Route 666

II

8 June 1995

The noonday sun was a circle of white hot iron, burning a hole in the blue canopy of the sky. Heat fell on his face like driving rain, hammering his frozen-open eyes. Slowly, his brain cooked.

Brother Claude Bukowski Hooper would die soon. He hoped. The Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots had downed him on the blacktop, then driven over him a bunch of times. Instead of knees, he had treadmarks.

Black scraps circled on high. Carrion birds, waiting for the spark to go so they could get their grits. Something with dark ragged wings dipped across his field of vision, flapping towards Brother Lennart.

As he breathed. Brother Claude felt the ends of snapped bones stabbing inside. He was too broken, crushed or squashed to fix. He'd hoped they'd zotz him outright, but here he was left in merciless sun, congealing into roadkill.

His fluid self seeped through sun-cracks in the road. The hardtop vibrated minimally. A ve-hickle, many klicks off. His nervous system fused with the Interstate. After death, perhaps he would see out of cats' eyes. Everybody knows, in a second life, we all come back sooner or later, the Josephite hymn went, as anything from a pussycat to a man-eating alligator… His senses would spread throughout the country, north to Alaska, Down Mexico Way.

If only Brother Claude could sleep now…

Loss of blood would probably get him, or else suffocation. It was almost impossible to draw breath into his collapsed windsacks. That was how Jesus died on the cross. As a kid, snoozing through scripture shows on the educational teevee that was all the cable Mama could afford, he hadn't thought much about what being crucified was like.

The Romans pierced Our Lord's hands and feet, just as the 'bots had zero-zilched Brother Claude's arms and legs. The idea was: exhaustion set in and you just sort of collapsed inside, lungs constricted flat by your ribs. He hadn't learned that from educational teevee – 'yes, Davey,' a fundamentalist cartoon dog might tell an audience surrogate, 'it took three days for Our Pal Jesus to die in hideous agony' – but from his tour with the Knights of the White Magnolia. Whenever the Knights found a houngan, they crucified the conjure man and watched him fade to black. After a while, it got mighty tedious.

Elder Seth said that as thou sowed, so should thou reap. Brother Claude had never exactly crucified anyone, but he'd stood about uselessly like the sportsfans who voted for Barabbas while gentlefolk were nail-gunned to garage walls.

Fancy-shmancy bio-implants and replacement doodads of the sort manufactured and licensed by the almighty GenTech Corporation could do zero for him, even if he could have afforded that kind of repair work. Not that he approved of mad scientist stuff.

The Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots were cyborgs. Ashamed of their remaining humanity, they wore black all-over suits with cut-away patches to show off sparkling plastic or metal. Some must be more machine than flesh.

The 'bots had a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. A digital display sign on their largest RV read stop, pay toll. The resettlers' convoy had no way around, and little enough goods to hand over. So little that the 'bots were irritated enough to cut out a couple of the Brethren and enjoy a bout of mindless ultra-violence.

As he stomped Brother Lennart with seven-league feet, the hulking panzerboy they called Pinocchiocchio sang 'I've Got No Strings to Hold Me Up or Tie Me Down'. He did a puppet-like dance of strange grace, reminding Brother Claude of the British series – Thunderbirds, Stingray, The Forsyte Saga – that filled out the educational channels.

Something winged was tugging Brother Claude's boot, rolling the foot both ways. He couldn't feel anything that far down, and he couldn't lift his head to shoo the ugly bird away.

Before they drove on, one of the 'bots had knelt tenderly by him and spilled a little water into his mouth. He tasted his own blood in the drink.

'Are you alright, bro?' The kneeling water-dispenser asked, concern dripping from every syllable.

Brother Claude had tried to smile, tried to make the woman (if woman she was) feel better. She wore a black tutu, fluffed out to show long, shinily PVC-skinned legs.

'Snazz,' she said, black against the sun. As she stood, the 'bot hummed to herself:

'When a gal's an empty kettle,

She should be on her mettle

Yet I'm torn apaaaa-art…'

Brother Claude remembered The Wizard of Oz. His MRA Troop had been shown the film, a scratchy video dupe from some striated celluloid print, blown up and projected on an off-white sheet. Tatum O'Neal as Dorothy, Lee Majors as the Tin Man, Frank Zappa as the Wizard.

Satisfied, the 'bot kicked him again, jamming the point of her pump into his ribs, breaking a few more bones.

'Just because I'm presumin'

That I could be sorta human

If I only had a heart…'

Her leotard was cut away over her chest like a fetish suit. Her breasts were hard, clear, plastic bumps. Inside were wheels and pistons. An LED clock flashed numbers. Tiny gears moved like insect-legs. A rounded glasspex stomach sloshed with acids that processed whatever the cyborg needed to keep walking. Batteries?

The 'bots drove away, leaving the stink of their exhaust in the air. Elder Seth said a few words over Brother Lennart, and repeated them for Brother Claude. He had thought it best not to interrupt his own funeral service with unseemly groans. The survivors moved on.

He understood the concept of sacrifice. By his death, the Path of Joseph would be seeded.

He didn't envy the 'bot. It was better to die clean than live on with half your guts replaced by vacuum cleaner parts and computer terminals.

Nobody had chanced along the Interstate since the convoy followed its yellow brick road. Brother Claude wasn't surprised. Only a damfool would venture this far sandside. A fool, or a pilgrim …

He was twisted in the middle, face up but skewed at the hips, groin pressed to the asphalt. He couldn't feel anything below his ribs. Considering what he could feel from the rest of him, that was a mercy. He realised he was deaf. One of his eyes was shut, sealed by a rind of dried blood.

Brother Claude, born in the Phoenix NoGo, had lived outside Policed Zones all his short life, and always had to follow someone. His daddy took off early – Mama Hooper tried to make out he was some high mucky-muck in Japcorp, but Claude knew better the types she slung out with and so he found other daddies.

During the Moral Re-Armament Drive of the early '80s, the ten-year-old Claude enlisted in President Heston's Youth Corps. Big Chuck looked like a Prezz ought to: a mile wide at the shoulders with a jaw like a horseshoe and acres of medal-heavy chest. When Pioneer Hooper was cashiered for breaking a kid's nose in a dispute about the superiority of Battlestar Galactica over Charlie's Angels, he transferred allegiance to Burtram Fassett, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of the White Magnolia. The IGW told the pledge that he, as a white heterosexual male, was a Prince of the Earth, and that it was the young recruit's duty to stick killing steel into the human vermin who dared rise up against nature's aristocrats.

If he was a Prince of the Earth, he'd tried not to wonder, how come his mama couldn't afford the Playboy Channel?

Then he was a soldier in the War. Not any of the overseas Wars, like the ones in Cuba or Nicaragua; the War between the Knights and the Voodoo Brotherhood, when the Knights tried to clear nigras out of Arizona. That'd been a gold-plated bust. He'd had noble ideas about racial purity and Aryan jihad drummed into his graymass, then it turned out the Knights were financed by raghead troublemakers from the Pan- Islamic Congress.