It had a long, thick tail, poking through the buttseam of a pair of waterlogged and multiply-holed designer jeans.
Simone was still screaming. Duroc had her in the skimmer now, and she was clutching her knees, certain that her legs ended there. He saw she wasn't hurt.
'A gun,' he said. 'Give me a gun.'
Quarrill's cries got sharper, and then cut off. His head rolled across the floor of the copter, and dropped into the water. The eyes were rolled up, showing only white. The mutant turned around, its jaws bloodied, and yelled in triumph. Pouches under its jaw inflated as it shouted.
'Go for it, buddyboy,' it was saying, the words struggling through a throat no longer designed for speech. 'No pain, no gain.'
Sister Addams was sitting glumly on the other side of the skimmer, hands joined in prayer. She seemed resigned to being high tea for the monster. Religion could be a weird thing.
'I said, give me a gun.'
Duroc couldn't believe none of the Josephites were armed.
Simone whimpered. The mutant raised its arms, and roared. It was an ugly son of a bitch.
'Breakfast is for wimps.'
Fonvielle lifted up his vest and pulled an old army revolver out of his waistband.
'Mr Prezz…'
Duroc took the antique, and hoped it wouldn't blow up in his hand. He thumb-cocked the piece and sighted on the creature.
All this activity was rocking the skimmer and the copter. But they were too close for him not to get a good shot.
The bony skull was probably too well protected. And the thick plates over the chest looked tough too. Duroc shot the mutant in the greenish white soft V of its throat. It choked on the slug, and threw itself into the water.
Duroc emptied the gun at the thing as it dived, lifting up little spouts of seawater. It twisted in the water and punched the sky with a clawed fist, shouting something defiant but incomprehensible, and went under.
'Freaking yuppies,' said Fonvielle. 'I hate 'em worse than poison.'
II
Two days on the road, and the trip was going fine. She had taken a turn driving last night, while the Op slept in the back seat. The Cadillac handled well. Krokodil appreciated the machine. Every part was in its place, doing what it was supposed to do. The Cadillac was a fine cocoon, inside which she could ignore the rush of sensations, of information. The thing inside her was dormant, and she was not overwhelmed by its perceptions. She could remember her Jessamyn self. She could remember the Jazzbeaux days, on the road with the Psychopomps. Back then, a fast car, a neat guy, unlimited funds and super-powers might have seemed like the summit of her ambitions. Now, things were different. She felt a driving sense of purpose. It was waiting for her among the flooded silos and rusting gantries of Cape Canaveral.
The Op had been playing her his old records. He had been reticent at first, but a few words had pressed the right button, and he was pulling out more and more scratchy-sounding vinyl-to-tape-to-CD-to-musichip transfers. She realized she had heard of him before, dimly. She had the idea that he had been quite a big name before she was born. Before her father was born.
The dashscreen flashed a warning.
'Bandits,' she said. 'One-five.'
The Op took a look. There were three flying objects, in tight formation, moving fast. Their current course would intercept the Cadillac in two and a half minutes.
The Op chewed his lower lip.
'It's probably government, or corp. Just routine.'
'Nope,' he said. 'That's an attack formation.'
He was right.
Seth must know she was coming. He could scramble some killcopters with no trouble. Her internal workings buzzed, prepped for a fight.
'Hell, it's the CAF,' the Op sneered. 'Sorry, ma'am. This ain't your fight, but you're in it.'
'What's happening?'
'I pissed off some nasty guys a couple days ago. Hoodheads.'
She knew what that meant. In her Jazzbeaux days, she had tangled with the far right gangcults: the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Minutemen, Buckley's Buckaroos. Down South, they had the Confederate Air Force and the Ku Klux Klan instead.
The road up ahead exploded, and Elvis swerved the Cadillac into the soggy brush. He flipped a dash-switch, and the underside air-blowers cut in, putting a cushion between the car and the mud. They wouldn't do for outright swamp, but they should keep the vehicle from getting bogged down.
The killer birds were overhead now. They had broken formation, and were circling around, dropping charges. Krokodil saw the Stars and Bars stencilled on their underside.
The Op was as good a driver as she had heard. The long car slalomed between explosions, sustaining barely a graze. Panels slid open on the car's flanks, and the weapons arms poked out.
'Rock,' Elvis said, 'and roll…'
That was nothing to do with music. That was the army expression for 'lock and load.'
The lases sliced the air, and one of the spidercopters had to dodge the red beam, going into a difficult spin the pilot only just managed to pull out of.
'May I?' Krokodil asked.
'Be my guest..'
She reached into her hold-all for the M-312 all-purpose combat rifle she had 'liberated' from the US Cavalry back in Arizona, when she and Hawk-That-Settles pulled the first of their fund-raising raids on the G-Mek convoys. It was state-of-the-art deathware, with a laser sight, a full clip of minimissile slugs, and enough punch to put one of its charges through the granite wall of a pyramid. Elvis whistled as she unwrapped it from its antistatic cloth.
'Quite a baby,' he said.
'She'll do.'
The CAF were laying down ground fire now, angling the copter noses towards the dirt and spitting bullets from the twin snoutguns under the armourbubble.
Krokodil rolled down her window, and squeezed through. This surprised Elvis. But she didn't have to worry too much about the skeetersting slugs these hoodheads would be packing. And she wanted to get a free shot.
The wind whipped her ponytail as she pulled herself with ease up onto the roof of the Cadillac.
She could see the look of astonishment on the haggard face of the pilot of the lead copter. He was wearing a back-turned baseball cap. He paused for a second before pouring some shots into her…
…and a second was all she needed.
Getting a firm footing on the reinforced roof of the Cadillac, she raised the M-312 and put the dot of the laser dead centre on the exposed elastic of the pilot's cap.
One penetration-plus round was all it took.
The pilot's head exploded, and the spidercopter dropped from the sky. Hoodheads rained around it, trying to hurl themselves from the falling machine. Elvis drove in a big semicircle and kept out of range of the explosion, but Krokodil felt the wave of hot air pushing past her.
The Cadillac's lase crossed with a beam from one of the other copters, and there was a chain-lightning crackle as the discharges fed back. The CAF weren't top quality airborne killers. Krokodil reckoned they'd come out second if they took on the Red Baron and his Flying Circus, the Arizona-based aerial gangcult She put a couple of shots into each of the other copters, to dissuade them from coming in any closer.
