The Kiribati Test

by Stacey Cochran

  “You son of a bitch!” I said, and I wailed Staringer with a hard kick across his ribs. It knocked him out into the hallway, and he scrambled to start shooting in the direction of the gunmen.

  It sounded like the gunmen had machine guns.

  I swung around and saw the keys over by the kayak machine, and I tried to kneel down to pick them up. Sara was staggering to her feet.

  “Here,” she said.

  She reached down and got the keys. She unlocked the handcuffs, and I kissed her quickly on the lips.

  We both looked at the dead officer on our foyer floor, the pool of blood now wide around him. Stu was laid out flat in the hallway. Staringer lay on his stomach, firing a volley at the gunmen up the hallway. Lenny was out of our line of vision, but he must have been firing, too.

  “Who are they?” Sara said.

  “Global-Com thugs,” I said. “They’ll kill us all.”

  “The fire escape,” Sara said.

  I grabbed the slip of paper with the bank account number on it, and Sara and I started toward the fire escape just beyond the kitchen. I glanced back and saw Staringer shot. Lenny shouted something, and I saw him run wildly by the doorway in the direction of the gunmen. There was a rapid-fire barrage of bullets, and Lenny’s yell ceased.

  All four officers were shot.

  “Go, Sara!” I shouted.

  We opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the fire escape balcony. It was night out, and the city lights glimmered.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  We started down the fire escape. One of the gunmen hit the front door to the apartment and opened fire just as I dropped down out of his line of sight. I could hear the apartment exploding with bullets.

  Sara and I hit the pavement below, and I looked up three stories to our apartment. Two gunmen leaned out the window and opened fire on us. We ran across the parking lot, and sparks exploded on the ground.

  Sara’s silver Honda was parked around the front of the building, and we rounded the corner and sprinted hard in that direction. I could hear the gunmen hit the pavement behind us.

  Sara screamed her voice I.D. command at her car. The doors unlocked, and she climbed into the driver’s seat. I leapt across the hood of the car, sliding. I scrambled up on the passenger side and dove into the open door.

  The gunmen rounded the corner of the building, and Sara put the hover-car in drive, and we took off through a wooden fence. Bullets sprayed the rear window, glass shattered, and we both winced and pulled out into the street and were almost nailed by a station wagon.

  The station wagon swerved and took out a bus-stop shelter. Glass exploded up into the air and across the paved street. Sara got the Honda pointed straight ahead, and we took off into the night, racing through every stoplight for the next five blocks.

  We hit I-10 at the McDowell onramp, and a few seconds later, we were cruising along the interstate in the direction of the airport.

  “What do we do?” Sara said.

  I pulled out the sheet of paper with the bank account information on it. We had two photo I.D.s and the clothes we were wearing. I had exactly twenty-seven dollars and two credit cards, which were both maxed out.

  “We need to see if we can access this money,” I said.

  “Is there a pin number?” Sara said.

  “9-8-7-6-5,” I read aloud.

  Sara checked the rearview mirror, and I kept glancing over my left shoulder.

  “See anything?” I said.

  Sara shook her head and exited toward the airport. The hover-car circled around the exit ramp, and we started up toward the airport terminals. We parked the car on the fourth floor of a parking garage, and we took an elevator down to ticketing.

  The airport was not terribly crowded, and I spotted a cash machine. Sara saw it, too.

  “Well, let’s see if this works,” she said.

  We stepped up to the ATM, and Sara placed her thumb on the scanner.

  “Welcome, Sara Connors,” the machine said. “Please state your name into the red speaker for voice identification.”

  “Sara Connors,” she said.

  “Thank you,” the machine said. “One moment please while we access your account.”

  I scanned the airport lobby for any sign of trouble and managed to stay relatively calm.

  “Please enter your pin number, now,” the machine said.

  Sara pressed 9, 8, 7, 6, 5.

  There was a pause. I moistened my lips. My heart beat hard in my chest. We stared at the screen.

  “How may I help you, Sara Connors,” the machine said.

  “Sweet!” she said.

  She looked at me. My eyes were electric with excitement and nervous energy.

  Sara said, “Account Balance.”

  It took a moment, but then, the figure appeared on the screen, and Sara just turned and grabbed me.

  We saw written beside “Account Balance”: $58,000,000.00

  Sara and I kissed, and we stared into one another’s eyes. We tried not to draw too much attention to ourselves.

  “Create Account,” Sara said.

  “Creating Account,” the machine said.

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I want to create five accounts,” she said. “Nano Tech has the information for this account, and the sooner we put this money into our own private accounts the better.”

  I asked, “How much money can we get out this machine?”

  Sara said, “Most of these have a five-thousand limit, but we can transfer funds to a Ready Card.”

  Sara set up five new accounts. She divided the money equally into each of the accounts; $11,600,000 into each. We withdrew $5,000 walking around money, and she transferred an even $100,000 to a Ready Card, which the machine dispensed for us.

  She handed me the flimsy piece of plastic. “This is one-hundred-thousand dollars,” she said. “You can use this at any place that takes a credit card.”

  “I know how to use a Ready Card,” I said.

  “Sure you do.”

  We stepped away from the ATM, and we looked out at all the ticket counters: International, United, API, US Air, Quantus, AET, Pacific Air.

  “Now,” she said. “We just gotta figure out how in the hell to get to Kiribati.”

  XI

  Sara quietly put the envelope atop a wooden drink table beside my lounge chair. I saw the return address:

  Ministry of Health and Family Planning

  Parental Testing Agency

  P.O. Box 12

  Bikenibeu, Tarawa, R.O.K.

  tel: 28-081; fax: 28-152

  The white envelope was thick, as though filled with a packet of information. It was 11:42 in the morning, almost noon, and time for lunch. The sky was clear blue, and the temperature was up to 84 degrees (29 centigrade), and I was drinking my third cup of coffee that morning under the shade of a palm tree.

  I folded my laptop down and placed it toward the front of the lounge chair. For the past six months, I’d been trying to write a novel about our story, and my typical routine was to work up at the house with the windows open, a salty breeze wafting through the house, a ceiling fan on its lowest setting, bare feet on the ceramic tile floors, which were cool in the morning. Some mornings I worked in the lounge chair up on the edge of the beach.

  If I got a little stir crazy, I put the computer aside and walked along the beach or took a swim in the clear waters that pooled in a fingernail-shaped cove in front of our house. The Pacific Ocean stretched as far as we could see, six or seven miles to the horizon.

  One morning, I packed a backpack with a sandwich, a thermos of vegetable soup, some coffee, a paperback science-fiction novel, and I walked all the way around our island in just under four hours, stopping once for a thirty-minute break.

  Sara preferred to kayak, and we had both a little Sunfish sailboat and her kayak pulled up on the beach.

  I looked from the envelope to Sara, and I felt my heart beating in my chest. We had a
lready discussed the surgery with a doctor in Bairiki (1,200 miles to the west) and had tentatively planned an October out-patient surgery to remove Sara’s birth control chip. That, of course, was dependant on my passing the Ministry of Health and Family Planning’s test.

  I lifted the envelope from the table and tried to think of something to say to Sara that would break the tension.

  “Heavy,” was the best I could come up with, and Sara tried to smile. I could tell she was so nervous that she didn’t even want to stand there looking at me.

  “Should we say a prayer or something?” I said.

  Sara said, “Karl, I love you no matter what’s inside that envelope. We can take the test again if we need to. We’ve got a good life here, and no matter what they tell you, they can’t take that away from you. They can’t take me away from you.”

  There was a time when I thought it was impossible to love a woman as much as I loved Sara at that moment. It was just beyond my imagination that I could ever love someone as much as I loved her.

  I tore open the envelope and removed the packet of information from inside, and I saw the test scores on the very top sheet. Tears filled my eyes.

  “Oh, honey,” Sara said. “You can take it again. We can take the test again. It’s no big deal.”

  I looked up at her from the lounge chair, looked deep into her clear brown eyes, and I stood up to give her a hug.

  She said, “What? You passed? You passed!”

  And she reached for the test scores and tried to take them from my hand. I held them away from her teasingly.

  I grabbed her in my arms and pulled her close to me. I held her like I’d never held anyone else in my entire life, but she reached around trying to grab at the test scores.

  She grabbed the envelope and the papers, pushed me away from her, and glanced at the scores. I watched her eyes as she read the results from the test. The look that I saw filled me with the same emotion I’d felt when I looked inside that wooden box at one of the seven answers to the universe.

  So I said, “How do you feel about diapers?”

  The Cuda

  Robert Chalmers had heard a lot of crazy stories in his thirty years as Cactus, Arizona’s leading used-car salesman, but none quite as crazy as the one he heard on Wednesday March 14th.

  “She’s not much to look at,” Chalmers said.

  “That’s because you’re looking at it with your eyes,” the old man said.

  Chalmers, who had reported a case of vandalism on his lot just the day before, was in no mood to deal with a crackpot.

  “What else am I supposed to look at it with?” he said.

  “You mean, you don’t know?” the old man said.

  Chalmers looked at him. The old guy was probably in his late seventies. He had blue eyes, and his thinning gray hair was neatly combed from left to right. He wore faded overalls and a white T-shirt.

  Chalmers said, “I’ll give you three hundred dollars for it.”

  The old man walked out in front of the car. The desert sun was climbing up into the sky, and a cool dry breeze rustled the colorful pennants encircling the “Robert’s Used Cars” sign. Steam from Chalmers’s Styrofoam coffee cup spilled over the rim as though from a simmering volcano.

  “Your sign says ‘Push it, Pull it, or Tow it. We buy anything.’ The ‘anything’ is underlined, Mr. Chalmers.”

  “Yes, but we don’t generally specialize in, uh, classic automobiles, Mr. . .?”

  “Courtney,” the old guy said.

  “Mr. Courtney,” Chalmers said.

  “Alexander Courtney.”

  “Unlike a lot of used-car dealers, Mr. Courtney, I am a man of my word. And I will buy just about anything. But there has to be some appreciable profit-margin ratio, and this old thing is liable to sit up here on my lot, baking under the Arizona sun for the next three years. If I can’t sell it, I don’t want to buy it, Mr. Courtney. I’m offering you three hundred dollars.”

  “The 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda used to be the fastest street-legal automobile in the world,” Alexander Courtney said.

  “The operative word is ‘used’,” Chalmers said. He looked at the rusty, sun-faded clunker. “I reckon the darn thing runs alright, don’t it? Where’d you say you’re from, Mr. Courtney?”

  “That way,” Courtney said, pointing to the mountains on the southern horizon.

  “You do have the paperwork for this thing?” Chalmers said.

  The old man leaned forward and touched the rusty hood as though petting a dog he was giving over to the pound.

  “Mr. Chalmers,” Courtney said, “you have no idea what this car can do.”

  “Well, that’s a big engine,” he said. “I’ll give you that. What is it, a 440? But the body looks like it’s being held together by shoestrings and rust. It’s missing the back left fender. Both headlights are smashed out. The taillights don’t look like they’ve worked in ten years. There is actual duct tape holding the muffler in place. You got”--Chalmers looked incredulously at the trunk--“a blue bungee cord holding the trunk down. The back window is smashed. It looks like somebody took a knife to the upholstery--thirty years ago. Why should I take a chance on this car?”

  Courtney stood up straight. He looked Chalmers up and down, and then those aged blue eyes came to rest directly on Robert Chalmers’s walnut brown eyes. The two men stared at one another.

  And Courtney said, “Because this car can work miracles.”

  Robert thought he had misheard him. He said, “Miracles?”

  “If you put a broken VCR in the trunk at night,” Courtney said, “and you come out the next morning; it’ll be fixed as good as new.”

  Robert Chalmers realized the old man was serious. His mouth dropped open a little, and he tried to picture where he’d last put his .357. In my desk, he thought. Top right drawer.

  “I’ll give you three twenty-five,” he said. “You can take it or leave it. But I ain’t gonna have no crazy man up here on my lot. If you want to sell your car, that’s fine. But don’t indulge me with your mental delusions, old man. I’ll have the cops up here so fast it’ll make your head spin. Three twenty-five. That’s my final offer.”

  Alexander Courtney looked into his eyes. He made a thoughtful frown and nodded lightly.

  “Alright, Mr. Chalmers,” he said. “Three twenty-five. You’ll see soon enough.”

  Three weeks later, Robert Chalmers put the broken “For Sale $3,999” sign in the trunk of the Hemi Cuda. The Cuda stood in a back corner of his used-car lot next to an aluminum fence. The big plastic sign was designed to fit over the front window of a car, but it had broken in two between the “e” and “l” in “sale,” and a large corner on the bottom right-hand side was chipped off and nowhere to be found.

  One of his mechanics had just leaned the two pieces next to the aluminum fence--maybe they thought it would be a waste to throw the whole damn thing away--and it had stayed there for three months. But in a business where presentation was everything, Robert Chalmers knew that no broken sign would ever go on a car that he was selling.

  Vandals had apparently bashed in the front window of the Cuda at some point during the past three weeks. It was always a problem in car sales: what to do with the cars when you closed up shop at night and went home. And kids out in the middle of nowhere Arizona seemed to have a proclivity for vandalism.

  Chalmers complained to Harvey Denton, Chief of Police in Cactus, but there were only two all-night patrol officers in town, and they couldn’t just hang out at Chalmers’s used-car lot all night.

  It was late afternoon, and the mountains on the southern horizon were red with sunlight. The air was hot and dry, and Robert Chalmers stood there about four feet in front of the smashed-out front right headlight of the Cuda.

  “You’re a sad looking sight,” he said.

  And, as if in response, the trunk suddenly sprang open. Robert frowned and walked around back to pull the blue bungee cord tight. He glanced down inside the trunk and saw the broke
n sign he’d placed in there just a moment before, and he did a double take.

  The sign was still broken in two, but the bottom right-hand corner that had been chipped off was no longer chipped off. Robert grunted in surprise.

  “What in the world,” he whispered.

  And he leaned forward and touched his finger to the corner where it had been broken. It was seamless. Chalmers stood bolt upright and looked around him, suspicious that someone was playing a prank on him. But there was only the sound of a breeze flapping the pennants out front of his used-car lot.

  He shook his head and rubbed his mouth with the palm of his left hand.

  “I must be losing my mind,” he said with a curious smile, and he closed the trunk and fastened the blue bungee cord securely.

  The next morning, he carried a cup of coffee to the Cuda. He was afraid that someone would ask him what he was doing, and though he was doing nothing more than opening a trunk on a car that he owned, he knew that the motivation to open the trunk was the possibility that a sign was miraculously fixed.

  He stood in front of the Cuda. Sunlight glinted off of a broken piece of glass in the right headlight. He glanced over his left shoulder back toward the showroom. Robert cleared his throat and approached the trunk.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said.

  And he was suddenly afraid to open the trunk. He looked at the blue bungee cord that held the trunk in place. There was a large patch of rust on it like a giant stain. He peered through the rear window at the chewed-up vinyl seats. He started to reach his right hand forward to unfasten the bungee cord, and he saw that his hand was shaking.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. He pulled his hand back.

  He looked up over the Cuda at all the other cars in the lot. He watched a red Ford F-150 pass slowly on the street in front of the dealership. He recognized the driver as Harvey Denton, Chief of Police.

  Harvey waved, and Robert hesitated. Chief Denton’s brow furrowed, and he pulled the Ford up onto the lot. He started to drive it up toward him, and Robert suddenly felt afraid, as though caught in the act of something illegal.