Read Video Star (Voice of the Whirlwind) Online
Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #Adventure, #cyberpunk, #One Hour (33-43 Pages)
14
The video was full of drifting smoke. Vague figures moved through it. Jesus froze the picture and tried to enhance the images, without any success. “Shit,” he said. “More pickups.”
Ric had watched the action as members of Cartoon Messiah in Folger Security uniforms had hammered their way into a hospital back door. They had moved faultlessly through the corridors to the vault and blasted their way in with champagne-bottle-shaped charges. The blasts had set off tremblor alarms in the vault and the Folger people realized they were being hit. Now the raiders were in the corridor before the vault, retracing their steps at a run.
“Okay,” Super Virgin said. “The moment of truth, coming up.”
The corridor was full of billowing tear gas. Crouched figures moved through it. Commands were yammering down the monitored Folger channels. Then, coming through the smoke, another figure. A tall woman in a helmet, her hand pressed to her ear, trying to hear the radio. There was a gun in her hand. She raised the gun.
Thuds on the sound track. Tear-gas canisters, fired at short range. One of them struck the woman in her armored chest and bounced off. It hadn’t flown far enough to arm itself and it just rolled down the corridor. The woman fell flat.
“Just knocked the wind out of her.” Captain Islam was grinning. “How about that for keeping our deal, huh?” Somebody ran forward and kicked the gun out of her hand. The camera caught a glimpse of her lying on the floor, her mouth open, trying to breathe. There were dots of sweat on her nose. Her eye makeup looked like butterfly wings.
“Now that’s what I call poignant,” Jesus said. “Human interest stuff. You know?”
The kids ran away across the parking lot, onto their fuelcell tricycles, and away, bouncing across the parking lot and the railroad tracks beyond.
“We’re gonna spice this up a bit,” Jesus said. “Cut in some shots of guards shooting at us, that kind of thing. Steal some suspenseful music. Make the whole thing more exciting. What do you think?”
“I like it,” said Ric. He put down his untasted whiskey. Jacob and his neurotoxin had made him cautious. “Do I get any royalties? Being scriptwriter and all?”
“The next deal you set up for us. Maybe.”
Ric shrugged. “How are you gonna move the Thunder?”
“Small pieces, probably.”
“Let me give you some advice,” Ric said. “The longer you hang on to it, the bigger the chance Folger will find out you have it and start cramping your action. I have an idea. Can you handle a large increase of capital?”
15
“Is this the stuff? Great.” Marlene swept in the motel room door, grinning, with her overnight bag. She gave Ric a brief hug, then went to the table of the kitchenette. She picked up the white packet, hefted it in her hand. “Light,” she said. “Yeah. I can’t believe people kill each other over this.”
“They could kill
us,”
Ric said. “Don’t forget that.” Marlene licked her lips and peeled the packet. She took one of the small white envelopes and tore it open, spilling dark powder into her cupped palm. She cocked her head. “Doesn’t look like much. How do you take it?” Ric remembered the flood of well-being in his body, the way the world had suddenly tasted better.
No, he thought. He wasn’t going to get hung up on Thunder. “Intravenous, mostly,” he said. “Or they could put it in capsules.”
Marlene sniffed at it. “Doesn’t smell like anything. What’s the dose?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t planning on taking any.” She began licking in her palm. Ric watched her little pink tongue lapping at the powder. He turned his eyes away. “Take it easy,” he said.
“Tastes funny. Kind of like green pepper sauce, with a touch of kerosene.”
“A touch of stupidity,” he said. “A touch of . . .” He moved around the room, hands in his pockets. “A touch of craziness. People who are around Black Thunder get crazy.”
Marlene finished licking her palm and kicked off her shoes. “Craziness sounds good,” she said. She stepped up behind him and put her arms around him. “How crazy do you think we can get tonight?”
“I don’t know.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe I could show you our movie.”
16
Ric faced the window in the motel room, watching, his mind humming. The window had been dialed to polarize completely and he could see himself, Marlene behind him on the untidy bed, the plundered packet of Thunder on the table. It had been eight days since the hospital had been robbed. Marlene had taken the bus to Phoenix every evening.
“You should try some of our product,” Marlene said. “The stuff’s just ...when I use it, I can feel my mind just start to click. Move faster, smoother. Thoughts come out of nowhere.”
“Right,” Ric said. “Nowhere.”
Ric saw Marlene’s reflection look up at his own dark plateglass ghost. “Do I detect sarcasm, here?”
“No. Preoccupation, that’s all.”
“Half the stuff’s mine, right? I can eat it, burn it, drop it out the window. Drop it on your head, if I want to. Right?”
“That is correct,” said Ric.
“Things are getting dull,” Marlene said. “You’re spending your evenings off drinking with Captain Islam and Super Virgin and Krishna Commando... I get to stay here and watch the vid.”
“Those people I’m drinking with,” Ric said. “There’s a good chance they could
die
because of what we’re going to do. They’re our
victims
. Would you like to have a few drinks with them? A few smokes?” He turned from the window and looked at her. “Knowing they may die because of you?”
Marlene frowned up at him. “Are you scared of them?” she asked. “Is that why you’re talking like this?”
Ric gave a short laugh. Marlene ran her fingers through her almost-blond hair. Ric watched her in the mirror.
“You don’t have to involve yourself in this part, Marlene,” Ric said. “I can do it by myself, I think.”
She was looking at the darkened vid screen. Her eyes were bright. A smile tugged at her lips.
“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
“I’ve got to get some things ready first.”
“Hurry up. I don’t want to waste this feeling I’ve got.”
Ric closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see his reflection anymore. “What feeling is that?” he asked.
“The feeling that my time is coming. To try something new.”
“Yeah,” Ric said. His eyes were still closed. “That’s what I thought.”
17
Ric, wearing leather gardener’s gloves, smoothed the earth over the plastic-wrapped explosive device he had just buried under a pyracantha bush. He was crouched in the shadow of a vacation cabin. Drizzle rattled off his collar. His knees were growing wet. He took the aerial for the radio detonator and pulled it carefully along one of the stems of the bush. Marlene stood next to him in red plastic boots. She was standing guard, snuffling in the cold. Ric could hear the sound of her lips as she chewed gum.
White shafts of light tracked over their heads, filtered by juniper scrub that stood between the cabins and the expressway heading north out of Flagstaff. Ric froze. His form, caught among pyracantha barbs, cast a stark moving shadow on the peeling white wall.
“Flashlight,” he said, when the car had passed. Moving between the light and any onlookers, Marlene flicked it on. Ric carefully smoothed the soil, spread old leaves. He thought the thorns on the pyracantha would keep most people away, but he didn’t want disturbed soil attracting anyone.
Rain danced down in the yellow light. “Thanks,” he said. Marlene popped a bubble. Ric stood up, brushing muck from his knees. There were more bundles to bury, and it was going to be a long, wet night.
18
“They’re going to take you off if they can,” Ric said. “They’re from California and they know this is a one-shot deal, so they don’t care if they offend you or leave you dead. But they think it’s going to happen in Phoenix, see.” Ric, Super Virgin, and Two-Fisted Jesus stood in front of the juniper by the alloy road, looking down at the cluster of cabins. “They may hire people from the Cold Wires or whoever, so that they can have people who know the terrain. So the idea is, we move the meet at the last minute. Up here, north of Flag.”
“We don’t know the terrain, either,” Jesus said. He looked uncomfortable here, his face a monochrome blotch in the unaccustomed sun.
Ric took a squeeze bottle of nasal mist from his pocket and squeezed it once up each nostril. He sniffed. “You can learn it between now and then. Rent all the cabins, put soldiers in the nearest ones. Lay in your commo gear.” Ric pointed up at the ridge above where they stood. “Put some people with long guns up there, some IR goggles and scopes. Anyone comes in, you’ll know about it.”
“I don’t know, Marat. I like Phoenix. I know the way that city thinks.” Jesus shook his head in disbelief. “Fucking tourist cabins.”
“They’re better than hotel rooms. Tourist cabins have back doors.”
“Hey.” Super Virgin was grinning, metal teeth winking in the sun as she tugged on Jesus’ sleeve. “Expand your horizons. This is the
great outdoors.”
Jesus shook his head. “I’ll think about it.”
19
Marlene was wearing war paint and dancing in the middle of her condeco living room. The furniture was pushed back to the walls, the music was loud enough to rattle the crystal on the kitchen shelves.
“You’ve got to decide, Marlene,” Ric said. He was sitting behind the pushed-back table, and the paper packets of Thunder were laid out in front of him. “How much of this do you want to sell?”
“I’ll decide later.”
“Now. Now, Marlene.”
“Maybe I’ll keep it all.”
Ric looked at her. She shook sweat out of her eyes and laughed.
“Just a joke, Ric.”
He said nothing.
“It’s just happiness,” she said, dancing. “Happiness in paper envelopes. Better than money. You ought to use some. It’ll make you less tense.” Sweat was streaking her war paint. “What’ll you use the money for, anyway? Move to Zanzibar and buy yourself a safe condeco and a bunch of safe investments? Sounds boring to me, Ric. Why’n’t you use it to create some excitement?”
He could not, Ric thought, afford much in the way of regret. But still a sadness came over him, drifting through his body on slow opiate time. Another few days, he thought, and he wouldn’t have to use people anymore. Which was good, because he was losing his taste for it.
20
A kid from California was told to be by a certain public phone at a certain time, with his bank and without his friends. The phone call told him to go to another phone and be there within a certain allotted time. He complained, but the phone hung up in mid-syllable.
At the second phone he was told to take the keys taped to the bottom of the shelf in the phone booth, go to such-and-such a car in the parking lot, and drive to Flagstaff to another public phone. His complaints were cut short by a slamming receiver. Once in Flagstaff, he was given another set of directions.
By now he had learned not to complain.
If there were still people with him they were very good, because they hadn’t been seen at any of the turns of his course.
He was working for Ric, even though he didn’t know it.
21
Marlene was practicing readiness. New patterns were constantly flickering through her mind and she loved watching her head doing its tricks.
She was wearing her war paint as she sat up on a tall ridge behind the cabins, her form encased in a plastic envelope that dispersed her body heat in patterns unrecognizable to infrared scanners. She had a radio and a powerful antenna, and she was humming “Greensleeves” to herself as she looked down at the cabins through long binoculars wrapped in a scansheet paper tube to keep the sun from winking from the lenses. Marlene also had headphones and a parabolic mike pointed down at the cabins, so that she could hear anything going on. Right now all she could hear was the wind.
She could see the cabins perfectly, as well as the two riflemen on the ridge across the road. She was far away from anything likely to happen, but if things went well she wouldn’t be needed for anything but pushing buttons on cue anyway.
“Greensleeves” hummed on and on. Marlene was having a good time. Working for Ric.
22
Two-Fisted Jesus had turned the cabin into another plastic-hung cavern, lit by pale holograms and cool video monitors, filled with the hum of machinery and the brightness of liquid crystal. Right in the middle, a round coffee table full of crisp paper envelopes.
Ric had been allowed entry because he was one of the principals in the transaction. He’d undergone scanning as he entered, both for weapons and for electronics. Nothing had been found. His Thunder, and about half of Marlene’s, was sitting on the table.
Only two people were in the room besides Ric. Super Virgin had the safety caps off her claws and was carrying an automatic with laser sights in a belt holster. Ric considered the sights a pure affectation in a room this small. Jesus had a sawed-off twin-barrel shotgun sitting in his lap. The pistol grip might break his wrist but the spread would cover most of the room, and Ric wondered if Jesus had considered how much electronics he’d lose if he ever used it.