The Night's Dawn Trilogy (175 page)

He thrust his face forwards toward the black guy, snarling at the wiseass bastard. Just for an instant three long scars pulsed
hotly on his left cheek. “Gonna remember you, cock-sucker. Gonna find you again. Gonna teach you
respect
, and, buddy, it’s gonna be the real hard way to learn.” The old rage was burning in his body now, limbs trembling, voice
rising to a thunderous roar. “Nobody shits on Al Capone! You got that? Nobody treats me like some dog turd you stepped in.
I fucking ruled Chicago. I owned that city. I am not some asswipe street punk you can take for a ride. I. Deserve. RESPECT.”

“Bastard Retro!” The man swung a punch.

Even if Lovegrove’s body hadn’t been enhanced with the energistic power which possessing souls exuded in the natural universe
Al would probably have beaten him. His years in Brooklyn had pitched him into countless brawls, and people had quickly learned
to steer clear of his awesome temper.

Al ducked instinctively, his right fist already coming up. The blow was focused, mentally and physically. He struck the man
perfectly, catching him on the side of his jaw.

There was an ugly sound of bone shattering. Dead silence. The man flew backwards five yards through the air, hitting the sidewalk
in a crumpled sprawl. He slid along the carbon concrete composite for another couple of yards before coming to rest, completely
inert. Blood began to splatter from his mouth where serrated bone had punctured his cheek and lip.

Al stared, surprised. “Goddamn!” He started to laugh delightedly.

The girl screamed. She screamed and screamed. Al glanced around, suddenly apprehensive. Everyone on the broad sidewalk was
looking at him, at the injured black guy. “Shut up,” he hissed at the loopy broad. “Shut up!” But she wouldn’t. Just: scream,
and scream, and scream. Like it was her profession.

Then there was another sound, cutting through her bawling, rising every time she took a breath. And Al Capone realized it
wasn’t just handguns he could recognize after six hundred years. Police sirens hadn’t changed much either.

He started to run. People scattered ahead of him the way kittens ran from a pit bull. Cries and yells broke out all around.

“Stop him!”

“Move!”

“Stinking Retro.”

“He killed that dude. One punch.”

“No! Don’t try to—”

A man was going for him. Beefy and hard-set, crouched low for a pro football tackle. Al waved a hand, almost casually, and
white fire squirted into the hero’s face. Black petals of flesh peeled back from the bone, sizzling. Thick chestnut hair flamed
to ash. A dull agonized grunt, cutting off as pain overloaded his consciousness, and the man collapsed.

Then all hell really did hit the fan. Anxious people became a terrified mob. Stampeding away from him. Fringe onlookers got
caught and bowled over by thudding feet.

Al glanced back over his shoulder to see a section of the road barrier fold down. The squad car glided over it towards him.
An evil-looking black and blue javelin-head, airplane-smooth fuselage. Dazzlingly bright lights flashed on top of it.

“Hold it, Retro,” a voice boomed from the car.

Al’s pace slackened. There was an arcade ahead of him, but its arching entrance was wide enough to take the squad car. Goddamn!
Alive again for forty minutes and already running from the cops.

What else is new?

He stopped, and turned full square to face them, silverplated Thompson gripped in his hands. And—oh, shit—another two squad
cars were coming off the road, lining up directly towards him. Big slablike flaps were opening like wings at their rear, and
things
came running out. They weren’t human, they weren’t animal. Machine animals? Whatever, they sure didn’t look healthy. Fat
dull-metal bodies with stumpy gun barrels protruding. Far too many legs, and all of those rubber, no knees or ankles.

Assault mechanoids, Lovegrove said. And there was a tinge of excitement in the mental voice. Lovegrove expected the things
to beat him.

“They electric?” Al demanded.

Yes.

“Good.” He glared at the one taking point, and cast his first sorcerer’s spell.

Police patrol Sergeant Alson Loemer was already anticipating his promotion when he arrived at the scene. Loemer had been delighted
as his neural nanonics received the updates from the precinct house. With his outlandish clothes, the man certainly looked
like a Retro. The gang of history-costumed terrorists had been running the police department ragged for three days, sabotaging
city systems with some new style of plasma weapon and electronic warfare field. Other acts too. Most officers had picked up
strong rumours of snatches going down, people being lifted at random from the streets at night. And not one Retro had been
brought to book. The news companies were datavising hive loads of untamed speculation across the communications net: a religious
group, a band of offplanet mercenaries, even wackier notions. The mayor was going apeshit, and leaning on the police commissioner.
Smooth people from an unnamed government intelligence agency had been walking around the corridors at the precinct house.
But they didn’t know anything more than the patrol officers.

Now he, Sergeant Loemer, was going to nail one of those suckers.

He guided the patrol car over the folded barrier and onto the sidewalk. The crim was dead ahead, running for the base of the
Uorestone Tower. Two more precinct cars were riding with Loemer, closing on the crim, hemming him in. Loemer deployed both
of his patrol car’s assault mechanoids, and datavised in their isolate and securement instructions.

That was when the patrol car started to glitch, picking up speed. The sensors showed him frightened citizens in front, racing
to escape; one of the assault mechanoids wobbled past, shooting wildly. He fired shutdown orders into the drive processor.
Not that it made much difference.

Then the Retro started shooting at the patrol cars. Whatever the gun was, it ripped straight through the armour shielding,
smashing the axles and wheel hubs. Metal bearings screeched in that unique, and instantly recognizable, tone which heralded
imminent destruction. Loemer thumped the manual safety cut out, killing power instantly.

The patrol car slewed around and bounced off the road barrier to smack straight into one of the Regree trees planted along
the sidewalk. The internal crash alarm went off, half deafening an already dazed Loemer, and the emergency side hatch jettisoned.
Loemer’s bubble seat slid out along its telescoping rails. The translucent bubble’s thick safety-restraint segments peeled
back, allowing him to drop, wailing, to his knees as the air around him spewed out a terrible volley of sense overload impulses.
His neural nanonics were unable to datavise a shutdown code into the crazed assault mechanoids. The last thing he saw as he
fell onto the ground was the ruined Regree tree starting to keel over directly above him.

Even Al was bruised by the wild strafing of the senseoverload ordnance. The manic glee as he watched the patrol cars skid
and smash was swiftly curtailed by the onslaught of light, sound, and smell. His energistic ability could ward off the worst
of it, but he turned and began a stumbling run towards the arcade’s entrance. Behind him the assault mechanoids continued
to deluge the street with their errant firepower, lumbering about like drunks. Two ran into each other, and rebounded, falling
over. Legs thrashed about in chaos, beetles flipped on their backs.

The sidewalk was littered with prone bodies. Not dead, Al thought, just terribly battered. Je-zus but those mechanical soldier
contraptions were nasty pieces of work. And unlike real police, you wouldn’t be able to buy them.

Maybe New California wasn’t quite paradise after all.

Al staggered his way along the arcade, caught up in the flow of people desperate to escape the havoc. His suit faded away,
the sharp colour and cut reverting to Lovegrove’s original drab overall.

He picked up a little girl whose eyes were streaming tears and carried her. It felt good to help. Those goddamn brainless
pigs should have made sure she was out of the way before they came at him with guns blazing. It would never have happened
back in Chicago.

Two hundred yards from the arcade entrance he stopped among a group of anxious, exhausted people. They’d come far enough from
the sense-overload ordnance to be free of its effects. Families clung together, others were calling out for friends and loved
ones.

Al put the little girl down, still crying, which he thought was due to the Kaiser gas rather than any kind of injury. Then
her mother came rushing up and hugged her frantically. Al was given profuse thanks. A nice dame. Cared about her children
and family. That was good, proper. He was sorry he wasn’t wearing his fedora so he could tip it to her.

Just how did people express that kind of formal courtesy on this world anyhow? Lovegrove was puzzled by the question.

He carried on down the arcade. Cops would be swarming all over the joint in a few minutes. Another hundred and fifty yards,
and he was out on the street again. He started walking. Direction didn’t matter, just
away
. This time he kept Love-grove’s overalls on. No one paid him any attention.

Al wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. Everything was so strange. This world, his situation. Mind, strange wasn’t the word
for it, more like overwhelming. Or just plain creepy. Bad to think that the priests had been right about the after-world,
heaven and hell. He never went to church much, much to his momma’s distress.

I wonder if I’ve been redeemed, paid my celestial dues. Is that why I’m back? But if you got reincarnated didn’t you start
off as a baby?

They weren’t the kind of thoughts he was used to.

A hotel, he told Lovegrove, I need to rest up and think about what to do.

Most of the skyscrapers had some sort of rentable accommodation, apparently. But it would have to be paid for.

Al’s hand automatically went to a leg pocket. He drew out a Jovian Bank credit disk, a thick, oversize coin, sparkly silver
on one side, magenta on the other. Lovegrove obediently explained how it worked, and Al put his thumb on the centre. A hash
of green lines wobbled over the silver side.

“Goddamn!” He tried again, concentrating, wishing. Doing the magic.

The green lines began to form figures, crude at first, then sharp and regular. You could store an entire planet’s treasury
in one of these disks, Lovegrove told him. Al’s ears pricked up at that. Then he was aware of something being not quite right.
A presence, close by.

He hadn’t really thought about the others. Those who had been there when he came into Lovegrove’s body. The same ones who
had deserted him in the disused shop. But if he closed his eyes, and shut out the sounds of the city, he could hear the distant
babelesque clamour. It came from the nightmare domain, the pleas and promises to be brought forth, to live and breathe again.

That same perception gave him a most peculiar vision of the city. Walls of thick black shadow amid a universal greyness. People
moved through it all, distorted whispers echoing all around, audible ghosts. Some
different
from others. Louder, clearer. Not many of them among the multitude.

Al opened his eyes and looked down the road. A section of the barrier was folding down neatly. One of the bullet cars drew
to a halt beside it. The gull-wing door slid up, and inside was a proper car, a genuine American convertible wearing the streamlined
image of the New California vehicle like a piece of clothing. It was low-slung, with a broad hood and lots of chrome trim.
Al didn’t recognize the model, it was more modern than anything in the twenties, and his memory of the thirties and forties
wasn’t so hot.

The man in the red leather driving seat nodded amicably. “You’d better get in,” he said. “The cops are going to catch you
if you stay out on the street. They’re a mite worked up about us.”

Al glanced up and down the sidewalk, then shrugged and climbed in.

Inside, the image of the bullet car tinted the air like a stained soap bubble. “The name’s Bernhard Allsop,” the man behind
the steering column said. He swung the car out into the road. Behind them the barrier rose up smoothly. “I always wanted me
an Oldsmobile like this beauty, never could afford it back when I was living in Tennessee.”

“And this is real now?”

“Who knows, boy? But it sure feels real. And I’m mighty grateful for the opportunity to ride one. You might say I thought
it had passed me by.”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Caused a bit of commotion back there, boy. Them pigs is riled good and proper. We were monitoring what passes for their radio
band these days.”

“I just wanted a cab, that’s all. Someone tried to get smart.”

“There’s a trick to riding around this town without the police knowing. Be happy to show you how sometime.”

“Appreciate it. Where are we going?”

Bernhard Allsop grinned and winked. “Gonna take you to meet the rest of the group. Always need volunteers, they’re kinda hard
to come by.” He laughed, a high-pitched stuttering yodel reminding Al of a piglet.

“They left me behind, Bernhard. I don’t have anything to say to them.”

“Yeah, well. You know how it was. You weren’t altogether there, boy. I said we should have taken you along with us. Kin is
kin, even though it ain’t exactly family here, know what I mean? Glad to see you came through in the end, though.”

“Thank you.”

“So what’s your name, boy?”

“Al Capone.”

The Oldsmobile swerved as Bernhard flinched. His knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the wheel; then he risked an
anxious sideways glance at his passenger. Where before there had been a twenty-year-old man dressed in a set of dark red overalls,
there was now a debonair Latin-ethnic character in a double-breasted blue suit and pigeon-grey fedora.

“You shitting me?”

Al Capone reached into his suit and produced a miniature baseball bat. A now highly apprehensive Bernhard Allsop watched it
grow to full size. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the black stains around the end were.