thing the whole joint was being showered with confetti, all these louts looking up like it was Christmas, and the stage guy was nowhere.
Every single flake of confetti bore a miniature likeness of the stranger’s face.
4 THE BLACK BURDEN
There was only one venue worse than the Creosote Palace and that was the Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine Street, a dim pit of cawing rooks, glass dust and layered distortion. Those who asked for a shot and a beer rarely lived to examine the beer. Don Toto the barman sold anarchy symbols made of baked corn - pretzels, he called them. The clientele guzzled drugs laced with gin, world ales, soda and even milk. Some cocktails would cause their heads to swell up so they looked like Newt Gingrich. These unfortunate ones would have to be rounded up and slaughtered like hogs. Behind the bar hung a framed photo of Roni Loveless, the boxer who, ordered to throw a fight, burst through an inner struggle to beat not only his opponent but everyone in the arena and its locality in an outward-blooming explosion of violence against suppressive mediocrity.
Flea Lonza sat under the wind turbine nursing a Sniper’s Delight. An oily corpse in a casual jacket, he shored up his withered senses by smuggling facts and tobacco into America. His ears were just big enough to laugh at. In his capacity as a double edge only one client paid him to give the word to other people - and that client had just sat opposite.
‘You inform on me lately Flea?’
‘When don’t I.’
‘You aint holdin’ out on me are you?’
‘Ever get confused, Atom?’
‘No.’ Atom lit a shock absorber. ‘Smoke?’
Flea flashed his jacket to show a hundred shock boxes like the back room of an old cigar store. ‘Devil need a match?’
‘I’m asking the questions - you recommend my services the last few days?’
‘Yeah. Big guy. Dumb. Took a half hour to select his name. But the little slimeback with him - he did the real talkin’. Asked about Fiasco too - I coulda sent ’em straight to Harry but I put ’em onto you.’
‘Thanks.’ Atom handed over five hundred smackers.
‘This kinda money could get me into trouble Atom.’
Atom drew on his gasper. ‘Don’t knock it. Trouble’ll never leave you, never consider you unworthy of attention. Trouble’s a saint. Your saint, Flea.’
Right away Atom regretted it - what a terrible thing to say to a friend. Why did he have to be smart always? ‘I’m sorry Flea. Here.’ He gave him a pearl-finish photograph of himself sobbing amid a huddle of Emperor penguins. ‘And this.’ He reached into his coat and retrieved something, unfolding it. ‘It’s a clip-on charm filter.’ He fitted the tin bib onto Flea. ‘Now tell me you love me.’
‘I hate you, Atom - I only tolerate you because you pay me and buy me presents.’
‘See? It’s working already. Catch you later, Flea.’ Atom got up and left.
A half minute later a posse of Thermidor’s wrecking crew boomed in, headed by Nada Neck. ‘We don’t want no trouble,’ said Toto the barman, and that cracked everyone up. Toto gave a little bow, grinning as he cleaned a glass.
Nada Neck drew a mufflered M61 Persuader sub and breezed it onto Flea’s forehead as he sat down casual and surveyed the bar. Flea reacted like he’d found a bug in his apple.
‘You gentlemen need a muscle relaxant?’
‘You the local dataroach, right? I think you can help me. Yes, I think so.’
‘Look me in the eye and select a topic, if you can.’
‘Taffy Atom - you’ve met him.’
‘Sure I know Atom but he’s kinda busy. He’s a shadowman.’
‘That this week’s tag for a gumshoe? What’s makin’ him so busy? Remember the gun.’
‘Some guys want him to find Harry Fiasco.’
‘Which guys.’
‘Big dumbster and a lavender seed, don’t know the names.’
‘You don’t know a whole lot of anything do you Roach. That a bib?’
‘You can have it - it’s a charm filter.’
‘Wiseguy, eh?’
‘All I know is Fiasco’s doin’ a job on the side. The galoot said somethin’ about a squasher.’
‘A squasher.’
‘A brain, to you.’
‘A brain to me, to me a brain. Aint that dandy. Okay Roach, where we find Atom?’
On the way out, Nada Neck stopped at the door. ‘There’s a time for singing,’ he muttered thoughtfully, ‘and a time for fighting. Here, time stands still.’ And he turned back to the bar’s darkness, raised the automatic and let rip at Flea. A thousand Lucky Strikes lit at once.
5 THERE GOES MY GUN
‘Some people keep their faces on the inside,’ said Taffy. He and Maddy were in the privacy hole she had expanded to contain a gun lab. Resembling an alien’s bathroom, this was where Maddy had brought ballistics to a culinary art. The brotherhood were right in their claim that if you kept a weapon you’d soon find an excuse to use it, a theory proven by global atomic danger and their own gunplay. Madison had moved on, alchemising the old practice into liquid gold. Instant-acting psychoactives in a softnose dart put victims seamlessly into a religiously dazzling landscape from which they’d emerge brighter than before. Sleepers froze people where they stood, wiping out three minutes of perception the loss of which were noticed only when bank tellers began shrieking at a sudden and massive financial discrepancy. Treasury members were hit with hemisync inducers while speaking in public, causing them to snigger the truth. Arch rivals could be shot and slung into a cab, awaking with no identity atall.
Geared to place more value on property than human life, the law could forgive the lack of death but not the lack of destruction and bent over backwards to promote metabolics from their status of mild assault. Even this rarely stuck as victims awoke feeling better than they had in years. When metabolics hit the streets the users’ names became a prized resource and people travelled miles to fling themselves into the firing line. The brotherhood, who regarded ignorance as something close to a moral duty, stuck with simple alloys. Maddy holstered her achievement behind her heart.
‘Wanna hear the rest?’
‘Don’t smoke in here, Taff,’ said Maddy. ‘Bad for the ammo.’
‘What you workin’ on?’
Maddy lifted a tin football out of the circuit forge.
‘Syndication bomb. Strips the subtext from whatever situation it’s tripped in. Leaves everything meaningless for up to three hours.’
‘Have
