Demons by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page A

us go to the Council.”
     
     
    Late afternoon. The sky was lowering with smoke and haze; it looked as if the world was roofed in shale. We were in my converted Chevy—it had been converted to an electric car about ten years before and never seemed to have reconciled to the change. The body was a little too heavy for the electric engine, and it strained to reach forty. I was driving, the professor beside me, Melissa in the back, leaning forward between the seats.
    A burning garbage truck careened around the corner—I pictured it as a leviathan leaping from the surface of a sea of trash, a burning metal-and-rubber whale thrashing in and out of the oceanic swells of debris and decay at one of those really enormous landfills. It curveted on two wheels into the middle of our street, streaming flaming trash, its driver a black man with a bottle in one hand, laughing and weeping—I had to drive onto the broad sidewalk to avoid it. The truck was soon out of sight behind us.
    “We’ve got the wrong car for this,” I said, as we swerved around another drunken cadre of looters banging and bumping shopping carts full of holo-set players. “You need one of those hydrogen-powered SUVs—oh shit . . .”
    This last as an Arab with a rage-contorted face slammed a teenage boy onto the hood of our car. He’d backed him out of his half-demolished liquor store, was digging his rigid fingers into the boy’s neck. I had to hit the brakes to keep from dragging them down the street—Melissa yelling out the window, “Stop that, stop that, let him go!” The frustrated Arab, seeing his shop destroyed by looters, finally had one in his hands, and his face was—oh yes— demonic as he slammed the boy’s head on the hood of my car. He was enraged, but was he possessed? No.
    No, no one was possessed. Not exactly. There have been no possessions.
    Have I said that before? I say it again. It means something.
    The boy flailing and the Arab smashing, the two rolled off my car’s hood.
    “Help them!” Melissa yelled.
    I looked at Paymenz. “No,” he said. “Drive on. We must get there.”
    Driving on, past a group of children throwing bricks through the window of a store, I remembered the game HACKK, a first-person computer game I’d been addicted to. In HACKK, a biowarfare virus that attacked the human brain had turned most of the population into murderous zombies. The zombies were controlled by Terrorist Overlords. You had to get through the smoking ruins of the city to a sanctuary on the far side, killing psychotic ax-wielding viral zombies as you went, with weapons you picked up along the way, while outsmarting the Terrorist Overlords. It had been superbly realistic 3-D, in which every adversary was a distinct, cunning individual, and yet it had been dreamlike, had the tantalizing familiarity of some half-remembered nightmare.
    “Who was it,” I wondered aloud, as we veered down a mostly empty street—smoking ruins on one side, shattered plastic boxes trailing from store windows on the other—“who said that some video games had the quality of the bardos? E. J. Gold, I think. . . .”
    “You’re doing that nervous, irrelevant commentary again,” Melissa said, her voice tight with fear as we drove through gathering shadows.
    “Let him say whatever gets him through here,” Paymenz said.
    I was driving as I was speaking—as if in a trance. I was so tired. “Remember Gold? One of the last century’s grassroots, homegrown California gurus. He used the game Quake to induce a kind of paranoia-sharpened awareness in his followers, told them to think of the bardo states that would come after death as computer games set up by some mysterious programmer. Or something along those lines. Learn the rules of that bardo and you’d find your way out, pass the test into the next realm . . . the next level. . . .”
    What were the rules for this game? Were we in an afterlife bardo, here?
    It wasn’t that, either. Demons or no, this was