The body wanted a cigarette. Like most pre-owned vehicles it came with a smeary residue of the previous occupant's primary addictions. He walked the body back into the bedroom, getting the feel of it. A half full pack of Mild Sevens were among the clutter. He shook one out left-handed and lit it with the flame rose from his right index-finger and he took a deep drag. This Yuma had used his floor as a wardrobe. Clothing was littered along with beer cans, girlie mags, fast food containers, and old newspapers. A tabloid headline read HIT THE DIRT!, another I DONE IT! Slide smelled a shirt. It would do. He did not have time to dress with taste. He could sense a second human who needed neutralizing. Across a living-room that was little more than a couch, a bigger TV with audio-muted porn still pink-skin flickering, and a continuation of the garbage-floor motif, a fat sweat hog wallowed snoring in his disgusting pit. Slide sniffed. "I guess it's a question of wake him or kill him."
Or both, but in which order? The bastard was fat, a real human planet who oozed in enough pre-packaged filth to make the late Yuma look house-proud. Along with the black jeans, Slide had annexed Yuma's scuffed engineer boots. He poked the planet in an approximation of it's equator with the toe of a boot. The mass of offal was in a position as though he had passed out while masturbating, and now he grunted and gurgled with the incomprehension of waking outrage. "Fuck, Johnny? What the fuck? What the fuck?"
"What do they call you?"
The obese man-toad blinked. "You know what I'm called."
"Just tell me."
The fat man looked nervous but also reasonably familiar with the irrational and psychotic. "They call me the Blimp."
"I need money, Blimp."
"Fuck, Johnny, has the geezin' crystal finally Swiss-rolled your brain?."
"Look at me very, very carefully you over-fed fuck. Do you see any trace of your erstwhile homeboy known as one Yuma, Johnny?"
The Blimp looked into Slide's eyes, shook his head hard, and gulped his terror."What the fuck is happening? What are you?"
"You don't need to know."
"But…
"Money?"
"I don't have any money."
Slide knew the Blimp for exactly what he was. Dimes of this, grams of that, deals and fencing shit for ten year-old housebreakers, and then back-recruit them for kiddie porn, and some time a honey with a jones and no money could take a deep breath, close her eyes and suck him off for a taste of that for which she hurt. The Blimp had a cache of cash someplace. No question. Slide appropriated the mind of the fat bastard and sent back to where he, Slide, had just come from, to see if a whiff of the Darogad would get his attention. The saucers were moving in at a more leisurely pace, mopping up whatever was left at least partially alive. The EM blasts were so thick upon the ground they notched a higher resolve than what the grunts and troopers laughingly called reality. Running at a straight and true 447.5 MHz, the too-bad Frequency-of-Satan, they rez-stripped, and roentgened clear and metallic, right to the nerve endings like a sterile, high conductivity, ozone torture. The Blimp got it all and screamed.
"Coffee can!"
Slide saw a Maxwell House coffee can, one of the kind with the trick base they sold in drug paraphernalia stores. He unscrewed it and discovered close to seven hundred dollars in a roll of dirty twenties and hundreds. "And what else do we have here?"
Beside the coffee can was a fancy-ass, fifty caliber Desert Eagle, all new chrome and black plastic, and firing half an inch of Teflon coated slug that could crack the engine block of a city bus in anyone's time zone. Fuck the nine gods, consumer humanity in the twenty-first century, a fucking plague with few if redeeming features.
"You shoulda kept this toy under your pillow."
Slide slid out the clip. Loaded. Better and better.
The Blimp blubbered. "Don't kill me."
"Why not, Fats. Wouldn't I be doing the culture a favor?"
"I'll beg."
The idea of a naked and toad-like fat human groveling for his life was a little more than Slide could take so soon in the sector, but, instead of the shooting him, because, even in this dogbreath reality, it might have attracted attention, he flipped him back into the battle field illusion. The Blimp then commenced to scream. And the Blimp had cause. In his mind, he was naked among the dead. Not a fucking thing to do about it; no available refuge, no shelter from the hard-rain, or the knowledge that, on a carpet torrent of plasma projections, the flying saucers would drift silently and majestically forward for the finally mopping up, the phase of defeat when decimation turned to extermination.
"Shut the fuck up, or I'll gouge out your eyes in the here and now and really give you something to scream about."
The Blimp fell silent. Now he only squirmed, although at the same time achieving a small and flaccid erection. Slide didn't want to guess what the Blimp found to be a turn on. Instead he looked for a phone amid the slovenly trash. "Gotta find out if Doc Zen's operating."
10-10-666-07-9990-8786-15
Three blocks away, Nuygen von Bulow picked up the intercept, and smiled triumphantly at The Humiliation. "Just as I predicted. He's looking for Doc Zen." Nuygen von Bulow was an entity that, had Slide know she was listening to his call, would have evoked in him, among other more violent reactions, a curse on himself for a bad bout of overweening veteran's contempt. He'd landed at random in twenty-one dogbreath in the twilight of its techno-gods, and might be forgiven for not expecting high-test trouble to be ready and waiting. He knew better than that. He knew that, in the Fullness, all things were possible and nothing is forgiven. The last time that Yancey Slide had seen Nuygen von Bulow she had been felating a High-Soviet Knight of the KGB with a pistol to her head, and since it was Slide who had precipitated her into the less than welcome predicament, even for the creative von Bulow, he would not have
doubted she meant him anything but harm at that moment. Yancey Slide had been at odds with Nuygen von Bulow ever since he had first met her when she had been the pupil of Shiro Ishi during the notorious human vivisection experiments at Unit 7-31 in Japanese occupied Manchuria, but where Shiro had been at least approximately human, von Bulow was anything but. Shiro himself would certainly attest to this, especially when, in white furs and with a bullwhip, she'd drive him into the snow. She was perhaps a drencrom succubus with ambition, or a mutant demon of a kind he had never previously encountered. She didn't smell demon, but Slide knew how nothing could ever be counted on in this neck of time. "And he doesn't have the faintest inkling I am here."
And the way she smugly seized the testicles of The Humiliation in a slim and black gloved right hand, and with uncommonly long and slender fingers squeezed them triumphantly hard, indicated that was exactly how she wanted it.
All Slide knew was that the phone rang three times and when Doc Zen answered, he sounded dreadful "This had better be fucking good."
"Doc, it's Slide."
"About time you fucking called, do you know how much trouble you're in?"
"What's the time context on the trouble, Doc?"
"From here to fucking eternity, boy. From here to fucking eternity. You're reverberating all over the place."
Story so far: Having deserted the Allies at the height of the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, and escaped capture in a cooch joint by a three-team of Pentecostal Fire Boys, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, exits into an Earth Urban C21, where he appropriates the body a merzky speedfreak by the name of Johnny Yuma, terminating the mind and incarnation of Yuma in the process. His first goal is to see Doc Zen and find out what's what, but, unknown to Slide, his dimension transit has not gone unobserved.