K Jeter - Noir

McNihil was impressed in spite of himself. With a certain childlike, pure delight in random destruction- You never grow too old , he thought, for this kind of stuff -he watched as the gantry went wild, raking its terminal claw in the airliner’s row of broken-out passenger-section windows. The gantry end snagged in the window hole closest to the raised tail, with enough force to snap loose a few critical bolts and struts. The dead plane shivered and began to disintegrate, the remains of its laminated exterior peeling away like shed snakeskin, the structural elements wrenching loose from one another. The urban scavengers who had been making their homes in the fuselage were revealed as their sheltering curtain rags were torn away, the network of spun ropes snapping and whipping in air. A Brueghelian scene tilted in the midst of the city, of compressed, interwoven sleep and copulation, chemical ingestion and little meals prepared on tinder-fed campfires. Tilted to briefly vertical, the awake and sleeping inhabitants, in narcotized or other dreams, tumbled down the fuselage’s central aisle as the hooked gantry swung the other direction, upsetting the wreckage’s fragile balance. Their screams and surprised shouts echoed off the surrounding buildings.

With a metallic groan, the downed 747’s spine snapped, the rusted cylinder folding in the middle at a ninety-degree angle. Rag-ensembled bodies dropped to the ground below, the fortunate ones being able to shake their dazed heads and scramble to their feet before more debris fell upon them. McNihil had prudently backed away, retreating to the littered sidewalk on the other side of the street. From there, he watched as the broken fuselage now arced sideways, the motion uprooting the nose section from its grave in the tunnels. The operators of the panhandling gantry could be seen behind the cockpit’s shattered windows; a gray-bearded face displayed terror as the figure desperately clung to the useless levers and ropes.

The L-shaped wreckage finished its sideways roll, coming to rest in the middle of the empty street. Creaking metal sounded in basso, accompanied by the smaller, bell-like notes of rivets and bolts clattering through the struts, as the 747 continued to disintegrate in slower motion. The inhabitants, those who were still alive and relatively uninjured, stood in the clouds of billowing dust, commenting upon the loss of their home with emotions that ranged from hysteria to fatalistic amusement.

McNihil checked his watch. The unplanned destruction of the pirasite colony had been entertaining in its way, but a distraction from what he’d come here for. He was already a few minutes late for his appointment, and there were still some details he had to take care of before meeting up with the guy. He shielded his eyes from the dust and partial sunlight, scanning across the street-level fronts of the surrounding buildings. There we go , thought McNihil; he had spotted what he was looking for. Leaving the wreckage behind him, he strode toward a small transient hotel a block away.

“I’m going to be needing a room in a little while.” The jittering neon outside read End Zone Hotel; the place had a pro football motif, yellowing posters of numbered and helmeted players on the walls, from a time when there’d been those kinds of teams anywhere in the Gloss. Now the words seemed to have taken on a different meaning: the hotel’s lobby looked like one of hell’s waiting lounges, for those damned from sheer inertia. Not even half-devils , thought McNihil. Quarter- or eighth-devils, at the most . God probably couldn’t be bothered to hate them. “I’ll pay for it now.” He dropped old-fashioned cash into the battered chrome drawer extruded toward him.

“Then it’s your room right now, buddy.” Behind the overlapping layers of steel grilles, the desk clerk roused himself long enough to pull the drawer back and count the money. “Hour rate works out the same as the day rate. You only get a break if you stay a week or longer.” One yellow-tinged eye regarded him with suspicion. “You don’t look like you’re going to be around that long.”

McNihil glanced over his shoulder at the humpbacked upholstered chairs and sag-spined sofas, Salvation Army castoffs, that furnished the lobby. The furniture’s occupants had assumed the same coloration, the exact tone of dirty-gray putty he knew would be edging the clouded windows upstairs. The chairs and the nominal people in them looked as if they were made of the same substance, as though the sweaty cushions had been caught in the act of giving birth to blank-faced human beings, or the seated figures, legs and crutches sprawled in front of them, were slowly devolving into last century’s seating arrangements. McNihil glanced back at the desk clerk. “You got that one right.”

“Want the key now or when you head back here?”

“It can wait.” McNihil pulled several items out of pockets and deposited them in the tray. “But I need you to hold on to some of my stuff for a while.”

The desk clerk pulled the drawer onto his side of the counter and looked at the objects. “You gotta be kidding, mister.” The biggest and heaviest of them was the black shape of his tannhäuser. “We don’t get involved in that kind of trouble.”

McNihil slid more cash under the bottom edge of the grille.

Nodding, the desk clerk tucked the money into his shirt pocket. “Now we do.”

“Good.” McNihil pushed himself back from the counter. “Take care of everything and see how much better you feel.” He put his wallet away slowly, making sure the clerk could see the other bills’ corners sticking out of it. “Later on.”

As McNihil was heading out of the End Zone Hotel’s lobby, he glanced over again at the figures slumped in the decaying sofa and upholstered chairs. A half-dozen of them, still looking vaguely human, tundra for spiders to begin laying their gray nets over. A bigger web had already been spun: sustenance checks had obviously been pooled, so that a multi-apertured I.V dispenser could be rented. The surgical-steel box sat on the lobby’s threadbare carpet, at the base of a chrome tree with clear, fluid-filled bags hanging from its short branches. An octopus network of tubes ran from the unit’s central control mechanism to the hypodermics of the connectees, the needles taped down to the arms of the ones fortunate enough to still have usable veins there; other lines snaked up trouser legs or were fastened onto necks like long, skinny, reverse-flow vampires. The most decrepit of the figures had the line trailing into his open fly, as though the sharp metal and polyethylene tube were his final lover, searching for any place where his blood still flowed.

From the other tube, the big one of the television mounted on a plywood shelf in the lobby’s upper corner, mumbling junkie dialogue seeped out. McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced up at the screen. On it was the popular hypo opera He’s Never Early, He’s Always Late ; transactions involving little folded slips of paper and glassine envelopes were going on among the professionally disreputable-looking actors. A long time ago, back when he’d still been working as an asp-head, McNihil had done some heavy copyright defense for the show’s producers, laying into a Thai cable start-up that had tried to clone the central concept without paying royalties. He was glad to see that the show was still running, though he’d never been able to figure out the charm of it. For the decaying, knocked-out figures sprawled around the lobby, it must have brought back memories of their younger days. As he watched, needle-tip penetrated flesh on the screen; blood flowered up a calibrated cylinder. He turned his head, hearing the steel box click and hum; the thin hoses trembled. The gray faces turned grayer and half-lidded eyes unfocused as the synchronized hit, triggered by a data wire plugged into the back of the TV, rolled up their brainstems.