Route 666 Anthology Page 6

  Elder Seth looked at him, his terrible eyes burning.

  The Judge held Larroquette’s elbow in one hand and the ragged stump of his bicep in the other. He pumped a round into the forearm, and straightened the limb out.

  The last snap was louder than all the others.

  The Judge’s hat came off the top of his head with most of his skull wadded into it. Yorke wouldn’t stop screaming. Buildings were on fire. The cockatoo creature ran past Tyree, flaps of fair skin falling away as if a flock of invisible, sharp-beaked birds were attacking.

  Tyree took careful aim and shot Elder Seth three times in the small of the back. The thing that looked like a man turned, and she had the sense not to look into his eyes. That seemed like a good way to go mad or get killed.

  The unseen claws didn’t come to rip her apart, and Elder Seth was walking away, trailing his flock of resettlers. They were singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” with explosions to keep the time instead of drumbeats.

  Her voice came to her, and she found herself singing too. Miraculously, she knew the words…

  “… the beautiful, the beautiful river,

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river

  That flows from the Throne of God.”

  Quincannon was struggling with a Psychopomp and a little man in a blue suit. They were both trying to get knives into his throat. Tyree shot the panzergirl, and the Quince took care of blue suit with a heartpunch. The Sergeant shot her a salute, and floored another assailant with a backhand chop.

  She didn’t return the salute. She dropped her gun, and lurched towards the Josephites, as if pulled by puppetstrings. Her hair was disarrayed by things rushing by in the air. She knew she had to go to the Elder, go with the Elder Her life until now had all been designed to bring her to this point, to set her on the Road to Salt Lake City.

  Chollie Jenevein’s gas tanks went up, and fire was falling all over Spanish Fork. A nice, quiet little town. She saw Burnside slumped against the drug store, dead without a mark on him, his gun still holstered. Yorke was still screaming. The Elder had taken his spectacles back, and the Trooper was scratching Oedipus-fashion at his eyes. Quincannon slapped him, but it had no effect. He dug out a squeezer of morph-plus from his belt-slung medikit, and put the Trooper to sleep. Yorke shut up, but still writhed.

  Elder Seth was walking towards the city limits, ignoring his followers. He had Psychopomps with him now, and a few townsfolk. Everywhere he went, he could guarantee a new set of converts. Whatever his religion really was, she guessed it had nothing to do with the old Church of Joseph and still less with Jesus H. Christ.

  She was hearing him right now. “Six six six.”

  She knew it was madness, but she marched with the crowd, united by love. She knew she was like them, just another sacrificial lamb, just more meat for the juggernaut that rolled down Route 666 to the Apocalypse, but she was happy with her lot. There were arms around her. To her left was an old man, a Josephite, to her right a young girl, a ’pomp. Together, they walked towards the desert. The old man fell, and his Brothers and Sisters walked over him. He was still singing, they were still singing, as their feet broke his ribs.

  The Feelgood was blazing away like a Fourth of July bonfire, and the courthouse was beginning to smoulder. Outside it, there was a five-man gallows that would burn up beautifully. It was a shame nobody was in a mood to appreciate the fireworks and bake potatoes in the ashes later.

  Leona saw Elder Seth leading his Indians and his saints away from the blazes of massacre, his footprints filled with blood, spirits in the air. And she saw him now, exactly the same.

  Someone had hold of her, pulling her away from the ranks of the pilgrims. She struggled, possessed by the need to be with the Elder, and took a slap in the face. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard.

  She didn’t want to be a sacrifice for anyone’s god.

  The Quince was with her now. He was the only other citizen in sight not dead or crazy. He had hauled her out of the procession, and was holding her back.

  “What…?” she began.

  “Hell, Leona, don’t ask.”

  Elder Seth’s party were nearly out of sight now, beyond the walls of fire. Tyree felt shame flood through her, and self-disgust at what she had nearly been. She shuddered, and Quincannon embraced her.

  The cruiser was parked opposite the courthouse. Yorke had driven it into town. Tyree’s motorcyke would be melted metal by now. Quincannon punched his access code into the doorlock, and the cruiser opened for them. They hauled Yorke into the back, and slipped the restraints on him for when he woke up. Then, they drove steadily out of town, being careful to avoid the fires in the road. A mass of twisted, smouldering wreckage blocked their way, and Quincannon had Tyree use the directional cannon to blast a clear path through it.

  When they were out of range of the flying debris, they stopped, and the Quince pressed his head to the steering wheel. It was cool in the cruiser after the heat of the day and the fires, and the soundproofing cut out most of the noise.

  They watched Elder Seth leading his pilgrims down the road to Salt Lake City, and didn’t do a thing to stop them.

  Jazzbeaux had a skullcracker of a headache, and felt her optic dangling on her cheek. Ignoring the pain, she shoved it back into her eyesocket, and adjusted her patch over it. It would keep until she could get a decent cybersurgeon to fix the damn thing. She owed Doc Threadneedle in Dead Rat, Arizona, extra for her last amendments anyway. Without the durium platelocks in her skull, she would have been spilled brains for sure.

  She was in with a pile of corpses, surrounded by smoking ruins, and, for the moment, that suited her just fine. There weren’t any Psychopomps any more. She was just herself again. Her gangbuddies were dead or gone off with the preacherman. Good, she didn’t need any baggage for what she was planning.

  There was a well nearby. Her water-detector had twanged as soon as she crossed the Spanish Fork city limits. Later, she’d get herself a drink and see what she could do about finding herself some food and a transport out of here. There would be no problem with regular citizens. Everyone was dead or gone, and everything left behind was scav.

  Walking away from the mess that had once been Andrew Jean, she reminded herself she had a preacherman to kill.

  For the first time since she took out her Dad, Jazzbeaux felt she really had a purpose on this dull Earth.

  She hoped her old man would be proud of her.

  “Report it in full, Leona, and we’ll be Section-Eighted out of This Man’s Cavalry faster than the Prezz can tell a lie. The way I see it, we were attacked by Psychopomps and had a bad time of it. They pumped us full of ju-ju shots, and that made poor Kirby Yorke lose what sense he had. But we got away, and so did Elder Seth and his resettlers. They’ll be in Salt Lake by now, those that made it through the desert, and they’ll be building. Whatever the Elder is, he’s got himself a plan, and you and I ain’t no part of it. Let’s get back to Fort Valens and on with our lives. We’ll need to live fast and live full, ’cause I reckon we’re about near the end of our times. There’s something going down out there that’s gonna affect all of us in the end. When the time comes, maybe we’ll take up arms again and find out just what Elder Seth is made of. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just be swept away by the fires. This here is the road to Armageddon, and maybe we can just turn round and go back to Valens and hope nothing comes of it, because there sure ain’t much else we can do against someone who can do what he’s just done to Spanish Fork. Six six six. That’s in the Bible, I reckon. Something to do with the Beast of Revelations. The end of the world. Maybe that’s what’s coming. World’s been going to Hell for long enough, maybe we’re just about there now. Maybe… Hell, there’s too many maybes.”

  Quincannon gunned the motor, and drove South. Tyree slumped in her seat, trying to forget Elder Seth’s eyes behind his glasses, trying to ignore the urge to join him in his desert stronghold. They’d had to sedate Yorke again.

  The Quince
took something down from his rooflocker. A bottle. Shochaiku Double-Blend. He wasn’t supposed to have it out on patrol, but he did and she was grateful for it. He twisted off the top and drank from the neck, then passed it to her.

  “I was nearly one of them, Quince.”

  “I know. The way I figure it, Elder Seth was painting the road with blood, as a marker for something. He’s no more a Josephite than Didier Brousset or Pope Georgi. He’s just using them.”

  She took a swing of the booze, and felt warmth in her stomach. In the back, Yorke shifted, crying out in his sleep. She held the bottle.

  Quincannon picked something up off the floor. A piece of paper. It must have fallen from the rooflocker. Tyree craned her neck, trying to get a look, but couldn’t. Quincannon rolled his window down, and threw the paper out. It was whipped away in the air, and lost in the desert.

  To the west, the sun was slowly going down, turning the desert sands the colour of blood.

  “Goodbye, Marilyn,” he said, almost under his breath.

  Note: for further word of what becomes of Elder Seth, Sergeant Quincannon, Jessamyn Bonney (‘Jazzbeaux’) and others, see Jack Yeovil’s forthcoming novels Demon Download and Krokodil Tears.

  Kid Zero and Snake Eyes

  by Brian Craig

  Sure I’ll take a hit—a couple of Lily Pinks. Absinthe to wash ’em down. Who was it you wanted to hear about—Kid Zero? Sure I know Kid Zero. Knew him years ago, before he earned his number, when he was just the Kid. Yeah, I can tell you his story. It’s not so very long—but have another absinthe ready, just in case.

  It all happened down in Texas, on the interstate between Houston and San Antone. There’s a truckstop there called the Underground, run by the Trapdoor Spiders. It really is underground, but it’s quite a big place—rumour said it had been built as a series of nuclear bunkers, back in the days when they cared, but I reckon it was only some kind of storage facility. The Spiders ran the bars, the arcades and a dozen girls; it was a thriving little community, what with the kids the Spiders’ old ladies dropped and the whores’ brats. The Spiders were keen to keep it nice, so they oiled the Ops and the truckers, and made treaties with all the local gangs to keep their fights and vendettas out on the road.

  One of the gangs in the treaty was the Low Numbers, who were a biker team. They followed a guy who called himself Ace the Ace. All three of the Trip brothers were still alive then, and Johnny Hand and Steve the Fin—the meanest guy in the pack was Pete Quint, I guess.

  The Numbers used number-talk to discuss most things, though they’d dress the numbers up in a wacky way, so as not to say them straight out. They’d rate everything from girls to guns, but the ratings would be all disguised and mixed up, so it was sometimes difficult for outsiders to know whether they were saying something was real good or that it really stank. I think the top bracket was seven and the bottom was two, so that anything that was “septic” was top of the tree, but if you ever thought you heard Ace the Ace say something was “juicy” he was really saying “deucy,” which meant it was pretty disgusting.

  The Low Numbers were a pretty quiet bunch. They hijacked water, gas for their choppers, drugs for trade, anyhow and anywhere they could, but they didn’t make a big thing out of hurting people and they didn’t foul their own nest. They got on just fine with the Spiders, and the Ops didn’t hassle them much. Ace the Ace was the kind of guy who’d leave a sucker with a water bottle and enough gas in his tank to give him a chance, and because they mostly knew that, the saps the Numbers shook down were a little less likely to fight like cornered rats than they would have if they figured they had real motorpsychos on their tail.

  Nobody—leastways, nobody outside the gang—knew where the Kid came from. He just turned up in the Underground and signed on. I guess he had some kind of connection with Ace the Ace, or maybe Johnny Hand. He wasn’t anybody’s brother or anything like that—just someone who knew someone from way back when they were street kids… NoGo scavengers in Houston or Dallas.

  The Kid had a light bike with minimum armour, two handguns clipped behind the shield. He was strictly back-up then, to Ace the Ace and the guys with the heavier artillery, but he was good with the pistols… could hit what he aimed at. You’d be surprised how many guys can’t, and just rely on rapid-fire to take the target out.

  The Kid didn’t talk much, didn’t drink much, didn’t do much stuff. Didn’t bother the girls much, either—he had insides made of ice, for all anyone could tell. But some of the girls liked him, and the one who liked him best was Snake Eyes—and that was bad, because there was no way that a Low Number could like a person with a name like that. Snake Eyes is two in craps, and two was a real bad number, in the Low Number way of reckoning.

  It wasn’t Ace the Ace who named her Snake Eyes. The Numbers hadn’t hung the label on her as a curse; she came by it another way. But that didn’t matter. Once she had the name, she was untouchable as far as they were concerned.

  I guess it must have been the Spiders who gave her the name, when she first came into the cathouse. The story went that she’d been used by GenTech’s Bioproducts Division for testing out some new techniques they had in cosmetic surgery—techniques for altering the colour and texture of the skin, and the colour and pattern of the eyes. Somatic engineering, I think they called it—I don’t know for sure.

  Anyhow, she really did have eyes like a snake. She had pupils like vertical slits, and big yellow irises. Some of her skin was like a snake’s, too—bright and polished and scaly, patterned like a coral snake—but I guess that part of the test had mostly failed, because it was all in patches. The left side of her face was mostly converted, but the right was normal. There were a few small patches on her legs, but they looked more like sores than anything else. I never saw her stripped, but I heard that she was patchy like that everywhere else, with no bit of snakeskin larger than a handprint.

  I say that was the story—what I mean is that’s what everybody figured. Everybody except Snake Eyes herself. She said that she’d been born that way, and that her parents had walked away. She said that GenTech had taken her on to try to find a cure, but hadn’t been able to do it. Nobody believed her—we all know that GenTech doesn’t do charity work, and we all know that the BioDiv sees personal enhancement as the next big market—but I think maybe she believed it. Maybe she couldn’t accept that her mommy had sold her for a sackful of baby-blues, so that Gen Tech could use her as a guinea pig.

  Anyway, she had some crazy notion that there had been people like her in times long gone, who were part-woman and part-snake, and who could sometimes change from one into the other. She said people like that were called lamias, and that she was a lamia too, only she didn’t know how to change, because she’d never managed to figure it out.

  Regulars in the Underground would joke about that sometimes. When they saw her going by, wriggling her hips, they’d say: “Hey, Snake Eyes, figured out how to change yet?”

  And she’d say: “Not yet, but better watch out, ’cause when I do, I’ll be poison.”

  Surprisingly enough, she didn’t do so badly as a whore. You’d think that most guys would be turned right off—I sure as hell wouldn’t have paid good money to screw her—but it seems that some fruitcakes like their girls a little weird. Hell, maybe she was extra good at it—I wouldn’t know. Anyway, she earned her keep, and the Spiders looked after her just like all the other girls. She never got pregnant, though. Couldn’t, I guess.

  When people began to notice that she’d taken a shine to the Kid it was a bit of a joke—but the Kid didn’t think it was funny at all. He was a Low Number, and the baby of the gang. He of all people couldn’t get tangled up with someone called Snake Eyes. But he wasn’t actually repelled by her. He didn’t seem to think the scaly patches were horrible, and he didn’t do what most kids in his position would have done, trying to drive her off by making fun of her appearance, saying cruel things. He was always polite to her, like he felt sorry for her underneath, but
he was ice through and through. He wouldn’t touch her; to him she was number two, strictly taboo.

  Now I don’t pretend to understand women. I use ’em when I have to and I don’t when I don’t. No skimmie ever took a shine to me, so I can’t say how a smart chic ought to handle something like that. But what I do know is that what the Kid did was completely wrong. It was neither one thing or the other, nice or nasty, either of which might have helped the shine wear off. Instead, he was nice enough not to hurt her, but still determined to keep his distance. That fed her appetite the way that shit feeds mushrooms—what started as a little absent-minded tenderness grew into a positive obsession.

  It was love with a capital L.

  Well, as you can imagine, the more Snake Eyes got to like the Kid the more she chased him, and the more she chased him the more he tried to stay out of her way. At first Ace the Ace and the other guys were ready to laugh about it, and thought the way he handled it showed what a good Low Number he was, but pretty soon they began to worry that maybe it wasn’t so good to have one of their team being hunted by a walking slice of bad luck.

  It wasn’t so long before a couple of the Numbers’ little expeditions didn’t go as well as they might. Pete Quint got blown away by a sneaker and a couple of bikes got mangled in a contest with a wrapper’s pattern mines. Suddenly, some of the Numbers started wondering aloud if they hadn’t picked up some kind of Jonah, and Ace the Ace was under pressure to kick the Kid right out of the gang.

  Well, Ace was a big guy who didn’t bend easy, and at first he took the Kid’s side, telling the other guys not to be so stupid. But that didn’t work, and the Trip brothers started calling the Kid “Kid Zero,” by which they meant that he was a nothing, no use to the gang. The next time the Low Numbers went riding off to pick up a little jangle money things were a little strained, and the Kid must have felt pretty bad. The Low Numbers weren’t the type to look for trouble, and they didn’t ever say what happened, but I guess they found it and found it bad.