Route 666 df-1

by Jack Yeovil

  "Matthieu, Job," the Judge said "nobody asked me whether I wanted to be a citizen of Deseret and give up my cup of morning recaff, my slug or two of Colum's whiskey, my shot of Ferd's zooper-blast, or my Saturday evening hide-the-salami sessions with Miss Dolley. And, you know what, boys, I don't reckon I do want to give up those things. And nor, I would certainly wager, does anyone else in this lovely littie city. I'm a peaceable man, but sometimes you have to fight for the little comforts you believe in. Do you get my drift?"

  "Yes, Judge."

  Larroquette extended his arm, palm flat out, and flexed his bicep. There was a bang and a discharge of smoke, and the mangy cat twenty paces down the road flew to pieces. The deputy bent his elbow, then straightened out again, the spent cartdridge popping out of the hairy slit in his forearm. It fell in the sand. Larroquette primed his pump-action arm again.

  "I believe you do, Matthieu, I believe you do."

  II

  12 June 1995

  Jazzbeaux woke in the dark, sunwarmth playing over her. She was out of doors, mainly undressed, hair straggled over her face. On her back under a blanket, she felt soft pseudo-grass and sand beneath her. Through her optic sensor, the sun was a penny of heat in rust-red sky. Someone had switched her patch to cover her good eye. Probably Sweet-cheeks. The dear girl always thought that hilarious.

  She sat up, the aftershocks of last night's party still pleasurable as she unwound, and took a look at the heat picture. Recognisable ve-hickle shapes were warming in the sun, hot metal carapaces burning brighter than cool-ish engines. Otherwise, this was terra incognita.

  Yesterday, after settling with the DAR, the 'Pomps had hit Spanish Fork and wound up in a motel a klick out of town, getting some serious party favours. Jazzbeaux's nostrils stung, reminding her she had been persuaded to backslide and snort a few jolts. Just Candy Z, she stayed off the zonk. Pretty colours ran across the surface of her occluded eye.

  She slipped the patch back to the proper side of her nose and blinked. She had ended up outside one of a row of neat, off-white cabins. Up on a small hill was a gingerbread Gothic house: tall and wood and creaky.

  The Katz Motel, she remembered. She toga-wrapped the blanket around her bod; otherwise, all the clothes she had on were go-go boots and a red star choker. The fabulous shades, as she had come to think of the pair scavved from the preachie, were stuck up in her hair.

  Images and sensations from the party flickered back through her graymass: 'Cheeks stabbing a ruby pump into the non-abusable screen of the pornovideo, shouting how much she hated that satyrstud Billy Priapus as the set spark-destructed; Varoomschka strapping on a hardy boy, tying his hands to the bedboard with a leather bullwhip and riding him like a bronco for the full twenty minutes; Andrew Jean going weepy-sentimental about being all old and used up and having to be comforted with cuddles and kisses; Sleepy Jane, ripped on tequila, trying to shoot down spysats with a dart-gun; 'Cheeks singing 'Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad' way out of her key as a couple of the hardies tried to unpeel her without using their hands.

  Just the regular Psychopomp Victory Good Time.

  Jazzbeaux found a black leather miniskirt inside-out on a window-sill. It fit her, so she ditched the blanket. Feeling sunwarmth on untreated nipples, she wondered if this much exposure was good for her. Doctors recommended a six-monthly skinsmear against UV rays. She'd not been near a sawbones since her last amendment.

  Thinking of amendments and worrying about her breasts reminded her that Daddy once told her that the Amazon warriors of old used to have one of their tits amputated. That way, the surplus gazonga didn't get in the way of drawing a bowstring and firing off an arrow. Jazzbeaux had used a crossbow a couple of times but never a longbow, so she couldn't tell if the Robin Hood act really twanged a nipple off every time you sank a yardshaft through one of the Sheriff of freakin' Nottingham's Norman dogs. Her rule for amendments was that they were all right so long as they didn't spoil the package. Her eye was an exception, she hadn't chosen to have the thing fished out so she had this hole in her face which needed filling. Doc Threadneedle, her favoured bio-surgeon, could jazz her up inside, but she wanted to stay as human as she was.

  She pulled the shades down and took a quick scan at the landscape. Nothing was different. She had tamed the effect.

  Humming "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Flower Drum Song, she thought about her own victory celebration. Naturally, as the heroine of battle, she rated the best of everything: Colombian champagne, non-vat meatburgcrs. pick of the hardies and nancies, first go in the hot tub, and dibs on the cabins.

  Jazzbeaux had selected a sweet-faced hardy boy, all cowboy hat and low-slung jeans and wispy face fuzz, and gentled him into the tub for a long, slow seduction. Having been on the road with the girls for so long, the boy was a nice change. She almost lost control when she flipped him over and, just as she was finishing off, kept forcing his head under the ripples. When it was over, she had to squeeze soapy water out of his lungs and give him tongue-to-tongue artificial respiration.

  After that, she took her jolts and was carried in triumph around the complex by all and sundry, then turned over to So Long Suin and her acupuncture needles. With three precise jabs, So Long – without otherwise touching – brought her to a cataclysmax which thrilled her entire body. Now the warmth revived tactile memories of the pleasure paths her gangbuddy had mapped on her living body. And unlike the boy, three needles didn't half-drown when you showed them a good time.

  She turned lazily around a corner and threw a startle into a birdlike, jittery young man whose face instantly reddened. She crossed her arms modestly and tried to smile.

  The young man looked every way but at her, all at once, and stammered into an apology.

  "We met yesterday?" she said.

  "H-H-H-Herman K-K-Katz, ma'am. Like the K-K-Katz M-M-Motel."

  "Ahh," she said, "that Katz."

  "N-no ma'am, that K-Katz is my mother," he darted a look up at the old house. "She runs the place, I just help out."

  "Dutiful son, huh? A rare thing."

  "A boy's best friend is his mother."

  Jazzbeaux saw there was an uncurtained window in an upper storey, and a shadow figure looked down. Against the sunglare from the window, she instinctively slipped the shades on and regretted it. A black swirl of deathly evil seemed to pour out of the house, stretching tentacles toward them. Mrs Katz was probably scandalised her little boy was talking with a mostly naked woman. She lifted the sunglasses and let her hands fall to her sides, trying not to smile too broadly. For effect, she licked her lips.

  "I, uh, found some, uh, ladies' clothes, strewn around," Herman said. "I guess you lost 'em during the, uh, party."

  She shrugged, noting the way Herman's eyes kept being pulled back to her chest. This was pure wickedness, but hard to resist. She never got to flirt much; most people understood her straight off.

  "It must be lonely out here, Herman."

  "I have my mother, and my birds."

  "Birds?" she raised the brow over her good eye.

  "It's my hobby," Herman replied. "Stuffing birds. It's fascinating work, preserving life in death."

  She was suddenly bored with tormenting this timid, inoffensive character. If anything, she wanted to charge up the hill and face the old lady. That black, swirling cloud must mean some oppressive force, some wrinkled and bony thumb pressing down on a butterfly life. Let the kid go, she should say, it does no good to keep him shackled like a slave. In the end, he'll turn. She was surprised Herman hadn't already followed the Jessamyn Bonney Rid-Yourself-of-a-Cloying-Parent Manoeuvre. Perhaps Mrs Katz was cannier than Daddy Bruno. She was a woman, after all.

  All over her Jazzbeaux felt the grit she had slept on. Like a cat, she needed to clean herself.

  "I feel like a long, hot shower," she said.

  That seemed to excite Herman even more. His mind was easy to read, even without the fabulous shades; every porno-video had a scene where some big-titted fillette takes a show
er and gets intimate with the soap.

  Amused, she used the glasses and looked at Herman, which was a shock. She expected slobbering prurience but what she got was death, a skin-covered skull with empty sockets. The gaze of the death's-head was stabbing, vicious, accusing…

  Lifting the shades, she still scanned something dry and ancient looking out through Herman's eyes.

  "There's a shower unit in your cabin," he said, with a slight croak. "We have to pay a huge kickback to Judge Colpeper for use of the well-water, but we offer the only decent facilities for klicks around."

  She could almost hear water slicing around her, feel the dirt sliding from the folds of her body, water gathering in her hair and turning it into a heavy tail that slipped down to her waist. In a precog buzz, she heard a strange shrieking and felt a shuddering chill. The skullface she'd seen loomed through shower curtains, blade-like nails shredding plastic and reaching for skin. Gooseflesh pricked her breasts.

  "Well if that ain't pretty as a picture," a rich, deep voice said.

  At the same time, there was a startled, startling animal sound. A rattling inrush of breath. Jazzbeaux instinctively assumed a fighting stance, hip tilted to launch a kick, hands apart and loose, fingers together like bone-blades. She must scan like an Amazon warrior of old now.

  The rattle had been a horse almost whinnying. The man who spoke sat comfortably in the saddle, a roll-up in the corner of his mouth, leaning forward.

  Herman shrank back against the bleached wall of a cabin as if he had seen a ghost.

  The horseman wore a long duster, which was chalky with desert dirt. His face was deeply lined under his battered old hat, but she couldn't tell how old he was. He looked as if he'd been riding out here since the days of Billy the Kid and Jesse James.

  Her Daddy claimed they were kin to Billy Bonney, Billy the Kid, but she'd looked the Kid up in a datanet file and found out his real name was probably Antrim or McCarty. Bruno also mentioned Anne Bonney, the female pirate, as an ancestor. It was a wonder he didn't rope Bonnie Parker and Bonnie Prince Charlie into the family tree.

  "Don't see many critters like you out on the trail," the horseman said, grinning. "More's the pity."

  Herman Katz had shuffled away. Jazzbeaux didn't feel like a shower any more. She also didn't quite know what had just passed between Herman and her. She thought they were both a little wiser and a little more scared.

  "Do I know you?" she asked the horseman.

  "Could be you will know me," he said. "Most everybody meets me one time or another. It's what comes with being a saddle tramp. I haven't been out this way in a while."

  "You remind me of someone."

  "I've got one of those faces, I guess," he said.

  "John Wayne, maybe?"

  "I don't know the feller. He's from these parts?"

  She shrugged. "I don't think so."

  He was hunched over on his horse, bent a strange way as if he had taken some bad wounds a long time ago and left them untreated. She was reminded of a lightning-struck tree that grows strong but crooked.

  "You should cover up more, girl," he said, wryly. "In the desert day, you forget how cold it gets at night. You're begging for sunstroke or frostbite."

  "This is not my normal get-up."

  Wandering around in Barbie's Date Rape Outfit was beginning to get monotonous. Somehow, the desert got a lot less deserted if you wanted to sunbathe in the nude.

  "I reckoned not, Jesse."

  "Jesse?" Nobody had ever called her that before.

  "It's one of your names, ain't it? You must have a lot of names, as if you were trying them all on for a proper fit. Like a hat or something."

  "Jesse?" she said out loud, thinking about it. Just now, she wasn't really keen on being Jessamyn, and Jesse sounded like a shrivelled version of that.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "Who are you really?"

  The horseman grinned.

  "I've got me a lot of names too. I've been around a while. I figure to move on now."

  "No," she said, "who are you?"

  The horseman's grin sparkled.

  "You got the question right, Jesse. Maybe next time we meet you'll be ready for the answer."

  Lazily, without seeming to take an order, the horse moved off. Jazzbeaux stood and watched the horseman ride off into the sand, away from town.

  She used the glasses. The picture was exactly the same, only there were scarlet, bloody tracks where the horse's hooves had pressed.

  III

  12 June 1995

  There was a sign up by the roadside, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SPANISH FORK – A NICE, QUIET, LITTLE TOWN – PLEASE LEAVE IT AS YOU FIND IT. Once the sign was passed, there was a sort of shift and the landscape changed. Brown-orange gave way to green. Large, picturesque houses stood on generous plots of grassy land. Signs on front lawns said keep off the grass,BEWARE OF THE KILLER DOG, ARMED RESPONSE and TRESPASSERS WILL BE INDENTURED.

  Yorke slowed and looked over at the Quince.

  "Gas stop?"

  "If there's a place."

  It wasn't hard to find. Just inside the city limits was another sign, CHOLLIE'S GAS AND AUTO REPAIR, THIS WAY, with an arrow pointing to an old square building. Spanish Fork was obviously a big place for signs. Chollie's scanned like a cross between a livery stable, a junkyard and a dirigible hangar.

  "This must be the place," Yorke said. Quincannon grunted and tapped keys on the dash.

  Yorke turned the cruiser into Chollie's yard and the convoy followed. There wasn't room enough for all the motorwagons on the forecourt, so they spilled over up and down the street.

  It was early in the afternoon and quiet, so nobody minded much.

  "Do we know anything about Spanish Fork, Quince?"

  Quincannon was scrolling through Gazetteer. "Town used to be called New Canaan, a long time back. That rings a nasty historical bell. A bird named Colpeper more or less runs the place now. He calls himself a judge, just like Roy Bean. We don't have anything actually against him on the charge roll, though I doubt if any of these neighbourhood despots would pass muster if we mounted a full inspection. Of course, this is no longer the United States of America, so it's a moot point whether Colpeper is obliged to follow any of our laws on condoning drug traffic or immoral activities."

  Elder Seth was outside, knuckles rapping like bird-beaks. It was a good thing the cruiser's screens were reinforced armaplas. Quincannon down-rolled the window and the Elder's face dipped into view. His eyes were black pinpoints in the shadow of his hat.

  "Why are we stopping?"

  "We need a tank top-up, Elder. Your motorwagons could do with a going over, too."

  The Elder thought about it.

  "We only have another 50 miles to go to Salt Lake City."

  "Fifty is just the same as 50,000 in this country if your auto don't run. Better safe than vulture meat."

  The Elder considered a moment.

  "What is this place?"

  "Spanish Fork, Elder," the Quince said. "As a Josephite, you might better remember it as New Canaan."

  Elder Seth's mouth curved into an approximate smile. He walked away without saying anything. Yorke had the odd impression his half-complaint had been for show. There was a quality about the Elder just now that suggested he was home and knew exactly what he was doing.

  "He remembers," Quincannon said.

  "Remembers what?"

  "You'll see. I'll just bet this town has a sign up about it. I never did see such a place for signs."

  Nearby, a sign read: FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ROB CHOLLIE'S. Underneath the slogan was an airbrushed painting of two crossed pump-action shotguns and a neat row of symbols. Inside barred prohibition circles were startled cartoon thieves with stripy jerseys, domino masks and swag bags. Yorke got the impression the cheery little designs were grave markers.

  Many of the resettlers were stretching their legs and kicking tires. More than one radiator was boiling over. Since the business with Sister Mauree
n, there was less smiling and hymn-singing. Their armour of faith was getting dented out here on the road, but a stubborn backbone of contrariwise determination was being shown.

  Brother Wiggs caught sight of a stand of porno magazines and his face bloodied up, as if he were boiling to do some serious preaching and condemning. There was something weird about the Josephites when you looked at them close: Yorke would swear that two days ago, Wiggs had a regular face, with lumps and moles and marks. It seemed to be smoothing into a handsome mask. Maybe the Lord was clearing up the complexions of the chosen.

  Tyree and Burnside rolled up and checked the place out. Tyree slipped her cashplastic into a vending machine and pulled out a can of Mountain Dew, which she opened with a thumb press, tested with her pen-end analyser and drank at a draught.

  A scrawny kid with coke-bottle-bottom goggles ambled out of the armoured post by the gas-pumps. He wore oil-stained overalls with CHO LIE'S written on them. One of the Ls had peeled off.

  "Fill 'er up," Quincannon told him, "and check the oil. What kind of mechanics you got in this town?"

  "The best, sir. Chollie don't come cheap, but he don't come shoddy neither."

  Another sign read: MOST OF OUR CUSTOMERS ARE STILL LIVING.

  "You accept US Cav discount vouchers?"

  "How's that again?"

  Quincannon grinned.

  "You don't mind my amigo Kirby Yorke here rubber-neckin' while you're workin on the ve-hickles and shooting your dang head off if he figures you're sabotagin' or over-chargin'."

  The Quince played with his holster flap for emphasis. The kid goggled with respect.

  "Sounds mighty fair to me, sir."

  "Excellent. Now where can a man get himself some brunch in this burg?"

  IV

  12 June 1995

  Something buzzed up and down Brother Wiggs's spine. These days of driving had bent his body into a new position, and it was hard to bend out of it.

  The godless display of foul filth at the magazine rack still assaulted his mind. There were copies of Satanist propaganda like Hustler, Big Butts, National Geographic and Split Beaver mixed in with good Christian publications like Guns and Killing, White Dwarf, The Truth and Creation Science Monitor. The glossy covers burned like vile flames of sin, searing his brain, reminding him of all he had abjured.