Alpha Rats were the perfect excuse, the ultimate evasion. It had been that way for a thousand years; Jonny knew that much of history. The powers that be required enemies as much as they needed friends, and they could not live without scapegoats to keep their propaganda machines working. In earlier centuries it had been the Jews, the blacks, the homosexuals, the Hispanics. But the closed economic systems of their world had made old fashioned bigotry impractical. Like technology, commerce and travel: the big lie had expanded outward to embrace the rest of the galaxy. And why not, Jonny thought. It's in our blood by now.
He looked at his hand and to his horror, realized that the vacuum bottle was no longer there. Sometime after Ice had been shot, he had let it go. He dropped to his hands and knees, moving frantically between the gangsters' running feet. And spotted it across the room-wedged under the skirt of a Link screen showing Aoki Vega in a Kabuki-porn version of 'Casablanca.'
Between the shadows and the feet, the angry voices and breaking glass, Jonny dove for the bottle, surprising himself when he felt it in his grip. And then as quickly, it was gone. Shattered in his hands, a clear sticky liquid dripping onto his lap, gray fragments of industrial glass all around him.
In the hills, machines skipped a beat. Sumi convulsed.
Jonny looked up at Easy and the smoking gun as the one-horned man said: 'Now nobody has it.' And limped out the door.
Jonny followed him, pushing his way through the thinning crowd, the German pistol before him. Easy was just turning the corner at the far end of the pagoda. The Forest's private security was out. Two men moved through the crowd to intercept Jonny. He waited until they were a few meters away and calmly blew them to pieces. At the lake's edge, he took a hovercraft and headed back to shore, ran until his sides ached, filthy and red-eyed, to La Poupee. In the air re-circulation plant, he collapsed beneath two enormous filter cylinders and retched. Outside, he found a motorcycle in the employees' parking lot. A lithium battery powered BMW. The owner had hooked an air compressor to the exhaust outlet; the bike roared and sputtered like an old-style piston engine model. Jonny gunned the bike and took off.
TWELVE
Sand was blowing in from the desert, flaking paint from parked cars, filling the bottoms of drained swimming pools. Death owned the streets. Two AM, November second, two hours into the Day of the Dead: Dia de los Muertos. Processions filled the thoroughfares of Hollywood, like some graveyard Mardi Gras. Lepers danced together in papier-mache skulls behind white-robed bishops carrying enormous chrome crucifixes, hologram Christs floating a few centimeters above the crossbars, writhing in agony for all their sins.
Behind the hills, orange flared and lit the sky from the burn-off towers at the German synth-fuel plant north of the city. Jonny licked sand from his lips. He had never seen so many people in one place.
Zombie Analytics flashed the crowd images of dead pop stars, superimposing the outlines of their own bones on the famous faces.
Even the Piranhas were there, apparently untouched by the plague, drawn from their internal exile by the docks to the more inviting lights of the boulevard.
When he first saw Death lingering at the back of the parade, skull molded from old newsrags and clutching a crude sickle of pounded metal, Jonny charged, gunning the big BMW up onto the sidewalk. But he never connected. Never killed Death. It always saw him coming or Jonny had to turn the bike at the last minute when he heard human voices screaming from inside the paper skulls. And each time he rode away, he grew more desperate, more furious, knowing that Death had fooled him again.
Somehow, he ended up at Carnaby's Pit. The parade was moving quickly down the boulevard. Jonny was alone before the chained entrance, reading a notice that was printed in six languages plastered across the rusted and pock-mocked metal doors.
WARNING
Public buildings, except those constructed exclusively for the use of religious expression, are
OFF LIMITS to gatherings of three persons or more.
Emergency Ordinance #9354A- By authority of:
The Committee For Public Health
The parade was blocks away now, the sound of music and voices fading fast. Everything was dying. He looked around for the mercado (No way those people would miss a night like this.), but all he could find were glassy scars in the asphalt where the grills had sat, an ancient scratch-pattern indicating the placement of tent poles.
Jonny pulled the SIG Sauer from his jacket pocket and blew the doors to Carnaby's Pit off their hinges. The pistol's breech remained open this time, meaning he had run out of bullets. He tossed the gun away.
Clouds of green, metallic flies buzzed loudly into the night through the Pit's ruined doors.
Inside, the game room stood silent, all dust shadows and hints of greasy fingerprints where light from the street struck glass. Jonny had never seen the club like this before. In the weak mercury vapor light, without the sound and the colors of the games to distract him, the place seemed small, pathetic even. Lengths of frayed copper wires covered the walls, broke up the ceiling into a water-stained grid behind the dead holo projectors.
In the main room, a stack of Saint Peter's Krupp-Verwandlungsinhalt amps had fallen over. To Jonny's exteroceptors, the Freon leaking from around the speaker cones appeared to shimmer in turquoise pools. The air was damp and stale, close around him. Jonny shivered, looked back the way he had come in and watched sand sift in through the open doors. Death was in the club with him. Jonny could feel its presence. He pulled Nimble Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and went into a crouch, stalking Death through the jungle of abandoned chairs and broken glasses, finally spotting it behind the bar. Jonny recognized Death from his dreams. The mirror shades gave it away.
The kick from the little Derringer, when he fired, nearly broke his wrist, but Death was gone. The sound of the mirror shattering behind the hollow point shell caught him off guard. By the time he scrambled behind the bar and understood what he had done, he was shivering again, realizing he had wanted to do it for a long time.
If death was a illusion, as the roshis had told him, then, Jonny reasoned, he had just proved the lie of his own existence. He kicked at shards of the broken mirror with the toe of his boot and decided he needed a drink to celebrate the discovery of his true nature.
Shelves behind him held all manner of liquor: domestic, imported and bootleg. Jonny selected an unopened bottle of Burmese tequila and drank deeply. Gin, he reflected, would have served him better at this point, but he could not stand the taste of the stuff neat.
He laughed at the idea of taste.
What is taste when you don't exist?
'There's this old man, comes to a Buddhist priest, see,' Jonny said to the empty room. 'Turns out he's the ghost of another Buddhist priest whose been reincarnated five hundred times as a fox.' He took another pull from the bottle. 'In life, he'd argued that the laws of cause and effect do not apply to enlightened beings. So here the poor fucker is, you know, five hundred times- pissing in the woods, freezing in the winter and eating raw squirrel. And the other priest says: 'Schmuck, of course cause and effect applies to enlightened beings.' And the ghost disappears, suddenly enlightened.'
He doesn't have to be a fox anymore. Jonny moved around to the front of the bar, dropped onto a stool and propped the bottle on his knee, the tequila already half gone.
'I have swallowed every kind of shit,' he said.
Across the room, near the pile of fallen German amplifiers, a swarm of flies was moving over the carcass of some dead animal.
Massed together like that in the dark bar, the insects looked to Jonny something like waves kicked up on the shore of some crazy-quilt ocean. He giggled and lurched to his feet, threading his way drunkenly through the club, deliberately kicking over chairs and tables as he went.
Jonny approached the body slowly. From the bar it had looked pretty big for a rat, but that it could be human had not occurred to him until he was right up on it. Batting at flies that buzzed around his face, Jonny edged around
