Cities of the Red Night

meeting cock to cock.

'You boys have been looking for a fight ...' Wyatt drawls. 'Now we aim to give it to you.' He draws and gets Billy Clanton in the crotch. Billy sags but he knocks Wyatt out with a solar-plexus shot from the ground. Doc Holliday turns sideways but Ike Clanton circles and gets him right in his skinny ass. Virgil and Guy Earp are down. The Clantons have won.

The Earps and Doc Holliday are hanged simultaneously. The crowd goes hanging mad. Gunfights all up and down the street, people sniping from windows and doorways, casting from rooftops with deep-sea fishing gear and nooses, trying to snag someone off the street.

They are lined up at the gallows. Ropes are unslung and bodies thrown aside, some of them still alive, strangled by street boys or picked up by roving Buzzard Bands.

People hang from balconies, trees, and poles. Even horses are hauled into the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their teeth in mimicry.

The culmination of this loutish scene is now at hand as drunken cowpokes drag screaming whores out of the cathouses.

'You've given me your last dose, you rotten slut.'

'My God, they're hanging women!' Audrey gasps.

'Enough to turn a man to stone,' drawls Captain Strobe. 'Let's get out of here.' Six youths in chaps bar the way.

'In a hurry, stranger?'

'Yes,' says Audrey and he kills him with a neck shot. He flops against another boy, deflecting his aim. Audrey and Pu are unbelievable with hand-guns. They boys are all down now or dead.

We walk away and leave them, fair game for any roving band of vigilantes. Before we turn a corner, they are seized by the Hanging Fathers—naked except for their clerical collars. The Hanging Fathers represent one of the sects under the control of the Council of the Selected. They are one of the most powerful organizations in Ba'dan.

We stroll along to the amusement-park section. Here are the elevators, parachute, and roller-coaster gallows and all variations of hanging roulette. 'From Russia with Love' is played like Russian roulette. You stand on the trap with the rope around your neck and you get a gun with one live load. You spin the cylinder and then, instead of putting the gun to your own head, you aim at someone in the audience—if you can draw an audience or anyone within range—and if it's the live shell, the shot springs the release. Or maybe some yokel throws a firecracker under the gallows—they'll work up to an atom bomb eventually.

Now the wall of a building flies up and there are thirteen Commies hard at it, and we take off across the park, bullets whistling all around us. We duck behind the elevator-gallows building—ten stories, three hundred feet long.

You start at the tenth floor with a rope around your neck and drop down at express speed, and when the elevator stops a panel flips open and you get popped. And, of course, you can play roulette on the elevators, any odds you want.

Audrey is getting that weak feeling—it's the wet dream of his adolescence, going down very fast in an elevator that suddenly stops. He didn't know what it meant then. Now he just has to try it.

So up to the tenth floor. A red-carpeted corridor runs the length of the building. On one side a Turkish bath, on the other the elevators, green lights showing when the elevator is vacant. Youths, draped in towels or naked, come out of the showers and steam room to importune in the hall.

Audrey beckons imperiously to an attendant: 'Do you have a well-equipped think room?'

'Oh yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Very sensible of you, sir, if you don't mind me saying so, sir.'