Beyond the green, the land slanted up, into uncut pasture with a few paths through it, maybe made by cattle or horses. She could see white up ahead, and then she saw it was that same ugly fence, but along a different stretch of road. Two figures in black rose up, as they drew closer, running to the fence, lifting a length of it between them and moving it aside. Burton drove through the gap without slowing, out onto blacktop Pickett must have paid the county to keep in such good shape, then they were on that, speeding up.
About half a mile on, Tommy was waiting by his big white car, in a Sheriff’s Department helmet and his black jacket. Burton slowed, pulling up beside him. “Flynne,” Tommy said, “you okay?”
“I guess so.”
“Anybody hurt you?” Tommy was looking at her like he could see inside her.
“No.”
Still looking inside her. “We’ll take you home.”
Burton got off the ATV, walked across the road, and stood with his back to them, peeing. She climbed off. Carlos scooted himself forward, to the driver’s part of the saddle, took the handlebars, started the engine, swinging around. He was gone into the dark before Burton could cross the road again, headed back the way they’d come, she guessed to pick up the other two.
Tommy opened the passenger-side door for her and she got in. He went around, opened the driver-side passenger door, then his own, got in. Burton got in behind him and they both closed their doors.
“You okay, Flynne?” Tommy asked, again, looking over at her.
She closed her door.
He started the car, and they drove for a while in the dark, opposite direction to the one Carlos had gone in. He put the headlights on.
“Pickett’s a dick,” she said
“Knew that,” Burton said. “Was it Reece?”
“Pickett said they’d kill him if he didn’t bring me. Said Homes could find him anywhere.”
“Figured,” Burton said.
But she didn’t want to talk about Reece, or whatever else it was that they were doing. She didn’t feel like she could talk to Macon through the bug, because they’d hear her, and Tommy was concentrating on the road. So it felt like a long ride back to town, and everything that had happened before felt kind of like a dream, but still going on.
They were almost to town when Burton said, to whoever it was that wasn’t there, “Do it.”
They saw the light from it, the fireball, behind them, throwing the cruiser’s shadow ahead of it on the road. Then they heard it, and later she’d think she could’ve counted off the miles, like after a lightning strike.
“Goddamn,” Tommy said, slowing. “What the hell did you do?”
“Builders,” Burton, said, behind her, “still managing to blow their own asses up.”
Tommy said nothing. Got back up to speed. Just looking at the road.
She hoped Reece hadn’t stopped at all, had got out of the county, headed someplace interstate, gone. She didn’t want to ask Burton about that.
“You feel like a coffee, Flynne?” Tommy asked her, finally.
“Too late for me, thanks,” she said, her voice like somebody else’s, someone none of this ever happened to, and then she just cried.
76
The headband Ash was extending looked like the one Lowbeer had used to take him back to the patchers’ island, but with the addition of a clear bendable cam, its milkily transparent head like a very large sperm. “I’m not going back there,” he said, grateful for the expanse of Lev’s grandfather’s desk.
“You aren’t being asked. You’ll be visiting Flynne. At very low resolution.”
“I will?”
“We’ve already installed the emulation app in your phone.”
He leaned forward, took the thing from her. It weighed no more than the other one, but the spermlike cam lent it something at once Egyptianate and cartoonish. “They have peripherals?”
“I’ll let you find that out for yourself.”
77
You got a bug in your stomach?” Janice finally asked, from the dark at the foot of the bed. “And one in your ear?”
Flynne was sitting up against her pillows, in her underpants and the USMC sweatshirt, moonlight streaming in her window. “One in my stomach’s a tracker,” she said, “from a Belgian satellite security service. Me, Macon, Burton, Conner, we all got one, that I know of.”
“One in your ear?”
“Burton took it.”
“How’d he get it out?”
“Macon flew it out. Into a pill bottle. I thought it was some future-ass thing they showed Macon how to fab, but he says it’s from here, last season’s military.”
“The one you swallowed showed them where you were?”
“Or I wouldn’t be here now. Reece bagged my phone.”
“Macon’s made you a new one. Got it right here. How hard would it be to get that thing out of your stomach?”
“Six months, it just lets go, Macon said.”
“And?”
“You shit it out, Janice.”
“In the toilet?”
“On your friend’s head.”
“Happens daily,” said Janice, from the dark, “kind of people I know. But you’d just trust Belgians, telling you you’d pooped out their tracker bug?”
“Macon would. Where’s Madison?”
“Building a fort. Over at your new world headquarters, next to Fab.”
“Why?”
“Burton told him to. Gave him a Hefty charge card. Said improvise.”
“Out of what?”
“About two hundred pallets of those faux-asphalt roof tiles, mostly. The kind made of shredded bottles, old tires and shit. Leaves ’em in their bags, has Burton’s guys stack ’em like bricks, seven feet high, two bags deep. Stop some serious ammunition, that stuff.”
“Why?”
“Ask Burton. Madison says if it’s about Homes coming after us, won’t be any help at all. And Homes is all over what’s left of Pickett’s place. Got Tommy over helping them.”
“Must be getting sick of driving, there and back.”
“You didn’t get raped or anything, did you?”
“No. Pickett just mentioned maybe dislocating my jaw. Not like his heart was in it, though. I think he mainly just wanted the most money he could get for me.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” said Janice.
“What is?”
“Why I hope the fucker’s dead.”
“If you’d seen how they delivered that bomb, you’d know it wasn’t liable to be sneaking up on anybody, even with a squidsuit on.”
“Here’s hoping anyway,” said Janice.
“How’d they get squidsuits?”
“That Griff.”
“Who?”
“Griff. Ironside people sent him, right away.”
“Coldiron.”
“He was here almost as soon as Burton knew you were off the reservation. Jet helicopter, landed over in the pasture there.” Janice pointed, hand emerging into moonlight. “I never got a look at him. Madison did. Sounded English, Madison said. Probably where they got that micro-drone too.”
“What is he?”
“No idea. Madison says that copter came from D.C. Says it was Homes.”
“Homes?”
“The copter.”
Pickett had people in Homes, Flynne remembered Reece saying. “Guess I’m behind the curve again.” If she wasn’t in the future, she thought, she was getting kidnapped and rescued.
“With Pickett’s place all blown to shit, we get to wake up tomorrow and see who looks like their main source of income’s gone tits up. Here’s the phone Macon made you.” She passed it to Flynne, out of the dark.
“I’d rather have mine back.” Pissed her off, all the hours she’d put in at Fab to pay for that.
“Yours got flown to Nassau.”
“Nassau?”
“Somebody in a lawyer’s office there. They took it out of a Faraday bag, a little after Burton and them broke you out of Pickett’s. Macon bricked it.”