Mick Farren - THE FEELIES

The bastards had let her go home in a taxi. They hadn't even bothered to…

She wasn't going to think about that. She unscrewed the top of the whiskey bottle. She one third filled the glass. Next she stripped the seal from the Coke container and topped it up. She tasted it experimentally. She added a little more Coke. She tasted it again, and seemed satisfied.

She picked up the first pill, turned it over in her fingers, and put it in her mouth. She sipped her drink and swallowed.

She took a second pill and then a third. She started to get into a kind of mindless rhythm. She took the pills in scrupulous order, up one row and down the next. Pick up the pill, place it on her tongue, sip Jap and Coke, repeat the process.

She had worked her way through a third of them when she started to feel sick and a little dizzy. They couldn't be coming on so fast. It had to be her imagination. She got a grip on herself and pressed on.

The pills were half gone. The nausea had not faded.

She forced down five at once. She couldn't hold it together anymore. Her hand started to shake. She couldn't get herself to control it anymore. Wanda-Jean was afraid. She wanted to go, to end it, but she didn't want to go like this.

She suddenly wanted to talk to someone. She needed desperately to talk to another human being. She got up. Her legs seemed a very long way away. It was difficult to breathe, and walk. She lurched to the wall and made a badly coordinated grab for the wall phone. At the first attempt she missed. On the second attempt she managed to get a grip on it. She put it to her ear and pressed the button for the operator.

"Operator."

It was a synthetic voice. Wanda-Jean sobbed. "I need to talk to someone."

"I'm sorry, I'm not programmed to process that request. If you require an emergency service, please press three."

"I just want to talk to someone."

"I'm sorry, I'm not programmed to process that request. If you require an emergency service, please press three."

She should call someone, a friend, one of the men in her life. Yeah, right. Call Murray Dorfman, call Bobby Priest, call any of the millions of people who had seen her crawl naked from that tank.

The synthetic voice of the phone was in her ear. "I am breaking the connection. I will report a fault on the line."

The colors around her had become strange. They seemed washed out and dead, as if they were slowly fading to black and white. Wanda-Jean felt terribly tired.

It was very, very hard to stand. Things were fading around her. It was hard to make her thoughts work. She was drifting to an empty warm place. She would be safe there. She wouldn't be.

Wanda-Jean's legs gave way. She slid down the wall and crumpled in a heap on the floor. Her head lolled onto her shoulder. Her eyes had rolled up into her head. They didn't find her until three days later.

RALPH TURNED INTO EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE K as he had done every day, four days a week, for as long as he could remember. The sky was gray and overcast, and the air was sticky. Very soon it would rain, but that probably wouldn't help any. He had spent the night with the woman in the blue coat, so at least he was coming from somewhere different, and that in itself was a novelty. They had gone drinking together after the disturbance outside the Sanyo-Hyatt, and after a couple of hours, she had invited him to go back to her place. It was another cheap-lease as small and as pokey as his. He found it a bit disturbing that the walls were covered with stills from "Wildest Dreams," but he didn't say anything. They made love with the drunken clumsiness of the desperate. It turned out that her name was Nancy, and they made plans to meet later in the week. Ralph wasn't sure how he felt about that. Nancy was a little strange. She had spent too much time alone with her television. He really wasn't sure what he thought about very much at that moment. He had a vicious hangover, and he was still wearing the previous day's clothes. It didn't really matter. No one would notice. He passed his ID card across the scanner and punched himself in. He was actually on time for a change. Nancy lived a lot closer in than he did. He took the elevator down to 5066 section. Sam was already there. Sweeping.

"Morning, Sam."

"Morning, Ralph."

JOHN WILSON HEFFER WAS STILL BILLY the Kid, and his mind was screaming. The dialogue went on and on.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."

"Not unless you want to surrender peaceable and come back with me."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then I don't see no way out. We'd better get to it."

Without another word, Billy/Heffer's hand flashed to the Colt, but he wasn't fast enough. The rifle was in Garrett's hand before his own pistol was even clear of its holster. There was a bang, a puff of smoke, and, immediately afterward, a searing, burning pain in his chest that was made doubly bad by the overloaded tactile input. He was thrown back onto the hot, red dirt of the street. The loop of malfunctioning fantasy went around and around, picking him up and knocking him down again, over and over again, and all the time there was the pain of the bullets smashing into his chest. It seemed to have been going on since infinity. The detached part of his mind had curled into a metaphoric fetal ball, praying that madness would come and take away the pain. No one was monitoring, and no one was coming to get him out. All he could hope for was that something would snap and that he would achieve oblivion.

He was suddenly on his feet again.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."

"Not unless you want to surrender peaceable and come back with me."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then I don't see no way out. We'd better get to it."

Without another word, Billy/Heffer's hand flashed to his Colt, but he wasn't fast enough. The rifle was in Garrett's hand before his own pistol was even clear of its holster. There was a bang, a puff of smoke, and, immediately afterward, a searing, burning pain in his chest. He was thrown back onto the hot, red dirt of the street.

He was suddenly on his feet again.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."

In 1979, when the first version of this book was written, Mick Farren was observing punk rock with a grim delight and had become convinced that the world was headed for cultural damnation. In the ensuing ten years, he has seen little reason to revise his opinions.