by Reed King
“I’m not the prince of anything. Haven’t you been listening? I was made during the final administration. I’m a brain-splice patient, nothing more.” He shook his head. “Look, I didn’t mean to mislead you. But when you all came charging into the woods with your swords and your what have you, babbling on about he of the hoof and the silver-tongued god, I wasn’t about to correct you, was I? I mean, I may be a distant cousin of the common ass, but I’m no idiot, and I—”
“Silence.” For the first time, the elder notched his voice toward a shout. “Sorry,” he added, in a normal volume. “But it’s our turn now.”
Everyone’s weapons were up again in a flash, a landscape of metal barrels pointing like shame-on-you fingers, a crosshatch of weapons. If anyone fired, everyone would fire.
“As a missionary and representative of God’s Army, with the authority vested in me by the New Kingdom of Utah”—the elder’s voice rolled out in the silence—“I sentence every one of you to die.”
Then he pulled the trigger, and the whole world exploded.
15
They say it ain’t guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people.
But having a gun sure helps.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
The blast dropped me to my knees. I hit the linoleum as metal pinged against metal, wooden rigs exploded, carriages flipped upside down, and sawdust caked the air the color of tree bark.
I rolled between the tractor and a golf cart just as a bullet sang past my ear, pinging a Vespa and leaving a thumbnail-sized dent in its gas pipe. Across the room, Thrasher jerked as a bullet hit him square in the chest. A blood-spatter silhouette went up on the wall behind him like a giant handprint, sticky-wet and dark. I spotted a pair of horns flash between the rigs and prayed Barnaby had by some fat luck survived, but just then a missionary spotted me and I had to duck to avoid getting drilled. A bullet cracked the plaster behind me and showered me in a soft haze of dust.
When I looked up again, there was a girl standing over me, a bright-eyed gazelle with her hair tied back in a ponytail and a 9mm Jericho pointing its nose at me. Her nails were painted pink.
“I like your shirt,” she said, smiling. “Sorry about the muck-up.”
But before she could pull the trigger, half her face blew off and spattered the wall, the floor, even my pants. She hit the ground with a thud and a wet splat, practically on top of me, and I scrabbled backward, my sneakers sliding on a slick of blood and skin as vomit kicked up in my throat.
I spotted Bee behind a sniper’s rifle fifty yards away. As she lifted a hand to wave, four of her fingers vaporized, cleaved by a bullet.
The dead girl’s hand was coiled around her gun. I forced myself to take it, bending back her fingers one by one. It was a stupid thing to be thinking, but I remembered then how amped everyone was when the third-generation WorldBurn came out with improved VR, how the gamer pro-league said it was just like real combat. Bullshit. No sim could shake your head like a steel drum and make sweat slip down your balls and twist your stomach to your tongue. No sim could get the smell of it, guts bleeding out and bowels emptying themselves as bullets passed through them.
Another missionary popped up, and I triggered without thinking. The gun kicked like a salvage horse, but the missionary took a slug right in the chest, cranking backward with his arms outstretched like the Christ who-body they all worshipped.
At least so many hours of WorldBurn had taught me to aim.
A hand locked hold of my elbow. I whipped around, shouting, and only missed pistol-whipping Sammy across the interface by an inch.
“You need to hide,” she said. One of her lenses was shattered, exposing a nest of wiring behind it. Several red lights were blinking over the ridge of her copper-plated cheekbones.
“What happened to you? Were you shot?”
She twirled her head. “Shrapnel. The Militia doesn’t care enough to kill me.” She actually sounded pissed about it. “Listen. You’ve got to find a way out of here, Truckee.”
Another blast of gunfire forced me to the ground before I could ask her how in the hell she expected me to escape with both exits blocked. A rat-a-tat rhythm of gunfire hit the tractor, so many blasts at once that for a moment it rocked up on two wheels and I thought it might come down on top of us. As it slammed to the ground again, the passenger door popped open.
“Go,” Sammy said, and gave me a push. I scrambled up the stepladder and hurtled into the tractor, rolling headfirst into a pile of dingy shag upholstery as bullets pinged the hood.
The upholstery screamed, and tried to kick me in the head.
“Barnaby!” I couldn’t believe it: the little shit was still alive.
If Barnaby had had hands I was sure he would of grabbed my shoulders to shake me. Since he didn’t, he head-butted me instead. “Please, you’ve got to get us out of here. We’re all going to die.”
“Can’t you just wish up a great storm, O Unholy One?” A low blow, but he deserved it.
“I’m sorry.” His eyes were so close to mine, I could see all kinds of gold inside them. “I’m sorry, all right? I got carried away. ‘’Tis the pride of man that shall destroy him.’ That’s from chapter eight of—”
“Your memoir. I know.”
Big surprise, he began to blubber. Snot bubbled up in his nostrils.
“Look, stop crying. We’re safe as mittens for now. We’ll wait it out, and scroll off just as soon as the smoke clears.…”
But no sooner had the word sprung from my mouth than the room sprouted an echo. Smoke. The word came rolling back to me, lobbed up by other voices: smoke! smoke! smoke!
I hitched myself up in the seat and saw flames tonguing an overturned rig. A sharp and acrid stink made my eyes water. Right away, I thought of the barrels of oil stacked in a pyramid against the wall. If even a single spark hit …
Well. It would give brand-new meaning to the term “fire sale.”
“Move,” I told Barnaby, and for a click we danced an awkward tango of fur and flesh. I fumbled for the ignition switch and couldn’t believe it when my fingers closed on a key. I’d never game-played driving a rig this old, but I knew the basic mechanics, and I pedaled hard on the gas. The tractor jumped forward, then stalled out. I’d forgotten all about gears.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” Barnaby was stuffing his mouth full of upholstery in between his blather. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
“Shut your tits, will you?” I spun the wheel backward and manhandled the clutch into reverse. In my rearview, I had a full view of the fire playing hopscotch over the room, ten feet from that pyramid of explosives. In less than a minute we would all be blown to heaven—or hell, depending on what you believed.
This time, the tractor blew straight into a used ice van, swinging it left and sweeping the legs out from under another missionary. My mitts were so sweaty I could barely handle the gears.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I muttered. For a second the engine growled its displeasure, and we were frozen, wheels spinning, pinned in place.
But then, suddenly, we were free. We lurched forward, toppling a salvage horse and scattering it into metal pieces.
Then a bloody hand came down on the hood.
I slammed on the brakes, so hard Barnaby slid off the seat and ended up on the floor.
“Stop.” The missionary was maybe thirteen, fourteen. Skinny as a whip. But his gun was the largest motherfucking thing I had ever seen in my life. It looked like an elephant gun and an Uzi got in a tussle and called it quits by breeding.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I ask you, please, to stop.”
“Go!” the goat bleated. “Go!”
But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t so much as twitch. If I did, I knew the kid would turn my face to pastry. And even though he was leaning like a crumb drunk off moonshine, his aim was perfectly steady.
I really didn’t want to have to run him over.
“Listen to me,” I said. “If we don’t get out of here, we’re all going to die. Okay?”
The kid’s lashes were surprisingly dark. Another detail the sims never got right: the humanness of it. “There is no death for the soldiers of God,” he said. “Only home.”
Behind him, a giant shadow shook off a bit of smoke and turned into Tiny Tim.
My relief was electric. “You’re outgunned,” I said. “Let us go, or my friend behind you will twig your neck.”
The missionary didn’t even turn around. “The Straw Man? He won’t hurt me. He can’t. He has paid for his sins. He will receive God’s forgiveness. He will live.”
Of course, he was right. Tiny Tim couldn’t squash a spider, even a radioactive one: the Straw Procedure made sure of that. “None of us will live. Don’t you get that?” That was the problem with all these fanatics: no common sense. “If you’d just listen to me, if you’d just open the doors—”
I didn’t finish. The tractor leaped. It slammed straight into him, so his jaw cracked against the hood and his gun slid from his hand and let out a volley of sideways shots that went nowhere. Then he was gone beneath us and there was a sickening crunch as we rolled over him. I looked down to see the goat screaming one endless vowel, with a hoof jammed to the gas pedal.
When I looked up, we were headed straight for a steel wall.
“The doors, Tim!” I had to hang out of the open window, pointing, just to get him to understand. “Open the goddamn doors! The doors.”
Maybe he heard me. Or maybe he just understood. Dr. J. C. Straw may have hacked out all Tiny Tim’s violence and most of his smarts, but he didn’t get all of them. Tim slammed the latch free with a fist and shouldered open the doors a half click before we plowed into them.
Taking hold of the exhaust pipe, he swung himself up onto the steps as we passed.
“What a dust-up,” he said, grinning like we were all roaches at a goddamn picnic. “I ain’t seen nothing like that in a long time.”
“Sammy.” I realized then that we’d left Sammy behind. “We have to go back for Sammy!”
“I’m here!” A steel arm flashed in the rearview. Sammy had hooked herself to the fender. “Intact and operational!”
Barnaby was shaking so hard, he could barely clamber back onto the seat. “Thank God,” he panted. “I thought for sure we were going to—”
The rest of his sentence was blasted away in a fist punch of sound. A rolling pressure slammed me forward on the wheel and nearly took Tim off his feet. A rain of debris came down on us, cracking the windshield, pelting us through the windows.
It was one hell of an explosion. By the time I could lift my head, choking on the taste of melted plastic, I saw nothing behind me but smoke, a big empty lot full of mangled metal, and no evidence, at all, of who had won the fight.
16
One of the best places to make sales is the three-hundred-mile border fence that shims BCE Tech and Texas. Shantytowns sprout like wart clusters all along the border, every one of them packed with suckers sweating out some immigration issue. Just be on the lookout for Blythe’s taxmen, or they’ll skim you for 25 percent.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
We made it a full eight hours before the tractor’s front tire blew, luckily on an easy stretch of country road that some roadslicks had obviously been clearing. We rolled almost another half a mile before we had to climb out.
“When the devil gives you lemons, squeeze them in a child’s eye,” Barnaby recited solemnly.
“What should you do when he gives you a talking goat?” I snapped. “’Cause I’m getting pretty hungry.”
Thankfully, he stayed quiet after that.
Tiny Tim suggested we strip the tractor before ditching it. We could grift the usable parts in Granby, and the bling would come in handy; I didn’t know how long it would be before the Federal Corporation’s agents found me.
The road turned to gravel and then to asphalt as it fed us through a sprawl of Old World construction now adapted for the tourists and desperadoes who went this route. Downtown Granby was even bigger than Low Hill: Apart from the usual travel pits, there were dumpy immigration offices and border police stations; holos shouting the way to S&P Plaza and Biotech Belt; pay-for-access portal cafés with employees vaping in the street in front of dim interiors; quality control and food administration; shipping and freight stores, where packages got sent off around the continent on the backs of flesh drones who got paid pennies on the pound.
Innkeepers eyed us from the front stoops where they rolled fresh. Pharmacologists peddled drugs, cure-alls, salves, soaps, tinctures, and powders, plus small bottles of Canadian air.1 A half-dozen currency operators shouted prices and offered to buy, sell, swap. A long line of buyers clotted the road in front of a health bazaar, which advertised blood for sale and a two-for-one tetanus-shot special. The company stores were packed with shake I’d never seen before: enormous violet nukefruit from Halloran-Chyung, Anti-Aging Negative-Calorie Flatcrackers™ from the Real Friends© of the North, Caffeine Productivity Packs from Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated, smoked fish guts and popped cockroaches from the Russian Federation. Blythe must of had half a dozen countries greasing his palm for the right to sell in.
I’d never seen so many different kinds of people either: Androids of all models and generations; grifters icing it out with botcops over correct permits; girls moving in giggling packs; transspecies floats of birds, cats, and foxes, hissing at one another from across the street. Outside a genderless hostel, a few persons were getting heated over the right to self-identify as android. Two perfect tens carved through the crowd bumping hips in unison, and it wasn’t until they were nearly on top of us that I spotted all the metal beneath their NuSkin™ and reckoned them for what they were.
“Sexy Saams,” Sammy whispered. “Don’t look,” she said, when I started to turn. “They’ll have your wallet and your clothes before you can blink. They’re programmed that way.”
There were shifty-eyed men chewing fresh in alleyways, weapons depots selling flavors I’d never even dreamed of, immigration counselors, currency exchanges—all of that life, all of that hustle, flowing toward the border, the famous invisible fence, guarded by 200,000 Texas volunteer militia who shot at the first sign of trouble. Even from a distance, we could hear the rat-a-tat rhythm of their firearms.
We off-loaded our swag at a junk shop for a half-decent price. A sweet little security robot made of hammered alloy suggested we get out of the commercial district if we wanted a bed for the night, so we hunted down a fleabag motel called the Starlite. It was a dingy, out-of-the-way squat, obviously made for dimeheads and johns who peeped the Sexy Saams more than once.
“How much for a room?” I asked the receptionist.
“Depends,” she said, without bothering to turn away from whatever she was watching on her visor. She was enormously fat and suffering from a bad peel that came from trying to kick a shiver habit. “Got rooms by the half hour, hour, or by the night. You want two a room, that’s standard rates. More than that you gotta pay doubles. And the goat’s extra charge, plus a cleaning fee if things get messy.”
“Excuse me,” Barnaby said. This caught the woman’s attention. “I will have you know that goats by and large are an exceptionally clean species, and I am a paragon of personal hygiene.”
“It talks, too, huh?” The woman smiled. Her teeth were crowded and too small for her mouth. “That’s gonna be an extra charge. Can’t have no noise complaints. A hundred Crunchbucks a pop.”
“A hundred Crunchbucks?” That would nearly wipe me of Crunch dollars, even counting the cash we’d pulled from selling off the parts. “You’re kidding, right?”
She shrugged. “Busy season,” she said. “The Texas boys ain’t lettin’ no one past the border, not with all the recent hoo-dunny and talk of the Bozeman Boys and Willa Dirk and her Snake Char
mers2 runnin’ south and retaliatin’.” No wonder we’d heard so much shooting from the border. “But I might think about a discount. Who’s your friend?”
Her eyes slid over my shoulder to Tiny Tim. The ceiling was so low his head nearly grazed the light fixtures.
“The name’s Tiny Tim, ma’am,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”
“We’ll see about that, scarecrow.” She leaned forward and her breasts pooled across the desk like deflated airbags. “They say the cut make your brain as good as a limp noodle. So are you some kind of idiot or what?”
Tiny Tim smiled. “That’s about exactly the measure of it. An idiot through and through.”
She tilted her head like she needed to see him with her nostrils. “They say the cut make some other things go limp too,” she said.
Tiny Tim hitched his grin a little wider. “Well, ma’am, you can’t be right nine out of nine.”
She put both hands on the counter and stood up. It was incredible to watch. It was like the Level-7 Death-Head Volcano that had blasted Annalee and me out of WorldBurn for six straight months back when we still played, like an eruption of human flesh. You couldn’t imagine that there could be so much surface area on a single human being.
“Pin it here for a bit, shorty,” she said to me as she oozed around the counter. “We’ll talk tariff when I’m through.”
The receptionist disappeared with Tiny Tim into the back office and was gone for close to an hour. By the time they came back, I knew four different ways to string God and fuck together in the same sentence, and she’d undergone a major personality swap: she gave us a corner room for half price and a second room free of charge.
“You need anything, just ring down and ask for Mama Hazard,” she told me, dropping a pair of sweat-slicked keys into my palm. I half-expected her to curl up on her desk and start purring.
The elevator was out of order, go figure.
“What’d you do to her?” I asked Tiny Tim as we began the haul to the fourth floor. The stairwell was narrow and strewn with spam. We shimmied by old mattresses, reeking of shiver, still stacked in the landings, and crunched over empty purines and old chlorine tablets.
