Episode Two
Doing The Jump Without A Body
Johnny Yuma hadn't been able to find any speed. He had been deprived of amphetamine for more than ninety six hours. The Blimp had been monopolizing the living room, smoking some black-sticky bastard-concoction from south of the border, and washing it down with tequila straight from the bottle while watching pay-for-porno on the Russian mob's black satellite. Johnny had tried a couple of hits on the glass and tinfoil burner, but it had only made him want to vomit, which said a great deal for the Blimp's capacity for consumption if nothing for his taste. After a while, Johnny had also found himself sickened by all the cocks, cunts, garter belts, and lousy drum machine music on the big TV, and he retreated to the privacy of his bedroom to seek either death or oblivion. Fourteen Valium had finally put him to sleep, but then he was unable to wake from the nightmare. And was it some fucking nightmare. Usually Johnny Yuma came out his dreams screaming. In this one he was screaming going in. He screamed until he was dizzy, but it didn't make a blind bit of difference. The cacophony just smashed back at him with some Newtonian equal-and-opposite logic, along with a vast reverberating boom, like the towering rhythmic rage of some vast aquatic mammal. Johnny Yuma was submerged in a pit or tank. A pit of worms? Snakes? No. Not alive. Neither vertebrate nor oozing things; they were cables, roiling, squirming, fully articulated, varying in size from a domestic power cord to miro-filaments, some transparent, some blue-black, a scattering of red, and small but crucial coils that glowed bad, alien-with-gangrene green. All seemed controlled by their own innate quasi-intelligence, or maybe a single integrated mind, but that told Johnny Yuma a great secret within itself. He was being changed. Johnny Yuma didn't use phrases like "their own innate quasi-intelligence, or maybe a single integrated mind", dude. But more and more Johnny Yuma wasn't Johnny Yuma anymore.
He was being penetrated with all the symbolic and physical implications that came with the statement. Violated, invaded, fucked; although he wasn't sure if "fucked" applied. To be fucked, even to be raped, implied that whatever or whoever was doing the fucking would remove itself when the rape was complete. Johnny Yuma could detect no such guarantee. The cables appeared to be fixing to stay. They were even adapting him to their liking, sucking, shaping and changing the crucial him all through his being. A TV screen appeared. and with its coming all else was black. His screaming continued but the foldback seemed to have been turned down. The picture on the screen was of huge rabbits, the size of city buses, lolloping down Fifth Avenue in New York City, somewhere in the thirties, snacking on available sidewalk trees. ("How the fuck long is this going to take?")
("How the fuck should I know, I just run the program?")
The screen blipped and vanished and Johnny Yuma was drowning again in the all consuming cables. His mind was no longer working the way it had. All was plastic stretch and distortion. Simple arithmetic flattered. The spot on the dice didn't tally. Insulated vinyl sheathing was coating his brain. His bones were charged, electric, grinding like tortured machinery as they adjusted, but adjusted to what? Again the lights went out and the TV returned. Now the image was much smaller, or maybe distant, as though it had moved away from him. This image was of a woman's hand, with long, extended and carefully shaped fingernails, perfectly finished in paint the color of the flame. They were being roughly hacked short and ragged by a pair of crude kitchen scissors.
"I'm standing here with no fucking body, and wondering how much long it's going to take three very pissed off Pentecostal Fire Boys to figure out what I did, how I did it, and come after me?"
"Fuck you Slide, you go in when you go in."
Johnny Yuma could feel almost nothing left of what he considered himself. He was one with the wires. His identity was slipping away as the scissors chopped the nails. The image vanished and his self awareness with it. Johnny Yuma's final vision was just a tiny white blip that only stayed long enough to extinguish itself and vanish. Bye-bye Johnny.
"Okay, you got the corpus."
"About fucking time."
YUMA/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/SLIDE
Slide hit Earth, fully discorporate, at the start of the twenty first century, but his landfall wasn't as tidy as it should have been. He was on the barrier cusp of the randomly selected dimension and leakthrough was all over in form of minor
front-end and after-images. But that faded as he lined up with the prevailing time stream. What did anyone expect? He'd done the jump without a body. He was free of the Pentacostals, but where the fuck was he? The room in which he found himself was the third floor hovel of some speedfreak, junkie, stained-sheet grahzny, and the way Slide's luck was running, the cadaver was probably wasted from some fatally debilitating retro-virus. He was evidently somewhere, though, and that was an anytime improvement on discorporate time-tidal drifting. Slide sat up and rolled over with very little pain considering the levels of intoxicant abuse to which this body felt like it had been exposed for some protracted period. On the floor by the bed was a pair of narrow black jeans. In the back pocket was a wallet and in the wallet was a driver's license in the name of John Wayne Yumac, but other more trivial documentation that showed the former went by the name of Johnny Yuma. Slide sighed. Johnny Yuma? Give him a fucking break. This sonofabitch probably had warrants out on him. He pulled on the jeans and looked out of the window, over a rusting terminator side of a-city-that-no-one-wanted where rotting railroad spurs had been abandoned by the retreat of heavy industry.
"Choice neighborhood."
Slide knew he shouldn't be too judgmental. Most realities in this quadrant had already fallen to The Empire of the Mole People or the Retards' Crusade. At least this shithole had television. Slide turned on the TV and grazed to what was billed as the Sci-Fi Channel. He expected Star Trek and was pleased when he got it. Admiral Spock on the USS Bounty gave him an approximation of the Q-bias and DZM displacement. As if in confirmation he heard a muffled boom and a distant tremor shook the building. Urban nadsat juvie-bombers in this stream; probably augmented by random arson, and more legit political terror. He guessed he could have done worse although the place was probably overpopulated by feral baby-bouncers, hormone geeks, mindless shvat-whores, and the kinda pukes who collected Nazi empty Zyclon B canisters with letters of authentication. Such was
the detritus of a civilization in free fall but at least in this place Hassan IX would still be underground with his Mu-deer Network and dogpack of Al-zabadi Boys. Later Slide would check who was US President. That would pin the exactitude closer to the parsec.
Slide moved from bedroom to a bathroom which was equally filthy and disgusting, and looked at himself in a cracked and flyblown, flaking mirror. What he saw was a skinny greaser with a Ratfink-copy tattoo, and a death's head ring on the third finger of his left hand. He pushed the lank hair out of his eyes, and rearranged the face to make it more threatening than hunted, more predator than prey, more plausibly demon. In his infinite time, Yancey Slide had occupied more human bodies than he could count, and he knew that, just like all the others, this vehicle of flesh, blood, and toxins would gradually change, and start to look like all the others, but he didn't want to wait. Temporarily satisfied with the adjustments, he splashed water on his face, and took a deep breath. Someway, sometime, he would return to a dimension where he could wild with his own blazing right-fire, but, until them he would play out the hand.