reMix

Chapter Thirteen CasaNegro

The bar sucked her in through its wide adobe door, the way CasaNegro always vacuumed up those with no place to go. Inside Jude’s place, the music was stripHop/cheezy-listening, stuff LizAlec hadn’t heard in years. Original edits, too, but the tunes went with the heat, the slight edge of sweat and the mix of unshaven locals and bare-armed, stained-top backpackers.

Over the bar itself was a neon sign advertising Electric Soup. It flashed two pictures, one of a bikini-clad cowgirl, the other of the same girl with her clothes off. LizAlec wasn’t to know, but as an original and still-functioning bit of Dallas kitsch it was one of Fracture’s best-known sights. LizAlec wasn’t sure what the girl advertised but she ordered a couple anyway, stuffing ice-cold tubes into the side pocket of Laughing Boy’s oversized jumpsuit. The problems only started when LizAlec offered the woman behind the bar her gold HKS card in payment.

It would be a lie to say everyone froze, LizAlec decided. But shoulders definitely stiffened all the way along the scuffed and cracked oak plank that made do as a bartop. Chinoed men who’d clocked her entrance began to watch more openly and one or two were actually grinning. Still, not an enhanced canine in sight, LizAlec realized with relief. Not a vampire, not a wolfBoy or sandrat. Just straight human, even if most of them did look like spares from Fistful, that opening bit where you got offed by a rug-wearing psycho if you insulted his mule.

As for the blonde woman behind the bar, she looked tougher than most of the men. She was certainly taller. “¿Tú tienes alguna cósa persona que puedes usar?”

LizAlec looked blank.

“Nihon?”

The girl shook her head. St Lucius didn’t teach Japanese, they taught Latin instead. She’d always thought it was a bloody stupid decision.

“Inglés?”

“Yes,” said LizAlec, smiling with relief. She could do English.

“Honey, you got anything anyone can actually use?” The woman was thirty going on three hundred and then some. Her blue eyes were washed out with enough background to plot-line a thousand newsfeed novelas.

“You don’t take cards?” LizAlec looked startled. The holos promised HKS was universal, one of the ads even had a grizzled miner on Io or somewhere happily swiping an HKS gold through his belt in return for an improbably large opal. “What do you use?”

“What you got?” A young boy in combats and a goth T-shirt crowded in at her shoulder. He looked about fourteen and had the most stupid haircut she’d ever seen. Fuck it, thought LizAlec. She needed some smart-arse kid like she needed killer PMS. Actually she needed gut-rot more than she needed the kid.

“Yáyase,” snapped the woman and the boy stepped back. But he didn’t go away, and it didn’t look like he intended to.

LizAlec glanced over to a table near the door hoping for back-up, only to find Lars wasn’t there. Typical. Maybe she should have left the freak out at the base. But she couldn’t. Not after what she’d seen in his head. All those empty tunnels, all that blood. No wonder he was...

Actually, LizAlec didn’t know what he was, she was still trying to work it out. As for exactly what Lars lacked, she’d given up on that one after she’d ticked off two lungs, a normal human set of teeth and a spiralling list of other things starting with a basic knowledge of what it was to be normal.

At least, what LizAlec considered normal.

And anyway, leaving him wasn’t an option. He had Lazlo’s black ring, the one that kept her face from exploding. She couldn’t wear the bloody thing herself, could she? Not without closing the circuit. Which meant keeping Lars close by her for company.

That hadn’t been too difficult to date, because he’d been safely punch-drunk when she’d bundled him into the back of the buggy and still groggy when she’d dragged him after her into the bar. Maybe that was the problem, LizAlec decided. Dragging a staggering freak behind her was bound to draw attention.

“I’ll take the bracelet,” the woman said, nodding to the silver band wound tight round LizAlec’s wrist. “And I’ll even give you some change.” Without waiting for LizAlec’s reply, the woman hit a key and pulled a couple of dead presidents from an old bell, lever and clockwork till. Rococo scrolls of gold fluttered up the side and “Industrial Business Machines” was written in script over every flat surface. It looked original.

LizAlec shook her head. “The bracelet won’t come off, I’ve tried.” And that was true. LizAlec wasn’t sure exactly when the bracelet had woken up, but in the last hour it had wound itself so tight onto her arm that her flesh had puffed up around it.

“No problems.” The kid in the combats dipped his hand into a knee pocket and came up with a vicious-looking pair of pliers. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”

The woman frowned, the shake of her head so slight that at first the boy didn’t notice it — until he saw her stare over his shoulder and turned to find Lars standing behind him, a clutter of talismans round his thick neck, arms slung loosely at his side, mouth half open. The sandrat’s balloon suit was open to the navel, the flesh below it maggot-white and hairless.

“How you do that?” He was talking to LizAlec, the boy and the woman so far out of his interest they might as well not have existed. “How?”

He meant how did she knock him out, she knew that. LizAlec shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You must.”

She didn’t. Ripping out someone’s memories wasn’t one of her regular party tricks. But then, no one had ever tried to rape her before, whatever Lady Clare might think. LizAlec watched the sandrat stare into her eyes and then saw him shiver. “Drink,” he demanded, noticing where he was for the first time.

The woman nodded towards LizAlec. “She already got dos. Nada money. Only an HKS. Sweedak? She raised her eyes, inviting Lars to admit how dumb that was.

“Here.” Lars ripped a silicon square from the clutter of talismans around his neck and dumped it on the wooden bar. Reaching under the bar for a reader, the woman striped Lars’s stolen chip through the slot and took the price of two tubes. It put the cashchip into negative, but not enough to argue about, at least not with a sandrat. With a sigh, the woman tossed the empty cashchip into a bucket under the bar.

LizAlec looked on, baffled. Not understanding why Lars’s cashchip was good while her own swipe card had been rejected. But even if he understood her unspoken question, Lars didn’t have words to explain that empty&fills were good because they were finite, while a card that drew a credit stream through a proper orbiting bank was no use to anyone operating on the edges of legal finance.

“Need to sit,” said Lars and pushed past the boy without looking at him. The sandrat stopped at an occupied table right next to an over-chromed Cadillac jukebox and stared pointedly at two backpackers sitting in front of almost empty bottles of Kirin. When the grocks didn’t take his point, Lars up-ended their metal table with a crash, shattering glass.

Behind the bar, Jude sighed... It was going to be a long day. Reaching for her stun gun, the woman began to lift the flap.

But her presence wasn’t needed. Lars was already helping the tourists through the door and out into noonday heat hot enough to disgrace a hyperactive sauna, if only there’d been an inkling of humidity to go with it. The backpackers left without protest.

Jude figured it was the open lock-knife that helped the sandrat clinch his argument: though it might have been his bared teeth or the blood clotted down his chin that convinced them to try another bar.

Lars glared at LizAlec. “Drink,” he demanded, pulling the table upright.

Yeah, right. LizAlec passed him the tubes, watching as the sandrat ring-pulled both, ice crystallizing like frost down their silver sides. He killed one with a single gulp, then swallowed half the second tube before passing it back to the girl.

“Thanks,” LizAlec said sweetly, but it was sarcasm wasted.

LizAlec started to wipe the edge on Laughing Boy’s battle-dress and then gave up. The cloth was probably as germ-infested as the can. Besides, she’d had shots for every virus and infection known on Luna. The school had insisted. It was just a pisser she hadn’t taken that menstruation shot when it was offered: her gut was cramping so fast she didn’t even want to think about it.

The electric soup was cold as glacier meltwater, and thick like syrup. Sweet, too, but with a chemical aftertaste that should have warned her. LizAlec was taking a second gulp when the effects of her first swallow cut in, flicking the light level up a couple of clicks and putting glass-hard edges to the blades of the ceiling fan rotating slowly overhead.

Lars grinned as he took the tube from LizAlec’s unprotesting fingers and tipped the dregs down his own throat. Wizz, pop and bang — crystalMeth, seratonin and amyl nitrate. She didn’t yet know the effects, but she would.

LizAlec gasped, watching the room flick in and out of focus before it settled back to a hard-edged glow. A couple more of those and she’d either stop fretting altogether or go out and kill someone.

“Need power.” Lars told her. “For Ben...” The sandrat stood up, brushed matted brown hair out of his eyes and shambled for the door, metal lung banging noisily against his hip. Out of his tunnels, the sandrat was less fluid, less graceful than usual. As if he was only used to moving up surfaces rather than across them.

Lars was gone longer than she expected. And when he reappeared in the doorway his face was white under the dirt and dried blood, his brown eyes suddenly panicked.

“Ben...” He demanded loudly, then stopped. “Ben...?”

Not callous but genuinely puzzled, LizAlec started to shrug and then stopped herself, filtering his thoughts through her own memory to come up with a Matsui ice bucket. That was Ben. Or rather, what was in there was Ben. Except she’d never seen the bucket and she certainly hadn’t brought it with her. She was still wondering how to tell Lars when the need passed. Even across the crowded bar, he could see the answer scripted in her face.

The sandrat howled. It was a genuine, animal howl that filled the whole of CasaNegro, bringing conversation to a halt. This time everything did stop. Except for the Cadillac jukebox that kept spitting out its sour/sweet words of loss and lament.

Strat was a walled village, a jumble of adobe houses balanced on the lower slopes of a vast gap-toothed puig. Three roads led in, each guarded by scrawny pi dogs. Some visitors the packs let through, others were turned away with low growls and bared teeth. No one knew the logic of their choice, the augmentation was coded too far back for anyone to remember. There were three bars and only two served outsiders: CasaNegro was the larger, less intimidating of those, and howling sandrats were not on the menu.

Too tatty to be right on the tourist trail, a little too close to the crater’s entrance to be genuinely Sierra Mal, the CasaNegro’s jukebox was the stuff of skewed memory, full of white clouds, galloping horses and sad sunsets. Ersatz homesickness for people who’d long since stopped calling Mexico, Central America and the southern US their home.

The UN immigration laws of forty years ago had seen to that, stripping citizenship from any person more than two generations removed from a valid Earth passport. LizAlec knew about it vaguely, but only as history.

“Kid,” Jude said, her hand gripping LizAlec’s thin wrist. “You’d better get him out of here. My customers don’t like this.”

LizAlec didn’t blame them. Lars had his hands round a doorpost and was trying to shake it loose, anguished grunts coming from low in his throat. The post was real enough but its purpose was fake. The door to CasaNegro was virus-grown, currently healthy: it didn’t need props. But that still didn’t mean Jude’s regulars wanted the place destroyed.

“He’s nothing to do with me,” LizAlec said.

Jude’s eyes narrowed, though the smile stayed fixed to her tired face. “You dragged him in, you drag him out again...”

LizAlec nodded. When it came down to it she didn’t have any option. It wasn’t as if she could just dump him and run, not while he wore that bloody ring. All the same, she couldn’t stay in Strat or Fracture either, not long term. Come to that, she probably shouldn’t even remain on the Moon.

The tall Frenchman wasn’t going to know it was Lars who’d trashed Mickey and Laughing Boy. The man would send someone after her, no doubt about it.

“Can you use this?” LizAlec asked, pulling the Beretta that Laughing Boy had been carrying out of her pocket and sliding it across the table towards Jude. The woman covered it quickly with her hands, then glanced round the room. Everyone was still looking at Lars shaking and moaning over by the door.

“I thought you didn’t have anything to trade,” Jude said, staring hard at LizAlec. In answer, the girl pushed her hands into the side pocket of Laughing Boy’s balloon suit and pulled out a pack of shells, a second clip and the Zeiss nightspex he’d been wearing on his way down the corridor.

“That’s the lot,” said LizAlec. “They’re yours if you can get me to Earth.”

“Just Earth?” Jude’s voice was amused, the problem of Lars temporarily forgotten.

“Europe, Paris...”

“Honey,” the woman’s expression was sympathetic. “Don’t you watch the newsfeeds? There ain’t no shuttles to Europe. America maybe, you got the spread. But Europe — it’s closed.” She said it like that was obvious, which it was when LizAlec thought about it. Five days from the New Year was what the Met office had reckoned it would take for the virus to sweep Western Europe and hit the Atlantic, and LizAlec knew her mother considered that optimistic. No one knew how long it would take to cross the water.

“I have to get away,” LizAlec insisted. It came out sounding more desperate than she intended, but then Jude didn’t need words to work that out. Sitting on the wrong side of a bar gave you more than enough experience matching thoughts to expressions.

“Problems?” Jude asked.

LizAlec nodded.

“Men problems?”

LizAlec nodded again, thinking of the man in the Versace suit. “Yeah, she said, “men problems, mother problems and PMS bad enough to take your head off.”

“Okay, no promises.” The woman turned her head, shouting over her shoulder at the boy in the combats, “Hey, Leon!” The boy wandered over, just slowly enough to irritate Jude who was scowling by the time he finally reached their table. The boy smiled back, blandly, his expression hovering on the edge of bored. But when he looked at LizAlec his brown eyes told another story.