Cities of the Red Night (30 page)

A sharp sickening smell. In the middle of a red carpeted room I see a plot of ground about six feet square where strange bulbous plants are growing. Centipedes are crawling among limestone rocks and from under a rock protrudes the head of a huge centipede. I arm myself with a cutlass and someone I can't see clearly picks up a piece of firewood. I kick the rock over but the centipede digs deeper and I can see that it is huge, perhaps three feet long. Now it is under my bed and I wake up screaming. I know that I must make preparations for a war I thought had ended.

PLEASE TO USE STUDIO POSTULATED TO YOU

We arrive at Ba'dan around midnight local time. The space front is stacked with garbage under sputtering blue arc lights. Garbage collectors' strike. Someone is always on strike in Ba'dan.

Smugglers of every variety are moored at Ba'dan. The skippers all get together at the annual Skipper Party and award a gold cup to the all-around “Vilest Skipper of the Year.” Skipper Krup von Nordenholz will win hands down. There are also cops of every variety making deals with the skippers and arresting anyone who doesn't have the fix in.

We hail a cab. “Where's the action here, Pops?”

“Wal, I reckon you boys want to go to Fun City. Better pick up some artillery first.”

He stops at a neon-lighted all-night gun shop. The shopkeeper has all the old western models and some of the newfangled double-action 38's. These guns shoot an aphro charge that can disable or kill. Neck and heart shots are fatal, stomach, solar plexus and genital hits are knockout shots.

Audrey selects a snub-nosed 38 in a quick-draw holster. Pu slips a 41 Derringer into his vest pocket and straps on a Smith & Wesson 44.

“It's a much better load than the 45, old sports.”

Fun City is on a plateau that falls steeply on one side down to the river that separates Ba'dan from Yass-Waddah. On this slope is a vast casbah—the houses are connected by catwalks, trapdoors, and tunnels—that contains the largest per capita criminal population ever seen anywhere. Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.

We walk into a leather bar called the Stretch Nest. A goodly crowd is there—four feet deep at the bar, waiting in line for openings at the gambling tables, going up the wide red-carpeted stairs to private hanging rooms followed by waiters with trays of drinks and buckets of champagne.

The usual costume is boots and chaps, bare ass and crotch. Some have tight-fitting chamois pants up to midthigh and shirts that come to the navel. Many are naked except for boots, gun belts, and hang-noose scarves. Nooses dangle every ten feet from a beam down the center of the room.

A hang fistfight draws a circle of cheering onlookers, as two kids smash each other in the face—lips cut, eyes black, noses broken, spurting blood. One kid is down—he tries to get up and falls on his side.

The winner bends down and ties his arms with a noose scarf. Next thing, the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.

Now an old rooster, strapped into his corsets, comes in a-gunning for some kids to hang at his debutante daughter's coming-out party. He settles on Pu who has seen him a-coming and has the Derringer palmed.

“Fill your hand, you young varmint,” the old gun drawls. Pu shoots him in the neck with the Derringer and he falls farting and shitting, the corsets bursting off him.

“Lucky thing he had his clothes on, old sports.”

A naked fifteen-year-old sticks his head in the bar.
“The Clantons and the Earps is shooting it out at the O.K. Corral.”

A great bestial whoop goes up from the bar. The patrons shove and jostle out past hanged corpses, slipping in sperm. And they head for the O.K. Corral … there it is and right beside it a gallows that can service thirteen at a time.

The Clantons and the Earps walk towards each other, naked except for gun belts and boots, meeting cock to cock.

“You boys have been looking for a fight…” Wyatt drawls. “Now we aim to give it to you.” He draws and gets Billy Clanton in the crotch. Billy sags but he knocks Wyatt out with a solar-plexus shot from the ground. Doc Holliday turns sideways but Ike Clanton circles and gets him right in his skinny ass. Virgil and Guy Earp are down. The Clantons have won.

The Earps and Doc Holliday are hanged simultaneously. The crowd goes hanging mad. Gunfights all up and down the street, people sniping from windows and doorways, casting from rooftops with deep-sea fishing gear and nooses, trying to snag someone off the street.

They are lined up at the gallows. Ropes are unslung and bodies thrown aside, some of them still alive, strangled by street boys or picked up by roving Buzzard Bands.

People hang from balconies, trees, and poles. Even horses are hauled into the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their teeth in mimicry.

The culmination of this loutish scene is now at hand as drunken cowpokes drag screaming whores out of the cathouses.

“You've given me your last dose, you rotten slut.”

“My God, they're hanging
women!
” Audrey gasps.

“Enough to turn a man to stone,” drawls Captain Strobe. “Let's get
out
of here.” Six youths in chaps bar the way.

“In a hurry, stranger?”

“Yes,” says Audrey and he kills him with a neck shot. He flops against another boy, deflecting his aim. Audrey and Pu are unbelievable with hang-guns. The boys are all down now or dead.

We walk away and leave them, fair game for any roving band of vigilantes. Before we turn a corner, they are seized by the Hanging Fathers—naked except for their clerical collars. The Hanging Fathers represent one of the sects under the control of the Council of the Selected. They are one of the most powerful organizations in Ba'dan.

We stroll along to the amusement-park section. Here are the elevators, parachute, and roller-coaster gallows and all variations of hanging roulette. “From Russia with Love” is played like Russian roulette. You stand on the trap with the rope around your neck and you get a gun with one live load. You spin the cylinder and then, instead of putting the gun to your own head, you aim at someone in the audience—if you can draw an audience or anyone within range—and if it's the live shell, the shot springs the release. Or maybe some yokel throws a firecracker under the gallows—they'll work up to an atom bomb eventually.

Now the wall of a building flies up and there are thirteen Commies hard at it, and we take off across the park, bullets whistling all around us. We duck behind the elevator-gallows building—ten stories, three hundred feet long.

You start at the tenth floor with a rope around your neck and drop down at express speed, and when the elevator
stops
a panel flips open and you get popped. And, of course, you can play roulette on the elevators, any odds you want.

Audrey is getting that weak feeling—it's the wet dream of his adolescence, going down very fast in an elevator that suddenly stops. He didn't know what it meant then. Now he just has to try it.

So up to the tenth floor. A red-carpeted corridor runs the length of the building. On one side a Turkish bath, on the other the elevators, green lights showing when the elevator is vacant. Youths, draped in towels or naked, come out of the showers and steam room to importune in the hall.

Audrey beckons imperiously to an attendant: “Do you have a well-equipped think room?”

“Oh yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Very sensible of you, sir, if you don't mind my saying so, sir.”

The youths mutter angrily. “Come up here for a free feel.”

“
Hombre conejo.…
Fucking rabbit man.”

Inside the think room, the boys put on helmets. There are dials and screens—you can call your shots. Will it be an open elevator? The moon is full. The lights of Yass-Waddah twinkle across the bay.

Audrey could throw a potent curse. Or something with mirrors and video cameras—home movies to show his friends when he has a comfortable little bungalow in a nice residential district of Ba'dan.

Everything is permitted in a think room, so Audrey simply lets himself go. An open elevator or a mirror job? Why not both, one after the other?

POP      POP      POP

He is spattering death all over Yass-Waddah across the bay. Now he reaches out for the hermaphrodites and transplants of Yass-Waddah.

Two of these creatures undulate in, trilling, “You
know
what happens
now
don't you, Audrey?”

Jerry's head is on the body of a red-haired girl and her head is on his body, long red hair down to his nipples. Audrey gets the Gorgon Queezies at the sight of them.

“We're going to
pop
you, Audrey.”

An open elevator for this one.

“Here you goooooooooo.…”
Her hair blows up around her head like flames from hell.

POP

Audrey is learning to relax and throw his pops. A fire starts in a warehouse across the bay.

Now for the Big Dipper, which towers eight hundred feet into the night sky, all lit up with twinkling stars. Biggest and fastest roller coaster in the solar system. Like I say, Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.

Audrey stops in a little café he just remembers, up this little street and turn right … they sit under an arbor and order mint tea and all take a whopping dose of Itchy Tingles.

“You chaps just back up my play. Give me all your Itchy Tingle prana when I pop.”

“Sure thing, old sport.”

Audrey remembers a very exclusive little shop—you don't get through the door or even
find
the door unless the proprietor likes your looks. Audrey knows him from Mexico City where Audrey was a private eye in another incarnation.

Inside the shop, he buys winged-Mercury sandals and a helmet with wings from a whooping crane. He tops off the ensemble with a silver wand.

They take a private car on the Big Dipper. Audrey stands with a silver silk noose around his neck, feet apart, knees bent, riding the dips, the wand moving in front of him. Up they go now—up up up up up—Audrey is getting a hard-on … a dizzy pause and now, the Big Dipper comes down down downdowndown and levels off. Audrey extends his arm and the wand tingles straight for the power plant of Yass-Waddah.

P O P

All the lights in Yass-Waddah go out.

A LECTURE IS BEING GIVEN

Jimmy Lee is checking dials. “We better get out of here fast before they get our range.”

We walk over to the shooting galleries and penny arcades on the edge of the plateau. A high electric fence separates Fun City from the vast slum area in Ba'dan that stretches down to the river and extends along the river's banks.

It is 3:00
A.M.
, a warm electric night, violet haze in the air and the smell of sewage and Coleman lanterns. The pitchmen wear pink shirts, striped pants, and sleeve garters. They have gray night faces, cold eyes, and smooth patter.

One of the shills with a Cockney accent and a thin red acne-scarred face, standing in front of a curtained booth, makes a gesture that is unmistakably obscene and at the same time incomprehensible. Audrey is reminded of an incident from his early adolescence down on Market Street, brass knucks and crooked dice in pawnshop windows and a smooth high-yellow pitchman trying to talk him into a “museum,” as he called it.

“Shows all kind masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.”

Audrey does not exactly understand what the man is talking about. He turns and walks abruptly away. The mocking voice of the pitchman follows him.

“Hasta luego, amigo.”

We walk on and stop in an all-night restaurant where an old Chinese serves us chili and coffee. He puts a
CLOSED
sign on the front door and locks it.

“Out this way.…”

He shows us out the back door into a weed-grown alley by the fence. Frogs are croaking and the first light of dawn mixes with the red sky. A boy pads up beside us silent as a cat.

“You come with me, mister. Somebody want to talk you.”

The boy has a straw-colored face dusted with orange freckles, kinky red hair, and lustrous brown eyes. He is barefooted and dressed in khaki shorts and shirt. We walk along beside the fence.

“Here.”

The boy pulls aside a piece of tar paper. A little green snake slides away. Under the paper is a rusty iron panel set in concrete. We go down a ladder and through a winding passage that smells of sewage and coal gas, out into a narrow street that looks like Algiers or Morocco.

The boy suddenly stops, sniffing like a dog. “In here, quick.”

He guides us into a doorway, up stairs and a ladder onto a roof. Looking down, we see a patrol of six soldiers with machine guns checking every doorway on the street. Audrey studies the gray faces and cold fishy eyes of the soldiers.

“Junkies.”

“Fuckin' Heroids—” the boy spits.

The boy guides them through a maze of roofs and catwalks down a skylight, finally stopping in front of a metal door. He takes a little disk from his coat pocket. The disk bleeps faintly and the door opens.

A Chinese youth stands there. He is wearing a pistol in a holster at his belt. It is a bare room with a table, chairs, a gun rack, and a large map on one wall. A man turns from the map. It is Dimitri.

“Ah, Mr. Snide, or should I say Audrey Carsons, so glad to see you again.” We shake hands. “And your young assistant as well.” He shakes hands with Jimmy Lee. “Both somewhat altered—but none the worse for wear.”

We introduce the others.

“You are welcome, gentlemen … and now, there is much to explain.” He stands before the map with a long thin hazel stick in his hand. “We are here—” he circles the area below the plateau of Fun City down along the Ba'dan riverfront. “It is known as the Casbah. Outlaws and criminals of all times and places are to be found here. The area is heavily patrolled and the soldiers, as you have observed, are all heroin addicts. Their addiction conveys immunity to the fever and assures absolute loyalty to their masters who, of course, supply them … extra rations for arrests … rations cut for any dereliction of duty.”