Golgotha Run (dark future) Read online

  Golgotha Run

  ( Dark future )

  Dave Stone

  Golgotha Run

  Dave Stone

  My fellow Americans,

  I am speaking to you today from the Oval Office, to bring you hope and cheer in these troubling times. The succession of catastrophes that have assailed our once-great nation continue to threaten us, but we are resolute.

  The negative fertility zone that is the desolation of the mid-west divides east from west, but life is returning. The plucky pioneers of the new Church of Joseph are reclaiming Salt Lake City from the poisonous deserts just as their forefathers once did, and our prayers are with them. And New Orleans may be under eight feet of water, but they don’t call it New Venice for nothing.

  Here at the heart of government, we continue to work closely with the MegaCorps who made this country the economic miracle it is today, to bring prosperity and opportunity to all who will join us. All those unfortunate or unwilling citizens who exercise their democratic right to live how they will, no matter how far away from the comfort and security of the corporate cities, may once more rest easy in their shacks knowing that the new swathes of Sanctioned Operatives work tirelessly to protect them from the biker gangs and NoGo hoodlums.

  The succession of apparently inexplicable or occult manifestations and events we have recently witnessed have unnerved many of us, it is true. Even our own Government scientists are unable to account for much of what is happening. Our church leaders tell us they are holding at bay the unknown entities which have infested the datanets in the guise of viruses.

  A concerned citizen asked me the other day whether I thought we were entering the Last Times, when Our Lord God will return to us and visit His Rapture upon us, or whether we were just being tested as He once tested his own son. My friends, I cannot answer that. But I am resolute that with God’s help, we shall work, as ever, to create a glorious future in this most beautiful land.

  Thank you, and God Bless America.

  President Estevez

  Brought to you in conjunction with the GenTech Corporation.

  Serving America right.

  [Script for proposed Presidential address, July 3rd 2021. Never transmitted.]

  Who is the Real Benedicta?

  A Benedicta I knew, who filled the very world with the Ideal, whose eyes burned with the desire for majesty, beauty, glory and all that has us believe in the immortal.

  But this miracle of a girl was just too beautiful to live; she died, therefore, but a few days after I met her-and it was I alone who buried her, on a day when Spring swung her censer even in the cemeteries themselves. It was I alone who buried her, potted in a coffin of a wood fragrant and imperishable as any chest of India.

  And as my eyes were glued to the graveyard of my treasure, I saw quite suddenly a diminutive individual bearing a quite singular resemblance to the deceased, who, stamping on the fresh-dug ground with hysterical and somewhat bizarre violence, cried: “I’m the Benedicta! The real deal! And to punish you for your blindness, and your self-delusion, you shall love me as I am!”

  “No!” I cried in fury. “No! No! No!” And in the rage of my refusal, I stamped upon the earth so violently that my leg sank to the knee into the fresh-dug grave. And like a wolf caught in a trap, there I remain-attached, perhaps for all time, to the grave in which my Ideal still rots.

  All the same, though; I suppose a quick one wouldn’t be entirely out of the question.

  – with profound apologies to Charles Baudelaire

  To the Public

  Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores,

  Before breaking your putrid bones,

  Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out as use for fertiliser your too-fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,

  Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,

  Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy, mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,

  Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking you with passion,

  Before all that,

  We shall take a big antiseptic bath,

  And we warn you,

  We are murderers.

  Manifesto signed by Ribemont-Dessiagnes and read by seven people at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysees, Paris, 5th February 1920

  Preliminary Information: Deathless in Des Moines

  Artie Newbegin was looking in the bathroom mirror, watching (at last count, the last time he had counted) four thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine fragments of face looking back at him.

  Of course, that figure had long lost any kind of meaning by now; he had smacked a fist into the mirror any number of times since then (breaking three fingers the last time, which had actually been quite painful for a few seconds).

  The mildew was out of control between the cracks again, Artie noted, congealing over any number of the smaller shards. The overall effect was a little like looking at the surface of a jewel-strewn swamp.

  There was no real point in looking in the mirror in any case, nothing to do or worth doing with anything he might find in there, should the shattered visage ever suddenly cohere into something whole and complete.

  That face, reassembled, would be a perfect thirty (the mature prime, the optimal point before the human metabolic flipover into catabolism) with no trace of toxin-contamination even to the point of a mild hangover.

  The teeth pristine and cavity-and tartar-free, courtesy of the Bug, which knew the function of ostensibly inorganic compounds in the body, and knew, by and large, the differences between benign and malign bacteria. The beard would be a fixed, grown-out and somewhat straggly length, the Bug never having quite gotten its nonexistent head around the entirely human-level concept of shaving.

  The hair on the head, interestingly enough, would be thick and lustrous and supremely manageable. Everyone had fantastic hair these days, which might or might not say something about whoever it was who had designed the Bug in the first place, before it had escaped. Almost certainly it had been a he, with a bad case of male-pattern baldness, for starters.

  The bathroom was in an apartment, and the apartment was in a block, in what had once been downtown Des Moines, through which the wind whistled. Nothing much had changed, really, despite the pressure of the years inside Containment. Run-down, certainly, but still ticking over. Cars in the streets and the buses ran their routes a time out of three and most of them packed with those who still worked at some daily occupation or other.

  The postures of normalcy must be maintained, Artie thought-rather in the same way that he himself would go to bed at night, when the Dome overhead polarised to black, and lie there sleepless.

  And then, in the morning, going into the bathroom, even though there was nothing to do there, and going through the motions, before going out to make a killing.

  The Welcome Wagon was sleek and black and looked like death on wheels. In the Last Days, in the days before the Rapture Bug, a vehicle of this nature-used for the same general purpose, for example, by some governmental agency-would have been covert rather than overt, customised to look like a battered old baker’s van or something to blend into the scenery. Now, the sight of these utterly distinctive black trucks shuttling merrily through the Des Moines streets warmed the immortal hearts of people in their thousands. It was a bit like catching sight of a fire appliance would have been, in the days before the Bug hit. The Welcome Wagons were a constant reminder that someone, somewhere, cared.

  The process-and-containment facilities took up most of the space in the back and the cab was somewhat cramped
for three; proximity converting those colleagues one might quite like ordinarily, or at least find tolerable at a distance, into your worst nightmare.

  Artie was currently crushed in the middle of the seat between Mico and Alex, and Mico was demonstrating his new trick for the fifteenth time: smashing his fingers against the jamb of the spill-hatch and twisting the resulting fractured mess into a halfway-recognisable set of male genitalia-as he remembered them-before they reset under the Bug.

  In the hysteria immediately after the Rapture Bug had hit, after the Quarantine and Containment that would form the basis of the Dome had come slamming down, that sort of thing had become quite commonplace. In the higher-end of the art circles-so far as a city like Des Moines had had a high-level circle of art-there had been a brief vogue for the kind of body-modification that put the Theatre of Mutilation to shame… brief, of course, because the reset mechanisms of the Bug made such changes ultimately meaningless even in the terms of the avant garde. If the transformations don’t stick, and nobody gains or loses the slightest thing because of them, then there’s simply no point.

  In general life, of course, the world had for a while become full of people hurling themselves off rooftops or under trucks, hitting each other with sledgehammers and axes purely for the hell of it. For several months it had been a bit like living in a Road Runner cartoon without the invention or the wit.

  Those who were naturally inclined to jump in front of trucks in any case soon tired of the sheer futility of it, gradually followed by the rest of the Contained. Only complete retards like Mico found sufficient amusement in such things to even bother now.

  Alex was driving with a kind of teeth-gritted concentration, fighting blind impulses that might have had her hurling the Wagon through traffic, careless of what it might hit… and the darker impulses that might have her aiming the thing directly at a wall in the vain hope that this time suicide might work.

  Alex had once been, functionally, female, and now looked even more so in certain secondary aspects. Excessively, freakishly so in terms of the days before the Bug-though of course that was absolutely standard here and now.

  It was just another of those not exactly well thought-out, blanket customisations to the genome, reinforcing the suggestion that the mythical designers of the Bug had been male. Artie had vaguely wondered, more than once, if the enthusiasm with which Alex treated her work might come from some form of sublimated impulse of revenge. It was far more likely, though, that after all this time Alex was merely working on the same basis as anybody else.

  Logging up the hours on her Account. Working herself to death.

  Now, Artie tried to ignore Mico’s rather asinine antics by making a show of reading his clipboard, skimming through the client-list of those fortunate souls who had made enough on their Accounts to warrant the Welcome Wagon’s current attention.

  The process of monetary commerce was as good a way of keeping score as anything else-always provided that there was some mechanism for circumventing that process by pure luck.

  One of the names on the list was marked with a cheerful little skull-and-crossbones. One of the truly lucky souls, picked completely at random from the general populace whether they had enough in their Account or not.

  It had been months since Artie had been handed a genuine charity case-and he decided that it was just the thing to make him feel happier about the world, however temporary that happiness might be.

  He’d been feeling so down lately. This might be just the thing he needed.

  Artie Newbegin basked for a moment in the warm glow of anticipated altruism. Then he gave Alex the target and she punched up a location.

  It was later. Artie’s shoulder was still quite painful-a kind of ghost-injury pain in the way that amputees had once had ghost limbs. It would fully take a half hour or so to clear up.

  The procedure had started out well. They had parked the Welcome Wagon in a dedicated slot and deployed; located the precise position of the client in his apartment by way the ultrasonics, knocked a hole in the wall by way of clamp-mines and burst inside, Artie diving in low and doing it all totally by the book.

  It had to be quick and sudden or you lost half of the point of it. Artie had smack-shackled the target’s ankles to the floor, the electromagnetic concussion-bolts biting solidly into old, cured wood, and then gotten out of the way in a hurry so that Mico could shove the target over like the schoolyard bully that Mico once, presumably, at some point, had been. Mico’s aptitude for this part of the procedure, and his general demeanour, strongly suggested this.

  Mico and Alex held then the client-he was a client rather than a target, now-while while Artie used the buzzsaw, then hauled the upper body back, fighting against the phenomic homing-mechanisms that were even now, not to put too fine a point upon it, cutting in.

  More smack-shackles on the arms and then back to the lower body to nailgun in the spikes and crampons that would secure it while they dealt with the tricky business of the head.

  Using the buzzsaw, though, was always a risky business. It was quick but imprecise. Artie found that he had cut right through a vertebra, the smaller part of which chose that moment to detach and physically shoot for the larger part still attached to the pelvis… blasting through Artie’s shoulder in the manner of the sort of pistol round that, in the old days, left people’s arms hanging off.

  And for just an instant, it had.

  It had been a messy, complicated wound. It had taken almost a full minute for Artie’s arm to reattach itself and for the gross physical damage to heal. The subtleties of trauma-healing had taken a few minutes more, and Artie’s clumsiness had slowed them down in completing the first-stage vivisection.

  It had not, to cut it short, been a clean kill. They had lost points on the timing. Credit-points they’d never see in their Accounts.

  They were back in the Wagon again, the client safely packed away in the GenTech containment cells, heading for the depot, the multiple airlock access-hatches in the side of the Dome.

  Sometimes, Artie thought, he could hear the head and hands and feet and jointed sections of arm rattling around and hammering inside the cells, but that of course was nonsense. A failure of containment to the point where even sound waves could escape would probably result in a fusion-cell blowout that would level buildings (though not of course, ultimately, the people in them) for half a mile around.

  At the depot, by way of classified and carefully-controlled procedures, the various bodily components would be obliterated on the subatomic level and the lucky client at last given respite. An end to a life turned utterly meaningless and which, ordinarily, so far as humans reckon time, would have simply never stopped.

  The procedures were extraordinarily expensive and complex, thus explaining the comparative rarity of their use, and why the likes of Artie, Alex, Mico-and for that matter every other living soul under the Des Moines Quarantine-and-Containment Dome-worked like dogs in the hope of one day being able to afford those procedures for themselves.

  It had never occurred to them to wonder just what GenTech itself got out of the arrangement-and even if it had, it was doubtful that they would have cared.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. They had seen the future and what the future held… and it held nothing but an endless, sleepless night of small, unwanted resurrections.

  Default Settings: Tooling Up

  The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.

  The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, segueing in on one or other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off, weighing up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on, coming in from both sides.

  “The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care about the Brain Train-they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off th
e front-runner.”

  “ Yeah, well, ” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “ that would be us. What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a fag to wanna screw some girlies? ”

  “I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip on your lips was just flat-out murder.

  Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.

  The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.

  “Anyhow,” Eddie said. “The kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”

  “ Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us, ” the Testostorossa said. “ Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice-and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat. ”

  Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked and loaded.

  “ I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now, ” the Testostorossa said.” You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me. ”

  Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this?

  First Quadrant: Las Vitas Fault

  From the doorway a roscoe said “Kachow!“ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank… She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose… I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.

  “Killer’s Harvest” Spicy Detective July 1938

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