Novahead by Steve Aylett Page B

lane system and letting out glad cries. Way off behind the throng was a fishtail hearse, yellowed like a tooth. A saloon made from a saloon and the fossil of a Stegosaurus erupted outward as the poison apple Porsche accelerated through it, emerging from the wreckage like a butterfly from a pupa. She ’ d used the dagmar rockets, leaving two empty sockets in the fender.
    Narrowing the gap to our tail was an infected-looking car covered in faded kaleidocyclic dazzle-patterns and on the roof a Confederate flag in negative. In the Sparco buckets were what looked like a family of zombies in race harnesses. And I realised that skeletons are classically American - scary and scared at the same time. The front passenger unstrapped, flipped the dirty plastic windshield up and clambered onto the hood with a compressed-air bolt-gun slung over his shoulder. He swung the cattle dropper down and around as if to fire, then stumbled, briefly horsing around on the hood before falling off. The driver raised an old Mauser snub and without even really aiming blew out our rear window. Non-safety glass ricocheted around the cab. Murphy popped her window and leaned out with the slab gun. She left behind a dozen bullets and the zombies drove into some of them. Number two son fired back to the old ‘ shave and a haircut ’ rhythm. The Mantarosa started coughing. I flashed on the Professor shouting after us - did he shout ‘ damage ’ ?
    An army jeep full of hysterically laughing mercenaries veered toward me on the right shoulder and I accelerated - standing drunkenly to throw molotovs they crossed between my tail and the zombie crew, sinking suddenly off the road without a sound and no explosion.
    The kid woke up. He ’ d had his face against the AC grill so long his forehead was ridged like a cracker.
    I turned to watch the flight of a visceral-looking vehicle made of two fused chassis halves and the fin of a Great White Shark. The co-pilot had climbed the chicken-wired roof and stood in a charcoal duster that flapped behind him as he tipped a bright red jerry can at a funnel, loading precious liquor into the car while on the blur. The driver shot at me but his sightline was cut off as the black ambulance boiled past, with a motor that whirred like an airplane ’ s turbofan. As it pulled ahead of us it became obvious the rear doors had been removed to extrude what appeared to be a turbine from a passenger plane.
    ‘ I just had an idea, ’ said Edna, ‘ but I don ’ t think it hit anything. ’
    Hung out the passenger window firing at the shark car, Murphy was getting thrown around as we were blasted by the prop-wash of the black ambulance. The White Sharks had been hit and ploughed off the road, belching black smoke and expressing in many little ways their dissatisfaction with the way things stood. I braked a short car length from the giant fan, and fell back three. Murphy emptied the clip uselessly into the prop and ducked in to get another from the glove box.
    The gaunt desert family, their skin grey as mushrooms, were burning and stalling behind us. I saw the wife in the dead dress pull a blue metal keg onto her lap. The jagged jalopy exploded, springing momentarily off the ground. The flaming chassis tacked this way and that, finally locking into a hood-roll that almost overtook us. Burts of machine-pistol fire emerged from the smoke and the Porsche accelerated into view, the driver resting the muzzle in the crook of her wing mirror. More rounds pelleted our flanks as other ragged parties veered in at us. Bullets populated the space between us, some smart and some sent in the clear. I braked to avoid hitting the ambulance. A kid in a little twin-engine hoop car fired apologetically, as if he didn ’ t like to dictate, and was clipped into a spin by the Porsche.
    Off to our left was a jungle-gym on wheels, the low-slung scaffold car with the long fore deck. The hood puzzle-boxed open, extruding some sort of harpoon gun. The driver