He brought the gun up to bear, and Elvis could see the rifling on the inside of the barrel.
"…but it's also gonna give me a li'l piece of harmless amusement."
Elvis wasn't sure how what happened next happened, but he lived through ten seconds, and was able to breathe again…
Krokodil moved faster than was possible, and Chamberlain swung around to take a shot at her. It went wild. A Good Ole Boy was on the ground, blood coming out of a hole in his throat. Another was up in a tree with a broken back. A hoodhead was holding his ripped guts to his belly.
Krokodil was cartwheeling, her hands bloody and buzzing.
Elvis was in the grass, moving on his elbows. A shot fired overhead. Chamberlain was out to get him.
Krokodil was wrapping a hoodhead into a pretzel shape. Someone was speeding the hell out of the area on a cyke. That might well be a smart move.
There was another shot, and dirt lifted before Elvis's face.
He was down flat by the Cadillac now. A bullet spanged off the bodywork.
Two Good Ole Boys came at Krokodil with electroprods. She put a hand to her face and shifted her eyepatch. A sizzling beam struck out and the two GOB men fell screaming, their heads on fire. Krokodil had an optic burner implanted to replace her missing eye.
Half of the indentees had tried to make a break, dragging the other half with them. A Good Ole Boy with a scattergun jacked in some shells and was ready to bring them down, but Krokodil was behind him, her elbow nutcrackering his neck, and he fell like a broken doll.
She had the scattergun. It went off, and a bloody stetson rolled past Elvis's cover spot.
Most of the enemy would be out of the action by now.
Elvis pulled the car door open, and squirrelled into the passenger seat. He saw Chamberlain through the windscreen. A slug flattened uselessly against the bulletproof glass, and Chamberlain ejected an empty clip, fumbling in his jacket pocket for a spare.
Elvis pulled what he wanted out of the dash, and stepped out of the car.
Krokodil wasn't even breathing heavily. The last of the hoodheads was dead at her feet, still spasming.
Chamberlain had the clip out now, but froze.
Elvis held up the voodoo doll.
"You don't believe in magic, do you?" he said.
The Good Ole Boy rammed the clip into the gun, and sighted at Elvis.
"Careful, you might hit the dolly."
Elvis gripped the doll, feeling the wood strain and crack. Chamberlain looked uncomfortable. His face was red again.
"It's all psychosomatic, you know."
He pulled his tie loose, and his collar button burst.
"It just depends on the victim's credulity."
Chamberlain coughed, and tried to speak. He couldn't.
"You and me, we're not like that, are we?"
Chamberlain threw the gun away.
Elvis dropped the doll in the grass, and Chamberlain spluttered, clutching his throat, cursing…
Krokodil walked over to the car. She seemed almost bored. There was blood on her face and clothes, and several smoke-blackened holes had appeared in her jacket. She pulled the garment off, and wiped her face and hands with it. Her body was bruised, but the skin didn't seem broken at all. She was not self-conscious about her nudity, Elvis saw. She moved like a living statue, and again the Op wondered how much of her was the original girl.
She took an identical suit out of her hold-all, and stepped into the loose pants.
"Enjoying the view?" she said, not at all nastily, but without any invitation either.
"Sorry, ma'am," he gulped. He had been staring. Even Chamberlain, who was drawing in quick, chesty breaths, had been fixing his eyes on her.
She slipped on her jacket and knotted the sash at her waist. With a touch of the vanity she hadn't hitherto suggested, she ran a hand through her unbound hair, tidying it a little. She adjusted her eyepatch over the burner, smiled tightly and said "Ready?" to him.
She slipped into the car, and waited.
Whatever trouble she had been expecting on the journey, this was only a minor instance of it. Elvis was not quite scared by that.
Chamberlain was looking for his gun. Elvis saw it glinting, and kicked it across to the indentees..
A man picked it up, and pressed it to his ankle-lock.
"No," Elvis said, "you'll blow your foot off."
One of the electroprod men had a ring of keys hanging from his belt. He tossed it to the indentee, who unlocked himself, and passed the keys on.
Chamberlain sat glumly, not saying anything.
"The keys will be in their ve-hickles," Elvis told the indentee. "If I were you I'd strike West. You can lose yourself in the Delta country, maybe make it to Texas."
"Thanks, man," he said. Elvis didn't hold out much hope for them. It was a long trip. But the GOBs and the CAF hoodheads had plenty of loose hardware lying around. The runaways would be well-armed, well-wheeled.
All the indentees were free now, rubbing their aching ankles and wrists.
The wounded little girl looked up at Elvis. She had tight curls, and a protruding lower lip. He smiled at her, and patted her head.
"Here," he said, "have a dolly."
He scooped the Robert E. Lee Chamberlain doll out of the grass and gave it to her. She looked at it, unsure. It was an ugly thing, after all.
Chamberlain opened his mouth to protest, but the girl had her thumb over the doll's face. His eyes stared.
It was just a psychosomatic reaction, Elvis told himself.
He looked at the faces of the indentees, and saw the sufferings that had come with their forefathers from Africa. The man he had given the keys looked a lot like a picture he had seen of Robert Johnson, thin and scared and running…
The girl started chewing on the doll's wooden hand. Agony showed on Chamberlain's flabby face.
The girl laughed, and started twisting the doll's head and limbs.
Chamberlain convulsed, kicking the air.
Elvis waved goodbye, and got into the Cadillac.
Krokodil had already turned the ignition. Elvis took the wheel. The automatic windows rose, cutting out Chamberlain's cries.
He saw the girl waving. The doll had come apart in her hands, and she had what looked like red paint on her dress.
As they drove away, Elvis supposed that really had been the last time he would mess with Robert E. Lee Chamberlain.
He wasn't sorry.
V
Since the Prezz touched down, things on the Cape had been really jumping. Fonvielle was being consulted all the time as the Black Hats beavered around the command bunker, trying to hook up the systems again. It was a lot like stringing Christmas tree lights. You had to get every circuit working at the same time, or the whole thing would shoot sparks and fall to pieces. The Black Hats weren't up to the old NASA standards, but they were enthusiastic about the work. It was like the early days again. They were on the threshold, expanding the envelope, strutting out the righteous stuff, spitting up at the sun, holing the doughnut and conquering the high frontier.
"We're reaching out again," Fonvielle told the Prezz as the Big Board started to light up. "We're gonna stick up a hand and grab ourselves a fistful of the sky."
The Prezz just smiled and nodded sagely. He looked a lot different now than the last time they had met. Then, he had been a jowly, growling character, direct and domineering. Now, he was a quiet, confident, smoothly handsome man with a touch of a French accent. Fonvielle was used to the Prezz changing. Over the years, he had taken many new faces, many new bodies. But he was still the Prezz. Fonvielle had taken his oath personally to the President of the United States, and he would stick by it. He had always known that the Prezz would remember, even if the rest of the world forgot. You could count on the White House to be on top of everything.