Читать книгу Slaughtermatic - Steve Aylett - Страница 11

It occurred to Dante that midnight in the Mall might not coincide with midnight in the outer world. Waiting had proved nothing. Disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality, he felt more and more complacent about their position. He gazed out of the window, his thoughts dispersing harmlessly. Am I under the influence? he wondered. He’d once seen a wave weapon in action. During a little riot in McKenna Square, a cop flung a crucifixion bomb, which skittered into the plaza. A hemisonic flux affecting the guilt centres of the brain converted the entire crowd to Catholicism. Unable to look each other in the eye, the inhibited mob were fish in a barrel for the brotherhood, who slaughtered them before they could lapse.

The cops on Deal Street seemed inert and bored. A few fired at the entrance and bank front, and someone returned a little. Couple of carshells burned. A mail truck, leadlined against electro-radiation, lay on its roof and smouldered like charcoal. There was a snack stand and situation van.

Dante turned back to watch Corey the Teller reason with the Kid. Trying to buck his ideas up, she was inadvertently undermining the cowardice, laziness and force of habit that had kept his wrists closed for years.

An escaped braincut subject, the Kid was neurally bonded to his gun. When he pressurized the trigger he got an instant flash of his victim’s eye-view and the barrel of his own firearm. Several convicts had been given the Kafkacell implant experimentally, but rather than inhibit firing it sent them on a kill frenzy, their only motive a repeatedly frustrated urge to self-destruction. The Kid also found it improved his aim.

The heist was mining a rich seam of gloom in the Kid. Lacking the perversity so pivotal to the present headcrime, he was racing to waste. Looking as sad and creepy as a pickled alien, he whispered he’d give a medal to the man who could loosen the iron grip of his life. Corey, who had boosted eighty thousand smackers from the register in the confusion of the heist, considered him her ticket. She would have berated him anyway in her professional capacity as a stranger. ‘You’d be surprised how sullen I can be,’ she told him. ‘But you look like a bile fish, for Christ’s sake. It’s wrong.’

‘Why, miss - what happens.’

‘Morally wrong. Whatever shitstorm of motives brought you here they better be good enough to get y’out.’

‘Circular thought’s a way of surrounding something,’ he said in a voice devoid of all emphasis.

‘What? What are you, nuts? A maniac? Don’t you know there’s a streetful of army cops outside this doll brothel? Speak up you sonofabitch.’

She barked at Dante. ‘Hey, Lofty.’ But Dante was reading a book and did not reply. What sort of a hold-up was this?

The Kid swallowed a Coma Plus and almost inaudibly stated the view that humanity’s demise was rooted in an evolutionary strand which caused its ass-cheeks to undergo binary fission like amoebas under a microscope. ‘Every hundred thousand years, miss. First one buttock, now two, in a few years four, then eight, sixteen and so on. And you know where that’ll lead. Cumbersome, dragging heaps of dough.’

Corey breathed deep a while. A commotion of slaying echoed from outside. That Danny guy looked as hypnotized as a Segabrat. They were surrounded by inflatable bastards. She wasn’t any virtual puppet, but this wasn’t any virtual heist, so the peril level was even stevens. She’d have to take charge. ‘Kid. You and me get outta here, we’re happy as pups in a sidecar. Tell ya a secret.’ And she drew up a pantleg on an ankle-holstered Hitachi 20-gauge, one of the countless untraceable one-off guns designed on desktop since the Crime Bill. ‘Life’s a geology of precaution. Your pal’s knee-deep in himself. You hold up a place without thinking? What if everyone acted that way?’

The Kid found he agreed with the argument - it was what had stopped him becoming a doctor. What if everyone became a doctor? Who’d drive the buses? By some imperceptible transition he found himself feeling interested. He harboured a sly respect for her leg, the gun and the pink painkiller of her mouth.

Seeing a brawl in a bar, Download Jones had called the cops and been arrested for obstructing justice. A little blister of a crime, it had swelled into pranksterism. Pretty soon he was selling other people to science and slapping fire-eaters on the back so they’d gulp and explode. Now he sat in a yelling-cell at the end of a distinguished career and a cop was saying, ‘You pulled off a strong one, Jones - Chief still believes there’s a gun you can set for niggers.’

Snowblind with crass mediocrity, the cops were nettled and grateful at having to work over a small guy who was by their standards weird and clever. Download smiled in deference to their coarse elation. They tore off his coat and released a blizzard of ID cards. Download waded through them, yelling that one somewhere was authentic. An emphatic man who wore his ignorance like a badge of honour engaged him in a no-nonsense interrogation with a butane torch. Download underwent the surgical assault with a stupefying resilience, relentlessly inhaling and exhaling despite everyone’s best efforts. Crestfallen at Download’s unyielding integrity, the surgeon asked him about the Mall and snipped at him with a bolt-cutter. Download volunteered nothing but fluids. Blood flooded out in great gushing spurts - nature’s way of telling him he was bleeding. The overhead fans churned. Download felt like an individual nerve.

‘All the world loves a scamp,’ said the surgeon, ‘but in this case we’ll make an exception.’ He dealt Download’s skull a blow which turned it into a personalized planetarium.

Dazzlingly incoherent, Download began blurting a confetti of ominous statements. There was a device in his jaw - though his personality was on the net he’d prefer to preserve the meat version, scars and all. The surgeon looked crosseyed at his colleagues and made a drilling motion to his temple. Misunderstanding, one went out and returned with a power drill and a purposeful expression.

Now Download was yammering about another device, one he had to re-set every day - if he wasn’t free to do so it would unleash itself. He rarely made a noise on the subject, as there were people who would kill him if they thought it would cause trouble. ‘Ten past one, man. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it till I’m a seething heap of bugs.’

‘That may not be long,’ the surgeon told him, meaning he had a space reserved on Olympus Dump.

For years it had been assumed that expensive overcrowding would lead the city to establish the cod-eye sentence for all offences or abolish visitation and allow inmates to die and rot in an unofficial capacity. But it occurred in a more roundabout fashion due to some low-spark suggesting that lifers could be stored cheaply and easily in bulk cryogenic freezers. When the policy was adopted, the entire population went berserk in the hope of being slammed in a fridge and thawed out to a better world. The system was turned off and the powerdown blamed on faulty equipment - technology hadn’t advanced enough to keep the inessential alive. The authorities saw that the exercise had been unnecessarily elaborate and that rather than stacking thugs in a freezer they might as well stack them in a landfill. The Dump towered over Beerlight, a lesson to potential lawbreakers that the law was already broken.

Download was pounded to the floor. He moved his arm as though he’d the temerity to protect himself. In what form would his atonement come to fruition? They refused to tell him, feigning bafflement. A fist smashed into his jaw and with a sound louder than a bomb, the building vaporized so fast a dozen cops were left falsifying evidence in mid air.

How many times does a man have to shave, thought Blince, before his chin gets the message? He threw the razor aside and gazed through the tank window. Stubborn horrors passed in darkness. That’s how fish stay smooth, he thought - no chin. And birds? No chin, forehead, ears or nose to speak of. Imagine an army of such men. Worse than useless.

‘Den’s exploded,’ mentioned the driver without looking back. ‘It’ll be Parker.’

‘Sure, he’s been tryin’ to put me under the bridge for years. Remember the last one, Benny?’ Blince reminisced. A Barrett 82 Light Fifty blasted at the denfront, the shooter leaving the rig in the road and screeching off in a customized drophead. Brute Parker thought ‘passive aggressive’ meant shooting someone from a lounger. ‘Sure, distributin’ bullets with a real largesse.’

‘He’ll give you the cod eye, Chief,’ taunted the driver.

‘Not me. Nobody’ll get this joker coolin’ on a slab - nobody but God in his infinite wisdom.’ Blince thought about an early Parker attack and Benny getting winged. Few people Parker shot were ever shot again. ‘Someone’s been takin’ liberties with democracy, Benny. Democracy in its smartest pants.’

Benny sat opposite, his face revealing nothing - not even his eyes.

‘Wake up Benny goddammit, am I talkin’ to myself here?’

‘Sorry, Chief - feelin’ daffy.’

‘Daffy ain’t an option, trooper boy - what if we hadn’t called back-up and wound up stuck in the Mall? We’d be gettin’ rid o’ crooks only to have ’em spring up again to the crack o’ doom.’ He said it without conscious irony. ‘Boredom shoulda tipped us off, Benny, no gettin’ round it.’

The tank jerked to a stop and Blince threw the hatch open, lolling out and approaching the cop emplacement through the spackle of gun hits. Benny followed after, skirting bodies and bonfires.

A guy with a face like a spaniel trotted toward Blince. ‘Damn fine to meet you, Mr Blince. I’ve followed your career with astonishment and horror. Never in my wildest nightmares did I expect to shake your hand.’

‘Foresight’d be a gift in a smarter man,’ Blince remarked, sailing past the proffered limb and peering at the Deal Street bank front, where employees were screaming demands and throwing out their dead. A cop earthmover ploughed the corpses aside to allow the free exchange of gunfire. ‘Get a real sense of deja vu, eh Benny?’

The spaniel man was shouting through a hailer. ‘The violence you manifest is compromised by its appearance.’

Blince stopped in the act of lighting a cigar. ‘Just what at the subatomic level was that?’

‘Testin’ a new strategy uptown, Chief,’ Benny fidgeted, embarrassed. ‘Phenomenology.’

‘Phenomenology my bulgin’ ass,’ roared Blince, lumbering back toward the barricades.

‘Throw down the guns - an object is an object only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is in your hands,’ hailed the spaniel man, breaking off amicably as Blince arrived.

‘What’s your name, soldier?’

‘Tredwell Garnishee.’

‘What did you just say to me?’

‘My name, sir.’

‘His name, he says. That’s not a name, Tredwell, it’s a stab in the back for the forces o’ light. All bets are off. I’m takin’ over this investigation. What the hell is this?’ Blince snatched a bag from Tredwell. ‘Trail mix? You got trail mix for a bank job? I oughta slap your droolin’ face.’