Comeback Tour

call. It is worth one million dollars.'

IV

The ceiling fan revolved lazily, not doing much good. Roger Duroc lay naked on the bed, looking at the hotel room through mosquito netting. The insects were hell in the city, swarming all over the place. No matter how many screens you put up, you couldn't keep them out. The Ancien Grenouille Hotel had balconies with elaborate ironwork railings, but it would be asking for thep death of a thousand bites to step out in one during the daytime.

According to a documentary he had seen on the teevee in some other anonymous hotel room, the world's insect population was exploding. Man might find things heavy-going, what with all the toxic wastes and poison leaks, but the hardy bugs were thriving. New species were being discovered every day. Out in the Great Central Desert, there were apparently foot-long ants, barely able to haul their exoskeletons along, and a plague of locusts was chewing up everything in its path somewhere down in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega was accusing President North of bioengineering the strain as a weapon of war, and the US Government was issuing strenuously unconvincing denials. This was the age of bugwar. Even the gangcults had bioweapons in some cities: the Virus Vigilantes of Detroit had wiped out the Black Dragon Tong with a breed of killer-skeeters that did nothing but lay poison eggs in people wearing Black Dragon colours.

Beyond New Orleans, in the swamps, there was apparently a resurgence in the living fossil population. The trilobites were growing to the size of dinner-plates and nipping unwary waders, passing on nasty diseases. Duroc couldn't be sure, but he thought it all had to do with Nguyen Seth and the Dark Ones. Anything that could produce the Jibbenainosay would find a mere race of prehistoric lice easy to pull out of the black top hat. Despite his supposed position in a Christian Church, he hadn't cracked open a Bible since his spell in the seminary. But he knew that plagues of insects were one of the seals of the Apocalypse.

Across the room, her dark body indistinct in the gloom, the girl was fussing with the contents of the hospitality fridge.

He had brought Simone from her apartment. She passed the time, and was in no hurry to leave him alone. He discovered that she had been a high school student out in one of the Delta communities until the indenture men came by with papers and forced the town to hand over a goodly portion of its youngsters in lieu of taxes. Most of the girls had wound up in a vehicle components factory in Natchez, run by a GenTech boardroom. He still thought Nixon had been a hell of a good president—they had met when he received his Congressional Medal of Honour after the taking of Havana—but everyone since had been in the pocket of the corps. The army paid for his Zarathustra treatments, kept him in shape, kept him out of the craziness. But it couldn't be a shelter forever.

In 1987, coming out of the service, exchanging his uniform for civilian leathers, he had felt like Rip Van Winkle. So much had passed him by while he fought for his country.

America was a different place. Great stretches of it were desert, and there were predators out there. The corps were running the show, buying justice for themselves. And the gangcults—homicidal hoodlums—were quarrelling for whatever territory the corps were willing to deed to them. The people came last in the queue for everything.

Just about the only thing he could honourably do was become a Sanctioned Op. He knew he couldn't make much of a difference, but he wouldn't have been half the man his Pa had raised him to be if he didn't try. And so here he was, the sole owner and sole employee of the Hound Dog Agency, operating out of Memphis, Tennessee. His skills had found a use at last.

His phone rang. Too tired to stretch a hand out, he let the answerphone cut in.

After the message, a clear female voice sounded out.

'Colonel Presley, I know you're there. My name is Krokodil. Would you kindly pick up the phone and take this call. It is worth one million dollars.'

IV

The ceiling fan revolved lazily, not doing much good. Roger Duroc lay naked on the bed, looking at the hotel room through mosquito netting. The insects were hell in the city, swarming all over the place. No matter how many screens you put up, you couldn't keep them out. The Ancien Grenouille Hotel had balconies with elaborate ironwork railings, but it would be asking for the death of a thousand bites to step out on one during the daytime.

According to a documentary he had seen on the teevec in some other anonymous hotel room, the world's insect population was exploding. Man might find things heavy-going, what with all the toxic wastes and poison leaks, but the hardy bugs were thriving. New species were being discovered every day. Out in the Great Central Desert, there were apparently foot-long ants, barely able to haul their exoskeletons along, and a plague of locusts was chewing up everything in its path somewhere down in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega was accusing President North of bioengineering the strain as a weapon of war, and the US Government was issuing strenuously unconvincing denials. This was the age of bugwar. Even the gangcults had bioweapons in some cities: the Virus Vigilantes of Detroit had wiped out the Black Dragon Tong with a breed of killer-skeeters that did nothing but lay poison eggs in people wearing Black Dragon colours.

Beyond New Orleans, in the swamps, there was apparently a resurgence in the living fossil population. The trilobites were growing to the size of dinner-plates and nipping unwary waders, passing on nasty diseases. Duroc couldn't be sure, but he thought it all had to do with Nguyen Seth and the Dark Ones. Anything that could produce the Jibbenainosay would find a there race of prehistoric lice easy to pull out of the black top hat. Despite his supposed position in a Christian Church, he hadn't cracked open a Bible since his spell in the seminary. But he knew that plagues of insects were one of the seals of the Apocalypse.

Across the room, her dark body indistinct in the gloom, the girl was fussing with the contents of the hospitality fridge.

He had brought Simone from her apartment. She passed the time, and was in no hurry to leave him alone. He discovered that she had been a high school student out in one of the Delta communities until the indenture men came by with papers and forced the town to hand over a goodly portion of its youngsters in lieu of taxes. Most of the girls had wound up in a vehicle components factory in Natchez, run by a GenTech subsidiary, but the overseer of the program had found her appealing and cut her out of the herd for his own. She had resisted him the first time, but once the bruises healed she found it easier to go along with the man.

She was a typical Delta breed—a little black, a little Cajun, a little Choctaw—but the overseer classed her as negro, and the indenture program was heavily biased against blacks. As Duroc understood it, the indenture laws had been pushed through the Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida legislatures by affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan. Washington wasn't happy, but didn't want to push the issue in case.the Southern States tried to secede again from the Union. This time, they might get away with it. Ollie North was not Abraham Lincoln.

It all seemed paltry to Duroc. If these people knew what was really going down in the world, all the hot air would be over with and they would have to do something. Perhaps that was why so many people refused to believe what was happening all around them. After all, if you tried to deal with the fact that the fundamental laws of physics were being repealed en masse, your head started to hurt and you needed a brewski, a burger and a snort to make the pain go away.

Simone brought him a tall green drink with lots of ice and fake fruit in it. She still had the traces of stripemarks on her back. He sipped his cocktail, and ran his fingers over her scars.

The overseer had passed her on to the GenTech East CEO at the plant. A traditionalist to the core, the Japanese executive went in for tea ceremonies, long baths and the pleasures of the whip. Then, a few private pornovideos later, she had been sublet to Mink Hat, the young man she had been with at Fat Pierre's. She believed he was still turning over a percentage to the corp. Duroc wondered how those earnings showed up on the company