People hang from balconies, trees, and poles. Even horses are hauled into the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their teeth in mimicry.
The culmination of this loutish scene is now at hand as drunken cowpokes drag screaming whores out of the cathouses.
"You've given me your last dose, you rotten slut."
"My God, they're hanging women!" Audrey gasps.
"Enough to turn a man to stone," drawls Captain Strobe. "Let's get out of here." Six youths in chaps bar the way.
"In a hurry, stranger?"
"Yes," says Audrey and he kills him with a neck shot. He flops against another boy, deflecting his aim. Audrey and Pu are unbelievable with hand-guns. They boys are all down now or dead.
We walk away and leave them, fair game for any roving band of vigilantes. Before we turn a corner, they are seized by the Hanging Fathers—naked except for their clerical collars. The Hanging Fathers represent one of the sects under the control of the Council of the Selected. They are one of the most powerful organizations in Ba'dan.
We stroll along to the amusement-park section. Here are the elevators, parachute, and roller-coaster gallows and all variations of hanging roulette. "From Russia with Love" is played like Russian roulette. You stand on the trap with the rope around your neck and you get a gun with one live load. You spin the cylinder and then, instead of putting the gun to your own head, you aim at someone in the audience—if you can draw an audience or anyone within range—and if it's the live shell, the shot springs the release. Or maybe some yokel throws a firecracker under the gallows—they'll work up to an atom bomb eventually.
Now the wall of a building flies up and there are thirteen Commies hard at it, and we take off across the park, bullets whistling all around us. We duck behind the elevator-gallows building—ten stories, three hundred feet long.
You start at the tenth floor with a rope around your neck and drop down at express speed, and when the elevator stops a panel flips open and you get popped. And, of course, you can play roulette on the elevators, any odds you want.
Audrey is getting that weak feeling—it's the wet dream of his adolescence, going down very fast in an elevator that suddenly stops. He didn't know what it meant then. Now he just has to try it.
So up to the tenth floor. A red-carpeted corridor runs the length of the building. On one side a Turkish bath, on the other the elevators, green lights showing when the elevator is vacant. Youths, draped in towels or naked, come out of the showers and steam room to importune in the hall.
Audrey beckons imperiously to an attendant: "Do you have a well-equipped think room?"
"Oh yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Very sensible of you, sir, if you don't mind me saying so, sir."
The youths mutter angrily. "Come up here for a free feel."
"Hombre conejo.... Fucking rabbit man."
Inside the think room, the boys put on helmets. There are dials and screens—you can call your shots. Will it be an open elevator? The moon is full. The lights of Yass-Waddah twinkle across the bay.
Audrey could throw a potent curse. Or something with mirrors and video cameras—home movies to show his friends when he has a comfortable little bungalow in a nice residential district of Ba'dan.
Everything is permitted in a think room, so Audrey simply lets himself go. An open elevator or a mirror job? Why not both, one after the other?
POP POP POP
He is spattering death all over Yass-Waddah across the bay. Now he reaches out for the hermaphrodites and transplants of Yass-Waddah.
Two of these creatures undulate in, trilling, "You know what happens now, don't you, Audrey?"
Jerry's head is on the body of a red-haired girl and her head is on his body, long red hair down to his nipples. Audrey gets the Gorgon Queezies at the sight of them.
"We're going to pop you, Audrey."
An open elevator for this one.
"Here you goooooooooo...." Her hair blows up around her head like flames from hell.
POP
Audrey is learning to relax and throw his pops. A fire starts in a warehouse across the bay.
Now for the Big Dipper, which towers eight hundred feet into the night sky, all lit up with twinkling stars. Biggest and fastest roller coaster in the solar system. Like I say, Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.
Audrey stops in a little café he just remembers, up this little street and turn right ... they sit under an arbor and order mint tea and all take a whopping dose of Itchy Tingles.
"You chaps just back up my play. Give me all your Itchy Tingle prana when I pop."
"Sure thing, old sport."
Audrey remembers a very exclusive little shop—you don't get through the door or even find the door unless the proprietor likes your looks. Audrey knows him from Mexico City where Audrey was a private eye in another incarnation.
Inside the shop, he buys winged-Mercury sandals and a helmet with wings from a whooping crane. He tops off the ensemble with a silver wand.
They take a private car on the Big Dipper. Audrey stands with a silver silk noose around his neck, feet apart, knees bent, riding the dips, the wand moving in front of him. Up they go now—up up up up up—Audrey is getting a hard-on ... a dizzy pause and now, the Big Dipper comes down down downdowndown and levels off. Audrey extends his arm and the wand tingles straight for the power plant of Yass-Waddah.
P O P
All the lights in Yass-Waddah go out.
A lecture is being given
Jimmy Lee is checking dials. "We better get out of here fast before they get our range."
We walk over to the shooting galleries and penny arcades on the edge of the plateau. A high electric fence separates Fun City from the vast slum area in Ba'dan that stretches down to the river and extends along the river's banks.
It is 3:00 A.M., a warm electric night, violet haze in the air and the smell of sewage and Coleman lanterns. The pitchmen wear pink shirts, striped pants, and sleeve garters. They have gray night faces, cold eyes, and smooth patter.
One of the shills with a Cockney accent and a thin red acne-scarred face, standing in front of a curtained booth, makes a gesture that is unmistakably obscene and at the same time incomprehensible. Audrey is reminded of an incident from his early adolescence down on Market Street, brass knucks and crooked dice in pawnshop windows and a smooth high-yellow pitchman trying to talk him into a "museum," as he called it.
"Shows all kind masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special."
Audrey does not exactly understand what the man is talking about. He turns and walks abruptly away. The mocking voice of the pitchman follows him.
"Hasta luego, amigo."
We walk on and stop in an all-night restaurant where an old Chinese serves us chili and coffee. He puts a CLOSED sign on the front door and locks it.
"Out this way...."
He shows us out the back door into a weed-grown alley by the fence. Frogs are croaking and the first light of dawn mixes with the red sky. A boy pads up beside us silent as a cat.
"You come with me, mister. Somebody want to talk you."
The boy has a straw-colored face dusted with orange freckles, kinky red hair, and lustrous brown eyes. He is bare-footed and dressed in khaki shorts and shirt. We walk along beside the fence.
"Here."
The boy pulls aside a piece of tar paper. A little green snake slides away. Under the paper is a rusty iron panel set in concrete. We go down a ladder and through a winding passage that smells of sewage and coal gas, out into a narrow street that looks like Algiers of Morocco.
The boy suddenly stops, sniffing like a dog. "In here, quick."