by Jeter, K W
Adder hurled the magazine convulsively into the dark center of the room. He rubbed his eyes, gauging from their slight pain how long he had gazed unblinking at the gray representation of flesh long ago gone soft, wrinkled, then buried. A good lay, he decided. That’s what I need. When melancholia strikes, and all else fails, think of cunt.
Springing from the chair, he strode toward the storage room in which the young hooker lay sleeping, then changed direction midcourse for the surgery. Romanza won’t be able to tell, he thought, if I take first crack at his new toy.
Inside the surgery, he stroked the soft flesh of the body on the table. Asleep as a stone, still anesthetized. Fortunately, according to Romanza’s specifications, all sexual functions had been placed at the subconscious level, ready to go into action regardless of the girl’s degree of awareness. Adder turned his back on her for a moment, reaching for his belt buckle beneath the white lab coat. “Ad,” he heard the sleeping girl whisper.
He spun around, fear rising like a ball of vomit in his throat. The girl was still asleep, as he swallowed and swallowed, trying to get rid of the nauseating taste in his mouth. She was, as he well knew, with her modifications incapable of speech. Christ, thought Adder, sinking slowly upon the table beside her, I’m cracking up. What happened to the girl? a voice repeated inside his head. For a second he thought it was his own, rather than Limmit’s. What happened to her?
“Why?” he moaned, pathetic, looking down at the unconscious face. He felt himself struggling, losing hold of some line of demarcation within himself as the face turned to the black-and-white one in the skin magazine, then to another. “Why’d he ask that?”
Control! he screamed inside, fleeing into the office. Maintain. He frantically tore open one of the desk drawers, extracted a cylinder of red capsules, and shook several into his hand, then mouth. He gagged and vomited them whole onto the desktop. He stood looking at their wet surfaces, a tremor discernible to no observers in the vacant room. Toward the circumference of the light, he collapsed slowly into the chair, drawing his fingers through the clutter and across the compulsive scalpel incisions, like hieroglyphics, in the wood.
At the edge of the desk, his fingers trapped one of the capsules. He picked it up and bit into it, chewing automatically. The seeping red line along one finger, from passing over the scalpel’s upturned blade, went unnoticed. “That cocksucker,” he murmured, his voice drained and exhausted. “Stupid, cock-sucking asshole.”
Screw her, thought Limmit. She can go shit on someone else’s rainbow from now on. He walked through the milling crowds of the Interface, no longer alien. I belong here, he repeated fiercely to himself. On the inside of it all, at last. The hollow feeling in his gut persisted; he felt as if somehow he had been cheated during his sleep.
Absorbed in his own mood, he didn’t notice the arm approach from one side and circle his shoulders, halting him abruptly on the sidewalk. A voice pronounced his name with drunken hilarity. Limmit turned and saw Joe Goonsqua’s florid face next to his. “Hey, how you been doing?” he said, squeezing Limmit tighter.
“All right,” said Limmit, stiffening warily. “I sold it to Adder.”
“I don’t even wanna hear about it,” Goonsqua replied, his face beaming and shiny from some chemical exudation. “I knew you’d work out all right. I mean, what are you doing right now?”
Limmit eyed the sloppy, disorganized figure. “Just hanging around.”
“Yeah? Come to my...” He faded off, befuddled. “Party. That’s it. Was a surprise, all my pals celebrating my return to Orange County. Floated from there to here. Come on in; they said it’s nearly time for the big climax.” He tugged Limmit toward an open doorway.
He hesitated, then allowed himself to be pulled by Goonsqua into the building. Only when he was inside did Limmit recognize it as the MFers’ hangout bar where he had run into Droit. All the tables had been pushed and stacked against one wall, leaving a large open space in which several of the street’s hookers stood around listlessly. Goonsqua, chortling liquidly, let go of Limmit and pulled two of the hookers unresisting to the bar at the side of the room.
Limmit turned to leave. Something about the room full of idle whores both puzzled and depressed him. He felt it obvious now that Goonsqua at least knew nothing about the briefcase being bugged. He’s too messed up, thought Limmit, to pull anything off right. He didn’t even tell me how to get in to see Adder.
“Some party,” a bored voice said behind him. He turned and saw a one-legged hooker leaning on her crutch and surveying the room coldly.
“Aren’t you getting paid for it?” asked Limmit.
“Sure,” she replied. “But I don’t know for what. All the other GPC execs disappeared ten minutes ago, right out that door. They just left that pig behind,” she added, pointing to Goonsqua. She looked up at Limmit and smiled.
Reaching into his coat, he extracted a bill from the wad Adder had given him and handed it to the hooker. “Not tonight,” he said, turning back to the door. “Out of the mood.”
Even before he crossed the room and reached the door, he could sense something wrong beyond it. Complete silence had replaced the Interface’s usual nighttime noise.
Standing in the bar’s doorway, he looked out onto the crowded, motionless street. All of L.A.’s dealers and hookers were standing bunched together in the middle, staring frozenly at the far ends of the street. Limmit peered over their massed heads and saw one last Orange County straight, tiny at this distance, disappear, arguing drunkenly while being pulled behind a solid mass of MFers standing shoulder to shoulder across the width of the Interface. The other end of the street, only a few yards from where Limmit stood, was blocked the same way. The MFers’ hands, below their flushed faces, were full of long hard objects.
A telephone was ringing somewhere. Adder sat at his desk and listened to it. Had it been ringing long? he wondered. It was hard to tell; perhaps it had taken hours to pierce the red capsules’ fog and reach him beneath. The phone continued to ring, and Adder grew slightly annoyed. It won’t stop until I answer it, a portion of his narcotized mind realized. He got up, swaying slightly. One hand brushed across the desktop, rearranging the pattern of objects on its surface.
The telephone lay nestled between stacks of old skin magazines, as he remembered dimly it had earlier in the day. Their soiled white edges glowed faintly, like flesh. Adder picked up the receiver, silencing the ringing.
“Adder!” cried Droit’s voice from the phone, abnormally excited. “Where have you been? Something’s happening—” “Where,” interrupted Adder in a thick voice, “are you calling from?” It seemed important for some reason.
“What the fuck does that matter? What’s wrong with you?” yelled the voice of Droit. “You’re gonna have to get your ass out of there, and fast.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Adder. Whatever it was, he felt disinterested, as though it could not possibly affect him.
“Take a look out your window, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you seen? Mox has gone—”
Droit’s voice was replaced by a dead vacuum. Adder, without thought, put the telephone back on the floor and sat down beside it. Inside him, adrenaline started to flow, slowly cutting and dissipating the fog. In a few minutes, he rose shakily, walked to the window, and looked out.
Screams, shouts of varying pitches and intensities, struck his ears. It must be a hallucination, he said to himself. But then why had Droit phoned him? He went rigid, startled by the sudden, glaring realization that the carnage in the street below was real. MFers armed with short pipes chased the Interface’s whores, pimps, and dealers, bludgeoning them senseless or dead upon capture. Already dozens of skull-smashed bodies lay twisted and heaped on the sidewalks. Spots and trickles of blood merged into a general flow, filling the gutters like a small river. As Adder watched, some of the MFers, exhausted and grinning, exchanged places with the others guarding the street’s exists. One pimp dived between their legs, struggled past their graspin
g hands, and sprinted down an alleyway. An MFer with a red armband, who seemed to have been giving orders, came running up and extended a large, blued-steel pistol at the fleeing figure. A small hole appeared in the pimp’s back, then he was lifted from his feet and propelled a yard farther down the alley, landing in the pool of blood and tissue that had burst from his chest. The gun’s noise echoed over the chaos in the street.
That’s what Droit was trying to tell me, thought Adder. Mox must’ve gone crazy. He wouldn’t dare—why hasn’t the GPC exec board stopped it already— His thoughts snapped off. Immediately below, he could see the heavy padlock dangling broken and useless from the iron gates. He spun away from the window and froze, facing the darkened room. All of the toxins seemed to dissipate instantaneously from his bloodstream. Faintly, on the floor below him, he could hear the sounds of a group of men trying to enter the building as quietly as possible, but betrayed by their own excitement.
What the fuck is going on here? thought Limmit, dazed in the middle of the street. He looked around wildly for some exit from the buffeting chaos. The motion of maddened, fear- and blood-crazed runners on all sides doubled him over convulsively for the second time since the massed MFers at either end of the street had surged forward on signal from their red-armbanded leaders. He heaved dry: nothing was left from the first vomitus when he had narrowly eluded the MFers swarming over their old hangout bar at the far end of the street.
A pair of crutches clattered on the ground before his eyes. Limmit looked up and saw an amputee hooker, her eyes glazed with animal panic, fall to the asphalt beneath an MFer’s short metal pipe. The weapon imbedded itself so deeply into the base of the girl’s skull that her fall twisted it out of his hands. Before Limmit could move, the MFer, his face maniacal, leaped massive and toadlike at him, knocking them both sprawling onto the sidewalk. The MFer scrambled to force his weight on top, as Limmit, with the strength of unthinking reflex, jerked one fist up into his groin. The heavy body rolled off, writhing, lost under other running feet. Limmit, breathless, knelt on hands and knees and panted. Delirious, he thought he could feel the confusion and death flow wavelike over his back.
A hand grasped his shoulder, then jerked him over onto his back. Another MFer grinned and straddled his chest, pressing his metal pipe down on Limmit’s throat. The carnage’s noise grew louder and merged into a single roaring sound in his ears. A silver line of saliva trailed from the MFer’s rictuslike grin and Limmit felt its liquid warmth across his brow and cheeks. The pressure on his throat became an iron band of smaller and smaller dimensions as the MFer pressed his thumbs, wide as houses, into his larynx.
Suddenly, as the black, vacuumlike dots before his eyes started to grow and merge with each other, the metal pipe’s pressure ended and the MFer rolled off Limmit’s chest, and lay on his side, staring astonished into Limmit’s face. He grunted and spurted blood around the handle of the knife sunk deep into his back.
“Come on,” said Mary urgently and jerked Limmit to his feet. She started to pull him down the street but he pulled his hand free. “Wait a minute,” he said calmly. He walked back to the dead MFer and pulled the knife free. He was right—it was his own. She must have taken it from my boot just now, he thought dazedly. Maybe she lost her own already, just getting to me. He wiped it carefully on the gray coat before reinserting it into its sheath in his boot.
“Are you crazy?” yelled Mary, grabbing his arm again. “Come on!” She dragged him after her for a few yards until, as if suddenly waking, he ran alongside her, following her lead.
“This way,” she said, pointing to a small alleyway between buildings. “Quick. They’ve spotted us.” He looked behind and saw a dozen MFers, one with a red armband at their head, racing over the corpse-littered street toward them. The unceasing noise from the Interface was eclipsed briefly by the sound of the leader’s pistol, and the bullet thudding into the bricks on one side of the alley.
Before Limmit could follow Mary into the alley’s dark mouth he tripped over an outstretched hand on the sidewalk. Landing painfully on one knee, he saw in a flash of recognition that the obstacle was Joe Goonsqua’s arm, beyond the shoulder of which lay his face, the eyes puzzled looking and the forehead caved in around a small, neat hole in its center. A small line of drying blood ran from the hole to the larger pool beneath. Limmit shook off the strangely riveting effect of the vision, rose, and caught up with Mary in the alley.
“I saw this,” Mary panted between strides down the alley’s dark length, “when I came out after you. They’ve only got one young kid guarding this way out. The others must have got excited and went to join in the action.”
The alley bent sharply, revealing the young MFer. His face drained white as he swiveled a rifle up at them. His fingers went paralyzed with fear around the gun’s trigger. Mary snatched it away from him, uppercutting his chin with its blunt end. The MFer fell to his knees, his face bloodied, and Mary brought the butt down on his neck. “No time for that,” she said as Limmit drove his boot into the side of the unconscious head. She pointed along the rest of the alley. “North. Go to Rattown. We’ll lose them there.”
She threw away the rifle and they ran on, leaving the body spread-eagled in the alleyway for their pursuers.
The door to the office flew open, and a second passed before three shots flared from the stairway’s darkness at the figure silhouetted against the window. The figure dissolved into a man-high stack of skin magazines, bursting out through the window in an exploding storm of shattering glass and paper, driven by the bullets’ impact.
Adder, standing silent and invisible behind the desk, sighted two feet behind the spot where the long gouts of flame had appeared in the doorway and squeezed off with both hands three shots of his own from the .44 Magnum, keeping his arms level despite the pistol’s jolting kickback. There was the sound of two large objects, rigid but filled with liquid, hitting the far wall of the stairway, and a scramble of live bodies back down the stairs.
The young hooker slowly opened the door from the storeroom. In the dim light from the window, Adder could see that her eyes had the confused look of someone who has awakened suddenly, but for whom the nightmares hadn’t ended. Fearfully, she stepped into the office and looked around in the darkness. “Dr. Adder?” she whispered.
Adder stepped from behind the desk and grabbed her by one wrist. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered tensely. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here.” For a moment, she could see the planes of his face illuminated by the light from the smashed window as he pulled her across the room and flattened them both against the wall beside the door to the stairway.
They waited until she felt Adder, with a barely audible hiss of intaken breath, stiffen suddenly beside her. The sounds of rapid, shallow breathing were in the doorway, detectable at about knee height. Adder, his eyes fully accustomed to the darkness now, watched as the faces of two MFers appeared at that level, eyes intent upon the desk at the other side of the room. Swiftly, Adder whipped the girl by one arm into the center of the room. Stumbling into the faint shaft of light from the window, she had time to blink once in her confusion before the first MFer, with trained rapidity, raised an old CIA issue shotgun and had at her. The deafening blast lifted her naked body, flying, disintegrating into bloody fragments, into the far corner of the room; Adder took careful aim and shot the MFer behind one ear, snapping his head down onto the floor in a spatter of fluid.
The second MFer took one look up at Adder beside the door behind him, fired one shot wide of the mark, then collapsed alongside his comrade, his face shattered by Adder’s subsequent bullet. Stepping quickly to the desk, Adder snatched up the flashglove’s black briefcase. He turned and vaulted over the bodies blocking the top of the stairway. Hope that’s all of them, he thought, racing down the steps. Hope they haven’t touched the motorcycle.
He shot one more standing guard in the courtyard, dropped the empty gun into the cavity where the MFer’s chest had been, and mounted the
cycle. It started up with a single kick, roaring and spitting. It hadn’t been tampered with—overconfident, they hadn’t expected him to get this far.
He pulled the machine past the iron gate with its smashed lock dangling, out onto the Interface’s surging chaos. A few feet away from him in all directions, the Moral Forces members, spotted with red and insane grins, chased, beat, and killed, frenzied with delayed vengeance. The hands of L.A.’s whores and pimps clutched and implored at the sudden vision of Adder in their midst, impeding him as they caught hold of the motorcycle, until he picked up enough speed where no worshipper or enemy could gain a purchase on him. The forks bucked under his hands upon running over whatever limbs he wasn’t able to avoid in his path, the wheels slipping in puddles of various fluids.
He gunned it harder, the motor’s unmuffled roar blending into the screams of the dying Interface, then saw the mass of MFers blocking the end of the street, waiting for him. He pulled the cycle around short, balancing on one foot through a stopping turn of 180 degrees. The other end of the street was blocked as well. MFers from either blockade started to run toward him, joined along the way by the ones already in the street alerted to his presence, all converging on him, pipes and guns raised. Shitfire, thought Adder, desperately looking around him. His thoughts burned for a fraction of a second, then he turned the motorcycle in the direction he had started. He picked up speed again, weaving around the mounded bodies in his path.
Ahead of him, the blockade of MFers grew closer; a few, then most of them scattered at his manic approach, till only a coolly professional trinity remained standing in the middle of the road, large guns clutched in both hands and calmly focused on him. They were waiting for point-blank firing distance. Their unblinking eyes bored straight into his with a cold passion of hatred. Adder felt he could discern and memorize every separate line in their faces, swelling up like earth fissures as he aimed the geometrical center of the motorcycle’s handlebars square into their collective midst. He saw the small contraction of their fingers around the triggers of their guns.