Slide On The Run

Episode Three Art's Snooker - Second Floor

As Yancey Slide exited the street door of the walk-up tenement firetrap that had been the domicile of the former Johnny Yuma and the Blimp, he had noticed the stretch Hummer limousine that rolled slowly past him. The absurdly extended, laughably impractical vehicle was impossible to ignore or overlook, even for one as preoccupied as Slide had become since, on the phone, Doc Zen had told him that he was "reverberating from there to fucking eternity." He hadn't, however thought too much about the limo, dismissing it as the transport of idiot celebrities looking for drugs and the dubious thrill of coming to cop in a grahzny neighborhood. Such was the way of it in a C21 reality of free-falling civilization. As if in confirmation, a P.D. black and white swung in behind the Hummer, but with its sirens quiet and no lights flashing, delivering a warning rather than making a stop. In a clearly decaying and resentful part of town, the cops didn't need any rich and slumming narco-tourists. Satisfied the limo had nothing to do with him, Slide turned his attention back to the sidewalk, and the deft negotiation of all the lurking beggars, wino-bums and wandering alkies, plus the soft parade the baby-bouncing nadsat juvies, and hormone geeks talking to their invisible friends that made walking awkward, and the you-imagine-it-I'll-do-it shvat-whores in their tight-high-and-low-cuts, with whom he should avoid eye contact so as not to start a keening chorus of the ritual "meee sooo horneeee, babeee." With his attention thus wholly engrossed he never gave the ludicrous limousine the kind of deep idimmu examination that would have revealed Nuygen von Bulow as the passenger within. Later Slide would try to blame his oversight on the occupied body of Johnny Yuma. The body was starting in on a chemical jones, and that might well prove to be an annoying problem. Non-specific receptors wanted a random combination of stimulants and narcotics, and bio-figured that just about anything would do as long as it delivered the buzz and stopped the itching and sniffing, but Slide knew that once the buzz was in place, it would probably start whining for physical gratification. He fallen into a body with a bad case of permanent dissatisfaction. Right at that moment, the need was only a slow jangle, but he knew it would undoubtedly grow worse as the day progressed. Fuck you, Johnny Yuma, wherever you were. He considered making a body jump. The last thing he needed was to be on the lam with a hold-over, secondhand, multiple-abuse addiction. He had more important things to do with his time than to be running down hole-in-the-wall drug dealers for a marginal body that was aching and sweating, stumbling in slow-motion indolence, or twitching and babbling. Maybe a pint of tequila would be enough to set the body to temporary rights. He made a mental note to stop at a liquor store once he had seen Doc Zen, and wondered if codeine was sold over the counter in this particular C21. A couple of shots of tetradetoxin would have brought the damned body under complete control, but where could you get tetradetoxin in a shithole like this?

Inside the Hummer, Sharkboy thumbed the Apex to standby and minimized the safety in preparation for locking onto Slide. "Do I take him now?"

Nuygen von Bulow rolled over on the vehicle's teardrop command bed, peered out of the smoked glass window, and shook her head. "He's on his way to Doc Zen. If we wait, we can take both them, or at least have Slide when he knows a bit more. I would imagine, right now, he's close to clueless."

The limo was multi-dimensional and customized Tardis-style, so it was massively more spacious within than the exterior of the stretch Hummer could ever have indicated. Outside the smoke-black glass of the window was twenty-first century Earth, inside was her own world of drencrom conditioned depravity, a fluid and tubular space that undulated like a section of some vast intestine, in crude pseudo-sympathy with the Great Flux, and had irregular asymmetric windows and lozenge-shaped display screens set in the continuous wall. A murmuring mercury cascade made patterns between them, and streamers of blue and purple vapor decorated the air. The Humiliation lay at Nuygen von Bulow's feet, licking and suckling on the long cruel heel of her left boot with rapt concentration, blurring the mirror finish of the patent leather with its breath. Its maleshape was fixed by steel clamps and a locked exoskeleton, while pleasure/pain drip-catheters protruding from the remaining soft-sections.

The Humiliation had been with von Bulow longer than most could remember, and some rumors claimed she had owned the creature for centuries, although the rumors never quite defined by what timescale these centuries were calculated. That Nuygen von Bulow should not dismiss and replace her attendant Humiliations with anything like the rapidity that she changed the rest of her entourage, was, of course, highly understandable. Of those

who attempted the initiation only a tiny percentage ever survived, and even less were ever deemed suitable for servitude. Even the current Humiliation was put away for long periods, stored frozen and dreamless in the null-void while not wanted, as when von Bulow had been in Manchuria with Shiro Ishi for the Unit 7-31 atrocities, or when it had lingered longer still while she had been imprisoned by the High-Soviet Knights of the KGB.

In a black skinsuit of tuck-and-roll, armored latex, and wearing the silver eagle insignia of the Ninth Legion to which he was in no way entitled, Sharkboy crouched over the y-tech, assisted by a Zeech in its personal life-tank. Sharkboy was fairly new to von Bulow's traveling retinue, and, as she saw it, he would be lucky to remain much longer. The combination of his insolence and feral overeagerness to inflict painful and lingering fatalities was beginning to irritate her. Normally she would not have entertained any objection to a techhand who combined gratuitous cruelty with a killer relish, but she sensed the Sharkboy harbored a concealed but nonetheless vaunting ambition. Nuygen von Bulow expected nothing short of fawning devotion, and, in one who though more about his own advancement than her's, devotion could never be anything but a temporary and self-serving sham. She had flogged, lacerated, and electrocuted him on a number of occasions, well beyond any capacity on his part to enjoy the punishment, and, although he had bowed bloody from the whip, blade, and super conducting paddles, and appeared chastened to the point of abject, she sensed his contrition was an act, another deception, and she was of a mind that, very shortly he would have to go. Indeed, Sharkboy must cease to exist. Even in his short time with her, he had seen far to much to be allowed to stray loose-lipped and untrustworthy.

Unaware of these thought of his doom, Sharkboy turned from the y-tech displays and the controls of the multi-dimensional vehicle and looked at von Bulow. "I could take Slide easily. Piece of cake."

"I said wait didn't I?" "I have him in the cross-hairs. I could at least lock on to him."

Von Bulow jerked into a sitting position, lacerating the Humiliation's tongue with the heel of her shoe, and all but cracking its beak in the process. "Don't reveal yourself as more of a fool than you have already demonstrated. He's idimmu. He would notice the lock immediately."

"It would be very easy."

"You crave yet another electrical beating?"

The Zeech wetly distanced itself as Sharkboy lowered his head in faux subservience. "No ma'am."

"Then do as you are told and be quiet."

"Yes, ma'am."

The Humiliation made a moist blubbering sound, and von Bulow slapped it sharply across its approximation of a penis with a slim black glove. Sharkboy was silent for slightly more than a local minute, and then glanced back again. "Ma'am?"

"Now what?"

"A native law unit has moved in behind us."

"That is no problem. It will be Bannion. We have an arrangement."

Von Bulow decided that she would keep Sharkboy with her until Slide was brought down. After that she world rid herself of him. He was clearly impossible, but to replace a combined killer and techhand and recruit anew in the middle of a mission was too much trouble, no matter how much he vexed her. Tolerating Sharkboy would be worth the trouble if, at the culmination of this excursion, she saw Slide suffer. As far as Nuygen von Bulow was concerned, Slide had to suffer. Suffering was going to be his manifest destiny, if she had any hand in it. And after she'd had her fill of watching him suffer, she would hand him over to the highest bidder, either the Pentecostal Fire Boys, who were still hot about losing him in the cooch, or one of the other crews of bounty hunters who sought him all over the Fullness. That way, pleasure would be combined with a reasonably excessive profit. She still blamed the unpleasantness with the High-Soviet Knights on Slide, and that was only the most recent negative incident in a series of unresolved conflicts between her and the idimmu demon that extended back along the millennia and across the dimensional divides.

"Slide appears about to enter a building."

This time, von Bulow did not reprimand Sharkboy for speaking before he was spoken to. She peered through the closest window. Slide had halted in front of a doorway above which a dirty lightbox sign read; ART'S SNOOKER - SECOND FLOOR.

Slide halted. The two goons who flanked the door were looking at him with disparaging expressions. "How many times do we have to warn you, Yuma?"

Slide had, of course, never seen either of them before in all of his near-infinite lifespan, but that they knew and apparently disliked Johnny Yuma was another reason for Slide to strongly suspect that he had chosen the

wrong body when he'd made reality-fall after his untidy escape from the cooch joint. He smiled politely, and spoke with a mild tone. "I think we're all under something of a misapprehension here. I might look like the person you know as Johnny Yuma, but I can an assure you that I'm not."

The goon on the left, a shaved head muscle-builder with a stud in his lip, and a teardrop tattoo at the corner of his left eye, held up an authoritarian hand, level with Slide's chest, but not touching him. "What the fuck are you trying to pull now, punk?"

It had been a long time since Yancey Slide had been addressed by anyone as "punk", and even though the mistake was understandable, he could feel a demon ire rising inside him. The teardrop tattoo didn't worry him, but he still held his wrath in check. He did not wish to create an occurrence right there on the street, and thus resisted the impulse to fill these two minders-of-the-door with the double-whammy horrors right there and then. "I'm here to see Doc Zen."

"Why should Doc Zen want to see a always-broke, scrounging-asswipe speedfreak like you?"

Still Slide refrained from imposing the full horrors, but also realized that to argue with the goons guarding the door of Art's Snooker was pointless. The simplest solution was to simply erase himself from their perception. If either of the goons had retained a memory of what had happened, they would have told everyone they knew how "fucking Johnny Yuma" had apparently turned into a heavy vapor, sunk to the sidewalk, and flowed past their feet into the entrance and on up the stairs. Of course, they would never do that. At the same time as erasing himself, he also wiped the memory from their minds. As far as the goons were concerned nothing had happened. Johnny Yuma had never been there or spoken to them. That was one of the advantages of being an idimmu. You could always fuck with the minds of humans if it made your life a little easier.

He resumed his human form halfway up the stairs to the second floor, and was Johnny Yuma again when he pushed through the double doors into the pool hall itself, reflecting on how he seemed to be rapidly reinforcing the first impression that stealing the body Johnny Yuma had been a very poor choice. The pool hall was nominally closed. Indeed, it had been nominally closed since Doc Zen had taken it over as his headquarters. The large room, with its twelve full size tables was dark save for a single light of one table in the far corner. Four men and two artificials were clustered around it, but their attention was entirely on a gilded California blonde, practiced and willowy, leaning over the pool table to make her shot. She was a bright blaze of irradiated gold in the Rembrandt whiskey haze of the pool hall's interior, a fluid symmetry between the electric blue halo above the pool table and verdant green of its surface. The solid colors of the balls clicked at the command of her stick. She tossed her mane at each fresh position, short shorts, long legs, and when she turned to dust her hands with talc and then chalked her cue before dispatching the frame, Slide could feel the Yuma-body stir with desire. The woman must have sensed something because she looked up, saw him, and gestured to Doc Zen who was her opponent in the game of eight ball.

Doc Zen had the powerfully sculpted features of a Roman Emperor, except he was a Roman Emperor with long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail and dressed in white linen suit from the days of river boat gamblers, a silver brocade vest, and matching sleeve garters on the arms of his black silk shirt. If that moment, his suit coat was hung carelessly over the back of a chair, and he leaned on a custom-made cue waiting for the blonde to finish her break. At the sight of what he also though was Johnny Yuma, he frowned angrily. "What are you doing here Yuma? I thought I banned you."

Slide was really growing bored with all this mistaken identity. "Damn it, Doc. It's me, Slide."

Doc Zen's eyes narrowed. "Well so it is. What the fuck made you possess the body of a worthless fuckwit like wretched Johnny?"

"I was in something of a hurry."

"So it would seem."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Why don't you adapt the damn body to look more like yourself? You don't need to be carrying Yuma's penny-ante baggage around with you."

"Shape-taking takes time, and I only just got here."

"Time seems to be a major problem with you right now."

"Like I just said, what's that supposed to mean?"

"In a nutshell, my boy, someone's been walking on butterflies. And they're trying to put the blame for it squarely on you."

"Butterflies?"

The blonde had straightened up from the table, and Doc Zen put down his cue effectively suspending the game. "You know the old story. Guy rides a time machine a couple of million years into the past, and he steps in a butterfly on kills it. In the present, New York vanishes."

"Shit, Doc, I know the fucking story. What does it have to do with me?"

"A couple of entire dimensions have completely vanished?"

Slide was shocked. The news was monumental enough to move even his jaded sensibilities.

"Vanished?"

"To say they were even history would be an exaggeration. No more DZM displacement, not so much as a vestigial Q-bias."

"Fuck."

"That's one way of putting it."

"And they're blaming it on me?"

"Couldn't happen to a nicer person."

"Fuck."

"That's the second time you said that."

"All I did was take a powder from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies."

"That would seem to have been the cause of all the trouble. You were supposed to rally your men, turn the tide of the fight and save the day. When you didn't, much changed. Some things quite inexplicably. Even in this exactitude, the city of Baltimore blinked and found it had been taken by the Mole People."

"That's bullshit. You know I'm not the rallying kind, and I never save the day if I can in any way help it. I'm Yancey Slide goddamn it."

"You and I know may that know that it's bullshit, but the price on your head is downright flattering."

A voice suddenly came without warning from the gloom between the table and the door. "And that's a price I intend to be paid, Doc Zen, so I suggest that you and your people step away from Slide and let me take him and his valuable head."

If a voice could be simultaneously melodic and threatening, Nuygen von Bulow's had that capability, and she had also appeared completely out of nowhere. The doors had not swung, light had not entered the dark pool hall, footfalls or the rap of high heels had not ascended the stairs or crossed the floor, and neither Slide nor Doc Zen, both of whom were, to say the least, watchful and cautious by nature, had noticed her enter. Nuygen von Bulow was still in her slight and oriental body mode, very much the way Slide had last seen her, the moment before he had made good his escape from the High Soviet Kremlin, forced to her knees, in bra, panties, and black opened toes shoes, in front of KGB Knight, blowing him at gunpoint. This time, however, her thin, almost emaciated frame was clad in a tailored riding habit of scarlet raw silk, buttoned high to the neck, but with the long skirt slit almost to the hip, so the black patent leather of the thigh-length and intricately laced boots flashed as she moved. Slide recalled that Nuygen had always indulged herself with dramatic footwear. Her eyes were hidden behind enigmatic, wraparound sunglasses, but no one needed to read her eyes to know her intentions were grimly serious.

In her gloved right hand, she held a needle gun from entirely the wrong century, and it was pointed at location halfway between Slide and Doc Zen so she could burn either with only the slightest of turns.

Her sole companion was a young male with the face of a oceanic predator, armored in a predictable latex skinsuit. He aimed a Mossberg pump, and wore the Dragon's Cross with Maple Clusters, and, as Slide looked down the barrel of the shotgun, he noted that the kid had to be far too young to be entitled to the decoration.

It took the blonde who had been shooting pool with Doc Zen to break the silence that had greeted von Bulow and her boy, and say what everyone else was thinking. "You know, Doc, I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but this does not look good at all."

Story so far: On the lam from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, makes it to an Earth Urban C21, but with bounty hunters in hot pursuit. He appropriates the body of a speedfreak called Johnny Yuma, and seeks help from the legendary Doc Zen. Unfortunately, Slide has not moved fast enough among the all the random time variables, and his one time lover, but now implacable enemy, Nuygen von Bulow catches up with him at the pool hall where Doc Zen has made his home.