Bring Me the Head of the Buddha
Page 31
EPILOGUE
After initial surgeries to remove bullets and stop internal bleeding, after the setting of bones at clinics expensive enough to not ask questions, it was cheaper to buy medical equipment, have it installed in Hi-5's palatial six floor suite, and have doctors and nurses come to them during their recovery. It was certainly more fun for the patients.
Two weeks later, Hi-5's clinic was still full.
Surfing the Big Baby's shockwave in the Thumper without seatbelts had broken a lot of bones. No broken necks, just arms and legs and ribs, lots of ribs.
Hi-5 had made her Japanese terraced gardens into the convalescence wing. It was her recreation of a landscape seen in isometric perspective in a series of her favorite erotic prints. She'd had them built as a set for a video shoot and then decided to keep them. Casper had only ever been exposed to one scene from the video, but every time he and Otis got stoned on the terrace by the waterfall he'd remember, in flashes, what acts had been documented there, and he always needed another bong hit to forget again.
The ceilings were high and AniLux coated, and blue skies with fluffy white time-lapsed clouds that zipped by quickly were the selection of the day everywhere except the waterfall terrace. That was hooked into Otis's FragNBox. Hi-5 had a million toys, but Otis liked this one with the teeth marks his ugly dog put in it. Even with the bajillion Amero MUNI 5-7 had shifted into his account, Casper still hadn't bought himself his own FragNBox. He liked this one, too. Watching Otis and Alvin box while lying on their backs was funny, but Otis had two broken legs and that was the only way he could float like a butterfly with fancy footwork.
While his ribs healed, Alvin wore a foam cast around his torso, and he couldn't inhale too deeply. Casper watched him exhale a short, puffy, dense plume of smoke. Otis's ugly dog waddled three steps over to Alvin's belly and collapsed with his eyes rolling in different directions. Alvin had been overfeeding him.
There were golden robes two terraces away, surrounded by bamboo, and every once in a while a flash of gold cloth would pop over the top of the thick bamboo groves surrounding them. The fans that blew wind on the grove made the whole room a little breezy, and Otis was having trouble getting lit. He gave up and lay back on the tatami. Casper laughed quietly because he remembered the waterfall scene from Hi-5's video and decided not to mention what he'd seen happen on the very spot where Otis's head was resting.
Before Casper left the terraces to go find Bonnie, he heard the FragNet version of Hi-5 introducing a rematch and Otis talking shit to Alvin over her song about Bloodfest.
Bonnie bought a new eye. It was a cold, silver-gray color flecked with green slivers. It had been in for a week, and she could use it now, thanks to some very expensive surgery performed by robotic nano-surgeons. They were poured into her eye out of a quarter-inch-wide vial to do microsurgery beyond the human hand's dexterity. She could afford a second one, but after some consideration, she decided to keep the emerald eye. It was patched and shielded. She'd been off the painkillers for a couple of days. They'd treated her bullet wounds and fractures, and they'd left her with foam casts immobilizing her ribcage, an arm, and a leg.
Bonnie was sitting back in bed, propped up against the wall with a pillow, watching the news with the sound off. When Casper entered, she was viewing the Big Baby's detonation on a wall-sized AniLux screen. The news played the explosion a hundred times a day, and she just kept watching it. Casper figured she was attached to it the same way Carlos was attached to Hannah's gun after he'd been shot with it.
The only videos that got more play that week had been Hi-5's new video that Coco had shot on the roof during the Battle of the Zig, and the on-scene report after the Big Baby's detonation, live from the glassy crater itself, showing newscaster Kelsea Kimora and her film crew fleeing Dune Dogs. The dogs actually managed to chew off the tires of her news van and made their way through the passenger door panel before she escaped by tossing an intern out the back of the van to distract them. She was on-screen now, reporting from a helicopter, and the wall filled with images of the quarter-mile-wide concavity of cracked green glass that had been left by the Big Baby. The airborne camera turned to the Ziggurat and the Lady Chatterley was still wedged in its side.
The insurgents had reinforced by land in great numbers. In a news conference on the roof, they dubbed the Ziggurat “New Jerusalem.” Catherine was there. The insurgent groups divided the step pyramid in an uneasy truce between religious factions, and the embarrassed G.S.A. still hadn't managed to take it back.
When Bonnie noticed Casper, she shifted herself to the left to make room for him on her right. Casper always sat on her right, with Bonnie to his left, because his right arm was broken and so was her left. Casper hesitated a moment, and she patted the spot next to her where she wanted him to sit. She knew it embarrassed him, and she enjoyed doing it. He sat next to her and leaned against the wall, too. “Lean forward,” she said.
Casper leaned forward and asked, “What...Why?” Bonnie put her arm around his shoulders and thought about how it felt good to trust someone. Casper just smiled like an idiot, enjoyed the warmth of her touch, and didn't question his luck.
THE END