The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [98]
With a bestial roar he lurched upright. Wimberley stumbled, scrambling in darkness. Van kicked his legs from under him, clamped a hand on Wimberley’s scrawny neck, and smashed his head against the floor. The whole building shook. Wimberley emitted a desperate, catlike squall.
Van sank a knee into his enemy’s guts and hammered his skull with a fist.
Wimberley went limp.
There was a sullen sound of liquid dripping.
The overhead light came on.
Wimberley’s unconscious face was spattered in blood.
“Get up, Van, Jesus, he’s out cold.”
“He’s bleeding,” Van mumbled. A piece of his tooth fell out.
“No, man, you are bleeding. You are bleeding all over him. Jesus, what happened to your face?”
Van put his hand up. He could not feel the shape of his mouth. His cheek. It was all gone. There was nothing there but a nightmare patch of bloody mush.
Things were lively at the local emergency room. A man who had merely had his face smashed in had to sit down and take a number.
Van held his iced towel against the ruins of his face. He could not touch the damage there without mind-bending pain and a sense of deep, cosmic, nightmare terror. He hadn’t merely lost some of his teeth. He had fractured, really smashed, the inner structure of his skull. The gaping wound wasn’t about to stop bleeding. The staffers were calling around for a specialist surgeon.
The young woman sitting next to Van had red, staring eyes and dirty blond dreadlocks soaked in drying blood. Gore had soaked the shoulders of her white Guatemalan blouse. Blood had spattered her broomstick skirt.
“Hey, friend,” she said to him. “What’s your affinity group?”
Van moaned, his tongue thick with blood.
The girl opened a woven yarn-bag covered with leftist political buttons. She dug in her bag and retrieved a small digital videocam. “So, you were outside the World Bank with us, right? Did they come after you with those horses?”
Van said nothing.
“That’s when I caught it, from the horses. I sure hope somebody puts all that up on Indymedia. Did anybody tape you? I mean, when the pigs hit you?”
Van shook his head minimally.
The bleeding girl looked around the chaos in the emergency room. It looked like a campground for derelicts. “I wonder where they put the rest of us. We can’t be the only ones.”
A wave of blackness coursed through the rupture in Van’s head. He blinked in silent agony.
“Your eyes look nice,” she told him. “You didn’t get peppergassed.”
Van nodded behind his blood-soaked towel.
“I’m gonna have to get stitches,” said the bleeding girl. “They’re gonna shave off my hair. But, friend, I don’t feel scared anymore. I just don’t feel scared of those warmongers. Because the power is in the streets now, man. I can feel the power.” She squeezed Van’s loose hand, warmly. “Our streets, okay, brother? Our streets! They can bust my head, they can bust your head, but they can’t bust everybody’s head. Pretty soon America will wake from this nightmare. The corporate media lies, man! They all lie!”
Van shifted his towel. Some ghastly crust parted stickily into the fabric. The icy numbness came alive with a flare of deep, burning pain.
“You know why I feel so happy now?” said the injured girl. “Because there weren’t any chemtrails today. I checked again and again. I looked up at the sky and it was clean! No more chemicals up there! So they’re just plain running out of whatever that bad stuff is, that’s what I think. That poison that keeps the people so passive.”
Van’s eyes blurred over. He was suffering double vision. Double vision had never happened to him before. Now he understood why people talked about it so much.
“After 9/11 there weren’t any jet trails up there for three whole days,