Madlands Page 8

  I turned back the box’s top flaps. Inside it, Eddie’s eyes caught enough of moon- and starlight for me to see them gazing up at me.

  “Okay, pal.” I wasn’t sure if he still had anything like ears left. Snakes don’t, and they can pick up vibrations. It didn’t matter; I was talking more to myself than anything, else. I pulled out Geldt’s piece and cocked it. The metal-on-metal click bounced loud down the hill. “It was nice knowing you. I mean that.”

  The cerebral matter was right behind the eyes. I aimed between them, my arm laid straight down. The shot rang like a safe dropped on an iron sidewalk. Goddamn these over-amped loads.

  The optic remainders had gone dull, no longer reflecting on either side of the newly drilled hole. The bottom of the box was already soggy. Eddie’s cells, not too organized already, were into the liquefaction stage, and leaking into the stubbled ground. That was okay; it saved me the trouble of digging a hole to slide him in.

  I straightened up, the gun heat rolling into my wrist. Eddie’s eyes weren’t looking at me any longer, but somebody else’s were. I had a good idea who.

  I held Geldt’s piece up by my ear, and talked to the night. “All right—” I cocked it. “Come on out.”

  FOURTEEN

  I LOOKED over my shoulder as Eastern showed herself, stepping out from behind the corner of the apartment building.

  “Hello, Trayne.” She smiled at me. “Isn’t your arm getting tired, holding that thing up there?”

  Geldt’s piece lowered itself; all I had to do was relax and uncock. I was actually glad to see Eastern. It had been a long day, stocked with unpleasant faces.

  “Not a good idea.” I tucked the gun back into my pocket. “Sneaking around people in fire mode.”

  “But you’re so slow. You always have to think.” She walked over to me. “What’re you doing, blowing away kittens?” She looked down into the cardboard box. “Eeyuck.” Her nose wrinkled.

  “Just my friends.” I nudged the box away with my foot, where its contents weren’t so visible. “Paying off old debts.”

  “Anybody I know?” She was hip to the score, that it was an n-formation basket case I’d been out here dispatching.

  “Eddie the Make.”

  “Eddie? That was Eddie? Awww. Shit.” She shook her head. “He was on my payroll. I was just about ready to go round and see him, pay him a little something on account.”

  “Well, you don’t have to now.” Eddie had been a walking info shop for a lot of people besides me. Even for a line cop like Eastern.

  She looked genuinely sad about a snitch’s demise. That was what I liked about Eastern. She didn’t give off cop radiation. Actually, she smelled rather nice—she was that close to me, her cropped hair at about the level of my shoulder. Not perfume, but just the way some women can smell with mere soap.

  “Poor little sonuvabitch.”

  “Tell you what.” I pulled Geldt’s piece out of my pocket, holding the butt with my thumb and forefinger. “Let me go stow this someplace where it won’t hurt people. And then maybe we can go and have a drink. I’m kind of depressed about this.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Eastern hunched her shoulders up inside her denim jacket. “I’ll meet you down by that ugly car you’ve been driving.”

  She had been watching me for a while. I had known that it was her I’d felt, the gaze on my back. That was something we needed to talk about, the why of it.

  In the apartment, Geldt had passed out. Still breathing, but basically asleep. I cracked the windows to air out the sour smell of Eddie’s terminal metamorphosis. Geldt’s piece I tucked up on top of the bookcases. I locked the door behind me and headed down the sidewalk to the Hudson and Eastern leaning against its fender.

  * * *

  Eastern and I went a long ways back. We had both drifted into the Madlands at about the same time, but from different directions. And different motivations: if she’d been looking to get away from something, the way I’d been at the time, I never found out what it was. She’d inevitably blanked me on that angle of inquiry. Of course, it was always possible that she’d come into these parts just out of curiosity, which was a much more dangerous reason for doing things. That was how you got into trouble. I should talk. Here she was with an official-type gig, working for the Feds, and I was the one out on the margin, helping operate Identrope’s long-running scams and now signed up in my head to off my employer.

  “You’re looking good.” I said that because she was, in this latest body she was walking around in. We had that in common, the shuffling in and out of other people’s flesh and bones. Where she’d stashed her original body, the one she’d been born in, I didn’t know. That was a good secret for people like us to keep locked up, even—or especially—from each other. Regardless, I always recognized her—something in the eyes, if you looked way in the back where the soul hung on its bone cross. Plus she always went for dark gamine types, small-breasted and fast, the sports cars of the female form.

  “Thanks.” She always recognized me, too. We had these tags on each other. “You look like hell.”

  We were sitting in a red booth in the dim Formosa, the leatherette under our butts mended with duct tape. Over in the corner beneath the signed photos of Elvis and Marilyn. Moisture had leaked under the picture frames’ glass, causing a brown leprosy-like fungus that had eaten most of the stars’ faces. They all looked like tryouts for poster boy and girl in some campaign against rampaging entropy.

  Eastern was halfway through a tall scotch, the same thing I had in front of me. She was the type who always ordered what you did, not to flatter, but because it was all the same to her what she drank.

  “I’ve been busy.” I rattled the ice in my glass. “I don’t have some cushy government job, so I got to spend more time making a living. That cuts into my personal maintenance time.”

  “Your ass.” She smiled, teeth sparked blue from the sputtering neon in the window. “‘Cushy’—I wish. I’m on perpetual overtime just keeping up with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Christ, Trayne, it’s my job. That’s why.”

  I shook my head. “You know what I mean. How come all of a sudden I rate this much tail activity? I always thought you people had better things to do.”

  God’s truth on that one; it was why I wasn’t one hundred percent happy to see her again. About the time I’d signed on with Identrope, Eastern had joined the enforcement wing of the FCC. The federal telecommunications agency was naturally locked into a hip-tight embrace with Canal Ultime, their biggest player. Most of the time, Eastern and the other line cops were busy enough drawing down on scapegraces doing illegal feeds off CU’s entertainment network. Protecting corporate profits was their business, and rightly so.

  Eastern tapped a finger on the rim of her glass. “You crack me up. You really do. Sitting there and acting like you haven’t been doing shit. Come on—you know you’ve been a busy lad. With all that dropping out of sight, and stuff.”

  “Yeah, well. That was personal business. Between that asshole Geldt and me.”

  “Your personal business hooks up with my professional business.” Eastern wasn’t smiling at me now. “Geldt was dealing with some off-the-wall people.”

  I shrugged. “He’s an off-the-wall kind of guy. That’s why I stopped having anything to do with him.”

  “So why was he going around looking for you?”

  She had her ear out on the street, that was for sure. I gave her another shrug. “Beats me. If I see him again, I’ll ask him.”

  Eastern sent back a look that I could read out as meaning she knew I’d had lots of contact with Geldt recently. Maybe she knew that I even had him wrapped up back at my apartment. “You sure know how to piss me off, Trayne.”

  “So change the subject.”

  “All right. New Moon.”

  I played dumb. “Is it? I thought we were having a full moon tonight, the way everybody’s been acting so weird.”

  Eastern drained her glass down
to the ice, while I watched one of the waitresses squeeze between the tables on the other side of the room. If somebody ever got around to inventing high-heeled air-pillow shoes, these old bats would think they’d died and gone to heaven.

  “You know, Trayne, I used to think you were a halfway intelligent guy.”

  I brought my gaze back to her side of the booth. “I don’t get paid just for being charming.”

  “You could get paid for being the world’s ugliest paperweight, and I wouldn’t care.” It must’ve been something I’d said—I hadn’t seen her in this bitchy a mood before. “Beats me why Identrope keeps you around.” She just kept rolling. “Those cornball dance numbers you put on the air—Christ, I expect you to come on some night in a Day-Glo tuxedo, jump up, and shout, Live! From the Copacabana!” She shook her head in disgust.

  “Hey. Fuck you.” I was genuinely wounded. “Look, Ms. PMS, I never went around saying what I do for Identrope is great art or anything. People like it, so sue me. And besides, if it were really my stuff, you could say anything you want about it, and I wouldn’t give a shit. But I’ve stolen all those moves from a lot of dead people whose memories I’ve really come to respect. Slag me off all you want, but not Jack Cole. Okay?” I knocked back the dregs of my own drink.

  Our voices had risen, and a couple of barflies turned around on their stool perches and looked at us.

  Eastern didn’t care. She was already zipping up her jacket. “I can’t believe I’m having a conversation like this with you. As if I give a fuck about you and your stupid tap-dancing show. Your goddamn rumba extravaganzas.”

  “That’s it?” I watched her sliding out of the booth. “I thought maybe you had something important to tell me.”

  “Important? You want important. Fine. I’ll tell you something important.” She put her palms down on the booth’s table and lowered her glare to my level. “Watch your ass with these new friends of yours. This New Moon bunch. They’re a hinky operation. Strictly nonkosher.”

  I shouted after her as she headed for the door. “Thanks for the advice. If I did what cops would like me to do, I’d be selling magazine subscriptions for a living—” She didn’t hear the last bit; she was already gone.

  The waitress plodded over and gave me the tab. I was hugely pissed off by now, mostly at myself. The shouting matches weren’t the sector of my past with Eastern that I’d been hoping to revive.

  I’d been really glad to see her again. I’d been looking to get laid. It looked pretty certain that was off the agenda for this time around.

  I left money on the table and walked out.

  FIFTEEN

  I LAY on my bed, thinking. I had a cigar fired up, a hand-rolled anonymous jobbie from a resurrected Cuban refugee on Fairfax. Not because I liked smoking it—I took a couple of hits to keep it going, and that was enough to vulcanize my tongue—but because I liked to smell it burning. As long as I had the place opened up, so the night Santa Ana wind could blow the smoke out over the city’s distant lights. In the room’s dark, I could hear Geldt on the other side of the wall, snoring around the gag in his mouth.

  More to think about. The business with discovering that Eastern had been the one spying on me. I hadn’t found out much more than that from her. Though our aborted conversation had confirmed my previous impression that the New Moon Corporation was a little on the flaky side. And not in any benign sense of the word. They had started out with me by talking about murder; if that’s your square one, then the potential for damage rolling all the way across the rest of the board is pretty good.

  The cigar’s coal was dying to dirty red. I flicked off the ash and gave the wet end a puff. The orange flare outlined my knuckles.

  Even if I hadn’t gotten any—the other any—off Eastern, I could take some comfort in the deduction that she still had some vestigial regard for me. Enough to lay the unneeded warning about New Moon on my head. And to get all pissed about what a jerk I was being. Even when the two of us had been an item, laminating ourselves together from ankle to breath on a daily basis, that had been a major component of her spoken exchanges with me.

  Those were other days, Jim . . . That reminiscing about them still brought a twitch in my crotch showed that it must’ve been love. That it didn’t bring anything more than that showed that I was getting old.

  The fact that Eastern and I had a history, that there was a past to get nostalgic about—in a zone like the Madlands, where your DNA was hostage to the dance in which Eddie the Make had fallen—that made it pretty conclusive Eastern and I had some essential quality in common. We were bound to get together on one level or another. We were brother and sister under whatever skins we happened to be wearing.

  I had all kinds of urgent business to think about, but I’d already absorbed enough of a nicotine load—the dry wind had died, and the room’s air had turned thick and smokeblue—to sink into loose, undifferentiated musing.

  A favorite daydream of mine rolled by. I got on and rode with it, watching the movie on the mottled ceiling.

  I was dead in the dream—that was why it was my favorite—and people still talked about me. Everybody’s favorite dream. So much so, that in my version there was a lecture hall, one of those steep-banked circling university numbers, every seat filled. Podium and blackboard down below, the point where every gaze focused. The guy talking had my face, if I’d gotten old and wise.

  On the blackboard, somebody—probably not the lecturer—has done nice portraits of Eastern and myself, with cross-hatching to show her dark hair and the shadows on my face.

  The lecturer has a pointer about a meter long. He taps my face—the face on the blackboard—with it.

  He speaks. “We come now to the subject of d-rangers.” He has a whispering, sepulchral voice; the audience leans forward in their seats to hear him. “A controversial subject in the convoluted natural history of the Madlands. In terms of the emotional baggage attached to just the word, we have entered a dread-filled semantic landscape.”

  The pointer taps Eastern’s face. “The very existence of these entities was a source of much rumor among the habitués of the Madlands zone. Some were terrified of them, certain that they were real. Others considered d-rangers to be a joke that wasn’t very funny. Like talking about ghosts or vampires, if there were a large section of the population who really believed in them.”

  He turns away from the board and grips the podium, the ends of the pointer sticking out to either side. “D-rangers—if they existed, or could even be identified—could be considered to have been the infectious agents or vectors of the n-formation disease endemic to the Madlands. So it is easy to see how the term developed its associations of death, despair, insanity down to the cellular level. The d-rangers could be said to have been the factor that put the mad in Madlands.”

  The lecturer broods for a moment into a fist brought up to his lips. He speaks around his knuckles, as though he could chew the answer to everything out of the round bones.

  “One question of interest is whether the d-rangers were in fact mere vectors transmitting the n-formation disease, or whether they themselves were infected with it. The fact that the d-rangers did not suffer the terminal multi-cancer symptoms associated with the disease is not conclusive proof; the d-rangers’ characteristic abilities—the body-swapping, et cetera—may actually have been a super-normal adaptation or immune-system reaction to the disease. If we use the viral model in our examination of the disease—and it may not be just a model; there may indeed have been a virus localized to this geographical area, a leftover from the biological weapons labs associated with the preceding war—then it may make sense as well to project a certain population section not only resistant to the disease’s negative effects but also deriving a situational benefit from the infectious agent.”

  The audience frantically scribbles all this down in their notebooks. My head is singing.

  The lecturer presses on. “Viewed coldly, dispassionately, the d-rangers’ ability was a functional
evolutionary adaptation to the circumstances of the landscape in which they operated. They survived, in their own peculiar way, not because they had a right to, or any particular claim to moral superiority, but simply because they could. Yet at the same time, it cannot be denied that a certain revulsion is triggered in the human observer by the contemplation of the d-rangers’ actions.”

  Right, you bastard—my hatred for him burned up from my breastbone. They always go on that way, in my dreams and reality the same. First they absolve you with the right hand, then they damn you with the left.

  “Much as from a purely biological viewpoint, a vampire—if one had ever existed—could be said to have been merely following the same dictates of hunger and survival that we all do, so also with the d-rangers. Their nature determined the way in which they made their living. And yet, and yet . . . that very nature disgusts us, arouses a seemingly righteous ire in our hearts.”

  I could have wept, in the depths of my maudlin daydreaming. Perhaps my imaginary lecturer wasn’t such a bad guy, after all. Perhaps he understood.

  “The moral dimension enters into the geometry of diseases when an infected organism—consciously or unconsciously—becomes the disease itself, and in so doing, becomes different from his or her fellows. The organism—the man, the woman—becomes no longer human, but another thing, a thing that looks upon his former species as prey, as food.”

  That seemed to be putting it pretty harshly. I still loved all you people, as much as you could be loved. You were the brake on that process, not me. I assumed Eastern felt the same way.

  “Food, even if we’re still talking in terms of models and metaphors, and not actual digestive mechanisms. Something more metaphysical than that, though no less real.” The lecturer nodded, appreciating his own good point. “In discussions of the d-rangers, assuming their existence, this human substance was usually referred to as o-positive. Let us define this substance as that which enables an individual to organize reality—and his or her existence in that reality—and to maintain the commonly shared perception of reality. This o-positive substance is thus exactly that which enables a human being to stay human, in the field of humanness. The lack of this substance is what causes the n-formation disease, and the resulting genetic dissolution and death from multi-cancer, just as the lack of vitamin C causes scurvy and all the physiological effects pertaining thereto. Though, of course, our topic of concern today is slightly more serious than that; bleeding gums don’t quite compare to hemorrhaging one’s existence away.”