Last Call (Last Call 1)

I'm coming, thought Crane as he slapped his pockets for his cigarettes; luckily for the environment, I'm sociodegradable. He found a pack of Arky's Camels, fumbled one out, and tucked it between his dry lips. Now did he have a match? Again he slapped his pockets.

His good eye was stinging with smoke and exhaustion, so he let it close and peered around through his plastic eye. The street and the casinos were hallucinatorily exotic viewed through it, impossible Samarkand-scapes of glowing crenellated palaces and broad boulevards peopled with robed Kings and Queens.

He smiled and breathed deeply, feeling the liquor humming in his veins.

Then it all started to change. The metallic clank-clank-clank of the slot machines was the fast, hammering background of a savage music that could be played only by an orchestra of honking cars and pavement-clicking heels and drunken shouts.

"Time to go home, looooozers!" quacked the striker in jarring counterpoint.

The people on the sidewalks were moving jerkily; apparently they were unwilling participants in some degradingly mechanical dance.

Suddenly Crane was near panic, and he opened both eyes wide and breathed deeply. He smelled exhaust fumes, and sweat, and the eternal hot desert wind.

He was on Fremont Street, and the people around him were just random tourists, and he was just drunk.

The cigarette still hung from his lower lip, and he thought that if he could get it lit, he would feel better, would sober up a little.

"Need a light?" asked someone next to him.

With a relieved smile Crane turned—then froze at the double exposure with which he found himself face-to-face.

Through his left eye he saw the fat man who had ransacked his apartment, the fat man who had had on the seat of the gray Jaguar the envelope with the URGENTLY FOLD note about Diana, the fat man who had eaten the leaves from the ginger plant across the street from his house in Santa Ana.

And through his right eye Crane saw a man-size black sphere, with a black, warty head and stubby, bristly black arms; away from the boundaries of it, excluded by it, boiled away a Kirlian aura of green tendrils and teal carapaces and green fishtails and red arteries.

Handlebar! thought Crane—no, the Mandelbrot Man—and then Crane was running away, ignoring the blazing pain in his cut leg, blundering through the crowds and hearing only the whimpering in his own head.

Some traffic light must have been green under the blue-white neon suns of the Horseshoe, for the crowd stretched entirely across Fremont Street, and he found himself on the opposite sidewalk before he had even realized that he had stepped off the curb.

The crowd was sparser to his left, and he ran that way, his shoes flopping on the stained pavement. A street opened to his right and he spun around the corner, nearly losing his footing when his left knee refused to flex, and half hopped and half jogged toward the blue and red beer signs of a liquor store ahead.

This street, disorientingly, was nearly empty; a cab idled at the curb ahead of him, and a solitary man in overalls was trudging along the opposite sidewalk under the high shoulder of a parking garage. Crane ran for the cab … but out of the corner of his good eye he saw the man in overalls look alertly toward Fremont Street and then point at Crane.

"Yes!" yelled somebody from behind Crane.

The man in overalls was suddenly facing Crane, crouching and holding his clasped fists toward him.

Bam.

An instant's smear of white light had obscured the man's fists, and concrete chips were hammered out of the wall at Crane's back.

Without thinking, almost as if something else were acting through him, Crane unzipped his jacket and hoisted out the .357; another shot exploded the edge of the curb in front of him, but he raised the revolver in both hands and pointed it at the man across the street and pulled the trigger.

He was deafened and dazzled by the explosion, and the recoil seemed to shatter the bones in his sprained wrist; he stepped back and sat down heavily on the sidewalk.

Two sharp bangs echoed down from Fremont Street. Crane looked in that direction, blinking against the red glare-blot floating in his vision, and he saw the thing that was both the fat man and the black sphere; it was growing in size, waving its misshapen arms as it rushed toward him.

He stood up and cocked the pistol, dreading the thought of what another recoil would do to his wrist. Then out of the corner of his false eye he caught a glimpse of a woman standing beside him, and once again he involuntarily turned to look.

This time she was there: a short Asian woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties; she was wearing a cabdriver's uniform, and she grabbed his arm.

"Shoot 'em from the cab," she said quickly, "as we're driving away. Hurry, get in!"