Dreambox Junkies 14 страница

A blast of freezing cold air.

“You frucking move you DIE! "

> Held rock-steady in the hands of the black-clad, pulverbooted goon who had kicked down the door and issued the injunction was a compact silenced spewgun.

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Chapter 28

They lay there shivering in their own urine, the terror having gone straight to their bladders, while the shortest of the goons—there were three of them in all—sought to entertain the others with a touch of slapstick, carefully closing what was left of the splintered cottage door, reducing the onslaught of bitter night air to a fierce icy draught. In the other room, Kali was making it known that the commotion had caused her deep distress.

Fury, the most intense, burning fury, rose up within Paulie Rayle.

“Let me go to my baby, ” Ruth implored. She sounded distanced, numb, and yet, beneath it all, immensely strong.

Ignoring her, the first goon, lean and rodenty and obviously the leader, indicated Kali's door. The short goon kicked it down. Ratface and the third goon, distinguished by a trendily tattooed nose, stood brandishing their spewguns, richly amused by Paulie's impotent rage.

The short goon re-emerged, Kali crying in his arms.

Paulie moved, and Ruth was even quicker; she was up off the bed like a shot. But Ratface, more swift than either of them, backhanded Ruth hard across the face, sending her crashing back down on top of Paulie, knocking the wind from his lungs and leaving him agonized, gasping for breath and dully reflecting that a dethanatized, unmasochistic boxdreamer would almost certainly have been spared such an ordeal.

So that settles it, he thought. This is Ruth's world, not mine.

Or, God forbid, it was Groundworld.

He knew that Ruth hooked up without dethan, didn't protect herself; she'd told him as much. But why the fuck would her psyche go and do this to her?

They hauled Ruth up off him. Ratface had hold of her hair and was dragging her up, pushing her away against the wall, while Nose-Tattoo kept Paulie in the sights of his spewgun, mutely challenging him to make another move.

The short goon plainly knew about babies, perhaps had children of his own, for he had worked some kind of magic and quietened Kali down. She gazed around with big curious eyes.

“Give me Laurel, ” Ratface snapped, bringing his wrist up near his face as though testing scent.

“I'm real sorry, hon, but this is an airjam zone, ” the goon's wrist mobe purred in a vocpat Paulie guessed to be Jailbait Ear Candy.

Ratface hawked and spat and swore.

Laurel? Paulie struggled to make sense of it. Bertrand Laurel? So in this world Bertrand Laurel hadn't been murdered by Sick Nick? Not that the deduction made things any clearer.

Ruth threatened icily, “Don't you hurt my baby. "

Ratface poked out his studded tongue.

Had he been within reach of a firearm, Paulie could quite cheerfully have cut the goons down like mad dogs. Yet, all his instincts urged him not to antagonize them. The spewguns were as real as anything else in this world and, to all intents and purposes, lethal.

Ratface held out his hand, snapping his fingers with impatience. From a bag, Nose-Tattoo produced, of all things, a Dreambox. Ratface snatched it and held it up. “You, ” he told Ruth, “are going to dream us a nice little dream. "

Ruth stared stonily.

Ratface said, “You know the deal... you don't co-operate, we do things to your partner in piss here. You still don't give suck, we start on the kid. "

“I'll kill you first, ” Paulie told him.

All three smirked at the bold counterthreat, and Paulie wondered why psychos like these were not themselves box junkies, gleefully making pseudolife hell for their humiliants.

Unless, he thought, this is Ratface's boxworld?

“I'm doing nothing unless you give the baby, ” Ruth indicated Paulie, “to him. "

Ratface considered, then gestured to the short goon, who stepped forward and, not without reluctance, handed Kali over to Paulie. She started crying again. Ruth looked to Ratface, contemptuously awaiting instruction.

“Dream that the Dreambox was never invented, ” Ratface commanded. “But leave everything the same apart from that. "

If not for the anger and the fear and the pain, Paulie could have laughed in the goon's ugly face. The plan was obviously a product of extreme desperation. How could Laurel, presumably the mastermind behind all this, have possibly imagined that Ruth would play along? What was to prevent her from dreaming that Laurel had never been born? Provided, of course she knew who Bertrand Laurel was. And were Laurel's goons also holding the whole ONTOTECH team at gunpoint, making the same demand? Or had they singled out Ruth, Zeller's onetime star imagineer, as their best hope? Over and above all that, though, surely the goons realized that fulfilment of Laurel's demand would have ramifications with regard to themselves?

Ratface's thin lips twitched in mirth. “I know exactly what you're thinking: if the dream works and the world changes, we'll never get our money, us three. We could end up anywhere. You're thinking we must be thick as shit, not thinking it through. ” He glanced at his companions, likewise smug. “Well, you see the thing is, nanoprick, the three of us were chosen for this mission on account of us all having had people close to us suffer Dreambox-related deaths... in my case a twin brother. We're all of us unbalanced by grief, united in our hatred of these disgusting devices... so I shouldn't bother playing the rationality card. "

Ruth's eyes let Paulie know that she too was wondering whose imagination it was, her own or his, that was smoothing over the lacunae, painstakingly patching up logical flaws. And yet, like him, she was also bearing in mind the grim possibility that this was the true and actual Groundworld.

Ratface tilted his spewgun toward their own Dreambox, still there on the bedside table. “A philosophical question: are millies really alive? Humiliants... can they really, ” he fired the spewgun, “be murdered, a whole worldful at a time? ” The Dreambox leapt, splintering fragments, and landed in front of Nose-Tattoo, who finished the job with the heel of his pulverboot.

Paulie thought, You sick bastards.

Kali was crying again. He did what he could to comfort her.

Ratface thrust the other Dreambox into Ruth's hands and shoved her down onto the wet mattress beside Paulie. “WELL, FRUCKING MOVE IT... WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? "

Ruth fumbled on the trodes, sank back onto the pillow and, after a brief glance at Paulie, closed her eyes and hoarsely whispered the speakstart command.

The box hummed into action.

Ruth gasped orgasmically as the bliss belly ingested her.

Nose-Tattoo guffawed.

“Just tell me something. ” Ratface turned to Paulie with a grimace of revulsion. “How can you fruck something with all that unsightly underarm fuzz? ” Pointing his spewgun at Paulie's head, he broke into a big, manic Cheshire Cat smile. “Bit of a run of bad luck on your part, wouldn't you say, what with me being deranged, given to acts of senseless violence straight out of your worst nightmares, and now looking for one last little bit of fun before the big change. ” He adjusted his aim. The weapon was now pointing at Kali. “You know what I always say? If you feel an evil impulse coming on, well, what the fruck, why not give in to it? After all, you only live once. "

He squeezed the trigger.

“No! ” Paulie heard himself screaming as he whirled, twisted, tried to shield his daughter from the bullets. “NO! "

LIGHT. BLINDING LIGHT. AND THEN SILENCE.

“Here, let me help you. "

The voice was both familiar and unfamiliar. The blurry image sharpened into a face, a face Paulie both did and didn't recognize. The sun was blazing outside. It no longer felt cold. One moment darkness and ice—the next, daylight and warmth.

“Here. "

Something was being offered to him. A coat, his own coat from the back of the door. A coat to cover his nakedness as he stood there shivering, his baby daughter still warm, living, breathing, in his arms.

“Here. "

The coat was slipped on over his shoulders. The change in the weather had rendered such an item of apparel highly inappropriate, but something said it would be wrong to reject the tiny gesture of atonement from this person who, scarcely more than an instant ago, had been a vicious ratfaced goon.

“I can't believe it. "

Ratface sank to his knees. In fact it was no longer fair to call him Ratface, for he now looked altogether ungoonlike. “I can't believe how I was, the way I behaved, the life I led. ” He stared at the five transplosive spewshells hanging frozen, in stark defiance of omniversal laws, a mere arm's length from Kali's head, from Paulie's chest. One by one they dropped, bounced, clattered to the floor. “I just can't believe it. ” He looked all at once bewildered and embarrassed and appalled to be in possession of the spewgun. Reversing the weapon, he offered it to Paulie.

Oddly enough, Paulie felt no suspicion, no urge to unleash pent-up anger. For there was no anger, none at all. He took the gun and, for want of a better means of disposal, dropped it into his coat's capacious pocket. Respiration, the complaints he was receiving from his ribs, left him in no doubt at all that certain elements of the former state of things remained distinctly untranscended. Pain still had a part to play, even in this strange, sun-drenched place.

“Paulie? "

Ruth was sitting up in the bed, hugging the quilt up around herself. Her jaw was bruised, her smile wan but reassuring.

Their three erstwhile assailants were weeping profusely.

“I know it's not enough to say I'm sorry, ” sobbed the man who was no longer Ratface, gazing down at the shattered, spewshell-ridden Dreambox. “Nowhere near enough. But I guess the best thing we can do for you people right now is get out of your sight. "

Much as he appreciated the goons’ miraculous transformation into civilized beings, Paulie thought the idea a splendid one.

Aghast, Ex-Ratface said to Ruth, “I can't believe I hit you. "

“And sorry about the door, ” added the second reformed goon, whose nose, though still tattooed, now adorned a nicer face.

“Would you like me to come back and fix it for you? ” offered the third, no less diminutive but, like his friends, a good deal kinder now around the eyes.

Paulie shook his head.

“You sure now? "

Paulie nodded.

“'Bye, then... and take care. "

The trio of penitents gingerly reopened the broken cottage door, taking great trouble not to damage it further.

This is insanity, Paulie Rayle thought. But a whole new sort of insanity, one far preferable to the old. He needed a cigarette.

But wait—no, he didn't need one.

Funny.

Ruth got up, kissed him, took Kali from him and cuddled her. “I remember it occurring to me that maybe the only thing that would do it was a direct threat, a physical threat, to Kali, to you. ” She eyed him solemnly. “I want you to forgive me. I should never have put you both through all that. Not that I was doing it at a conscious level. That's if it really was my doing. "

Paulie could do little but wait for his emotions to catch up; they seemed to have been mislaid in transit between worlds.

“You often hear of amazing physical feats performed on behalf of a loved one. So why not psychic feats, too? ” Ruth wrinkled her nose. “This whole place stinks of piss. I think we've ruined that mattress. "

Paulie asked her, “What was it you dreamt? "

“I don't know, I don't remember. Whatever it took to save you and Kali. "

“ONTOTECH or SAGRADA? "

Ruth shrugged.

Paulie pushed open the window. He was greeted by the scent of honeysuckle. Ruth brought Kali over to see this miracle of a fresh summer's day in the middle of a February night.

Rain began to fall. Big droplets, slow and lazy. A summer shower. Rain and sunshine both together. They went outside. The warm rain washed them, and there was a rainbow, and it was all just a little too rosy and cosy. To Paulie Rayle's mind, at any rate. Yet Ruth appeared at home here. And so did Kali, gurgling contentedly.

They went back in. Handing him the baby, Ruth grasped his discarded shirt between her toes, flipped it up off the floor and caught it. Dropping it down over her head, she wriggled sinuously into the garment and grinned at him. How he loved her, this Goddess to whom he owed everything.

She said to him, “Believe. "

He would try. It wouldn't be easy. But he would try his very best. For he had never seen Ruth so happy. And it gave him such pleasure, her happiness. And this world did indeed feel different. And something told Paulie Rayle that it would prove radically unlike any other world he had ever known, or even imagined.

He thought, Deus ex machina.

And watched Ruth rummage in the drawer and step into a clean pair of knickers.

—THE END—

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Richard Laymon, Dreambox Junkies

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