Codename Prague by D. Harlan Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

opposite direction. They punched each other for two minutes. Then the sasquatch disemboweled the Lundgren, tearing open the android’s six pack and yanking out intestines hand over fist. There was no blood. Only viscera. And the viscera scarcely glistened in the dull orange light of the office.
    Rabelais clutched his chest. “Cunt on a stick! These models are supposed to be fully loaded. The government isn’t paying for me to get off on empty shells.” The sasquatch looked at him with wet, apologetic eyes. Rabelais retrieved an instruction manual from a drawer and began to rifle through it.
    A SAMSA entered the office through a trap door and brained the sasquatch with a two-by-four. As the cleaning crew busied themselves, Prague rose from his chair. The chair tried to keep him seated, but he eluded it.
    “This has been fun, CR. Go fuck yourself.”
    “Relax, Vinnie,” he said, setting the manual aside. “No need to get pissy now.”
    “I’m not pissy. I’m cool. I’m calm. I’m Jack and the beanstalk.”
    Rabelais nodded. “OK. Not sure what beanstalks have to do with the price of beans. Solid fairy tale, though. Same thing goes for fairy tales as for Shakespeare, by the way. All literature, really.”
    “Thanks for the tip. Ibid, fuck you.“
    “More pissiness. Where does it end?”
    The chair’s arm reached up and gripped Prague by the elbow. He ripped off the arm, then turned and destroyed the chair with a fusillade of stomps.
    “You’re paying for that,” said Rabelais.
    Prague replied, “If you say so. I’ll be in touch. Maybe I’ll oblige the MAP after all—killing that chair brings back memories.”
    As he left, the wall birthed a mob of xenophobic, sadistic Karen Carpenters and one occupant of interplanetary flesh…

 
    04
    The Scorsese Boys
     
    After receiving his assignment, Anvil-in-Chief Vincent Prague went straight to the zoo and stole a crocodile. “People usually try to stay clear of crocs,” said the zookeeper when he watched the tape of the theft. “They don’t befriend them.”
    Prague put a leash on the crocodile and took it on a walk through the park. It devoured two dogs. It attacked a toddler in a stroller.
    Prague apologized to the toddler’s mother. He apologized to the crocodile before putting it down with a gyrostabilized submachine gun. “You’re riding high in April,” he told a reporter, “shot down in May.” He signed a few autographs, then went home to pack. He wouldn’t tell Rabelais that he planned on taking the job until later. Maybe he wouldn’t tell him at all.
    On the gondola ride, he put on a halo and skimmed the editorials that spiraled around his head. The other passengers did likewise, sitting at attention in hoverchairs, backs straight, hands on knees, with lips granulated like scar tissue…Beyond the gondola, the lights of City City slashed the night into long strips of chemical darkness…
    Prague ran into trouble outside the entranceway to his building. It set in motion a sequence of troubling events that encompassed nearly two decades of his life.
    The Scorsese Boys.
    They included the meanest, craziest and most vicious of director Martin Scorsese’s anti-heros: Casino ’s Nicky Santoro, Gangs of New York ’s Bill the Butcher, Cape Fear ’s Max Cady, GoodFella s Tommy DeVito, The Departed ’s Francis Costello, and Taxi Driver ’s Travis Bickle. All of the androids were easily recognizable by their roles and the actors who played them. Prague was well-versed in Scorsese cinema and had scrapped with the gangsters before. The MAP unleashed them whenever they suspected an agent of insubordination, even if the act of insubordination had not yet occurred, and even if the probability of it occurring was a shot in the dark.
    The Scorsese Boys annoyed Prague on multiple levels. The shithawking terrorism they wreaked annoyed him, of course, but so did the fact that DeVito and Santoro, both of which had originally been portrayed by Joe Pesci,