THE STRAIGHTS:

  President Fitzgerald—He was running for reelection and running scared—and he’d promise the people Mars, or even nuclear destruction if it got him the vote …

  Winton Wilson—His goal was Fitzgerald’s job and the prez’s head on a platter, and if blasting The Bastard Child was the way to get it, Wilson was ready to blast away …

  THE WRACKERS:

  Eddie Dixon—The Founder who saw the truth on the march to Moscow, and gave Wrackers The Music that would set them free …

  Bitch Alive—A superstar who went out in a blaze of glory on a mission to the Moon, and blew America’s space power right out of the sky …

  The Bastard Child—The Moon Lady’s daughter, she had the beat, she had the group, she had the Power—and she swore she’d give it to the Straights and give it to them good …

  Get ready, for The Music is about to play—

  and set Wrackers and Straights dancing to

  the Armageddon Blues!

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1986 by Bradley Denton

  All right reserved.

  Popular Library and Questar are registered trademark of

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Cover art by Richard Corben

  Cover design by Don Puckey

  eBook format by Son Agia

  Popular Library books are published by

  Warner Books, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10103

  A Warner Communication Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: November 1986

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 0-445-20306-4

  For Barbara

  PRELUDE

  We goin’ up to Moscow

  Got our rifles in our hands.

  Yeah, we goin’ up to Moscow

  Got our rifles in our hands.

  Well, we goin’ up to see of Uncle Joe,

  So he an’ Gen’rl George can be friends.

  Well, when we get there Joe’ll be sorry

  For all the bad things that he done.

  Yeah, when we get there Joe’ll be sorry

  For all the bad things that he done.

  He been messin’ round with Cousin Adolf,

  But now we gon’ have us some fun:

  We gonna wrack an’ ruin—

  Yeah, gonna roll right over you.

  Gonna cut you down, Joe,

  Ain’t gon’ be nothin’ you can do.

  Say now,

  What’s this here thing blazin’ in our soul?

  Just some of Gen’rl George’s sonofabitchin’

  Wrack an’ Roll.

  —Pvt. Eddie Dixon

  “Goin’ up to Moscow,” 1945

  HYSTERICAL PERSPECTIVE I

  Dallas, Dallas, Do You Read?

  Bitch Alice died on the Moon in 1967. She was standing in front of a TV camera in the Mare Tranquillitatis, about to sing “Race You to Hell” with a taped accompaniment, when a fuel valve exploded on the lander thirty yards away.

  There was no chance that she and the other four astronauts of Conquistador 18 could be rescued. History does not record how many of them committed suicide before their twelve remaining hours of oxygen were expended.

  The former Alice Pendleton was survived by an illegitimate ten-year-old daughter, seven platinum albums, and millions of pissed-off Wrackers.

  Forty thousand of the latter, give or take a few hundred, honored her memory by carrying out her last wishes.

  “If I’m gonna die,” she had said before anyone at the National Organization of Space Science (NOSS) had the presence of mind to cut off the worldwide transmission, “those jewbaiters are gonna pay.”

  A half-second of silence had followed, and then came the Bitch’s last two publicly-heard words:

  “Trash Dallas.”

  So they did. Not the entire city, but all of the suburb that was NOSS.

  America’s manned space effort, which had taken twenty years to build, took only three hours to be destroyed.

  Almost before the riot was over, the Anglo-Chinese Alliance (still miffed over being stuck with the ravaged Eastern and Western Trust Territories in 1946 while the United States had taken the relatively undamaged Central) saw its opportunity. Thus, by the mid-Seventies, the Lemon-Limeys had not only established a Moon outpost but had constructed Churchill-Chiang Station in Earth orbit.

  They made no secret of the fact that their goal was to gain economic and political ascendancy over the United States.

  Still, the scrod didn’t really hit the slinger until December 1979, when (1) the British invaded the island of Concepcion in the Caribbean, and (2) the political war between Annabelle “the Squid” Kirk (J.D. Fitzgerald’s secretary of state) and “Big Whig” Winton R. Wilson took a violent turn. Dealers and Whigs had been bitter enemies ever since their creations in 1933 (after Garner succeeded the short-lived Roosevelt), but never before had they been so brutal with their pawns …

  In retrospect, it seems funny that the Whigs expected results from Pissant Jackson. It must be remembered, however, that Wilson was used to getting what he wanted from people—and if he didn’t, he got rid of them. Painfully.

  Also in retrospect, the fact that Kirk tried to manipulate the Bastard Child seems ludicrous. But since when did Straights ever understand a skagging thing about Wrackers?

  Or even about Straights? Nobody foresaw the minor but necessary role of the Hack—my personal hero even though he was a jagoff.

  But, as Bitch Alice wrote:

  You’re a slice of putrid scum.

  You screw and cheat and lie;

  You’re nothing but a human rat—

  Hey, baby, so am I.

  Man, ain’t it the glorious truth.

  —Lorna P.N. Chicago-deSade,

  A Brief, Biased History of

  Postwar America, 1945—1995,

  Complete with Nude Photographs

  (New Miami: Purple Press,

  2019), pp. 245-46. [Sound-

  and Visi-tracks Available on

  Barsoom Chips & Discs.]

  CHAPTER 1

  Rock & Ruin

  A man break in my room,

  Say he got a gun.

  Singa gimme gimme bang bang

  Gotcha you’re gone.

  Say he want me to love him

  ‘Fore I next see the sun.

  Singa gimme gimme bang bang

  Gotcha you’re gone.

  Well the sun don’t mean that much to me.

  I ask if he’d like to watch TV.

  He got the gun but I got a knife.

  He turn his head I take his life.

  Singa gimme gimme bang bang

  Gotcha you’re gone.

  —Lieza Galilei

  “A Song About Flowers,” 1975

  Thursday, December 20, 1979. Washington, D.C.

  The good pain didn’t come until the seventy-eighth sit-up, but then it hit all at once in a warm rush. Lieza paused for a second, grinning at the mirrored wall, and watched the flush move up from her slick abdomen to her breasts. The upper third of her appendectomy scar burned violet over the waistband of her leathers.

  Her forehead, cheeks, and neck tingled under wet strands of black hair. Sweat stung her right eye, but she didn’t let herself wipe it away. Instead she concentrated on the lovely sharp stink of muscle balm and the prickle of the carpet on her back. She had seventy-two more sit-ups to go in this set.

  The buzz of the phone on the table beside the bed broke her concentration, and she barely managed to get back into rhythm without losing count.

  Sputzing hotel. She’d never been bothered when the old Madison had been here, but the fricking Straights running this new beast seemed to have a collective death wish. She hadn’t minded doing without a suite, but she’d meant it when she’d told them no calls, no bugs, no nothing.

  She glanced at the clock beside the phone and saw that it was only 4:00 P.M.; it wouldn’t be time to leave for another three hours. She’d have to tell Cherry, Fug, and Joel to trash their rooms.

  Not to worry about Tycho’s, though. He never waited to be told.

  The phone was still buzzing when she got to a hundred and twenty. All this sensation to savor—pain, strength, muscle, sting, wrench, stink—and she’d lost it somewhere around a hundred and seven. She’d finish her set, and if the phone hadn’t stopped by then, she’d rip it out of the wall, throw it through the window, and watch it fall eighteen stories.

  But first she’d find out who was calling. There might be an opportunity here to make a Straight miserable.

  At a hundred and fifty she fell back, unhooking her feet from under the barbell. The effort of the final thirty had calmed her a little, so for a moment she was able to enjoy the contradictory hot-and-cold sensations created by having exercised while wearing black leather jeans and no shirt.

  The room’s ventilator kicked on, and she felt as though her nipples had become as hard as pebbles.

  Lieza liked the simile. Teats of stone, she thought, and decided it would make a good song title.

  The first line was almost complete in her mind when the buzz went up an octave.

  Her jaw muscles tightened. Messing up a workout was bad enough. Messing up a song was Death.

  She stood, kicking the jar of muscle balm across the room, and went to the table. She stared at the phone for several seconds before picking up the receiver, imagining hot blue bea ms shooting from her eyes.

  The beige plastic felt cold and utterly Straight as she pressed it against her ear and waited for a voice. Too bad this wasn’t a visiphone. Faces were easier to hate than sounds.

  “Lisa Pendleton,” a flat male voice said.

  The plastic creaked in Lieza’s fist. Nobody called her that. Nobody who wanted to keep his teeth and at least one of his eyes.

  “No Straight here, skaghead,” she said in as even a voice as she could manage. She hoped she didn’t sound as feral as she felt, because she didn’t want to scare off this scrod-sucker before she found out who he was.

  “Lieza Galilei, then,” the voice said.

  Probably a Wrack-lusting Jack who’d paid the desk clerk for her number. Going with that hypothesis, she said, “My name ees Babette, sojerbwah. Who be you?”

  “Are you or are you not Lisa Pendleton, stage name Lieza Galilei?”

  Her face and hands felt as hot as flame. “Go sputz, jagbreath. You’ve probably got it in your hand, oui, oui?”

  She slammed down the receiver, and the buzzing started again.

  Lieza overturned the table, knocking the phone, lamp, and clock to the floor, then tried to yank the plastic-sheathed telephone wire from the wall.

  “United States government business,” a faraway voice said from the receiver on the floor.

  “Special Agent Dodson speaking. Urgent. The President wishes …”

  Lieza sat on the floor, braced her feet against the wall, and pulled, straining until her muscles felt like knotted cables. This time she managed to get the wire out, and when she hammer-threw the phone, the floor-to-ceiling window shattered into beautiful silvery fragments. The only disappointment was that the plastic bomb just missed a parking-lot preacher who was loudly denouncing the minions of Satan, more popularly known as Blunt Instrument.

  She couldn’t tell whether any of the glass shards got him or not, but she felt better. To celebrate, she took a quart of French vanilla ice cream from the room’s tiny refrigerator. After eating, she did another hundred sit-ups, went into the bathroom to vomit, and put on a thin camisole.

  “Bleached cotton, black leather,” she said aloud while looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, and realized that she had another song title. She went back into the main room, set the table upright, and got to work with pen and paper. A freezing mist had started to fall outside, and wisps of it blew in through the jagged hole where the window had been.

  She had lyrics and most of a melody worked out by seven o’clock, when Tycho broke down the door with an ax.

  “Am I early?” he asked as he came in.

  Lieza smiled. Tycho looked like a six-foot-four personification of Hell, which meant he was anxious to play even though tonight’s show was only the warm-up for tomorrow. He was wearing a cowboy vest without a shirt and had managed to find his zircon-studded pink kneepants. His long blond hair and beard were knotted and tangled, and his chest was crisscrossed by random scratches.

  His silver nose was dulled by what appeared to be a greenish blob of grease.

  “Right on time,” Lieza said, glancing at the blue numerals of the clock on the floor. “I was just working on a new song.”

  Tycho put the ax over his shoulder and crawled across the bed to look at what she’d written.

  “Jag-ass great,” he said after a minute. “Best thing you’ve cranked in months. Maybe work it up for tomorrow?”

  “If we have time. Cab here?”

  “Yeah, but we better hurry.” He shook his head and exhaled a cloud of steam into the cold air.

  “Center’s sending over a limo. Sputzin’ D.C.‘s gettin’ more dink every year.”

  Lieza nodded and looked out the hole. The sun had gone down, but she could see the bright shaft of the Washington Monument a half mile to the south. Lights glowed everywhere, illuminating the mist that was rapidly changing to snow.

  “You got that right,” she said. “At least about this part of town.” She stood up and jammed her new song into a hip pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Tycho grunted absently. He was staring out into the mist.

  “Teek? Dallas to Teek, over.”

  “I was just thinkin’,” he said without looking at her. “That George Washington musta been some lover.”

  Lieza half-laughed and headed for the doorway. “Wouldn’t know.”

  “Why else would they build him a monument like that?”

  Lieza made her way out of the room over the scraps and splinters that had been the door.

  Tycho caught up with her at the elevators and brandished his ax at an overweight Straight who hurried off down the hall.

  “How you figure he can run so fast bein’ so fat?” Tycho asked.

  “Wouldn’t know,” Lieza said again, punching the down button with her thumb.

  “Pretty dink to leave without me. You coulda got hurt.”

  Lieza looked up at him and curled her upper lip back from her teeth.

  Tycho shrugged, then glared at the numbers above the elevator doors. He had a twitch in his cheek that Lieza knew indicated impatience.

  “We’re not gonna beat the limo at this rate,” he said, and axed the panel containing the up and down buttons. “Let’s take the stairs. That’s where I found Bert.” He started down the hall at a trot.

  “Bert?” Lieza asked, dashing past him.

  “Bert, the Fire Emergency Ax!” Tycho bellowed as he chased after her.

  Lieza hit the stairwell door first, but Tycho beat her to ground level by three floors.

  “No fair jumping at sixteen and seven,” she said at the first-floor landing, doubled over with her hands on her knees.

  Tycho used Bert to push open the door. “I think I broke my sputzin’ foot,” he said, and limped out.

  Lieza followed him down a short hallway into the huge blue-carpeted lobby. At Lieza’s suggestion, Tycho paused beside a velveteen bench and asked Bert to whack it to pieces. Bert did so. The numerous Straights who had been milling about began to disappear.

  While Tycho and Bert were occupied with the bench, Lieza went to the desk and crooked her left index finger at a pair of red-jacketed Straights.

  “You there,” she said. “Jack and Jackie.”

  The male said, weakly, “Yes, ma’am?”

  Lieza smiled a smile of mock sweetness. “Eyeam no ma’am, sojerbwah,” she said, fluttering her eyelids. “Eyeam, ah, howyousay, a hoor.”

  “Um,” the man said.

  “That’s how I’ve been treated,” Lieza said, all sweetness, mock or otherwise, instantly gone. “It was essential that I be left to myself this afternoon. Yet I was disturbed. Do you see the gentleman with the ax?”

  The man and woman behind the counter nodded.

  “Good. He’s rearranging the components of that exceedingly tacky piece of scrod in order for it to serve as a reminder to you to be nice to paying guests no matter what their sociopolitical persuasion or lack of same. Any questions?”

  “Ah,” the Jackie began, and reached into her blazer.

  Immediately, Tycho was there, holding Bert high, ready to split Jackie’s skull.

  The woman made a gagging noise and stumbled backward. A record album, still in its plastic wrapping, fell from her blazer.

  Lieza leaned over the counter and saw that the album on the floor had a cover photo depicting a church sanctuary full of parishioners. The view was down the central aisle, and the priest at the far end was holding a dagger over a naked baby.

  After four years, Critical Mass was still selling. Not bad for a second effort, Lieza thought. The third and fourth were better, but Critical Mass held a special place in her heart because it had been the first time she’d worked with Blunt Instrument instead of her mother’s band.

  Or maybe it was because it contained the first song of hers to start a small riot: “Bonzo’s Blood.”

  Now there was The Music.

  Tycho leaned over beside her. “Oh,” he said, lowering Bert. “Autograph time.” He reached down with his free hand and retrieved the album, then offered it to Lieza.

  “To Maureen, please,” the red-jacketed woman said hoarsely.

  Lieza laughed. “Got no pen, Jackie.” She took a corner of the album cover into her mouth and bit down hard. Tycho took the opposite corner.

  Then they dropped the album onto the counter. Two sets of teeth marks were pressed into the parishioners.

 

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