by Mick Farren
Unaware of these thought of his doom, Sharkboy turned from the y-tech displays and the controls of the multi-dimensional vehicle and looked at von Bulow. "I could take Slide easily. Piece of cake."
"I said wait didn't I?" "I have him in the cross-hairs. I could at least lock on to him."
Von Bulow jerked into a sitting position, lacerating the Humiliation's tongue with the heel of her shoe, and all but cracking its beak in the process. "Don't reveal yourself as more of a fool than you have already demonstrated. He's idimmu. He would notice the lock immediately."
"It would be very easy."
"You crave yet another electrical beating?"
The Zeech wetly distanced itself as Sharkboy lowered his head in faux subservience. "No ma'am."
"Then do as you are told and be quiet."
"Yes, ma'am."
The Humiliation made a moist blubbering sound, and von Bulow slapped it sharply across its approximation of a penis with a slim black glove. Sharkboy was silent for slightly more than a local minute, and then glanced back again. "Ma'am?"
"Now what?"
"A native law unit has moved in behind us."
"That is no problem. It will be Bannion. We have an arrangement."
Von Bulow decided that she would keep Sharkboy with her until Slide was brought down. After that she world rid herself of him. He was clearly impossible, but to replace a combined killer and techhand and recruit anew in the middle of a mission was too much trouble, no matter how much he vexed her. Tolerating Sharkboy would be worth the trouble if, at the culmination of this excursion, she saw Slide suffer. As far as Nuygen von Bulow was concerned, Slide had to suffer. Suffering was going to be his manifest destiny, if she had any hand in it. And after she'd had her fill of watching him suffer, she would hand him over to the highest bidder, either the Pentecostal Fire Boys, who were still hot about losing him in the cooch, or one of the other crews of bounty hunters who sought him all over the Fullness. That way, pleasure would be combined with a reasonably excessive profit. She still blamed the unpleasantness with the High-Soviet Knights on Slide, and that was only the most recent negative incident in a series of unresolved conflicts between her and the idimmu demon that extended back along the millennia and across the dimensional divides.
"Slide appears about to enter a building."
This time, von Bulow did not reprimand Sharkboy for speaking before he was spoken to. She peered through the closest window. Slide had halted in front of a doorway above which a dirty lightbox sign read; ART'S SNOOKER - SECOND FLOOR.
Slide halted. The two goons who flanked the door were looking at him with disparaging expressions. "How many times do we have to warn you, Yuma?"
Slide had, of course, never seen either of them before in all of his near-infinite lifespan, but that they knew and apparently disliked Johnny Yuma was another reason for Slide to strongly suspect that he had chosen the
wrong body when he'd made reality-fall after his untidy escape from the cooch joint. He smiled politely, and spoke with a mild tone. "I think we're all under something of a misapprehension here. I might look like the person you know as Johnny Yuma, but I can an assure you that I'm not."
The goon on the left, a shaved head muscle-builder with a stud in his lip, and a teardrop tattoo at the corner of his left eye, held up an authoritarian hand, level with Slide's chest, but not touching him. "What the fuck are you trying to pull now, punk?"
It had been a long time since Yancey Slide had been addressed by anyone as "punk", and even though the mistake was understandable, he could feel a demon ire rising inside him. The teardrop tattoo didn't worry him, but he still held his wrath in check. He did not wish to create an occurrence right there on the street, and thus resisted the impulse to fill these two minders-of-the-door with the double-whammy horrors right there and then. "I'm here to see Doc Zen."
"Why should Doc Zen want to see a always-broke, scrounging-asswipe speedfreak like you?"
Still Slide refrained from imposing the full horrors, but also realized that to argue with the goons guarding the door of Art's Snooker was pointless. The simplest solution was to simply erase himself from their perception. If either of the goons had retained a memory of what had happened, they would have told everyone they knew how "fucking Johnny Yuma" had apparently turned into a heavy vapor, sunk to the sidewalk, and flowed past their feet into the entrance and on up the stairs. Of course, they would never do that. At the same time as erasing himself, he also wiped the memory from their minds. As far as the goons were concerned nothing had happened. Johnny Yuma had never been there or spoken to them. That was one of the advantages of being an idimmu. You could always fuck with the minds of humans if it made your life a little easier.
He resumed his human form halfway up the stairs to the second floor, and was Johnny Yuma again when he pushed through the double doors into the pool hall itself, reflecting on how he seemed to be rapidly reinforcing the first impression that stealing the body Johnny Yuma had been a very poor choice. The pool hall was nominally closed. Indeed, it had been nominally closed since Doc Zen had taken it over as his headquarters. The large room, with its twelve full size tables was dark save for a single light of one table in the far corner. Four men and two artificials were clustered around it, but their attention was entirely on a gilded California blonde, practiced and willowy, leaning over the pool table to make her shot. She was a bright blaze of irradiated gold in the Rembrandt whiskey haze of the pool hall's interior, a fluid symmetry between the electric blue halo above the pool table and verdant green of its surface. The solid colors of the balls clicked at the command of her stick. She tossed her mane at each fresh position, short shorts, long legs, and when she turned to dust her hands with talc and then chalked her cue before dispatching the frame, Slide could feel the Yuma-body stir with desire. The woman must have sensed something because she looked up, saw him, and gestured to Doc Zen who was her opponent in the game of eight ball.
Doc Zen had the powerfully sculpted features of a Roman Emperor, except he was a Roman Emperor with long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail and dressed in white linen suit from the days of river boat gamblers, a silver brocade vest, and matching sleeve garters on the arms of his black silk shirt. If that moment, his suit coat was hung carelessly over the back of a chair, and he leaned on a custom-made cue waiting for the blonde to finish her break. At the sight of what he also though was Johnny Yuma, he frowned angrily. "What are you doing here Yuma? I thought I banned you."
Slide was really growing bored with all this mistaken identity. "Damn it, Doc. It's me, Slide."
Doc Zen's eyes narrowed. "Well so it is. What the fuck made you possess the body of a worthless fuckwit like wretched Johnny?"
"I was in something of a hurry."
"So it would seem."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Why don't you adapt the damn body to look more like yourself? You don't need to be carrying Yuma's penny-ante baggage around with you."
"Shape-taking takes time, and I only just got here."
"Time seems to be a major problem with you right now."
"Like I just said, what's that supposed to mean?"
"In a nutshell, my boy, someone's been walking on butterflies. And they're trying to put the blame for it squarely on you."
"Butterflies?"
The blonde had straightened up from the table, and Doc Zen put down his cue effectively suspending the game. "You know the old story. Guy rides a time machine a couple of million years into the past, and he steps in a butterfly on kills it. In the present, New York vanishes."
"Shit, Doc, I know the fucking story. What does it have to do with me?"
"A couple of entire dimensions have completely vanished?"
Slide was shocked. The news was monumental enough to move even his jaded sensibilities.
"Vanished?"
"To say they were even history would be an exaggeration. No more DZM displacement, not so much as a vestigial Q-bias."
<
br /> "Fuck."
"That's one way of putting it."
"And they're blaming it on me?"
"Couldn't happen to a nicer person."
"Fuck."
"That's the second time you said that."
"All I did was take a powder from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies."
"That would seem to have been the cause of all the trouble. You were supposed to rally your men, turn the tide of the fight and save the day. When you didn't, much changed. Some things quite inexplicably. Even in this exactitude, the city of Baltimore blinked and found it had been taken by the Mole People."
"That's bullshit. You know I'm not the rallying kind, and I never save the day if I can in any way help it. I'm Yancey Slide goddamn it."
"You and I know may that know that it's bullshit, but the price on your head is downright flattering."
A voice suddenly came without warning from the gloom between the table and the door. "And that's a price I intend to be paid, Doc Zen, so I suggest that you and your people step away from Slide and let me take him and his valuable head."
If a voice could be simultaneously melodic and threatening, Nuygen von Bulow's had that capability, and she had also appeared completely out of nowhere. The doors had not swung, light had not entered the dark pool hall, footfalls or the rap of high heels had not ascended the stairs or crossed the floor, and neither Slide nor Doc Zen, both of whom were, to say the least, watchful and cautious by nature, had noticed her enter. Nuygen von Bulow was still in her slight and oriental body mode, very much the way Slide had last seen her, the moment before he had made good his escape from the High Soviet Kremlin, forced to her knees, in bra, panties, and black opened toes shoes, in front of KGB Knight, blowing him at gunpoint. This time, however, her thin, almost emaciated frame was clad in a tailored riding habit of scarlet raw silk, buttoned high to the neck, but with the long skirt slit almost to the hip, so the black patent leather of the thigh-length and intricately laced boots flashed as she moved. Slide recalled that Nuygen had always indulged herself with dramatic footwear. Her eyes were hidden behind enigmatic, wraparound sunglasses, but no one needed to read her eyes to know her intentions were grimly serious.
In her gloved right hand, she held a needle gun from entirely the wrong century, and it was pointed at location halfway between Slide and Doc Zen so she could burn either with only the slightest of turns.
Her sole companion was a young male with the face of a oceanic predator, armored in a predictable latex skinsuit. He aimed a Mossberg pump, and wore the Dragon's Cross with Maple Clusters, and, as Slide looked down the barrel of the shotgun, he noted that the kid had to be far too young to be entitled to the decoration.
It took the blonde who had been shooting pool with Doc Zen to break the silence that had greeted von Bulow and her boy, and say what everyone else was thinking. "You know, Doc, I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but this does not look good at all."
Story so far: On the lam from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, makes it to an Earth Urban C21, but with bounty hunters in hot pursuit. He appropriates the body of a speedfreak called Johnny Yuma, and seeks help from the legendary Doc Zen. Unfortunately, Slide has not moved fast enough among the all the random time variables, and his one time lover, but now implacable enemy, Nuygen von Bulow catches up with him at the pool hall where Doc Zen has made his home.
Episode Four
Life On Mars?
The weapon-weight of the Desert Eagle he had taken from the Blimp was hard and metallic against Slide's back, but no way could he put a hand to the gun. Inside Art's Snooker, on the second floor, Nuygen von Bulow and her Sharkboy
sidekick totally had the drop on him. The exact nature of Nuygen von Bulow had always been a mystery to Slide. She was perhaps a succubus with ambition, or a mutant demon of a kind he had never previously encountered. On their first meeting, long parsecs in the past, aboard the ancient Moche airship, he had known she wasn't human, that was for sure, and later, in the perfumed confines of her private state room, she hadn't smelled demon either, but then the bomb planted by Good-time Charlie Christmas and his Sky Pirates had detonated, the airship had been blown clean in half, and he had been deprived of any further chance to investigate. In the present, the needle gun in Nuygen von Bulow's right hand, the breathy Hanoi street-edge in her voice, and the Mossberg toted by her boy companion told him that, whatever she might really be, he should move with extreme circumspection.
"I suggest that you and your people step away from Slide, and make no let or hindrance while we take him, and claim the completely outrageous price on his suddenly very valuable head."
Slide moved just slightly. "Perhaps, before we go any further, someone would like to explain to me why my head has quite so high a fucking price on it."
Nuygen von Bulow looked Slide up and down. "I would have taken you without any financial incentive, Yancey Slide. You've fucked with me too many times for me to feel anything but an extreme and unpleasant delight in watching you suffer all the way to your limits, and well beyond. I haven't forgotten what you did to me at the Kremlin."
Slide shrugged and raised his hands. "I know you and I have a somewhat problematic history, Nuygen, but I really would like to know why I've suddenly become so damned valuable."
Sharkboy hefted the shotgun and looked eagerly at von Bulow. Slide knew the kid wanted to blow someone apart so bad he could taste it. "He's just stalling, ma'am. Doc Zen gotta have filled him in already."
Despite the predicament, Slide was not only able to look Sharkboy directly in the eye, but also raise an amused eyebrow. "That shows how little you know of Doc Zen, kid."
Von Bulow glanced at Slide. "I think we know enough about Doc Zen to assume he's not going to get in the way when we take you out of here. Isn't that right, Doc?."
Zen moved further away from Slide, closer to the pool table. "I'm sorry, Yance, but you're just too damned hot to have around."
Slide's lip curled. "Thanks Doc. With friends like you, what the fuck do I need with parasites?"
Von Bulow gestured with the needle gun. "Are you going to come quietly?"
Before Slide could answer, the door to the stairs swung violently open, and two cops, in blue uniforms, and with drawn guns, squinting in the comparative darkness of the pool hall, were suddenly a new factor in the equation of showdown. "Everyone stand right where they are and don't move as much as a muscle."
In the first fraction of a second, all the players in the room froze as instructed, and the officers moved forward. "Put your hands on the back of your head, Yuma. Fingers laced."
As far as Slide could tell, Sharkboy was the first to break the deadlock brought about by this new Johnny Yuma problem. He turned with the clear intent of blowing away the intruding policemen. Slide was the second to join the play. The Desert Eagle was in his hand, and, without conscious thought, he fired the big .50 caliber automatic with a deafening report in the enclosed space. It was alleged that a bullet from a Desert Eagle could crack the engine block of a Mac truck. Sharkboy staggered forward with a massive wound in his back where the hollow point had torn into it. The cops, being mere humans, were no problem in terms of response. Compared with an idimmu at full stretch, they were infinitely slow. Nuygen was another matter. She had the needle gun pointed straight at him. Although she couldn't kill him, she could have maimed him with a blast of razor-sharp steel micro-shards to the point that his immediate future would be exceedingly uncomfortable, complicated and immobile. Her hesitation stemmed from her not wanting him maimed. She wished him alive and walking, and ready to suffer at her hands, and in that small but crucial moment, as she was divided between desire for sweet revenge and practicality, Slide saw his chance.
He tossed her an illusion. Slide and Nuygen were suddenly somewhere else.
Balanced, legs braced like surfers, they were each on a flying disc about five feet in diameter, she was a buxom blonde in a bikini and boots, a
nd he was a somewhat epicene young man, stripped to the waist, with a wide and studded Spartacus belt. The two of them were going at each other with long, snaking electric whips, and swords hung from their belts, that would supposedly come into play if they moved closer to each other. Slide had no idea where or when they were, but a vast and roaring crowd way below then indicated that they were the current attraction at some ultra-extreme, stadium sporting event. He knew he had never been in any situation or place like it before, and he could only assume the context of the vision had come from her memory rather than his. He still had the edge, however, having instigated the distracting phantasm. His whip shot sparks and coiled around von Bulow's knees and thighs, pulling her off balance. For a moment, she screamed and teetered, and then began to plummet to the stadium below.
Slide cut the illusion as fast as he had started it and, back in Art's Snooker, his hand was around Nuygen's thin right wrist. He twisted, she cried out, and the needle gun went flying. The fifty caliber was up beside her head. Slide fired again, but she was not the target. Again the busting of the cap was a hazard to eardrums, but it was worse for the first native cop who went flying backwards, effectively headless, with blood, brains, and skull fragments sprayed over an elliptical area being him. Slide fired again, and the second cop replicated his companion's arc of final flight. Only then did he step back and place the muzzle of the huge automatic hard against Nuygen's left temple.