Metrophage

TWELVE

Sand was blowing in from the desert, flaking paint from parked cars, filling the bottoms of drained swimming pools. Death owned the streets. Two AM, November second, two hours into the Day of the Dead: Dia de los Muertos. Processions filled the thoroughfares of Hollywood, like some graveyard Mardi Gras. Lepers danced together in papier-mache skulls behind white-robed bishops carrying enormous chrome crucifixes, hologram Christs floating a few centimeters above the crossbars, writhing in agony for all their sins.

Behind the hills, orange flared and lit the sky from the burn-off towers at the German synth-fuel plant north of the city. Jonny licked sand from his lips. He had never seen so many people in one place.

Zombie Analytics flashed the crowd images of dead pop stars, superimposing the outlines of their own bones on the famous faces.

Even the Piranhas were there, apparently untouched by the plague, drawn from their internal exile by the docks to the more inviting lights of the boulevard.

When he first saw Death lingering at the back of the parade, skull molded from old newsrags and clutching a crude sickle of pounded metal, Jonny charged, gunning the big BMW up onto the sidewalk. But he never connected. Never killed Death. It always saw him coming or Jonny had to turn the bike at the last minute when he heard human voices screaming from inside the paper skulls. And each time he rode away, he grew more desperate, more furious, knowing that Death had fooled him again.

Somehow, he ended up at Carnaby's Pit. The parade was moving quickly down the boulevard. Jonny was alone before the chained entrance, reading a notice that was printed in six languages plastered across the rusted and pock-mocked metal doors.

WARNING

Public buildings, except those constructed exclusively for the use of religious expression, are

OFF LIMITS to gatherings of three persons or more.

Emergency Ordinance #9354A- By authority of:

The Committee For Public Health

The parade was blocks away now, the sound of music and voices fading fast. Everything was dying. He looked around for the mercado (No way those people would miss a night like this.), but all he could find were glassy scars in the asphalt where the grills had sat, an ancient scratch-pattern indicating the placement of tent poles.

Jonny pulled the SIG Sauer from his jacket pocket and blew the doors to Carnaby's Pit off their hinges. The pistol's breech remained open this time, meaning he had run out of bullets. He tossed the gun away.

Clouds of green, metallic flies buzzed loudly into the night through the Pit's ruined doors.

Inside, the game room stood silent, all dust shadows and hints of greasy fingerprints where light from the street struck glass. Jonny had never seen the club like this before. In the weak mercury vapor light, without the sound and the colors of the games to distract him, the place seemed small, pathetic even. Lengths of frayed copper wires covered the walls, broke up the ceiling into a water-stained grid behind the dead holo projectors.

In the main room, a stack of Saint Peter's Krupp-Verwandlungsinhalt amps had fallen over. To Jonny's exteroceptors, the Freon leaking from around the speaker cones appeared to shimmer in turquoise pools. The air was damp and stale, close around him. Jonny shivered, looked back the way he had come in and watched sand sift in through the open doors. Death was in the club with him. Jonny could feel its presence. He pulled Nimble Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and went into a crouch, stalking Death through the jungle of abandoned chairs and broken glasses, finally spotting it behind the bar. Jonny recognized Death from his dreams. The mirror shades gave it away.

The kick from the little Derringer, when he fired, nearly broke his wrist, but Death was gone. The sound of the mirror shattering behind the hollow point shell caught him off guard. By the time he scrambled behind the bar and understood what he had done, he was shivering again, realizing he had wanted to do it for a long time.

If death was a illusion, as the roshis had told him, then, Jonny reasoned, he had just proved the lie of his own existence. He kicked at shards of the broken mirror with the toe of his boot and decided he needed a drink to celebrate the discovery of his true nature.

Shelves behind him held all manner of liquor: domestic, imported and bootleg. Jonny selected an unopened bottle of Burmese tequila and drank deeply. Gin, he reflected, would have served him better at this point, but he could not stand the taste of the stuff neat.

He laughed at the idea of taste.

What is taste when you don't exist?

"There's this old man, comes to a Buddhist priest, see," Jonny said to the empty room. "Turns out he's the ghost of another Buddhist priest whose been reincarnated five hundred times as a fox." He took another pull from the bottle. "In life, he'd argued that the laws of cause and effect do not apply to enlightened beings. So here the poor fucker is, you know, five hundred times- pissing in the woods, freezing in the winter and eating raw squirrel. And the other priest says: 'Schmuck, of course cause and effect applies to enlightened beings.' And the ghost disappears, suddenly enlightened."

He doesn't have to be a fox anymore. Jonny moved around to the front of the bar, dropped onto a stool and propped the bottle on his knee, the tequila already half gone.

"I have swallowed every kind of shit," he said.

Across the room, near the pile of fallen German amplifiers, a swarm of flies was moving over the carcass of some dead animal.

Massed together like that in the dark bar, the insects looked to Jonny something like waves kicked up on the shore of some crazy-quilt ocean. He giggled and lurched to his feet, threading his way drunkenly through the club, deliberately kicking over chairs and tables as he went.

Jonny approached the body slowly. From the bar it had looked pretty big for a rat, but that it could be human had not occurred to him until he was right up on it. Batting at flies that buzzed around his face, Jonny edged around the corpse, noting the discolored tumors on its arms, the leonine welling of the face, all the obvious symptoms of the virus's mock-leprosy. The corpse's limbs were twisted, back arched until the body was bent almost double, fingers splayed, hands turned back on themselves at the wrists in the spastic posture of advanced neuro-syphilis. Jonny forced himself to lean closer and look into the half-opened mouth. Standing up, he momentarily fingered the edge of the soiled apron, thinking that the body did not look much like Random any more.

Jonny did not turn when he heard the footsteps, expecting it to be Zamora or some Committee boy come to take him away. When the steps came to a stop a few meters off, he turned and saw Groucho brushing sand from his English schoolboy jacket. "He swallowed his tongue," Jonny told the anarchist.

"I'm sorry," Groucho said. "I've seen a lot like this these last few weeks. Gonna to be a lot more, too."

"You come looking for me?"

Groucho nodded. "Yeah. I figure I've got a vested interest in you. 'Course, so do lots of people these days."

Jonny took a drink from his bottle. "How'd you know I'd be here?"

"Isn't this where you always end up?"

"Yeah. I guess." Jonny shrugged. "Kind of shabby little place to run and hide, huh?" He took another drink and threw the empty bottle back toward the bar, listening to it shatter. "Ice is dead," he said quickly.

"I heard. I'm sorry, man," said Groucho. "So what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know," Jonny mumbled, crouching down near Random's body. "Lotta bottles to work through," he said, gesturing back toward the bar.

"Yeah, always the clear thinker. I knew we could count on you."

"Just save that shit for your own people, okay?" said Jonny.

Groucho leaned under a nearby table and picked up a small silver bell from the floor; he rang it softly as he spoke. "I heard you were at the Forest of Incandescent Bliss tonight," he said. "What for?"

"There's a cure for the virus. I was supposed to pick it up, only Easy Money blew away the container it was in and now it's gone," said Jonny. Bending, he touched one of Random's arms, disturbing the flies which rose, droning, into the air.

"Sumi's infected, you know. Gonna die just like Random. Pretty surreal way to go, huh?" Turning, he swung a drunken fist at Groucho, but the anarchist danced out of the way.

"What would your fucking surrealists say about that?" Jonny shouted.

"So you're just going to let her die like that?" Groucho asked. He bent again and came up with a toy switchblade, about the length of his thumb.

"What are you talking about?" Jonny asked.

"I'm saying that if you love her, you're going to take some responsibility." With his long fingers, Groucho snicked the tiny knife open closed a couple of times. "Ever since we left the fish farm, I've been thinking how all these little bits, how all the shit that's been floating around you is possibly related. I heard from some people that Conover was the one that was moving that layered virus that got loose. Then, when Zamora picked you up, he starts talking about space men and how he wants to you turn Conover for him. All the time, though, he's planning a raid to take out all the lords and the gangs with them. And this is happening at the same time the city's going balls up from this plague."

"You think Zamora might have planned all this?"

"I don't know yet," said the anarchist. "Doesn't really sound like him, though. A bit subtle."

Jonny stood, brushed away some flies that had landed on his aviators. "There was this Arab at the Forest tonight, he was talking about the Alpha Rats. Said something about a war."

"Well man, we got our own war right here," Groucho told him.

When he leaned over this time, he was holding a key ring with a plastic Ganesh on top; cheap paste rhinestones glittered in the elephant god's eyes. He dropped the key ring and switchblade into his jacket pocket. "I wanted to tell you- Zamora's moving on the lords tonight, guess he figures it's a holiday, so half the city'll be blasted. We're moving, too. All the gangs. Viva la revolucion."

"Jesus," Jonny said. "Are you guys ready?"

"Vyctor Vector's waiting out in the van with Man Ray, so we've got the Naginata Sisters and the Funky Gurus, tambien. We're stronger than Zamora realizes," said Groucho and he smiled.

"Besides, amantadine supplies're running pretty thin around here. If the Committee doesn't get you, seems like the virus will. Nobody's got much to lose anymore."

"What about going to the lords for help?"

"The lords?" Groucho said. "Are you really that naive? The lords protect themselves. Period. They're no better than Zamora."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Jonny. "Not all the lords are sell-outs like Nimble Virtue."

"Sure they are," replied Groucho. "This is big business, Jack. The ultimate fix. The architecture of need." The anarchist gestured as he spoke, his hands open wide. "I mean, if you're in the desert, you sell the natives ice water, right? Nimble Virtue, Conover and the rest have a captive market here, and they like it that way. This underground market drives the prices of their goods right through the roof. The lords aren't dealers, they're vampires. They live on pain. And you're as much a part of it as they are."

Jonny frowned. "I sold medicine, asshole. People needed me."

"You're just afraid to face the real issue," Groucho said. "By selling Conover's shit you are just another part of the drug organism. And when I say drugs, I mean anything people need, that they'll pay money for. Food, data, booze, medical supplies. People don't need you. They need to be free of this ridiculous cycle of drugs and pain. Free from the Committee and the lords because they're two sides of the same coin. One can't exist without the other. This whole city is built on bones. You're a vampire, too, Jonny. That's what I mean about taking responsibility."

Jonny walked back to the bar and started sorting through the various bottles. At the back of the bottom shelf he found a half-empty quart of mescal and set it on the bar. The small hallucinogenic worm inside bobbed momentarily to the top of the golden liquor.

Dead fetuses. He saw Nimble Virtue's children floating in alcohol.

Releasing the bottle, Jonny shouted to Groucho: "If I'm such puke, what the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm here because in the end, I don't think you are one of them," said Groucho. He came to the bar, still ringing the silver bell in his left hand. "You're what those old warriors used to call Dragon head-Snake body. You're intelligent; you've got courage and integrity, but you keep sabotaging yourself through fear and stupidity." The anarchist picked up something the size of a playing card from the bar. When he touched it, the card flashed a series of animated views of Japanese casinos and resorts, spewing hard-sell patter in tinny German. "Also, I thought you might be able help the revolution. Ice liked you and I wanted to keep her happy. Zamora was interested in you and so was Conover. I thought maybe we could make use of that somewhere along the way." He looked up at Jonny. "Revolution's a hard nut. See what happens to us? I guess I was using you, too."

"If I go back to Conover's, will you go with me?" Jonny asked.

Groucho shook his head. "There's no time. We've got a lot to set up if we're gonna take on the Committee tonight."

"Sorry. A silly question."

"I know where Conover's place is," Groucho said. "I'll meet you there later if I can."

Jonny nodded, took the mescal bottle and set it back on the shelf behind the bar. Removing his mirror shades, he turned to Groucho, making sure the man got a good look at his new eyes. The anarchist raised his eyebrows a fraction of a centimeter, but that was all. "These exteroceptors are funny," Jonny said. "It's like watching a movie or something. Kind of a detached feeling. I don't know what to do anymore."

"Here," Groucho said, and handed him the little silver bell. "For luck. And remember: thought is an illusion." He touched his chest, "This is an illusion. Fear, confusion, dread- the worst elements of your life can lead to enlightenment as easily as the best. When the time comes to act, you'll do all right."

The silhouette of a tall woman was framed in the door of the club. She wore tight leather pants and boots, a racing top crossed by studded leather straps; in her hand was some kind of heavy wooden staff that was almost as tall as she. Her skin shone silver in the street light, a heavy layer of metal-based make-up covering all her exposed skin, except for a band around her eyes. Naginata war paint.

"Groucho, we gotta hit it," said the woman. "Hi ya, Jonny."

"How're you doing, Vyctor?" he called.

The woman shrugged. "Getting ready to die right," she said.

"Heard about Ice. Sorry, man. I gotta tell you, though, I was kinda jealous when she moved in with you and Sumi. I really went for her."

"You got good taste, Vyctor."

"You know it. Groucho, I'll see you outside." She went out then, her shadow curving over the small drifts of sand that were collecting around the fallen doors.

Jonny left the mirror shades on the bar and followed Groucho out of the club. In the game parlor, he said to the anarchist: "So what are you, anyway? You really an anarquista or just some loco with a bodhisattva complex?"

They continued out under the awning, through the falling sand to the van parked across the street. Finally, Groucho grinned. "Tell you the truth," he said, "I spend most of my time feeling like everybody's mother." Man Ray nodded as Jonny came over. The Funky Guru's new van was as big as his old one, with the same ugly-beautiful lines. Something like a mechanical claw protruded from one side, hydraulic digits tense against the body of the vehicle. Groucho pointed to Jonny's motorcycle. "You have fuel?" Jonny nodded, walked over to the bike and climbed aboard. "You take care, Jonny," called Vyctor. Jonny waved and kicked the bike awake. Then he and the van moved off in opposite directions.

From the desert, the wind was picking up, hard-blown grit biting into the backs of his hands, grinding between his teeth. The heat of the night and the tequila came down hard on him. Jonny felt himself moving through a dream-time, no longer trusting or quite believing in anything he saw. Heading north out of Hollywood, he watched bands of junkies roaming the streets eating piles of sugar candy skulls they had stolen from merchants below. Monks hiding their tumors behind things like fencing masks took the confessions of lepers squatting in Griffith Park while nearby, Neo-Mayanists cut the beating hearts out of captured Committee boys, offering them up to gods whose names they had forgotten, begging for forgiveness and an end to the plague. Writers had been busy with their canisters of compressed acid, turning the walls outside the park into a fair representation of the skull walls at Chichen Itza. They had left messages behind, too.

BOMB TOKYO NOW

BOMB NEW YORK NOW

BOMB EVERYTHING

Jonny swerved to avoid some animal in the road and almost succeeded in flipping the bike before he realized that there was nothing there. He kept flashing on recordings of Ice's face: the moment she saw his cat eyes, when she kissed him in the Forest, as she lay dying. He had not yet accepted that she could really be dead and he knew that was good. Barely functional as he was now, Jonny understood that some animal survival mechanism in his brain had cut in during the course of the last few hours, pumping him full of specific neural inhibitors, preventing him from accepting the true nature of her loss. He knew it was there, though. The loss. He imagined that he could feel it, like a sac of poison lodged at the back of his skull, ready to burst when all this was over.

He throttled up on the bike and skidded around a section of asphalt that was jutting at an angle from the narrow roadbed. The air compressors attached to the BMW's exhaust obliterated all sound but their own, while the thermographic display in Jonny's exteroceptors glazed the park into a series of slick surfaces like the ones he had seen in a Dali landscape.

Nearing the top of the hill, Jonny began to consider the notion of payback. It seemed to him that if he was to take the responsibility he had been avoiding all this time, others ought to do the same.

There was blame here to be laid at somebody's feet. But whose? Ice was dead, and Skid and Raquin before her. Soon Sumi would be gone, too. Because of his failure to salvage her cure? Because Easy Money had stolen Conover's virus? Or was it because he had left Sumi alone for so long while running from Zamora?

Yes, to all those questions. But was that enough? Jonny sensed it went deeper than any of that, but the chain of responsibility and blame, when he tried to trace it back to its source, seemed endless, extending beyond any of their lifetimes.

"How many will die tonight?" he wondered.

"How many have died already?"

Jonny tried to count up the bodies, the friends and acquaintances that had snuffed it or disappeared over the years. He could not remember them all. Again the chain- one face always leading to another. For a few, he could remember no name just the movement of a hand, the tilt of a head or a panther tattooed shoulder.

Jonny thought of Ice, in many ways just another one-percenter, living the same foolish life as any of them, dying the same senseless death, and all the while being unaware that it had all been laid for her in advance. Like a ship's course computed, entered and executed, she had lived according to the strange process that seemed to take them all in the end, Random, Skid and the rest. They were the dead wandering the streets on Dia de los Muertos. Drifting their whole lives through the city, living by rules they never really understood.

The cops had been part of it. The Committee. And yeah, Jonny thought, the dealers, too. He had been a part of it as much as anyone, supplying the medicine and the dope that kept the people docile.

Groucho's city of bones became more real, more palpable each time he considered it.

Lights on the hill above startled him. Jonny swung the BMW onto the driveway leading to Conover's mansion, wondering why the hologram dome was down. Sand whispered through the trees. He left the bike in the drive and made his way to the house through the bamboo grove, hoping that the billowing sand was dense enough to confound the smuggler lord's surveillance equipment.

The front door of the Japanese wing was open. Sprawled facedown in the walk-way was one of the smuggler lord's medical techs, a hole from what looked like a Futukoro shell burned in the man's back. Inside the house there were more bodies, techs and security staff, some lying in groups, others meters away where they had been gunned down trying to run. In the art-glutted dining room in Victorian wing, soft Elizabethan music was coming from the hidden speakers; the sound chip on the stereo read: William Williams: Sonata in Imitation of Birds. He found the African staff dead in the kitchen and the service corridors.

Working his way back through the house by feel, Jonny located the elevator he had used the day they had given him his new eyes.

Not certain of exactly where he was going, he punched in the code for the lowest level. He pulled the Derringer from his pocket, turned it over in his hand once, and put it away. It would not do him a hell of a lot of good against a Futukoro.

In the clinic area were more dead techs. The hall was littered with overturned drug carts, Pyrex culture dishes and leaking drug vials. Jonny saw Yukiko's body, recognized a couple of the Russians that had assisted on his eye surgery. A security man lay dead on his back, most of one shoulder and his lower jaw had been shot away. He was holding a small cardboard box. Scattered around the guard's head like a plastic nimbus were dozens of interferon inhalers similar to the one Easy had been using. Jonny knelt by the guard's body and stole his Futukoro. The man had not even gotten it out of the holster.

It did not take Jonny long to find Sumi's room.

At a bend in the garbage-strewn corridor was a door marked with diamond-shaped warning signs: orange biohazard marker, color-coded symbols for flammable liquids and cryoprotectants.

The door was locked and when he could not kick it open, he shot the lock off. Inside, he passed through a short retrofit airlock, ignoring neat piles of sterile paper gowns and caps, to a dust-free clean room beyond. Inside, the sterile chamber echoed with the steady whining of malfunctioning life-support units and the gurgling of protein vats. Near the circular vats, four male bodies were laid-out on what looked like stainless steel autopsy tables. From the sour smell of the place, Jonny guessed that it had been at least twenty-four hours since the life-support had shut down.

Looking into the protein vats, Jonny found what at first he took to be several dead eels, drifting limply in the swirling solution like individual strands of sea weed. The animal's had been dissected bilaterally, exposing the entire length of each spinal column. When he saw the delicate Toshiba micro-manipulators poised over each open back, Jonny realized that the animals were lampreys. He remembered Conover telling him that the nerve tissue his techs had spliced into Jonny's injured shoulder had come been grown in a specially bred variety of the animal. Seeing them now, Jonny was glad the poor fuckers were dead.

He touched one of the manipulators, running his fingers along the rows of microscopic lasers that sliced intact tissue from the lampreys' backs. A bundle of mil-thin wires ran from the base of each manipulator and was secured to node points along the exposed spines. He touched one of the bundles. A tail twitched. Jawless mouth gaped. "Shit," Jonny said and released the manipulator, realizing (and the realization turned his stomach) that the animals were still alive, swimming in their absent way, against the whirling current of the protein solution, alien tissues taking root in their backs.

That's when he found Conover, chest neatly lasered open, lying on one of the autopsy tables. Jonny had turned in disgust from the lamprey tank and froze, staring down at the body of the smuggler lord lying under ten centimeters of clear liquid. But it was not the Conover Jonny knew. It was the Conover he had seen in photos in the storage room that earlier night. The Conover from Central America in the nineteen-eighties: healthier, before the Greenies addiction had set in. Jonny checked the other tables and found Conovers lying on each of them, sunk in the same fluid, torsos neatly split from crotch to chin. All the bodies were wired into a complex array of life-support unit. They were all missing certain organs, livers, stomach, hearts and pancreases, mostly. He knew then that what he was looking at was essentially a farm.

Conover had become a parasite, feeding on himself. Somewhere in his drug-ruined body, his techs must have found some cells that Greenies had not yet invaded. They had used these to clone copies of the smuggler lord to use for patch jobs. The liquid in which they floated would be some kind of perflourocarbon, Jonny guessed, to keep the bodies oxygenated. He just stared. It was amazing; suicide and murder all rolled into one package. The taste of tequila and bile was strong in his throat. Jonny fled through a door beyond the tables, away from the butchered young men.

The room he entered was still and very cold. The thermographic read-out in his eyes showed it to him as an almost seamless blue surface, broken here and there by neon-red patches of warmer electronic equipment. Some kind of gas vapor was crusting on cryogenic pipe inlets, drifting in white clouds to the floor. A dozen gray laminated tanks (he thought of coffins or sealed specimen cases) stood against the walls. Jonny spotted her in the only tank that was occupied, near the far end. When he tried to wipe a layer of frost from the Lexan faceplate, his fingers froze to it instantly. He jerked his hand away, stifling a small cry of pain as he left some skin behind. Using his jacket sleeve, he rubbed at the port until he could see her face clearly.

Sumi appeared to be asleep in the cryogenic tank. A VDT inset at chest-level in the gray laminate displayed her life readings as a series of slow-moving horizontal lines, hills and valleys indicating her body's various autonomic functions. The top of the screen was dominated by an animated 3D display of some growing crystal. For some reason, it reminded Jonny of a cocoon; he kept expecting to see some new form of plant or animal life to burst suddenly from the fragile egg shell facets that the crystal kept unfolding from within itself. Someone had written "L VIRUS" on a strip of surgical tape and stuck it to the VDT just below the crystal display. Jonny nodded, recognizing the animation as a growth sequence. He had a pretty good idea just what the programmers had been modeling when they created the display. The lesions around Sumi's mouth confirmed this.

Jonny backed away from the cylinder, spun and kicked savagely at the door to the clean room, his face hot. All the half-conscious illusions of a daring rescue he had been nursing up the hill were dying fast. He prowled the edges of the frigid room, cursing to himself, punched a Sony monitor off a work station and kicked it into a wall, shattering the screen.

A minute later, he was standing in front of the tank in which Sumi slept. "They never told us how it worked," he explained. "So naturally it got all fucked up." It was an apology of sorts.

The concussion from the first Futukoro round cracked the Lexan plate above Sumi's face. Steam from the super-cooled liquid inside screamed through the broken plastic, condensing in the air as a miniature whirlwind of ice. Jonny kept on firing, pumping round after hot round through the walls of the cylinder until the room was full of freezing white vapor and the life readings on the tank registered as a series of flat, unwavering lines.

When some of the vapor had cleared and he could see again, Jonny peered through the cracked Lexan to find that Sumi's face had remained unchanged. He was aware, on some wordless level, that from that moment on, he would be utterly alone. But he found himself comforted by Sumi's face, the lines of her cheeks, the set of her lips. There was no hint at all of pain or betrayal in her smooth features. Jonny stepped back. Calmly, gratefully, he placed the barrel of the Futukoro between his teeth and aimed for the back of his head. Closing his eyes, he was filled with an odd sense of euphoria, thinking: From now on, we make our own rules.

He pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked once.

Jonny shouted and threw the thing across the room. Behind him, the door to the clean room slid open and Conover came in. Not one of the pretty boys on the autopsy slabs, Jonny saw, but the red-eyed death's head he knew. He was sure the smuggler lord had been watching him. "Listen, son- " Conover began.

"You pig!" Jonny shouted. "How could you do that to her? Treat her like a piece of meat!"

"I never intended for you to see this," Conover said. He opened his hands in a gesture of sympathy. "Really, we had not choice. She could have infected everybody here."

Jonny looked back at Sumi in the cryogenic tank. Most of the fluid had evaporated, leaving a few feeble streams of vapor trailing from holes the Futukoro shells had made. "Did you kill all those people upstairs?" Jonny asked.

"I'm afraid so," Conover said. He moved to sit on the edge of a disconnected Hitachi CT scanner. Jonny noticed that the smuggler lord was holding a Futukoro loosely at his side. "In a sense, though, they were already dead," Conover said. "Between the virus and Zamora, if they didn't die now, they would be gone very soon." He shrugged. "Besides, I'm leaving. The life's gone out of it. L.A.'s no place for me anymore."

"What are you talking about? You're leaving Last Ass?"

Conover lit one of his brightly-colored Sherman's and nodded.

"Yes, my ride ought to be here in a few hours. You interested in coming?"

"Where are you going?"

Conover smiled. "New Hope."

"What?"

"I think you should come," the smuggler lord said. "In fact, I insist on it." Conover had moved the Futukoro so that it was lying across his legs, pointing casually in the direction of Jonny's midsection.

Jonny felt his brain frosting over, as if he were asleep and dreaming in one of the cases next to Sumi. "Mister Conover, what the fuck is going on here?"

"It's the end of the world, son."

"Great. Think anyone'll notice?" Jonny asked. He looked at Sumi and shook his head, thinking that once again, he had failed her.

Conover got up, dropped an avuncular arm around Jonny's shoulders and said: "Don't sweat it, son. We've got big plans for you."

He steered Jonny out the clean room, upstairs and through the Victorian wing toward the roof. "There's so much to say over before our ride gets here, but if we hurry, I think we might just have time to give you the fifty-cent tour of the universe."