Terminal Two - First Episode: Conurbations

Maranaloka is a city on the edge. Cable-draped slums knot and conspire like keloid, scabs so picked at that they are forever ugly and ruined. Town Hall rises from the wound's crusted centre like a crappy obelisk, upper floors gubbling with glots of green sun-blistered ooze. At the western city limits, fenced off and lonely as an apocalypse car lot, Jenkins Airport drinks heat, waiting.

* * *

We boosted down Fifty-Fifth in a volley of lawbolts, pulping as many of the Governor's verdant grot-brained kids as we could kiss with the fender. By the time Two Blade stalled the Ram trying to exit the Pay & Park, my fingers were hot as loaves, the footwells musical with crackling etheric runoff.

'Bishop in a bag!' Two Blade spat and dug the accelerator with his heel. Empty clunks. He made a gecko face and twisted the ignition key like an ear. A score of City Peace in white riot duds were marching up the exit ramp, park lights gliding like goldfish over their visors and trembling in the heatwarp from the prongs of their SafeStaves.

I said nothing to Two Blade, but twizzled a wet finger in his ear. He gave a sour grimace and then the engine awoke, phlegmy and confused like a grandpa. The Peace stirred from a march to a clumping run and I, feeling chewy and nihilistic after a blow to the head the previous evening, elected to summon Thoth's heart onto the wasted potential of my lap.

Thoth had long since been bound to the will of a Solicitor far more enterprising than I, but His heart, black and gooey like a massive cancerous testicle had detached itself from its owner and now wandered through the lacy membranes of Underspace, phasing in and out of indifferent planes and occasionally assuming stinky corporeal form. I made the passes with scissored digits and reality puckered just above my crotch. There was a sound like a toothless codger sucking on a pig's liver then the heart soughed wetly into existence.

It was big as a calf; scabbed with wheezing valves it sweated a tarry resin that hardened into waxen ovals on contact with my thighs. The gory sac pullulated fitfully as I laid my palms against its spaghetti-veined chambers. Something like used chewing tobacco slobbered from the base. We were already wheelspinning out onto the street when I turned and, leaning over the Ram's folded roof, flung Thoth's heart at the advancing Peace.

It hit the tarmac like a spoiled pud, rolled a few feet then sank under the weight of its own dark redundancy. Gouts of steam trumpeted from breached liquorice arteries; ink pooled and showed the world perfect and reversed. The Peace wavered. Taking this as a fine augury, I began to play harmonica. Two Blade swung the Ram round to face uptown, towards the Syphilis Barracks and Club Tatami, where scarab-headed girls spat juice into tall vases. Meanwhile, the most junior of the Peace's ranks shuffled toward the heart with obvious resentment. His SafeStave thrummed like a power cable. He glanced back at his colleagues, who offered only oven-faced neutrality. His sigh was discernable even through five skins of environmental suit. Raising his SafeStave like Poseidon, the young patsy plunged it into the stinking daemonic organ.

There clung a brief, sickening hiatus while the superheated prong luxuriated in the impossibly cold core of Thoth's heart. Two Blade's heel shadowed the accelerator like a hawk over a field mouse. Trust the City Peace to stab first and invent justifications later ' Peace excuses were frequently so implausible that they heaped insult upon the original injury.

Of course the heart exploded like a depth-charged peat bog and Peace fell in their clammy dozens clawing at smoking clots of viscera. Two Blade hit the gas and we were down the road and on our merry way to Gunt Tunnel before the stench of scorched flesh began mingling with exhaust fumes.

* * *

Getting the codes out of Prenderghast was tricky as stilt-sex. While Two Blade pinioned his arms I went for the StockPriest's shins with the unimaginative end of a fire extinguisher. It was beauty and ugliness and he sang all the while, gibberish arias that clearly sapped his energy. I called him a dunce, but I might as well have drawn sand mandalas for all the impact it had on the ninny, sluicing blood through his teeth and whinnying of coastal boltholes and some busty object of a teenage crush. My despair was an intensely private affair.

Eventually the tarnished vice halves of Two Blade's impatience winced shut. He began to stalk the room, sloshing pilfered gasoline over Prenderghast's prized martyr figurines and screaming: 'Is life suffering? Only if you're doing it right!' Prenderghast was all prayed out and just watched, woozy and pink round the eyes. I didn't have anything to add at this juncture, so I let the acrid theatre play out however Providence and her five whorish daughters dictated.

'Okay! Okay!' relented Prenderghast in a ketchup mist.

Two Blade paused mid-spree. A last drop of gasoline hung from the rim of the can like a tear.

'You're teetering on the brink, padre,' he warned, his upper and lower teeth shifting back and forth like two shelves of a penny cascade.

Prenderghast sniffed gloomily. 'I need an x-ray.'

'Nothing's broken we don't all know about,' Two Blade sneered. 'This is a precision operation. No barrelling in half-cut some time around ten then knocking off come three, no siree.' He clenched his fist and the pulpy remnants of a plum tomato wept through his fingers. 'Think I built my portfolio taking tea breaks? Mark my face, padre ' me and the Chief are the twin pinnacles of data extraction and gut-splattered aftermaths.'

'The codes are graven into my forearm.' Prenderghast looked plaintive and pooped. The destruction of the tomato had clearly shaken him to his blighted core. 'You need an x-ray to read them.'

Two Blade scowled. 'What kind of world are we living in where a simple fifty digit code nosebleeds out of a chump's head before his peers can steal it?'

'A flat one.' I was already hefting the cleaver. When Prenderghast saw what I meant to do he crumpled like a pranged dirigible.

'Radiation's the silent killer,' I cooed. 'Take your doubts to Roentgen if you don't believe me.'

'But he's been dead for over two hundred years.'

'Exactly.' The blade sliced through his arm like the lake-tached prow of a yacht.

* * *

Hammering down the savage remnants of the freeway we heard a noise like two shovel blows to a mole's skull then the engine gave. Two Blade pulled over onto a glassy rink that had once been desert. Chugging stolen beer, I remained both taciturn and enigmatic in the back seat. Two Blade scrambled over the driver's door in a kind of frenzy, then straightened up, as if remembering himself, and strolled round to the front grille in his own sweet time, whistling a maddening ditty that had been popular during the Distraction Wars.

He popped the hood with a tap from his ebony cane. Instantly I smelt rancid bacon. Two Blade made the international sign for 'holy shit' and I knew we had homunculi. I tugged on a summoned deerstalker and joined him, peering into the hot garbage of drums and warped cylinders while somewhere people fucked and ate mint cake. Purple critters were gnawing at tubes and staging mock executions beneath the spark plugs.

'This is a sad day for pessimists,' I uttered, with all the finality of a crunched heirloom. My announcement failed to rouse the focused vermin, and even Two Blade looked noxious with contempt.

He flexed his long, witchy fingers. 'I'll have to pluck 'em out each in turn like raisins from a muffin.'

'Ah, the much hated raisins,' I echoed, glad to shift the target of his ire. A homunculus began urinating into the radiator, grinning its triumph. 'Best not touch these filthy immigrants, Teeb ' give you the gastrospore or worse, phase your uncomprehending heiney to a plane where neurons are made of polystyrene beans and knackers burst at room temperature.'

Two Blade took a step back. 'Aha. Thanks for the heads up, Chief.' He held the tip of his cane to his lips and started to thrill his fingers up and down its shaft as if it were a flute. Glowering into the riddled engine, I pretended not to notice.

'This,' I announced to no one in particular, 'is the work of a bastard.' I pointed to various spots amongst the junk. 'A HexNet shielding these happy campers, see?' Two Blade sniffed his sodden armpit in a way which told me he did not see. 'They're free to feast until the cows come home ' and those bovine sons of bitches have been AWOL for years.' I straightened, expression flat as a roadbridge suicide. 'I can't oust these scoundrels, Teeb. That's beyond my capabilities with the resources at hand.'

Two Blade glanced about, bamboozled. There was tarmac broken up like a dropped tray of flapjacks, glass desert and the odd ex-lookout tower melted to black slag.

'That's right,' I said, slamming the hood like a concert pianist. 'We're gonna have to get a stomp on.'

Two Blade set the base of his cane down upon the road. The cane was far too short and he was forced to hunch like a crone.

'Just so long as there's good winds for kite day,' he said.

'Get to the trunk, you asshole. We can't leave the padre's codearm out in this wilderness. It'd be devoured by wolfcopters lickety-split.'

Cowed, Two Blade clumped round to the back of the Ram and retrieved Prenderghast's forearm from the sweat-slick boot. He'd had the presence of mind to wrap the limb in cellophane and now it glistened like a mannequin part.

The sky was staccato with dingbats hurling bleached squeals at each other. The original plan had been to lay low somewhere out in the warped wilds munching tinned rations until the heat cooled to a sexy afterglow. Then we would've snuck back into the city under the cover of veg, riding in a bogus zucchini truck all the way to the Sargasso Palladium, beneath which our prize lay pulsing like a trout in a mattress.

Our plan had taken a turn for the fucked. I goggled down the cracked spine of the freeway, thumbing tears from my eyes, the city's towers stiff and grey past the vanishing point like a pinmould culture. It reminded me that I'd left the refrigerator open. The milk was probably up and about and belching its newly-sentient glee. Meanwhile heat vapour turned the road liquid. The sun was blast furnace gutsy, as if the bastard were showboating.

Our alternative was staying with the Ram till a random philanthropist stopped by, fresh from touring the Bombwastes looking for a couple of paralegal misfits to extricate from failure's fat jaws. Fact was, is and always will be bucko that ever since the Samsaraleak, hanging round beyond city limits after dark was like kneeling in front of a train track with your balls laid flat on the cold, cold line.

'We're going back to the city,' I said, glumly.

'Change of plan, Chief?'

'You betcha sweet bippy.' I loaded a rucksack with beer. 'We're doing the heist tonight.'

* * *

I armwrestled a deal with some low-rank sallow-faced ghoul for rags, and me and the T-Blade crept back in amongst the highrise haberdashers and funk-wafted conurbations disguised as harmless almsmen. There must've been a beautiful screamwind blowing through the Outer Circles because the sour minion sweetened the exchange with some tarnished pots and pans, which hung from our rounded backs on bits of twine and clanked pathetically. We shuffled up Snark Avenue which had its guts torn out for the benefit of new soulwires and shoddy resurfacing to facilitate easier axle damage. Public works were recrimination flypaper, snagging the populace's scattergun fury and giving it an easy home, leaving officials free to shaft citizens and each other in ever more outlandish and creative ways. The citizens, for their part, got off on the merry-go-round of misplaced trust, betrayals and blue-faced hollering ' after all, there wasn't a carbon-based being in Maranaloka who wouldn't resort to a blowdart from a speeding taxi if the circumstances were favourable. Every fucker in the city's either a bastard or a moron ' and a moron's just a bastard too stupid to know it yet.

Two Blade let out whimpering noises as he walked and at first I thought they were part of his character and felt very impressed with the inventive so-and-so. Then I thought it might be the caltrop he trod on when we took a shortcut through Shinobi Underpass, but the red footprints had stopped a good three blocks back and frankly, if he'd still been complaining at this late stage I'd have gleefully given the intolerant bastard a clock round the loaf with a saucepan's underside. Finally I caught the tremble in his knees and realised he hadn't taken a piss in six hours, poor lamb. I guided him down an alleyway where junkies lay frothing and singing folksongs, gristly rodents suckling on their sceptic track marks in trios and quartets. A brown-cowled kid sat next to a busted melon crate. Two Blade sidled up to the dark brick of the alley end. The wall was slashed with anti-daemon graffiti. After a tense thirty seconds of fumbling, a short arc of gold fell from his crotch and broke itself against the soot-tanned stone. I was so damn proud.

'You're pissing on the wrong wall if you want to call Brahmini Jones.' I turned and the hood kid was staring up at us, one eye all puckered and yellow like a bellybutton filled with yolk. Two Blade just went right on draining his bladder, cheery as a tickled tyke.

'And what the Jenkins would you know about fast ways to die, little man?' said I, flexing and bracing myself for a couple of tendril requests.

'Nowt,' said the kid, and I noticed his fingernails were painted coma black, 'but I know a tad about half-daemonic Fleshbrokers with a penchant for whist and intraphase migraines like you wouldn't believe, brother.' He fanned himself with a bit of damp cardboard.

'The prophecy has been fulfilled!' Two Blade sang, shaking a final few droplets from his victorious Johnson. All the numbskulls in the alley groaned like squashed accordions. He stepped back from the wall, where his piss had left a wet patch in the shape of a fir tree.

'Didn't think you two looked much like real beggars,' the kid scoffed quietly. But I heard him. Oh, I heard him all right. Understand that at least.

I wasn't friendly with too many genuine vagrants but I realised now that the tendril thing would've been out of character. I tried to veil my embarrassment, but behind the perfect façade my guts were mulching.

'Well, now that y'mention it, maybe I ought to purge my bagpipes also,' I blustered, and I snatched my dick from under the rags in a single, fluid motion, shaming Two Blade to ruddy contortions. The kid remained implausibly calm as I rotated forty-five degrees to face the opposite wall and started pissing like a man possessed ' which, of course, I am.

And so it was that steam rose like time-lapsed wheat sheaves and the brickwork scrunched then billowed out and sphered us. I'd barely time to pinch shut the mighty reservoir when me and Two Blade found ourselves drenched and standing inside some kind of driftwood treehouse, the heady stench of foliage and guano wafting in through thick, putty-coloured drapes.

A half-daemon with tusks for nostrils and a lower torso resembling nothing so much as a drift net full of soaked horses regarded us from behind a teak escritoire. He wore a small pair of wire reading glasses and, from the scent of his huffing breaths, I deduced he had just finished a very hot lamb curry laced with hash. A bronze nameplate read: 'BRAHMINI JONES ' Fleshbroker' followed by a sequence of what were either primitive ideograms or claw-marks.

'Aha. My good people,' said Brahmini Jones, opening his arms in a generous air hug.

Me, Two Blade, and my flaccid pink organ were silent as pies.