The American Zone (19 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure

BOOK: The American Zone
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“What in the abominated name of whiskey taxation is that?” Lucy exclaimed, pointing with her Gabbett-Fairfax to indicate a long green fiberglass tube with lettering stenciled on its surface in a typeface I’ve always thought of as “G. I. Joe.” At the same time, my darling Clarissa waved to me from the back of an orange ambulance that had just arrived. She was taking off with the patients she’d just helped us to create. Sometimes being a Healer in this culture could be a lot like having one of those Roosevelt New Deal government jobs where you dig holes and then immediately fill them in again.
I replied, trying not to sound smug, “That, my dear friends, happens to be the field case for a Stinger missile where I come
from, almost certainly the Stinger that was used against us on the Greenway. I don’t know where these guys were hiding at the time, but they’re consistent: they’re terrible shots.”
Suddenly, I heard an all-too familiar voice behind me. “Pardon me, sir!” It was the Spaceman’s Fund lady again, with her big hat and veil and her basket of change. She was certainly nothing if not persistent. I stood up suddenly and cracked my head painfully on the underside of the trunk lid, but the look on her face when she recognized me was almost worth it.
“I believe,” I grinned at her, holding the top of my now throbbing melon, “that I gave at the office.”
SOMETIMES THERE’S MIDNIGHT baseball in Greater LaPorte—it’s one of the most beautiful experiences you can have out of bed—but not tonight. There are heavily armed security guards at None of the Above Park all night (of course they’re heavily armed in the daytime, too, when they’re shopping with their wives and kiddies in the mall), but I was an old friend of their boss, the grim and grizzled chimpanzee who’d guarded my body when it had first arrived, full of submachine-gun perforations and leaking messily on Ed Bear’s driveway at 626 Genet Place, nine years ago. Sitting now, in a shadowed corner of the gigantic parking lot in Will’s battered old 211 Rockford, I raised Captain Forsythe on my personal’Com and gave him the
Readers’ Digest
version of what the fearless leader of the Greater LaPorte Militia—and little old I—were up to.
“Please! Please don’t tell me any more, Win,” he demanded. “I don’t want to know. You two miscreants promise not to burn down the ballpark or steal all the seats?”
I wanted to tell him I was more of a creant, than a miscreant. But the fierce old guy really meant it in his own way, although he was trying to be nice, and both of us promised solemnly.
Forsythe punched up a three-way conversation and told the employee at the nearest gate—his people do wear uniforms; you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fully grown orangutan in a military kilt—to unlock it, look the other way when we came by, and pass the word to the other guards that they couldn’t see us, either.
“Come to think of it,” I told Will once our business with Forsythe and his Assorted Anthropoids was over, “I have no idea how High Colonic’s going to get in.” Will yawned, drew his big silver pistol, and pulled the slide back a quarter of an inch to reassure himself that the chamber was still loaded. I don’t know who the hell he thought could have sneaked into his holster and unloaded it. “Not our problem, partner. It’s 8:52—let’s go.”
All right, so I dragged the .41 from my sling and rolled the cylinder to make sure there were six fat cartridges occupying the cylinder. So what.
Naturally, all of the elevators and escalators had been turned off, so Will and I got to climb six flights of metal stairs in the dark to get to the beer garden where High Colonic had said he’d meet us. Will seemed okay—he is younger than I am, after all—but by the time I’d finally clawed my way to the top, I’d decided to take some of that hyperbaric oxygen therapy Clarissa had been trying to sell me on.
I probably wouldn’t want another cigar for a month.
I hated cloak-and-dagger stuff like this with a passion. Sneaking around and being sneaked at. Now that I was all the way up here, I’d much rather simply gaze out through the openwork of the most beautiful athletic arena I’d ever seen, and enjoy the multicolored lights of the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, scattered across the darkened land to an invisible horizon that—in terms of peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity, anyway—was truly limitless.
Unless the badguys won this thing.
I might even get to watch a real live spaceship taking off. They did that here, right from the tops of skyscrapers at the very heart of the city (wherever the hell that is), employing technology identical to that at work in the GLPM’s electrostatic aerocraft. It was quite a pretty sight, with all their running lights twinkling and an eerie glow emanating from their several thousand high-voltage electrodes. Once aloft—at around one hundred thousand feet or so—they’d fire up their main fusion-driven engines, and that was quite a pretty sight, as well.
Even in high summer, it was more than a little frosty, six stories up, fairly late at night, in an openwork construction of steel beams, brick columns, and zero walls. That’s the High Plains for you. The air curtains weren’t running any more than the elevators were, and a Rocky Mountain chill had begun seeping into my kidneys and shoulderblades. I felt around for the control lump sewn into the seam of my cloak and turned up the temperature, hoping that whoever our unknown enemies were, they wouldn’t have had time to hire a replacement for the four stooges—like somebody who had an infrared rifle scope.
Nine o’clock came and went.
Ten o’clock came and went.
By eleven o’clock, I couldn’t feel my toes anymore (note to self: buy some electric shoes), and there were no messages, on any of our communications systems, indicating what, if anything, had gone wrong. High Colonic simply hadn’t shown up and now I felt like an idiot for ever believing that he would. Fortunately, it hadn’t been some kind of deadly trap, either. Nobody had taken a shot at us or tried to push us over the railing. Call it even for the night, I guess. Go home. Visit with Clarissa. Go to bed. Usually she warmed her cold feet up on me. Tonight, she was going to get a surprise.
Slower than we’d climbed up, Will and I climbed down the six cold flights of metal stairs. At each step my toes felt like they were going to break off, like glass, and my kneecaps were going to flip across the parking lot like Tiddlywinks. We asked the guard if he’d seen anybody (he hadn’t, and checked with his colleagues for us), told him good night, and headed for Will’s car. “Wait a minute, Will!” I hollered at him, just before he grabbed the door handle to lift it up. For a long minute he stood there with his hand outstretched, looking like a curbside jockey. “Who’s to say somebody didn’t sneak in down here while we were up there and put a bomb in your car?”
Will got an exasperated look on his face, and said, “Win, believe me. If anybody had even breathed hard in the direction of this car, it would have set up a shrieking that would have awakened every corpse in every graveyard in this city.”
I gave it some thought. “Unless they knew how to cheat around your security system. You could do it, couldn’t you?” When other arguments fail, try flattery.
He bit. “There’s always that, I suppose. Say—”
I’ve tried. There isn’t any way to accurately simulate the sound that interrupted him. In that moment something happened that I had previously thought could only happen in cartoons. An object fell out of the clear black sky. It was a car, about twice the size of Will’s old Rockford. It crashed onto the surface of the parking lot, almost exactly sixteen inches from my left big toe.
I may never hear correctly in that ear again.
Overhead, just visibly underlit by reflected city light, I saw the long, ghostly silver oval form of a dirigible without running lights. I drew my revolver and considered shooting at it, but any of the big 240-grain slugs that failed to stop in the airship—which is mostly empty space, wrapped in plastic and filled with helium—
and came down again had to hit somewhere. At this angle, they might even hurt somebody.
“Okay,” Will asked, once the dust had settled. The parking lot lights had come on by themselves, and there were dozens of guards from Forsythe’s rushing toward us from the stadium. “Was that a trap or only a coincidence?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, suddenly distracted by the thought of all the wondrous things that are sold in vending machines in the Confederacy. “Do you suppose they’d let me back in to change my underwear?”
Ever notice that the “Golden Age” of television was when commercial sponsors had the strongest control over program content?
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin.
You’d think I’d have learned by now.
Will dropped me off at my front doorstep, still feeling like I was frozen to the bone. It was like one of those Chicago drive-bys where they roll the body out the door, onto the sidewalk, and put the pedal to the floor. I no sooner got the door down on the Rockford than he sped off, down the drive and across the street, anxious to see his brace of pregnant brides.
I shuffled through my trouser pockets, an awkward task for a man with his arm in a sling, and turned toward the door. I could have had some kind of automated door thingummy, I suppose, that would recognize my voiceprint, or the pore pattern on the end of my schnozz, but I like real locks with real keys. For that matter, I could have simply rung the doorbell, or even called Clarissa on my pocket’Com, but the girl works hard and I didn’t want to wake her up if she was asleep.
With my good hand busy with the key in the lock, and my attention focused on maybe waking Clarissa up after all, I didn’t see or hear my assailant until he put his hand on my shoulder. There were two of them. They’d been waiting in the bushes at the front of the house.
The first one swung a big fist at my head. I saw the buttery glint of brass knuckles, ducked, and stepped into him, letting go of the key, getting a hand on my revolver as my elbow hit his solar plexus. He smacked the doorpost, bruising the housepaint
and his knuckles, then danced up and down, cursing as the other one came at me.
They were wearing nylon stocking masks. By now my gun was out and I drew a fast bead on the second guy’s midsection. I started pulling the trigger, but only got the hammer halfway back, when the first guy, accidentally or deliberately, crashed into me from behind. By reflex, I pulled the trigger the rest of the way through and heard an anguished bellow as I fell forward on my knees. Almost at once, somebody stepped on my gun hand, grinding down hard and crushing it painfully between pistol and pavement. I thought I felt my trigger finger break where it passed through the guard and was bent forward toward the muzzle. I couldn’t support myself with my other arm, because it was in the sling.
Somebody else, or it could have been the same guy, kicked me as hard as he could in the ribs. He should have used the brass knuckles. I’d been kicked that way before, in a Federal Boulevard bar check that went sour back in my uniform days. It wasn’t pleasant, but I rolled with it almost gratefully, and that saved me another vicious kick, this time in the head, from the other guy, who kicked his partner in the shin, instead.
It also let me take aim and fire from where I lay on my back—guess the finger wasn’t broken after all—hitting the first kicker in the right thigh and tearing away at least two pounds of meat. I never heard the noise or felt the recoil, but I sure as hell heard him scream, and so did a lot of other folks from Oklahoma to Montana. The second kicker tried to rush me—the rule (and most of the time it makes good sense) being, “Run from a knife, attack a gun.” I lifted the Model 58’s muzzle in his general direction and pulled the trigger. The bullet took him underneath the jaw and seemed to lift him three feet into the air. He came down right on top of me, literally dead meat.
“Stand down, Win!” That was my brave and beautiful wife, standing on the doorstep in her pretty pink nightgown, Webley Electric in hand. The first guy I’d shot was unconscious, having leaked rather profusely on my driveway.
“Don’t worry, honey, I won’t shoot you.” She took only a cursory glance at my attackers, threw herself onto her knees beside me, and began taking inventory. As her fingers moved professionally over my body, I felt hot, very unprofessional tears falling on my chest, but he didn’t make a sound. I could have told her I was okay. The only damage I’d sustained were the stomped fingers and the kick to the belly that had probably saved my life. I climbed to my feet, feeling so stiff it almost brought tears to my eyes, but not wanting to show it to my child bride. “Let’s see who these clowns are.”
One was still breathing. Clarissa produced shears from somewhere and got his pantyhose mask off. To say that we couldn’t believe who it was only understated the matter by a couple orders of magnitude.
Getting the dead guy’s mask off—he’d taken one through the right upper arm, as well—was no joke, as accustomed as we both were—she the Healer, me the homicide dick—to that sort of thing, but the results were even more unbelievable, and horrifying. In the end, we stood together, arms around each other, staring down at two guys, one badly wounded, one very dead.
Both of them were Bennett Williams.
THE PRETTY LITTLE girl stood on tiptoes as the bespectacled proprietor behind the counter rang up her order.
“Now let’s see here, Mary-Lou,” said the man with the white apron. “You’ve got the CZ-61 Skorpion submachinegun, 500 rounds of high-velocity .32 ACP hollowpoint ammunition, and—what’s this?”
The little girl was typically American. She couldn’t have been older than eleven, maybe younger, to judge by the missing tooth in front. She wore a frilly gingham dress, white bobby socks, and saddle-shoes. Her shiny dark brown hair had been carefully braided into a pair of pigtails with ribbons in the ends that matched her dress, and she had freckles across both pink cheeks and the bridge of her upturned nose.
She was puzzled. “Why, that’s morphine, Mr. Suprynowicz. It’s for my mom.”
He shook his head. “Now you just take that right back to the shelf where you got it, Mary-Lou, and look a little harder next time. Our store brand is a lot cheaper, and it happens to be on sale this week.”
“Thank you, Mr. Suprynowicz!” When she returned, the storekeeper counted out her change, bagged her purchases, and she skipped out of the store, happy as a little freckled lark.
If I cringed, I guess it was because I’m still a blueback. It was also a leftover from the ugly place where I’d been born. I tried not to show it. My darling Clarissa didn’t show it, either—because she hadn’t even noticed the transaction, and if she had, she’d likely have thought nothing of it. She’d been born a Confederate and had probably gone to the store herself, for Mommy’s narcotics and Daddy’s ammo, once upon a time.
I was tired. I was seeing entirely too much of Mr. and Mrs. Civil Liberties Association, and they, in turn, were getting suspicious of me. I had to take them aside and explain exactly what kind of case I was helping with. I figured it was Will’s case causing all the bloodshed, not my own.
They took the bodies away, one to the meatlocker, the other to an infirmary. We woke Bennett Williams up and confirmed my expectation that he wasn’t either of the guys who’d attacked me. All they’d had with them, weaponwise, were the knuckles
and a switchblade. Clearly amateur talent, from out of town.
Way out of town.
I tried to relax and sip my chocolated coffee. I still hurt all over from last night’s adventures, but if there’s anyplace in the American Zone that rivals the Hanging Judge as a place to catch up on gossip in a congenial atmosphere—and get a lesson on living in a free country—it’s Suprynowicz’s General Store next door to the Golden Apple Tea Room at the end of the 2300 block at the corner of Wilson and Shea.
Clarissa and I were here, on our own at last, to visit two more of the people on my list of possible importers of Gable and Lombard (not to mention Cummings and Davis) pictures. It was good to have her along; this was how I’d always wanted it to be, her Nora to my Nick.
Will was at home with his wives for the morning, dealing with some crisis, or so he’d claimed, involving paint colors for the nursery. It must not have been much of a crisis. He’d been humming cheerily to himself when he rang off. It was one of those stupid situations where I knew he was lying, he knew I knew he was lying, and I knew he knew that I knew, but the forms had to be followed nonetheless. Meanwhile, Lucy had grabbed an ultraspeed flight all the way down to Lubbock (twenty minutes’ air time—they actually consume half their delta-V keeping the plane from going into orbit), believing she was in pursuit of another of Will’s native radical suspects.
Somebody sitting near the front window leaned back, put his feet up on the table, and fingered a guitar.
“Well I used to be an American,
Where they told us we were free,
But the only ones with rights were crooks,
And the newsheads on TV—”
The little bell over the door jingled. Samuel T. Harkin IV had kept the appointment with us first. At forty-nine, according to my research, Harkin was a grim, perpetually impoverished in-the-cellar-with-a-candle-guttering-in-the-winebottle type anarchist. Word was, he’d spent the last thirty years of his life Stateside laboriously writing, editing, printing, collating, and distributing thousands upon thousands of smudgy political pamphlets that nobody ever read. Until recently, when he’d emigrated to the Confederacy one leap ahead of the Immigration, Naturalization, and Condemnation Service’s killer hounds, he’d been an illegal squatter—in the house that his parents had once owned—in southern California’s “Earthquake Safety Clearance Area,” one of those corrupt west coast government land grabs that stank across eleven thousand worlds. At least he’d fared better than Donald Scott, the California guy local governments had murdered for his ocean-front Malibu property.
It was said that Harkin had an odd knack for gathering about him artists and writers, mostly younger than he was, with genuine talent greatly exceeding his own.
Greeting a few of the regulars with a negligent wave—I noticed Daggett the knifemonger was here, having his first Diet Coke of the day—Harkin also nodded at Suprynowicz and looked around until he found us. He came to the card table Clarissa and I occupied, and seated himself without asking.
“I’m Harkin,” he informed us. We knew, we’d seen his picture. He was tall, but with a lot of belly under his black T-shirt and black jeans. (One report claimed that he wore black underwear, as well.) Under a black beret straight out of a comic book, he also wore a big round face on which it looked like someone had pasted a fake moustache and goatee.
“I’m Bear,” I replied, as deadpan as I could. “She’s Bear,
too—but it’s a free country.” Clarissa stifled a giggle. I’d always wanted to say that.
No discernable sense of humor. Harkin pulled out a huge, well-used briar pipe from somewhere on his person, stuffed it full of some kind of vegetable matter—it may even have been tobacco—lit it, tamped it, and put his lighter away. “You wanted to ask me some questions?”
I lit a cigarette. For this particular setting, I’d reverted to American duds: my old gray working suit, white shirt, plain black zero-power necktie, comfortable brown oxfords, white socks, and the same felt hat I wear every day. Despite the fight I’d been in my still-mending left arm was supported now by a blue transparent plastic contraption that I could take off for bathing and dressing. It was still annoying, but an improvement.
At my suggestion, Clarissa had looked for American clothes, too, at the local equivalent of Goodwill: a very nice camel-colored suit without the least hint of sex-appeal, an off-white silk blouse, dark nylons, and what I call “Nazi nurse” shoes. The idea was to look serious and professional, not sexy or pretty. It didn’t exactly work—she still looked sexy and pretty anyway—but it helped some. “We wanted to talk to you,” she said, attempting to imitate Will imitating Jack Webb—which meant she sounded just like Dana Scully. “About what you import from the United States.” I noticed for the first time in that instant that although there isn’t any difference (not that I can hear, anyway) in the accents of Confederates and United Statesians, still, there’s
something
. My lovely spouse was trying to sound American, but she sounded like somebody on the BBC trying to sound like somebody from Texas.
Harkin spotted her in a heartbeat, and stood up, not quite going for whatever it was he carried in his waistband. “Damn
Confederates anyway! What, are you planning to set me up for the train wreck or the Old Endicott explosion?”
You can never tell what’s on people’s minds. I stood up, too, put my good hand on the wrist that was reaching for his gun, and through gritted teeth, said, “Calm down, you idiot! I’m a blueback, just like you—Clarissa here is a Confederate native, my wife, and this happens to be her first case.” Not exactly true, but it would do. I turned to her. “I’m sorry, kiddo, I guess I gave you bad advice. You should have remained your own sweet self.” Back to Harkin. “We’re trying to find out who’s importing certain movies from various versions of the States, is all, not even dirty movies. I’d be glad to explain the whole thing, if you’ll just sit down and relax.”
He blinked. “Say, you’re Win Bear,” he informed me. I’d known that, of course, but didn’t let on. “The first sucker through the blue hole. That’s a pretty good shiner you’ve got there. Your secretary didn’t tell me who you were when she called.”
“Secretary?” I scratched my head. “Oh,
secretary
! I did ask her to call you, didn’t I? I was confused because this is her day off, and she’s gone shopping or something in Lubbock. Yes, well, I’m Win Bear, guilty as charged, and this is Clarissa MacDougall Olson-Bear.”
Harkin sat down and nodded, giving Clarissa the once-over despite her getup. I offered him something to drink and he asked for beer. I went to the counter—this wasn’t a restaurant, I’d been told, and it didn’t have waiters—and ordered beer for Harkin, tea for Clarissa, and another mocha for me. By the time I got back, Harkin and Clarissa were chattering away, about movies, of all things.

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