NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  The woman saw two Drifters, a man and woman, in torn bridal gowns, coming down one street and a third Drifter, a man in a blue Dodgers jacket, coming from the other side of the van. He had long hair and a matted beard, and his running shoes didn’t have laces, so with each shambling step he almost lifted out of them. He kept his eyes down.

  Keeping a hand on the chisel, the woman walked down the stairs, aware of every route she could take to get away from the van if someone, Drifter or van driver, attacked her.

  She walked up to the table and in one fast move skewered an orange with the bloodstained weapon. She slipped the orange from the steel blade, pushed a finger deep into the entry hole, tore the orange in half, and offered one piece to the Drifter in the greasy Dodgers jacket.

  Drifters almost never shared at these buffets and Sinatra studied the man, wondering what Chisel Girl saw in him that provoked her generosity. She wasn’t giving anything to the other two Drifters, the man and woman, who looked to be in better shape.

  Sinatra handed Chisel Girl another orange. “These are gifts. We don’t expect anything from you. It’s good, isn’t it? When was the last time you had a fresh-picked orange?”

  She could talk but decided not to give up that information until it had value.

  “I’m Pickle. I’m here to tell you something you may not have heard. We’re out here looking for people who might become our friends. You can stay here; that’s your choice. Or you can come with us back to Los Angeles, where there’s a lot more food, and safe places to sleep. But you can’t carry the chisel in the city. I can’t let you on the van with the chisel.”

  “I won’t use it unless I have to.” She took a bottle of Dasani water from the table, unscrewed the top, and then drank from it quickly.

  “Do you have a name?” Frank asked her.

  “No.”

  “Do you know what you were before?”

  “Before what?”

  “Do you remember anything of your rehab?”

  “Rehab?”

  “Well, you can stay out here and take your chances, or you can come with us and we’ll see if there’s a way for you to live a better life. Think about it.”

  The Drifter in the filthy Dodgers jacket had stopped his clumsy movements and Sinatra knew that meant the man had been listening to them. Sinatra passed him, brushing shoulders, and then introduced himself to the Drifter couple. “My name is Frank Sinatra. I invite you to get on the van and come with us to where there is more food and a warm place to sleep.”

  He said this without looking too closely at the Drifter in the Dodgers jacket.

  The couple got on the van. The Dodgers Drifter stayed close to Chisel Girl, eating Slim Jims.

  “You sure you don’t want to come with us?”

  Dodgers seemed incapable of understanding. “This is good,” he said.

  Frank tried again. “There’s more food in Los Angeles.”

  “This is good,” he said again. The man reached for another orange, and as his arm stretched, Sinatra saw the circle of pale skin on his wrist.

  “Did your parents ever hire a clown for your birthday when you were a kid?”

  “More food,” said the Drifter.

  “When you were too old for it, say, I don’t know, fourteen, fifteen, did you go trick-or-treating on Halloween with your buddies for the free Snickers, without bothering to wear any kind of costume?”

  The Drifter ate his food without turning his head.

  Pickle said, “What are you doing? I don’t think he understands you.”

  Frank persisted. “Cat or dog? Fish or turtle? Both? Hamster? Cockatiel? Xbox or PlayStation? Do you still remember your password to Facebook?”

  The man stopped adding food to his plate.

  “What was rush hour like? Cars so thick you couldn’t move. And did you ever see the Lakers play? You weren’t here when it hit; you were never sick. How’d you miss it? What happened? Were you out of town, sailing? There’s a theory that the Completes were just passengers on a cruise ship coming back from Hawaii, and that the captain heard about what was happening and stayed a hundred miles off the coast. And when he finally landed, some of the people who made it to shore split up and went alone and stayed away from everyone else for, what?” Frank paused. “Well, you tell me, six months? And have you found others? Are you waiting until you find others to create a small army that can conquer us the way the Spanish conquered Mexico? That’s from a book. I read them. History, it’s interesting. We don’t have it anymore, not like they used to. I’ve spoken to a few Completes. They say they’ve all gone crazy because there’s no one to share with, unless they randomly find another Complete, but that’s only happened a few times that I know of. There may be a community of Completes beyond the desert, but if there is, they’re smart enough to stay away from us. Have you found any others?”

  Sinatra tossed Dodgers another question: “Excuse me, do you know what time it is?”

  The Drifter’s eyes flicked to his left wrist.

  “My guess is that the watch is in your pocket. My guess is that it’s a good watch, too. And that you took it off because Inventory likes to claim good watches.”

  The Drifter sighed. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s a great watch.”

  “And you know what time it is. You know what day it is.”

  The Drifter took a watch out of his pocket. “It’s eleven seventeen a.m., April seventeenth, twenty twenty-one. That’s the time; that’s the date. I know you’re out of phase because I’ve seen the clocks on Figueroa. Some are right, the ones with chips in them. The rest, no.”

  Pickle slapped Frank on the back. “You got him! You’re amazing, sir, amazing. I don’t think I ever saw a better demonstration of what makes a man head of Security than that.”

  Sinatra asked Dodgers: “Where do you sleep? Near here?”

  “The fire station.”

  “Pickle, I’m going for a walk with our new friend here. You can pack up the van, I’ll be back soon.”

  Pickle asked Chisel Girl for help and instead of stabbing his eye, which had been her plan; she put the uneaten food back in the cooler.

  “I’m coming with you to the city.”

  “Of course you are. Why would you want to stay out here now that we’ve found you? And we might find out who you really are. Don’t happen every day, but it happens every week.”

  The two men walked down the middle of the street between the long boulevards with all the signs in Chinese. “This was a big Chinese neighborhood. The food here was great, very authentic, typical of many regions of China.”

  “You live with any others like you?”

  “No.”

  “Is it hard? Remembering everything?”

  “There’s no one to share it with. It’s like remembering something that never existed. You go crazy.”

  “Why didn’t you get on the van and take your chances?”

  “Because in ways great and small, I would have tripped myself up. I’m too nervous. Too lonely. I can’t fake it. I’ve been to Figueroa, but on my own terms.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Justin Ozu.”

  “Where’s the fire station, Mr. Ozu?” asked Sinatra.

  “Two blocks south, three blocks to the west.” Justin knew Sinatra would have trouble with the compass. A trustworthy sense of north and south came from a continuously aware lifetime, not a reset only four years old. Rehabs Level 1, or whatever Justin felt like calling them on any given day, used other ways of keeping their place in the world. Rehabs Level 1. First Wavers. Semicompletes.

  “Have you found others like me?”

  “We’ve seen a few.”

  “And there may be others in the desert?”

  “It’s a rumor. Check it out.”

  “I never heard the rumor. Who do I talk to?
I don’t talk to anyone. Too dangerous. Not that it matters anymore. You’re going to kill me now. With all my knowledge.”

  “Knowledge is power. You have more knowledge. We can’t let you back, none of you. We’re not making memory weapons—that was you.”

  “That was the North Koreans.”

  “I’ve heard that, Justin, but I don’t know that. I know where I slept last night. I know where I woke up four years ago. I know a few things about me from a letter my rehab doctor wrote to me, but I only know those things from the letter. I don’t actually remember them, and that’s your fault.”

  “I’m half Japanese. My father. My mother was Mexican. I’m not a North Korean.”

  “You might just as well be. Really. You escaped this thing. I didn’t.”

  “You’re still alive. You’re in charge of something, aren’t you? You have your own kind of power. That counts for a lot.”

  “That’s the way things used to be, right?”

  “Human nature.”

  “Well let me give you a big round of applause for that. You’re the only one with human nature, Justin, because you’re the only one who’s still human. I am a reinvention of the idea of the human. I don’t know anything from before; it’s all just a series of stories. I can’t pick out the news from old movies, and you can. You can tell the difference between a movie and the news. And is the boat story true?”

  “It wasn’t a cruise ship. It was a Coast Guard cutter. We had full contact with the shore. They told us what was happening. We were called back to keep control at the port in Long Beach. We voted to stay at sea. A few took a Zodiac boat to shore because they had family in Los Angeles. They’re gone. The captain wanted to stay at sea. I took my chances and I got off the boat in Santa Barbara and ended up here.”

  They were in front of the fire station.

  “Why a fire station?”

  “Good locks on heavy doors. If you look in the windows on the ground floor you can’t see any evidence of life. Plenty of living space on the second floor. Iron shutters to block the light for the fire fighters who work the night shift and sleep in the station during the day. I keep them down all the time.”

  Ozu opened the door with a key. The fire engines were still there, polished, their tires full of air.

  He led Sinatra up the stairs. “If you want to know what time it is, look at this,” he said, opening the door to what had been the dispatch room. There were shelves and tables, and watches on every surface.

  “How many?” asked Sinatra.

  “Eight hundred and twenty-three, all set to the same time.”

  “What’s the best watch you have?”

  “Do you want to go three hundred feet underwater? Do you want a watch to measure your heartbeat while you’re mountain climbing and know the rate of ascent, and keep a record of the climb that can be transferred to your iPhone? Do you want to impress an Iranian hotel owner with how much money you can spend on a quality timepiece? Do you want a watch that costs more than a Ferrari?”

  “I like Audis.”

  Ozu picked up six watches. “These would be a fair trade for an Audi RS7. Which one do you think is the most valuable?”

  “I know Rolex watches are expensive.”

  “Well, Rolex is nice, they actually . . . they kind of lived up to the promise in the ads. They work really well, but they’re expensive to maintain. I keep them out of the dust. I don’t abuse them. But they don’t keep time without being cleaned every four or five years and they’re starting to slow down. And I can’t fix them.”

  “What watch did you take off before you came to the van?”

  Ozu took a large watch out of his pocket. “It’s an IWC. A Portugieser Chronograph. About ten thousand dollars, at least. That Rolex Daytona, there, that was twenty grand. Some of them are more, way more.”

  “Who wore the IWC?”

  “Men who had a lot of money, who . . . well . . . wanted to appear too cool to wear a Rolex. But the more I look at them, and think about who wore them, the more I find a kind of dishonesty in the IWC and I keep coming back to your basic Rolex Submariner, a bit James Bond, even though he wears Omega, but the standard that everyone else is copying. It’s sort of like a BMW compared to an Audi. No insult to Audi. You know what I mean.”

  “Well put,” said Sinatra.

  “Please, don’t kill me. Don’t you want someone to help you? I can be your secret weapon. You don’t have to tell anyone what I really am. I can give you help with things that no one else even thinks about. I can even help you find passwords.”

  “We don’t want to rely on memory anymore. Not your kind. You’d take the power back.”

  “No. I’d help you get the power for yourself.”

  “You’d end up killing us, or killing the leaders. You have a cleverness that we can’t imitate.”

  “I’m not being clever with you now. I can help you. Take any watch you want. It’s something I’ve learned from the Founders, how to give a gift.”

  “What Founders?” asked Sinatra, walking away from the watches and looking around the bedrooms.

  “I like you. I let a few Drifters through but I can’t live with them. They’re stupid, too stupid.”

  “Women?”

  “I’ve had a few.”

  “Did they ask for your protection or did you just take them up here?”

  “It’s nothing I’m proud of.”

  “Pride? I’ve heard that word.”

  “But you don’t know what it means.”

  “There’s a difference between feeling and understanding, Justin. Do you know what it is?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “I don’t. And that’s why we have to hunt you all down and kill you when we see you. Because you know the difference naturally and we have to figure it out for ourselves. Because you don’t have the problem of a Silent Voice, do you?”

  “No, I don’t, but I have a lot more than one voice in my head. We all did.”

  “We were left with only our main thoughts and the Silent Voice. Two voices. Twenty people like you could take over.”

  “Everything you’re saying is bullshit, Frank. Have some respect for me, and be honest to me about why you can’t let me live. I know what you and Chief did. Anyone else who’s Complete knows it, too. The people who ran the world put you in line ahead of them for rehab because without you, they wouldn’t be able to fix anything that broke. They couldn’t fight for themselves. You promised them they were next, and then when you and your friends had saved the right people, you broke your promise and you built a fence to keep yourselves safe from the people you didn’t save. Then you made up the Founders to hide your crime. You’re going to kill me, so please kill me for the truth.”

  Sinatra left the body on the floor and scooped twenty watches into an empty shopping bag. He would tell Inventory about his new trick: the next time they set up a buffet, lay out a spread of cheap watches with a Rolex or two among them. They make good bait.

  While the van waited for Sinatra to return, Pickle talked to Chisel Girl.

  “There’s blood on your chisel.”

  “What’s a chisel?”

  “That sharp thing you carry, the thing that has blood on it.”

  Sinatra came around the corner with the shopping bag. He wanted to move quickly now. “Pickle, it’s time to go. Run me to West Covina and then take them back to the DMV. Has she made up her mind? In or out, her choice.”

  “Chisel Girl,” said Pickle. “You see? It’s your choice.”

  While she thought about the offer, Frank grabbed her hands from behind, pressed her into the side of the van, and tied her hands behind her with zip ties. He took the chisel away.

  “If you’re not verified and you want to come back out here, we’ll make sure that happens.” He opened the door and put her in the middle seat.
She didn’t fight.

  On the way to Covina they passed a food-storage warehouse marked with a green triangle and Frank told Pickle to stop. “Stay in the van. I have to see something.”

  Chisel Girl asked, “Why are we stopping?”

  “He wants to,” said Pickle.

  All food-storage depots were secured with steel plates welded shut. Until it was time to release the larder, nobody could get into them without torches. But this one was missing a plate. Frank looked inside. The food was gone.

  He needed to talk to Vayler and Toby Tyler, because if there were Drifters out there who could handle acetylene torches, then Center Camp was in trouble. This was news best discussed in person. Pickle drove him to the West Covina Audi dealership, let Sinatra out, and went back to Los Angeles.

  The freeway here was straight for a few miles in each direction and no one on a bicycle could hide, but there were miles of parallel roads and not enough people to watch them. The Inventory crew had a room for Frank in a hotel if he was going to stay the night. “I expect I have to,” he said. “Now show me the cars.”

  An hour later Frank was doing 155 miles an hour in an Audi A7—worth thirty watches—when the call came over the radio from Redwings. “A doctor disappeared from Westwood. Not Piperno. Name of Seth Kaplan. He was working on the driver who was shot in the ambush and the driver died. It’s my opinion that the truth may be that knowing of Dr. Piperno’s way of threatening new personnel with a punishment, which is promising death for failure, that is in truth not part of our Chief’s arsenal, he went to the beach and drowned himself, but what do you think, Frank?”

  “Nobody saw him in Santa Monica?”

  “So far as we know, no.”

  “He might have gone for a canyon hike on the trails above Brentwood and fallen down a cliff, maybe. Broke his neck or leg, is out there now crying for help. But all that’s coming for him is a pack of coyotes.”

  “You’re a good man, Frank, and you may be right. If he wasn’t a good doctor, I don’t think Piperno wants him back.”

  “Do we have other things to worry about?”

  “We do, sir.”