Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  She bent at one knee, plucked the club from his hand, and placed one running shoe on his throat.

  “We’ll be going now,” she said. “Don’t bother to get up. I’d just have to split your fucking skull open. Okay?”

  The man groaned and coughed blood before nodding weakly.

  Dan was stunned. He could tell she was about to head into the trouble.

  “Julia! Wait on!”

  “No. Come on!” she snapped. “We’ve got to get down there.”

  Dan shook his head.

  “No we don’t.”

  In the opinion of Detective Sergeant Lou “Buster” Cherry it wasn’t an entirely bad thing, that nigger and her toy Jap getting themselves killed. From what he’d seen and heard of these time travelers, they needed putting in their place.

  Buster had been on the job for twenty-three years, eighteen of them in Chicago, and if he’d learned anything it was that once you had your boot on somebody’s throat, you didn’t take it off. They were liable to come at you with a knife or a gun. Your niggers and your spics and dagos and so on, they needed keeping down. They bred quicker than white folk. They had no respect. And if they got wind of the idea that a bunch of superniggers had somehow grabbed the keys to the kingdom, there’d be no stopping them. They’d come roaring out of the ghetto demanding a piece of the action for themselves.

  Buster was certain of it, even if his thinking was a little slowed down by the three bourbons he’d taken after the autopsy. Not that he was squeamish, mind you. He’d eaten his lunch during postmortems in the past.

  No, he was just shook up by that ship full of freaks.

  He was so shook up that rather than heading back to the station he drove down to Hotel Street, and walked into the Black Dog, where he ran a tab that was probably larger than his annual wage. He’d never bothered to keep track, and the owners were never going to ask him about it.

  As soon as the barkeep saw Detective Sergeant Cherry force his way through the crush of humanity, a shot glass and bottle of Old Fitzgerald appeared on the bar. Buster knocked down the first two shots without much of a gap between them. But he took his time over the third. He was used to the jostle and chaos of places like the Black Dog. It felt more like home than his own miserable apartment. He nursed the drink and tried to calm down. Two or three times, he’d been tempted to pop that Francois bitch right on the hooter. She was a goddamn ball breaker, and she looked at him like he was something nasty she’d found on her shoe.

  Old Doc Brumm and ADA Crew, they weren’t much help. Not that he could blame them. There was a ton of pressure coming down from above on this case. The chief himself had called Buster and told him to break as many arms as it took to wrap the fucking thing up as quickly as possible. He was taking heat from the military, no doubt about it. And that heat was being applied directly to Buster, like a blowtorch to the belly.

  Well, fuck them.

  If they couldn’t see how dangerous these fuckers were, they were gonna get swept under. Buster recognized power when he saw it. And those half-breeds and dykes out on that ship thought they had it. You could see they were used to getting their own way at home, and he’d pay a thousand to one that they were already trying it on here. Otherwise, why would the chief be on his ass about a couple of dead colored fuckers? That sort of shit was what his old Ma used to call “an everyday happystance.” You didn’t waste time breaking arms over it.

  Buster hunched his giant shoulders against the seething press of the crowd. Hundreds of men were crammed into the Dog. They were mostly drunk and stupid. They stank. They roared. They shoved and pushed and elbowed each other. But they were mostly good guys when you got down to it. They were going off to die, a lot of them. And for what? A country that was gonna turn itself into a fucking ghetto.

  Buster threw down the last of his drink and was just about to pour another when the roaring bedlam of the crowd dipped unexpectedly. He turned away from the bar as a general push toward the doors began. There must be a fight outside. He would have ignored it. After all, it was none of his goddamn business, and he’d seen enough ignorant fucking drunks beating on each other over the years that the prospect held no interest for him, now.

  But the tidal flow surging out of the door, and the increasingly furious sounds coming back in from the street, told him this was no ordinary brawl. It sounded more like a riot.

  Buster checked his gun and the heavy leather blackjack he carried in a back pocket, and then he headed out.

  He was right.

  It seemed to him that the dusty, sunbaked street was choked with thousands of brawling men, most of them in uniform, but not all. The sound was deafening, like the blast of a huge crowd at a sports stadium when you emerged into the open, having gone to get a beer and a hot dog. Smoke and fire poured from the upper windows of two buildings across the street. A thick mass of struggling men surged around two jeeps in the middle of the street. Buster saw a flash of white helmets in the center of the melee. Normally he would have walked away. A man can get himself killed very easily in a shit fight like that. But the bourbon and the resentment he felt toward that snooty fucking lady doctor lit his fuse, which was admittedly short at the best of times.

  Somebody cannoned into him from the left. But Buster stood six-four in his socks and weighed 198 pounds. Even a little drunk and hungover, his street smarts were more finely tuned than most men’s, and he sensed the impact before he felt it. Buster braced himself and drove an elbow into the guy’s head. It wasn’t a clean hit. His elbow caught a cheekbone, which gave under the impact, but most of the force of the blow was misdirected, unbalancing him a little.

  He didn’t bother to check on the man he’d just knocked out. Buster was vaguely aware of the body falling away into the threshing machine of arms and legs that now surrounded him. But he was locked into his own narrow world. He slipped the blackjack out of his pocket: eight inches of stitched leather with a solid lead weight sewn into one end. It felt like an extension of his hand. He didn’t have a lot of space in the violent, heaving mass of brawlers, but he didn’t need much. He began to lay into the crowd around him.

  Eddie Mohr could hardly see through the blood and sweat running into his eyes. Somebody had knifed him just outside the bar. It wasn’t a deep cut. The blade had glanced off a rib. But between that and the open gash on his forehead, he was starting to lose more blood than he ought to. He knew, from working on the floor with his old man, how that sort of thing could sneak up on a guy. One of the boners at the stockyard had shivved himself with a knife so sharp he didn’t feel the cut. He bled to death, standing in a lake of his own blood, boning a yearling calf.

  The riot wasn’t breaking up, but it was spreading out. Eddie didn’t like the way every breath felt like he was sucking in fire. He’d broken a knuckle on somebody’s head and was limping from a kick to the back of his knee. It was time to get going. The MPs would be here in force soon, breaking heads with their nightsticks. And if they brought any reinforcements from the Multinationals with them, they’d be carrying those electric batons. He didn’t fancy getting one of them stuck in his ass.

  He’d lost contact with the other guys. Last he’d seen of Pete Craven the dumb bastard was pounding on a corporal from the engineers. Hundreds of men still fought like that, piled atop each other, gouging, biting, and knocking heads. Nothing like the fights you saw in the movies. He’d fought his way clear by using a trick his old man had taught him. Swinging a bar stool like a club, he’d made as though he was going to brain any bastard who challenged him. When they instinctively threw up their hands, Mohr swung the stool low and fast into their knees, knocking them down like cornstalks. The stool had broken after the fourth time, but by then he was outside.

  Smoke and dust, hot ash and the sounds of the riot filled the air.

  He felt dizzy and tired.

  He started to move off, closing up like a prizefighter and taking a couple of poorly aimed hits on his shoulders and arms. A section of burning wooden s
unshade crashed down in front of him. Men jumped away from it, cursing and shouting. Mohr altered his course, heading for a side street that seemed a little quieter.

  He turned the corner at a bar called the Black Dog and recognized one of the chiefs from the Leyte Gulf. The guy’s face was badly banged up, but he was pretty sure it was Jose Borghino, or Borgu, or something. He was leaned up against a car, obviously in trouble. Mohr started to move toward him when a man in a torn, bloodied suit crashed into him and knocked him to the ground.

  He heard somebody call out, “Get away from the car, asshole.”

  And then a big gun, a .38 or .45, boomed twice, so loud it deafened him.

  Half blinded by blood and grit, Mohr looked up as Borghino fell away from the car. His mouth full of dirt, his ears ringing, he was about to scramble up and confront the suit. That guy had to be the shooter. But a white-hot bomb went off inside his head, and he tumbled down into darkness.

  Restricted to camp after the riot, Slim Jim Davidson was anxious to hear from Big Itchy. The confinement was driving him nuts. He feared the dumb gangster would be so preoccupied by the destruction of his clubs on Hotel Street that he wouldn’t have followed through on the plan to clean out the stateside bookies. Slim Jim was stretched out in his rack, cursing his luck and the suck-ass pattern of his so-called life, when the cry of “Mail call” went up.

  Moose Molloy Jr., who was resting on his cot, leapt to his feet.

  “C’mon, Slim Jim. Mail’s here,” he enthused.

  “Big fucking deal,” said Slim Jim flatly.

  “Oh don’t be like that. We’ll be out of here soon. I even heard they’re gonna kick the niggers—sorry, the African Americans—off those ships and let us crew ’em. Wouldn’t that be great, Slim Jim? Can you imagine fighting the Japs in one of them babies? They’d never lay a glove on you.”

  “Yeah?” said Davidson. “They gonna leave the pussy in place? Did you happen to hear that?”

  Moose didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

  “No,” he answered ingenuously, “I didn’t hear nothing about the lady sailors. I don’t reckon they’d let us keep them, though. There’d be another riot if everyone thought we was getting girlfriends and a new ship.”

  “Oh, God,” groaned Davidson as he pulled a threadbare pillow out from under his head and attempted to smother himself with it.

  Moose waited patiently for another minute before asking whether Slim Jim was planning on getting up. They could already hear the mail being handed out in the distance.

  “C’mon, Slim Jim, maybe some Girl Guide sent you some cookies.”

  “Unless she sent me a picture of her fanny I couldn’t care less,” he moped.

  “Slim Jim!”

  Moose seemed genuinely offended that anyone could sully the image of the Girl Guides of America. As far as he was concerned, protecting them from the ravages of the Japs was one of the main reasons they were here, camping out in this godforsaken burned-out cane field.

  “I’ll tell you what, Moose,” Davidson said finally, “if I get any Girl Guide cookies, you bring ’em back for me, and we’ll share them.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “You can bank on it. Just let me get some rest.”

  Moose hurried off in pursuit of free cookies. Davidson thought about whipping his shank out for a quick pull, but he couldn’t even work up the enthusiasm for that. He lay on his cot, scratching his balls until a thought occurred to him. Checking that Moose really was gone, he rolled to his feet and dragged his duffel bag out. The flexipad was at the bottom, and it took some digging to retrieve it. When at last he had the stolen pad in his hands, it felt heavy with possibilities.

  A quick check out the tent flap again. No sign of Moose. Davidson smiled as he powered up the unit. He’d become quite adept at controlling it and quickly found the file he’d been meaning to check out. A few taps on the touch screen and suddenly he nearly wet himself at the sound of a nigger band—called Death Row of all fucking things—punching out a weird number called “Rape the Bitch Now.” The title had intrigued him since he’d first seen it a day earlier. The jigaboos sounded like they were doing some really angry, fucked-up poems to a jungle beat and it was hard to understand everything they said.

  He dropped the volume and shook his head in disbelief throughout the two-minute performance. It took him three repeats to fully understand the lyrics, and when he did, he struggled with a tangled mass of feelings. He found that for the first time in his life, he was genuinely affronted. His morality—Could you believe it? His fucking morality!—was actually outraged by those fucking hoods. But contending with that outrage was excitement at the images that accompanied the “music.” He’d never seen women dance like that, not even in the skankiest fucking New Orleans whorehouse. Those hussies were like damn dogs in heat, the way they were throwing their fannies around.

  “Goddamn,” Slim Jim hooted softly. “The future looks rosy!”

  He cycled through another performance by Death Row. It sounded so similar that he couldn’t be certain, if he closed his eyes, that he was listening to a different song—if you could even call it a song. But the new clip featured an entirely different bunch of “bitches,” as he quickly and effortlessly came to think of them, and Slim Jim had no trouble at all telling one bitch from another. He was about to revisit his decision not to haul his shank out for a quick one, when he heard the heavy tread of Moose Molly approaching. Davidson hastily shut down the pad and jammed it under a blanket.

  “Hey Slim Jim, you’re up.”

  “And at ’em.”

  The big oaf had a package for him. If it was cookies, it was the biggest pack he’d ever seen. Davidson pushed himself up on one elbow. He was slick and sticky with sweat. The tent felt like the inside of an oven.

  “You got laundry,” Moose said as he tossed over the package.

  “Laundry? I didn’t send no fucking laundry out,” said Davidson.

  “You must have left some with the Chinese place before we shipped out for Midway,” said Moose.

  “Chinese?” said Davidson, suddenly coming wide awake. “Yeah, now that I think of it, I did leave some pants behind.”

  “You’re always losing your pants, Slim Jim.”

  “Ain’t it the truth? What’d you get, buddy?”

  “Just a letter from my old man. He says they’re having real trouble keeping the spics in line now that a lot of the younger fellows have left the police force for the army. But he reckons the old boys on the force, they still got a few tricks in them.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Davidson.

  “And I spoke to Chief Craven, he said Chief Mohr’s gonna be out of the hospital tomorrow and there’s no way we’re shipping out with the other guys. We’re staying here.”

  “Well, you gotta take the good with the bad,” shrugged Slim Jim, who’d die a happy man if he never set foot on another goddamn boat.

  “You gonna open your package?”

  “For a pair of pants? No. I’d thought I’d save the excitement for this evening. Give me something to look forward to in the cocktail hour.”

  And it was early evening before Moose left the tent again, giving Davidson a chance to tear open the brown paper parcel. He found a couple of shirts inside, and two pairs of socks. Wrapped up in one pair was an IOU from Big Itchy for six thousand dollars, payable when next they met.

  A grin as big as the Grand Canyon broke out on Slim Jim’s face. He could almost feel that money in the tips of his fingers. A lot of guys would have wanted it right there with them in the cot, thinking they could keep it safe that way. But Slim Jim Davidson knew his dough was more secure locked up in the strongbox beneath Big Itchy’s desk. Any sticky fingers straying near the combination lock were liable to get themselves hacked off with a machete.

  There was a note with the IOU.

  “Got any more ideas?”

  The two men sat in the shaded portico that ran around the hospital, sipping at iced water and squinti
ng into the glare of the midday sun. Eddie Mohr was in far better shape than Lieutenant Commander Evans. The funny little gizmo they’d stuck on the back of his neck seemed to block all the pain he should have been feeling from his cracked skull and stitched-up wounds. But he found that he still got dizzy if he had to walk very far. Evans had it tougher. His ruined arm was encased in one of those fat, blow-up sausages and he told Mohr that most of his arm wasn’t even his anymore. They’d grown it in a test tube.

  “Musta been a big fucking tube, sir,” said Mohr.

  “More of a vat, they told me,” said Evans.

  The Astoria’s senior enlisted man shook his head at the idea. Eddie Mohr had spent a good part of his life on the floor of a slaughterhouse. He wasn’t a squeamish guy, but the idea of growing your own meat in a glass bowl made him feel distinctly giddy. Still, there were friends of his alive because of it, and because they’d been cracked open and fitted with mechanical hearts, and plastic bones, and Christ only knew what else.

  Rumor had it that one guy off the Hornet was sporting a brand-new dick. Two inches longer than his old one!

  Mohr wondered if you could put a request in for that sort of thing.

  Other casualties meandered slowly about the grounds under their own power, or were pushed about in wheelchairs by nurses. The sun was so fierce it hurt to look at their white uniforms, unless you were wearing sunglasses. It seemed that almost everyone from the future did just that, even indoors. It was just another of the many things about them that made Eddie Mohr’s head spin.

  He felt himself dozing off, nodding forward in his cane chair, until Evans’s voice cut through his torpor.

  “Do you hear anything about Captain Anderson?” he asked.