by Jack Yeovil
Tyree stood over Yorke, fending off the streams of people with the threat of her gun. Quincannon got to the kid and slapped him, but it had no effect. He dug out a squeezer of morph-plus from his belt-slung medikit and put the Trooper to sleep. Yorke shut up but still writhed. Quincannon tried to get a grip on him.
Tyree still fought the impulse to go with the music. A tall Psychopomp, an elegant girl in see-through plastic, shoved past her and fell in step with the Josephites. She marched off like a catwalk creature. Tyree knew she should follow.
Elder Seth walked towards the city limits, ignoring his flock. Everywhere he went, he could guarantee new converts. Whatever his religion really was, she guessed it had nothing to do with Jesus H. Christ.
She was hearing him right now. “Six six six.”
With a lurch, her legs were moving, and she was among the multitude. A ticking calm settled around her. Quincannon and Yorke would be left behind with the dead. If she went with the Josephites, she would be saved, she would atone for her sins. She followed.
The Quince called for her, but she ignored him,
She knew it was madness but she marched with the crowd. They were united by love. She knew she was like them, another sacrificial lamb, more meat for the juggernaut that rolled down Route 666 to the Apocalypse, but she was happy with her lot. There were arms around her. To her left was an old man, a Josephite, to her right the ’pomp she had seen join the resettlers. Together, they walked towards the desert. The old man fell, and his Brothers and Sisters walked over him. He was still singing, they were still singing, as their feet broke his ribs.
Tyree and the tall, thin girl embraced. Her name, Tyree gathered from the gush of welcome, was Varoomschka. Love was all around, and old enmities were strewn in the blooded dirt. When she stumbled, she was held up by Varoomschka and Brother Wiggs. Both had burned away their sins and imperfections and become beacons of purity.
The Feelgood blazed away like a Fourth of July bonfire, and the courthouse began to smoulder. There was a five-man gallows that would burn up beautifully. It was a shame nobody was in a mood to appreciate the fireworks and bake potatoes in the ashes later.
She saw Elder Seth leading his Indians and his saints away from the blazes of massacre, his footprints filled with blood, spirits in the air. And she saw him now, exactly the same.
Someone had hold of her, pulling her away from the ranks of the pilgrims. Varoomschka tried to rescue her from the new tugging, arms slipping around her neck in a bear-hug. Tyree struggled, possessed by the need to be with the Elder, and took a slap in the face.
She closed her eyes and concentrated hard. She didn’t want to be a sacrifice for anyone’s God.
The Quince was with her now, red face pale. He was the only other citizen in sight not dead or crazy. He had hauled her out of the procession, and was holding her back.
Brother Wiggs, smiling, reached out for Tyree. Putting all his meat into it, Quincannon stuck a huge fist into the Josephite’s face. Wiggs’ smile caved in like an abusable teevee screen and cracks appeared, but no blood burst through. He drew in breath and his face filled out, beatific expression popping forth.
The Quince was ready to fight, but Tyree didn’t want to be fought for. She struggled to be with Wiggs and Varoomschka and Ciccone and Elder Seth. Most of all, Elder Seth.
Then, it snapped inside. She realised how insane this all was. It would be better to die than go to Salt Lake like a zombie. She clung to Quincannon and scanned the pilgrims with loathing.
As Wiggs began to march her off, Varoomschka mewled for her lost new friend and cried out “suestra, suestra”, sister, sister…
Tyree took the fillette’s hand and pulled her away from Brother Wiggs. Perhaps she could save someone. Varoomschka squirmed and got loose. She stumbled a few steps, then fell in line with the others. She would find more new friends in the throng.
Damn.
“What…?” Tyree began.
“Hell, Leona, don’t ask.”
Elder Seth’s party were nearly out of sight now, beyond the walls of fire. Shame flooded through her, self-disgust at what she had nearly been. She shuddered and Quincannon embraced her.
The courthouse exploded, and flaming timbers fell out of the sky like pick-up-sticks.
Quincannon hauled her through the fires and into the wake of the pilgrim procession. They found Yorke, still out cold, curled up on the sidewalk. Taking an arm each, they hauled the kid off towards Chollie’s Gas and Inferno. The cruiser was parked opposite, unharmed by the explosions, Tyree’s motorcyke was melted metal by now, though.
“Burnside?” Quincannon asked.
Tyree shook her head.
Yorke moaned in his troubled sleep. His eyes leaked blood where he had clawed.
Quincannon punched the access code into the doorlock, and the cruiser opened for them. They hauled Yorke into the back and slipped restraints on him for when he woke up.
The Quince sucked in his belly and got behind the wheel. Tyree took the weapons console and fired everything up. Then they drove steadily out of town, careful to avoid the fires in the road. A mass of twisted, smouldering wreckage blocked their way, and Quincannon had Tyree use the directional cannon to blast a clear path through it.
When they were out of range of flying debris, they stopped, and the Quince pressed his head to the wheel. It was cool in the cruiser after the heat of the day and the fires, and the soundproofing cut out most of the noise.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Quincannon said. Before them, on the road, the crowd walked. They were thousands strong, a column winding away into the distance. Whoever they had been before, they were Josephites now, marching off to whatever Elder Seth had in store at Salt Lake City.
Tyree’s fingers flexed on the keyboard. She could unloose the chainguns, the maxiscreamers and launch a couple of missiles. She had the impression she would be doing these people a good turn by killing as many of them as possible now.
But she did nothing. Elder Seth followed the Path of Joseph.
XVI
12 June 1995
Dying is easy, as her old man used to say, it’s the coming back that’s hard.
Inside her head, there was darkness. A red darkness. She was sinking slowly into it. Her optic implant was dangling useless on her cheek, her durium skull platelocks were bent uncomfortably inside her head. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They were under guarantee. Doc Threadneedle had used only the best scav medtech from the Thalamus Corp.
There were deadfolks in the road with her. The Feelgood Saloon was burning, and there were overturned ve-hickles all around. The whole town was going up in flames.
All you need to be a freedom fighter, Petya Jerkussoff sang on his “The World We Have Lost”, is a fiddle and a bow and cigarette lighter.
Somewhere in the darkness outside her head, something—an animal or a person—was howling in pain.
There was a dull whumpf! as a gastank exploded. Jazzbeaux felt specks of heat on her face. The blacktop shuddered with the impact of flying debris. She knew she was lucky not to have been cut in half by a razor-edged cardoor playing frisbee.
Her father, of course, was dead. He had never come back.
The longer she lay here, the shorter the odds became…
… she tried to open her eye and found it glued shut. She had blood on her face, dried-up and mixed with grit from the road.
The road. All her pain came from the road.
Get your kicksssssssssssssssss, the preacher had hissed, on Route SixSixSixxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!
She had a skullcracker of a headache, and guessed she’d been opened in several places by knifecuts, branded in others by dollops of fire…
… she kept losing herself, losing her train of thought. She wished she had listened when Doc Threadneedle tried to tell her about her brain. It’s where you live, the Doc had said, you should take care of it. Well, she had tried. A durium skullsheath doesn’t come cheap. A year’s worth of fenced scav had brought
her the treatment. It was supposed to be like armour inside your head.
But the preacherman had opened up a crack and got into her graymass. Somehow, he had wormed his way into her private self, the place where she lived. And he had done a lot of mischief in there. She knew her body could be fixed, but she wasn’t sure about the important stuff. Doc Threadneedle couldn’t replace neurons and synapses. Even the GenTech wizards, Dr Zarathustra and W. D. Donovan, could only reconstruct a ruined face; they couldn’t do anything about a shredded psyche, a ruptured personality, a raped memory…
… somewhere in the distance, there was gunfire. Shots were exchanged. Then, nothing. She could hear fires crackling. The thing in pain was out of it now. Spanish Fork was another ghost town. She was probably the only thing alive in it. Soon, the predators would lope out of the desert for her. On the road with the ’pomps, she had seen some pretty weird critters, wolfrat coyotes, subhume vermin, sharkmouth rabbits. They had to eat red meat one day out of seven.
Jessamyn.
Amanda.
Bonney.
She held onto herself, trying to come to the surface of her cranial quicksand.
Jessamyn Amanda Bonney.
Nobody called her that any more. Nobody but cops and ops and soce workers. Not since her old man.
Jessa-MYN, her dead daddy whispered in her inner ear, cain’t you be more sociable?
No, not Jessamyn. She didn’t live here any more. Jazzbeaux. She was Jazzbeaux. That was her name in the Psychopomps, that was who she was. Jazz-beaux!
She brought her right hand up to her face. A numbed pain told her two of the fingers were broken. She rubbed her eye, and tried to open it again. The blood crust cracked, and she saw the night sky.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.,.
… pushing hard with her elbows, she half-sat in the road. Her back ached, but her spine was undamaged. That was something. The Feelgood was a stone shell full of glowing ashes. A half-burned corpse sprawled on the steps, the top of its head gone. A wind had come through with the Josephites, and blown away the man’s whole world.
… I wish I may, I wish I might…
… the starlight and the firelight went to her head like a blow, and she blinked uncontrollably. Her damaged implant was leaking biofluid. Delicately, with an unbroken thumb and ringfinger, she eased the ball-shaped doodad back into its socket. The connections were loose, and the optic burner didn’t respond to her impulse command. No prob. Doc Threadneedle could fix that. At least, he could if the fault was in the machine rather than in the meat.
She found her eyepatch on the ground, and slipped it on over her optic. She pulled her hair out from over the patchcord, and passed her fingers through it. Blood, dirt and filth came loose. Her broken fingerbones ground painfully.
… have the wish I wish tonight.
… she was more in control now. Soon, she would be able to stand up, able to walk out of here on her own two legs.
The Psychopomps were finished, she guessed. Andrew Jean, her lieutenant for the past two years, was a few yards away, skin in shreds, orange beehive hairdo picked to pieces. The corpse looked as if it had been attacked by dagger-billed birds. She found So Long Suin and Sleepy Jane Porteous too, both killed. The ’pomps who weren’t dead had gone off with the preacherman…
… citizens, Psychopomps, Cav. There were lots of casualties. Jazzbeaux had been out of it for most of the fighting, but she could tell from the leavings that things had got serious. Some of the people looked as if they had been torn apart by animals with more in the way of teeth and claws than the Good Lord intended for them to have. Sweetcheeks was literally crushed flat into the road, dead eyes staring from a foot-wide face. A farmer was burned to the bone inside his unmarked Oshkosh B’Gosh bib-alls. A black cavalryman was slumped against the front window of the drugstore, dead without a mark on him. She unbuttoned his holster, and took out his side arm. She had lost her own gun back in the Feelgood.
The official killing iron was heavier than she was used to, but it would do the job. She unbuckled the yellowlegs’ gun-belt, and cinched it around her hips.
Then, she picked up a half-brick and threw it through the drugstore window. Picking the glass away from the display, she reached for a squirter of morph-plus. She exposed her wrist, and jabbed the painkiller into her bloodstream.
Her head clearing slightly, she filled her jacket pockets with pills and jujubes. She popped a glojo capsule into her mouth, and rolled it around on her tongue, not biting into it. The buzz seeped through her body. Some of the pain went away. Some…
… There was a well nearby. Her waterdetector—now lost—had twanged when they crossed the Spanish Fork city limits. She would need a drink soon, and food.
She couldn’t find a ve-hickle that worked. Her prized Tucker Tomorrow was somewhere in a block-sized scrap metal bonfire. She supposed Elder Seth must have taken everything with him when he left in his motorwagon train. He would be half-way to Salt Lake by now.
Now, she was coming for him. He had done his best to destroy her, and she was still here. She was still Jazzbeaux.
She squatted by the mess that had been Andrew Jean, and said her goodbyes. Andrew Jean had been a good ’pomp, a good gangbuddy. Nobody deserved to die like that.
Except the preacherman. Elder Seth needed to die slowly. He had been invincible earlier, when he had changed—the real self pushing out from behind his human mask—but now he was her meat.
The preacher had taken a girl out to kill her, but made of her a weapon which could be used against him.
Jazzbeaux walked away from Andrew Jean. Just off the main street, she found the first of the carrion creatures. It was a bad one, a mew-tater. There was some kind of housecat in there, but it was the size of a moose, had white skunkmarks down its back, and the buds of vestigial extra heads hanging in its neckfur. It had gathered three or four corpses, and was playing with them, slicing them out of their clothes. Its saliva was corrosive, and etched patterns in the pale, dead skin of its supper.
Jazzbeaux stretched her fingers and lightly rested them on the butt of her scavved gun. The creature turned its head to look at her with slit-pupilled eyes the size of saucers. It showed its needle-sharp teeth, and flared a furry ruff. It could have leaped. With her broken fingers, she probably couldn’t have outdrawn the thing.
But she met its eyes. It recognised a fellow predator, and backed down, returning its attention to its food. She walked away.
For the first time since she iced her dad, Jazzbeaux felt she really had a purpose on this dull earth.
She hoped the old man would be proud of her.
Epilogue
12 June 1995
“Report it in full, Leona, and we’ll be Section-Eighted out of This Man’s Cavalry faster than the Prezz can tell a lie. The way I see it, we were attacked by Psychopomps and had a bad time of it. They jolted us full of zonk, and that made poor Kirby Yorke lose what sense he had. But we got away, and so did Elder Seth and his resettlers. They’ll be in Salt Lake by now, those that made it through the Des, and they’ll be building. Whatever the Elder is, he’s got himself a plan, and you and I ain’t no part of it. Let’s get back to Fort Valens and on with our lives. We’ll need to live fast and live full, ’cause I reckon we’re about near the end of our times. There’s something going down out there that’s gonna affect all of us in the end. When the time comes, maybe we’ll take up arms again and find out just what Elder Seth is made of. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just be swept away by the fires. This here is the road to Armageddon, and maybe we can just turn round and go back to Valens and hope nothing comes of it, because there sure ain’t much else we can do against someone who can do what he’s just done to Spanish Fork. Six six six. That’s in the Bible, I reckon. Something to do with the Beast of Revelations. The end of the world. Maybe that’s what’s coming. World’s been going to Hell for long enough, maybe we’re just about there now. Maybe… freak, there’s too many maybes.”
Quincannon gunned the motor, and drove south. To the west, the sun was rapidly sinking, turning the sands the colour of blood. Tyree slumped in her seat, trying to forget Elder Seth’s eyes, trying to ignore the urge to join him in his mad march.
They’d had to sedate Yorke again. His watery, empty eyes suggested permanent trauma. Tyree thought the kid was as dead as Burnside. Fifty per cent casualties on this patrol. Not good.
The Quince took something down from his rooflocker. A bottle of Shochaiku Double-Blend. He twisted off the top and drank from the neck, then passed it to her.
“I was nearly one of them, Quince.”
“I know. The way I figure it, Elder Seth was painting the road with blood, as a marker for something.”
She took a swig of the booze, and felt warmth in her stomach. In the back, Yorke shifted, crying out in his sleep. She held the bottle.
“There were invisible things…”
“Don’t think, Leona.”
Quincannon picked something up off the floor. A piece of paper. It must have fallen from the locker. Tyree craned her neck, trying to get a look, but couldn’t. Quincannon rolled his window down a crack, and threw the paper out. It was whipped away in the air, and lost in the desert.
She swallowed whiskey, focusing on the burn in her gullet. She could not not think.
Outside, full night had fallen and the Des was dark. Quincannon gunned the cruiser into the visibility funnel of its headlights.
“Goodbye, Marilyn,” he said, almost under his breath.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Book of Joseph
The Book of Marilyn
ZeeBeeCee’s Nostalgia Newstrivia: The 1960s
The Book of Meat
ZeeBeeCee’s Nostalgia Newstrivia: The 1970s
