks were shot into the tangle of metal and as much as possible was dragged away. Only then did the very reluctant troops move in.

  The handlers fought like furies. When their ammunition at last ran out they used homemade fire bombs, they threw corrosive cleaning fluid into the faces of the attackers and they went for them with knives and steel bars. When the area had been all but secured, the butcher squads, who had effectively kept themselves out of the costly first assault, moved in to finish off the wounded and probably a number of women who had had no part in the fighting at all. The butchers swept through the living area killing everyone that so much as twitched. Their simplest technique was a fast bullet in the back of the head from a sidearm but others did fancier, more disgusting work with garroting wires and bayonets. Lamas made no effort to stop them. Apparently General Living Area 26 was to be used as a terrible example of the penalty for rebellion.

  Vickers, Yabu, Debbie and Parkwood walked slowly into the scene of carnage. Bunks had been overturned and the walls were pitted with bullet holes and spattered with blood. A half-dozen small fires were still smoking. There were bodies strewn all over, both soldiers and handlers. A uniformed corporal had a handler down on her knees. She was bleeding from a gash on her forehead and the top of her uniform had been torn away. He held a pistol but he seemed in no hurry to fire. He seemed to be savoring her terror. Suddenly and inexplicably, Yabu erupted.

  "Leave her alone!"

  The corporal looked up and made a fatally stupid mistake. He told Yabu to go fuck himself. Yabu was on the man before anyone could stop him. The action was too fast for Vickers to see exactly what he did. In one fluid movement, seemingly impossible for one of Yabu's size and bulk, he ripped off the corporal's helmet. He grasped the back of the man's head like a basketball. His other hand came down, a clubbing fist. Blood spurted out the man's eyes, ears and nose. Yabu let the body drop to the ground. He looked defiantly around the room.

  "I sleep with this woman. Nobody harms her."

  He helped the woman to her feet with unexpected tenderness and put a protective arm around her. The entire area froze. Lloyd-Ransom, with his bodyguards and dog handler had walked into the area at exactly the right moment to see the whole incident. It was, however, a very different Lloyd-Ransom. His white uniform was creased and dirty. His collar was unbuttoned and he looked sallow and ill. His appearance was something of a shock. Not as much of a shock, though, as Yabu's next move. Yabu glared and walked slowly toward him, still supporting the woman. His expression was one of undisguised disgust.

  "You've made a very bad mistake, Lloyd-Ransom. You have left these people with no hope."

  Yabu continued walking, right out of the area. Nobody, not even Lloyd-Ransom, made an attempt to stop him.

  There was a deep, uneasy silence in the security club room. The people in there drank with a quiet determination. There was far too much to blot out. It had been just about possible to keep the butcher squad and the individual assassinations out of sight and mind. The rationale was fairly easy. Life in the bunker was lived at a fairly drastic level and, from time to time, drastic solutions were required. The mass destruction of an entire living area was something else entirely. It left no room for moral maneuvering. A feeling hung in the air of the club room, almost as the smell of fire and death still lingered on the second level. The bunker was starting to tear itselt apart. The death toll was ninety-three and that was too much to be dismissed as a "solution." It was a massacre. No omelette could be worth that many eggs.

  The public address didn't help lighten the weight of gloom. Wolfjohn had taken it into his head to read the full list of names in a slow, doleful rasp. Inside the club room, guilt was driving a wedge between those who had taken part in the killing and those who hadn't. Yabu's stand, even though it was a matter of self-interest, had made it hard to use the excuse of blind obedience. The whole bunker was wondering what would happen next. For the moment, there seemed little danger that Lloyd-Ransom would lose control of the bunker. The military and its officers were still solidly behind him while security seemed to be sullenly turning in on itself. Some of those without uniforms were coming in for a good deal of hostility. Yabu had been the one who'd actually made the protest but it had also been noticed that Parkwood, Vickers, and Debbie had virtually sat out the action well to the rear. Even some of their own kind seemed about to turn against them. Annie Flagg, Carmen Rainer and John Walker all appeared to side with the uniforms. There had been some snide remarks but it had yet to go any further.

  The gloomy quiet that surrounded Wolfjohn's dirgelike recitation of the names of the dead was broken by the ringing of one of the wall phones. A uniform picked it up and looked around.

  "Rainer."

  Carmen Rainer looked up from whispering quiet, deviant suggestions to a petite, doe-eyed blonde.

  "Yo."

  "It's for you."

  Rainer stood up. The day's creation of tight black vinyl and leather straps were particularly bizarre. She took the handset, listened for a few moments, nodded, hung up and sauntered back to the blonde. She pinched her cheek.

  "Got to go to work, sweetie."

  Fenton overheard the remark and raised his head.

  "Got someone to kill, dear?"

  "I guess I have to do it all no
w nobody can count on you or Vickers or the rest of your little pacifist clique."

  Vickers, who was already quite drunk, threw back the remainder of his shot.

  "One of these day's I'm going to have to do something about that mouth of yours."

  Carmen Rainer's lip curled.

  "Are you capable? You were supposed to be a good corpse, but as far as I can see, you've lost it."

  Vickers shrugged.

  "Time will tell."

  The sneer increased.

  "Sure."

  Rainer turned and walked to the door with an exaggerated sway. As the door hissed shut Fenton grunted.

  "One of these days we really are going to do something about that bitch."

  The doe-eyed blonde pouted. "I'm going to tell her you said that."

  Wolfjohn finally finished the list of the dead. Mercifully, he didn't decide to go through it all again. Vickers hoped that he'd stop sticking his neck out and put on some music. Instead, he launched into a gravel-voiced monologue.

  "It's a dark day in this hole in the ground, friends and babies, a dark, dark day. Ninety-three of us dead today at our own hands. This is madness, friends and babies. It's a black, black madness that's got a grip on us here. When you consider that we may be all of humanity there is left, you gotta know that we shouldn't be doing this to each other. We are the history of the new world down here. We shouldn't have to include this dreadful Black Thursday!!"

  "I didn't know that it was Thursday."

  "Honest?"

  "I lost count months ago."

  "… in that history. We are down in this hole, friends and babies, and we are killing each other. Ninety-three of us died this afternoon and I, for one, don't see the reason for it. Ninety-fucking-three of us, friends and babies. Ninety-fucking-three of us when there's only a few thousand of us left."

  "Is he drunk or what?"

  The strain was starting to show in Wolfjohn's voice. The velvet of the rasp was starting to fray.

  "What I want to know is why? Why did ninety-three of us have to die? Huh? I heard it was because they didn't want to go to work. Am I expected to believe that ninety-three people had to die because a bunch of women got pissed off and didn't want to go to work? So who decides that? Somebody want to explain that to me? Hey, Lloyd-Ransom, maybe you'd like to come on this mike up here and tell us all why those people had to…"

  There was a pause. Something seemed to be going on in the background. Suddenly everyone in the club room was paying attention.

  "… What? What's the matter, honey? Lloyd-Ransom sent you up here to explain for him?" Wolfjohn's voice abruptly changed. "So it's my turn is it? Well fuck you! I'm not going to beg…"

  There was a short, ugly sound of scarcely human pain and a booming thud as if the microphone had been knocked over. There was a long silence in the club room. Fenton slowly put down his drink.

  "So they even greased Wolfjohn. The bitch Rainer was sent up there to finish him."

  "He stuck it out too far."

  "Jesus Christ, what harm did he do?"

  Vickers stood up to get himself another scotch.

  "He wanted to get the fuck out of this hole."

  Eggy hurled a chair at the wall. One of the legs broke off. On the way down it knocked over a lamp that also smashed to the floor.

  "They're calling it a fucking boyc'ott! Me! Can you believe that? The women on the second level have decided they won't sleep with anyone in either security or the military. Even me!"

  Debbie didn't seem impressed.

  "It'll do you good not to have things your own way."

  "After all I've done for them."

  "What you've done for them is probably reason enough on its own for a boycott."

  "There's going to be trouble."

  "This is trouble. There's military all over the place, all of them looking for a chance to shoot someone."

  "I've been damn good to those women on the second level. I figured there had to be a couple that'd weaken but they're all watching each other. If one breaks the rules the others'll shave her head. It's ridiculous."

  "You'd probably enjoy that."

  "I've been damn good to those women."

  Vickers wondered if Johanna in GLA30 would be part of the boycott. She almost certainly would. He realized guiltily that it was the first time he'd thought of her since the start of the trouble.

  On impulse, Vickers stepped off the elevator on level five. He had decided to go and see Lance Cattermole. Cattermole was the curator of the bunker's considerable archive. The archive was supposed to be the surviving record of human culture but, like so many things connected with the bunker, its planning was a little uneven. As Cattermole put it, "Too much of the damned Beatles and hardly anything on Pascal. The people who put this place together were obsessed with twentieth century junk culture." The attraction of Cattermole's dim, quiet, warren-like domain was that, down among the dark stacks that held the tapes and discs, the cards and books and artifacts, in the soft greenglow of the computer terminals, there was an illusion of peace and permanancy that was quite unlike anywhere else in the bunker. Cattermole's kingdom was a backwater, bypassed and largely untroubled by the madness that gripped most of the rest of the installation. It was a place where Vickers could hide for a few hours. There were a couple of additional attractions. One was that Cattermole kept a fine collection of vintage wines and was the kind of host who was more than willing to share a bottle or two with anyone who stopped by. The other was a tall, witty brunette called Yoko who had incredibly sensitive breasts and who was usually willing to treat Vickers to very skillful and inventive, standing sex back in the depths of the stacks. Yoko was one of the reasons he'd been neglecting Johanna.

  Yoko smiled and winked as she let Vickers in through the outer door. Vickers smiled back.

  "Where's the boss?"

  "In his inner sanctum."

  "Will he see me?"

  "Sure."

  The inner sanctum was an electronic cocoon of computer equipment. As Vickers ducked inside, Cattermole peered over the top of his rimless half-glasses.

  "Have you come to kill me?"

  Vickers laughed. "No, not this time."

  "Well, that's a relief."

  "Who'd want to kill you?"

  "It gets hard to tell these days."

  Yoko brushed against him carrying an armful of files and whispered something obscene in his ear. Vickers grinned.

  "I've got to talk to your boss first."

  Yoko flashed him a backward pout and vanished in among the stacks. Vickers turned his attention to Cattermole. There was something gnomelike about the curator of the archive. Given a green hat and pointed ears, he could have been one of Santa's little helpers. He was completely suited to his dim, cluttered environment from which he rarely emerged. On the few occasions when he did, he gave the impression of blinking at the light like a dazzled mole.

  "Have you come down here with a specific purpose or do you just want to waste my time, drink my wine and maul my assistant?"

  "I was thinking more of the latter."

  Cattermole put down the whatbox he was using. He didn't seem particularly put out by the interruption. He smiled.

  "I suppose I have to keep in with security. I have what ought be a rather fine Medoc; it should suit our purpose."

  Cattermole disappeared into the confusion. He returned a couple of minutes later carrying a bottle, two glasses and a corkscrew.

  "It'll need to breathe for a little while."

  Nobody knew exactly where Cattermole kept his wine. It was one of the lesser of the bunker's mysteries. He let it stand uncorked for five minutes and then poured it. Vickers held his wine up to the light.

  "You live pretty well down here."

  "We do our best, but that's not to say that I won't be extremely glad to get out of here. I'm sure we've been down here long enough. If the surface hasn't returned to some approximation of normality by now, it probably never will."

  H
e gave Vickers a sharp look. "Of course, I really shouldn't voice these things around you, should I? Isn't it some kind of official heresy?" He glanced up at an imaginary concealed microphone. "I hope you're getting all that."

  Vickers sipped the Medoc appreciatively.

  "You know you can say what you like around me. I don't give a damn. As it happens, I've been hearing stories that someone has been going outside."

  Cattermole's eyes twinkled.

  "The Lloyd-Ransom story. He doesn't know how to get out. I thought that at least you in security would know why Lloyd-Ransom regularly vanishes."

  "I haven't heard a thing."

  "My god, you people are impossible. You mean you really didn't know that our glorious leader has become an opium addict?"

  "Say what?"

  "Our leader has taken to hiding himself away and smoking considerable amounts of opium. It probably holds back the heart of his own particular darkness. He must have a considerable burden on his soul. He's not the only one, either. Opium has become quite a clandestine little trend among the superpersons."

  "Where in hell are they getting opium from?"

  "There's about a ton of it. Nuclear survival people were always very keen on stockpiling opium. It's a holdover from the twentieth century. They seemed to think it could provide a basis for some manner of ad hoc pharmacopeia. I've never been quite clear how that would be done but they kept on stashing it away."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "Me? I'm technically in charge of the ton of opium. It's supposed to be part of the medical archive. I have to tactfully look the other way when our leader comes down to cut himself off a slice."

  Vickers grunted. Not only were a few thousand people being kept under the ground at one man's whim but now the one man turned out to be a dope fiend.

  "What about Lutesinger? Is he going the same route?"

  Cattermole took off his glasses.

  "Now there's the real mystery. Nobody's seen him in months. He's locked himself away in his quarters and refuses to see anyone. He has his food sent in but he never emerges."