War & P.R.

The checkpoint guys don't know him and they don't actively want him dead, because everyone who wants him dead is either dead or thinks he's dead. Hauser knows this. They're just drones with heads full of spiced-up caffeine and company buzzwords who wouldn't know an original thought if it bit them, and they certainly don't know pity. He should definitely know this.

"Guys, come on," he says, trying to appeal to their better nature anyway. Hell, apparently he had one, after all, so it turned out that you never knew. "Look at me. Look at them--" Natalie and Yonica, sullen, tired and hollow-eyed in the back of the truck. "Look at the sand behind us. Look at the sand in front of us. What we gonna do that you shouldn't let us pass? Tell me. Tell me?" He doesn't have much hope, but he kind of hopes that they really will look at him, with the healing scarring on his face and neck and the stiffness of his left arm -- they probably can't see the leg from where they're standing -- and the two girls in the back, and connect the fucking obvious: that these are three people who've been through hell and are just trying to get out of it, and they wouldn't hurt a God damned fly.

Only that last part is a lie.

It's not working, which mean's that Yonica is rolling down the back window and... shit, his blood pressure peaks, there's a pounding in his head, and he has to remind himself as his twitchy hand scrabbles around his pockets that there is no hot sauce. Instead he digs his fingertips into the flesh around his left knee and the world turns momentarily red. That's better. But not for long. "Hey, boys," Yonica purrs. "Bet what you want is some ass. Right? Bet you want my ass." With her head and one shoulder through the window, she contorts her body on the seat and slaps the aforementioned.

Hauser twitches. The car twitches. The guards twitch. So do their guns.

"Holy shit! Easy there, everyone! Easy!" Natalie yells.

He could've fucking predicted Yonica's leering, highly unconcerned next line, which is, "Ooh, you boys want to shoot my ass?"

Natalie's hand is on Hauser's shoulder, and that's probably the only reason he's not out of his seat and... flat on the ground. Yonica's methods are working better than his, unfortunately, and the checkpoint guards are lowering their weapons -- the guns, anyway -- and taking interest. Of course they fucking are. They're stationed in the middle of nowhere guarding a line between one stretch of indistinguishable desert and another, with nothing that smacks of civilisation except a hut and a jeep and a tent. The truck rocks as Yonica curls out of the window and climbs onto a guard, hands on his shoulders and legs wrapping around his waist. Hauser wants very badly to kill something. "Oh yeah, baby. You want to shoot my ass." The eyepatch doesn't make a lot of difference to Yonica's ability to play the tramp, but it and the lack of make-up do mean she doesn't look too much like Yonica Babyyeah anymore. He can't make his mind up if that's to their advantage or not. The guy tips backwards into the tent, and his eager buddy follows, bouncing on his heels while keeping the gun trained on Hauser and Natalie. A canvas flap falls into place closing them off from view. Sounds aren't much muffled by the fabric, so it's eminently possible to hear one of them chanting, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah."

Hauser shoves open the driver's door with a snick loaded with murderous intent and swings his right leg around. "What the hell are you going to do?" Natalie hisses.

"Something." He shushes her sharply because she's about to freak out, and jerks himself upright with both arms clamped onto the frame of the truck. The guns were lost back with the plane and his left leg below the knee, and while he wouldn't be so crass to complain about that overmuch, because not only did he survive the missile misfiring just shy of their tail but luck out against the massive odds of dying of wound infection afterwards, both present him something of a practical problem at the moment. He has a stick improvised from some desert shrub he doesn't know the name of and uses it to take a lurching step. Natalie is freaking out behind him, but that's fine, because she's doing it silently.

Hauser deserves this, deserves far worse than this, and knows he does, but what he really wants right now is to get his girls out of Ugikistan, because neither of them deserve any of this. Little over a month might not be much time to heal the injury he's carrying, but he's been useless enough so far, though at least now he can take on his share of the driving. It feels like time to get properly back into the action. His body, if it disagrees, doesn't get a fucking vote. Yonica--

His daughter preening and moaning makes his stomach turn. He can't manage 'quiet', forced to shuffle along like this, but the noises at least cover that. There's nothing he dare risk leaning on by the door of the tent to get up some momentum. How to do this? He stops, wary of the shadow he's casting alerting them, dark against the fabric moving slowly in the breeze. Of course, they're probably too distracted. Their shadows are clearer than he needs. His gut roils. His temper flares and determination sets in. Now.

Hauser drops, tucks in the stick and rolls, flat, under the loose flap that makes the tent door, and close enough to strike. His foot takes the one in the ankle and the stick comes up hard between braced legs and bared buttocks. The soldier howls and the sound feels damn good. Yonica, too, gives a yelp of surprise, staggering back and gaping down in outrage, but she's quick enough to drag her clothes back into place.

The next move with the stick, executed while clamping his weak arm about the guard's ankles, might be deemed unnecessary and excessive and -- messy, because he does want to use that stick again -- but. Yeah. That fucker touched his sweet little girl. He jacknifes his body, twisting to drop the remaining man with a swift pincer move of his right arm and leg. Once the soldier is on the floor, he's Hauser's. Meanwhile, Yonica joins in to smack the other repeatedly in the face with what looks like a metal dinner plate, even though he's not putting up much resistance.

"What the fuck?!" Yonica shrieks. She continues to deliver each slam to the gradually deteriorating face of her victim, who doesn't seem to have noticed because his whole body is curled around his nether-regions. Hauser sits up, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve, letting his legs, such as they are, sprawl loose in front of him, muscles trembling a bit from exertion. "What the fuck? What the fuck?" Eventually she finds a point. "What the hell you think you doing, shit-for-brains? I would've got us past! Safe!"

"What else am I to do?" he asks plaintively, feeling that a father really oughtn't have to be so much on the defensive. "Can I stand by and watch those scumbags with their paws all over my sweetie? No! Sweetheart... honey... don't be mad." He guiltily starts rubbing off the blood on his hands with the dead guard's jacket. It's something he approaches pretty damned conscientiously because he knows how Natalie will react if she sees.

"Jesus! Is it such a problem to let me do something? We could've been out of here with no blood! Now we have a mess. Again. Is every solution killing someone? How the fuck you even do that when you're down to one leg?" With a final slam, the luckless soldier hits the sand.

"...Leverage, mostly." He swallows. "Leverage and... planning. Hey, pumpkin, lend your dad a hand getting up?"

She watches a few false starts first. "You are a freak of nature."

"You know how much I value these rare nuggets of affection. Hey-- whoa, careful there." Gripping onto her arm and hopping on one leg, he leans over the check the guards one by one and take their weapons. "Next time, these should make it easier, huh?" He smiles at her, encouraging some acknowledgement for pulling off one improbably superb gallant rescue.

"Idiot! And already you make plans to kill more people? Get off me!" She shrugs his arm off and marches out of the tent, the loose flap dashed aside with a flounce. Hauser wobbles for a moment, trying to position the stick and brace himself, but loses.

All very nice having family back, he thinks, rising to elbows and cupping his chin in his hand as he contemplates again the journey up from the floor, but in his dark years as a self-hating, angry, angst-ridden, near-empty hollow shell of a man who'd had all his gentle, domestic dreams burned down and stolen, he'd also managed to forget what a pain these family spats could be.

It's been a shit month. On the other hand, it's also been the month he spent getting to know his daughter all over again, so he'll admit to some conflicted feelings on its account. Crash landing was more than just fucking unfortunate to begin with, crash-landing in Ugikistan was worse, and crash-landing in Ugikistan right before it was carpet-bombed by Tamerlane forces was sour luck of epic proportions. So much for the reluctantly bribed locals and kindly back alley doctors who'd aided them after the crash. Weeks of lying low while trying to avoid the strategic missile attacks landing unerringly on every hospital and scrap of civilian population, and Hauser had had it with hiding and waiting. He could move around without bleeding or puking, and that was near enough to 'ready' in his book, so they'd made their move. They were finally going to get out of this crapsack country before they were all blown sky-high.

The signs on the desert highway beckon like a beacon of hope. "Shit," Hauser says, after the third, because not only are Yonica's eyes fixed ahead across his shoulder and her salivating mouth chewing on the back of his seat while her whole body vibrates, but his own mouth is watering. "We can't do it, campers. We're close to home free -- or at least making some degree of progress in that direction. I am not going to be ended by a jones for a MacDougal burger."

The problem is that none of them have eaten properly in a few days, and the stuff they stole from the checkpoint back there doesn't meet the technical definition of 'food'. Even a MacDougal burger is closer. Hauser groans and head-butts the steering wheel several times, causing the car to honk and swerve in the middle of nowhere. It's fate, or they're sucked in by a wormhole or something, because he'd swear he doesn't even do anything but the next thing he knows, he's pulling into a car park.

"This is a bad, bad idea," he says aloud, as they walk -- in his case lurch -- across the car park. There are a couple of goats and a donkey tied up there, apart from their truck. "It's a lousy idea. I'm going to regret this. I know it."

"Only if you pull those guns out without a damned good reason," Natalie says next to his ear, closer than he'd thought she was, in a voice that most of his stone-cold CIA-trained brethren couldn't have matched. The less conspicuous of the firearms stolen from the checkpoint are concealed now on his ragged person. But then her hard shell crumples into a pitiful whimper. "I want fries. Fries, and bread like damp cardboard. and meat with the texture of old boot soles. I want it. Please kill me before I start foaming at the mouth."

"That's a joke, right?"

"So help me, Hauser, if you even think of..."

"Whoa! Okay, okay!" It's hard to make earnest gestures while walking, now, without the world dropping him on his ass for it. A goat bleats as Yonica pushes open the double-doors like she's a pop star making her grand entrance onto stage, and the three of them cross into the dazzle of the light beyond.

It's Yonica who has the money, too. Hauser doesn't want to know where she got it from.

"We want two burgers... some chicken wings... and a mountain of fries. You got hot sauce?" Hauser asks of the generic figure behind the counter. Acne is a universal constant. Both women glare at him. "By the bottle. I'll take a few bottles while we're here." His eyes shift, exploring the back wall. "It's for later. Just in case." He peels Yonica's notes off the wad. The counter is a convenient height to lean on.

The youth's reply is largely gibberish -- though Natalie seems to understand Ugiki -- but the words 'fries', 'chicken', 'burger' and 'hot sauce' are distinguishable within it. As a bottle of hot sauce appears, Hauser gestures and another appears. Rinse and repeat until there're four bottles on the counter and both girls look like they mean damage. He claps the notes into the youth's hand and takes his bottles. "Thank you. Thank you so much. We are going to find some seats now."

The seats are plastic, and red and blue, and there's no shortage of choice. The Ugiki goat herder in the corner is staring at them over his MacDougal chicken salad. Somewhere outside is the abbreviated music of a precision missile strike taking out another chunk of the local populace, but everyone knows MacDougal's has a supernatural imperviousness so not a person in that pre-fab paper-thin box reacts.

"You're not going to start doing that shit again," Natalie groans as he takes a bottle out and turns it over to study the label.

"This stuff? Is like baby food. This is the junk they'll sell commercially. They don't even need to put warnings on it." He points the lid of the bottle at the tip of her perfect nose.

"Just don't. Fucking pig dad. You dare spend our money on that!" Yonica dashes it from his hand. It rolls off the table onto his lap and he quickly stuffs it safely away again. It's not his preferred poison, but if things get really bad it might keep him from reopening more wounds.

"208," drones the MacDougal guy, dumping a pile of sealed plastic trays on the counter.

"Ooh! That's our number," Hauser says keenly, relieved to have a distraction.

Yonica folds her arms. "You can get it."

He looks at Natalie, but she lifts her eyebrows and lowers her eyelids and looks sideways down at the floor, her fingers drumming on her elbow.

"Come on," he implores, shifting his eyes to indicate the distance between himself and the counter. Walken always did say he had puppy-dog eyes. Not that that's a voice he wants in his head right now, or ever. "That's just cruel and unusual."

It's funny how the world can look brighter on the other side of a combination of chewy bread, cardboard burger and relish of indistinct origin. Well, Yonica also has a plastic toy. As they leave their squat, brightly-signposted oasis, Hauser's beating a rhythm on the steering wheel and they're belting out one of Yonica Babyyeah's more obnoxious hits through the rolled down windows, torturing the empty desert. On the last chorus of 'Surgical Strike on Your Heart', the silhouette of the building dwindling behind them disappears into a wall of flame. Hauser's jolt skids the truck all over the road, and he overrides his impulse to swerve to a halt, slamming his foot on the accelerator and pointing them dead ahead.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Natalie shrieks over the stressed groans of the engine. "Those things are like fucking cockroaches. That's not supposed to happen! What the hell kind of war is going on in this country?!"

Five miles on they hit the edge of a bombed-out town. Hauser warns, "We've got Tamerlane," his head full of grim curses. It's not the first settlement they've seen torn down, spit on and burned to ash, but it's a few weeks since the last one where the fighting wasn't over.

"What? Four weeks of fucking press releases of those company bastards claiming there's no ground occupation in the west, Hauser! Four weeks!" Natalie yelling in his ear doesn't help. "Does this make you proud of your business, Mr P.R.?"

"It wasn't me this time," Hauser says. "Besides, the P.R. gig was a cover. I told you, I kill people. I find it a much more defensible moral position. If I were you, I'd worry more about what we're going to do than Tamerlane's stars-and-stripes circus that I am no longer running."

"They were bombarding back there," Yonica says. "We cannot go back. What the shit we gonna do? If your crazy psycho parental skill set is meant to be good for anything--"

"How's the map?" he asks Natalie, very slowly and levelly, trying to keep it calm. "Is there another way through?"

"You mean this map that might as well be drawn in crayon?" she shoots back, the abused paper crackling as she sweeps it angrily through the air.

"Yes. The only map. Please look at the map. We should've travelled something like fifty miles south of Kadhbadh by now." The one and only road sign they passed, the one pointing the opposite direction, with the severed head swaying from it that he sort of hopes the girls didn't see, read "Kadhbadh 50m", anyway. He's more worried that the head was wearing a standard issue Tamerlane headpiece. They've no friends on either side, here. Of course, chances are they'll be indiscriminately bombed from the air without either side getting to look them in the face and judge.

He hears the crackling of paper accompany the fizzing of burning buildings and crumbling masonry and the purr of the engine. "Shit. If this is fifty miles south of Kadhbadh, this is Bharipoli." Her eyes rise fearfully from the map to the stretching devastation in front. Most of it is still confined to the horizon, but it's just possible to see figures moving through the flames. The drone of air support slides into hearing and Hauser swears and drags the truck off the road. It's bumpy, but they'll survive that. They bump across to a half demolished building that's not currently on fire and he eases the truck under the cover of its partial ceiling and walls, forging through some debris, 'til he's sure they can't be seen.

"Can't keep moving through this. Can't go back. We'll have to wait it out."

"Shit!" Yonica kicks the back of his seat, keeping going until she gets that out of her system, then kicks open her door, shedding the junk blocking it from the outside. She squeezes out of the narrow gap and slams it.

"What are you doing? Whoa -- wait. Where are you going, kid?" Hauser yelps from his wound-down window.

"Cigarettes! Fucking booze! Better clothes! While we're here, I look for something worth taking. If we are gonna get blown up anyway, I am not doing it sober!!"

"You know your daddy's not going to let that happen, sweetcheeks," Hauser tries to reason after her, trying to make it sound reassuring. He's pretty sure it would be more reassuring if he was confident of being able to get out of the truck. It's not only because of the pile of junk Yonica's just shoved in front of his door, but that certainly doesn't help. "You keep that eye sharp for any more medical supplies, too, honey?" Her form has disappeared into the gloom of their shelter, but he can hear things shifting as they're scrabbled over, thrown and kicked aside.

He sighs and leans back, knocking the lever on the driver's chair so it sprawls back as far as it'll go, and turns his head to view Natalie, on the back seat. "Hey, babe."

"Hauser."

"If this place has got a basement, cellar, underground store, so on and so forth, it might be a good idea to find it. I'm guessing we're looking at an explosive night ahead."

"Are you all right?"

"No." He's fairly sure something's bleeding again. "Do we have any bandages left back there, Natalie?"

She crawls across the back seat and worms her way out of Yonica's door. After some serious excavation work, she succeeds in getting him out of the truck, too. With the stick and her arm, they manage to get across the room, where she props him on a wall while she looks for anything that smacks of more stability than the groaning half-destroyed structure above their heads. It's worrying that they can't see or hear Yonica anymore, but it's a worry he's had to get used to already. His little girl grew up with an independent streak and not much patience. She's been all right so far every time but the one she got her eye blown out.

"There's nothing here," Natalie says. "I'm going to try those buildings across there." She points through a hole in the wall. The remnant structures she's indicating are about twenty yards away. Hauser nods and wordlessly hands her a primed automatic. He's not going to slow her down carrying him across that space 'til he knows there's something worth doing it for. He slides down the broken wall as she runs, guns in both hands ready if she needs covering fire. The sun's starting to go down and cast an orange glow over the city outskirts that merges with the fires. It's going to be one of those fabulous, romantic, life-changing sunsets a guy and a girl could remember forever. Which would be nice if hiding in a small, dark hole in the ground wasn't an all-around better prospect for survival.

Natalie takes longer than he's comfortable with, but comes back with the goods. Not only has she found a cellar crawlspace in one of the of the buildings ahead, she's carrying a basic first aid kit.

"Great. Let's do this here, where there's light. Since we're still waiting for the kid -- again -- I guess there's no real option." He has to rest the weapons down while he strips off his battered jacket.

"What are you doing?" She's automatically sunk down to examine the leg.

"I'm not even looking at the leg again 'til we have a doctor on hand. We need to get this, though. Think something reopened when I was rolling about at the checkpoint." His elbow below the torn-off shirt sleeve is a patchwork of the aftermath of bad stitching, a real fucked-up repair job, but considering for those first few days they'd thought the arm would have to come off, too, a sight of immense beauty as far as he's concerned. Sure enough, one of the garish healing wounds is leaking a thin trail of red. "Just -- clean it up and tie it all secure again. I need to use that arm."

"I'd like to see that leg, too," Natalie says, as she finishes. The bandaging job is quick and efficient. She's had practice. Not like his sweet little daughter would be persuaded to help with the task. Her hands are careful as she helps pull the jacket back over his arms, and that's sort of the reason he also doesn't really want his darling daughter helping out with that task.

He shakes his head. "Actually, I've been wanting to talk to you for a few days now. Alone-talk, just you and me." They're sitting on the ground, she knelt within the arc of his sprawled legs. It's pretty intimate. It could pass for romantic. He goes for it. That sunset's starting to creep across the sky, and it's not a great time, but chances are he's not going to find a better one.

"I've been thinking on this long and hard. These past weeks, there's been a lot of time to think, and having something important to think about as a distraction -- well, I can't say it wasn't something of a blessing, so I've been doing that a lot. What I'm trying to say is this isn't some kind of shallow, spur-of-the-moment declaration or any psychological manifestation of... you know... shared traumatic experience. I've thought it over and I'm pretty sure that... I love you." He pauses there, just in case she wants to put forward any sort of parallel statement. She doesn't. Her mouth hangs slightly open and her eyes look faintly incredulous. "I'm not being funny. I'm not being flippant. I'm being honest. This is as honest as the hot sauce. I swear it." He waits.

He makes a small 'go on' gesture with his hands to encourage her to voice... any response she might have about this.

"The hot sauce," she states finally. Her face is a wall of scepticism. This is not good. "See, I have to think about the hot sauce and wonder why a man of your proclivities would be compelled to fixate on a journalist who despises every ideology he's ever represented, and within that context, the hot sauce concerns me, and that makes me unsure about what exactly it is that we have."

"That was honest," Hauser defends again, just to make absolutely sure she believes the point.

"I know."

They're quiet for a while. Technically, it might qualify as an awkward silence, but since she hasn't moved or pulled away from him, he hopes they're actually both just being... comfortably honest. That or they're both too tired and strung out to react. But when he reaches over and takes her right hand in his, for a brief squeeze, she allows it. They sit and wait for Yonica some more. He starts to think that one of them should go looking for her, but since that'll be Natalie, also thinks he'll wait a bit longer before voicing that thought.

"So," she says out of nowhere, and it's oddly conversational considering the situation. "What are you planning to do when you get home, Hauser? Home, right? You do have a home, somewhere? You must." She laughs and it changes to something lighter as she checks herself. "Is there really a place in the world that someone like you comes from and goes back home to?"

He tips his head in neither assent nor denial. He has a few hideouts. Safe houses. Anonymous, character-less apartments. That's not what she means. "I have to confess I was hoping that my plans would dovetail with your plans." He hopes that still comes off more 'hopefully dignified' than 'pathetic'. "There's probably no reason you can't go back to your old life. They don't know you were on that plane. You weren't, strictly speaking, on the guest list for the wedding. That was -- that was Yonica's doing, last minute. Anarchic. Spur of the moment. That's my little girl for you. A number of, uh, lists and security protocols should've--"

"Shh." She puts a finger over his lower lip. "I don't want to hear about what I'm doing, especially when I still don't know what I'm doing with you, outside of the obvious pressures of necessity. You being a killer -- I don't know how I'm going to feel about that in the normal, calm and open air."

"Check. I'm actually hoping we live long enough to find that out," Hauser allows.

But she's still not finished. "So what are you planning to do? I obviously need to know if it's going to involve killing people again, at least if you expect me to stick anywhere near you, but I'm pretty curious what you'd do if you weren't doing... that."

Hauser smiles broadly with debatable real humour and nods. "You want to hear about the things I've done working undercover? Probably I've more experience of the everyday trades of modern America than most of the working population. Firstly, I have to say once and for all that I don't really think the killing thing is for me anymore. It's been building a while, but after the crash and... you... I hope that I'm fully over that phase of my life. I'm feeling it's a good time for a new start. I could be a banker, a business manager, I've worked in a number of organisations. Drove a limo for a while -- I like cars. Machines. Something like that would be great. I've also done a bunch of stuff in advertising and P.R., which you know, but that business feels a bit too much like the other thing to me, so I don't think I'd want to go down that road. I trained racehorses once. That was fun, but you need a lot of capital, and I'm not sure any of my stashes will have survived that whole Walken, Tamerlane meltdown crap back there. Hey, I was even a cameraman -- I could be your cameraman, and then that would slide together nicely."

She catches both his hands midway through the accompanying gesture and pulls them down. "Bullshit. Is it too much to ask that you come up with something real?"

It sounds like a criticism, but the thing is that their hands are still entwined, for all that. He strokes her fingers with his and laughs gently. "The part about the cameraman was definitely--"

"My one-legged cameraman. You do know the kinds of places I work?"

"There are prosthetics for that. I've seen guys run marathons. Tamerlane has some top of the range designs of their own, remember? You think I won't be able to take care of myself?" He fixes her gaze, dead serious. "You'd be safer, too."

She laughs and shakes her head, lowering eyes tainted with bitterness. "I'm sorry. Just because we have this terrifying attraction to each other than seems to elude all rational explanation, I'm not compelled to use that as an excuse to get down and dirty with a killer while we're stuck in a war zone." She tries to extricate her hands. Hauser resists; loses the fight with his left.

"Are you sure? Because we actually could probably do that, now, if you changed your mind. I'm feeling better. You're looking good." Her snort is derisive but he quickly adds, "You always look good. Here--"

What he's intending to do is to wipe the smudge of dirt from her cheekbone. What he ends up doing is cupping her cheek while they furiously kiss.

It's possible that his most persuasive techniques in this relationship do not involve talking.

Eventually, she pulls back. "Wait! Wait! Wait!"

Hauser pulls back. "You're right. We need to be on our guard. This is too dangerous a location. Besides which, I don't think that's an image Yonica needs of her newly-discovered father. I might not be any great shakes in the parenting stakes, but I wouldn't want to smash all her ideals already."

"You two are fucking pathetic." Yonica peels from the shadows, arms weighted with spoils. "You want to fuck, then fuck already. I'm going down to that cellar before getting blasted by helicopters from fucking sky. It's crazy over there!"

Hauser knows his jaw is hanging open and he tries his best to close it. How long has she been there? He didn't hear her return. Which means that in more ways than one, he's slipping.

They hole up for half the night, until there's a decent lull in the fighting, then try to make their break. They find the truck a smouldering shell, so hole up again until first light because that strikes as a better prospect than limping around in the dark trying to find alternative transport before either side of the fighting find them. Fortunately the fireworks stay quiet a few more hours. In theory they're taking turns to sleep, but the reality ends with Hauser hunched up beneath the ladder with two guns trained on the trapdoor, listening to the heavily punctuated silence, until the darkness shows its first grey signs of thinning out.

In the hazy, dim light they creep through the rubble. Hauser has a girl under each arm and a gun in each hand and feels, now, like a refugee from a Robert Rodriguez script. If it was remotely practical to mount a machine gun on his left leg stump, he fucking would. This sucks. The women don't really want to kill anyone but he can't move properly, and if there was a way to work out those issues in a fashion that was suave and cool, he'd be doing it. A stoned-looking sheep, dazed from the night of explosions, almost gets blown away as it startles him, springing from a pile of rubble with a distressed bleat.

"Shit!" A moment later, he curses himself for the expulsion. There's another noise on the air, aside from the hissing of dying fires and shifting of rubble. It sounds like voices -- no, it's a full-on chant, Hauser decides, and it's coming from the cleared space of what used to be a street, up ahead. He urgently directs the girls into better cover. Yonica peels off his shoulder, leading the way with the automatic, as they creep forward through the broken walls to see what's going on.

"Well, we've found trucks," Natalie points out unhelpfully.

This is true. Less usefully, there are almost two dozen Tamerlane soldiers accompanying the trucks. They're bunched in a circle like they're on the football field, arms over the shoulders of the adjoining men, jumping together in a manic rhythm as the war chant rises from their midst. This is more than raw caffeine hits. The chant shifts from a low, indistinct half-growled "RAR-RAR-RAR" to something that liberally features the word "kill".

"So what do you think?" Hauser poses softly, in his most calm and reasonable voice. "Should we approach them and, explaining that obviously we're not from around here, throw ourselves upon their mercy to try and get some help for a few war-stranded civilians just looking for a way back to U.S. soil?"

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Yonica says, and when she sees that he is, smacks him. "You are an asshole."

"Don't you talk to your daddy like that." Her mouth opens again and he juggles his supports to slap a hand over it. "Shh, sh-sh-shhhh!" he hisses. The scrum of Tamerlane troops is pretty loud, but so is Yonica when she gets going.

The scenario, actually, is something they've talked about more than once. Sure, Tamerlane are the enemy, but they don't necessarily know that. Walken and the former Vice-President believe he's dead, so they shouldn't have circulated photos or descriptions. If they could approach a group of soldiers outside of the fighting, would it be worth the risk? They'd want papers and security checks, and while he has a couple of identities he could bring up, he doesn't have the fake proofs on him, or know if they're compromised since his demise. Then there's Yonica, whose face half the world knows, even if it has changed a little.

"You think if we wait around long enough we might get chance to steal one of those without being caught?" Natalie asks dubiously.

"Hah--" Hauser chokes on the aborted laugh, feeling that the situation is starting to send him crazier than he's comfortable with. "I think we need to get out of here right now. Come on... take it slow. Back off, and then around." His leg whams against the stick as he stumbles, and it's all he can do not to howl in agony. Natalie grips his arm hard and warningly, not missing the blunder.

It's not the only one. Back there, the troops were rowdy and undisciplined enough to give him a false ease, and the sentry they've set is actually surprisingly good.

"Now what you folks think you're doing?" The automatic in the youth's hands clicks and his Southern accent is full of challenging menace.

"...Lost, actually," Hauser says. He stumbles, lifting himself away from Natalie's shoulder, takes a staggering two steps, and lets Yonica catch him. "Maybe you can help with that, fine example of a privately-contracted U.S. serviceman that you clearly are."

"I ain't giving you diddly 'til you drop those firearms," the soldier drawls back -- an instruction he obeys, because his balance is fucked and there's no way he could even aim in the time it'd take the guy to shoot him, and that's if he wanted to bring the whole squad down on them with the noise.

"No offence. You can't be too careful in this sort of neighbourhood." He waves his empty hands.

"Please!" Natalie takes her cue, falling to her knees and producing a little melodrama for the audience. "Please get us out of this hellhole." She practically beats her chest in despair. "Don't leave us here to die!"

Hauser's braced against Yonica, ready to pull out the move they've practiced, but the soldier is good, and doesn't give them the opening they might have hoped for as he transfers a little more of his attention to Natalie.

"Sorry," he says, hefting the weapon. "You look like a nice lady and all, but we can't be too careful. There're anti-liberty forces around every corner. Some of 'em look just like regular people, too, you see."

"There are also regular people around every corner." Natalie's mask of a damsel in distress is quickly slipping. "This is a major city."

"Oh, no, ma'am. The civilian population was warned to clear the area well in advance of the ground forces comin' through. We know what we're doing. For sure there's not nobody left here should have any business bein' here." He grins like a loon, seeming oblivious to the contradiction of his words. "Private Gall, ma'am... you got a name, yourself?"

"Clear the area and go where?" Natalie shoots back, oblivious. "Go where? There's a fucking aerial bombardment happening back there! Mountains to the east, empty desert to the west, and up ahead the border to a foreign fucking power who wouldn't give most of these folks the time of day."

"Don't you worry. These towelheads know the desert like the back of their hands."

"This is a city!"

"'Sides which," the youth carries on, matter of factly, "that wasn't no bombardment. That'll just be Zee Squadron carving their name on the desert. Hey, I got it here... darnedest thing... you c'n see exactly what they did..." The soldier balances his gun one-handed while rummaging in his pocket, from where he pulls out a cellphone and starts pushing buttons with his thumb.

"Nice phone," says Hauser.

"I know. Birthday present from mah mother." Which Natalie is old enough to be, and Hauser sorely wants to point this out whilst booting the kid up the ass. Private Gall hands the phone across to Natalie with moderate caution and a couple of false starts. "There you go. Ain't that a piece of art?"

Natalie's mouth drops. For a moment she gapes at the phone speechless, then her mouth tries to frame words that won't come out.

"Got another on there but, pardon me ma'am, I won't show it. Those boys blasted out the biggest damn graffitti of a cock and balls you ever seen south of Bhuto last week. Those boys are crazy. If command catches 'em they are toast."

"This is... insane... I don't even..." Her hand shakes uncontrollably and she drops the phone as she's pushing it back towards him. Private Gall makes a noise of dismay as he lunges to retrieve his treasure, and Hauser sees the moment. His fingers jab into Yonica's back.

She twists and hurls him at the armed man, dropping a kick to the centre of his back that's straight from one of her wild dance routines. Not comfortable, but it adds momentum he wouldn't have had without it.

"Gotcha," Hauser chokes out as he grabs Gall's gun, using all his weight to drag it down -- since he's headed that direction anyway -- and drives his other hand up at the soldier's jaw from below. They land together relatively silently, no shots fired.

Hauser shoves the gun away and squints at the picture on the mobile phone. "Wow, they're recruiting some unique artistic talents these days."

"That's the single most sickening thing I've ever seen, and so help me, Hauser, if another smart-ass comment comes out of your mouth--"

"It's sarcasm, dear. You really think I like that anymore than you? I was always a professional. Get on with it, do the thing, no frills added. This is more like Animal House in the desert." He crawls over the unconscious form, divesting it of not only weapons and ammunition, but anything else worth stealing while he's about it, before he spreads his hand across the bared throat -- and freezes.

It's automatic. Habit. The instincts of survival. Fuck.

He doesn't get a word out before Natalie and Yonica grab him by the collar and haul backwards.

"No," says Yonica, like she's commanding an ill-trained dog. "Just when I am worried in case I hurt you. He is down, okay? He is fucking down. Why do you need to do more fucking killing? He's down."

"Honey... I was going to discuss it with you. That's why I stopped. I think it's only fair to let me point out how a certain danger lies in leaving this guy alive, if he gets a good description out, and while I'm definitely focused on integrating a new value for human life, on the scale of things this gung-ho dirtbag killer-in-training doesn't even come close to the value of the two of you." He claps Yonica's sweet face between his hands, wavering because he's reaching up from his knees and that's not a great position, and smiles and gives his best effort at looking charming, but even so when he tries to move along, Natalie backs away from a repeat of the gesture.

"Hoo, no. Down, boy." She does pick up and pass over his stick. "I think we need to be leaving, now," she stage-whispers.

They get about two hundred yards before a major motherfucking payload drops out of the air, turning the strip of land all the way back to where they spent the night into a wall of flame. One last hit drops like punctuation two hundred yards behind them, close enough Hauser can feel the heat come at him and he's almost rocked off his feet -- foot.

"Jesus Christ!" That's not a professional reaction, but at least nobody hears him over the roar of the blast and the cacophony of men screaming. After he's had a moment to process, he mouths "dumb fucking luck" to himself, but that is not a sentiment he's planning to share with the ladies.

"Run! Run! Run!" he shares instead. "Get into cover."

They're collapsed gasping behind a stone wall while pandemonium reigns when he realises that the ringing isn't entirely in his ears. He digs out the unfortunate Private Gall's mobile phone and prods the 'ok' button to accept the message.

"Lookie, we added ! mark @ end. Jez says that 1 landed close. Sorry 2 wake U boys up so rly."

"Didn't I tell you?" Hauser says, nodding encouragingly while he displays the accompanying photo to Yonica and Natalie. "Artists at work. Artists at work!"

They'd hoped to be out of that armpit of hell and away by the time the sun came up fully: instead they're stuck playing hide-and-seek with the riled-up Tamerlane forces, who it strikes Hauser haven't been told that it was themselves who blew up their comrades earlier, since knowledge of that kind might instigate a degree of caution in which they remain lacking. 'Anti-liberty infidels' all the way, even if he and presumably whatever asshole is in command here knows the truth. His stolen phone has stopped getting new messages through, and he's turned it off while he thinks about the who/where/what of all his old contacts it would be best to risk putting that call through to for help getting out of Ugikistan. Until he makes up his mind, they're surrounded by a bunch of jackasses on speed with big fucking guns and an engineered score to settle, so these thoughts are pressing upon him with some urgency.

Hauser's frustrations rise every step of the way, no pun intended, because he's the one slowing his girls down. He'd tell them to leave him behind, but they don't have the stone-cold meanness of temperament to survive in this shithole. They'll come across a situation that Yonica can't whore herself out to and Natalie can't talk herself out of sooner or later. On foot, though, they're hopelessly disadvantaged by his lack of a foot, and they need to do something about that, soon.

Seriously. If the machine gun thing would work, he would do that. Exotic dancer versus nearly thirty years of kickboxing training and he'd out-ass-kick Rodriguez' stripper any day. Fuck.

"Wait." He grabs Yonica, and sags onto Natalie, halting their progress mid-step to point at a building across the street. "Are my eyes deceiving me, or what does that look like to you?"

"It's a hospital," Natalie breathes. "Those fuckers..."

What she means is that half of the roof is collapsed in onto the uppermost floor and part of the entryway is on fire. It looks like they've damped it down and kicked the bits free from the main building so the rest won't catch, and nothing's still falling off the roof, so they do seem to have things under control. There's an ambulance in the carport, which Hauser regards, calculatingly -- undamaged and unguarded except for a skinny, tired Ugiki man leaned against the front of it smoking like it's his last cigarette in the world -- but they're not sunk that low yet. "Come on."

"We're doing what, exactly?" Natalie stops him with a hand on his arm. But her eyes slide down to his leg and then jolt deliberately back up, lined with grimness. "What the fuck haven't you been telling us?"

He shakes his head, minutely, flicking his gaze towards Yonica. "We're too slow. I need something like crutches, or a chair, or fuck it I'd settle for a walking frame right now. We need to be able to move around better than this."

"All right." She takes a deep breath and nods.

They break cover and cross the road, with guns put away and whatever hands they have to spare between them raised, calling out "peace" and "help" and "doctor" in Ugiki and English both. Hauser tries to look more dishevelled and pathetic, if that's possible.

Two men in the uniform of the gutted Ugiki police force surge out from the broken overhang of the entryway, pointing guns and yelling in their native language. The three of them break apart, Hauser wavering on one leg as the men make a bee-line for him and proceed to divest him of every stolen weapon and clip he's carrying. That's a long time to be stood on one leg. Natalie's waving her outdated journalist pass from Turaquistan all the while, and frantically continuing to shout in her basic Ugiki, while Yonica raises her hands and keeps her mouth shut, which is unusual enough to be worthy of note. As they remove the last of his weapons, Hauser gets a rifle butt in the stomach and a question shouted in his face, which he infers to be along the lines of does he have any more, but can't answer anyway. Natalie gestures fiercely towards his left leg and yells some more. The policemen fire rapid Ugiki between them, then turn back with expressions that mean business.

A number of possible moves flash through Hauser's brain and it turns out just as well the one he picks involves waiting that extra second as Yonica breaks into one of her hits. The policemen stop in their tracks. The song is halting at first, but picks up pace quickly, with a passion that seems more focused and fuelled than her singing ever was before. The rapid Ugiki exchange starts to contain a lot more pointing and freaking out, along with much repetition of the words "Yonica Babyyeah".

Yonica wraps up the long note on the end of her rendition of the well-known chorus by merging the note into a triumphant screech of "Yonica BabyyeahYEAH!" as she leaps into the air, then bounces around and squeals with the celebrating Ugikis. The ambulance guy joins in as well. They start to get others from inside the hospital, in white coats more red than white and stained bandages alike. Five or six battered and bloodstained little girls run out -- limp in the case of the poor little lamb that, like Hauser, is missing a damn leg, and isn't that a sight he never wanted to see? -- and they scramble through the legs of the adults to cluster around their heroine. Natalie and Hauser are forgotten.

Well, yippee-ki-yay. The two of them exchange grim glances through the crowd.

It's too late to start wondering if this was a miscalculation. But at least they're in.

"Hit me with your best shot, ooh-ooooh! Come on and hit me with your best shot!"

Yonica is serenading the injured in an impromptu concert. Absolutely everyone seems to have packed into the largest ward in the hospital, regardless of severity of injury or status of treatment, where the wounded and maimed bounce along in jolly fashion to cheesy rock favourites now that she's exhausted her own repertoire. Hauser has mixed feelings about the situation -- not to mention his kid's taste in music, but what can a man do? He already knows she was raised wrong.

"Five weeks," he answers the question asked by the doctor, which gets translated by Gehi, a startlingly cheerful Ugiki carpet salesman who has more broken ribs than he has remaining fingers and toes and is swathed in enough bandages to pass for an Egyptian archaeological exhibit. As a pair with the doctor, they look like the resurrected mummy and the raving mad professor. Gehi's English is learned as a consequence of his passion for Australian soaps, leading to a heavy Aussie accent and occasional oddities of expression, lending a different kind of surreality to the conversation.

The doctor speaks, behind his grey beard and the glasses that are so scratched and soiled they're nearly opaque. It's not actually possible to see any of his face, but his hands are twisted and he performs every movement in a series of jerks. He's either upwards of a hundred or he's forty. Hard to tell, around here. Gehi translates, "You oughta have been puttin' in more rest with an injury like this one, sport."

Hauser's mind is largely on other things. The resurrection of Yonica Babyyeah poses considerable problems. First and foremost is the fact she makes him want to crawl out of his fucking skin, projectile vomit, march off to ritually sacrifice babies, or all of the above every time he sees her moaning and gyrating on a stage. Add to that the fact of her demise -- which seems to have already joined the annals of music's mythology along with all the other great and famous who met their end too soon -- being inextricably linked with his own fate in the eyes of Tamerlane. When word of this spreads, he is going to be a hunted man. He'd thought, surviving long enough to escape Ugikistan presumed, that he was free and clear. It could spell dangerous for Yonica, too. If a pan-Asian pop idol speaks out against Tamerlane, that's pretty sour P.R., and considering what she's seen and knows, he's not sure Tamerlane will want to take the risk.

Then again, if they'd been shot by the Ugiki police, he wouldn't be around to be fretting on the matter. Perspective -- his baby saved his life. She definitely saved the life of the bastard who'd hit him, and that man should be suitably grateful, but likely doesn't realise it.

"It ain't lookin' a pretty picture," the doctor says via Gehi, as another tirade of offensive sounding grunts delivered in a series of volatile jerks is transformed into cheery Aussie. "This here amputation shoulda seen some attention way before now." The last of the bandages are peeled off. Hauser makes the mistake of looking down and reverses the move quickly.

"Fuck... can you cover that up? Don't let me see that." He hovers a spread hand to block line-of-sight to the truncated end of his leg. "Do me a favour. I don't want to see that. I'm supposed to be a tough-guy."

"Sorry, mate," Gehi blatantly ad-libs while the doctor smacks Hauser's hand away, then translates, "The wounds are inflamed and you need antibiotics for it, soon, skip. But we don't have antibiotics. The hospital's all out and right now no supplies are gettin' through."

"No worries. I'm not staying." He watches Gehi and the doctor exchange more words in Ugiki, and glares at both for the worried looks they share. "What? All right, give. How long?"

Gehi speaks, the doctor answers with increased volume, and Gehi offers hesitantly, "Coupla days before we're talkin' cutting into that limb again." He looks uncertainly at the doctor and there's another brief exchange for confirmation. "With no antibiotics, soon the infection's gonna be too bad to cure. That means cutting it out." Then the doctor speaks, unintelligibly but forcefully enough to eject food chunks from his beard, fixing Hauser with berating eyes and making a slicing gesture with one finger across his leg. Gehi opts not to translate.

"Great." Hauser swallows. "But to get this straight, the leg is not going to kill me yet, and while surgery is something I'd prefer to give a miss, I've got time. What's a few more inches, right?"

The next tirade leans him backwards by its sheer vitriol.

"Moving around sure ain't helpin'," Gehi says. "And when it gets worse you won't be doing much of that, even if you wanna."

"Tell Doctor... Strangelove... 'thanks', and ask him to please wrap it up to go," Hauser says with a sigh. "Thank you, too... sport." He flops back on the gurney and just floats in the pain of the doctor's ministrations and Yonica's singing, and stays like that, drifting, 'til long after they conclude he's passed out and move on to deal with other people's missing limbs.

This is not good. They need to get out of Ugikistan, and the truth is, he doesn't know how he's going to do it anymore. He's damaged goods, and they barely avoided a potential disaster brought on by the needs of his fucking leg this time. When he decided they had to stop hiding and make their break, he honestly thought he had more time than this, but it seems fate's concluded he's been tempting it too much. Where do they go from here? And how? He can still fight, if he can get close enough, but he can't run. They're on the run, and he can't run. Maybe the girls really would do better on their own, if they could avoid the soldiers. Maybe he should make them leave him here. If he stays, the rest of his leg will rot off for sure, if it doesn't kill him all the way. Fuck. Fuck...

He fumbles the cap off one of the bottles of hot sauce and upends it over his open mouth -- and almost chokes, because even if it is watery shit, it's still not a good idea to try drinking it lying down.

It doesn't make him feel any better about the idea of losing his family all over again, either.

The fits of coughing ease at last. Yonica has moved onto Meatloaf duets. She's found a Ugiki singer to take the male role. Truth to tell, it sounds like they're all having hell of a time. The audience might not know English, but they're singing along anyway. The whole thing is crazy. Like how when they arrived, it seemed there wasn't a single person in this whole place who didn't know who Yonica Babyyeah was... even if he'd never heard of her himself, two months ago.

Wait, wait, wait. Hauser sits up sharply.

He's instantly accosted by a bunch of hospital staff, none of whom he can understand, but he takes from the exchange well enough that if he's not unconscious or actively dying, they want the gurney back. There's some reshuffling while he relocates to the floor.

With his back leaning on the wall, he takes out Private Gall's mobile phone and switches it on again. It's a great phone, just about every feature imaginable in a compact, lightweight package, but he already established that Gall's taste in tunes and entertainment was even more lousy than Yonica's. He accesses the internet on it and begins to research.

It doesn't take him long to realise that Yonica Babyyeah, resurrected, could be the most famous woman on the planet.

Yonica alive was verging on superstardom. Yonica reported dead in a fucking plane crash before her 20th year was the martyred darling of the entire fucking world, with a media circus of public mourning the likes of which might even surpass Princess Diana. Her records have sold in millions across the globe. Her image is an icon. Yonica Babyyeah, resurrected with one eye and her missing father by her side and the story to tell the world that she is, by God, going to be telling, is going to be the biggest worldwide phenomenon the motherfucking world has ever seen.

Hauser snaps shut the phone and stares down at it in a daze.

He's been going about this all wrong. He's been thinking like a killer, a CIA assassin, a mercenary, a warrior. Hampered, at that, by the expectation from Natalie and Yonica that he'll dredge up some new honour code or moral regimen to live by to prove his reformed state. Now, it's strikingly obvious to him that he's had his head up his ass the whole time.

What he should have been doing is thinking like a P.R. man.

"Are you all right? Hauser?" Natalie is squatting in front of him, her hand soft on his shoulder -- her hands are always soft -- and her voice interrupting the increasingly complex patterns drawn by his thoughts.

"I'm a P.R. man," he says dazedly. "Maybe that's just as bad as a killer but -- it seems that's what I am now, not any of those other things we were talking about. Could you love a P.R. man, Natalie?" Hell, she's a goddamn journalist, it's not as if she's got so much wriggle-room.

She gives him that look again.

Take two. He shakes himself to full alertness. "My leg's rotting as we speak," he answers her, "And I know how we're going to get out of this mess. No bullshit -- I really know it." The sounds around them are back now to hospital sounds, but there's still a patter of excitement, of optimism, even though the singing has stopped. That's Yonica Babyyeah. That's the power of celebrity, the unstoppable force that's going to save their lives and keep their family together. "Could you grab Yonica and fetch her over here? If you could rustle up come crutches, that would be nice, too."

Her eyes stay uneasily on him as she backs away, until she reaches the door of the main room and stumbles over someone dead or dying on the floor.

He watches that door until Yonica walks back through it in her place. There's a halo around her, an energy, a light. This - this is the manifestation of the blind and stupid adoration of the people, a lie, a mask, a fantasy, all of them seeing their own created monster in place of his little girl. But it's what will save their lives.

"Dad!" The rarest word leaves her lips as she runs the last few steps to reach him, dropping to her knees and gripping his shoulder. Hell, that means he looks even worse than he thought. "Natalie said -- what's wrong with your leg?" He pushes the phone into her hand. Since he got it, he's been turning the question over and over in his brain -- who to call, which of his ex-CIA or mercenary contacts or old backup plans he might still rely on, complicated equations of trust and risk. He knows now exactly how to place that all-important call. "Sweetie, could you call your international agent?"

"--What? Did they give you Morphine again?"

"No Morphine." More the pity. "Honey, you remember I told you what my daddy said about the added benefit of the truth? Well, we're going to tell the truth." He places his own hand on her shoulder. "We're going to make it such a big, glorious, Technicolor, surround-sound and HD truth that the public will be lapping it up. In fact, once we get the word out, Tamerlane will be running from Bharipoli so fast we'll be looking at their dust-trails yesterday. I looked up the sales figures, Yonica. I looked up the publicity since your rumoured demise. Right now, potentially, that oversexed little ass of is one of the most powerful on this planet. But first, we need for you to be alive, and we need it fast. We need to get the word out. News spots, bloggers, viral marketing. We need this out there. Call your agent. Take a picture to send him. Take a picture with me. I'm Yonica Babyyeah's long lost bastard dad. Do you start to see how huge this is going to be? Do it. Do it. Do it. If we can get this out there before a Tamerlane missile lands on this God-forsaken hospital, that would be... you know, better."

She holds his gaze for a long moment, both their hands locked together around the phone. A crazy spark fires up in hers, and she laughs, long and wild, takes the phone from him. Takes a picture. Takes more pictures. Him, her, passing doctors, the guy on the floor in the corner howling for drugs, and numerous combinations thereof. Then she starts pushing numbers, getting there after a few false starts.

Hauser watches tiredly, and can't muster more reaction than a faint smile -- but it's a real one -- when she finally makes the call and someone picks up the call and Yonica starts shrieking excitedly. The general focus of the shrieks morphs from "I'm not dead! Did you get the pictures? I'm not dead, Brian!" to "How fucking rich?!" after Brian says his piece, then to "I'm in Ugikistan! Fuck, I'm in Ugikistan and they are dropping fucking bombs on us! How are you gonna get me out of Ugikistan, Brian?!"

At that point, Hauser extends his hand and waggles his fingers in a gesture of gimme. He can see Natalie just turning around the end of the corridor carrying two crutches. Fantastic.

"What you just did in there," he tells Yonica before he puts the phone to his ear, "We're going to do in front of the world... Hi, Brian. Brand Hauser. You don't know me. I'm an ex-CIA mercenary killer and I happen to be Yonica's daddy. Do you remember Live Aid, Brian?" He laughs at the man's incoherent response. "I'm sitting here in a Ugiki hospital. We have Natalie Hagelhausen, Yonica Babyyeah, a bunch of local musicians, and I am sure we can rustle up a camera and some sound equipment from somewhere. You saw the pictures? Your girl's missing an eye, make sure that gets some sympathetic cover. Oh, and you might want to mention that was Tamerlane's doing, not the Ugikis? Brian, I'm thinking Live Aid in the Desert. You, me, Yonica, Natalie... all we need is for Tamerlane not to make an air strike over our heads and we've got it made."

Yonica is staring at him like he's crazy. He hands the phone back to her. "I'm sure the two of you can hash out the details now you have the picture. Go forth, Little Bird, fly." He flaps his hands to wave her off, and looks up at Natalie, who's just dropped both crutches with a thunk. Hauser catches the nearest and uses it to poke the other into reach, but he can't be bothered to get up by then, so just lays them across his lap.

"What the hell are you doing?" Natalie asks.

"Concert for Ugikistan? How's that sound? Right here, right now. Hm, maybe the slogan needs work. You're going to present it. It's what you wanted, right? You'll get to tell the world." He calls over to Yonica, "Ask him how long it would take to get hold of Bono."

Natalie looks like she wants to pick him up and shake him but doesn't quite dare. "Are you high?"

"No! No drugs are involved. Why do you two keep asking that?"

On the phone, Yonica says, "No, he really is my dad. Yeah, he's even more of an asshole now I've met him in person."

"Fuck! Because they're going to kill us, Hauser. Tamerlane will hear about this with everyone else and the instant they do -- it's 'whoops, sorry about that stray precision missile strike', and we're nothing but a stain on the desert!"

"No, no, no, no," Hauser sighs. "Do you have any idea how much bad P.R. that would be? This is going out there now. Tamerlane will know when the whole damn world knows and that's -- blowing up journalists, civilian hospitals, their own men, their allies, homeless crippled orphans, those are all things their public image can survive. Blowing up a resurrected international popstar at the biggest musical event in--"

Suddenly, Natalie is nodding along with him, wearing a grin that isn't exactly nice nor exactly sane and shows all her teeth.

"We need cameras, recording equipment, radio equipment, whatever, and we need it right now -- Yonica, sweetie, hon? What about Bob Geldof? -- so we need to ask around the Ugikis and get ahold of that. There's this guy called Gehi around somewhere, can you find him?" He thinks about it and starts trying to drag his reluctant body upright, to get his foot under him and the crutches braced. He can't co-ordinate all of this from the corridor floor. "Musicians. Local groups. Traditional, modern, anything. Tell them it's their chance to go worldwide. This is about the Ugikis, too, don't forget. Besides, Yonica needs a band. We need to figure out how many hours it'll take to go live on this."

"Hours...? Oh, my god. This is happening." It's Natalie's turn to slide down the wall and sit mumbling on the floor.

"This is fucking happening!" Yonica shrieks, jumping up and down waving the phone their way. "I am in conference call with Bono! He says 'Hello'. Say 'Hi' to Bono, dad!"

Hauser obliges. Their steadily growing Ugiki audience echoes him. Yonica pulls the phone back to her, listens a moment, and responds, "Yeah, he really is my dad."

"Tell those guys they can get Madonna as well -- if they want her," Hauser puts in with nasty glee. "That bitch owes me from that fucking mess in Europe a decade ago."

Natalie stares up at him, dazed. "You are a crazy, crazy bastard..."

He shuffles 'til he's standing over her. "This crazy bastard and his girls are going home. So how about it, Natalie? We play our cards right, we could be the new first family of the world. We live our lives so far in the public eye that there's nothing Tamerlane nor nobody but the public themselves can ever do to touch us again."

"That could be just another permutation of being thrown to the wolves," she murmurs.

He tips his head, acknowledging the point. "But living through it is always a good start... Wait one moment." He spins and hisses to Yonica, "Can you write a new song, now? Right now, like now when you come off the phone? Doesn't have to be good. Just has to be real."

She gives him a flat look. "You want to know if I have songs to write after the last fucking month? Find me a pen, paper and guitar!"

He jabs his finger at her: go-to. Gives her his best shady smile. "Then you tell Brian -- and Bono -- there'll be a song, too."

He turns back to Natalie, juggling the crutches to offer her a hand up. "How about it, then? Are you on board for this wild ride?"

"Well, you know," she says. "If you already have Bono, how can I refuse?"

Yonica Sings For Ugikistan is the biggest musical event of the last three decades and maybe longer. It's certainly the most swiftly organised. It's amazing what a life-and-death situation will do to speed up the wheels of organisation, even when half your workers are down a limb or more. Except Hauser's kind of suspicious that these guys aren't even thinking of driving Tamerlane from their door, because all they can see is Yonica Babyyeah, resurrected, bright and real in their midst. In record time, they gather lighting and sound equipment and cameras, get themselves satellite linked to the web broadcast, and if the gear is a bit rickety or jerry-rigged, so be it. Yonica's agents are doing their job, and when the news goes public, it hits from all directions at once. Tamerlane don't stand a chance in hell of squashing this or covering it up. Within an hour of hitting the global news, troops are being pulled out of Bharipoli like Satan's laughing on their tail.

The numb exhaustion that hits Hauser in a veritable tsunami when they get that news is unfortunate, since he still has the world's biggest concert to produce.

"You know how I said I wasn't doing this shit anymore?" he says wearily to his precious charge, in about the only stolen quiet moment they're likely to have.

"You weren't doing this shit anymore? I wasn't doing this shit anymore!" she retorts. "Shit!"

He hopes the unspoken agreement they take out of this conversation is that it's still better than dying. He also hopes his practice with lack of sleep over the last several weeks stands him in good stead for the night ahead: ten hours of culturally diverse pop perfection and on-the-scene reporting of real-life drama. They have a New York, Los Angeles and a London stage for sure, and probably a few dozen offshoots by now. Thankfully, he's not the one who has to keep track of that shit, at least. And tomorrow... tomorrow, he'll be flying back to Los Angeles and major news network interviews, and sufficient medical treatment to stop his leg from rotting off entirely... which, strangely enough, is enough to keep him going.

Earlier, Yonica disappeared into a -- because there isn't a lot of space in the hospital -- janitor's closet, locking herself away to write her new song, and came out again after only about half an hour, looking pleased. Hauser's not sure whether to take that as a positive or a warning to be afraid.

Every so often, new casualties wander into the middle of it all -- more all the time, now the soldiers have gone, and people are more able to move about on the streets -- and go from dazed and shell-shocked to dazed and astonished. Natalie says he can be proud of that. He's not sure how proud she's going to be of the media circus he intends to stage around her serious revelations of Tamerlane's corrupt heart.

The thing is, if they tell it the way she'd want to tell it, if they keep it serious business, they're dead. Make it so big, so glaring, loud and perverse that it'll never find a court, even an international one, and Tamerlane can't touch them for it. As one of their old poster-boys he's walking a fine line himself, and it will give him great comfort to know that anything suspicious happening to the three of them will credit a real conspiracy out of the all the public farce.

The hours pass in a hallucinogenic blink of an eye. Early on, with Gehi firmly installed as his assistant, he managed to gather a band together. They've been on stage since, with Yonica, finalising the list of tunes and breaking into a few bars every so often, getting in what practice they can. The bassist's in a wheelchair and the drummer's got one arm, but that never stopped Def Leppard. This shit's due to start about 5pm, local time, and that's any time now. He's heard the song she wrote -- it's awful, and screams instant hit. By tomorrow morning there won't be any more iconic image in the world than Yonica Babyyeah, who lost an eye in the conflict, singing for the plight of the Ugiki people.

Natalie sidles over to his current leaning spot against the busy wall. Everything's squeezed into gaps between the injured and the dying. "Tell me," she says from the corner of her mouth. "This is all still a big con, isn't it? You don't care for these people."

"No," he agrees truthfully. He's exhausted beyond description and, at the time, trying to adjust a camera while balancing upright, so distraction is possible, but he tries to inhabit the moment as much as he can, because he gets the feeling that it's an important one. "I like some of them. I'm not fond of some others -- those that were going to shoot us, earlier, to give a purely random example. But 'care'? No. Look, Natalie -- I can't control how much of this you decide to put down to my need to make amends for my past actions in some new humanitarian quest, I don't even know. But most of it... most of it I think is pure self-interest on my part to protect the lives of yourself and Yonica, because it seems to me that my life just doesn't have any meaning if the two of you were to die. I'm sorry if that's wrong, but -- this is it." Spreading his arms out to indicate all of himself is a gesture in dangerous territory in a couple of ways. "This is me. Brand Hauser. I've been him too long to change it all at once, so--"

One crutch clatters to the floor as she unexpectedly grabs his collar down so his lips can meet hers.

"--What did I say?" he asks when they finally come up for air.

"Stop talking," she advises him. "And keep that up long enough so maybe we'll get chance to do some more not-talking together after the thing."

Typical, he thinks, eyes on her back as she walks away. The only thing he'll be in any state to do after the thing is fall into a coma. He's been awake 40 hours and counting since he last slept on the back seat while Yonica drove.

The last few scrambled hours of preparation are punctuated by arrivals, key among them being a kamikaze professional sound crew that were air-lifted in, bringing enough expertise and equipment to ease at last the worst of Hauser's headaches. It's a relief to start to be able to leave tasks to others, especially because his vision has been greying around the edges in an alarming fashion at times. The part of him that's been trying to convince himself this is not the biggest mistake of his life has switched its focus to trying to convince himself it's not the last one.

"Brand Hauser," a clipped voice says next to his ear. "It looks like the killing machine needs sending back to the shop for re-tuning."

He lacks the energy to be surprised as he turns to face the voice's owner. He shouldn't be surprised, anyway, that Tamerlane at least sent someone. Even if they don't dare to act, they'll want to observe. There are probably ways they can still find to make a profit from this. Wouldn't want to miss those. The man leaning next to him is in his fifties, tall and no longer lean, since he's starting to develop a considerable paunch. "Gardner. How long's it been? Three years? Hong Kong?"

They're about to go on air. The professional crew have taken over, but they still look to him for a nod and a wave. Natalie and Yonica are on the improvised stage area, miked up, with the Ugiki band. Natalie's going to do most of the introductions and talking, but they need to keep Yonica's presence there, a worthy line thrown in every so often to remind everyone that it's Yonica's show. First on the cards is to get the story out. Everyone knows by now that Yonica Babyyeah isn't dead and have an inkling as to why. That's not the same as putting her own words up there in lights.

"Cut the small talk, Hauser. Do you really think we're going to let you get away with this farce?"

"Do you know that we're about to go live in -- oh, about right now?" The opening boom of the introductory music and a handful of Ugikis firing guns up at the ceiling drowns out the last few words, and Yonica and Natalie are onstage in the eyes of the world -- safe, says a voice within, and some of the tension left in Hauser starts to relax. He tries to keep a track of their words through the intro and beginning of the opening interview, but Gardner's talking and his own nausea split his attention. He would honestly shoot Gardner just for that if he could rely on his shaking hands not to fluff it.

"See, the part that confuses me is where you think that that is going to save you." Gardner isn't even bothering to hide the fucking huge gun he's produced, punctuating his gestures with it. Half the room are similarly armed.

"You haven't heard? I'm Yonica Babyyeah's fucking father, you asshole. Part of the story, the main event, the family reunion, popcorn for a billion households around the world -- you get me here, Bob? Everyone who knows Yonica knows me, now. I'm a fucking celebrity in anonymity. I'd be an event if I was an absentee alcoholic who got bored and walked out. Wait'll they hear about the real thing -- murder and bloodshed makes for great drama. Hell, maybe I'll write a damn book. It looks as though I'll be spending a few more weeks on my back--"

Gardner's grip on the gun is turning his hands white with rage.

Over his shoulder, a member of the crew is frantically waving for Hauser's attention and begins counting down from three with his fingers the moment he gets it. Hauser waves back and grins, jerks the crutches into place as a camera rolls around to him, and says from the corner of his mouth, "Smile, Bob. You're standing in front of more of the world than ever tuned into a single broadcast before, so early estimates suggest... Now if you don't mind, fame and fortune await."

"You really do. You think you've gotten away with this," Gardner hisses. "Well, I'll tell you something else. I don't care what it takes, I'm gonna kill you, and your dirty slut of a so-called daughter, and then that fucking bitch of a reporter you somehow brought into this."

Hauser's already moving, stumping down the aisle of space the bloody, bandaged spectatorate clear for him, but he feels the sweat break out at those words. Yonica's screeching and waving at him like the reunion is now and they haven't been arguing all of the last month already, like it's somehow more convincing that she could love him as her father when she's up on that stage surrounded by the noise and the glow. Natalie's trying to look professional, but a little bit of it seems it might be catching. They're so close, and Gardner's gun clicks behind him, loud even below all the rest of the sounds.

"Don't do it, Gardner. You know Tamerlane won't thank you for it happening this way..." As he stops, speaks the words and looks back over his shoulder, the strands of fate seem to separate and fly apart before his eyes.

In one world, Bob Gardner's eyes say it all: I never liked you anyway, and those bullets fly. They mow down Hauser's wretched life, Yonica's and Natalie's and the unfortunate Gehi's, lined up on the stage behind him, along with a dozen Ugiki bystanders -- and Bob Gardner's life, too, when Tamerlane get hold of him, for making them a part of the most public massacre the world has ever seen. Because the problem with playing the P.R. game... the problem... is always the idiots who don't understand the rules.

In a different world, Gardner lowers the gun after his one malicious moment of fucking with Hauser's head -- no real choice after all: such petty grudges aren't worth dying for -- and he makes it to that stage. To the crazy fascination of millions. To his two beautiful girls. For the rest of his life, he's as rich and untouchable as any of the worst S.O.B.'s at the heart of Tamerlane.

Not knowing which it will be, Hauser turns and keeps walking, feeling the future glare heavily at his back.

END