Comeback Tour

by Jack Yeovil

  Sister Addams was sitting glumly on the other side of the skimmer, hands joined in prayer. She seemed resigned to being high tea for the monster. Religion could be a weird thing.

  “I said, give me a gun.”

  Duroc couldn’t believe none of the Josephites were armed. Simone whimpered. The mutant raised its arms, and roared. It was an ugly son of a bitch.

  “Breakfast is for wimps.”

  Fonvielle lifted up his vest and pulled an old army revolver out of his waistband.

  “Mr Prezz…”

  Duroc took the antique, and hoped it wouldn’t blow up in his hand. He thumb-cocked the piece and sighted on the creature.

  All this activity was rocking the skimmer and the copter. But they were too close for him not to get a good shot.

  The bony skull was probably too well protected. And the thick plates over the chest looked tough too. Duroc shot the mutant in the greenish white soft v of its throat. It choked on the slug, and threw itself into the water.

  Duroc emptied the gun at the thing as it dived, lifting up little spouts of seawater. It twisted in the water and punched the sky with a clawed fist, shouting something defiant but incomprehensible, and went under.

  “Freaking yuppies,” said Fonvielle. “I hate ’em worse than poison.”

  II

  Two days on the road, and the trip was going fine. She had taken a turn driving last night, while the Op slept in the back seat. The Cadillac handled well. Krokodil appreciated the machine. Every part was in its place, doing what it was supposed to do. The Cadillac was a fine cocoon, inside which she could ignore the rush of sensations, of information. The thing inside her was dormant, and she was not overwhelmed by its perceptions. She could remember her Jessamyn self. She could remember the Jazzbeaux days, on the road with the Psychopomps. Back then, a fast car, a neat guy, unlimited funds and super-powers might have seemed like the summit of her ambitions. Now, things were different. She felt a driving sense of purpose. It was waiting for her among the flooded silos and rusting gantries of Cape Canaveral.

  The Op had been playing her his old records. He had been reticent at first, but a few words had pressed the right button, and he was pulling out more and more scratchy-sounding vinyl-to-tape-to-CD-to-musichip transfers. She realized she had heard of him before, dimly. She had the idea that he had been quite a big name before she was born. Before her father was born.

  The dashscreen flashed a warning.

  “Bandits,” she said. “One-five.”

  The Op took a look. There were three flying objects, in tight formation, moving fast. Their current course would intercept the Cadillac in two and a half minutes.

  The Op chewed his lower lip.

  “It’s probably government, or corp. Just routine.”

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s an attack formation.”

  He was right.

  Seth must know she was coming. He could scramble some killcopters with no trouble. Her internal workings buzzed, prepped for a fight.

  “Hell, it’s the CAF,” the Op sneered. “Sorry, ma’am. This ain’t your fight, but you’re in it.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I pissed off some nasty guys a couple days ago. Hoodheads.”

  She knew what that meant. In her Jazzbeaux days, she had tangled with the far right gangcults: the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Minutemen, Buckley’s Buckaroos. Down South, they had the Confederate Air Force and the Ku Klux Klan instead.

  The road up ahead exploded, and Elvis swerved the Cadillac into the soggy brush. He flipped a dash-switch, and the underside air-blowers cut in, putting a cushion between the car and the mud. They wouldn’t do for outright swamp, but they should keep the vehicle from getting bogged down.

  The killer birds were overhead now. They had broken formation, and were circling around, dropping charges. Krokodil saw the Stars and Bars stencilled on their underside.

  The Op was as good a driver as she had heard. The long car slalomed between explosions, sustaining barely a graze. Panels slid open on the car’s flanks, and the weapons arms poked out.

  “Rock,” Elvis said, “and roll…”

  That was nothing to do with music. That was the army expression for “lock and load.”

  The lases sliced the air, and one of the spidercopters had to dodge the red beam, going into a difficult spin the pilot only just managed to pull out of.

  “May I?” Krokodil asked.

  “Be my guest…”

  She reached into her hold-all for the M–312 all-purpose combat rifle she had “liberated” from the US Cavalry back in Arizona, when she and Hawk-That-Settles pulled the first of their fund-raising raids on the G-Mek convoys. It was state-of-the-art deathware, with a laser sight, a full clip of minimissile slugs, and enough punch to put one of its charges through the granite wall of a pyramid. Elvis whistled as she unwrapped it from its antistatic cloth.

  “Quite a baby,” he said.

  “She’ll do.”

  The CAF were laying down ground fire now, angling the copter noses towards the dirt and spitting bullets from the twin snoutguns under the armourbubble.

  Krokodil rolled down her window, and squeezed through. This surprised Elvis. But she didn’t have to worry too much about the skeetersting slugs these hoodheads would be packing. And she wanted to get a free shot.

  The wind whipped her ponytail as she pulled herself with ease up onto the roof of the Cadillac.

  She could see the look of astonishment on the haggard face of the pilot of the lead copter. He was wearing a back-turned baseball cap. He paused for a second before pouring some shots into her…

  … and a second was all she needed.

  Getting a firm footing on the reinforced roof of the Cadillac, she raised the M–312 and put the dot of the laser dead centre on the exposed elastic of the pilot’s cap.

  One penetration-plus round was all it took.

  The pilot’s head exploded, and the spidercopter dropped from the sky. Hoodheads rained around it, trying to hurl themselves from the falling machine. Elvis drove in a big semicircle and kept out of range of the explosion, but Krokodil felt the wave of hot air pushing past her.

  The Cadillac’s lase crossed with a beam from one of the other copters, and there was a chain-lightning crackle as the discharges fed back. The CAF weren’t top quality airborne killers. Krokodil reckoned they’d come out second if they took on the Red Baron and his Flying Circus, the Arizona-based aerial gangcult. She put a couple of shots into each of the other copters, to dissuade them from coming in any closer.

  Someone was shooting at them from ground cover now. This had the feel of a well-assembled trap. The Cadillac was crashing through thick grass, and the snipers were well dug-in.

  Krokodil adjusted the M–312, and squirted concentrated napalm in an arc, hoping to start a brushfire that would distract the ground troops.

  One of the copters came too close, and Elvis got off a ground-to-air rocket that took out its right runner and arm-guns. It wavered in the air, and went down for a bumpy landing. Hoodheads poured out, burpguns chattering.

  A stray slug passed through Krokodil’s thigh, putting a grey hole in her karate pyjamas. The lead just grazed her. Her bioflesh tingled as it knit. She wouldn’t even have a graze. Since Dr Threadneedle worked her over, even all her old scars were healing over. One morning, she expected to wake up a virgin again and with her eye grown back.

  She turned around, feeling the wind press her jacket to her back, and potted enough hoodheads to make the others throw themselves flat. She noticed there were two types of bandit in the assault team. The CAF were the hoodheads with red crusader crosses on their camouflage robes and white steeple hats. The others wore brown suits and stetsons and bootlace ties. Krokodil recognized the usual strip of the Good Ole Boys, an Agency she had heard only bad things about.

  The sole remaining copter was hanging on, keeping high enough to be out of range, but staying in the race. A hatch opened in the b
ottom, and four black things dropped into the air. They didn’t fall, they flew like whizzing birds, clawed arms clacking.

  Krokodil recognized the devices as Killer Crabs. They were remote probes that locked in on a human heat pattern and pursued their subjects mercilessly. When they caught up with you, they hugged you with their razor-tipped arms and exploded.

  The Killer Crabs moved too fast for her laser sight to be any use, and so she fell back on her senses. Aiming and firing fast, she exploded two and winged a third. The crippled crab fell out of the sky and burst in the grass. The final drone zigzagged towards her. It was too close for the M–312. She reached into the sky, and snatched it, turning it around so that its arms tried to hug the empty air. The Killer Crab pumped streams of paralyzing nerve-toxin out of its arm, and green splashes marred the roof of the Cadillac.

  Krokodil’s fingers sank through the durium-laced carapace of the crab, and she felt circuit-boards crunch. The Killer Crab sparked, and its legs hung useless. She tossed the piece of junk away.

  They were out of the grass and on a highway again. And there were other ve-hickles in the game. This was moonshine country, and the GOB would need souped-up machines to keep up with the moonrunners. Fifty yards back was a wedge-shaped racing tank with a rear-mounted cannon. Krokodil put a line of slugs across its window, turning the supposedly shatterproof white glass to powder. The tank flipped up and over and exploded.

  Elvis was slowing down. Krokodil looked up front. There was a block across the road. The kind of block the Op wouldn’t drive through.

  Krokodil swore. Her hair had come loose, and was streaming around her face in rat-tails.

  If the GOB had parked a couple of trucks across the road, and set fire to them, then laid down a hundred yards of minimines and caltrop spikes, then Colonel Presley would probably just have cruised on through and trusted the Cadillac’s defences.

  The Cadillac rolled to a halt. Krokodil slipped a new clip into her M–312, but held her fire.

  Strung across the road was a human chain. Men, women and children in ragged work clothes. They must be indentees. They were chained at ankle and wrist. There were one or two white-ish faces in the chain, but the overwhelming majority were black.

  A couple of Good Ole Boys with pumpguns were riding herd on the indentees. There was a small gentleman with white whiskers and a big hat in charge. Krokodil wondered where she had seen him before.

  He took off his hat, and swept the floor with a bow. “Howdy, ma’am,” he said. “Always a pleasure to meet a lady.”

  She sighted the red dot on the crotch of his tan pants. He had an automatic pistol in his hand. It was pointed at the head of a sullen, big-eyed little girl.

  “Now, if you would kindly cayuh to lay down your weapon, then I won’t have to spread this pickaninny’s brains all over the interstate.”

  Krokodil didn’t have time for this. But the Op was already out of the car, without a visible gun and with his hands up.

  “Back off, Chamberlain,” he was saying.

  The pursuit ve-hickles were drawing up around the Cadillac, and Good Ole Boys were pouring out. There were one or two hoodheads left, but most of them had been wasted in the air.

  Krokodil kept her sight steady. Her business was too important for this distraction.

  “You could be singing soprano,” she said to the Southern gentleman.

  The automatic kicked, and the little girl screamed, pressing her hand to her head. Chamberlain had just nicked her ear.

  “Next one will be two inches to the right.”

  Krokodil knew why the Good Ole Boy seemed familiar. She had seen his face recently, but not in the flesh.

  “Krokodil,” said Elvis, “please…”

  She let the dot fall to the ground between Chamberlain’s feet, and set the M–312 on the car roof. Two Good Ole Boys snatched for it, and immediately started arguing over the bone.

  Krokodil stood tall on the Cadillac, feeling the slight breeze in her hair, letting her body relax.

  Inside her, the Ancient Adversary stirred.

  III

  Shiba’s bites were itching badly. He knew he shouldn’t scratch, but he lacked the willpower not to. The backs of his hands were worst. Dotted red with bites this morning, they were covered with nail-tracks this afternoon. The scratching didn’t help, of course. If he got the time, he would ask Mary Louise Blaikley if there was anything he could do.

  He was having to spend the day with Visser, which was not a thing he much relished. There had been another break-in, and a whole stretch of the compound fencing was down. Visser had some of his Good Ole Boys out in the swamp with rifles, tracking whatever large predators were out there. The ground by the fence had been suggestively trampled by something big. Some of the indentees were missing. Shiba wasn’t sure whether they had been taken by the intruder or simply taken the opportunity to run away.

  There was a work gang seeing to the fence now. The indentees worked slowly. Shiba noticed that there was an apparent epidemic of grogginess among them. One woman had just spent five minutes trying to loop a piece of wire around a pole. It was hard to watch. Shiba felt a compulsion to step in and perform the simple action. But that was not done. He was in administration. It was his job to administer. The woman acted as if she were drugged, or struck down with a swamp fever. Shiba would check to see that the indentees were being fed and medicated correctly. GenTech knew how to treat a workforce to get the best out of it.

  There was a thumping sound, and he turned. Two indentees had been carrying a roll of wire, which was now quarter-sunk in a mudpatch.

  “Hey, boys, that there’s ’spensive,” Visser shouted, slapping his truncheon in his hand.

  One of the indentees bent down to get a grip on the wire, and a Good Ole Boy planted a kick on his buttocks. The man took a nasty fall on his face.

  Visser laughed. “Get him one o’ them mudpack beauty treatments, eh?”

  “This is ridiculous, Captain,” Shiba snapped. “How can you expect these people to work if you treat them like this?”

  “’Denties are lazy, sir. You gotta give ’em a couple o’ asskicks a day or they fall behind.”

  The fallen man got up, and a mask of mud fell from his face. Shiba noticed that there was something wrong with his cheek muscles. His lips were pulled away from his teeth in a sardonicus grin.

  “C’mon, Smiley, git back ter work,” sneered the asskicker, administering a light tap with his truncheon.

  The indentee pulled the wire out of the mud. There was a sucking sound, and it came free. His mouth grinned, but hatred glowed in his prominent eyes. His eyelids were drawn back, too. And his tight skin had a grey-greenish pallor that didn’t look healthy.

  “Skeeters got ya?” Visser asked.

  Shiba realized he was clawing at his hands. Some of the bites were leaking a milky pus.

  “Yes.”

  Visser rubbed his belly. “Me, too, chief. Ain’t a place for a natural man, this ain’t.”

  Shiba was inclined to agree, but didn’t want to question the decision of the GenTech committee that had established the research compound, and sent them all here.

  “The work can only be carried out under these conditions, you know that.”

  Visser slapped a bug off his shoulder. “I suppose so. Tell me, chief, don’t you ever wonder just ’zactly what the gol-dang work is?”

  Smiley was unwrapping the wire like a bale of silk, and the other indentees were languidly stretching it out.

  “That’s Dr Blaikley’s department, Captain. I am not qualified to follow it. We’re doing medical research. Important biomedical research.”

  “That, as my ole Daddy used to say, can cover a whole multitude of sins.”

  Shiba’s hands felt as if they were on fire. He also had pains at the base of his spine and the joints of his jaw. They couldn’t be mosquito bites.

  “You don’t look too chipper, chief.”

  Shiba left Visser with the fence crew, and walke
d away. He wanted to get his hands under some cold water.

  Suddenly, it was as if a hot poker had been shoved into his belly. He doubled up, and leaned against a wall. His mouth filled with warm water. There was a drainage sluice in the ground. He vomited neatly into it, feeling the hot pain surge up through his pipes. There was blood in his chyme.

  Shiba straightened his tie and stood up. He patted his hair into place, and walked towards “A” block. His head was pounding now.

  Reuben was outside, getting some feed sacks from the concrete bins. He said something, but Shiba didn’t hear him properly.

  The flaring pain at the corners of his mouth was making him grind his teeth. That was most unhealthy, Shiba knew.

  He remembered the pain of his Blood Banner initiation. This was worse.

  He pushed into “A” block. This was Blaikley’s kingdom. There was a washroom just past reception.

  The duty guard—a Good Ole Boy (Good Ole Girl?) called Serafina—forced him to take a plastic tagbadge, and logged him in. His hands couldn’t work the catch, and she had to pin it on for him. It was as if acid were eating into his skin. Finally, he was officially able to enter the facility.

  Serafina smirked. She obviously thought he needed desperately to urinate.

  He blundered into the washroom, and ran a cold tap, filling a basin. As he stood at the washstand, waiting for the bowl to fill, looking at the floor, a scorpion scuttled out from the waterpipes. It was a freak, with two tails. He crushed it under his shoe. The work blocks were supposed to be kept clean of that sort of vermin. It was most unhygienic, irregular. He would upbraid Blaikley severely.

  The pain was rising up his spine now, as if the vertebrae were being displaced.

  He plunged his hands into the water, and scrubbed viciously. Flakes of skin came away.

  He looked up at the mirror, feeling some relief from the pain. His face shocked him. He could see the bones of his skull shifting, dislocating. A trickle of blood crept from one nostril. His jaw shifted from side to side. This was agony.

  He realized he was screaming. The sink overflowed, and water cascaded around him. He looked at his hand, and saw the new skin that had risen where he had scratched the old away. It was rougher, greener…