The stripping-her-naked part? The running-away part? Or did they just flash on their Magic Moment thirty times in a row, like a disc with a stuck Blu-ray beam?
The group had been flashing and reflashing on the rape of a spanic virgin girl a little more than an hour earlier. The plan—Coyne’s plan, mostly—had been to snatch one of the cute little fourth-grade spanic girls on her way to school and gang-bust her cherry. “One of those sweet little virgins with just an ant trail of hair above her gash,” as Coyne had so artfully put it. “Something we can flash on and get off on for weeks.”
But they hadn’t nabbed a sweet little fourth-grader. All those sweet little spanic girls were being driven to school by armed dads and older brothers, rumbling down the surface streets in their hybrid low-riders with the virgins peering out through the gunslit windows of the backseats. In the end, they’d just grabbed Hand Job Maria, the retarded ninth-grader who went to their own high school. HJM might have technically been a virgin—there had been some blood when Coyne had gone first—but the sight of her naked, the rolls of fat hanging down over her cheap underpants, her pasty white lump of a face with the vacant eyes staring up, her tits large but already old- looking, stretchmarked, and drooping—had excited Val in a sick-making way, but had also made him say he’d be lookout during the actual rape.
He’d flashed when the others did here under the high overpass, but only a ten-minute return to his fourth- birthday party back in Denver. Val tended to go back to that party the way he’d read about schizophrenics repeatedly burning their arms with cigarettes in order to remind themselves they were still alive.
The seven reanimated boys lit cigarettes and sprawled out on the exposed girders. They liked the girders, but no one wanted to lie on the narrow bands of steel sixty feet above the empty highway while twitching under flash. All of them wore holed jeans, black combat boots, and faded interactive T-shirts of the sort that almost all middle- class high school kids wore to their classes: images front and back of chillsweet dudes like Che and Fidel, Hitler and Himmler, Mao Somebody and Charles Manson, Mohammed al Aruf and Osama bin Laden—all of whom they knew almost nothing about. Coyne had interactive and voice-responsive faded images—which could go holo and respond in real dialogue when spoken to—of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris on the front and back of his T-shirt. Val and the others really didn’t know anything about Klebold and Harris, either, other than they were chillsweet killers about the age of the guys in this pathetic little flashgang who’d tried to off their entire school back when that was a new idea sometime in the last century when dinosaurs and Republicans still walked the earth.
Val, like the other guys lounging and smoking here high above the highway, had often thought about and talked of killing everyone in his school. The problem, of course, was that schools weren’t soft targets anymore. Klebold and Harris had had it easy (and word was that they’d screwed the pooch even so, their propane-tank bombs not even going off). Today the halls of Val’s high school near the Dodger Stadium Detention Center had almost as many armed guards as students in the halls, the local militias protected the kids stupid enough still to be going to and from school, and even the damned teachers were required to pack heat and take regular target practice at the LAPD’s firing range in the old Coca-Cola bottling plant off Central Ave.
Coyne stood up, unzipped, and took a leak out into space, the arc of urine falling six stories to the weed- spotted highway pavement far below. This started an epidemic of pissing. Monk, Toohey, the Cruncher, and Dinjin were the first to follow their leader, then Sully and Gene D. and finally Val. He didn’t
“Hey, stop!” Coyne shouted before the younger boys and Val were finished.
A roar echoed down the concrete canyon of the 101. It was hard to stop urinating once you started, but Val managed. Suddenly a dozen or so Harleys roared under them, the exposed tats and muscles of their male riders visible outside the black leather, the long black or gray hair streaming behind them.
“They’re burning real fucking
The riders passed under them without looking up, despite the fact that the boys were plainly visible with their little peckers hanging out over the void. The roaring Harleys were doing about eighty miles per hour.
“Shit, I wish we were down the road a mile or so,” breathed Sully.
They all knew what he meant. A little less than a mile ahead, with no exits in between, a twelve-foot chunk of the 101 had fallen away during the Big One, creating a twelve-foot gap dropping down sixty feet or so to darkness and concrete blocks studded with rebar stakes and twisted, rusted metal of old wrecks and, the boys had heard, scores of skeletons of other bikers. Some Harley-borne chillsweet had wedged a wide slab of concrete as a sort of ramp years ago and these bikers would have to hit that ramp at high speed, no more than three abreast, to jump that gap and go on their way to the first opening in the exit barricades out where the 101 met what was left of the Pasadena Freeway. Val had seen the stretch on both sides of this break in the raised highway and there were streaks of dried blood and torn rubber and sculpted rubble piles of chrome and steel on the west side of that ramp- jump gap. But the 101 curved just a little north here beyond Alameda and they couldn’t see the jump point from this overpass.
The boys avidly watched the bikes recede, the Harleys already narrowing their formation and jostling for position, the huge, hairy leader with his red tats injected with real blood leading and accelerating away around the curve, and as the roar of power and fuck-you-death defiance grew and echoed around them, Val felt himself grow physically excited in a way he hadn’t when the others had been banging poor Hand Job Maria.
Coyne caught his eye and smiled a bit, cigarette dangling from his thin lower lip, and Val knew that the older boy was also getting a hard-on. At times like this Val felt a little gay.
He spat loudly over the edge to hide his blush and embarrassment and zipped up, turning his back on the others. The roar of Harley engines grew, peaked, and diminished to the west.
Coyne reached under his T-shirt in back and pulled something from the waistband of his jeans.
“Holy shit!” shouted little Dinjin. “A gun.”
It was indeed. All seven boys gathered around Coyne where he squatted at the edge of the pigeon-splattered ledge.
“M-nine Beretta nine millimeter,” whispered Coyne to the huddled circle of heads above him. “Safety’s here…” He pushed a little lever backward and forward. Val guessed that the red dot meant “safety off.”
“Magazine release is here…” Coyne pushed a little button on the stock behind the trigger guard. The clip or magazine or whatever the hell it should be called slid out and Coyne caught it in his free hand. “Holds fifteen rounds. Can fire one in the chamber with the magazine out.”
“Can I hold it? Can I? Can I?” breathed Sully. “Please. I’ll just, you know, whatchamacallit, dry-fire it.”
“Is that like dry-humping a girl?” asked Monk.
“Shaddup,” said Val, Coyne, Sully, and Gene D. together. They didn’t like it when a junior member spoke out of turn.
Coyne held the magazineless semiauto up and pointed the muzzle at Sully. “I’ll give it to you if you know how to handle it. Can it shoot now?”
“Naww,” laughed Sully. “The clip’s…”
“Magazine,” said Coyne.
“Right, yeah. The magazine’s out. I can see the bullets packed in the… magazine. Gun’s safe.”
Val could see the bullets, too, or at least the top one in the magazine: brass-wrapped, lead-nosed, notched at the top as if cut with a penknife. It made him feel weird, stirred him the same way the roar of the Harley- Davidson motorcycles had.
“You’re a moron,” Coyne said to Sully. “Coulda killed yourself or me or any of these other rat-twats panting here.” Coyne racked the slide back on the old gun and a bullet that had been in the chamber arced up and out. The leader caught that round, slug, cartridge, bullet—whatever you should call it—in his free hand.
“There was one in the pipe,” Coyne said softly. “You would have blown your own dick off. Or killed one of us.”
Sully grinned and blinked rapidly, admonished but obviously still so eager to hold the weapon that he forgot to act pissed at being rebuked.
Coyne moved the butterfly safety so the red dot was covered up, pulled the trigger so that the slide slammed forward again, and handed the semiautomatic pistol to Sully, his oldest friend and first disciple. The other guys crowded closer to Sully as Coyne and Val stepped back three paces.
