Eclipse Penumbra by John Shirley

Author:John Shirley
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Spector walked out onto the stage, just glancing at the cameras and the studio audience beyond the bulletproof glass. He pointed the pistol loaded with blanks at the grinning man in the cowboy hat at the other end of the stage and walked toward him, toward the big gun in the man’s hand.

He walked right up to a gun that was loaded with real bullets. And Spector smiled softly, thinking, This is the only way I’ll ever go free . . .

NEW YORK CITY.

You could smell the place, the Hollow Head, from two blocks away. Anyway, you could if you were strung out on it. The other people on the street probably couldn’t make out the smell from the background of monoxides, the broken battery smell of acid rain, the itch of syntharette smoke, the oily rot of the river. But a user could pick out that tease of amyl para-tryptaline, thinking, Like a needle in a haystack. And he’d snort, and then go reverent-serious, thinking about the needle in question . . . the needle in the nipple . . .

It was on East 121st Street, a half block from the East River. If you stagger out of the place at night, you’d better find your way to the lighted end of the street fast, because the leeches crawled out of the river after dark, slug-creeping up the walls and onto the cornices of the old buildings; they sensed your body heat, and an eight-inch ugly brute lamprey thing could fall from the roof, hit your neck with a wet slap; inject you with paralyzing toxins and when you fall over, its leech cronies drain you dry.

When Charlie turned onto the street, it was just sunset; the leeches weren’t out of the river yet, but Charlie scanned the rooftops, anyway. Clustered along the rooftops were the shanties.

New York’s housing shortage was worse then ever. After the Dissolve Depression, most of the Wall Street firms moved to Tokyo or the floating city, Freezone. The turn of the century boom in Manhattan deflated; the city couldn’t afford to maintain itself. It began to rot. But still the immigrants came, swarming to the mecca of disenchantment till New York became another Mexico City, ringed and overgrown with shanties, shacks of clapboard, tin, cardboard protected with flattened cans and plastic wrappers; every tenement rooftop in Manhattan mazed with squalid shanties, sometimes shanties on shanties till the weight collapsed the roofs and the old buildings caved in, the crushed squatters simply left dying in the rubble—firemen and emergency teams rarely set foot outside the sentried, walled-in havens of the midtown class.

Charlie was almost there. It was a mean motherfucker of a neighborhood, which is why he had the knife in his boot sheath. But what scared him was the Place. Doing some Room at the Place. The Hollow Head.

His heart was pumping and he was shaky, but he wasn’t sure if it was from fear or anticipation or if, with the Hollow Head, you could tell those two apart.

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