Free Novahead by Steve Aylett Page A

questions. Guess we know who wears the pants in this barn! ’
    ‘ Did you attack these two? ’
    ‘ Honestly I had no sense of punching them very hard. ’
    I was bored. Believing she could have no idea why, I explained it in finely-crafted detail, after which I was astonished to see her anger increase.
    The kid and the old man exchanged cards like the common cold.
    ‘ Gather all you ’ ve decided to make yours, take the back way out and gather in the alley, with some clothes on. ’
    I went back upstairs and approached the saloon bar. Someone was talking to Toto. I cracked the door a little and peered in. One of Betty ’ s men had him covered with a La France automatic rifle. The piglike gunsel had a flat nose and wide flesh-tunnelled piercings so his earlobes resembled trigger guards.
    Toto stood there evading, obfuscating, sneering, shouting and doing whatever else entered his mind. He didn ’ t turn into a quivering balloon animal - I would have been surprised if he had. But he did a good job of spreading his arms to indicate the liquor bottles behind him. ‘ All this can be yours. ’
    ‘ Are you calling me fat, you bastard? You ’ re the fat bastard. ’
    Toto struck what he probably thought was a chastened pose but succeeded only in looking like an ape.
    ‘ Where ’ s Atom? Where ’ s the kid? ’
    In answer to his enquiry Toto gave a gesture of dismissal into which he managed to invest a wholly inappropriate quality of saintliness, enraging the gunsel instantly. ‘ Doing me a hard favour are you? ’ the pigman asked, ‘ by deigning to ignore me? You imperious - ’
    Toto produced the Pound gun, firing and ducking instantly behind the bar. The gun ’ s pulse grid mapped the room and propelled every local unfixed object after the bullet. Bottles, glasses, knives, guns, chairs and beernuts stormed at the gunsel in a deafening thunderclap of blood and splinters. Before he hit the floor I had slammed the door and run out back.
    I piled the old man, the kid and the girl into the Mantarosa. Edna was cheerful, the bone-haired loon. ‘ Curiosity is honest or it is inoperative, ’ he crooned. It was a Gamete cliche - apparently there were fans even in the Fadlands. That reminded me, and I flung the Gamete book at the back seat before peeling out.
    Through the Portis Thruway and out of Beerlight into the fringes of Our Fair State. Fewer street skulls and more voodoo masts as we approached the Terminal state line. Next to me Murphy put her bare feet up on the dash and injected the inside of her thigh, tarpaper shacks and derelict emplacements blurring by behind her. We were crossing through intermediate jurisdictions of lopsided shelters, dry irrigation canals and telegraph poles stumped for fuel or barricades. The road fed into the hood like accelerated information. In the back seat the kid and the old man fixed some Jade, for which they seemed to have got a taste, and the kid was looking at Schottner Kier. It occurred to me that, by a number of astounding twists of fate, he had at some point learned to read. Where? Compared to the Fadlands and its hollowphernalia, even this burning distance of waste was a fertile paradise.
    Murphy had apparently sauntered all over these two in the basement. If they knew something considered of value, the smart play was to ditch them in this bayonet wasteland. But the kid looked guileless, the greenest kid since Leon Wardial whose reference to a ‘ plural-barrelled shotgun ’ had provoked near-lethal scorn.
    Peroxide clouds in a sky the colour of stonewashed jeans. We rolled through marooned neighborhoods sentried by creosote plants. Lux Murphy ’ s canary-yellow hair flickered in desert wind. We were shot at only once. ‘ Got my good side? ’ Murphy yelled at the hidden sniper. Then we hit an atoll of part-inhabited houses, a surprise district of shattered answering machines and little black gardens. The suburbs: every car looks satisfied. Dust-covered trees like antique