Terminal Two - Fourth Episode: Chief For Governor

Spectacular nuggets of hearsay orbit Klaus Firework like hot moons.

Accelerated to escape velocity by the faddish chatter of BabbleNet wankgaggers and paranoiacs, the KF meme took on a brainless unlife. Eager participants exchanged bogus factoids like bodily fluids, claiming 'Klaus Firework is a billion miles tall', 'Klaus Firework spits super-heated arctic wolves', 'Klaus Firework bursts from ruptured prophylactics to chide careless lovers' and other impossible feats of strength and prowess. The phenomenon peaked and split its shackles when one list ended 'Klaus Firework has killed you and all your friends and all sentient life and everything in existence and now stands, panting, alone, at The End of Time, warmed only by the slow dawn of his own burgeoning regret.' It's a testament to Firework's then rising stock as an anti folk hero that a number of readers took this statement to be literally true and died of shock.

It was only a matter of time before the Klaus Firework myth escaped to the streets and insinuated itself like piss.
A faded piece of graffito alleges he's half daemon. Wild-eyed sots in Maranaloka's clammiest bars will insist he's pureblood and an ex-Doomlord to boot. One legend popular amongst the city clergy says that he was a Seraphim who in a moment of temptation supped from the chilltides, instantly realising the banality of virtue. There's a sect, hundreds strong, tucked away in some sticky armpit of the Lower East Side Catacombs operating under the central credo that Klaus Firework is the collective guilt of humankind given life through some bumbling minion's clerical error. Some whisper that he is an egg which if broken open will reveal the glow-soaked secrets of the universe. A Stockpriest once told me quite seriously that Firework is just an ordinary guy with excellent intraphase marksmanship skills and a knack for self-publicity. Of course I gored the lying bastard's groin with a yak horn.

No one can agree on what Firework looks like or when he was last seen. Doesn't stop them attributing every otherwise inexplicable death in town (and plenty of perfectly explicable ones) to him with gay abandon. The more he isn't there, the more he's got a foot-long manhood that sprays flame.

'We'll ride this trauma out, Chief,' Two Blade chirruped as we trudged boomerang-backed through the flyblown alleys of the Garbage District. 'He's just one man.'

'And a wasp's just a raisin wrapped in hazard tape. Gimme a break, Teeb. Hell, gimme three and we'll call it quits.' I sparked up a filched cigar with the loose intent of igniting a methane pocket and blasting the pair of us to stinky embers. No such luck.

'You give soul trampling pessimism a bad name,' Two Blade muttered, unable to repress a little heel click and shimmy-shake to the left. 'I thought you and the jitters were no longer on speaking terms. You sure it's abject fear being struck into your heart and not just angina?'

'"Gazelle-like, citizens leap to conclusions. Doltish herd! I am a lion, toothy with hidden catches.'

'That's from the Governor's acceptance speech, isn't it?'

I scowled. 'It was his campaign slogan.' I punted an old oil can and it rainbowed through the last good pane of a slum window. Glass slivers fell like flat clear slices of pie. 'And terror's still unwelcome at my table. The shakes wracking my body are aggravation's doing.'

'Do you think¦' Two Blade halted and gazed into the puffy basin of his open palm. 'Do you think there's ever been a pancake so flat it didn't exist?'

'There's something about that guy,' I continued, 'that makes me just¦' I blew a smoke loop round and fat as two doughnuts. 'It's like every time I hear his name I want to bite a kitten's nose off.'

'What? Klaus Firework?' Two Blade supplied the catalyst with a hint of a smirk.

'You sick potato. I'm not an atrocity vending machine.'

'I know. It's just I got into this argument with a kitten once and-' He broke off like the far end of a long piece of cheesecake.

'And what? Did you lose? Did you let it bleed like a radiator? Speak to me Teeb. You know awkward silences remind me of my-' My gaze drifted westward in the slipstream of his and encountered a soot black stove, its door slatted like a knight's visor, blocking our path between two trash mounds. It trembled three feet from the ground on a half dozen jointed legs. They looked to have been cannibalised from a messload of sources ' one was a bent radio aerial; another was the piston mechanism from a large footpump; the leg to the left and rear looked like it had once been one of the telescopic TeslaBatons the City Peace used to tote before SafeStaves became standard issue. From the top of the flue-pipe, the rectangular camouflage-green head of a trench periscope flicked from me, to Two Blade, to me again. Through the narrow gaps in the stove's guts we could hear flywheels clicking and the hum of a cooling fan. I squinted into the dull lens of its junk eye, unsure of the proper etiquette and edgy as a coked-up nun.

'Think it's hostile, Chief?' Two Blade breathed.

'We're in Maranaloka, Teeb. Of course it's fucking hostile.'

'But it's got no arms.'

'Neither has a waffle iron ' but would you go sticking your dick in one?'

Two Blade gave me a look of baffled wonderment. The periscope slowly rotated to scrutinise him.

'Exact-a-freaking-mundo,' I said.

'So what we do now? Back off like we never saw nothing?' Fingers all bunched together in a knuckle orgy he appraised the tarnished oddments keeping the teetering junkbot aloft.

'We need to go this way,' I growled, 'and besides ' it's seen our faces.' I slathered my final clause in an especially generous portion of portentous sauce.

Two Blade cocked his head and peered into the periscope lens. 'You think it can really see out that kooky window?'

'Does it matter, oh ye of little face?'

Two Blade shrugged. 'I dunno. Just seems to me if we make a policy of destroying everything we don't understand, we'll end up dying of exhaustion¦ or killing each other.'

'Yeah right ' I can read you like a Braille suicide note.'

'And you're like a Dear John letter with a crude phallus scrawled at the bottom.'

I had to smile at the comparison ' it was apt, for all its vapid cruelty. 'Apt!' I remarked out loud.

Two Blade beamed. 'Like imprisoning a mime in an invisible sound-proof box.'

'Like eating a fatso.'

While we bandied apposite similes back and forth a subtle tick-a-tack-a-tick-a-tack-a-tick-a-tack whispered in our lugholes. Two Blade glanced askance at the gloom-hung sky.

'Is it raining marbles?'

'I don't hear the warning klaxons.'

'The city doesn't have warning klaxons.'

'Exactly.'

'Save for the Governor's anguished groans.'

I amphitheatred my ear with a cupped palm. 'And can you hear the bilious parasite broadcasting his displeasure as thousands of tiny glass spheres pelt his green and semi-liquid guts?'

Two Blade shook his head, abashed.

'Then what the Jenkins could that noise possibly-' And I turned to see a motley congregation of junkbots six rows deep confronting us.

'Answers roll downhill, Chief.'

A rusted oil drum with a road cone bursting from its midriff like a loud hailer, a doll's pram palpitating with arpeggiating pistons that gurgled steam, some kind of cracked metal trough augmented by complex motor parts and ogling the urban squalor through a thick nest of proctoscopes; fire-blackened trash cans and welded canisters tottered on shoddy clusters of articulated limb-salvage, breaking into abrupt waltzy skitters as their balance centres glitched then came back online. The junkbots whirred, clicked and peep-peep-peeped, studying us and each other and the clumped grots of surgical waste landscaping the Garbage District. Every so often two would dink appendages and a ripple of looping feedback ghosted the crowd like static through a wheat field.

I drew breath through palisaded gnashers and eyed Two Blade. 'In my boundless optimism¦'

The air chittered as several dozen bots shifted, insectile, directing ear-trumpets, myopic lantern-eyes, duff barometers, clickety Geiger counters and windsocks towards the new info source. A scuffed leather trunk snuffed at me through a giant porcine schnozz of vulcanised rubber grafted onto its lid. A towering aggregation of camera paraphernalia flashed and shutterbugged like a tree stuffed with exploding lobsters, pivoting on mismatched tripod legs, its glassy menagerie of trapped lenses twist-zooming for close-ups and wide-angles.

My shoulders slopped with resignation. 'The reason I've called this press conference,' I declared with hastily faked-up composure, and flashbulbs blasted my pupils to pinpricks, 'is to announce my decision to run for Governor.' I felt Two Blade tapping me on the shoulder. 'What is it?' I hissed. 'Can't you see I'm in the middle of a-'

'I thought¦' The hiss-hum tide of thirsty data-harvesting slid to the new speaker. His jaw clenched under the pressure. 'Chief¦' he whispered, gurning magnificently. 'My understanding was that we were trying to enter the city, uh¦ incognito?'

'Incognito schmincognito. Just trust me.' I turned to address the clanking miscellany. 'Ah¦ of course, what my Campaign Manager means to say is AHA!' And my hands hey prestoed out from ragfolds and hung, clench-twitching in the evening's stink, signifying nothing. Even the junkbots seemed underwhelmed. I blinked, squinted for the spackle of Swiss-cheesing ether, the nasty coruscation of uncanny blue voltage, a disquieting confetti shower, anything. Hints of ozone wafted cheekily behind the grim pong of shit and motor oil.

'Chief?' breathed Teeb.

'So you see,' I went on with a loon's stridence, 'I have two ordinary palms just as any other man. Not a trace of algae nor means to shed snotty offspring via repugnant asexual fission. Rub your collective face in it? Not on your Nigel. Shower my doomed bid in mass indifference and watch me bump and inconvenience my way up through the ranks like an untethered barrage balloon. Head honcho?' I ground a thumb against my breastbone. 'Give over, laddos, you know it makes a surreal, discomfiting kind of sense.' Through the corner of my mouth I growled at Two Blade: 'HexNet. Massive as a circus tent. Whole area's no-go for Soliciting.'

He whispered: 'You want we should back up?'

'Seems we're surroundified.' I nodded at the sudden herd of brass-scuttle misfits clamouring obliquely behind us. 'Besides¦ this is our smartest route. Things may seem receptive to a welter of equally valid methodologies but choice is a rum swizz, Teeb. Try lighting a cigarette on a gas explosion and see how much of your face stays intact.' Scrutinising my audience with boss-eyed disdain, I brandished a fat grin and careened blithely on. 'Of course, I lost the last of my scruples down the plughole, I care nothing for this city and as far as I'm concerned the lot of you should be melted down and metamorphosed into some scrappy macabre tableaux ' perhaps two dugongs in their death throes.'

Two Blade winced and I realised I had carried the ruse past its logical conclusion into some barren hinterland littered with the bleached bones of swindlers too dim to say when. I was so convincing as a city official it was all I could do to hold back from ripping my bonce clean of its shoulders and dropkicking it into the nearest trash compactor.

'Or perhaps you ought all to pretend I am made of smoke and do nothing as I shuffle cussing between your thronging reconstituted peculiarities, eh?' My hands slipped back beneath the lank contours of my increasingly incongruous beggar disguise. A hunch nestled hamster-comfy in my guts ' someone was watching us. 'I'll take your clear dearth of sentience as a yes.'

T-Blade bit his lip and looked sexy.

'Come on, Teeb,' I wheedled. 'We've done enough to check the box marked "Fanny around with ill-conceived garbage sentinels on today's to-do list. The milk's spilt and I refuse to act lachrymose ' bigger and better challenges lie ahead, huh?'
Two Blade eyed the ad hoc ranks of steel and tin automata, leery of wading amongst fleshless trashkin sans daemonic back-up. 'I've got to tell you, Chief, I'm not sold.'

'Look.' A flashbulb popped and I was momentarily blinded. 'Maybe tonight's the night I get diced to pet food but it won't be at the sad, rickety limbs of this gormless tribe.' As my vision cleared I saw a dirty hatbox scuttling blindly on a carpet of typewriter-key legs. It bumped against Two Blade's ankle and he squealed with such conviction that several junkbot microphones fritzed and blew. When he at last mustered the sack to peep downward he saw the hatbox turning rapid, baffled circles on the muck-smeared tarmac. 'See? They're just dumb animals. Like us.'

Two Blade sighed. 'Whatever you say, Chief.'

'And if I told you to defy gravity?'

'It's a dead cert I'd be spring-heeling off drab ziggurats and whooping my purty little head off.'

I slapped him on the back, his tatty cookware jangling. 'Good lad.'

I took my first bold step, and instantly the ramshackle mob stiffened to attention, a single massed shuck. Spooked and drooling perspiration I stepped again. Like a beachload of mating season crabs, the junkbot gaggle reacted in queer mechanised harmony. The crowd unzipped down its centre leaving a clear corridor through their ranks.

'Is this a welcoming committee,' Two Blade muttered, 'or did I just hear the click of a trap setting its jaws?'

'Check how many legs you've got when we reach the other side and there's your answer.' I took a breath ' a little habit I can't seem to kick ' and strode down the newly opened path. No brake cable tendrils lashed out to scourge me; no crane arm crunched my ribcage like a cracker packet. I passed the putt-putt-putt of an idling outboard motor that coughed clouds through a warped grille like a fag-knackered geriatric. Two Blade followed, affecting a front of hissing, feral mistrust.

We lived ' if you call this living. On the bot river's far bank we found ourselves entering the trash warrens proper, channelled into sludge-licked byways lined with hedges of urban detritus three storeys tall. Mixed organic waste had slid into the cracks and hardened like beetle spit round a cold assortment of the lost or discarded. There were little things, like pennies embossed with the Governor's amorphous visage and fringed with the city motto: TRUST US, IT'S BETTER THIS WAY; verdigris-tainted but still legal tender they waited like tiny pockets of the world's crappiest ore, daring some bloody-minded drudge to set the lot loose with a chisel and earn himself enough change for a casual slap at Roxy's Punishment Bar. Balloon whisks, palette knives, fish slices and a host of other part-perished culinary utensils hung in static constellation around what appeared to be the jaundiced skeleton of a chef, some sort of cylindrical cranial deformity protruding from the top of his skull and filling the space where his white hat ought to have been. There was larger, more outré stuff, the marbled refuse-walls just showing off now: the dull exposed fluke of a giant barnacle-crusted anchor; the brittle carcass of an entire combine harvester; a massive fibreglass clown face, its red-lipped mouth a door. We came, we saw, we ducked under the crooked rotor of a crunched chopper stuffed floor-to-ceiling with mouldering goose cadavers. There were no rats at all, only spiders.

'Are we there yet?' said Two Blade, then we rounded a bend and emerged in a courtyard. Shaped from the trash heaps its stench was at once vile and distinct; the centrepiece was a gaping sewage pipe like a tank barrel, retching brown slurry from its dark and boomy interior. The junk-bluffs on either side were sculpted to near-perfect symmetry, the light check-patterned; I glanced up and saw a cross-crissed canopy of insulated cables slung low over the whole sloppy enterprise, weird simian junkbots brachiating from one wall to another with gangly pincered limbs.

Suddenly one sputtered mid-grab, lost its purchase and dropped straight for Teeb, who was whispering to a spider. Gotta hand it to the boy ' they never respond nor seem to do anything worthwhile yet he'll keep demanding favours of them all the same. Sometimes the stuff he asks for he ends up getting. Who am I to say spiders don't deserve partial credit? At least, says Teeb, there's no tedious bun-fights over whether they exist.

So T-Blade was about to get squished by an old gas cooker crammed with pulleys, cogs and a dinky engine, and with my Underspace connections nixed I might as well have been painted on plasterboard, and I thought Death is the meat-puppet's strings getting snipped, and then the spider in ever-blackening shadow scuttled away from him and he stepped after it yelling, 'Oi Muggins! I'm not done with you!' and the junkbot pistoned into the ground he left vacant, buckling in a six-tiered spark-sneeze. The oven door blew loose and motor guts spilt in a fan-pattern.

Two Blade straightened, glanced over his shoulder, then chucked the arachnid a chummy wink. 'Cheers mate!' The spider vanished into a soda can. Two Blade looked over at me, beaming, the fallen junkbot a concertinaed ruin behind him. 'See? What did I tell you?'

'That I should get a haircut and stop asking strangers if I can borrow their eyes.'

'Well, feel free to treat this as a vindication.'

'It's a peach, Teeb. No denying that.'

Two Blade closed the distance between us, sun-dried excrement crunching underfoot. 'So where now, Chief?'
I pointed at the frothing sewage pipe. 'Just a five mile paddle through wretched effluent and we're laughing.'

'Or dry-gagging.'

'Meh. They both look the same with the sound off.'

And then there were two identical midgets in defunct rubber gas masks and grey environmental suits, standing atop the outlet pipe and locked in an embrace.

'Oh,' said Two Blade, and for once, I agreed.