Contraband by George Foy

Author:George Foy [Foy, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Venture
Published: 2019-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘At first glance, everything looked the same . . . it wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.’

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

PC, Rocketman, the pilot, God, and the Hegel bird drove to Indianapolis in fifteen hours straight, motorvating linear down the interstate, doing exactly the speed limit in the old Chevy the pilot had bought in Bayou Noir.

PC wanted to take his Bavarian sports car, but Rocketman insisted the Chevy would be more anonymous. The sports car, innocuous in the city, would stand out in the Midwest, he said.

Also, like all late-model vehicles, the Bavarian car had an anti-theft transponder that would send PC’s full name, UCC number, and a hundred other details blooping onto the activator screens whenever they passed through a tollbooth or got within a quarter mile of a state police post. If BON had somehow managed to link PC to the pilot, they would be picked up within a hundred miles of New York.

The Malibu, on the other hand, could not be linked with the pilot, since he’d kept the old tags, which were registered to a crippled woman in a godforsaken bayou in Louisiana. He’d bought the car under a false name in any case.

When, around eight o’clock the following night, they got to the area of Indianapolis indicated in the wedding announcement they found most of that suburb was taken up by a huge covered shopping mall.

The mall was a wall-mall – built in the new style, with three floors underground and five over, incorporating not only shops but clinics, an arboretum, a motel, a bus station; surrounded by razor wire, perimeter lights and interlocking-arc security cameras.

Behind the perimeter, the building itself controlled the suburban landscape. Built of brick and concrete, it resembled a gigantic two-dimensional slime mold that had grown and reproduced in right angles over a geological epoch. Its reptilian back was almost a mile long and covered with thousands of individual square growths, like scales. It excreted black asphalt – at any rate it was surrounded by three square miles of it – and was serviced by boxy metal creatures that drove in and out twenty-four hours a day to pick up nourishment in white plastic shopping bags or drop it off in large brown cardboard boxes.

Large neon signs flashed arrows whenever they approached. ‘Parking available Level 7-G!’ the signs insisted.

They drove around the mall, looking for someone from whom they could ask directions, but no humans were visible. Only two or three souped-up drag-jousting cars that periodically would scream out of the black depths of the asphalt and hurtle around the old Chevy. The drag-jousters were late-model Trans-Ams and Land Cruisers with truck engines and tractor shocks. They had multiple exhausts and twin or quad chromed carbs sticking out of their mirror-polished hoods. They sported silver wheels, and darkened windows.

Painted flames and dragons’ teeth made snarls of their wheelguards and grilles. The long, hydraulic jousting booms were strapped down on support braces, for car-jousting was too deadly to practice at, and the booms were used only in official competition.

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