Sniffy recognizes them: “Trump” and “Getty.” The bigger of the two, the one who calls himself Trump, sports a red polyester baseball cap with a surly wolf stencilled on the front. He’s got a black nylon ski-mask, too, tucked floppily into his pistol-belt.
Except for this, Trump looks pretty much like any American civilian used to look in the old days, except that his jeans and shirt are patched and dirty, and he’s thinner. And he looks very young. Sniffy tries to imagine what Trump would look like if he appeared his true age: forty? Fifty? Sixty-five? It’s hard to see this scraggly bearded tough, hardly more than a teenager—with sharp, clear, lively eyes—as a vice-president pushing papers across the desk in some bank.
Trump’s pal, Getty, crouches lithely beside the bullet-riddled bed of the second Toyota. Getty’s girlfriend, or maybe his mom or even his grandmother, has stitched his gang-name across the back of his Chamber of Commerce camou-jacket. He’s reassembling his assault-rifle. A pair of rags, a long brass rod, and a reeking tray of solvent hang over the edge of the truck bed.
Getty shoves a clip into the rifle. “Keep your butt down, boy!” he says. “You might could get shot.”
“What’s going on?” Sniffy asks.
“Strange helicopter,” Trump says laconically.
“National Guard?”
“European, most likely. Looked like a Swiss flag on ’er; white cross on red. Right, Sniff?”
“Right, that’s Switzerland,” Sniffy says. He’s got a reputation as the bookish type.
“Scoping out the city,” Getty says, and looks unhappy.
As if talking about it has called it back, the air throbs with the beating of rotors and a copter slides into view, a hundred yards above the trees. Sniffy ducks through reflex, but then he sees it’s a cargo-job—not one of the lethal National Guard battle-copters. He squints, recognizes the starred emblem of the European Community.
The cargo door slides open and the copter dumps a cloud of yellow leaflets. The leaflets are blasted down by the rotor’s downdraft, then flutter toward the trees and street. The copter circles off, still dumping.
A thin rain of leaflets settles gently over the roadblock. Sniffy plucks one out of the air. The cheap paper features a grimy photocopy of a dumpy, balding man in thick glasses.
He reads:
REWARD * REWARD * REWARD
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
SIDNEY J. HAVERCAMP, calendar age forty-two, blond hair, 160 centimeters tall, weight 84 kilograms. M.D., Ph.D. in biochemistry. Former associate, Burroughs Wellcome Research Triangle Facility. The European Community Health Service urgently seeks Dr. Havercamp. His safe delivery to EC representatives will be rewarded by fifty ampules of Free Radical Endocrine Enhancer.
REWARD * REWARD * REWARD
“Hell,” Getty mutters. “Now even the Euros are looking for Havercamp.”
“Fifty ampules,” Trump says. “A man could live a long, long time on fifty ampules.”
“My ass,” says Getty. “Hell, if you could get your hands on Sidney Havercamp, you could have all the FREE you wanted.”
“Havercamp’s dead,” Sniffy says brightly. “Died a long time ago, everybody knows that.”
“No he’s not dead, man,” Getty says seriously. “Havercamp’s in Costa Rica. They say his dope posse owns that whole country.”
“I heard the Feds have him under wraps,” Trump says. “They keep him prisoner in one of the old NORAD sites.”
Getty examines the leaflet again. “Fuckin’ Euro faggots. ‘One hundred and sixty centimeters.’ Who the fuck knows what a centimeter is?”
“How tall does that make him, Sniff?” Trump asks.
Sniffy stuffs the leaflet in his jeans pocket. Trump is watching him in a way that makes Sniffy nervous. “Real tall,” he says. “Six-five, six-six—a real beanpole … Look out guys—here comes a patrol!”
A caravan of four station wagons appears on the crest of the next hill, east on Wade. They’re flying militia flags from tall, wobbling C.B. aerials. The glass in all the windows has been replaced with slitted sheet-iron. It’s a patrol from the Library Defense League.
The caravan stops at the foot of the hill, considering the Chamber of Commerce outpost. A fat guy in helmet and flak jacket leaps out, collects a few scattered leaflets, leaps back to safety again with a heavy slam of the door. Then the cars turn south, down Gardner, rolling sluggishly back toward their own turf on the university campus.
The Chamber of Commerce men begin to breathe normally again. “Yeah man, those Library boys,” Trump drawls, his eyes slitted. “They never have the guts for a face-off.”
“Yeah,” Getty muses with nonchalant menace. “Them intellectuals all wanna live forever.”
It’s true that the eggheads of the Library Defense League usually avoid close combat. However, they’ve cunningly staked out all of West Raleigh on accurate artillery grids. A battery of 105-millimeter cannon lurks on the top floor of the D.H. Hill Tower, on the north edge of campus. A definite possibility exists that the L.D.L. might airmail a sudden barrage this way.
Getty washes his hands, greasy from the gun-cleaning, with a gush of brown water from a five-gallon plastic jug. He inspects his fingernails cautiously. They were bad to start with, and the solvent hasn’t done them much good. His thumbnail is cracked.
Sniffy’s nails are even worse, worn-down far below the quick. His fingertips bulge with callused skin. His hair is two blond inches of frizzy split-ends. It’s not that he cuts his hair short. Over the years, Sniffy’s hair has simply worn-out while still rooted in his skull, like the fur on an old horsehair sofa.
As for Trump, he’s wearing a valuable antique set of Lee Press-On Nails.
A humid breeze rustles the oak trees, blowing one of the leaflets against Trump’s sneaker. He plucks it off, examines it. “Maybe these Euros plan to move in permanently. Try and take us over.” He impales the flyer on the Toyota’s rusty aerial. The aerial pierces Sidney Havercamp’s photocopied left eye.
“They better not,” Getty says.
A car honks, distantly. The driver’s hitting his horn while still a block away, which is standard practice when approaching a militia roadblock. Trump tugs the black ski-mask over his face and swaggers out in the road, while Getty covers him with his M-16.
“Wish I had a gun,” Sniffy says.
“I dunno, Sniff,” Getty mutters. “That time with the nuns and the shotgun, y’all didn’t handle it too good.”
The van pulls up. It’s the Kentucky Fried Chicken man, and his personal bodyguard. The Chamber of Commerce guys enjoy fried chicken as much as anybody, but Trump demands a toll payment anyway.
The chicken man digs into a bulging wallet full of militia passes. He’s got them all. Library Defense League, Brown Berets, Raleigh Police Department, Christian Faith Militia, Bellevue Terrace Community Watch, Popular Front for the Liberation of Robeson County. Even the little splinter groups and dope posses who control only a block or two, like the Preacher’s Crew and the John-Johns.
“That copter hit your end of town?” Trump asks.
“Yessir. Dumpin’ leaflets all over. Thought I saw ’em try to land, over by the campus.”
“Think they’ll find old Havercamp?”
The chicken man laughs nervously, nods at his bodyguard. “Bobby here says Havercamp is the Antichrist. The one that made these bad things to happen.”
“He’s got one eye and ten horns,” says Bobby.
“Ought to make him easy to spot,” Trump says.
Bobby just stares at him. Bobby’s a large black guy with part of his face missing. Car-bomb work. No wonder he thinks the world is coming to an end.
The chicken man finds a Chamber of Commerce pass—but it’s expired. So he gives up, and hands Trump five old silver quarters. Trump gives him a new pass, and messily whacks it with a rubber stamp.
With this transaction safely over, Sniffy approaches the car. “Hey,” he says, sticking his frizzy blond head through the o
pen window, “you got any chicken livers?”
“What’s it to you, kid?” says Bobby.
“I got twenty milligrams here, for some chicken livers.”
That changes matters. The chicken man gives Sniffy a cardboard box of cold fried livers, in exchange for the homemade ampule.
The chicken men drive off, weaving cautiously down the potholed length of Wade Avenue, toward the next checkpoint. Trump looks at Sniffy, speculatively. “Seems like you always got a spare shot of FREE, Sniffy.”
“And it’s always really good-quality, too,” grumbles Getty.
It’s borne home to Sniffy how he’s gotten careless in the last months, as if being on friendly terms with the Chamber of Commerce made him safe. Being a kid deflected a lot of suspicion, but the Swiss helicopter and those bales of leaflets are going to heat things up again.
“It’s in the nose,” Sniffy says, tapping it. “I may be just a kid, but I can tell quality chemistry, just by smelling it. If it weren’t for me, us Commerce guys would get burned all the time on bad FREE.” He straps the chicken-box to the back of his bike. “You guys want a chicken liver? Lotta good iron in a chicken liver. Real good for your bone-marrow.”
“You sure know a lot about nutrition and that stuff, Sniff,” Getty says.
A bead of sweat runs down Sniffy’s ribs. He’s too damn talkative for his own good. He picks up his baseball bat, measures the distance to the tray of solvent on the truck bed. Maybe he can knock the solvent into Getty’s face, then whip the bat into Trump’s gut before Trump can squeeze off a shot.
Maybe not, though.
They’re not really on to him. He’s imagining things. This is no time for panic. “Well boys, I got to move on,” Sniffy says.
Turning his back on them, trying hard not to hurry, he mounts his bike and pedals off.
• • •
Out of sight of the roadblock, he sneaks across Wade and into L.D.L. territory. He knows he’s running a risk, but he needs information more than he needs safety. He probably shouldn’t have come back to Raleigh at all, but at least he does know the city from his years at the lab, and hiding out on the Carolina dirt farm was boring him to death. A guy can only eat so many cans of chili.
Besides, he’s made out pretty well over the years by improvising, and he isn’t ready to panic yet. Brains still count for something.
He pedals through the old neighborhoods. Years of moldering leaves choke the broken gutters. Kudzu smothers the porch rails of former shot-houses and gangcenters, now derelict and blackened by Molotovs. Doors, walls, and windowframes are lavishly bullet-pocked. Here and there, roofs have been knocked in by mortar-fire or rocket grenades.
It’s surprising, though, how many Raleighites have survived the endless years of troubles. Like Sniffy, they’ve learned to become unobtrusive. The doors are reinforced now, barred and triple-bolted, backed by sheet-iron or concrete. Windows are shuttered, the glass taped against the prospect of sudden concussions.
A kind of demented routine has settled in. There are vegetable gardens, chicken coops, bomb shelters, private water tanks, basements, trenches, tunnels. Lately, the electric power’s been on again, for two or three hours a day. And the water runs once a week.
Most of the locals have loyally stencilled their doors with L.D.L. insignia. A few houses feature North Carolina flag-decals, but not many, since the National Guard atrocities.
The east side of campus is quiet. On the corner by the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, Sniffy sees an L.D.L. steerer pushing the library’s dope to a dozen shot-hungry Raleighites. As it happens, these customers are senior citizens, yanked back by the Free Radical Endocrine Enhancer from the brink of death by old age.
Those few oldsters who have survived the years of troubles have been taking shots longer than anyone else. The aged were the first of the population to get a steady supply, back in the days when there was still a national health-care policy, and a government to back it up. As they bargain skeptically in their cautious group, they appear blissfully, unnaturally spry. The life-infusing FREE shots have worked absolute wonders on them. Except for a few unavoidable details.
Sniffy’s practiced eye spots the symptoms easily. A frizzy white-haired gal triumphantly displays sleek legs in tight jogging shorts, but her puffy blouse and windbreaker can’t conceal a dowager’s hump. Osteoporosis; that’s a difficult syndrome.
A grinning smooth-faced geezer restlessly swings his heavy cane. Advanced degenerative arthritis; his knees are still bad.
The very old make interesting case-studies. At one time, back in his scientist days, Sniffy would have given his right arm to get them into a lab with a control group. But who wants to be in a control group? That’s pretty much the whole problem, in a nutshell. No one wants to grow old. Get a steady supply of FREE when you’re young, though, and you never do. In theory, it was a wonderful prospect. The practice hasn’t quite panned out.
The problem’s simple enough. If there’s not enough dope to go around, it’s gotta mean somebody’s cheating. If there are shortages, if the price is too high, it’s because somebody’s stealing your share of FREE, stealing and shooting-up the years of your life! It’s obvious when you think about it. Only a fool would trust those government crooks and hustlers, with their big connections. They expect you to grow old gracefully, because they don’t have to. All those politicians and millionaires will dance on your grave a hundred years from now, and laugh at you for being such a sucker.
Unless you get them first, that is. If you want your share, you gotta make connections.
So everybody starts making connections. That puts a strain on things. As soon as the government falls, you really need connections, just to survive. Kinda funny how fast the logic of chaos hits. Kind of a modern miracle. Not exactly the miracle he’d had in mind, but then, he doesn’t remember having had much of anything in mind, at the time.
The yellow leaflets are everywhere. Sniffy forces himself to ignore them. He rides fearlessly past the barbed-wire lawn of the L.D.L. shot-house, ignoring the snipers in the bell-tower, and waves cheerily to the guards in their sandbagged kiosk. The guards let him pass. They, too, recognize Sniffy’s usefulness.
He pedals on down Pullen, then ditches his bike in the hedges, on the bank above the old football practice field. He crawls through the thick photinia and crosses the field of tents and shacks, where the Robeson County refugees live, to the hospital tent. He’s looking for the hospital doctor, Cecily Russell. The refugee camp and Red Cross field hospital are there on L.D.L. sufferance. The L.D.L. would prefer to have Dr. Russell work only for them, but as long as she gives preference to L.D.L. casualties, they’re willing to let her doctor some others. Cecily Russell is the closest thing to a welfare agency left.
At length Sniffy finds her in a corner of one of the tents. She’s eating a skimpy breakfast of brown rice. Her white cotton smock is bloodied from surgery. “Cecily!” Sniffy says.
She looks up, frowns. “I keep telling you: call me Dr. Russell,” she says testily. Her hair has gone lackluster from poor diet, and her glasses are held together with wire and surgical tape. When she was thirty-five, Sniffy recalls, she looked more attractive than she does now at twenty or so.
“Don’t get uptight, Cecily.”
“Go away, Sidney.”
Sniffy looks around to see if anybody’s heard. “Don’t call me that.”
“Now who’s uptight?”
“I brought you some chicken livers,” Sniffy says. “For you, or the kids here … you know … whatever.” Sniffy sets the chicken box on the hospital’s wooden picnic table, which has been stolen from a public park. He sits beside her on the bench, digs out a handful of cold livers, crams them into his mouth. “You need some iron, Cecily. Help that low red-corpuscle count. Enhancer bone-marrow depletion.”
“Why do you do this stuff? Every time I figure I’ve got you pegged as a mercenary little creep, you do something nice.”
“Maybe it’s love.”<
br />
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t know why I do it, Cecily. Who cares about that stuff? Life’s for the living. That’s my philosophy.”
“I guess that works pretty well if you’re not dead.”
“And we’re not, are we. We’re younger than we ever were.”
“Right. I just wonder what kind of man wants to be twelve years old forever.”
“This? This is purely practical. Supplies of FREE are erratic. The best insurance I have against a prolonged drought is to build up an age cushion. This way, even if I run out, it’ll be years before I even hit puberty.”
“Don’t you miss puberty?”
Cecily is very big on guilt trips, but Sniffy is immune. “Not in any way that really matters.”
Russell puts down her spoon and stares into her bowl. She picks out something. A weevil, maybe.
Sniffy pulls the leaflet from his pocket, slides it in front of her. “Listen, Cecily, what about this European helicopter? Pretty threatening to see them hunting for one of us. The old team and all. Once a thing like that gets started, who knows where it will end? They get a foothold here, they might just try to take over.”
“Fine by me. Maybe they can impose some order on this chaos.”
“What about our freedom? Don’t you believe in the Stars and Stripes?”
“I believe in antibiotics and public health. And a few less automatic weapons would help.”
“Now, now. Someday you’ll thank me for this. When the troubles are over, and things settle down.”
“When will that be? A hundred years?”
“Maybe,” he shrugs. “Why should that bother us?”
“We’ll both be dead, you little fool!”
Sniffy laughs. “Possibly. But not from old age, that’s for sure.”
“Go ahead, laugh, but you’re in trouble.” Dr. Russell shakes her head wearily, her eyes glazed with fatigue. “One of their helicopters is parked over in the brickyard right now.”
“Do you know what this is all about?”
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