The Apex Book of World SF 2 (20 page)
Read The Apex Book of World SF 2 Online
Authors: Lavie Tidhar
After losing a
couple of minutes in the cold Manhattan air, I manage to convince John Winston
Lennon. It took revealing two or three state secrets, describing what Paul
McCartney was up to on November 3, 1967, and showing him my portable time
machine.
"But, look," he
says, "there's not going to
be
any Beatles reunion any time ever. That's
finished. Over. Kaput. Capisce?"
a few minutes before ten o'clock. I get out of the limo, Yoko stands next to
me. Chapman approaches from out of the blue and yells something I can't quite
make out. My mind is as lucid as ever, but my ears are deaf for the time being,
or so it seems.
"Mister John!" he
shouts and I can understand him this time.
I turn around, and
he empties his pistol's chambers into my chest.
The bullet-proof
vest absorbs the impacts.
Then I empty my own
gun into him.
Yoko begins to cry. John comes up to me and says, "So, that's the guy." Someone
out there yells for an ambulance.
Lennon walks out
onto the street, maybe to get a better view of the scene, or maybe to hail a
taxi to move the corpse to the nearest hospital. Or the nearest morgue.
However, at that very instant the ghostlike silhouette of a dark Porsche is
crossing the street with the speed of a shooting star. It's all over in a
microsecond. Half a microsecond.
The car screeches to
a halt, the squeal of its brakes can be heard all the way to San Francisco, and
the body of John Winston Lennon goes flying some five metres into the air
before crashing into a lamppost. And that's that.
Mark David Chapman
lying blood-drenched on the sidewalk, Yoko crying over John's twisted body, and
Madonna behind the wheel of the Porsche with those wild eyes, diamond eyes, a
material girl watching me, watching the two bodies, and the night, and the
snow.
Ambulance sirens
pierce the heavy silence that has suddenly settled between us like a blanket of
something far whiter and colder than this snow that falls down, and then the
police arrive, asking questions and filling out reports. I slink away quietly,
consoling myself with the fact that there was nothing I could have done for
Lennon, and ain't that a shame.
But it's not all
bad. Madonna's autographs will certainly come in handy in my own present, in
their own future. Just like the autographs I got out of Lee Harvey Oswald right
before I had him ice Nixon.
Hungry Man
Will Elliott
Australian Will Elliott is the author of
The Pilo Family Circus
, a magnificent novel of murderous
clowns which won the Aurealis, Ditmar and Shadow awards in Australia. He
is also the author of
Strange Places
, a memoir about schizophrenia, and
of the forthcoming
Pendulum
trilogy. The following story is original to
this anthology.
the baby carriage at last moved out of earshot, Phil said, "It's easy, just get
it down the back of your pants. You saw me do it a hundred times, come on."
Lex looked nervously
at the girl behind the news-agency counter and said, "She'll see me. We come
here every other day and never
buy
anything."
"She doesn't care. For twelve dollars an hour, think she cares if they're missing a couple
magazines? C'mon go, she's not looking."
Phil made it look
easy. In awe, Lex had watched him walk out of shops with packets of corn chips
stuffed in his shirt so he looked pregnant, watched him take show bags from
stalls at the carnival, condoms from the chemist (they did nothing with them
except leave them on the spouts of their school's drinking fountains). Phil
stole cigarettes and sold them to the older kids who played coin-op games. He
stole CDs, once a DVD set from
JBHiFi
. His prize catch: an iPod, one of
those nice thirty-two gig ones with a digicam inside. Close call, the Target
woman turned her back for just a moment after he'd got her to take it out of
the case for a look at it, not even planning to steal it till she took her eyes
off them. A security guard chased them out of there and they couldn't go back
to Westfield Strathpine again any time in the next decade.
For his part, Lex
had stolen two packets of bubble gum. It had been from this very news agency
the girl had gone out to the back for a minute or two. "The register," Phil had
urged. "Go! There's fifties in there."
Lex had been unable
to do it. People had been walking past the doorway; they'd have seen him. He
took the gum instead. His hands shook for half an hour afterwards.
And right now the
news agency was busy. Old people buying lottery tickets. A creepy perverted
dude by the porn mags who hadn't moved since they'd come in, probably had a big
fat woody while he fumbled through the latest
Picture
. "Don't worry
about that perv," Phil whispered. "That's the retard who walks up and down the
road all night. If he sees you, he won't even remember it five minutes from
now."
"How do you know?"
"We threw rocks at
him, me and Trent. He just looked at us, didn't even care. Next day we walked
right past him, he didn't recognise us. So what are you worried about?"
I have a dad at home
, Lex thought but
didn't dare say.
Not like you. Your mother won't pull your pants down right
in front of everyone at any old excuse to do it and hit the crap out of your
nude butt like it turns her on
.
Well no, Phil's dad
wouldn't do that exactly. Phil's dad would visit once a week and his doped-out
mum would sit there in a Valium cloud and list out stuff he'd done wrong during
the week in a calm dreamy voice, while Phil's dad slowly undid his belt.
Alex,
I think you should go home now.
You'd hear it from three houses down: cries
and pleads as if Phil were being killed in there, whack, whack, whack. Every
Tuesday. Visiting Day.
Phil said, "Alex,
listen. You eat the stuff I steal, you keep half of it. You never take anything
yourself. Bubble-gum? How badass. Come on. Go-get us some titty mags and we're
even."
Lex left Phil
standing before the comics, sidled over to the magazine stand opposite the
titty mags and looked nervously at the girl behind the counter, now selling
smokes to some geezer who thought he was pretty funny. Lex snuck a glance at
the glossy covers, heart beating faster with the alien allure of women as old
as his teachers, posing on the
Penthouse
with legs open, a white sheet
draped between them; on
Barely Legal
in roller skates with a lollypop
and pig-tails; in this weird black leather outfit on
Babes & Bikes
. Suddenly he wanted each magazine very badly. He'd all but forgotten the pervy
guy, who hadn't moved, still thumbing through the
Home Girls
section in
Picture
. The pervy guy was just a pillar of legs beside him, as inhuman as concrete.
Lex grabbed a
Penthouse
and a
Playboy
. Down the back of his shorts they went, where they slipped
and slid almost completely out till he tucked them into his underwear. Turning
for the exit, not daring to look to see if anyone had witnessed it, he walked
head-first into the pervy guy's legs, his face striking the man's hip.
It was a long way to
look up and see the face staring down at him, half-covered in black stubble.
The man's wide mouth hung open, eyes just peering down with no way of telling
if it was anger or total blankness in them. Lex sensed something
else
there, too, a threat he didn't understand at all, which made something inside
him scream
run
but at the same time paralysed him so he couldn't.
"Hey, Alex, let's go
for a swim," Phil called innocently across to him from the news-agency counter.
"Before it gets dark. Over at the nature strip. C'mon." Phil's voice seemed to
break Lex out of a trance. He walked through the magazine rows, not daring to
look sideways at the girl behind the counter, whose gaze he felt following him.
The magazines down his pants were surely sticking out a mile.
At long last,
blessedly, they were outside in the afternoon light. Cars whizzed by on Anzac
Avenue. Their bikes leant against the shop wall. "Don't pull ‘em out yet, you
dink," Phil hissed, as Lex adjusted the magazines' position. "Oh shit. Quick,
get on your bike and go."
"What, why…?"
The pervert guy,
like a horror movie zombie, shuffled slowly out of the shop and headed their
way. His mouth still hung open, his eyes as dead as pebbles. "Catching flies,
fuck head?" Phil said to him. "Shut your mouth, you look like a spastic." The
man didn't say a word, just stared and shuffled closer. "I think he likes you,
Alex. Frigging weirdo."
They rode away,
wheeling through traffic and many pissed off drivers, car horns blaring. Lex
was so filled with sweet relief to be out of the news agency he hardly noticed
how close he was to getting run over.
if you could get to the waterhole at night, you'd sometimes see the bogan kids
who got drunk in the Kallangur shop car parks doing it with their girlfriends,
actually doing it right here in the long grass. They'd been out here one
sleepover to test the theory but had seen no such thing.
It had rained last
night and now the quite frequent cars that swung down the nearby road's dip
sloshed up water as they went. On the wide grassy platform a few metres above
the water, Phil took out the Mars bar he'd slipped into his pocket right in
front of the counter girl while he'd joked with her about the pervert guy. He
peeled back its wrapping, which took much of the squished melted thing off with
it, then stuffed the rest into his mouth. "Yeah, I saw that retard before,"
said Phil, examining the
Penthouse
centrefold. "Lives on Sheehan Street.
He just walks around at night, right down the middle of the road sometimes.
Drivers have to go around him. Lives with these really old people, maybe his
parents. Not right in the head. You can throw rocks at him or whatever and he
just looks at you, doesn't even care. So, are you going to jump or not?"
Last time they'd
come, Phil had ridden his bike off the ledge and into the water. It was now Lex's
turn. From the seat of his black BMX, the water was just a brown wedge visible
over the sloping rise before the drop. Phil said, "You won't break your legs or
anything. It's deep right down there."
Lex said, "Not
worried about my legs, I'm worried about the bike."
"It's
water,
man, jeez come on."
"I didn't get this
bike for my birthday like you got yours. I delivered pamphlets on Saturdays in
the heat and paid for it myself."
"Then you went and
stole from the shops. What a good boy." Phil took the
Playboy
out of Lex's
schoolbag. "If you don't jump I'm keeping this."
"Okay, okay." Lex
took off his shoes, put his glasses in their case, took a deep breath then
pushed off, pumping hard on the pedals, the tyres bumping over the grassy
ground. The water opened up into view three metres below, then he was airborne,
letting go so the bike flung itself out ahead of him while he landed feet first
in the water.
It was cold and not
as deep as Phil had claimed, for his feet touched the hideously soft mud at its
bottom. He came up and used his first gasp of air to whoop in triumph. He swam
forwards to get the bike. "See that?" he laughed, spitting out a coppery
mouthful.
"You didn't stay on
your bike, doesn't count. Do it again."
"I'll do it again,
no problem. That was sweet!"
Nearing the top of
the path, Lex heard other voices up on the grassy platform: someone laughing. "Oh
shit," he heard Phil say. "Lex, get up here, okay?"
Still elated, Lex
wheeled the bike up the curving path, starting to feel a chill from the late
afternoon air. There was, at most, an hour of daylight left.
When he got up there
he saw why Phil had been worried. Craig Randall and Keith Hume, that was why.
There was, Lex was quite aware, a chance for him to get back on the bike and
ride it down the path and out of there. And he knew he would have if his
schoolbag and shoes hadn't been up there with Phil, along with the precious
magazines. Both these guys had been kicked out of school for beating people up.
The last guy, Keith had rammed his head into a pole and put him in hospital and
into a neck brace. Keith's messy blond hair hung down over his shoulders, muscled
arms exposed in a singlet. His friend Craig was tall, fat, redheaded, with
squinting eyes and skin entirely covered in freckles. They were both three
years and many growth spurts older.
Craig casually took
Lex's bike from him and sat on it in a way somehow devoid of aggression—just
borrowing a seat. "Your friend's fucked," he said in his oddly high pitched
voice.
Going to be a pretty good show, hey?
Craig smiled with no malice
at all and produced a little bag of cask wine, which he put to his lips and sucked
on. The wine's cheap stink filled the place.
Phil didn't move as
Keith Hume stepped closer to him.
"Why do you have to
hit him, Keith?" Lex said. "We got no problem with you."
"Shut the fuck up,
Alex," Phil snapped at him.
Lex remembered what
Phil had said about guys like this. They
would
beat you up now and then,
face it. Just let them. Don't be a pussy about it and they'd mostly leave you
alone from then on. "Get it over with," said Phil.
"What'd you say,
cunt?" Shove to the shoulder, fists up, here it came. Jab, jab, crack went
knuckles on Phil's nose and cheek. They were fast, economical punches. Long
fast arms, punching machines made just for this. Phil's head rocked back. Lex
almost felt it, almost saw the explosions of white stars. Craig chortled and
slurped his wine. "Come on, Keith, that's enough, hey," said Lex.