The tow truck roared like a semiballistic jet, amber strobes blazing from above the cab and from inside the massive front grille. Monk watched that grille coming closer and closer and closer until it seemed huge, titanic, and it suddenly occurred to him that the truck wasn't slowing down and he was standing right in front of it Abruptly, Minx yanked him aside, and the tow trucks tires screamed and white smoke billowed into the air.
"Come on!" Minx shouted.
The tow truck screeched to a halt, the door swung open, and Minx all but pulled Monk up the steps and into the cab.
The truck roared ahead. The acceleration was incredible. It thrust Monk against the back of the broad bench seat, holding him there till he could hardly breathe. He glimpsed a pair of black-gloved hands gripping a steering wheel and the front dashboard, blazing with controls- lights, graphic indicators, LED dials and gauges-all winking, gleaming, flaring and flashing incessantly. He stared wide-eyed at the broad white lines of the roadway streaming toward him in a blur. Exocentrical Rumination blasted from speakers all around.
"Who's your friend?" someone shouted. "Real booty!"
There was that word again.
Minx grinned. "This is Monk!" she yelled. "Monk, this is Harry! Harry the Hack, people call her! She's the best hack in the city!"
"Yeah?" Monk shouted, wondering what a "hack" might be.
Minx nodded, smiling.
"Used to drive a cab!" Harry exclaimed. "Never managed to lose the tag!"
Minx sat back, and Monk leaned forward to get a better look at Harry. She had gold-blonde hair drawn back into a thick braid. She also had the perfect, cosmed-generated face of a Maria Mercurial novastar, complete with languid bedroom eyes and a small dark mole a little above and beside voluptuously full ruby lips. She wore a shiny, studded black jacket and black engineer boots. She took a quick drag on a brown Sunset Neon cigarette, then looked across at Monk and grinned.
"What the hell are you looking at!" she shouted.
Monk looked at the dashboard. A TV/3V show was playing on the vid there. "As The E-Mail Turns," rolled across the screen. The first scene showed a glowing neon man in a glowing neon room pushing glowing neon envelopes around on a glowing neon desk, and muttering incoherently. Monk hadn't ever seen this show before. If it made any sense, it escaped him.
Something barked. Monk looked aside to see Minx giving a hug and a kiss to a huge dog with glaring red eyes and vicious white teeth. "We call 'im Prince!" Harry shouted.
Prince of Darkness? Monk wondered.
Minx, and Harry burst out laughing.
Abruptly, the corridor of the transitway vanished, and they were sluicing through a sea of automobiles and trucks. The tow truck roared and squealed. Horns blared, sirens wailed. Monk caught a glimpse of a bus hurtling straight toward the right side of the tow truck's cab, a solid wall of cars charging straight toward the tow truck's nose, and a crowd of people abruptly scattering from all around the tow truck's front and sides. Buildings, towering buildings, black rain-tarnished retrofitted brick and ferrocrete buildings spun past in a blur.
Monk felt himself wrenched forward, practically out of his seat, then thrust against the passenger door, then back the other way, right across Minx's lap and practically into the jaws of the giant, red-eyes-glaring Prince of Darkness dog.
Minx looked down at him and smiled and gently pressed his hair back from his brow.
"That's the other thing, you booty!" she called over the deafening roar of the truck. "Whenever you ride with Harry, you ALWAYS wear YOUR SEAT BELT!"
There was that word again.
Booty.
"HERE WE ARE!" Harry cried.
For a moment, the tow truck seemed to turn sideways. Tires screamed. Monk, still sprawled across the seat, felt his feet and lower legs drawn inexorably toward the ceiling. Then the truck stopped suddenly, and he tumbled onto the floor under the control console. Minx and Harry burst out laughing.
"Come on, Monk! Come on!"
Minx grabbed his hand and tugged him from the cab and down onto some street somewhere in Sector 2, near Port Sector. He could smell the rank river, the Passaic River, that was for sure. Maybe Newark Bay, too. The street immediately around nun, lined with old factory and tenement buildings, looked like a disaster area. Cracked-up cars straddled the sidewalks and sat at odd angles all over the street. Bodies lay all over the place, too, some of them still moving. Slags hi paramilitary armor stood around shouting at one another. Emergency strobes atop ambulances and Omni police vehicles and other cars and trucks flickered and flashed brilliantly against the dusky suffusion of early dawn. The tow truck growled. Harry had a thick cable stretched out from the rear of the truck to a big blue sedan sitting on its side.
Minx tugged Monk in another direction, straight toward some heavily armored slag sprawled over the curb. The patch on his shoulder pictured something like a gorilla.
A light flashed, and Monk realized Minx had a camera pointed at the slag's body. She bent down for a close-up. A real close-up shot. So close she nearly had the lens of the camera touching the surface of the pool of blood slowly trickling out from the under the gleaming reflective faceplate of the slag's helmet. And then she moved the camera just a bit aside and lowered her mouth… her mouth…
"Monk?"
The world began slowly turning around him. He glimpsed Minx smiling quizzically at him and caught sight of Harry grinning and laughing just before the street tilted on end and everything went black.
"You booty…"
15
The van glided through the back streets of Rahway, straddling the border of Sector 13. The gloomy dawn resembled twilight. The ancient buildings flanking the road cast dark shadows. Rico knew this part of the sprawl as the Dead Zone. Nobody lived here but ghouls and wandering gangers and the odd slag on the run. There was no power and no water but what people found for themselves. The badges didn't hardly know the place existed, and that was probably good for them, the cops. The fog from some long-ago metaphysical catastrophe rolled forever through the streets. Devil rats, some as big as small dogs, peered from the alleys and out of the windows of abandoned buildings. The only light came from the fires in metal storage drums or seeping down from the sky through a pall of dark clouds.
"Freaking dust devil!" Thorvin growled.
A swirl of fog evolved into a storm of dust and grit rattling against the sides of the van. Rico glimpsed a series of grotesque shapes, faces, contorted bodies only vaguely human, flowing over the windshield and around the van like ghosts, but he knew these were just an artifact of the storm. Metaphysical FX. A token of the Dead Zone. It passed as swiftly as it had come.
"Status," he said.
"Clear," Thorvin growled. "Freaking clear. I got a fouled intake port, but we're freaking clear."
The van rumbled and turned across the road and slowed, descending a steep ramp into a sublevel garage. The garage door trundled down behind them. "Building okay?" Rico asked.
Thorvin nodded. "It's clean."
Rico looked toward Bandit, but didn't bother asking for confirmation. Magicians didn't like using magic in this part of Sector 13. Too much static. That was what Bandit said. Rico took his word for it. "Set the watch," he told Thorvin.
"It's set already," Thorvin grumbled.
From the outside, the building didn't look like much, two stories of crumbling brick with rusty-looking steel shutters over every door and window. The appearance was deceiving, though. The place was a fortress, equipped with sensors, offensive and defensive systems, all capable of independent, computer-directed operation. No one would have to stare out any windows here. The building and its automated systems would stand guard for them.