Slaughtermatic

by Steve Aylett

The old man chuckled to himself and shuffled along so slowly that palaeontologists were pouring plaster into his tracks. Dante and the Kid put their heads together. ‘Must have been a glacier in a past life, Danny.’ ‘Yeah, lucky we ain’t really after cash - this rate it won’t be worth shit after inflation.’

Every suicide line he called turned out to be an anti-suicide line. He was trapped.

Half bastard, half bastard.’

The sun peeped over the horizon like a timid sniper.

The kind of tall that seemed to be dangling from a meathook,

Dante was convicted and slipped custody disguised as an escaped criminal.

On a coffee table was a large bowl of anodyne pills, used to damp down original thought and reduce conspicuity in public. The practical hazards of re-examining one’s mental premises on the wing were well known to the denizens of Beerlight - a guy skyjacking a plane one time had pushed a gun to the pilot’s face and instead of demanding a flight to Cuba, snarled, ‘The cultural space vacated by logic and morality has been filled at once with an automated and meaningless simulacrum which is nevertheless of precisely the same dimensions.’ A kidnapper started assembling a ransom note from scissored headline letters and finished a year and forty thousand words later with the words ‘and won’t accept the jig’s up even when faced with a show of apathy equal to their own’. The kid he kidnapped had long since escaped. Another sparkhead entered a bank right after a romantic break-up and delivered a bitter monologue on how ‘women send signals but men speak English’ while performing the most mawkish heist in Beerlight history. He later wrote and signed a confession which, published under the title The Seahorse’s Gaze, replied to theories of gender manipulation with those of hermaphroditic self-fertility and indifference.

Delegates’ bags were bomb-checked on the way out of the building.

Gulls exploded upward with applauding wings.

Remember that guy went and carved little anti-cop statements into his finger-ends? Had the boys in the print lab hoppin’ mad? Prints otherwise smooth, burnt off if I recall. Then after a time the boys realized the messages contained a kind of veiled respect, first they’d received in years. Took another long while for ’em to notice the terrible spelling and realize it was the work of a cop - remember that, Benny?

She stared back in the grey, faded, well-worn shock of meeting an idiot.

Outside they ran slam into Terry Geryon, Harpoon Specter and a handful of laughing cops. Specter reacted like a rag doll when Rosa grabbed him and backed down the corridor, pressing the cell guard’s gun to his head. ‘Hold your fire or the lawyer gets it!’ The air exploded with ammo and cordite.