Theme Planet (24 page)

“Shit,” he muttered, and his
impatience was an alien in his chest, beating to get out. His disappointment
was a discovered love letter from another man. His frustration was a premature
ejaculation.

“Damn you all,” he growled, and
glanced up at the sun, at an alien sun, and yet it felt so normal, felt like
Earth. Part of the con, he realised. Part of the sick trick. No wonder Theme
Planet did so fucking well. It was the perfect location; exotic, but not too
exotic. Foreign, but not too foreign. Ideal for wannabe adventurers who really
didn’t
want
an adventure. It’s fake, he realised. The whole fucking place, the
whole fucking thing is
fake.
Fake
experiences, fake rides, fake thrills, fake adventures. Even on Adventure
Central, the climbs up the Skycloud Mountains, the rides down the Death Rapids,
exploration in the Lost Dunes, searching for treasure in the Caves of Hades...
all constructed adventures, all manufactured experiences. None of it was real.
None of it was
genuine.
Not like this. Here. Now.

Dex watched the police station.
There was absolutely no indication there had been a violent shoot-out on the
marble steps involving Theme Planet’s finest law enforcers. Dex narrowed his
eyes, once again suspicious. Everything was just too neat, too perfect, too
damn
clean.

As Dex waited, fuming gently, he
analysed himself. A few bruises and a spinning mind seemed his only injuries.
And his knuckles. They hurt like a motherfucker. They always did.

The sun crawled across the sky.
In the distance, children squealed in pleasure and wheels rumbled on tracks.
The fake pleasure of the Theme Planet really started to grate on Dex’s nerves.
It was all created. All fake. All false. An ersatz
world.

A groundcar pulled up, and five
provax police piled out, running up the steps. They left the motor running,
modest fumes
phutting
from gleaming exhaust pipes.

“There’s something so
wrong
here,” he muttered, and wondered about talking to himself. Kat always told him
off for his little guilty pleasure, but the more time he spent trawling the
streets of London looking for crimes to solve, bad guys to put down, evils to
cure, wrongs to right, the worse and worse he got. Only now,
now
he
would have preferred London a thousand times over, preferred the dark violent
corners of the Concrete Grove, rejoiced in the dirt and grime and human
effluence in Downtown Bury, sang with celebration to the High Gods for only a
moment of fighting in Dirtside Ringside - when compared to the plastic grass
and fake pleasure of Theme Planet. “It’s bad here,” he realised. “As fake as
plastic steak. As false as
Bible II - The Remix.’”

There.

Jim had stepped out from the
shade of the building, and was glancing up and down the street. He seemed wary
-and quite rightly. If Dex had his way, he’d shove a fucking battleaxe up Jim
the policeman’s arsehole, sideways, and with multiple prejudice.

Jim stood for a few moments, then
lit a cigarette. Even from this distance Dex could see the glow of the tip, and
he imagined he could smell the smoke.
Bastard,
he thought, now even
having
more
reason to hate the man.
That son of a bitch’s bitch.
Dex wondered if he could take a cigarette from a dying man’s mouth...

And now Dex knew something was
corrupt. The last time Jim was at the police station, he’d been sprinting and
shooting fellow policemen. And here he was, cool as cucumber, on the scene of a
recent massacre?

Yeah right.

Seemingly satisfied that no
Dexter Colls was going to leap out and machine gun him, Jim walked down the
steps and started along the street. He stopped by a battered old brown Ford -
somewhat at contrast to the sleek hydrogen groundcars of Theme Planet - opened
the door, and looked up and down the street again.
He knows,
poked Dex’s
paranoia.
He fucking knows what you’re thinking, knows what you’re planning.
But of course he didn’t. As far as Jim was concerned, Dex was being a good boy
and getting on the next Shuttle bound for Earth. In Jim’s world of tough
hotshot cops, fuckers did what they were told, and if they didn’t, Jim shot
them. He was old-school; Dex could tell. He’d met men like Jim a thousand times
over - and they weren’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, they got the job
done, and got the job done good.

~ * ~

Dex landed on
the
paved car park, boots thudding, and ran to his groundcar. He wheelspun from the
car park, hammered down the road, then slowed as he saw the brown Ford up
ahead. He dropped back further and allowed a few cars to interject between
himself and the car he was tailing. Having worked PUF in London for years, Dex
was proficient in following suspects, but as he so rightly recognised, Jim
was
police, and police were the best in the business not just at following, but at
recognising, in turn, that they were being tailed. Dex kept a good distance,
and they headed inland, away from the tourist resort to the north of the Kool
Kid Zone.

The sun was still gleaming in the
sky, and Dex felt incredibly tired as he followed Jim. He was filled with self-doubt
and a constant, niggling fear. The what-ifs which could poison a man’s brain.

No, he told himself.
You have
to stay focused, buddy. You have to see the job through and get the job done,
no matter what the cost. And this Jim bastard
?
Well, he’s going to
become a casualty of war.

Jim did nothing suspicious,
nothing to make Dex think he knew he was being followed. But Dex knew he would
check; all police did, simply as a matter of course. After all, in this day and
age, there was always some dangerous motherfucker wanting you dead. Dex knew
that better than most. London was a rough town, one of the worst. A living,
breathing beast, a dark beast, which sucked people in and only allowed them to
escape in pieces.

They turned from the interstate
after twenty minutes of driving, and Dex allowed Jim to escape
into
a
gated housing estate complex. There was no way he could successfully tail him
in such close confines. He had to cruise, so as not to be discovered. It was
much better this way.

Dex waited five minutes to give
Jim time, then as another car entered he nipped through the gates behind it - a
woman driven an elderly lady who drove as if her car carried a gyroscope
triggered nuclear bomb, with greatest, anally-retentive trepidation.

Once inside the housing compound,
Dex eased the Honda around the sweeping streets between colourful trees, with red,
yellow, blue and green trunks as well as leaves, and between bushes of what
smelled like lavender and rose. The whole place was alive with sensory
information.
Ha. The benefits of being Theme Planet police. But it’s still
fucking fake!

It took him ten minutes to find
Jim’s car, and then he settled down up the street in the shade of various
multicoloured, sighing trees. Opening his window, again Dex craved a smoke.
Just to soothe his nerves. Just for old time’s sake. After all, any minute now
he could get a sniper’s round in the back of the skull...

If they wanted him offworld that
bad.

If they wanted him
quiet.

Dex eased back the Honda’s seat
and tried his best to relax. He imagined Jim entering the house after a hard
day’s work, placing his gun on the side, kissing his wife on the cheek as she
emerged from the kitchen with an apron covered in flour. “Hi honey,” she’d say.
“Hard day at work?” He’d frown a little, and then mutter, “No, nothing unusual.
Fucked over an Earth policeman called Dex Colls, but hey, that’s just the way
of the world, isn’t it?” Then his kids would come galloping down the stairs and
he’d swing them into the air, kissing their scented hair, smiling in response
to their laughter...

Dex awoke. Something had changed.
He wiped away a tear, and focused on the brown Ford. Jim was standing outside
in casual clothes (well, casual for a piggy-pig-pig, thought Dex, bitterly) and
his wife stepped out. She had long, curled black hair, and the two boys that
emerged shared her dark colouring. Jim ruffled one boy’s hair as he passed and
climbed into the back of the Ford, and for some reason, despite his earlier
fantasy, despite his earlier imaginative rambling, this clamped Dex’s heart
worse than any electric-shock therapy, and
squeezed
it, and filled him
with bitterness and bile. This was no longer some fantasy, this was real, and
Jim had his own family and that was just
bad,
so bad, worse than
anything Dex had ever felt. “Man, where’s your fucking empathy?” he thought. “Where’s
your fucking humanity? How could you do this to me, how could you treat me like
this? I’m the same as you, I’m the fucking
same,
Jimboy.”

The Ford reversed off the drive,
and headed down the street like something out of the old Earth filmys. Dex
followed at a casual distance, wondering idly where they were headed, but not
really caring. The worst of the burn had eased off, and the sun was finally
sinking. It was cooling down, shadows lengthening as they hit the highway and
flashed past signs for
Dinozens, Kiddy’s
Coaster Overload
and
Lolly Pop
Forest.

Surely not now, thought Dex. Not
rollercoasters,
now...

They finally reached the
Dinozens
turnoff, and Dex followed the
Ford up a wide twenty-lane sliproad and through colourful avenues, until they
reached a car park which stretched off for as far as the eye could see. Jim
parked up and his family climbed out of the car. The young boys were bouncing
excitedly.

The car park wasn’t the only
thing that stretched off for as far as the eye could see. So did... the
dinozens.

Dex sat, and stared up, and
stared up, and gawped like a drooling village idiot. They were big. Hell yes,
they were BIG.

“What, in the name of
fuck,
are those?” he mumbled, and climbed out of his groundcar. He glanced around
warily, but received no undue attention. He stared at the beasts. There were
perhaps fifty of them that he could see, each as big as a forty-storey
towerblock or cubescraper. They were all manner of shapes and sizes, some
reptilian with great jagged heads covered with armoured plates and tusks and
scales that gleamed violet in the dying rays of the sun. Their eyes glowed;
several breathed fire. And it was with a
blink
they reminded Dex of
dinosaurs.
Of course, he groaned inwardly. Dinozens. Dinosaurs. Aliens. Alien
dinosaurs...

They were a deformed mimicry of
Earth’s ancient fossils, even bigger than Earth dinosaurs, even wilder of eye
and sharper of tooth and fang and tusk and claw. They roamed around this
section of the
Kool Kid Zone
with
great ponderousness, swinging their huge heads, some sharp, some armoured, some
shaggy like a wild thing, moving and turning, shifting and watching with
baleful reptilian eyes.

Dex realised Jim and his bouncing
family were getting away, and he followed at a wary distance. Now all he needed
were a few spare moments with Jim. That was all it would take, Dex knew. He
gave a sour grin. Oh yes. The hand had been dealt, Dex treated like a fucking
loon. Not any longer. Now, Dex was wiser than wise, harder that hard,
streetcool and tuned in to the
game
, fucker.

He made the gates, passed through
the turnstiles (there were no charges here, not like other theme parks where
charges applied at
every damn step of the way, sucker -
pay for travel,
pay to park, pay for entry, pay to piss, pay to eat, pay to fucking
breathe
in some of those money-grabbing bastard establishments - and those were the
ones Dex could mention and remember and spit and moan about). He took a map.
Dinozens
was zoned, with different
breeds of dinozen occupying different areas, some with very high fences and
warning notices. Dex narrowed his eyes, only giving the map a cursory glance.
It couldn’t be
that
dangerous; after all, it was for the kids, right?
And anyway, he was more intent on seeing where Jim and his wife and kids went.

There. Down a wide, leafy
walkway.

“You back-stabbing traitor,”
muttered Dex, and hurried after them. So, they were out for an evening’s
entertainment. Enjoy the Theme Planet on which they lived and worked, and on
which so many poor dumb schmucks had to
pay
a fortune just to visit for
two or three weeks.