He’s dragged me to a seated position by now, my head against the bus shelter ledge. Just for a finale, he knees me in the side of the face. Now he’s panting, looking down at his scanner. “So, Private Sad Sack. Just for listening to the truth for a few minutes, you’re getting off easy tonight. Right before our little talk, I fined you fifteen thousand dollars for damaging Security property, plus five thousand dollars for public intoxication, since I can adjust your blood-alcohol levels to show whatever I want—eh? See there? That’s all it takes, a flick of my finger and I can keep you in debt for the rest of your sad little life.”
“Thank you, sir,” I say. It’s all I can do not to laugh, actually. I can’t help it. I just cannot believe how good I feel right now. I feel like a normal healthy guy who’s had the crap beat out of him by Security. I want someone to put a weapon in my hands again.
“You’re welcome.” He’s quiet for a moment, frowning at something on the scanner. “Well, look at this shit.”
I let my head hang. My shoulders are shaking with laughter. I can’t help myself. I know I shouldn’t. But I’m laughing. I can’t look up—better to let him think I’m down here sobbing in humiliation. The guy would probably only love to concuss me if I gave him a reason.
“Your fine’s already been paid. Just like that. I’ll be damned.” He brings the black screen of his scanner closer to his face and squints. I’d love to catch a glimpse of whatever he’s looking at, but my eyes are starting to swell shut. “Walker. Your guardian angel’s name is Walker. I’ll be shucked and fucked.” I can hear him breathe in heavy through his nose. He doesn’t like his situation.
“What did you say your name was, Officer?”
“You don’t need to know my name.”
“I’d just like to know who it was that gave me my first real lesson in the truth.” I tilt my head up to treat him to a bloody smile. He’s looking down on me, and in his expression there’s contempt battling it out with worry for himself. Walker is a name his commissioner won’t like seeing on his report, I guess. My future brother-in-law, good old Kenneth Walker of Lake Rise 8, has his uses, will you look at that.
Maybe it’s the drugs, the beating, the blood rush, who knows, but I really can’t help it, I’m laughing hard now.
“The fuck are you laughing at, Private?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . There’s no way you’ve got a son in the National Guard.”
His face contorts into a snarl.
“I mean, you’re older’n me, but you’re not my pop’s age. Nobody was having kids by the time you were old enough to start a family.”
“Fuck you, Private.”
“Even if you had a boy, right now he’d be, what—fifteen? Even if your wife was unlucky enough to beat the odds?”
He grabs a fistful of my hair, slams my head back against the bus shelter bench, and that’s about it for me for a while.
IN THE FIRST PLACE
They’ve been under the dust for a few days now, and everyone’s going a little crazy but doing their best not to show it. There’s nothing to do but wait it out: not even the scavengers mobilize during storms like this, so there’s nothing to trigger at, nothing to scout for, nothing but howls and grit and a threatening red presence edging its way in through every crease, creating a powdery fog even in the air inside the base, which is really nothing more than a series of interconnected tents and huts. Everyone’s got a chesty cough; everyone’s lungs ache; everyone’s got their face masks on unless they’ve already been diagnosed with something and there’s nothing left to prove. No one’s eaten in a day or so. You can’t open a packet without the dust getting in it.
Mostly the guys are rereading and replaying old messages. It’s what they do when the storms close in. Nothing new transmits cleanly through this shit. And it beats peering through the dust, thinking about what it’s probably doing to your lungs. Everybody knows the dust is mostly metal and plastic, ground down to infinitesimal, tissue-annihilating particles. There’s a lot that it’s better not to know.
What he wants to know most he will never know anyway.
He’s going over his favorite message from Gard, the one where she’s laughing and laughing and laughing. She’s tickled herself with a joke she couldn’t tell anyone else but him and Fred, and she can’t help herself; she’s laughing her head off, laughing like a loon. He loves it.
When he’s finished with his favorite messages of Gard’s, he calls up his favorites from Fred. The one he half downloaded in the firefight, the one where she’s telling him she’s going to be a mother, as only Fred would do it. I guess it’s time I told you. Can you fucking believe it? And, later, the one where she’s trying, trying the hardest way, to understand their mother. I understand a little better, now, why she wanted a way out. A lot of people did, you know. It wasn’t just her.
A way out. Well. Don’t we all want that.
What he wants to know is why he’s here.
How did he end up here.
Whose fault is it. No, that’s not right. It’s not that he wants to blame anyone, he knows exactly whose fault it is. But what he wants to know is, why did he do it, why did he take the first step in the sequence of steps that landed him, ultimately, here, behind the lines of abandonment, within the First Place, unsafe in ways he’d never seriously contemplated, desperate to do anything but be here, coated in a storm made of death, sheltering in a place built on death, a million deaths, tens of millions of deaths. Everyone who used to live here is dead or on the other side, the side that’s trying to kill him. During the First Wars, his father fought to save these people, as many of them as could or would be saved.
But the men he lives with and loves and relies on, they’re all fighting in the Second Wars, just like him. These are the wars everybody’s pretty sure will never actually end. He will have to fight the left-behind people, and go on fighting them. For reasons he can’t remember. For made-up water. For a fiction. For the capsules shimmering past them in the cloud, always moving, even when they’re not.
FREDERICKA QUINN
135 PAULINA NORTH, #4B
NEW CHICAGO 0606030301
NEW STATES
PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766
MCC 167 1ST MAW
FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309
September 19, 8:22 p.m.
Hi, CQ,
I guess it’s time I told you. Gard told me to tell you. She’s always been bossy.
I’m going to have a baby. I’m due in early January. I’m not going to find out whether it’s a boy or a girl. Or maybe I will. I still don’t know. I was waiting until it was safe to tell people, or at least until it seemed like a real thing that might really happen. I had a few complications. But they went away, or I guess just became less something to freak out about.
Can you fucking believe it?
It’s all a little weird. As you can probably imagine. I’m showing at this point. People stare. It’s hard to explain.
You’re probably still just trying to process this, so feel free to take a couple of deep breaths or whatever before the rest. God knows I needed to take a few fucking deep breaths when I found out.
Everything’s okay, right now anyway. I’ve had my tests and I’m in touch with the father, and he’s going to do the right thing, whether I want him to or not. I met his mom and dad this week. It wasn’t Insemina; it just happened. I don’t know why that’s sort of embarrassing to admit. Everybody keeps telling me it’s a miracle.
Does it feel like a miracle? Let me tell you how a miracle feels. I seem to have entered a festive stage where the pace of change has accelerated. Like up until now, things were changing, but so gradually and gently that by the time I noticed, I was already used to it, whatever it was—better skin, some dryness on my legs and hands, a small backache.
Now, though, I seem to have hit some kind of midpoint milestone, where every day is bringing something new and freaky. Also, something seems to be standing on my pelvic bone. Also, every time I stand up or ben
d over, I can’t help but make a small weird noise. I can’t imagine what I’m going to look like when I get to be thirty-eight weeks. I’m going to be tremendous.
This might all be a little too much for you, little brother, but to be honest, I’ve got to find someone to talk to who’s not in my Care Circle, because they’re all just so weepy and earnest, my God. Or who’s not a Completionist like Gard—nothing you can tell her surprises her. I could have a fucking horn coming out of my belly and she’d just tell me about some woman she saw at her clinic once who had two horns.
It’s hard to explain what a surprise this all was—although, I mean, I’m sure you can imagine. Who expects to actually get pregnant and have a baby these days? Without Insemina? I didn’t. I really didn’t.
On the one hand, it feels like I’ve been chosen, for a prize or something. On the other hand, it feels sort of unfair. I can’t say this to many people. But I’m not sure I—I mean, I keep imagining my old life, the one I’m not going to have now, continuing, just without me, in some other place.
I’m all over the place. I should just stop here and hit send. Here’s what I was doing while I was dictating this message, just so you can picture it: I was standing by a window, moody and making an ass of myself, rubbing my fucking pregnant stretched-out stomach. There. That’s what pregnant women do. In case you were wondering. We stand by windows and space out and talk a mile of nonsense to people who can’t possibly—who might have been shot at that day, Jesus, Carter, I’m sorry. Forget 90 percent of this message. I don’t know. [unintelligible] Just remember the part where I told you to be good and stay good.
Fred
SEVEN
And now I’m coming to for the third time in one day, this time because someone’s standing over my head, shouting hoarsely: “Shut up shut up SHUT UP!”
That’s not the only sound. There’s also a blaring, ongoing horn, and a public safety message repeating itself at an earth-shuddering volume: Disabling or impeding the progress of a public autobus is a crime punishable by law. Please step aside. Disabling or impeding the progress of a public autobus is a crime punishable by law. Please step aside.
I am lying in the street, directly in the path of the bus, which like all buses in the New Cities is driverless, and which must have stopped for my signal and was unable to keep moving because I was lying, inert, in front of its wheels. But now someone is standing over me, trying to lift me by my shoulders. It’s Fred, as I can tell from her currently-in-progress argument with the driverless (and probably also passengerless) autobus. The thickness of the profanity she’s laying out is impressive, even for her.
“I am moving this piece of colorful shit as fast as I fucking can so shut up shut UP! I am fucking EIGHT FUCKING MONTHS PREGNANT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST—”
“Wait, Fred—” I mumble, nowhere near loud enough.
“You are a bus! You are a public utility! Shut the FUCK UP!”
“Fred. Fred. You’re going to hurt yourself, stop—stop it . . .” I manage to push myself up on an elbow, but find I can’t open my eyes more than a slit, because they’ve both swollen shut. “You’re going to hurt the bus. Fred. Stop.”
“And you!” Fred, behind me now that I’m partly sitting up, gets a knee wedged behind one of my shoulder blades and pushes at me with it, in an attempt to force me forward, up and out of the street, making horrible bellowing sounds as she does so. “Oarrrrrgh! Ragaahhh! Move, you crapfuck! This bus is going to keep freaking out at us until you get out of its fucking way, so move, dammit, move oarrrrRRRRRRGH!”
Somehow, via a combination of propulsive kneeings from Fred and my attempts to drag myself along, like Pop’s half-feral cat wiping its own ass on the rug, I get myself back onto the sidewalk, where I sit, head and hands hanging down between my knees, and try to catch my breath. The autobus message and horn alarm both stop abruptly, mid-blare, and with a grate and a hiss the thing moves on down the road. I am wheezing audibly, sore all over, tasting blood, nose and eyes and rib cage throbbing, but I still feel good. I feel good. For the second time that day, I want a weapon. And a drink.
“What in the sweet barbecued fuck happened to you?” Fred demands.
She is standing over me on the sidewalk. I try to look up at her, but the streetlight is behind her and she’s tall and all I can make out is her belly, in an expensive-looking maternity shirt. Her shoes, though, I can see clearly, since they’re closer to my level and it’s easier to look down than up with my eyes swollen almost shut. Ankle boots. Also expensive-looking. She looks well cared for. It could just be an effect of the streetlight, but she is actually glowing, and again I’m reminded of a space princess, descended to a lesser plane to attend this world’s parties and fuckups.
“I thought you knew what happened to me.” I swallow a chunk of something thick and metallic-tasting—a blood-soaked globber. “I’ll have to thank Ken when I see him at the wedding this weekend.”
“You,” Fred says distinctly from over my head, “are the most expensive fucking idiot in New Chicago. You think Ken knows fuck all about this? And don’t even talk to me”—here she pushes at my head impatiently with one hand—“about the fucking wedding because I’m going to die of fucking apoplectic rage before it even fucking happens. What were you even thinking?”
“Fred, please. Give me a second here.”
“Sure. Oh, sure. Take all the time you need,” she drawls. “And whenever your sorry pile can get up and walk, my car is parked across the street, and I’ll be waiting inside it, because it’s air-conditioned in there, and I am sweating like a medieval garbage picker, thanks to you, because I’ve been kneeling here in the street for the last twenty minutes trying to get you to wake up before an autobus ran over your stupid fucking melon. And you saw,” she tosses back over her shoulder, “how well that went.”
As her car door slams I take a quick physical inventory with my fingertips. Nose bleeding, swollen, but not broken. Ribs aching, but none of the sharp pain that comes with a break. Wrists rubbed a bit raw by the restraints, which Security must have removed before getting back into his cruiser and tossing me unconscious and bleeding into the road in front of a bus stop. My face feels worse than my ribs; I might have a bruised cheekbone. Anyone in my position would hate to admit it, but Security knew was he was doing. No lasting damage, but plenty of hurt. Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
Can I get up? Sure. Sure I can.
It might take a few tries.
But sure. Here, look.
Now I’m holding my left side and shuffling, a zombie, making my way to Fred’s sleek driverless electric sedan, which I can hear more than I can see, its murmuring idle the exhalation of a beautiful machine. As I’m making my way to her I’m trying to figure out how much I can tell her, what I can and cannot say. I have about twelve slow, side-clutching steps to decide, for example, whether to tell my sister that I may have just been diagnosed with some kind of degenerative and apparently fatal condition caused by biological weaponry I deployed against a whole host of desperate, stupid people for about three years. That despite harassing all her former coworkers, I’m still no closer to finding our sister, Gardner. That I’ve been told, by someone I trust (although I’m not sure why, because she’s clearly terrified of me), that I need to ask our father what he had to do with Gard’s disappearance. And that I’m afraid to do it. I’m more afraid than I’ve been of anything.
Opening Fred’s elegant car door, falling into the interior onto a seat that is suede-like—no, trusting-baby-animal-like—in its soft, scented luxury, I start with what’s most likely to piss her off, because I’m her kid brother.
“I don’t think I can get my suit back from the cleaner’s in time for this Friday night. Sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry. I’ll break into the goddamn cleaner’s myself if I have to.” Fred looks up at me from her wearable. “Jesus, Carter.” Her face, dear and sharp and beloved, alight in the glow of the car’s dashboard controls, is doing something strange. If
for the last twenty or so years of my life she hadn’t been teaching me better than to believe it, I’d think she was almost about to cry. “Look at you. Look at your face.”
The Completionist Page 11
