It was Bruce who wakened him from an anxious and depressing dream in which naked people roamed a chill blue-gray desert and fought each other with long chrome spears like giant needles. At first he was disoriented and didn't recognize the room. He'd been temporarily housed in a small, faceless motel in back of the Strip. When he realized where he was, he profoundly wished that he was someplace else. "Damn."
He needed a holiday. "Time to move now."
"I feel terrible."
"Let's get going, shall we mate?"
Vickers had slept in his clothes, so all he had to do was to splash water on his face and gather up his belongings. On the way out the door, Bruce reached for the case that contained Vickers' brand new guns. "I'll take that for you."
Vickers halted. "Yeah?"
"It'd be better."
It seemed tactful not to make an issue of it. "Whatever you say."
Bruce took the case and started toward the parking lot. On the way, they passed a line of vending machines.
"You mind if I get some coffee?"
"You'll find everything you need in the car." When Vickers had been told a car would collect him, he'd expected nothing more than that. He was surprised to discover a minor motorcade. A black stretch limo was preceding and followed by a matched pair of lime green Jeep Comanches with inch-thick plexiglass and wire-mesh screens on the windows and windshield. To say the least, he was confused. One moment they were buying him guns and the next they were taking him away; one moment a cracker box motel, the next the red carpet. What did they want with him? What did they want him to do? He was even more confused to discover a nurse waiting for him in the limo. He assumed she was a nurse because she wore a nurse's uniform. She was so totally Vegas that she could just as easily have been a hooker on special assignment. Whichever one, she seemed almost unnaturally calm as she sat with her long legs neatly crossed and the reading light burning in the far corner of the dark-blue leather interior.
"This has to be a joke."
"Something wrong, Mort? Why don't you get in?"
Vickers hesitated and then sat down beside her. Bruce also got in. Vickers was very aware that they were on either side of him.
"I wasn't aware that we were going to a costume party. I was told I was on my way to the desert."
The car was moving.
"You are."
Vickers looked at the woman.
"So why the nurse suit?"
"I'll be administering the medication."
"Medication?"
"You'll be out for part of the trip."
"Out so I don't know where I am?"
"Exactly."
"I'm starting to feel like a prisoner."
"You could look at it like this, sport: you don't have the option of changing your mind anywhere in the near future."
Outside, the night glare of Las Vegas was whipping past. Vickers didn't know the city sufficiently well to be able to work out what direction they were taking. Soon, however, the liquid glare of the opticals was replaced by old fashioned neon. This was only to be expected. They were headed out of town. Vickers explained to himself that there was no percentage in speculating. Somewhere along the line they'd shoot him full of dope and then he'd wake up someplace. He'd be disoriented and the place would undoubtedly be weird. That was assuming he woke at all. The thought had crossed his mind that he might be the subject of a Herbie Mossman merciful execution. He couldn't work out a reason for that, though. It was all too elaborate. So elaborate, in fact, that he did his best to concentrate on the moment. He remembered the coffee. The limo came with a bar, a TV and an Eldo simulator. He helped himself to coffee from the Mr. Coffee built into the bar and then he hesitated. The booze was in plain sight in cut-glass decanters.
"Is there any reason why I shouldn't have a drink? We're not headed into any kind of emergency, are we?"
Bruce shook his head. "Not that I know of."
As Vickers poured himself a scotch, Bruce leaned forward and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels until he found one that was showing reruns of Rogan's Vengeance. Bruce had the manner of someone who made the trip regularly and Vickers wondered how many others had been ferried out to this place in the desert before him. The limo was now running through dark, edge-of-town streets. There was nothing to look at and Vickers' attention was drawn to the TV screen. He discovered with a little consternation that Bruce tended to bare his teeth in a faint but unholy grin during sequences of physical brutality. Even this, though, didn't stop his being sucked in by the flicker of mindless sex and violence. In fact, he was so sucked in that he only looked away when the car slowed to a stop. They were at a city limit checkpoint. Beyond it were the barrancas, the unlit, unpoliced and completely unwanted twilight zones of shanty towns and bum jungles that surround almost all of the sunbelt cities but, in the case of Las Vegas, weren't even acknowledged to exist.
This was something of a puzzle. To drive out of the city through the barrancas meant that you were going somewhere obscure along a rarely used route. As they pulled away from the checkpoint, it was like entering another world. Tin shacks sagged against decaying tract homes. Dead cars, rusted down to their skeletons, formed the basis of even cruder homes. Narrow, rat-run alleys and trenches that were open sewers snaked and zigzagged between the shanties, shacks and hoochies, tightly packed as more and more desperate wanderers daily arrived at a city that didn't want them. Vickers noticed a large plastic freight pod, white in the night. It was the kind they used on the C400 shuttles. It had been dragged from God knows where to house what looked like an entire extended family.
The original road was cracked and overgrown but comparatively clear of obstacles. Neither the limo nor the pair of jeeps showed any inclination to slow down. The limo's deluxe ride gave it a tendency to yaw and wallow on the uneven surface.
Vickers got a firm grip on a handhold and continued to lean forward and peer out of the window. Here and there, it was possible to see the yellow-white glow of what had to be stolen electricity but, for the most part, the only real light was from the fires that had been lit all over. Each one was surrounded by its own circle of figures with their dull brown faces. There were more faces lining the sidewalk. They looked at the limo with an implacable, angry hate. It was the kind of hate that can only be known by those who, in a world that knows it has too many people, have been declared by the rest to be surplus. Fists were raised and some of the faces seemed to be shouting. Urchins ran alongside the car also yelling.
"They'd drag us out and tear us to pieces if they got half the chance."
The nurse didn't seem particularly concerned. "They won't get the chance."
Vickers shook his head. There was just too much fury waiting to erupt. He experienced a brief twinge of shame to be riding in the limousine. It was so much of an affluent, ruling class affront to these people's poverty. If anything, the jeeps were the targets of even more glowering hate. They constituted an even deeper arrogance and more of a sneering threat. Jeep Commanches with protective screens, security glass and garish paint jobs were favorites with all the rabid groups who made a practice of venting their angry fear on the structurals-the Klan, the Red Squads, the Aryan League, the Sons of Davy Crockett and all the other quasi-legal vigilantes who liked to roar into the barrancas to murder and terrorize.