by Reed King
He was old, he smelled, his nail beds were like hairless fetuses. But I liked him. I probably even loved him. I used to imagine once in a while that Billy Lou would move into our shoebox, that he’d lay one of his stubby nailless hands on my head and call me son, that it wouldn’t be pretending.
When my mom got switched to freight and had to work doubles, it was Billy Lou who came over to shake up my soup cartridges or grow a roast by adding water. He taught me stuff that wasn’t on the data feeds,4 like prehistory, and the names for all the animals that went extinct in the Great Die-Off, and the basics of chemistry and algebra. Even if I couldn’t scan even a tenth of it, I loved the idea of all that knowledge, the clutterfuck of numbers and letters that, when nudged and prodded and poked in just the right ways, would fall down into a sequence, into a solution.
I used to lie in bed and wish the world was like that, that the different countries with their wars and militias and hungers and greed were just letters in a higher alphabet, and so far we’d just been too dumb to work out the meaning.
But that maybe, just maybe, we would.
That maybe, just maybe, we could.
And in a world like ours, only a kook, a hophead, a hero, or all three, would even bother with a lesson like that.
3
First let’s get one thing straight about what a grifter is and what he isn’t. I’m using “he” to spare the ink, even though some of the best grifters this country has ever seen are women, from the San Antonio Girls who tuck drugs into their hootenannies and smuggle into the prison towns, to Old Ma Dregg, who could sell you a ten-year-old shrimp with an eyelash flutter. I’ve known android grifters, non-binaries and duologies, and pansex and genderless grifters. I even heard of a surviving dog that used to trade plastic salvage for food, and nip at anyone who wouldn’t fork over a fair bit of Sausedge™. But boy, girl, bot, droid, or furry, one thing we all got in common: balls.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
The alarm split sound into grenades and exploded them all at once. Flashing lights cut the world into a bad network feed.
All of us were on our feet, trying to get a squint at Billy, and the security SWAT teams rushing him from different quadrants. Dirsh Grossman, the foreman, came sprinting down the catwalk—not toward Billy Lou but away from him. His face was masked by an enormous gas-sucker, but I knew it was him from the way his big-ass man breasts were practically punching him in the face.
For a half second, I thought it was a joke—good old Billy Lou, slinked out of town before the DoJ could get him and wouldn’t go down without a fight—and almost laughed. But then a pair of riot-suited Human Resource apes got close, and Billy Lou put down the goat. When he straightened up again, he was holding a gun.
“Down!” I screamed. “Get down.” I reached out and grabbed Oliver. Unfortunately, and only by instinct, I grabbed Dan, too, and dropped them both.
The first gunshot cracked the plastic. But the second and third brought it down in big sheets. I threw my hands up as a chunk of two-inch-thick industrial-grade polymer toppled over the console and walloped me.
I straightened up again, even as security scattered for cover. One of the HR rats was swinging out over the catwalk, legs kicking wildly, desperate to hang on. Billy was trying to grab hold of that goat again, trying to heft it over the railing.
And then, all at once, I knew: he was going to chuck that cloven-footed collection of C-H bonds straight down into the tank of chlorinated polyethylburitane, and the whole place would light up like Christmas.
I didn’t think. I vaulted over the console and through the empty space where the observation panel had been only seconds earlier. My footsteps rang all the way to my teeth when I ran. The air stank of chemical burn: I didn’t have a mask, and my visor must of blown clear off my melon when he fired.
“All right, cowboy, nice and easy…” One of the HR apes had his gun level with Billy. He was going to shoot—I could see it in the ropy tension of his muscles, in his finger twitching for the trigger. I lunged to grab his wrist, and in the tussle he lost the gun. It spun out over the railing, and for a second we both watched it drop, straight toward the different vats and molds and boiling pots of chemical steam. By some miracle, it landed on the floor between two conveyor belts and let out a single cracking shot into nothing.
“What the hello are you doing?” the ape growled at me. His training was topshot. He even grimaced in a decent approximation of a smile.
I shoved past him without answering. Now Billy Lou and I were face-to-face on the catwalk, alone.
Kind of. There were eight catwalks, all intersecting, and from each corner, HR SWAT teams inched toward us, their automatics cocked and leveled. They looked none too happy to see Billy Lou again—or maybe they were none too happy he’d given them the slip back in December. Crazy ol’ Billy Lou cooked up a batch of shiver right in his squat, and by the time the HR SWAT tracked the scent, half the residential block was rioting on a fierce high.
I put both hands up. “Billy,” I shouted, over the noise. “Billy Lou.”
He blinked at me. He was high. That was obvious. Higher than I’d ever seen him. Even with his fingernails gone he’d found a way to scratch his neck and face to shit. His pupils were the size of pinpricks. I didn’t know if he recognized me.
“It’s me. Truckee.” The terrible chemical stink made my eyes water. “Truckee Wallace. From 22-C. You remember.”
He was still holding that squirming bit of fur to his chest like it was a baby. “All men are gods” was what he said.
Or at least that’s what I thought he said. His voice beneath the alarms was like a cockroach dropping on you from someplace unexpected: I didn’t hear it so much as feel it in my spine.
“Remember? Sugar Wallace’s kid. You used to teach me math and science and all that kind of thing.” I could tell the guards were angling for a secure shot. The only reason they hadn’t blown me full of holes was because two corpses were harder to wrangle than one.
For a half second, a cloud slid away from his eyes. For the first time, he seemed to really see me.
“Mr. Truckee,” Billy Lou said in his soft, shy way, like we weren’t both balancing on a three-foot-wide strip of steel suspended thirty feet above vats of 350-degree chemical food agents, surrounded on all sides by a bunch of trigger-happy Policy Enforcement officers. “How’re you doing? How’s your mom doing?”
He’d forgotten my mom had died. I’d heard the most powerful shiver could do that, just erase all the bad stuff, snip it clean away. Still, I’d never seen a shiver high like this one. I could feel the drug and its synthetic seep, a kind of radioactive decay. Like if I got too close I’d get sick.
“She’s fine. She’s just fine.” I could hear one of the HR rats huff-puffing behind me, a wet panting like the breathing of someone trying to jerk off quickly in the toilet. “How about you and me go somewhere quiet and talk? Like old times.”
I don’t know if he heard. His eyes kept floating behind me, maybe to the guards, to their guns.
“She was a smart one, your ma,” Billy Lou said. So maybe he did remember. Now his pupils were growing, expanding like miniature universes, eating all the color. “She knew all about what was coming. She saw it in advance.”
Funny enough, even though the alarms were still screaming, standing there I felt like I’d been cranked out of my body and slotted somewhere silent and dark—a dead place. “Saw what?”
He smiled, and it was horrible: not like a smile at all. Like a wound. “They’re coming for your head, Truckee. They’ll have all of our heads before long.”
One of the HR rats growled low in my ear. “Move out of the way.”
“Please.” My eyes were stinging from all the chemicals and I wished I had my visor on. The goat in Billy Lou’s arms was small, very white, one of the whitest things I’d ever seen. A patch of fur grew long between its ears. Its eyes were the color of CrunchAlmondz™. Its skinny little legs tap
ered into hooves, and for a second I was near to crying. I stood there swallowing and blinking and trying not to lose it, because of those little hooves, because of its aliveness, because it had survived. “Put the goat down, Billy,” I said. I know that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but he was holding a fucking goat, so I said it.
“Out of the way.” The rat behind me was practically hyperventilating. “I want to shoot this sonofabean.”
Billy Lou’s pupils ate up the last of his color. Then, horribly, they began to seep. The black began to dribble into the whites of his eyes, too, as if an inner membrane had broken. A scream nested somewhere in my throat.
He said, “It’s the end of the world, Mr. Truckee.”
Before I could stop him, he released the goat. He threw that fucking thing at me. One of its hooves went straight into my rib cage, and I slammed backward onto the catwalk, breathless, toppling the two guards behind me. The goat was heavier than it looked, and warmer too. It smelled like the ground after a hard rain except without the sewage. And for a second I was eye to eye with the thing, holding on to it, reflected in its strange sideways pupil. For a second, I thought it spoke to me.
I thought it said, Ah, shit.
There was an explosion of gunfire. I sat up in time to see Billy Lou jerking all over the place, like a short-circuiting android. There were a half-dozen security teams still standing and they all let loose at once. The first bullets knocked out his shoulders. One shot plugged him straight through the forehead but even so, Billy Lou was smiling, even as he staggered backward, even as the next shots blasted his abdomen and turned his kneecaps into craters.
I must of been screaming because there was a terrible raw pain in my throat. For a second Billy Lou was there, balancing against the railing. Then a new volley lifted him off his feet and flipped him, and Billy Lou tumbled down, down toward the floor.
There was a moment of absolute silence before he hit the chlorinated polyethylburitane headfirst, and then an inferno, a single middle finger of fire, an explosion like the hand of God coming down to backhand us all into oblivion.
4
The worst thing about grifting around the Crunch, United, colonies is all the lonely mid-level execs with their frosted dayglo hair and unperturbed breasts atrophying in regulation bras. The best thing about grifting around the Crunch, United, colonies is all the lonely mid-level execs with their frosted dayglo hair and unperturbed breasts atrophying in regulation bras.…
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
In my dream, I was lying flat out on a conveyor belt and a goat was scoping me for doneness.
“He’s too pink,” the goat said as Annalee cut me open with an old-fashioned butter knife and began turning over my organs with a fork. “Look at that liver. See? It’s positively bloody.”
“I don’t know.” Annalee used the knife to stake my heart, then lifted it to the light. “It seems normal to me.”
“Normal!” The goat changed: its teeth bolted back into its mouth, its hooves twitched into long pale hands. Now Mark J. Burnham, CEO, was standing at my bedside. Only the gummy smile was the same. “Normal! He’s the answer to our prayers. Look at all that stuffing.”
“If you say so.” Annalee looked disappointed. “Then I guess I can’t have even a little bite…?”
I woke up, gasping, with the taste of metal shavings in my mouth. When I breathed, a sharp pain spiked near my spleen. A new scar, six inches long, puckered the skin beneath my left ribs.
“Good morning, sunshine!” A health manager—blond, big NuSkin™ boobs, smell of Fresh Breeze Breath Spritz™—beamed down at me.
“What is this?” I tried to sit up and couldn’t. My hands and legs were bound to the bed. They’d stuck so many tubes in me I looked like a giant sprouting tray of polyurethane ColorGrass™. Other than that, I was bald as Appalachia:1 shirtless and, from what I could tell, pantsless to boot. Not how I’d imagined being strapped down naked to a bed by a woman. “Why am I tied up?”
“Don’t worry,” the health manager said when I tugged at my restraints. “That’s just for your own safety. You were flipping and flopping all over the place the past few days. Looked like you were trying to get up and run away.”
A breeze rippled the curtains drawn tight around my bed. Swank stuff—on the lower floors of Health, the cots were squeezed so tight together you could play footsie with the rotguts cooling next to you. On the other side of the fabric, rubber shoes squeaked on the tile. Health managers babbled about bone reorganization and organ relaxation. Even dying would be easier if everybody just smiled about it. (That was in the Constitution too.)2
“How long was I out?” I asked.
A holo pinned to her uniform beamed a smiley face that floated below her real chin. Toggling between smiles made me dizzy.
“Four days and change,” she said, and bent forward to unstrap me.
“Four days?” All at once, I remembered Billy Lou, and the look in his eyes. I remembered a column of flame and blasting backward with the goat straddling my pelvic bones. “What happened?”
“You’re one of the lucky ones,” the health manager said. “Ten fingers, ten toes, a beating heart, a nose cute as a button.”
Lucky ones meant, obviously, there were unlucky ones, too—people missing fingers, toes, and beating hearts.
“How many?” I asked bluntly.
She dropped the trained act, powering off the holo with a quick jab. When she wrestled the visor to the top of her head, her hair fanned out around the strap. Lines around the mouth and eyes, scrunchy lips, chemical-additive wobble beneath her chin. Dayglo orange just beginning to web her forehead and nose.
“Twenty-seven,” she said. Even the idea of Dan Ridges blown up into ashes gave me a cramp in my stomach. “Half of Chem Ops got fried. Some flibbert locked them in when he heard shooting. A few jumped. The other ones just sat there while the fire came, swiping their emergency icons. I wasn’t kidding when I said you were lucky.”
As terrible as it sounds, I relaxed. No one I knew, then.
“What’s with the stitches?” I asked. The wound was angry-swollen but hard to the touch, like a piece of my bone had razored off inside me. “What’d you do to me?”
“Saved your life.” The nurse tweaked the IV flow manually, gesturing commands through her visor. Sixty years ago, the whole flow would of been automated. Now electricity was too precious.3 For years Crunch, United, strutted on about giant public toilets to strap and pump the methane produced there—a more humane solution, for sure, than the body plants of Florida Island that ran off of corpses.4 That was a joke in Crunch 407: How do you know the world’s gone to shit? When it’s powered by farts. “You got hit with some shrapnel. Blew up beneath your ribs. If even a single piece had reached your heart, you’d be in a plot by now. We got most of it out.”
“Most of it?”
She shrugged. “Half the roof blew off. What do you expect? But you know, a lot of people got out while you was chatting him up on the catwalk.” Now that she’d dropped all the jumble-speak, even her voice had changed. I thought some Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated mix. “Elsewise who knows what woulda happened.” The health manager looked me up and down. “Everyone’s calling you a hero, you know.”
I thought of Billy Lou saying Mr. Truckee, his stubby hands without their nails, and how patient he was when I was too dumb to scan a thing. He’d once scavenged all of Low Hill for me, looking for books, real books, made out of paper and bound with glue. He’d found exactly three: The Hobbit, The Mists of Avalon, and something called The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA, which was bound in leather, handwritten, and as bloated as a corpse in summertime. I’d tried to read the last one, but it took me a Hawaii hour5 just to make sense of the scrawl of static lettering: all those words looking like squashed bugs, like they might jump down my throat when I wasn’t looking.
“I’m not a hero,” I said. Twenty-seven people were dead. Billy Lou Ropes was dead. “I
just didn’t want to see him killed.”
She gave me a long look. “That’s hero enough for most people nowadays.”
* * *
I got a new visor, an upgraded model with a wraparound sonar headband and better motion recon. It was used, and still had glitches, but at least it didn’t color everything like molten lava flow.
Annalee had fed half a dozen panicked messages to my feed, and Jared had dropped me a thirteen-minute lecture about returning his chats. (I think—it was almost impossible to hear him through all the sneezing.) I streamed hundreds of company blasts, too, including a 3-D from the CEO M. J. Burnham, about reconstruction at Production-22. A recent dust storm had partially blasted off the cloud of vaporized fiberglass and asbestamite left hanging visibly in the air after the collapse of Production-22, but still, the air quality rating was at .5, and HR was threatening fines for anyone spotted without a gas-sucker. Funeral announcements got slotted between the interdepartment fantasy-football league results and reminders from HR about the recent criminalization of untucked shirts.
I tried to sleep, because it was better than being awake with a holographic happy face trying to punch me in the nose, and having to think about Billy Lou Ropes and those twenty-seven dead people. But I kept dreaming of that goat standing above me, babbling about undercooked organs, prodding me with a hoof.
Either blow your nose or roll over, but the snoring has to stop.
I jerked awake sometime after dawn, when the green glow of phosphorescence off the river was just breaking up the darkness. The smell of goat had followed me out of my dream—warm and strange, like trash in the heat but not exactly bad.
I could hear whispering behind the curtains. “All night, too … no respite … like an early-century motor with no oil.”
“Hello?” I said. Abruptly, the voice went quiet. “Hello?” I repeated.
