Route 666 Anthology Read online

  “Come for it, switch-bitch,” Jazzbeaux hissed, “come for my knifey-knives!”

  The Daughter walked forward, as calm as you please, and with a samurai movement drew the needles out of her hair. They glinted in the torchlight. They were clearly not ornamental. She grinned. Her teeth had been filed and capped with steel. Expensive dental work.

  “Just you and me, babe,” Jazzbeaux said, “just you and me.”

  The rest of the DAR cadre stood back, humming “America the Beautiful.” The other Psychopomps were silent. This was a formal combat to settle a territorial dispute. Utah and Nevada were up for grabs since the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez and US Cav joint action put the Western Maniax out of business, and Jazzbeaux thought the ’pomps could gain something from a quick fight rather than a long war.

  This was not a funfight. This was Serious Business. Jazzbeaux heard they did much the same thing in Japcorp boardrooms.

  The Daughter drew signs in the air with her needles. They were dripping something. Psychoactive venom of some sort, Jazzbeaux had heard. Hell, her system had absorbed just about every ju-ju the GenTech labs could leak illegally onto the market, and she was still kicking. And punching, and scratching, and biting.

  “You know, pretty-pretty, I hear they’re talkin’ about settlin’ the Miss America pageant like this next anno. You get to do evenin’ dress, and swimwear, and combat fatigues.”

  The Daughter growled.

  “I wouldn’t give much for your chances of winning the crown, though. You just plain ain’t got the personality.”

  Behind her patch, the implant buzzed open, and circuitry lit up. She might need her optic burner. It always made for a grand fight-finisher.

  Jazzbeaux held up her ungloved hand, knuckles out, and shimmered the red metal stars implanted in her knucks. Kidstuff. The sign of The Samovar Seven, her fave Russian musickies when she was a kid. She didn’t freak much to the Moscow Beat these days, but she knew Sove Stuff really got to the DAR.

  “You commie slit,” sneered the Daughter.

  “Who preps your dialogue, sister? Neil Simon?”

  Jazzbeaux hummed in the back of her throat. “Unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics…” The ’pomps caught the tune, and joined it. The Daughter’s eyes narrowed. She had stars on one cheek, and stripes on the other. The President of their chapter wore a Miss Liberty spiked hat, and carried a killing torch.

  “Take the witchin’ slag down, Jazz-babe,” shrilled Andrew Jean, her lieutenant, always the encouraging soul.

  The DAR switched to “My Country ’tis of Thee.” The ’pomps segued to “Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad,” popularized by Vania Vanianova and the Kulture Kossacks.

  The Daughter clicked her heels, and made a pass, lunging forwards. Jazzbeaux bent to one side, letting the needle pass over her shoulder, and slammed the Daughter’s midriff with her knee. The spiked pad ripped through the Daughter’s blouse, and grated on the armoured contour-girdle underneath. The Daughter grabbed Jazzbeaux’s neck, and pulled her off her feet.

  Jazzbeaux recognized the move. Her Daddy had tried it on her back in the Denver NoGo when she’d been Jessamyn Bonney, and nine-year-olds were worth a gallon on the streets. One thing she had to say about Dad, at least he had prepped her for the world she was going to have to live in. Other girls graduated from the Policed Zone high schools, but she knew she was a woman the day she ripped her old man’s throat out. She had been with the ’pomps since then, and still had a healthy career in front of her. If she was lucky, she might live to see twenty-five. She didn’t believe she’d marry Petya Tcherkassoff and move to a dacha on the steppes any more.

  She bunched her fingers into a sharp cone and stabbed above the Daughter’s girdle-line, aiming for the throat, but the Daughter was too fast, and chopped her wrist, deflecting the blow.

  Just what her Dad used to do. “Jessa–myn, cain’t you be sociable?” The low-rent ratskag.

  She danced round the bigger girl, getting a few scratches down the back of her suit, even drawing some blood. The Daughter swung round and Jazzbeaux had to take a fall to avoid the needles.

  The ’pomps were chanting and shouting now, while the DAR had fallen silent. That didn’t mean anything.

  She was down in the dirt, rolling away from the sharp-toed kicks. The DAR had good intelligence contacts, obviously. The girl had struck her three times on the right thigh, just where the once-broken bone was, and had taken care to stay out of the field of her optic burner. Of course, she had also cut Jazzbeaux’s forehead below the hairline, making her bleed into her regular eye. Anyone would have done that.

  But Jazzbeaux was getting her licks in. The Daughter’s left wrist was either broken or sprained, and she couldn’t get a proper grip on her needle. There were spots of her own blood on her suit, so some of Jazzbeaux’s licks must have missed the armour plate. The hagwitch was getting tired, breathing badly, sweating like a sow.

  She used her feet, dancing away and flying back, anchoring herself to the broken lamp-post as she launched four rapid kicks to the Daughter’s torso. The girl was shaken. She had dropped both her needles. Jazzbeaux caught her behind the head with a steelheel, and dropped her to the ground. She reared up, but Jazzbeaux was riding her now, knees pressed in tight. She got a full nelson, and sank her claws into the back of her neck, pressing the Daughter’s face to the hard-beaten earth of the street.

  Finally, the Daughter stopped moving, and Jazzbeaux stood up. Andrew Jean rushed out, and grabbed her wrist, holding her hand up in victory.

  “The winnnnerrrr,” Andrew Jean shouted, sloppily kissing Jazzbeaux.

  She pulled her eyepatch away, and looked at the DAR. They stood impassive as the optic burner angled across them, glinting red but not yet activated.

  “Is it decided?” Jazzbeaux asked, wiping the blood out of her eye.

  An older Daughter, with a pillbox hat and a grey-speckled veil, came forward and stood over her sister. The girl on the ground moaned and tried to get up on her elbows. The veiled Daughter kicked her in the side. The poison blade sank in. The fallen Daughter spasmed briefly, and slumped again, foam leaking from her mouth.

  “It is decided,” said the veiled Daughter.

  The DAR picked up the dead girl, and faded away into the darkness.

  The Psychopomps pressed around her, kissing, hugging, groping, shouting.

  “Jazz–beaux! Jazz–beaux! Jazz–beaux!”

  The Psychopomps howled in the desert.

  “Come on, let’s hit Spanish Fork,” Jazzbeaux shouted above the din, “I’m thirsty, and I could use some real party action tonight!”

  “Sergeant,” shouted Yorke, “incoming transmission from Fort Valens.”

  Quincannon jogged back to the cruiser, belly bobbing between his braces. Night had come now, and the Josephites were sat at a trestle table, having their supper. They had not offered to share their meal with the Troopers, which Yorke considered a mercy. He’d rather eat his K-rations than the grey gruel the Sisters were serving up.

  The sergeant squeezed himself into the cruiser, and keyed in his reception sign. The two-way screen irised open, and Yorke saw Captain Brittles seated at her desk, fussing with her waves of hair and the two rows of buttons down the front of her tunic. Brittles was always fidgeting with something.

  “Quincannon,” she said, “we’ve got your report. Good work. Nice and concise.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. It’s all cleared up here. Not much else we can do.”

  “Quite.” The captain wasn’t saying something. Yorke saw the shifty look in her eyes. Brittles was the kind of old girl who wasn’t happy unless she had a long-tongued Trooper under her desk working up a shine on her boots, and Yorke could tell when she was gearing up to dish out a zeroid assignment nobody in their right mind would accept. Like now.

  “Permission to circle back to Valens, ma’am? We’ve been out for three days now.”

  “Denied, Quincannon.” She gave a slight smile with a nasty twist in it, and Y
orke wondered if there had ever been anything romantic going on between the Sergeant and the Captain and whether that had anything to do with the way Quincannon’s Troop, of which he was a fully paid-up member, got all the dirty details. “You have new orders coming in. The cruiser will print them out directly.”

  Captain Brittles cut out, and Quincannon said “good bye” to the dead screen. The dashprinter began to gurgitate a strip of paper. Quincannon and Yorke looked at it curling out of its slot. The orders ended and they both sat in the front of the cruiser, putting off the moment. Finally, with a sigh, Quincannon tore the paper free and read it, his face falling as he did so.

  He swore, crushed the paper into a ball, dropped it on the floor, swore again, got out of the cruiser, kicked some sand up, swore extensively—affrighting a pair of Sisters who happened to be passing—and walked away.

  When he was gone, Yorke picked up the paper, uncrushed it, and got a sneak preview of the troop’s orders.

  Yorke swore too.

  You could burn up by day and freeze to death at night in the desert. The Josephites had built a cooking fire, but let it go out. They’d kept warm by going to bed early, although Tyree was damned if she could see what for.

  “No carnal relations,” Yorke kept chuckling, “it hardly seems like living at all.”

  Back at Valens, Yorke had come on to her a couple of times. She hadn’t let anything develop as long as they were in the same Troop together. She didn’t want to divide her loyalties. Still, once she got her cruiser and had maybe a stripe or three on her shoulder, things might change. Kirby was sort of appealing, with his fair hair and crooked smile. He kept making remarks about the way she filled her Cav pants, though, and she was bored with that. Every woman in the service got fed up with cracks about her ass, no matter that tight pants were about the only thing you could wear on a mount without risking a stray fold of cloth getting caught in the workings and causing a flip-up crash. Plus, nobody ever passed remarks about the way certain Sergeants and Troopers of the male persuasion strained the seats of their uniforms with that species of elephantiasis of the butt so common in Americans of a certain age.

  Quincannon had detailed Burnside to requisition some firewood, and get a pot of recaff on. He’d nastily offered a cup to Brother Bailie, but the man had virtuously resisted the temptation. Tyree could tell Bailie missed recaff, and probably other things too. You couldn’t yank out your taste buds and hack off your primary sexual characteristics when you converted to the Church, she knew, although there were sects out there that went in for that sort of thing.

  “Are we really stuck with these damfools, sarge?” asked Burnside.

  Quincannon swilled the last of his recaff about in his tin mug and threw it in the sand. “I’m afraid so. Orders from on high.”

  “General Haycox?”

  “Higher.” Quincannon stuck a cigar in his mouth. “The Prezz himself is behind Elder Seth. Hell, he practically gave away all of Utah. Can you imagine what’d happen if he tried that with California, or New York? He thinks resettlement is a jim-dandy idea, and is backing the Josephite Church up in their scheme to rebuild Salt Lake City.”

  “Then why didn’t he send the army out to guard this convoy ’stead of letting ’em get cut down like dogs by every freakin’ stray and renegade who comes by?”

  A match flared, and the Quince sucked smoke. “I said the Prezz was backing the Josephites, not that he wanted to spend any money on them…”

  Everybody laughed. The federal government was reputed to be bankrupt after the last round of trade incentives and tax cuts. Fort Valens scuttlebutt was that the government was even planning the withdrawal of its portion of the US Cavalry funding next season, and that private individuals and companies would be invited to step in. So far, the rumour mill suggested, the best tenders had come from GenTech, Shochaiku and Walt Disney Enterprises. They could be wearing Mickey Mouse shoulder insignia next year. Tyree thought she would feel a lot less happier having to do or die for some Faceless Corporate Creep than for John Taxpayer. The corps owned enough of the world as it was. Somebody had to be on the side of people.

  “Ollie made a nice speech about the resettlement drive last week, and swore to cash in on any good publicity there might be going if Elder Seth doesn’t get himself killed, but hasn’t got his neck stuck out so far that he’ll look a bozo if the Brothers and Sisters just disappear in the desert.”

  “So what are we along for the ride for?”

  Quincannon exhaled a cloud of smoke. “We’re wagonmasters, Yorke. We’re going along to protect the wagon train from the injuns and the varmints and the outlaws. Like in the first pioneer days, when the West was a virgin wilderness waiting for the farmers to cultivate it.”

  “But that was then…”

  “It wasn’t so long ago. I was born down in Wyoming. Pretty good country it was before it stopped raining and all the grasses dried up and blew away.”

  “There weren’t never no freakin’ grass in Wyoming, sarge. I been there. It’s worse than here. Just sand dunes as far as the eye can see. Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello grew old and died just waiting for the surf to come in.”

  “It wasn’t always like that, Burke. The mid-West used to feed the world. We had enough for ourselves, and some over to spare for other country’s needy folks. Not now, though. It’s all to do with the freakin’ pollution, I heard tell. All the corps pumped their waste sludge into the rivers and the oceans and the water don’t evaporate no more. So it don’t rain no more, and we ain’t got no grain nor grazing land. Funny what some folks will do for money, ain’t it?”

  Burnside was listening to the old man intently. “Is that why the seas are rising?”

  “I suppose so. I was in N’Orleans once, when I was a kid. A right pretty city it was too. Now, I hear it’s half-underwater and all the houses are on stilts. Crazy. My Daddy fought in Europe in WW II. I was born the year that one ended. He used to tell me he’d taken up arms to make a better world, but I guess this ain’t the one he meant.”

  “They say things are better in Russia.”

  Quincannon laughed so hard he started coughing, and coughed so hard he brought up a mouthful of brown spit that hissed in the fire.

  “Oh yeah, Russia. Boy, that is a good one.”

  “What did I say?” Yorke was hurt.

  Quincannon wouldn’t tell him.

  “Quince, did you ever see the Mississippi?” asked Burnside. “Back when it was a river, I mean, before the Great Lakes dried up?”

  “Yeah, I saw the Missus-hip, and the Missouri, and Niagara Falls—that’s Niagara Muddy Trickle these days—and I remember you could swim in the sea off Monterrey without wearin’ a Self-Contained Environment Suit and when New York didn’t have that damn wall to keep the stinking water out. I remember all those things. But when I die, that’ll be it. You can all forget those days and get on with what’s here and now. At least Elder Seth is doing that, coon-crazed as he is.”

  Tyree recalled the sunsets in Elder Seth’s shades, and the iron in his voice.

  “Do you believe in what he’s doing, Quince?,” she asked. “In the resettling?”

  “Hell, Leona, I wish I could. I hauled in a drunken Comanche from that War Party who took on the Bible Belt last month. His people have gone back to the old ways, he said, because the buffalo were going to come back. That ain’t never gonna happen. And the wheat ain’t coming back neither. Just sand, like Kirby Yorke here says. That’s what America’s gonna be. Just sand. Over a hundred years ago there were people in uniforms just like these. They were helping to build up a new nation, to create something. We’re here to stand back while it all falls to pieces. It’s not a thankful task, but someone has to be muleheaded enough to do it, and I guess we elected ourselves.”

  The fire burned low. Out in the desert, something was howling. “And that,” said Quincannon, “sure as hell ain’t a freakin’ buffalo.”

  Quincannon put a Sons of the Pioneers CD on, and hummed al
ong to “Bold Fenian Men” and “I Left My Love.” The cruiser was at the head of the convoy as they passed through a place that had once been called Moroni. It was just a ghost town now. Yorke, out of habit, logged it as still unpopulated. Whenever they saw signs of new habitation, they were supposed to call in and Valens would schedule a check-out sometime soon. It wasn’t exactly illegal to move into a ghost town, but most of the people who thought that sounded like a good idea were into practices that were.

  Ever since the Enderby Amendment of 1985 had, in desperation, opened up the field of law enforcement to private individuals and organizations, Kirby Yorke had wanted to be with one of the Agencies. Sanctioned Ops were the only heroes a kid from the NoGo could have these days. Turner-Harvest-Ramirez got all the glam covers on Road Fighter, and Harry Parfitt of Seattle’s Silver Bullet was always being declared Man of the Month by Guns and Killing, the nation’s best-selling self-sufficiency magazine. There were other kinds of Heat going down all over the country, Agency Ops and stone-crazy Solos who brought in Maniax for bounty and mainly died before they could carve a legend.

  But Yorke knew the only Agency which guaranteed its Ops a life expectancy longer than that of the average mafioso-turned-informer was the United States Cavalry. Its quasi-government status bought it better hardware, better software, better roadware and better uniforms. He had joined up on his 16th birthday, and didn’t plan on mustering out much before his 60th. He wasn’t ambitious like Leona Tyree. In a world of chaos, the Cav offered a nice, orderly way of doing things. He liked being a Trooper, liked the food, liked the pay, liked the life.

  But he didn’t like this detail one bit.