Future on Fire Read online

  “Hype,” Deke said. “Last person I heard of got caught with that shit got three years in the infantry. How’d you score it?”

  “Cut a deal with a vet who was in grad school. She bombed out last month. Stuff gives me perfect visualization. I can hold the projection with my eyes shut. It was a snap assembling the program in my head.”

  “On just two hits, huh?”

  “One hit. I’m saving the other. Teach was so impressed he’s sponsoring me for a job interview. A recruiter from I. G. Feuchtwaren hits campus in two weeks. That cap is gonna sell him the program and me. I’m gonna cut out of school two years early, straight into industry, do not pass jail, do not pay two hundred dollars.”

  The snake curled into a flaming tiara. It gave Deke a funny-creepy feeling to think of Nance walking out of his life.

  “I’m a witch,” Nance sang, “a wetware witch.” She shucked her shirt over her head and sent it flying. Her fine, high breasts moved freely, gracefully, as she danced. “I’m gonna make it”—now she was singing a current pop hit—“to the…top!” Her nipples were small and pink and aroused. The firesnake licked at them and whipped away.

  “Hey, Nance,” Deke said uncomfortably. “Calm down a little, huh?”

  “I’m celebrating!” She hooked a thumb into her shiny gold panties. Fire swirled around hand and crotch. “I’m the virgin goddess, baby, and I have the pow-er!” Singing again.

  Deke looked away. “Gotta go now,” he mumbled. Gotta go home and jerk off. He wondered where she’d hidden that second hit. Could be anywhere.

  There was a protocol to the circuit, a tacit order of deference and precedence as elaborate as that of a Mandarin court. It didn’t matter that Deke was hot, that his rep was spreading like wildfire. Even a name flyboy couldn’t challenge who he wished. He had to climb the ranks. But if you flew every night. If you were always available to anybody’s challenge. And if you were good…well, it was possible to climb fast.

  Deke was one plane up. It was tournament fighting, three planes against three. Not many spectators, a dozen maybe, but it was a good fight, and they were noisy. Deke was immersed in the manic calm of combat when he realized suddenly that they had fallen silent. Saw the kickers stir and exchange glances. Eyes flicked past him. He heard the elevator doors close. Coolly, he disposed of the second of his opponent’s planes, then risked a quick glance over his shoulder.

  Tiny Montgomery had just entered Jackman’s. The wheelchair whispered across browning linoleum, guided by tiny twitches of one imperfectly paralyzed hand. His expression was stern, blank, calm.

  In that instant, Deke lost two planes. One to deresolution—gone to blur and canceled out by the facilitator—and the other because his opponent was a real fighter. Guy did a barrel role, killing speed and slipping to the side, and strafed Deke’s biplane as it shot past. It went down in flames. Their last two planes shared altitude and speed, and as they turned, trying for position, they naturally fell into a circling pattern.

  The kicker made room as Tiny wheeled up against the table. Bobby Earl Cline trailed after him, lanky and casual. Deke and his opponent traded glances and pulled their machines back from the pool table so they could hear the man out. Tiny smiled. His features were small, clustered in the center of his pale, doughy face. One finger twitched slightly on the chrome handrest. “I heard about you.” He looked straight at Deke. His voice was soft and shockingly sweet, a baby-girl little voice. “I heard you’re good.”

  Deke nodded slowly. The smile left Tiny’s face. His soft, fleshy lips relaxed into a natural pout, as if he were waiting for a kiss. His small, bright eyes studied Deke without malice. “Let’s see what you can do, then.”

  Deke lost himself in the cool game of war. And when the enemy went down in smoke and flame, to explode and vanish against the table, Tiny wordlessly turned his chair, wheeled it into the elevator, and was gone.

  As Deke was gathering up his winnings, Bobby Earl eased up to him and said, “The man wants to play you.”

  “Yeah?” Deke was nowhere near high enough on the circuit to challenge Tiny. “What’s the scam?”

  “Man who was coming up from Atlanta tomorrow canceled. Ol’ Tiny, he was spoiling to go up against somebody new. So it looks like you get your shot at the Max.”

  “Tomorrow? Wednesday? Doesn’t give me much prep time.”

  Bobby Earl smiled gently. “I don’t think that makes no nevermind.”

  “How’s that, Mr. Cline?”

  “Boy, you just ain’t got the moves, you follow me? Ain’t got no surprises. You fly just like some kinda beginner, only faster and slicker. You follow what I’m trying to say?”

  “I’m not sure I do. You want to put a little action on that?”

  “Tell you truthful,” Cline said. “I been hoping on that.” He drew a small black notebook from his pocket and licked a pencil stub. “Give you five to one. They’s nobody gonna give no fairer odds than that.”

  He looked at Deke almost sadly. “But Tiny, he’s just naturally better’n you, and that’s all she wrote, boy. He lives for that goddamned game, ain’t got nothing else. Can’t get out of that goddamned chair. You think you can best a man who’s fighting for his life, you are just lying to yourself.”

  Norman Rockwell’s portrait of the colonel regarded Deke dispassionately from the Kentucky Fried across Richmond Road from the coffee bar. Deke held his cup with hands that were cold and trembling. His skull bummed with fatigue. Cline was right, he told the colonel. I can go up against Tiny, but I can’t win. The colonel stared back, gaze calm and level and not particularly kindly, taking in the coffee bar and Best Buy and all his drag-ass kingdom of Richmond Road. Waiting for Deke to admit to the terrible thing he had to do.

  “The bitch is planning to leave me anyway,” Deke said aloud. Which made the black countergirl look at him funny, then quickly away.

  “Daddy called!” Nance danced into the apartment, slamming the door behind her. “And you know what? He says if I can get this job and hold it for six months, he’ll have the brainlock reversed. Can you believe it? Deke?” She hesitated. “You okay?”

  Deke stood. Now that the moment was on him, he felt unreal, like he was in a movie or something. “How come you never came home last night?” Nance asked.

  The skin on his face was unnaturally taut, a parchment mask. “Where’d you stash the hype, Nance? I need it.”

  “Deke,” she said, trying a tentative smile that instantly vanished. “Deke, that’s mine. My hit. I need it. For my interview.”

  He smiled scornfully. “You got money. You can always score another cap.”

  “Not by Friday! Listen. Deke, this is really important. My whole life is riding on this interview. I need that cap. It’s all I got!”

  “Baby, you got the fucking world! Take a look around you—six ounces of blond Lebanese hash! Little anchovy fish in tins. Unlimited medical coverage, if you need it.” She was backing away from him, stumbling against the static waves of unwashed bedding and wrinkled glossy magazines that crested at the foot of her bed. “Me, I never had a glimmer of any of this. Never had the kind of edge it takes to get along. Well, this one time I am gonna. There is a match in two hours that I am going to fucking well win. Do you hear me?” He was working himself into a rage, and that was good. He needed it for what he had to do.

  Nance flung up an arm, palm open, but he was ready for that and slapped her hand aside, never even catching a glimpse of the dark tunnel, let alone those little red eyes. They were both falling, and he was on top of her, her breath hot and rapid in his face. “Deke! Deke! I need that hit. Deke, my interview, it’s the only…I gotta…gotta…” She twisted her face away, crying into the wall. “Please God, please don’t…”

  “Where did you stash it?”

  Pinned against the bed under his body, Nance began to spasm, her entire body convulsing in pain and fear.

  “Where is it?”

  Her face was bloodless, gray corpse flesh, and horror burn
ed in her eyes. Her lips squirmed. It was too late to stop now; he’d crossed over the line. Deke felt revolted and nauseated, all the more so because on some unexpected and unwelcome level, he was enjoying this.

  “Where is it, Nance?” And slowly, very gently, he began to stroke her face.

  Deke summoned Jackman’s elevator with a finger that moved as fast and straight as a hornet and landed daintily as a butterfly on the call button. He was full of bouncy energy, and it was all under control. On the way up, he whipped off his shades and chuckled at his reflection in the finger-smudged chrome. The blacks of his eyes were like pinpricks, all but invisible, and still the world was neon bright.

  Tiny was waiting. The cripple’s mouth turned up at the corners into a sweet smile as he took in Deke’s irises, the exaggerated calm of his notions, the unsuccessful attempt to mime an undrugged clumsiness. “Well,” he said, in that girlish voice, “looks like I have a treat in store for me.”

  The Max was draped over one tube of the wheelchair. Deke took up position and bowed, not quite mockingly. “Let’s fly.” As challenger, he flew defense. He materialized his planes at a conservative altitude, high enough to dive, low enough to have warning when Tiny attacked. He waited.

  The crowd tipped him. A fatboy with brilliantined hair looked startled, a hollow-eyed cracker started to smile. Murmurs rose. Eyes shifted slow motion in heads frozen by hyped-up reaction time. Took maybe three nanoseconds to pinpoint the source of attack. Deke whipped his head up, and—

  Sonofabitch, he was blind! The Fokkers were diving straight from the two-hundred-watt bulb, and Tiny had suckered him into staring right at it. His vision whited out. Deke squeezed lids tight over welling tears and frantically held visualization. He split his flight, curved two biplanes right, one left. Immediately twisting each a half-turn, then back again. He had to dodge randomly—he couldn’t tell where the hostile warbirds were.

  Tiny chuckled. Deke could hear him through the sounds of the crowd, the cheering and cursing and slapping down of coins that seemed to syncopate independent of the ebb and flow of the duel.

  When his vision returned an instant later, a Spad was in flames and falling. Fokkers tailed his surviving planes, one on one and two on the other. Three seconds into the game, and he was down one.

  Dodging to keep Tiny from pinning tracers on him, he looped the single-pursued plane about and drove the other toward the blind spot between Tiny and the light bulb.

  Tiny’s expression went very calm. The faintest shadow of disappointment—of contempt, even—was swallowed up by tranquility. He tracked the planes blandly, waiting for Deke to make his turn.

  Then, just short of the blind spot, Deke shoved his Spad into a dive, the Fokkers overshooting and banking wildly to either side, twisting around to regain position.

  The Spad swooped down on the third Fokker, pulled into position by Deke’s other plane. Fire strafed wings and crimson fuselage. For an instant nothing happened, and Deke thought he had a fluke miss. Then the little red mother veered left and went down, trailing black, oily smoke.

  Tiny frowned, small lines of displeasure marring the perfection of his mouth. Deke smiled. One even, and Tiny held position.

  Both Spads were tailed closely. Deke swung them wide, and then pulled them together from opposite sides of the table. He drove them straight for each other, neutralizing Tiny’s advantage…neither could fire without endangering his own planes. Deke cranked his machines up to top speed, slamming them at each other’s noses.

  An instant before they crashed, Deke sent the planes over and under one another, opening fire on the Fokkers and twisting away. Tiny was ready. Fire filled the air. Then one blue and one red plane soared free, heading in opposite directions. Behind them, two biplanes tangled in midair. Wings touched, slewed about, and the planes crumpled. They fell together, almost straight down, to the green felt below.

  Ten seconds in and four planes down. A black vet pursed his lips and blew softly. Someone else shook his head in disbelief.

  Tiny was sitting straight and a little forward in his wheelchair, eyes intense and unblinking, soft hands plucking feebly at the grips. None of that amused and detached bullshit now; his attention was riveted on the game. The kickers, the table, Jackman’s itself, might not exist at all for him. Bobby Earl Cline laid a hand on his shoulder; Tiny didn’t notice. The planes were at opposite ends of the room, laboriously gaining altitude. Deke jammed his against the ceiling, dim through the smoky haze. He spared Tiny a quick glance, and their eyes locked. Cold against cold. “Let’s see your best,” Deke muttered through clenched teeth.

  They drove their planes together.

  The hype was peaking now, and Deke could see Tiny’s tracers crawling through the air between the planes. He had to put his Spad into the line of fire to get off a fair burst, then twist and band so the Fokker’s bullets would slip by his undercarriage. Tiny was every bit as hot, dodging Deke’s fire and passing so close to the Spad their landing gears almost tangled as they passed.

  Deke was looping his Spad in a punishingly tight turn when the hallucinations hit. The felt writhed and twisted—became the green hell of Bolivian rain forest that Tiny had flown combat over. The walls receded to gray infinity, and he felt the metal confinement of a cybernetic jumpjet close in around him.

  But Deke had done his homework. He was expecting the hallucinations and knew he could deal with them. The military would never pass on a drug that couldn’t be fought through. Spad and Fokker looped into another pass. He could read the tensions in Tiny Montgomery’s face, the echoes of combat in deep jungle sky. They drove their planes together, feeling the torqued tensions that fed straight from instrumentation to hindbrain, the adrenaline pumps kicking in behind the armpits, the cold, fast freedom of airflow over jet-skin mingling with the smells of hot metal and fear sweat. Tracers tore past his face, and he pulled back, seeing the Spad zoom by the Fokker again, both untouched. The kickers were just going ape, waving hats and stomping feet, acting like God’s own fools. Deke locked glances with Tiny again.

  Malice rose up in him, and though his nerve was taut as the carbon-crystal whiskers that kept the jumpjets from falling apart in superman turns over the Andes, he counterfeited a casual smile and winked. Jerking his head slightly to one side, as if to say, “Lookahere.”

  Tiny glanced to the side.

  It was only for a fraction of a second, but that was enough. Deke pulled as fast and tight an Immelmann—right on the edge of theoretical tolerance—as he had ever been seen on the circuit, and he was hanging on Tiny’s tail.

  Let’s see you get out of this one, sucker.

  Tiny rammed his plane straight down at the green, and Deke followed after. He held his fire. He had Tiny where he wanted him.

  Running. Just like he’d been on his every combat mission. High on exhilaration and hype, maybe, but running scared. They were down to the felt now, flying treetop level. Break, Deke thought, and jacked up the speed. Peripherally, he could see Bobby Earl Cline, and there was a funny look on the man’s face. A pleading kind of look. Tiny’s composure was shot; his face was twisted and tormented.

  Now Tiny panicked and dove his plane in among the crowd. The biplanes looped and twisted between the kickers. Some jerked back involuntarily, and others laughingly swatted at them with their hands. But there was a hot glint of terror in Tiny’s eyes that spoke of an eternity of fear and confinement, two edges sawing away at each other endlessly….

  The fear was death in the air, the confinement a locking away in metal, first of the aircraft, then of the chair. Deke could read it all in his face: Combat was the only out Tiny had had, and he’d taken it every chance he got. Until some anonymous nationalista with an antique SAM tore him out of that blue/green Bolivian sky and slammed him straight down to Richmond Road and Jackman’s and the smiling killer boy he faced this one last time across the faded cloth.

  Deke rocked up on his toes, face burning with that million-dollar smile that was the trademark
of the drug that had already fried Tiny before anyone ever bothered to blow him out of the sky in a hot tangle of metal and mangled flesh. It all came together then. He saw that flying was all that held Tiny together. That daily brush of fingertips against death, and then rising up from the metal coffin, alive again. He’d been holding back collapse by sheer force of will. Break that willpower, and mortality would come pouring out and drown him. Tiny would lean over and throw up in his own lap.

  And Deke drove it home….

  There was a moment of stunned silence as Tiny’s last plane vanished in a flash of light. “I did it,” Deke whispered. Then, louder, “Son of a bitch, I did it!”

  Across the table from him, Tiny twisted in his chair, arms jerking spastically; his head lolled on one shoulder. Behind him, Bobby Earl Cline stared straight at Deke, his eyes hot coals.

  The gambler snatched up the Max and wrapped its ribbon around a stack of laminateds. Without warning, he flung the bundle at Deke’s face. Effortlessly, casually, Deke plucked it from the air.

  For an instant, then, it looked like the gambler would come at him, right across the pool table. He was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Bobby Earl,” Tiny whispered, his voice choking with humiliation, “you gotta get me…out of here….”

  Stiffly, angrily, Cline wheeled his friend around, and then away, into shadow.

  Deke threw back his head and laughed. By God, he felt good! He stuffed the Max into a shirt pocket, where it hung cold and heavy. The money he crammed into his jeans. Man, he had to jump with it, his triumph leaping up through him like a wild thing, fine and strong as the flanks of a buck in the deep woods he’d seen from a Greyhound once, and for this one moment it seemed that everything was worth it somehow, all the pain and misery he’d gone through to finally win.

  But Jackman’s was silent. Nobody cheered. Nobody crowded around to congratulate him. He sobered, and silent, hostile faces swam into focus. Not one of these kickers was on his side. They radiated contempt, even hatred. For an interminably drawn-out moment the air trembled with potential violence…and then someone turned to the side, hawked up phlegm, and spat on the floor. The crowd broke up, muttering, one by one drifting into the darkness.