Jack Yeovil Dark Future 3 Comeback Tour

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were straining now, and he could only see blurred shapes in the murk.
"Where ees the maan, Frankie?"
Frankie growled in answer. He didn't know.
Elvis kicked, and swam away from the shapes. He would have to surface soon,
or die.
He pushed upwards, exhaling steadily. His head above the water, he breamed
again.
He could hear the Suitcase People, but not see them. They made a lot of noise
as they crashed through the swamp.
Something took a bite out of the flesh of his arm, and he swallowed a yelp of
pain.
He turned, his knife drawn, and stabbed out. He was worried that he'd have to
face another one of the man monsters.
The knife speared a trilobite against the bole of a tree. The big louse
wriggled and died.
"Prehistoric bastard," he whispered, pulling his knife free.
There wasn't any more gunfire. Had Krokodil got away?
He wanted to get some solid, dry-ish soil under him. He pulled on the lower
branches of the tree, and found himself an island.
The mud dried on his pants and jacket. He hated looking and feeling like
this. He had been dirty enough as a kid, always running around in ragged blue
jeans. He wished he had left all that behind.
Something moved in the water, and Elvis gripped his knife-hilt harder.
It bobbed into view, and he let out his breath. He fished the guitar out of
the swamp. It didn't even have any water in it.
He cradled the instrument in his lap like a baby. It was silly, but he felt
better with 'Ti-Mouche's gift.
A huge shadow fell over him.
"Hey, Guitar Maaan, how about givin' us a song?"
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PART THREE: ALL MY TRIALS
I
Jay-Zeuss, Mary and Joseph, Lola Stechkin thought, this Gavin Mantle
character is an A-One A-Hole! She wished she was in Greater Rhodesia with the
serious newshawks, covering the Taabazimbi disaster. That had been some
fry-up, a fireball enveloping the town where the Broederbond were holding a
mass rally to commemorate the Battle of Blood River. This was peanuts.
"It's like this, Lola-baby," Mantle sleazed, scratching his ballooning gut
with an American Excess goldcard, "I figure it's not right to take the two
kids out of their school and their old neighbourhood. I have to think this
whole thing out, you know sweetbutt. 'Cause I don't want them to grow up with
a warped sense of values because they're rich, y'know. So I figure Tish and
Reggie can stay with their mommy. I'll still see them on weekends and National
Holidays, but, you know, my lifestyle now is, like, very alien to what they
have come to expect. So, like I said, I thought the fairest thing was to leave
them out of it..."
Gavin Mantle was floating on an aircushion in his private swimming pool. He
was wearing immodest Ballsac swimtrunks that showed off the first of the
GenTech-financed bio-amendments he had demanded. She understood that his
initial request had been anatomically unfeasible.
The bottom of the doughnut-shaped pool was scattered with gems, inset into
the concrete. They sparkled as the sunlight filtered down to them. Tropical
fish swam between the beams, perpetually high from the trace stimulants the
household system pumped into the water.
She focused on the autoprompt chip in her contact lens, and moved onto the
next question.
"And what about Clodagh, Gavin?"
Mantle made a great show of sighing with regret as he poured himself a
tureen-sized cocktail of creme de menthe, zooper-blast, Shochaiku
Double-Blend, Beluga caviar and Sta-Hard drops.
"Clodagh doesn't understand the demands that wealth visits upon you,
Lola-honey," he winked. "She's moved back in with her mother."
One of Mantle's sexclones swam past in a lazy backstroke, her lithe body
breaking the surface of the vitamin-enriched water, her unwieldy breasts
floating like cherry-topped islands. The sexclones were vat-grown human
bodies, perfect in every detail, but with artificially limited brains. The
rumour was that they used hormone-dosed rabbit's cerebella for the most
successful models. Lola, who had never wanted for willing sexual partners,
found the whole notion of screwing a flesh-product nauseating, and she was
especially disturbed whenever she encountered one of the creatures encoded
with her own genetic structure. Mantle, of course, had ordered one of those.
She wished now she hadn't licensed her likeness, but the corp had offered her
an enormous commission.
The Lola sexclone was on the patio now, switched off. Lola wondered if her
revulsion for the thing had anything to do with the fact that it was modelled
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on her as she had been five years ago. She dreaded the day they thought one
could anchor the show better than her. At twenty-two, she was already one of
the oldest newscastresses on the networks.
"So, I reckon it's my duty to all those millions out there to live out all
their fantasies of enormous wealth..."
Lola knew that the camcrew were getting everything on tape. Behind Mantle
they could see the newbuilt villa. It was rounded and pink, almost obscene,
and used only the most expensive materials. A forest of satellite dishes rose
from one roof, tuned to receive input from every broadcasting system in the
world. Imported ocelots gambolled on the crazy-croquet lawn. The custom-built
phallic Rolls Royce was ostentatiously parked in the driveway, its gold
filigree gleaming as a muscle implant Adonis polished the glans-shaped hood
with creamy white cleanser.
Mantle poured the potentially lethal dosage of intoxicants into his face.
Fluid poured over his chest, soaking through his gold-thread T-shirt. It bore
the legend in psychedelic silver, "WORLD MUFF DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS, HABANA,
CUBA, 1997." It was probably the most expensive dirty joke in the world.
Mantle swallowed, and his eyes started to float. His system had been amended
to take care of any side-effects. He could mainline napalm or snort ground
glass without getting so much as a slight hangover. However, his body
chemistry was being permanently changed; if he urinated on the grass, he would
kill it.
"Lola, darlin'," he said, "you know, a guy like me and a gal like you...
maybe we ought to get together after the interview..."
His swimming trunks writhed as if he had a rattlesnake down there.
Ick!
The camcrew were getting all this down. The Evening News would be leading off
on The Gavin Mantle Story all week. Everything else they had to cover was
depressing, and so the producer wanted at least one "up" item between the
wars, assassinations, plagues, and famines. Lola was beginning to feel
nostalgic about Dino the Skateboarding Duck.
Since he received his one hundred million, Gavin Mantle had been living in
the fastest of the fast lanes. The camcrew had followed him through the
orgiastic party at which he demonstrated his bio-amendments for the first
time, and got enough footage for the X-rated news shows. From a man whose
entire life was devoted to kitchenware, he had turned into the kind of
sybarite whose party guest list is composed in equal parts of exotic hookers,
high-price drug dealers, minor soap-opera stars, third world politicians,
over-the-hill Sanctioned Ops pretending to be "security consultants," this
week's "in" criminals, religious fanatics, circus performers, lawyers,
parasites, gossip columnists, obscure offshoots of forgotten Royal families,
ex-Presidents and quack doctors of various specialisms.
There had been fifteen of these Blotto Lotto give-aways in the past five
years. Three of the winners were still alive, and one of them was in a
shock-trauma coma surrounded by the best medtech money could own. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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