BOOK ELEVEN - !BUSTED¡
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN - “FIRE!”
It's twilight when Broonzy returns to
the Baawl and trudges up the steps of the Andromeda
to Gargareeva's office, where a moodbox
with the sound off replays the twilight news; images of Rateyes
and Turpin being marched up the steps of the Yellow Palace.
“Back you be!” rails the great hotelier toad. “Friends no good time for the shurts! Room you no have, gone,
rent I. Other only nine floor except… no
good you for nine floor. Is be clean…”
“Got anything else?”
“One.” Gargareeva almost smiles as he dangles the key to room
640.”
“Don't want no room dead bodies been in…” Broonze
shakes his head.
“Is all Andromeda… rooms of mawt! Only is.
Make bargain…” the proprietor proposes, “ten soys
first week…”
“Don't need a week! Getting' outta
this rawth soon as I get paid… don't look at me that
way. Don't jammin' look at me that way!”
Gargareeva
swipes and gives the card back with a key to 640. “One night – kulk! For old times sake.”
Broonzy
tosses and turns in the middle of the night.
A shimmering shade, reflected in the dark mirror by the ocean scapescreen, teases him, faint lavender fog wafting through
the room as Lyca Arbatax
whispers… entreaties and palliatives…
“But I love my husband…”
He thrashes with nightmares in the mawt
room 640; vapors infused with essences of the dead woman seeping through his
memories… he sees, through her eyes, the love she made with Turpin, glancing at
them both from far off… rising from the damp mattress and going upstairs to
knock on the door to room 919. He sits up - Lyca's
image in the mirror slowly dissolves.
Down the hall, Walter cries out; thick, old shoes slimy with clear
ichor, leaving puddles on the Andromeda's carpet…
“Bahrbarah! I need bread, bahrbara… I need kackles…”
Broonzy
pulls on his shoes, splashes water over his face and runs a finger over the
scars on his neck. He exits, skulking downstairs to the office. The moodbox plays at low volume but Gargareeva's
not there. He looks over the window, sees the manager on the floor, dead… a
mask and empty bottle of roar on the desk, along with a soycard which he swipes on
the landlord’s fincom, just to see...
“There are… eighteen
hundred twenty one sols and sixty four
centis… on this card,” the voice on the box informs
him…
“Presto!” Broonzy takes the soycard, puts
it in his pocket and follows a trail of clear, foul slime that leads back
upstairs to room 610, behind which comes laughter of preks
and smashing of glass. Old Mallah replies to his
knock…
“Go away, please!” the old joob
replies from behind the door. “Don't
need any help… aaugh!”
The scream isn’t Mallah’s, it’s Marina’s.
“Jam off, sikken!” one of the prekts snarls.
“We're havin' a roar party, and you're not
invited…”
Broonzy
kicks the door down. Mallah
sits on a chair, face battered, shirt off… one prekt
looks up from burning him with kackles – arranged in
what seems to be an occult pattern.
Another lunges at Broonze with a stabgat… the snaker sidesteps his
roar-impaired lunge, grabs the prekt by the back of
the head and slams his face into the doorframe with a lethal crack. He drops in
a soggy heap, and Broonzy grasps the torturer,
hurling him through the boschian décor of the scapescreen mounted in front of the window through which he
falls, flailing to the street in a plood of bloodspatter and breaking glass; allowing the neon of the
pawnshop Guns/Money ilaam entry, tossing the roar on
the bureau after him. A third prekt rises from the bed, grabs his trousers and scrambles
away, partially exposing Marina, dazed and naked from the waist up, on the
rumpled bed.
“Hey!” the yoot protests
sleepily. “Jammin'
bool… saved your jammin' life, you ‘member?”
“Now I save yours,” Broonzy
replies. “Get out of here!”
“You can't do this to me…” Marina wails as he yanks the
remaining bedclothes off, leaving her totally nude, totally enraged. “I'm a genius!”
She starts crying. Broonzy retrieves Mallah's shirt
from the floor and pushes him into the hall, where he kneels over the dead prekt. The snaker realizes that the old jim is crying, too…
“There's eighteen hundred soys on
this; last I heard, passage to Terra was fourteen hundred, which'll have to do
you. Get to the Passport, get the first bird out and don't ever come back here
again… ever!
Mallah
strokes the dead yoot’s hair, then rises unsteadly. “Kin' I
take my stuff?” he asks, meekly. When Broonzy makes a gesture of indifference, he leaps to the
bureau, collecting papers from the top drawer and pushing them into a
carpetbag, then pushes the bureau away from the wall and bends over to remove
an old splaybox with a cunning smirk.
“My wife!” he says, turning box so that Broonze
and Marina can see the image of a younger man in the uniform of a Regency swob embracing a different rouged-up prekt
with narrow, reptilian eyes in one of the fake Polynesian bars of Gamma Gacula. “Veebs never found her…”
In reply,
“Know what they say 'bout demon hunters, snaker?
You want to take me, and you want to kill me… and you end up doing rawth…”
“Save it for the payin' customers,
genius!” he says, pushing past her.
“Just get gone! One more loose end to take care of in this place…”
Broonzy
stalks towards the stairwell and climbs, proceeds to room 919, the red door
seen in Lyca's nightmare, kicks in the door and
surprises Meechee Chealls
at his labors… distilling counterfeit bah-roor from
the slime pouring down his inhuman, inhurtian face…
“Thought it'd be you…” he scowls, “…jammin'
poisoner…”
The immigrant raises his hands, pleadingly. “No poisoner!
Honest work. Sell carpet…”
He rises from his devices, standing in his long, reeking
overcoat made from the same rough material as his rugs, sweating vile ichor as
he gestures to the pile of carpets on the bed.
“Doc Kollucks was right… we aren't
alone!” Broonzy accuses through curled lips. “Too bad we share the jammin'
universe with rawth like you…”
He kicks out with his left leg, smiting the rug dealer and
seemingly breaking him in half beneath the long overcoat. Chealls' upper body
tumbles to the floor, the vaguely human aspect withering like a deflated
balloon while slimy… things… scuttle out the door on what seem a million oily
tentacles... The casing used to simulate human legs disgorges fluttering,
flapping pale gray creatures… somewhere between octopi and spiders. Broonzy flails at
and kicks at these, and squishes a few… most follow their host down the hall
and disappear beneath doorways.
The screaming starts…
Broonzy
hurries downstairs and steps back into room 640; the violet mist, the rustlings
and ripplings of Lyca Arbatax are more pronounced, almost corporeal, embracing
him with limbs strong and desperate as any living prue. Her face stares back at him from the mirror,
unseen hands fingers his hair and trousers. He strips the bed, rips the scapescreen down, gathers various left-behind garments,
hair and paper, sweeps everything into a trashbucket
and sets this afire. Holding it to the walls and ceiling, he makes sure that
640 is burning briskly before leaving; passing Al's room on his way to the
staircase. Ever courteous, Al tips his hat.
“Save those as value second chances,” he dictates, “let the rest
of the jammin' veebs burn!”
Al replaces the old, black fedora and looks upwards. “Sir?”
“Have to trust you to make the right decisions… nobody else here
will…
So Broonzy made of me what I'd
dedicated my years to avoiding…a judge of others… and I walked up and down in
the Andromeda, that evening, and it were as if a mark
had been inscribed onto every door that showed me my errands… now an angel of mawt in passing, now a redemptor.
And I saw in the flames the living and dead, and of the dead and vanished souls
forgotten or concealed by infamy; I wept, but tears would not subdue these flames,
nor would the Regency, nor God, nor Rassoul…
On the Baawl, Broonzy
crosses the swarming, smoky nighttime street, threading his way through the
arriving firemen, refugees and gawkers to the pawnshop, bracing the
jackal-faced pawnbroker
behind his window.
“Lemme guess,” says the shkook, “you're a seller, not a buyer?”
“How much for my unilator? Works good,” he promises, removing the device
and handing it over to the pawnbroker, who attaches a monocular glass to one
eye to inspect it.
“Piece of rawth! Ten sols
,,,” the shkook
decides.
“Can't understand
you!” Broonzy shouts back, pointing to his naked ear. The pawnbroker nods, holds
up eight fingers. “Ten,” Broonzy replies, and the jim
raises a thumb; the snaker nods, hands over his soycard for charging and takes it back, with his redemption
ticket. Crossing the street back to al-Gool…
inexplicably still in business, and crowded, despite the flames above and water
cascading down the walls… he revels in the myriad mysteries of a hundred tongues
that surround him, desultory conversations rendered foreign, even exotic…
“Gimme an ale…” he bids the publican.
“Draft or bottled?” comes the reply… and as his customer frowns…
“Draft
or bottled??”
“One o' those…”
Broonze
points to the tap, and quaffs deeply, sitting on the barstool the rising water
laps at his ankles. A segment of Klub al-Gool’s ceiling near the
front door suddenly falls, aflame – only now do the babbling patrons… the swobs and the heathers, the danks
and sikken, methyard
drudges and gamblers and shkooks waiting on Old Mort…
all flee now (some still holding their drinks), emitting a torrent of
incomprehensible, unimaginable curses.
The publican scuttles out from behind his bar and disappears into the
throng, but Broonzy remains on the stool, savouring his last drink.
Another segment of ceiling collapses with a fiery shriek.
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