The chopper slows, cuts in closer to land, begins following the highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they home in on a short bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance.
The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy ’n’ Fly. Fortunately, the lot’s mostly empty, they don’t cut any heads off. A couple of youths are playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight of the chopper. She’s glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this dull assortment of old farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L. Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall.
These guys were stupid enough to put her in the seat right next to the fire extinguisher. No reason not to take advantage of that fact. She jerks it out of its bracket, pulling out the safety pin in virtually the same motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony’s face.
Nothing happens.
“Fuck!” she shouts, and throws it at him, or rather pushes it toward him. He’s just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the extinguisher hitting his face is enough to put a major dent in his ’tude. Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper.
Everything’s getting fucked up. One of her pockets is zipped open, and as she’s half-falling, half-rolling out of the chopper, the fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and holds her. By the time she’s gotten free of that, Tony’s back, now on his hands and knees, reaching out for her arm.
That she manages to avoid. She’s running out freely into the parking lot. At the back, she’s hemmed in by the Buy ’n’ Fly, along the sides by the tall border fence that separates this place from a NeoAquarian Temple on one side and a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchulate on the other. The only way to escape is out onto the road—on the other side of the chopper. But the pilot and Frank and Tony have already jumped out and are blocking her exit out onto the road.
NeoAquarian Temple isn’t going to help her. If she begs and pleads, they might just include her in their mantras next week. But Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs to the fence and starts trying to climb it. Eight feet of chain link with razor ribbon on top. But her clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly.
She gets about halfway up. Then, pudgy but strong arms are around her waist. She’s out of luck. L. Bob Rife lifts her right off the fence, both arms and both legs kicking the air uselessly. He backs up a couple of steps and starts carrying her back toward the chopper.
She looks back at the Hong Kong franchise. It was a close thing.
Someone’s in the parking lot. A Kourier, cruising in off the highway, just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy.
“Hey!” she screams. She reaches up and punches the lapel switch on her coverall, turning it bright blue and orange. “Hey! I’m a Kourier! My name’s Y.T.! These maniac scum guys kidnapped me!”
“Wow,” the Kourier says. “What a drag.” Then he asks her something. But she can’t hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades.
“They’re taking me to LAX!” she screams at the top of her lungs. Then Rife slams her into the chopper face first. The chopper lifts off, tracked precisely by an audience of antennas on the roof of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
In the parking lot, the Kourier watches the chopper taking off. It’s really cool to watch, and it has a lot of bumping guns on it.
But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major.
The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code.
Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are massed on the reinforced-concrete banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their next major hit single, “Control Rod Jam.” A number of the Kouriers are taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the river; only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without doing a wilson into the crete.
And then the dark mass of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating, orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It’s a mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it’s a new visual effect put together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a mass flicking of Bics, except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks like some poor skater called in a Code.
In a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchise on the out-skirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these.
But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can’t help waking up.
He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie’s yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns.
Fido doesn’t like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.