Metrophage

bodies as the women's mouths met over his shoulder.

The undressing was a haphazard affair. Jonny yanked at the boots he had just put on and tried to help each woman out of her clothes. Without his eyes, though, he just succeeded in tangling them in their shirts. Sumi pushed him down on the bed and held him there, reminding him that a couple of days was not a very long time, and that maybe he should not help them.

Eventually, they bent together, in one three-way kiss. Hands moved in phantom caresses and scratches over Jonny's body. The women pressed him to the bed, embracing each other on top of him, exciting each other while moving in slow undulations over his body.

Occasionally their rhythm would change and he would feel a tongue or hand would sweep over his belly or up his thigh. They were teasing him, he realized. Making his blindness a part of their lovemaking. He loved it.

The women changed places, moving back and forth across his body. He lost track of them, could no longer tell one from the other.

One bent to his penis and he leaned back, shuddering pleasurably against the other's breasts. The smell of their bodies overwhelmed him.

While the one remained on his cock, he tilted his head back into the sweet-sour folds between the other's legs. He and the one he was tonguing (he thought it might be Sumi) came together- in that instant he felt his life drain out into both of them, as theirs' drained into him.

The one on his cock stayed there until he was hard again and mounted him from the top. The other woman moved between them biting, scratching, caressing the two of them as they moved together. Then the women switched places and a new warmth enveloped him. He felt one riding him (Sumi, he was sure.) lean across his chest and brush her lips across the other's labia. Ice trembled to a climax as he kissed her and the life moved between the three. The smells of concrete and rust, sweat and sex flared and merged with his own orgasm, lighting, for a moment, the vast and eyeless darkness in a small act of binding.

And then the light was gone and he was blind again, but this time he did not feel so alone.

'Big trouble.' It was Groucho's voice.

Jonny sat up in bed and fumbled for a light switch, then remembered where he was. He felt Ice and Sumi stirring on either side of him. 'What's wrong?' he asked.

'Zamora,' said Groucho. 'He's got the city sealed off. There are goddamn jetfoils patrolling not a hundred yards out from here. Road blocks on the freeways and secondary roads. Aerial recon on the desert. Nobody's going anywhere.'

'How'd you hear about this?' asked Ice. Both women were up now. Fabric rustled softly as they pulled on their clothes. Jonny waited for someone to hand him his.

'A rescue team just brought in a driver from up north,' said the anarchist. His voice was tired, hoarse. 'She was riding point for a camel train moving down the coast from San Francisco, bringing in antibiotics and amantadine. Seems that everything was clean and clear until they hit Ventura. Some of Pere Ubu's boys were waiting and all hell broke loose.'

'She going to make it?' asked Jonny. Someone dropped his clothes in his lap and he started to dress.

'I doubt it,' said Groucho. 'She's shot up pretty badly. Gato just shot her up with the last of our endorphins. I've been on the radio all night. Ubu's got the town sealed up tight.'

'Think he's ready to move on the lords?' asked Ice.

'No question about it,' Groucho said. 'This driver said they made a run on New Hope, hoping they could pick off a warehouse. The place is deserted.'

'Then we're fucked,' said Jonny. 'They've moved the heavy money out of the way of war.'

'We're still safe out here, aren't we?' asked Sumi.

'Not any more,' said Jonny, pulling on his boots. 'It's standard Committee procedure to let a few people get away from any raid, just to see where they run. They probably had that driver tagged all the way out here.'

'Which is why we're going back to the city,' Groucho said. 'I have people packing up anything we can use. The rest gets dumped. We've got a few kilos of C-4 wired to pressure points all along the superstructure of this building. When Ubu's boys get here, it will be waiting for them.'

'What happens to Jonny?' Sumi asked.

'Funny, that was my next question,' Jonny said.

Groucho sighed. 'What can I say? We're pretty good for weapons, but we have to coordinate with the other gangs before we can hit the Committee. We can find something for you to do once we get set up.'

'Like rolling bandages and hiding under beds when the shooting starts? No thanks. I got other plans.'

'What?' asked Groucho.

'Well, I don't mind telling you, Mister Conover was pretty choked up when I took off from his place. He'll be glad to see me.'

'You sure you can trust him?'

'Absolutamente,' said Jonny. 'He always been right by me and, besides, if there's any way to move stuff out of town, he'll know about it.' He stood up from the bed and pulled on his shirt. The sounds of movement, clattering tools and footsteps, things being dragged across concrete, echoed through the complex; there was tension in the voices Jonny heard, a frenetic buzz that he recognized as the prelude to combat. At that moment, he no longer had any desire to remain at the farm, thinking, The Colonel's taken that away, too.

'I'll need a driver,' he said.

'That's me,' said Sumi.

Jonny reached toward her voice and felt a hand close over his.

'You should go with them,' he said. 'They can use your help. If Conover can't move me, it could mean sitting on our asses for a long time.'

'We had a deal,' said Sumi firmly. 'I don't see where this changes anything but the location. I go with you now and Ice joins us later.'

'When the girl's right, she's right,' said Ice.

'You sure?' asked Jonny.

'Completely,' Sumi replied. 'What about a car?'

'No problem.' Groucho's voice was farther away, near the noise from the door. 'Be ready to go in thirty minutes,' he said.

As the anarchist left, Jonny said, 'He says that like we got to pack or something. He just wants to give us time to say good-bye,' said Ice.

Jonny laughed. 'I don't think a half-hour is going to be enough,' he said.

Sumi took his hand, pulling Jonny through long and curving corridors that buzzed with the staccato beat of voices (too many languages at once, he could not understand any of it) and hurrying feet. The smell of nervous sweat hung in the air, an undercurrent, like a faint static charge.

Outside, a cool salt breeze lapped at his face. The sun warmed him. Sumi took him down two switchbacks and then out over hard sand that crunched like broken glass under their feet. It was a sound from his childhood. Fused silicon. He knew where they were now, could picture the scene in his head. The smell of burning fossil fuels came from his right, along with the growling of primitive combustion engines. The sun was dead ahead. Yes, he could see it. The vehicles that had been hidden under the pylons of the fish farm, were being rolled out onto the blackened beach, leaving feathery webs of cracks in the dead glass of the Pacific Palisades shore. Jonny had visited the beach before.

The summer of his twelfth birthday. He and a boy named Paolo went over the wall from the Junipero Serra state school. In Santa Monica they stole a small launch. Paolo piloted it up to the Palisades and they weighed anchor at the sight of a wrecked Venezuelan freighter. 'Liquid natural gas explosion,' Paolo had said. 'Wiped out the whole town.' Jonny nodded, trying to look cool, but he could barely keep his lunch down.

There was not much of the freighter left above the surface. In the leaking wet suits and respirators they found on the launch, swimming through the wreckage of the ship's engine room. It had been blown, nearly intact, onto an outcropping of rock a few dozen meters below the water level. The big furnaces were crusted with bright streamers of coral and undersea plants, like some weird ice castle. On their way back to the surface, Jonny spotted something. An odd shape below the big mussel-studded steam pipes. He swam closer. A skeleton, blackened with the sea and time. The back of the skull and ribs had melted when the ship burned, flowing in the same pattern as