Thus it was that when the entire top of the HumGee split open under a claw and inhuman strength, Drexler was already in the process of bringing up the gun and unloading both barrels.
The shot tore into the thing beyond, opening up a hole within which internal organs gave off their own pale glow.
In this light-or for that matter any other-these organs looked like the insides of nothing on or of this Earth.
For a moment, the creature recoiled, eyes rolling down to regard the wound and jaw yawning open in a moment of imbecilic, even comical, puzzlement.
“Got you, motherfucker,” Drexler snarled, thereby increasing, again, the number of times he had sworn in his life by an actually measurable percentage. “Fuckin’ hurt your ass!”
The moment of incongruous puzzlement passed. The skin of the creature liquefied and flowed over the hole and knitted.
The creature brushed at itself momentarily, and somewhat fussily, with a claw.
Then it reached in, clamped its talons around Drexler’s head and hauled him out of the HumGee, snapping his neck in the process.
This was probably more fortunate than otherwise for Thomas Marlon Drexler, since it meant that he could not feel what the creature did next.
From his immobilised point of view, past the foreground spray of various fluids as the creature went to work with a vengeance, Drexler could see the night sky. The stars burned brightly, in a wide range of colours due to suspended atmospheric pollutants.
The last thing Drexler saw was one of the stars visibly move and expand. Something coming.
Big light coming down.
“Oh shit,” Eddie muttered, increasing the number of times he had sworn in his life by no particular increment at all. “Here comes the backup.”
Hunched up in the lee of a caterpillar-treaded hoist, which he had operated years before under the instruction of Little Deke, life had become quite simple, containing a grand total of two possibilities. Either the thing that had once been Trix Desoto would tire of amusing itself with the NeoGen troops and come sniffing after him, or NeoGen reinforcements would arrive to shoot him in the head.
The latter, it seemed, would be the case.
The big VTOL carrier hung in the air stitching fire into the junkyard. Eddie had scrambled for cover before realising that the VTOL was merely firing tracer-flares to provide snapshot-illumination, maybe for some variety of photosensor-system. This inference gave him no impetus to come out from cover, though, on account of (a) a direct hit from a tracer-flare wouldn’t do him much good, and (b) the little fact that if NeoGen saw him they were gonna shoot him in the head.
As the carrier banked and descended, however, Eddie caught sight of the illuminated logo on its side: GenTech
This wasn’t reinforcement for the bad guys, Eddie Kalish realised belatedly. This was the cavalry.
A drop-hatch opened and a score of impact-armoured troopers hit the dirt. Each of them toted a big MFG, and it would have been more to Eddie’s taste if they hadn’t looked more or less identical to the NeoGen operatives he had seen, but then you can’t have everything.
One of them, presumably the squad-leader, carried a small flatscreen readout, which he was busily consulting.
“ Primary target is forty metres south-southeast,” he ordered through a miniature amplifier. “ Carter and Trant, secure the package. ”
A pair of troopers peeled off and headed in the direction that Eddie vaguely remembered leaving the comatose old guy.
”Track-and-tranque detail, see if you can’t find the silly bitch. Try to take her alive. Try and shock her into latency. The rest of you clean up the area. Standard track and pop…”
Eddie decided that, on the whole, it would probably be better if he made his presence known rather than wait for the troops to come across him. Moving slow and trying to make himself look as unimpressive and unthreatening as possible, which wasn’t hard, he walked from the cover of the hoist and gave the troops a small wave. “Hey, guys..?”
Those of the squad who remained here, maybe ten in all, swung their MFGs toward him instantly.
“ You! ” the squad-leader bellowed. “ Give me your clearance! ”
“What?” said Eddie.
“ Security key-code clearance! Now! ”
“What the fuck?” said Eddie.
Automatic fire from maybe three sources stitched into him, and that was the last thing Eddie Kalish remembered.
Second Quadrant: Section in the Sky
From behind me a roscoe belched “Chow-chow!” A pair of slugs buzzed past my left ear, almost nicked my cranium. Mrs Brantham sagged back against the pillow of the lounge… she was as dead as an iced catfish.
“Veiled Lady” Spicy Detective October 1937
Supplementary Data
The conurbation that would eventually become known simply as the San Angeles Sprawl was built on the processes of overexpansion and of dying back, both happening simultaneously.
That isn’t the oxymoron it might first appear. Population-pressure had been well along the way of thickening up the developments along the routes forming an irregular and somewhat elongated triangle formed by Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego, turning any last vestiges of natural landscape into an urban-landscape, when the ultimate collapse of petrochems as a global source of power had forced human populations to collapse and congeal in a specifically structural manner.
The vast majority of the urban population now subsisted in what were basically corporate hives-fortified and monolithic compound-blocks, resource-regulated and microclimatically controlled, amongst the rubble and wreckage of what was almost literally, now, an urban jungle.
It was, in a sense, as if humanity itself had split itself in two. Those with the ant-like temperament to survive in corporate-controlled culture had holed themselves up in these arcologies; those who were essentially nomadic, or indeed bandits, took to the roads… but when the world splits in two, whatever the sense, there are always those who fall through the cracks.
Sometimes these people gravitated toward settlements, like the ill-fated Las Vitas in New Mexico, and eked out a living on sufferance, servicing those who truly lived out in the wide-open spaces on the simple basis that there has to be somebody who does.
For the most part, though, they ended up crawling through the tenebrous wreckage of cities cannibalised and consolidated into the corporate hives, living in the ruins of the No-Go Zones. Living the best they could, like maggots on the rotting corpse of the old world.
Of course, even amongst the society of maggots on a corpse, or any other parasite or scavenger, there were differing degrees of devolvement and ferality.
There are some who wax fatter than others… and some who don’t.
These had once been the tunnels of the Los Angeles Transit Authority Subway. Never particularly well-regarded or frequented when they had been operational in the first place, years of dereliction had left them choked with the recycling detritus of the ruins and their punctuating corporate compound-blocks above.
Things lived down here in the mix of garbage and toxic sludge, some of them human, some of them not.
A variety of okapi, for example, released by animal rights activists years ago from the Los Angeles City Zoo, had managed to gain purchase here. Turned nocturnal in this endless subterranean night, surviving while all manner of other released creatures died, subsisting on the fronds of a similarly incongruous fungus that had proliferated through the tunnels on escaping from some or other biolab in the world above. Such coincidental survivals might give the more thoughtful pause for thought on the indomitability of biological life.
Not in the case of this particular okapi, though. As it delicately finished its fungus-frond meal and prepared to leave, a meticulously sharpened blade that had once served as one half of a pair of garden shears sliced through its neck and it fell.