by Jack Yeovil
The kitchen was what she had expected, dominated by an antique cooker and a fridge the size of a Buick. She found some reconstituted milk and some no-brand krill, which gave her a bowlful of mush to eat while the old kettle boiled. There was a plastic model of Redd Harvest’s G-Mek V12 ’Nola Gay in the packet of krill, but the wheels fell off when she ran it across the table.
It occurred to her that most people, her former self included, would not walk away from an attack by a homicidal transvestite and sit down to a healthy breakfast. She knew she was changing inside.
It was something to do with Seth’s magic mirrorshades.
She hadn’t slept, but she felt rested, calm, perfectly balanced. It was as if the fight with Herman had had the effect she would have expected from eight hours on a contoured mattress and a course of Doc Threadneedle’s pick-me-up shots.
The kettle whistled, and she made herself some recaff. Her father always swore while he drank the stuff, claiming to have been raised on real coffee before the CAC stopped exporting from Nicaragua, but she never understood his complaints. She had had real coffee once or twice on the ’pomps’ raids down into Mexico, but it hadn’t seemed special. She preferred recaff. This morning, she could barely taste anything. It was important to fill her stomach, and the warm liquid was nice in her throat, but that was it. There was no pleasure in the old sensations.
On the kitchen table, there was an old, leather-bound book. It had KATZ FAMILY ALBUM embossed on it in gold. She flipped it open. There was a plump baby with Herman Katz’s shining eyes, trussed up in a blue nightie, perched unsteadily on the lap of a haggard young woman. Herman and his mother. The couple recurred over the next few pages, with Herman becoming a child, then a young man, but never losing his startled look, as if the camera flash were a slap in the face. No one else intruded in the pictures, although someone must have been there to point the camera.
The book was half-full of perfectly mounted, perfectly posed snapshots. Then, between two pages, she found about thirty polaroids loose. They were of different people, all women, but from the same view, from behind the mirror in the bathroom of one of the chalets. Women bathed, showered, brushed their teeth, sat on the toilet, peered at the mirror. They were all naked, or nearly so. The latest was no more than two days old. It was Cheeks—dead Cheeks—squatting nude, snorting a line of zooper-blast from her pocket mirror, talking to someone in the bedroom. It had been Jazzbeaux. She remembered the moment. She had been talking about the rumble with the Daughters of the American Revolution, playing with Seth’s glasses, putting them on and taking them off. At the time, with the glasses on, she had imagined she could faintly discern the shape of a skull under Cheeks’ plump face. Now, the memory made her shudder.
She had seen too many ghost skulls, and all under the faces of people who were now dead. For a moment, she vowed never to look in a mirror again, in case she should be able to trace the outlines of her own durium-laced bones. Somewhere along the road, she had picked up a few extra senses, and she would have to learn to live with them.
This book, for instance, turned her stomach. She could see beyond the snapshots, and feel the gradual destruction of little Herman’s personality as his mother became ever more dominant, ever more demanding. No wonder the kid had snapped.
Where was the real Ma Katz?
Jazzbeaux finished her recaff, and pushed the album away. She left the kitchen, and looked up the stairs. There was something up there beyond the landing, in one of the shuttered rooms. She knew it for a fact. It was calling to her, calling inside her head.
“Jessa–myn,” it hissed. It was a woman’s voice, but it reminded her of her father’s whining. “Jessa–myn. Come upstairs, come upstairs.”
She found she was halfway up already, unconsciously obeying the voice. She moved as if she were in a dream, wading through viscous liquid. Nothing mattered, but the voice.
“Jessa–myn, cain’t you be sociable?”
Her headache was back, and her vision was disrupted. With her right eye, she saw the staircase before her, and the landing above, but with the left side of her sight, she was seeing her past replayed. There was her father, bleeding from the throat. There was Andrew Jean, face close to hers, tongue flicking. And there was Elder Seth, baring his teeth as he pushed her face into the asphalt. She shook her head, and tried to rub out the impossible visions. Her broken optic shifted painfully, and she realized she had been seeing out of her empty left eyesocket.
She had lost her eye when she was fifteen, in a brawl with the Gaschuggers outside Welcome, Arizona. She had never missed it until now.
She grabbed the banister and dragged herself upwards. She was under some kind of attack. Nothing new there.
In the darkness inside, Elder Seth laughed silently, his eyes blazing through his mirrorshades. Her face was in his eyes, distorted and shimmering.
She was on the landing now, and it spun around her. She assumed a fighting stance, but couldn’t remain balanced.
The door opposite hung ajar. It creaked as it swung open. The room beyond was mainly dark, but lines of pale daylight stabbed through the slats of battered shutters. The creaking continued when the door was open. Jazzbeaux recognized the noise. It was a rocking chair, its weight shifting from the person in it.
“Mrs Katz?” she asked. There was no reply.
Reflections flashed in the darkness. Suddenly, Jazzbeaux knew whom she was about to face. Elder Seth. In the dark, Seth would be his true self, his human face off but his dark glasses still on.
The rocking carried on. Things scuttled. Rats. The house was filthy, she realized, practically falling to pieces. How could Herman and his mother stand it?
Jazzbeaux held onto the guardrail of the landing, and struggled to control her equilibrium. When she first lost her eye, she had had trouble keeping her balance, but she had thought she had overcome that. Obviously, any knock could send her mind spinning like a top.
She let go of the rail and stepped across the landing. She tottered through the open door. The smell hit her first. It was overpowering. Many things had died in this room and left their stink behind. There was a powerful chemical stench, and a psychic residue of pain and cruelty that was like a punch in the gut.
In the darkness, Ma Katz rocked. Jazzbeaux saw grey hair as the figure’s head passed through the knives of light, and a dress like the one Herman had been wearing in the bathroom.
“Mrs Katz?”
She knew the woman had been dead for a long time. She stepped around the rocking mummy, and pulled the shutters open. Light streamed into the room, and caught the corpse.
It wasn’t so bad, not after the things Jazzbeaux had seen back in Spanish Fork. Herman’s taxidermy was inexpert, but Ma Katz was desiccated rather than rotten.
The dead woman was wearing a pair of sunglasses. They weren’t anything like Seth’s. Pink, heart-shaped Lolita frames and pale blue lenses.
Jazzbeaux turned away and looked out of the window. On the horizon, she could see Spanish Fork still burning. Columns of smoke were drifting up into the sky. That would attract the Road Cavalry soon. She would do well to get out of the area before they turned up. Some of the patrol who had been in the Feelgood could have radioed in a report before things started blowing up, or maybe even got away. She had only seen one corpse in union blue. There had been four in the cruiser.
The creaking behind her stopped, and Jazzbeaux spun around. Ma Katz was shakily standing, impossibly animated. Her glasses shone with reflected sunlight. The creature which should not have been came for her, clawhands jerking.
“Jessa–myn!” it shouted from its dry mouth. It had her father’s voice. It had Elder Seth’s voice.
She cleared her holster, and put a shot into the thing’s chest. A puff of ancient dust came out as the slug went in. Her bullet tore through Ma Katz and spent itself against the wall. The thing kept coming. She shot again, trying for the head. The glasses went wonky as the upper left quarter of the head flew apart. The hair
came off like Herman’s wig, and the papery flesh flaked away from the exploded skull. A glass eye rolled out of its socket.
Something gurgled in Ma Katz’s throat, and the dead woman collapsed in a bony heap.
In her head, the echoes of Seth’s laughter died away.
“Mama,” said a high-pitched voice from the landing.
Herman staggered in, his apron on again, a tray of breakfast things in his hand. He shook, but didn’t spill the milk.
“Mama…”
Jazzbeaux looked at the long-gone creature on the floor, and across to her son. Herman had no adequate response in his emotional repertoire. He set the tray down gently by the bedside, and picked up what was left of the mummy. It came apart in his arms, but he bundled it onto the bed.
“You’ve hurt mother,” he said.
Jazzbeaux tried not to look him in the eye.
“Once I tried to hurt mother, but she got better. She’ll get better this time, won’t she?”
“Yes, Herman,” Jazzbeaux lied. “Everything will get better.”
She left him there, and went out into the desert, not knowing where she was headed, or what she was going through. Inside her head, the lights went out one by one, systems shut down. She walked towards the west, towards the point where the moon had just set. The sand began at the edge of the property. She walked out onto it, her boots sinking in with each step, and left the Katz Motel behind her.
Dead women didn’t walk. Dead women didn’t talk with the voice of Elder Seth. She knew that. But Ma Katz had got out of her rocking chair, and the preacherman had stared at her through the mummy’s glass eyes.
Jazzbeaux walked, trying to reconcile what she knew with what she had seen, what she had felt. As the sun rose higher into the morning sky, circuits went inside her greymass, flaring up and dwindling to ash. She ignored her hurts, and kept walking, dragging her feet a little, but still walking…
In Spanish Fork, the fires began to burn themselves out.
Part Two: The Sandrat
I
In his isolation tank in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle of Joseph, naked but for his mirrorshades, Nguyen Seth sampled Jazzbeaux’s memories. He had access to portions of her mind she herself was losing. He could not tell why he was fascinated with this girl. It had happened before, down through the centuries. He would join in battle or in love so closely with a human that a link was established that worked both ways. Usually, it was a woman or a very young man. Sikander the Greek, Cleopatra, the Maid of Orleans, Aphra Behn, Emily of Haworth, Lizzie B, Rupert Brooke… It took a peculiar collection of qualities to catch his mental eye. It was a weakness, he supposed, but not one he could do anything about. Especially vivid was the period in Jessamyn Bonney’s life between her first meeting with the Josephite motorwagons and the burning of Spanish Fork, when she had worn his spectacles. She had left her imprint upon them, and now her mind overlapped with his whenever he wore the sacred lenses. He felt himself sinking into one of the familiar vignettes…
The Daughters of the American Revolution had been racking up a heavy rep in the past few months. They had total-stumped some US Cav in the Painted Desert, and some were saying they had scratched a Maniax Chapter in the Rockies. But after tonight, their time in the sun was Capital-O Over. And the Psychopomps would rule!
Jazzbeaux pushed a wing of hair back out of her eye, and clipped it into a topknot-tail. She took off the snazzy shades she had taken from the preacherman they’d jump-rammed this morning, and passed them back to Andrew Jean. No sense getting your scav smashed before it was fenced. She beckoned the Daughter forward with her razorfingered glove, and gave the traditional high-pitched ’pomp giggle.
The others behind her joined in, and the giggle sounded throughout the ghost town. Moroni it was called. The War Councils of the gangs had chosen it at random. It was some jerkwater zeroville in Utah nobody gave a byte about.
The Daughter didn’t seem concerned. She was young, maybe seventeen, and obviously blooded. There were fightmarks on her flat face, and she had a figure that owed more to steroids and implants than nature. Her hair was dyed grey and drawn up in a bun, with two needles crossed through it. She wore a pale blue suit, skirt slit up the thigh for combat, and a white blouse. She had a cameo with a picture of George Washington at her throat, and sensible shoes with concealed switchblades. Her acne hadn’t cleared up, and she was trying to look like a dowager.
More than one panzer boy had mistaken the Daughters of the American Revolution for solid citizens, tried the old mug-and-snatch routine, and wound up messily dead. The DAR were very snazz at what they did, which was remembering the founding fathers, upholding the traditional American way of life and torturing and killing people. Personally, Jazzbeaux wasn’t into politics. She called a gangcult a gangcult, but the Daughters tried to sell themselves as a Conservative Pressure Group. They had a male adjunct, the Minutemen, but they were wimpo faghaggs. It was the Daughters you had to be conce with.
“Come for it, switch-bitch,” Jazzbeaux hissed, “come for my knifey-knives!”
The Daughter walked forward, as calm as you please, and with a samurai movement drew the needles out of her hair. They glinted in the torchlight. They were clearly not ornamental. She grinned. Her teeth had been filed and capped with steel. Expensive dental work.
“Just you and me, babe,” Jazzbeaux said, “just you and me.”
The rest of the DAR cadre stood back, humming “America the Beautiful.” The other Psychopomps were silent. This was a formal combat to settle a territorial dispute. Utah and Nevada were up for grabs since the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez and US Cav joint action put the Western Maniax out of business, and Jazzbeaux thought the ’pomps could gain something from a quick fight rather than a long war.
This was not a funfight. This was Serious Business. Jazzbeaux heard they did much the same thing in Japcorp boardrooms.
The Daughter drew signs in the air with her needles. They were dripping something. Psychoactive venom of some sort, Jazzbeaux had heard. Hell, her system had absorbed just about every ju-ju the GenTech labs could leak illegally onto the market, and she was still kicking. And punching, and scratching, and biting.
“You know, pretty-pretty, I hear they’re talkin’ about settlin’ the Miss America pageant like this next anno. You get to do evenin’ dress, and swimwear, and combat fatigues.”
The Daughter growled.
“I wouldn’t give much for your chances of winning the crown, though. You just plain ain’t got the personality.”
Behind her patch, the implant buzzed open, and circuitry lit up. She might need her optic burner. It always made for a grand fightfinisher.
Jazzbeaux held up her ungloved hand, knuckles out, and shimmered the red metal stars implanted in her knucks. Kidstuff. The sign of The Samovar Seven, her fave Russian musickies when she was a kid. She didn’t freak much to the Moscow Beat these days, but she knew Sove Stuff really got to the DAR.
“You commie slit,” sneered the Daughter.
“Who preps your dialogue, sister? Neil Simon?”
Jazzbeaux hummed in the back of her throat. “Unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics…” The ’pomps caught the tune, and joined it. The Daughter’s eyes narrowed. She had stars on one cheek, and stripes on the other. The President of their chapter wore a Miss Liberty spiked hat, and carried a killing torch.
“Take the witchin’ slag down, Jazz-babe,” shrilled Andrew Jean, her lieutenant, always the encouraging soul.
The DAR switched to “My Country ’tis of Thee.” The ’pomps segued to “Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad,” popularized by Vania Vanianova and the Kulture Kossacks.
The Daughter clicked her heels, and made a pass, lunging forwards. Jazzbeaux bent to one side, letting the needle pass over her shoulder, and slammed the Daughter’s midriff with her knee. The spiked pad ripped through the Daughter’s blouse, and grated on the armoured contour-girdle underneath. The Daughter grabbed Jazzbeaux’s neck, and pulled her off her feet.
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Jazzbeaux recognized the move. Her Daddy had tried it on her back in the Denver NoGo.
She bunched her fingers into a sharp cone and stabbed above the Daughter’s girdle-line, aiming for the throat, but the Daughter was too fast, and chopped her wrist, deflecting the blow.
Just what her Dad used to do. “Jessa-myn, cain’t you be sociable?” The low-rent ratskag. Of course, one time his reflexes had been off, and now he was recycled organs.
She danced round the bigger girl, getting a few scratches down the back of her suit, even drawing some blood. The Daughter swung round and Jazzbeaux had to take a fall to avoid the needles.
The ’pomps were chanting and shouting now, while the DAR had fallen silent. That didn’t mean anything.
She was down in the dirt, rolling away from the sharp-toed kicks. The DAR had good intelligence contacts, obviously. The girl had struck her three times on the right thigh, just where the once-broken bone was, and had taken care to stay out of the field of her optic burner. Of course, she had also cut Jazzbeaux’s forehead below the hairline, making her bleed into her regular eye. Anyone would have done that.
But Jazzbeaux was getting her licks in. The Daughter’s left wrist was either broken or sprained, and she couldn’t get a proper grip on her needle. There were spots of her own blood on her suit, so some of Jazzbeaux’s licks must have missed the armour plate. The hagwitch was getting tired, breathing badly, sweating like a sow.
She used her feet, dancing away and flying back, anchoring herself to the broken lamp-post as she launched four rapid kicks to the Daughter’s torso. The girl was shaken. She had dropped both her needles. Jazzbeaux caught her behind the head with a steelheel, and dropped her to the ground. She reared up, but Jazzbeaux was riding her now, knees pressed in tight. She got a full nelson, and sank her claws into the back of her neck, pressing the Daughter’s face to the hard-beaten earth of the street.
