“ Yeah, well, ” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “ that would be us. What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a fag to wanna screw some girlies? ”
“I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip on your lips was just flat-out murder.
Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.
The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.
“Anyhow,” Eddie said. “The kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”
“ Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us, ” the Testostorossa said. “ Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice-and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat. ”
Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked and loaded.
“ I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now, ” the Testostorossa said.” You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me. ”
Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this?
First Quadrant: Las Vitas Fault
From the doorway a roscoe said “Kachow!“ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank… She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose… I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.
“Killer’s Harvest” Spicy Detective July 1938
Radio None
“This is WWAXZY News, every hour, on the hour-sponsored by Big Easy Gumbo, steaming bowls of fishy goodness just like your big fat Momma used to make. Big Easy Gumbo is a property-division of Eidolon Industries SA. Big Easy Gumbo and Your Big Fat Momma are registered trademarks. All rights reserved.
“And our top story, of course, are the rumours that chart-topping B-girl Freak-E has split with her longtime manager and boyfriend, Slee-Z. Freak-E, who is currently topping every corporate datanet download chart with her international superhit ‘Be My Pimp’, is said to be distraught and was unavailable for comment. Slee-Z, on the other hand, couldn’t say enough to our waiting reporters. ‘Yo, b h, wheres my fking money, ho? Think I’m gonna make you a star and then let you start sking the next n a’s dk, think again, b h. Watch yo back yo.’
“Latest reports suggest that Freak-E is currently in talks with king of the New York hip-hop scene, Big Master X, about representing her. You can bet we’ll be bringing you more news on this one as is happens, folks.
“Other news: across the pond in Merrie Olde England, the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has criticised PM Peter Mandelson’s support for the US carpet-bombing of the Confederated Republics of the Congo as, quote, ’The act of a simpering and cowardly little freak, so far up the US President’s crack you’d need a pickaxe to get him out, and the world would be a cleaner place if he’d ran down his mother’s leg.’
“The President was unavailable for comment. The PM himself is currently out of reach of our reporters. The Grand Old man of British politics, however, Sir John Lennon, has issued the statement that, ‘This outburst is simply not how we did politics in my day, and it shames me deeply that this man might be seen, by way of party membership, to have any connection with me in the slightest. I wish to disassociate myself from this execrable little st and his statements entirely.’
“You go tell ’em, Johnny! Rock the House.
“Closer to home, the mysterious outbreak of mass hallucination down in Los Bolivaros has now been explained by declassified footage showing seconded DEA agents burning genetically-modified coca fields as part of a joint operation with Securidad Internationale. The hallucinogenic effects of the toxins released, from a crop destined to become a major component in a whole new breed of Designer Crack, convinced befuddled locals that the very gaping Maw of Hell had opened up to spew creatures born of neither man nor woman, spawn of the Ever and Eternal Screaming Night.
“Uncontrolled bleeding from the eyes and ears of these locals was purely psychosomatic-to believe that creatures spawning from the ever and eternal screaming night truly existed, in any way, shape of form, would be just plain loco.
“‘Besides,’ sez Drugs Czar Karenna Gore Schiff, ‘anyone around to actually witness these hallucinations was drug-running scum, and shooting them in the head to put them out of their misery was better than they deserved.’
“That’s the main news on this hour. Now here’s Freak-E with ‘Be My Pimp’…”
1.
Eddie Kalish crawled on his belly and squinted through the good lens of his goggles. He’d picked them up maybe a year ago, from the crushed remains of a lone motorsickle package-runner who hadn’t needed them anymore.
The mutated coyote that had killed the runner hadn’t wanted them either, leaving them on the corpse after it had fed.
Coyote didn’t have the smarts, or the manipulation, to deal with truly human technology. They just set up these crude and dumb but incredibly complicated apparatuses for dropping rocks on people, without ever quite understanding why.
The bad lens of the goggles was crazed and crusted with liquid-crystal chemicals leaking from the multiple lead-glass sandwich. The good lens, though, could still track and target, zoom in on images and enhance them with some degree of clarity.
Eddie zoomed in, somewhat ineptly, down the mesa to the plain beyond, where steel and polypropylene and meat were being systematically taken apart.
The big Behemoth tankers of a GenTech Corp road-train had fallen foul of a jackgang-a variety of gangcult that, through a tortuous network of fronts and double-blinds, had a connection to some actual Incorporate patron. The patron supplied funding and a market for loot. This meant that large-scale hijacking was practicable, as opposed to pulling down the smalltime shit for the pure hell of it.
The jackgang had actively planned this, maybe over months. Whoever might be funding them had seriously tooled them up.
The road-train front runner, in his zippy little Toledo, had run straight over undetectable carbon fibre tyre-slashers, and smack into crash-barriers that sprang up under one-shot servos. The outriders were taken out by shoulder-mounted STS projectiles, closing off the turning-circle, and the mobile Command and Control unit by mortar, effectively boxing the road-train in.
The jackgangers had then moved in for the kill… only to find that they had walked into a trap of their own. With the concussion of detonation-bolts, three of the Behemoths had split open along pre-stressed fracture lines to reveal GenTech shock-troops armed with heavy-duty weaponry of their own.
In the world of physics, equally matched forces tend towards an equilibrium. In the world of humans possessed of heavy-duty armament, equally matched forces result in sheer bloody chaos.
Eddie decided to leave them to it. Only when the last bodies-or their component parts-were still, did he climb to his feet and head for the battered little Kraut Karrier RV that counted for everything he owned in the world, and thence down the dirt track leading down from the mesa to the plain.