“Put it away, Page,” I said.  He was playing with his
Tamagouchi again.  Well, that was the slang for it, since that’s what
the first one was called.  In fact it was called a “Palm Pet.”  It was
only supposed to be for guys over 18 so, naturally, Page had one, even
though he wasn’t 18 yet.  He liked it.  It featured a girl.  You could
make her do just about anything you wished.  Page undressed her very
slowly the first day he got her.  Then, as he gave his sexual urges
freer reign, he made her do other things.  “Put it away,” I told him
again.  “She’s coming.”
         “I know.  She’s cumming!” Page said.
         “Not here, numbnuts.  The prosecutor,” I told Page.
         “Oh.”  Page said.  He fumbled with his Palm Pet, slipped it
into his pocket.  Together we watched the woman coming out of the
courthouse.  They said she was a “top prosecutor”.  She put a lot of men
and boys in prison.  We watched her crossing the street, briefcase in
hand, her feminist lackey beside her.  God knows what he was.  “Junior
top prosecutor”?
         Page stepped out first.  Page.  Fucking Page.  I think he was
going to do some kind of Mark David Chapman, John Lennon thing.  You
know, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am?  I admire your work.  May I have your
autograph?”
         But my finger was like, you know, “This is it.”  At last.  It
had taken us two weeks to smuggle the gun parts into the center of the
city, past all the guards.  The first time we assembled it and tried
firing it we almost killed ourselves.  My hands were still burned from
that.  Page put out one of his burned hands toward the woman, like he
wanted to shake hands with her.  Her lackey, sensing trouble, darted in
front of her.  His lackey eyes narrowed and he pushed at Page.
         “Get back, Page!” I shouted.  I wasn’t much more experienced at
shooting laser rifles than I was at assembling them.  The lackey turned,
looked at me.  He reached into his jacket, fast.  I fired.  There was an
eruption where his neck connected to his head and the head just kind of
popped up, like a ball, ripped neck muscles flaying uselessly at open
air where the head had once been connected, where all those lackey
thoughts had travelled down from his brain to the places that actually
worked normally, like his asshole.
         (His asshole, give it credit, continued to function normally. 
At the severing of his head his shithole made a nice big crap in his
thousand-dollar pants.)
         The “top prosecutor” watched as her lackey’s headless body
crumpled backward and fell to the street.  She seemed shocked.  Her eyes
looked past his body toward his head, rolling aimlessly down the
street.  I think in that moment of horror she actually, in locating his
head, tried to say something to it, but then her higher brain prevailed
and counter-manded the order, realizing it was quite useless.
         She turned toward me.  It’s interesting how someone powerful
looks when they’re at the wrong end of the barrel of a gun.  At first,
there was rage in her eyes.  Page was still trying to do something
smart-ass, like ask her for her autograph.  I felt like shooting his
head off too, but I needed him.  He was useful as a diversion if nothing
else...
         Page’s antics caused the women to turn her glance away from me
and look at him.  At the same moment, she tore open her handbag and
reached into it.  I never found out whether there was pepper spray in
there, or a real weapon.  She focused on Page, I think, in her last
moment of life, because he was nearer.  Amazing how the primal instinct
goes for things like that, isn’t it?  I have a gun, but since guns were
only invented in the last 300 years or so, she goes for Page, because
he’s nearer.  And weirder.  But he was, you know, unarmed.  A
weird-fucking dude, a threat to the social order, probably somebody who
needed to be prosecuted right away but, nonetheless, unarmed.
         I fired.  The shot missed.  The prosecutor dug around in her
handbag, reaching for whatever it was she was looking for.  Lipstick?  I
fired again.  I hit her that time.  Right in the chest.  She had no tits
to speak of, so I didn’t consider it a loss of anything important.  Her
insides became her outsides and her outsides just kind of disappeared. 
She fell backward, the blast knocking her a good five yards before she
hit the street.  I ran up to her, aimed at her head, and fired again.  I
didn’t want to take any chances.  Doctors are good these days. 
Especially with expensive patients, like her, who earn them a good
return because of insurance.  I aimed for the ‘brain,’ if you could call
it that, given all the feminist crap that was clogging it.  Her head
blew open and I felt a wave of satisfaction and relief.
         Almost at once I heard sirens.
         “Shit man, you did it!” Page said.  He danced around me and the
woman’s body.  He put a rolled-up fist to one of his eyes and pretended
to film the whole thing, like he was going to put it on the 10 o’clock
news.
         “Well, yeah.  I guess I did,” I said.  My first kill.  No, my
second.  The lackey was my first.  I hadn’t been sure, five minutes ago,
if I’d have the guts to do it.  Now I had two notches in my belt.  Too
bad I wasn’t wearing one.
         “Shit, and I wanted to get her autograph too,” Page told me.
         “Now you can have anything you want,” I said.  I looked at
Page.  I motioned towards the woman’s purse.
         “No, man,” Page said.  “That would be, like, stealing.  You
know, desecrating the dead.  This is for Liberation, right?”
         “Yeah,” I said.  “But we could use the money for the Cause.”
         Page considered a moment.  I heard sirens wailing louder.  I
thought I heard a gun go off, somewhere.  Screams reached my ears
distantly.  It was like I was in a vaccuum, even though I was standing
out on the sidewalk, next to the street.
         “Yeah.  For the Cause!” Page said.  Then he leaped down on the
woman’s purse.  Almost at once he got hold of some money, actual
Benjamins, and he tore them out of her purse and lifted them up to me.
         “Let’s go,” I said, turning.  I didn’t want the money.  I
needed to be able to shoot and run.  Page didn’t have a gun.  Let him
hold the fucking money.
         Another gunshot.  I think that one was close to my head.  ‘Do
Unto Others As They Do Unto You,’ you know.  I guess the feminist
lackey’s “Junior Prosecutor” had some friends.  Other prosecutors, cops,
court clerks, who knows?  Anybody authorized to carry a gun in the
center of the city.  And that was the whole fucking establishment,
except for people like me and Page.  
         Moving as if in slow motion, I broke from the vaccuum that
seemed to enclose me.  I gaped with a kind of childlike innocence at the
people nearest me.  Yes.  Nearest.  My primal mind worked the same as
the prosecutor’s.  I didn’t know whether they were armed or unarmed.  I
fired.  Once.  Twice.  Again.  I heard more screams.  Louder.  More
urgent.  I saw blood but paid no attention.
         “Let’s go, Page!” I said.  He took one final camera-look at the
prosector and her dead lackey through his curled fist.
         We ran out into traffic.  Horns.  Screeching tires.  Someone
cursed and I fired in the direction the curse had come from.  I don’t
know if I hit him or not.
         A Porsche stopped.  
         “Nice car,” Page said.
         “Too unique,” I said.  I saw a Ford.  It was one of those big
fucking vehicles families ride around in these days.  It had stopped,
near the Porsche, in the middle of the street.  They always tell these
people, ‘don’t rubberneck,’ but they do it anyway.  I aimed for the
driver.
         BLAM!  BLAM!  Two shots.  The side of his window shattered. 
His head flew off and bounced around inside the front part of his van
and then plopped into his wife’s lap.  She was sitting beside him.  I
fired at her.  I hit her head too.
         “Head shots,” Page said, echoing G. Gordon Liddy.  He yanked
open the driver’s door.  He gaped at the interior.  It was drenched in
blood.  “God, what a mess.”
         “Get in!” I said to Page.  I pushed him from behind.
         “All this shit’ll ruin my clothes!” Page protested.  I shoved
hard.  He gave a wail and went sprawling into the body fat and blood
that now soaked the whole interior of the vehicle.  At the same time the
driver, headless, decided to come out for a rest break.  His body
slumped towards me.  His arm dangled down into the street.  It was as if
he were reaching for the ground that would soon hold him forever.  I
climbed over him.
         Page threw the woman out the other side of the vehicle.  I
pushed the driver down onto the asphalt below.  He made a sickening thud
as he hit the street.
         “God dammit there’s a dog in here!” Page shouted.  I heard loud
barking.  I turned and saw some big fucking monster trying to bite
Page’s head off.  I fired.  It burst into blood and bone fragments and
one of the fucking beast’s bones, flying past my head, almost put my eye
out.  Imagine that.  I’ve got cops and God-knows-what shooting at me,
and I almost lose an eye thanks to some dumb fucking dog.
         I threw the laser rifle into Page’s lap.  I yanked the driver’s
side door closed.  Page’s door on his side of the Ford van was still
open.  I grabbed the wheel.  The vehicle had begun rolling, or perhaps
had never quite stopped, and now I hit the gas hard.  We lurched
forward.  A gunshot hit the front windshield and it caved in on us.  I
blinked, found I still had both my eyes from that mess, and shoved the
glass toward Page.  A clear view of the street presented itself through
the broken-open front of the van’s windscreen.  I felt chilled air on my
face.  At the same time I heard, softly, the purring of the interior
heating system.  The van was like a body half-blown away, but with the
other half, unknowingly innocent of it all, still functioning normally. 
Like the prosecutor’s shit hole, dumping a load in his pants after I’d
already removed his head.
         “Shut your door, Goddamit, Page!” I shouted.  I looked in his
direction.  He was tripping on the whole scene, the glass, the sudden
possession in his lap of my gun, all the while the side door open next
to him.  
         I heard a slam.  More gunshots.  I careened around the back of
a truck and looked over at Page again.  He got the door closed.  His
side of the van struck a car a moment later.
         “Watch where you’re goin’,” Page grinned.  He liked movies with
wild car scenes in them.  Now we were the stars of one.  Dirty Mike and
Crazy Page.  Too bad we didn’t have any Mary with us.  Just some dumb,
dead dog.  
         “God, this is a mess,” I said, looking briefly down at my lap. 
There was blood, human remains, glass, everything all over the inside of
this (formerly) luxurious Ford van.  The heating system warmed it all,
combating the chill blowing in from the front of the shattered
windscreen.
         “Where’s the fucking Lift Bar?” I asked Page.  I let go with
one hand from the steering wheel and groped along the blood-spattered
dashboard.
         “This isn’t a lift area!” Page shouted to me.  He grinned as we
hit another car.  “Damn Toyota,” I heard Page mutter under his breath,
still grinning.
         “God Dammit I know this isn’t a lift area!  Where’s the Bar?” I
screamed to Page.  I was feeling kind of desperate now.  I was still
hearing gunshots and they weren’t far away.
         “We’ll hit something if you Lift!” Page warned me.
         “We’ll get our ass blown off if we stay Grounded,” I told him.
         “There’s no windshield!  We can’t do a Jump!” Page told me. 
Grinning, for we were still careening wildly down the street, he pointed
at the shattered windscreen.
         “Hell I know that!  I just want some Lift!” I yelled back.
         “This isn’t a lift are--” Page began.  I found the Lift Bar and
yanked on it.  Suddenly, the van’s tires drew in.  Engines spiralled
neatly downward from the underside of the van.  We both heard a roaring
sound.  
         And then we went up.  A hard burst of unfriendly fire scudded
beneath us, just missing us.  A moment more of being Grounded and we
might have both been killed.  I felt a hard bump as our van thudded into
something overhead.  There was a shower of sparks and something, a sign
I guess, tumbled past us and slammed into the street.
         “See?  You hit something!  This isn’t a lift area!” Page said. 
But his grin widened as our van rose higher and we topped a building’s
roof.  A spectacular sunset greeted our eyes.  Gleaming in the setting
sun were the Sky Dwellings.  Prime real estate.  I guess at one time
people could lie in grassy fields and look up and just see clouds.  But
now, with anti-grav technology, all that empty space in the sky was
starting to fill up.
         “Let’s go,” I said.  I groped along the dashboard again,
feeling for the Lift Forward button.  It was hard to find it in amongst
the blood and bodily tissue streaking the dash.
         “Can’t.  There’s no fucking windshield,” Page said.
         “We can’t Jump,” I said.  Meaning, of course, that we couldn’t
leave earth’s atmosphere.  I wasn’t sure if this model of Ford was built
for it, anyway.  “But we can damn well hit the gas.”  Meaning, of
course, not the gas pedal, that was for Groundside.  Rather, the Lift
Forward button.
         I found it.  There was a blast of air through the shattered
windscreen as we lurched forward.  Page screamed.  The wind drowned it. 
The gunshots I’d been hearing faded away.
         “I can’t see!” Page, his eyes narrowed to slits, complained
through the wind.  My eyes were barely open themselves.  The Ford
streaked through the sky, over the city below, making the air rush in on
us.  The Sky Dwellings loomed larger as we rushed toward them.
         “Don’t worry.  I can see well enough to know when to stop,” I
told Page.
         “You’d better,” Page said.  The buildings floating in the
distance bulked larger in our windscreen.  “I don’t want to be a
pancake,” Page said.
         A burst of laser fire hit the back of our Ford.  It careened
wildly in response.  I clung to the wheel.  Somehow I kept the Ford from
dipping into a fatal dive.  Page turned, looked back.  The next thing I
knew the laser rifle was going off beside me.  Page was firing.  I
glanced toward him.  With a hand on the driver’s side door, precariously
gripping the window frame in the door, his upper body was completely out
of the window.  He was sitting with his ass on the bottom of the window
frame.  He looked like he was in a movie.  Except he wasn’t.  
         BLAM!  BLAM!  BLAM!
         “Fucking Page!” I yelled.
         “I almost hit one!” Page shouted.
         THHHWUNK!  Our Ford careened again as a well-placed shot
slammed into us.  I didn’t dare turn around.  A quick glance in the
rear-view showed what I most feared.  Two gaping holes, near the back of
the Ford.  We had twin moon roofs now.  But the engine showed in the
dashboard that the damage done by the laser blasts was causing it to
overheat.
         “Damn, they were quick!” I said to Page.  Meaning, the skyborne
police vehicles.  I guess I hadn’t counted on them being that quick. 
“They were quick, Page.  Too quick,” I said.  I looked over at him.
         “We ain’t gonna make it,” Page said.  He slipped back into the
Ford.  His face was pale.  He was holding the laser rifle aloft.  He
pulled the trigger.  I cringed.  But nothing happened.  Our gun was
empty.  We had no reloads for it.
         I gazed ahead of us.  The Sky Buildings were coming up fast.  I
saw people standing on a terrace about midway up one of the nearer
buildings.  They pointed.
         “They’re pointing at us!” I said.  I had found a piece of the
windscreen that was still intact.  It was over in the leftmost corner of
the (formerly) screened area.
         “Yeah,” Page said.  I glanced at him and saw he had a similar
setup; a small corner of glass that he could hunch behind to see
through, and keep the wind out of his eyes.  (Actually out of only one
eye; he had to close the nearer one.  The wind was coming in too strong
to keep both of them open.)  “We’re the life of their party,” Page
said.  He shoved his rifle through the broken portion of the windscreen
and pulled the trigger.  Nothing.
         “Page....” I said.  There was a sense of unreal coolness in my
voice.
         “Yeah?” he shouted over the roar of the incoming wind.
         “We’ve got no chance against the cops,” I said.  He heard me,
somehow, even though I didn’t think I’d said it loud enough.
         “No chance!  They came up so fast!” Page yelled to me.
         “So fast!  But we got her!” I yelled to Page.
         “Yeah,” Page agreed.
         “Page?” I asked.  “Did you ever crash a party?”
         “Hmmm?” Page asked.  He looked at me and grinned.  It was all
the permission I needed.  We both knew what kind of people lived in the
Sky Dwellings.
         “I’ve never been invited to a party, actually,” I thought I
heard Page say.  As he said it I instinctively looked down.  Down at the
seat.  The Sky Dwellings were coming up very fast now.  The people on
the terrace had stopped pointing and were drawing back, beginning to
run.  I wanted to stare at them, at their horrified faces, as we shot
straight into the middle of them, but instead I found myself gazing down
at the seat, at Page’s lovely Palm Pet.  What did Page call her?  Chloe,
I think.
         Bye, bye, Chloe.