Zooming back to the “Etam reality,” Corcey found the Sophia-Thing’s prophecy to be true. The shuttle was boarding, and guards were eyeing him hungrily.
Slowly, he forced himself out of the chair and began to limp toward the airloq. His legs still felt the phantom gnashing of the maggots’ consumption of muscles and feast of ligaments, and with tormented effort he made his way onto the craft.
Corcey had seen variations of that dream before. In fact, it predated his quest by over a decade to the time when Sophia had told him she was pregnant.
Slowly, the horror of the old faded, replaced by one more up to date.
...thump... ...thump... ...thump...
Forcing a calm exterior, Corcey boarded the shuttle. Most of the people had already gotten on; Corcey would be the penultimate passenger that flight. The front of the shuttle was full up to half way back, but then spacing between seats became more plentiful. Finally, at the very back, a young Hamaddi couple were making out on one side of the aisle, sloppily (and noisily) kissing with actual passion. Across from them, another human couple were looking through a handiqomp while an older Pandrovian eagerly looked on from atop his chair ahead of them. There had been an obvious unspoken agreement between the two groups that they would ignore each other, but Corcey’s entrance into their immediate area tremored that truce, and five shaky sets of eyes stopped what they were doing and turned on him.
Corcey wanted to be left alone as much as the others did, so he immediately took the seats he was next to; bags in one, his butt in the other. He observed the accepted etiquette: eyes forward and silent, and after a few moments heard the sucking clank of Hamaddi mouthplates intermingling with a low conversation in Pandrovian.
He slid lower in the chair. The ship’s artificial gravity wasn’t quite up to snuff, so it felt like floating on foam. Corcey leaned back and rested his head on the cushion. He closed his eyes, removed his sunshades, and massaged the callused grooves behind his ears.
Up the aisle he heard the conductor collecting fares. Languidly, Corcey put his tin token on an eyelid, and a moment later felt bony fingers pluck the piece off. Corcey even thought he heard the swish of robes as the conductor went by.
The Ba’alistti was receding, brewing its chemicals for the storm ahead. The lull actually allowed him to calm down a few shades shy of tranquil, so despite the mental metronome he was warmed by the flames of grace and peace.
He sequestered himself in darkness until well after they had landed on Gilead Gershon, New Ra’Math’s seventh-largest city. It was dusk on this part of the planet, but the airport was lit up like high noon. Beyond the xenon, though, black overcast clouds darkened the sky’s parlor.
The horny Hamaddi couple were quick to get up and get off, so they could get a room and continue to paw at each other in private. Understandably so: he had just been sprung from a year’s stint in the infamous Edam Oubliette, and she’d waited faithfully for his release. The other trio continued their low Pandrovian mutterings. The woman spoke quite poorly, though the document she was quietly reading aloud off her handiqomp was a bad translation to begin with. Occasionally she would break into fast Galaqommon with her friend, and the two would banter numbers, probably prices and quantities, before continuing in Pandrovian with the man sitting backward ahead of them.
Corcey reinstated his shades, picked up his bags, and made his way into the terminal. A half-asleep Hamaddi customs thug scarcely paid attention to him, merely eyeing him over, and finding that an unpleasant task, ran his name through the qomputer.
It would still be several hours before Ourgon would find Gorgo’s corpse, so Corcey was waved through with a hello, yawn, and a reminder that he was still under arrest. He promptly made his way to the far end of the terminal.
He faded into the shadows, and on foot made is way away from the crowds, until he finally found himself by the ground vehicle long term parking lot. He hadn’t seen anyone in minutes, but looked around reflexively to ensure his privacy. Double-paned glasstic windows overlooked the outer tarmac. The sun had just set, but in its place on the horizon were more masses of angry clouds. Outside, the lot was moderately filled with various terrestrial chariots, many makes and models he did not recognize. No signs of any of their owners.
The exit itself was at the end of a long hallway off the concourse corridor he had been on. Half way down, two vidifones stood opposite each other. At the end, a sign above the double-doors announced in seven languages that this was the East Wing, Stop Number Seven on the parking shuttle’s circular tour. There was an empty bench beneath. The doors bucked against their frames at the unsteady pace of the wind, adding ominous tones of percussive drumming.
Corcey went up to one of the fones and dropped his bags to the worn carpet floor. He looked the fone over, and noted with approval this one took annonocards as payment. Fortunately, he still had a few of the hard to get cards that had a couple hectobytes of credit left on them, but finding places to redeem them was a rare affair (such was the control of the Beast.) Fishing into a pocket, he fed a severely drained annonocard hand-labeled ΦΩΝ into the machine. After some mechanical deliberation, it accepted the offering, and the screen came to life with a menu of options in Galaqommon.
With the help of an Operator, he placed an orbit qal.
Illania answered, wearing a black nakkin with the knot in the front.
“Let me guess,” she said into her screen, “this is your one foneqal before sentencing.”
“I’m on New Ra’Math,” he said simply. She looked surprised, in a pleasant way.
“Oh!” She bobbed slightly: gravity was still gone. “Are you happy yet?”
“I’m not done yet; ask me then. But I just...”
There was a loud explosion off screen, accompanied by a bright flash and a few sparks. Looking over, she sternly yelled “Landahl!” and looked quickly back at Corcey.
“Cho,” they said together, and the screen went blank, replaced by a qal charge summary: 49 bytes were deducted from the card, would he like a receipt? He hit the delete qey, and the bill inventory was replaced by a short options menu.
A long, cracked fingernail lightly grazed the glyphs for Directory Assistance. Ovals inscribed with the Galaqommon alphabet appeared on the screen, a touch-sensitive typingboard. He tapped in the request, waited patiently until the listing appeared, then ran his finger along the numbers. They lit up at the touch, shining blurrily through a fingerprint smear tinged with oil, burnt gunpowder, and unhealthy hemoglobin.
The text sequestered itself to the side of the screen, and the dialing icon appeared in the center. The ring was in lo-fi surroundsound, a silly-sounding beep at middle C.
“Stensor Merchandizing.” The tone was hostile, wary of intrusion.
“Yes,” Corcey began positively, in a voice loud and polite for him, “Little over a week ago, you had a client named Eden Marcom come to your factory there to inspect some goods she ordered.”
The middle-aged man on the monitor stared back at him through archaic horn-rimmed glasses that struggled desperately to bring the qaler into focus. The squint was accompanied by a frown of distaste. His prissy manner was evident after only seven seconds of viewing.
“I am not presently disposed to confirm, deny, or comment on client information with anyone other than the client. Will that be all, then?”
Corcey was caught off-guard by the abruptness; he wondered if the account he was inquiring about was a sensitive subject around Stensor. He modified tactics.
“So, are you going on record as saying you will not cooperate with my questioning concerning this account?”
“Not unless you are Ms. Marcom, and you obviously are not.” The man guarding the gate glowered at him condescendingly. “This is clearly covered by client/attorney privilege, as you should know. I could transfer you to our legal department…” and his voice trailed off menacingly as an evil grin faded in.
Cerberus looked impatiently at Corcey, waiting for him to either say something or hang up. Cerberus couldn’t disconnect the qal himself—that was considered bad customer service. Came straight out of his paycheq if he did that, and Stensor Overlords routinely monitored the qals for quality service and to see that nothing important was being divulged to unfriendly competitors. They even randomly evaluated some qals, with a high score proportional to the pay the Fone Patrolman got.
“Who’s your supervisor?” Corcey inquired with a sly smile.
Corcey had said the dreaded ‘S’ word, though Cerberus concealed his shiver well. “Ummm, I can transfer you; will you hold?”
Cerberus had countered by invoking the even more-dreaded ‘H’ word, and Corcey correctly suspected a trap. One could grow old from being on hold, cycling endlessly while waiting for the end of the low-priority queue to reach the next available Fone Patrol Operator.
“No,” said Corcey with plain distaste; “I’ll qal back later,” he proclaimed, and quickly killed the qal.
Cerberus logged the qal on his qomputer and submitted it to his Superiors. It was read within milliseconds: he had been QMEd on the qal, and his report was part of his grade. Sloppy: Cerberus hadn’t established the identity of the qaler or the nature of his interest in the client. Cerberus’s Qal Auditor noted that in his own log, and processed his own report to both Big Blackie
[7] and Payroll Department.Stensor Payroll credited Cerberus’s account one hundred bytes, and NRT&T deducted one byte from Corcey’s annonocard. A summary of the deduction charge appeared on the screen before him, which he Deleted to get back the main menu.
Corcey thought for a moment, his head bobbing up and down slightly as he considered his choices. He hit Reqal.
Cerberus reappeared almost immediately. A slight sneer of recognition, and then “Stensor Merchandizing, though of course you already knew that...”
Corcey had been hoping for a different Fone Patrolman, but no luck. “I’m sorry; I must’ve hit reqal. Mea Culpa.” He disconnected the qal immediately.
Irked, he ruled out a third try, because if he hit the Cerberus wall again, Corcey knew he would quite likely end up on a problem watch/shit list at Stensor and never be able to get anywhere with them ever again. He couldn’t afford to lose this lead. But he could see that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Stensor right now; he abandoned that avenue until later, when he could put some thought on the topic on how to pursue it. Meanwhile, he moved on.
The screen before him had rolled back to the main menu. Pondering his options, he at last tapped Directory again and typed “lodging” in the subject search. The qomputer referenced the request, and promptly spewed out the list on the screen. It went on for some time.
Corcey stared blankly at the list as it scrolled the names, addresses, and qal numbers of all the hotels in Gilead Gershon. When it finally reached the end, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly in expectation of the tedious task ahead. He replayed the list, stopping it after only a couple came out. He added a second smear to the screen by swiping the first entry.
"Amadril Manor, Gilead Gershon" said a Saladrin on the screen through its voice modulator. "Can I help you in some way, Sir?"
“Yeah, I’m calling to confirm that you had a patron named Eden Marcom stay with you ten days ago.” He was hoping that she would check in under the name she was using for the Stensor deal in case they tried to contact her.
The Saladrin extended an appendage to a qomputer off screen and began to access the information. After a moment it manipulated the machine again, then turned back to Corcey.
"According to this, we've never had anybody by that name here. Are you sure it was this hotel?"
Corcey frowned for effect, then said “I’m her court-appointed, and I’m checking her alibi.”
On New Ra’Math, if you didn’t have an attorney, the prosecutor was assigned to defend you as well. However, Corcey had a different definition of Court in mind when he said he was her appointed, a heavenly one the Saladrin knew not of, so in his own mind he wasn’t quite lying to it. All Thunes knew lying was wrong, but secretly agreed that equivocation and subjective misinformation based on gentile ignorance were murkier matters that could be conditionally explored. And even though it was a type of lying, sarcasm was expressly exempt and even encouraged.
"Lucky you," the Saladrin said with synthetic sympathy, assuming Corcey was local law, not cosmic.
“Just to be sure, can you tell me everyone who checked in that day?”
It was against the Law to hinder an arrest inquiry, and even though Corcey had not flashed a badge, it was rare on New Ra’Math to see one. The Saladrin read off the roster, correctly assuming that Corcey was checking for aliases. He recognized none.
“Thanks,” Corcey said. He was about to hang up, but was interrupted.
"I get credit for exposing her alibi?" the bug asked, its voice box effectively conveying its greed. If someone was credited in a legal brief as a source of information that led to a conviction, they were rewarded in monetary credit for their civic duty to step forward and fight crime. Anonymous credit paid a lot less than taking full responsibility by your own name. The system wasn’t as abused as you’d think: payment was made on the Beast, so someone with the Beast’s ear could find out who you were if they didn’t like your testimony—even if you made it anonymously.
“No can do,” replied Corcey with a sour smile. “I asked you as her court-appointed, so credit would come from the defense fund. If she goes down, that fund goes dry.”
"Well then," it said, understanding, "would you like her to be registered? Be glad to tailor an entry for you, and you qaled before the prosecutor did, so how will you know?
"“Disclosure,” Corcey said with distaste for the thing’s mercenarism. “Tell you what: if you want credit, I’ll qal you as the prosecutor. Let me go get a cup of water; you just wait there, and I’ll qal ya right back.”
He clicked off, and was duly charged another 1 byte 75 bits for the qal. He tried the next hotel on the list.
“Astralodge, Gilead Gershon;” said a harried looking old hag, who promptly turned profile and yelled “shut the phuq up, Alyce, I’m on the fone!”
Corcey gave a variation of the same prolonged pitch, but ultimately drew a blank.
As he did with the next.
And the next.
And the next.
Half way through the extensive list he had to switch to the other fone: the first’s screen was scarred with repeated finger smears that made the print illegible. As he moved his bags to the new fone poll, an airport shuttle bus cruised by. It was the second to do so since he’d started qaling. The bus slowed enough to allow the automated driver to detect Corcey’s presence, and then came to a stop by the hall’s double door exit. Corcey could hear the transport’s doors open in expectation of him, but when he made no move to get on, the bus’s automated program correctly concluded that it should proceed to its next stop. Corcey glanced out to see if anyone had gotten off, then returned his attention to the new vidiofone.
“Traveler Inn, Gilead Gershon,” a pleasant, feminine voice said to him. She was aged in her late forties, and had a proportioned plumpness to her. Wavy straw blonde hair, dyed long enough ago that the grays were resurfacing. Blue eyes that, despite seeming weary, had a happy cast within them that still outshone the exhaustion.
Laydee looked back at Corcey on her own screen. It was a poor transmission; his image was fuzzed. That, or the effects of her second consecutive double-shift were taking its toll on her eyes. Still, she perceived beyond the poor transmission and sleep-deprivation slurring, and saw a superficial glimpse of him. Shave, haircut, and bath, and he’d be a honey. Laydee considered the qaler a moment, then said with a slight smile “You look like you need a room.”
“Actually,” he said with a slight smile of his own at the comment, “I’d like to know if you had a woman named Eden Marcom stay there ten days ago.”
“Eden Marcom?” Laydee asked. Corcey verified, gave the spelling.
Off-screen typing.
“Yes sir,” she said after a moment. “She was here ten days ago, but she’s since checked out.”
...thank You...
“I know,” he slid in smoothly without missing a beat. “Edam enforced her arrest.” He assumed that would have been true if she’d moved on from New Ra’Math.
“Oh?” Laydee asked, with mixed emotion. “What did she do?”
“I am not presently disposed to confirm, deny, or comment on this case,” Corcey droned in a good mimic of Cerberus’s earlier tone.
Laydee was one of the few New Ra’Mathians who, like Lot living in Sodom, lived outside of the statistics in that she never intentionally broke the law, and always cooperated with authorities when she did so by accident. Another of Corcey’s kindred spirit exception to the rules.
“Are you prosecution or defense?” she asked.
“She handles her own defense,” Corcey said, and Laydee assumed this meant that Corcey was with the Etam legal team. He did nothing to correct this misperception, and authoritatively asked, “can you confirm the dates she stayed?”
Laydee looked at the Traveler’s screen. “That’s about all I can do, actually. There’s a reference to her stay in the main registry, and the notation showing she settled her bill and checked out with no problems. But that’s all.” She looked back to the fonescreen. “Sorry,” she said.
Corcey nodded that it was okay: any information he got was useful.
“So, when did she stay?” he reminded her after a pause.
She read off the relevant facts on her split screen. “Okay, she checked in on Moonday the 9th, and left on Manesday.”
Corcey nodded, pretending he was verifying the information with something out of sight. “What room’d she stay in?” he asked, but the last few syllables were undermined by a brooding thunderclap. Corcey glanced around him, uneasy.
It was cool outside, and a draft blew at him from the exit. He could smell the humidity. Through glasstic doors, gray clouds mingled with the dark sky, then teasingly danced chain lightning among themselves.
Having grown up on a planet where water was scarce, rain unnerved him, as did such then-foreign concepts as oceans. It was one thing to read about it in Scripture, quite another to empirically experience it. The first time he had ever seen rain was during one of Aridia’s bicentury flash floods. Corcey was only seven, and it was the first time—though not the last—that he thought the World was ending.
“Room 225.”
Her comment brought him back to the present. “225, right. How much does that room rent for a night?”
Another quick glance to reconfirm her guess. “One hundred a night,” Laydee struggled to remember the qaler’s name, settled on “sir.”
“So her bill should have been roughly... 300 bytes.”
“380.76, which is what she paid.”
Corcey had the look of the mother who just caught her son with his hand in the fudge. Laydee knew that Eden Marcom had just been busted.
“Ohhh really,” he hissed with melodramatic venom. “Well, ma’am, you’ve confirmed her alibi, but the expense voucher she filled out listed the price at 2,000 bytes exactly. I’ll be sure to pass that along to the Audit Inquisition.” He attempted to grin, but it didn’t quite work.
As said, Corcey truly tried not to lie. The times he did, such as now, he always felt genuinely guilty about it. This was intensified because he was lying to a lady who had done him no wrong, and he was lying about someone who was... well,,, Sophia. Laydee seemed nice and was being sincerely helpful. He knew he was already walking a fine equivocation tightrope on the thou shalt not lie commandment, but had decided to drastically redact not bearing false witness in favor of some playful prevarication.
“Glad to help,” she said simply.
“And you have.” He gave her a sincere smile of gratitude. It was obvious some of the muscles that made it had not been used in a while.
Laydee beamed, clearly pleased, and Corcey felt better. Playing loose with the truth had the benefit of making Laydee feel good as a reward. Thunians called such things liwilis,[8] but warned caution in their use. Sophia’s Masters Thesis at the Athenæum was a peshar on such conundrums, using the Book of Yonah in exegesis: is a falsehood that comforts better than a than a truth that wounds?
Laydee seemed to have been happy to have helped. Plus she could tell Corcey was glad he got what he was looking for, which sweetened the honey’s pot. She’d seen him smile, and it reinforced the proxy-puppy honey crush. “Hey, her charging two thou’ is outrageous rates for a room; no way we’d charge that much. This place is nice, but not two large nice. She must be really milking an expense account.”
Nodding solemnly, “Blood is coming from the udders, ma’am.”
“But it was 380.76, after expenses and CityTax.” She was about to continue, but Corcey cut her off.
“Excuse me; what were the expenses?”
“It doesn’t say,” she said, shaking her head with an apologetic expression.
Corcey was disappointed at that, but shrugged it off. “How did she pay?”
Laydee looked the data entry over. “All it says in here is that she settled her debt. Method of payment isn’t listed.” A witty glint appeared in her eyes. “I bet our bookkeeping records would have that, saying where we got paid from. We keep that on a different qomputer that’s not linked to this chain right now. I have to upload and balance today’s totals into it anyway later on, so I can dig for our copy of the receipt then. Give me your office number, and I can send copies of her bill to you when I get them. Good enough?”
Corcey paused to think how to backpedal—now she was asking for his contact information, and would doubtless get suspicious if it wasn’t prefixed to some obvious law enforcement office. In the brief, awkward pause, he saw peripheral lightning through the window. “Out of curiosity, that room available right now?”
Quick status check on her qomputer, then “As a matter of fact, yeah.”
“Nice; I’d like to reserve it. I’ll just pick up your copy of Eden Marcom’s receipt when I get there and check in. I need to crash for a couple of hours, and a soft bed sounds nice.” Pause for a weak smile. “Are your beds soft?”
“Very.” Her description was exaggerated; her smile was not.
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Actually yeah it does...” Laydee whole-heartedly agreed, “a crash nap sounds fantastic right about now... I’ve been a one-woman show running this place since sometime yesterday straight, and I’m still not nowhere near done. My daughter should be back from school in a few hours to take over the desk, but then I have to do accounting crap for however long.” She paused to catch her breath, and then asked, “Sorry, am I whining?”
“No,” he liwilied.
“Okay, good.” Brief, sheepish smile. “Well, I’ll be on the accounting box later tonight anyway, so I’ll look for your girl’s bill first thing I do. Stop by my office when you get here, and I’ll hopefully have it for you by then. If not, I can leave it with my daughter at the desk. Heq, I might even take the rest of the night off early and just do that sleep thing you were talking about.”
“Actually, I prefer rest to sleep, but yeah, do what ya gotta do. Anyway, hold the room for me, I’ll probably be on my way within the hour and show up... then.”
Laydee looked around her twice, then leaned in slightly toward the screen. “Actually, if you’re just coming by for the receipt and need to cat nap a few hours, we can probably work something simpler out.”
Sly smile. “Actually, I do want her specific room for the night. As an investigator, I should check out the crime scene to be thorough.”
Shrug. “It’s not a problem, and might be wiser. I know when I sleep, I don’t like people interrupting it, so a little cubby hole of your own can be a good thing.” She was going to enter his name on the hold form, and drew an absolute blank on what it was.
That’s when she knew she needed a nap and was acting loopy: she realized she had been flirting with someone whose name she didn’t even know. Most un-Laydee-like, and she knew it.
“Could you spell your name for me, please?” she asked sweetly. He spelled out Lebbaeus, and she double-checked her typing.
“Done. One suite, soft bed.”
“Good.” He glanced at the address on the side of the screen. It meant nothing to him. “Where are you, anyway?”
“The Old Quarter. We’re on Qaterpillar Avenue and Orange Tree Road. Do you know the Old Quarter?
“Vaguely. It’s east of the airport, by that big wall, right?”
“Haydrin’s Wall is the northern border of the Old Quarter. The streets run alphabetically from the northwest corner, the Big Brass Sundial Fountain.”
Corcey nodded. “I can find that. Qaterpillar and Orange.”
“We’re on the corner. I’ll either be at the front desk, or in my office. That’s at the end of the hallway behind the front desk. Easy to find: it will be the open door marked ‘office’.”
“I’ll be by.”
Laydee accepted that with pleasure. “Great. Well, Lebbaeus, I’ll see you later.”
Corcey’s reply was drowned out by an immense thunderclap. He disconnected the qal, and reached up to extract his finance card from the fone slot.
“You can jes’ pass that right back here, Home Slice,” said a voice that wasn’t Corcey’s. He felt something small, circular, and coldly metallic press into the nape of his neck.
Smiling wryly to himself, Corcey slowly turned around.
He found himself confronted by a seventeen year old standing only one and a half meters tall, shakily aiming a small lazer pistol directly at his face.
He was also completely nude.
Lüzür was too fried to notice, much less care. He had other things to focus on. The young hoodlum looked strung out and needing a fix
bigtime. His upper lip twitched as he awaited his hapless victim to comply with his request. Lüzür’s breathing was heavy, labourious with an unhealthy cracking. In a mouth full of yellowed, rotting stumps that were once teeth, his breath came out hot and distinctly fetid. Long oily bangs covered bloodshot, dilated eyes and went down to a rotted nose that dribbled a pussy yellow mucous. Lüzür didn’t weigh one hundred pounds—a strong gust of wind from outside would’ve knocked him sideways.“C’mon, Slice, I said ‘Hand it over’!”
Corcey grinned grimly, with a smidgen of wry amusement in it. “Sure.”
He handed Lüzür the annonocard.
With the gracelessness of a baby snatching a rattle, Lüzür grabbed at the card with his free hand. His victim did nothing. Smug with success, he sneered, “What else ya got, Slicey?”
Corcey’s grin got grimmer, and his patience weighed thin. “Look,” he explained with forced tolerance, “I’m busy. You got my card, so go away and main-vein yourself to High Heaven.” He nodded with his head toward the exit. Even behind his sunshades, Lüzür saw him wink.
Even though he did not take his eyes off Corcey, Lüzür’s peripheral vision picked up on Corcey’s plump-looking luggage.
In a cocky cadence: “I don’t think you heard me quite right, Slice. What else you got t’give over?”
“I don’t think you heard me quite right,” Corcey replied in a cadence of his own, his grin now gone. “I’m trying to be nice to you; you can get by and get high a couple of times by my card. Now you’re getting greedy; don’t be that guy.”
Lüzür managed to remember that he had the gun. “Phuggin shaddap” he sniveled, the phrase meaning ‘You are prohibited from speaking’ in the slang of his native Cassadinian dialect. “Hand over the sacks, Slice.”
Coldly: “No way.” Corcey had exhausted his tolerance. Although an old rabbi once opined ‘If a man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,’ the New Thunian Talmud was pretty specific about exceptions to this. Corcey knew at least two to which this situation applied. Submission to the stick-up would not only prevent the doing of good works but contribute to evil. Plus there was the disgustingly vulgar issue of Lüzür’s exposed, filthy, uncircumcised penis: proof of him being a gentile.
“No way,” Corcey repeated coldly, with obvious distaste and disdain.
Corcey looked Lüzür dead on. He knew Lüzür wouldn’t possibly understand his theological point of view on all this, so he had to sink down to Lüzür’s level of of comprehension. Know your enemy, so that they can understand that they have been beaten.
Lüzür was on the nose-dive end of trip that was an eggbeater in his white matter. Corcey was still riding the tense tranquility wave, but that was metamorphosing under the caress of the cactus as he climbed the first peak from his Buds. He wondered who was more phuqed up, and decided this idiot was. Corcey bowed to the Master: he leaned forward and put his teeth on the barrel.
Smiling broadly, he snarled, “Your move. I recommend moving towards the exit.”
Lüzür was stunned—that wasn’t what he had expected for a response.
The Voice with the Sandpaper Laugh nesting in his skull cackled that he should resort back to the Tough Guy Approach. He looked menacingly at the pistol-prostrating Thune, but found that he couldn’t focus on him. In fact, his victim was actually painful to look at. Lüzür assumed it was just the Overcrank creating chaos with his vision, and it reminded him he needed to remedy fast.
“Just back off from your bags,,,” he tried, disoriented by the blur, “...or I aerate yer head.”
Corcey could taste the oil and grease on the barrel, the tip of his tongue caressed individual grains of dirt.
“Ready when you are, loser.”
That really messed with the young hoodlum’s burnt out mind. He was having trouble concentrating on the words, and the Whispering Chatter in the background was becoming deafening.
Then another withdrawal convulsion hit him, and his veins, which had contracted to the width of his lice-ridden hair, felt like they were being yanked out through his spinal column. There was no question that if he didn’t redose within the hour he’d fatally crash and burn. Either he killed to get the money to crank, or he died from withdrawal. Overcrank would claim another life either way.
Alas for Lüzür, he took too long to fortify his will on following through. A wave of time distortion washed over Corcey, and the six seconds he watched Lüzür self-destruct literally felt like six whole days to him. Corcey’s patience ran out on the Sabbath; when after the Day of Rest Lüzür had failed to put him to rest, at dawn on the eighth day he took action.
With speed Lüzür couldn’t comprehend, Corcey’s right hand shot up in an arc and snapped the gun half out of his hand. Lüzür was too surprised to shoot and too inebriated for his reflexes to kick back the trigger until his hold was tenuous at best. The blue beam sizzled harmlessly away from Corcey’s face and into the vidio fone behind him. Lüzür lost his grip on the gun as Corcey snatched it, and there was a dry snap as his index finger broke and jammed in the triggerguard. Pulled by this, he fell off balance and to the floor in agony as Corcey freed the pistol from its possessor.
Without warning, another blue beam crackled into view, and this one struck home: Corcey’s right shoulder. He dropped Lüzür’s lazer as the impact sent him down, his body consumed by a sensation that was beyond pain or pleasure.
The first shot had been so close to his face that his eyes were filled with the intense afterimage of the burst; flashing bands of bright colours (intensified by the oncoming Bud rush) obscured much of what he saw. However, he could tell that the second blast had come from the doorway.
Lüzür was projectile vomiting onto his own shriveled, rotten gonads, and thus was in no condition to do anything else. A second blast, aimed at Corcey, actually came closer to him.
Snaking his left arm behind him, Corcey pulled out peace. In the flashing haze of his vision, he could make out that the second gun-moll was also a human teen, in about as good shape as her friend. She too was butt-naked, butt-ugly, and all but dead from withdrawal. With desperation she fired a third blast at Corcey but missed him. Her lover gave a gargle-like yelp as the beam sliced an ear off.
peace returned fire. Unfortunately, Corcey’s sight was still impaired, so his retort shattered the glasstic window into a giant spider’s web. While his left hand was occupied with pulling the trigger, his right went to his belt and activated the switch of his albedo screen.
Wÿnÿr somehow realized this, and after two tries jacked the power on her pistol to maximum. The next shot would drain half of her weapon’s energy, but it would not only overload and blow out Corcey’s albedo, it would overload and blow out Corcey with it.
But Corcey had superb reflexes, and his sight was slowly restoring. He squeezed off a shot, and the archaic bullet spiraled off to its destination and slammed home. It wasn’t exactly what he’d aimed at, nor was it a killing blow, but it was enough to prevent Wÿnÿr from disintegrating Corcey’s body. It also gave Corcey that crucial second he needed to place his next shot. A third eight-millimeter projectile spun down. The sickening squelch of impact as it shattered the bridge of her nose and bore directly into the fleshy part of her brain. Wÿnÿr sprawled backwards and against the doors and fell against small sanitary dumpster.
Corcey returned his attention to Lüzür, who was on his hands and knees amidst a self-made puddle of urine and black vomit. The yellow ooze from his leprous nose was now crimson. He was in the midst of yet another withdrawal cramp.
Corcey kicked the lazer pistol across the carpet, sending up a grisly splash as it sailed out of reach. Lüzür’s severed index finger was still stuck in the guard.
Behind him, he could hear sirens echoing down the hall from the main concourse, and more military wails came from far outside; he’d have to work quickly.
Reaching down, he grabbed the Lüzür’s scruffy hair and pulled his face up. He did that with his right hand, and as the wounded muscles were forced into action he felt the acid sensation which was becoming more readily identifiable as agony.
Corcey ground his teeth together to stifle the yelp that was forming. He looked into the eyes of the youth as he raised his pistol to the young man’s forehead. He saw pain, but mostly he saw fear in those eyes, and Lüzür started to cry. Each tear reflected a select scene of Lüzür’s brief life, which was actually flashing before his eyes. Between the wounds and the withdrawal, he knew he was living on his last moments.
“Hey: dieing’s the easy part, Slice,” Corcey told him encouragingly. Lüzür saw that sympathetic grimace and shat blood. Corcey’s normally coal-black pupils were alive with crackling blue flames that shone even behind his sunshades.
Corcey was about to chant the Mantra, but suddenly It washed over him, riding the crest of a peak wave that crashed into him as he squeezed his index finger back.
...MUST...
His forearm jerked up slightly in recoil. A hole the size of a baby’s fingerprint appeared between Lüzür’s teary eyes. The barest fraction of a millisecond later, the back of his head exploded. The skull literally split apart: the left and right halves expanded away from each other like wings unfolding for flight. The two bony slabs parted, and the gray and white matter they had once held vomited onto the wall behind him. His eyes detonated in an explosion of scarlet fluid that fountained out far enough to spray Corcey, and suddenly it was a gruesome contest to see which could bleed more: the gory sockets or the mouth that had tried to scream just a moment before. The back of his head, having spat out its contents, imploded back upon the empty cavern of skullbone. They met with a thundering chime, as if the two flaps of skull were orchestra cymbals being smashed together to punctuate a crescendo.
The execution took less than a ...thump...
To Corcey, it took seven minutes.
Corcey had done such point-blank executions before, and each time it was slower, more drawn out, more vivid. The clarity of detail became more stark and entrancing each time.
For reasons he never consciously understood, death by head-shot disturbed him. Watching Lüzür’s head explode via a point blank from peace reinforced his revulsion, and conviction that it was a baaaaad way to die.
This was the third time Corcey had literally stared down a barrel but come out victorious. He wondered if next time his shooter would follow through with true aim. How slow would it be then, when you’re on the receiving end?
Even thinking about it made his innards queeze.
He didn’t want to go out that way: as empirically evidenced, only losers optioned, voluntarily or involuntarily, for a pistol point blank to the head. Even though he deemed Lüzür’s execution as more of a mercy killing, it underscored the phobia. Only children tapped their temples with the lethal toy.
He was determined that he would not enter the Kingdom like a baby suckling a bullet to the brain.
Lüzür’s body fell on its side and lay still. Corcey blinked, surprised by the sudden realization that he’d been daydreaming. He looked around. The sirens were louder. Outside on the tarmac he could see the yellow strobes of an airport atv coming in. Calmly, nonchalantly, yet quickly, Corcey turned and faded from the scene.