by David Ohle
As they walked back to the blacksmith's shop, Dewey said to everyone, "Think about it this way. We keep the brick for a while and then we bury it out there on the prairie somewhere. When the law's been repealed, why we'll come on back and get it. This smithy's not entitled to even an ounce.
When they arrived at the shop, Dewey outlined a plan. "All right, we're gonna do the smart thing. We're taking the gold and we're taking that wind wagon, too." With the rifle barrel, he struck the blacksmith a sharp blow to his shoulder. The snap of bone was audible and the blacksmith fell backward, his head hitting the horn of the anvil, his numb hand dragging through the forge and flinging hot coals onto the hay-strewn mud floor. A fire began quickly, spreading outward in a perfect circle, setting the blacksmith's apron on fire.
"Everybody, on the Reverend's wagon!" Dewey shouted. "Let's get the hell on out of here."
"Look, that man is on fire," Charity said. "His face is bubbling."
Harp took a step toward the blacksmith. "Shouldn't we drag him out? He'll burn to death."
"Us, too, you moron," Dewey said.
Mildred and Harp nevertheless made an attempt to save the smithy. She took one of his feet, Harp the other, and they pulled until the boots came off, but managed to move him only a few feet before the fire drove them back.
Dewey looked up and down the street, then at his tired mules and broken spoke. He held his bandana in the air. "Luck's with us, folks. The wind's good and strong off the prairie. Everybody, let's push this wagon out and raise them sails."
Getting the wagon into the street and the sails raised took some doing. With only three adults and a weak stinker girl, it was a back-breaking push. But when the sails caught the wind, the wagon rolled along at a fair clip, leaving the blacksmith and his shop in flames.
After two full days of a steady wind from the east, the wagon had made good progress. When it came to the ford at Bloody Creek, Dewey applied the brake and brought it to a slow stop, the front wheels axle-deep in water.
"Here we are, folks," Dewey said. "Once we cross the Bloody, we're in the prairie. If there's one, there's ten million imps that live there. We'll be running over them as we go. Figure we'll bury the brick out there somewhere, maybe in an imp hole. No mule driver'll ever take his animals where there's that many holes. They'd go lame in no time. A wind wagon's got that advantage, no mules attached."
The Guard and his deputy had stood by and watched the blacksmith's and the adjacent livery burn to the ground.
"Sure did go up fast," Ratoncito said.
"Dry wood, I guess," Peppard said, using a long, branched stick to roll the smoldering blacksmith out of the ashes. "His body's all asizzle. You hear it, Ratoncito?"
"I hear it."
"Smells like bacon, don't it? You ever had bacon?"
"Never did. Couldn't get it. Big shortages all the time."
"When the Reverend gets his re-meating imps to market, there'll be all we can eat all the time."
"Looking forward, Major. Looking forward to that day."
"Well, all right. There's Dewey's wagon and his mules. Now where's Dewey and his passengers?"
"What do you suppose happened to that wind wagon, Major? You think it burned up?"
"Most likely Dewey and company took it and went. They knocked that poor smithy out, set the place on fire and sailed off in the Reverend's own wagon."
"I 'spect we better go on after them, whenever the wind quits. Go get the artist and the mortician. We've got to put a notice in the paper and get the smithy and the stinker buried before we run out of sunlight."
When the wind died that evening, Peppard and Ratoncito were able to follow the wagon's tracks to the edge of Bloody Creek on a fast Q-ped. Within sight was an abandoned farmstead that consisted of a small sod house, a falling-down barn, a well, a privy and an old windmill. There were the dead remains of a persimmon orchard, a fallow garden and a dusty scarecrow.
The two Guards dismounted the Q-ped and crept toward the house. In the stillness of the morning they could hear snoring inside.
"They're sleeping," Peppard whispered.
"I'm not," Charity said. She was sitting on a wooden bench outside the front door, hidden in the shadows. "I get nightmares." She was holding the brick of tooth gold in her lap, stroking it.
"Quiet down, you," Peppard whispered. "We're fixing to make some arrests here and it'll be a damned sight easier if the perpetrators are asleep."
"What the hell's that she's got?"
"Lord God if it ain't a brick o' tooth gold."
"Where'd you get that?"
"Isn't it pretty?"
Ratoncito pointed his firearm at her and wiggled it. "Shoo! Go on! Git lost! Put down that gold and go."
"I'm with Mrs. Balls. She's taking care of me."
"Honey pie. You're on your own now. Follow them wagon tracks back to town. Go to the Templex. They'll take care of you. Walk due east, where the sun comes up."
Charity looked directly into the sun without squinting. "That way?"
"Yep "
"All right, then." She walked past the well, past the barn, and collapsed in the orchard.
"She went down, Major."
"It's no business of ours. The imps'11 take care of her. We've got arrests to make. Possession of tooth gold, destruction of property, stealing the Reverend's wagon and who knows what all else."
One, then two imps left their wallows on the banks of Bloody Creek and stationed themselves in the shade of the barn. They remained still momentarily, making their final calculations before venturing out to feed on Charity.
"Looky there," Ratoncito said, aiming his finger at one of the imps pulling flesh from the stinker's abdomen.
"Our friends are hungry today," Peppard said. "Now, let's go on in there and give them sons of bitches a rude awakening."
When the two Guards entered the house, they found Mildred sleeping on a bare mattress, Dewey and Harp on the floor.
"Rise and shine," Peppard said, holding up the gold bar. "We've all got a date with the wig."
Dewey raised his Sharps and tried to curl his sleepnumbed finger around the trigger. But Peppard and Ratoncito stopped him short with eight shots to the body and head.
Harp sat up, terrified.
Peppard said, "We're taking you in for possession of tooth gold and for malignant neglect in the death of the blacksmith. And we've got a stolen wagon, destruction of property, and arson. State your name. Who's that old woman?"
"I'm Ray Harp. That's Mildred Balls. It's her gold, not mine. I'm an innocent party in all this. I was just a passenger."
The Major stepped closer to Mildred. "She's a damned deep sleeper, wouldn't you say?"
Harp clasped his hands behind his back. "She's very tired. We're all very tired. A lot of sleep was lost."
Ratoncito went closer, touched her forehead. "She's stone cold dead, Major." He placed his hand near her mouth. "I don't feel no breath, neither."
"Well, Mr. Harp, looks like we'll be taking you in all by your lonesome," Peppard said, rocking back and forth on his boot heels. "But first, I want you to give that old dead woman a kiss, right there on them lips. Don't be ascared."
"Not on the lips. I'll just give her a little peck on the cheek."
Peppard raised his weapon and cocked it. "You heard what I said. Ratoncito, what did I just say?"
"You said for him to give that poor dead woman a decent kiss."
"On the lips."
"Yeah, you said that."
"Get to it, Harp. We got a hard ride back to town."
"Isn't kissing prohibited? What if she's infested?"
"We'll all get 'em sooner or later. Eventually, why not now. Ain't that what the Reverend says?"
Harp bent over slowly and lightly touched his lips to Mildred's, which were far colder than he expected they would be, so cold that his head snapped back in reaction.
"Well," Peppard said, "let's get on back now. We'll leave these two for the critters."
&nbs
p; Ratoncito snapped a pair of cuffs onto Harp's wrists.
Eleven.
There is rising demand among Hookerites for the construction of a cinderblock wall, thirty feet high, stretching from Indian Apple to Bum Bad a distance estimated to be one thousand miles. "We want a community we can call our own, " said a spokesperson representing the group. There are more stinkers now, the group believes, than fully living persons. "Many Hookerites, " the Reverend recently observed, are angry when they read the City Moon and are told the same tiring lie, that there are more of us, the uninfested, than the cumulative sum of stinkers. "
As evidence of the growing problem, Hookerites cite news accounts of American settler populations dwindling before the influx of stinker immigration to the Fertile Crescent. According to recent investigations, stinkers in the area now number some sixteen thousand. Because the Crescent is the most luxuriantly rich and abundant land mass on earth, and thusfar relatively parasite-fire, widespread infestation there could bring Chaos to a land where peace, prosperity and order were the rule.
A stinker widow in one of the bailiwicks went into business making her own pure imp sausages, which she served to neighbors on an urpmeal bun. She had learned how to make sausages when she worked at Zeus Bologna Company. Before her husband was put down, he had built her a screened-in lean-to off the side of their trailer. It wasn't visible from Dunvant Road, and that's just the way the widow wanted it. She wasn't as clean or as careful as required by ordinance. There were worn gears in her grinder, which indirectly caused some tooth breakage when customers bit down on a piece of bone.
The widow was in violation of at least ten meat sanitation laws. She was ordered to stop production. "But people in the bailiwick depend on my sausages," she told the City Moon. "They send their kids over whenever I've got a batch ready. And they always know when that is because I hang a fresh-made sausage on my clothesline. They come running over with their little sacks and fill them full for a buck or two. They take them home and the family lives off them the rest of the week. "
For as long as they could, neighbors learned to ignore the putrid smell that rose up off the meat in the summer months. It was kept sitting in an open tub, fly-covered piles of it, wormy and ripe. When a number of children took to their beds with taut, rounded bellies full ofpar- asites, and one nearly died, the neighbors' complaints were given a hearing and the widow was ordered to cease the production and distribution of her tainted sausages. Ignoring the intent of the order, she simply began making the sausages at night after the air cooled down.
But she used gel cans for light, which brought bugs around by the hundreds and they often dropped into her meat and urpmeal mix. Still, hungry for meat, the children came. And again, they were taken sick. After repeated warnings from wigs in that jurisdiction, the widow's sausage-making continued until, weeks later, two Guards came to her trailer one evening and exercised a warrant by standing her up against the side of her trailer and shooting her in the back of the head.
Its the latest fad among third-stagers. You see them wearing canvas suits, coiled in rings of breathing apparatus, bobbing belly-up in the canals like poisoned fish. They tangle in water hyacinth, which strangles the canals every summer, then free themselves and float on, city to city. The afternoon sun returns blinding spikes from their goggles, scaring children and animals along the bank. On average, every summer, just under a hundred and fifty of these aquatic stinkers are eviscerated by hagfish.
News from the Permanganate Parasite Facility is that a component of the venom of the humble fiddleback spider has been shown to be a potent anti parasitic. Several cases of spontaneous expulsion of the parasite have been reported and many of those confined on the Island are being released. Patients there had been kept in isolation to prevent the spread of infestation. In the end it proved not to be the isolation that halted the spread but the presence of the reclusive fiddleback in many of the Island's remote living quarters.
A star is dead here, requiescat in pace. Mitsuguro Bando, noted Kabuki actor, has died of hagfish poisoning at a restaurant in Pisstown. After his performance at the Flickerama, he dined with fans on roasted hagfish at the Palace Orienta. Upon remarking about particularly tasty hag, he suddenly collapsed, his cheeks engorged and pathologically distended.
Bando's body, once preserved will be kept in a curb stand made of opalescent material and illuminated by concealed lamps. During the day the stand will look like any ordinary glass structure, but when darkness comes the lamps will be turned on and the famous actor will be bathed in a ghostl}t fluid light.
Once known as the Iron Duke for his ability to eat metal, glass, and stone, Wallace Hooker will announce his retirement from that practice at the Bones Jangle tavern Tuesday night. It was a nearly deadly meal that hastened his decision, he revealed in today's City Moon. During a public demonstration at the Gons Hotel, he dined on imp brains until the kitchen was out of them, then ate his plate, his drinking glass, and coffee cup with saucer. After eating the tablecloth, he sucked twenty starch bars through a napkin. Then he went downtown, entered an antiquary shop and took bites from a tin sitz bath. "On a butcher's scale," Wallace said, "My stomach would have weighed fifty pounds. I had gone too far. "
William Parker Yockey's life has been cut tragically short by a hagfish attack. Vacationing on Square Island, Yockey was asleep on a hammock hung between two posts near the water's edge when what is suspected to have been a hagfish wormed its way out of the water at high tide and attached its tentacled mouth around Yockeys navel, extruded its horned tongue, macerated the muscle, then sucked out enough of Yockey's vitals to kill him.
Somehow the hagfish discharged a great heat in the process, such that there was nothing left of the shrubbery but a burned circle where the two struggled. This latest attack comes as a surprise to marine scientists, who previously stated that the hagfish would never enter the canal system. Now it is feared they will propagate on the slimy bottom, filling their bellies with nutrient-laden sludge.
Such memories of the first big Chaos. Confined to our Hyberhomes, often ten or twelve to a ten-by-ten space, we passed the time making up games to play. There was no room to move, or to scuffle and fight. We became wellorganized and decided it was good to stay calm, to make the air easier to breathe. Some of us stood while others slept, sitting with their arms around their knees and pulling them toward their chests.
Some of us formed a dream club. Before going to sleep we planned to meet at specific dream locations. After a few nights we began to recognize in common a shadowy, poorly dressed figure standing in the shadows of our dreamscapes. We all called him Dewey and we knew that he had come to threaten the peace and privacy of our sleeping world. Reasoning that he would feel no pain, we agreed to murder Dewey during the next round of dreams. We would meet at the Impeteria in Pisstown. Dewey would be there, waiting to haunt and taunt us without let-up. He could brandish a shin in our faces or spit on our dream shoes. We never knew what to expect.
There were nine of us dreaming that night. Dewey little suspected he would be facing organized hostile dream bodies, and when he did he melted away like a candle. We had killed a dream figure by simply wishing it, not as an individual but as a group. The solitary dreamer has little power. It takes a group to have any influence in the dream world
Cora Fry Hooker, pretty nineteen-year-old niece of Reverend Hooker and daughter of Wallace, was found dead in a water trough at her father's home early Sunday morning. Her slender throat had been slashed ear to ear, and her left wrist showed gashes, but the Reverend's physicians stated the death was due to drowning. Cora was to be married at eight o'clock that morning to a prominent Pisstown merchant.
The young woman had been in the best of spirits Saturday night and had gone to bed at her usual time. The household slept and knew nothing of the tragedy until the body was found. In the parlor of the home, the proposed wedding room, the funeral was held this afternoon. Cora's shroud was her trousseau. Saying he was despondent, the would-be
groom declined to comment.
Madeleine Mott, noted stinker artist, has survived a near fatal, self-inflicted wound. She did it among a group of laughing children with whom she had been playing in Hooker Park last evening. The game was bargello, the object to kick the inflated bladder ofa hagfish toward and across a predetermined goal line. In the pitch of darkness and without warning she pulled a pocket pistol, and. before her meaning could be understood by her playmates, discharged a bullet into her temple. Taken to the Pasteur Clinic, where a surgeon excised the spent lead, Miss Mott was back at her easel in a matter of days, content to be alive.
Shifted back to Bum Bay, to mate with one Carleton Manson, Ophelia traveled by pedal tram over the monotonous stretch of scrubland with only three or four outposts along the way. It took two full days for her to get there. Before the introduction of the Q-ped and pedal tram, shiftees made the journey on the backs of prairie imps culled from wild herds. They would not accept a saddle and were impossible to control, wanting always to go their own way. Before the rider knew it, an imp would have gone a hundred miles in the wrong direction.
On arrival, however, the imp would be slaughtered, dressed, smoked, preserved in salt, and eaten on holidays for seasons to come. On one well-documented occasion, new arrivals were instructed to bring their imps to the abattoir without delay. It seemed the ice-house had been struck by lightning. All the winter's ice, cut in blocks from the frozen Canal, packed in hay and stored there, had melted. It was important now that all meat be smoked and salted as soon as possible. After the long trip, the imps were trim and the meat light. Slaughtering and dressing was a relatively easy and quick affair. Some of the imps were so exhausted they entered the chute that led to the killing floor contentedly, even briskly. Now, with the wild prairie imp in danger of extinction, Q-peds and trams are used exclusively, but fresh meat is a rarity.
