It was perfect.
After refueling, Mesa and Kaizhou walked hand-in-hand down the block and crossed the street to the Esquire Inn. The motel billed itself as the best in Elko and featured a micro fridge as the prime amenity.
Mesa’s go bag had carried a few slips of universal currency, which she had discreetly transferred to her hip pocket. Inside the small lobby, she passed over a folded collection of twenties, enough to cover the week. The shaggy gray-haired woman licked the tip of her index finger then meticulously counted out the bills and squinted at the validation markers. Satisfied, she gave them two small plastic cards to Room Twenty-seven.
“Y’all have a blessed day,” the motel clerk said, the words nearly an automatic, bored sigh.
Mesa nodded, equally bored, before turning heel. She stepped back into the blistering heat. Even before noon, the temperature was already an inhuman one hundred twenty degrees.
After walking around the side of the main building, past an ancient, banged-up vending machine, and up the flight of stairs, they found Room Twenty-seven. The card reader seemed to be the most modern feature in all of Elko and was perhaps what made the Esquire Inn the city’s best motel. With an electronic click-buzz-whir, the light flashed green, and the door popped open.
She welcomed the arctic blast of air conditioning, smiling as she stepped inside, unconcerned about the lackluster accommodations.
A king-sized bed covered by a garish seashell-themed comforter, in which clashing pinks and purples vied for supremacy, dominated the small room. A framed faded print of the Taj Mahal hung above the thin wooden headboard. The carpet was clearly heavily trafficked and was worn thin in spots; in other areas, it rolled with the fury of an angry ocean. Crossing the thin aisle between the foot of the bed and the dresser was practically a dare. Sure enough, the micro fridge was there, right next to the bathroom door.
She passed the accent wall—she guessed the sickly pale mucus color would have been inappropriately named cool mint or some such similar misrepresentation—to check out the bathroom. The WC was surprisingly modern and neat but unsurprisingly tiny.
Elko’s finest. Nothing but the best.
“I need to shower,” she said, pulling off her shirt. Kaizhou nodded and plopped down on the bed, watching her undress. She wiggled out of her jeans then playfully tossed them at his face as she headed into the bathroom.
She twisted the dial for cold then let the arctic blast cool her warm body. She hadn’t spent much time outside, but geographically speaking, she was half-convinced Elko resided in the crook of Satan’s taint. When her teeth began clattering together, she raised the water temperature to a milder setting.
Eyes closed, she stood under the light rain, willing her body to relax and working the tension from her muscles. Her neck and shoulders ached from the long car ride, despite the regular breaks.
Thoughts of the dying scavengers intruded on her attempts to achieve a clear head. Even in the aftermath of the recent violence, she’d felt calm—full of adrenaline, but calm. In control.
Killing squared away with the rest of her too easily, but even that felt wrong. Was this a natural trait of her personality that she had somehow failed to recognize? Was this who she was before her memory was destroyed? A killer, a woman accustomed to violence and death?
She should have felt more, should have been more psychologically and emotionally wrecked, and she was angry she wasn’t. Her flashes of violence had felt too natural, as if somebody else had taken charge and propelled her forward, subduing her conscious will in order to exact the tolls of death. Yet that wasn’t quite right, either. Her movements, her finesse with weapons, her calm collectedness while in danger-they all felt reflexive. Instinctual.
Who the hell am I?
She wished she could talk with her therapist, but even running the REMIND software was a dangerous idea, and she didn’t want to answer the sure-to-be-asked questions regarding her false identity and faked credentials. No, that bit of software was quite off-limits.
And Kaizhou… he was sweet, but the last few days had clearly taken a toll on him. Mesa worried that he was afraid of her. He tried to hide it, but maybe the fear was justified. She couldn’t even begin to guess how he would react if she opened up to him about this, regardless of how much she, or he, needed to talk about it. He had tried to talk to about it, but she’d shut him down and weaseled out of facing it. A distance had erupted between them.
During the ride, he’d lost himself in his music, and they’d settled into an uncomfortable lull of silence. When she tried to take his hand, he’d flinched ever so slightly. Trying to recover smoothly, he had given her a dry smile and wrapped his fingers around hers, but he was hesitant in a way he never had been before. Or at least she thought he was. After a brief moment of connection, he’d broken away and gone back to his life’s soundtrack while staring blankly out the window. Even when she knew her own gaze must have been burning into him, he’d failed to turn toward her.
He could have been putting distance between them because he was afraid of her cold-bloodedness or maybe he was being distant because she was acting distant. Or the distance might be all in my head. Fuck! There would be time for it later, she decided. Take things one step at a time, that’s all. There’s a time and place for everything, and now is not the time. Or so she told herself, pressing her forehead against the cool ceramic tile and letting the cold water run down her scalp and along the curve of her spine.
She tried not to think of dead men, of the corpses of scavengers, or her gut-shot father falling to the floor, torn apart by bullets. She failed. Her body felt rubbery as the tears consumed her, but she wasn’t sure whom she was crying for. Were the tears for them or for her?
Damp and naked, she laid her towel across the bed and lay next to Kaizhou. Her eyes burned, and she felt raw and cold, her energy pent up and electrifying her past her own exhaustion. She needed to move, to run, to crash and burn. More than anything else, she needed human contact. After a too-long moment, he put his arms around her and held her close. Her fresh tears soaked through his shirt to the skin beneath.
She could taste the salt on her own lips when she pressed her mouth to his, and she was gratified to feel him return the kiss. She felt ravenous for affection, for the closeness of their bodies, to entwine and become a singular, writhing creature, a proof of life. She needed to feel something other than pain. She needed to feel something other than damaged.
Later, their bodies slicked with sweat, they slept in one another’s arms. The exhaustion of the last few days caught up to her, forcing her under.
When she awoke, she was surprised to still see daylight streaming through the window shades. Gently, she broke away from Kaizhou to rinse off in the shower and use the toilet. As she dug the last change of clean clothes from her backpack, he began to stir, his eyes gummy with sleep and unfocused.
“What time is it?” he asked, too lazy or too tired to check the chrono app on the DRMR dash.
“After five. Sunset is still a few hours away, but we need to scope things out.”
“I thought you weren’t meeting until ten?”
She nodded. “Better to be early. I don’t want any surprises.”
She’d spent the last few minutes thinking over a plan for the evening. She wanted to trust Mariann Korgan, but blind trust was a good way to get killed. The way things had been going of late, being prepared was a necessity. If things went well, then great. If they didn’t, she didn’t want to be caught unawares without at least a fighting chance.
“We’ll drive around town for a bit, get a lay of the land,” she said. “I want to be inside the church by eight, at least, ahead of Korgan.”
Kaizhou nodded.
Korgan had sent directions the night before to meet at the Lighthouse Christian Fellowship, one of the last few churches left in
Elko. As Mesa studied the map, a sense of dread tickled across her spine over the ironically named Last Chance Road. Too fucking perfect, she thought.
According to the map, the drive was five minutes, down Fifth Street to Last Chance. She wanted to see the area while there was still some daylight, but the satellite views didn’t show much. Last Chance lied at the clearest demarcation of Elko’s borders before they gave way to the vast stretch of dessert and scrub of the pointy Elko Hills, the mountain ranges beyond, and the surging currents of the Humboldt River.
“What do you want to me do?” he asked.
“Drive around, keep your eyes open. If anything goes wrong, I want you nearby.”
She slipped into a pair of cotton panties with an image of a cartoon cat grinning across the front of it and pulled on a jogging bra. Her last pair of jeans were a bit loose, but the gun tucked into the waistband helped take up the little bit of slack. The black T-shirt fit, and she briefly admired herself in the mirror then set about fixing her hair. She used the long strands to partially shield her left eye and cheekbone. Elko was unlikely to have sophisticated security image protocols, and the way her hair broke up and obscured half her face should be enough to fool the dummy software and confuse the programming. Dark eye shadow and bright rouge across her cheeks would further disrupt and confuse the surface metrics. She smiled at the urban camouflage, congratulating herself on a job well done. I actually look pretty hot.
Kaizhou must have thought so, too. She caught the rising bulge beneath the thin top sheet and gave him a wry smile.
“Later, bud,” she said. “Get your pants on. We’re going.”
The sun had been baking Elko all day, and she regretted the jeans and black tee almost immediately, despite the dearth of choices she’d been left with.
Fifth Street took them across the narrow banks of Humboldt, leaving the bright, flashing lights of the gaming parlors and brothels behind them. Civilization died out completely before long. They passed the tiny burned-out remains of small suburban outposts, and the husks of looted and destroyed ranch houses flickered past the windows.
God hadn’t bothered to do anything to save the Lighthouse, much like Elko and the rest of the US surrounding it. The structure was long and squat. Dirty white doors hung off their frames, and the windows were busted out. The white sign advertising the church and the lighthouse logo were broken and askew. The desert winds had sandblasted the blue-and-purple siding into faded ghosts. Still, the sun beat down upon it, threatening to whiteout all sense of color as the years went on.
“We’ll stay linked up over the commNet,” Mesa said. “Be each other’s eyes and ears in case anything goes wrong.”
“I’ll drive around a bit,” he said.
She kissed him, darting her tongue across his before she quickly withdrew and hopped out of the Jeep.
The smell was the first thing to hit her as she passed through the church doors. The building was rank with the earthy scents of mold and rotting wood. The walls were deeply stained with water damage.
A community posting board held yellowed, wrinkled papers. She couldn’t help but groan at the flyer, whose author must have been struck with a divine pun, which advertised Wednesday’s “Pot Luke” dinner.
She passed through the metal frames of what had once been glass doors before somebody had taken a chunk of concrete to them. Glass crunched underfoot as her eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering in through the stained-glass window.
Walking down the aisle, she noticed the pews had been seriously disrupted. Some were toppled; others had been shifted to form a circle around an old, soot-stained barrel.
Faded paint on the wall showed where Jesus had once hung, but he, too, had fallen and lay on the floor with a cracked skull and a missing arm. His face was contorted with pain. The broken body was cast between a jeweled beam of sunlight shining through stained glass and the empty shadows of the nave.
The priest’s office and the administrative quarters were through another door beyond the rectory. A colorfully decorated classroom had fallen into disrepair, a poster depicting the trains of animals boarding Noah’s Ark hanging to the wall by a single corner. The whiteboards were spray-painted with obscenities and crude genitals. Somebody had used the entire back wall to spell out FUCK U, and Mesa wondered which author had been more creative, him or the Pot Luke guy.
Content with her explorations, she slowly worked back toward the front doors. Kaizhou pulled up a minute later.
“Everything seems OK,” he said.
“No surprises yet,” she agreed.
They still had a few hours to kill, and her stomach grumbled for attention. They decided on dinner at the restaurant in Commercial, whose main selling point seemed to be the giant polar bear above the main entrance.
Walking inside, they were greeted by noise, smoke, and White King, allegedly the world’s largest taxidermied polar bear. Mesa was surprised by the high-quality oil paintings of gun fighters. They looked expensive, which was an anomaly in Elko.
Even more surprisingly, the ten-dollar prime rib dinner was entirely edible, and the coffee was delicious. She watched the men in cowboy hats and boots quickly scarf down their food before returning to the slots and tables. The cheap music and ding-ding-dings of the gaming machines multiplied and echoed, their chorus ringing throughout the floor.
She’d been worried about keeping the gun hidden in her waistband, but that concern had been foolish. The men and women around her were unabashed open-carry fans, and guns were slotted into hip and shoulder holsters of nearly every individual in the casino. Men bullshitted one another, resting one hand on the butts of semi-automatic while the other held cans of beer. Still, she kept the tail of her loose T-shirt over the gun.
The food came and went, and despite the pleasant taste of the meat, the grease left her with an unsettling bit of indigestion. After her fourth cup of coffee, Mesa’s nerves were jittery, but she blamed that more on what lay ahead than the caffeine-laced adrenaline that was building in her as the meeting ticked closer.
Kaizhou settled the bill with cash, and they delicately pushed their way through the crowds and back outside. Elko was dark, save for the bright neon of casinos and motels.
By eight, Mesa was back inside Lighthouse, sitting in a pew facing the door, hidden in the shadows, waiting.
She and Kaizhou kept an open optic feed between them. She watched in a small window broadcast across the lower right corner of her field of vision as Kaizhou parked in an alley halfway down the opposite block. Tucked away in the darkness, the position made him difficult to spot but gave him a clear view of the church and its main entrance.
With the commNet live, Mesa watched through Kaizhou’s display field as Mariann Korgan approached the building, casually observing her surroundings and checking behind herself. She was dressed in ragged, cut-off blue-jean shorts and a purple tank top, an oversized pink purse hooked over her shoulder. The point of view shifted slightly as Kaizhou scooted farther down the driver’s seat, letting the steering wheel obstruct his full line of sight. Korgan disappeared behind the building then came back around the front a few minutes later.
At quarter to ten, Mesa listened to the loud crackling noise of glass underfoot. The darkness shifted as Korgan stepped into view, carefully moving into a shaft of prismatic moonlight.
“You’re early,” she said, seeing Mesa immediately. She gave the gun in Mesa’s lap a long stare but said nothing.
After a long, pregnant silence, she said, “How do you want to do this?”
Mesa shrugged. In truth, she didn’t actually know how things were supposed to proceed. She said, “Tell me about LA.”
“What, you looking for tourist tips?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“OK. Fine. No small talk. Mind if I sit?”
&nbs
p; Mesa used the gun to point to the pew across from her, and Mariann nodded, sliding onto the wooden seat kitty-corner from her.
“I’m not sure what you know about the LA branch.”
“Presume I don’t know anything at all. Tell me everything.”
“OK. So. Our enclave was small but well-funded. We were supported by a woman named Alice Xie, who was the head of an organized crime syndicate.” She paused, making sure Mesa was still with her.
“What use did a gangster have for memorialists?” Mesa asked.
Korgan nodded with approval. “Good question. Most memorialists see the convergence web as a system of unity, something that connects mankind, right?”
“Sure.”
“But it can also be used for exploitation, blackmail, murder. It’s amazing how much information people put out there freely on a daily basis, you know? Entire memories that they don’t even think about, just surface stuff. Superficial memories. But memories have layers, and most don’t even stop to recognize that, or realize how easy it can be to peel back those layers and glean information. So, like, you ask what good a convergence web would be for a gangster, and I’m telling you it’s a treasure trove for exploitation.”
“And what you’re saying beneath all that is, there’s a pretty good reason for people to want you dead.” Mesa’s eyes flickered around the church, seeking any signs of movement. The feed off Kaizhou’s sightlines was clear, but she was starting to worry about the implications of Korgan’s line of thoughts.
Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Page 11
