Free Dangerous Games by Michael Prescott Page B

came here.
    His headache was a cloud of pain drifting around his skull, a moving field that traveled with him. He steered his beat-up Oldsmobile through heavy traffic and exhaust fumes. The radio worked, but he never listened to it. He didn’t need some talk-show jackass telling him what to think.
    This part of the Boulevard was a dirty stretch of shotgun flats—cheap motels and week-by-week lodgings, liquor stores, and adult video shops, and all the social detritus they attracted. With the windows of his car rolled down, he could hear the competing squalls of boom boxes and car radios, the laughter of kids congregating on street corners, the blare of sirens. Although LA had funneled millions into giving the Boulevard a face-lift, much of it remained a festering garbage dump, a dark lump of scar tissue in the heart of the city, as the city itself remained a hungry tumor in the heart of the world. Los Angeles, the new Babylon, the breeding ground of the cancer eating away at civilization.
    Above him was the perfect illustration of his point, a lighted billboard promoting the latest Hollywood product, a teen sex comedy. The gigantic image of a nearly naked girl floated against the dark sky. Kolb knew the kind of movie it would be, a joyless thrill ride laced with coarse language and empty titillation, a diversion for pampered children who wanted some meaningless fun in their meaningless lives. Another chunk of offal dumped by this city into the sewage canals of modern culture to pollute a dying nation.
    He idled at a red light next to a boosted-up Jeep blaring rap music. Behind the wheel, a kid in sunglasses bopped to the pounding beat.
    Who was it who’d said that civilizations were born to war anthems and decayed to waltzes and minuets? Hell, maybe nobody had said it. Maybe he’d made it up himself. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly true. There were no waltzes anymore. America was rotting to the sound of ghetto slang rhymed and chanted at top volume.
    Tenement noise for a nation of trash. Trash like the punks outside the Safeway and their tattooed whores. They came swarming into this country like termites infesting a half-dead tree, nesting in the dry wood and hastening the rot. He didn’t hate them for their skin color, only for the culture they brought with them, the ugly music and stinking food and loud, undisciplined, street-smart attitude. They humped like stray dogs, too. It was as if they were in a constant state of arousal, perpetual heat. Maybe the baggy pants they wore gave their genitals too much room to float around. Or maybe some unconscious survival drive was prodding them to reproduce so prodigiously that they could complete their takeover of the country by sheer numbers.
    Decadence. A society in decline. The signs were everywhere, but only a few men had the courage to see.
    The attempted rehabilitation of the Boulevard had involved removing the most visible elements from public view. Those would be the hookers, of course. Arrests had been made, sweeps had been carried out, and the upshot was that the girls in micro-minis had moved a block south to Selma Avenue, where they gathered in the same numbers as always.
    Kolb hooked onto Selma and watched the girls give him the bump and grind. Their squawks and howls sounded like the shrieks of beggars in some feculent Third World alley. They were the female principle in distilled form, raw and desperate, and like all women they bore the shadow of something enigmatic and prehuman, some lingering primitivism that found expression in menstrual blood and the damp, secret darkness of the womb.
    The whores disgusted him. The thought of putting his cock between their legs, inserting it into a soup of disease…He might as well try screwing a test tube full of bacteria.
    Even so, he found himself inexplicably slowing the car, easing up to the curb. He leaned toward the open window on the passenger side and smiled at the girl who drew near.
    “Want some action, honey?” she