“Tacoma?”
“Clovis,” she said. “You’re Netherton.” And she picked the Wheelie up, turned it.
Unflattering angle, from below, of what he nonetheless took to be a very attractive face. Short black hair. He tried to see the face of the proprietor of The Clovis Limit there, but only saw her ancient, waiting skull. Terrifying. God’s view of humanity, perhaps, were there one. “Wilf,” he said, “hello.”
“Here she is,” she said, turning, and he was looking down on Flynne, her head in a strange, awkward, glitteringly white construct of some kind, cushioned with white pillows. Her eyes were closed. It was like looking down at the peripheral in the back cabin, except that this was Flynne herself. Absent.
“Can she hear us?” he asked.
“No. The crown’s an autonomic cutout. So I’m told. I thought you had all this tech, up there.”
“We do,” he said. “I’m not technical, myself. But our version of this looks like a transparent plastic hairband.”
“They were made up to your specs, but we had to improvise.” She turned him again. Flynne’s brother was in the next bed, under an identical crown. In the third bed, a face he didn’t recognize. The two of them under blue blankets. What he’d first seen were white bars at the foot of Burton’s bed, against blanket. The second man’s body mass seemed child like.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Conner.”
“Penske. I’ve only seen him in the dancing master.”
“The who?”
“Lev’s brother’s martial arts instructor. Peripheral. Excellent dancer, apparently.”
“I’d give my left nut to get up there, see all that,” she said, turning him to face her again. “What can I do for you, Wilf?”
“Is there a window?”
“Not really. On the other side of this stupid wall,” and she turned him, to view an improvised surface that seemed to be made of stacked white envelopes, perhaps containing paper files. “But they’ve sprayed it with polymer, so you can’t see out. Even if you could, you’d just be seeing the alley behind a strip mall in Buttholeville.”
“Is that the town’s name?”
“Nickname. Mine. My sister’s too, I guess. We’re awful.”
“I’ve met her,” he said. “She’s not awful.”
“Told me she met you.”
“Do you know when Flynne will be back?”
“No. Want to wait? Watch the news? I’ve got a tablet here.”
“The news?”
“Local’s interesting, today. We’ve got Luke 4:5 pulling out, nobody’s sure why. Griff actually doesn’t like it. He’s had two PR firms keeping them from getting media coverage, and that’s been working. Now that they’re leaving, for no apparent reason, there’s some national interest. Basically because it’s not what they usually do. You won’t be able to change the channel.”
“I’ll try it, then,” he said. “It fascinates me, here.”
“Takes all kinds.”
107
Flynne opened her eyes.
“Your little buddy’s here,” said Clovis.
“Wilf?”
“Got any others?”
“Where is he?”
“Watching the news.” She lifted the crown off Flynne’s head, put it down on the bedside table.
Flynne rolled on her side, sat up slowly, lowered her legs over the side. She’d been standing with Lowbeer in Lev’s kitchen, looking out at the garden. She felt like she could still see it, if she closed her eyes. She did. Didn’t see it. Opened them.
“You okay?” asked Clovis, eyeing her narrowly.
“Jet lag, maybe,” Flynne said. Standing up. Clovis was obviously ready to catch her if she fell. “I’m okay. Burton okay?”
“Fine. Been back to pee, again to have dinner and hydrate. Walter Reed’s happy with him.”
Flynne went over to the chair where she’d left the Wheelie. Clovis had collapsed the telescoping rod the tablet rode on, and propped a tablet of her own against the back of the chair, on a wadded sweatshirt. The Wheelie was watching the Ciencia Loca episode about spontaneous human combustion. “Hey,” she said, “hi.”
“Wah!” said Netherton, startled. The Wheelie’s spherical body rotated backward on fixed wheels, tilting its tablet and camera up at her. “That was frightening me,” he said. “I kept imagining my body igniting, in the Gobiwagen’s observation cupola. It came on after the news and I couldn’t change it.”
“Want to watch the rest? Second half’s scuba stuff, the old tip of lower Manhattan.”
“No! I came to see you.”
“I’ve got to eat. I’ll take you to Sushi Barn.”
“What’s that?”
“Hong’s restaurant. It’s at the other end of the mall. Madison’s cut holes through and built a hamster run with shingle bags.” She checked her reflection in a plastic-framed mirror that someone, probably Clovis, had taped to a blue tarp with aquamarine duct tape. “That crown is hell on my hair.” She sat down on the chair, put the Wheelie on the floor, and put her sneakers on. The Wheelie extended its tablet, whirred, and wheeled across the floor, tablet swiveling. “Stay there,” she said, getting up. She crossed to it, picked it up, and ducked through the slit.
“This is bizarre,” he said, on the other side. “It looks like some primitive game.”
“Boring game.”
“They all are. What is it for?”
“If we’re under attack, we can walk through this to Sushi Barn and get the shrimp special.”
“Does that make sense?”
“It’s a guy thing. But I think it was Lowbeer’s idea, as interpreted through Burton and my friend Madison.”
“Who is Madison?”
She stepped through the hole in the central wall. “My friend’s husband, nice guy. Plays Sukhoi Flankers.”
“What’s that?”
“Flight sim game. Old Russian planes. Lowbeer is Griff.”
He didn’t say anything. She stopped, between the shingle-bag walls, raised the Wheelie Boy. “‘Is Griff’?” he asked.
“Griff. Becomes her. But not exactly. Like this isn’t her past anymore, so he won’t have her life, because none of this happened to her when she was him.” She started walking.
“You somehow seem,” he said, “to simply accept all these things.”
“You’re the one living in the future, with nanobots eating people, spare bodies, government run by kings and gangsters and shit. You accept all that, right?”
“No,” he said, just before she ducked through, into Hong’s kitchen, “I don’t. I hate it.”
108
Tommy came in and squatted down on his haunches at the foot of her foam, hat in his hand. She was groggy from the pill she’d let Tacoma give her, but she’d had her best sleep in about a week. “Sit on the foam, Tommy, you’ll wreck your knees.”
“Best they got for you in here?” he asked, swiveling on his heels and dropping his butt on the corner of the slab.
“Hospital beds feel like hospital. And Burton and Conner both fart a lot. What’s that with Luke 4:5 packing up? Are we sure we didn’t buy them?”
“You sure shit didn’t buy ’em,” he said. “Why I’m waking you up before anybody wants me to. To tell you about that.”
“What?” She got up on her elbows.
“I think the other guys pulled them out because they’re a media magnet. Not that much on their own, anymore, but you add something else to the mix, media’ll be all over it. Or even if they just do something off-script, like leaving here now, they’re more interesting, maybe just for a news cycle. Like your PR operation’s been dialing them down, keeping your face pretty much out of it, but there’s still been a blip from them leaving.”
“So why would someone want them to leave?”
“So they won’t be an add-on draw when something else hits town,” he said. “Something they really don’t want any spare attention on, if they can help it.”
“Like what?”
“Homes. A strategic shitload of Homes. Vehicles, personnel. Grif’s connections are showing two big convoys headed this way. Serious lot of white trucks. Meanwhile, over at what’s left of Pickett’s, Ben Carter’s cousin’s in that quite sizable detachment of Homes, right there. And he’s telling Ben that the rumor’s they’re headed here, today, to mop up the armed remnants of the evil Cordell Pickett’s multicounty drug empire. Which incidentally they’re now behaving as though they put a stop to, as opposed to your vigilante brother, his best friend, and a prosthesis from the Veterans Administration.”