Novahead by Steve Aylett Read Free Book Online Page A

the fire out and sat breathing at the ground, the battle gradually stuttered back into play. My bloody paw had been cauterized, anyway. The kid and the old man had recovered and were now merely looking at me like dogs with nothing to lose. Heber was wearing a cheap suit like a kid at a wedding. It was battered and too small, and he hadn ’ t even the sense to jettison the tie. He looked about seventeen. The old man was conspicuous in a defective chameleon coat that consistently flushed through with the opposite colour from its background. I pushed the pair into a crouch behind the fire drum.
    Assault rifle charm and the swerving tracer wake of Kurras triage ammo crisscrossed the field of battle, illuminating a dimestore apocalypse. Seemed several parties had shown up wanting to do all their dying in one day, firing everything from rag-and-bone voodonics to Styx cannons to tat guns that fired embarrassing Mom tattoos. A chef was recklessly feeding an etheric belt through an old Vickers machine gun while giving out about this and that in a mixture of English, Behlta and Harangue. A mime in a half-car drawn by three lawyers was taking pot-shots with a Tuesday Afternoon Special. A frazzled clown brought down a nun with a flying tackle, and both instantly flared into a blot of dirty orange flame - one or the other must have been a bomb zombie. There was even an uncooked monkey scampering over the hardscrabble and busted blacktop. It seemed like every time I went into town, all hell broke loose.
    The smaller detonations sounded like bad edits but a thermobaric shell blew open so close and loud I briefly forgot my current name. Through swirling smoke and particulates I saw something like a bandoliered picture card - Junco was holding a bulky strata gun showing several tiers of add-ons and no sign of its original identity. A Saab? He fired a salvo at the cop car, which seemed to go wide, and racked another shell into the gun ’ s chamber. He tilted at an olive-drab Abrams tank covered in random insignia. A life lesson: tanks are faster than you think. This was speeding across the plaza until a vague auroral blackness peeled away behind it and it seemed to lose direction, plunging into a corrugated ammo hut. An eye-blinding fireball lit a group of roller-caged prowlcars as they took up position. Their deployment appeared incredibly unsophisticated, a staggered formation expressing an irregular equation with multiple values. Blince emerged from one into a speaker cage to spout unfathomable courtesies through a bullhorn. There was no pause in the charm bonanza and he had to holler above the blast of war. ‘ This is the police. None of us are remotely qualified to understand what is taking place here. Here ’ s the crux of the nutshell - I propose a suspension of law until this outrageous state of affairs has been explained. ’
    I extrapolated nothing of interest from this and nobody took it more seriously than it deserved. Blince ’ s mentality hadn ’ t changed, though to me it seemed he was alone in not getting any thinner over the years. What with the current lack of new food supplies, I suspected an autopsy might find other people ’ s bones in his body. Leon Wardial once argued that Blince shouldn ’ t be allowed to live because gravitational force had infinite range. Blince continued, the cops to either side of him already firing trad and triage into the field.
    ‘ Now a word from the acting DA, Gordi Pivot, who has a warrant for search and seizure on your broken bodies. I ’ m proud to tell lies shoulder-to-shoulder with this man, whose jurisdictional fiending would steal the wounds off a dead man. ’
    Blince signalled that this was all he knew or was willing to say by applying himself to the task of handing the bullhorn to Pivot and disappearing inside the armoured roller. Pivot was colourless, white-haired, an albino in cream. He took the bullhorn as he rose without enthusiasm or change of expression. ‘ Thank you