by Dave Stone
Then a GenTech outrider slammed in to broadside the Long Red, spearing him and his vehicle with the reinforced polycarbon blades that served both as impact-protection and offensive weapon—and which gave motorsickles their name as opposed to the more literal and prosaic motorcycles.
Presumably, the outrider had been counting in the impact-resistance aspect of those blades to protect him from damage—but those same blades now caught in the Long Red’s mechanics and hauled the outrider over, sending both of them spinning off down the blacktop and on fire.
“Screw him,” Eddie muttered to himself. “That’s his job.”
Now he realised that, in his alarm, he had just flung himself desperately into the Behemoth’s connecting rig. He was hanging from a tangle of data-transfer cables, fortunately of the sort designed for rough and heavy duty treatment and thus could bear his weight.
The shutoff lever for the coolant was directly before him. He reached for it and yanked it.
The lever came off in his hand.
Eddie said a bad word.
Behind him, he heard a complicated, tearing crash as a number of vehicles collided in any number of interesting configurations. Eddie had no idea what had actually happened, and who might have died on either side, and quite frankly he didn’t care.
The shutoff valve, despite the lack of a lever, still seemed more or less functional. Oh, well. It was worth a try. He grasped it with his free hand and attempted to twist it.
For a moment, it seemed that he was tearing the skin, and the meat for that matter, off his hand. Then, somehow, it was as if the skin and flesh had just hardened. The valve turned, then got a grip and lodged. Eddie Kalish had the distinct thought that he might have twisted it still further and torn it out, had he wanted.
In any case, he thought now, he’d done the job to any point of which he was capable—and if anybody like Trix Desoto, for example, wanted any more then they could just shove it.
Eddie let go of the cables, boosted himself off and dropped back into the Testostorossa, doing a neat little flip around the sill of the door that he would never know had looked incredibly impressive to anyone who might have seen it.
“All right,” he said to the world in general. “I’ve fucking done it, okay? Good enough? Can I go, now?”
“Good enough,” the voice of Trix Desoto admitted over the comsat-link. “For long enough.”
The Testostorossa lurched again on its suspension.
“I’m back under your masterful control,” it said. “You know, incidentally, just so’s you know. So are you gonna drive me or what?”
Eddie Kalish drove, running the last remaining Long Red off the road without even particularly thinking about it.
And it would only be later, yet again, that he realised that he had just done three separate things that it would have been impossible, for a human being, to do.
14.
After finishing off the Long Reds, the Brain Train hit nothing more than minor skirmishing. It was simply too big a target for any but the largest, well-supported or clinically insane gangcult to think it worth having a shot.
The Brain Train hit the Lone Pine ghoul-town and went through it slow, in silent running, while shark-like cars cruised the streets, driven by what appeared to be shapeless forms under sheets.
North through Bishop on Route 6, “Home of the World’s Biggest Ball of Ear-wax!”, only nobody wanted to see it. Then the State Line south of Boundary Park, where Trix Desoto decided to take advantage of the National Parks Service customs check to stop and repair the damaged Behemoth.
The net result was that, momentarily, Eddie Kalish found himself at a loose end. Masterton had given him a GenTech-issue credit chip—the first such thing he had ever owned—and it was burning a hole in his pocket.
The problem was that, here and now, there was nowhere and nothing to spend it on.
Eddie hauled the Testostorossa up next to a small convenience store a little way off from the Customs checkpoint. He debated with himself as to what might be the most expensive thing it stocked, but the exercise was probably pointless. He suspected he could buy the entire store, freehold, on GenTech credit.
A couple of girls, not wearing very much, were lounging by a vintage hydrogen-converted Caddy and chatting with a black guy in a long leather coat. They had Hollywood looks—that is, they looked how, in your dreams, hookers were supposed to look, as opposed to the way they actually do look in any real life.
One of the girls shifted round as he shot the door and clambered out of the Testostorossa.
“Hey, guy, nice ride,” she said. “You feel like a good time?”
Eddie thought about this—and it must be said, he considered it in more or less the same terms you might consider going on a theme-park ride, or going to a movie. The unworldly perfection of these Californian girls was utterly at odds with, say, backroom girls in Las Vitas; it was difficult to think of them in the same connection.
“Yeah, sure,” he said after a moment. “What do you do for a couple of grand?”
“We arrest you for soliciting,” the black guy said, slapping a pair of smack-shackles around Eddie’s wrists and then showing him his badge. “California State Cavalry Vice Squad.”
“The fuck?” Eddie bellowed. “This is entrapment!”
“No it isn’t,” one of the girls smirked. “We just asked you if you wanted a time. Didn’t say a thing about money.”
Much as he didn’t want to make assumptions about good-looking girls—whether hookers or vice cops—and their general level of intelligence, Eddie got the distinct impression that this was the most brilliant trick that had ever been thought up, so far as she was concerned, and she wondered how anyone could have thought up such a brilliant trick.
“Okay, okay,” he said wearily. “Write me a ticket or whatever. What’s the fine?”
“Mandatory jail time,” said the black guy. “Twenty-four hours.”
“Shit,” said Eddie, dispiritedly.
This altercation, meanwhile, had drawn the attention of Trix Desoto, who had left the roadside-maintenance of the damaged Behemoth and now stormed over.
“What’s happening?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”
The vice cops took one look at her, in her strategically-ripped PVC, and arrested her too.
“Idiot!” Trix Desoto seethed. “You’re an idiot. What are you? A fucking idiot, that’s what you are.”
“Sorry,” said Eddie.
“I mean,” Trix Desoto continued, “Nevada’s famous for its legal prostitution industry. What on earth would have you trying to pick up hookers, two hundred yards the wrong side of the State Line? How could you not have realised it was a Moron Patrol?”
They were in the clean and otherwise empty cells reserved for those picked up by the State Cavalry Vice Squad—their lack of use testament to the fact that nobody was quite as stupid as Eddie Kalish.
It was all just a bit unfair, Eddie thought. In and of himself, he knew, he didn’t know shit about anywhere much except for the little piece of New Mexico in which he had spent the majority of his life. It would have been nice if someone had thought fit to encode that particular bit of useful information into the Loup.
“I knew there’d be problems,” Trix was saying, “the minute I heard we were heading into Nevada. I hate Nevada.” She shuddered. “Too many bad memories.”
“Memories?” Eddie said. “What memories?”
“None of your business.”
“Suit yourself.” Eddie sat on the fold-down cot and twiddled his thumbs.
“All right,” Trix said after a while, in a somewhat exasperated voice, as though Eddie had dragged some revelation out of her with his persistent and devilishly clever questioning. “I came out of one of the Nevada Baby Ranches.”
“Baby Ranches?” Eddie said. The term meant nothing to him.
“It’s one of the worst things that happened when the… Nevada Industry went out of control,” Trix said. “Contraceptive f
ailure is an occupational hazard, of course, and there were lots of ways for dealing with the result—but some of the worst operators simply dumped the results into internment camps, treated them like animals.
“It’s like the way that, in Victorian London, you got orphanages—but you also got baby farmers, who took kids in exchange for the clothes on their backs, killed them and dumped the bodies in whatever the name is of that river they have over there.” Trix got a brief far-away look in her eyes. Eddie realised that her own Loup was downloading some new bit of information for her. “The Thames.”
Eddie supposed that he should be finding the whole idea of baby farming vaguely shocking. Then again, he’d been alive long enough to know the sort of shit people got up to, the sort of things they did to each other, so it wasn’t exactly a big surprise.
“Bastards like that,” he said, “strikes me that they’d be more likely to do what the baby farmers did instead of spending money even on a camp.”
“Thank you for your concern,” said Trix Desoto with withering sarcasm. “The Ranches were used to supply ready meat. Girls for the sickos who got off on torturing people to death. Fodder for the movies. I was picked up on a trawl by a GenTech grey subsidiary operating in that area.”
Trix smiled grimly.
“Fortunately, they ran a gene-scan before feeding me into the snuff-movie grinder. GenTech were on the look out for people with certain genetic markers—attributes that made them the perfect candidates for induction into what eventually became the Loup.” She shrugged. “I got the first really viable strain. It’s been tweaked a bit since then, but GenTech were nice enough to let me test out some of the preliminary effects on people I remembered from the Ranch. You know, guards and stuff.”
“Does this Ranch still exist?” Eddie asked her.
Trix grinned. “What do you think? I was very thorough, apparently. So I’m told. This was before I learnt the techniques for riding the Loup and remembering what happened after.”
For his part, Eddie Kalish was thinking that there was an aspect to Trix’s story that was very interesting indeed. Masterton had never lost an opportunity to tell him, Eddie, how he had merely been some random body that had been infected with the Loup, purely on the basis that it had happened to be lying around.
Now, it seemed, there was an active search going on, on the part of GenTech, for those with the proper genome for the Loup to infect.
Eddie got the feeling that he was slightly more important in the general scheme of things than he had been told. This bore thinking about.
Some half hour later, the black guy in the big leather coat came along and let them out.
“You been touched by an angel,” he told them. “Seems like your bosses have a lot of swing with the California State Legislature. You’ve been sprung on your own recognisance.”
“Word, motherfucker,” said Eddie.
Trix Desoto looked at him. “You really can be a tool, can’t you?”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Masterton told him, over a scrambled signal on the Command and Control rig’s comms link.” What are you?”
“I already told him,” said Trix. “He’s a fucking idiot.”
“You’re not exactly in my best books either,” Masterton told her. “The Brain Train is supposed to be a covert operation, in so far as an enormous road-train rumbling down the pipe can be covert. That, for the hard of thinking, tends to mean that it is not a good idea to draw attention by getting arrested. And that goes double for you, Trix.”
“Be fair,” said Trix Desoto. “How was I to know about Attire Calculated to Promote Offence? They’re statute-happy here in California, where the Law applies in the first place. Statutes about smoking within five hundred yards of a child, statutes about taking the top off a bottle in an unsafe manner—and it changes on the hour. It’s like they’re compensating for all the places where they slit your throat over a clean syringe.”
“Be that as it may,” said Masterton. “You’re on your last gasp. GenTech has too much invested in this particular operation to screw it up. Any more trouble, I yank the plug and we put together something else from scratch.”
The Brain Train crossed into Nevada and dropped off the face of the world.
Tracksat-counterdetection systems were cut in. Radio silence was maintained. There was no way, short of being on the ground and watching it as it rolled past, that one could tell where it was and in which direction it was heading.
Except, of course, for the miniaturised tracer unit, planted by the Long Reds when they had attacked.
The tracker fed its data directly to the Long Red’s backers, NeoGen, who extrapolated the Brain Train’s route and learned that there was an upper-ninetieth percentile probability that its eventual destination was a location that did not appear, officially, on any map. Designation: Arbitrary Base.
Within NeoGen itself there was the feeling that the world would be a better place if they simply took the Brain Train out now. Stop messing around, just send in a strike-team and take them out from above.
Certain… associates, let us call them, however, countermanded the order. Their—call them adversaries—who were using GenTech as puppets, in much the same way that these associates were using NeoGen, wanted almost precisely the same thing as they did. Albeit to a somewhat different end.
Better, in the end, to let these GenTech minions do the job they had been appointed to do—and then come in at the last moment, and kill them all, and then enjoy the purloined fruits of their labours.
Besides, there were any number of other dangers still out there on the road. If the Brain Train fell prey to one of them, then all the labours of GenTech, and for that matter NeoGen, and those who respectively backed them, would turn out to be absolutely meaningless in any case.
15.
Blackout.
(Motherly, hushing sounds. The rasping slither of soft, warm skin. Slipping crackle-crust. Soft, cool hands roll me over and a knee crunches into the back; sharp-edged carbon steel biting into wrists as hasps lock with quick precision: snick, snap.)
And we fade up to:
A clean bare room, cracks and patches of plaster crumbled off the lath.
Scrubbed floorboards. Abstract and vaguely totemic designs are scrawled on the walls: black and primitive but complex. Bright sunlight outside and a simple Japanese paper screen across the window. Black plastic bags of clothing strewn across the floor.
Scattered clothing, male and female.
A mattress lies against one wall. A radiator pipe and broken radiator. A small pile of various unused condoms in their wrappings by the bed. A ceramic bowl containing four used condoms beside it. There is blood on them; smears on the mattress.
A MAN, naked and face-down on the mattress, legs splayed and tied by ankles to steel rings bolted to the floor. His left wrist is handcuffed to the pipe. His right hand grips the pipe tightly. He wears a number of heavy rings.
There is a wad of bundled clothing under him, raising him slightly. Well defined musculature. Scratches fresh and half-healed on his back. A tattoo on his shoulder and another and another on his upper arm. A solid-black Cocteau design.
Longish, fine and off-blond hair. His face is pressed into the mattress. Straddling one splayed leg, on her knees, a WOMAN: mid-twenties, punkshock hair that might once have been blonde, face intent and childlike-serious.
(And in the Calibrian part of Italy, women saved a few drops of their menstrual fluid in a small bottle which they carried wherever they went. It was believed that when such drops were secretly administered to the man of their choice the man would be bound to them forever. The Elixir Rebeus!)
She smears her palm across her mouth. A slick film of saliva.
She falls upon the man, gnaws gently on the back of his neck.
(And the weight on top of me, pressing on me, and a mouth pressed to my ear and murmuring.)
She finally passed out. And when she finally passed out I hamstrung her, dislocated her hips and s
houlders. It was vital that she remained immobile, absolutely still.
(Saline drips and bloodpacks. I inserted a catheter and I fed her through a needle. I kept her alive for months. It was quite difficult. Slaying skin and muscle and glucaea a single tiny shred at a time. A fragile tangle of veins and arteries and lymph ducts. Lymph and bile and cephalic fluid stored in individually-labled bottles and refrigerated. It’s… You have to believe. Have to believe I never…
Her voice is cool and monotonic, matter-of-fact flipping someone I don’t know from vanilla fern to ritual butchered meat. In that instant I don’t know if she’s making it up or not.)
She slithers down. Teeth clench lightly, momentarily and release. A tongue slips inside.
(There’s a black iron engine hanging in a hot red sky and the machine is me and as I try to comprehend its vast and churning maze of internal conduits my mind shifts and slips like shale and suddenly I crazy-move to:
Sand dunes under an azure summer sky. A salt breeze ripples samphire. A blonde and beautiful child, a girl, offers me a clump of tiny, pale blue flowers. It’s not, she says, it’s not—and the light, the crushing light comes down, washing out my field of vision with its flat blank white.)
Hooknails bite into shoulders and rake down. Slithers up: slugtrail tongue.
(And we stumbled through the tunnels ’til we found the husk of Nail: wasted and flaking and propped against the wall, crumbling into papergrey ash. The Strata Angel was there, a construct now, like gelid glass, shot with wormholes filled with lambent fluid. Shadowplay on translucent surfaces, macroforms splitting and flickering and pulsing. Somewhere somebody was shrieking, clawing at his face in a room of broken machinery…)
She half-smiles, catlike.
(She pirouettes in mid-air, screaming tactile subsonics from her eyes and mouth and vagina, down corridors and catwalks and vast brick vaults with chessboard floors and halls hung with shredded membrane and the false backs of cupboards and skylights and holes in the wall. A dark room hung with burning kites. The death of the hollow age.)