There was a crackling noise as Jeeves squeezed the ebony tabletop so tightly that the black surface splintered beneath his sausage fingers. It spiderwebbed as his hands continued to slowly clench. The sort of raw strength you'd need to do such a thing made it hard to believe that Jeeves was a human being.
Rooney raised his empty hands, trying to bring back some semblance of civility to this botched meeting.
“I'm not threatening anybody, Mister Fell! I'm just saying that a lot of people are worried, and that you need to do something about the situation right now or there won't be any Whispers left.”
Ernest smiled darkly.
“Do I, now? Is that a fact, Rooney?” Ernest smiled. “So is that the reason you're here? To volunteer as my advisor? To point out all the ways I'm failing at my job?” Ernest's smile hardened into bared teeth. “How about we see how good an advisor you are as a bag of spugging Cricket Chow, Rooney? How about I advise you that you have exactly three seconds to disappear before The Lohan loses another seven members?”
Bennett found his courage again as Dog Rooney started to back off. It was possible that Bennett's next words may have defused the situation, or at least slowed the spiral. Unfortunately, Bennett made a lethal mistake: he didn't heed the direct warning he'd received from Jeeves.
“You can't just ignore what's happening, Fell!” Bennett yelled, his finger rising, slowly unfolding towards Ernest. “You have a responsibility to-”
True to his word, Jeeves twisted towards Bennett at top speed and and sank his entire index finger into Bennett's forehead clean up to a golfball knuckle. The lesser henchman twitched a few times, his pupils rolling up into his head in opposite directions, and he died with a sigh.
Jeeves calmly extracted his red digit in a spurt of gore. The next two seconds passed as slowly as Ice Ages, but before Jeeves had a chance to clean Bennett's brains off his finger another of Rooney's men lunged across the tabletop with a chemically-sharpened meat cleaver. Simultaneously dodging his face out of the way of the chopper and latching onto the offending arm as it streaked harmlessly past, Jeeves broke the guy's wrist in six places with one hand and used the other to tear the arm clear out of its shoulder joint with a horrible SKRUNCH noise. Blood scythed out in the arm's wake, splattering Rooney and his stunned men with an arc of crimson.
Things immediately escalated beyond fisticuffs and blades without a single word being necessary, and within the space of a second Ernest, Jeeves and the five remaining members of Dog Rooney's crew were standing around the splintered black table with a total of fourteen kinetic accelerator pistols. A humming chorus of magnetic coils ascended beyond supersonic as fourteen highly-illegal hand-held mass-drivers spun up to their top setting. Between them, the seven men had enough combined firepower to raze The Lohan to a smoking handful of cinders in a heartbeat.
“We didn't want it to come to this, Mister Fell.” Rooney's voice was shaking, and he looked a mixture of frustrated, sad and terrified. He had one accelerator pistol trained on Ernest and the other on Jeeves. “We tried to be civil about this, Mister Fell. We just wanted you to act. We wanted you to lead. That's all. That's all we wanted.”
Ernest kept his attention split towards Rooney and some other stupid kid whose lifespan was now measured in seconds. Ernest knew there was no way he and Jeeves could take down all five and walk away afterwards, but the triggers hadn't been squeezed just yet. Nothing was over until he decided it was over.
“You think killing me here and now will accomplish a damn thing?” Ernest yelled, addressing everybody in The Lohan. Silence greeted his words as The Whispers waited for him to continue. “You think I'm an idiot? You think that I don't have contingencies? That it'll just be business as usual if you smoke me in my own club? You think you're safe? You think that your families are safe? Do you have any idea how many hundreds of millions of yen I've allocated to avenge my own death? My entire fortune will be transferred to the best mercenaries in The Unison the moment that my heart stops beating, and every face in this room is on the list! Can you imagine the sick orders I've issued, the twisted things they'll do to everybody here?” Ernest bared his teeth at Rooney, who'd turned white as a Nascar audience. Rooney was shaking so bad that it was a wonder he hadn't bumped the hair-triggers on his accelerator pistols. None of Rooney's men looked like they wanted to be here anymore. Ernest smiled at their reaction. “Can you, Dog?”
There were simultaneous beep-beep error messages from all four of the mass-driver weapons being duel-wielded by Jeeves and Ernest, and their glowing blue status lights switched to flashing red LEDs in an unmistakable warning that something was wrong. Ernest gritted his teeth at the accelerator pistols in impotent rage.
“Really?” Ernest screamed at the entire club. “Who nulled our weapons? Who?”
Jeeves squeezed his triggers in curiosity. Both made the same beep-beep error messages as before.
High above, at least fifty old-school laser pointers carved through the pall of cigar smoke from all four corners of The Lohan. A multitude of red dots came to rest on Ernest and Jeeves like wasps who would accept any excuse to start stinging relentlessly. There was the unmistakable crackling sound of railguns being prepared to fire single grains of iron at two-thirds the speed of light. Glaring up at the dark depths twenty metres above, Ernest rested a homicidal glance on Rooney.
“I have a long memory, kid. And now every single person you've ever loved, that you've ever known, is sitting right here.” Ernest tapped his forehead with a useless pistol. “You'll be seeing me, Dog. Be sure of it.”
Rooney shook his head, his eyes downcast. To say he looked disappointed with how badly things had gone would be an understatement.
“I think you should go now, Mister Fell.” Rooney stepped aside, keeping well clear of Jeeves' lethal hands. “I hope we meet again under more...profitable circumstances, Mister Fell.”
Ernest appraised Rooney for a moment. He might be wet as a fish, but the kid had potential. If Rooney survived long enough, there was little doubt he'd rise to the top like a layer of rich cream.
Ernest jammed both nulled pistols into their hidden holsters and stormed out of The Lohan. He was trailed closely by Jeeves, as usual, but he was followed even more closely by dozens and dozens of laser dots.
*
One hour earlier, Bob Tuesday yawned himself awake in the insane luxury of his penthouse. Situated on the highest floor of a starscraper block in the heart of The Heights, this sweeping palace was filled with so many priceless artworks and highlighted by so much pure gold that Charles Foster Kane would have quietly suggested it was “a bit much.” It made Xanadu look like the Welfare Sector, and had more in common with the Louvre than a mere home.
Slowly coming back to consciousness, Tuesday spent a few moments reclining in a bed the size of an Olympic swimming pool before looking over at the leather-wrapped form of Ms Humple. She was asleep, thankfully, and her cat o' nine tails was well out of reach.
Tuesday exhaled in relief.
Creeping out of the Caligula sized bed (it took a good ten rolls for him to reach the distant edge), Tuesday threw a handful of weightless, tissue-thin polyweave sheets over Ms Humple for the sake of modesty, hitched up his silk boxer shorts, and considered his lot in life. Affluent, famous, and loved by millions as a hero. All of Seven Suns was eating out of his unwashed hands. Yup, Tuesday had it made. He'd scummed his way to the very top.
Like every unspecified time he woke up (Tuesday had abandoned trying to understand how the seven afternoon timing system worked on this stupid planet) Tuesday staggered onto the solid-gold bedroom balcony for his first chlorine cigarette of the day. Igniting the chemical suck-burner with a sharp inhalation, Tuesday gazed around at the towering ivory apartment blocks that stretched off to the horizon in all directions of The Heights. “Exclusive” didn't begin to describe the local real estate. Tuesday thought that the way the sunlight carved through the thick tendrils of creamy fog and picked out the metallic highlights of
a hundred kinds of precious minerals meant that The Heights had a lot in common with how primitive man had perceived Heaven in medieval artwork.
As always, the biggest news headline of the day was scrawled across the stratosphere in perfectly formed neon letters. Doing his best to read the phrase, it took Tuesday several frustrating minutes of quiet muttering and headache-inducing logic to eventually decode the headline. He eventually figured it out: “After decades of construction, The Frontier will finally begin its maiden voyage in two hours.”
Leaning over the nipple-high safety railing, Tuesday looked down on the so-called “park views” that had been a part of the real estate description. This was a pointless exercise, as the twisted elms and weeping willows were more than three kilometres straight down and obstructed by thick layers of puffy cumulus. As he leaned over the gilt edge of the balcony Tuesday considered what would happen if somebody pushed him. Tuesday reckoned he'd fall for about two minutes, his lips pulled back behind his ears in a scream lost to the wind, until he hit the ground with enough force to immediately reduce his body to a thin smear of person-flavoured sandwich spread...
Flicking his smouldering cigarette butt over the edge of the balcony, smiling at how funny it would look when somebody got hit by the burning filter all the way down at street level, Tuesday turned around just in time to get smacked right in the mouth by a flying bottle. Knocked effortlessly to the floor, holding his buzzing, swelling lip, Tuesday groaned the usual greeting he gave to Ms Humple, the love of his life.
“What was that for?” Tuesday whined for the eighteenth time this week.
Ms Humple picked up the empty bottle and held it right in front of Tuesday's face. He flinched, but thankfully she didn't hit him with it again.
“See this? We're completely out of coconut Midori. I've told you what happens if I don't have my second afternoon cocktail, haven't I?”
Tuesday nodded in misery. His lip really, really hurt.
“I'll be sure to get you some more, sweetness.”
She adjusted her lingerie.
“You better. Or I'll be teaching you about pain.”
“Love you.” Tuesday offered.
“Burn in a dumpster fire, you scrotum-faced gerbil.”
Even though he felt woozy, Tuesday eventually got back to his feet. Out of habit, Tuesday patted the silken pocket of his boxers to make sure his Dad’s beaten Zippo was still there. As usual, this spurred him to think about the man known as Jim Tuesday, his long-lost Dad, and the hope that he was being remembered in return. The odds of this weren't very good, as Jim had once forgotten his own middle name for two and a half years. Despite the fact his Dad was nothing more than a hazy memory of very early childhood, Tuesday loved him and hoped that he was happy, wherever he was, and even gave a little prayer on the subject. Feeling totally out of character by the time he said “Amen,” it took a moment for Tuesday to understand why he’d just done such an unusually spiritual thing.
“Mansonites,” Tuesday muttered darkly, as though it was a swear word.
Tuesday often left his eyelid screens switched on in the wee hours of the seventh afternoon while he was trying to sleep, and last night he'd unwisely had them tuned to a blatant propaganda sitcom from the local Latter Day Church of Marylin Manson called Everybody Is Damned To Burn In Hell Forever (Except For Us). Tuesday had recently formed a grudge against organised religion in general, as since receiving the Binary Star he'd been contacted by every single one of them - from the Latter Day Church of Marylin Manson to the Jedis to the Reapers to the Gandalfians and far more - who all wanted him to publicly declare that he had always been a devout member of their respective churches, and would be evermore. However, they'd all decided to frame their requests by threatening Tuesday with imminent and eternal damnation if he didn't say yes on the spot. After three days of playing piggy-in-the-middle with all the local cults, Tuesday finally decided to stick with pointless, bleak, hollow atheism, and had told them all, in no uncertain terms, to punch it up as high as they could reach.
Licking his split lip, Tuesday got up from the balcony floor and began a gruelling trek to the distant kitchen on the far side of his penthouse. This involved a long march down a seemingly endless hallway that had been decorated with a “before recorded history” theme. The corridor was carpeted by cloned woolly mammoth rugs and lined on both sides with looming glass cabinets. The displays were filled with ancient cave paintings on rough granite slabs, crude neolithic tools and all sorts of dinosaur fossils. Even more impressively, the hallway's centrepiece was of one of those infamous dragon skeletons that the Vatican had kept a secret for nearly six hundred years. Tuesday had nicknamed the draconian creature Cuddles.
Puffed out by the time he reached a kitchen that would make a Michelin Star chef weep, after a short rest on a maple countertop Tuesday rattled around in the cupboards for something to nosh. After the first nineteen wooden slabs revealed nothing except ingredients (yeah, like he was going to cook something) Tuesday lucked out on door number twenty with shelf upon shelf of non-expiring Meal-Inna-Can cubes emblazoned with the Hormel Foods Corporation logo. Sure, Meal-Inna-Can cubes were created specifically for fallout bunkers, but they reminded Tuesday of some of the less-crappy bits of his childhood.
Popping a fresh tin of smoked-salmon-flavoured sushi (known as Spushi) and eating it with his fingers, Tuesday padded towards the nine-doored fridge for something foamy and fermented. Finding nothing on the shelves except fruit juice and cricket milk, Tuesday checked over his numerous hiding spots until he eventually discovered a boiling six-pack of Blindman Brew jammed behind an industrial-sized nuclear microwave. Swigging a bubbling mouthful straight from a hot-to-the-touch bottle, flinching as the radioactive pilsner blistered his tongue, Tuesday discovered what the English had suffered with for so many centuries.
As Tuesday reached the end of the tin of Spushi he felt a weird twitching sensation in the hunk of flesh between his thumb and his index finger, the bit known as the web of the hand. He scratched at the spot absently, but didn't pay it any attention.
After getting lost for nearly fifteen minutes in a series of unfamiliar rooms he could have sworn weren't there yesterday, Tuesday eventually made it into the main lounge area of the loft. Filled with all manner of self-modifying furniture that had been programmed to keep up-to-date with what was officially classed as trendy by the glitterati for each particular minute, Tuesday sank up to his armpits in a leopardskin sofa before he remembered how much he hated this particular blob of fabric-covered gel. After fighting free of the blubbery mound with a bit of effort, Tuesday staggered over to a more traditional chair that, thankfully, didn't try and consume him whole. Lighting a second smoke, ashing it into a decorative vase, Tuesday surmised that he hated this entire room and needed to set fire to it sometime soon.
The flesh next to his thumb twitched again. He ignored it.
Wiping his mouth, Tuesday pegged empty beer bottle number four into the hungry leopardskin lounge. It disappeared without a trace. Now adequately fed and watered to the point where he no longer felt like head-butting somebody, Tuesday went about searching the cushions for where he'd dumped his clothes last night. After five minutes of digging and dragging Tuesday unearthed a purple pair of designer jeans, a yellow polyweave shirt, a half-full aerosol can of spray-on socks and one self-lacing boot. While he was trying to find boot number two Tuesday instead discovered his SpendPlus card. This particular SpendPlus was capped at an astonishing nine hundred German yen a day, but the little neon-white rectangle of plastic was restricted to whatever stores, restaurants or entertainment venues Tuesday was meant to be spruiking on any given occasion. In return for free goods and other kickbacks, these businesses would advertise that the world-famous Bob Tuesday shopped there/ate there/got high colonics there all the time, painfully milking his fame for all it was worth. As image was very important in this equation, the SpendPlus card couldn’t be used anywhere that would reflect poorly on the Mayor, his office, or a
ny of the companies that kept Tuesday living in paradise, so pubs, clubs, brothels, weapon stores and other hives of scum and villainy were off limits. The spaceport was a no-go area too, as there was no way the Seven Suns government would allow one of their propaganda pets to escape without permission. The Mayor's office had even been kind enough to provide a detailed auto-updating list of where Tuesday should and shouldn't be seen, arranged by how desirable or undesirable those places currently were.
Tuesday was public property.
His hand twitched a third time. Looking down at his thumb for a blank moment, Tuesday cursed his awful memory and defective attention span as he remembered the Omni implant in his hand. Five days ago Tuesday had been injected with a minuscule egg-shaped biomod no bigger than a grain of Basmati rice – an Omni - and this tiny implant provided him with a suite of the very best technological conveniences money can buy, all in less than five percent of a gram of wetwire hardware. Like all implants of its class, the Omni was actually a living organism that used self-upgrading protein strains for code, and if the Omni was no longer wanted for any reason it could instantly dissolve into a mist that would be harmlessly absorbed into the host's blood without a trace. One of the Omni's more basic features – one that announced itself with a subtle trembling sensation – was a simple organiser program that kept track of Tuesday's appointments, meetings and alarms. Unfortunately, Tuesday was still unaccustomed to the subtleties of how the implant next to his thumb meat operated, so the last five days had involved a lot of trial and error (as well as two or three severe stuff-ups that had nearly involved a trip to the Emergency room).
Scum of the Universe Page 24
