Jay-Zeuss, Mary and Joseph, Lola Stechkin thought, this Gavin Mantle character is an A-One A-Hole! She wished she was in Greater Rhodesia with the serious newshawks, covering the Taabazimbi disaster. That had been some fry-up, a fireball enveloping the town where the Broederbond were holding a mass rally to commemorate the Battle of Blood River. This was peanuts.
"It's like this, Lola-baby," Mantle sleazed, scratching his ballooning gut with an American Excess goldcard, "I figure it's not right to take the two kids out of their school and their old neighbourhood. I have to think this whole thing out, you know sweetbutt. 'Cause I don't want them to grow up with a warped sense of values because they're rich, y'know. So I figure Tish and Reggie can stay with their mommy. I'll still see them on weekends and National Holidays, but, you know, my lifestyle now is, like, very alien to what they have come to expect. So, like I said, I thought the fairest thing was to leave them out of it…"
Gavin Mantle was floating on an aircushion in his private swimming pool. He was wearing immodest Ballsac swimtrunks that showed off the first of the GenTech-financed bio-amendments he had demanded. She understood that his initial request had been anatomically unfeasible.
The bottom of the doughnut-shaped pool was scattered with gems, inset into the concrete. They sparkled as the sunlight filtered down to them. Tropical fish swam between the beams, perpetually high from the trace stimulants the household system pumped into the water.
She focused on the autoprompt chip in her contact lens, and moved onto the next question.
"And what about Clodagh, Gavin?"
Mantle made a great show of sighing with regret as he poured himself a tureen-sized cocktail of creme de menthe, zooper-blast, Shochaiku Double-Blend, Beluga caviar and Sta-Hard drops.
"Clodagh doesn't understand the demands that wealth visits upon you, Lola-honey," he winked. "She's moved back in with her mother."
One of Mantle's sexclones swam past in a lazy backstroke, her lithe body breaking the surface of the vitamin-enriched water, her unwieldy breasts floating like cherry-topped islands. The sexclones were vat-grown human bodies, perfect in every detail, but with artificially limited brains. The rumour was that they used hormone-dosed rabbit's cerebella for the most successful models. Lola, who had never wanted for willing sexual partners, found the whole notion of screwing a flesh-product nauseating, and she was especially disturbed whenever she encountered one of the creatures encoded with her own genetic structure. Mantle, of course, had ordered one of those. She wished now she hadn't licensed her likeness, but the corp had offered her an enormous commission.
The Lola sexclone was on the patio now, switched off. Lola wondered if her revulsion for the thing had anything to do with the fact that it was modelled on her as she had been five years ago. She dreaded the day they thought one could anchor the show better than her. At twenty-two, she was already one of the oldest newscastresses on the networks.
"So, I reckon it's my duty to all those millions out there to live out all their fantasies of enormous wealth…"
Lola knew that the camcrew were getting everything on tape. Behind Mantle they could see the newbuilt villa. It was rounded and pink, almost obscene, and used only the most expensive materials. A forest of satellite dishes rose from one roof, tuned to receive input from every broadcasting system in the world. Imported ocelots gambolled on the crazy-croquet lawn. The custom-built phallic Rolls Royce was ostentatiously parked in the driveway, its gold filigree gleaming as a muscle implant Adonis polished the glans-shaped hood with creamy white cleanser.
Mantle poured the potentially lethal dosage of intoxicants into his face. Fluid poured over his chest, soaking through his gold-thread T-shirt. It bore the legend in psychedelic silver, "WORLD MUFF DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS, HABANA, CUBA, 1997." It was probably the most expensive dirty joke in the world. Mantle swallowed, and his eyes started to float. His system had been amended to take care of any side-effects. He could mainline napalm or snort ground glass without getting so much as a slight hangover. However, his body chemistry was being permanently changed; if he urinated on the grass, he would kill it.
"Lola, darlin'," he said, "you know, a guy like me and a gal like you…maybe we ought to get together after the interview…"
His swimming trunks writhed as if he had a rattlesnake down there.
Ick!
The camcrew were getting all this down. The Evening News would be leading off on The Gavin Mantle Story all week. Everything else they had to cover was depressing, and so the producer wanted at least one "up" item between the wars, assassinations, plagues, and famines. Lola was beginning to feel nostalgic about Dino the Skateboarding Duck.
Since he received his one hundred million, Gavin Mantle had been living in the fastest of the fast lanes. The camcrew had followed him through the orgiastic party at which he demonstrated his bio-amendments for the first time, and got enough footage for the X-rated news shows. From a man whose entire life was devoted to kitchenware, he had turned into the kind of sybarite whose party guest list is composed in equal parts of exotic hookers, high-price drug dealers, minor soap-opera stars, third world politicians, over-the-hill Sanctioned Ops pretending to be "security consultants," this week's "in" criminals, religious fanatics, circus performers, lawyers, parasites, gossip columnists, obscure offshoots of forgotten Royal families, ex-Presidents and quack doctors of various specialisms.
There had been fifteen of these Blotto Lotto give-aways in the past five years. Three of the winners were still alive, and one of them was in a shock-trauma coma surrounded by the best medtech money could own.
Mantle was getting bored with the interview, Lola could tell. His implant glands were shooting a recipe of amphetamine, testosterone and adrenalin into his blood. He would have to get back to the party before, like the winner before last, his head and scrotum simply swelled until they burst. The small print of the winner's contract stated that if the Blotto Lotto superluck champion were to die within a year of receiving the prize, the unspent portion of the cash, plus all of the assets purchased with the windfall, would revert to the GenTech subsidiary that organized the contest. It was incredible, when you came to study the figures, how difficult it was for the unimaginative to fritter away a hundred million dollars.
The last question flashed in Lola's eye.
"And how did it feel to win the Blotto Lotto?"
"Well," he grinned with his new Rod Rambone teeth, "it was kinda a lot like sex, y'know. I was watchin' the teevee like usual, waitin' for My Pal, the Biosurgeon to come on. I love that show. Nurse Nookie is such a fox, don't you think? I wonder when she and Doctor Bob will get it on. Anyway, I wasn't really watchin' Blotto the Clown as he was openin' the envelope from RaLPPH, but out of the corner of my ear I hear somethin'. At first, I don't believe I'm hearin' it. Like, y'know, I thought it was Clodagh yellin' my name from the kitchen. Only she never uses my full name. You know, 'Gavin Mantle.' She usually calls me 'Big Stud,' for reasons which are pretty damn obvious. Anyway, I couldn't believe it when it sank in. There was like this earthquake, and it was like suddenly…"
Lola sneaked a look at her wristwatch. This was boring crappo, and she'd ream the producer's ass when she got back to the studio.
"It was like a bolt from the sky, y'know, and then, WHAM-BAM-ZAPPO, like…"
As she nodded, Lola imagined a flash of light.
And there was a pile of smoking ashes on the air cushion, which was hissing as it sank into the pool.
"Elvis? Elvis Presley?"
The 'gator man couldn't believe it.
'"All Shook Up'? 'Hound Dog"? 'Heartbreak Hotel'? That Elvis Presley?"
The Op nodded. "Uh huh, sir."
'"Baby, I Don't Care'? 'A Big Hunk o' Love'? 'The Girl of My Best Friend'?"
Hiroshi Shiba was an unnervingly strange creature. His extended snout was that of a swamp 'gator and his grey tail hung down from his black pants, but otherwise he was every inch the perfect Japcorp exec. He wore a sober suit, with a white shirt and a discreetly striped tie. His English was perfect as far as syntax and vocabulary went, but his accent was heavily Japanese and even more heavily alligator. Elvis couldn't help liking the mutant.
Elvis stood quietly, no longer even surprised at the latest off-the-wall twist this gig was taking.
Shiba paced his office, tail lashing, a hungry grin showing in his snout. The handkerchief in his top pocket was folded into a perfect triple point, and he wore emblems of his company and national decorations in a medal ribbon.
"'King Creole'? 'Blue Christmas'? 'Teddy Bear'?"
Elvis always had been popular in Japan. He still got the odd royalty cheque, although most of the money seemed to trickle towards Colonel Parker. There were a few odd little clauses in the original contracts Elvis had not bothered to read back in the '50s, and he was still paying heavily for them.
"This is a great honour," said Shiba, clapping. "A great honour."
Raimundo Rex, the hispanic dinosaur, was less impressed. He was picking his teeth with a breadknife, dislodging fragments of food. Elvis didn't want to know what they had been before they became a meal. The big mutant was practically wild.
The guitar 'Ti-Mouche had given him was on Shiba's neatly-ordered desk, along with his other personal possessions. Money, guns and documentation.
The creature's grin glistened. "'Dirty, Dirty Girl'? 'Your Cheatin' Heart'? 'Blue Suede Shoes'?"
Elvis looked down at his swamp-smeared boots. The mud had dried and fallen off, but he was still dusty. He was feeling light-headed from swamp gas.
The Suitcase People weren't turning out to be the monsters he'd expected. In fact, some of them were proving downright hospitable.
"Get Mr Presley some food, Reuben," Shiba told a black-skinned reptile indentee. "And anything else he wants."
The exec hummed "Tutti Frutti," and laughed. His yellow eyes gleamed, blinking.
"Uh, excuse me, sir…?"
"Yes, Mr Presley?"
Shiba bowed honourably, displaying the bony ridges that had risen from his scalp.
"Uh, I don't like to ask, but, uh…well…am I a prisoner?"
Raimundo snarled, tiny nostrils flaring, huge jaws grinding. Obviously, dinosaurs didn't dig rock 'n' roll.
Shiba lashed his tail airily. "Oh, no. Much misunderstanding. Most regrettable. We mistook you for some other parties. Enemies have been attacking. Hunting platoons comb the swamps. They come from the coast. From Cape Canaveral."
"The Josephites?"
"Even so. How do you know?"
Elvis wondered if he could recruit any help here. He had the impression that, without Krokodil, he might well need it.
"My friend. The girl you lost in the swamp…"
Raimundo snapped the blade in his mouth and did his best to pout sullenly. It didn't look right on him. His face was too big for such petty expressions to register.
"…we were heading for the Cape. She had business there. The Josephites are our enemies too."
Shiba was delighted. "Good. Of course. They are crazy people."
"Los locos," Raimundo agreed, spitting a fist-sized green ball at the floor.
Elvis wished he knew exactly what Krokodil had wanted to do at the Cape. She had more or less admitted that her salvage story was a cover, but she hadn't confided fully in him. He knew that he had some part in the game that was being played out, but he wished someone had bothered to explain it properly to him.
"They are dangerous," he agreed. "Some of them ain't human."
He realized immediately that hadn't been a tactful thing to say, but Shiba took no offence. Elvis wondered if the Japanese quite realized what had happened to him.
"You are free to go any time, Mr Presley," said Shiba. "Although we should like you to stay and enjoy our hospitality." He laid a scaly hand on the guitar, twanging a chord. "Of course, if you would care to perform for us, it would be most appreciated…"
Elvis had played some strange shows before, back in the barroom and hootenanny days. But this would be the living end. He picked up the guitar and strummed a few chords. Shiba's mouth stretched into a toothy smile. Elvis sang the first few lines of "Mystery Train"…
"Train I riiiiide…sixteen coaches long…train I riiiide…"
The music took over, and his fingers found the notes. The words reemerged from the void in his memory into which he had cast them forty years earlier, and meant something to him. He sang about loneliness, desolation and the darkness at the end of the track. The long black train sped from nowhere to nowhere, carrying him along with it. The words of the song were vague. He remembered an argument in the old studio, about whether the mystery train was reuniting the singer with his girl, or speeding her away from him. He had always sung the song neutrally, but there was a persistent despair that crept in. He imagined Colonel Parker in a Casey Jones hat pulling on the whistle, Mr Seth leering like a skull as he wandered through the carriages punching tickets for dead men…and he saw Krokodil standing on the observation platform, waving to him as the mystery train vanished into the tunnel that fed into the depths of the earth and never rose again to daylight.
He finished his song, and said, "I should find my friend."
Shiba clapped, alligator tears on his creased green cheeks. Raimundo snorted steam. Elvis put down the guitar, and the music receded inside him. He remembered 'Ti-Mouche's suggestion that the music was his magic, his source of power. He wondered how he could harness it.
"A thousand apologies for the way you have been treated."
Elvis felt sorry for the humble creature. "That's okay, sir. I understand. You can't be too careful, what with some of the things wandering the swamps these days."
"Indeed, indeed…"
Shiba's intercom buzzed.
"Mr Assistant Director," a voice crackled, "the East perimeter fence has been breached."
Elvis heard gunfire outside.
"This is what I had feared."
Shiba nodded to Raimundo, who charged out of the room, his massive thighs pounding the shaking floor. Elvis had to hang onto a filing cabinet to stay upright. Reuben unlocked a cabinet, and started pulling out automatic weapons.
A klaxon sounded like a hellhound's whine.
"I apologize for this inconvenience," Shiba said to Elvis. Then, to the intercom, "Marielle, scramble the defence squads."
The gunfire was louder, and there were shouts. Through the office window, Elvis could see Suitcase People running towards the break in the fence. Some of them had guns, but others were just armed with the knives in their mouths and on their fingers. A human-eyed pterodactyl flapped past, flying low on leathery wings.
The window shattered, and Elvis ducked to avoid flying glass.
Outside, in the compound, an armoured transport was rolling across the field. Suitcase People were trying to resist a force of well-drilled soldiers in combat fatigues and black hats. Elvis recognized the adherents of the Church of Joseph. The pterodactyl dipped a beak in a Josephite's chest, but was cut to pieces by a chaingun.
The Moulinex was at the bottom of the swamp, but Elvis had had his side-arms when Raimundo brought him in. He picked up the fully-loaded Python from the desk, and cocked it. Shiba was slithering on all fours.
A grapefruit-sized object came through the window, bounced off the desk and skittered on the floor. Unconsciously counting the seconds, Elvis reached for it, but Shiba was there first. The exec took the grenade in his jaws and tossed it back.
It exploded in the air outside, blowing in the wall of the prefab hut, and filling the room with fragments of plasterboard and wallpaper.
Gunfire poured into the office, scarring the opposite wall.
Papers flew. Reuben was shoved back against the bulletmarks, bloody holes stitched across his chest.
"Reuben," shouted Shiba, scuttling towards the indentee.
The old man's lungs weren't working. Bloody froth leaked from his mouth. Shiba tried to press his paws to the indentee's wounds, but wasn't coordinated enough to do it properly. It would have been no use anyway. The man-thing was dead.
A figure came through the smoke, gun cradled in his hands, and checked the place out for resistance.
The Josephite saw Shiba and Reuben before Elvis, and took aim on the 'gator man's head.
Elvis got off a shot that tore through the Josephite's shoulder, spinning him around. He fired a burst into the ceiling. His hat came off as he steadied himself and brought the machine gun up again.
Elvis went for the head shot, but knew it wouldn't do any good.
The Josephite was Donny Walton. Another one. Blonde and smiling, he had a hole in the middle of his face where his nose had been. He shook his head as if to get the ringing out of his ears and aimed the gun. He pulled back the catch, setting his weapon on single-fire. He was going to take out Elvis and Shiba like a surgeon performing an operation.
Donny Walton pointed the gun at Elvis, and pulled the trigger…
She swam through the thick mud, reverting to her animal self. The Ancient Adversary was stirring inside, ascending within her mind. She was near the Cape, and would have to go on, with or without Colonel Presley. She was sure he would make his own way. Their twinned destiny had yet to be fulfilled. They would come together again.
As the Adversary grew, so did her awareness of Nguyen Seth. The Elder was trying to shield himself from her, to shut her out. But he was thinking of a ring around the Earth. That had something to do with the Cape. He was in Salt Lake City, but his catspaws were out there at the launchpad.
He had to be stopped.
Krokodil surfaced, and wiped the mud from her face.
She was in a quiet lagoon, alone with an old friend.
The fates were drawing her close again. The pink Cadillac was half-grounded on an island, its bodywork streaked with dried mud.
She waded ashore, and looked through the windscreen. An old man, his face wrinkled and scaled, was asleep in the driver's seat, a half-full bottle open against his belly, sloshing moonshine into his lap. It must be the porch-sitter from Donny and Marie's Deathtrap Diner.
Elvis had given her the emergency override entry code for the car door. She opened the keyboard hatch under the doorhandle, and tapped in the number sequence.
The door opened outwards, and a waft of alcoholic reptile body-odour hit her. The drunk grumbled, and made a grab for the jug. It tumbled out of the car and rolled into the swamp.
"Out," she said sharply. "No arguments, Pops."
She took him by the arm, and pulled. He came free and staggered into the sunlight, blinking sideways. As the light hit him, he started screeching. Obviously, the mutation was rendering him abnormally photo-sensitive.
He plunged into the water and immersed himself, leaving only his eyes above the surface. The jug bobbed against his head, and he pulled it down, presumably making a suck for the last of the liquor.
The joyrider hadn't done any harm to the Cadillac when he ran it aground. Krokodil initiated a complete systems check, just to be on the safe side. The car cleared itself.
She braced herself and got a grip on the front bumper. She lifted the three-ton car and eased it off the island and into the water. Dr Threadneedle's augmented muscles did their job.
The joyrider was gone now. Krokodil wondered who he was, and what he was turning into, but she had no time to go into that.
She stripped off her Filthy pyjamas, and washed with non-potable water from the Cadillac's tanks. She found a leech attached under her ribs, and pulled it off. Its teeth hadn't quite penetrated her skin, but it did leave a red suckermark. She hadn't even felt the thing.
She only had one outfit left, a black, green and brown camouflage danskin catsuit. She pulled on jungle boots and a padded vest over it, and then strapped herself into the holster harness. The guns and knives balanced her perfectly.
Ready for everything, she towelled the stinking booze off the driver's seat—it left greyish stains etched into the tough pink leather, so God alone knew what it did to your stomach—and slipped into the car.
She was reaching for the ignition keyboard when the brainstorm hit her…
She was sucked back through her life. In the Denver NoGo, Bruno Bonney, her Dad, thrashed wildly with his willow switch, spittle falling from his mouth. Somewhere on the road, Andrew Jean embraced her, long tongue poking into her month, pressing the zooper-blast ampoule against the roof of her mouth as it exploded. Andrew Jean dissolved into Dr Threadneedle, his face burned off his metallic skull, then into Hawk-That-Settles, singing his song of death, and then into Colonel Presley, singing "One Night With You." Through her one eye, she saw the world Nguyen Seth perceived, thick with hidden wonders and horrors. In Spanish Fork, she saw demons dance bloodily in the air as the preacher's spectacles fell from her face. She felt her face pounded against the hard tarmac, blood spattering around her. In the Katz Motel, she faced the risen corpse of a murderer's mother, and felt her mind fleeing. In the desert, she chased lizards for food and took on a Miss America contestant in a swimwear single combat. Miss America's face was superimposed over Mrs Katz's rotten skull, and was displaced by others. A preening prettyboy Op hiding in his machine while she killed her way towards him. Dr Ottokar Proctor, the erudite monster, smiling as the cartoon Tasmanian Devil displaced his features. Then, in its terrible grandeur, the Jibbenainosay blossomed, blotting out the sky, calling a challenge to the being cocooned inside her. She did not know which frightened her more, the monster on the outside, or the thing that expanded to fill her mind and body…
Krokodil gripped the wheel, and tried to clear her mind of the unwanted images. Her entire body shook.
Remembering Hawk's tutoring, she centered herself, trying to make her mind the calm eye of the raging hurricane.
Elder Seth appeared in the centre of the Jibbenainosay, eyes blank. He was waiting for her to kill him, she knew.
She remembered her other selves. Jessamyn Bonney. Jazzbeaux. Jesse Frankenstein's Daughter. They came to her, and melded with her current person.
Krokodil.
She was Krokodil.
She started up the motor, and did a three-point turn in the lagoon. Cape Canaveral was almost directly due East.
The Cadillac knifed through the swampwater, leaving nothing behind but a wake.
Raimundo's jaws closed over the Donny, snapping him off half-way down his torso. The dinosaur worried at the Josephite until the mouthful came loose, and Donny's lower body fell, twitching, to the floor.
"Heyyy, homes," said Raimundo between swallows, "chewy-chewy, maaaann!"
"Watch out," Elvis said. "He's not out of it yet."
Donny's body got up. One arm was still attached by a strand and a joint, and the fist convulsed, discharging the gun. A bullet whined against the blades of the ceiling fan.
Raimundo nudged the headless Josephite, knocking him down, and put a three-taloned foot on the wriggling thing. The dinosaur put all his weight on one leg, and Donny squished apart.
Josephites appeared behind Raimundo. Elvis head-shot two, and they went down. They weren't all Waltons, thank the Lord.
Raimundo stumped off into the thick of battle, stray bullets flattening against his hide.
Elvis and Shiba dashed out of the wrecked office. Shiba chewed the ankles of a Marie Walton, wrenching her leg off. Elvis fired his remaining shots at the armoured transport, and paused to reload. The battle seemed to be turning in their favour.
Raimundo loomed over the transport. Its tower was swivelling, trying to bring a chaingun to bear. The dinosaur ripped the thing free and, its magazine flapping, pointed it down into the interior of the transport. He got a talon into the manual trigger-guard, and fired it. Empty cartridges clattered against the armourplate, and the interior of the transport rang with resounding ricochets and cries of pain.
The Suitcase People were coming out ahead. The Josephites hadn't sent a large enough force on this strike.
Shiba had been stabbed in the tail by a Marie, but was chewing on a writhing arm. He was ripping the creature apart. The head was babbling adspeak, endorsing the latest oven cleanser, while the fingers of her remaining hand crawled towards Shiba's left eye. Elvis grabbed the wrist, and bent it back. Shiba, through a mouthful, said thanks.
A Josephite with his hands up shouted, "I surrender, I surrender," his hat falling from his head. He was a young kid; one of the clear-eyed idealists who wanted a miracle, Elvis suppposed. A Donny Walton twisted the boy's head around on his shoulders, and was torn apart by gunfire. He staggered forwards, his face still a smiling blank, and collapsed like a marionette.
Krokodil had said the Waltons were clones, but Elvis wasn't sure. All the sex- and labourclones Elvis had met revealed a total lack of personality. While the Waltons were walking stereotypes, there was a tenaciousness and cunning about them that suggested a nasty intelligence. He was reminded of soldier ants, those insects who move in a huge, hungry mass, seemingly governed by one guiding group mind.
A half-Marie advanced rapidly on its hands, and was hosed down with fire by an indentee humping a flamethrower. The thing screeched and burned, the lacquered hair crumpling in an instant. Elvis shot into the fireball until it wasn't moving any more.
Raimundo was howling with victory, his huge throat open wide enough to swallow a sheep whole. An iguana-faced soldier gave him a high-five slap, and they bumped asses in a little dance. The dinosaur's steps made the ground shake.
"Yo, homes," Raimundo shouted, "we don' real gooooood!"
Shiba was bipedal again. The smoke cleared. There were dead Josephites all over the compound, and not a few indentees and Suitcase People.
A tear leaked from Shiba's 'gator eye.
"A waste," he said. "Regrettable. The next time, we shall not be so unprepared. I shall see to it."
A lizardman in fatigues walked across, limping slightly, a bloodied pad pressed to a neck wound. He saluted. Elvis recognized Captain Tip Marcus, the security chief he had met earlier.
"I accept full responsibility, Mr Shiba. I should have posted more people in the swamp. You may have my bars…"
Shiba shook his snout. "No. You did what you could with your resources. I am the one who should have foreseen all this."
They could have continued their polite argument, each trying to grab the lion's share of the blame, but there was a distraction.
A Donny crawled out of the transport, broken by Raimundo's random fire, but still in one piece. He hissed, hands turned to claws, and fell off the ve-hickle. Raimundo stomped on him, and he stopped moving. The mess stamped into the dirt spilled recognizable organs, but there wasn't much blood. Krokodil had been right. The combat fatigues were torn enough to disclose a featureless tailor's dummy of a body, without nipples or genitalia.
"Frankie, skin me op, maaan!" the dinosaur shouted.
The iguana soldier pulled a reefer the size of a man's arm out of a haversack and gave it to Raimundo.
"Yow, incredibly gen'rous, homes!"
Raimundo stuck the spliff into his maw, and leaned towards a patch of burning wall that had been spattered by a phosphor grenade. The dinosaur sucked in marijuana smoke, and his eyeballs rolled.
"This ees great shit, maaaan!"
The dinosaur's chest inflated, stretching his ragged T-shirt to its seams. Then, Raimundo shot ten-foot spurts of smoke from his nostrils.
The whole compound was going to wind up stinking of whoopee weed at this rate.
"Ramirez," snapped Marcus. "Remember…discipline!"
Raimundo waved a claw, and took another prehistoric toke. "Yo, homes. Discipline an' shit, maaan! We don' stomped os some righteous Black Hat bad-ass! Call os the kiiings of the jongle!"
A petite, veiled woman with green arms came up. It was Marielle, Shiba's assistant-cum-secretary. She had a provisional damage and casualty report.
"This is unfortunate," Shiba said, looking at the figures. "We shall have to work hard."
The woman scuttled away, head down.
"We should hit them, maaan! Hit them hard so they don' never forget. The Suitcase People rule the swamp. This is our territory, and don't no one gonna freak with us!"
Raimundo wiped his enormous head with his hands, as if slicking back the hair he didn't have any more. Marcus was nodding.
"He's right, Mr Shiba. We should go on the offensive. I've got some intelligence reports from the Cape. They're up to something. This assault force was below strength because they need all their personnel. We should strike now, while they're preoccupied."
Shiba hung his snout thoughtfully.
"How many people can we put in the field?"
Marcus was eager. "Enough. If we make a strike, we can call in all the non-aligneds out in the swamp. The Josephites haven't been discriminating between factions."
Elvis understood that some of the Suitcase People were living ferally in the swamp. They were the ones who could barely remember their human lives. The bastard who had stolen the Cadillac was probably one of those, although no one he had questioned could think of a mutant matching his description.
"Rolling stock?"
"Visser left us a couple of half-track amphibians. And we've got a stockpile of Good Ole Boy guns 'n' ammo. If Raimundo hasn't shot up the armoured car the Josephites came in too badly, we could requisition and re-equip it."
"Mr Presley," Shiba said to him, "your opinion?"
Elvis thought it through. "Well, it's not my place to make suggestions, but I have to go to the Cape. If you came along, I'd feel a whole lot safer. Whatever the Josephites are up to, I want it stopped. I'll carry a gun and take orders if I have to. I don't really know what kind of a set-up they have at Canaveral, but my guess is that they won't be easy to take out. Those Donny and Marie things are as tough to get shot of as cockroaches."
Shiba was pondering.
"Very well," he said. "Captain Marcus, you have twenty-four hours. Ready a strike unit. We'll hit them tomorrow."
Raimundo expressed his approval with a tail-lashing frenzy.
Since Needlepoint came on line, Fonvielle had been seeing the tall, spear-shape take form out on the main pad. It was a rocket made of immobile smoke. He stood out on the firing grounds, remembering the long-ago times when golf-carts loaded down with generals and politicians and journalists scurried across the empty expanse for every launch. There had been stands like at Yankee Stadium for the spectators. Being wood, they had rotted into the water and now existed only as streaks of colour in the mud. The streaks were ghosts of a sort too, the Commander supposed. He put his hands into his flightsuit pockets and scratched his thighs.
The bent and rusted gantry didn't prop the rocketshape up, but he could see phantom lines running between them. He recognized the craft. It was the next-to-last of the Titan 7 series, the one that had exploded,under Circe IV, killing Mikko Griffith, Lester Mihailoff and Mildred Kuhn. That had been in 1976. Debris had rained all over the peninsula after the firework display, and there had been now-nameless ground casualties. Fonvielle wondered if those smitten-from-the-sky technicians and swamp-rats qualified for the elite ghost cadre, the sacrifices of outer space.
Fonvielle searched his arm for the patch, and found it. The three names were written around the circumference of the circle. A siren pouted against a starscape, posed like Marilyn Monroe in her nude calendar, the Roman numerals modestly concealing her body.
The Indians claimed that even inanimate objects had souls. They were called manitous. Once an object, be it a table, a 1968 Studebaker or a piece of sculpture, was destroyed, its manitou lingered on for the use of the discarnate spirits of men. The Happy Hunting Ground was stocked with spirit game, spirit trees, spirit lodges. Since the white men came to America, Fonvielle assumed that the Indian afterlife was also littered with manitou co-cola cans, drive-in motels and TV sets. There was no reason why a spacecraft should not have a ghost.
None of the Black Hats could see the Titan 7. They walked through it, disappearing into the smoke and emerging the other side. Fonvielle couldn't bring himself to try the experiment. He was afraid that the smoke would be as substantial as the real rocket for him. As far as he could tell, the smoke rocket was becoming denser, more solid. The only other person on the Cape who could see the ghosts was the First Lady. She must have a touch of the Dream…
"Commander?" Addams pulled him out of his reverie.
"Yes?"
"We're dry-firing the system in twenty-five minutes."
"I'll be with you."
The success of the Needlepoint Ring was a vindication, at last, of the programme. With this proven, the Prezz would surely authorize more funds. The Cape would live again. The next rocket wouldn't be a ghost. Mars called, and Deep Space. Camp Glenn should be re-manned. Now America owned the skies, it was time to put on a little show.
The Black Hats were staking out an animal in the sun, and sawing at its throat. It was one of the Suitcase People, a black-hided warthog thing with yellow tusks. Blood trickled across the tarmac, following the almost-erased markings. No spirit shape was coalescing in the air above the sacrifice. It didn't count.
Fonvielle walked towards the bunker. Grissom was waiting for him by the elevator platform, his helmet off. His stocky face was still wet, his hair plastered back with seawater. He looked ill, and his suit sloshed as he moved.
"Gus?" Fonvielle said. None of the ghosts had ever talked.
Grissom nodded his head in recognition. His face was greenish, and slightly swollen.
In 1962, Virgil Grissom had gone EVA in a blaze of glory, and been automatically photographed against the rising sun, waving a confident thumbs-up at the stars. There had been much speculation around the project as to whether Grissom or Glenn would be selected to captain the moon mission. Fred Flintstone and the Clean Marine, they had been called in the press. An artificial rivalry had been generated carefully by the publicity Suits NASA was saddled with, and soon the fake contest became a real one. Fonvielle wondered whether that had been what killed Gus. The board of inquiry said it was a faulty hatch, but the Commander sometimes imagined that Grissom had been pulling some grand gesture stunt, climbing out onto the surface of the capsule to be found sitting on top of it bobbing in the blue Pacific, and had it backfire. That was the Fred Flintstone style. He knew that after the disaster, the Clean Marine had shown his first traces of humanity, getting as drunk as a skunk. Grissom's re-entry had been perfect, but a hatch had opened as soon as he splashed down, and the capsule had sunk like an anvil. By dying after re-entry, he just missed being the first American to perish in space, losing that miserable honour to poor old orbiting Richard Rusoff. Fonvielle remembered the recriminatory inquisition canning every non-essential staff member who could conceivably have touched the hatch mechanism, from the designer down to the janitor. It hadn't been fair, but the purge had gone some way towards assuaging NASA's collective guilt. But, within three months, Rusoff was off his trajectory, and America had another martyr. And Cape Canaveral had another ghost.
"Gus, can you hear me?"
The drowned astronaut shook his head, and opened his mouth. Black brine leaked down the front of his silver suit. His eyes watered.
"What is it, Gus? What do you want?"
Grissom held up his hand, thumbs-down.
"Commander?"
It was Addams. Grissom was transparent, and fading fast. Addams was treating him like an idiot.
"Are you ready?"
Grissom was gone.
"Yes," Fonvielle told Addams. 'Take us down."
Addams worked the mechanism, and the platform sank towards the bunker.
The oblong of the sky receded above them.
The Prezz was waiting for them in the bunker, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Board of General Motors, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Walt Disney and Frank Sinatra. It was the full tum-out. They all saluted.
"Ah, Fonvielle," said the Prezz, "good to see you. I've reported to the Elder. He is well pleased with our progress."
Fonvielle expected he would get the Congressional Medal of Honour for this.
The First Lady exchanged looks with him. There was something about that one. She was hardly more than a girl. And she was wise to the Cape.
She could see Griffith, Mihailoff and Kuhn clustered in the corner, smouldering.
"Now Keystone is responding," Fonvielle told the Prezz, "it's vital we establish that the inter-satellite communications lasers are angled correctly. We took a certain amount of deviation into our original calculations, but no one has looked at the system for fifteen years."
The Prezz understood. He was up on Needlepoint. He didn't need the lecture really.
"Okay, let's reach for the skies."
Hiroshi Shiba looked at the Op for the thousandth time, and had to force himself to believe that this really was Elvis Presley. He remembered the old films and television programmes he had watched in his dormitory in Kyoto. He remembered the time Inoshira Kube had made Shiba, Sonny Shamada and Tetsuya Ito abase themselves in front of the entire trainee corps after they had been caught greasing each other's hair into "Elvisu Pu-res-lieh" quaffs. Later, while taking the American culture courses all GenTech East execs had to qualify in before they were sent overseas, he had been able to put Elvis in context, tracing the influences on his work. The blues, country and western, Carl Perkins, Dean Martin, Chuck Berry, Al Jolson.
Still, for Shiba, the Elvis of the '50s represented the apex of America as a cultural force. When he vanished into the army, the cutting edge of rock 'n' roll was lost to the USSR and the United States began its long descent into its current position as the warring ground for gangcults, multinats, lunatic factions and desperate psychopaths. So much vitality applied to so little effect. It was frightening.
He wished he could reach out and touch Elvis. The man contained within him all that was great and potentially great about the country. Ideally, he would have liked to recruit the Op as a member of the Blood Banner Society—he felt sure Elvis would appreciate the purity of its ideals, its motives—but that honour was open only to pure-born Japanese.
They were working on Visser's half-track amphibians, converting them to assault vehicles. Elvis was with Captain Marcus, checking under the hood. Raimundo Rex hefted the half-track up by its prow, lifting it at a forty-five degree angle so Elvis and the Captain could take a look at the hull. The saurian was a one-mutant combination tank, trash disposal system, fork-lift truck and Spanish lesson. After Elvis, he was the hero of the compound.
Marielle brought Shiba some papers to sign. He tried. His signature was getting problematic now that his fingers were almost fused. He would soon have to revert to the oriental practice and start favouring his personal seal. Marielle sped away. Since the change began to affect her, she had been veiled with thick mosquito netting. She had never been an extraordinarily attractive girl, but evidently her vanity was affronted by the creeping greenness, the thick scaly plates and the yellowing eyes. That was a shame. The Suitcase People would have to learn to appreciate their own form of beauty.
There had been burials in the swamp earlier, and Shiba had said a few words over Reuben and the others. Reuben had been much loved by the indentees, and his heroic death had bound them to the Suitcase People. Even those who had not picked up Dr Blaikley's modifying enzymes volunteered to go along. Privately, Shiba had decided that once GenTech shut this facility down, he would see to it that the indentees were released from their obligations to the corp. They had earned their freedom. While Reuben had been laid on a bier and ceremonially burned, with Colonel Presley singing "All My Trials" as the embers sank, Spermwhale Visser had been wrapped in oilcloth and dumped in the deepest lagoon with the other Good Ole Boys. Now, they even had a layer of Josephites on top of them. The swamp was getting thick with the dead.
Shiba looked again at Colonel Presley. The hair, dyed black and swept back, was the same, and so was the thin, agile body. He had lost the babyfat he remembered from the earliest films, and was almost gaunt now. Facially, he was an almost exact match for the Statue of Liberty, with sad blank eyes and heavy lips. When he had sung earlier, the voice had been richer, deeper than on the earliest recordings. If only he had kept out of the clutches of managers and madmen, he would have been bigger than all of them. Bigger than Tcherkassoff, than Dodd, than Sinatra…
He was appalled to find that none of the Americans remembered Elvis as more than a fad of the long-ago '50s, on a par with hula-hoops, flagpole-squatting and red and green 3-D movies. That was another reason for the country's degeneracy, its failure. It always neglected its past greatness. As the 21st century bore down, America was backpedalling to stay where it was. It had neither a future, nor a tradition.
Shiba hoped to return to Japan soon.
But at least he had met the King. And, thanks to Dr Blaikley, he had some inkling of the potential within himself.
He dropped to all fours, and weaved across the compound to his office. Once Cape Canaveral was taken, he would requisition a satellite link and communicate with Kyoto. Then, the operation could be decently closed down.
It occurred to him only then that perhaps his current form would not prove pleasing to the higher echelons. There was a great deal of prejudice against the abnormal, the impure. Anger flared as he imagined Inoshira Kube sneering at his craggy grey body. He felt hungry. He imagined his jaws clenching around Inoshira's head.
His body might be that of an alligator, he knew, but his soul was burned pure.
Once the Keystone was responding properly, the rest of the Needlepoint System fell into place. It was a more or less tedious business, transmitting test signals and receiving the programmed response codes, and Duroc left Sister Addams to handle it. Machsler's files contained all the long-unused Q and A buzzwords needed to convince the Keystone's Security Program that it was receiving orders from a duly authorized US Government source. Addams estimated at least twelve solid hours of interface were necessary, before they would have full control of the ring of death. Duroc wished someone had thought to tell him that before he first tested the thing out.
Duroc had hoped to get some down-time with Simone. ZeeBeeCee were putting out a three-hour Tribute to Gavin Mantle, complete with home movie footage of his childhood and interviews with all his family, friends and work-mates, followed by a group of experts discussing the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. The scientific debate would be the important part of the show. Duroc wanted to find out how close to the truth the investigators were getting. There was still a window of opportunity for someone to cotton on to the takeover and activation of the Needlepoint System and to deploy thermonuclear missiles against Keystone, disabling the entire ring. Once the whole system was on-line, nothing from Earth could get through, and Elder Seth could rain down fire from the heavens at will. But until then, they were vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike.
Duroc, who was used to running through all the worst eventualities, had listed the nations, organizations and individuals capable, working singly or in cooperation, of putting together the missile strike force necessary for the job. GenTech, the Winter Corporation and Haussmann A.G. of course; Russia, America, the UEC and China, probably; the Pan-Islamic Congress. McDisneyworld, Greater Rhodesia, Japan and the Vatican, maybe.
When that listing unnerved him too much, he tried to steel his resolve by listing individuals and institutions against whom the Needlepoint System could be profitably deployed. Pope Georgi headed any list, of course, and Duroc would have added Sister Chantal Juillerat, the pontiff's computer-packing hit woman, and Father Declan O'Shaughnessy, the Vatican's top cyberfeed jockey, to any top ten of dangerous Roman Catholics. After that, it was back to petty personal vendettas: Jessamyn Bonney, by whatever name, was top of that chart; and Dr Ottokar Proctor, for failing to keep his part of a bargain; not to mention United States Cavalry Trooper Nathan Stack, the Navaho Hawk-That-Settles, Simone's bullying pimp, expendable risk Machsler, UEC President Le Pen for being an idiot, and so many others…
But just now the Cape had other, more immediate, problems, and Duroc was supposed to see to them. Brother Turney's expedition against the Suitcase People had not returned, and they had lost radio contact with them. Turney had found an enclosure of the freaks out in the swamps and, at the time of his last report, was about to move in and clean them out. Evidently, he had met with more than the expected resistance. Hitherto, Duroc had assumed he was dealing with a scattered and uncoordinated nuisance, but obviously not all the mutants were sub-normal morons.
He was sequestered in the armoury with Brother Tozer, trying to work out which of the blips on the tablescreen were Suitcase People. It wasn't easy, because each mutation was different. Some were cold-blooded, some weren't. Some of the blips could be ordinary animals. Some of the mutants wouldn't register. Duroc wished he had a spare biochemist to autopsy the Suitcase People they had been able to kill. Maybe there was some nerve poison that would only affect their metabolisms, and they could spray the swamps with it, avoiding a messy shoot-out.
"Radar isn't much use, Elder," Tozer was saying, "nor are thy heat sensors…not that they've ever been satisfactory in this climate. Mine advice would be to install some sort of movement detectors. Nothing can get about in a swamp without making waves. Thou couldst monitor that, and have a perfect early warning system."
Duroc nodded. "How long?"
"Once we getteth the equipment, a day or two at the most."
"Once we get the equipment?"
"Yea verily. Of course, that's the snag. For a job like unto this, thou'd need custom-made goods. GenTech, probably. The ungodly Japcorp supplieth most of the Sanctioned Agencies."
Blips were massing near the site of Turney's last call-in.
"What's that?"
Tozer frowned. "I dost not know. Do alligators swarm?"
Duroc didn't know either. The church had too many people who knew what to do with a desert like Salt Lake City, but no specialists in swampland. Recently, he had been wondering whether Elder Seth wasn't getting too wrapped up in the big picture to take care of the details. This whole Canaveral Project was ridden with niggling minor considerations that hadn't been cleared up. The Suitcase People wouldn't have been a problem if the Church of Joseph had known about them before the establishment of the base on the Cape. A few passes with napalm and some poison in the swamps would have wiped them out. But now, they were going to be more difficult to get rid of than an infestation of termites. They had to be taken in their own environment, and they were a lot better at swamp warfare than any of Tozer's security people.
Provisionally, Duroc decided to request an airlift of Donnys and Maries. He could send them out on search-and-destroy missions and not feel he was wasting a human resource. They were among the most loyal and dedicated of the Elder's followers, but that didn't make him any more comfortable around them.
There was a small teevee in the armoury, usually tuned in to the Josephite cable service with its non-stop fund-raising telethons, choral concerts from the Tabernacle, advertisements for the resettlement drives and smarmy homilies on wishy-washy religious themes. Just now, Duroc had ZeeBeeCee tuned. The Gavin Mantle show was on. There was an intense argument taking place between lawyers representing Clodagh Mantle and Erik Kartalian, both of whom were contesting the channel's claim to Gavin's swelled estate. They cut to Sonny Pigg, singing his instant cash-in song, "Bye-bye Gavin."
"Look," said Tozer, "there seems to be some pattern…"
The blips were converging, amassing. There must be some sort of jungle telegraph. Duroc remembered his uncle taking him to see Johnny Weissmuller films as a child. He imagined hordes of animals crashing through the mud calling out to each other.
"Where is that place?"
Tozer pressed a key, and place names were superimposed over the large-scale map.
"Narcoossee? What's there?"
Tozer asked the map a question, and got a read-out. He whistled.
'"Tis a GenTech research establishment, Elder. BioDiv. Classified, of course. They're supposed to be conducting a long-term investigation into immune reactions."
The green blips were joining together, forming a large blobby mass.
"Immune reactions?"
"That's what they say."
"Nonsense. They're creating monsters."
Tozer agreed. "That's possible. The godless multinats have been trying to get round the legal restrictions on altering the divinely-designed human form for years."
Duroc saw it immediately.
"And they've got a good source of human raw material in the indentees. They can write their own ticket out here."
Duroc wasn't sure how he should proceed. The Church was powerful, and every day its worldly influence grew, but GenTech was the largest organization on the planet. It had more employees than most countries had citizens, and its economy was stronger than that of every nation in the world. He didn't want to get the Church of Joseph into a shooting war with the corp. As the Soviet Union was rapidly finding out, that was a conflict that could only be resolved in the favour of the businessmen.
"Pull in all the patrols that are still out there," he ordered. "I'm going to have to consult with Salt Lake on this."
Tozer saluted. "Blessed be, Elder."
A comedian was delivering Gavin Mantle's funeral oration in a cathedral full of mourners, doing a series of "bolt out of the blue" jokes. He was getting nervous laughs.
"Divine lightning" was the expression that was being mainly used to "explain" the Blotto Lotto winner's sudden death.
Duroc felt unusually on edge. So many of the current circumstances were beyond his control. Tomorrow, when the world was held tight in a Josephite fist, he would breathe again.
He wondered where Simone was. The girl was spooked too, he knew, and he hadn't had time to find out what was wrong.
He left the armoury, and stood on the expanse of cracked, drying concrete. The swamp smell was still strong, and rancid clumps of rotting vegetation were still lying around. He would have them cleared when the crisis point was passed.
The shadow of the rusting gantry fell over the launchpad. Duroc rubbed his eyes. He could have sworn that there was a smudgy shadow in the air by the thing. It was indistinct, but there seemed to be a shape taking form.
"Elder," said a Donny, "would you come over and look at this?"
He was smiling, and had a pipe in his hand. They all had pipes, but he had never seen one smoke.
He followed the terminal-stage Josephite over to the gantry. Close-up, the rotting pile was more ominous. It shifted slightly, creaking. It was probably dangerous, and ought to be pulled down.
He looked up. The shadow was still there.
"Look. These have appeared…"
The Donny pointed into the pit. It had been drained. The bottom was blackened from the immense discharge of a Titan 7 rocket. There had been a bad accident here, he had heard.
At the bottom of the pit, outlined a stark white against the sooty black, were three Hiroshima-blast shadows.
They were negative people, with large round heads and thick limbs.
Duroc looked at the Donny. He was calm, his handsome face expressionless, unreadable. He wondered whether the thing could have curiosity, fear, love…
He looked back at the silhouette astronauts.
"But…"
They had moved. He stared at them for a few seconds, and they were still. One seemed to be reaching out, as if to make a reduced-gravity hop on the moon and languidly drift for fifteen yards. Another was rising from a kneeling position, as if finishing prayers. They didn't move.
He looked at the Donny again, and looked back. The leaper was in the air, his lower-legs bent back from the knees, the riser was nearly upright.
The Donny wandered away silently. Night was falling. The white astronaut shapes were brighter in the darkness.
This was one more thing for Duroc to worry about.
He left the gantry, putting the three blast ghosts out of his mind, and looked for Simone.
He found the indenture girl in the bungalow, and she made him forget all his worries for too-short minutes.
The sun went down on the Cape.
Elder Nguyen Seth, the Summoner, concentrated on the bowl of blood, and his consciousness left his ancient body to roam beyond. In the Outer Darkness, the Dark Ones waited patiently, as they had always done, but Seth could feel their excitement building. After millennia, the scant months that stood between the present and the Day of the Summoning were like seconds. Time had always been the one thing Seth had in abundance, but now there were so many things to be done, and so many sacrifices to be seen to.
Elder Seth looked down upon the gently revolving globe, the Needlepoint satellites sharply outlined against the clouds and the oceans. Lights winked on their years-dead exterior surfaces as they communicated with Sister Addams in Cape Canaveral. The ring of satellite weapons felt comfortable. The Elder slipped into them, and took them as a body. He allowed the IFF transmissions to continue, feeling a tingle as each of the links in the Needlepoint Ring came on line.
Down there, humans swarmed towards their predestined End. Seth thought of his favoured followers: Dune in Florida, serving as his family always had done; Priapus in Berlin, the anarchic satyr ejaculating hate with each thrust; the Waiting Snake in Rome, preparing to strike fatally at the heart of the Vatican. He considered the hordes pouring into Salt Lake City, making it a Paradise on Earth, and of their gradual transformation into Waltons, as their hair blonded and stiffened, their features melted and reformed as handsome masks, and their bodies turned to mannequins. How few of them would be among the Elect, the favoured of the Dark Ones.
For his part, Nguyen Seth hungered for oblivion. His centuries weighted him like chains. With the world's end, and the achievement of the Dark Purpose, his ordeals would be over.
"Old man?"
It was Krokodil, still inside his mind like a nestling parasite, trying to eat away at him.
"It's nearly over, old man."
If he was still capable of it, Seth loved Krokodil for her wrong-headed persistence. She contained in her the seeds of the defeat of the Dark Ones, but she would never unleash them so long as she were questing solely for revenge against him. She was so typically human, so limited in her vision. With literally half a view of the world, she was obsessed with him, and that obsession was the key to her failure. How unworthy she was of her ennoblement. She was the only being on the planet who could face down one of the Dark Ones, and yet she frittered her power away on selfish concerns.
"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…"
She was mocking him. Foolish girl.
Soon, Dune would feed Krokodil's heat pattern into the Needlepoint computer at Cape Canaveral, and a beam from the sky would end her.
Seth wondered how much he would miss the girl.
PERSEUS: SOURMASH.
KINGMAKER: ADAGGIO.
PICADILLY: YELLOWSTONE.
TIN LIZZY: COPPICE.
PETREL: CLAW HAMMER.
CURLY JOE: VIGILANCE.
Stealth was not one of Raimundo Rex's strong points. They switched off the motors of their swamp-skimmers once they hit the Indian River, which put them within earshot of the Cape, and fell back on paddles. Raimundo kept bumping his head on low cypresses, and his bulk made the skimmer sit dangerously low in the water. Elvis was sure the saurian had been doping before the mission. It was hard to tell what with his independently-floating reptile eyes, but the Op thought Raimundo had hopped himself up on some zooper-blast.
A lot of other Ops used drugs to get them through the combats, but Elvis thought they were stone crazy. Back in the music days, he had popped his share of pills to keep him going eight gigs a week, and in the army he had been shot full of morph-plus several times, when he was badly wounded, and he had found the dissociation from his body deeply disturbing. Since then, he had been down hard on recreational or professional drugs. He had first earned the enmity of the Good Ole Boys by turning over to the cops a couple of Memphis dealers who had paid off plenty to stay in business. The smacksynth salesmen had gone in one side of the revolving door and come out the other, protected by a court order and the word of Judgement Q. Harbottle. Drugs were a poison, seeping through the cities of America, turning everything sour…
In Cuba, when he had been shot in the chest and had been in surgery for twelve hours, they had given him enough morph-plus to deaden the pain of torture by flaying. He had had bad dreams, and never really been able to shake them off. He would find himself standing alone in a beam of bright white light like police interrogators use, uncomfortably strapped into a white, fringed, spangled clown outfit. He was sweating like a pig, and his clothes were sticky, and he was mumbling his way through a song he could barely remember, trying to do his old act despite the pains shooting through his legs and arms. The lyric of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" hovered just beyond his mental grasp, and he was repeating the title over and over again like a mantra, gabbling "are you lonesome tonight, are you lonesome toniiiiight, are you lonesome toniiiiiiiight?" The worst of it was that he was weighed down by heavy pads on his stomach, his buttocks, his thighs, his arms, his legs and under his chin. No matter how he fought, he couldn't get free of the weights. They weren't just fixed to him by tape or wire, they were growing out of him as if he had spent twenty years guzzling brews and downing cheeseburgers by the faceful. There were drugs in him too, not just the medical anaesthetics, but a potent mixture of everything illegal that could be injected, snorted, inhaled, infused, swallowed, skin-popped or poured into his ears. Since Cuba, that nightmare had come back to him too often.
Raimundo was weaving about on his skimmer, paddling with his huge foot like a kid on a push-bike. Elvis hoped the dinosaur would be okay in the fight. He'd seen too many gung-ho junkies get death rather than glory.
The dawn was breaking over the Cape. Working with Captain Marcus, Elvis had formulated a plan of attack, trusting that the Josephites were too stretched to maintain a proper defence perimeter around the Cape. The base was too large to be kept secure by anything less than a regiment, and the NASA fences were in a state of severe disrepair. Marcus's intelligence showed that most of the old observation posts weren't even manned most of the time.
The Captain was leading the bulk of their forces, using the captured armoured transport as a Wooden Horse-cum-command centre. They would attack the main gates. Those Suitcase People best adapted to swimming were circling around to come at the Cape from out of the sea, striking up at the sea wall from the almost unpatrolled beach. And Elvis was to lead a spearhead force up the Indian River whose main task was to draw fire away from Marcus's column.
There were docks on Merritt Island and the instep of the Cape, and the river ran between them. Actually, the river had swollen to such an extent that the narrow causeway separating it from the sea was more or less permanently underwater, a swirling mass of long grass just breaking the surface, and Merritt Island was just another lump in the swamp, but the docks still rose out of the salt marsh. They would provide good cover, and a fine fall-back point.
Aside from Raimundo and a few of his Suitcase People, most of Elvis's team were indentees from the compound, transplanted blacks and Cajuns, rallying behind Shiba. Some bore the marks of the change, but they were less far along than Raimundo, Marcus or the bestial swamp creatures that had responded to their call.
Raimundo was still fidgeting, eager to get into the scrap. The saurian had crossed bullet bandoliers on his chest, and was packing a rocketlauncher and a chaingun, both specially adapted so he could work them with his thick, clawed fingers. Stoned or not, he wasn't what Elvis would have most liked to have come angrily after him.
The indentees were another matter. Elvis couldn't work them out. He wondered why they hadn't scattered into the swamps when Marcus overran the compound. He wondered why they were so quietly acquiescent to the mutations that were overtaking them. He also noticed that they looked at him much as Ti-Mouche had done, with a strange combination of awe, reverence and fear.
He didn't feel magical this morning, although for some reason he had packed the battered guitar into the skimmer's lockers. It was like a totem. Other guys wore lucky medals or carried two-headed coins, he knew. He had never been battle-superstitious before—after all plenty of two-headed coins had to be prised out of the stiff, dead fists of lucky soldiers—but this wasn't like the other actions he had seen.
There was a warning buoy up ahead, bobbing in the water. Elvis signalled to Raimundo to halt, and the dinosaur just managed it, their small force settling behind him, back-paddling to keep themselves out of the marker's range.
Elvis watched the buoy's flashing lights. It sent out an all-clear every thirty seconds. He could shoot the thing, but that would shut it off, giving just as clear a warning as its alert signal would. There was nothing for it, they would have to trip the thing. After all, the whole point of the Indian River thrust was to make the Josephites think this was the main attack, and to have them concentrate their defences on the South perimeter.
He drew his Colt and took a sight at the buoy. He thought he could blow out the blinking red LED.
Elvis looked around. Raimundo and the others understood. Once this shot was fired, the attack would be on. There would be no way out except victory.
He cocked the pistol.
There was a mass of clicks as safety catches were flicked. Raimundo heaved his shoulders and hefted the rocket tube. A couple of 'gator men slipped off their skimmers and into the water, their weapons floating above their backs in sealed polythene bags.
The disc of the Sun was entirely above the horizon now, staining red the waters beyond the Cape. Insects buzzed above the marshland. In the distance, Elvis could see the remnant of a rocket gantry, and barely make out a dark shape beside it
The LED flashed. Thirty seconds. It flashed again. If he took it out the instant it winked off, they would have an extra thirty seconds. Some of them could hit the docks by that time. Allowing for a sleep-heavy response time from the defenders, who would either have just woken up or be at the end of a gruelling night shift, they should all be over the docks and penetrating the restrung fences by the time the Josephites had anybody in the field.
Thirty seconds. Flash.
With a prayer, Elvis shot the buoy. It exploded in a geyser of water, raining transistorized parts.
Thirty seconds.
Elvis's people surged forwards, and hit the dock.
An alarm klaxon sounded on the Cape.
Elvis was on the docks himself, hauling up a couple of indentees. There was some light equipment in the skimmers. He wanted it assembled before the welcoming committee turned out with garlands and gas grenades.
The indentees' hands moved fast, slotting together the artillery like child's assembly toys.
Raimundo charged the fence, bringing a section down. The klaxons were nearer now, and Elvis heard boots hitting concrete, engines starting up.
Raimundo roared. The shooting had started. There were whistles, and the shells started to fall.
Fully awake, fully alert, Elvis ran towards the fence, firing from the hip at the advancing black figures.
An indentee next to him took a direct hit and fell in bloody chunks. Red threads crossed the concrete.
They ran across the firing grounds. The smell of cordite was thick in his nostrils. There were dead things on the ground. Suitcase and regular people, meticulously butchered.
What the hell was going on here? And where was Krokodil?
A jeep rumbled towards them, someone with a machine gun standing up in the back and firing wildly. Raimundo launched a rocket at the ve-hickle, which turned up in the air above the explosion, spilling burning people.
There were a lot of Black Hat Josephites now, all armed, all firing.
Elvis found some cover behind a lump of concrete and sniped at them. The Donnys and Maries shrugged off direct hits and kept advancing, but the ordinary Christian Soldiers died like anyone else.
Raimundo had a Donny in his claws, and was chewing his head. The big lizard must be developing a taste for Walton meat.
By his watch, they had been in battle for nearly two minutes. Elvis had promised to keep up the attack for fifteen before Marcus struck.
Bullets impacted with the concrete, spitting up dust and shards. Someone was trying to get a fix on him. Elvis made a quick calculation, and tossed a frag grenade. That put the sniper out of commission.
Twelve and a half minutes to go.
A 'gator man rolled past screaming, one foreleg gone, most of its skull exposed.
If you got killed, Elvis supposed, twelve and a half minutes was forever. . "Jesse Garon," he prayed, "get me through this…"
RIGOLETTO: BELDUNGSROMAN.
Brother Tozer handed him a headset. Without putting it on, he could hear the tinny reports of gunfire from the surface. Roger Duroc made a snap decision.
"Tozer," he said, "seal the bunker."
The Brother was taken aback. "But Elder, we can resist the attack. There's no threat to us.."
"Do what I say."
VANQUISHER: BRANDYWINE.
"But thou wil't be abandoning our faithful up there."
Duroc slapped the security chief across the face. "Seal the bunker."
Tozer shook violently, but brought himself under control. He whispered orders into his lapel microphone.
CHEYENNE: PEPPERPOT.
"This is nothing to be concerned with," Duroc addressed the technicians. "Please continue with your work."
Sister Addams transmitted another coded word to Keystone, and received the correct answer.
ATROPOS: NOCTURNE.
She had been at her console all night, and there were smudged circles under her eyes. Her left hand was twisted in her ratty hair as her right flew over the keyboard.
SPOTLIGHT: SEARCHLIGHT.
The guards rushed past, their raised rifles clattering, and took up positions by the elevator. A lead shield, used during take-offs, was painfully grinding across the shaft.
Duroc could hear the noises of battle above, tinnily from the headset. There were about a hundred Josephites, most of them Waltons, up there. He mentally wrote them off.
After all, sacrifice was what this was all about.
BUCKAROO: COUNTY CORK.
The surface forces should be able to hold off the Suitcase People long enough for Addams to complete the code sequence. After that, the Needlepoint System would get a thorough work-out. The Suitcase People could run from the thin beams, but they couldn't hide. Gavin Mantle's lonely corner of Hell would be getting overcrowded.
CANDIDE: CANDYMAN.
Simone was with him. Duroc was glad of that. He wouldn't have wanted to cut her loose on the surface, to take her chances with the mutants. For some reason, she was important to him. The girl was terrified, but that was only to be expected.
Fonvielle stood over Addams's console as the Sister went down Machsler's list of keywords.
ICE CREAM: CONE.
The Commander's job was nearly over. Duroc wondered whether it was worth the effort of tidying him out of the way. It was so nearly over.
ARROWROOT: HEXAGON.
Duroc wondered who had formulated the codes. They seemed random, at once trivial and suggestive. Each triggered a different function in Needlepoint's vast repertoire of responses.
MAMIE: LEXINGTON.
On the big board, the satellite's readings were clusters of different-coloured lights, each signifying a capability no longer dormant. It was quite pretty. Instruments of mass devastation were always aesthetic triumphs, Duroc mused.
PONDEROSA: BANDERSNATCH.
The freight elevator was rising to meet the lead shield. Tozer's men were yanking wires from the works. They were burying themselves in the bunker on the assumption they could get out later. Tozer himself was dishing out instructions, but didn't look happy about them. Like Addams, he was one of the Church's compromises: he possessed skills necessary to the mission, but along with them a degree of independent thought not to be found in the typical Black Hat Josephite. Most of the worshippers here would swallow battery acid upon the direct order of an Elder of the Church. Fools.
Duroc picked up a headset, and listened to the course of the topside battle.
MOM'S APPLE PIE: CRANBERRY SAUCE.
Orders and cries for help flew between wired-up Josephites. The human ones died easily, but the Waltons were hardier, more dangerous. Screams and explosions, shouts and gunfire. None of the bunker staff were concerned for their topside comrades. They all had their work to do.
COCONUT SHY: ERASMUS.
Duroc gathered that the invaders weren't all mutants. They were well armed. He wondered whether GenTech were in on it. That could be a more than momentary nuisance.
CARTWHEEL: JONQUIL.
Simone was sitting quietly, her hands in her lap, trembling.
"They're here," she said.
"What? Who?"
Duroc looked at the indenture girl. She seemed to be seeing more than him. This must have something to do with the strange shapes he had been glimpsing out of the corner of his eye. She could see them more clearly.
"The ghosts…"
Elvis dropped a frag grenade into an airshaft, but it bounced back out. Shutters had closed the aperture. He kicked the grenade like a soccer ball, and it exploded in the air above a Marie Walton, spreading her out on the concrete like a throwrug.
He had heard rumbling from underneath the firing ground. Whoever was down there was fortifying themselves pretty heavily.
Three minutes to go before Marcus struck.
Raimundo was a berserker in battle. His chaingun chattered in one hand, while the other lifted a Donny to his forest of teeth, and his feet tore at a fence.
Elvis knew he had lost a lot of his people in the first wave. He had expected that. In the main, they had died well.
He'd been scratched by flying shrapnel, and was bleeding.
A Donny came at him, smiling placidly. Elvis sprayed the creature with bullets, using his burpgun. It staggered back under the multiple impact, its skin and clothes exploding as each slug slammed into its unreal body. It jitterbugged twenty yards backwards, and fell. It was still kicking, but it couldn't stand up.
A trio of Maries, their hairdos wobbling, took down an indentee with a toadish cast to his features and tore him apart with immaculately manicured bare hands. When he was sure the indentee was beyond help, Elvis tossed a frag into the grouping, and threw himself down as they blew up in a cloud of flame and flesh.
A halftrack went head to head with Raimundo. The saurian got his arms hooked under the ve-hickle and lifted it up off the ground. Its treads flapped loosely as Raimundo tore the machine apart. A Donny, the life ripped out of him, flopped in the driver's seat. Raimundo tore away iron plating to get to the tasty morsel.
A Josephite Black Hat rolled by like a wheel. Was there a wind rising? No, it was a spidercopter.
Hovering over the base, it laid down covering fire, seeming not to care whether defender or invader took it. The nose nozzle squirted burning napalm, and the flames spread.
Elvis signalled to Raimundo. They would have to put the copter out of action before Marcus hit.
One minute, ten seconds.
Elvis bent over and ran towards a half-assembled field mortar. There was a dead indentee by it. He hunted around for the missing struts, but couldn't find them.
Raimundo roared, and stamped over.
Elvis would have to pull a bluff. He took a rocketshell and dropped it into the mortar tube, then made a great play of fiddling with the sights, taking an eyeline on the spidercopter's nose.
The pilot saw him, and the copter eased forwards. A marksman hung out of the door, trying to draw a bead on Elvis. He signalled the pilot to take the craft lower.
Elvis twiddled with the sights, bringing the useless weapon to bear.
Forty-five seconds.
The spidercopter was just fifteen feet off the ground now, and the marksman would have a clear shot
It was close enough.
Raimundo reared up, and pulled the marksman out by his ankle, biting his foot clean off. The man hit the hard ground like a potato sack, and Elvis heard bones splintering. Raimundo trampled him with a horned heel, all the while reaching for the spidercopter's runners with his arms and jaws.
The pilot tried to take the ve-hickle up out of range, but the two-ton dinosaur hung on, shouting obscenities in Spanish.
The copter tipped up, its blades slicing dangerously near Raimundo's head. His skin was thick, but he'd need six-inch durium plate if the blades got to him.
Josephites fell out of the copter, crunching against the ground, screaming. Elvis took an automatic rifle from the dead indentee, and shot at the durium-laced plexibubble. The transparent material didn't shatter, but whitened where the bullets hit. The pilot was struggling with the stick.
Raimundo's tail lashed the ground, finishing off fallen Josephites. He had a dozen shallow bullet wounds up his spined back.
Fifteen seconds.
There was a wrench, and the copter came out of the sky. Its blade ground into the concrete and snapped, spinning away. Raimundo heaved, tossing the heavy mass as far away from him as possible.
The copter rolled over twice, its bubble cracking in half, and exploded.
Raimundo was hurled off his feet, and Elvis was sure the dinosaur was extinct, but he rolled in a surprisingly neat ball, his tail tucked over his head, and came up roaring defiance.
"Freakin' A, maaaaann! The chopper ees come a cropper!"
Five seconds. Elvis shot a running Josephite, bringing him down. He was holding a grenade, which went off as his fingers relaxed.
"Righteous, guitar maaaan!"
Raimundo was triumphant, indestructible.
"Less kick som' Black Hat ass, homes!"
Now.
ZOOT SUIT: AARDVARK.
Addams was on the ball. She kept going, despite the press of ghosts crowding around her console position.
Fonvielle stuck by her, ready to protect the Black Hat from the ghosts if their mute, motionless threat turned to action.
Grissom was there, and Gagarin, Collins, Capaldi, Rusoff, Kuhn, Breedlove, Griffith. The others were turning up by the. moment, taking on ever more solid shape.
WATUSI: CRUSOE.
Even the Prezz could see them now. And the rest of the Black Hats.
"What's going on?" asked the Prezz.
The First Lady's brown face was grey with dread. She saw them even more clearly than Fonvielle.
BESOM: FRIENDSHIP.
Behind the Prezz, two new shapes took form. Poole and Bowman, lost in deep space since '68. At least their presence here confirmed their deaths aboard the Jupiter Probe.
Al Tracy, the first dead man on Mars, was sitting at an unmanned console, his hands filling out. Soon, the ghosts would be solid enough to intervene.
ZODIAC: SPENCER.
"Gus?" Fonvielle said to Grissom. "Not now, no…the Dream. You died for it. You can't betray it now."
Grissom looked him full in the face, and mouthed a word.
ANGELUS: CINCINATTI.
Grissom's thin, black lips moved again. Fonvielle couldn't read them.
"The Dream, Gus. The Dream is alive!"
Grissom didn't look like Fred Flintstone any more. His fishy skin was turning rancid, getting soft. His mouth worked, repeating over and over again…
"Betrayer," the ghost croaked.
It was like a rabbit-punch in the belly.
The Prezz had a pistol out. He walked across, and jammed the gun to Grissom's head. The barrel sank into the ghost's skull. The Prezz wasn't sure whether to fire.
SANDALWOOD: LARGESSE.
"It's cold," the Prezz said, his fingers passing through Grissom's face, making ripples.
The First Lady was beside him, pulling his hand out of the dead astronaut.
Grissom looked at the First Lady, and the ghost of a smile appeared on his dead face.
TOPEKA: DUKE.
There was an explosion topside, and the whole bunker shook. Only the ghosts kept their footing. Fonvielle blundered against Tracy, and felt the shiver running up his arm as he brushed the astronaut's insubstantial form with the back of his hand.
Gagarin had his hands around Addam's throat, but she was resistant. She still couldn't see the ghosts, and so only felt a slight breeze. She flicked at her throat, toying with her crucifix, but kept typing, kept registering the codewords.
MENDACITY: MANDALA.
The Big Board was still lighting up.
"Just keep going," ordered the Prezz. "It's all a trick. Psychological warfare. Ignore it."
VULCAN'S HAMMER: ROYAL FLUSH.
Fonvielle's heart was trip-hammering. The Dream was so close. His fists clenched.
Seawater tears coursed down Gus Grissom's still-rippling face.
"Grab the sky," Fonvielle said to himself, "grab the sky, and never let go."
ESCUTCHEON: WABBIT SEASON.
"Never let go."
Captain Marcus's column rolled through the fences easily. Colonel Presley had done his job well, and there was little resistance.
Shiba wasn't comfortable in the human-tailored seat of the amphibious vehicle. There was no room for his tail, and he couldn't stand up without bruising his thighs.
Marcus was laying down groundfire and advancing steadily. There was fighting going on hundreds of yards away, out on the concrete expanse of the launchpad.
Shiba ordered Marcus to press on. It was important to relieve Presley before his people were wiped out.
There should be a wave pouring in from the sea.
Shiba leaped out of the transport, and worked his way forwards on all fours, weaving between the explosions and the bullets.
He wished Inoshira Kube were here to see him distinguish himself in honourable combat.
A Josephite fell in front of him, and he got his jaws wrapped around its head, wrenching it free.
He could see Raimundo Rex standing tall on the field of battle, surrounded by fire and smoke.
Where was Colonel Presley?
Marcus's Wooden Horse transport rolled across the concrete plain, its guns rattling.
A row of bungalows set well away from the firing grounds were being fiercely fought over. Josephite snipers were using them as cover to pick off the sea wave as they advanced up the beach to the sea wall.
Marcus directed a few shells towards the bungalows, and one was reduced to burning rubble in an instant.
Scuttling to the top of a wedge of concrete, Shiba could see the beach. There were Suitcase People lying dead and dying on the sand, or being washed back and forth by the waves. It was a killing gallery.
Shiba saw Elvis, his black leathers scuffed, his thick hair hanging over his face. He was trying to pot the bungalow snipers with accurate shots at their darting figures. But the cover was too good.
Marcus blew up another building, and the fires spread.
Shiba saw an iguana man halfway up the beach spin around, blood spurting from his throat, and fall flat.
An indentee, one of Reuben's friends, hit the concrete next to Shiba, a canvas sackful of incendiaries slung over one arm.
"Give me those," Shiba said.
The indentee gladly handed them over.
Shiba took the sackstrap between his teeth and slithered off the wedge, heading for the edge of the field. There was a crushed fence, and beyond that a thick tangle of swampgrass and cypresses. He thanked providence that the Josephites hadn't done too much clearing, and plunged into the grass.
His soft belly was scratched on the rusty ends of the smashed fence, but he ignored the trickles of blood.
He was near the bungalows now, and he saw three of the clone-faced creatures Elvis called Waltons. They were crouched low behind a three-foot high garden hedge, taking turns to snipe at the beach. They rose, fired, sank, expelled a discharged cartridge, and went through the process again. Synchronized like machine gears, they were firing constantly.
Shiba pulled the tag of an incendiary and tossed it at the snipers. It fell short, but rolled across a neat lawn, coming to rest like an egg against the legs of a pink plastic flamingo.
The Waltons kept firing, working like perpetual motion machines. On the beach, Suitcase People died.
The incendiary fizzled, and one of the Waltons half-turned, raising his rifle to his eye and searching for Shiba.
The bomb was a dud.
Shiba scrabbled back deeper into the long grass, but knew the Walton had sighted him well enough to fire blind.
The incendiary flared and exploded, and there was a curtain of flame between Shiba and the Walton.
Shiba took the rest of the bombs and rushed alongside the row of bungalows, tossing incendiaries at twenty-yard intervals. As the first bombs exploded, he sped up, hoping to get out of range.
It did not matter. This would be an honourable way to die.
He yelled his Blood Banner vows. The bungalows were a wall of fire now. Man-shaped flames screamed inside the inferno.
The beach was safe now, and Suitcase People, still wet, were getting over the sea wall.
Shiba felt the waves of heat on his back, but realized he had come through alive. He was surprised.
Something was crashing through the swamp towards him. Something big and mechanical.
He was out of bombs, defenceless.
He turned snout-on to the thing, and awaited the killing stroke.
He tried to sing the GenTech company song, but his throat couldn't manage it.
Trees fell, and the grass parted.
Shiba found himself looking at the snarling radiator grille of a pink Cadillac convertible.
A woman was behind the wheel. She swerved to avoid Shiba, and the beautiful body sped past, lurching up out of the swamp, its roadwheels bursting from its hull.
Shiba had never seen such a gorgeous car. It made the company's Toyotas and Sony LandMasters look like junkyard wrecks.
The driver waved to him.
"See you later, alligator," she shouted.
The wash from the Cadillac rocked him in the water as he tried to follow the car.
"After a while," he yelled, getting a bellyful of foul swampwater, "after a while…"
BLANDISHMENT: DA-DO-RUN-RUN.
MELACHRINO: VOLARE.
MCMURDO SOUND: IOLANTHE.
VARGTIMMEN: SOLITUDE.
"…Krokodil!"
Elvis shouted as the familiar pink monster rolled across the Cape. He didn't have time for questions. He just knew who it had to be.
There was a wave of Suitcase People breaking over the seawall. Marcus's heavy guns were cutting even the Waltons down.
The topside battle was all but over as far as serious fighting went.
A Marie with a machine gun she should barely have been able to lift stood in front of the Cadillac and fired a burst.
Krokodil swerved out of the way and crushed the creature under the front wheels. The car squashed the Marie and cruised on.
Elvis was proud of the old girl. And Krokodil was doing pretty well too.
Marcus, who was visible in the tower of the armoured car, was making snap dispositions of the remaining forces. It was clear that the Josephites had abandoned the surface of the base to the Suitcase People. But that still left the underground complexes.
Whatever it was that Krokodil was concerned with, Elvis bet it was down there, under thirty feet of concrete and durium, guarded by heavily armed psycho clones.
Someone was up in the gantry, sniping at the invaders. One of his bullets ricocheted off the armourplate of Marcus's transport. It had only been a foot or so off. Marcus ducked back into the interior of the ve-hickle.
Krokodil extended the Cadillac's lase, and singed the sniper out of the tower. He fell into the dark shadow Elvis couldn't account for.
There were a lot of unaccountable shadows around the base. They stood implacably while the Josephites and the Suitcase People fought, looking on, waiting for something.
"Toto," Elvis said, "I don't think we're in Kansas any more."
The Cadillac drew to a halt beside him, and the window rolled down.
"What kept you?" he asked.
"I had a dizzy spell," she replied, "lost a few hours. Whose side are we on?"
"The green-faced guys."
"It figures."
There was an explosion nearby, and Elvis cringed. Concrete chips rained against his back and the Cadillac's flank like hailstones.
"We have to get underground," Krokodil said.
"Sweet thing," Elvis began, "there's just one thing I forgot to ask earlier…"
"Yes?" Her smile was dazzling.
"What the freak are we here for?"
WAGNER: MALTHUS.
Simone Scarlet knew suddenly, with a blinding clearness like the rapture her born-again Mammy had promised, that she had to help the ghosts stop whatever Roger was doing.
PENCIL LEAD: CALCUTTA.
The drowned astronaut reached out, and laid a nearly substantial hand on her heart. The cold seeped through her.
Her mother had been reborn, but her mama-loi aunt stayed with the old ways. She remembered prayers to Damballah, Shango…
GORDONSTOUN: ROSEMARY.
The Mad Old Man looked at her, and knew what she would do. He wasn't sure whether he should try to stop her.
The Revelations poured into her mind. There was magic nearby. A powerful houngan was in the area. She must find him, and tell him to work his miracle. Then the ghosts could become solid enough to intervene on the earthly plane.
BRUIN: COPPERPLATE.
The Sister was nearly through now. There wasn't much time.
"Blood," Roger said calmly. "We've not spilled enough blood. The sacrifice has yet to take."
GODHEAD: BROOKLYN BRIDGE.
Roger looked around. Simone realized her saviour was searching for someone to kill. It could even be her.
"Tozer," Roger snapped, "pick your three least capable men and lay them down in the bed of the elevator shaft."
RAWHIDE: TRAVOLTA.
The Brother in charge of security didn't question the order, but he took a few seconds choosing. Roger's face darkened. Simone realized how close he was to a breakdown. He seemed so strong, so solid. And yet he had been walking a knife-point. There was a great blackness in his life.
GREENBACK: FIBONACCI.
Tozer hauled a fat woman, a near-albino blonde boy and a grey middle-aged man out of his line of defence. That left only Waltons, Simone noticed.
None of the potential sacrifices complained as Tozer pushed them at gunpoint into the shaftbed. The woman lay down with an ecstatic look on her face, delighted to be of service to the Church of Joseph. The middle-aged man just sat down without a word and stretched out, resigned to everything. The albino hesitated, and Tozer chopped his gunbutt into the back of the boy's skull, dropping him senseless.
CALEDONIA: ARABESQUE.
"Bring the platform down," Roger ordered.
The drowned man hugged her from behind, his face flattening against the back of her head. Her dress was wet, and her inner eyes were opened. She heard guitar music, and knew the conjure man she must find was a singing shaman. They weren't common, but she had known one in New Orleans, a piano player in the GenTech recreational house who sprinkled chicken blood into his instrument and wrung tortured music from the keys while telling the girls' fortunes.
SPINDRIFT: SEAVTEW.
Tozer was reconnecting the elevator, a fistful of wires jammed together in a sparking tangle as he wound insulated tape around it.
PIDACOR: ??????
Keystone beeped angrily. Sister Addams jumped, tears starting from her eyes. The screen flashed at her.
PIDACOR: ??????
She checked her list, and stared at the screen. The beeping continued. Roger looked as if he were shaking with painful rage.
PIDACOR: ??????
Addams saw the error, and pressed CANCEL, ending the alarm.
PICADOR: DALE ARDEN.
Tozer had the elevator controls working now. The platform was descending.
The albino was moaning. The fat woman was singing "Tis the Gift to Be Simple." She was no conjure woman. Her voice was cracked, and grated on Simone's ears.
CARDINAL: CHEOPS.
"Blood sacrifice," Roger muttered.
BRONISLAU: CHOP SUEY.
The Josephite hymn was cut off with a sickening crunch as the platform ground into the elevator bed.
Simone couldn't stop herself looking. The blood was welling up in the cracks, and dribbling into the bunker. Tozer was slumped, grey-faced, against the far wall, trying not to be sick.
"How soon, Addams?" Roger barked.
Addams nodded.
HOUSEMARTTN: SHOTGUN.
"Very soon. Elder."
AXOLOTL: PLINY.
Simone broke away from the ghost, her mind spinning, her body tingling from her partial possession.
Fonvielle could have tried to stop her, but he just looked away.
She ran for the elevator, and snatched the controls from Tozer.
BR1GADOON: FONTAINBLEAU.
She pushed the Brother away from the platform, and pressed the UP button. She glimpsed Roger's astonished face as she rose, and heard bullets striking the durium-sheeted underside of the platform.
She was being pushed upwards on a solid column. There was a lead shield at ground level which could squash her as flat as the three sacrifices.
But, oddly, she wasn't worried about that…
Krokodil felt the rumbling in the shaft beneath the cover. Someone was coming up.
The Ancient Adversary awoke and uncoiled inside her, swallowing her consciousness at a gulp.
With inhumanly strong hands, she bent back the lead-durium shielding and rolled it like linoleum.
Elvis just raised an eyebrow and pouted, but the lizard-faced army officer in the beret was astonished.
The shield wrenched free, breaking into three pieces. She spun the largest fragment into the air, and sailed it thirty feet across the launchpad. It scraped the concrete with a harsh scream that set teeth on edge.
The elevator platform surfaced, exposing to light a shivering black girl in a thin white silk dress.
The girl looked her in the eye, searching for something she didn't find. She turned away from Krokodil and looked at the others.
She had seen many wonders, obviously. The girl looked at Raimundo Rex, Captain Marcus, Hiroshi Shiba and the others without seeming to see anything unusual.
"Heyyy," said Raimundo, "chiquitaaaaah! Whass happenin' bay-beeeee?"
The girl ignored him, still looking for something, for someone…
The Ancient Adversary relinquished control of Krokodil, and disappeared back into the depths of her mind. She felt pain in her torn and bloody hands.
"Which of you…?" the girl began.
Then she saw Elvis, and sank to her knees.
The Op looked behind him, then thumbed his chest with a sullen "who, me?" expression, and shrugged.
Krokodil remembered the way 'Ti-Mouche had treated Elvis in the swamp. She was the host to a magical being, but he had a touch of the pure-bred, pure-born voodoo in him somewhere.
"Conjure man," the girl said.
Elvis shifted his collar. The Suitcase People were staring at him.
"Yes," said the alligator exec, "yes. Conjure man." He clapped his forefeet together.
"You must help them."
There were dark figures among the Suitcase People, shadows becoming human. Krokodil recognized the spirits of the dead.
Elvis passed a hand over his hair, shaping it perfectly.
"Help them?" he asked. "How?"
"You have magic…"
The girl's words were intently serious. She knew exactly what she was saying.
"…you must use it."
Shiba had slithered off. Krokodil wondered where he had gone.
Marcus was wrestling with the elevator controls. "It's no good," he said. "They've disconnected them down there. We'll have to blast our way in. If that's possible."
"No," the girl said, "use the magic."
Krokodil realized how young the girl was, and felt another history of ill-use and exploitation. Perhaps another Daddy like Bruno Bonney, certainly a string of artful torturers…
"Missy," Elvis said, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're tryin' to say. I ain't no conjure man…"
Shiba was back. In his jaws he carried a familiar object.
"You see," the girl said. "He knows. I know. Inside yourself, you know. You must let the magic come out. You must."
Elvis looked at Krokodil, an appeal in his eyes.
Krokodil didn't know. This was not what her dreams had led her to. But she had always known that she must bring Elvis Presley and none other to Cape Canaveral. He had always had his part to play in this drama, even if it had never been made known to him or to her.
"Krokodil, what's this about?"
He picked up the guitar, gently disentangling it from Shiba's mouth, and slung the shoulder strap around him.
"Down there, they're using black magic and blacker science to gain control of a powerful weapon. They're trying to take over the sky."
The Op looked appalled. He was almost unconsciously tuning the instrument, tightening keys and twanging strings. She could feel the power gathering even in such flawed and negligible notes. 'Ti-Mouche had been right. The girl from the bunker was right. This was magic.
"The sky?" Elvis asked. "That can't be. Why…like the man said…the sky…"
CANTICLE: EPILOG.
The Big Screen was a blazing kaleidoscope of lights.
Sister Addams yelled, and Commander Fonvielle hugged her.
"Total control. Elder," she screamed, "we have total control."
Duroc smiled, and recovered his composure. Despite Simone, despite Krokodil, despite everything…
The Needlepoint System was on line.
"Throw me up a large-scale map of the Cape, and give me manual control. We're going to try a little target practice."
"…belongs…"
It had first been said, so the story went, on February 3, 1959, in a small airport near Mason City, Iowa. Charles Hardin Holly, top-lining a mid-west rock 'n' roll tour, had chartered a four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza to take him to Moorhead, North Dakota for the next engagement. Besides the pilot, the plane was already weighed down with Jiles Perry Richardson, The Big Bopper, and there was one seat left. It would go to either Tommy Allsup of the Crickets or the Chicano kid who sang "La-La-La-La-La-La-La Bamba," Richard Valenzuela. The kid won, but was unnerved, his breath frosting in the cold air as he protested to Buddy his lifelong fear of flying. Sometimes, he dreamed of dying in an air crash. "Don't worry Ritchie," said the twenty-two year-old to the seventeen year-old, confident of their immortality, "the sky belongs…"
"…to the stars!"
Elvis began to play, not as he had played for the Cajuns, to return a hospitality, or for Shiba, to please an admirer. This time, he played for himself alone, although maybe he hoped his Mama Gladys and Jesse Garon could hear, and he played as he had never done before.
Always, Colonel Parker had hammered home, he had been a face and a voice and a set of hips, not a pair of hands and a brain and a heart. Now, he was everything.
He had never been a great guitar player, but now his fingers slammed against the strings as well as Buddy's ever had, and his voice found new heights, new depths…
Without thinking, he started off with a song he had heard many times but had never sung.before. Buddy Holly's "Everyday…" It must be the association with what he had said.
It was getting closer, and it-was coming faster than a rollercoaster…
It was supposed to be a song about a love that had surely come to stay, but Elvis realized as he sang, watching the stricken looks on the faces of the liule group standing around him on that great expanse of blackened and bloody concrete, that it was really a song about darkness, about death, and about what comes after.
Death had certainly come for Buddy, who had often been compared to Elvis, and to so many others. He sang for Buddy, tapping his foot to add the famous handclap to the song, and he sang for Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and that nameless pilot. He sang for Robert Johnson, whose ghost must surely be out there in the swamps, for Charlie Parker, for Johnny Ace, for Frankie Lyman, for Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, dead in a car crash in a foreign land, for Chuck Berry, for Jackie Wilson, for Harvey and the Moonglows, for Alan Freed, for the musical dreams of John Lennon, for Jesse Garon, for Reuben, for all those who had served in battle with him, for the Suitcase People still bleeding on the beach, for the murdered indentees of the Delta, for the mind-robbed Josephites he had killed.
Krokodil was crying, a stream trickling from her one good eye. The ghosts stood solemnly in ranks, solidifying as the song took effect.
Liquid electricity coursed dirough his veins, and he segued into Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail," singing of the blues that fell down like hail.
The girl from underground was sobbing now, falling into Krokodil's arms. With a tenderness the Op had never seen before, his employer stroked the black girl's short hair, and kissed her forehead.
There were more songs to come. "Jambalaya," he sang, expunging the menace from the melody as he evoked fun on the bayou.
Raimundo Rex was dancing, his feet crunching into the concrete, his tail lashing.
The ghosts were coming up through the elevator platform, emerging slowly like conjurer's phantoms. They were all dressed in spacesuits, all hideously mutilated. Elvis had to sing for them.
Something from an old children's show came to him, and he had to sing it. "I Wish I Were a Spaceman."
Then there was a Sinatra song, "Fly Me to the Moon."
And Petya Tcherkassoff's "Soyuz Love."
There were more ghosts than Suitcase People now. The music fought to get free of him, and he felt like a channel to the beyond through which magic was pouring in an irregular, gushing, dangerous flood…
He sang the first songs, the ones he had laid down with Bill Black and Scotty Moore in the Sun Studio in July, 1954. The songs that had taken him from truck driver to star. They were the songs, the ones that still meant the most to him, meant the most to everybody…
"I Love You Because…"
"That's All Right (Mama)…"
"Blue Moon of Kentucky…"
"Blue Moon…"
Love, defiance, prayer, longing.
It was music to reclaim the stars.
“We haven't got time to take heat pattern readings, just tell Keystone to strike down everybody above ground within a five mile radius of this installation…"
Addams' tired fingers paused over the keyboard. She was on the lip of questioning an order from the Prezz.
Fonvielle knew what was needed. Direct, unhestitating action. If the Dream was to be preserved, he would have to get into the cockpit and haul on the stick.
He elbowed the woman aside, and slipped into her chair. It was a keyboard and a screen, not a joystick and a windshield, but he was a fighter jock again.
He fed in the co-ordinates.
The Prezz laid a supporting hand on his shoulder.
The ghosts were ascending through the ceiling. Grissom was the last to go, with a sad wave. Fonvielle was too busy communicating with Needlepoint to pay attention.
"Target co-ordinates locked in, Mr President…"
The Prezz squeezed his shoulder.
"Firing…"
The kid had come into the studio to cut a presentation record for his mother. Marion couldn't imagine anything more square, and yet there was something about his sulky good looks, and the way he shifted about on his feet. He looked a bit like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, and dressed like a motorcycle hoodlum.
"What kind of singer are you?" she asked as they were setting up.
"I sing all kinds."
"Who do you sound like?"
"I don't sound like nobody."
"Hillbilly?"
"Yeah, I sing hillbilly."
"Who do you sound like in hillbilly?"
"I don't sound like nobody."
Elvis sang, surrounded by a swirl of ghosts. Across the site, by the gantry, the ghost rocketship was taking shape. The ghosts seemed to be converging on the thing, melding into it, giving it substance.
He couldn't stop himself. As he sang and played, his feet moved, his hips moved. The music shook him.
He was all shook up.
"…NOW!"
Fonvielle stabbed the RUN key, and the instructions were downloaded from Keystone into the entire Needlepoint Ring. There were two satellites who could bring their lases to bear on Florida.
Duroc's fist clenched and his breath caught.
Within seconds…
"You know, Marion," Sam Phillips had said, listening to the ten-inch acetate the kid had made, "that boy has got something. That boy has got the power!"
Krokodil felt the channels opening up as the Op sang. The music was getting into her too, shaking her down to the depths, the depths where the Ancient Adversary lived.
The whole Cape was shaking.
The gantry creaked enormously as it collapsed, leaving the shadow ship standing, smoke pouring from its base.
The spirits were clustered close around the rocket.
Elvis sang "Jailhouse Rock."
A lizardman burst into flames, and fell in ashes. Krokodil looked up at the sky.
"I wouldn't let my daughter cross the street to go to an Elvis Presley concert," declaimed the shouting preacher in 1958, "with his lewd behaviour, his jungle rhythms, his obscene movements, his suggestive lyrics, and raucous jangles that barely qualify as music, that boy is an instrument of the Devil!"
Nguyen Seth's consciousness nestled inside Keystone, and looked down with a strange detachment at the State of Florida. The hair-thin beams were striking down meticulously, criss-crossing the Cape Canaveral site, snuffing out the inconvenient creatures.
And yet there was a disturbance in the Outer Darkness. A great magic was being worked down on Earth. The Ancient Adversary was exerting its baleful influence.
Krokodil was there. And another shaman, a pure human with great powers.
Seth's anger spurted through the circuits of the satellite. The death rained down with redoubled fury.
Shiba didn't know what was happening. People all around him were exploding in flames.
Captain Marcus shouted to everyone to "take cover, take cover…"
Elvis kept playing, too caught up in the music that possessed him to notice the chaos around him. Shiba wondered if the music was doing this, causing people to explode…
In Japan, they had always said that rock 'n' roll was bad for you.
No, he thought. Whatever this effect is, the music is set against it. If the Op keeps playing, maybe there's a chance that the fires from above will stop.
"…take cover," shouted Marcus, his head smoking, "take…"
The Captain's blood boiled over, leaking out of his mouth, eyes, nostrils and eardrums. He pointed his pistol into the sky, and fired…
His clothes were burning now. Marcus struggled to hold himself together, but it was hopeless.
He burst apart, spreading sizzling scraps around him.
Fonvielle's elation was ebbing.
The Dream was working. Needlepoint was on line. The program would be up and running again.
But the console in front of him was doing funny things.
"T-minus ten…" said a rasping computer-generated voice.
"What?" asked the Prezz.
"It's initiated a launch sequence."
"T-minus nine…"
"What has?"
"T-minus eight…"
"The equipment. Something is cleared for take-off…"
"T-minus seven…"
"…according to the readings, it's the Circe IV…"
"T-minus six…"
"…but that blew up years ago…"
Simone ran, the invisible beams all around her. The Suitcase People were being cut down like stalks of wheat.
The ghosts were together now, in the body of the ghost ship. Great clouds were being discharged from the manitou.
She just hoped she lived to see it take off.
"T-minus five…"
Duroc had turned to ice. Not since the Jibbenainosay, had he felt such a dread.
'T-minus four..,"
"Fonvielle, abort take off."
'T-minus three…"
"I'm trying, Mr Prezz, but the instruments…"
"T-minus two…"
"…don't respond."
"T-minus one…"
Duroc hoped Krokodil was dead by now.
"Ignition."
The bunker staff were looking at each other, bewildered. Sister Addams was hugging her knees, tears on her face. Fonvielle was chewing his entire beard.
"Lift-off," said the mechanical voice, "we have lift off!"
"The only possibility in the United States for a humane society," said Phil Ochs, "would be a revolution with Elvis Presley as leader."
It was over. He was exhausted, emptied of music.
Surrounded by burning people, Elvis dropped his guitar and ran.
The dark shape was rising from the Cape, stabbing into the sky.
Krokodil was tearing at the ground, possessed again of an enormous strength, ripping through the elevator platform.
An indentee, down on his knees praying, exploded, spattering Elvis with burning fat. He wiped the fire spots from his jacket.
To the East, the sea was boiling. A tidal wave of boiling steam swept across the base.
Elvis's face and hands stung.
"Something's coming through," Tozer shouted, firing up into the elevator shaft.
"Resist it," Duroc ordered.
Waltons crowded into the shaftbed, trampling underfoot the remains of the sacrifices.
"It's exiting earth atmosphere," Fonvielle said.
Duroc knew where it was going. He swore under his breath.
The Commander was plotting the phantom's trajectory.
"It will intersect with Keystone, sir…"
There was only one thing for it.
"Cease the ground attack. Order Needlepoint to defend itself."
A large chunk of something fell down the shaft, crushing a Donny.
Fonvielle communicated with Needlepoint, rapidly reprogramming it.
Keystone responded, its defensive systems activated.
The rain of death had stopped, Shiba realized, and he was still alive. He looked around to see who else had survived. Raimundo was nowhere to be seen, and that was a bad sign. He should be impossible to miss. Krokodil had torn open the elevator shaft. The black girl from under the ground was wandering out of the smoke, her thin dress wet through. And Elvis was slack-jawed, astonished at what had been torn from him.
The steam felt good on his hide.
Seth withdrew from Keystone, and watched sadly as the Needlepoint System tried to defend itself. Its lases sliced accurately through the sky and passed harmlessly through the smokeshape of the Titan 7 rocketship.
The object was a cluster of angry ghosts.
"We've screwed the pooch, Mr President," Fonvielle shouted, "the Dream's not for killing. Needlepoint's been rotten from the start. It's an insult to the dead. That's why they want to stop it."
The Prezz had a gun. Fonvielle saluted his chief, but knew that what he had done was an obscenity, a perversion of the great work…
Fonvielle knew he had to take what was coming to him. He knew he had to join the knot of spirits in the manitou of Circe.
The Prezz shot him through the heart. "Thank you, Mr…"
"Prezzzzz…"
He was with the others now. Grissom, Capaldi, Metelkina, Poole, Kuhn, Sementsova, Griffith, Collins, Tracy, Lazarev, Mihailoff, Breedlove, Bowman, Rusoff, Gagarin, Victorov. All of them.
Their bodies had some substance. Not flesh, exactly. More like electricity, or fire…
The Circe IV sped towards its target.
Krokodil dropped frags into the shaft, and ducked away from the blast. This battle was nearly over. She knew now that Elder Seth wasn't down there, that she would have to face the preacher on some other field. But she knew that the Adversary had won a victory today, a victory that would tell…
Duroc looked at the monitor. Underneath the splash of Fonvielle's blood, the Circe IV blip .was nearing Keystone. Only moments until impact.
Seth was hurled out of Keystone as the Circe IV phantom enveloped the satellite, and tugged back to his body in Salt Lake City.
In the daytime sky, a star blazed brightly for an instant.
"Sir, sir," shouted a junior lieutenant at Edwards Air Force base, "we're getting some wild readings from earth orbit."
"Shee-it," swore his superior, "this is like last year's fiasco all over again."
"So, do we log it?"
The officer swilled hot recaff, and knew he was going to regret it, "Yeah, log it…"
The tracking screens were flashing like strobe lamps.
"…but be prepared to swear we're talking instrument failure."
Simone knew Roger was down in the hole. He would be angry with her. But she owed him something.
The Krokodil woman was leading the surviving Suitcase People, readying for a strike into the depths, to wipe out the Josephites.
Simone didn't know what to do.
Duroc watched it on the big screen. Keystone went first, flaring and leaving a black hole amid the light readings. Then the others, one by one, until all twelve were gone.
Addams was back at her monitor. "Needlepoint is down," she said.
There was fighting in the elevator shaft now. Tozer was dead, and the Suitcase People were abseiling down. Most of the Waltons were finished.
The bunker staff mainly sat quietly at their consoles and waited. There were several fires raging as the Needlepoint circuits burned out.
The big screen cracked across, and sheets of glass fell.
There was water on the floor. Hot, salt water.
Duroc threw away the headset he had been gripping throughout, and left his command position.
It was time to pull out.
"Premier Yeltsin, we thought you should know the Americans have been getting rid of some of their astro garbage."
"Does this violate any of the treaties?"
"Most of them."
"Ah well, call up Oliver and give him a bollocking. If he squeals too much, insist on a UN inquiry. What are GenTech…I'm sorry, I mean…what are the Japanese Government doing?"
"Nothing."
"It is good."
Raimundo Rex roared out of a pile of rubble, tail whipcracking, and jumped past Shiba into the elevator shaft.
Krokodil signalled the Suitcase People to follow.
Elvis took a rope, and plunged downwards into the fiery dark.
Shiba followed.
"Holy Father," said Father O'Shaughnessy, "it is happening again. Another major tremor."
Pope Georgi unconsciously popped his ring into his mouth, and pondered.
"Pray, Declan," he said, "pray…"
Elder Seth erupted from his isolation tank, still shaking. In the Outer Darkness, the Dark Ones raged at him. Another failure.
Elvis hit the bottom of the shaft, and sprayed gunfire at the Waltons. The fighting was almost over. Raimundo had finished most of the surviving bunker staff off.
There were fires, and water was coming in from somewhere.
"Bye-bye, Gavin," sang Sonny Pigg, backed in this special commemorative concert by most of The Mothers of Violence and the bassman from Bolt Thrower, "I'm a gonna zap you…" So long, Gavin, you're just a piece of crap, you "Won all that cash, but it was gone in a flash…"
Duroc crammed himself into the escape canister, and pulled levers. This should shoot him three hundred yards through a disused ventilation tunnel, and bring him up in the saltmarsh.
He didn't have time to be angry about the collapse of the Needlepoint Project.
He had to survive, to serve the Summoner again.
Krokodil ran through the corridors, searching, firing into empty rooms.
She was her own self again, the monster receding. There were alarms going off everywhere around her.
At the end of the corridor was a chute of some kind. There was an eggshaped metal pod the size of a man on a pad, and there was someone in it.
Krokodil took aim at the face she had never seen before, and fired…
The ejection system fired, and Duroc felt his entire body slamming against the floor of the pod as it shot through the tunnel. The pain was unbelievable, and he was sure that every bone in his body was broken, every organ ruptured. Grey stone rushed past the faceplate.
…an instant too late. The pod was gone.
But the face of the man inside was indelibly printed in her memory.
There would be another day.
The pod burst through an old iron grille and shot fifty feet into the air, spinning end over end.
The faceplate was overlaid with red. Duroc waited to die.
The pod brushed the tops of some cypresses, breaking branches. Its momentum spent, it fell to the swamp, and settled, bobbing.
There was wetness around him now. Water was leaking in.
Raising a hand that felt as if it had been under a pile driver, Duroc tried to press the buttons.
With the knuckle of his thumb, he hit the right control. Explosive bolts blew off the hatch, and more water flooded in.
Pushing against the seat, Duroc launched himself out of the pod, and hugged a man-sized island.
The pod half-sank and settled. The muddy water was only about four feet deep.
Duroc's vision blurred…
Raimundo was doing a good job of trashing everything, Elvis thought. The remaining Josephites weren't resisting, so he ordered the dinosaur not to kill them. He seemed disappointed, but had plenty of machinery to vent his frustrations on.
Krokodil came back into the main command centre. She conferred with Shiba, bending down to talk to the Japanese.
"Okay, guitar man," she said to him, "the show's over. Let's pull out."
Elvis found Krokodil squatting in the blackened area by the collapsed gantry.
"Krokodil?"
She looked up at him, her one eye cold and clear.
"Krokodil, are you still you?"
She nodded, but didn't say anything.
"I got a whole lotta things to think about, you know. I feel all mixed-up inside. You brought me here, and things have been happenin'. I don't know if I can go back to Memphis and pick up. Things ain't like I've been figurin'."
"Go home, Elvis," she said.
"Pardon, ma'am."
"Just get in your Cadillac and go home. Live your life as best you can. We may not have long."
At the other side of the base, Shiba and Raimundo were seeing to the wounded, and trying to salvage something. Shiba was going off the idea of calling up his superiors in Japan. The Suitcase People needed administrators, he had decided. More were coming out of the swamps every hour. There were the makings of a real community.
"And you?"
Krokodil sighed, and stood up. "Salt Lake City. There's something I have to do."
"I could…"
She shook her head. "No. I've taken up too much of your time. I have Hawk."
Elvis felt disappointed. Didn't she think he had done well?
"I'm sorry, Elvis, I shouldn't have changed you so much…"
Elvis didn't understand. The music was coursing through his veins. It was like being young again.
Shiba had released the indentees from their contracts, but most of them, even the unchanged ones, were acting as if they'd rather stay with the Suitcase People than return to their former homes to chance another indenture sweep.
"What will you do with the money?" she asked.
He shrugged, shaking his hair. "That don't matter. I might buy me a congressman and do something about the Good Ole Boys. There's lots of things round the South that need changing."
"That's true."
She kissed him, quietly. This time, it was like being touched by a ghost. Then, she walked to the edge of the base, and slipped through a hole in the fence, into the swamp.
Elvis watched her go.
"C'mon, Jesse Garon," he said. "Work to do…"
Simone found him in the marsh, floating, his face just above water. He wasn't badly hurt, but he was bruised and bleeding. Struggling with his big body, she eased him to dryish ground.
There were Suitcase People all around. Some were out searching for stray Josephites, but most were just wading towards the base where they could be sure of a welcome.
Roger was trying to say something, but was too badly shocked.
She had found a two-person skimmer by the docks, surrounded by the bloated corpses of Suitcase People who had died trying to make their landing.
It was not going to be easy getting Roger into it without tipping it over. She rested.
The conjure man's music still reverberated inside her head. She had never heard anything like that before.
Roger shifted, and tried to sit up. He winced, and slumped down again.
Simone didn't know what she had been a part of…
She slipped her thin arm around his shoulders, and he lolled against her. She hefted his weight, and he vaguely tried to help, pushing against the grassy island.
She levered Roger against the skimmer, and heaved.
Groaning with pain, Roger Duroc eased himself into the driver's seat. He was out of breath.
Her feet were deep in the mud at the bottom now. She pulled them up, and heard submarine sucking sounds. The water was up to her chest. Her thousand-dollar dress might as well be a potato sack now.
He had found her in a swamp, and given her a way out. Now, they were even.
And there was the question of her desertion.
The cold started seeping into her body. She put her hands on the side of the skimmer, and pulled herself up.
Roger shifted, and there was a gun in his hand, its barrel against her forehead.
She slipped back into the water, her feet touching the bottom.
Not saying anything, Roger flipped off the safety catch with a shaking thumb. Simone looked up into his muddy eyes.
There were big things nearby, shaking the cypresses.
With his left hand, Roger engaged the skimmer's' engine. A wash began to swirl from the stern, and the craft rose in the water.
Simone bowed her head, her chin dipped into the swamp.
When she looked up, Roger's skimmer was gone, leaving only a frothy wake and a wave that rocked her in the water.
She slid up onto the island, and waited for the Suitcase People.