Waugham, Mendoza and Handsome, fools for the city.

Mendoza kept on coming.  The people in the spire ahead thought he might actually be a zombie, this Mendoza from Chapultipec. 

He was staggering of course, the only hold out egg that adhered in any way to the fresco of our narrative, but by choice or nature, tis an entire industry built around the question as it is, and Mendoza might really be a zombie, or infected with 245 Tri-ox, and nobody would know but a few porn stars.

Waugham was prepared to shoot at him, and had seen enough movies:  in head, Fred.  The head.  Preferably between the eyes, and that the only cream that had rose on the mileau crag that was the spread of the place.

At the spire, they had spirited the children off to the vault, and the handlers were sliding papers under the door, the door not being sealed per se, tightly, but something of that, a hair strand between freedom and safety, and safety in response to freedom, and everybody saying if you disagreed with him, you were a Nazi, in some circles, and a Marxist in others, and Marxists suctioned to the glass like a bizarre species of insect.

Jack Handsome's encrypted text messages.  How they become camp news, around and around it goes, nobody really knows, but that maybe some sysadmin or pickpocket, maybe something along that order, clubbing Jack in his helmet hair, and him too, helmet hair and all, calling the other street gang Nazis.

It was such in the way that any insult they hatched onto the others was broadly applicable to both camps, none being immune, but morally and existentially enfeebled to the extent that the white boys were at once, red and blue, and the black boys, and a few of the brown boys, were purple, even in their gums, and some of them scrambled, some of them sat, buttholes drawn tight, as Mendoza pre-ambled steadily forward.

I had run in to one of the girl fighters in the desert at a station.  I recognized her by her own cadence, a kind of stagger from a knee wound.  She had big reputation, once upon a time, but it was such, big explosions and all, for a while there, we just didn't know the difference between the dead and the alive, and afterward, her not to be seen, was assumed among the kaputniks.  But yet not, having taken up something more regular, a menial job, paying her check advance and being economy-sized feminine hygiene products.

On the crag of democracy and gang warfare, so many had flaked-off their blood aspiring to the precipice, "where eagles dare".

Mendoza's mangy old mastiff was wandering toothlessly along the street behind him, eager always for the next crust, for the next flea-flick of an ear scratch, and to listen to the booming voice of her master.

Royal Salmon kept book at the spire, kept book for the Combine, made his little scratch marks for the takes and the owings and all that, the comings and goings, and he was such that the put powdered sugar in his tea all the time, only powdered, not granulated, but powdered only, and a tin of exotic mints, exotic like that usually overlooked in Arkansas, not that its not available, but that they don't give a fig one way or the other.

Clarissa Ward had even come over for American television and camped at the spire, eating from the same types of cans as the common warrior-bean, and I mean, some of those boys at pure, straight, unseasoned spaghetti sauce or tomato sauce, and the American would wait until her cameras were on to actually speak to the detestable brutes, "freedom fighters" beholden not to freedom at all, and for the record, not doing much fighting, but more or less just looking kind of formidable without actually doing much, not a deterrant as much as a detriment, such that they knew the hanging of Handsome or Mendoza by the World Court kind of cleared their own books, such that they could go back to the rat race for capital thereafter, unphased.

"What's she smell like?" Some of the outsiders asked.  "The American."

"Paper" some said.

Could you imagine licking her ear if you're nose was glutted with the smell of something like A4 copier paper?  But anyway, they were brutes, not active enough to be rewarded with the consideration of being even the merest of fiends, and without the unction to commit to much but their own "dan tian", the little region of the body center-pocked with pubic hair, stomach near the top and the tessies marking the southern egress.