M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Hey!' said Tig Vesicle.

They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them. They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles-where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height. Cafй йlectrique had already rotted her little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then said something like:

'Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?'

She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm not sure what you're saying.'

This seemed to anger her unreasonably. 'Fortie!' she shrieked.

Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:

'I'm so scared I don't know whether to laugh or shit.'

Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the street door. The girl's eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.

It was this:

One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing air. Even their shadows had tusks. Their huge arms were blue with cold, but they were too fucking hard-on to care about that. 'Hey,' they told one another, 'I wish I'd put less clothes on. You know?' The entry pattern was this: they rushed the door of the twink parlour in twos, and the kiddies inside shot them down from behind the coffins.

It was bedlam in there in quite a short time after they killed the Hi-Lite girl, with the flat fizzing arcs of reaction bolts, the flicker of laser sights in the smoke, and a rich smell of human fluids. The front window was out. Big smoking holes were in the walls. Two of the tanks had fallen off their trestles; the rest, alive with shocking pink alarm graphics, were warming up fast. To Tig Vesicle it seemed that the whole issue revolved around Tank Seven. The kids had given up on getting it open: but they weren't going to leave it for anyone else. Seeing this early on, Vesicle had crawled as far away from it as possible, and got in a corner with his hands over his eyes, while cultivars rushed through the smoke, shouting, 'Hey, don't bother to cover me!' and were picked off. The kids had a tactical advantage there: but down on firepower, down on your luck, and they were being pushed back. They shrieked in their gluey argot. They pulled new guns from beneath their rainslickers. Looking over their shoulders for another way out, they got shot: in the legs, or the spine, and they were soon in a condition the tailor couldn't cure. Things looked bad, then two things happened:

Somebody hit Tank Seven with a short reaction shell.

And the Cray sisters appeared in the tank farm doorway, shaking their heads and reaching for the pieces in their purses.

Chinese Ed and Rita Robinson were on the run somewhere in the weeds in back of the burning carwash. Hanson was dead, Ed guessed, and the DA too, so there would be no help from that quarter. Otto Rank had the high ground. He also had the 30.06 he had taken from Hogfat Wisconsin's kitchen after he tortured and killed Hogfat's teenage daughter. It was the way he laid her out that was the missing piece of the puzzle, Ed thought. I should have seen that, but I was too busy being the smart dick. Not seeing that was going to cost two more lives, but at least one of them was only his own.

Ed's head got too far above the weeds. The flat crack-and-whip of the 30.06 cut across the drowsy afternoon air. Some birds flew up from the river bank a quarter of a mile away.

Sixteen shots, Ed thought. Maybe he's low on ammo now.

Ed's ramrod Dodge was where he had left it parked, on the service road the other side of the lot. They weren't going to make it that far. Rita was shot. Ed was shot too, but not as bad. On the up side, he had a couple of shells left in one of the Colts. He ran harder, but this seemed to open Rita's wound.

'Hey, Ed,' she said. 'Put me down. Let's do it here.'

She laughed, but her face was grey and defeated.

'Jesus, Rita,' Ed said.

'I know. You're sorry. Well you shouldn't be, Ed. I got shot with you, which is more than most girls get.' She tried to laugh again. 'Don't you want to make it with me in the weeds?'

'Rita… '

'I'm tired, Ed.'

She didn't say any more, and her expression didn't change. Eventually he put her down in the weeds and began to cry. After a minute or two he shouted:

'Otto, you fucker!'

'Yo!' said Rank.

'She's dead.'

There was a silence. After a bit, Rank said:

'You want to come in?'

'She's dead, Otto. You're next.'

There was a laugh.

'If you come in-' Rank began, then seemed to be thinking. 'What is it I do?' he called. 'Hey, help me out here, Ed. Oh, wait, no, got it: If you come in I see you get a fair trial.' He put a shot where he estimated Ed's skull had last been. 'Guess what?' he said, when the echoes had died away. 'I'm shot too, Ed. Rite shot me in the heart, long before she met you. These women! It was point-blank, Ed. You make anything of that?'

'I make suck my dick out of it,' Ed said.

He stood up as coolly as he could. He saw Otto Rank down at the edge of the carwash roof in the classic infantry kneel, the 30.06 up at aim, its sling tight round his elbow. Ed raised the Colt carefully in both hands. He had two shots left, and it was important he spoiled the first one. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and squeezed off carefully. The round went ten, twelve feet wide, and Ed dropped his pistol arm to his side. Otto, who had been surprised to see him pop up out of the weeds like that, gave a wild laugh of relief.

'You got the wrong gun, Ed!' he shouted.

He stood up. 'Hey,' he said. 'Take another pop. It's free!'

He spread his arms wide. 'Nobody shoots anybody at eighty yards with a Colt.45,' he said.

Ed raised the gun again and fired.

Rank was picked up from the head end and thrown backwards with his feet in the air. He fell off the roof and into the weeds. 'Fuck you, Ed!' he screamed, but his face was half off and he was already dead. Chinese Ed looked down at his Colt. He made a gesture as if to throw it away. 'I'm sorry, Rita,' he was beginning to say, when the sky behind the carwash turned a steely colour and ripped open like a page of cheap print. This time the duck was huge. Something was wrong with it. Its yellow feathers had a greasy look, and a human tongue hung laxly out of one side of its beak.