Madlands Read online

  I wondered where he’d gotten that kind of stuff fed into his skull. Maybe there was some kind of residual connection between what was going on in that original skull of mine and whatever one I was currently using. Maybe he’d come awake, his mind blank, when I’d been watching that old film, and the Joad business had just zapped right in there. Then again, that Okie stuff was part of ancient Southern California mythology; the Madlands, in its constant re-creation of that world, might have just called some Joadoid personality into existence, using D as a convenient carrier. Whatever the explanation, it didn’t matter much. The guy was walking around with my face and a repertoire of shitkicker moves.

  D was obviously doing some heavy-duty analysis of his own. I could see it sparking around behind his eyes.

  “You know . . .” He rubbed his chin as the words drawled out. “You do seem kinda familiar, mister. Somehow. The more I look at you, the more I seem to remember you from someplace. But I don’t rightly know where.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” I tapped my fingernail on the rim of my cup. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”

  D shook his head. “It seems crazy like, but . . . it’s almost like I remember you from a long time ago. Like you were my long-lost brother or something. But I don’t know if I even ever had a brother. Not like you, at least.”

  He was catching a piece of that odd kinship radiation. He could look at me and see a mirror, but with somebody else’s face in it.

  “Well, D—” I gave him my kindest smile. “Maybe we are brothers.”

  Another shake of the head. “My only kin is . . . up there.”

  It took me a moment to figure that one out. “You mean Identrope?”

  D nodded, looking both a little embarrassed and defiant at the same time.

  “You think Identrope’s family to you?” Now I was starting to talk like him.

  “I don’t think it, mister. I know it. In my gut. If I could just get across these crazy parts around here, and get to him . . . He’d recognize me. And he’d help me. That’s what kin are for.”

  A wild longing hope had broken in D’s voice. Not the same lust for salvation that Identrope’s usual be-doomed followers expressed, but something darker and more powerful, a yearning for union on the subatomic level. Family business.

  “Maybe . . .” D reached over and touched my hand. “Maybe you could help me.”

  He didn’t have to say what; I knew what he meant. Maybe I could get him to Identrope, somehow.

  The edge of another plan entered my thoughts, with Identrope’s death at the inevitable still center.

  I gave D a bigger smile. “Maybe . . . we can both help each other.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I HAD to hand it to Geldt. I had grievously underestimated the little fucker.

  Not until later, after all kinds of shit had happened, and bits and pieces were still raining down, ashes floating in the air, did I find out what Geldt had managed to pull off. Reports came filtering in to me from the various parties involved, and I lined up the various jigsaw edges until I got the big picture.

  Geldt was, I thought, off the scene and no longer an active player, due to my own machinations. Rasty Mike and the rest of the Stone Units had taken him off my hands; they could feed and water him for a while. That while might be a short one or a long one, depending upon how obnoxious Geldt made himself. The Stone Units had been known to drop screaming parcels off an overpass onto the hard concrete bed of the Los Angeles River, said packages being people that the Units had decided were on the tiresome side. I’d figured there was likely some learning curve for Rasty Mike and his crew, at the apex of which was the realization that they’d been sold the old stiff one, and that Geldt was not the valuable property they’d been led to believe. Geldt’s disposal lay on the other side of that curve.

  Though no longer on the scene as a player, his own scheming interrupted by my maneuver, Geldt was paradoxically having a greater effect as a passive participant. Once I’d convinced Rasty Mike that Geldt was actually this mysterious entity known as “Trayne,” Geldt at that time became transfigured into a new state of existence. Here were all these people paying attention to him, who wouldn’t have deigned to piss on him before. He should have regarded that as a net improvement of his lot in life. Plus, his having been subsumed into “Trayneness” furthered my own scheming, giving me a new anonymity in which to operate.

  All in all, I’d figured that Geldt as Trayne was a pawn whose position on the Madlands board was nailed down, no longer subject to his own calculus of greed and spite.

  I was wrong about that, as it turned out.

  He must have been listening up pretty sharply while I’d been handing my own line of bull to Rasty Mike. Maybe he’d managed to wriggle over to the door of the room I’d been keeping him in, and plaster his ear to it; at any rate, he had the whole scoop on exactly what I’d told Rasty Mike, about him being Trayne, and, even more importantly, all the business about him being able to control the satellite the New Moon Corporation was planning to send up. Behind his bugged-out eyes—and how much of him being scared pissless, I came to wonder, was also an act designed to keep me thinking I had everything cooled—and his bullet-sweating face, his brain must have been racing, every little cell firing as he figured out his own moves.

  The way I see it, rolling the movie inside my head, Rasty Mike and the rest of the Stone Units took the trussed-up Geldt straight back to their funky clubhouse. I’ve seen the place, down in the middle of the warehouse district. The main decorating motif is black engine grease, as though they’d actually tried to paint the walls inside and out with Pennzoil thirty-weight. Lots of bike parts lying around, machines in various stages of dis- and reassembly, most of them looking like the bones of chromed sabertooths mired in the tar pits. Broken down Salvation Army sofas, shiny and smelling of sweat. Bootleg Mexican biphets and bennie cartwheels, trodden into white powder in the muck. And various women, the Stone Units’ girlfriends, of some species that had started out only vaguely human and thus didn’t have much to lose by hanging out in the Madlands.

  The Stone Units probably dragged a straight-back wooden chair out from the clubhouse kitchen and tied Geldt into it, hands behind the chair’s back, right in the middle of the club’s main room. The Stone Units had seen enough movies to know that was what you did with your prisoners, especially if you were going into heavy interrogation mode. Was Geldt still sweating then, or had he gotten his spiel worked out in his head, all ready to fire?

  Rasty Mike, in my head movie, whipped off the gag from over Geldt’s mouth. Looming up big and dangerous in front of their captive—Vee haff vays, et cetera. Except Rasty Mike was already being steamrollered, before he could open his own hairy mouth. Geldt was off and running.

  “It’s about fuckin’ time!” Something like that would’ve been the first words out of Geldt’s mouth. Geldt was just enough of an animal psychologist to have known that you can’t show them fear. He would’ve called up whatever secret reserve of guts he kept underneath his stomach, and gone for the big show of bravado. “I was about ready to eat that goddamn rag, it’d been in my mouth so long. What the hell were you assholes waiting for?”

  Rasty Mike would have been rocked back on his heels a bit. My spiel to him had led him to think that Geldt, in this incarnation as Trayne, was some spineless corporate drone, deep in the pockets of the New Moon Corporation’s boardroom directors. He wasn’t expecting someone to come up chewing bullets and spitting out shrapnel blood.

  “Whuh—?” Some brilliant comment like that from Rasty Mike.

  “You heard me.” Geldt would have narrowed his eyes down to razor slits. “Come on. We’ve got work to do. Untie me, for Christ’s sake.”

  By then, even Rasty Mike’s brain would have managed to get back into gear. “Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t go telling us what to do—”

  “You want to be rich? Powerful? Kick ass and sleep in late? Get blown by beautiful women instead of these douche bags you got flopped ar
ound here?” Geldt’s full-out salesman pitch. “Then get these fuckin’ cuffs off my wrists. Christ, I can’t even feel my fingers anymore. If I get gangrene waiting for you guys to pull your thumbs out of your butts, I’m going to be major pissed. And then I’ll have a good mind to just shut up, and you won’t get all the candy you want in this life.” A lift of Geldt’s eyebrow. “So what’s it going to be, hairball?”

  By that time, all the rest of the Stone Units would have been clustered around. Rasty Mike’s underlings had missed everything I had pitched to him when he’d been in my apartment. All they would have known was that Geldt/Trayne was a figure of some kind of strategic importance. So Geldt’s talk of money and getting laid would easily have fired off their greed and lust circuits—in these guys’ neural systems there probably wasn’t much else left. They would have started bouncing up and down, and climbing over each other’s shoulders in sheer salivating excitement.

  That kind of excitement is contagious for the weak-minded. If he’d been by himself, Rasty Mike might have resisted it. But surrounded by the hyped-up microcephalics he called his brothers, he undoubtedly gave in.

  “That’s better.” The straight-back kitchen chair would have been a throne then, all eyes upon the seated man, Geldt rubbing circulation back into his chafed wrists. “Now we can talk.”

  What did Geldt tell them?

  I know he didn’t waste time denying that he was this thing called Trayne. Fate, in my person, had dealt him that hand, and he had spotted a way of filling the inside straight. Better a Trayne with something these murderers wanted than some schmuck named Geldt that they dispense with like something they’d stepped in on the dirty sidewalks outside the clubhouse.

  The business about the New Moon satellite being some kind of ancient super-weapon had already been planted—by me—in Rasty Mike’s head. It would have been easy enough for Geldt to spread it into the rest of the Stone Units’ thinking, such as it was. It’s also easier to build on top of lies with more of the same, rather than trying to refute them with anything close to the truth.

  Next would have been to confirm that he, “Trayne,” was capable of controlling the New Moon’s killer satellite. Another already-implanted notion—all of this would’ve been cake for anybody, let alone Geldt with his back to the wall.

  Finally, the third leg of the tripod, something of his own creation.

  “All right, you guys—” More movie talk, even if Geldt didn’t know that was where he was getting it from. By this point, Geldt would’ve been sprawled out in the chair, maybe even tipping it back a bit to give that air of easy command All the Stone Units, including Rasty Mike, would have been under the sway of his words. “That other guy’s a punk.” He meant me. “We don’t need him. He sucker-punched me when I wasn’t looking. And the only reason I was hanging out with him was because I was trying to put together a crew for this action. Somebody had told me he was a righteous type, and he turned out to be a weasel. You can’t trust people like that. I should’ve come around here and recruited you guys, since I was looking for right-on criminal accomplices.”

  A murmur of approval from the crowd. Geldt was singing their song.

  Rasty Mike, if he’d had any sense at all, would’ve tried to hold on to at least a bit of his leadership role. Rubbing his chin through the thatch of his beard—“Just what kind of action you talking about?”

  “Come on.” Geldt would have continued to lay it on thick. “I was dummying up all along with those New Moon people. I’d been putting up with their shit for years, scheming and waiting to get the control implants for the satellite crammed into my head. Soon as the satellite went up, I split on ’em. That puppy up there is mine now. I can do what I want with it. Fire and brimstone, major bad news raining down. Only thing is, I need some help on the ground. Right? A group of like-minded people to handle all the details. Such as piling all the loot up in one handy place. All the better to divvy up shares. That’s where you guys come in.”

  “Wait a minute. That was our plan. Except you were supposed to be working for us.”

  “Get real.” Geldt would have glared at Rasty Mike. “You think if I’ve got some ancient war satellite up in the air, loaded to the gunwales with instant death, I’m going to stand around and take orders from somebody else? When I can just fry their asses on the spot? No way, dickbrain.”

  I don’t know if Geldt came up with a convenient explanation of why he hadn’t rained fire on my ass, back when I’d had him trussed up in my back room. Fortunately for him, the Stone Units’ brains were built for speed and not for logic.

  “Let’s face it, guys. Either I get some official clout in this organization, or you’re all dead meat.”

  The upshot of Geldt’s verbal footwork—as it was reported to me later, by those who should know—was that Rasty Mike retained his head-honcho position with the Stone Units. That was considered fair; after all, he knew everybody’s name. But Geldt, or “Trayne” as he was being called now, instead of being the Stone Units’ prisoner, the way he’d started out, was elected by acclamation to commander in chief of Rasty Mike’s battle council. He’d made it; he’d talked his way into their good graces.

  What happened after that, Geldt had no way of foreseeing. He was improvising on ice, as it was. He’d bought himself some time and maneuvering room, but at a price he’d have to scramble just to service the compounding interest on.

  If he’d thought the Stone Units were an ugly bunch before, he hadn’t seen at that point what they could be like when they found out they’d been fooled.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IF I’d known what was going on with Geldt, all his cutting and maneuvering while my attention was elsewhere, I might have been better prepared for the other changes that were about to roll my way. If Geldt’s worm could turn that much, from prisoner/hostage to biker subchieftain, then I shouldn’t have been surprised by any other transformations roiling just under the skin of the world.

  I took my new pal D to a hole-in-the-wall bar, the kind of place where the woodwork was stained black with the tears of alcoholics and a flotilla of dead men’s cigarette butts drifted in the urinals. One, I was tired of that stomach-peeling coffee; two, I wanted to get this D guy feeling even chummier toward me, and going down the line with a few beers and shots seemed like a good way to accomplish that. And three, I needed to make a phone call.

  The bar had a little alcove by the men’s room door, a pay phone with whores’ numbers scratched into the black enamel. I could keep an eye on D, sitting hunched on a stool and knocking his first one back, as I fed in a dime—it was an old phone—and dialed up Harrison. The city was wrapped in deep night, but I had the feeling I’d get Harrison in his office, anyway.

  I was right about that.

  “Trayne! For Christ’s sake!” His voice yelped in my ear. “Thank God you called me. You heard about it, didn’t you—”

  “About what?”

  “Jesus, Trayne—they were all killed! It looked like a fucking slaughterhouse out there!”

  The penny dropped. “Oh, yeah . . . right. Out at the junkyard.” I had almost forgotten about the carnage scene I had stumbled onto out at the New Moon Corporation’s work site. All that blood soaking through white lab coats, death’s own Rorschach. I was a little dismayed at how cold my heart had grown over the years; all those poor bastards facedown in the dust, and, after my initial gut reaction, I had barely managed to register them in memory. “That’s a real shame, all right.”

  “Shame?” Harrison screamed over the line. “Are you out of your mind? Something like that happens, we have absolutely no corporate contingency plan for it, we don’t have the slightest idea how it’s going to affect our operations . . .”

  Yadda yadda yadda. I let Harrison run on for a while, holding the phone an inch away from my ear to avoid catching any of his flying spittle. The guy was both coldhearted and overexcited, a bad combination.

  “Harrison?” I eased in when the man stopped to pant for breath. �
��Are you through for a moment?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s not going to help, running around flapping your wings like a kerosened chicken. Take deep breaths. Now, have you done anything at all about this situation?”

  He gulped air, then spoke in a small, strangled voice. “We’ve secured the area. Where the missile and the satellite are. We’ve sent in a new crew of technicians—”

  I wondered if the New Moon Corporation had bothered to clear away the previous, now dead, tech crew before sending the new ones in. I couldn’t see how it would do much for employee morale to be walking around in pools of your predecessors’ blood.

  “—and we’ve got them working on a rush basis, trying to get the satellite wired up and ready for launch. We pulled in an outside security agency to maintain the area’s perimeter—”

  “Really?” I had a hunch. “Who’s in charge of that?”

  “What is her name . . . real sharp woman, used to be a line cop for the Feds . . .”

  “Her name wouldn’t be Eastern, would it?”

  “That’s right. You know her?”

  “Yeah . . . she’s the best. You won’t have any problems now.”

  I had to admire Eastern’s operating skill. Now she was working for everybody, Canal Ultime and New Moon, with none of them knowing about the others. And at the same time, she was working for no one. No one but herself.

  Harrison’s voice pleaded at my ear. “Can you think of anything else we should be doing?”

  That was the problem with rooting around in the junkyard, looking for keen buried treasures. Just like in the old fairy tales, every magic treasure chest came with interesting curses attached. I could have warned Harrison and the rest of the New Moon Corporation, but I doubt if they would have listened to me.

  I couldn’t resist, anyway. “You know, you should have thought about this, and been a little more careful, before you went out there dicking around with this stuff.” “Trayne, what are we going to do?” He sounded desperate.