“Bad, man, muy bad.”
In a baggy leather chair slumped the Alcalde, face drained white. He looked as if he’d been beaten extensively. On a desk by him was an old-style square TV set, with news coverage. There were aerial views of the burning Jungle.
Irises showed ID photos of García and Scotchman.
“What is this about?” Stuart asked.
“You, gangsta,” Esperanza said.
The iris showed Stuart’s passport shot. He hated it; he was wearing his old school tie.
“They say you’ve been taken out by a zonk gang,” she said, translating the garble of the newscast. “Two cops are dead, you just missing. There’s an “orgy of cop killing” going down, and Chief Ryu is sending in Special Tactical Groups.”
The TV cut to Mayor Jute, improbably well-groomed for someone hauled out of bed in the middle of the night.
“Genfems of the press,” she said, “the officers who’ve fallen will be honoured. The sympathies of the city are for the significant partners and offspring of the law enforcement casualties.”
“What about the ridealong?” a non-CGI journo asked.
“Every effort is being exerted to recover Stuart Finn. I have just interfaced with Prime Minister Heseltine and assured him our best non-gender specific operatives are onstreet . . .”
“I didn’t vote for him,” Stuart blurted.
“At this temporal juncture, it seems decreasingly likely that Mr Finn is still living. The Zonk Gangs have demonstrated in the past their savage ruthlessness.”
Back in the studio, the news-anchor summed up, “Following an unprovoked attack by gangs, two LAPD officers are confirmed dead . . .”
Grainy homevideo footage showed two burned bodies hanging from cuffed wrists. The camera focused on a boiled face. It was García.
“. . . and a British writer on a ridealong is missing . . .”
García and Scotchman had set Stuart up, then been set up themselves. This was a stage-managed riot.
But why?
“Chief Ryu has vowed . . .”
The Alcalde spasmed with coughing. Stuart thought the man had a couple of broken ribs, at least.
“They’re coming down like a hard rain,” the boy said. “Soon as this shit started, they got the Alcalde. It was deliberate, man. On radio, I got word others have been taken out. Not just gangstas, man. Others like the Alcalde. That commie priest, he’s dead. And a couple of women from the Committee for the Disappeared. It was a surgical strike. Shut up the troublemakers, man.”
Esperanza was thoughtful.
“All this community spirit garbage is over,” the boy waved around. There were anti-zonk posters, schedules for educational drives, portraits of positive ethnic role models. “The Caldiarres were right, Warchild. We should just’ve fought back.”
The Alcalde died.
Esperanza thought it over. The boy hefted a machine pistol, itching to get onstreet and take out some cop butt. Finally, the girl nodded agreement.
“Gangsta,” she said, pointing at Stuart, “we dead by dawn, dead or disappeared. You, you have to live, live to show the lie. You a writer, right? Tell this story. Tell them all how it went down.”
It seemed a fair bet to say Stuart would not be working on the Shadowstalk script any more.
“You a hero, man,” the boy said. “I can see it on you.”
He was alone. The explosions had died down, though there were still bursts of gunfire. The TV chattered quiet lies, and repeated shock footage of edited truth. There was talk of arrested zonk gangstas, but not of slain community leaders.
The Alcalde was under a dust-sheet. Stuart gathered he had tried to give his people an example, tried to keep them out of the gangs, off the drugs. Something about the waste of effort chilled Stuart to despair.
There were kids out onstreet who had hung with the Alcalde, studied hard and tried their best; they were just as dead as the zonkbrains and gangstas.
He wondered where the beast-man was in this fight. Lost, probably. In a city-wide battle, one small impossible wonder counted for little.
The office door opened.
“Fuck shit death,” Stuart said.
A young man staggered in. It was Vega, one of the Alcalde’s boys. His clothes were a ruin. He had been in a fight.
“Black man,” he said, looking at Stuart. “I’m spent.”
His eyes shone. Stuart recognized them and staggered back against a desk.
Vega smiled; the smile became a snarl. The hunter’s snout surfaced in Vega’s face and receded again.
Now Stuart knew Vega’s secret, could the beast-man let him live? The whole of Los Angeles had reasons for finding it more convenient if Stuart Finn were dead.
“What did I do?” he said. “I wrote a book? Hollywood called, I took the money. Do I deserve to die for it?”
“Depends on the movie,” Vega said, grinning.
XVI From the Corrido of Diego
“So, black man, that is what I am, what I have done, what I have been, what I have learned.
“Some call me monster, some call me hero. They will call you the same things. I know truly I am neither. I am merely a fool. I know I can make no difference, can change nothing but myself, but I have been compelled to try. Many are deservedly dead by my hand, but many more equally as deserving never crossed my path. I have felled tiny trees in an ever-expanding jungle.
“That poor dead man, the Alcalde, was better than I. He was a man of peace, of learning, of love. His way was best. And yet he has been killed. Others, men and women of good will, are slaughtered. This is as bad a time as I have known and it wearies me more than I can tell. I am near the end of my days and I am not sorry.
“At first, I understood that I killed for my people. I was wrong, I killed for my kind. Chicano, black, white, whatever. My kind is all colours. I am of the pobres, the poor, the oppressed, the neglected, the inconvenient. I am the cry of the sad, the true grito de dolores. My task has been futile, but I have not abandoned it until now.
“You are different from me. You will understand the curse. You will tilt at windmills, for you have no choice. You will stand knee-deep in the sea and cry ‘go back, waves.’ I am truly sorry for you, but I have no choice, as I have never had a choice. Your face shines, not as the faces of those I kill shine, but with a rainbow brilliance. The viejo must have been that rainbow in my own face.
“Live long with your legend, black man . . .”
XVII
“What do you mean?” Stuart asked.
“This,” Diego Vega said, holding out a frail hand. Pain passed across his face. His eyes were ancient.
Diego struck out, and touched Stuart’s face.
It was an electric jolt. Stuart convulsed and fell, banging his head against a deskleg. His body throbbed as something coursed through his flesh.
After a time, his mind came back together. He did not know how long he had been space-voyaging inside his skull. The corrido Diego Vega had told him was imprinted in his brain, as if the man’s memories had passed from his mind to Stuart’s at the moment of the jolt.
Scrambling across the floor, he found a body. Diego Vega was dead; an old man, withered to a husk. There was no particular expression of peace on his face. Nobody was home.
Stuart stood, wondering how he was changed.
As Diego had spoken, the noise from the Jungle had changed. Fewer shots and explosions, more sirens and helicopters. They had ignored the TV as the flickering images of violence became pacified. Onstreet, the Tactical Squads were taking control.
Stuart knew he should get out of the office. People were looking for him. He had to find the right way of coming out of the Jungle. It had to be public, preferably televised. Mayor Jute had said he was probably dead, and many of her subordinates wouldn’t hesitate to turn her supposition into a statement of fact.
The door was kicked open and three cops with shotguns piled in, levelling gleaming barrels.
Stuart, in the throes of
a change he couldn’t understand, was still going to die. He would die before he had achieved his potential.
“It’s him,” a cop said. “Finn, the Brit.”
They paraded him, half-captive and half-trophy. An officer made a comprehensive report into a wafer-phone,
The Jungle was tamed. The dead had been disappeared. Now, things were being cleaned up. Teams shifted the burned-out cars, searched for survivors and culprits, even picked up empty shell-cases like litter collectors.
Stuart was still too high on the jolt he had taken to be tired. Last night, several times, he’d thought he was a changed man. Now, he truly was. He remembered Diego’s voice, at once urgent and discursive, and the corrido that had been an education and a preparation.
Small businessmen sighed outside smoking wrecks. Crying mothers searched for missing sons. Floral tributes lay on corpse outlines. Cops stood around with paper cups of coffee. Newsteams scavenged for interviews with firefighters and cops.
Everyone would want Stuart’s story.
He was hustled to an intersection where a tangle of newsies pointed cameras and mikes at a knot of officials. There were uniform cops, faces grimed from the action, and serious, smiling dignitaries. He recognized Chief Ryu and Mayor Jute.
Their faces glowed like moonlight.
The gleam made Stuart sick. He clenched fists, and felt his sharp, strong nails breaking his skin. His forefingers were lengthening, strange aches in their knuckles. The pain was not unpleasant, and made him aware of the growing reconfigurations of his nerves and senses.
The crowds parted and Stuart was welcomed. Hundreds of questions were asked, but a suit Stuart had never seen explained “Mr Finn is exhausted from his grueling ordeal but will answer all serious inquiries later.”
Stuart knew he’d rate a debriefing before he was allowed to say anything.
Chief Ryu and the Mayor competed to shake his hand. The Mayor, a head taller, won. Dazed by the almost-opaque wasp’s nest of light around her head, Stuart accepted Mayor Jute’s grip.
He left her palm bloody, and smiled.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“This atrocious situation will not be repeated,” Chief Ryu insisted to the media. “When the moon comes out tonight, things will be different.”
“That’s true,” Stuart said. Reaching out as if dazed, he wiped his bloody hand on the hood of a police armoured car. It was warm in August sunlight.
Diego Vega had talked most of the day away, invisibly dying all the while, something inside him gathering to make a leap. Now, evening was rushing on, and night was creeping after.
As Stuart’s smile stretched, he ran his tongue over his teeth and felt an unfamiliar sharpness.
“Regardless of the bleats of the bleeding heart bunch,” Ryu said, arms extended, “there is Evil all around us. And Evil must be suppressed. Wrong-doers must be punished.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Stuart said.
He looked at the car he had smeared. His mark was drying. His mark in blood.
Zig-zag-zig.
Jo Fletcher
BRIGHT OF MOON
Jo Fletcher is associate publisher at British book imprint Gollancz. She co-edited the World Fantasy Convention anthologies Gaslight & Ghosts and Secret City: Strange Tales of London (both with Stephen Jones), and contributed to the macabre poetry collection Now We Are Sick. Her own verse is collected in Shadows of Light and Dark. The first recipient of the British Fantasy Karl Edward Wagner Award, she has also won the World Fantasy Award: Professional.
The dark of moon,
The torment born
For those the gods have marked.
Slow swell of moon
Presages doom;
The change has now been sparked.
The bright of moon,
A change of form –
The Children roam the land.
Howl at the moon
And shun the dawn,
Ravenous and damned.
The wane of moon,
The Feeding done,
In shadows spurn the sun.
’Til pull of moon
The Frenzy spawns –
The Children once more run.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 64
