'Get back, Kling,' she said. 'Slowly.'
He couldn't hear, or didn't care. He still had his gun. He fired a wild shot. She realized the T-H-R man was aiming at her,
'We're not responsible, Kling,' she shouted. Kling stumbled forwards, and fired again. He missed again, but was getting closer. She pulled her gun and brought it up.
'Kling,' she snapped, feeling stupid, 'don't make me shoot you.'
His face was ugly with pain and rage. He was bleeding like a burst leech. His wounded leg was trailing useless as he pulled himself along the side of the car, leaving a smear.
Tyree could have sworn the blood sank in like water into sand. The polished and painted metal was clean now. She imagined something licking vampirish lips.
The cruiser just sat there like a machine, as if it had nothing to do with anything.
Kling was only a few feet away. Even he couldn't miss at this range. He raised his gun, and she shot him. In the remaining three minutes of her life, she would tell herself several times she had no choice but to make a head shot, that there hadn't been time to wound Ken Kling. Then, she would call herself a liar.
Stack was out from under, and running towards her.
The cruiser's right headlamp winked, and she felt her shin sting as the beam holed her leather boot. It passed through flesh and bone.
She was dead already, she knew. There was just going to be a little more fuss before it was all over.
VIII
Stack couldn't figure it. Leona had just shot Ken Kling. The cruiser was on automatic and killing people. The gas station was burning, and due to go up like the Fourth of July in moments. This wasn't a routine patrol anymore. The peace was over.
He drew his gun, not liking where this was leading.
'Leona,' he said. 'Drop your weapon. Maybe we can sort this out.'
She fell to one knee, wounded somehow, and looked at him. He saw hurt in her eyes, not at the physical pain, but at his instinctive assumption she was behind all this.
But, damnit, she had control of the cruiser! She had just shot a T-H-R man!
She had dropped her gun, and was holding her leg with both hands.
'Leona?'
She opened her mouth to speak; and the cruiser lurched forwards. It must have hit a stone as it started, because it lifted up off the ground. The front bumper struck Leona in the chest, forcing her backwards, and the ve- hickle drove clear over her.
Stack screamed, and automatically fired his pistol, emptying it in the air. It got hot in his hand, and he threw it away.
The cruiser drove off, leaving Leona sprawled in the sand, half-buried already, leaking black blood. Stack ran to her, and took her in his arms. There was a fresh tyre track across her chest. Her hair was loose, and thick with blood, grit and oil.
She was still breathing, but he knew there was no hope. He took a squeezer of morph-plus from his belt-slung medkit and shot it into her arm. As he depressed the syringe, an eye snapped open in her soot-blacked face.
He had something to tell her, but he couldn't get it out.
She gripped him with one hand, clutching a fistful of his shirt, scraping skin off his chest. She was shaking as the drug killed her nervous system. There wouldn't be any more pain, at least.
'Leona?'
Blood came out of her nostrils and mouth.
'Le…oh…'
The cruiser was coming back. Stack disentangled himself from the corpse, and ran. He ran towards the burning house, the cruiser swallowing the ground between them in instants.
There was a voice coming from the car. 'Cum-a-kay-aye-yippie,' it shouted, 'yippie-yippie-yippie-aye, cum-a- kay-aye-yippie-yippie-ay!'
He felt flames as he ran past the house, through the already burning rubble. He was surrounded by heat. Behind him, the cruiser's engines gunned. The gas tanks exploded, and he was at the centre of a fireball.
IX
Duroc's chest was as good as new. Better, even. Thanks to the Zarathustra treatment, designed by GenTech's finest and available only to the
The woman at the desk was plastic. She could have been a sexclone with a voice-activated set of automatic responses. She smiled at him, and buzzed him through. There weren't many people who could be admitted as easily to the Central Lodge in Salt Lake City.
The two tall, bearded, barrel-chested men stood aside, and Duroc went through the double doors into Elder Seth's personal office.
The Elder sat with his back to the door, looking up at nine inset television screens on the wall, each showing a different channel. There was a soundtrack babel. Lola Stechkin read the news on ZeeBeeCee. A bionic bobby doffed his nipplehead helmet and beat up a scruffy French terrorist in a black and white British police series. President North emphatically made a point. A Spanish-speaking lady aristocrat with remarkable cheekbones struggled on a soap to come to terms with her daughter's romantic attachment to a dobermann pinscher. A cartoon Op chased Mohawk-headed renegades on a kiddie show with more violence to the minute than Hitler's home movies. Petya Tcherkassoff, in an open-fronted white shirt and unpleasantly tight culottes, seduced a teenage girl with a song called 'My Heart Bleeds Love for You' in a Russian musickie video. And the Josephite Tabernacle Choir raised money on Salt Lake's own network.
Seth swivelled around on his chair, and smiled. Duroc was reminded vaguely of a piranha. It was a smile designed purely to show off sharp teeth. It wouldn't extend to the eyes currently concealed behind dark glasses. The office was bare apart from the screens. Everywhere else in the City, there were crosses and portraits of Elder Seth and the original Elder Shatner. Here, no trimmings were needed.
The Elder stood up, and extended a hand. He wore a conservative black suit, anonymously tailored in a style that hadn't changed for two hundred years.
They shook hands. As always, Duroc was surprised the Elder's skin was warm, normal. Such a great man should have ice-cold flesh and a grip like a vise.
'It is done?'
Duroc nodded.
'It is as well.'
The Elder was the titular head of the Josephite Church, a protestant sect founded in 1843 by the American visionary Joseph Shatner. By the sheer force of his will, Nguyen Seth had rallied many followers, and persuaded the United States to turn over sovereignty of the wilderness of Utah to him. He had renamed it Deseret, he had brought the first motorwagons of resettlers to the region, he had supervised the irrigation and fertilization projects that had made crops grow where science said none could, and he had built a power base unmatched in the mid-west. Now, having unified and fortified the Josephites, he was actively seeking gentile resettlers to bulk out the population.
