After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  The memor squinted her eyes, then nodded. “Okay. Can I inquire as to the nature of these goods?”

  “Maybe,” Max said. “Why?”

  “There’s a rumor going around that the Wonderblimp has in its possession a very interesting commodity:

  A powder of white

  that brings new light and destroys

  the awful darkness.

  She smiled. “Some would pay very well for such a thing. This Big Mac, for instance, or the memor’s guild. Do you see?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I see,” said Max.

  “You might want to make this trade elsewhere,” the memor said. “Big Mac, for instance, is in Sue City. There is a small colony of memors in Sue City, too. If you could get your ‘goods’ to Sue City . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Good idea. Okay, change that deal. Can you get a message to Big Mac that we might have something for him?” The memor nodded. “Good. Tell him we’ll be coming up to Sue City. And tell the blimpers that delivery of the ‘goods’ will be at a time and place specified. Um”—he bit his lip, then pointed a finger at her—“we should probably set this up face to face with the blimpers. Can you arrange a meeting?”

  The memor nodded, and said:

  Hammer and Blimper

  Will meet for another trade

  In time of twelve hours.

  She shook hands with us, and we left the shed.

  * * *

  Back at the Hunt building, I went out with Rindi and helped her feed the dogs. With the God Weirder dogs we were now up to forty-five dogs, a lot of mouths to feed, and, I found out, a lot of crap to pick up. Rindi handed me a bucket of dried dog food, meat scraps, and general organic crud, and I went and slopped piles of food into dog dishes Rindi had improvised from hub caps. Then Rindi handed me a shovel and we walked around the garage, shoveling poop, tossing it into a big bucket.

  “You know,” Rindi said, looking at the God Weirder dogs, “these dogs are good distance dogs. With a couple of hyperdogs in lead and these dogs taking up the slack, we could probably run forever.”

  “Snow would run out,” I said.

  She smiled. “Ah, I’d just keep going north.”

  “North,” I said. “That’s where I’m headed.”

  “Why north?” she asked.

  “Well, there’s this memor message,” I said. I told her about Coop’s message at Moose Pass. “Then there’s this feeling I have that if I go north, I’ll find out who I am.”

  “You know who you are,” Rindi said.

  “I know my name. A name isn’t enough. I want to find out who I was.”

  Rindi scooped a shovel of poop into the bucket, grimaced as she missed. “What does it matter who you were? It only matters what you are, and what you will become.”

  “Do you know who you are?”

  She shook her head. “Like you, I only had my name. But it doesn’t matter. I think the Zap did us all a favor. Lots of us probably had pasts we were eager to forget. Maybe we should have a Zap every ten years, give us a new start.”

  “Tabula rasa,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A phrase I read once. ‘Blank slate.’ Some philosophers felt we come into the world a blank slate. The Zap would erase the slates of everyone.”

  “Maybe that was the idea.”

  “Yeah.” I shook my head. “A goddamn crazy idea.”

  * * *

  I walked into the kitchen of one of the Wonderhomes. Max was lying on the table, shirt open. Lucy was drawing lines on his chest with a crayon. She kept thumping his chest, listening with some instrument—damned if I knew where she got it— that let her hear inside Max. She thumped, listened, and marked a line.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, smiled, and that smile called back recent memories. The bruises on her face were fading; she was starting to look normal again. “I’m trying to figure out where Max’s chest bomb is. If I can figure it out, maybe Doc North and I can remove it.”

  “You put it in,” I said. “Shouldn’t be too hard to take it out.”

  “Holmes,” she said. “I didn’t put it in.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “You think you can remove the bomb?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “I doubt it,” Max said. “Benelux told me that if anyone tried to take it out, the bomb would blow, or I’d die. She’s not touching me.”

  Lucy looked down at him, scrunched her eyes. “I think you should let me try.”

  Max shook his head. “Screw that. Just tell me how to fire the bomb.”

  I sat down at the table, ran my fingers over the lines Lucy had drawn on Max’s chest. She’d drawn an oval-shaped design about six inches long running roughly along his sternum. “Why do you want to fire the bomb?”

  “Just because,” Max said. “The need may arise.”

  I stared at him, wondered what was going on in his head. He wanted the coke. And yet he wanted to die, too. I couldn’t figure it out. “Okay. How are you going to do it?”

  “From what I know of the chest bomb,” Lucy said, “I mean, what Doc North has told me, it’s a simple detonation. The trigger sends a radio signal to a small wad of plastic explosive in the chest nuke; the explosive goes off, and that’s all she wrote. I figure, if you put some explosive on the outside of the chest, you could get the explosive inside going.” She tapped a point right at the bottom of his sternum. “Put some plastic explosive right here, and—”

  “Ka-boom,” Max said.

  “Yeah, ka-boom,” I said. I got up and left the room. I didn’t like to think about Max dying, about nukes blowing. I had this horrible gut feeling about nukes. I had this feeling that long before I ever got north I’d see a nuke blow up.

  I didn’t like that idea.

  * * *

  That night I heard the Wonderblimp fly over Down Town, then hover over the strip, but when we got to the trading shack the next morning, the blimp was gone. Nike and Bron were there, though. Max and I wore our hoods into the meeting in the back of the trading shack, but as soon as the memor left, we took our hoods down. Nike was going to figure out who I was soon enough anyway.

  “Holmes,” he said, smiling. “It figures. I thought you were dead.”

  “That’s the way you acted,” I said. “You could have come back to get me. You could have come back to rescue Lucy.”

  “We had other things on our mind.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “No matter, though, eh?” Nike smiled. “The Hammer took care of you, I see.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded to Max. “He’s been taking care of a lot of things.”

  “You been taking care of those nukes?” Nike asked Max.

  “What nukes?”

  “The six inactive nukes you’re supposed to have.”

  Nike smiled. “I only have one nuke.”

  “One?” Nike stared at him. “Rei said you had six.”

  Max shrugged. “You know memors. Sometimes they screw up the messages.”

  “Well, one nuke, six, whatever you have, we’ll take it.”

  “It’s not for trade.” Max unbuttoned his shirt, showed them the scar. “The only nuke I have is the one inside me.”

  “Oh,” Nike said. “Well, you do have Lucy.”

  “I do,” Max said. “And you have my coke.”

  “You told him about the coke?” Nike asked me.

  “Oh, I’ve known about the lazy.” Max put his hands on the table, leaned forward. “It’s been a long time. I should charge interest.”

  “You’ll get your coke,” Nike said, “when we get Lucy.”

  Max smiled. “That’s what I’m here for. How do you want to set it up?”

  Nike shrugged. “Same way we had it planned before. Meet at the bluff?”

  “Nope. You hear of this guy Big Mac? Lives up at Sue City?” Nike nodded. “Big Mac is looking to get a hold of that lazy. Don’t blame him—should be a good market for it if it works the way Holme
s told me it works. Now, I figure the PRAK being the kind of place it is—”

  “Lot of loose minds,” I said. “Screwed up minds.”

  “Yeah, screwed up minds,” Max said. “This Big Mac guy should pay top price. If he doesn’t, the memors will.” He glared at Nike, and his voice took on a razor-sharp edge. “I figure, those suckers will buy the lazy even considering its other special properties.”

  “What special properties?” Nike asked.

  “Nike,” I said. “He knows about the radioactivity.”

  Nike glared at me. “I thought I told you to keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  I shrugged. “All promises went out the window when I didn’t see the Wonderblimp coming back for me.” I rubbed the leather glove on my right hand, pulled it off, slapped it in front of Nike. “I don’t think I’m a blimper anymore.”

  “Once a blimper, always a blimper,” Nike said. But he reached across and took the glove. He looked at Max. “Yeah, the coke’s radioactive. So you want to pawn it off on the Big Mac guy?”

  Max nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know this Big Mac from Adam, but I figure he’s not going to know. Hell, he’ll probably dilute the damn lazy and sell it for triple what I give him. I could give a shit. Anyway, what I want you to do is take the coke—and Holmes and me—to where this Big Mac is. When you deliver the coke to him, then I’ll release Lucy.”

  “How does Lucy get there?” Nike asked.

  “My friends take her up by dog team. You can track them from the air, but if you try to land . . .” Max held his hand to his head like a pistol.

  “Okay,” Nike said. “You guys come with us, and we meet the rest of them in Sue City?” Max nodded. “Doesn’t make sense. Why shouldn’t we take you hostage?”

  “You will,” Max said. “But you need Holmes here to get to Sue City. Or did you get a reader at the trade fair?”

  “Couldn’t find one smart enough to read maps,” Bron grumbled.

  “Okay, then,” Max said. “I’ll come along for the ride, to protect Holmes.” He smiled. I stared at his chest; I knew what Max meant.

  Nike leaned back, put his hands on his belly, laughed. “Okay, okay, Hammer. We’ll play it your way.” He grinned. “But if you only knew what you’re getting into . . .”

  “I know,” Max said. He stood up, held out his hand.

  Nike took his hand, shook. “It’s a deal then. We’ll deliver this coke to Big Mac.” Nike unrolled a map, laid it on the table. My eyes got real big when I saw the map. Nike shrugged. “What can I say? I keep finding maps. Now, show me where Sue City is.”

  I pointed to a bend in a river marked SUE, next to a big X someone had drawn on the map.

  “Right here,” I said.

  CHAPTER 14

  On the morning that Rindi and Nivakti and Lucy left for Sue City, Rindi turned Lucy into a bush punk. Max and I had gone into the trade fair to get rid of the God Weird dog team. Rindi and Nivakti were only going to need thirty-eight dogs; they kept one God Weird dog for wheel, and sold the rest. The trade fair was winding down, but it wasn’t over yet. There were fewer campfires along the strip, fewer roving bands of bush punks, fewer trades going on in the trading shack. We had to take a loss on the God Weird dogs, but that was okay, considering they had been a bonus in the first place. We got twenty-five keys in bullets for the whole lot, which made me smile: a God Weird team was worth more than a God Weirder like Odey.

  Rindi had told us to pick up a few things for her, cosmetics mostly, but also “any sort of bush clothes.” Max gave me a box of bullets and left me at a booth with a naked plastic mannequin hanging on a pole in front. “Got to go get some stuff,” he said. “Meet you back at the safe house.”

  A lady with a pink crew cut watched the booth. I went over Rindi’s list in my mind, asked for “hair color remover, any color dye except blue, and a stick of red ocher.” The lady nodded, opened a safe, and handed me two bottles, one that said CLAIROL and another that said CELLOPHANE PINK. She took a small red stick from a box under the booth, added it to the bottles.

  “Half a key for the dyes, a bullet for the ocher,” she said.

  “Half a key?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Vintage cosmetics aren’t cheap. Ocher now . . . ocher’s like coal. There’s enough of it if you look in the right places.”

  I handed over the bullets, fifty-one of ’em, and asked what she had in the way of clothes. Crew Cut pointed at a box of clothes, handed me a tattered plastic bag that said PAY ’N’ SAVE on it. “End of the fair special,” she said. “Fill the bag for twenty-five bullets.” So I gave her the bullets and filled the bag with as much stuff as I could cram in: sweaters, a pair of pink wool pants, a pink anorak, socks, mukluks, gloves— all pink. The whole box was full of pink clothes. I guess I could have gotten any color I wanted, as long as it was pink.

  “You like pink or something?” I asked the lady.

  She scratched the nubby pink hairs on her head. “Gee, I guess so. Why do you ask?”

  I shook my head and went back to the safe house.

  Back at the safe house Nivakti and Rindi were packing their sled bags. Lucy was in the bathroom, using up the Wonderhome’s water, taking a shower like Rindi had told her to “because you never know when you’ll get the next one.” I handed the bag of clothes to Rindi. She took out the dye, the pink wool pants, held them up.

  “Pink?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “They had a sale.”

  She shook her head. “Help Nivakti. I have to go get the blimper disguised.” Rindi went back into the bathroom.

  Rindi and Nivakti were going to take Lucy in the sled up to Sue City. Lucy said she couldn’t handle a team, and Rindi was all for teaching her, but Max nixed that. He said they’d have to train outside of Down Town, and too many people would see her; he didn’t want to risk letting the God Weirders know who had her. Besides, Max didn’t trust her on her own. He said it would be just like her to tell us she’d never been behind a dog team in her life, and then suddenly “remember” how to run dogs somewhere north of We’ll See Ya and take off into the woods. He glared at me when he said that.

  It would be tricky sneaking Lucy out of Down Town. A memor had told us a small band of God Weirders was waiting right outside Ship Creek, in open territory. Apparently they had hired some help from one of the nastier militias, the Spenard All Mighty People’s Militia. The shippos could guarantee her safety only so far as the border. After that, she was on her own. So Rindi had to disguise her enough so that they could slip by any God Weirder patrols.

  About half an hour later Rindi came out, Lucy behind her. She stepped aside and Lucy wasn’t there anymore. Instead there was this person, all pink, pink anorak with pink fur trim, pink pants, pink mukluks, and a pink palm where her glove had been. Her lips matched her pants and her eyelids matched her lips and the forehead of that long face faded into a tangle of short curls that poked out from under a silver scarf wrapped around her head.

  “The braid—” I said.

  Lucy smiled, and the scarf bulged and wriggled and fell off. A pink braid burst out from the back of her head and wrapped around her neck.

  Rindi held up a pair of scissors snapped in two. “The stuff in the front cut like butter,” she said, “but that stuff in back . . . It’s not hair.”

  “Flamingo,” I said.

  “What?” Nivakti asked.

  “She looks like a flamingo.” I turned to him. “It’s this bird I saw down south once.”

  “Flamingo, then,” Rindi said. “Lucy, you’re now Flamingo.”

  Later that morning Max came back from the trade fair. He carried a small ammo box under his arm, “Danger: Explosive” stenciled on it in big red letters. Max looked at Lucy, squinted, then smiled. “Good work, Rindi,” he said. Then he motioned to the bathroom, and took Lucy’s arm. “Need your skills, Electrolux,” he said.

  When Max came out later, he didn’t say what Lucy had done to him or what had been in the box, but I knew. I knew exactly
what he’d picked up at the trade fair. Plastique. Max had rearmed himself. He was a walking nuke again.

  That afternoon, a few hours after sunrise, two months after I’d first met Lucy at the St. Herman’s Club, we bid Nivakti and Rindi and Lucy, a.k.a. Flamingo, good-bye. They would follow the Strange Trail north, through We’ll See Ya, and up to Sue City, on the Sue River. The Wonderblimp would leave Ship Creek in two days, and we would all meet at an airstrip in Sue City in three days’ time.

  We loaded their sleds, strapping Lucy into Rindi’s sled bag. Max and I grabbed gee poles, skied out with them to just beyond the Down Town gates. We went ahead, crept into the bushes just before where we saw a bunch of God Weirders stopping sleds as they went north.

  Half-a-dozen militia folks helped the God Weirders. The soldiers didn’t favor any sort of particular hair style, like the Weirders, but they all had the same crazy-eyed look about them, something like the Snow Angels had: ready to shoot just to see what bullets could do. They all wore olive drab, like Odey: dark green wool pants, parkas, the works. Even their guns were green. The only spot of color on them was their shoelaces: pink shoelaces, red shoelaces, orange shoelaces, all sorts of different colored shoelaces.

  Each militia person wore a red armband, and in big red letters on the armband was the word SPAM. I chuckled. I almost remembered Spam. Spam had been like this really good cheese from France. The God Weirders inspected the sleds, and the Spenard All Mighty Militia stood in the trail, rifles raised.

  I watched through the sight on my rifle as Nivakti, Rindi, and Lucy got up to the God Weirders. One of the Weirders went up to Rindi, looked her in the eyes, then looked down at Lucy—Flamingo—in the sled. He ordered Lucy out, then held a gun on her as she stood before him. I clicked the safety off my rifle, heard Max next to me slide a round into the chamber of his gun.

  The God Weirder walked around Lucy. He motioned at her with the gun, said something. Lucy lifted the anorak over her head. The Weirder stepped forward, started unbuttoning her shirt. Lucy moved toward him, slipped an arm around him, put her hand down his pants. The God Weirder stopped, yanked his hand back, stepped back, said something, and motioned with his gun back at the sled. Lucy smiled, put her anorak back on, and climbed in. The dogs got up, and the SPAM got out of the trail and let them by.