by Michael Shea
Not quite Curtis’s height, but more heavily muscled, his and Japh’s Zoo-meat friend had bloomed up here in the mountains. He’d bought the hardware store when they all first arrived, and for all his Zoo toughness he loved being a shopkeeper.
His cue-ball head shone in the warmth of the jammed room. “Sheriff’s right, we’ve been flat-out framed. And it makes no sense! Why would the state wanna destroy us? I mean money-wise? We’re a thriving economy. State scarfs on our sales an’ income taxes, on the power they sell us.
“There was Cranktown, sure, but that was just trash-clearing, demolition. Nothing but shoot-outs an’ untaxable drug money. But why trash the cash they’re raking off us?”
Cranktown in San Berdoo was a statewide surprise. Not because the state had sent contract-cops into that hive, but because when some of these cops got shot it charged Cranktown, Inc. corporately with homicide, and inflicted “in-field capital punishment” on more than half of them. Jailed the rest and made their site state property—and a trashy, polluted piece it was.
Sunrise was an earning concern. Incorporated Rural Townships (IRTs) like Sunrise policed and fire-protected themselves, built their own roads and infrastructure, bought power from the state, and paid hefty taxes. Organic veggies, meat and dairy, natural textiles, specialty lumber, quality weed—all these sold as luxuries on the Coast.
Curtis stood up. “The state’s got us. But you wonder. Was it the state’s idea? I gotta tell you I don’t like bringing this up. I and a lot of my fellow ex-extras up here, well … we just hate this happening to everyone here, who took us in as neighbors. But it has to be said: Why the hell would the state frame a whole community like this? I hate saying this—you have no idea how bad it makes me feel—but what if it’s really a studio that’s behind this?”
Not everyone got this at first. A growl of conversation began to fill the theater. Sandy Devlin stood up. That’s all this hot-dog ex-payboat rafter from Panoply Studios had to do to get everyone’s attention. “Can I come up, Sheriff? You mind?”
“How could we mind?”
IV
I HOPE TO GOD WE’RE WRONG
Sandy Devlin mounted the dais. Not willingly, but since she felt herself and other ex-Studio folk to be on the spot, she figured she might as well stand there. Before her now—she struggled to suppress the thought—there sat so many of the dead-to-be. She scanned their faces, trying to meet all of them eye to eye. Seeing ghosts-to-be, she found, led to seeing ghosts that had been.
A lean, bright-haired woman. Even with her eyes looking somewhat at a loss, her body was restlessly present, her weight shifting left leg to right and back again. “Give me a second,” she told the packed room. All her years of payboating for the studios were suddenly upon her, a fugue of images, of people dying in agony beneath her on the teeming pavements of a dozen different sets.
So many shapes of violent death, reaping a mad harvest of souls, their whole lives left down there, sprawled in that broken meat. For years her only help for them was paying fast, shouting warnings. Later she’d defended them, covertly killing APPs where she could. She could have quit. But then there wouldn’t have been even one raft to help them.
But look what she’d paid for staying in the game. How clear and individual those faces, hundreds of them, in her brain forever. Desperate people making their lives’ one big gamble and losing it, and taking in rage and grief the last look at the sky they’d ever get. The sky that she zipped through untouched.
She found she had to clear her throat before speaking. “I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve never thanked you, all of you, for taking me in here, me and the friends who came with me.” She paused again, but it had to be spoken. “I hope to god we haven’t somehow brought this here.”
“Nonsense!” An indignant old lady’s voice. She was in a motor-operated wheelchair with a high wooden back to it, like a judge’s chair. Iris Meyer, retired teacher of the Sunrise Grammar School. Three generations of grown Sunrise natives had been schooled and scolded by her through grades four to six. She glared around, a woman who had no problem talking to crowds. “Evil doesn’t need to be brought anywhere. It comes calling on its own.” A lot of the native Sunrisers’ heads, gray ones among them, listened slightly bowed in an ancient reflex of obedience and attention. “I don’t know about the rest of you”—a pause here just long enough to have added “boys and girls”—“but when evil comes here to my home, it’s going to have me to deal with.”
This brief declaration felt like a hand on Sandy’s shoulder. She cleared her throat. “Thank you, Iris. Friends, those who don’t want to stay, we’ll get you out. We’ll get you safe. For those who are staying … I’m not gonna say what I suspect. Not till I know for sure. I just wanna emphasize what Sheriff Smalls has already shown us: how … skillfully this whole thing was scripted. Six dip-sticks in phony costumes, with low social skills, perfectly cast to irritate and alarm everyone. And sent here for the Rasmussens. No offense, Elmer—we all respect you—but you and your family have been involved in more ‘firearm incidents’ than any twenty other families put together.”
Some chuckles here—some from the younger Rasmussens themselves.
“So. Look at it, friends. Perfectly scripted. The goons to alienate and threaten. The Rasmussens to return fire. This script worked like a charm, and we are corporately incriminated in first degree murder. And Cap’s exactly right. Is it likely the state wants title to our land? To our modest lumber output? Our alpaca flocks or livestock bloodlines? Our low-yield cinnabar mine? What’s left for them to want here, except our bodies? Except us? And of course, the state can’t want those either. If we’re evicted, or if we’re corpses, the state loses taxes. If we’re in prison, the state’s supporting us.
“So it’s plain as day. This isn’t coming from state. It’s someone who has the money to buy a murder warrant from the right corrupt people in state government.”
That caused a silence in the hall about three heartbeats long. Someone tall stood up—it was Japh. “Tell me if I’m off here, Sandy. If Sunrise is found guilty, the state can license any body of state approved corp-cops to enforce the sentence on us.”
“Correct. That’s the next step. And of course any sizeable corporation will have its own licensed enforcement arm. So. What corporation might want to own us?”
She paused—felt the silent attention from these endangered hundreds. Steady, stubborn people, living their own ways and accepting one another’s. It dawned on her: she loved them. Straight-up, generous people. Even with this danger upon them, there seemed to be no rancor turned toward the extras.
“You might already get what I personally believe. But ask all your Coast contacts, get them to put their ears to the vine. Myself, I’m going down to L.A.”
Low talk started here and there, and quickly rose back to a roar. Sandy stepped off the platform and made for the doors, but a lot of people wanted to show her solidarity—gripped her hands or smacked her shoulders. She was dying to get out those big double doors and into the night by herself.
“Sandy’s right,” Ricky Dawes told Japh and Curtis. “Something rotten here. Government—that’s something you can always buy if you have the clacks.” Ricky had been in his sawmill the last ten hours, was hungry, and his thoughts were tending toward his lunch bag. Japh jumped to his feet and gripped both his friends’ shoulders. “We going to meet up at Chops and Gilly’s?”
“Naw, not me,” said Ricky. “I got more paneling to mill. Then I gotta get down to the Valley early, get plenty of twelve-gauge shells.”
Curtis said, “We’ll bring up beer, Japh. Eleven or so!”
Because Japh was already edging his way through the crowd toward the doors that Sandy had just gone out of.
* * *
“Sandy! Wait!” She was already two blocks down Glacier Avenue, and just hooking into an alley where her two-seater Jag was parked, when Japh’s shout stopped her.
In the alley mouth she stood half in sh
adow, while Japh stood full in the streetlight. He looked at her, earnest, a little hesitant.
“Just lemme do something, Sandy. It’ll just take a second.”
He ducked in quick and kissed her cheek. “I wanna tell ya, like, you’re dear to me. You’re dear to a lotta people.”
It seemed perfectly natural, then, that she should stand there grinning up at him. It was like she’d known him all her life, and could even see in his somewhat scuffed-up face the happy, disaster-prone kid he’d been when he was ten—just as if they had been kids together.
She said, “Gimme your face a minute,” reaching up and taking his head in her hands and bringing it down to where she could thrust up her own and rub her cheek against his. It made her laugh, it felt so satisfying.
“I think,” he said, “I’m afraid I know why you’re going to L.A.”
“Yeah…”
“I hope to God we’re wrong.”
* * *
Smalls had opened the platform for people to speak by turn. Dozens jumped to their feet and, while waiting to be called on, began talking in a deafening roar, so the sheriff had to bellow, “Shut up please! By turns. Christy. You speak first.”
A slight young man, with short white-blond hair. He was one of the bikers from down at the Wheel Right Hogs. “I say it’s first things first. We hafta get everyone properly armed.”
Others followed Christy. Two-thirds agreed with him, but differed at length about armaments. The other third repetitively suggested that the whole town take to the higher mountains, or down to stay with friends in the Valley, in Redding or Red Bluff or fucking Sacramento.
So much repetition quickly bored Ricky Dawes. He slipped his hard-callused hand into his lunch bag and unwrapped his sandwich. He’d been cooped up all day milling a big order for new residents—a bunch of just-arrived survivors from Maw of Mars. Ricky was a gnarly middleweight pushing forty, a man with an incessant appetite who would die lean through no fault of his own. He’d brooded all he could about Sunrise’s dire straits, and was tired of thinking about it now.
He tucked in and enjoyed it—pork and dill pickles on rye bread.… And as he ate, his idle eye kept noticing one of the dogs at the meeting.
A few older people had to have their dogs for support or guidance, and at every meeting there were always some people straight down from the hills at work who brought their dogs with them, always on sufferance for good behavior. Thus a substantial canine presence marked all meetings in the Hall with a family mood. But this particular dog, a biggish black-Lab mix, had a stand-out quality that Ricky couldn’t quite put his finger on.
It was an unusually clean dog, for one thing. For another, it threaded here and there through the crooked aisles among the crowd, very active and alert but seemingly not after anything—acting exploratory and curious in the general way of dogs, but casual about it, not really hunting human touches or acknowledgment.
When it trotted past Ricky on its circuit, he held out a chunk of his sandwich to it. It gave the treat a dab of its nose, and trotted by. Ricky was startled when Iris Meyer on his left said, “Where are all these new dogs coming from lately?”
“All what dogs, Miz Iris?”
“All the new ones around!” She answered in a testy tone that seemed to add, ‘you young airhead!’ “There’s that little Sheltie mix. And the first time I saw that wooly brown bitch over there was yesterday.”
“Sorry, Miz Iris. I don’t get outta my mill much during the days. I guess dogs wander in, what can you say?”
“No they don’t, Richard Dawes.” Her tone induced meek attention from Ricky, and she went on to describe three other canine newcomers she had seen around town. And after a moment it struck Ricky … that she was right. Few strange dogs did wander in to any settled community like this, as full as it was of territorial resident dogs.
“Listen, people,” shouted Smalls, whom the endless, aimless series of speakers had at last exhausted. “We’re spinning our wheels. The charge is gonna be judged without us, and damn small doubt of the verdict. Go talk to everyone else now! Network! Go city-side, coast-side, find out what you can about who’s after us.
“But I just wanna say one last thing for myself. This situation we’ve got hasn’t changed one thing for me. When I went extra on They Teem, I went in knowin already that Sunrise here was where I wanted to buy in, where I wanted to live. An since I’ve been here, it’s been worth every ounce of the arm it cost me. I’m not goin anywhere else. Anyone comes to cage or kill me had best bring their lunch, and all the help they can find.
“So. Tomorrow at my office we’ll be organizing runs down to the Valley, both for those who are … relocating temporarily, and for those who are setting in stores. Com or come in and we’ll try to get everyone taken care of.”
* * *
As the moon declined, they all sat on Chops and Gillian’s deck under the star-ceiling, which shed light enough to make their eyes glint from their shadowed sockets. All except Jool were holding a beer or a second beer. Curtis and Jool sat at the deck’s edge dangling their legs off, arms around each other’s shoulders.
Gillian said, “If you count people who are older but still tight, we could have six or seven hundred effectives up here.”
“More!” said Chops. “And a lot are way-back country people who know how to fight.” They were looking far down the slope at Sunrise, whose jagged lines of street and house lights was a tiny echo of the stars’ abundance.
Gillian said,”Whoever’s doing this, they have to know that a lot of people are gonna fight. I think the fight is probably what they want.”
Japh said, edging closer to it with the rest of them, “The scam that got us in this fix … was really well scripted.”
Japh noted that Curtis and Jool’s embrace got a little closer as they looked down over the town. Curtis nodded.
“It’s pretty clear Sandy’s not just going to L.A.—she’s going to Hollywood.”
Now it was out. They all relaxed a little.
“Real-life Live Action,” Japh said bitterly. “Another groundbreaker. And who’s the biggest groundbreaker of them all? Who invented Live Action?”
“Gotta be,” Chops growled. “You know there’re two hundred survivors just from Alien Hunger alone up here?”
“Yeah. Has to be Panoply Studios Sandy’s got in mind.”
V
TARGET PRACTICE
Before the sun came up, Curtis and Jool woke up and got it on. As their baby had grown in her, he had taken to moving more gingerly when he was in her too, worried that it might hurt Jool to be holding them both. But then she began to ride him strongly, snatching him up into her recklessness and making him reckless too.
Reckless was good, because it was like a promise. It meant they had their whole lives of love ahead of them and could spend it how they wanted. He felt that she was not riding toward him, but taking the three of them away from here to somewhere safe from what was coming down.
Afterward, embraced, their heartbeats slowing, it seemed they had indeed traveled and passed a long and happy time somewhere else. But here came the real world gathering around them once more, the dangerous world they’d lived in since the day before yesterday.
He put his hand on her belly. “Jool. Would you please just go? Get the baby, get Momma and Auntie far away and safe? You know me—no way I won’t survive and bring you all back here!”
“Honey,” she said, “you wouldn’t go, if it was just you. I wouldn’t go, if it was just me. And you and me are who this baby’s gotta live with. Down in the Zoo I dreamt all my life of a place like this. Nothing’s gonna chase me out of it.”
“What about Auntie and Momma? They’re spry but they’re not young.”
She smiled. “We can ask ’em to go—do you see ’em doin it?”
They lay stroking each other, the sky’s silver light like warm drapery on them. Their love began growing again as they fondled and snuggled, involved in that sweet studious wrestling, trying
to get closer, and closer still, shedding tears as they came.
After, they dozed till the sun was rising, and had just dressed and started coffee when Momma and Auntie’s three-wheeler growled down the slope, coming down from The Garden Spot, their “flower ranch” two hills over, with Auntie Drew at the wheel.
On their runs down to L.A. to bring their household possessions up here to Sunrise, Momma Grace had proved to be God’s own combat-driver when running the Five through the bandit nests, but lately she’d been putting Curtis’s auntie at the wheel to train her. Auntie’s fingers, crooked from years of keyboarding in the ’Rise, were straighter already with her months of gardening, and she loved driving, but that hadn’t made her very good at it yet. Fearless and enthusiastic, yes—and this could make her dangerous if you were in, or near, her path.
When the coffee was ready they brought it out to the ladies, who were just coming up the steps. They all talked planting and fertilizers, gulping the brew.
When Jool and Curtis had at last made their pitch, Auntie squawked, “Run us down to Redding? Curtis, you must be trippin! We’re stayin right here, an we mean to cap some studio ass, child.” Her diction had gone downhill up here in Sunrise, even as her fingers and her spine had grown straighter. Her hair was a weedy white ’fro now, like a dandelion puffball. Momma Grace, for her part, must’ve lost sixty pounds—no sylph yet, but a sturdy, tight country momma.
“Well then,” Jool said, “lemme get you some things we’ve got for you.”
She brought out the weighty duffel she and Curtis had readied, and took from it first two old shirts. Foam blocks cut from an old cushion were glued inside their right shoulders. “Put these on an button ’em up, dears. Get the foam snug on the front of your shoulders.… Good. Now let’s go on up to that draw there. We’ve got us some practicing to do.”
Auntie asked, “Practicing what?” But her smile at the satchel said she already knew. As they marched ahead up through the grass it made Curtis sad to watch them. You could see them just loving where they were so much, the grassy hillside, the sun, and the sky.
