by Michael Shea
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As always, to Linda
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
1. Chance
2. Starry Night
3. Town Meeting
4. I Hope to God We’re Wrong
5. Target Practice
6. Hollywood
7. The View from Above
8. Deep Shit
9. We Like How You Fork a Bike
10. Much Deeper Shit
11. The Choosers of the Slain
12. The Monster’s Flesh
13. Enlistees and Properties
14. Armaments and Hail
15. The Signing
16. Sunrise Besieged
17. Action
18. The First Movement
19. A Barbecue
20. A Perfect Cameo
21. Bottoms Down
22. Ticking Down
23. Premature Execution
24. Combat
25. Fingers Falter on the Keyboard
26. The Last Entr’acte
27. And the Dead Shall Be Raised
28. Fortress Hollywood
Books by Michael Shea
About the Author
Copyright
I
CHANCE
As the late summer sun neared setting, Jool was working on their winter garden. Curtis came back up from town, two rolls of chicken wire in the little bed of their three-wheeler. He paused just shy of their house, an A-frame cabin they’d finished at last in just under two years. Paused because, in town, he’d heard news he didn’t want to tell her.
She was weeding, her face profiled in the golden light that shadowed the honey-colored slant of her cheekbones. He could see the low swelling of her belly, like the curve of a crescent moon. Four months along. Their baby would be a beautiful blend—his black with her buckskin hues; his frame solid, hers slender.
“Guess what.” she called. “We’ve got a visitor.” Though she said it smiling, there was something sad in her eyes.
“Someone I know?”
“I think so. In a way.” And here the visitor came, loping down the path behind her: a rangy dog, vaguely Lab-shaped with longish blond fur. A big, affable fellow, all tongue and enthusiasm.
And the moment Curtis saw it, he understood what he’d seen in Jool’s face. In a heartbeat he was projected back to that morning in L.A., sitting with thousands of other extras-to-be in the bleachers outside Panoply Studio’s great wall, watching a demo of the monsters they would be facing on the set inside that wall. They’d watched a dog that looked very much like this one come to a gruesome end.
“Damn,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Faces and memories. Their thoughts went inward to fugues of nightmare and adrenalized turmoil they would never forget. It came naturally, then, for Curtis to tell her what he had just learned in town.
She stroked his face and sighed. The sun was just set. Below them Sunrise, in its tree line, had its streetlights on. “I’ll tell Momma and your Auntie Drew,” she said. The house they had built for those two ladies was just in the next vale over from their own. “You go up and tell Chops and Gillian. We’ll meet you for the meeting down in the hall. And this guy? We’ll keep him, right?”
“Sure.”
She smiled. “You sure now? He’s a big eater—already finished the rest of last night’s roast.”
He smiled back. “What do you want to call him?”
“Well, he was lucky to find us,” she said. “Let’s call him Chance.”
II
STARRY NIGHT
Up in the Trinity Mountains, the stars—even when the quarter moon was up—were no feeble thing. The universe was right there on top of you, a pavement of white coals. Their light lay like frost on the grassy slopes and on the grandfather pines in their thousands.
As Gillian bent to the eyepiece of their telescope, Chops watched her, her Native American hair a black so glossy that the stars struck gleams off it.
“Whoa…” she said softly, and Chops, seeing her so tenderly intent, felt a tingle of warmth.
Raising her head, she beckoned him and whispered—as if they must be careful not to disturb the distant galaxy she had just captured for them. “Take a look.”
And peering at it, he in his turn had to say, “Whoa.” It was a tiny egg of light, fuzzy round its edges with a fog of stars: the globular cluster in Orion’s sword.
Gillian, as much Comanche as Miwok, had grown up on one rez after another in Idaho, Washington, and here in Northern California—drifting with different branches of family, with friends—always preferring to live in mountains and forests on their own terms and nowhere bulldozers had made.
Sometimes she’d think of Chops as a wolf who was also her mate. A lean, smallish one, rapt now by this lens on the stars, but always ready to jump at a sound or a scent. She wanted to stroke the bristly fur on the back of his head, but held back so as not to risk startling him.
He’d been born in the Zoo, a hard life in itself. Then he’d been to prison and there suffered scars one couldn’t see. He would never hurt her, but loving him she never touched him unaware.
“Jeez!” he said. “Stars! I never saw them in L.A.”
Gillian had quested in three different mountain ranges through the years of her adolescence. She knew how to fast and find that ghostly unity with the wilderness where hunger and physical extremity made your senses pour out of you like radiation, where all life’s personalities—clawed, fanged, feathered, scaled, and furred—sooner or later showed themselves. Where they met your eyes and let you look into theirs.
Once, a few years ago, a cougar, a well-grown female, came stepping onto a game trail she’d sat by. Such was the big cat’s beauty that when it left, Gillian believed that her wonder had canceled her fear and purchased her life.
Chops’s first quest had begun at sunup yesterday morning five miles higher in the mountains. They had reached the place where they were to diverge—for each one’s vigil must be alone. A deer trail crossed a steep open field of brush and lupen amid spruce forest.
Chops had tried to clarify his feelings toward the quest he was embracing. “I do feel open to all the living things here, but you know I’m armed.” He touched the hilt at the small of his back, his one knife, almost a short-sword. “I can’t help it. I just won’t go unarmed anywhere there’s a chance I might have to protect you.”
“Honey,” she said. “Everyone does it their own way.”
Sitting there a while before parting, just in the pleasure of being together, they could smell the lupen and ferns all around them and the forest-scent washing over them in the breeze. They watched the greens get greener, the sky bluer. The pine skirts crowding the path gave a shudder … and a big brown bear, five hundred pounds at least, came rolling forward.
Gillian knew her for a sow. Worse luck if she had cubs still trailing her—spring was not terribly far behind them after all. No cubs appeared, but the bear paused just before them. Chops seemed to find amazing depths in her little muddy reddish eye
s. To Gillian’s eyes, in that moment, Chops seemed to have borrowed some of the animal’s magnificence.
The bear seemed to see only him, to find something absorbing in that rapt human form. She seemed not to register the disparity between her mass and his. And then with a direct glance at last to Gillian—a glance oddly like a courteous parting nod—the sow had turned and padded on up the trail.
Maybe it wasn’t a proper vision quest. Could you have a joint vision quest? They’d been talking it over since yesterday.
Now, as she was pointing out for Chops the Pleiades, her com purred. She clicked it on, listened, and murmured, “OK. We’re coming down.”
“What’s up?” Chops asked.
“Curtis is coming to meet us. There’s a big meeting, some kinda bad news.”
They capped the telescope and folded its little tripod slowly, still looking up at the stars. They wanted to stay in the peaks, not go down to the valley. But they also knew that if it was the town’s trouble, it had to be theirs too.
Coming the last half mile downslope, the couple paused to look at Sunrise. All the lights of the town were burning, the broad main drag the brightest. The half-dozen branch roads that angled up and downslope of its axis showed lesser lights—glowing windows and porch lights, some yards floodlit to protect gardens from deer and chicken coops from foxes. The whole looked like a jagged little lightning-bolt beneath the starry night.
They paused when they reached the tall new water tower, which marked the town’s upslope rim. Between it and Glacier Avenue spread an industrial fringe of wide lots and hangar-like buildings of various sizes—two lumberyards, a sawmill, a couple machine shops, the automotive repair shop with trouble lights glaring from raised hoods.
Curtis emerged from one of the alleys off Glacier and came across the weedy crackled asphalt to meet them.
“Sorry to drag you down,” he said. He hugged them.
“What’s up?” asked Chops.
“It all happened yesterday, and happened pretty fast. A group of guys came looking for the Rasmussens. Armed guys. And as you’d expect, some of those guys got shot. And, as it turns out, those dead guys are state cops.” Curtis let them take this in.
All Chops said quietly was, “Shit.” But Gillian knew what her mate was thinking. What they were all thinking. Just how far away do you have to go to be free?
“We’re about on time,” Curtis told them. “Smalls is gonna make his report.” He slanted them a look, and they could see his grin in the mix of starlight and streetlights just ahead of them.
“You know, you guys look good. Did you see anything?”
Chops smiled. “Funny you should ask.”
III
TOWN MEETING
They’d never seen the Majestic this full—a quarter of the town must have been there. The movie-house seating was long gone. A half acre of folding chairs, stools, armchairs, and anything else that could be sat on filled the floor, with just crooked pathways branching between them. The tattered screen was still hanging in place, and the low dais in front of it was where Sheriff Smalls now stood waiting for the uproar to die down so he could speak.
Everyone was roaring at once. It was a motley mob Smalls faced, maybe six hundred souls. The majority were second and third generation mountain-born, and these ranged from sheep ranchers in boots and canvas coats, to machinists and lumber-millers in denim and leather, to bikers in leathers with rabid wolves painted on them. Mixed in were the town’s white-collar folks in neat flannel shirts and pressed jeans.
Then there were the relative newcomers to Sunrise, mostly ex-extras like Curtis. Most of these, unlike Curtis, had been Zoo, and hadn’t stopped looking it. Though interspersed with the natives, they were easy to spot, because down in the Zoo, flair is an issue. They had neck tats that put Curtis’s little necklace of blood-drops to shame: barbed wire, ouroboroses, battling squids and dragons wrapped their throats and branched down along their spines. Hair was anything, or half scalp tats, or nothing. Earrings were big—and sometimes big—usually of fierce ugly things devouring their own tails. Nose rings, lip rings clung to faces like crescent moons of gold or platinum. Denim vests tattered from wear bore on their backs demons in gorgeous brocade. Knives hung sheathed behind shoulders, and on some knuckles chromium impactors were implanted.
In all this hubbub Smalls, bulky and half bald, just stood on the dais facing the crowd, his big face slack and shoulders slumped. He made Curtis think of a chained bear, duty-bound to hear, humor, and help if he could this mad mob.
He caught Curtis’s eye, and shouted something twice before Curtis understood and went and closed the old theater’s doors.
Smalls’ mouth worked for a while, completely inaudible. Then he shouted. Then he really shouted, and everyone decided to shut up and listen.
“People … everyone’s been commed. I want as many as possible to hear it together and get some kinda consensus, so that everyone else gets the full picture straight.
“Now for shit-sake don’t interrupt me, please! Lemme lay the whole thing out, because it’s the whole thing needs talking through, because we are lookin at a serious disaster.” New shouts, questions, but just as quick, more voices shushed them. Smalls took a deep breath.
“Yesterday morning six strangers came into town while I was down-county on business. They showed up in pairs in different parts of town, but they were all eggs from the same basket. They all wore up-woods clothes brand-new, synthetic down vests, big new hiking boots, excetera. Four of ’em had face hair, but so barbered it looked just as store-bought as their rigs.
“They went everywhere. In all the bars, all the shops, even the public library. They asked all kinda sly and under-the-table where they could find a man named Elmer Rasmussen. Like it was a mystery.”
That woke some laughter. Any time after 3:00 P.M., Old Elmer would be down in one of the town’s three bars. Not a sot, just a reliable drinker once sundown hove anywhere in sight. Somber Elmer—sitting now right below the dais—ignored the laughter.
“The result,” said Smalls, “was that everybody they asked said they didn’t know any such fella. Then at least twenty of those people went right up to Elmer’s afterward and told him that some strange goons were in town lookin for him.
“Around eleven A.M. Hap Bolger came up half drunk from Shasta, said sure he knew Elmer, and told them where his house was.
“So. The six of those city boys came up on Elmer’s house and stood fanned out in front of it. Their jackets were open and they all had industrial-grade firearms in shoulder rigs showing, but they weren’t showin any I.D. Elmer stepped out on the porch. He had on a jacket but—I guess ten a.m. was kinda early by his standards—was wearing just his boxers.”
A female voice crowed out, “Oh Elmer! I sure wish I coulda seen those bony white legs a yours!”
“Elmer was unarmed,” Smalls went on evenly. “But he had three of his sons an’ four of his grandkids all standing at the front windows on either side of him, and all of them were holdin firearms.
“The lead city boy stepped out an’ told Elmer that him and his brother Rake were under arrest, Rake for murder and Elmer for accessory.”
“That’s a load a horseshit!” roared Elmer Rasmussen, brought out of his brooding by the sense of injustice that seethed in him. “Rake cut that guy with the guy’s own knife after he’d stuck it into Rake first! An’ they both walked away!—well, limped away maybe.”
“Guy just died,” said Smalls.
“More’n a year later!”
“We know it’s bullshit, Elmer!” shouted Smalls. “That’s my point! Just lemme tell everyone, OK? Anyway. Who opened fire first? Who knows? Once you got this kinda situation, someone’s gonna fire an’ everyone else’s gonna follow.
“Now the first important point for everyone to notice comes right here.” Smalls scratched his right arm, an older style motorized prosthetic, which of course never really itched—the scratching a tic of his when he was trying to sort out
problems. “Body armor and all, three of those six fellas were riddled with thirty-ought and were dead or dyin before any of ’em caught on that their own guns weren’t doin anything. I want you to notice this point, folks. They obviously thought they had solid rounds. They were issued bogus ammo an’ didn’t know they were shooting powdered lead!
“The three who weren’t drilled yet took off when it dawned on ’em, commed down a jet-sled from somewhere, and were snatched off the mountain a hundred meters downslope. The only killing they’d managed was of three of themselves. They hit Elmer center-mass, and just gave him some big bruises.”
“They nearly took one a my eyes!” Elmer turned his gaunt, outraged face full on the rest of the audience for the first time. It wore an accent mark of thick red scab where half of his left eyebrow had once dangled its shaggy abundance. Amazed, aggrieved, he said, “They fuckin disfigured me!”
“Anyway,” resumed Smalls, “after the shoot-out we found that the three dead ones did in fact have state licenses on ’em and had the murder warrant. And now Sunrise is ‘corporately accused’ of three counts of homicide. That means all of us, individually accused. Of aggravated homicide against state officers of the peace in performance of their duty—a top-of-the-list capital offense.”
Smalls’ eyes swept the audience. “It seems to me pretty damn plain that all of us have just been framed. That those guys had blanks to ensure that they’d die. We’ve already been informed that the state has enough camera footage of the shoot-out for its so-called ‘deliberations.’ That raft that picked up the survivors must’ve been shootin the whole damn thing! But the short of it is, they’ve informed me—and I quote—that ‘the murder charge will be adjudicated unilaterally by the state.’ We should have a ruling in two to three days.”
Everyone’s voices woke up again, but the noise had a deeper pitch. Doubt and dread could be heard in it. Their voices churned like choppy seas, till someone stood up with the lungs to be heard.
“Why?” It was Cap. He stepped up on the platform.
