‘You killed him.’
‘He went for me with a laser.’
The bartender held up his hands.
‘It’s nothing to me, kid. I’m just saying that he’s dead. You could leave a twenty for the cleanup crew, though.’
Billy dropped his gun into its holster, and took a hit from the bottle of mescal. He tossed a twenty on to the table, and turned to Angelina.
‘I’ve got to get out of here.’
She picked up her bag.
‘Want me to come with you?’
‘How much is that going to cost?’
She ran a pointed tongue round her blue lips.
‘You just killed a man, honey. You can have me all for free.’
***
She/They moved forward, the two units carrying the fallen third cradled in her/their arms.
Forward, along the blue bridge that cut such a perfect line through the swirling kaleidoscope mists.
Forward, seeking a place of stasis where Her/Their power could be concentrated on healing Her/Their wounds.
Forward, creating the bridge in front of Her/Them.
Forward, with the bridge behind Her/Them smoking and boiling, finally becoming one with the swirling, shining, coloured chaos as Her/Their area of power moved on.
She/They had been alone from the beginning. It was Her/Their choice. The other beings who had, on occasion, used the order that She/They created for their own purposes had been so contaminated with the seeds of chaos that if they appeared too often, She/They had always moved on, removing the field of influence and leaving the area to disruptors and the shimmering mists. There could be no serenity and order where other beings came with their scattering influence. Since the beginning Her/Their being and purpose had been concentrated on creating an order sphere wherein She/They could find the real satisfaction.
She/They had devoted Her/Their infinite existence to that world of white sky, smooth surface resolved into perfect squares of alternate black and white, total density of the solid ground and total purity of clear air.
Her/Their being found its only satisfaction in the poetry of ultimate symmetry, in a purity of form that had been destroyed by the coming of the disruptors.
Her/Their memory of Her/Their life before the disruptors raged across the levels of the finite world was old and clouded. The most She/They could recall from that time was a longing for a cloistered, patterned existence. It came to Her/Them as indistinct fragments of pale contentment. She/They had long abandoned any hope that She/They might regain Her/Their place in that ordered work. The order that now maintained Her/Their being was the single purpose to reconstruct as much as She/They could of that which the disruptors had ruined and destroyed.
Her/Their wounds, the bridge across which She/They travelled, and most particularly the circling, twisting mists that insinuated, attacked and sought to engulf Her/Their sole symbol of order caused Her/Them pain and horror that were unique in Her/Their experience.
Although She/They used the entire residue of energy that was left from Her/Their creation of the bridge to break down, analyse and catalogue these impulses, She/They was intensely aware that the very existence of such phenomena as fear, pain and the awareness of danger had introduced disorder into the heart of Her/Their consciousness.
She/They loathed and hated the impulses that attacked Her/Them, but in that loathing She/They knew that She/They was Her/Their self producing disorder. The silence She/They prized so much was flawed with a high static sound, and the words that formed in it glowed a garish, ugly red, ‘Irregular spiral.’
‘Estimate product to be destructive.’
‘Energy drain approaches critical.’
‘Active destruct move at spiral results in tightening the circuits.’
‘Emergency.’
‘Willeffort fails to negate trend.’
‘Passive acceptance reduces trend but increases spiral motion.’
‘Paradox.’
‘Paradox is not.’
‘Paradox exists therefore is.’
‘Contradiction produced.’
‘Warning warning.’
‘Reduce trend or increase speed.’
‘Solve paradox.’
‘Energy drain.’
The words were burning with a hideous brightness, crackling against themselves. The silence began to break up under the strain of gusts of white noise.
‘Attempt order production by mathematic route out’
‘Product of wave form.’
‘Prime.’
‘Root of wave form.’
‘Prime.’
‘Numerical escape blocked by prime number groups’
‘Out, out, out.’
‘Negative.’
The bridge began to turn, it assumed an elliptical and downward form. Inexorably it started to corkscrew.
‘Class A emergency.’
‘Disorder in terminology.’
‘Terminology by definition is a factor for order.’
‘Disorder as term becomes factor of definition.’
‘Reject.’
‘Rejection tightens spiral.’
‘Stop.’
She/They stopped.
‘Paradox flow up four points’
Cracks appeared in the bridge.
‘Prepare passive state.’
‘Wounds preclude total passivity.’
Her/Their form became spherical, but gradually one side began to flatten and streaks of colour began to creep across Her/Their reflective surface.
‘Wounds render passivity partial.’
She/They resumed the triple form. A large section of the bridge fell away into the mist. Slowly She/They raised the energy wand. It glowed a dull red. She/They stood on the flat side of a blue hemisphere.
Slowly it began to rise, and the silence broke into a scream.
***
If Billy’s mind hadn’t been blown by the killing, it certainly was after Angelina had finished with him. She did everything that Miss Ettie’s girls had ever done to him, and then took him into places that he had never been before.
Her blue skin was strangely cold. Afterwards, he told Reave that it was like fucking an energetic corpse. Fucking was, by no means, the end of it. It was little more than a beginning. After she’d sucked him and brought him on, she rushed him through to a series of numbers that took him higher and higher until he finally blew apart. That wasn’t the end of it, either. She pulled a little induction coil from her bag. It didn’t generate more than maybe ten volts, but it was sufficient to do alarming things to their nerves when each of them held a terminal and their bodies came in contact. Her arms slid round him like blue snakes, and they started again. This time with the added electric jolt.
Billy’s head was spinning and his body was exhausted by the time they’d worked out all the possibilities of the shock machine. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling while Angelina ran her fingernails over his chest.
He was drifting in a half sleep when there was a furious pounding on the door. Billy woke with a start and reached towards the gun in his belt.
‘Who is it?’
‘Never mind who it is, open up.’
Billy carefully got up, and draped a blanket over his shoulder.
‘Hold on, I’m coming.’
Holding his gun in one hand, he opened the door a tiny crack with the other.
It was immediately kicked open and the barrel of a huge .70 calibre recoil-less pistol was shoved under his chin.
‘Police Department, freeze.’
Billy stood perfectly still as a huge beer gut of a man removed his gun, while his equally huge partner held the pistol at his throat.
The Dogbreath Police Department took pride in their appearance. They wore yellow metalflake helmets with a red star on the front and black visors. Their bodies were encased in black PVC one-piece suits with padding on the shoulders, ribs, elbows, crutch and knees, and decorated with a wealth of badges and insignia.