Noir

The L-shaped wreckage finished its sideways roll, coming to rest in the middle of the empty street. Creaking metal sounded in basso, accompanied by the smaller, bell-like notes of rivets and bolts clattering through the struts, as the 747 continued to disintegrate in slower motion. The inhabitants, those who were still alive and relatively uninjured, stood in the clouds of billowing dust, commenting upon the loss of their home with emotions that ranged from hysteria to fatalistic amusement.

McNihil checked his watch. The unplanned destruction of the pirasite colony had been entertaining in its way, but a distraction from what he’d come here for. He was already a few minutes late for his appointment, and there were still some details he had to take care of before meeting up with the guy. He shielded his eyes from the dust and partial sunlight, scanning across the street-level fronts of the surrounding buildings. There we go, thought McNihil; he had spotted what he was looking for. Leaving the wreckage behind him, he strode toward a small transient hotel a block away.

“I’m going to be needing a room in a little while.” The jittering neon outside read End Zone Hotel; the place had a pro football motif, yellowing posters of numbered and helmeted players on the walls, from a time when there’d been those kinds of teams anywhere in the Gloss. Now the words seemed to have taken on a different meaning: the hotel’s lobby looked like one of hell’s waiting lounges, for those damned from sheer inertia. Not even half-devils, thought McNihil. Quarter- or eighth-devils, at the most. God probably couldn’t be bothered to hate them. “I’ll pay for it now.” He dropped old-fashioned cash into the battered chrome drawer extruded toward him.

“Then it’s your room right now, buddy.” Behind the overlapping layers of steel grilles, the desk clerk roused himself long enough to pull the drawer back and count the money. “Hour rate works out the same as the day rate. You only get a break if you stay a week or longer.” One yellow-tinged eye regarded him with suspicion. “You don’t look like you’re going to be around that long.”

McNihil glanced over his shoulder at the humpbacked upholstered chairs and sag-spined sofas, Salvation Army castoffs, that furnished the lobby. The furniture’s occupants had assumed the same coloration, the exact tone of dirty-gray putty he knew would be edging the clouded windows upstairs. The chairs and the nominal people in them looked as if they were made of the same substance, as though the sweaty cushions had been caught in the act of giving birth to blank-faced human beings, or the seated figures, legs and crutches sprawled in front of them, were slowly devolving into last century’s seating arrangements. McNihil glanced back at the desk clerk. “You got that one right.”

“Want the key now or when you head back here?”

“It can wait.” McNihil pulled several items out of pockets and deposited them in the tray. “But I need you to hold on to some of my stuff for a while.”

The desk clerk pulled the drawer onto his side of the counter and looked at the objects. “You gotta be kidding, mister.” The biggest and heaviest of them was the black shape of his tannhauser. “We don’t get involved in that kind of trouble.”

McNihil slid more cash under the bottom edge of the grille.

Nodding, the desk clerk tucked the money into his shirt pocket. “Now we do.”

“Good.” McNihil pushed himself back from the counter. “Take care of everything and see how much better you feel.” He put his wallet away slowly, making sure the clerk could see the other bills’ corners sticking out of it. “Later on.”

As McNihil was heading out of the End Zone Hotel’s lobby, he glanced over again at the figures slumped in the decaying sofa and upholstered chairs. A half-dozen of them, still looking vaguely human, tundra for spiders to begin laying their gray nets over. A bigger web had already been spun: sustenance checks had obviously been pooled, so that a multi-apertured I.V dispenser could be rented. The surgical-steel box sat on the lobby’s threadbare carpet, at the base of a chrome tree with clear, fluid-filled bags hanging from its short branches. An octopus network of tubes ran from the unit’s central control mechanism to the hypodermics of the connectees, the needles taped down to the arms of the ones fortunate enough to still have usable veins there; other lines snaked up trouser legs or were fastened onto necks like long, skinny, reverse-flow vampires. The most decrepit of the figures had the line trailing into his open fly, as though the sharp metal and polyethylene tube were his final lover, searching for any place where his blood still flowed.

From the other tube, the big one of the television mounted on a plywood shelf in the lobby’s upper corner, mumbling junkie dialogue seeped out. McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced up at the screen. On it was the popular hypo opera He’s Never Early, He’s Always Late; transactions involving little folded slips of paper and glassine envelopes were going on among the professionally disreputable-looking actors. A long time ago, back when he’d still been working as an asp-head, McNihil had done some heavy copyright defense for the show’s producers, laying into a Thai cable start-up that had tried to clone the central concept without paying royalties. He was glad to see that the show was still running, though he’d never been able to figure out the charm of it. For the decaying, knocked-out figures sprawled around the lobby, it must have brought back memories of their younger days. As he watched, needle-tip penetrated flesh on the screen; blood flowered up a calibrated cylinder. He turned his head, hearing the steel box click and hum; the thin hoses trembled. The gray faces turned grayer and half-lidded eyes unfocused as the synchronized hit, triggered by a data wire plugged into the back of the TV, rolled up their brainstems.

The show, McNihil knew, prided itself on authenticity, or enough of a simulation of it to get the ratings. On the screen, at the other end of the cable, the actors probably weren’t chipping at the same low-grade opiate as this audience-AFTRA regs usually insisted on blissful fentanyl-but it certainly wasn’t sterile Ringer’s solution being shot up. That’s entertainment, thought McNihil as he headed for the door.

Outside the transient hotel, he found himself thinking of the last dead-really dead-person he’d seen. Which had been the one named Travelt, lying with blank eyes on the carpeted floor of a cubapt farther south on the circle. A little movie with no action unrolled behind his eyes, on the smaller screen of memory. That poor bastard would’ve been exactly the kind of fool to imagine that there was some sort of low-rent glamor to that sad congregation in the hotel lobby, that his sheltered exec life had kept him from all sorts of dark fun. Imagining things like that, and then acting upon them, was what had most likely left Travelt staring up at the ceiling, his breath all clotted blood in his throat. Which was just a little too late to acknowledge the hard lesson he’d been taught.

Unencumbered by the tools he’d left with the desk clerk, McNihil headed toward the movie theater off the little urban park. By now, the dead 747 had finished collapsing, its disjointed wreckage strewn across the grassless raw earth and the surrounding streets. The destructive work that the Noh-flies had begun was complete; the city’s dispossessed who’d made temporary shelter from the fuselage now stood around or scrabbled with their black-clawed hands to drag their meager property from it.

“Hey! That’s the sonuvabitch! That’s the guy!” A voice called after McNihil as he passed by. “He fuckin’ did it!”

He recognized the voice as that of the panhandling gantry’s operator, now undistorted by the tube-and-funnel arrangement. The face behind the beard was cave-pallid from what had probably been years down in the buried nose section of the airliner. Even this zone’s diminished sunlight was enough to force the red eyes into teary, squinty blinking. A dirt-encrusted hand pointed an accusing finger toward McNihil.

Soon there were a dozen or so ragged figures trailing after him on the sidewalk. He stopped and turned around to face their bearded leader.

“Look,” said McNihil. “Too bad about what happened. But I’ve got business to take care of. And you’re cramping my action.”

“Screw that.” The one with the beard hunched over troll-like, as though his confinement in the airliner had permanently bent his spine. “You owe us, man.” A grimy paw, the flesh-and-dirt equivalent of the articulated gantry, extended toward McNihil. The crowd behind the bearded figure emitted a mumbling, angry chorus. “Pay up. Card or cash.”

A familiar adrenaline ticked through McNihil’s bloodstream, as measured and evocative as that produced by the machine back in the hotel lobby. Part of him could sit back inside his skull as his hands grabbed the front of the other man’s shirt, gathering the tattered cloth into his fists, then lifting the other into the air. The line of McNihil’s white knuckles pressed up beneath the bearded figure’s collarbone.

“I tried to tell you.” McNihil turned and slammed the man’s spine against the nearest building wall. “I’m busy. And I don’t like being harassed for small change.”

Pinned between McNihil’s doubled fists and the wall, the bearded figure did a spastic butterfly dance.