Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones

someone,’ offered Cecile.
    ‘No thanks. I mean, yes, I suppose—’
    ‘I hate these things.’
    ‘So do I. What’s the point of a party if you can’t get drunk.’
    ‘You can get drunk, Fio. Go ahead, be a rebel. What else were you hired for? Look at Ken. He’s going to be legless in about ten minutes.’
    But she didn’t want to be drunk, not here. In any case, the milling about was over, it was time for the musical entertainment. Pigsty and the Organs moved on up. Security men stood in front of the double doors, only exit or entrance (isn’t that a fire hazard? wondered Fio) from this crowded room. Pigsty was wearing vr goggles, leather jodphurs, jackboots: a new, shaggy Afghan waistcoat open over his six-pack belly; the chains between his nipple rings swinging and glinting. He strode to the front of the stage, the image of a cleaned-up but still deliciously scary Countercultural Monster.
    ‘And now,’ he roared. ‘All you RAVERS. It’s time to GET DOWN!’
    The lights went out. There was a drum roll, and a fusillade of wild bangs, yells, crackles like machinegun fire: an incredible, shapeless racket. Typical Organs, thought Fiorinda, a bored sigh rising in her throat. Get down ! wailed someone: grabbed her and dragged her to the floor.
    Some lights came on again. Her knees were warm and wet. She was crouching in a pool of blood. Cecile lay beside her, face upturned and eyes wide open, the side of her head and her lower jaw blown away.
    Where had the gunmen come from? Through the roof? The prefab was full of choking smoke, coloured smoke from the stage act, grey smoke that smelled of cordite: no, they must have come through the doors but how? How did they get past the security? How many of them were there? Three? four, five? People were running, pushing and fighting each other, to the other end of the prefab: but there was no exit that way, no way out. The gun men were going into the crowd, like shepherds among blundering sheep, still firing. There was Ken Batty, the Think Tank’s earnest politico, lying on the floor screaming, a horrible mess of blood and grey, puddingy stuff falling out of rip in his belly. There was a man in a dinner jacket, trying to crawl and falling on his face, oh God where’s Ax…?
    …and then right by her she saw someone dragged out from under the buffet table. It was Martina, blood in her dreads and all over her Red Sonja jerkin, but who was that holding her? It was Pigsty . He held Martina and snogged her, very deliberately, mouth all over her face, hand inside the laces of the jerkin, squeezing one of her tits as if he was trying to wrench it off: then he hauled off and shot her in the jaw. Fiorinda backed away, staring, electrified, her mouth open…and someone grabbed her again. Not Cecile, Cecile was dead. It was Fereshteh the ghazal singer, dark eyes gleaming through the eyepiece of her veil, drawing Fio with an iron grip into the shelter of the palms. There they stayed, clinging to each other.
    Somewhere off in the distance, sirens began to wail.
    They were found, and hauled out. The room was full of the sounds of people crying and screaming, full of a confusion of moving bodies; the air smelled foul. The men who hauled them out looked like hippies from the campground. They were not rough, only insistent: they hustled the two young women out of the prefab. Fiorinda thought they were being rescued, she kept saying I’m all right , because she thought the hippies should go back and rescue someone worse off. But then they were bundled into the back of a small van. No one else in there with them, no windows. Sirens all around but they could see nothing.
    The women didn’t speak to each other.
    The van didn’t go far. They were delivered into a big tent, one of the Hyde Park indoor venues. It was brightly lit: the slick heavy duty membrane of the empty floor shining like the surface of a black pool. Pigsty was on the stage, holding a big hand gun. With him were the Organs,