Scally nodded. “Touché. But why are you running the company like a lunatic?”
Suddenly she moved to face him, her hands taking his shoulders, her violet eyes searching his. “Do you believe that human cruelty is balanced by our generosity?”
Scally swallowed, laughed again. “Will this be on the test?”
“Do you? Have you ever thought about it?”
He looked away suddenly embarrassed.
“You haven’t,” she outed him. “You oversee the development of some of the most important products in the world, and you’ve never considered the human condition. Have you ever read a book?”
She shook his shoulders, pleading. Craving something Scally didn’t think he even had. The space under her desk suddenly seemed tiny. He glanced up into those imploring eyes and something about her filled him with fear. He didn’t know what and he didn’t know why, only that he desperately wanted not to be frightened. The philosophy behind his father’s company suddenly seemed cruel and he wanted that cruelty to end. And then, suddenly, something about the Baroness’s uncommon nonsense felt sensible.
“Is your license plate from Don Quixote?” he asked.
“Ah, you have read a book.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Is it true about the rubber penis at the COO meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Are the seats in your Hummer really made from rattle snakes?”
“Fake.”
“Are you really a Baroness?”
She paused, glanced at the floor, took a breath and held it then let it out slowly. “The world is a very sad fucking place, Scally. And I’m either going to fix it or shoot it down in flames. If I fix it, yes, I’m a Baroness. If it burns, I’m dead and nothing, along with the rest of us.”
“Yet you use the title. Demand it, even.”
“Color me an optimist.”
“Will you ever tell me who you really are?”
She smiled. “No. But if you guess I’ll admit it.”
To Scally’s surprise, he found himself genuinely impressed.
“You’ve got some amazing attitude, lady.”
Her grip relaxed.
“You have any questions for me?” he asked.
“Just whose side you’re on.”
He scrutinized her carefully then, this gorgeous woman who made a mockery of hierarchy and institution. This woman feared nothing, “Not even the wild truth,” as his father had once claimed of himself; and this woman had told him the truth where his father had lied. So, Scally recognized where his loyalties would come down. But he short-changed her, just as he did his girlfriend, just as he did his mother.
“Mine,” he told her. “I’m on my side.”
The Baroness laughed whole-heartedly now, like some dam had broken and relief had finally come. “You’re a real bastard, you know that, Thug Life? A real mysterious bastard.”
CHAPTER 14
Terri Tehzan woke up and couldn’t see.
“That can’t be right,” she thought, rubbing her eyes. Terri couldn’t be blind anymore than she could be pregnant, married, blessed, or depressed. Certain ends of the spectrum were beyond certain people. And Terri Tehzan didn’t get things like RV707, more commonly known as Flower Flu.
Her cat, Zippers, launched all sixteen pounds of himself into her lap as she reached to her nightstand for her saline solution. The drops stung slightly, but didn’t improve her vision. Zippers shook his head with that funny, flappy sound that always made Terri smile, and she figured she’d dropped some saline on him.
Zippers had always slept on the bed, but since Terri broke up with Rabi, the big cat seemed to prefer the couch. Like an anxious child trying to stay up until Dad got home. Similarly, Rabi had never felt completely serene until Zippers settled at his feet. “Our little family,” he’d say, and then he and Terri would doze off to the peaceful drone of Zipper’s big purr. Terri had to admit she missed all that.
She rubbed her face against the creature’s softness. “Hello, little traitor.” He dropped himself into a furry, purring circle, resting his head on her leg, and she ran a hand over his thick fur, his black-on-black stripes that she could make out only when he rested in the sun on a normal day. Today she couldn’t see them at all, couldn’t even see him.
She blinked at the windows, where she knew them to be, the direction the bed faced. Light made its impression, confirming what her alarm clock had shouted, that it was morning, time to be awake and out of bed, showering and eating breakfast and driving to her law office.
The heat of fear prickled its way in a rush from her belly to her face, left her lightheaded and dizzy, made her pant and fight tears. She took a long breath, counted while she exhaled. Panicking was not going to help.
She aimed her sight at the door. The room, or at least her vision, darkened considerably, a sharper discrepancy than she had ever noticed when her eyes worked right. This part was interesting. Inconvenient and frightening, yes—she could feel her heart and worried about her blood pressure. But this near-blindness was tolerable, especially compared with what came next, the rest of the disease. That, Terri knew, would be truly horrible.
Terri did what she always did in times of crisis: She called Daci. When her friend didn’t answer the house phone she called her cell, which Daci answered on the second ring with, “What’s wrong?”
Terri had planned to be suave and collected, What makes you think anything is wrong? But fear takes the reins sometimes. “I just woke up and I can’t see!”
A muttered curse, the briefest of pauses, then: “Okay. Lemme head back to the house, pick up my stash, then I’ll be over. Gimme maybe forty-five minutes. Tops.”
Terri nodded into the phone, hung up, calmer. She got out of bed, Zippers jumping when she moved and landing with a thump. Thankfully, an unpretentious single story comprised her little house. No stairs to fall down. She shuffled her way to the kitchen, running a hand along the wall and staring toward the floor. The morning light glared from white tile there, providing a visual clue stark enough for her to ascertain even in her debilitated state. The touch of a button enabled her to get coffee brewing, as she’d set it up the previous evening. Zippers harangued her for his morning meal but feeding him involved opening a can and she decided not to risk slicing open a finger. His cries shifted from reminders to pleading to righteous indignation.
With deliberation, she managed to pour herself a bowl of puffed rice. She first opened the cupboard and felt from the bottom, the shelf, the plates, one, two…six; then the bowls. She plucked the top one, brought it level with her other hand which rested on the counter. The cereal, she stored in a cabinet just below the plates’ cupboard.
She held the bowl with one hand, her thumb inside it, with the other hand located the edge of the box, and shook the box gently until she felt the cereal reach her thumb. She stopped then, taking metered breaths and fighting tears. The concentration and resultant sluggishness reminded her of when she and Daci used to try to write with their non-dominant hands, back in junior high. But this wasn’t a game. She couldn’t just pull off the blindfold and push her morning back into real time.
Another agonizingly slow process brought her to the refrigerator, where the milk waited on the door. Luckily, she hadn’t yet shopped this week, so there was no juice to confuse it with. She used the same thumb technique to cover the cereal with milk (at which point Zippers sat at her feet purring again, hoping at least to get the leftovers).
Terri ate the rice puffs, plain since she didn’t want sugar all over her kitchen floor, and very slowly, so that they were soggy by the time she’d finished. Even feeding herself relied on sight! She hadn’t recognized this fact. She maneuvered another bite into her mouth, recalling sogginess as the reason Daci refused to eat cereal, even as a child.
Thus began a friendship that had withstood the cute boys, jealous girls, and too-easy, too-boring, and often irrelevant classes of Santa Barbara Junior High, then Santa Barbara High School, where they sauntered through halls once walked by the likes of Charles Schwab and John Northrop.
Dacianna spent her summers in New York—the Hamptons, a place even more surreal than Santa Barbara. College kept them on opposite coasts, and the girls, now women, pursued very different fields. Terri began her career at the Southern Poverty Law Center, while Daci had forsaken her engineering degree to conceive, start, and sell a series of successful, unrelated businesses while earning a Master’s in Global Policy.
Now Terri had her own practice, Tehzan, Preston, and Guite: Experts in the Unprecedented. Daci had just taken over Survivanoia, Purveyors of the Post-Apocalypse. Not so different on paper. Not so different at the core.
Daci’s signature rapping came, three short, impatient strokes—either Daci or the police. Terri felt her shoulders loosen, her teeth unclench. Zippers lunged to meet Daci at the door and cry for food.
“That didn’t feel like forty-five minutes,” Terri told her.
“More like forty-five days?”
“No, actually. The individual tasks felt like forever, but now that I’m through with that minutiae, it seems like I just got off the phone with you. Weird.”
“That could be the Flu talking. Like when you have a high fever? Your sense of time distorts? Let me get you some water.”
Terri moved to her leather armchair, felt to make sure it was where she thought it was, and sat down. “Can you feed Zippers?”
“Yes. I can see he’s starving.”
She heard Daci’s heels click on the kitchen tiles, heard the cat food can pop-top snap open and Zippers purring around his breakfast. Everything sounded closer, clearer, like a TV turned up too loud. She heard the water run, raised her voice over it. “Hey, was there a guy washing my car when you drove in?”
“Was there supposed to be?”
“Does my car look clean?”
“Your car always looks clean.”
“Right, but I never take it in. I park it and it’s dirty and I get up the next morning and it’s clean. But I never get out of the house early enough to catch him. I think it’s the guy three doors over.”
“The professor?”
“Yeah, Salvador. Turns out he’s a cook, too.”
“For a living?” Click-clack-click then soft padding when
Daci hit the shag leather carpet.
“No, he’s a professor for a living. I meant he’s able to cook well.”
“You know those Mexican guys all have three jobs. Never related, you know, si senorita, I teach calculus, and on weekends? I’m a valet.”
Terri laughed at her friend’s spot-on Mexican accent.
“Usually they fix cars, though, they don’t wash them.”
“Right? Good luck finding a mechanic once Flower Flu is done decimating the Hispanic population.” Daci pressed a small tablet into Terri’s hand.
The comment, not flip indeed tinged with venom, gave Terri pause. She rolled the pill between her thumb and middle finger. Tiny, like the little red sinus medication pills. Not round, though, angled, like a tiny squared football. Terri squinted at it but it made no impression against the dark blur of her hand. “What color is this?”
“Silver, what else?”
“Tell me again why these aren’t for sale—or for free—to the public.”
“It’s not my decision. I just started there. Give me, like, a minute.”
Daci’s seeming lack of frustration sparked Terri’s.
“Not ‘just started’. It’s been what, three weeks? A month?”
“And I’ve been chasing every lead I have!”
Terri flung an open hand at where she supposed Daci stood. “You’re the president of the company. If you say sell the drug, it gets released.”
“You know that’s over simplistic. Don’t feign ignorance. It’s not just my company that needs convincing, there are two other corporations involved in a binding, legal agreement. And in all three companies, stockholders, CEOs, COO’s, all these jokers need to nod in unison before anything can get done. I can barely keep up with the alphabet, let alone do the right thing.”
“Don’t quote Spike Lee at me, you traitor.” Terri stood, stomped a few steps, then thought better of it and slowed, not wanting to storm into a wall. “You need to do what you took over Survivanoia to do.” To her relief Terri found the bedroom, where she made her way to her clothing butler.
“I’m working on it!”
“I figured that’d be the first thing out of your mouth once you were at the helm. That’s why you took over in the first place!”
A sigh from Daci. “Can we talk about this after you take the pills?”
“No! We clearly need to have dialogue. I’m not taking the pills until you spell out for me unequivocally what your plan of attack is for getting this medication into public hands. Not just those of your best friend.”
“You’re holding yourself hostage?”
“I’m the only clout I have.”
“I’m agreeing with your mother at this point.”
“What!”
“She always said you have an overdeveloped sense of justice.”
“Didn’t they say that about Timothy McVeigh?” Here was her bra, on the top of the butler, as always. She fumbled with it until she identified the cups, distinguished the inside from the outside, put it the right way against her body. Hooking it? Shit.
“Can you help me with this, please?”
Daci arrived, took the two ends from her and completed the task. A task Terri had taken for granted every day since she’d proudly sported her training bra at age twelve.
“They gave Timmy the chair,” Daci reminded her. “Zzztttt! Here’s your shirt.”
“I don’t plan to use incendiary devices on public buildings.”
“What about private?”
“Nope.” Terri shimmed into the shirt and Daci buttoned it, leaving Terri feeling ridiculous. “Not even mine?”
“Nope.”
“Damn. You were my last hope. My Obi Won Kenobi.”
“He was her only hope. Which would describe you.”
“I brought you the pills.”
“Me. What about everybody else?”
“Didn’t we just have this conversation?”
Terri ran a hand over her dark grey pinstripe suite, let the arm rest akimbo. A court move. “Give me something. Some idea, some modicum of something to impress upon me that you are serious!”
Daci gave an audible sigh. “You should take these pills now. You’ll have fully restored vision by the time we get to your office.”
“I’m abstaining as a means of protest.”
“I guess you’ve forgotten that it was you who sent me on the snipe chase to determine if Survivanoia invented the goddamn Flu in the first place.”
“Can you walk and chew bubblegum at the same time?”
“It’s a matter of resources.”
“No, it’s a matter of priorities. First you save the victim, then you solve the crime.”
“This entire conversation is insulting!” Daci paused. Terri couldn’t see her friend’s face but she knew her well enough to envision the combined rage and bewilderment.
She kept the urgency from her voice. “I’m just trying to understand your modus operandi.”
“You al
ready know it! Setting yourself on fire is not going to speed the process along!” A pause. “You’re killing me.”
“Well, you’re killing thousands.”
“Not me. Syd.”
“Maybe millions! Horribly, I might add.”
“Can we discuss this in the car, then, Gandhi? I need to stop at the desalination plant on the way.”
Outside, the heat and brightness slammed into Terri like a wall, nearly knocking her over physically. She grasped the railing surrounding her little garden patio. “Are we in triple digits already? It’s not even nine in the morning.”
“Nine in the morning? It’s not even technically summer yet! Anyway, the car is refrigerated. Come on.”
One, two, three steps but then Terri was at a loss. The stinging sun washed everything out, leaving her no visual cues at all. Daci took her arm and guided her to the curb and what Terri knew was a giant yellow beast of a vehicle. “Step up,” her friend warned her. “Higher.” She climbed in, feeling like a child in every capacity.
The moment she was seated she felt relieved. “How is it still so cool in your car?”
Daci’s door closed without slamming. “I told you, it’s refrigerated. I wasn’t being facetious.”
Terri ignored the frustration in Daci’s voice. Let her sweat until she has an answer. “Your Mexican genius actually altered it?”
“Replaced the air conditioner with a refrigeration unit.”
“What’s the difference?”
“An air conditioner pumps chilled air into a room or whatever. A refrigerator removes heat.”
“Where does it put the heat?”
“Outside. Believe me, nobody notices.”
The car moved up PCH, which would bring them to the 10 and then the 405. From there, they would take the airport exit, to where Survivanoia’s desalination plant stood. Out of habit, Terri moved her eyes in the direction of the window. Pointless. Plus the brightness proved uncomfortable. She focused on the interior of her friend’s giant car, and in her new weird state of aural alertness, she noticed how little noise the Hummer made.
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