by Mick Farren
Armageddon Crazy
Mick Farren
A complex and mordant satire. Near-future America has become a dictatorship run by a fundamentalist Christian televangelist in the Jim Bakker mould, with the Constitution suspended, a religious police force of Deacons who root out heresy and liberalism by torture, and concentration camps for unbelievers. Control is reinforced at mass prayer meetings by the use of extravagant special effects projections – the Beast, the Whore of Babylon, and other Revelations favourites in 100-foot high 3D. The best effects programmer in the business is Charlie Mansard, an eccentric slob who would long ago have wound up in a camp but for his usefulness to the regime. Meanwhile, a terrorist group, the Lefthand Path, is setting bombs in public places. Harry Carlisle, a tough old-school NYPD cop, is tasked with nailing Lefthand Path, unaware that he is merely a pawn in a power struggle among the elite (and that his girlfriend is a terrorist sleeper agent). Some great jokes in here. Notice how Americans (the South Park movie, Dennis Leary in No Cure for Cancer, etc.) often jest about having a war with Canada? Well, in this novel, it’s the Canucks who do the invading. Oh, and Elvis is an officially-tolerated cult religion, followers dressed in His image, and His own Holy Book. The whole thing builds to a glorious climax when the special effects finally run amok and the regime comes crashing down. With the state of special FX in the movies now, this novel is entirely filmable. But would anyone have the balls? Not in Hollywood, probably.
Mick Farren
Armageddon Crazy
ONE
Mansard
"No economy can support an institutionalized religion of this size. It's a matter of simple arithmetic."
Mansard was drunk and he didn't give a damn. Over the last few months, his downtime drinking had been getting worse and worse, but when anyone summoned the courage to say something to him, he simply shrugged and asked them what they expected. In a world that had patently gone crazy, the sane man surely had a moral obligation to shut out as much of the lunacy as possible. He looked slowly around the bar. O'Ryan's was a cheesy joint, but that went for every bar in the city, and probably for every bar in the whole sorry country. He ought to be thankful that there was any kind of bar at all for him in which to lose himself. The return of prohibition had been a major plank in the Faithful/Wrench platform. When they had ridden the landslide into power, however, the idea had been quietly dropped. Someone had whispered in Faithful's ear that, judging from the last time around, the net result of a new Volstead act would be to give an astronomical amount of money to organized crime. Larry Faithful might claim a direct line to God, but in day-to-day practice he was nothing if not the pragmatist. The last thing that he and any of the people around him wanted was to give astronomical amounts of money to anyone outside their circle.
Still, Faithful and his gang had done what they could to discourage the social drinker. The friendly tavern had been reduced to a place of shame. Gone was the warmth and comfort that Mansard remembered from his youth. All that remained was a flyblown red-and-blue Budweiser sign with a third of its tubes burned out, a rack of bad generic booze on electronic measure, and a line of barstools so patched with gaffer tape that scarcely any of their original fabric remained. The walls were dominated by the legally mandated display signs that reminded patrons of the manifold evils of demon drink. The sound system oozed one after another of the mawkish saccharine neobilly ballads that dominated the top forty. The deacons and even the miserable, vindictive children of the Young Crusaders came through at least twice a night, checking IDs and generally intimidating the customers.
Mansard signaled for another shot.
"It's like the poor goddamned Tibetans," he said to no one in particular. "The whole sad-ass country, which was an uphill struggle at the best of times, fell apart in the mid-twentieth century under the strain of supporting a system in which 60 percent of able-bodied men were engaged in full-time religion. The country starved because its main industry was Buddhism. This country is going the self-same route because our major industry has become Jes-us."
The sneering singsong stress on the final word was a clear parody of the Faithful whine. Most of the other people in the bar were avoiding looking at him, trying to pretend that he did not exist. Eddy the bartender was beginning to give him the hard eyeball. Eddy generally tolerated his mouthing off. Mansard did, after all, piss away the bulk of his salary in O'Ryan's and places like it. Only when people got nervous enough to start leaving would Eddy move firmly to shut him down.
That moment was getting very close. A shabby middle-aged couple with furtive faces who, from the look of them, subsisted on the dingy fringe of the black market, were already gathering up their change.
Mansard snarled at them. "What's the matter with you? Am I driving you out?"
The man took the woman's arm protectively as they stood up. They refused even to glance in Mansard's direction. Mansard swayed ominously, half off his stool.
"I'm talking to you."
The man raised a frightened, defensive hand. "Listen, mister, we don't want no trouble. We've got troubles of our own."
" 'Fraid of the thought police? Is that it?"
The couple were edging toward the door. Mansard finished his shot. He doubted that Eddy would give him another.
"You don't have to worry about me. They can't touch me. Charlie Mansard can blaspheme all he wants and there ain't a damn thing the deacons can do about it. You want to know why?"
He received no response, but he went on anyway.
"They can't touch me because they need me too bad. I'm an artist, goddamn it, and they can't do without my art. I make their stinking miracles for them."
Eddy was moving down the bar. The boom was about to be lowered on Charlie Mansard's evening.
Carlisle
The call had come just twenty minutes earlier: There was a bomb in the prayer parlor at the corner of Broadway and Eighth. The caller had identified herself as a Lefthand Path. She had used the antihoax code that was the terrorsect's only compromise with the authorities, so it was close to certain that the call was the real thing. The LPs inevitably meant business and rarely screwed around with false alarms. The data had flashed on the 17 screens as an emergency interrupt; it would have simultaneously been routed to the deacons and the bomb squad. 17, the NYPD's lower Manhattan anti-terror task force, worked out of the brand-new Combined Crime Control complex on Astor Place, and there was no excuse for them not being among the first on the scene.
By the time Lt. Harry Carlisle had reached the corner, uniforms had already closed off the streets for three blocks in every direction. Union Square was probably already gridlocked, the traffic beginning to back up all the way to midtown. Carlisle took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air. It was a tense situation, but at least it was real. He was out of the Astor Place complex and temporarily beyond the reach of its internal politics, its paranoia, and its induced religious mania. He had joined the police department to chase criminals, not to absorb a lot of crap about the wrath of God and the punishment to come. Of course, back in the days when he had been a rookie patrolman, life in general had seemed a whole lot simpler. Religion had been a thing that was there on a Sunday morning for those who wanted it. It had not been a vims that infected the whole damned country.
A heavily armored blue-and-white bomb-squad truck with black-and-yellow warning bars on its rear doors was pulling up beside the prayer parlor in a flurry of lights and sirens. Reeves and Donahue, also from T7, were already there. They were standing well back, keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any possible explosion. It was the members of the bomb squad who were paid to risk their lives. T7 sifted for clues once the danger was over.
The bomb squad, in full blast armor, was off-loading i
ts ATCO J40 search robot. The prayer parlor was one of the Good Shepherd chain, the biggest franchise east of the Mississippi. In Harry Carlisle's estimation, the prayer parlor was one of the rinkiest of dinky ideas in an ultimately rinky dink epoch. If a person wanted to talk to God, all he had to do was to plastic in, duck into a pod, and wait while his credit was checked out. If his plastic was good, the opaque cover closed and he was free, in seeming privacy, to mutter his specific needs, hidden fears, or darkest confessions into the nativity-blue microphone that was supposed to lead directly to the ear of the Almighty. The sense of privacy was illusory. The microphone also led to the deacons' central records complex in Virginia Beach. Each individual's desires, fantasies, and shameful little sins were collated, analyzed, and data-shaped. If no other action was taken, they would finally be downloaded into the memory banks by which the Good Lord, with the help of his ever-present secret police force, kept his flock on the straight and narrow. According to the deacons, God could never get enough data.
Of course, the deacons paid through the nose for their tap into the heavenly hotline. It was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but anyone in the know was well aware that annual user fees garnered by Good Shepherd Inc. alone ran into the hundreds of millions. The deacon hierarchy would have been overjoyed to cut out the middleman and run the prayer parlors itself, but not even the deacons could walk over the fundamental principles of Christian free enterprise. Government and even religion were supposed to stay off the back of business. Thus the deacons had to lease their access to the data matrix from the franchise owners.
The robot swayed down the ramp that led out of the back of the bomb-squad truck. There were wisps of blue smoke coming from the small rotary engine set between its two sets of treads. That did not bode well. Harry Carlisle scowled. The deacons got everything they wanted while the regular cops, who in his estimation did the dirty, day-to-day work of law enforcement, had to operate with hardware that was little more than obsolete garbage. There was hardly anything in the department that was not held together with epoxy and duct tape.
The deacons themselves had arrived on the scene. Two of their big black Lincoln Continentals were nosing through the police barriers to stop on the corner of Tenth Street. They, too, were keeping their distance. The doors opened, and eight deacons climbed out of the two cars. They were the standard issue: cold-faced young men in dark suits so alike that they were virtually a uniform. Although he could not see from where he was standing, Carlisle knew that they were wearing the tiny gold crucifix insignia in their lapels. He reached the spot where Reeves and Donahue were standing and nodded to the two detectives.
Reeves grimaced. "That J40 looks about to burn out."
"So what else is new? "
Carlisle checked his tracy. When it finally came on line, the small wrist screen showed a robot-eye view of the entrance to the Good Shepherd. The robot lumbered forward. Carlisle flicked the channel changer with the nail of his index finger. The image changed to a close-up of the bomb-squad officer who was monitoring the operation from inside the truck.
The man glanced impatiently into the screen. "What do you want, Lieutenant? I kind of got my hands full here."
The man's name was Vargas. One of the last holdout Catholics on the force, he would probably never make it past sergeant. The two men were not friends, but they knew each other by sight, and there was a certain mutual respect.
"Is that robot of yours going to hold up?" Carlisle asked.
"How the hell should I know?"
"Shouldn't talk like that with deacons around."
"Believe me. I've got more shit to worry about than petty blasphemy."
"We could really use a bomb that was defused and intact – anything that could give us a lead."
"I'm doing the best I can."
Vargas cut the connection, and Carlisle's screen once again showed the view from the robot. It was inside the prayer parlor, running on its redscope and moving slowly along the row of pods. The Good Shepherd was a big joint as prayer parlors went – a full two dozen pods. There was the heat image of a human figure inside the pod at the very end of the line.
"What the hell is that? I thought the place had been cleared." Vargas' voice boomed and crackled from the robot's speakers. "Come out of there right now with your hands in plain sight!"
The reply was picked up by the robot. It was a man's voice, weakly amplified.
"Jesus won't let me be harmed."
"Christ, we got a nut in there. How did you morons manage to miss him?" Vargas was back on the wrist screen again. "We'll have to get some uniforms in there to drag him out. Goddamn lunatic."
A uniformed officer whom Carlisle did not know was on the screen. "My men can't go in there. They don't have any armor."
Vargas was cursing in Spanish as he sent in his own men. The deacons remained aloof and silent throughout the entire exchange. There was a confusion of heat images on the tracy. The nut was screaming about sacrilege and damnation, and then abruptly he stopped. One of the bomb squad must have chopped him out with armored gloves that could quiet just about anyone. The robot was on the move again, sniffers going. Within seconds, the bomb location symbol was flashing. Then the screen snowed. The J40 had malfunctioned.
"Now we're screwed," Vargas said.
"How long to detonation?" Carlisle asked.
"Six minutes, if the warning call was on the money." Vargas was shaking his head. "I can't send in any of my men."
One of the bomb squad cut in. "It's Massey, chief. I'm still inside, and I 'm on the device."
"Get out of there."
"I think I can drop the sucker."
"Don't try it. There's no time."
"It looks like a couple of keys of juiced plastique with a simple d-style timer. It's in a supermarket bag. A&P."
"Timer got a readout?"
"Yeah."
"How long to go?"
"Four forty-two and counting."
"So get out of there."
"I tell you I can down it."
"Forget it!"
"I can do it, Sarge."
"Give me the bomb location."
"It's under the seat in one of the booths."
"Which one?"
"Hang on, I can't read the numbers… It's seven. Booth number seven."
"Just look in the bag. Don't touch a thing."
"I'm looking."
"And?"
"There's no sign of a trembler. I'm going to try to get it out of the bag."
The explosion left Carlisle deaf for thirty seconds. Flying glass had cut his cheek. Reeves had been hurled to the ground. The glass was like a carpet of fresh, glittering hail that stretched for a block and a half in every direction. Windows were gone from buildings all around the intersection. The deacons were sheltering behind their Lincolns. Flames were licking inside the ruined shell of the prayer parlor. Debris showered down. There was no longer a link with Vargas in the truck. Carlisle started running. The back doors of the truck burst open, and Vargas staggered out, pulling off his protective helmet and shaking his head. It would turn out that his hearing was permanently impaired.
Speedboat
Speedboat waited until well after dark before he decided to leave the apartment on Avenue C. The girl was out cold on the bare mattress. She had been packing away bootleg doomers all the previous night and was in a world of her own. A tiny trail of spittle ran from the corner of her mouth. He could hardly believe that just eighteen hours earlier he had figured her to be the hottest thing on spikes. For an hour he had sat on the rusting fire escape and watched the bloodred sun going down over the buildings. There had been an explosion earlier that had sounded like a bomb. Probably some cult bombing – if there really were cults. Sometimes he wondered if the deacons didn't plant the bombs themselves to give them the excuse for more purges.
He found the apartment altogether too oppressive. It was just too witchy. The broad was full doombeam, and had all the spooky crap that those people fe
lt they had to surround themselves with. The broken dolls; the ropes of beads hanging from rusty nails; the fans and feathers; the tattered, one-eyed stuffed owl; the crumbling building itself – all added up to a particularly defeated strain of spiritual decay that Speedboat was willing to skirt in the course of business but in which he never wanted to become completely immersed. Her violently disturbing collages, made of plates ripped from medical textbooks juxtaposed against mutilated images from twentieth-century girlie books, were more than enough to convince him. If the dekes ever kicked their way in there, they would have a field day with her artwork. She would probably wind up in Joshua.
Winding up in Joshua was something he, above all, wanted to avoid. One could the in the camps. That was why he waited for the cover of big-city darkness. It was not just simple paranoia either. When he left the place, he would be carrying more than enough contraband to make him dead meat if he was picked up by a prowler. Behind the strip of false baseboard, he had stashed a small fortune in pornosoft and a dozen proscribed audio discs from the '80s and '90s. The latter included a couple of Billy Idols and a mint Motorhead. The old packrat Metal Monster on Third Street would pay premium for those, while Manny on St. Marks would give him a good price for the hardsoft in-out. All in all, he should realize some seven hundred on the evening's running. That, in turn, would be enough to get him a hundred Haitian spansules from Jook Aroun, which he could straightaway peddle in the rat traps for twenty a pop. Escape to Canada was nearing reality, but as it did, anxiety made quantum leaps. Nothing must go wrong.
The sun had gone, and the block beyond the airshaft was a black silhouette against a deep red sky. Speedboat did not turn on the light but just sat in the gathering gloom, staring at the shape of the girl on the mattress. She had told him that she had been a phone whore for nine months. That was probably enough to have flipped her over all on its own, sitting there and listening night after night while the holy bastards with the jobs and the plastic spewed out the sump poison of their God-fearing psyches. He could imagine them crouching in dark rooms, muttering their equally dark fantasies to a girl at the end of an anonymous phone. It was a world where everything had to be hidden from the light. Speedboat had stopped getting angry about it a long time ago. He was getting out.
