…somewhere in the distance, there was gunfire. Shots were exchanged. Then, nothing. She could hear fires crackling. The thing in pain was out of it now. Spanish Fork, Utah, was another ghost town. She was probably the only thing alive in it. Soon, the predators would lope out of the desert for her. On the road with the Psychopomps, she had seen some pretty weird critters, wolfrat coyotes, subhume vermin, sharkmouth rabbits. They had to eat red meat one day out of seven.
Jessamyn.
Amanda.
Bonney.
She held onto herself, trying to come to the surface of her cranial quicksand.
Jessamyn Amanda Bonney.
Nobody called her that any more. Nobody but cops and ops and soce workers. Not since her old man.
Jessa-MYN, her Dead Daddy whispered in her inner ear, can't you be more sociable?
No, not Jessamyn. She didn't live here any more. Jazzbeaux. She was Jazzbeaux. That was her name in the Psychopomps, that was who she was. Jazz—beaux!
She brought her right hand up to her face. A numbed pain told her two of the fingers were broken. She rubbed her eye, and tried to open it again. The blood crust cracked, and she saw the night sky.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…
… pushing hard with her elbows, she half-sat in the road. Her back ached, but her spine was undamaged. That was something. The Feelgood was a stone shell full of glowing ashes. A half-burned corpse sprawled on the steps, the top of its head gone. That had been the town's boss-man, Judge Colpeper. A wind had come through with the Josephites, and blown away the man's whole world….I wish I may, I wish I might…
…the starlight and the firelight went to her head like a blow, and she blinked uncontrollably. Her damaged implant was leaking biofluid. Delicately, with an unbroken thumb and ringfinger, she eased the ball-shaped doodad back into its socket. The connections were loose, and the optic burner didn't respond to her impulse command. No prob. Doc Threadneedle could fix that. At least, he could if the fault was in the machine rather than in the meat.
She found her eyepatch on the ground, and slipped it on over her optic. She pulled her hair out from over the patchcord, and passed her fingers through it. Blood, dirt and filth came loose. Her broken fingerbones ground painfully.
…have the wish I wish tonight.
… she was more in control now. Soon, she would be able to stand up, able to walk out of here on her own two legs. The chapter was finished, she guessed. Andrew Jean, her lieutenant for the past two years, was a few yards away, skin in shreds, orange beehive hairdo picked lo pieces. The corpse looked as if it had been attacked by dagger-billed birds. The 'pomps who weren't dead had gone off with the preacherman.
The preacher. He was the start of it. Seth was his name. Elder Seth. The Josephite.
He had seemed to be such a nothing, meek and mild in his black suit and wide-brimmed hat, calm behind his mirrorshades, surrounded by his quivering flock.
Such a nothing.
The motorwagons were pulled over to the side of the interstate when the Psychopomps' advance scouts first sighted them. Jazzbeaux was on her way to a pre-arranged duel of honour with the Daughters of the American Revolution. There was a territorial matter to be settled. It was an important fight, and she shouldn't have been conce with petty pickings like the hymn-singers. She could have passed by without rumbling the Josephites, or just given them a light pasting and taken their food and fuel. She had other business to cover, major league business. There was no need to take the time to beat up on the new pioneers.
But there was Elder Seth, standing tall, and smiling just like her old man. On sight, she knew she would have to take him down.
The scav was pathetic. She took Seth's mirrorshades. At first, she just wanted to look into his eyes, to taste his fear. But there was no fear. She hadn't been able to read anything from the ice-chips that stared back at her. Not even when she had Andrew Jean and the others cut out a couple of the pioneers and pizza them across the two-lane blacktop. She remembered the names of the dead. Brother Akins, Brother Finnegan, Brother Dzundza. She never forgot the names of her dead.
She could have killed him then. Done it easy, shoved a gun into his mouth and squeezed off a ScumStopper through the roof of his mouth, exploded his brain.
But she let him live. She took his dark glasses, and let him live. Two mistakes. Bad ones.
… citizens, Psychopomps, Cav. There were lots of casualties. Jazzbeaux had been out of it for most of the fighting, but she could tell from the leavings that things had got serious. Some of the people looked as if they had been torn apart by animals with more in the way of teeth and claws than the Good Lord intended for them to have. Cheeks, a gaudy girl who had been riding with the 'pomps for the last few months, was literally crushed flat into the road, dead eyes staring from a foot-wide face. A farmer was burned to the bone inside his unmarked Oshkosh B'Gosh bib-alls. A black US Cavalryman was slumped against the front window of the drug store, dead without a mark on him. She unbuttoned his holster, and took out his sidearm. She had lost her own gun back in the Feelgood.
The official killing iron was heavier than she was used to, but it would do the job. She unbuckled the yellowlegs' gunbelt, and cinched it around her hips.
Then, she picked up a half-brick and threw it through the drugstore window. Picking the glass away from the display, she reached for a squirter of morph-plus. She exposed her wrist, and jabbed the painkiller into her bloodstream.
Her head clearing slightly, she filled her jacket pockets with pills and ju-jujubes. She popped a glojo capsule into her mouth, and rolled it around on her tongue, not biting into it. The buzz seeped through her body. Some of the pain went away. Some.
There was something strange about the preacher's shades. Jazzbeaux had been wearing them on and off for two days.
They were clearer than regular dark glasses, and did funny things to her. Once or twice, she thought she saw things in the periphery of her vision that couldn't be there. Indistinct things, but somehow unsettling. "Whassamatter, Jazzbie," Andrew Jean had asked, "you a loca ladybug? You're spookola in spades this ayem…"
After a while, she began to get migraines. She took the glasses off, and thought about throwing them away, driving her cyke over them. But she just slung them around her neck.
The world looked real again, but she found herself wanting to put the glasses on again. It was like when she was eight, and Dead Daddy put her on Hero-9 to keep her under control. She had had to wean herself off the dope over a period of years, and still felt the occasional urge for a H-9 hit. This was an irrational longing too, but after a while it became irresistible. She fought it for as long as she could, but it was such a silly thing. She was a War Chief. She wasn't afraid to wear a pair of glasses.
This time, the effect was different. Colours were brighter, but less sharp. There were shadows where there shouldn't be. It was a little like a Hero-9 or Method-! buzz, but without any of the elation. Somehow, with the glasses on, she felt compelled to look back over her shoulder all the time.
Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, Tasha sang on her Ancient Mariner Mambo album, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.