Yeah, maybe. I was confused as hell.
“That bomb work?” I asked him, pointing at the scar on his chest.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Never tried it. You want to try it?”
I waved my hands at him, like I was pushing back a wall of Jello. “That’s okay. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Hell, don’t take my word for it. I don’t know if this thing works or not. Don’t care. It should, but you know the Feds: they could easily screw up. Who can say?”
“But how would you make it work? I mean, assuming you got bored with life and thought, gee, give it a shot?”
“I’d punch the button.” He pulled out a little box that was about the size of a pack of cigs. “First you have to tap in the code.” He pressed a few buttons. “And then you just press the button, like this.” He punched the button.
I grabbed for the box; Max jerked it away. Then, when I realized I wasn’t melting and my heart was still beating, I sat back down. Max looked at me, giggled.
“Twice,” he said. “You punch the button twice. And if you don’t do it within fifteen seconds, the cycle goes off.” The little box hummed and then a flashing red light on the top of the box went out.
There was a loud banging at the outside door, followed by the creak of the door opening, and then loud voices arguing. I heard thuds from things hitting the floor and then slaps and cracks and groans. Max stood up; I tried to, but a stabbing pain shot up my left side, so I lay back down. Max reached into his pocket, tossed me a heavy object. I caught it, turned it over in my hand: a 9 mm pistol, semi-automatic, with a full magazine and the word NISSAN stamped on the barrel. I slipped the Nissan in my pocket.
Two Snow Angels stumbled into the room. Rindi had an arm around one angel’s neck, a leg around his leg, but the mercenary—it looked like Pigbreath—was carrying her like a mink stole. The other angel had one black eye and a bloody nose, but from the moans I heard behind him the people left in his wake seemed to be worse off. Both guys had their knit caps off, showing shaved heads except for a pigtail over each ear.
Max took the nuke trigger and punched in the code. The little red light started blinking. Max held his thumb over the firing button, held the box up so the angels could see it.
“Hang on a second, fellas,” Max said.
The guys in white stopped. “We want our coke,” Pigbreath said.
“You don’t get your coke,” Max said. “I didn’t get my coke, you don’t get your coke. We had a deal.”
“We changed our minds,” said Pigbreath. “How were we supposed to know the God Weirders would attack?”
“Hey guys,” I said. “It was a surprise to us, too.”
“Yeah?” said Pigbreath. “Well, we don’t like surprises. The coke, Max.”
“Listen, you morons, I didn’t get the coke. Read my lips. NO COKE.”
“Okay, man, that’s cool. Give us a few of your hyper dogs,” Pigbreath said. “That’ll do.”
“No way, Pigbreath,” Max said. “You know I can’t do that. Those dogs are sacred.”
“Hey, so’s your ass, Hammer,” he said. “Of said ass I am about to pound into butter. Coke, dogs, man, I don’t care. We want our pay.”
“No coke, no dogs. Beat it. When I get the coke, I’ll pay you.”
The two angels moved forward. Rindi was still clawing away at Pigbreath, but he took her along like a fly on a moose. “We want the coke. Now.”
Max yelled to the writhing bodies on the floor in the next room. “You idiots through moaning? Won’t someone get these assholes out of here before I get mad?” Max held the little box up.
“No, Max, no,” said Rindi. “I got him, I got him.” She swung her leg up, poked two fingers into the angel’s eye. Pigbreath screamed, doubled over, stood up, shrugged the pink-haired lady off him and slammed her face first against the wall. There was a sound like wood splitting and then a slight moan from Rindi. He swung his foot back to kick her.
“Enough!” yelled Max. He jabbed the button on the little box.
The button clicked.
“Hey, man,” Pigbreath said. “That nuke don’t scare us. I know all about your little box.”
Max hit the button again.
The button clicked.
The angel stopped, smiled. He followed through with the kick. Pigbreath grinned, started moving toward Max and me.
“Oh, shit,” said Max. He dropped the little box.
I pulled the pistol out of my pocket.
“Need this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Max. He grabbed the Nissan from me, clicked the safety off, and pointed it at the two guys in white.
Pigbreath shook his head, laughed. “No more bluffs, Hammer.” He came at us.
Max squeezed the trigger, pumped three shots into Pigbreath’s chest, three more in the other guy. They hit the floor like sacks of dog food and drained red stuff onto the wood floors.
“No more bluffs,” said Max. He crunched the little box under his foot.
CHAPTER 9
A gaggle of bruised and beat up bush punks stumbled into the room. They looked like some of the people I’d seen in Kachemak: heavy emphasis on utilitarian clothes, less emphasis on a unified color scheme.
“We heard shots,” said a guy in a paisley rag sweater.
“I heard thuds,” said Max.
“Aren’t supposed to be guns in the Redoubt,” he said.
“Aren’t supposed to be goons in here asking rude questions, Paisley,” Max said. He tossed the Nissan pistol at Paisley. Paisley caught it, turned it over in his hand like a dead rat, tossed it at me. I caught it, clicked the safety on, held on to it; the Nissan had come in handy before, and there was one bullet left.
Rindi got to her feet, clutching her right side with her arm. Her nose was smudged with dirt, one eye was swelling up, and little trickles of blood streamed down her chin. Her head had been shaved on the right side, where the bullet had grazed her, and she had a big white bandage over it.
“Max had the trigger,” she said. “He primed the trigger and hit the button.”
Paisley looked at Max. “That’s true?”
Max turned to me, raised his left eyebrow. I nodded slightly.
“What’s the trigger?” I asked.
“That little box,” said Paisley.
“Max dropped it,” I said. “One of the white boys stepped on it.” I pointed at the shattered box, chips and transistors spilling out of its guts. “Frizz-head there was playing submarine races with the wall. She couldn’t have seen anything.” Rindi glared at me like I had just killed her grandmother.
Paisley kicked at the shattered pieces of plastic. “That true, Max?” he asked again.
Max shrugged. “Sounds good to me,” he said, grinning.
“Well, damn,” said Paisley. “Where the hell are we going to get another trigger?”
Max glared at him. “Who needs a trigger?”
Paisley cocked his head. “No trigger, no nuke.”
“Who needs a nuke?” Max asked.
Paisley ran a thin hand through his hair. “Look, Max, you know that your bomb is the only reason more of these jerks” —he kicked one of the dead bodies—“don’t run over the Redoubt.”
“And here I thought it was because they liked me,” Max said, smiling. “Look, Paisley, you’re the only damn person who seems scared of my bomb. Not even a dumb turd like Pigbreath here was afraid of it.”
Paisley looked down at his feet. “Maybe that’s because they have no imagination.”
“Maybe,” said Max. “Hell, who needs the bomb? I could give a damn. I’m terminal anyway. All I care about is my . . . my last few months of life.”
Rindi held a rag to her nose, mopped up the blood. “You’re not going to die, Max. Forget it.” She touched her nose, winced. “What’s this about the coke?” she asked.
“What’s what?” asked Max.
She spat red phlegm onto the floor, kicked one of the bodies. “This guy wanted co
ke. What coke? Our coke? Is that what the blimp was supposed to deliver? What the hell’s going on?”
Max got up, went to Pigbreath’s body, rolled it over. He was staring straight up, his mouth twisted into a look of pained surprise. Max closed Pigbreath’s eyes, pushed the mouth into a neutral smile. He looked at Rindi. “You ask too many questions, Rindi.” He walked over to the other body, checked his pulse, shook his head, and closed the guy’s eyes. Max turned to Paisley. “Take these guys back to the angels. Give ’em a few ounces of hyperdog jizzum. Tell them we’ll pay up later, if we get our—tell them we’ll pay later.”
Paisley and two other bush punks lifted the bodies up, dragged them outside. Rindi waited until they were gone, walked over to Max, and stood before him, arms crossed.
“Tell me about the coke,” she said.
Max glared at her like you’d look at a cat who pooped on the carpet, then sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “The Wonderblimp was supposed to deliver my payment—the stuff the Feds were supposed to deliver five years ago.”
“That’s why you sent me down there with the train, huh?” she asked.
“Yeah. I guess I should have mentioned the coke.”
“Yeah, I guess you should have.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head. “So . . . ?”
“So the blimp has the coke now, but Holmes says the coke was hotter than a Hiroshima picnic.”
“Not only that,” I added, “but this coke was kind of special coke. Nike called it lazy. I got an accidental sniff. It’s sort of a hallucinogen, a psychoactive drug. Makes you feel like God. Feels like chili on the brain—opens the pores of the brain up, so to speak. I suspect that if you gave it to even a wipe it would make them feel like a damn genius.”
“Sheet,” Rindi said. “Lots of folks would like to be able to think again. You’re talking about something that could make a person very, very, very rich.”
“No kidding,” Max grumbled. “And it’s supposed to be mine.”
“Except it’s radioactive,” I pointed out.
“How did that happen?” Rindi asked.
“Got me,” I said. “It was stored in the nuke lockers on the Wonderblimp. Probably leakage over time. Stuff would do a number on someone if they tooted it a lot.” I felt my nostrils itch; heck, I probably hadn’t taken even a millirem, but it still made me feel funny.
“But the blimp has Max’s coke,” Rindi said. She clicked her fingers. “Nothing personal, Holmes, but we have you. We could make a trade.”
“If they’d trade me,” I said.
“No need for that,” Max said. “I mean, I don’t think the Wonderblimp tried not to deliver the coke. I just think they got in a little trouble.”
I nodded. “Sure. They didn’t mean to dump me. Just ran into the God Weirders, that’s all. You saw them, Rindi.”
“Sure,” Rindi said. She rubbed the back of her head. “But why do you think the God Weirders were waiting? Someone set you up.”
“Odey?” I asked.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, chewing on a fingernail.
“Well, heck, Nike wants me back,” I said. “He needs me. I’m their reader.”
Max looked at me, furrowed his brow. “You can read?” I nodded. “Damn,” he said.
Rindi gave me a look that made me think she saw readers all the time, and didn’t think all that highly of them. “Think the Wonderblimp will come back for you?” Rindi asked. “Maybe those God Weirders scared them off.”
“Blimpers don’t scare easily,” I said. I thought of Doc and Nike shooting away at the God Weirders while bullets were flying up at the blimp.
“They do if it works to their advantage.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Maybe they don’t want to come back,” Rindi said. “Maybe they’ll just keep the coke.”
“They’ll come back,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. “I’m their fellow blimper.”
“Yeah?” she asked. “Don’t bet the rent, sucker. They aren’t coming back.”
“I don’t know . . .” I said. “Hey, wait a second. This memor at Naptown—Rei—said you had six inactive nukes. The Wonderblimp might want those.”
Max chuckled. “Rei told you that?” He shook his head. “Good guy. But I lied. We don’t have any nukes”—he thumped his chest—“except this little one.”
“Nike doesn’t know that,” I said. “So the blimpers are still bound to be interested in you.”
“But they might not be,” Rindi said.
“Sure,” I said. “Well, okay, maybe they won’t come back. No big deal.” Sure, I thought to myself. Stranded in the PRAK surrounded by nut cases. No big deal. Then I remembered what Nike had yelled to me as I was sliding down to blow the cable. “Wait a second . . . Nike told me to meet him at the trade fair. As I was going down to the train, he told me that.”
Max looked at me. “The trade fair?” He sighed. “Meet you at the trade fair?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Where’s that?”
“Ship Creek. Maybe twenty miles from here.” He scratched his chin. “Hate to travel this time of year, but hell, if the Wonderblimp doesn’t come for you, I guess we’ll just have to—”
“—go find them,” I said.
Max smiled. “Yeah.”
* * *
They didn’t come back.
I waited a few days and it began to dawn on me. Nike wasn’t coming back. Oh, I thought up excuses for them. They’d gone to rescue Lucy, and run into trouble. They were out of fuel. They couldn’t find Redoubt. But I was probably being too kind. Sure, I was a reader, but with that coke, Nike could buy all the readers he wanted. The Wonderblimp wasn’t going to come back and get me. I’d saved them, sure, but as far as Nike was concerned, I was bear food. Still, I knew that if Lucy had been on board, she would have talked Nike into turning around and getting me. Yeah, Lucy cared. But Lucy . . . I didn’t want to think about her. Lucy could be dead, cut to shreds by the God Weirders.
But Nike had said to meet him at the trade fair, whatever that was. So, okay, I’d go to the trade fair. If the Wonderblimp wouldn’t come for me, I’d go for the Wonderblimp.
* * *
After a week my ribs felt better; Max could bear-hug me and I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out. Once I’d healed to the point where I could hobble through the snow without periodically swimming in it, Max showed me around the Redoubt.
The Redoubt itself wasn’t much: a big huge log cabin, a bit like that church I saw in Something-chik, eight-sided, built on an upper terrace of a hill. There were outbuildings all around it—barns, sheds, stables, smaller cabins. In a hollow below the main building a team of maybe sixty dogs was staked out. The main trail out of the Redoubt zigzagged below the terrace, and smaller trails wound around the sides of the hill and back into the mountains behind the Redoubt.
Max and I sat down on a knoll above the Redoubt. He took out a pair of binoculars, scanned his land. His property took up four mile-square sections, most of the west flank of a mountain between Kaditali Valley and Turnagain Arm. Banjo Snowshoe Mountain, a peak maybe 4,000 feet high, dominated the area. From where we sat the tip of the peak appeared to be a little cairn of rocks. Above us the land had been bulldozed flat into an airstrip; a windsock flapped at the top of a log blimp pylon—where the Wonderblimp would have finally docked, I guessed, if everything had gone according to plan.
“How’d you get the land?” I asked Max. I knew, but I wanted to hear his version.
“Gift of the federal government,” Max said. “Reparations, they said.”
“Reparations?”
He tapped his chest. “You know why they put this nuke in my chest? Did Nike tell you?” I nodded. “Right. They said I was a murderer, but you know they were wrong.” He stared out at Cook’s River, at an island I remembered my maps had called Far Island. “So to compensate me for my suffering”— he tapped his chest again—“they gave me this land. Four square miles. Four section
s. Used to belong to a cocaine dealer.” He smiled. “Oh, the Feds got his ass. He was the richest man in old Alaska, but he got too greedy. The Feds took his land because he used it as part of his coke operation.” Max turned around, pointed up at the blimp pylon. “See that airstrip? That’s how the guy got his deliveries.” He smiled again. “I guess I kind of inherited his business, huh?”
“I guess,” I said. I looked down at the wide trail winding down from the Redoubt to the bottom of the hill. “Nice road. That guy build it just to make cocaine runs?”
“Hah!” Max said, chuckling. “Oh no. State built that. I mean, yeah, it was used to deliver coke, but the guy had this big development planned here. He got the state to build this million-dollar road. The old Alaska state, I mean.” He shook his head. “State-sponsored drug dealing. Well, they got him in the end.”
“And you got the Redoubt?”
“Yeah, I got the Redoubt.” He handed me the binoculars. “Want a look?”
I looked through the binocs at a broad plain that stretched north and west from the foothills below to Cook’s River. The Redoubt trail—the million-dollar road—wound down to another trail that ran around a marsh. The trail continued north into mostly flat country interspersed with an occasional hill: what was left of a city Max called Ship Creek.
Ship Creek must have been huge in its time: the skeletons of skyscrapers rose in a cluster from a point northeast of where Cook’s River met Turnagain Arm, up from Far Island. A lot of bare spots in the forest showed where acres and acres of houses and buildings must have been, but all that I could see through the binoculars were occasional girders or burnt-out shells. Untracked roads—white bands in the ruins—criss-crossed the bowl. Most of Ship Creek looked uninhabited, except for plumes of smoke that rose from a cluster of buildings to the south, and from the part of the city where the skyscrapers were.
I pointed at the big plume of smoke. “What’s that? Some village?”
Max took the binocs from me. “Nope, not a permanent one. That’s probably the trade fair. But in those tall buildings is sort of a village—folks called Downtowners live there.”
After the Zap Page 12
