by K. W. Jeter
George had had down pat all the words to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” The Dionne Warwick version, complete with all the crooned doot doot doots. “That’s our song,” he’d explained to his partner. “I mean, Susan and I think of it that way. They gave us little radios out in the quarantine camps, when we first came here.” He’d taken another swig of clotted milk, his gaze tracking on those memories. “And that was the first human song we heard. It sounded so . . . sweet.”
At that time, and since then, Sikes had managed to keep from saying that George had pretty granny taste in music. People sang “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” on the Lawrence Welk show, for Christ’s sake. Sikes’s own CD collection was stuffed with Art Pepper and pre-Bitches Brew Miles reissues. He’d played some of that for George one time, and George had sat there smiling politely and looking like the spots were about to crawl right off his head.
“Maybe I better sit this one out.” Sikes glanced over at Susan. She lay motionless on the hospital bed. “I can’t carry a tune.” That was true; in grade school he’d been humiliated by the choir teacher telling him to just open his mouth and pretend, without making a sound. “How ’bout Albert?”
“I’m sorry . . .” Albert, still holding the chicken, shook his head. “I don’t know songs. I never learned any.”
“George, I can’t sing. Really.” Sikes felt his own throat tightening up. “I would if I could, honest. You sing—okay?”
“All right.” George nodded. “I understand.”
Sikes stepped away from the bedside. A nurse had come into the room and opened the blinds covering the window. He stood gazing out at the corridor beyond the glass. Part of him wanted to go, to just slide through the air lock and be out there, away from the press of emotion contained in the small room. Maybe they should be alone right now—but he knew that wasn’t why he wanted to leave. He just couldn’t help thinking of the two of them, George and Susan, in those lost other times, when they’d been happy.
Behind him, George started singing, in a low, soft voice. The song wasn’t “San Jose.”
“Sleep in peace, till first the stars . . . mark the silent twilight’s fall . . .”
It took him a long moment to recognize the song. The slow tune caught another memory, deeper and more mysterious than the first. Of sitting in the Francisco family’s backyard after a barbecue, on one of those long summer evenings when the earth stops turning for a while, the air so still and mild. Susan had carted the paper plates and the leftovers back into the kitchen, its light spilling from the window over the sink. The kids’ voices and laughter had drifted from where they had been horsing around inside the house. Sikes, with the last of a six-pack in his hand, had sat comfortably slouched in the lawn chair next to George’s, listening to the soft murmur of the little portable radio between them. There’d been music coming out of it, and he’d been so pleasantly relaxed that he hadn’t even known when it had started. Only that it was strange and beautiful, but not strange at all; familiar as everything he’d ever forgotten and still remembered, memories he hadn’t known he’d had. He’d glanced over and seen that George was just as affected by the single voice singing, gaze lost in some sweetly melancholy interior world. The radio had been tuned, Sikes had found out when the announcer had spoken, to some program of Celtic roots music, on one of those crazy little listener-sponsored stations. Some of the singing had been in Gaelic, some translated into brogue-accented English, but all in those haunting wild melodies, full of longing and grief.
George had told him about it, when the sun had gone down and the only light had been the last few coals glowing under the barbecue grill. At the relocation camps, they’d heard those regular songs, Dionne Warwick and all that, and it’d made them happy and close to each other. But they’d heard the other music, too, the radio waves bouncing across the high desert skies. Late at night, or sometimes a Sunday afternoon, weak signals that were hard to tune in. But when they came, and they heard those other singers, maids and old women of Donegal, shepherds of the isles, skinny London Irish soaked deep in Guinness and what their grandparents had told them . . . the keening tunes and the sense of loss in the words . . . they sounded so oddly close to old Tenctonese songs that the sweet and bitter yearnings echoed in their doubled hearts. This place would be home, but there was another one, across a wider sea.
“The haunt from the Gray Rock comes . . . to wrap the world in thrall . . .”
Sikes knew what that song was. ‘The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby.’ He was Irish on his father’s side; the tune drew up in him a dim memory of a white-haired woman who must have been the grandmother who died before he could even walk. Maybe she had sung it to him; he couldn’t remember that far back.
He gazed out the room’s window, down the dark corridor outside it. The doors at the end had been left open, and he could see the nurses’ station, brightly lit. Human nurses, and Newcomer nurses, dressed in the same white pantsuits, talking to one another as they went efficiently about their tasks. There seemed to be an equal number, a half dozen or so, of each race.
Behind him, George sang to Susan, suspended between life and death. “I’ll envy you, my own sweet child, my love and heart’s desire . . . the crickets sing you lullaby, beside the dying fire . . .”
A vision came to him. Not of something he could see, but something he couldn’t anymore. Sikes watched the nurses’ station and saw all the human ones there. All the Newcomers were gone.
God, he’d miss them. There were none of them left in the hospital, or out on the street, or down at the police station. They were all dead, murdered by a weapon you couldn’t even see, taken away and buried, or their ashes strewn across the desert, the first of this new world that they’d ever seen. All gone, taking with them their funny-sounding talk, their strange ways, the weird stuff you couldn’t believe they’d actually eat. All of that—gone.
“Dusk is nigh, and the reaper’s barn . . . is wreathed in rings of fog . . .”
He could still hear George singing. But he was afraid to turn around and look, afraid of how much this bleak vision had wrapped around him.
He turned; he forced himself to. And saw the room empty, the purple UV lights switched off, the beds made, sheets neatly tucked in at the sides.
They were all gone, and Sikes felt his heart, the single one inside his chest, break with loneliness.
“Siobhra sails his boat till morn . . . upon the starry bog . . .”
The vision faded, a bad dream let loose in the day. He could see them again. Albert holding the chicken in his arms, George standing by the bedside of his wife, his daughter only a step away.
“I’ll stay . . . I’ll stay—” George’s voice broke off, his face stricken with sudden grief. He spoke, the words hollowed and barely audible. “I can’t remember the rest . . .”
Another voice sang. “I’ll stay with you till the faded moon . . . has ringed our clasp with dew . . .” Sikes leaned his shoulder against the window glass, and heard his own voice singing, the words brought from his own hidden memories.
A smile drifted across Susan’s sleeping face.
“And weeps . . .” Sikes had to draw in a deep breath, and close his eyes, to finish the song. “And weeps to hear this lullaby . . .” Long ago, far away. “I sing my love to you . . . I sing my love to you . . .”
An arm wrapped around his shoulder, and he knew it was George.
They both looked over at the hospital beds. The woman and the girl slept more easily now, their breathing slow and even.
“Thank you,” said George.
“Any time . . .” Other memories, fresh ones, of stupid words spoken just yesterday, had already begun to fade. When Grazer came by again, he’d have to ask the captain to tear up the memo he’d handed in, the one requesting a new partner.
His vigil was rewarded. Ahpossno saw a Tenctonese female come up to the doors of the hospital’s security unit; her arms were loaded with a tray of lab equipment. He watched as she turned her head t
oward the guard.
“Do you really need to see my pass?”
The guard smiled and shook his head. “Naw—go ahead, Cathy. Need a hand with that?”
“It’s okay.” She used her shoulder to push her way through, and was gone down the corridor behind.
The woman apparently held some position of authority here. She could be useful. Ahpossno stayed back in the opposite corridor, watching and waiting.
Big rectangles of daylight crossed the oil-stained concrete floor, the sun angling through the warehouse’s high, dust-clouded windows.
“What’s so important?” Darlene Bryant was glad she had on her warm-ups and flat shoes as Guerin led her fast into the rear sections of the Purist operations headquarters. She had been on her way to her morning workout when she’d gotten the phone call. “Is there a problem with the bacteria?”
“You have to see this . . .” The tension was audible in Guerin’s voice.
He pushed open a set of doors, revealing the laboratory area beyond. All of the white-coated technicians were present, their backs turned, clustered around something on one of the work tables.
“What—”
The technicians turned around, the group parting to either side. On the table was an elaborately frosted birthday cake, with a half dozen candles burning on top.
“Happy birthday, Miss Bryant!” The group shouted and laughed, a couple of the younger women clapping their hands together.
She smiled in relief, and turned toward Guerin. “You rat . . .” She shook her head. “You had me so scared.” She stepped up to the table and admired the cake, her name written in swirls of pink and blue. “This is so sweet of you all.” She radiated her best beauty-pageant smile at them. “Thank you so much.”
Leaning forward, she blew out the candles as everyone applauded. One of the technicians handed her a kitchen knife. “Here goes my diet!” She sank the blade into the cake.
“This isn’t all.” Guerin stood right next to her. “We have the best birthday present you could imagine.” He grabbed the arm of one of the techs, a gawky twenty-year-old with a set of Walkman headphones looped around his neck. “Niemeyer here figured out a way of forcing the bacteria culture’s growth rate—”
Excitement bubbled up in the kid’s face. “Yeah, it’s kinda neat . . .” He started gesturing with his loose, big-knuckled hands. “You can take the petri dishes up to a whole ’nother temperature range if you fiddle with the nutrient medium’s pH factor, and then a carbon dioxide flush goes over the—”
Guerin cut him off. “What it boils down to is that we can replicate the bacteria twice as quickly. We’ll be ready to spray in two days.”
“That’s wonderful news.” She kissed the technician on his blushing cheek. “How clever of you.” He ducked back into the crowd before she could hand him the paper plate with the square of cake she had just cut. She gave it to Guerin instead. “What about the Franciscos? I hear they’re still alive.”
“Only because they’re on life support.” Guerin took a bite, a chocolate crumb falling on his chin. “You can’t put two hundred and fifty thousand parasites on life support.” Another bite; the piece of cake was half-gone. “By Friday, they’ll all be dead.”
Bryant laughed. “As they say—TGIF.” She turned away from him, holding up a piece stacked high with frosting. “Who wants the flower?”
C H A P T E R 1 6
HE WATCHED AS they beat the crap out of the old guy.
All Noah had wanted to do was cut through the alley, the long one that ran behind all the taquerias and nothing-over-five-bucks storefronts on Alvarado. He had been making his way over to MacArthur Park, where his whole agenda was to hang out on a bench and watch nickel-and-dime drug sales go on all around him. That, and listen to the deep subsonic ramble of the Red Line trains as they shivered the surface of the refilled lake. When he had a bit of a buzz on, like he did this morning from a dog-bottle of Night Train he’d talked some palsied rummy into scoring for him, he liked to hear that bass note walk up his spine, and imagine the earth itself opening up. With flames and smoke and shit, and everything crashing into the chasm like the cardboard buildings of one of those corny old Japanese monster movies. That was pretty much what he figured everybody deserved. All of them.
He was supposed to be over at the high school right now. That was other people’s agenda for him, and they could just shove it. He’d had enough of that crap already. What good was it? Books and talk about books, and Flaubert and Kafka and a bunch of other jerk-offs who should’ve hurried up and died before they’d wound up bothering everyone else.
The way he’d figured it, he’d finished his business at the school. Done his stealth bomber bit, zipped in and laid down a few kilotons of high explosive on that bitchy Marilyn and her pet slag. She and Buck Francisco weren’t going to forget him soon. That was what they got, what they deserved, for making him feel like a fool.
Plus, the more he’d thought about it—the more he chewed out all its bitter juices between his teeth—the more he’d realized that it must’ve been true. It was true. All the stuff he’d told his folks, and that they’d gone running to the principal with. All that stuff about Marilyn and Buck, and what they’d been doing whenever they’d thought they were alone, and no one watching. He could see them now, his memory perfect and unclouded. And that explained everything, the way she’d acted all the time with Buck—it hadn’t been Flaubert and Madame Bovary and all that other BS. She’d had the hots for Buck, pure and simple. Come up to the park and we’ll talk about books—yeah, right—and then we’ll rank on Noah until he’s just sick of it and he splits. And then they’d be alone at last, for what they were really interested in . . .
The image of the two of them going at it, with her red hair loosening out of its French braid, right next to Buck’s ugly spotted skull, drove everything else out of Noah’s field of vision. So much so that he just about walked right into the beating going down in the alley.
They were guys his age, a couple of them maybe a little older. Four or five of them; they had an old man down on the trash-strewn alley pavement, their heavy boot heels flying into his ribs. The old guy was so curled up, trying to protect himself, that Noah didn’t even realize that he was a slag, a Newcomer, until he saw the blood bubbling out of the broken-toothed mouth, and saw that it was pink instead of bright red. Another kick knocked away the skinny arm that had been shielding the spotted, earless head.
He stood frozen in place, watching. Until one of the pack caught his presence, and turned toward him.
“What the hell you lookin’ at?”
The smart part of his brain was telling him to split, to zoom back down the alley the way he’d come. To get a long way away from these guys, before they decided that he was next in line, just for being there. But his leg muscles, trembling at the back of the knees, didn’t snap into gear soon enough. One guy had left off the action on the old man, and circled around behind him. Noah could feel the guy right at his shoulder blade, adrenaline breath on his neck.
“Hey, kid . . .” One of the others, with dirty blond hair falling into his eyes, beckoned Noah with a tilt of the head. “Come over here.”
The old guy on the ground wasn’t moving anymore. Still breathing, but his yellowed eyes were glazed and vacant. The pack took a step back from him.
“Come on . . .” The blond guy grabbed Noah’s arm—the one behind him had bumped him a few steps forward—and tugged him closer. “You wanna look? Look all you want.” The others guffawed.
The beat-up old guy was right at Noah’s feet. He looked down and saw the pink blood trickle out into a shiny snake on the pavement.
“Way we figure it—” the blond kid rocked back on his heels, hands planted on his hips “—all these butt-ugly slags are gonna be dead soon. So ya gotta hurry up if you want some fun with ’em.”
Noah realized something else. None of the pack had bent down and gone through the old slag’s pockets, to see if he had even a little b
it of money on him. That meant they’d been doing him over just for the hell of it. The fun of it.
“You got a problem with that? Huh?”
He looked up into the blond guy’s eyes. He shook his head. “No . . .” Something wild and laughing broke free inside his chest. “I don’t have a problem with it.”
He left the car parked at the curb. The house’s curtains were open; crossing the Franciscos’ neatly trimmed front lawn, Sikes could see inside, all of George and Susan’s square upholstered furniture. They probably hadn’t bought it all at Montgomery Ward, but it sure looked as if they had.
All kinds of memories were walking around inside Sikes’s head right now; that was what hospital reconciliations could do for you. He remembered ragging George about the furniture.
“But, Matthew—I got a very good deal on it all. They even threw in the rear tables!”
“End tables, George.” They had been cruising late at night, looking for someplace to catch a quick bite. “They saw you coming. Look, just stop short of the La-Z-Boy recliners, okay? Those’re too much.”
“You know—” George’s voice had gone reflective “—I tried one of those, Matt. And it was very comfortable . . .”
Sikes leaned on the house’s doorbell. He could hear it ringing inside, the sound another small memory from before. Through the big front window, he could see movement inside.
Buck pulled open the door. In the living room, Vessna was tucked into the bassinet sitting on the couch; she had a nursing bottle, filled with something green, clutched in her small hands. It looked as if her older brother was taking pretty good care of her.
“How’s it going?”
“ ’S okay.” Buck nodded in reply, then glanced over at the sofa. “She gets a little fussy about Mom not being here.” He shrugged. “Not much I can do about that.”
