Jerry continued to play “Fire,” seeing no particular reason to change the tune.
Major Sung shrieked: “Capitalistic running dogs of the demographic People’s revisionist lackies of Elvis Presley have over-run the ideological manifestations of decadent elements within the amplifier of the pagoda!” and committed hara-kiri.
The Rock began smashing slot machines with a baseball bat.
Starlets tore off their bikinis and chased terrified hatchet men around the poolside.
The human wave reached the pool, dove in, and proceeded to beat moribund crocodiles to death with their gunbutts.
A suicide squad hurled itself through the plate glass window of a trailer and devoured the rug.
Cadillacs circled the boxcar of heroin like hostile Indians, filling the air with hot lead.
The sopping remnants of the human wave reached the trailer camp and began beating thugs to death with dead crocodiles.
Red Guards showered the C-5A with ink bottles.
Tongues of flame were everywhere.
Explosions, contusions, fire, gore, curses, looting, rape.
Jerry Cornelius began playing “All You Need Is Love,” knowing that no one was listening.
Riding eastward across the wastelands on their diseased ponies, something under two hundred decrepit remnants of what once had been the glorious Golden Horde, most of them incoherent with exhaustion, spied a great conflagration on the horizon.
Flaccid adrenals urged near-moribund hearts to beat faster. They flayed their ponies with the shafts of their spears. Drool flecked the lips of doddards and ponies alike. Their backbrains smelled blood and fire in the air.
The smells of gunpowder, gasoline, burning balsa wood and paper mache, sizzling flesh, gave Jerry Cornelius a slight buzz as he began to play “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly.” The swimming pool was colored a bright carnelian, which did little to mask the chlorine odor. Bits of anodized aluminum struggled to keep afloat amid scraps of charred balsa wood and shards of placards.
A dented Cadillac careened through a barricade of beach chairs and into a squad of Chinese soldiers beating a starlet to death with copies of the Little Red Book before sliding over the rim of the pool to sink bubbling into the churning depths.
The pillar of fire consuming the Chinese Disneyland reminded Jerry of the Dresden firestorm. Sentimentally, he began to play “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want To Leave The Congo.”
In a strange display of gallantry, Red Guards, hit men, capa mafiosas and Chinese soldiers joined hands in a ring around the ruined trailer camp, screaming “Burn, baby, burn!” in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Pidgin, and Yiddish. At each “burn” a canister of napalm dropped from somewhere onto the conflagration.
Reduced to sentimentality despite himself, Jerry played “God Save The Queen.”
Two hundred or so pairs of rheumy eyes lit up with feral joy at the sight of a great city (by current Horde standards anyway) going up in flames, at the sight of smashed cars, broken bodies, naked starlets shrieking, and a great pool of what appeared to be blood.
Weeping great nostalgic tears, the last generation of the Golden Horde shouldered their spears, whipped their ponies into a stumbling gallop and charged in a body into the fray, the image of the Final Massacre burning like a city in the fevered brains of the aged savages:
Village! Burn! Pillage! Rape! Kill!
Mongolian ponies wheezing and gasping under them, the crazed doddards reached the conflagration and found to their chagrin that there was precious little unburnt, unpillaged, unraped, unkilled.
They found a boxcar guarded by machinegunners and charged it en masse, sacrificing half their number to impale the befuddled Chinese troops on their spears and set the boxcar aflame. As a strangely-intoxicating aromatic smoke billowed from the burning boxcar, the remnant of the remnant scattered, looking for more things or people to burn, rape, and kill.
A dozen of the doddards expired attempting to rape an aged whore to death, and another dozen were compelled to shamefacedly trample her to death under the hooves of their ponies, eight of which expired from the effort.
Fifteen of the Horde had heart attacks trying to beat Cadillacs to death.
A half-dozen doddards died of broken hearts when the slot machines they were torturing failed to cry out in pain.
Several of the Horde fell to devouring the corpses of crocodiles and choked to death on the splinters.
As the last Khan of the Golden Horde watched in senile befuddlement, the great silver bird issued a terrible battlecry and began to move. The doddard’s bleary eyes bugged as the C-5A picked up speed, shot by him, and actually left the ground!
A feeble nervous impulse traveled spastically from his optic nerve into his brain, and thence to his arm and throat.
“Kill!” he wheezed asthmatically, and hurled his spear at the unnatural thing.
The spear was sucked into the intake of the left inboard jet engine, lodged in the turbine, and shattered it. The jet engine exploded, shearing off the wing. The C-5A nearly completed a loop before it crashed upside-down to the runway and exploded into flames.
From an aerial viewpoint, the runway and the railroad spur formed a T with a finite bar and an infinite upright, but the only living being in the area did not notice the symbolism. Riding into the sunset on his pony, his back to what in the distance seemed naught but a smoldering refuse-heap, the last Khan of the Golden Horde, sole survivor of the Final Massacre, filled his dying brain with one thought, like a dwindling chord: fulfillment; Golden Horde died in glory; village; burned; pillaged; raped; killed; ancestors proud.
This thought flared brightly in his brain like a dying ember and then he went to that Great Carnage Heap in the Sky. The wheezing pony tripped over a rock, dislodging the body, which fell to the ground in a twisted heap. A vulture descended, pecked at the body, sniffed, and departed.
The pony staggered on for a few steps, then halted, its dim brain perhaps mesmerized by the glare of the setting sun.
The Mongolian pony was still standing there an hour later when Jerry Cornelius, in his pin-stripe suit, porkpie hat, and Italian loafers, wandered dazedly up to it out of the wasteland.
“Here’s a bit of luck,” Jerry muttered, perking up a bit. (The short-circuiting of his electric violin had seriously vexed him.)
Jerry mounted the pony, kneed its flanks and shouted: “Git ’em up, Scout!”
The pony waddled forward a few steps, puked, and died.
Jerry extricated himself from the corpse, brushed himself off, and consulted a fortune cookie he had secreted in a pocket.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary,” the fortune cookie informed him.
Munching the soggy rice pastry, Jerry trudged off into the setting sun whistling “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, now hear de word of de Lord…”
About the Author
Norman Spinrad was born in New York City in 1940, and graduated from City College of New York in 1961. He began to write full-time almost immediately, although he did not make his first professional sale until a year later. For the next three years, he sold stories sporadically to the science fiction magazines, holding body and soul together with the traditional writer’s grab-bag of odd jobs. In 1965 he moved from New York to Los Angeles, and has done no work more physically taxing than pounding the keys of his manual typewriter since then.
Spinrad’s short stories have appeared in all the major American science fiction magazines, in the British magazine New Worlds, in Playboy and other slick magazines, and in several hardcover collections of original stories. His novelette The Big Flash and his novel Bug Jack Barron were 1969 Nebula Award nominees.
Having lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London for extended periods, Mr. Spinrad now makes his home in Hollywood’s Laurel Canyon, without any firm conviction that the move will be permanent.
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The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 24
