Fade to Black

7

Everybody wanted something.

That's why the crowds stood waiting outside the old stadium beneath the giant TV/3V screen advertising Chromium Retrosocket, coming soon. That's why so many thousands of people jammed the Main Line along Bloomfield Avenue through the western half of Sector 3. And that's why Monk stood in the middle of the traffic lanes, amid a teeming mass of people, with six-story tall coffin hotels on the left and decrepit ferrocrete tenements on the right, all ablaze with flickering, flashing neon signs.

Just a few steps in front of him stood a man on a plastic crate. "What's wrong with society?" the man shouted, waving a sheaf of hardcopy. "Too much coercion! Corporate, government, economic coercion! No one can escape it, not the squatters, not the salarymen, not the execs, not even the SINless! Coercion dooms us all to sterile and empty lives, years with no hope, no goals and no end!

"Neo-anarchism is the only answer! the only way humanity can throw off the chains of oppression! Transcend its degeneracy and rise up out of the mire of the new corporate feudalism!

"We must unite in common cause and seek Pareto optimality!"

Monk frowned.

Pareto what?

A bit further along was a woman shoving a pushcart up the street while she hawked weevo warts, which, when applied with a solution of three percent sodium bicarbonate, would make all men handsome and virile and all women beautiful and fertile.

Weevo warts… Monk wondered what those were.

After that came pyramids and crystals, positive and negative ion generators, a grow-your-own-clone booth, a tarot reader, a palmist, a noodle stand, cheap body organs and cyberware, another noodle stand, soykaf, a Sidewalk Doc, and a group of masked men big enough to be orks, all wearing the black hoods, jumpsuits, gloves, and boots of the Sanitation Department.

"Where's the stiff?" one shouted.

Monk tried not to pass judgment. The writer's business was to watch and listen. To learn the patterns of the world and reveal them to others. To do that, he had be like a sponge. He had to soak up everything, remember it, and eventually find ways to explain the seeming randomness of existence to others, regardless of the medium he used.

One of these days, people would read his telebooks or watch his tridplays or experience simsense performances that he had orchestrated, and they would find truth.

And that would be a great day.

He could see it already: "One Day in the Life of the Main Line Mega-market of the Newark Metroplex!"

Or words to that effect.

"By Monk!"

He grinned.

What happened then caught him completely by surprise. From somewhere amid the noise of the street, the babble of voices, the reverb of adverts, the rumble of subways and transitways, the roaring of boom boxes and the distant clatter of gunfire, he heard a kind of high-pitched whining sound, but didn't really pay much attention. He didn't think anything of it.

As he turned one way, something hit him from the other direction, first in the leg, then in the hip. The impact itself didn't come as much of a shock. He'd been getting jostled by the crowds for hours, in fact, practically every day of his life. It was what followed that took away his breath.

Whatever had hit him seemed to sweep him right up off his feet. For a second or two Monk felt himself being carried along at near breakneck speed, arched over backward, his arms and legs flying out wide into empty air. Just in passing, he noticed a few things: the blur of a neon sign advertising soykaf, the face of an Asian man, mouth gaping as in astonishment, eyes bulging and staring down at him, a hooded woman battling a pair of gangers over a handbag, the rear of a fat man's bald head, a rat dashing across the sidewalk, threading a path through a half a hundred pairs of feet.

There was that strange whining sound, too. And a kind of exclamation, like, "Hey!" Then Monk suddenly realized he was in freefall. He wasn't quite sure how that had happened. It was really strange. Like he was just floating in midair. Immune to gravity. He caught a glimpse of someone smoking a red cigarette, then spotted a patch of ferrocrete wall, then everything around him was crashing. He was tumbling, rolling, flipping upside-down, smashing into things. His body hit the ground. That kind of hurt.

"Are you all right?" somebody called.

Monk wasn't sure about that. He felt kind of funny. Like he might suffocate and vomit and pass out all at once. He felt banged up, too. He spent a few moments just getting back into the habit of breathing. Once he got that down, he tried opening his eyes and looking around. The first thing he noticed was the pile of plastic trash cans around him. The second thing he noticed was someone kneeling next to him. Someone wearing a leopard-print jacket, pants, and boots. As another moment passed, Monk realized this someone was female and looking right at him. His eyes widened. He looked at her more closely. Her hair was frizzled and wild and kept changing colors, winking from red to orange to gold and back again. She had bright blue eyes, a pert nose, and lips like Cupid's bow. She smiled, looking right at him, and showed off teeth as white as… well, anything he had ever seen. She smelled like a fragrant garden. She was… she was…

She was beautiful…

"Hey, you're kinda cute."

"Huh?"

She giggled.

Aches and pains faded to nowhere. Monk stared. Women never paid much attention to him. Beautiful women like this one never even seemed to notice he existed. They weren't interested in writers. Didn't consider them good nesting material. They had their eyes on salarymen, execs, and the tall towers and big money over on the other side of the Hudson River.

She lifted a hand to cover her mouth, then helped him sit up. She had slim little hands like a girl.

"You must've been in another world," she said, smiling. "Didn't you hear me beep?"

Monk frowned, wondering what she meant.

"Hey, are you an elf?" Abruptly, she brushed at his spiky hair and leaned over as if to look at the side of his head, maybe at one of his ears. His ears were kind of weird. Pointy like.

"Uh…"

"My father was a dwarf. Can you believe it?" She looked him in the face again, then smiled and thrust her arms out to her sides as if to invite him to look her over. Monk couldn't help accepting the invitation. She was slim and just plain gorgeous.

"Wuh… wiz," he said, breathing hard.

She giggled again, then smiled warmly, right at him. "I'm Minx," she said. "Who're you?"

"Monk," Monk blurted.

"Wiz!" she said, softly. "You know, you remind me of the flower children. They were always in another world. They were these people back in the twenty-hundreds who said we should make love, and mostly just that." She smiled like she thought that was funny. "And they meditated, too. A lot of them wore tie-dyed clothes like you."

"Yeah?"

"Sandals, too."

Monk looked down at the colors splashing across his Fixe Rescue tee, then down the lengths of his faded blue rippers to the black and red sandals on his feet. Flower children? Wasn't that what people called weed-eaters? elves? "I…"

"Hmmm?" Minx looked at him inquisitively.

"I think… something on the… the California Channel… about… uh…" What had she called it? Them… "Flower children."

Suddenly, Minx covered her face with both hands and bent forward at the waist. She was laughing, Monk realized, laughing so hard that when she straightened up again she had to wipe at her eyes and gasp for breath. "See!" she said. "See what I mean!"

Monk wondered about that.

"So where do you live anyway?" Minx asked, fluffing out her hair, then smoothing it back again with delicate movements of her hands. She paused to look at him, and said, "Monk."

"Huh?"

"Wanna go to my place?"

Monk stared, feeling a strange heat rise up the back of his neck and into his face. This couldn't be happening. This beautiful, gorgeous, captivating woman couldn't be talking like that. He must have missed something, misunderstood, misconstrued something she said. But then Minx took hold of his arms and half-pulled him to his feet. She seemed pretty strong for a girl.

And she was small, really tiny. Her head barely reached his chest and he wasn't tall at all. But it only made her seem more gorgeous. When she shook back her hair and looked up at him and smiled and slid her hands up his chest, Monk felt his heart begin to pound. Like it would leap right out of his body.

"You're a lurker," she said. "You watch and listen. I like that."

"Huh?"

She laughed.

Just a few steps away lay a red and black Honda scooter. It matched Monk's sandals. Minx pulled it upright, touched the starter and revved the engine. This is what had bowled him over, Monk realized. The scooter. "Come on, Monk, you booty," Minx said. "Get on." Booty?

There was barely enough room. Monk eased himself onto the scooter's seat right behind Minx. There was no way to sit there without touching her, without feeling the soft swell of her hips against the insides of his thighs. The sensation was indescribable and left him feeling short of breath.

Abruptly, Minx looked back, tossing her frizzed-out hair, and pulled his arms around her waist. "Don't be. shy," she said. "I'm a girl, you're a boy. Scan it?"

"What?"

"Hang on!"

The scooter whined and they were off, flying out of the alley and up the Main Line. It was a ride Monk would never forget. The scooter weaving wildly back and forth, crowds of people rushing past on either side. Arms and elbows and other parts of people's bodies banged off Monk's head, shoulders, and legs. Things began moving so quickly he couldn't keep track. It became a blur, a churning sea of people and buildings and the occasional vehicle, a series of near-misses that defied comprehension. Monk remembered the rat he'd seen threading a path through hundreds of feet just minutes ago. It was like that. No one could possibly steer a scooter through the crowds on the Main Line like Minx was doing, and yet she was doing it.

A huge black Department of Sanitation truck loomed up suddenly before them-the scooter was heading straight for it. In the final seconds, Monk glimpsed a crew of black-clad men tossing plastic body bags into the back of the truck.

Monk stared wide-eyed, and shouted.

"Yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

In the next moment, or what seemed like the next moment, the scooter was in a back alley and purring to a stop. Minx slipped out of the circle of his arms and stood up. Monk stood up, too, but his legs were vibrating like the ground near a subway station. Minx smiled and chained the scooter to one of the metal struts of the seven-story coffin hotel rising between the rear of the buildings.

"Some ride, huh?" she said.

"Yuh," Monk answered. "Clam."

"Wizzer." Minx took his hand, then stepped up close. Monk swallowed. "This is my private place, okay?" she said quietly. "So don't tell anybody you know."

Monk shook his head.

"You're so booty," Minx said, smoothing a hand like cool cream across his left cheek.

Booty…

Abruptly, she was tugging him by the hand up the metal stairs and onto the gangway fronting the fourth story of coffins. Three steps along the gangway, a pair of ork gangers were tussling, growling, and swearing, arms and shoulders interlocked. Minx ducked between them and tugged Monk right along with her.

"Hey!" one of the orks roared. "Smoothies!"

Something swept Monk's right foot out from under him, but Minx dragged him up by the arms and yanked him ahead at a run. Halfway along the gangway, she stopped, pulled out a credstick, slid the stick into a slot, then pulled open the hatch of a coffin. "Quick," she said.

"I'll tear ya to bits!" somebody snarled from behind them.

Monk didn't look back. He ducked into the coffin, banging his head on the hatchway. Minx followed, not banging her head, and slammed the hatch shut.

Someone started pounding on the hatch from outside, but Monk hardly noticed. The inside of the coffin was wild, a deluxe cubie, with enough space to actually stand up beside the bed! Storage cabinets ran down the left. Telecom and trideo were set into the wall opposite the hatchway. The low bed, the ceiling, and walls were scarlet red and covered with overlapping twenty-by-twenty five centimeter photos.

The photos caught Monk's eye, snared his attention. They were amazing. He'd never seen anything like mem. The first few he looked at, taped on the wall above the bed, looked like shots of… traffic accidents. Bodies. Dead people sprawled across dark-stained pavement, hanging out of demolished vehicles. The next few pics he looked at seemed to have been taken inside buildings. These showed bodies, too. Some with missing limbs. Some missing heads. One or two didn't look like bodies at all, not at first, because they were so horribly mutilated they didn't look like anything even remotely human. "Hey," Minx said.

Monk turned around. Something flashed-light, brilliant white light Dazzlingly bright. When his eyes finally cleared and he could see again, he found Minx smiling at him, holding up a little camera for him to see.

"Gotcha," she said, smiling.

She had a strange look in her eyes.