Dying is easy, as her old man used to say, it's the coming back that's hard.
Inside her head, there was darkness. A red darkness. She was sinking slowly into it. Her optic implant was dangling useless on her cheek, her durium skull platelocks were bent uncomfortably inside her head. That wasn't supposed to happen. They were under guarantee. Doc Threadneedle had used only the best scav medtech from the Thalamus Corp.
There were dead people in the road with her. The Feelgood Saloon was burning, and there were overturned ve-hickles all around. The whole town was going up in flames.
All you need to be a freedom fighter, Petya Tcherkassoff sang on his "The World We Have Lost," is a fiddle and a bow and a cigarette lighter.
Somewhere in the darkness outside her head, something—an animal or a person—was howling in pain.
There was a dull whumpf! as a gastank exploded. Jazzbeaux felt specks of heat on her face. The hardtop shuddered with the impact of flying debris. She knew she was lucky not to have been cut in half by a razor-edged cardoor playing frisbee.
Her father, of course, was dead. He had never come back.
The longer she lay here, the shorter the odds became…
…she tried to open her eye—the right one, the one that was still there—and found it glued shut. She had blood on her face, dried-up and mixed with grit from the road.
The preacherman had hauled her out of the Feelgood and battered her face against the road. That was how she lost her optic implant, how her platelocks got knocked out of shape.
The road. All her pain came from the road.
Get your kicksssssssssssssssss, the preacher had hissed, on Route SixSixSixxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx! *
* See "Route 666" in the Route 666 anthology for more background on the Spanish Fork Massacre.
She had a skullcracker of a headache, and guessed she'd been opened in several places by knifecuts, branded in others by dollops of fire.
Sicksicksick, sicksicksick, sicksicksick, sicksicksick…
…she kept losing herself, losing her train of thought. She wished she had listened when Doc Threadneedle tried to tell her about her brain. It's where you live, the Doc had said, you should take care of it. Well, she had tried. A durium skullsheath doesn't come cheap. A year's worth of fenced scav had brought her the treatment. It was supposed to be like armour inside your head. Guaranteed sound against anything up to a direct hit in the eyeball with a ScumStopper bullet.
But the preacherman had opened up a crack, and got into her greymass. Somehow, he had wormed his way into her private self, the place where she lived. And he had done a lot of mischief in there. She knew her body could be fixed, but she wasn't sure about the important stuff. Doc Threadneedle couldn't replace neurons and synapses. Even the GenTech wizards, Dr Zarathustra and W. D. Donovan, could only reconstruct a ruined face; they couldn't do anything about a shredded psyche, a ruptured personality, a raped memory…
…somewhere in the distance, there was gunfire. Shots were exchanged. Then, nothing. She could hear fires crackling. The thing in pain was out of it now. Spanish Fork, Utah, was another ghost town. She was probably the only thing alive in it. Soon, the predators would lope out of the desert for her. On the road with the Psychopomps, she had seen some pretty weird critters, wolfrat coyotes, subhume vermin, sharkmouth rabbits. They had to eat red meat one day out of seven.
Jessamyn.
Amanda.
Bonney.
She held onto herself, trying to come to the surface of her cranial quicksand.
Jessamyn Amanda Bonney.
Nobody called her that any more. Nobody but cops and ops and soce workers. Not since her old man.
Jessa-MYN, her Dead Daddy whispered in her inner ear, can't you be more sociable?
No, not Jessamyn. She didn't live here any more. Jazzbeaux. She was Jazzbeaux. That was her name in the Psychopomps, that was who she was. Jazz—beaux!
She brought her right hand up to her face. A numbed pain told her two of the fingers were broken. She rubbed her eye, and tried to open it again. The blood crust cracked, and she saw the night sky.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…
… pushing hard with her elbows, she half-sat in the road. Her back ached, but her spine was undamaged. That was something. The Feelgood was a stone shell full of glowing ashes. A half-burned corpse sprawled on the steps, the top of its head gone. That had been the town's boss-man, Judge Colpeper. A wind had come through with the Josephites, and blown away the man's whole world….I wish I may, I wish I might…
…the starlight and the firelight went to her head like a blow, and she blinked uncontrollably. Her damaged implant was leaking biofluid. Delicately, with an unbroken thumb and ringfinger, she eased the ball-shaped doodad back into its socket. The connections were loose, and the optic burner didn't respond to her impulse command. No prob. Doc Threadneedle could fix that. At least, he could if the fault was in the machine rather than in the meat.
She found her eyepatch on the ground, and slipped it on over her optic. She pulled her hair out from over the patchcord, and passed her fingers through it. Blood, dirt and filth came loose. Her broken fingerbones ground painfully.
…have the wish I wish tonight.
… she was more in control now. Soon, she would be able to stand up, able to walk out of here on her own two legs. The chapter was finished, she guessed. Andrew Jean, her lieutenant for the past two years, was a few yards away, skin in shreds, orange beehive hairdo picked lo pieces. The corpse looked as if it had been attacked by dagger-billed birds. The 'pomps who weren't dead had gone off with the preacherman.
The preacher. He was the start of it. Seth was his name. Elder Seth. The Josephite.
He had seemed to be such a nothing, meek and mild in his black suit and wide-brimmed hat, calm behind his mirrorshades, surrounded by his quivering flock.
Such a nothing.
The motorwagons were pulled over to the side of the interstate when the Psychopomps' advance scouts first sighted them. Jazzbeaux was on her way to a pre-arranged duel of honour with the Daughters of the American Revolution. There was a territorial matter to be settled. It was an important fight, and she shouldn't have been conce with petty pickings like the hymn-singers. She could have passed by without rumbling the Josephites, or just given them a light pasting and taken their food and fuel. She had other business to cover, major league business. There was no need to take the time to beat up on the new pioneers.
But there was Elder Seth, standing tall, and smiling just like her old man. On sight, she knew she would have to take him down.
The scav was pathetic. She took Seth's mirrorshades. At first, she just wanted to look into his eyes, to taste his fear. But there was no fear. She hadn't been able to read anything from the ice-chips that stared back at her. Not even when she had Andrew Jean and the others cut out a couple of the pioneers and pizza them across the two-lane blacktop. She remembered the names of the dead. Brother Akins, Brother Finnegan, Brother Dzundza. She never forgot the names of her dead.
She could have killed him then. Done it easy, shoved a gun into his mouth and squeezed off a ScumStopper through the roof of his mouth, exploded his brain.
But she let him live. She took his dark glasses, and let him live. Two mistakes. Bad ones.
… citizens, Psychopomps, Cav. There were lots of casualties. Jazzbeaux had been out of it for most of the fighting, but she could tell from the leavings that things had got serious. Some of the people looked as if they had been torn apart by animals with more in the way of teeth and claws than the Good Lord intended for them to have. Cheeks, a gaudy girl who had been riding with the 'pomps for the last few months, was literally crushed flat into the road, dead eyes staring from a foot-wide face. A farmer was burned to the bone inside his unmarked Oshkosh B'Gosh bib-alls. A black US Cavalryman was slumped against the front window of the drug store, dead without a mark on him. She unbuttoned his holster, and took out his sidearm. She had lost her own gun back in the Feelgood.
The official killing iron was heavier than she was used to, but it would do the job. She unbuckled the yellowlegs' gunbelt, and cinched it around her hips.
Then, she picked up a half-brick and threw it through the drugstore window. Picking the glass away from the display, she reached for a squirter of morph-plus. She exposed her wrist, and jabbed the painkiller into her bloodstream.
Her head clearing slightly, she filled her jacket pockets with pills and ju-jujubes. She popped a glojo capsule into her mouth, and rolled it around on her tongue, not biting into it. The buzz seeped through her body. Some of the pain went away. Some.
There was something strange about the preacher's shades. Jazzbeaux had been wearing them on and off for two days.
They were clearer than regular dark glasses, and did funny things to her. Once or twice, she thought she saw things in the periphery of her vision that couldn't be there. Indistinct things, but somehow unsettling. "Whassamatter, Jazzbie," Andrew Jean had asked, "you a loca ladybug? You're spookola in spades this ayem…"
After a while, she began to get migraines. She took the glasses off, and thought about throwing them away, driving her cyke over them. But she just slung them around her neck.
The world looked real again, but she found herself wanting to put the glasses on again. It was like when she was eight, and Dead Daddy put her on Hero-9 to keep her under control. She had had to wean herself off the dope over a period of years, and still felt the occasional urge for a H-9 hit. This was an irrational longing too, but after a while it became irresistible. She fought it for as long as she could, but it was such a silly thing. She was a War Chief. She wasn't afraid to wear a pair of glasses.
This time, the effect was different. Colours were brighter, but less sharp. There were shadows where there shouldn't be. It was a little like a Hero-9 or Method-! buzz, but without any of the elation. Somehow, with the glasses on, she felt compelled to look back over her shoulder all the time.
Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, Tasha sang on her Ancient Mariner Mambo album, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.
It was like that. You didn't see the frightful fiend, but that didn't mean it wasn't there.
The preacher was coming after her, coming for his property. That shouldn't have scared her.
But it did.
…There was a well nearby. Her water detector—now lost—had twanged when they crossed the Spanish Fork city limits. She would need a drink soon, and food.
She couldn't find a ve-hickle that worked. She supposed Elder Seth must have taken them all with him when he left in his motorwagon train. He would be half-way to Salt Lake City by now.
Now, she was coming for him. He had done his best to destroy her, and she was still here. She was still Jazzbeaux.
She squatted by the mess that had been Andrew Jean, and said her goodbyes. Andrew Jean had been a good 'pomp, a good gangbuddy. Nobody deserved to die like that.
Except the preacherman. Elder Seth needed to die slowly. He had been invincible earlier, when he had changed—the real self pushing out from behind his human mask—but now he was her meat.
The preacher had taken a girl out to kill her, but had made of her a weapon which could be used against him.
Jazzbeaux walked away from Andrew Jean. Just off the main street, she found the first of the carrion creatures. It was a bad one, a mew-tater. There was some kind of housecat in there, but it was the size of a moose, had white skunkmarks down its back, and the buds of vestigial extra heads hanging in its neckfur. It had gathered three or four corpses, and was playing with them, slicing them out of their clothes. Its saliva was corrosive, and etched patterns in the pale, dead skin of its supper.
Jazzbeaux stretched her fingers and lightly rested them on the butt of her scavved gun. The creature turned its head to look at her with slit-pupil led eyes the size of saucers. It showed its needle-sharp teeth, and flared a furry ruff. It could have leaped. With her broken fingers, she probably couldn't have outdrawn the thing.
But she met its eyes. It recognized a fellow predator, and backed down, returning its attention to its food. She walked away.
For the first time since she iced her Dad, Jazzbeaux felt she really had a purpose on this dull earth.
She hoped the old man would be proud of her.
This is ZeeBeeCee, The Station That's Got It All, bringing you What You Want twenty-four hours a day, sponsored by GenTech, the bioproducts division that really cares…
In just five minutes, it will be time for Keep Fighting Fit With Amie, and some helpful advice on the maintenance of muscle implants in the elderly. Then we'll be bringing you Casey Kasem's Wide World of Executions, with some remarkable footage of garotting in Morocco, burning-at-the-stake in Thailand and, for the traditionalists among you, an Olde Englishe Publicke Hangingge from Tyburn Tree in London, England. But first, tune into reality with Lola Stechkin, bringing you The Pre-Breakfast Bulletin from the comfort of her dancercise studio…
"Hi, Early Birds of America! It's August the 27th, 1995, and this is Lola, inviting you to stretch and strain and lose that pain. Here it is, folks, all the news you can handle…
"Washington, D.C. Last night. President North fielded tough questions concerning the controversial economic policies of his administration. Accused by some factions of bringing the nation close to bankruptcy with the Big Bonus, his personalized combination of high spending, high unemployment and decreased taxation, the President claimed 'we'll just all have to wait and see how it pans out, won't we?' Dr Ottokar Proctor, head of the presidential think-tank, and widely believed to be the architect of the Big Bonus, was unavailable for comment, although he is scheduled to make an appearance at a film festival in Tampa, Florida, where he will give a lecture on the Sisyphean influence of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner on contemporary American culture.
"Salt Lake City, Deseret. The first wagontrain of Josephite resettlers, under the leadership of Elder Nguyen Seth, is due to arrive in the deserted conurbation sometime before noontime today. Elder Seth has vowed to reclaim the wilderness from the elements as the Mormons did before him. A bill providing, among other things, for the renaming of the State of Utah, has been passed unopposed through Congress. The recent demise of Representative Osmond of Utah, who had planned to speak against the bill, is still unexplained.
"The horror murders of the inhabitants of a quiet suburban estate within the Savannah PZ have been attributed by Ms Redd Harvest of the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez Agency to the serial murderer who signs himself 'The Tasmanian Devil.' T-H-R claim to be following several leads, and hope to make an arrest soon. 'The Tasmanian Devil' has claimed over 350 victims in all quarters of the United States in the last year, and is noted for the savage ingenuity of his frenzied attacks. Surviving eyewitnesses are few in number, and give contradictory descriptions of the killer, but all agree on his unnatural strength and viciousness. 'We'll get him,' Ms Harvest has sworn. More on this as it breaks.
"Moscow. Talks broke down today between the Soviet and Japanese delegations who have been negotiating over recent territorial clashes over culture-krill-harvesting operations off the island of Sakhalin. Premier Boris Yeltsin has announced that he still hopes to come to an amicable agreement with the Imperial representative and the board of GenTech. In an editorial statement later this morning, Akira Kobayashi, the Chief Executive Officer of GenTech East, will explain how unreasonable and inefficient the Soviets are proving on this issue.
"Don't you think it's unfair of nature to insist that humanity only have two dentitions? The set-up was fine when life expectancy was barely thirty years, but with modern advances in medtech ensuring that all solvent citizens can enjoy a full and active life well into their 100s, one set of milk teeth and one set of adult teeth just isn't enough. Well, thanks to GenTech, you can now have sown the buds of a third, fourth, fifth and even sixth set of genuine enamel-coated teeth. For as little as $500 a tooth, we can get you great-grandpas back on the taffy and rare steaks. GenTech, the biodivision that cares…
"Glastonbury, England. Prime Minister Archer today opens the state-sponsored popular music festival, showcasing the best of British culture. He has announced that hewill join patriotic singer Johnny Lydon, host of the popular British variety program The Johnny Lydon Band Show, in a rendition of the star's biggest hit, 'God Save the Queen.' Other British showbiz greats scheduled to appear include Matt Monro, Clive Dunn, Tessie O'Shea, Norman Wisdom. Mrs Mills, Valerie Singleton and the comic duo of Benny Elton and Ricky Mayall, with American guest stars Liberace and Conway Twitty reaffirming the Special Relationship. Rumours that Ken Dodd plans to come out of retirement for this one last concert have been denied by the reclusive multi-billionaire entertainer's manager, Peter Hall. John Lennon, the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, who was briefly a member of an unsuccessful group called The Quarrymen back in the 1960s, was apparently asked if he wanted to reform to appear on the bill. 'Nobody was interested back then,' he told our reporter, 'I don't see why they should be now, like.'
"Manila, the Philippines. President-for-life Imelda Marcos yesterday dedicated a new statue of her late husband, the former president-for-life, and announced, after singing twenty-eight patriotic songs to the assembled multitudes, that she would set in motion a new scheme to clear up the streets of the city by personally firing the first bullet. Rebel forces remain encamped in the North of the islands, apparently supported by a Chinese Guomintang warlord and a Swiss-based multinat. Imelda will be guest-hosting the popular ZeeBeeCee show, You and Your Shoes, for the next three weeks.
"Puerto Belgrano, Antarctica. Following President Galtieri's 75% increase of the levy on non-Argentine mining interests around the South Pole, violence flared up again as British wildcat oilmen tried to even the score after their resounding defeat in the Malvinas War of 1981. 'Wild' Charlie Mander, the British consul, and Sheriff Felipe Almodovar, the self-styled 'Law South of Tierra del Fuego,' met for talks in an attempt to reach a settlement, but tempers rose and shots were exchanged. Ice Kold Katie, the Scottish esperado who has robbed several Argentine-owned banks and trading stores on the continent, celebrated the increase by ambushing and killing a troop of Argentine snowcat cavalrymen on their way to Esperanza.
"Ladies, don't you wish you had breasts as nice as mine? Well, thanks to GenTech biodiv, your wish can be granted. Personally developed by Dr Zarathustra, winner of the Nobel Prize for Genetic Surgery, our pectoral pump treatments can yield astonishing results. Even Warren Beatty won't be able to tell the difference. This is Shiralee St Croix of Saginaw, Michigan. We treated one of her breasts with the GenTech pectoral pump, and the other with a product manufactured by one of our competitors. I think you can see the difference for yourself. GenTech, the biodivision that cares…
"Teheran, the Pan-Islamic Congress. Today, the Ayatollah Bakhtiar, chairperson of the Sword of Allah Jihad Committee, sentenced to death in absentia graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, author of the award-winning Tintin in the Land of the Ragheads, which has been widely interpreted as a personal attack on the Moslem faith and the continuing Islamic occupation of Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro. Gaiman has gone into hiding, but claims to be still working on his next work, a reconstruction of the myth of Desperate Dan, portraying the comic cowboy as an Indian-hating mass murderer. Viewers are invited to fax in with their guesses about where Gaiman is holed up. The closest to the truth will win a thousand dollars credit at their local Titancorp comics store, a Captain Haddock T-shirt and an all-expenses-paid holiday for two in balmy Beirut.
"Vatican City. Petya Tcherkassoff, the Russian singing idol, today had a personal audience with Pope Georgi. Tens of thousands of fans thronged St Peter's Square to glimpse the pair. What was discussed between the two has not been revealed, although Tcherkassoff did modestly state to the press that 'the cheloviek in the white hat has a bigger following than I do.' Tcherkassoff's current album release,' Songs for Suicidal Lovers, has been at the top of the musichip charts for six straight months.
"The Isle of Skye, Scotland. Sad news for children everywhere. Despite the donation of more than thirty million European Currency Units raised by GenTech-sponsored concerts in America and the Soviet Union, Wally the Whale—believed to be the last cetacean in the Atlantic Ocean—died today of natural causes totally unconnected with the acceptable levels of pollution in the area. Iain Menzies Banks, mayor of the island, has mooted a plan for the preservation of the whale as the centrepiece of Wallyworld, a luxury tourist preserve and family theme park. The whale will be coated inside and out with acrylics, and Banks intends to open a restaurant called The Jonah Snackbar in its stomach. Wally will, of course, live on in our hearts and minds, thanks to his continuing adventures on our Saturday Morning cartoon show Wally and His Whalesome Pals, and his smiling face will still appear on the packets of Wally's Whalefood, the popular krill-based breakfast cereal.
"This has been Lola Stechkin at ZeeBeeCee, signing off. If it's all right with you, it's all right with us…"
Stay tuned to ZeeBeeCee, The Station That's Got It all, if you want to enter the competition of the day. You could be the lucky winner of a free course of pectoral pump treatments, or a brand new Cadillac convertible. All you have to do is answer three simple questions, complete the following sentence, "If I had bigger breasts, the first thing I'd do would be…," and send your answers in on a fax with coupons from any three GenTech products. The questions are: a)Which former Vice-President of These United States had a sex change operation under the aegis of GenTech's own Dr Zarathustra? b)Who wrote the words to the 'GenTech Merry Marching Song'? Remember, it's the lyrics we're interested in, we know Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music. And c)What is transhumance?
As you heard on the news, we at ZeeBeeCee have been saddened by the tragic passing of Wally the Whale. As a result, a three-hour tribute to the brave aqua-mammal will pre-empt tonight's scheduled address to the nation by President North, which will now take place after the eleven o'clock nightcap news. A whole host of stars, including Drew Barrymore, the Mothers of Violence and Susan Sontag, will be coming into the studio to share their memories of Wally with English folk singer Gordon Sumner, who has composed a special 'Goodbye Wonderful Wally' song to mark the whale's death. But now, on a lighter note, heeeeere's Arnie…
The Katz Motel was a klick out of town, and hadn't been touched by the firefight. There was an old wooden house perched on top of a small hill, and the featureless cabins were spread out across the property below. The Psychopomps had checked in and done some minimal damage two nights back. Jazzbeaux had left some of her stuff in the cabin, confident that the twittering, birdlike manager would be too afraid of the 'pomps to bother lifting anything from the gangcult.
On the road out of Spanish Fork, she had become aware of a wound just above her knee. It was a deep cut, and made walking painful. She bit down on the glojo capsule, and the pain went away.
She got stronger as she walked towards the motel. Perhaps she should sleep a while, and recover some more. Little girlie-girl, you've had a busy-busy dayyy, sang Petya Tcherkassoff in her head.
It was nearly dawn. There was some light in the sky. Nothing had come out of the dark to bug her.
Her knee felt like a wet sponge. She was limping. The' glojo buzz faded away, and the pain trickled back.
She hadn't hurt this much since Daddy Deadest was around, playing his games with his willow switches and aluminium rods.
By the time she got to the motel, it was daylight. The manager was waiting for her at the desk, deftly fidgeting with a half-stuffed peregrine falcon. Herman Katz was a thin, youngish man with nervous eyes and a slight stutter. He was wearing an apron which made him look like a housewife, and tinkering with glass eyes, taking them out of a box and holding them up to the empty sockets of the dead bird, trying to find a matching pair that fitted. It wasn't Jazzbeaux's idea of a hobby, but there were more dangerous people in the world.
"Morning," he said. "Quite a bit of noise, last night. Nobody else has come back from town."
She didn't feel like giving him the news. He would find out sooner or later that there wasn't any Spanish Fork any more. She wondered if he'd stay on in the motel business, or move out. Not her prob.
"Mother was upset. She couldn't get to sleep, what with all the shooting and shouting and I-don't-know-what-all else."
Herman kept talking about his mother. She was an invalid, stuck in a rocking chair up in her room in the house. Jazzbeaux hadn't met her, but she could imagine the type. A bitter old biddy, eating herself alive with bile, pretending to be crippled to tie her son to the old place, sucking all the life out of him. She knew all about demanding parents.
She'd learned about that back when she was Jessamyn Amanda and nine-year-olds had been worth a gallon of potable water on the streets of the NoGo. Ma Katz could hardly be more of a monster than Daddy Dear, Bruno Bonney. He had told her she would have to be an outlaw because of her heritage. The old man had claimed kinship with Anne Bonney, the pirate queen of the Spanish Main, and William Bonney, Billy the Kid. One thing she had to say about Dad, at least he had prepped her for the world she was going to have to live in.
Other girls graduated from the PZ high schools and got Senior Proms, but she had known she was a grown-up woman the day she ripped Bruno's rotten throat out for him. She'd breezed through the courts, faking numbskull stupidity, and come out clean. Everyone knew what she had done, but no one was really that conce with it. A few looies spread around the Juvie Op Agency, and she walked free. She had been with the 'pomps since then.
Yesterday, she had thought she might have a healthy career in front of her. She didn't believe she'd marry Petya Tcherkassoff and move to a dacha on the steppes any more, but she thought she might see twenty-five. Now, things were different. She would live as long as she had to to see Elder Seth dead, and then she would think again…
"It was a rough night. Don't worry about it."
"You want your room key?"
"Chalet Number One."
Herman fussed with his bird, needlessly wiping his palms on his apron, and took the key down.
Jazzbeaux took the key. "Is the shower working?"
"Sh-sh-shower?" Herman was spooked. That put her on her guard.
"Yeah. I'm a mess. I want to clean up."
"Sh-sh-sure, the shower's fine. I checked the systems myself only a week back."
"Terrif."
"It's a special service. Costs extra. Water's expensive. We have to get it piped in from town special. We have to pay one-third of our turnover to Judge Colpeper for the privilege, so you'll have to dig deep into your purse."
She pulled her jacket off her shoulders. Some skin came away with it, and her back stung. Her cutaway T-shirt was even more cutaway than it had been when she bought it. Herman's eyes popped. She couldn't work out whether he was ogling her breasts or appalled by the extent of her injuries. He tried to say something, but she walked away, towards Chalet Number One.
"I put in cuh-cuh-clean towels, mizz," Herman whined.
She ignored him, and unlocked her door. Inside, the room was a mess. She had partied with Andrew Jean, Cheeks and So Long Suin the night before last, and Herman hadn't even tried to clear up. One of Andrew Jean's beehive combs lay on the dressing table in a spread of pills and lipsticks. The pornovideo set was smashed, a high-heeled ruby pump lodged in the cracked screen. Cheeks hated Billy Priapus flickies. The ice sculpture had melted, leaving a tray of warm water on the floor. That brought back interesting, if cool, memories. There were bulletholes in the ceiling—which might have been there before the 'pomps checked in — and the queensize bed was a tangle of ugly tie-died sheets and surplus clothing.
She remembered the night, the nights. Andrew Jean on top, Cheeks squealing. So Long rocking her to a cataclysmax. She would miss her gangbuddies. The days of fun and frolic were gone for good. Freak, she was nearly seventeen. She should be all grown up. She'd never sign up for marriage and mortgage, that was for sure. But there was an adult place marked out for her.
The bathroom was better. Jazzbeaux took the rubber ducks and Wally Whales out of the tub and threw them away, then turned on the shower, letting the water run. Getting naked was a long and painful process, and involved finding out just how much punishment her body had taken. She had to cut her stockings off with nail scissors, and the fishnet pattern was stamped in red on her swollen knee. She wasn't bleeding any more, but there were huge scabs on her face, chest and back. She stretched, and little stabs of pain shot through her.
Jazzbeaux stepped under the shower, and sponged her wounds. The warm water washed over her face and body. She shook her hair, scraping the slime out of it. The remains of her whiteface make-up came off with the clotted badges of blood. The warmth made her sleepy, and she slipped down in the bathtub, lying under the shower jet, taking the water full in the face. Between her feet, water swirled down the plughole, taking red and black threads of blood and dirt with it.
She thought of sleep, but was too tired to make a move for the bed. Wearily, she sponged her torso and stomach, cleaning her wounds. They stung, but it was a healthy, healing pain. Doc Threadneedle had fixed her body up so she healed quick, and the stinging meant that the microorganisms he had fed into her flesh were doing their good work. What you want is a parasite that works for you, not on you, he had said.
Her head lolled to one side, and her eye fluttered shut. Something moved, and she looked again. There was a shadow on the shower curtain, a human-shape holding something in an upraised arm.
The plastic dimpled, and a silvery point poked through. It was a long knife. The curtain tore, and the figure stabbed…
Hawk-That-Settles, son of Two-Dogs-Dying, was waiting. But he knew his wait was nearly over.
His people, the Navaho, had been waiting for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Brutally suppressed by bluecoats led by Rope Thrower, known to whites as Kit Carson, in 1863, they had been out of the major Indian Wars because the Reservation lands given to them were so arid and dreary that even the white man didn't want to kick them off to somewhere else. No gold, no oil, no food, no water: just Navaho, persisting as they always had done, getting drunk and stubbornly refusing to die out. Now, the whole of the West and the Mid-West was like the Navaho Reservation. Before Rope Thrower subdued the Great Chief Manuelito—among whose lieutenants was Hawk's many-times-great grandfather Armijo—the Navaho had been herders of horses and cattle, cultivators of com, pumpkins, wheat and melons and famous for their groves of peach trees. The Navaho had respected Rope Thrower as a warrior, but could never forgive the destruction of their prized orchards. Removed from their fertile lands in what became New Mexico, the Navaho were transported to the Bosque Redondo and into the mountains.
Now, in Monument Valley, on the border between Arizona and Utah, Hawk pulled his stetson lower, to keep the glare of the sun from his face, and strode out of the drugstore to join the depressed knot of Indians at the roadside. The motorwagons were passing them by, a battered parade. Two-Dogs was slumped in his usual chair, with four legs of unequal length, sucking like a baby on the brown-paper-wrapped bottle he always carried. Haw! nodded to his father, the man who had tutored him as Dreamwalker, and was not acknowledged. He knew all the others by name, by the names of their families for generations past. It was his place to remember the ancestors. He was the medicine man, now that Two-Dogs was the whisky Navaho.
Bowed, weary, and with deeply-lined faces, the Indians all looked ancient, even the children. If possible, life was harder even for these ragged redskins than it had been for their forefathers after the war with Rope Thrower, when their livelihood had been deliberately burned away fromr them. Only Jennifer White Dove replied to his greeting with a tight smile. They were of an age. Hawk and Jennifer and had been close as teenagers, before Hawk joined up with the Sons of Geronimo and left the Reservation, intent on changing the world. By the time he had been through that and was ready to return, Jennifer had been married and divorced and was almost a stranger again.
The motorwagons were full of smiling, unreadable pilgrims in black, presumably joyous at being so close tc their destination, Salt Lake City. The convoys had been coming through all week. Hawk still had the shakes although they were coming under control. He had been doing road duty when the first wagons rolled past, with a US Cavalry Escort, and he had looked upon the face of the Josephite leader and known that these were the last days of the world. Nguyen Seth was his name. Hawk had read about him in the newsfax, but rarely watched teevee, and so had never seen his face before. That is, not in the flesh.
From his childhood, he had known the face, had seen it in paintings and had drawn it himself. It was the bone-white, dark-hole-eyed—sunglasses, he now realized—face of the Summoner. Two-Dogs had not always been a whisky Navaho, and he had taught his son the stories his father had taught to him. The stories of the Last Days, when the Summoner would open up the Dark Reaches of the Spirit Lands and call down the worst of the manitous to lay waste the worlds of the white man and the red.
Since he had caught sight of the Summoner, he had not liked to watch the resettlers pouring through into Utah, knowing what it was they were really following. He had talked with a plastic young couple in the Reservation Diner, listened to them enthusing about their new-found life and the dictates of their faith, but had seen the deadness in their hearts. Some of the Reservation Indians had gone with them when they left, eager for a chance at something better. The Navaho Jospehites were all young, as young as he had been when he joined the Sons and painted his face to strike a blow at the heart of the white man's world. That had been a futile crusade, he knew now, but it was better' than the lie Seth offered, the lie that concealed the end of all things.
The Indians of the Plains—Apache and Comanche—that he had known in the Sons of Geronimo had sworn that the white man's time was nearing an end, and that the buffalo would return. But he knew these were dreams of sand. The buffalo could do nothing against the deadweight of the Europeans.
He had been waiting for the spirit warrior his father had told him of in infancy, the One-Eyed White Girl. If the Summoner was abroad, then he would soon be followed. It was revealed in the series of pictures, drawn and redrawn in his family for generations. Two-Dogs said the One-Eyed White Girl would have steel in her muscles and fire in her empty eye, and that she would come to the Navaho—to the family of Armijas—for her education. It was the duty of the medicine man of the line of Armijas to tutor the spirit warrior through the Seven Levels, to prepare her for the final battle, in which she would stand with the other spirit warriors—the Holy Woman From Across the Great Water, the Man With Music in His Heart, the Red-Handed One, the Yellowlegs Who Has Lost Much, the Great Father in White, the Man Who Rides Alone—against the army of the manitous and the story would end.
Hawk had seen it told as a series of pictures on buffalo hides. The last pictures were just darkness. Much had been foretold, but the ultimate outcome was unknown, unknowable. "I envy you, my son," Two-Dogs had told him yesterday, "you will see the last pictures." Two-Dogs claimed his time was almost up, and was drinking even more heavily than usual. He had foreseen his death so many times that Hawk no longer bothered much with such presentiments, but, this time, things were different…
The Sons of Geronimo had been a wash-out in the end. Lots of fiery meetings and grand gestures, plenty of petitions to Washington and protests outside John Wayne movies, but in the end they had just been a bunch of dumb redskins battering their heads against the white man's bricks. Their political campaign had been as ineffectual as their terrorist "outrages," which had harmed no one but the odd insurance firm. Chata, their chief, had been shot dead by a bank guard in Wyoming during an attempted hold-up. The Sons had been running short of funds. Then Ulzana, the Apple Apache in his Gucci Ghost Shirt, would-be heir to the eagle-feathers, graduated from Berkeley, and set up a computer software firm. Hawk had sent him a parcel containing a bisected apple: red outside, white inside. The trickle of money raised by the tribes had dried up, the teevee crews stopped coming round, and the white girls all drifted away, with or without their pale-skinned babies, petitioning to rejoin the master race. Hawk didn't know where the others were. What had happened to Sacheen Littlefeather? Sky Buffalo? William Silverheels? Two-Dogs-Dying had shrugged, and gone back to waiting for his monthly security cheques. Only Hawk-That-Settles was there to carry the dream forward, to pass it on—if need be—to his son.
Now, there would be no son.
The motorwagons were gone, and everyone was drifting away. Jennifer White Dove smiled at him again, almost soliciting his interest. On the Reservation, being a medicine man meant literally that these days. He was in charge of the drugstore, and Jennifer's husband had left her with a habit or two. Sometimes, he knew, she would bruise herself with a rock to get morph-plus out of him. There were a lot of Indians like that, so used to the cycle of hurt and deadening that it was a snowballing addiction. He didn't meet her eyes, and she drifted away with the others.
"Father?"
Two-Dogs looked up, eyes not focusing.
"Father, I must leave."
Two-Dogs nodded his head, yes. "The Holy-Place-From-Over-the-Great-Water? "
"Yes, father." It was the title of one of the pictures. Two-Dogs had long ago found the real place, an abandoned monastery in the desert. It was far south, near the Mexican border.
"She will come to you there, the One-Eyed White Girl."
"So you have said."
"And so my father said before me. So we have all said, back to the times of the peach trees."
There was an embarassing pause. Hawk always felt ill at ease in these conversations, as if he were forced to read the lines of a savage redskin in a Hollywood film. He did not talk like this with anyone else, but his father would not laugh at talk of the Holy-Place-From-Over-the-Great-Water or the Yellowlegs Who Has Lost Much.
Beyond the road, Hawk saw the table mountains lumped against the sky. They had made many Hollywood films here. As a young man, Two-Dogs had fought with many armies of extras, firing off pretend guns at John Wayne in Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers. Once, Hawk had found a faded snapshot of Two-Dogs dressed in the beads and paint of an Apache standing proudly between a smiling John Wayne and a one-eyed Irishman he guessed was the movie director John Ford. Later, ashamed, Two-Dogs would picket screenings of the films he had appeared in, although he admitted in private that many times as a young man he had eaten well at a movie commissary when he would otherwise have starved. Once, a message had been sent to Ford in Hollywood, entreating aid for the Navahos after a hard winter, and the director had found a Western script to make in Monument Valley simply to bring some money to the tribe. Still, Hollywood had done an irreparable harm to the Indian, perpetuating the lies of the Manifest Destiny, the Savage Redskin and the Noble Bluecoats.
Two-Dogs took a swig on his bottle. Hawk would never grow old like this.
"Goodbye, fadier."
Two-Dogs nodded, and Hawk turned. He had a long walk before him.
The figure stabbed at the empty air.
Naked and wet, Jazzbeaux leaped out of the tub at the knife-wielder. She didn't need this, but she was prepared. She hadn't lived through the hell of Spanish Fork to be carved up by some common-or-garden psychopath.
The knife raked her side, but she ignored the pain and struck out with the flat of her hand at the psycho's chin.
It was the old woman, she assumed. As the knife darted towards her like a hawk's beak, she glimpsed iron grey hair in a bun, and saw the swish of the long, faded dress.
Her blow connected, and Ma Katz staggered backwards, blade scraping the flower-pattern wallpaper. Jazzbeaux half-turned and launched a kick, punching with the side of her foot into the old woman's stomach.
The knife came again, and she chopped with bodi hands at Ma Katz's wrist, satisfied by the crunch of breaking bones.
Ma Katz shrieked like a wounded eagle, and the knife clattered to the floor. The old woman's fingers curved into talons and she scratched at Jazzbeaux's face.
There wasn't much more Ma Katz could do to her face that Elder Seth hadn't, but lines of pain opened up, and Jazzbeaux felt her vision distorting. She was used to having one eye, but now she knew she wasn't seeing what she should.
Ma Katz's face, twisted by hatred, was that of her son.
Jazzbeaux made a point with the fingers of her left hand, and jabbed it into the old woman's throat, twice.
Ma Katz coughed and spluttered, yellow tears coursing down her face. Jazzbeaux grabbed the old woman's hair, and it came away in her hand.
Sobbing, Herman Katz sank to the floor, drawing in his arms and legs as he assumed a foetal ball, trying to return to the safety of his modier's womb.
Jazzbeaux threw the wig into the toilet, and reached for a towel. She didn't fully understand the set-up at the Katz Motel, but she had been through the fires, and was surviving.
Bruno Bonney had been fond of quoting Nietszche. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Of course, that was before she had killed him.
Herman?—Ma Katz?—whoever—had not killed her.
She was stronger.
Now, she wanted breakfast.
In the deserted city, Roger Duroc waited for Nguyen Seth and the resettlers. His prep crew had coptered in a few days ago, but it was psychologically important for the movement that the first arrivals turn up in the old way, like the Mormon pioneers who had first built by the Salt Lake and made the desert bloom.
Duroc's team had got the power on, and he had sent exterminator packs into the streets to begin the task of clearing out the vermin that still clung to the ruins. He had picked up a group of experienced hunter-killers from the Phoenix NoGo, and turned them loose on the remaining sandrats. There were less in Salt Lake than in most ghost cities, because of the lack of water. For the first few years, that would be the big problem for the resettlers too, but a pipeline was being built that would bring a supply down from Canada.
Seth had it all worked out.
With the backing of President North, the Josephite Church was building its sanctuary in the former state of Utah. Now, it was renamed Deseret, and was only technically a part of the United States of America. It would have its own flag, its own judicial system, its own state religion, its own Great and Secret Purpose.
Duroc looked over the reports from the engineers he had sent down into the dry sewers. Their casualties had been acceptable, and the cynogen had put an end to the indigenous subterraneans. Tunnel-fighting. That took him back to the 'Nam, where he had joined up with the Summoner and later fought with the VC against the Ivans.
The lights flickered. The power was still variable, but it was a start. He had made his headquarters in what had been the presidential suite of the Hilton hotel. A portrait of Trickydick Nixon glowered down at him. Someone had shot its eyes out, perhaps a Comanche hoping to condemn the Ex-President's incomplete spirit to an eternity of wandering between the winds.
He had come a long way with the Elder, as had his family from time immemorial. He remembered the day in Paris, all those years ago, when his uncle had introduced him to the tall, quiet man to whom his life would be dedicated. Nguyen Seth hadn't changed since then, Duroc knew. But then again, the Elder was older than he looked. Sometimes, he assumed the Elder had been around since the Creation. Once, tens of thousands of years ago, he might have been remotely human.
Now, so close to the Last Days for which he had been prepared, Seth was what he was, and nothing less.
Sometimes, Duroc missed his uncle. But the succession had had to take place. Duroc had had to come of age and replace the older Duroc in the service of Nguyen Seth.
Blevins Barricune, the ex-Op Duroc had put in charge of the city limits, came through on the intercom.
"We have a sighting, sir."
Duroc lit up a gauloise. "Good."
"Twenty or thirty ve-hickles, moving slowly."
"The wagon train?"
"Affirmative."
Duroc blew a smoke ring. "Well, get the brass band out. The Elder will need a welcome. You know the hymns they must play."
"It will be done, sir. By the way, we've found some children in the old tabernacle. Five, between the ages of eight and twelve. They have no speech beyond grunts, but they've been surviving out here."
"Children?"
"Yes sir."
"How remarkable. They must have endured many hardships to keep going out here."
"Yes. They overpowered Vercoe and Wood."
"Vercoe and Wood? What's their status?"
"Both casualties, sir."
"The children?"
"Unharmed, mostly. Pouncey was Vercoe's squeeze, and so he cut loose a bit with the cattle prod."
"That's understandable."
Duroc picked up his broad-brimmed black hat, and set it upon his head. He examined himself in the mirror. He looked very clerical.
"I'll be down directly. Have a car ready to take me to the city limits. I'll want to see the Elder arrive. The moment must be marked with all due ceremony. The vid team will record it for posterity."
That was a lie. There would be no posterity.
"And the children?"
"Oh, you know what to do. Hang them."
"Fine, sir."
"Let Pouncey do it. The man deserves something for his loss."
"Very well, sir."
Humming "All Things Bright and Beautiful," Duroc left his suite.
With her wounds dressed and bound and clean clothes on, Jazzbeaux felt approximately like a human being. That was dangerous, she knew. Ever since she had looked through Seth's shades, she had been more than human. Or perhaps less. She felt an odd detachment that she would have to get used to. Her humanity was something useless to her, something that came from the Denver NoGo and which should have died in Spanish Fork with Andrew Jean and the others. She was still carrying it about, like a Mexican mother in a warzone still toting a dead baby at her breast. Membership in the human race was a psychological crutch she knew she could do without, but wasn't quite ready to throw away yet. There would be time.
She had left Herman Katz in the bathroom. He was verging on catatonia. Yesterday, she would have casually killed him. Now, she didn't sec the point. She was saving herself for Elder Seth.
There was no food in the chalet, so she went up to the house. If there was no real Ma Katz to bother her, the place should be empty and Herman ought to have the makings of a breakfast. She wanted a pint of recaff and a toasted cheese sandwich. Perhaps a bowlful of Wally's Whale Food, and a jujube or two to give it a buzz. Perhaps not. Perhaps she didn't need drugs any more, didn't want the buzz. There were enough new things going on in her mind.
She climbed the rickety steps set into the hillside and got up to the porch of the Katz house. The door was open. Inside, the hallway was musty and dark. She saw an old French dresser with faded photographs in gilt frames under a bed of cobweb. An embroidered sampler hung on the wall, A BOY'S BEST FRIEND IS HIS MOTHER. Three identical aprons hung on a crooked coatstand. A buzzard, wings outstretched, posed stiffly over the kitchen door, its glass eyes thickly dusted-over.
The kitchen was what she had expected, dominated by an antique cooker and a fridge the size of a Buick. She found some reconstituted milk and some no-brand krill, which gave her a bowlful of mush to eat while the old kettle boiled. There was a plastic model of Redd Harvest's G-Mek V12 'Nola Gay in the packet of krill, but the wheels fell off when she ran it across the table.
It occurred to her that most people, her former self included, would not walk away from an attack by a homicidal transvestite and sit down to a healthy breakfast. She knew she was changing inside.
It was something to do with Seth's magic mirrorshades.
She hadn't slept, but she felt rested, calm, perfectly balanced. It was as if the fight with Herman had had the effect she would have expected from eight hours on a contoured mattress and a course of Doc Threadneedle's pick-me-up shots.
The kettle whistled, and she made herself some recaff. Her father always swore while he drank the stuff, claiming to have been raised on real coffee before the CAC stopped exporting from Nicaragua, but she never understood his complaints. She had had real coffee once or twice on the 'pomps' raids down into Mexico, but it hadn't seemed special. She preferred recaff. This morning, she could barely taste anything. It was important to fill her stomach, and the warm liquid was nice in her throat, but that was it. There was no pleasure in the old sensations.
On the kitchen table, there was an old, leather-bound book. It had KATZ FAMILY ALBUM embossed on it in gold. She flipped it open. There was a plump baby with Herman Katz's shining eyes, trussed up in a blue nightie, perched unsteadily on the lap of a haggard young woman. Herman and his mother. The couple recurred over the next few pages, with Herman becoming a child, then a young man, but never losing his startled look, as if the camera flash were a slap in the face. No one else intruded in the pictures, although someone must have been there to point the camera.
The book was half-full of perfectly mounted, perfectly posed snapshots. Then, between two pages, she found about thirty polaroids loose. They were of different people, all women, but from the same view, from behind the mirror in the bathroom of one of the chalets. Women bathed, showered, brushed their teeth, sat on the toilet, peered at the mirror. They were all naked, or nearly so. The latest was no more than two days old. It was Cheeks—dead Cheeks—squatting nude, snorting a line of zooper-blast from her pocket mirror, talking to someone in the bedroom. It had been Jazzbeaux. She remembered the moment. She had been talking about the rumble with the Daughters of the American Revolution, playing with Seth's glasses, putting them on and taking them off. At the time, with the glasses on, she had imagined she could faintly discern the shape of a skull under Cheeks' plump face. Now, the memory made her shudder.
She had seen too many ghost skulls, and all under the faces of people who were now dead. For a moment, she vowed never to look in a mirror again, in case she should be able to trace the outlines of her own durium-laced bones. Somewhere along the road, she had picked up a few extra senses, and she would have to leam to live with them.
This book, for instance, turned her stomach. She could see beyond the snapshots, and feel the gradual destruction of little Herman's personality as his mother became ever more dominant, ever more demanding. No wonder the kid had snapped.
Where was the real Ma Katz?
Jazzbeaux finished her recaff, and pushed the album away. She left the kitchen, and looked up the stairs. There was something up there beyond the landing, in one of the shuttered rooms. She knew it for a fact. It was calling to her, calling inside her head.
"Jessa—myn," it hissed. It was a woman's voice, but it reminded her of her father's whining. "Jessa—myn. Come upstairs, come upstairs."
She found she was halfway up already, unconsciously obeying the voice. She moved as if she were in a dream, wading through viscous liquid. Nothing mattered, but the voice.
"Jessa—myn, cain't you be sociable?"
Her headache was back, and her vision was disrupted. With her right eye, she saw the staircase before her, and the landing above, but with the left side of her sight, she was seeing her past replayed. There was her father, bleeding from the throat. There was Andrew Jean, face close to hers, tongue flicking. And there was Elder Seth, baring his teeth as he pushed her face into the asphalt. She shook her head, and tried to rub out the impossible visions. Her broken optic shifted painfully, and she realized she had been seeing out of her empty left eyesocket.
She had lost her eye when she was fifteen, in a brawl with the Gaschuggers outside Welcome, Arizona. She had never missed it until now.
She grabbed the banister and dragged herself upwards. She was under some kind of attack. Nothing new there.
In the darkness inside, Elder Seth laughed silently, his eyes blazing through his mirrorshades. Her face was in his eyes, distorted and shimmering.
She was on the landing now, and it spun around her. She assumed a fighting stance, but couldn't remain balanced.
The door opposite hung ajar. It creaked as it swung open. The room beyond was mainly dark, but lines of pale daylight stabbed through the slats of battered shutters. The creaking continued when the door was open. Jazzbeaux recognized the noise. It was a rocking chair, its weight shifting from the person in it.
"Mrs Katz?" she asked. There was no reply.
Reflections flashed in the darkness. Suddenly, Jazzbeaux knew whom she was about to face. Elder Seth. In the dark, Seth would be his true self, his human face off but his dark glasses still on.
The rocking carried on. Things scuttled. Rats. The house was filthy, she realized, practically falling to pieces. How could Herman and his mother stand it?
Jazzbeaux held onto the guardrail of the landing, and struggled to control her equilibrium. When she first lost her eye, she had had trouble keeping her balance, but she had thought she had overcome that. Obviously, any knock could send her mind spinning like a top.
She let go of the rail and stepped across the landing. She tottered through the open door. The smell hit her first. It was overpowering. Many things had died in this room and left their stink behind. There was a powerful chemical stench, and a psychic residue of pain and cruelty that was like a punch in the gut.
In the darkness, Ma Katz rocked. Jazzbeaux saw grey hair as the figure's head passed through the knives of light, and a dress like the one Herman had been wearing in the bathroom.
"Mrs Katz?"
She knew the woman had been dead for a long time. She stepped around the rocking mummy, and pulled the shutters open. Light streamed into the room, and caught the corpse.
It wasn't so bad, not after the things Jazzbeaux had seen back in Spanish Fork. Herman's taxidermy was inexpert, but Ma Katz was desiccated rather than rotten.
The dead woman was wearing a pair of sunglasses. They weren't anything like Seth's. Pink, heart-shaped Lolita frames and pale blue lenses.
Jazzbeaux turned away and looked out of the window. On the horizon, she could see Spanish Fork still burning. Columns of smoke were drifting up into the sky. That would attract the Road Cavalry soon. She would do well to get out of the area before they turned up. Some of the patrol who had been in the Feelgood could have radioed in a report before things started blowing up, or maybe even got away. She had only seen one corpse in union blue. There had been four in the cruiser.
The creaking behind her stopped, and Jazzbeaux spun around. Ma Katz was shakily standing, impossibly animated. Her glasses shone with reflected sunlight. The creature which should not have been came for her, clawhands jerking.
"Jessa—myn!" it shouted from its dry mouth. It had her father's voice. It had Elder Seth's voice.
She cleared her holster, and put a shot into the thing's chest. A puff of ancient dust came out as the slug went in. Her bullet tore through Ma Katz and spent itself against the wall. The thing kept coming. She shot again, trying for the head. The glasses went wonky as the upper left quarter of the head flew apart. The hair came off like Herman's wig, and the papery, flesh flaked away from the exploded skull. A glass eye rolled out of its socket.
Something gurgled in Ma Katz's throat, and the dead woman collapsed in a bony heap.
In her head, the echoes of Seth's laughter died away.
"Mama," said a high-pitched voice from the landing.
Herman staggered in, his apron on again, a tray of breakfast things in his hand. He shook, but didn't spill the milk.
"Mama…"
Jazzbeaux looked at the long-gone creature on the floor, and across to her son. Herman had no adequate response in his emotional repertoire. He set the tray down gently by the bedside, and picked up what was left of the mummy. It came apart in his arms, but he bundled it onto the bed.
"You've hurt mother," he said.
Jazzbeaux tried not to look him in the eye.
"Once I tried to hurt mother, but she got better. She'll get better this time, won't she?"
"Yes, Herman," Jazzbeaux lied. "Everything will get better."
She left him there, and went out into the desert, not knowing where she was headed, or what she was going through. Inside her head, the lights went out one by one, systems shut down. She walked towards the west, towards the point where the moon had just set. The sand began at the edge of the property. She walked out onto it, her boots sinking in with each step, and left the Katz Motel behind her.
Dead women didn't walk. Dead women didn't talk with the voice of Elder Seth. She knew that. But Ma Katz had got out of her rocking chair, and the preacherman had stared at her through the mummy's glass eyes.
Jazzbeaux walked, trying to reconcile what she knew with what she had seen, what she had felt. As the sun rose higher into the morning sky, circuits went inside her greymass, flaring up and dwindling to ash. She ignored her hurts, and kept walking, dragging her feet a little, but still walking…
In Spanish Fork, the fires began to burn themselves out.