None of which had registered immediately, or for some minutes thereafter.
Why are there two half-naked people fucking on the bed beside me?
How weird was that?
Johnny was always boasting about the ‘awesome gigs’ he had had on this bed.
Johnny was full of shit!
When he fucked her it was like he was always in a hurry. Like foreplay was some kind of race. Not that any of Johnny’s girls let him fuck them because he was any kind of latter day Casanova. Johnny knew everybody; Johnny opened doors none of the other shithead ‘agents’ and ‘promoters’ could open. Most important, Johnny had no shame. That was why the little prick had signed Sam Brenckmann up to tour with those redneck no-hopers the Limonville Brothers. Brothers! Jesus, those guys were jerks! The moment she had laid eyes on them she had decided that wherever they came from idiocy ran in the family and that they still allowed brothers and sisters to get married! Miranda hated feeling so guilty about Sam’s gig with the Brothers; just not so much she had wanted to risk upsetting Johnny by trying to talk him out of it. Sam should have treated her better. He should have listened to what she was trying to tell him. The dumb schmuck only had himself to blame…
Miranda blinked in the gloom.
The only illumination was the loom from the hall light coming into the bedroom through the half-open door. She squinted myopically. A big black guy was pumping a chubby white girl with flowers in her hair. He was doing her from behind, very hard, and the girl was gasping snatches of dirty talk, goading him to fuck her ‘deeper’.
The other woman glanced at Miranda, her eyes glazed.
Three in a bed gigs had never rung Miranda’s bell.
The black guy groaned loudly and collapsed on the fat girl. He was sweating heavily, Miranda could smell him. His breath rasped, he coughed, propped himself on his elbows. Oblivious of Miranda’s presence inches away his hips rose and fell as he re-commenced thrusting, faster and faster.
Miranda rolled away, and attempted to sit up.
This turned out to be a really bad mistake.
Her head swam, she leaned forward and retched.
The bathroom might have been a million miles away for all the chance she had of getting to it before she threw up; and inevitably, she was sick in the doorway, on the floor at her feet, on her feet, and on her long, crazily tangled blond hair. On the plus side she felt a little better afterwards. Glancing over her shoulder she discovered that the black guy had turned the fat girl onto her back and was rocking back and forth on top of her; and for a very brief moment she felt so much better she actually started feeling horny, which was not — when all was said and done — a thing that happened very often when she was in Johnny’s bedroom.
There was loud music blaring from the ground floor.
The sound of voices; and the sickly stench of cheap hash were in the air.
Suddenly Miranda desperately needed to get to the bathroom before she pissed herself.
Stumbling into the bathroom it was obvious that it had already been visited by partygoers in a far worse state than she was. She would have been angry or even a little disgusted if she had not just been so sick in her own hair. Pot calling the kettle black and all that shit. Her temples throbbed. Taking pills, any pills that Johnny gave you was never a good idea.
The smell in the bathroom was so bad she opened the window wide.
The cool night air hit her all at once and she almost passed out.
Her head cleared.
“…ALL CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO STAY INDOORS IF THEY ARE UNABLE TO REACH A COMMUNAL PLACE OF SAFETY…”
What?
“…IF THE FALLOUT ALARM SOUNDS STAY INDOORS WITH ALL DOORS AND WINDOWS CLOSED UNTIL THE ALL CLEAR SOUNDS…”
What the fuck?
The booming, muffled sound of the Tannoy was coming from outside in the street.
Did somebody say the word ‘fallout’?
Miranda leaned out of the window.
“…STAY INDOORS…”
A police car was cruising south down Haight Street towards the intersection with Ashbury Street, its lights spinning brightly. There was no other traffic on the road.
None at all.
Fallout alarm…
The music downstairs had stopped.
She heard the radio being tuned, the volume turned up high, and several savage bursts of seething static rising and falling as somebody twirled the tuning dial.
“…THE STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED IN THE BAY AREA AT TWENTY HUNDRED HOURS WEST COAST TIME REMAINS IN EFFECT. THE GOVERNOR HAS ANNOUNCED THAT NATIONAL GUARD UNITS WILL BE DEPLOYED ON THE STREETS AND THAT LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT…”
Miranda suddenly stopped worrying about the vomit in her hair.
The fat girl came out onto the landing as she staggered out of the bathroom.
The fat girl was young, and her fat was puppy fat. The kid would have been pretty if she had not been bawling her eyes out. Miranda thought about being a true sister, of maybe putting her arm around the kid’s shoulders. But the girl rushed towards the stairs before she could act on her fleeting good intentions.
Fallout. States of emergency. The National Guard on the streets. Looters to be shot on sight…
Fallout…
The mad bastards in Washington and the Kremlin had finally done it!
The end of the World was nigh.
Notwithstanding that the end of the World was nigh the big black man was standing in the bedroom door with other things on his mind, watching his distraught fuck mate disappear down the stairs.
Miranda stared dreamily at his very large, semi-erect penis.
That was when she decided she would worry about nuclear fallout and the fate of nations some other time.
Chapter 15
“I don’t know what came over me,” Max Calman muttered, staring at the floor of the small windowless office the base security officers had frog marched him into a few minutes after ‘the incident’.
The Base Security Officer, a major with a face that spoke of a life running through walls in the pursuit of his duties was not buying it. He studied the ashen-faced, blood spattered round shouldered man sitting across the other side of the gun metal table. Looking at the man one would not have believed him capable of beating up his boss. However, in the Base Security Officer’s long experience in the military the harmless looking guys were almost always the most dangerous ones.
“You put your boss in hospital,” he growled like a grizzly with toothache, “and you don’t know what came over you?”
“No.”
Major Paul Gunther had been in uniform thirty-one years. He had started out as a rifleman at Fort Bragg when Herbert Hoover was President. He had first seen combat in China, defending the US Legation in Nanjing from rioters in 1937; and first killed one of his nation’s enemies on Guadalcanal in 1942. He had been commissioned in 1943 and assigned to Douglas MacArthur’s personal staff in command of a headquarters guard platoon in 1944. As a mustang — an enlisted man selected from the ranks for a commission — he had never expected to progress beyond captain, in the event he had been awarded his major’s oak leaf insignia five years ago. Deep into his fiftieth year the posting to Ent Air Force Base was likely to be his swansong; in a couple of years his time would be up, he would take his pension and look for a post at a cadet school or perhaps, possibly as a security consultant with one of the big contractors involved in the SAGE Project.