by Rusty Coats
One said, "Wells, be reasonable. We don’t have enough light to --"
There was a crackling noise and the thump of a man falling out of his saddle.
Janak made tsk-tsk sounds. "Well, Bob? Think we have enough light?"
Bob's response was nothing but prompt. "Yes, Mr. Janak. Definitely."
"Excellent."
I listened to the horses clop away, up the northern branch. I shook Rita until her eyes focused and gestured at the ladder, telling her to stay put. Rita nodded drunkenly.
The fallen Neuromantic looked like a used incense cone. The fedora's band was fused to his scalp and his skin was cooked black. His rifle lay on the ground beside him, but his horse was gone. So were Janak and his henchman.
I signaled Rita and she climbed up slowly, but the fumes had turned her muscles to taffy. She couldn't carry the knapsack, so I told her to drop it and carried her behind a row of trees where Jakob and I ate our lunches. The fresh air made her cough, and she fought to keep quiet as her lungs worked the fumes out. I pried Sam’s rifle from his claw, gave it to Rita and told her to watch the trail while I fetched the knapsack.
It had come open when she’d dropped it, so I stooped down to cram the ROMs into the pocket, feeling my way along the dark mud. Clothes and boots, Rita's cheaters, all of it reeking of gas now, along with me, turning the missionary robe into a Molotov wick. I groped the ground until I had everything but my fedora, bumped my head on the tank a few times, squinting, searching for the antique. It took me three more precious minutes, and when I finally found it, I shook my head at the pitiful thing. The visor had been torn for years and the speakers squelched too much and the filament microphone hung like snarled fishing wire from the band. Now the gasoline had turned the gray felt into a toxic sponge. But I needed it like an old maid needs her knitting. Old hats.
Rita hissed like a mating tomcat, once to get my attention and then used a punctuated hiss; good old Morse. A horse was coming back. Get out.
Slinging the pack over my shoulder, I climbed up in time to see Janak, riding alone at the crest of the hill. There was no way I could make it to the trees.
"I must thank you, Jack," he called, trotting into the clearing. "This is twice you've relieved me of substandard Neuromantics."
Nothing in the knapsack could be used as a weapon. Rita had the rifle, and if I was lucky, she'd use it. Because all I had were my hands and Janak was a Southpaw trained in a dozen schools of human butchery. I pressed my face closer to the pungent soil and tried to ignore the idea that I was standing on the top rung of my grave.
"Not that I’ve done an exemplary job as your executioner," he said, swinging his massive thighs off the horse. He pushed the black fedora back to let the stars light up his smile. “In fact, if I were my own boss, I'd dock my pay."
He pulled the rifle out of its saddle holster and lowered the voltage level. "But my boss is understanding. When I dispatched the traitor in Van Meter’s office, but let you slip away, my boss said, 'Don't worry. Jack won't go to Avalon. He suffers from post-traumatic grief.' Or something like that. You how Cassady can be."
Janak bent down to touch a footprint while I stared stupidly into space. Van Meter's office. Traitor. Then I remembered what Van Meter said in the memory batch Monk dug out of the Flux. "The bombs hit, I move in, we position ourselves for ownership." Van Meter had been working with Adam McFee to chisel his own niche in the new order. Only then, I didn't know the Neuromantics were the new order. Or that McFee was a trooper in the Tomorrow Crusade.
All I knew was that McFee was killed by a dragon. Christ.
"See," Janak said, standing up, "the Doc believed that if we just framed you with the traitor's death, you'd go back to Jasper, lick your wounds and forget all about it. Van Meter had your parole officer in his pocket; we had Van Meter." He shook his head. "Resourceful man, Van Meter. A special cunning for working the angles." Janak chuckled. "His offer was juvenile, of course. Greed. Totally perpendicular to our needs."
The Neuromantics must have already vetoed Van Meter's manifest destiny when I went to see him at the Rhapsody Club. That's why he was parading me around, telling everyone I'd killed McFee. Even then, he knew his days were numbered.
Janak stared down the path, back toward Marigolde. "But when you stormed into New Hope and made off with those discs, we had to up the ante. Cassady was foolish to leave encrypted files where a privacy hack could find them. But then, that's his Achilles heel, isn't it, Jack? He measures mankind by his own intellect."
He scanned the trees, the dirt pile, the hole. "You were too dangerous to send back to Jasper. But you'd disappeared. So we called Van Meter and renegotiated. He was amazing. 'The only thing Jack cares about is his past,' he said. So to trap you, he'd plant your family discs with the Sysops. A brilliant plan. He'd trap you and endear his Digerati brothers -- when, in fact, we'd agreed to eliminate the Sysops by year's end, as long as he delivered you. And the traitor's code, of course."
He began walking backward, sinking his feet into prints Rita and I had made in the mud. "We knew what would happen if the traitor's code fell in your hands. We knew you couldn't resist. Yet -- and I feel comfortable saying this, Jack, because despite our differences, I respect you -- even we underestimated you." He stopped at the opening of the trees, took his bearings and then started walking forward again in our footsteps. "When you flashed those images of Cassady and Van Meter plotting to overthrow the Digerati onto every screen in Avalon, the entire Tomorrow Crusade nearly ruptured. You tossed our agenda into turmoil, undermining years of work. Our projections showed that we'd take over Avalon in less than a year. Our fusion bombs were performing perfectly. The Digerati feud had reached a boiling point. But once the Sysops understood the files you flashed on the screens, we knew they'd increase their scanning capability and possibly blow our cover. Unless we did something drastic."
He followed the footprints past Sam's charcoal body, glanced around for the Neuromantic's stun rifle, then stroked the puncture wound on his forehead.
"Cassady had just worked out the bugs in the neural tapeworm. The traitor was the guinea pig. You were supposed to be number two, but you escaped. What we didn't know at Club Troc was how the tapeworm would work on a large scale. We do now."
He lowered the rifle to his hip. "We honestly wanted to save Van Meter. He'd proven his worth to the Crusade. But when you triggered that encryption code and I saw Jenner Van Meter eat the bullet intended for you, I realized how much we'd underestimated you. And that every day you draw a breath constitutes a risk to the Tomorrow Crusade. And I can't allow that."
He spun around and pulled the trigger before I could duck into the hole. But he wasn't aiming at me. He'd aimed at the trees, and the barbed bolts leapt from his rifle to its target: Rita.
I jumped out of the hole and ran to the pile of dirt while Janak fired, his back to me. He walked to the trees with the stun against his shoulder. Hidden behind the dirt, I dug through the pack, searching for anything lethal. Ferret may be able to decapitate someone with a sharpened ROM, but in my hands a disc would be as deadly as a wig. The stun was still dead. I made a last grab and pulled up Rita's wire-rimmed cheaters, accidentally keyed the communications chip and it bleeped, telling me that it still had full power, as if that was a consolation. As Janak pushed aside the branches to reveal Rita's body, I sagged against the mound, eyes watering from the fumes.
"Your sentry has fallen asleep at her post," he called. "Should I execute her now, or would you prefer to plead her case?"
I pulled the fedora off my head and fanned the fumes away, struggling to think clearly. Rita was still alive, but only so Janak could use her for bait.
Janak made a show of increasing the voltage on his stun rifle. "While Avalon would have been a more fitting spot for your leap into the hereafter, it appears that this fanatic camp will have to do. So I will count to three, and you will show yourself, or I will turn this woman into a charcoal briquette. Savvy?"
"I savv
y, you techno-fascist," I said under my breath. But the noise that came out was no whisper. My voice rang in my ears, full-volume, and it took a moment to realize what I’d done: I'd spoken into the communications chip of Rita's cheaters, which uplinked the signal to my fedora, which broadcast my voice through the headband.
I stared into the hole I'd dug around the gasoline tank and inhaled its sweet, toxic fumes. And then I glanced at the scar in Janak's temple, remembering Thurgood and the Southpaw Organization’s penalty when Janak killed DeMaster.
I took off my fedora.
"One."
I reached under the tattered headband and increased the volume until the tiny speakers squealed. I crawled near the hole on my stomach, still out of Janak's sight, and on the rim I paused to dust the debris off the gray felt and straighten its brim one last time, remembering the symphonies I'd heard through the headband, the codes I'd spoken into the filament mike, the worlds I'd seen from the torn visor. As a free man, I'd never seen my shadow without the smooth lines of this fedora. I wondered if I'd recognize my shadow without it.
Then, with a flick of my wrist, I sent the old hat sailing into the hole. Its brim hit the tank and skidded along its surface, then dipped and fell into a puddle of pink gas. It sat askew, so that in the darkness it looked as if I were hiding beneath the tank.
"Two."
I belly-crawled behind the dirt pile and dialed up the volume control of Rita's cheaters and whispered into the chip. The cheaters transmitted into the hole and my fedora's speakers blared it loud enough to hush the owls.
"Jesus, you're a melodramatic bastard."
Janak spun around, pointing the rifle at nothing but air. Then he glanced at the pile of dirt, the footprints and finally at the rim of the hole.
"Melodramatic?" He smiled and took a slow, silent step toward the hole. "I'm not the one used every Telepresence screen in Avalon to embarrass my boss."
"That's improvising. Melodramatic is dressing up like a dragon."
He moved closer, stalking the hole. "I see your point."
I stayed in a corresponding orbit, so that as he came around the pile of dirt, I moved in the opposite direction, hidden. Janak dialed the stun rifle even higher, until it had topped out. From across the clearing I could hear its dynamo pulsing.
"Indulge me, Janak," I said. The hole gave my voice a cavernous echo. "What's so important about McFee's code?"
At the mouth of the hole he removed his fedora and draped it over the pincers of his rifle. Then he held it over the edge. I nearly blew my cover by laughing.
"You're a smart boy, Jack.” He moved to the crater. "Avalon finally belongs to the Tomorrow Crusade. Tomorrow has no room for ghosts."
He'd stopped now, his pale gray eyes fixed on something deep in the hole, and he slowly brought the stun rifle up.
"I still don't get it."
His finger slowly curled around the trigger. The stun's pincers caught the starlight. The air was noxious with fumes. "Neither did your mother."
I stared at the puncture wound in his temple and said, "Wells."
"Yes, soldier?" Feet spread apart, rifle stock anchored, sight taken, grinning.
"Here there be dragons."
"Not anymore, Jack." And he pulled the trigger.
Bolts of electricity jetted into the hole with enough energy to turn the old hat into a puff of felt and silicon. The spark ignited a puddle of gasoline beneath my old hat and then the fumes filling the crater I'd dug. Blue flames boiled inside the hole like angry ghosts. Rita's cheaters squealed in my hand, but Janak didn't hear it. He was too busy laughing, thinking he'd just detonated my head.
He was still laughing when the gas tank exploded.
The blue-orange flames leapt from the hole like a dragon cursing God. Janak dropped the rifle and swatted at his arms, neck and face as flames devoured the fumes that had soaked into the fabric of his thick coat, burning the silver collars to crisps and obliterating the Party insignia on his back.
And then he ran, screaming, down the path toward Marigolde, a blue wick of flame that disappeared in the trees, stinking of burnt pork. An odor Janak couldn't smell.
AVALON XXVIII: Missionaries
Moon's body blended with the red and blue ceramic tile in the doorway he'd used as a perch since Prohibition turned him into a dealer. Clean uplinks to Jaxom for the discerning customer, orgasm loops for the junkie on a budget -- the Chinese refugee had turned the stoop into a full-service filling station for the libido. His pidgin English had become part of the off-key symphony of the Mission District and the treasures tinkling from his hidden pockets had become essential souvenirs of an era.
But today he shivered in the doorway, drooling blood on the Spanish tiles. His blue overcoat of treasures was gone. His arm draped onto the sidewalk, broken so many times it resembled an Irish shillelagh.
I broke away from our missionary pack. We prowled the Mission in white robes, recruiting muddy-eyed junkies and the legions left unemployed when the Neuromantics sealed off Avalon. Prohibition had employed half the city; now the prostitutes, gladiators, dealers and Digerati patsies burrowed into the woodwork. A few brave soldiers, like Van Meter's Southpaw, stayed to fight, but this time Thurgood was outgunned. Rita found his burnt body stacked next to a dead Peruvian elevator boy.
I kneeled and pushed the thick hood off my head. One of Moon's eyes had swollen shut. The other spun like a roulette wheel.
"Deneez." He studied the missionary robe. "You join?"
I shook my head. "I don't join anything, remember?"
Laughter bubbled in his throat. "Deneez always wear somebody else skin."
He coughed wetly, his insides shaking loose. "This Luca fault. Luca join, suck up, drop dime on Moon." He spat on the Spanish tiles. "Luca try save skin."
"We're all trying to save skin," I said.
Moon probably thought he'd seen his last traitor when he fled the secessionists in Guangzhou, after mainland agents convinced Beijing to nuke its rebellious regions – which turned a third of the planet into a hot zone. As a doorway dealer for Danny Marrs, Moon was part of the Digerati brotherhood. But with the death of the Sysops, old loyalties bred cannibalism. Self-preservation is a treacherous business.
The Neuromantic foot-soldiers were jittery. The Crusade had made mistakes in the past weeks, the kind of mistakes you make when the alarm goes off an hour early. They had no system for rounding up dealers, just jackboots that caught some, killed others and allowed most to escape. Most junkies had been shipped off in sanitarium copters, but some remained in the buildings they’d haunted for a decade. And when a Digerati crew in Petaluma fought back, the Neuromantics panicked with their thermal charges and destroyed the substation, including the people inside. Sloppy.
Still. Sloppy or not, the Neuromantics were running the show. The United Nations had washed its hands of Avalon, the substations and what was left of the city. The U.N. wanted a clean slate. People like Moon were picking up the tab.
I leaned in and smelled the copper breath of punctured lungs. "Moon, is there any way to plug in to Avalon?"
One eye roamed free. “Postcard, two-D, all shut out. I try, once. After takeover. Plug in, hit Leap, can't get past gateway. Locked tight."
"But the doors are still there."
"Yes. Doors. Other side? Who know?"
Moon started coughing blood and I cradled his head to keep his windpipe open. "Moon, where are the kids?"
His teeth were red. "Gone. Disappear. Maybe leave city."
"You haven't seen the Neuromantics haul them away?"
"No. No kids. Mystery."
Mystery was right. We'd heard nothing since leaving Marigolde; my fedora was the only way Monk knew to reach me, and it was ash and shrapnel. And Monk was too smart to use the same uplink twice. For two days Rita and I had hoofed it with the soul-savers, looking for a trap door to the underground, where we hoped Monk and Ferret's gang hunkered down. But for two days we'd seen nothing but bloody dealers, unemployed ROM-ru
nners and Neuromantic jumpsuits.
"All right," I said, reaching down to lift him. The missionaries had three pedicabs, mostly for triage. "Let's see if we can set that arm."
But he pushed me away with his good arm. "No," he said. "Leave here."
"Don't be a martyr. The jumpsuit Crusaders will shine their boots on your skull."
He shook his head, then opened the hem of his pants, revealing a secret pouch. Inside were six hits of Snap, a palmtop, a porn ROM and a disposable immersion kit.
"Gonna go?" he asked rhetorically. "Then go style."
"A new day has dawned on the blighted WPA Campus. After banishing the last dealers and moving the remaining victims of SDS and CNI into Neuromantic-sponsored hospitals, the Party will renovate the area that once gave birth to Avalon. In its place, with the support of the United Nations, the Neuromantics will build a research facility dedicated to the future of the human race. The Neuromantic Party: The Tomorrow Crusade begins today."
Rita and I kept our faces covered with the white hoods of our robes, ignoring the propaganda billboards and avoiding eye contact with the Neuromantics. The Tube ride into the city had been effortless; the Sons of David hostel accepted us without a blink. But we were keeping our heads down.
The patchwork quilt of tarps that defined Haggletown had been ripped to ribbons. A few fire barrels still burned, but the barkers were gone. So were the wares they'd collected from the abandoned high-rises and 'burb towns. The only thing unchanged was St. Luke's Cathedral, its stained-glass martyrs staring dispassionately at the wreckage below.
The missionaries fanned out to pick through the rubble, looking for survivors. All except Rita. She stood on the pavement in front of the church, letting rain fall in her eyes as she stared at the steeple. She'd spent almost six years working beneath that church with her antique WPA posters and ninth-generation Mensas for the company, running code for Baxter Levy and shacking up with Merlin. Now Haggletown had been wadded up and Levy was dead. And other than the two-word message from Monk on my fedora, we didn't know what had happened to Merlin.