by Rod Rees
‘Bullshit, man. Ways ah figure it dere ain’t nowun putting no bombs in dat dere hotel.’ Edu unfolded the scruffy piece of paper and studied it. ‘Says in dis note ob yous dat “Dissident agents of the nuJu Independent Retributive Group are attempting to bomb the Hotel du Zulu. Every effort must be made to evacuate the hotel immediately,”’ He eyed the nuJu warily. ‘Ah’m kinda thinking yous blowing me shit. Yeah, ah’m guessing dat you’s wun ov dese agent provocative items sent to fuck up de smoove running of NoirVille.’
‘No, I’m not,’ the nuJu protested. ‘Believe me, there are Zealots trying to blow up the hotel. It’s vital that the hotel’s evacuated. Hundreds of lives depend on it.’
As he stood there towering over the seated nuJu, Edu had to admit that the cat sounded convincing but in his experience the only reliable way of eliciting whether someone was really telling the truth was through the inflicting of pain. With this objective in mind he grabbed the nuJu by the shoulder and made to drag him to his feet. To Edu’s amazement the bastard began screaming even before he’d been thumped, loudly complaining that he had a broken foot. From Edu’s point of view, this was interrogational manna from heaven.
Edu pulled out the steel baton he had holstered on his belt and whacked it hard against the nuJu’s boot. The one thing this proved was that the nuJu sure as Hel wasn’t lying about his foot. He screamed, crashed from his chair and then rolled around in agony on the floor of the café.
‘Hot diggity. Well now, sweet cakes, ah’s gonna ask yous just one more time: is yous jingling my jangles wid all this terrorist shit yous laying on me?’ And just to make sure the nuJu realised he was in earnest, he gave the foot another whack.
‘Yes, yes,’ wailed the man, ‘I’m telling the truth. But for pity’s sake don’t hit me again.’
‘You knows wot, man, if ah gets to thinking yous mouthing make-believe, ah’m gonna work on dat foot ob yours until it’s blown up bigger dan a balloon. But right now yous gonna have to come wid me to de guardhouse so’s we can do some real heavy-duty questioning.’
‘I can’t walk, you fucking numbskull,’ snarled the nuJu, tears of pain trickling from his eyes. ‘And all the time you’re wasting here the sooner the bombs come to exploding.’
There was something in the nuJu’s tone that gave Edu pause, but he smacked his baton hard on the boot just to make sure. ‘Yo’ fo’ real, man?’
It took a moment for the nuJu to stop screaming and to become calm enough to answer. Dealing with the pain radiating out from his busted foot obviously put a crimp on his conversational abilities. ‘Yeah,’ he gasped finally. ‘Please … I beg you … get everybody out of the hotel. Even as we speak Zealots are planting three hundred and fifty kilos of blasting gelatin in the hotel’s kitchen. I’ve been ordered by the JAD’s General Council to warn you so that the people in the hotel can be saved.’
For a moment Edu didn’t quite know what to do, but finally he reached a decision. He pulled a pair of handcuffs from out of his jacket pocket and shackled the nuJu to the table. ‘Now yo’s just hang tight while ah goes’ and sees iffn dis story ob yours is more dan just a pile ob crap. But remember, man, iffn dis is a wild goose chase, ah’s gonna be taking retribution out ob yo’ sorry nuJu ass an’ yo’ even sorrier foot.’
*
Realising that his sergeant wasn’t a great lover of having his pecker pulled, Solomon Edu decided to go check out the nuJu’s story personally before raising the alarm, but being possessed of a cautious temperament, he made sure he had his Colt in his hand when he approached the hotel’s kitchen entrance. That there wasn’t any guard on duty should have tipped him the wink that things were not fine and dandy in Fairyland, but he decided to push his luck a little further and sneak a peek into the kitchens proper.
At first glance there didn’t seem to be anything much amiss, just a couple of busboys helping to move some milk churns around, but this impression of normality didn’t last long. As soon as he was spotted lurking in the doorway, the busboys hauled out pistols and began blasting away at him, bullets whining around his head, pinging off walls and saucepans. Outnumbered and outgunned, Solomon decided to retreat and to retreat at pace, so he charged back down the corridor, screaming and firing his Colt in the general direction of the bad guys as he went. Only by a miracle did he emerge unscathed into daylight.
Now he got lucky. Across the hotel’s backyard he saw his sergeant and the rest of his platoon returning from breakfast. ‘Sergeant,’ he yelled, ‘we’s bin attacked by nuJu gangsters! Dey’s in de kitchen making wiv de—’
Now he got unlucky. He never got to finish the sentence. He took a shot in the back which whirled him around and sent him tumbling to the cobbles. Even as he lay there he saw a nuJu cock his pistol ready to take a second and, by the look of it, a much more accurate shot. Fortunately, the nuJu bastard was deterred by a fusillade of firing coming from the half a dozen black-uniformed HimPeril racing to Edu’s rescue.
*
Stern tried to maintain his composure, though with a firefight going on only a couple of metres away and bullets whizzing around his head he was finding it bloody difficult to remain calm, cool and collected. He had to find a way to escape.
In order to obviate the risk of the Shades being able to defuse the bombs, he had equipped each of the churns with an anti-tamper fuse, a spring-loaded detonator positioned underneath the churn such that should it be moved, the fifty kilos of gelatin it contained would instantly go bang.
One of the grenades thrown by the HimPeril bounced past him into the kitchen, where it exploded, causing the churn nearest the corridor to tip.
*
Jude Iscariot’s life was saved by the steamer that came to a halt on the road outside the café … or more accurately, Jude Iscariot’s life was extended by twenty seconds by the steamer that came to a halt on the road outside the café.
He had been sitting there desperately trying to wriggle his hand out of the handcuff’s embrace when the milk churns exploded. The first he knew of it was when the café’s floor started to shake and the glasses and plates on the tables began to dance and tinkle. Before he quite knew what was happening he was thrown from his chair, his arm, handcuffed to the table, taking a tremendous wrench in the process. He was still on his knees when the blast gushed out of the hotel’s ground floor, surged across the road and enveloped the café. Being in the lee of the heavy steamer saved him from the explosion’s initial onslaught but for the majority of the pedestrians walking along the pavement and the poor sods seated enjoying an early morning coffee in the café there was no such protection. As though slapped by the hand of some invisible giant, men, women and children were hurled backwards – somersaulting, spinning, tumbling as they went – to be smashed into walls or shoved through windows. And then, barely an instant later, came the reverse pressure wave which ripped off clothes, pulled eyes out of sockets and sent shattered glass flying around like shrapnel. Stunned, Jude knelt amongst the debris, blinded and choked by smoke and pulverised concrete, his skin blistered by the heat and his ears deafened by the screams of the dying.
He blinked his eyes clear of dust then looked about him at the wreckage of what, just a few moments before, had been a bustling café. Bodies of patrons and waiters were heaped against the bar, the faces of the dead and the dying caked with dust and smeared with streaks of liquidised SAE, their limbs bent and twisted in unnatural angles. He retched, choked by the sweet stench of fried humanity. But even as he was spitting out the bile in his mouth he heard a loud creaking noise and saw the frontage of the building behind the café quaver. Then it collapsed, flattening him under fifty tons of bricks and concrete as it smashed to the ground.
*
ABBA must have heard Moynahan’s plea for a diversion. Suddenly the side of the hotel across the square from where they were standing exploded, the blast so big that all of them were blown off their feet. By some miracle they avoided being trepanned by flying debris, but even so it took a moment for them to
recover their senses. The square was filled with a thick, choking mist made from brick dust and pounded plaster and everywhere Norma looked there were people staggering around screaming and wailing. Then whistles began to blow and soldiers raced towards the stricken building.
‘Now’s our chance,’ shouted Moynahan as he hauled Norma to her feet. ‘We gotta get moving while everything’s FUBAR.’ And without waiting for a reply he began to drag her across the square in the direction of Checkpoint Bravo with the rest of their group stumbling in their wake.
Part Three:
Battle For The Jad
1:19
Las Vegas
The Real World: 9 February 2019
1.8. When ABBA looked about Him, He dug that there wasn’t anyone else to make with the chin music, so, not wanting to be on His lonesome as soloing all the time is most UnCool, He commanded Yggdrasil to spill its seed on the ground and from this seed grew the first Man, Adam, who ABBA created in His own image. 1.9. And ABBA granted Adam dominion over the Demi-Monde and all the creatures that lived in it, though He did tell him not to touch the fruit of Yggdrasil as that would be unCool and would get right up His ass. 1.10. So it came to pass that one day Adam called up to ABBA and said, ‘Yo there, ABBA, do you not dig that there is, like, nothing to do here in the Demi-Monde ’cept meditate, jerk off and get it on with the animals, some of whom, I gotta tell you, are starting to look a mite tasty? You gotta bust me a break, ABBA, and make with the company, ’cos I’m going out of my skull down here.’
The HIM Book, Book of the Coming: Chapter 1, Verses 8–10
Aaliz stood on the half-built stage gazing out on the vastness that was ParaDigm’s Las Vegas SuperBowl, the venue that would host the Gathering. Now, after almost three months of day-and-night work, the enormous auditorium was fast approaching completion. The huge banks of seating rose like cliffs around the semicircular arena; the mega-sized pyramid – a replica of the Great Pyramid standing in Terror Incognita – was almost finished; and the towering Flexi-Plexi screens that would carry the 3D images of what was happening on the stage to the six-million-strong audience were sprouting skywards. The SuperBowl was an awe-inspiring piece of theatrical engineering, a testament to the vision of the architects, the skill and effort of the contractors and workmen, and the amount of money that ParaDigm had thrown at the project.
What would it be like, Aaliz wondered, to stand on this stage and look out over the arena when it was packed with so many millions of people? What would it be like to be the focus of so much adulation? What would it be like to know that she was the one who would signal the rekindling of the Aryan super-race, the PreFolk? The thought of possessing so much power was intoxicating and for a moment she felt light-headed.
‘If you would say something into the microphone, Miss Williams, so that we can check levels. Please use your normal speaking voice.’
The instruction that cut through her daydreaming came from the engineer responsible for the installation of the SuperBowl’s audio-visual equipment. Automatically Aaliz stepped up to the microphone. ‘Good morning,’ she breathed and then rocked back, astonished by the volume of her amplified voice as the two words boomed out over the desert, then reverberated back to her, echoed by the steep sides of the arena. It took a moment for her to recover her equanimity: even now, just six months into her Real World sojourn, she was still surprised by the awesome power of Real World technology. It took an encouraging nod from the engineer to persuade Aaliz to speak again. ‘I am Norma Williams, leader of the Fun/Funs, and I’d like to thank all of you working on this project for your efforts on my behalf.’
That provoked a cheer from the workmen toiling away under the hot sun. Aaliz waved at them: they might be drones and of little worth but every good leader knew that occasionally the peasants needed to be encouraged rather than driven. The driving – and the culling – would come later … after the Gathering.
‘Very good, Miss Williams,’ commented the engineer. ‘And don’t worry about the echo. When the arena is full the bodies will absorb the sound. Now we’ll just check camera connectivity.’
Immediately five cameraBots swooped down from the gantry above the stage and began to hover around Aaliz. The Flexi-Plexi at the very rim of the arena fired up, and though it was two miles distant, its sheer size – it must have been a hundred yards tall and fifty wide – gave Aaliz an excellent view of what she looked like on stage. And she thought she looked pretty good: the short skirt she was wearing showed off her excellent legs and her tight top announced that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She gave a swish of her long blonde hair which was rewarded by cheers and whistles from the workmen. It seemed that as far as they were concerned, if Norma Williams was an emissary from God, then God had great taste in women.
‘It is amazing how susceptible Fragile males are to the sexual wiles of women,’ came an observation from the side of the stage. ‘It would appear that they follow the inclinations of their loins rather than their logic, which presumably accounts for the Fragiles’ quite astonishing fecundity.’
Aaliz turned to see Professor Septimus Bole striding across the stage. Despite it being such a ferociously hot day, the Professor was clad, as always, in his trademark black serge suit, his only acknowledgement of the intensity of the desert sunshine being the wide-brimmed hat that shrouded his face in shadows and the larger than usual pair of shaded spectacles.
‘Professor Bole! This is a surprise. I thought you were in the Demi-Monde.’ All this was broadcast throughout the arena.
Bole scowled and made a chopping motion across his throat, signalling to the engineer that the microphones be switched off.
‘You may be unfamiliar with Real World technology, Miss Williams, but that is a poor excuse when such carelessness could jeopardise the success of all we have worked for.’
Aaliz felt her cheeks redden, a product of anger with herself for making such a mistake and with the Professor for having the temerity to rebuke her. ‘I understand, Professor, but I would thank you for not taking that tone with me.’
Bole stared at her for a few silent moments and then gave a bleak smile. ‘Very well,’ he said and then took her by the arm and led her out of earshot of the technicians busily installing the mass of stage equipment. ‘I have just returned from the Demi-Monde, where I consulted with your father. He is most perturbed by the unscheduled appearance Norma Williams made at the Victory in the Coven celebrations.’
‘I find it quite outrageous that Norma Williams should have the gall to pose as me!’ Aaliz spluttered. ‘Why has nothing been done to stop her?’
‘I think quite a lot has been done, unfortunately none of it has had the desired result.’
‘But surely the Checkya must be able to find and arrest one girl.’
‘She’s proven to be very elusive and, of course, she enjoys the support and succour of the Normalists. It would appear that Norma Williams has abilities as an organiser quite the equal of yours, which is hardly surprising given that your genetic makeup is identical.
‘But … but … this is terrible.’
‘Indeed. Your father has made the elimination of Norma Williams the Checkya’s Number One priority but, as I say, she is something of a will-o’-the-wisp.’ Bole stepped further back into the shadows and used a handkerchief to mop his brow. ‘By bringing the specious cant and disaffection of Normalism to the very heart of the ForthRight she undermines all the work we have done in inculcating the people with an unshakeable belief in the tenets of UnFunDaMentalism. There is talk that your father will be unable to persuade believers to participate in the Ceremony of Purification.’
‘But then—’
‘Then we will fail and all our efforts here, in the Real World, will have been for nothing.’
‘Then what’s to be done?’
‘Checkya intelligence – a contradiction in terms, but no matter – would have us believe that Norma Williams has fled the ForthRight with the intention of seeking refuge in the JAD, where the la
st remaining Portal connecting the Demi-Monde to the Real World is situated. It is obvious that she is intent on returning to the Real World. This is good news. My agents control the Portal and she will be dealt with immediately she presents there.’
‘Then why are you telling me this? If you are so confident of silencing the girl, why concern me?’
‘We must recognise the damage that Williams has caused in the Demi-Monde and move to set it aright. My belief is that having Aaliz Heydrich – the real Aaliz Heydrich – make a series of appearances in the ForthRight where she denies her Normalist tendencies and reaffirms her loyalty to her father would do much to repair this damage.’
The penny dropped. ‘You want me to go back to the Demi-Monde!’
‘Yes.’
Aaliz blinked. Going back to the Demi-Monde did not appeal. She liked it here in the Real World. ‘But … but … is such a thing possible?’
‘Of course. You have a body in the Demi-Monde which is being cared for by nuns at Wewelsburg Castle.’
‘But what of my work here?’
‘Most of the appearances to be made by Norma Williams between now and the Gathering are scheduled to take place on the Polly, so those are easy enough to fabricate – we have, after all, a perfectly usable PollyMorph of you. We’ll simply use an actress who is similar to you in looks and build and then amend her appearance digitally. Once her voice has been adjusted to match yours she will be indistinguishable from the real Norma Williams … or should I better say, the unreal Norma Williams!’
‘But I will be returned to the Real World in time for the Gathering, won’t I?’
‘Oh, yes. We have eighty days, ample time for you to do what you must do in the Demi-Monde.’
