Slide On The Run Read online

  ("How the fuck should I know, I just run the program?")

  The screen blipped and vanished and Johnny Yuma was drowning again in the all consuming cables. His mind was no longer working the way it had. All was plastic stretch and distortion. Simple arithmetic flattered. The spot on the dice didn't tally. Insulated vinyl sheathing was coating his brain. His bones were charged, electric, grinding like tortured machinery as they adjusted, but adjusted to what? Again the lights went out and the TV returned. Now the image was much smaller, or maybe distant, as though it had moved away from him. This image was of a woman's hand, with long, extended and carefully shaped fingernails, perfectly finished in paint the color of the flame. They were being roughly hacked short and ragged by a pair of crude kitchen scissors.

  "I'm standing here with no fucking body, and wondering how much long it's going to take three very pissed off Pentecostal Fire Boys to figure out what I did, how I did it, and come after me?"

  "Fuck you Slide, you go in when you go in."

  Johnny Yuma could feel almost nothing left of what he considered himself. He was one with the wires. His identity was slipping away as the scissors chopped the nails. The image vanished and his self awareness with it. Johnny Yuma's final vision was just a tiny white blip that only stayed long enough to extinguish itself and vanish. Bye-bye Johnny.

  "Okay, you got the corpus."

  "About fucking time."

  YUMA/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/BLACK/SLIDE

  Slide hit Earth, fully discorporate, at the start of the twenty first century, but his landfall wasn't as tidy as it should have been. He was on the barrier cusp of the randomly selected dimension and leakthrough was all over in form of minor

  front-end and after-images. But that faded as he lined up with the prevailing time stream. What did anyone expect? He'd done the jump without a body. He was free of the Pentacostals, but where the fuck was he? The room in which he found himself was the third floor hovel of some speedfreak, junkie, stained-sheet grahzny, and the way Slide's luck was running, the cadaver was probably wasted from some fatally debilitating retro-virus. He was evidently somewhere, though, and that was an anytime improvement on discorporate time-tidal drifting. Slide sat up and rolled over with very little pain considering the levels of intoxicant abuse to which this body felt like it had been exposed for some protracted period. On the floor by the bed was a pair of narrow black jeans. In the back pocket was a wallet and in the wallet was a driver's license in the name of John Wayne Yumac, but other more trivial documentation that showed the former went by the name of Johnny Yuma. Slide sighed. Johnny Yuma? Give him a fucking break. This sonofabitch probably had warrants out on him. He pulled on the jeans and looked out of the window, over a rusting terminator side of a-city-that-no-one-wanted where rotting railroad spurs had been abandoned by the retreat of heavy industry.

  "Choice neighborhood."

  Slide knew he shouldn't be too judgmental. Most realities in this quadrant had already fallen to The Empire of the Mole People or the Retards' Crusade. At least this shithole had television. Slide turned on the TV and grazed to what was billed as the Sci-Fi Channel. He expected Star Trek and was pleased when he got it. Admiral Spock on the USS Bounty gave him an approximation of the Q-bias and DZM displacement. As if in confirmation he heard a muffled boom and a distant tremor shook the building. Urban nadsat juvie-bombers in this stream; probably augmented by random arson, and more legit political terror. He guessed he could have done worse although the place was probably overpopulated by feral baby-bouncers, hormone geeks, mindless shvat-whores, and the kinda pukes who collected Nazi empty Zyclon B canisters with letters of authentication. Such was

  the detritus of a civilization in free fall but at least in this place Hassan IX would still be underground with his Mu-deer Network and dogpack of Al-zabadi Boys. Later Slide would check who was US President. That would pin the exactitude closer to the parsec.

  Slide moved from bedroom to a bathroom which was equally filthy and disgusting, and looked at himself in a cracked and flyblown, flaking mirror. What he saw was a skinny greaser with a Ratfink-copy tattoo, and a death's head ring on the third finger of his left hand. He pushed the lank hair out of his eyes, and rearranged the face to make it more threatening than hunted, more predator than prey, more plausibly demon. In his infinite time, Yancey Slide had occupied more human bodies than he could count, and he knew that, just like all the others, this vehicle of flesh, blood, and toxins would gradually change, and start to look like all the others, but he didn't want to wait. Temporarily satisfied with the adjustments, he splashed water on his face, and took a deep breath. Someway, sometime, he would return to a dimension where he could wild with his own blazing right-fire, but, until them he would play out the hand.

  The body wanted a cigarette. Like most pre-owned vehicles it came with a smeary residue of the previous occupant's primary addictions. He walked the body back into the bedroom, getting the feel of it. A half full pack of Mild Sevens were among the clutter. He shook one out left-handed and lit it with the flame rose from his right index-finger and he took a deep drag. This Yuma had used his floor as a wardrobe. Clothing was littered along with beer cans, girlie mags, fast food containers, and old newspapers. A tabloid headline read HIT THE DIRT!, another I DONE IT! Slide smelled a shirt. It would do. He did not have time to dress with taste. He could sense a second human who needed neutralizing. Across a living-room that was little more than a couch, a bigger TV with audio-muted porn still pink-skin flickering, and a continuation of the garbage-floor motif, a fat sweat hog wallowed snoring in his disgusting pit. Slide sniffed. "I guess it's a question of wake him or kill him."

  Or both, but in which order? The bastard was fat, a real human planet who oozed in enough pre-packaged filth to make the late Yuma look house-proud. Along with the black jeans, Slide had annexed Yuma's scuffed engineer boots. He poked the planet in an approximation of it's equator with the toe of a boot. The mass of offal was in a position as though he had passed out while masturbating, and now he grunted and gurgled with the incomprehension of waking outrage. "Fuck, Johnny? What the fuck? What the fuck?"

  "What do they call you?"

  The obese man-toad blinked. "You know what I'm called."

  "Just tell me."

  The fat man looked nervous but also reasonably familiar with the irrational and psychotic. "They call me the Blimp."

  "I need money, Blimp."

  "Fuck, Johnny, has the geezin' crystal finally Swiss-rolled your brain?."

  "Look at me very, very carefully you over-fed fuck. Do you see any trace of your erstwhile homeboy known as one Yuma, Johnny?"

  The Blimp looked into Slide's eyes, shook his head hard, and gulped his terror."What the fuck is happening? What are you?"

  "You don't need to know."

  "But…

  "Money?"

  "I don't have any money."

  Slide knew the Blimp for exactly what he was. Dimes of this, grams of that, deals and fencing shit for ten year-old housebreakers, and then back-recruit them for kiddie porn, and some time a honey with a jones and no money could take a deep breath, close her eyes and suck him off for a taste of that for which she hurt. The Blimp had a cache of cash someplace. No question. Slide appropriated the mind of the fat bastard and sent back to where he, Slide, had just come from, to see if a whiff of the Darogad would get his attention. The saucers were moving in at a more leisurely pace, mopping up whatever was left at least partially alive. The EM blasts were so thick upon the ground they notched a higher resolve than what the grunts and troopers laughingly called reality. Running at a straight and true 447.5 MHz, the too-bad Frequency-of-Satan, they rez-stripped, and roentgened clear and metallic, right to the nerve endings like a sterile, high conductivity, ozone torture. The Blimp got it all and screamed.

  "Coffee can!"

  Slide saw a Maxwell House coffee can, one of the kind with the trick base they sold in drug paraphernalia stores. He unscrewed it and discovered close to seve
n hundred dollars in a roll of dirty twenties and hundreds. "And what else do we have here?"

  Beside the coffee can was a fancy-ass, fifty caliber Desert Eagle, all new chrome and black plastic, and firing half an inch of Teflon coated slug that could crack the engine block of a city bus in anyone's time zone. Fuck the nine gods, consumer humanity in the twenty-first century, a fucking plague with few if redeeming features.

  "You shoulda kept this toy under your pillow."

  Slide slid out the clip. Loaded. Better and better.

  The Blimp blubbered. "Don't kill me."

  "Why not, Fats. Wouldn't I be doing the culture a favor?"

  "I'll beg."

  The idea of a naked and toad-like fat human groveling for his life was a little more than Slide could take so soon in the sector, but, instead of the shooting him, because, even in this dogbreath reality, it might have attracted attention, he flipped him back into the battle field illusion. The Blimp then commenced to scream. And the Blimp had cause. In his mind, he was naked among the dead. Not a fucking thing to do about it; no available refuge, no shelter from the hard-rain, or the knowledge that, on a carpet torrent of plasma projections, the flying saucers would drift silently and majestically forward for the finally mopping up, the phase of defeat when decimation turned to extermination.

  "Shut the fuck up, or I'll gouge out your eyes in the here and now and really give you something to scream about."

  The Blimp fell silent. Now he only squirmed, although at the same time achieving a small and flaccid erection. Slide didn't want to guess what the Blimp found to be a turn on. Instead he looked for a phone amid the slovenly trash. "Gotta find out if Doc Zen's operating."

  10-10-666-07-9990-8786-15

  Three blocks away, Nuygen von Bulow picked up the intercept, and smiled triumphantly at The Humiliation. "Just as I predicted. He's looking for Doc Zen." Nuygen von Bulow was an entity that, had Slide know she was listening to his call, would have evoked in him, among other more violent reactions, a curse on himself for a bad bout of overweening veteran's contempt. He'd landed at random in twenty-one dogbreath in the twilight of its techno-gods, and might be forgiven for not expecting high-test trouble to be ready and waiting. He knew better than that. He knew that, in the Fullness, all things were possible and nothing is forgiven. The last time that Yancey Slide had seen Nuygen von Bulow she had been felating a High-Soviet Knight of the KGB with a pistol to her head, and since it was Slide who had precipitated her into the less than welcome predicament, even for the creative von Bulow, he would not have

  doubted she meant him anything but harm at that moment. Yancey Slide had been at odds with Nuygen von Bulow ever since he had first met her when she had been the pupil of Shiro Ishi during the notorious human vivisection experiments at Unit 7-31 in Japanese occupied Manchuria, but where Shiro had been at least approximately human, von Bulow was anything but. Shiro himself would certainly attest to this, especially when, in white furs and with a bullwhip, she'd drive him into the snow. She was perhaps a drencrom succubus with ambition, or a mutant demon of a kind he had never previously encountered. She didn't smell demon, but Slide knew how nothing could ever be counted on in this neck of time. "And he doesn't have the faintest inkling I am here."

  And the way she smugly seized the testicles of The Humiliation in a slim and black gloved right hand, and with uncommonly long and slender fingers squeezed them triumphantly hard, indicated that was exactly how she wanted it.

  All Slide knew was that the phone rang three times and when Doc Zen answered, he sounded dreadful "This had better be fucking good."

  "Doc, it's Slide."

  "About time you fucking called, do you know how much trouble you're in?"

  "What's the time context on the trouble, Doc?"

  "From here to fucking eternity, boy. From here to fucking eternity. You're reverberating all over the place."

  Story so far: Having deserted the Allies at the height of the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, and escaped capture in a cooch joint by a three-team of Pentecostal Fire Boys, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, exits into an Earth Urban C21, where he appropriates the body a merzky speedfreak by the name of Johnny Yuma, terminating the mind and incarnation of Yuma in the process. His first goal is to see Doc Zen and find out what's what, but, unknown to Slide, his dimension transit has not gone unobserved.

  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 lik
e 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.