Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  DE LA TIERRA

  Emma Bull

  The piano player drums away with her left hand, dropping all five fingers onto the keys as if they weigh too much to hold up. The rhythms bounce off the rhythms of what her right hand does, what she sings. It’s like there’s three different people in that little skinny body, one running each hand, the third one singing. But they all know what they’re doing.

  He sucks a narrow stream of Patrón over his tongue and lets it heat up his mouth before he swallows. He wishes he knew how to play an instrument. He wouldn’t mind going up at the break, asking if he could sit in, holding up a saxophone case, maybe, or a clarinet. He’d still be here at 3 a.m., jamming, while the waiters mopped the floors.

  That would be a good place to be at 3 a.m. Much better than rolling up the rug, burning the gloves, dropping the knife over the bridge rail. Figuratively speaking.

  They aren’t that unalike, she and he. He has a few people in his body, too, and they also know what they’re doing.

  The difference is, his have names.

  “¿Algo más?” The wide-faced waitress sounds Salvadoran. She looks too young to be let into a bar, let alone make half a bill a night in tips. She probably sends it all home to mami. The idea annoys him. Being annoyed annoys him, too. No skin off his nose if she’s not blowing it at the mall.

  He actually is too young to legally swallow this liquor in a public place, but of course he’s never carded. A month and a half and he’ll be twenty-one. Somebody ought to throw a party. “Nada. Grácias.”

  She smiles at him. “Where you from? Chihuahua?”

  “Burbank.” Why does she care where he’s from? He shouldn’t have answered in Spanish.

  “No, your people—where they from? My best friend’s from Chihuahua. You look kinda like her brother.”

  “Then he looks like an American.”

  She actually seems hurt. “But everybody’s from someplace.”

  Does she mean “everybody,” or “everybody who’s brown like us?” “Yep. Welcome to Los Angeles.”

  He and the tequila bid each other goodbye, like a hug with a friend at the airport. Then he pushes the glass at the waitress. She smacks it down on her tray and heads for the bar. There, even the luggage disappears from sight. He rubs the bridge of his nose.

  Positive contact, Chisme answers from above his right ear. Chisme is female and throaty, for him, anyway. All numbers optimal to high optimal. Operation initialized.

  He lays a ten on the table and pins the corner down with the candle jar. He wishes it were a twenty, for the sake of the Salvadoran economy. But big tippers are memorable. He stands up and heads for the door.

  Behind him he hears the piano player sweep the keys, low to high, and it hits his nerves like a scream. He almost turns—

  Adrenal limiter enabled. Suppression under external control.

  Just like everything else about him. All’s right with the world. He breathes deep and steps out into the streetlights and the smell of burnt oil.

  The bar’s in Koreatown. The target is in downtown L.A. proper, in the jewelry district. Always start at least five miles from the target, in case someone remembers the unmemorable. Show respect for the locals, even if they’re not likely to believe you exist.

  He steps into the shadow that separates two neon window signs and slips between, fastlanes. He’s down at Hill and Broadway in five minutes. He rubs the bridge of his nose again. Three percent discharge, says Chisme. After three years he can tell by the way it feels, but it’s reflex to check.

  The downtown air is oven-hot, dry and still, even at this hour, and the storm drains smell. They’ll keep that up until the rains come and wash them clean months from now. He turns the corner and stops before the building he wants.

  There’s a jewelry store on the first floor. Security grills lattice the windows, and the light shines down on satin-upholstered stands with nothing on them. Painted on the inside of the glass is, “Gold Mart/Best prices on/Gold/Platinum/Chains & Rings.” Straight up, below the fifth floor windows, there’s a faded sign in block letters: “Eisenberg & Sons.”

  Time to call another of the names. He massages his right palm with his left thumb.

  Magellan responds. Not with words, because words aren’t what Magellan does. Against the darkness at the back of the store, white lines form, like a scratchboard drawing. He knows they’re not really inside the store, but his eye doesn’t give a damn. The pictures show up wherever he’s looking. This one is a cutaway of the building: the stairwell up the left side, the landings, the hallways on each floor. And the target, like a big lens flare . . . at the front of the fourth floor.

  They’re always on the top floor. Always. He focuses on the fifth floor of the diagram and massages his hand again. The zoom-in is so fast he staggers. Vertical axis restored, Chisme murmurs.

  The fifth floor seems to be all storage; the white lines draw wireframe cartons and a few pieces of broken furniture in the rooms.

  Not right, not right. Top floor makes for a faster getaway, better protection from the likes of him. Ignoring strategy can only mean that the strategy has changed. He probes his upper left molar with his tongue, and Biblio’s sexless whisper, like sand across rock, says, Refreshing agent logs. Information updated at oh-two-oh-three.

  Fifteen minutes ago is good enough. He thinks through the logs, looking for surprises, new behaviors, deviations in the pattern. Nada. His fourth-floor sighting will be in the next update as an alert, an anomaly. He’s contributed to the pool of knowledge. Whoopee for him.

  He stands inside the doorway, trying to look like scenery, but every second he waits makes it worse. If the target gets the wind up, a nice routine job will have gone down the crapper. And if the neighborhood watch spooks and the LAPD sends a squad, the target will for sure get the wind up.

  But it’s not routine. He knows it, he’s made and trained to know it. The target is not where it ought to be. The names are no help: They follow orders. Just as he does. No te preocupes, hijo. Do the job until it does for you; then there’ll be another just like you to clean up the mess, and you’ll be a note in the logs.

  Blood pressure adjusted, Chisme notes. Not an admonishment, just a fact. The names give him facts. It’s up to him what to do with them. To hell with the neighborhood watch. He touches thumb to middle finger on each hand, stands still, breathes from the belly. Chisme isn’t the only one who can do his tune-up.

  He takes the chameleon key from his pocket, casual as any guy who’s left something on his desk at work—oops, yeah, officer, the wife’ll kill me if I don’t bring those tickets home tonight. The key looks like a brass Schlage; he could hand it to the cop and smile. But when it goes in the lock—

  He feels it under his fingers, like a little animal shrugging. It’s changing shape in there, finding the right notches and grooves and filling them. When it feels like a brass key again, he turns it, and the lock opens easy as a peck on the cheek.

  Thirty seconds on the alarm, according to the documents in the archives of the security service that installed it. Biblio tells him what to punch on the keypad, and the display stops flashing, “ENTER CODE NOW” and offers him a placid, “SYSTEM DISARMED.” This part is never hard. If a target showed up in one of the wannabe mansionettes on Chandler at four in the morning, he could walk right in and the homeowner would never know.

  If nothing went wrong after the walking-in part, of course.

  The stairs in front of him are ill-lit, sheathed in cracked linoleum and worn rubber nail-down treads. He smells dust, ammonia, and old cigarette smoke. But not the target, not yet.

  He starts up toward the next floor.

  • • • •

  The evening before, he got an official commendation for his outstanding record. He had to go to Chateau Marmont, up the hill from Sunset, to get it, and on a Friday, too, so he had to pay ten dollars for valet parking to get his head patted. Good dog. If he could fastlane
on his own time, it would solve so many problems. But hey, at least there was still such a thing as “his own time.”

  She was out on the patio by the pool, stretched in a lounge chair. From there a person could see a corner of the Marmont bungalow where Belushi had overdosed. He was pretty sure she knew that; they liked things like celebrity death spots.

  Some of them almost anyone could recognize—if almost anyone knew to look for them. They’re always perfect, of their kind. That’s why so many of them like L.A., where everybody gets extra credit for looking perfect. Try going unnoticed in Ames, Iowa, looking like that.

  She had wavy golden hair to her shoulders, and each strand sparkled when the breeze shifted it. She wore a blue silk halter top, and little white shorts that showed how long and tan her legs were. She could’ve been one of those teen-star actresses pretending to be a Forties pin-up, except that she was too convincing. She sipped at a mojito without getting any lipstick on the glass.

  For fun, he jabbed his molar with his tongue to see if Biblio could tell him anything about her—name, age, rank. Nada, y nada más. None of them were ever in the database. Didn’t hurt to try, though.

  “Your disposal record is remarkable,” she said, with no preface.

  “I do my job.” He wondered what other agents’ records were. He was pretty sure there were others, though he’d never met them. She didn’t ask him to sit down, so he didn’t.

  “A vital one, I assure you.” She gazed out at the view: the L.A. basin all the way to Santa Monica, just beginning to light up for the night, and a very handsome sunset. No smog or haze. Could her kind make that happen, somehow? They’d more or less made him, but he was nothing compared to a clear summer evening in Los Angeles.

  She turned to look at him fully, suddenly intent. “You understand that, don’t you? That your work is essential to us?”

  He shrugged. A direct gaze from one of them had tied better tongues than his.

  “You’re saving our way of life—even our lives themselves. These others come from places where they’re surrounded by ignorant, superstitious peasants. They have no conception of how to blend in here, what the rules and customs are. And their sheer numbers . . .” She shook her head. “A stupid mistake by one of them, and we could all be revealed.”

  “So it’s a quality-of-life thing?” he asked. “I thought the problem was limited resources.”

  She pressed her lips together and withdrew her gaze. The evening seemed immediately colder and less sweetly scented. “Our first concern, of course. We’re very close to the upper limit of the carrying capacity of this area. Already there are . . .” (she closed her tilted blue eyes for a moment, as if she had a pain somewhere) “. . . empty spots. We are the guardians of this place. If we let these invaders overrun it, they’ll strip it like locusts, as they strip their native lands.”

  A swift movement in the shrubbery—a hummingbird, shooting from one blossom to another. She smiled at it, and he thought, Lucky damned bird, even though he didn’t want to.

  “I still don’t get it,” he said, his voice sounding like a truck horn after hers. “Why not help them out? Say, ‘Bienvenidos, brothers and sisters, let’s all go to Disneyland?’ Then show them how it’s done, and send them someplace where they can have their forty acres and a mule? They’re just like you, aren’t they?”

  She turned from the bird and met his eyes. If he thought he’d felt the force of her before, now he knew he’d felt nothing, nothing. “Have you seen many of them,” she asked, “who are just like me?”

  He’s seen one or two who might have become like her, in time, with work. But none so perfect, so powerful, so unconsciously arrogant, so serenely sure, as she and the others who hold his leash.

  • • • •

  He’s on the first landing before he remembers to check the weapon. Chisme monitors that, too, and would have said something if it wasn’t registering. But it’s not Chisme’s ass on the line (if, in fact, Chisme has one). Trust your homies, but check your own rifle.

  He holds his left palm up in front of him in the gloom and makes a fist, then flexes his wrist backward. At the base of his palm the tiny iron needles glow softly, row on row, making a rosy light under his skin.

  He used to wonder how they got the needles in there without a scar, and why they glow when he checks them, and how they work when he wants them to. Now he only thinks about it when he’s on the clock. Part of making sure that he can still call some of the day his own.

  When he finishes here, he’ll be debriefed. That’s how he thinks of it. He’ll go to whatever place Magellan shows him, do whatever seems to be expected of him, and end by falling asleep. When he wakes up the needles will be there again.

  He goes up the stairs quiet and fast, under his own power. If he fastlanes this close, the target will know he’s here. He’s in good shape: He can hurry up three flights of stairs and still breathe easy. That’s why he’s in this line of work now. Okay, that and being in the wrong place at the right time.

  Introspection is multitasking, and multitasking can have unpleasant consequences. That’s what the names are for, hijo. Keep your head in the job.

  Half the offices here are vacant. The ones that aren’t have temporary signs, the company name in a reasonably businesslike typeface, coughed out of the printer and taped to the door. Bits of tape from the last company’s sign still show around the edges. The hallway’s overhead fluorescent is like twilight, as if there’s a layer of soot on the inside of its plastic panel.

  At least it’s all offices; one less problem to deal with, grácias a San Miguel. Plenty of the buildings on Broadway are apartments above the first two floors, with Mom and Dad and four kids in a one-bedroom with not enough windows and no air conditioning. People sleep restless in a place like that.

  Which makes him wonder: Why didn’t the target pick a place like that? Why make this easier?

  On the fourth floor, the hall light buzzes on and off, on and off. He feels a pre-headache tightness behind his eyebrows as his eyes try to correct, and his heart rate climbs. Is the light the reason for this floor? Does the target know about him, how he works, and picked this floor because of it?

  Chisme gives his endocrine system a twitch, and he stops vibrating. He’s a well-kept secret. And if he isn’t, all the more reason to get this done right.

  He walks the length of the hallway, hugging the wall, pausing to listen before crossing the line of fire of each closed door. He doesn’t expect trouble until the farthest door, but it’s the trouble you don’t expect that gets you. Even to his hearing, he doesn’t make a sound.

  Beside the last door, the one at the front of the building, he presses up against the wall and listens. A car goes through the intersection below; a rattle on the sidewalk may be a shopping cart. Nothing from inside the room. He breathes in deep and slow, and smells, besides the dry building odors, the scent of fresh water.

  He probes his right palm with his thumb, and when Magellan sends him the diagram of the fourth floor, he turns his head to line it up with the real surfaces of the building. Here’s the hall, and the door, and the room beyond it. There’s the target: shifting concentric circles of light, painfully bright. Unless everything is shot to hell, it’s up against the front wall, near the window. And if everything is shot to hell, there’s nothing he can do except go in there and find out.

  At that, he feels an absurd relief. We who are about to die. From here on, it’s all action, as quick as he can make it, and no more decisions. Quick, because as soon as he fastlanes the target will know he’s here. He reaches down inside himself and makes it happen.

  He turns and kicks the door in, and feels the familiar heat in nerve and muscle tissue, tequila-fueled. He brings his left arm up, aims at the spot by the window.

  Fire, his brain orders. But the part of him that really commands the weapon, whatever that part is, is frozen.

  • • • •

  The coyotes most
ly traffic in the ones who can pass. After all, it’s bad for business if customers you smuggle into the Promised Land are never heard from again by folks back in the old ’hood.

  But sometimes, if cash flow demands, they make exceptions. Coyotes sell hope, after all. Unreasonable, ungratifiable hope just costs more. The coyotes tell them about the Land of Opportunity and neglect to mention that there’s no way they’ll get a piece of it.

  Then the coyotes take their payment, dump them in the wilderness, and put a couple of steel-jackets in them before leaving.

  He’s done cleanup in the desert and found the dried-out bodies, parchment skin and deformed bone, under some creosote bush at the edge of a wash. The skin was often split around the bullet holes, it was so dry. Of course, if they’d been dead, there wouldn’t have been anything to find. Some that he came across could still open their eyes, or speak.

  • • • •

  Maybe in the dark this one can pass. Maybe she looks like an undernourished street kid with a thyroid problem. In the pitch-dark below an underpass from a speeding car, maybe.

  She should never have left home. She should be dying in the desert. She should be already dead, turned to dust and scattered by the oven-hot wind.

  Her body looks like it’s made of giant pipe cleaners. Her long, skinny legs are bent under her, doubled up like a folding carpenter’s ruler, and the joints are the wrong distance from each other. Her ropy arms are wrapped around her, and unlike her legs, they don’t seem jointed at all—or it’s just the angle that makes them seem to curve like tentacles.

  And she’s white. Not Anglo-white or even albino-white, but white like skim milk, right down to the blueish shadows that make her skin look almost transparent. Fish-belly white.

  Her only clothing is a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, in what looks like size XXL Tall. It’s worn colorless in places, and those spots catch the street light coming through the uncovered window. The body under the shirt is small and thin and childlike. Her head, from above, is a big soiled milkweed puff, thin gray-white hair that seems to have worn itself out pushing through her scalp.