Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  “Three blocks from here,” Squeaky says to the driver.

  “Hops?” Hiro says.

  “I know the place. Local microbrewery,” Squeaky says. “They grow their own hops. Contract it out to some urban gardeners. Chinese peasants who do the grunt work for 'em.”

  When they arrive, the first authority figures on the scene, it is obvious why Raven decided to let himself get chased into a hop field: It is great cover. The hops are heavy, flowering vines that grow on trellises lashed together out of long bamboo poles. The trellises are eight feet high; you can't see a thing.

  They all get out of the car.

  “T-Bone?” Squeaky hollers.

  They hear someone yelling in English from the middle of the field. “Over here!” But he isn't responding to Squeaky.

  They walk into the hop field. Carefully. There is an enveloping smell, a resiny odor not unlike marijuana, the sharp smell that comes off an expensive beer. Squeaky motions for Hiro to stay behind him.

  In other circumstances, Hiro would do so. He is half Japanese, and under certain circumstances, totally respectful of authority.

  This is not one of those circumstances. If Raven comes anywhere near Hiro, Hiro is going to be talking to him with his katana. And if it comes to that, Hiro doesn't want Squeaky anywhere near him, because he could lose a limb on the backswing.

  “Yo, T-Bone!” Squeaky yells. “It's The Enforcers, and we're pissed! Get the fuck out of there, man. Let's go home!”

  T-Bone, or Hiro assumes it is T-Bone, responds only by firing a short burst from a machine pistol. The muzzle flash lights up the hop vines like a strobe light. Hiro aims one shoulder at the ground, buries himself in soft earth and foliage for a few seconds.

  “Fuck!” T-Bone says. It is a disappointed fuck, but a fuck with a heavy undertone of overwhelming frustration and not a little fear.

  Hiro gets up into a conservative squat, looks around. Squeaky and the other Enforcer are nowhere to be seen.

  Hiro forces his way through one of the trellises and into a row that is closer to the action.

  The other Enforcer—the driver—is in the same row, about ten meters away, his back turned to Hiro. He glances over his shoulder in Hiro's direction, then looks in the other direction and sees someone else—Hiro can't quite see who, because The Enforcer is in the way.

  “What the fuck,” The Enforcer says.

  Then he jumps a little, as though startled, and something happens to the back of his jacket.

  “Who is it?” Hiro says.

  The Enforcer doesn't say anything. He is trying to turn back around, but something prevents it. Something is shaking the vines around him.

  The Enforcer shudders, careens sideways from foot to foot. “Got to get loose,” he says, speaking loudly to no one in particular. He breaks into a trot, running away from Hiro. The other person who was in the row is gone now. The Enforcer is running in a strange stiff upright gait with his arms down to his sides. His bright green windbreaker isn't hanging correctly.

  Hiro runs after him. The Enforcer is trotting toward the end of the row, where the lights of the street are visible.

  The Enforcer exits the field a couple of seconds ahead of him, and, when Hiro gets to the curb, is in the middle of the road, illuminated mostly by flashing blue light from a giant overhead video screen. He is turning around and around with strange little stomping footsteps, not keeping his balance very well. He is saying, “Aaah, aaah” in a low, calm voice that gurgles as though he badly needs to clear his throat.

  As The Enforcer revolves, Hiro perceives that he has been impaled on an eight-foot-long bamboo spear. Half sticks out the front, half out the back. The back half is dark with blood and black fecal clumps, the front half is greenish-yellow and clean. The Enforcer can only see the front half and his hands are playing up and down it, trying to verify what his eyes are seeing. Then the back half whacks into a parked car, spraying a narrow fan of head cheese across the waxed and polished trunk lid. The car's alarm goes off. The Enforcer hears the sound and turns around to see what it is.

  When Hiro last sees him, he is running down the center of the pulsating neon street toward the center of Chinatown, wailing a terrible, random song that clashes with the bleating of the car alarm. Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be. Lost in the biomass.

  Hiro draws his katana.

  “Squeaky!” Hiro hollers. “He's throwing spears! He's pretty good at it! Your driver is hit!”

  “Got it!” Squeaky hollers.

  Hiro goes back into the closest row. He hears a sound off to the right and uses the katana to cut his way through into that row. This is not a nice place to be at the moment, but it is safer than standing in the street under the plutonic light of the video screen.

  Down the row is a man. Hiro recognizes him by the strange shape of his head, which just gets wider until it reaches his shoulders. He is holding a freshly cut bamboo pole in one hand, torn from the trellis.

  Raven strokes one end of it with his other hand, and a chunk falls off. Something flickers in that hand, the blade of a knife apparently. He has just cut off the end of the pole at an acute angle to make it into a spear.

  He throws it fluidly. The motion is calm and beautiful. The spear disappears because it is coming straight at Hiro.

  Hiro does not have time to adopt the proper stance, but this is fine since he has already adopted it. Whenever he has a katana in his hands he adopts it automatically, otherwise he fears that he may lose his balance and carelessly lop off one of his extremities. Feet parallel and pointed straight ahead, right foot in front of the left foot, katana held down at groin level like an extension of the phallus. Hiro raises the tip and slaps at the spear with the side of the blade, diverting it just enough; it goes into a slow sideways spin, the point missing Hiro just barely and entangling itself in a vine on Hiro's right. The butt end swings around and gets hung up on the left, tearing out a number of vines as it comes to a stop. It is heavy, and traveling very fast.

  Raven is gone.

  Mental note: Whether or not Raven intended to take on a bunch of Crips and Enforcers singlehandedly tonight, he didn't even bother to pack a gun.

  Another burst of gunfire sounds from several rows over.

  Hiro has been standing here for rather a long time, thinking about what just happened. He cuts through the next row of vines and heads in the direction of the muzzle flash, running his mouth: “Don't shoot this way, T-Bone, I'm on your side, man.”

  “Motherfucker threw a stick into my chest, man!” T-Bone complains.

  When you're wearing armor, getting hit by a spear just isn't such a big deal anymore.

  “Maybe you should just forget it,” Hiro says. He is having to cut his way through a lot of rows to reach T-Bone, but as long as T-Bone keeps talking, Hiro can find him.

  “I'm a Crip. We don't forget nothing.” T-Bone says. “Is that you?”

  “No,” Hiro says. “I'm not there yet.”

  A very brief burst of gunfire, rapidly cut off. Suddenly, no one is talking. Hiro cuts his way into the next row and almost steps on T-Bone's hand, which has been amputated at the wrist. Its finger is still tanged in the trigger guard of a MAC-11.

  The remainder of T-Bone is two rows away. Hiro stops and watches through the vines.

  Raven is one of the largest men Hiro has seen outside of a professional sporting event. T-Bone is backing away from him down the row. Raven, moving with long confident strides, catches up with T-Bone and swings one hand up into T-Bone's body; Hiro doesn't have to see the knife to know it is there.

  It looks as though T-Bone is going to get out of this with nothing worse than a sewn-on hand and some rehab work, because you can't stab a person to death that way, not if he is wearing armor.

  T-Bone screams.

  He is bouncing up and down on Raven's hand. The knife has gone all the way throu
gh the bulletproof fabric and now Raven is trying to gut T-Bone the same way he did Lagos. But his knife—whatever the hell it is—won't cut through the fabric that way. It is sharp enough to penetrate—which should be impossible—but not sharp enough to slash.

  Raven pulls it out, drops to one knee, and swings his knife hand around in a long ellipse between T-Bone's thighs. Then he jumps over T-Bone's collapsing body and runs.

  Hiro gets the sense that T-Bone is a dead man, so he follows Raven. His intention is not to hunt the man down, but rather to maintain a very clear picture of where he is.

  He has to cut through a number of rows. He rapidly loses Raven. He considers running as fast as he can in the opposite direction.

  Then he hears the deep, lung-stretching rumble of a motorcycle engine. Hiro runs for the nearest street exit, just hoping to catch a glimpse.

  He does, though it is a quick one, not a hell of a lot better than the graphic in the cop car. Raven turns to look at Hiro, just as he is blowing out of there. He's right under a streetlight, so Hiro gets a clear look at his face for the first time. He is Asian. He has a wispy mustache that trails down past his chin.

  Another Crip comes running out into the street half a second after Hiro, as Raven is pulling away. He slows for a moment to take stock of the situation, then charges the motorcycle like a linebacker. He is crying out as he does so, a war cry.

  Squeaky emerges about the same time as the Crip, starts chasing both of them down the street.

  Raven seems to be unaware of the Crip running behind him, but in hindsight it seems apparent that he has been watching his approach in the rearview mirror of the motorcycle. As the Crip comes in range, Raven's hand lets go of the throttle for a moment, snaps back as if he is throwing away a piece of litter. His fist strikes the middle of the Crip's face like a frozen ham shot out of a cannon. The Crip's head snaps back, his feet are lifted off the ground, he does most of a backflip and strikes the pavement, hitting first with the nape of his neck, both arms slamming out straight onto the road as he does so. It looks a lot like a controlled fall, though if so, it has to be more reflex than anything.

  Squeaky decelerates, turns, and kneels down next to the fallen Crip, ignoring Raven.

  Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.

  He runs up to the Crip, who is lying crucified in the center of the street. The lower half of the Crip's face is pretty hard to make out. His eyes are half open, and he looks quite relaxed. He speaks quietly. “He's a fucking Indian or something.”

  Interesting idea. But Hiro still thinks he's Asian.

  “What the fuck did you think you were doing, asshole?” Squeaky says. He sounds so pissed that Hiro steps away from him.

  “That fucker ripped us off—the suitcase burned,” the Crip mumbles through a mashed jaw.

  “So why didn't you just write it off? Are you crazy, fucking with Raven like that?”

  “He ripped us off. Nobody does that and lives.”

  “Well, Raven just did,” Squeaky says. Finally, he's calming down a little. He rocks back on his heels, looks up at Hiro.

  “T-Bone and your driver are not likely to be alive,” Hiro says. “This guy better not move—he could have a neck fracture.”

  “He's lucky I don't fracture his fucking neck,” Squeaky says.

  The ambulance people get there fast enough to slap an inflatable cervical collar around the Crip's neck before he gets ambitious enough to stand up. They haul him away within a few minutes.

  Hiro goes back into the hops and finds T-Bone. T-Bone is dead, slumped in a kneeling position against a trellis. The stab wound through his bulletproof vest probably would have been fatal, but Raven wasn't satisfied with that. He went down low and slashed up and down the insides of T-Bone's thighs, which are now laid open all the way to the bone. In doing so, he put great length-wise rents into both of T-Bone's femoral arteries, and his entire blood supply dropped out of him. Like slicing the bottom off a styrofoam cup.

  20

  The Enforcers turn the entire block into a mobile cop headquarters with cars and paddy wagons and satellite links on flatbed trucks. Dudes with white coats are walking up and down through the hop field with Geiger counters. Squeaky is wandering around with his headset, staring into space, carrying on conversations with people who aren't there. A tow truck shows up, towing T-Bone's black BMW behind it.

  “Yo, pod.” Hiro turns around and looks. It's Y.T. She's just come out of a Hunan place across the street. She hands Hiro a little white box and a pair of chopsticks. “Spicy chicken with black bean sauce, no MSG. You know how to use chopsticks?”

  Hiro shrugs off this insult.

  “I got a double order,” Y.T. continues, “cause I figure we got some good intel tonight.”

  “Are you aware of what happened here?”

  “No. I mean, some people obviously got hurt.”

  “But you weren't an eyewitness.”

  “No, I couldn't keep up with them.”

  “That's good,” Hiro says.

  “What did happen?”

  Hiro just shakes his head. The spicy chicken is glistening darkly under the lights; he has never been less hungry in his life. “If I had known, I wouldn't have gotten you involved. I just thought it was a surveillance job.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don't want to get into it. Look. Stay away from Raven, okay?”

  “Sure,” she says. She says it in the chirpy tone of voice that she uses when she's lying and she wants to make sure you know it.

  Squeaky hauls open the back door of the BMW and looks into the back seat. Hiro steps a little closer, gets a nasty whiff of cold smoke. It is the smell of burnt plastic.

  The aluminum briefcase that Raven earlier gave to T-Bone is sitting in the middle of the seat. It looks like it has been thrown into a fire; it has black smoke stains splaying out around the locks, and its plastic handle is partially melted. The buttery leather that covers the BMW's seats has burn marks on it. No wonder T-Bone was pissed.

  Squeaky pulls on a pair of latex gloves. He hauls the briefcase out, sets it on the trunk lid, and rips the latches open with a small prybar.

  Whatever it is, it is complicated and highly designed. The top half of the case has several rows of the small red-capped tubes that Hiro saw at the U-Stor-It. There are five rows with maybe twenty tubes in each row.

  The bottom half of the case appears to be some kind of miniaturized, old-fashioned computer terminal. Most of it is occupied by a keyboard. There is a small liquid-crystal display screen that can probably handle about five lines of text at a time. There is a penlike object attached to the case by a cable, maybe three feet long uncoiled. It looks like it might be a light pen or a bar-code scanner. Above the keyboard is a lens, set at an angle so that it is aimed at whoever is typing on the keyboard. There are other features whose purpose is not so obvious: a slot, which might be a place to insert a credit or ID card, and a cylindrical socket that is about the size of one of those little tubes.

  This is Hiro's reconstruction of how the thing looked at one time. When Hiro sees it, it is melted together. Judging from the pattern of smoke marks on the outside of the case—which appear to be jetting outward from the crack between the top and bottom—the source of the flame was inside, not outside.

  Squeaky reaches down and unsnaps one of the tubes from the bracket, holds it up in front of the bright lights of Chinatown. It had been transparent but was now smirched by heat and smoke. From a distance, it looks like a simple vial, but stepping up to look at it more closely Hiro can see at least half a dozen tiny individual compartments inside the thing, all connected to each other by capillary tubes. It has a red plastic cap on one end of it. The cap has a black rectangular window, and as Squeaky rotates it, Hiro can see the dark red glint of an inactive LED display inside, like looking at the display on a turned-off c
alculator. Underneath this is a small perforation. It isn't just a simple drilled hole. It is wide at the surface, rapidly narrowing to a nearly invisible pinpoint opening, like the bell of a trumpet.

  The compartments inside the vial are all partially filled with liquids. Some of them are transparent and some are blackish brown. The brown ones have to be organics of some kind, now reduced by the heat into chicken soup. The transparent ones could be anything.

  “He got out to go into a bar and have a drink,” Squeaky mumbles. “What an asshole.”

  “Who did?”

  “T-Bone. See, T-Bone was, like, the registered owner of this unit. The suitcase. And as soon as he got more than about ten feet away from it—foosh—it self-destructed.”

  “Why?”

  Squeaky looks at Hiro like he's stupid. “Well, it's not like I work for Central Intelligence or anything. But I would guess that whoever makes this drug—they call it Countdown, or Redcap, or Snow Crash—has a real thing about trade secrets. So if the pusher abandons the suitcase, or loses it, or tries to transfer ownership to someone else—foosh.”

  “You think the Crips are going to catch up with Raven?”

  “Not in Chinatown. Shit,” Squeaky says, getting pissed again in retrospect, “I can't believe that guy. I could have killed him.”

  “Raven?”

  “No. That Crip. Chasing Raven. He's lucky Raven got to him first, not me.”

  “You were chasing the Crip?”

  “Yeah, I was chasing the Crip. What, did you think I was trying to catch Raven?”

  “Sort of, yeah. I mean, he's the bad guy, right?”

  “Definitely. So I'd be chasing Raven if I was a cop and it was my job to catch bad guys. But I'm an Enforcer, and it's my job to enforce order. So I'm doing everything I can—and so is every other Enforcer in town—to protect Raven. And if you have any ideas about trying to go and find Raven yourself and get revenge for that colleague of yours that he offed, you can forget it.”