Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220

by TTA Press Authors

"That's an A,” I tell him, pointing to it with the bruised-up, bit-down fingernail. He looks at me blankly. “A's for airway."

  I can't read, he says, gentle like Chezley's teacher voice, with all the sweet little pity in the world. I don't even know words except for Washington.

  "Yeah, I suppose you don't,” I sigh, and crumple it up. “Thought there was nothing to lose for tryin', though."

  S'good to try, he agrees, old bluesman's voice in a little kid's body, and bats the ball of paper across the sleeper floor. The truck turns on a curve against the four a.m. sky. The ball rolls right damn back.

  "I dunno,” I say, and kick the old map back to the sleeper doorway.

  No?

  "No,” I say, choosing my words careful. I don't recall what I thought about right and wrong when I was ten-eleven years old, and I sat in church every Sunday and a schoolroom where right and wrong were beat into us by Maur's old aunt from nine to three on weekdays. “The problem is that ... well, I don't know if us stealing the bomb and dumping it in the mountain is doing right."

  Why not? the kid says in a real small voice. I look up into the front of the cab. Chezley's still driving, leaning forward against the oncoming road as if it's a breeze come to meet her.

  "It won't matter, in the end. Maybe it was just something on impulse we did to make us feel better. Maybe if we really meant it we'd have stayed low, stayed quiet and made change another way instead of blowing all our chances from here on forward to make some difference. To be something good for real, not just ... bomb's a symbol. It's not the world."

  I lean back on the bunk and feel the wet trickle down to the corner of my mouth. I take it in with my tongue, swallow. I don't know why people say cryin’ tastes like salt. It always tastes clean to me.

  "You can't stop the bomb,” I say, looking down at the dirty sleeper floor. “You can't take these things back once they're out there. We're making a pretty picture but this ain't gonna mean shit."

  Maybe you've gotta see it different, the kid says after a moment, and Chezley changes lanes, takes us jerkily into the passing lane of the first four-lane road we've seen in hours.

  "How's different?” I whisper so she doesn't turn around.

  Is it gonna kill people? Nicodemus asks, fretting away at the metal clips holding his bandage together until I lightly slap his hand. It crumples him in the corner like a wounded rabbit. Something about the fear on his face makes me want to slap that away too.

  "Yeah,” I tell him. My trigger fingers shakes. I put my own hand back in my lap. “Thousands and millions of them."

  So you oughta burn it, he says, clear and simple, and rolls over onto his good side to sleep.

  The sleeper smells like piss: Nicodemus's dirty sweat and our own and the jars we brought so we don't have to stop in the home stretch combined. I go up front and open the window just a crack, press my face against it to breathe in the cool, smoky air. It's not complicated out there. Night, and day. Good air you can breathe and shit air you can't. It's only in here things got complicated, it's only when you start thinking in those loops and twists and not like a little kid who don't know one word except Washington can see.

  "How many miles?” I ask Chez after a while.

  "Maybe one-fifty,” she whispers just above the engine and the wind and the night.

  "I'll spot you,” I tell her, and pat her knee, friend-like, not a come-on. “C'mon. Take a nap. I'll drive."

  * * * *

  Going up to the crater's not allowed. It wasn't even in the days before the road checkpoints, the passes, and the bomb. But we've broken enough rules already that I can't feel bad about one more, and the truck thunders into the old national park.

  Here, there's guards.

  They post ‘em on all the entrances to the national parks now; the few patches of land where you can live off the earth if you're inclined to be on the run. They're always rooting some insurgency out of Yosemite or Yellowstone or the endless caves in the Grand Canyon. They check ID now coming into the parks. But we're close enough.

  I gun it.

  The little stick of a barrier they've got across the road just snaps against the grille, bounces off the windshield and it's hard to see for a minute, but then we're in the clear, running up the roads, Chezley calling turns all tense and rough with the highlighted map in her hands. There's gunfire behind us—I can't hear which direction—but different kinds of guns, automatics and then bang bang, the sharp clear call of that goddamned useless rifle. Dancer's shooting back at them, stuffing ammo into the rifle's mouth.

  For a second I feel like shit for thinking she'd turn and throw in with the bomb.

  The shots stop after a bit, both sides. “We outrun ‘em?” Chez says, leaning at the window.

  I risk a peek into my side mirror. “Nobody behind.” I'm grinning. There's a big stupid grin on my face that cracks the sunburn I didn't even know I had. In front of us, I can see the mountain, dragonlike under its big smoke signal.

  Thirty miles. Twenty-nine.

  The road runs out. We hit the trails.

  I keep the windows up against the branches, and even then we can hear the truck busting up the trails, splintering trees and bushes and crushing what good's left in the land out of it as we turn and turn and climb. The wheels rumble, tires crunching, and the farther up we go the heavier and heavier the bomb gets, the whole trailer dragging us back, dragging down the mountain back into the bad old world of everyone who doesn't want to stop the bomb.

  "Almost there, almost there,” Chez breathes, and I'm breathing it with her, little rhythmic prayer.

  No, you can't. You can't stop the bomb, comes muffled from behind the sleeper, the trailer, where it might have been a roar before it met crating and rope and metal and the whistling air between the trailer wall and the hitch and ourselves.

  "Yes we can,” I whisper, and take another turn.

  There's another noise now, the bap-bap-bap of helicopters, and I crane my head up and around the driver's-side window before Chez puts a hand on my locked steering arm. “Don't worry,” she says, almost shameful. “They're with us."

  I slow it down, take another ditch right up in the teeth. The helicopters are bright red and green. They have numbers on the sides. “Channel Four,” I mutter. “You did call the news."

  "Yeah,” she says unhappily.

  "Why?” and the bomb laughs again, ‘cause I have to stuff my tongue against my teeth to keep from yelling again. We're so close, so very close—

  She gives me a look, the kinda look I'd expect from Dancer tellin’ me how I'm stupider than dirt. “This isn't any good unless people know about it,” she says, and then her voice shakes, and she slips out of that prissy UNT accent back into Marion, like she talked when she was a little kid. “I ain't throwing my life away for nothing."

  The bomb yells up the first half of the mountain, and nobody's on our tail. Chez slaps a hard hand against the back of the sleeper, and three raps come back: steady, strong, half-drowned out by the noise of dying branches. Dancer's okay back there, I realize, and lean down over the wheel.

  "How many miles?” I ask Chez, and she traces a finger on a pinpoint piece of map.

  "Ten,” she whispers, hands drunken-jerky and wild.

  It begs when we hit eight-point-three. Please, you're doing it wrong, if you'd just turn around and push it down and press the little button—

  I ignore it. I'm laughing now, laughing this mean little chuckle that I didn't think could ever come out of my own mouth. I win, that laugh says. I win and you lose.

  Nicodemus pokes his head out of the sleeper, the top of his matted hair just showing in my rearview. That's right, he whispers. We're right. It's wrong. That's how you keep driving and stop the bomb. It sings in my head like a nursery rhyme.

  Five miles. Four, and then three, and two, and one.

  And we stop.

  This isn't gonna stop nobody from building more bombs, it whimpers.

  I throw the clutch into reverse. The
trailer door bangs: up, and down. Dancer getting clear. The truck hisses like a wounded cat.

  You don't know if the other team wrecked their notes.

  They did.

  You didn't take care of those scientists. They'll make up new bombs.

  Not in Marion they won't.

  You shoulda just aimed and pressed the button.

  I know that bombs can't talk. I know the voice that comes out of the metal and ceramic and wire, that filthy radiation heart is really a voice from inside me. But I'm not a religious man, and I don't know of good ways to clean out filth from a person's heart that don't involve god.

  I do know how to back a trailer into a mountaintop.

  It dangles for a minute over the crater, dragging the cab with it stubborn as I grab my ballcap and jump out the door. Chez clambers after, onto rock that burns through my sneakers, air that's more like steam coming in than anything that's good to breathe. “Done,” she whispers as the truck teeters over the crater.

  "Done,” and I reach out to hold her shaky hand, before I look back into the cab and see Nicodemus.

  I got no words for that moment. It's the moment when your heart sinks into your feet and through the rock, and burns up like everything else does when it gets near the spit of that volcano. It's finding out your dog died while you were away at school at ten years old, and you're never gonna get him back, gonna sleep all by yourself on that narrow little single bed every night, forever, until you finally find yourself a woman who maybe someday will love you that much, trust you that much. It's knowing that warmth is going away, and that no matter what you did, it's over. It's all over.

  "Nick, you gotta get out!” I'm yelling. I'm running. The truck tilts. I won't reach it in time. “C'mon, you gotta come out of there—"

  He huddles in deeper, arms around his knees between the driver and passenger seat, staring up at the world that's coming apart in thunder and fire.

  The news choppers hover. They press in deeper, close.

  "He doesn't understand,” she says, her face dirty sick brown, her hands shaking in front of her. “He's just a little kid."

  She looks down at them. Looks at her two hands.

  "Chez, no—” and then Chezley runs back and dives into the dangling truck.

  He doesn't scream when the trailer detaches, fishtailing off the hitch and plunging the whole thing down, down into the hot rock of the blackened, crusty bowl. Tough little kid doesn't scream, and I imagine the tiny explosion deep down in the rock as his tongue burns away and his heart stops, setting off the chip they shoved up into his skull and the explosives they put where the appendix used to be.

  I don't know if Chezley screams. I imagine her silent, like heroes are. Or laughing: the bomb takes her into the hot bubbling guts of the earth and she laughs: ha ha ha. We did it. We stopped the bomb.

  I don't have maps no more, and really, that's it. That's it and I'm tired. Dancer and I stand at the edge of the volcano's mouth and watch our U-Haul die.

  The trailer burns clean and simple, just like divine punishment in a little kid's world, eaten quietly by the fire as it sinks lazily down into the dark.

  * * * *

  In the dream the choppers come down low. They come down with their cameras and fancy-hairstyle men in shirt and tie, and circle around us filming, commenting, broadcasting their theories fast ahead of the army, before the government can wipe us away.

  "Why did you do it?” shouts Channel Four, close enough to hear, far enough away so we don't pitch ‘em in the volcano too.

  Because Chezley asked me to, and I could never say no to the grace she got in the lines of her neck when that woman felt something was right or wrong. “'Cause the people down in Marion don't want no bombs,” I yell out instead. “We're honest folk. We don't want no part of making people die."

  That's what she'd want me to say.

  In the dream I see a crowd standing at the edges of the treeline, way far off down, too far for me to see so I know I must be dreaming. They've got rifles in their hands and stained bandanas on their heads. They look like schoolteachers and mechanics.

  We can't take you with us, their dirty, sunburnt faces say. Maybe if you hadn't called the helicopters. Could've lived to fight another day in the wilderness with us.

  They sound sorry. I nod to them, and imagine a hundred thousand radios sputtering with breaking news.

  That's okay.

  * * * *

  They show up after half an hour in ranger trucks, those bouncing jeeps with no doors, armed to the eyeballs with automatics and gas masks and men in hazmat suits.

  We don't have our gun no more. If we did, I'd think about that life National Security's been trying to stamp out: the rebels in the woods, fighting off the government, living off the land. But I can't catch no deer with my hands and I'm tired, so we just put up our hands when they come and don't say boo as they throw us across the hoods of their cars and tie on the plastic cuffs.

  "What was in there?” they ask, “Huh, pigs? What the hell you terrorists throwing in volcanoes?"

  "The bomb,” I say, crooked-smiled, and Dancer laughs. They cuff her across the face until she spits blood.

  They march us down the mountain, one at each arm, and I know that's how they'll march us for the rest of our short lives. One at each arm like dancers through the streets of crumbling towns, in the victory floats at Independence Day parades, out there in front of the field-rotted crops with our eyes screwed shut and tongues cut short.

  It won't matter. We did right. We did right and they'll do wrong, and little children'll know the difference when they see it on Channel Four. Little kids who can't yet talk, growing up in Marion, Texas and not having to worry about their mamas and papas falling to the whisper of allegiance to the bomb. Kids who can grow up clean and write newspapers about how it's wrong to run wild straight-toed and feral, who'll have proper shoes and know their ABCs, and not know nothing about the dirt of other countries or laboratories or blood, even if they don't get to go to UNT and get themselves their education. It's not always good to be smart. Sometimes it's good to be clean.

  But now—now, they parade us through the riot barriers, through crowds of fingerprinted-and-ID-checked campers on supervised holiday who stare at our dirty clothes, our burning eyes.

  Past small children staring by the roadside, too young to know Washington, greedily pulling the wings off flies.

  Copyright © 2009 Leah Bobet

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  MEMORY DUST—Gareth L. Powell

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  Illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey

  * * * *

  This is Gareth Powell's third story in Interzone, after ‘The Last Reef’ (issue 202) and the Readers’ Poll topping ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ (issue 212). His collection The Last Reef & Other Stories is now available from Elastic Press, and he has recently completed a novel called Silversands. You can find out more at garethlpowell.com.

  * * * *

  "If you pull this off, you're going to be rich,” his agent said. They were in an anonymous hotel suite, where she'd joined him for an early breakfast. The room looked out over the ocean. Sunlight sparkled on the water. Caesar wore slippers and a white robe tied at the waist; his agent wore a grey suit.

  "I'm not doing this for the money, Jennifer."

  He took a sip of coffee, black and sweet. After a moment, he said: “Have you spoken to Amber this morning?"

  Jennifer shook her head. Her eyes were the same colour as the sky. “Your daughter's still angry, I'm afraid. She still thinks you're going to kill yourself."

  Caesar pushed back in his chair. He was cranky because he hadn't slept well. His back hurt, and he'd had that dream again, the one he'd had every night for the past three years.

  "Well, that can't be helped,” he muttered.

  He got dressed and took a rickshaw to the civilian spaceport. The narrow streets heaved with rush
hour traffic. By the time he got there, the reporters were waiting for him. They'd been tracking him for weeks, in the build up to this final, record breaking flight.

  He pushed past them in dark glasses, ignoring their hovering cameras, brushing off their shouted questions, not slowing until he reached his ship.

  * * * *

  The Red Shark was a tough, streamlined wedge with a thick heat shield, and paint scoured to ash by the pitiless fires of hyperspace. He walked up the cargo ramp into her belly without looking back. He'd been stuck on this worthless planet for three long years, growing old and tired and soft. He could hardly wait to get airborne again, to open the throttle and feel the kick of the engine, the giddy freedom of the up-and-out.

  He double-checked the contents of the stolen crate in the cargo hold. Then he made his way to the spherical Star Chamber at the ship's heart, where he found Maya Castillo. In her late forties and an accomplished jumper in her own right, she was to be his co-pilot on this final trip.

  "How are we doing?” he said.

  She turned and smiled. The shoulders of her khaki fatigues were emblazoned with the logos of the organisations sponsoring the flight.

  "Pre-flight looks good,” she said. He took the seat beside her, checked the readouts. All the lights were green. The Red Shark throbbed with potential.

  "Spin her up,” he said.

  * * * *

  They quit the atmosphere at full throttle, leaving a roiling wake of turbulence, moving so fast the news cameras had a hard time following. In the Star Chamber, Caesar watched the ground fall away without regret.

  "I should call my daughter,” he said. He opened a secure channel. The phone rang for over a minute. When she finally answered, Amber looked harassed and tired, ready for an argument.

  Caesar spoke first, before she could start. “It's all in your name,” he said. “The media rights, the sponsorship, everything. It's all in your name. It's all for you and the kids. I've left instructions. You'll be taken care of."

  Amber pushed a hand back through her hair. “We don't want your money, Dad."

  "Sure you do. Call my agent, she has the details."