Count Zero by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

the things Two-a-Day had taught him.
    The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufacturers, part of the “shadow economy” the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz.
    Moths strobed crooked orbits around the halogen tube. Bobby watched blankly as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest, scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have been part of a coatrack. When the last one made it over the top, into the mess of plastic scrap, the line was drawn swiftly up. The scrap began to creak and rustle.
    Just like me, Bobby thought, I used to do that shit, fill my room up with weird garbage I’d find. One time Ling Warren’s sister found most of somebody’s arm, all wrapped in green plastic and done up with rubber bands.
    Marsha-momma’d get these two-hour fits of religion sometimes, come into Bobby’s room and sweep all his bestgarbage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin Mary, it didn’t much matter to her when the mood was on her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff again and I’ll kill your friends, Mom, all of ’em. She never tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.
    Now one of the dumpster kids popped up and conducted a slit-eyed survey of the immediate area, then ducked out of sight again. There was a clunking, scraping sound. Small white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a meter from the soles of Bobby’s boots; as it touched down, it happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol that stood for biohazard. “Hey, fuck,” he said, drawing his feet up reflexively.
    One of them slid down the rope and steadied the canister. The other two followed. He saw that they were younger than he’d thought.
    “Hey,” Bobby said, “you know that could be some real bad shit? Give you cancer and stuff.”
    “Go lick a dog’s ass till it bleeds,” the first kid down the rope advised him, as they flicked their grapple loose, coiled their line, and dragged the canister around the corner of the dumpster and out of sight.
     
    He gave it an hour and a half. Time enough: Leon’s was starting to cook.
    At least twenty Gothicks postured in the main room, like a herd of baby dinosaurs, their crests of lacquered hair bobbing and twitching. The majority approached the Gothick ideal: tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt restlessness, young athletes in the early stages of consumption. The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldn’twarp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.
    Now he watched them flexing and glittering in Leon’s like a composite creature, slime mold with a jigsaw surface of dark leather and stainless spikes. Most of them had nearly identical faces, features reworked to match ancient archetypes culled from kino banks. He chose a particularly artful Dean whose hair swayed like the mating display of a nocturnal lizard. “Bro,” Bobby began, uncertain if he’d met this one before.
    “My man,” the Dean responded languidly, his left cheek distended by a cud of