A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Stevie waits in the yard, one fist planted on her hip, arm cocked like the hammer on a revolver. She wears gray camouflage combat pants and a sleeveless retro RiceBoy t-shirt, with checkered flags on chopsticks. It shows off the Airborne insignia and sergeant’s chevrons tattooed on her right arm.

  You get out, legs stiff from hours in the car. Stevie’s half-smile verges on a smirk. She hesitates for a second and then embraces you. You hesitate too, then hug her back hard. “God, it’s good to see you,” blurts out of your mouth.

  “You’re lucky you caught me at home,” Stevie says. “The patrol has us working so much overtime. What’s up?”

  It pours out, not the way you intended at all, everything from the first day you suspected you were pregnant up to the miscarriage that morning. You’re babbling about Brandon standing in the road with one bare foot when Stevie cuts you off.

  “You bring any stuff with you?”

  “No, I left everything behind.” You didn’t realize, until you say it, that’s what you’ve done.

  “Smart. Come with me.”

  You enter the double doors, squeeze past a couple loungers and a cherry-veneer entertainment center. Muted light filters through a window made with plastic wrap and duct tape, falling on a pair of handcuffs atop a little fridge. When she stops by the fridge, you hold out your hands so she can cuff you.

  She opens the door. “Want some Crank?”

  Your hands twitch back. “Uh . . . do you have any Diet Crank?”

  “Like you need the diet stuff.” But she tosses you a can, and while you stand there, feeling the cold sweat run down your palms, she stuffs a backpack with clothes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and rolls of cash in ziploc bags.

  You pop the lid and sip the soda to hide your confusion. “Are you coming with me to jail?”

  “Fuck that! You aren’t going to jail.”

  Hope kicks its tiny foot in your chest. “What?”

  “But we’ve got to get you back on the road quick so I don’t end up going to jail for you. Here, carry this.”

  You take the backpack. Stevie shoves wires and tools into her back pockets, then picks up a little machine that looks like the heart monitor in the doctor’s office. When you step outside again, the blinding sunlight startles the question out of you. “Where am I going to go?”

  “I don’t know, Nikki, I don’t want to know.” Stevie walks over to the battered jeep. “Your best choices are Mexico, Canada. Maybe Massachusetts. The wall makes it hard to cross into Sonora, and baby-killing’s a capital crime there too. But it’s close and there’s no extradition right now because of the Tijuana security zone dispute. Gimme that.” She grabs the backpack and flings it into the back seat.

  “I figured the other car was yours,” you say. “It’s kinda like Dad’s.”

  Stevie snorts and pats the hood like a hunter stroking a favorite dog. “Yeah, he wishes. This is a turbo-charged Freon with upgraded heads—the classic American ricemobile.” Her grin curves into a frown. “But it’s got a busted suspension. The jeep belongs to Dave, but he’s working overtime today, so he took the patrol car in.” She pops the jeep’s hood.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble with anyone—”

  “Shit, Dave was recon, he’ll understand. I’ll tell him I needed it. He won’t even ask.” She locates the antenna, traces the wire under the hood. “I gotta kill the tracking chip in the GPS so they can’t trace you. The first time we dropped into Seattle—did I ever tell you about that?”

  “No.” All that has happened since the last time you talked.

  “No shit, this is what happened. We dropped in, hit the target, and were supposed to make our way out toward Portland with the other refugees. So we stole a classic Land Rover, a beaut with the rhino package, and thought we were home free.” She works while she talks, stripping the wire, connecting the alligator clips, plugging them into the monitor. “Fucking OneStar thought we were car thieves—which, technically, we were—and dropped the local private forces on us. Man, that sucked. More for them than us, as it turned out. Okay, here we go.”

  She flips a switch and the screen flickers into existence: a green line laid over a grid—spikes, like a static heartbeat, with a fork, like a choice between two roads.

  “When we went back the second time,” she says, comparing lines on the screen to what she sees under the hood, “I took one of these with me, state of the art, size of a wristwatch, not like this piece of shit. But that time, we—damn. Cheapass bastards.”

  Your head swirls, barely able to follow her. “What’s wrong?”

  “They’ve got the receiver and transmitter in one unit.” She rubs her hand across her buzzcut, their father’s gesture, Stevie’s legacy. “You good to go with no mapping?”

  “Sure.” You have that legacy from your dad at least; you know how to follow road signs.

  “Good girl.” Stevie grabs the needle nose pliers, twists something under the hood, and checks her watch. “Two minutes, twenty-seven seconds. It doesn’t count though, ’cause I stopped to talk.” She slams the hood shut. “Give me your keys. I’ll have to drive your car somewhere else before I strip it.”

  You start to take the car key off the ring, then hand them all to her when you realize you are never going home again. “I can’t go to Mexico, Stevie. I don’t speak Spanish. And the north, I, I hate the cold, I—”

  “Don’t tell me. Just pick a place. You’ll have to listen to the news, wait for one of the borders to open, then go for it.” She looks in your eyes. “You can do this, okay?”

  “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know.”

  Stevie looks either way, reaches under her shirt and retrieves a small gun from the back of her pants. It lays in her hand like a clot of blood. Her eyebrows rise questioningly. You inhale sharply, shake your head once, then a second time. That’s not you. Will never be you.

  With a simple nod, Stevie slips the gun into her waistband again. She scribbles a name and number on a slip of paper. “Here’s a guy in Fort Worth who can fix you up with a new ID. Just mention my name.” She hands it over, pauses. “I liked what you said at Mom’s funeral.”

  It’s the last thing you ever expected to hear. “It’s how I felt, that’s all.”

  “Mom fucked me up,” Stevie says. “Hell, she fucked us all up with her crazy religious bullshit, all that hellfire and punishment. But what you said at her funeral, it made me see the good in her.”

  You bristle a little. “There was a lot of good in her. She always did what she thought was right.”

  “Yeah, even when she was totally wrong.” Stevie hugs you again, releases. “You gotta hit the road, sis, or they’ll catch you. That’s my professional opinion.”

  The Diet Crank is warm in your hand. You’ve barely touched it. You put it in the cup-holder, climb into the driver’s seat, and wave goodbye as you pull out of the rut that serves as a road. You steer onto the highway and reach automatically to punch in your destination, only to remember that the mapping is dead and, besides, you don’t know your destination. You see a sign for Fort Worth and turn that way.

  Halfway there you hear your name on the radio.

  “The search continues for California fugitive Nicole Palmer, wanted for manslaughter in the miscarriage of her third child. Husband Brandon Palmer is worried for her safety.”

  Brandon’s shaky voice: “She’s crazy with grief. If I don’t find her, she could do something to hurt herself.”

  Something in you hardens at the sound of him. You aren’t crazy and you’ll never hurt yourself. You don’t need his plans or his help.

  The announcer’s voice continues: “Meanwhile, in Valley State Prison, Mary MacLean enters day forty of her hunger strike. MacLean, convicted three years ago of manslaughter by miscarriage, is fasting to protest the Supreme Court decision that declared all laws applicable to the preborn—“

  You punch the radio off. You’ll keep running for a short while longer, just until you’re str
ong enough to face what you have to face. Until you’re more like your mother. Strong enough to do the right thing, no matter what.

  #

  In Fort Worth you become someone else. New name, new ID. Remembering the depression, the two summers your family spent fruit-picking when you were a kid, you drive through farm country and small towns looking for work off-the-books. When you pass the rundown carnival with its Help Wanted sign, you slow down.

  The owner shakes her head, but she hires you.

  Spring becomes summer becomes fall: one small town becomes another small town becomes another, until you’re somewhere in Kentucky at yet another streetfair, this one for Halloween. The air smells like leaf mold and wood smoke, and all the pumpkins on the porches wear evil grins.

  Your ride’s the roller coaster box, because there’s more to running it than hitting an on/off switch. You stand by the simulator box while long lines of children wait for their turns inside. The box ceases bucking on its hydraulic pumps and you open the door. Four girls climb out, still screaming.

  “How was it?” squeaks a perky friend behind the rope.

  “Ohmygod! It was so scary!”

  “It’s not real.”

  “It is too!”

  “It’s real as you let it be,” you say, and chivvy them along. The next girls rush inside. You take their ten dollars, buckle them in, and glance over the slate at the coaster ride they designed. You tweak it quickly—lowering one hill, raising another, adding an extra loop near the end, losing yourself in the little details.

  “Jessica!” says a voice that sounds like a boot scuffing gravel.

  The voice calls the name a second time before you realize she means you and jump. It’s Boss, the old woman who owns the carnival. At first you thought her name was Bess. It took you a week to figure out she doesn’t have a name: she’s just Boss.

  “What can I do you for, Boss?” you ask, trying to sound like the other carnies.

  “You ain’t supposed to be holding up the line,” Boss says. A cigarette bobs in her tight lips, its flame a little orange buoy on a sea of smoke.

  You press the slate into its slot and pass the other one to the next kids in line. The box creaks on its worn hydraulics, rears back, and starts the brief ride.

  Boss stares at you for a moment, until your skin starts to twitch. You smile nervously. Finally, she says, “Come see me tonight after lock up.” The ash flies off her cigarette and falls into the dust as she walks away.

  You watch her wander down to the whirlygig to talk to the Dixon brothers. The Dixons joined up a couple weeks after you, just out of prison for dealing meth. The taller one leers at you sideways, shaggy mustache flopping as he laughs.

  You snap back to work. Most of your co-workers have criminal records like the Dixon brothers. Like you, you remind yourself. So you’ll go see Boss tonight and apologize for screwing up. Then you’ll work harder to fit in.

  The machine stops and you yank the door open. “Next,” you growl at the girls inside. “Let’s move.”

  The next kids designed a crappy ride. You slam it in the slot without changing a thing.

  The simulator shudders into motion.

  #

  The stench of stale grease and fireworks fills the air after dark as you walk through the deserted rides and booths. You tap on the door of Boss’s trailer.

  “It won’t open itself,” she croaks.

  Inside, everything is coated with a nicotine patina. Even the plastic roses have turned from red to brown, blood to scab. Boss sits behind a built-in table, cigarette in her mouth, counting and wrapping the day’s cash. A bottle of Jim Beam whiskey rests in front of her, a revolver sits at her right hand.

  “Boss, I know I’m not supposed to, well, change the rides designed by the kids,” you sputter. “But they enjoy it more when I do. And, and they come back—”

  “Naw, that ain’t it, you gotta real touch with the kids,” she interrupts, never looking up as her thumb flicks through the bills. “And the parents ain’t scared a you, so that’s bonus, ninety-seven, hold on, ninety-nine, a hunderd.” She wraps it up and tosses it on the pile with others. “Why dontcha go back to him?”

  You catch your breath. “Go back to who?”

  She snorts so hard it blows the ash off the end of her cigarette. “Your husband, somebody else’s husband, whoever he is.”

  You sort through your words carefully like pieces of fruit, trying to find the good ones amid the bad and unripe. “There isn’t anybody.”

  “If you say so, honey. What I’m telling you is you think there ain’t anybody like that now but maybe there was, see what I’m saying. I been around, y’know.”

  The thought of Boss getting around momentarily stymies you. You hear yourself say, “Sure, I’ll think about it.”

  “Good for you, sugarcup. It’s easier to change yourself than it is to change the world. But you think about it quick—we don’t have any more contracts lined up for the season, so I’m gonna start letting folks go tomorrow.” She counts out your wages, then peels a hundred dollar bill off one of the rolls and slides it across the table. “It’s not much, but you go on and take that for luck. You earned it.”

  You mumble thanks, pocket the bill, and leave. After the door closes, the weight of the darkness hits you like a truck. You don’t know where to go next.

  “Hey, bitch.”

  The Dixon brothers squeeze up on either side, smelling like weed and cheap beer. You clench up so tight you can’t move. The shorter one waves a knife at your throat.

  “Thinks she’s too good for us,” he says.

  The one with the raggy mustache grinds his crotch on your hip. “You know those good girls—they like to get bad.”

  “We know who you are, baby killer,” shorty says. “We saw you on America’s Most Hunted. Those contact lenses, the haircut, that’s bullshit. It doesn’t fool us.”

  “Hey, guys.” Your voice cracks. “Don’t do this, okay.”

  “Who you gonna call for help?” mustache asks. “We’ll just tell ’em who you are.”

  You’re blind with fear because you know they’re right. Nobody will help you. A little voice in your head whispers survive. They laugh at you so you laugh back, then they shove you toward your camper, and you go through the motions, saying the things they tell you to say, pretending the things they want you to pretend, until shorty puts his knife away and both of them are done. When they invite you to come over to their van for drinks, you hear yourself say that sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, you’ll be right over, and you start making other promises, any promises, until finally they go on ahead without you.

  Once they’re gone, you unhook the jeep, set the camper on fire, and smash the valve on the propane tank. You do it fast enough that you know Stevie would be impressed, even though you know she’d never let them do what they did, and she’d never run.

  As you speed toward the nearest highway, you keep looking back over your shoulder. The propane tank explodes when you’re just over the horizon, ripping a pumpkin-colored wound across the black sky.

  By the middle of the night you’re passing through the rolling hills outside Lexington. The white lines in the road blur together with the miles of white rail fence. Horses run behind those fences. Just like you, no matter how fast or far they run they’re never free.

  #

  You circle through the same few states for several weeks, sleeping in the car, not knowing whether you should be afraid that you’re pregnant or hope that you are. You realize you’ve let go of everything except that dream of being a mother. A dozen times you enter a drugstore, pick up a pregnancy test, put it down, and walk away.

  In a bathroom in a McDonald’s outside South Bend, Indiana, you finally start to bleed. You squat in the stall so long one of the workers comes in to ask if everything is okay.

  “No,” you snap, choking on the words. “No, it’s not.”

  The girl returns a few minutes later with her manager, who tells you th
at they’ll call the police if you don’t leave immediately. You leave.

  The gyre of your travels widens, falls apart.

  When the painful burning doesn’t stop, you find a doctor’s sign outside a flea market at an old mall in Milwaukee. One of the anchor stores, looming as large as your conscience, has been converted to a Missionary Reform Church just like the one your mother attended. Inflatable pilgrims, decorations for the holiday, flank the entrance. You run between them.

  Inside the mall, a narrow storefront is crowded with the other uninsured sick. The doctor—an elderly, gray-haired black woman in a trim, clean suit—walks among them, keying their complaints into an old-style PDA before she sends them to various rooms in back. When she comes to you, you describe your symptoms. You’re too ashamed to mention the rape. The doctor grumbles, then sends you to the very rear, past two women asleep on air mattresses while they receive IV meds. Their breast implants protrude lush and grotesque from emaciated, sore-covered bodies. You guess it’s one of the mutated forms of AIDS. The doctor follows you, has you drop your pants, and takes a quick swab.

  You dress again and wait on one of the plastic lawn chairs. A poster on the wall reads “Miscarriage of Justice” and shows a picture of the hunger striker, Mary MacLean, as emaciated as the two women at your feet, just before she died.

  The doctor sees you staring at it. “You know,” she says, “Change isn’t always change for the better. Sometimes we take one step forward then two steps back.” She holds the sniffer with the swab up to the light to read it. “You have chlamydia. You’re lucky this time,” she says, tilting her head at the two women with IVs. “It could be a lot worse. Have you ever heard of using condoms?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, next time listen. Do you know anything about Civil War history?”

  “No—”