LOVE WITHOUT GUN CONTROL

M. CHRISTIAN

ISBN 9781615080861

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

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PageTurner Editions/Futures-Past Science Fiction

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

LOVE WITHOUT GUN CONTROL

NEEDLE TASTE

HUSH, HUSH

1,000

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

THE RICH MAN’S GHOST

MEDICINE MAN

WANDERLUST

ORPHAN

BURIED & DEAD

FRIDAY

NOTHING SO DANGEROUS

SHALLOW FATHOMS

CONSTANTINE IN LOVE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Information

INTRODUCTION

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M. Christian, 2009

LOVE WITHOUT GUN CONTROL

“You’re a real psycho... a real burning, flaming, unhinged, bonkers, nutso, crazy kinda guy. You’d kill your mother for a buck, your father for the change in his pocket, kittens for a song, and strangle babies for candy. You’re a down-’n-dirty, scum-sucking, foaming-at-the-mouth, mucho, macho kinda guy,” Billy said, sneering at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“You’re a dangerous, hair-trigger, blood-soaked, son-of-a-bitch that smiles when he maims, sings when he cripples, and laughs when he kills. You’re dangerous, crazy, mean, nasty, and oh, so cool –”

Doc Sneezer’s hair cream tamed the jungle of his wheat locks.

“Mommas cover their babies’ ears when they hear your name, blind men avoid your stare, cripples run away when you come a’ walkin’ – you’re one scum-sucking, fast-drawing, vicious, crazy killer,” Billy said to himself, bare chest out, gun belt low on bony hips, baby-whiskered chin out in exaggerated machismo.

“Billy, you come down here this minute,” Mama Smithew yelled from below. “Supper’s on the table.”

“What did you call me?” to the mirror, “I’m coming, Missus Smithew,” over his shoulder, to the tiled bath, echoing down.

* * * *

The Smithew house rang with domestic harmony. The pine-shod walls of typical, traditional, cinderblock and steel cladding – set with photos and tributes to generations of kin lost to disagreement and wild shots – absorbed only so much of the talk, the laughs, the low-playing band music. The paintings of gone relatives, sporting in postures of dignity and preparedness, bounced against the walls with the actions of the family rustling around getting another Sunday dinner ready.

“Did you wash your hands?” Mountain of Mom, Ma Smithew, inspected the neighbor boy’s mitts. Billy Hitch complied with visible restraint: the cool demeanor of the macho vicious killer buried. Ma and Pa Hitch were in Dodge for an Aunt’s marriage – and their regular family backup was with them. Still, the giantess grated on his bravado, and he positively ached to draw and plug. But while youth granted much – fast healing, good reflexes, keen eyes – Ma Smithew could still cripple a flea off a limping dog at twenty paces: Had to have lived as long as she had and raised and buried so many of her own fast-fingered young ‘uns. “There’s something dark and farm here, Billy-Boy, but that’s probably the best as you can do, I guess.” She swatted him towards his seat at the table, putting the safety back on her pearl-gripped Widow-maker, and set to straightening the tablecloth.

Grandpa, an old wrinkled tablecloth himself, gray and white around his frayed edges, sat in his carved wooden throne depicting great moments in the winning of the West from the Unarmed Indians. “Goddamned sissies, goddamned pussies, goddamned freeloaders...” he drooled with tracking eyes and the sights on his ancient Colt revolver, as tired, rusted and tarnished as he was, trying to follow, and target, the scurrying actions of his descendants.

No panic, no ducks, no return fire: Papa was a figurehead and Unloaded – though no one was mean enough to mention it. Taken for granted was that the colt was froze and empty (gift from dead-and-buried Grandma, shot down in an honorable fashion: two for one sale at the Pixie Mart), and that Mama Smithew would always, always check that Grandpa’s hammer hit empty air.

“Mama! Rob’s almost here and the table’s not done!”

“Hush it, child. The boy’s got minutes yet.”

“Oh, Mama, am I pretty enough? Is he gonna fall for me?”

Cluck-cluck. “You’re painted up more than a banker’s house, child. I can’t smell your Pa’s cordite for the flowers of you.”

“Oh, Mama, you just don’t like me looking pretty.”

“Nothing wrong with looking womanly, girl, but you’d just better have the good ol’ firepower to tell all your admirers, ‘no.’”

“Oh, Mama, he’s not that kind of boy. He keeps himself in his holster like a good man should.”

“He ain’t nothing but a sissy, then, is he? He ain’t nothing but a damned preacher – watch him water the roses when he faces a man’s piece.”

“Goddamned sissies, goddamned pussies...”

“Grandpa, you shouldn’t say that ‘bout someone you’ve never ever met! And Billy Hitch, you keep a civil tongue in your head or so help the Lord, I’m gonna shoot it right outa you –”

“Christina, you leave the boy alone. Sure, he’s a trigger happy little bastard, but we have to be civil to the neighbors. Now you just remember what happened to the Vernons and the Hastings –”

– now just the click, click, click on Geiger counters. A concrete memorial to neighborhood civility and local arms reduction ordinances

“Oh, Mama, he’s just a worm.”

“He’s a guest of this here family, is what he is.” A cannon-fire voice, deep rumbling gravel tones, an avalanche of words – Pa, coming in from out of the cooling night, slapping dusty hands on dustier pants: “You treat him right, you hear, Christina? That means civil and respectful – or sure as he and your beau will be eating yer Mama’s fine fixin’s while you break and clean your pistol in your room tonight. Do we have an understanding?”

“Yes, Papa,” head down low, hands clearly away from her pearl-handles.

“That’s good,” Papa said, hands slowly floating away from his own chrome automatics, eyes never leaving hers, or her hands. “Now you help yer Mama with supper while I go up and wash the fields off me.”

“Goddamned sissies, goddamned pussies...”

“Yes, Papa.” Eyes half-way down, locked on Billy’s smirking face and his hand fluttering towards a child’s cheap leather holster, towards cobalt-blue revolver (a 12th birthday toy: .22). With the practiced grace of winter schooling at Miz Hanover’s School of Defensive Charm , Christina drew and clicked her own hammer at his pimples. Billy kept his tongue out and reached down.

The doorbell. Of all of them, only Late Uncle Larry’s portrait got tagged: the bubble-glassed, black-creped photo with stiff and curling black roses exploded off the wall. A hollow-point from Christina’s lady-like pearl-handled left a splinter-ragged tear in the living room wall. Plaster was incense in the air, and she crunched and crackled as she sprinted to the door.

“Damnit! No Gunplay In The House!” A cannon’s roar from upstairs and the thunder of Papa’s footsteps from bathroom to the landing.

“Goddamned sissies, goddamned pussies...”

Eula, their Unarmed Woman, scurried out from her sandbagged bunker under the stairs, dustpan in one hand, broom in the other, weaving and ducking, ducking and weaving – even though the only thing that followed was verbal.

“Christina! I’ve told you before –” started Mama as she swung out of the kitchen, drawn, cocked and ready.

“Damnit, how many times have I –” Papa said, rounding the stairs with earthquakes of his good rattlesnake boots, shotgun pumped and itching at his hip.

“Crazy, no good, screaming chicken bitch –” young Billy said as she reached for the brass skull of the front door, too inexperienced to think of drawing.

“Rob..,” she said through the chaos and perfume of cordite, eyes too wide for her face as she opened onto a now-dark prairie night, and a striking figure in white hat, white breaches, white vest (because of blood stains, white was considered fancy and peaceful dress).

“Good evening Christina Smithew, and how are you on this temperate evening?”

“Rob, you shouldn’t say such things...” Eyelashes batting, eyelashes batting.

“Are you going to make him stand out there all night, girl? Supper’s ready and it’ll only get cold.”

“I was just going to escort the handsome young Mr. Pommer inside, Mama.” A beaming smile of perfect porcelain (dentists are always perfect and painless where biting the bullet has a special meaning), to her beau. “Will you please accompany me inside, Mr. Pommer?”

“I would be delighted. This temperate climate seems to be getting a mite chilly.”

“We’ll see about warming you right up, Mr. Pommer.”

“Now, Christina, you keep your hormone talk civil, you here?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Are you quick? I’ll bet you’re not. I’ll bet you ain’t got what it takes. I’ll bet ya can’t hit yerself with a shotgun. I say you’re as yella as corn, and as slow as snow.”

“Shut up, worm. Now, Mr. Pommer – Rob – why don’t you have a seat and I’ll see about dinner.”

Stepping into the hallway – traditional with the expected reinforcing and bullet-resistance – Robert Pommer made the polite sign of entering another’s home: against the wall and spread. Papa Smithew returned the greeting with equal politeness, frisking the young houseguest, checking his little sport pistol for abnormal rounds before sticking it back into Rob’s holster and turning the young lad away from the wall. “Nice to have you here, Rob. Christina’s been nothing but fawning over your name for the last week.”

“Papa!” from the portal to the clatter and steam of the kitchen.

“Hush, girl, you know it’s true. Or are you callin’ your Papa out on a count a’ lying?”

“No, Papa, I’m not doing that –” Papa was the fastest draw in the house “– here, Rob, here’s your special place, right here at the head of the table.”

“I was just makin’ some peaceable chat with your Pa, Christina.”

“Face up to it, son, there’s damned little you can do about this kinda thing – save plug them with nickel lead. But then where’d all us men be, with nothin’ ta do all day but ping each other then. Not proper, it would be. Not right, not Christian.”

“Christina, why don’t you go see about the supper while I goes about serving the greens and fixins’.”

“Yes, Mama.” Then to the chiseled features at the head of the Smithew table: I’ll be right back with the best damned dinner as you ever did have, Rob, you wait and see.”

“Christina! I’ve told you about profanity in the house. How’d you like a flesh wound to remind your petty, heathen soul – “

“Sorry, Mama. I was just –”

“I know what you were doing, child. I knows exactly what you were doing. Now get ta fetching that supper before I take a shotgun to your scatter-brained self.”

“I’m going, Mama. I’m going.” To the chiseled, “Be back soon, Rob.”

“You’re chickenshit, aren’t you? I’ll bet you ain’t never even pointed and said ‘bang’. Ain’t that so? Ain’t there a yellow streak as wide as yer shadow at set runnin’ down yer back – I’ll betcha you cry when you hear a crack of a shot, thinking it coulda been you.”

“Goddamned sissies, goddamned pussies...”

“Billy! You watch your mouth! Or do I have to remind you that you are a guest in this here house, just as well.”

“It’s okay Mrs. Smithew, ah don’t mind. I have a little orphaned cousin just like him over in Colt Springs. He’s just full of spark and damned little sense. He’ll be okay; he’ll either cool down some once he gets his first real taste of lead and cordite, or his mamma will just swear on his cold corpse fer him bein’ so stupid. (sigh) As kin and allies of kin we just gotta try to educate him to responsible relations with his fellow armed betters or start thinkin’ about buryin’ him real early.”

“Why you chickenshit, mother-humping, yellow.”

In the next room. The kitchen knife, wiped clean of her blood, was back on its hook. Lady like finger over the mouth of the bottle, she mixed its contents with hers. Then, bending secret and covert over a steaming plate of hearty farm food, Christina emptied the little bottle. Little dabs of rust, flecked blood, on golden corn, slab of steak, on mountain of potatoes capped with melting butter, on asides of cloudy biscuits – then a little artistic smearing of that ladylike finger to hide the results of her orchestrations. Bottle then back, warm and hidden, down creamy white cleavage, label making a gentle itch between young breasts.

Dr. Gunn’s Miracle Love Drops – Guaranteed By the Marvelous Dr. Gunn to make the consumer reflect and experience genuine, heartfelt admiration for the donation of a drop, or two, or three, OF LIFE’S BLOOD into the pure mixture before consumption. NO MONEY RETURNED... the rest of it had been rubbed away by those same youthful breasts and certain eager fondlings during infatuated late nights.

As hocked and praised by the scarecrow himself, a flapping great bird in academic robes and mortar board. Longevity proving his reputation and quality – in the land of bullet complaints. He’d lauded and sold, praised and handed out his variety of wares, till the sun was dull on the horizon and the audience had departed to consume their goods with confidence, leaving the confused and infatuated Smithew girl.

Experience had given him the gaze of an eagle. Finger to lips, he’d dug in the cluttered interior of his gaudy tank, finally producing a dusty trunk, which gave up a gold silk bag, which then was a tiny bottle in his thin, boned hand. The price was reasonable, even for a girl on only an ammunition allowance. She left with a bounce in her step –

– just like the one that carried her from kitchen to dining and put lovely music in her voice when she said, “A special meal for my – OUR special dinner guest. I hope you enjoy it, Rob. I made it extra special, just for you.”

“Isn’t that like the girl, to take credit for her own mother’s fine cooking hand.”

“Oh, Papa, give the girl some room to make special for her man tonight.”

“Now you restrain yourself, Rob Pommer, while I go fetch the rest of dinner. I’ll only be gone a second.”

“You take your time, Christina. I wouldn’t want you to take to me special, and deprive your kin of their supper.”

Then she was gone, back into the bustle and rattle of the farmhouse kitchen:

“Well, being a MAN sure gives me a MANLY appetite. I think I’ll just help myself to these-here tasty-looking fixings, if I may. Being a cold-hearted man-killing monster has just given me a ravenous hunger.”

“Billy, now you just put that plate right back in front of Mr. Pommer. He’s a respectful houseguest, and you should be treating him as such.” Cool words, with an undertone of civilized irritation. Still, Papa Smithew’s hand didn’t quaver, or dip, and his automatic didn’t same from it’s sight on Billy’s cherubic forehead. Billy looked up with maybe his first fear at the gun’s tunnel, and swallowed, loud .

“Now, Mr. Smithew, don’t waste slugs over the matter. I’m sure Christina’s special meal will be special no matter whose plate is whose. Besides, I like to see these young ‘uns get a taste of their little paradise till their first firefight shows them the error ah their ways.”

“Yer, right, I guess, Rob. Yeah, can’t waste the little maggot over something like this. Besides, gotta keep up the neighborly truce, and all – wouldn’t be civil and Christian at the supper table, now, would it?” Papa said, spinning his chrome shooting iron into his holster.

Taking a slow, whistling breath to restore his powerful, maniac cool, Billy smiled smug and smarmy before stuffing his leering maw with potatoes, biscuits, gravy and, again, loudly swallowing.

“God above,” sighed Mama, clicking off her safeties under the table, “eating before Grace...”

And then came Christina, arms full. “I hope you resisted the temptation, Robert Pommer, to taste my special treats, cause, after all, it is considered polite and civil to wait for the others to be served...” The plates in her arms by the law of gravity, avalanched to the floorboards. Their Unarmed Servant peeked, frightened and wild-eyed, from under the stairs at the mess, judging the spill against a squabble where she could catch a hot slug.

Billy from the ‘stead next door also stared at the mess – then at Christina Smithew with a sudden, and powerful look of profound respect, admiration, and that certain something else...

* * * *

The jerk delivered the soda, gliding the cut crystal across the reflective counter-top with a sloppy flourish. In a shooting culture, specialties delivered fine-crafted goods, excellent workmanship, one-of-a-kind, pieces of pure art – because the creators of anything short of incredible usually got wasted. “That’ll put a few extra pounds on you. Not that anyone would notice a few extra... ”

“Delicious as always, Mr. Phipps.”

“Always a suck-up, Rob Pommer.”

“Ummmmm. It’s sooo good.”

“I hope she comes across. She’s too ugly for just company.”

Mr. Joshua Phipps made the best sodas – period, end of statement – in their little town of Summerville. In the state. It gave him a certain amount of fame, and a large amount of invulnerability. It also meant that Mr. Phipps of the Pearly Gates Ice Cream Emporium of Summerville , in the state of Freedom, in the land of the Brave and Quick, had to keep refining his skills, perfecting his talent, honing his edge. He was too damned annoying to fall into a fatal second place.

“Oh, Rob this is so romantic.”

“It’s just ice cream, Christina.”

“No doubt about it, he’s really hot on you, isn’t he?”

Parfaits, egg creams (lost to legend everywhere else with the blood bath end of NYC), sodas, banana splits, sundaes, cones, scoops, thousands of flavors, dozens of cones, millions of combinations. Sarcasm tap dancing on the sweet tooths of trigger happy maniacs.

“Just the two of us, like this. It’s just so... special .”

“Hum, oh, yeah, right, Christina.”

“I can hear them wedding bells already.”

The soda jerk flashily adjusted his fly, wiped his mouth on the back of his candy-red striped shirt, sneezed into a stained and sticky handkerchief – all in a ballet, a genuflection of leaking, smelly, gummy annoyance – before bending back to his work. He was so good the customers actually put their safeties on while slurping their parfaits.

“Oh, Rob, I could stay here all day.” Curls and locks on his broad farmer’s shoulder.

“I gotta go, Christina. If you wanna come...” Seeing something that broke the mood and shaking her tresses free.

“Ah, true love. Doesn’t it get you, right here, kid?” Mr. Phipps said to glassy-eyed Billy, three stools down, but the ‘brain-dead little piece of snot’ had awe-filled eyes only for the girl on the arm of Rob Pommer.

* * * *

On the screen, John Wayne swaggered his swagger, grinned his macho grin, and adjusted his mighty gun belt.

“Oh, Rob, I’m so excited!” thrilled whisper.

“It’s only a movie, Christina,” conspiratorial hush.

“I mean being here, with you, silly.”

“Shush, now, Christina, we gotta be polite and keep quiet.”

On the screen, Clint Eastwood scowled with his wrinkled lip, said a steely sound-bite, and reached into his coat.

“Don’t you feel it, Rob? Don’t you feel that we were (sigh) just meant to be.”

“I did make us reservations, Christina – now hush yourself and watch the movie.”

Charles Bronson spoke slow slurs through a caterpillar mustache, slowly raising the shotgun –

“But, Rob, don’t you feel it, too? Don’t you feel that there’s something magical, special between the two of us? These last few days specially, Rob, I’ve felt something powerful and, ah could almost say, spiritual between you, Rob Pommer, and little me. I feel it, Rob, here, in my chest, between my budding young breasts – don’t you want to feel it too, Rob?”

“Christina Smithew, what would your Minister say to hear you talk like that?”

Flicking images blurring into a fantasy of motion, Gary Cooper spoke his slow speech on a dusty road somewhere Wild and Woolly, fainting with his right while drawing with his left.

“Oh, you know what I’m talking about, Rob – I think you know how much I –”

“Shush, Christina, you know what the doctors are like this side of town – do you really want to get into an argument with someone about making too much damned noise?”

“But Rob –”

Steven Seagal, hair a helmet of glimmering gel, turned and, without smile or remorse, killed a plethora of unarmed opponents.

“Oh, Rob I-I don’t understand.” Pause, washed in the colors of justifiable gunplay. “Are you teasing me, Rob Pommer? Oh, Rob, you’re such a tease.”

The soundtrack vanished amidst the cracks and pops of protest, the popcorn explosions of padding as a variety of ammunition tore into armored seatbacks. The couple ducked and covered, using preschool training and well-honed reflexes to avoid the lead rain. Finally, when the firefight died down to singular potshots and the groans of the less-nimble, she offered, and Rob took, her arm to help her back into her seat. “Oh, Rob.”

The look on Rob Pommer’s face was painfully creased, scowled to the point of hiding his small brown eyes. He saw something, and the dance started: going to examination, to realization, to shock, to pique, to anger, to nausea, and, finally, resignation. “Come on, Christina,” he said, taking her arm and leading her in a duck and cover serpentine up the aisle.

Her heart sang and beat a furious melody. She had just started the gush, just started to take his arm in a warm and womanly embrace, when she happened to glance back just in time to see the cause of the complaint, an eager and persistent Billy vaulting over seats and heads and into the colored wash of the second feature. A new fusillade of protest smacked into reinforced walls and seats, just missing his youthful nimbleness.

* * * *

In the lead was Hudson’s Folly , a slim little two-seater with plenty of power and a bare minimum of lines. Following closely behind were the Jules Verne curlicues and seashell flanges of the Aquifer , kicking up it’s own foam from its souped-up screws and drive.

The pack became fuzzy beyond that point, a mad collection of iron and fiberglass, fancy and function with form far, far behind. They bobbed, struggled and floundered (apt, that) behind the leaders – even sometimes breaking the thin surface of Hero’s Lake. When they did, when a racing ‘mersible bubbled and churned in the foaming wake of the race, the quiet and almost invisible officials on the far shore would encourage it back into the dark waters with a few strategic rounds from the polished brass of their starter’s cannon.

Parked in flickering gloom under an applause of leaves in the cool night breeze, they stared out through the windshield of the Pommer family Hunchmobile – though the event was nothing but distant thunder and the racers nothing but ripples on the surface of the dark water.

“Oh, Rob, this is such a special time.”

The dark silhouette next to her put a warm, strong arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.

“I don’t know how to say this, but I-I –”

His lips found hers, a gentle touch at first, smooth skin grazing same. Dry, chase, adoring.

The only sound from her, a soft sigh – gentle breeze through young branches. In the washed moonlight, her eyes were sparkles in a sea of pale blue.

The slam and dimple of a bullet into the Hump’s bulletproof side window bolted him from her. Then he was gone, pulled into the dark and the cold, through the flung open driver’s door – whisked off by something twice his size, easily.

“Was this little pissant bothering you, Christina Smithew?” said the glowering face of Rob Pommer, holding, then loosing, the squirming form of Billy. Christina’s scream of anger and frustration, and a few quick dozen rounds from her and Rob’s pistols, followed him as he vanished into the trees, the forest, the night.

* * * *

The drive home was hot and cold. From the car’s stylish vents, the sticky warmth of an inefficient heater made her legs and feet itch and sweat. Streaming in from the windows, the cool night had become a chill darkness, making her face brittle and hard.

“– goddamned little pissant, no good, weasely, no account, chicken, yellow – ”

Next to her, Rob Pommer was ice to her furnace: “I seems ta me, Christina Smithew –”

“– I can’t believe he did that. Of all the no-good, goddamned, childish, moronic, infantile –”

“Christina, I think ya should try and see through this thing –”

“– I’m gonna take my little pearl-handled sweat pea, and I’m gonna take him straight into the choir invisible with one quick shot – and if my aim ain’t true, the damned spirit o’ retribution is gonna make it good enough to make him sing in our earthly choir, just real high – ”

“– I don’t like to stand in the way of somethin’ crazier than fast drawin’ –”

“That’s it! I’m gonna lay real low, take him when he doesn’t expect. No hints, now, something real twisted and mean. When he comes in tonight, no hail o’ lead, just a real quiet house. No expected bombs and no predicted shots. Just a simple little home. Tonight never happened, yep that’s it. In he walks and it’s all gonna be just ‘How ya doin’, worm?’ You know, the usual, nothing with any taste o’ metal. But I’m gonna wait, you see, wait real long – for when it’s all just foggy and faint in his tiny brain before I pull it clear, put it right up to his soft little head and squeeze off something crippling but not killing into his soft tissue and brittle skull – ”

“– ah mean, Christina, you’re a nice girl and all, but I don’t wanna stand in the middle now –”

“– and I’d stay right by his sorry little soul and say that his was a life so short, and so mistreated, especially by me, that I’d stay by his side to care for his stupid crippled body and whacked mind. I’d do a real good act, ah know I can, and when it came time to change his little diapers, or feed him his strained peas –”

“– ah just don’t see what he has fer ya, all in all. But, ah must admit it’s not my place to say who others should care for –”

“– I’d keep him nice and clean, so the others would look on my virtue, and rightly-armed Christianity, and smile at my charity. But at night, now, I’d take my sewing kit and Mama’s longest, sharpest hat pins and –”

“– ah just don’t see it as workin’ – ”

Round a few more bends they came, swerving on the long road back to the clapboard bunkers of Summerville, home, and a few hours away from daylight – Rob frowning into the windshield of the Hunchmobile, Christina, arms folded, staring out the passenger window, steaming.

Sometime past the medals hanging from the WELCOME TO sign (Lions, Rotary, NRA), it dawned on Christina Smithew how close she was to home, and what Rob Pommer had been saying.

It was only her struck stupidity, and his quick skid, dump, and hasty retreat of and from her that saved him from her wrath and shots.

* * * *

Murphy’s Inexpensive Funeral Emporium (In and Under for Under $25) vanished in a hurricane of flying glass, brick, postmortem body parts, surgical steel, and cheap plywood (how else do you think they could plant you for under $25?).

Soon after, in the space of a track and squeeze, the General Custer Grocery similarly vanished with a hail of canned goods, and a soft fog of instant-cook fresh veggies. Where it had stood for generations was now a smoking crater and a plume of foul and sticky smoke.

A quick accompaniment to this clash and burn, another dour member of the Row of Morticians similarly disappeared into a whistling and spinning mass of fragments. So powerful the blast that the next two in the dozens-long row of grave businesses went with it.

The next target in the cross-hairs was the first (normally your prime real estate) on the opposite side: Our Lady of Recoil became something of myth, legend, and debris with an ear-slap of concussion. Built of sterner stuff (for the protection of doctors and their ilk, a noble and particularly targeted group), Our Lady only took its neighboring Holy Order of Right to Bear with it.

Billy squatted, panting, squinting through the smoke, dust, and late-fleeing forms (the parade of destruction having started on the edge of town, giving the more fleet a chance to foot), tracking, looking, hoping, and not at all frightened –

From the woodsmoke and cordite fog that twisted and tumbled down the street, the rocket came – trailing lines of acceleration of a paler smoke towards him – but not quite on target.

Rolling, running, as only young legs and two fevered desires (one being for life, the other being for Christina Smithew) could inspire, Billy sprinted through hot dust – just as the Bullet For Your Thoughts Gun and Ammo Store went up as if it had aspirations of orbital velocity.

As he raced, as he ran, as the remains of store after store chewed the ground at his feet, he thought, maybe, perhaps, could-it-be – there! in the churning hurricane of smoke and dust. Could it be?

Another rocket, and the Premium Life Assurance Office , all the bullet proof (see ‘Doctors’) floors of it, skyrocketed and house-of-carded into groaning, shrieking chaos.

We break normal tale-flow to bring you this up-to-the-minute update on the expected and on-going attempt to halt the destruction of Summerville:

– perched on a battlement rooftop with a state-of-the-art (in a state where the only art was in destruction) in arm, Stanley Goodarm sighted his oil-vapor sighted, 35mm recoilless (hunting) rifle down from his near-invisible perch on the All-American Gun Emporium . There! He hovered the microscopically precise crosshairs on the silhouette of his target and squeezed (never pull) – imagining a second before a red bloom of brain meeting air through the intermediary of a high-velocity steel-jacketed projectile –

– before the figure turned and squeezed it’s own, and the All-American Gun Emporium became dust, flying bricks, twisting steel, and slashing glass. Finger absent from his wondrous weapon, he tumbled into the chaos, becoming a red bloom with it.

– and so went many others –

* * * *

“Where is he, where is that no-good, rotten, scum-sucking, lousy, peanut-brained, weak-kneed, yellow, prick –!” Christina Smithew said, searching the dusty, smoking street. “I know you’re out there, you pinheaded, dorky, pile of dogshit. I know you’re here somewhere –!”

Maybe there –? Turn, squeeze, kickback as the Junior Peacekeeper launched another of it’s foot-long ultra-high explosive tipped phallic symbols of doom. Aunt May’s Lady’s Bullet Boutique exploded into a million ricochets and detonations.

“I know you’re out there, somewhere, you chicken-hearted, yellow-bellied, sidewinding, idiotic, dork !” Maybe there –? The Colonel’s (Harlan Sunder) this time: a concussion like a slap in the chops, the stinging of shrapnel and flying junk and a sudden hail of now-flash-fried fryers.

Was that –? A sudden glimpse of something certain running through the smoke, dust, and also-running population of Summerville. She knew (knew!) he was here, somewhere – inexplicably drawn to her, forced on her, confining, ruining her –

And there went the Lt. Caley Memorial Bar and Grill : bricks, bones, steel, glass, in a fine airborne mix of it all.

“Where are you, you asinine, jerk-off, putrid, son-of-a–” Movement!

The Peacemaker’s slender messenger of explosive doom impacted, and careened off, the solid resistance of some thicker-than-usual, more-reflective-than-usual, armor. A rolling, clanking, banging, coughing and smoking monster of plate steel, duraluminum, adamantine, and arcane alloys that spelled to all a salesman of either extraordinarily poor, or extraordinarily fine, products – also spelling it with brilliantly painted (gaudy circus colors) banners: THE TRAVELING EMPORIUM OF Dr. Gunn! A THOUSAND MIRACLES FOR THE HAVING! A THOUSAND WONDERS FOR A FEW CENTS! A THOUSAND CHOICES UNDER A BUCK! AMMUNITION FROM AROUND THE WORLD, GUARANTEED TO NAIL THE MOST SNEAKY OF HORN-SWAUGGLER! COME ONE, COME ALL (NO CROWDING PLEASE).

Christina Smithew frowned with enough muscle to crack teeth. Streamer after streamer leapt from her Papa’s prized Peacemaker, missile after missile dropped from the over-barrel clip into the chamber, recoil after recoil knocked into her pale and petite shoulder.

One after one exploded with much sound and fury (damaging nothing) or bounced and arced back into what little remained of Summerville –

– and, incidentally, taking out one Joshua Sweet, Thomas Little, and Betty Sue-Anne Langfielder, who had all been strategically placed and ready to put their respective millimeters into the lithe and shapely skull of our Christina Smithew. To a one (man and woman) they vanished into their component parts with the hail of the rockets.

During a pause in the fusillade, while Christina ejected the spent thirty-round clip and scavenged in her spangled purse (for another they tended to be big, as no respecting young thing went anywhere without severe firepower and plenty of ammo) a hatch on the gaudy monster dogged open and swung out. The head that followed the opening was similarly gaudy – and dartingly hesitant.

“Lemmie see, lemmie, see, don’t tell me, lemmie get it on my own. Let’s see, let’s see – ” Dr. Gunn said, quite a spectacle with his big purple top hat, warning-red swallow-tailed coat, steel-toed work boots, English riding breaches, yellow silk shirt, and necklace of human fingers (trigger). Christina Smithew’s jacking home of another clip, and slow and precise aim, did nothing to halt his broad gestures, practiced manners, and machine-gun clip – “– I’ll get it, I’ll get it. Don’t help me, no hints – it was, lemmie see, lemmie see – a love drink, that was it, right?” He was good. No self-respecting (and living) traveling salesman could live and not be.

Christina lowered the Peacemaker, eyes round, blue and wide. “Yes. Yes, you did –”

“That’s it, I remember now. The Dr. Gunn Miracle Love Drops. Oh, yes, wonderful stuff – simply WONDERFUL –”

Christina jacked a rocket with loud and menacing assurance: Intent and target very obvious.

“Er, ah, um. Now, now, little lady, don’t you be gettin’ all fired up. Is there some kinda problem with my little pharmacological wonder? All of my products, after all, are 100 PERCENT GUARANTEED...”

Christina matched the fine threads of her sight on the slight wrinkles (now beginning to shimmer with perspiration) on the forehead of Dr. Gunn.

“...the effects, you know are one hundred percent effective. A wonderful stuff, powerful stuff, magical stuff. Just the thing to put the whistle back in your beau’s flute, the pied in your husband’s piper –”

The rockets missed due to the quick (had to be) reflexes of the traveling salesman. Off they went, with a ricocheting melody off the armor of his battlewagon. Arcing they went, to land in many places, including the partially-demolished roof of the Prospero Prosthetic Company with a clap and hail of plastic body parts (and some real, as they had nailed flat dead another would-be assassin).

Before Christina could smack home another clip and get lit by her finger on the trigger, this spilled out of Dr. Gunn’s trembling lips: “BUTTHEEFFECTSARETEMPORARY!!”

Christina’s mouth hung open, the weapon slowly dropping from her shoulder and it’s dead-on-site fix on Dr. Gunn’s panicked face. The facts didn’t immediately register through to her, but the basic idea made it. That one word.

“That’s right, er, ah, dear lady –” the doctor said, mopping his floral face with a large purple and gold handkerchief he’d produced from his kaleidoscope clothes “– while the effects of my Miracle Love Drops are wondrous in the extreme (and loads of fun at parties) the sad fact of life is that their awesome and powerful effect will suddenly depart, like love itself is apt to do, after, say, some two or three days–”

“It doesn’t last?”

“That’s right, you dear, sweet, thing, the effects of my Miracle Love Drops will soon be nothing but a faint memory in the mind of the subject, and a glow on your cheeks – ”

CLICK! Dead on target, finger tightening on trigger.

“UNLESSYOUDON’TWANTTHATNATURALLY–! My dear, sweet thing, you have my complete, money-back assurance, that whatever problems my little Miracle Love Drops might’ve caused, they should be gone one, slim day past their ingestion.”

Christina lowered the weapon again and took in the town. She lowered the gun and surveyed what little remained of Summerville: a broken line of businesses and homes stretching as far as the eye could see (towns tended to be small, so it was not an extreme distance): Smoke swirled up from a few out-of-control fires, wooden beams were left blood splattered, bare steel posts and cinderblock remained. A body part here. A body part there. Dust made the air thick and sandy, the color of pure bile. A moan here, a persistent scream there.

– and the rooster-trail of Dr. Gunn’s armored warehouse barreling bat-out-of-hell style away from the scene, pennants crackling with acceleration, top-hat tumbling in the air behind.

“Temporary–?” Christina mumbled to herself.

“Christina Smithew – did you do this?”

She turned, eyes wide again.

“This is hideous . It’s inhuman. So many people, so many – all these people. All the fires. It’s psychotic, it’s cruel, it’s so-so mean . You’re burning, flaming, unhinged, bonkers, nutso, crazy! You’re sour milk, bullets and babies crying for their dead mothers! You’re a blood-drinking, bone-breaking, eye-eating, thumb-chewing, loony-tune sort of person. You’re demented, deranged, and dangerous, Christina Smithew. Dangerous and mad and, and, and... .”

Click, click, Click CLICK! But she was dry, her birds had flown. Nothing but an empty clip in her gun. Nothing at all in her bag.

“– and reckless, and spiteful, and so, so, so TWISTED! All these people, all this destruction. Christina Smithew, I-I-I don’t know what to say –”

Her eyes got wide and she started to back up, too slowly, like in transparent molasses, or a dream. Nightmare –

“– it’s so psychotic, so crazy, so MEAN – ” Billy said, walking towards her with this particular expression. Wide-eyed, awed, taken, struck by her, by Christina Smithew, taken by her, and, mainly, what she’d just done.

“Christina “Billy started, “I–”

And she turned and ran, laughing, high and mad, into the destruction–

– with her beau right on her heels.

NEEDLE TASTE

Standing under the twelve by six poster of Desiree Proll, victim number #7, Prair watched the pit ripple, eat, and spit out dancers. They went in, he noticed, eyes lit with smack, booze, or just kid enthusiasm, and were spat back out into the shadowed booths or towards the bar covered in reflective, childish, sweat. On the stage, Heavy Foot was slamming through To Spite You . Even though their albums had names like Screaming Baby and Foundry , aficionados of their screeching metal, death-tasting, mood pieces knew that each and every one was just an extension of the last. Titles, for them, were as irrelevant as trying to take apart the static charge before a lighting strike

Prair felt frostbit, so he transferred his untouched drink to his other hand. He didn’t drink anymore but he felt crippled to be in a club without one.

Sometimes he even got it to work to his advantage: “Want a drink? Someone forced the damned thing on me and I can’t touch it.” Bang: generosity, cool anger, and sympathy. It was surprising how often it worked.

Tonight, though, he didn’t even feel like trying. Maybe it was Heavy Foot’s constant beat (one rolling into another which spilled into another). If you allowed yourself to think any part of it too repetitive, presumptuous, or just dull the whole night could come crashing down around you, because it was a constant – hate one bit, hate the whole fucking song, the whole fucking evening.

That night, it did – and had. The fragments of the song were like broken, weak neon reflecting off wet streets – fractured: the acid was weak and cut with too much speed. He wasn’t having a friendly night cruising on the secret rhythms of the city; he was facing a long, dark tunnel of futility and paranoia. The drug and the Friday evening parade of twitching young flesh did nothing, nothing at all, to push away overdue rent, a scummy day job, and an empty bed.

Across from him was another twelve-by-six poster: poor Little Amy Grantie, victim #9; her body captured by a police cameraman’s flash. Even from across the crowded and flashing, strobing, pulsing, club, Prair could still make out the stark details of the scene. Fingers cut off. Toes, too. The poster was in black and white, and the grass surrounding the body was a lighter gray where the blood wasn’t.

What was it Owlsley had said?

The only true sin is letting them go unpunished . A much more vivid memory was Owlsley’s capture: a three day action-adventure that had left thirteen dead, eight of them cops. The image was melted, frozen in his memory as he had watched it on his scummy little black and white set: the huge man, all scrub-brush beard and massive chest, naked except for a pair of jeans, being wrestled to the dusty ground in some mid-Texas flyspeck town.

His blood, too, had been dark gray – gray from the wounds that killed him two hours later. Prair remembered the newspaper captions, too, those five years ago: KILLER CAPTURED... then, in the morning DEAD.

Standing, surrounded by Owlsley’s “punishments”, Prair turned an eye back to the pulsing music, the pulsing youth. The acid was making his teeth jump in their sockets and he was sure that one group of black carapaced teenagers was laughing at him and his simple, traditional Jeans and fake biker jacket. He was so disgusted with them and the whole room that he almost slugged down his drink and left. He didn’t, though – instead he just passed the cold glass to his other hand.

What was outside, after all? Just wet streets from a shocking summer storm; a tiny apartment in the Haight; an empty, bare mattress on the floor; yet another shift of screaming suits at his Java City job.

At least you left with style, Prair thought, lifting his still-full, straight vodka in a salute to Greg Moore, victim #33 (again in hard black and white, showing his severed right arm and the almost black grass around it) but meaning it more to the architect, the man who, at least, had a face and an identity – and not an empty pit that was all Prair seemed to have.

* * * *

His walk home was more satisfying. There was something about the heavy fog, the oppressive drizzle, and the snapping cold that seemed perfect for Prair’s mood. The acid, of course, dulled most of the discomfort – turning the wet and the cold into abstracts, a perfect accompaniment for his depression and anger. He walked all the way to his apartment, alone in a world of bold contrasts and snapping wind.

By the time he made it to the Haight, the chemicals had faded into a kind of floating giddiness, an of lighter-than-air exaltation. To match (tying it all up nicely), the fog and the light rain had faded and lifted – becoming nothing but a dark and churning lid over the city.

At first he didn’t see her, crouching down on the landing outside his front door. The aftertaste of the acid blurred his time sense and for an elastic second he thought that she wasn’t anything but a trash bag, till the black plastic cautiously unfolded a bit and a pale, lean face swung out to look at him.

Trash bag to street girl was fluid and quick. The chemicals made him stare: a lithe nymph sprouting from a dark plastic carapace. In the cool night, her face seemed to hover and dance next to the dull brass of his front door knob. Her face: a pale moon. The knob: very gold (though it had been tarnished a long, long time). A hand (very, very white) appeared from somewhere and brushed thick black hair from a fine china face.

She stood slowly and elegantly as Prair took another slow step up, and uncoiled herself from where she’d been crouching.

In a snapping instant, perceptions and then explanations, avalanched through his mind.

She was wearing a slick black poncho; her hair was dark, wet with glossy reflections from the streetlight outside. She was a tiny doll, a miniature. She could have been a girl or a young woman. Her eyes whispered maybe oriental.

“Sorry, needed to sit and let the world... calm ,” she said, voice sharp and brittle – taken down off a shelf and used for the first time in a long while.

“It... it’s okay,” he managed to tumble out, the stammer pressure-pushed (possibilities jumbling through him, too many choices and fantasies in quick succession).

“You lit?” she said, smiling tiny teeth, only slightly jumbled.

He was now on the landing with her. She was small, yes, but not a doll. He didn’t have to look that far down to see her. He nodded.

“Can I come in for a piss?”

Prair nodded again, and fumbled for his keys.

* * * *

Flushing, she stepped out. The adrenaline smashing through his trip-hammering heart pushed the vibrant edge of the acid far back into Prair’s mind: the walls are just walls, and not breathing kaleidoscopes. The posters weren’t as brilliant as they could have been (thank god), and the spines of his books actually seemed to make sense.

Poncho pushed aside, showing a delightfully pale tummy, she yanked her stretch pants up a final inch. Something white flashed amid the swirl of the plastic poncho – a bra? “Major Owlsley,” she said, tracking around the room, checking out the posters, the books.

Prair didn’t talk about it much – he was a closet fan: wasn’t jumping to defend him, with anyone who took offense and wasn’t a complete enough fanatic for those who worshipped him as a genius.

He liked him, was all Prair could say. He liked reading his books and, sometimes, even liked to get ripped and get lost the photographic depictions of his... other works.

“Number 40, right?” she said, looking at one of the prints. “The Sacramento cop? Devers?”

He smiled, enjoying her simply standing there in his little place, standing in front of him. “Devers was the soldier in San Diego.” He nodded to the poster, to the splash of vibrating reds, the almost-black slice where Owlsley’s razor had cut through his throat. Unlike the prints back at the club, Prair’s were full-color reproductions: color second only to life, or someone just dead. “Farrley was this guy. But you’re right, it was in Sacramento and he was a cop.”

“He lied, right?”

“Yeah. Part of some child-custody case – friend of his wanted to keep his kids so he got the cop to write up some fake abuse report against his wife.”

“Which one lived? The one with the weird name –”

“Sanji Musta,” Prair said, walking towards the bathroom. A vivid red and green photo. Lying on her side, hands wrapped tight with electrical wiring as if out in prayer. Her skin was dark, the color of smudged ink. “An Indian exchange student. Lucky they found her; would have bled to death otherwise. Owlsley said that she was too proud.”

She followed, and leaned into the photograph, following the lines of its unintentional composition with dilated eyes. “Don’t get it.”

Prair mimicked, thumbs in the waistband of his jeans, threw his chest out. When he realized she wasn’t looking at him, he said, “Like this.”

It look her a beat, two, to see him, to see his posture, his thumbs. “Fuck. Duh .” Her laugh was broken, fragile. She might have been, but her laugh certainly wasn’t pretty. It sounded cracked, like she’d smoked, screamed or cried for too long.

She turned, wide eyes catching on another photograph, on the door to his bathroom. “That one I know. She was a shoplifter right, stole some cigarettes or something?”

Prair looked where she was staring. A print, smaller than the others: a young woman spread out on the sand. Blood: irregular Rorschach impressions next to her missing hands. “Jennifer Reynolds. Student at San Jose State down to visit her boyfriend. They found the first book there. Volume One: Crimes and Fallacies .”

“Read it?” her eyes were black pools from whatever she’d mainlined, and ringed with streaked mascara.

He nodded, walking past her into the living room and moving to the bookshelves. Bending down, he tapped one broken-spined paperback. “Loompanic’s First Edition.”

She walked over, squatted down with a ballerina’s grace and brushed pale fingers over the spines. “You’re a freak,” she said, an icing of respect in the words.

Prair shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I ain’t gonna follow him or nothin’. Just – well, fuck if I know. It makes sense sometimes, you know? When you look at it right.”

She sat down, rearranging her poncho, scanning the other books, videos. “You got it all.”

“Not really,” he said, sitting down next to her. “I’m not a collector or anything, I just like –”

He stopped as she turned to look at him, brushed the side of his face with those same long, pale fingers. “I gotcha. I do. Got him running though me, too, you know. Wanna hit?”

He shook his head but, again, she wasn't looking. Reaching under her poncho, she pulled out a threadbare fanny pack, then a small leather case. He knew the religion of a fix, the genuflection of the works. His had been the bottle – the cold weight of it, wiping the condensation off with his thumb. Measuring money in fifths and shots: This much meant that many.

Prair was silent, respectful – allowing the girl the solace of her worship. Sitting down next to her, he looked. The needle was old, an antique. It surprised him. He expected a couple of cheap works, a fold of foil and a spoon. Instead, he got an impression of something from old London, from the desk of Sherlock Holmes: steel and glass – not a cheap ticket. Hers was a first class accommodation.

A bottle. Tiny, with a rubber seal. A little bit of yellow fluid at the bottom. Jingling it, a watery bell, she frowned: “Fuck.”

Prair knew that fuck : not enough in his pockets – maybe half a bottle, only a cheap shot that wouldn’t give a tomcat a buzz.

“Gotta score,” she said, looking shorter, smaller. Without looking she dropped her head on his shoulder, started stroking the front of his shirt with a spray of white fingers.

Eventually, he bent down and kissed her. Her mouth tasted sharp, acidic – like metal and cigarettes.

* * * *

She was disappointed, and it’d showed on her pale face. Research, no matter how methodical, was not identity. She'd asked, in all sincerity, face burning with heat, for Owlsley – but what she'd gotten was just Prair: too old, too wasted, too tired, and with too much of a headache from the acid crash, to keep it up.

Afterwards she’d dug in her little pouch again, a junkie’s wishful thinking for a genie to have magically sequestered another hit there since she’d last looked.

Going to the bathroom, Prair avoided his own face in the mirror, focusing instead on the yellowish water in the toilet. When he stepped out she was dressed again. “Gotta score,” she repeated.

He nodded, understanding the sentiment if not the drug. He didn’t ask, considering it private, but she volunteered anyway.

“Gotta score some Owlsley,” she’d said.

* * * *

She wasn’t what he expected, but then his dealers usually lived in dim bars and offered small doses from bottles of amber liquid, not from tiny bottles of a strange, thin solution. Alcohol, not brain juice. Booze, not extracted thoughts.

What she said didn’t make any sense – a drunkard’s walk of myth and fabrication – but he followed her anyway. She wasn’t his first and wouldn’t be his last crazy fuck. What was unique was the way he blindly followed her, out into the chill night, to the hailing of a cab. The insanity of one girl was expected, no big shock there; but someone had sold her the fluid – someone had mixed her fix. Someone had taken fragments of Owlsley and put them in a tiny bottle, a distillation of reality and myth.

It was strange, frightening, crazy : he didn’t know where he was going, and where he hoped he was going was to a very thin rationalization, indeed – but he knew too well what was behind: a small, dark apartment full of books, full of someone else’s words.

Nothing of Prair.

* * * *

Words. He’d left behind Owlsley’s words in those rare editions, and he’d ended up arriving to see more of them in cheap red paint, mimicking blood, on a door made from a battered sheet of diamond plate.

The truth is in all of us – too common. Everyone knew that line, printed by Owlsley at the first ten murder sites. Very few, though, knew the others.

Show it to me had been painted on the cheap gold-flecked mirror of a hot sheet motel in Dallas where Betsy Lucas had been found, her hands clumsily severed at the wrists. One of the cops had reported that the carpet was black with her blood, and gleamed like dark, polished glass when he'd shown his flashlight inside. The manager had reported it after flies had begun to swarm outside the dirty bathroom window.

Let me see it in lipstick when Dr. Fallen's blood had proved to be too thin to successfully write with.

A transvestite, Owlsley had castrated him. Too ashamed to call for help, he'd bled to death in his gaudy Minneapolis home.

It's as plain as you printed in wide, passionate letters on the inside of a Ladysmith, Wisconsin garage. A secret drinker, and beater of wife and young son, he'd been gagged and carefully suspended. Prair couldn't remember if the coroner had pronounced him dead from the baseball bat that Owlsley had used on him for four hours or from the whiskey he'd forced down his throat using a length of old radiator hose.

If the door led to more little bottles, more thin yellow fluid, it must have been painted by people who either didn't understand the source of their worship, or who had carefully hidden themselves behind the most common, and thus mundane, of his pronouncements.

Weep , though, spoke of someone who at least had opened a book, cruised secret information. Only once had that word been written, in small, meticulous strokes. Her name had been Alice Souyer. She had been small, shy, and cautious. Prair remembered how the St. Augustine Herald had spoken of her: “...people were surprised to learn that she lived in the building.” Her death had brought her fame, but not even much of that – a week-and-a-half later Owlsley hacked the feet from a bail jumper. It was a much louder event – and her death after Owlsley removed her eyes and tongue was generally forgotten... save by those whose interest crawled over every inch of Owlsley.

Alice's anonymity in life had even endured beyond it – even though she was killed for staying silent after witnessing a rape when she was twelve. She stayed just a footnote for purists.

The girl's name was Alice's epitaph. She finally told it to Prair like it was a key to something secret within herself, something fitting a very special lock. A heated whisper in his ear as the cab entered the maze of abandoned factories, corrugated metal dead ends, industrial avenues, and chain link stretches.

After paying the dark, crumpled cab driver, and walking down the dark alley, she’d whispered it again to the door and her name opened it wide: “Weep.”

* * * *

He was big, broad across the shoulders and chest. His kind shouldn’t have been hiding in doorways smelling of mold and piss, dispensing amber bottles of... something. He was out of place without corn, hay, wheat, barley. Even his face was remarkably unmarked for living in the city. His attitude, though, spoke of some kind of acclimation, even if his face didn’t. Even his hair was the color of wheat, and cut as close as a recent harvest.

The unfamiliar emotion of hope was large in Prair’s chest – seeing the big man made it even more real, firmer. A couple of city freaks were just a pair of city freaks feeding off, and feedbacking their junkie delusions. A farm boy, even one with the dirt just lost from under his fingernails, was unusual enough to add fabric to the story she’d told.

Prair had, at first, just stared through her after she’d explained – her tale too improbable, too ridiculous. But his humiliation was too flushed on his face, her disappointment had been too pointed – this was all too real, and what she’d said, about mortician conspiracies, the decapitation of Owlsley's corpse, about memory extraction, of an RNA injection, could have been genuine.

The hick led them in, down a concrete access way. The room beyond was vast and heavy – everything steel and industrial, nothing created for the comfort of people: cement floor weeded with bent and chopped rebar, the stubs of plastic pipe, and loose coils of black wire. The only light was from several Coleman gas lanterns that looked to have been hastily hung from insulation-furry interior beams.

There were others – standing and talking in low voices. The room was dark where the lanterns couldn’t throw their light, and there Prair could see pale abstracts of bare arms and the dim moons of faces.

Fear – instant and visceral. Prair felt his asshole tighten and his stomach knot. One was a junkie’s dream, two was a chance for reality – more than that was too much reality, a firmness that was good to contemplate but when stumbled on... It was heavy and threatening. Too many of them to be safe. Too many – Prair was the outsider, on their ground, in their world.

As his anxiety started to spiral outwards, Weep put a thin arm around him and pulled herself close – anchoring him to herself and making him just unfamiliar, and not alone.

The farm boy walked up, looked them both over – Prair longer than Weep, examining him in the burning glare of the lamps. “Here for a hit?” he finally said.

“Fix us up,” Weep said. “I want to feel him.” She didn’t mean Prair – she meant the man in the needle. A taste of Owlsley.

The hick moved off to one of the support columns. Relaxing, Prair could hear light conversation sparkling around them: hints of laughter, a subterranean bass voice, and a cracking soprano.

He returned with two small bottles and two works – both mates to Weep’s. “Do you desire?”

Weep looked down at the concrete floor, suddenly fascinated with her simple shoes. Looking down as well, in reflex, Prair saw that they’d become smudged with cement dust. It was only when the hick repeated himself that Prair realized that while he thought the man been talking to them, he was really just speaking to Prair.

Prair nodded. He didn’t really believe in the tiny nippled bottle, didn’t think it was real – was possible. He didn’t even know if he wanted Owlsley's words, Owlsley's thoughts, Owlsley's beliefs swimming in his skull. Lost in this chaos, Prair – the part of him that remained – did manage to realize something: being Prair wasn’t good. Being Owlsley might be better.

Weep took both needles, both bottles, and handed him one of each. A touch of fear as he hunted for a vein, but she stopped to help him find it – with a few quick, cruel slaps on the inside of his arm.

The needle was cold... or what it contained was chilled, pure. The injection seemed to last for ages, as if Weep was intentionally slipping the concentrate into him – each memory, one strand of RNA at a time.

He wanted to cry. Why, he didn’t understand. Pleasure at the potential? The surging pain of the fluid entering his body? The possibility that it was all a cruel illusion, a trick that was going to laugh at him in the next moment? The tears finally did come, though, despite the fact he couldn’t pinpoint the source. Not wracking sobs – rather a seeping from his eyes, a glistening rather than a rainfall of sorrow.

Finally drained, Weep pulled the needle free, rubbed the sore spot with her thin fingers.

“Feel it?” she said, standing tall and sure, looking into his eyes with intense expression.

Did he? Did he feel the microscopic strands of Owlsley winding their way through his consciousness? A ghost seemed to walk through him – a physical illusion of weight and strength, confidence and cold assurance that he was right, perfect, and strong. But did he feel that – did he really? Something was there, either in the fluid injected into him or because of his faith in the action, a wish for the ridiculous dream that he hoped, above all else, he wouldn’t wake up from. He wanted – and that wanting might be enough to make him feel something.

“Let me introduce you,” Weep said, taking him by his sore arm and pulling him into the lights.

There were maybe in a dozen, a cross-section.

He saw a tall man in a blue suit, an old black woman, a middle-aged matron in a simple brown dress.

The farm-boy appeared on his left. “Larry Farrley.” His tone was cold and crisp, intimate but not friendly.

Prair managed a smile, saying, “Hello” as the hick melted back into the darkness of the vast building, to be replaced by a blond girl, maybe 23-34. Still girlish, but not a child.

Maybe it was Prair, maybe a touch of Owlsley, but suddenly he looking down at her and wondering, with certainly, what her sin was – what she would reveal to him, and what her punishment might be.

“Lucy Moore,” she said, firmly, looking him up and down as if finding him inadequate to be part of their circle.

“Nice to meet you,” Prair managed to say in a quavering voice.

An old white woman, a matron. She belonged in a knitting barn, in a shop somewhere that sold silk plants and antique furniture. Her air spoke of knowledge and skill over many years – a powerful figure illuminated by the angry hissing light of the lanterns. “I’m Margaret Reynolds.”

“Nice to meet you,” Prair said with sudden, firm conviction; a momentary surge of strength that seemed to flicked up from a furnace in his gut. Owlsley stretching, awakening?

“Charles Emmerson Lucas,” said a tall man in jeans and an over-large sweatshirt.

There were more, many of them. It was hard to keep them straight in his mind. Prair’s head began swimming, roaring along with the lanterns. He stumbled a couple of times as he was led around, and cursed himself for his clumsiness – he should have been strong and firm, not half-dazed on the arm of a tiny girl. Where was that strength he’d felt, that presence? He should have been seeing these people, not just letting their hard eyes glance across his fuzzy perceptions. He should understand them, see their secrets, their sins –

The last. An air of saintliness, a weight of silence as he was drawn across the warehouse space – through a shadowy region, cool from the absence of the many lamps – to an island of just one: A black woman, stately and cool. She stood, arms at her sides. Her face seemed carved, as warm and human as ancient stone. She said her name and Prair didn’t hear it.

Again he cursed his confusion. He should have been able to see, damnit, he should have strength . He should know , as Owlsley would have known, what was happening.

She said her name again. Her voice was clear and crisp, and again Prair didn’t hear, didn’t comprehend. Her eyes drank him in – as dark as knots in an old tree, as deep as bottomless oil. Her hair, he noticed, was hidden behind a tribal scarf. She was wearing a simple white blouse, a simple brown dress. Around her neck was a simple cross. She said her name again, cool and crisp.

I should know – I should – the weight of Weep on his arm was torture, his body was screaming for something... something that Prair wanted and Owlsley demanded. He pushed, forced it out in a high-pierced scream – a child’s cry of birth, a breaking of an already cracked mind.

He didn’t know if it was the fluid – or if Prair himself was creating Owlsley in his own mind from too much pain, too much guilt, too much humiliation, and failure. He never knew. Would never, ever know. But as he panted, kneeling on the rough cement, Weep away from him, standing near but not protectively, he knew something:

Brother, sister, mother, father, friend, wife, lover, child. Their names suddenly meant something: their secrets tumbled in front of him, their names linking to blown-up photographs, documentation, pages in books, and memories – maybe Prair’s, maybe Owlsley’s.

Weep bent down, lifted him firmly to his feet as footsteps softly approached from behind. “My sister,” she said, her new name taken from the word written over her sister’s body: “Alice Souyer was my sister.”

He didn’t look at her, instead he stared at the black woman, the woman who had spoken her name twice to him, but only heard for the first time right then – comprehension thundering in his mind. Her hands were behind her back – to hide, he knew , absolutely, her missing thumbs.

Owlsley, the man, was gone – all that remained of him were his words, and his fans. They missed him, but they weren’t the only ones. His victims, the survivors and the relatives, they, too, missed him – missed an opportunity to repay him for all he’d done.

The understanding, the revelation was thunder and lighting in his mind: as far as they were concerned Owlsley was back, and this time he was not escaping.

Whether it was Prair who understood this, or the RNA ghost of Owlsley, it didn’t matter – not to him and, certainly, not them.

HUSH, HUSH

When Nicolai was seven, his world-spanning uncle Theodore blew Tibetan daisy powder into his face. The burly, moist-eyed cloud of hair and exotic smells had found him carefully probing with – narrow, pale, pre-adolescent fingers – through his rattan suitcase. “What are you looking for?” Sheepish, young answer: “Nothing.”

“Hope you find it.”

Add a decade. A decade since Uncle Theodore had probed into his suitcase, brought out a polished-black wooden box. The consistency of cosmic dust, the color of bleached snow. A pinch, a blow. With college yawning and hormones crippling him, Nicolai happened to glance at a family portrait. Leaning precariously with teak-framed casualness against the head of the Balinese God that’d graced the homestead for as long as he’d been alive it showed, with all the warmth and style of a family of investigators and anthropologists, the entire contents of the Foote tribe, circa 1963: Ma, Pa, Grandma & Grandpa Foote (dead for nine years), Grandma & Grandpa Versteri (interred for five and nine, respectfully), Aunt Hester (before he’d been born), and Uncle Theodore (five years gone). Gone – long before the photo had been taken. There in faded camaraderie: smiles and waves from The Other Side. All it needed as a signature: Wish you were here.

When the wind blew over his left shoulder and the smell of jasmine was in the air, Nicolai could see despair at Disneyland, the restlessness in cemeteries, and repression and cowardliness in the Home of the Free and the Brave.

And the poor in China.

I AM –

After eight hours of non-stop sleep, the curse of time-zone-to-time-zone behind him in the isolated and artificial world of the official tourist hostel, Nicolai looked out the wrought iron gates at an orange sun setting on jagged-tooth Beijing.

– MUTE –

When Nicolai was twenty-seven a crazy accident involving automatic writing left him with a signature that only a master of ancient tongues or a world-spanning pharmacist could decipher. Nicolai Foote on a check looked like Chinese but didn't speak it. Not a word. He could read it, when Jasmine was in the air, and because of Tibetan daisy dust – but he spoke none of it.

The city hushed by, carried by a torrent of simple, ubiquitous black bicycles – humming and hushing by the gates of the Royal Imperial/Foreign People’s/Hotel. Moving as if in a dream – which he could easily convince himself he was still in – Nicolai Foote walked the cracked concrete and gravel path to the road.

When Inn met outside world, the huge gates towered over him. He noted well-oiled hinges, scrapes and cracks in the crude paint where locks had been required, demanded, enforced, more than a few times.

In China he saw the poor, but couldn’t talk to any of them.

The sun was starting to sink behind a distant slate roof. Behind his head, as he turned to watch it set, a gray mountain of tiny windows, torn curtains, and a spider’s web of thick electrical lines became the horizon. Voices called out strange music, while those bicycles hummed perpetually by.

At the foot of one of the gates, folded for economy and invisibility, the man fumbled something in cracked hands and mumbled something in a language too fast and clicking for a tourist’s hasty linguistics to pick up.

The man spoke to Nicolai, that much was certain. Under a blanket that may have been red at one time, he peered up, only the faintness of beard and broken nose visible behind the shroud. A hand came out, shocking in its youth and vigor; health and stamina had been recently there. He may have fallen far, to a place that Didn’t Exist (Officially), but he had definitely fallen lately. The man under the blanket extended arm and supple hand in a common gesture, seen the world over – from hallmarks of democracy to places where These Things Do Not Happen. A card, torn and faded from the sun and the rain and older maybe that its possessor came out in the collapsing sun. Nicolai felt the world stop for two minutes, smelled – distantly – jasmine and saw what was written on the card in a language he could not normally understand: I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP.

The coins made as much sense as the voices from the building behind the Royal Imperial Hotel. Digging out a weight of them, a hefty fist of strange discs that might mean meals for eternity, or not enough to buy a lung-full of air, he handed them over.

The man took them, his vigor a signpost: not one chimed against the street. The blanket tilted back, cascaded from tan shoulders, a full head of hair, peach fuzz on cheeks, face unmarked by the erosion of day-in, day-out. The young man smiled a pearly smile up at Nicolai’s foot.

Dots made a mustache of the smile. A series below, a series above. Groves pressed into youthful flesh, hard beads of dark blood making… above and below making... Nicolai’s mind connected the dots as the man praised him in a strange, musical language. Sewn shut. Quickly, recently, not a stitch out of place, a perfect parade of puncture, stretch, puncture, stretch, through tight, strong skin, through lips, across mouth, through lips, and again and again.

The praise stopped when the man realized his examination. His music changed to a storm of fear and anger. Turning, rolling, he got to his feet and moved like laundry blown off a line down past the iron gates, down heavy cobblestones, towards the growing dimness of a tight street.

The connection-of-the-dots froze Nicolai to the street. It was only when the man reached the point of fading into the hum of bicycles, the wall of blue coats, blue pants, and little caps, that he got to his feet and followed. It was unreal, something dreamlike that wasn’t part of culture-shock and jet-lag. This was something new, unique, strange, and very possibly weird – something a Foote could never resist.

Two tall buildings of plaster over stone, highlighted by gutters, wet cobblestones, the bicycles, and the coolness of a setting sun. The street was quiet for so soon off the river of cyclists. He saw faces quick there and quick gone from windows high above. There, two old men over a barrel, playing some game just a little slightly older than they. A mama cut across the end of the alley, from an invisible street to another invisible street with something large and wooden on her back.

Behind was the Schwinn river (he was all-American), he jogged (completely American) down the not-an-alley. It emptied into another street, a junction, a part of the deeper Capital maze. More people. He towered over them, looking for the once-red blanket, the silent man – seeking a forever quiet man in the whole buzzing, humming, singing, cackling city.

A flash of crimson, but when he twisted around nothing was there–nothing but stroboscopic xenophobia. There – was that him? Could it be? A brisk walk turned into a trot, then a run – Comrade citizen Chinese bolting out of the way of the scarecrow, the black and bearded stranger.

And he had earrings!

The tide boiled away, revealing a broad avenue of old stone and iron bolted buildings. Before the tourist, a flapping blanket. A call to Wait! Stop! Don’t run was a stone in his throat. Goddamnit, stop running! But the thought of hoping his mouth, uttering those oh-so English words in a place where language was a singing cacophony of squeaks, clicks, and fluid vowels was too much. One word, just one word, was enough to pin him to a wall, show to all the Chinese world of Beijing that he was Not One Of Them.

Not that the earrings, hair, and beard didn’t help – but then he was running after a sight of torture, of mutilation, to help someone. Or was it because it was something he just had never seen before..? Just Foote genes hitting hard?

The lights of Beijing were economically placed, and leaked out through dull curtains onto deep valleys of ancient streets. The chase led from corner to corner, hour to hour, and from dusk to deep night. Heart banging on his chest to be let out, Nicolai stopped in the dark under the gaze of a weak yellow light and propped himself on his knees – panting in hopeless English (he was sure) and damning himself for not joining an effective health club.

There were people around him... he noticed after a while.

Looking up from the dull glazed wet cobblestones, he saw one, another, and then more of the same:

The first was an old woman – maybe the spiritual/physical twin of the wood carrying one he had seen (miles?) before. The other was perhaps her mate, wrinkled, hobbled, with a faded blue cap, and a thick wool coat. More of the same were the other residents – some young, some old, some between, some ugly, some pretty, some between. The light flicked onto them, and through a haze of near exhaustion, Nicolai Foote noticed–

A row of dots, a pattern of dried blood, precise like from a machine–

– sewing machine –

– some above, some below. Their eyes above the scars on their lips, on their faces, eyes locked tight behind fear and suspicion. Nicolai watched them walk past him, their eyes trying to reach out past pure Chinese to pure Mutt to tell him, to communicate, and not being able to past the ghost of the mutilation, the silencing.

The old woman noticed him, and a speckle of light dawned in her eyes. She left the stream of suppressed humanity and moved towards him. Reaching out to him, Nicolai noticed something in her hand. Looking down at her gray and wrinkles, he saw it was a card. The Chinese scratches and creaks crawled across a mangled and dirty piece of printed cardboard. The language was as opaque as it had been at home, at the airport, but he knew what it said. He’d seen it before: I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP.

Nicolai felt the flutter of panic pluck his down-deep strings. He wanted to run, to escape the mass silencing, the pleading, frightened stares of this people, but something deeper wanted to speak, to utter a denial, to call down the might and majesty of the rest of the world.

I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP.

But the silence and the pleading, capped him down. It was like swimming under the ice, plunged down deep with the light of the sun, and the promise of air, so far away, so impossibly far away, you might as well drown anyway. It wasn’t a negation of the horror or the anger, it was the mind-boggling scope of it, that made him simply stare.

I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP.

The pleading was in an incomprehensible language. Repetitive, with each torn, tattered, and old card. Some had nothing but the pleading in their eyes. Befitting the quiet of all this, a searchlight swept the night sky. Nicolai noticed it, as it picked out the lines of buildings that dared reach higher than a few stories.

Then the light noticed Nicolai.

Pinned. Whiteness invaded Nicolai's corner of really, impaling him in an unblinking stare of pure, undiluted white. Blinking, he tried to bring hand to eyes. Refusal. Pinned by a spotlight that couldn’t have possibly made it down the narrow street, Nicolai realized with growing panic that he was immobilized. Blind. Blink. Eyes tight shut. Fingers stiff, arms and legs aching, neck locked to a sight of the crowd. Frozen in the unblinking white light.

The silent crowd backed away. In the distance, others boldly ran. Their eyes showed total fear, a silently screaming fear that couldn’t be spoken through traumatized lips. They moved away, scared of it, scared of what was happening, sorry for the tourist, the stranger.

A burst of pure frustration went through Nicolai like a jolt of current. He vibrated and shook, fighting against the pinning light. Exhaustion came soon. Nothing. He was stuck, fly in amber, flypaper. Pinned by the light.

His wife, Teal, his flock of children, his brother, Constantine, his other cohort, Baldwin asked him in person, by mail, by computer disc, why he was going, why the hell was he dropping himself into deepest, darkest Beijing, why he was spending money he didn’t have on something that seemed to make not the barest amount of sense. Nicolai had responded with wit, deception, aversion to every single one, save to a complete stranger at the San Francisco airport:

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.”

“Hope you find it.”

Same airport, he waved good-bye to the stranger and the ghosts who’d come to see him off.

The street’s hush deepened into something beyond library, close to morgue. It was the still of the silenced, the awed. Some of the silent remained, with eyes lit from behind by something close to the fires of religion, the atheists of deep Beijing, urban china, watched Nicolai. And, pinned by the brilliance of the light, all Nicolai could do was watch them–

The brilliance escalated from something that danced blue spots before his eyes to something beyond that. The flash of a thousand bulbs, the sun on a blue-sky day at high noon – staring down at his naked eyes, looking too long into a powerful flashlight. Then the street was back, Beijing was back around him, the awe-struck faces of the mute, stitched, people still staring.

Plus one: he smiled like a little yellow sticker on the back of pink Volkswagen. A face of benevolence, without the wrinkles, jaw-line, mustache, or turban of public evil. What to make of a face that seemed sincere, kind, soft, and more than slightly stupid?

Nicolai had a copy of his book, back when he was young and walking the country – just a backpack, the little red book, and all the ghosts –

For a second, he wanted to ask him for his autograph. But then Nicolai realized the chubby little man wasn’t looking at the tourist. His round cherub face was tilted upwards, his chins stretching into one as he craned his head up... towards... something...

Nicolai was denied craning, but his eyes still swam in their dazed fluid. He looked up and beyond the beatific smile of the Chairman, into the beam of the searchlight. There was something there, playing in the light: a photon dolphin in a light stream.

It was a silver dart at first, a something darting amongst the blue flashes of the light burning into his eyes. At first he discounted it as part of the total hallucination – that’d started with I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP – but then he felt his body too real, to slid. And his frozen legs hurt too much. And he was thinking too clear – and he’d hallucinated better.

The flash darted back and forth, playing. A puppy, a playful pet anxious to please its master. This way and that, the little silver fleck danced and danced – until it left the beam with a quick flip, and there it was:

In front of the Chairman’s innocently fat face, the needle with its tail of thread danced and played.

Nicolai was pinned by the beam of the searchlight – he couldn’t scream.

The silver touched him. The thought of the pain was worse than the sensation: fact of life, he lived it but knowing didn’t make it any better. The needle zipped through the air, in a spirited, lifelike, animated sort of way, from the smiling gaze of the Chairman through a couple of playful loops, darts, zags, and zigs, to hover an inch or less in-front of Nicolai's buzzing eyes.

It danced there, inspecting him, savoring his fear, relishing in the thought of the act. Then, slowly, the needle sank down, down, down–

– below the angle of his paralyzed eyes.

The rest you know, can guess.

The itch was first, and the fear bloomed inside Nicolai. God, he wished he could scream, a point of cold itch on the left side of his lower lip. Itch, irritation, burning, cold, pain, pain, pain. He could feel his lower lip stretch upwards under the unrelenting pressure of the needle.

One of Nicolai's friends was an insomniac, until he discovered the perfect bed. On his mattress of nails, he once told Nicolai how strong living tissue is. Ever pierce someone's ear? Strong, strong, strong. Nicolai, in retrospective, having his lips sewn together in the dim and dark of a Beijing street, knew that to be an act of cruelty on the part of the Goddess: weak skin would have parted long ago, and surely not hurt as much–

The pop was a jerk inside his head, the puncture of his lip a vibration through mandible, through cranium, to inner ear. A felt pop, heard pop. Then pressure again, then the slipping of the needle through sensitive, nerve-laden tissue, a point again. An itch, a burn, pain, pain, pain – on the underside of his upper lip.

Sparing the details: one stitch concluded, the needle rose slowly into Nicolai's frozen field of vision: inspecting him for fear, for respect, for worship, and pleading – it got all of them. Then a slow dip, dive and pain back down through – accompanied by the sliding through of waxen thread through the two holes freshly punched in his lips–

Sparing the details, fill in your own at your leisure: Nicolai had his lips sewn together.

As the needle worked, and as the pain drew his consciousness out of his shell, to hover, fuzzy and dreamlike above, he watched the beatific smile of the Chairman as his agent completed its censorship.

Then needle came up through his lip (left side, top), hard and fast – tightening, jerking the stitches tight – and hung in front of him. He was snapped at the end of this string, and BANG was back in his body, with the pure, raw, pain.

Like giving birth, the thread moved free of its sharp parent till it fell out of the loop, and gently sagged to become entangled in the brushy hairs of Nicolai's mustache.

The Chairman never stopped smiling.

Still pinned with his screaming lips (because he couldn’t do the screaming on his own), Nicolai threw clichéd daggers at the chubby demon (because he was in too much pain, with too much anger to be more original). If the Chairman knew, if the Chairman heard, felt, or sensed, he didn’t show it. With a quick turn, he moved off back down the street – and the beam left Nicolai.

A string metaphor would be perfect: like a puppet released, he dropped down to the cold stones of the streets, his pain and anguish pushing out against his mouth – and back down as he stretched the fresh sutures to moan.

The knife came out of some pocket. Had Chinese Law and Chinese Order known about it, he would never have gotten in. But they had missed it, perhaps blinded by overwork, maybe by something Nicolai had done (after all, after the Tibetan daisies, the visions of stuff no one else could see, and accidents such as the number with automatic writing, who could say what anyone saw of him), but in any event, he had the knife: modern chromium technology – a mite-sized work of magic. Of course, it didn’t exactly look like a knife: Playing card thick, pocket ruler-sized, as sharp as a molecule seen edge on, it had been contributed to his collection of absurdia by a Wizard who lived in the magical land of Silicon Valley, who, it was said, in hushed whispers in the halls of great Techno-magic, had grown it in a tank from wild, rootless carbon atoms.

He had the knife. Using it, though, was another matter.

Using it on himself was completely another matter...

Nicolai held the thin metal strip to the corner of his mouth. Memory: Lab coat and greasy hair demonstrating on the banister of Foote’s home. A hunk of solid oak tumbling with a metronome of thuds down the stairs. Ooops!

Ooops! With finger tips as guides, and expecting the metronome of middle finger and finger-tips dropping down to that cold street, he tried to guide the knife through the threads that sewed his mouth shut. The first cord popped, springing his mouth in a sneer. The second popped and his face was a wide grimace. With each cord, string, suture, the sores and holes screamed out at him. Sitting on the cold stone, Nicolai moaned with each pop and cried.

The third went, and his chin was wet. Thinking drool, and embarrassed in his weakness before the Chinese he guessed were still there (his eyes were closed the instant the knife hit cord), he wiped the liquid away. Later he would see his red hand and realize he’d sliced off a good bit of lip.

Fourth. Two to go. Breathing hard, constellations on the inside of his eyelids, Nicolai opened his eyes – forcing them to see the crowd, to look anywhere but down at the knife between his lips, and the pale string of the last thread.

The crowd looked back at him. Against a musical backdrop of very old city, the singing of the bicycles from the Old Grand Road, the crowd watched him: some with that same air of curiosity, fear, and sympathy. Silent in their common plight and surgical oppression, they watched him saw away the bonds. Others, though, looked the other way – anxious to look at anything save the silenced tourist.

Not wanting to see then trying not to see him, Nicolai scanned away from their faces...

The searchlight arced and moved over the sides of the old buildings, like a playful pet looking for a lost toy. It moved there – no, it wasn’t there. It moved there – but, no, it wasn’t there. It waved and crawled across the sky – giving nothing away of it’s lamp: it swept one way, fixed itself then swung its tail. It shifted and swung its way across the cool black night. Back and forth. Back and forth. It swung its end far into the dark city, before letting go and swinging again.

Surrounded by the silence of his people, the Chairman watched it go. Bland, faintly smiling, he watched the circle of light cut the darkness with its persistence. Then it found her.

– and the Chairmen smiled.

She was caught as she moved through the silence. She was young girl, face a porcelain plate below the faded blue of her wool cap. Hair painted from the night that surrounded her, minus the gray of old snow. Cap pushed to eclipse her eyebrows, she had been trying to slip away, to fade into the stonework.

The beam arced towards her. The face of the Chairmen stretched from bland amusement to that of the hunter whose dog has found the scent. Fear cracked her porcelain, and her eyes strained and quivered. Tears bowed under her lashes, and her mouth worked itself.

Nicolai wanted to call out. Just a sound, something deep and primal to break the impenetrable silence, to make himself heard – if not understood. Something that would catch the attention of those with the needle, with the searchlight, to make them turn and look if only for a second – so that the girl might merge and vanish into the streets.

If you’re expecting dialogue you’re going to be disappointed.

Nicolai's hand was at the blue shining blade in his mouth. The searchlight winged the girl, freezing a few people standing near her. The blade slide too easily across the next cord in his mouth. The Chairman started to walk with all the time in the world towards the girl. The last cord that bound Nicolai's mouth into oppressive silence popped free, and as he flexed his mouth open the roar of pain pushed him straight onto his hands and knees – a deep sound from the soles of his tennis shoes at the cool stones of the street. As the Chairman walked towards her, she turned and melted into the silent walls of the crowd.

Nicolai turned his head and watched: The beam, confused, darted among the throngs that stood and watched, freezing them, unfreezing them as it slid past, looking for her scent, her sight. The Chairman moved towards them, and they shuffled into a more dense form to allow him to pass.

The girl was moving away.

Something, anything to make him stop, to swing the beam back. Nicolai was ready to suffer the stitches again, to use the knife again, to do anything to make the chase stop, to let just this one escape. He wanted to scream, to protest, to say anything.

If you’re expecting dialogue you’re going to be disappointed .

* * * *

The streets were still stone. The buildings were still plaster over brick. The city was still humming with the sound of bicycles, the clatter and click of Chinese spoken with intimate, comfortable speed. The lights that lit his way through the maze of deepest, most-alien, Beijing were cast by accident, thrown in this way by open doors, badly-placed lamps beside open doors, leaked from public structures.

Heart pounding, lips and mouth pits of open fires, Nicolai paused beside a simple wooden door. Hands on knees, backside against plaster-over-brick, he concentrated on his game show theme mantra – slowing his heart, pushing the blood around. His head swam for a few moments, but then the colors faded and he started to feel as normal as Nicolai Foote ever got. Distantly, via a bad sound-system, Sting’s voice crawled into his ears: “Every breath you take/every move you make/I’ll be watching you – ”

The knob on the door was warm. Casting a look over his sounder: the tracking beam of the searchlight, a beam of pale light cutting through the mist of the night, ending in a circle of painful luminosity on distant walls, swept by and over. Standing on the street behind him –

– was that the Chairman, coming to whistle and fetch the beam and the needle? Nicolai's heart pounded and drummed through The Sixty-Four Dollar Question and Jeopardy before he realized it was just long-dead, long-lost Uncle Theodore. The spirit was puffing on his as-always pipe, still in his perpetual wool jacket. He smiled at Nicolai and faded back to invisibility.

The door opened suddenly, and, hand still on the knob, he was drawn into the loudness of “Every move you make –” Blinking against the dimness of the concrete-lined pit, he made out first the dim spot on the sort-of space, then the moons of faces turned towards him, their eyes full of glimmering fear and suspicion, their mouths shut, nailed, sewn –

I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP.

Panic a booster on his mind, he scanned the moons, squinting into their reflective faces, looking for her, trying to find her in the crowd. Some of them watched him, moving off, lips moving in subconscious jerks and quivers. About to cry. Fearing exposure. The needle. The Chairman – thou shalt not speak, unless spoken to. Nothing. Her face was not there. The knob again, and again the cool night.

What am I doing?

The bed was there back at the hotel. European comforts, and island of isolation. The squinting suspicion of the withered old concierge – and her hotline to the police. It was a place of rest, comfort, a soft bed, electric power, clean sheets, sleep, dreams and (oh, yeah) bandages and betadyne. It was far from the frightened faces, the silence, the needle and the searchlight. It was just simple moments away from the plane, the long, almost unendurable flight, jet lag, his wife, their endless children, and – God – sleep.

Maybe, maybe. He didn’t know why, but all that was maybe . After he found the girl.

* * * *

Outside, the moon was high and full; the air was crisp and dry – but he could feel rain in the future, like a curtain being slowly drawn.

The corner that hid the tiny illegal club branched off into the distance. Moon. Sky. Ancient brick. Nothing. Searching the sky till the clouds were ancient history and his neck cracked and popped, Nicolai could see nothing of the beam. The night was cool and dark, hinting at rain, and empty.

He walked. Watches had a tendency to lie to Nicolai – to tell him things that were either out-and-out lies (“You’ve got plenty of time”) exaggerations (“No time left!”) or truths that were useless against their treacheries (“Now!”) he didn’t consult the dime store plastic on his wrist. He didn’t know how long he wandered the strange city’s strange streets, looking down dark alleys by the light of the moon, and the loose splashings of miscellaneous lights. He wandered, more asleep than awake. He passed walls more ancient than his native tongue.

Nicolai walked the streets, tripping in his somnambulism over dents from tank treads, rolling on the images of spent brass casings, deaf to the whispers and screams that had been there recently

In his lethargy and damned persistence, the foreigner in a very foreign land was nothing but a suggestion: as if in his exhaustion he was too tired to be really seen. The policeman walking past, the Militia in their armored car, the assorted spooks, spies, and informants ignored him. Nicolai turned and turned again, the image of her face keeping one foot in front of another.

The square was flat and enclosed with a mathematical orderliness alien to the wandering city. It was cut from an immense die pounded into rock. He walked cool stones, gazing absently up at the ghostly after-image of Democracy, while ignoring the faint scratching of the Goddess's residue on his shoes. Pausing, the tourist wished for his camera – or a camera that would take what he saw; the image of simple, crude, vigorous with a determination blessed with possibility, a square of raw Maybe –

The reality of what he saw came down hard. A chill night with the threat of rain, standing in the square, surrounded by soldiers, surrounded by stone, miles from where any self-respecting stranger ought to be. He was scared. He was dead.

He thought of speaking, asking forgiveness of anyone he should meet in making an escape. Please, I’m a stupid tourist who got lost. Don’t point the gun at me, you don’t have to shoot me – but all that came when he opened his mouth was an unprintable sound as lips till recently sewn together parted a fraction.

Pain.

He shut his mouth and move carefully, slowly, as if the stones themselves could set up an alarm. There, he thought, where the stones cut the square into darkness and moon-brightness. Hide in the shadows, maybe for an hour, maybe till he could he sure that he wouldn’t get caught. It wasn’t called the Forbidden City for nothing.

Like when he’d sprinted before, Nicolai's heart started to tap-dance. Acid burned his mouth and he wanted to spit, but swallowed his own bile instead of making even that tiny sound.

Something scraped against the bottom of his shoe. The sound rang out to the stone walls and back and forth and back and forth. There, he was sure that was the sound of a machine gun being cocked.

Then Nicolai smelled Jasmine.

Above him, passing with quiet like a mellow though, a beam of intense light swept the sky, looking, looking, looking. Swing, stop, swing from the other end. Stop. Swing. Stop. Looking, looking, looking – Uncle Theodore touched him on the arm (ice flows skidding across frozen stones) and pointed up at the searchlight beam.

Nicolai felt for the knife in his pocket, and started running, hard and noisily fast, towards where the beam pointed.

* * * *

Images from the non-camera of a tourist too preoccupied to take snapshots:

Nicolai ran through the quiet dark streets of Beijing, too occupied with the hunt to be noticed by anyone. In his hand the blue steel shine of Silicon Valley magic. Down his chin shone the black of freshly opened sutures. His beard was a clotted mass hanging from his ruined mouth. His breath steamed out into the chill air, escaping in clouds.

Across a road, past thin trees, stepping into footprints that stopped before the dents of heavy tank treads. Nicolai stopped there, scanning the dark sky.

There.

There – the beam swept across a faintly reflective sky. It swung back and forth over a distant quarter of the ancient city. With each sweep, he noticed with the hammering in his chest and the wind whistling in and out of him, it got shorter and shorter. Finally it stopped and pointed, and Nicolai started to run.

A twisted and crushed bicycle underfoot, and a short leap to clear it. A twisted and crushed student, lips tightly sewn shut. Another leap.

Uncle Theodore came into view, came into focus standing on the side of the stone-lined street, then past. Were his lips moving? What was he saying?

Hope you find it.

I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP – he wanted to call past the blue jacketed, blue capped citizens of Beijing. They’re going after her. I’m sure she has a sweet voice, please help, I’m sure she has lovely things to say – please help .

Crap , he thought, rounding a corner – even if she has crap to say, please help .

The maze came on Nicolai with a quiet only a malevolent predator could muster. Nicolai stood, rasping breaths away from collapse, or at least defibrillation. Stone on all sides, stone rising from every side to the dim rectangles of apartments. The street branched off in how many directions? It was hard to tell. This way and that, panting, his neck a knot of tension. Come on, come on, where are they? Where is she?

Nicolai tried to count the corners, to number the roads that converged on this tiny pocket of the ancient city, but the smell of Jasmine over his left shoulder was too strong.

He saw roads on roads from the path Peking Man first took from cave to water, to the steps of Confucius, Pei Ling, The Dowager Empress, Mao, Ms. Mao, every path that had fallen into disuse, was ghosted, lay before him. A thousand paths to choose from –

– but she was down just one.

Okay, that’s it. That’s it – his legs snapped under him and the stone street was a firm smack on his backside. Wheezing, he sat and watched the phosphors in his eyes do their little acrobatics. His lungs were full of cold needles and his legs were pillars of broken glass.

And, of course, someone had sewn his lips together.

Absently, trying not to think about what was happening to her, he flipped the knife over and over in his hand, playing with the edge that wanted to taste his blood, cut his thumb off. It twinkled in the light, casting a broken rectangle. He started to hate her then, with a fury that made his knees buckle and his vision blur. She wouldn’t stand and fight, she wouldn’t reach into some hidden bag of tricks. She’s just standing there, impassive and frozen and allowing her lips to be stitched, allowing the cold steel needle push and push and PUSH its way up through her lip, pulling its waxy suture behind it, without fighting.

Or making a sound. Like he did.

He wanted to scream at her, yell into that crisp Chinese night, to tell her to scream, cry out, say anything into the dark silence. Make a noise to tell him WHERE IN THE HELL IS SHE? His fist lashed out and make a sickening bruising sound against the cold stone.

Something cut his hand. A sharp pain like having his hand dipped in ice. He passed it up into the light. A thin line; the meaty heel of his hand smiled at him with a bloody grin. It was starting to ache and hurt, but it wasn’t bad, wasn’t deep.

The knife lay on the stone. After a few hammering heartbeats he bent to pick it up. A beam of light from the card, a plaything version of the accusatory searchlight. A beam that went down the alley.

Down the alley.

With a practiced move that would later send even more shivers down his quaking spine, he scooped up the magic of American technological might (think of grabbing it wrong, and leaving fingers behind) and went down the real street, into the real city, away from the illusions.

With his reflector showing him the real stone pass, he moved. Angry and still frightened, he moved either the right way or the wrong way.

Silently, he cursed her again: where are you?

* * * *

The crowd came on him like a wave. Deep blue, like the ocean. A crowd that stood and started at where the beam touched, where they had gathered in there worshipful silence and fear.

Nicolai tried to push, and then to claw, and finally to beat his way through the press of humanity (branch name: Chinese). For every shoulder he pushed and pulled aside, for every foot he smashed a booted heel down on, another slipped out of the tide and into his way. It seemed hours, but was more like simple moments, that had gotten him past the first three comrades in the thick. Now he was up against tired bricks, a pitted and blacked water pipe and the smell of mildew and age. As he pushed and pulled, he saw the beam, unwavering in its accusation of voice: it pinned someone too short to see to the same wall. The Chairman was nowhere to be seen – but then he wasn't a tall man.

But then there was the dome of a head in the center of the press. And was that – can’t really make it out – something shining, silvery, playing in the beam of light? Before he was aware he was doing it, Nicolai was above the crowd and looking down at their blue-capped heads from the pipe. It was slippery with cool night dew, and cold, cold, cold: but there was enough of a gap between it and the wall for him to get his narrow, strong fingers in. Leverage. He was head and shoulders above the rest: a tide of mute humanity: I AM MUTE. PLEASE HELP on torn, tattered cards, lips sewn horribly quiet. Against the wall, the girl was pinned and paralyzed. In front of her, the smiling Chairman, in the beam, the frisky needle smelling voice.

Still too far away.

The heads were a long way down now. How do they measure length in China? Along a narrow ledge one story (a long one) up, three, four meters, dozens and more feet. A ledge was either a mistake in the simple lines of the building or an accident. Fingers raw and cramped, he moved one foot, then another, then another. Wanting to scream, to shout, to say ANYTHING, he cursed her again for her silence, and the quietness of her pursuit. He wasn’t going to make it. It was too far down to jump, too long to climb down. He couldn’t watch, and so turned towards the wall.

The impact on the old street almost broke his ankle. He was unprepared for his own bravery and so didn’t make a good parachutist landing. Smashing down hard on the old stones, Nicolai crumpled and then rolled. Screaming (ah, but quietly) anger drove a steel spike from his right foot up his leg, spine, and into his brain. He opened his mouth to scream, but couldn’t say a word.

The Chairman towered over him in his small size. The beam above him, his faithful muzzler, in it the playful sadism of the silencing needle.

The knife came out of his pocket with all the silence of its silicon edge. He tried to stand, failed, and instead passed it quick and near through the Chairman’s legs.

A knife a few dozen of molecules thick hits some kind of resistance depending on the material. Clothes, skin, tissue, femoral artery, bone, he shouldn’t have been able to whiz right through it like a playing card through cigarette smoke, but it did. The Chairman still smiled, and behind him, in the crowd, Uncle Theo frowned.

The needle played in and with the searchlight beam. The Chairman ignored Nicolai and his silence and moved towards her. Closer, closer, Nicolai wondered if he was going to walk around him or, like a molecular knife through a manifestation of the collective will, pass right through him. The Chairman’s shoes, Nicolai noticed where simple and black, like streamlined beetles.

The Chairman showed no signs of slowing in the least. Fear crawled Nicolai's spine, freezing his legs and putting out the pain. Out of determination rather than elegance, he pushed himself away from the little round-faced man, away from what he was, represented and (high above) controlled.

As he moved, his head touched the bottom of the beam – and Nicolai became lost in the odd sensation of having his hair and scalp being frozen by the light. Then the Chairman was still walking, still moving towards him. Reduced to something small and feral, he brandished the knife.

...blue, something like metal. He saw the springing playfulness of the needle begging to be released, wanting to touch and seal her lips against speech. He saw the Chairman nod, let go of the leash.

And Nicolai did what he did on the ledge. The knife was up. The caught a piece of the beam before his hand froze. The fraction of the beam bounced and bent, slapping off the knife like hard water off of stone. A bent square landed between the uncaring eyes of the Chairman, freezing him in the light.

The wind changed. The smell of Jasmine was no longer in the air, in Nicolai Foote’s mind. That tiny piece of China smacked into hard reality. No light, no Chairman – just the hard reality of hard China. Nicolai's eyes hurt, like from being crowded with too deep a sleep. Awoken, his lips burned and screamed in violated pain.

The crowd melted away, slipped back into silent anonymity. The fact that they wouldn’t speak of that night shouldn’t have to be... stated.

In time, he got up. After a few minutes, he shook some concentration back into himself. A minute or so later, he noticed her, leaning against the wall.

Stoking the smoothness of her hair, he was, for the moment, a father again. He held her as she shook and cried, and felt her grow softer and softer in his arms.

When the dawn started to stare at their intimacy with earnest, the American started to fear the prying eyes of some local informant – but first he had to find something out.

Luckily, his automatic writing was working for once: Why didn’t you scream? in rough Chinese on the dirty wall with a finger wetted with spit (you didn’t expect him to open his mouth and speak – ?).

And she: a simple but well rehearsed gesture. Into the folds of her jacket. A simple card, fresh and new, and carried with hundreds of its kin as an explanation: I AM MUTE. PLEASE –

Well, you know the rest.

And Nicolai went home, waving “Till we meet again” to the fading ghost of his Uncle Theo – looking forward to seeing him again.