American Monster Read online

  She exhaled, weakened by their passing, but she knew what they were. Slashes have them too—indeterminate beings, beings arrested in their passage from one world to the next. She sunk down on the stone bench with her elbows on her knees and continued to wait. She picked her teeth, wondered again if she should try and call Mommy, if it was too late to abort. Was there a Plan B? She didn’t think so. Mommy had always been a Plan A kind of deal. It could or would, not self-correct.

  Norma tried to be in the moment but she wasn’t sure how or what the moment was. She’d dreamt about the devil puppet last night. It was lying on the ground and she was walking toward it. She was back up at San Miguel. The mission chapel. The devil puppet was trying to tell her something. The air in her dream filled with noise, with yelling in a language she did not understand but she knew it was the language of pain. Slashes didn’t dream pain. Norma did. She dreamt of the pain of her arrival. The pain of her birth, the moment when she became.

  Her BlackBerry beeped.

  She reached for her cheap chunk of comtrash but it was dead. A bird looked down at her from the branch above her. Its eyes were yellow. Cheep cheep, it said.

  Vehicles began to appear on the broken road, snaked out of sight all along the blacktop. At the front of the line, a station wagon recombo draped in black. It stopped at the walk that led to the canopied seating. Bunny emerged from it black-clad in a pinstriped pencil skirt. His face starkly free of make-up beneath a vaguely inappropriate veiled pillbox hat. He started up the steps with an androgen on either arm. Behind him, the slamming of doors and shifting of gears. Little Barry pulled up in an ancient Mercedes and scrambled out. He lurched around the car to open the door for Una who climbed out to tower above her man. Others arrived—the bartender from World Wide Wang, D-Cup bejeweled in Mexican silver, friends of the family whom Norma did not know, all making their way up the hill to bury the early dead.

  A yowl of electric engines cut into the respectful hush. It was Augustine and his lackey pulled up on their Veelos, bulbous battery packs streaked with rain and giant chains wrapped around their waists. Norma stood and braced herself against the burn in her shoulders. The Roidheads pulled to the curb and killed their engines but did not alight. Augustine scanned the crowd from behind wraparound shades, his jaw hinging. The lackey said something inaudible. Norma waited for Augustine to look up but he didn’t. The gathered mourners chafed at their presence, and Norma’s head felt hot.

  D-Cup and Jesus—glaring at the interlopers—bore Bunny’s son in his undersized coffin from the hearse. The other pallbearers were awkward ginger youths who bore a passing resemblance to Bunny. Behind the coffin stumbled the mother, a faded redhead, clinging to the arm of her second husband, her legs giving way beneath her every few yards.

  Norma’s big breakfast sat heavy in her stomach. People took their places on the chairs. The bearers brought the coffin to rest on a tarp beside the mound of dark earth. The dead boy’s mother found her seat in the front row beside Bunny and his sons. The androgens sitting behind with the stepfather. The mother perched disbelievingly on the edge of her seat as if ready to jump up and be somewhere else, in a universe where she had not outlived her child. The bier with its flowers and wreathes hung suspended on straps across the weal of the grave. A pair of F-17s cut across the swollen belly of cloud overhead, drowning out the minister’s words, the eldest son’s eulogy—Jake was the bravest person I’ll ever know—the click of cursors.

  Norma kept one eye on Augustine and his lackey. A few minutes into the service they made a squealing exit under cover of the jets’ roar. Beneath umbrellas the mourners stared at their shoes, surreptitiously checked their messages. Norma felt a breath at the back of her neck but when she turned around there was no one there.

  Bunny stood wigless in the rain. The coffin began to lower, the mother gibbered at the sky, and the androgens wept into silk hankies.The brothers glared at the ground, at their shoes to which the wet grass had stuck. Bunny headed blindly to the grave on wobbling stiletto heels. Norma extended her heart to steady her old friend who would oversee his son’s last descent. The step-brothers led their mother away and still Bunny stood above the dark gash that had snatched his blood. With most of the mourners’ backs to her, Norma recklessly dropped thirty yards down the slope and landed beside him. She took him gently by the arm.

  – I’d go with him if I could, said Bunny.

  – In those shoes?

  – He asked me once if there were wheelchairs in heaven, said Bunny.

  – What did you say? she said.

  Bunny shrugged. I told him to ask his mother.

  Rain webbed the veil across his face, across his nose and grim mouth. The pillbox hat askew his balding head. A mild aftershock rolled in from the sea. He slipped at grave’s edge, kicking dirt with his pointed toes, and Norma steadied him. He rummaged in his purse and pulled out the crumpled Head & Shoulders coupon. Let it flutter from his fingers into the grave, where it came to rest on some rose petals atop the coffin.

  – Remember me, he said, and let Norma lead him away.

  Bunny drove, said he needed to. Norma rode shotgun. Jesus sat in the back openly weeping with the Androgens perched like gargoyles on either side. Bunny drove like one possessed and no one told him not to. Norma twiddled with the radio on the lurching dashboard until she found some Mexican music. Hard sad chords and clacking beats.

  31//:big lady

  Gene felt that he was closing in on her. He felt her near, that she was everywhere and nowhere at once. He thought he saw her, the black slash of her jacket through the crowd, smelled her musk on his fingers beneath the smell of salt and sulphur from the slick. But it wasn’t her. He’d cashed in another diamond, found himself a container squat deep in a bamboo grove at the edge of Birmingham Beach Market and everywhere he went they said, You just missed her.

  – Big lady? Boss jacket? Combat boots?

  – That’s her.

  – I ain’t seen her.

  – Legs to here? Some kind of rack?

  – Yeah.

  – You just missed her.

  – Looks military, man? Don’t want to piss her off?

  – Yeah, that lady.

  He went back to see the geezer, that Mac guy up in Arcadia who traded comtrash for intel. To see if she’d been there and if she’d seen the devil puppet and what did she say, but he was having a pretty intense conversation with Freddy Krueger and Gene couldn’t get a word edgewise.

  One night, mid February, Gene heard about a brawl at the Factory. The Cartels owned most of it now, but there were pockets still on official Consortium or Republic ground. Where the brawl occurred—in a corridor occupied by blacksmiths and spare parts dealers, a few games arcades—was Consortium turf. Gene heard that a woman who matched Norma’s description and another guy had started throwing punches because someone insulted some drag queen they knew, but when he went down to check it out he was told that he had just missed her. The man who told Gene had blood on his fringed jacket. He brushed long hair off his face and held out a huge hand, even bigger than Gene’s.

  I’m Jesus, he said.

  Gene missed Gloria’s guiding spirit, but the truth of it was that he had not felt her presence since he’d arrived in Spill City, and that bothered him on a couple of levels. He felt a little lost without her, one, and two, he wondered what it was about Spill City that kept her away. That scared her. A part of him wondered if it was Norma. He missed the simpler times when it was just him and Gloria. They’d gone great distances together and he’d be lying to himself if it had been enough but it was something and it had sustained him. Norma was different, the way she’d come into his life, been everything. And that had been too much.

  Since coming down to Spill City, there were too many lonely nights in the little container conversion walled in bamboo. Too many aftershocks that rattled the broken skylight above the bed. Nights where he came home alone and far from sleep, stayed up to work away on his game until dawn, jacked off
to porn until he hated himself. Then he’d walk to the end of the street where there was a lookout. He watched the moon fall into the luminescent slick. Trying to think her back into his life. There was a part of him that he was scared of now, that part that would follow her wherever she went.

  There was a part of him that hated her.

  32//:miduri sunset

  By the time Bunny pulled up at Killers Field they had drunk their way through a couple of six packs and a fifth of Jack. Palm trees skewered a violet sky. Jesus and the transgenders were inside the bar, just silhouetted forms in the window. Norma stomped her boots on the pavement and night fell in a smear of neon.

  The street teemed with human and battery-powered life but there had thankfully been no sign of Augustine and his lackeys after they crashed Jake’s funeral. Norma passed Bunny back the roach and he ground it out with the pointed toe of his stiletto. He kept grinding until she put out her hand and touched his arm. His stricken eyes still looked at her without seeing. She took his hand and they went back into the bar. He ordered a round of Miduri Bombs which would be her downfall and they raised their glasses. A text came in on Bunny’s console and he texted back and soon a Magdela tuk-tuk pulled up and the ginger-haired pallbearers piled out and there was another round of Miduri Bombs. One of the pallbearers—Bunny’s step-son—went upstairs to play pool and his twin sat at a table with a group of programmers down from LA on their way to TJ.

  – I haven’t seen geeks this last decade, said Bunny, Jesus watching over him like a Wookie. Things must be looking up in Spill City.

  Killers Field was a bar south of Bunny’s apartment. It sat on the cliffs overlooking the beach at the edge of the spill. Mansions cleaved by the quakes. Private roads wound down beneath the sea. In Killers, there was scratched wood painted a dozen times, redundant windows cut into container walls, a sense of all the bars that it had tried and failed to be. Colored lights pierced the ambient gloom. Above them was the loft bar, its walls jumping with glyphs. Norma ordered drinks and watched the pale, plump barmaid pour them with a tremulous hand, the little green shots aglow in the UV haze. Norma reached across, took the bottle and finished pouring. She slid a shot over to the barmaid but the girl shook her head.

  – Not my poison, she said. She pulled a glass pipe out of her pocket, smiled dully at Norma and said, Meet me round the back.

  Norma said, Maybe later.

  Because to be with a woman was just not in her program. Regrettable maybe, but there it was. She was a horn hunter after all, whatever nameless others had entered ravening into the play. Norma held the drinks above the sea of heads and tried to find Bunny. He was leaning limp against the wall next to Jesus, runs in his pantyhose. The transgenders and one of Bunny’s twin step-sons were at a table near the stage. The band started. It was an Ace of Base cover band and Bunny weaved to the stage to sing, “All That She Wants.” A software designer grabbed one of the transgenders by the crotch and she kicked him in the shin and he punched her in the stomach. Bunny’s step-son stood up and threw a wobbly cross that got the coder in the ear. Bunny still crooning on the stage, She’s gone tomorrow, boy... Jesus stepped in and caught a swung bar stool across his shoulders. He staggered and then charged at his attacker, throwing him bar stool and all at a sheet metal wall from which he bounced with a crack.

  Bunny jumped down from the stage and started throwing punches, his pencil skirt hitched up around his thighs. His fine, receding hair stood out in tufts, his eyes strangely focused behind the veil and his thin lips were pulled back in a deranged smile. A security guard pulled a taser. D-Cup jumped the guard and the taser got one of the coders instead of Bunny. The coder jigged around boneless and collapsed to the floor. The guard shook D-Cup off and bottles shattered and someone screamed. A trio of bearded Westborian truckers with a slogan on their jackets that read ‘Ten For the Lord,’ appeared from nowhere wielding knuckle dusters and pool cues. The air filled with the crack of breaking wood and scuffling boots. Bunny’s other boy dropped down from the loft bar onto the red-checked shoulders of the tallest trucker, tried to get him in a chin lock but was thrown like a rag onto a table littered with bottles and ashtrays. A trucker with a wide gray stripe in his beard reached behind the bar, picked up the cash register and pitched it at Jesus, but Bunny rushed in to push Jesus out of its path, catching the cash register on his temple and going down like a sack.

  Norma slowly put down her drink. Her head suddenly cleared. Her heart beat in her throat and her temples throbbed, but her shoulders did not burn because this was nothing more than human pain and rage, and her soul did not quake to meet it. She licked her lips. From the edge of her eye she saw the third trucker closing in, hairless except for his beard. She jackknifed her arm out to break his jaw, then picked him up by the collar and hurled him through the window. Felt a seismic and liquid shock through her frame, and she wet her pants. She held her jerking body up by sheer force of will and turned to face another taser-wielding guard. She pulled out the little darts while the guard watched in disbelief, then took him and the remaining truckers and designers out in a staticky blur of tusks and sidekicks. By then, Consortium back-up had arrived wielding Tech Zens. Norma raised her hands—because this was not the time or place to test daemon ontology—and backed away from the prone and scattered Slashes. She even let the Consortium goons rough her up a little before they rounded up everyone still standing to take them downtown to the Sprawl.

  Killers was still in active Consortium—not Cartel—territory, which meant that the company lockup was in the old downtown and not six feet under. It was called the Sprawl—a double decker grid of containers sealed off in a massive steel cage armed by surveillance drones—and there was a certain comfort to the ritual. Called Play and Pay, the length and severity of incarceration in the Sprawl depended on the wardens who skimmed their salary off the top of the fines extracted to secure the offenders’ release. For Norma it wasn’t just that, the prospect of a reprieve from the Spill City streets—plenty a drooling hobo willing to share his corner of the cage with a hungry horn hunter—there was also the fact that she and Bunny had met there six months ago after the last Consortium Raid on the World Wide Wang. Bunny, still in in Wonder Whoa-Man drag had taken on three Sonoran bull-wranglers who’d cornered him and made off with his Wonder Woman Golden Belt, the source of all his power, he said. She’d gotten the belt back for him, at some cost to all concerned—the loss of an eye for one of the wranglers, bladder function for another and three nights at the Sprawl for her and Bunny, who had been friends, sometimes less, sometimes more, ever since. So there was a sense, exchanging gallows winks as the Consortium driver threw them into the Humvee recombo, of things ending as they began.

  – Play and Pay, said Bunny, spitting out a tooth. Just like old times.

  The guard gave Norma a low wolf whistle as he slammed and locked the door to their cage.

  She woke up around noon the next day in Bunny’s arms for what she knew would be the last time. The cell reeked of piss and worse. Its steel-reinforced walls were sprayed with SLA tags and slogans. Separate or Die Trying. Norma touched her swollen lip with her tongue and winced. Bunny’s pillbox hat was gone. He lay crumpled on the floor with blood black and caked at his temple. The skirt he wore to bury his son was tented in the groin. He opened one eye and closed it again.

  – Am I dead?

  – Close enough. You should see a doctor.

  – Look who’s talking. You look like a George Romero extra. What about a hand job?

  – Bunny.

  – For old times sake.

  – Ouch.

  – Don’t laugh. Look, you’ve opened up that gash on your lip.

  In the opposite corner of the cage lounged a couple of twitching geeks who’d overdone the nootropic arcades downtown. One of them fiddled with the knobs of his console, trying to find some music.

  Bunny said, It’s the end of an era. I feel it.

  – You mean us? said Norma.

  – Was
there ever an us?

  – I guess not, said Norma. I’m sorry.

  She curled back up beside him and sighed in the crook of his arm.

  – I can’t put my finger on it, he mumbled.

  – That’s not your finger.

  – What is it about you?

  – I’m leaving soon, said Norma, scoping the cell for a place in which to pee. So it won’t matter.

  – Australia was it, Dorothy? Or Kansas? Or Uranus?

  – Your head says hi, she said.

  He laughed which turned to a coughing fit, and she waited until the fit was over.

  – Duty calls.

  – Booty too.

  – That too.

  – I guessed as much.

  – Soon as I find the girl—

  Bunny stared. The street kid that ripped off the Roidhead? Leave it, Norma.

  – She didn’t rip them off, said Norma. In point of fact.

  – Facts don’t matter, said Bunny. Kickers eat facts for breakfast.

  – I know. I’ve seen their table manners.

  Norma shifted uncomfortably on the filthy cement floor. I thought you told me not to worry.

  Bunny adjusted his arm beneath her head, brushed her hair off her face, looked into her eyes, one of his swollen shut. You ever find that guy you were always looking for? Woody Long.

  The joke had gotten old. Norma sighed. I think he’s looking for me, now.

  Bunny coughed again and pretended to strangle himself with one hand, and then dangled the bioswitch between her breasts in trembling fingers.

  – The source of all your power?

  Bunny’s breath was rank with exhaustion and the remains of a kebab the guard had brought them to share. She smiled as blandly as she could, Like Wonder Woman’s golden belt.

  – Looks like gum, he said. That thing inside the pendant.