Jack Yeovil - Demon Download

Chantal, knowing she should favour caution, ran for it, and slipped herself through, into the darkness.

Inside, strong hands grabbed for her.

Stack had been lucky with his first shots, and put a couple of Oscars in the dirt. He had aimed high, and caught their heads just as their durium visors were raising. Where a human being would have eyes, these things had twin lases. Lauderdale would be looking at his prey through the remote cameras in the Oscars' heads. Stack ran across the soft sand towards Lake Havasu. The heavy androids would have to step carefully or sink. That gave him a chance to get to cover.

A high whine started.

Stack picked up speed.

The noise got louder, painfully so.

One of the Oscars was mounted with maxiscreamers. At close range, within ten seconds, the noise would trigger epileptic fits in those susceptible to them, and make susceptible 7 % of those not previously afflicted. Within twenty seconds, it would cause motor neuron dysfunction, triggering nausea, vomiting, diorrhea, internal and external bleeding, uncontrollable hiccoughs, loss of bladder control. Within thirty seconds, it would crack your skull like a plate and cook your brain like a microwave. By then, Stack would have been dead anyway, because at about twenty-five seconds the pitch would be enough to detonate the slugs in his pumpgun and, more importantly, the ScumStoppers in the rings of his bandolier. Stack beat any and all of his own personal records over the distance.

Behind him, rocks flew apart as the waves of ultrasound vibrations hit them.

Stack grit his teeth as they began to rattle, and resisted the temptation to jam his hands over his ears. That would just slow him down, and his only chance was to get out of the range. The maxiscreamer was a riot control device. It was supposed to put people within a few hundred yards out of commission so the mop-up squads could move in. Its drawback was that you couldn't send anyone or anything into the field while it was turned on. If he could outrace the sound, then he would have a head start on the Oscars.

He felt a trickle of blood come form one of his ears. Later, he would find whether he had a ruptured eardrum. Later…If there was a later.

He was between the half-buried hulks of buildings now. Twenty feet below there would be the street level of old Lake Havasu. The necks of streetlamps stock out from the sand. The business signs were flush with the ground level.

There would be whole buildings down there for future archaeologists to pick through.

Up ahead, looming out of the sand, was a battered hardboard cut-out of John Travolta, greasy pompadour half-broken away, grin still in place, and rhinestoned arm reaching for the sky. Behind him were broken letters. This had been the Rialto, the local movie-theatre. The curtain must have come down on Havasu during the run of the Grease-Saturday Night Fever reissue double bill in the early '80s.

Stack had heard that John Travolta was out of show business these days. The story was that the star had joined the Josephites and was out there in Salt Lake City. That might have been a smart decision, Stack figured. It didn't look like the gentiles were going to come out of this well.

The dome behind Travolta was cracked like an egg. Stack squeezed through, dropped fifteen feet and found himself crouched between rows of rotting velvet seats. He was up on the balcony. A withered corpse in an usherette's uniform, with a tray of dusty confectionary, lay a few feet away. The carpets were thick with sand, ticket-stubs, cartridge cases and used Trojans.

Incredibly, there were pictures playing in the dark. There was no sound, and the silver screen had three long horizontal rents across its Panavision breadth; but the projector was still working.

It was a bizarre assemblage of spliced-together offcuts from late '70s Hollywood, up-to-date porno, Russian musickie video and newsnet footage. Down there in the stalls, there must be an audience. Stack realized he had stumbled into a sandrat nest.

Clint Eastwood raised his Magnum .44, mouthing "do you feel lucky, punk?" The German hardcore star Billy Priapus— who had bio-implanted horns and goat's feet—strutted his stuff, slobbering. Petya Tcherkassoff preened to a disco beat. A pair of esperadoes slugged it out mentally in a Puerto Galtieri backstreet, veins popping.

The Oscars would be here soon. He supposed he ought to get out of range before innocent people got killed in the crossfire.

He found the stairs, and barreled down them. People, no more than skeletons in rags, were sleeping in the corridors, huddled against the walls. The foyer was lit by a burning torch. Outside the reinforced glass doors, the sand was a solid wall.

"Have you got a ticket, boy?"

Stack turned, his gun up. An old, old man in what was left of a commissionaire's coat staggered at him. His eyes were dark voids.

"Quick, how do I get out of here?" Stack asked.

"Can't get out without a ticket, boy."

"How do I get a ticket?"

"You pays at the counter. Kids today don't know nothin' about respect. You forms an orderly queue and you pays at the counter."

Stack glanced at the cashier's box. A bald fashion mannequin was stuffed into it, her ballerina's tutu fluffed up around her, her stiff arms broken.

There was a commotion outside. The secured doors shifted, and sand dribbled through at the bottom.

"I can't stand customers who track dirt all over the carpets, you know."

Sand was being scraped away from the doors. Stack saw the metal face of an Oscar, and the glass exploded inwards. The shards were followed by fifty tons of sand.

"You can't come in like that," said the commissionaire. "You can't…"

Stack barged through the double doors into the auditorium. The Oscar was floundering through the sand behind him. Stack had heard the creak of a lase visor being raised.

The show was over, and the audience—sandrats, gaudy girls, no-hope gamblers, AWOLS, a few Indians—were on their feet, singing.

An MC with protruding cheekbones and a top hat led the chorus in "America the Beautiful, 1999".

"Oh beautiful,

for spacious skies

Oh amber heaps of sand…''

The Oscar was in the auditorium, its lase lashing out like a whip. A row of seatbacks burned through. Some people scattered. Others kept singing.

"Oh poison mountain majesties

Above the blighted land…"

Stack whirled and fired the pumpgun. His shot clanged harmlessly against the Oscar's durium torso. The android's head swivelled, trying for a lock on Stack's heat pettems.

"America, America,

God spat His curse on thee…"

The audience was panicking, crushing through the exits. The MC kept singing, waving his thin arms, keeping the beat with a conjurer's wand.

"And made it worse

With massacres

From sea to stinking sea…"

There were two more Oscars in the cinema now. Sand pressed in after them like a slow wave. A chandelier fell from the ceiling, and draped around the first Oscar like an incredibly ostentatious diamond necklace.

Stack fired again, and got the machine in its lase hole. The Oscar stood stiff, and fell forwards, smashing seats like balsawood. Its companions came for him.

Stack backed away, towards the screen. There were pictures playing again. Marlon Brando as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The old sage of the spaceways was ranting, cotton falling from his cheeks, at C-3PO, a golden-skinned robot. As a kid, Stack had seen Star Wars twenty or thirty times.

The Oscars came down the aisles. Bitterly, Stack wished all robots could be cute and bumbling like C3PO.