“Those cops aren’t gonna let us be.” Then: “I can’t talk to cops.”
“You can’t make them stop?”
“Nah, they’re too focused.” I stand up, reach down for her. “We’ve got money for the bus to LA. That’s what we needed.”
She shakes her head, shoves the money from the can into her pocket, and stands up without my hand. We start walking. The cops lose interest.
We’re crossing up over the big open field by City Hall when I feel someone watching me. I slow and look around.
“What’s up?” Corina asks, looking around herself.
I wave her off, still focused on my feeling. “Sec . . .” Then I see him.
When you see Bicycle Man, run up the hill!
A blond guy, his hair barely contained by his helmet, is drinking coffee from a paper cup, watching us from the other side of the park. Even at a distance, I recognize him. He nearly ran into me on the night the Locust killed my parents. Bicycle Man. I make myself look away like I didn’t see him, didn’t recognize him. I make myself smile like everything’s good and start walking again, falling in right next to Corina.
“Don’t act weird, but we’re being followed.”
She doesn’t miss a step. She doesn’t turn around. “Who?”
“Bicycle Man. I warned myself about him on my self-glide . . .” I trail off because I can’t finish my thought out loud. Suddenly, I know the truth: He’s the guy who delivered the Live-Tech. He’s the guy who brought the Locust to my house. He’s the guy who arranged for my parents to be killed.
“He’s working with them.”
She’s quiet until we reach the corner. While we’re waiting for the light, she looks around. “I see him.” Then: “Ideas?”
“When I warned me about him?”
She looks at me: “Yeah?”
“I told myself what to do.”
The light’s ready to turn. “What?”
The walk sign lights up. “Run up the hill!”
We dash across the street. It’s crowded in the crosswalk, so we leave the lines, running between waiting cars, getting to the far side.
“This way!” Corina shouts, pointing up the big hill to our right.
She takes off before she finishes, catching me flat-footed. I jump after her, not wanting to get separated. Bicycle Man is on the far side of the street. He’s got his bike and he’s starting up the hill parallel to us.
But the hill’s getting steep and it’s easier to run than bike. He starts to fall behind. My legs feel heavy and my lungs hurt, but we push on. Corina’s still ahead of me, creating a path through the pedestrians. By the time we reach the top, he’s two blocks behind us.
“There!” Corina’s pointing at a hotel with a line of driverless cabs in front. We dash to the first one, tell it to drive, but it doesn’t move.
“We don’t have the App, Plugzer—we aren’t going anywhere.” She starts to get back out of the car.
I dive. The guy at the valet stand. He’s an easy rewrite and by the time I open my eyes, he’s got his screen up against the tap pad.
“Thanks!” Corina says to him, closing her door.
The cab pulls into traffic.
“Where we going?” Corina asks me when she sees my eyes open.
“Back across the bridge, then I don’t know.”
She looks out the back window and I do, too. We both duck down suddenly. Bicycle Man is cresting the hill. “We should get out of town.”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t say anything for a bit, but then she looks at me. “I don’t want to take more busses, so you’d better find somebody to rewrite into giving us a ride.”
Fifty-Five
We’ve been in LA for days. Nothing. We’ve visited lakes. We’ve done what we can to avoid being seen, but every minute we stay, the chances that Bicycle Man or somebody like him finds us gets bigger, and the only thing we’ve learned is that Corina and I irritate each other when we’re feeling hopeless.
Corina doesn’t know what I’m planning. She went to get us some dinner. When she gets back, I’ll know what the plan is—I’ll know what’s going to happen.
I won’t be able to tell her because I’ll be a Zombie, but at least I’ll know. I lie down on the bed. I’ve been working on how to do this for a few days, but this is my first real attempt. I close my eyes. My music is there, top of the drawer. I pull it, examine the staff, looking far ahead, following it beyond where it splits, splits again and again, following one thread into the mist.
A week from now:
My eyes are closed. This was a bad idea. Memories are flooding in, but it’s all coming in too quickly to sort. There’re parts that feel familiar and then there are other parts that don’t make any sense.
I open my eyes. I’m in a bathroom stall. I’m sitting on the toilet with my pants down. My head is in my hands and my legs are nearly asleep. I’ve been here awhile.
Corina is here, too. Somewhere. Outside. We’re at a rest stop near Palm Springs. Near the windmills, past the big casino.
We got a ride here from a guy in a minivan who made room for us by asking his youngest son to sit on another kid’s lap. I wouldn’t have made him do it if we hadn’t been desperate.
We needed to get away.
The last week comes into clearer focus:
I make a plan.
Corina and I talk it over. She wants to keep going to lakes, but I tell her it’s a waste of time. I tell her about the car crash when the truck nearly hit me and how Cassandra was the one who saved me. “Maybe she’s still around my old neighborhood.”
Corina’s sure somebody will recognize me and I’ll get arrested. I point to my hair, which is now a fuzzy mess. “It looks so terrible that as long as I wear the nerd glasses, nobody’ll even look at me twice except to laugh.”
She comes around eventually, but she’s not thrilled.
We set out the next morning. We’re on the bus and then we’re at Echo Park. I’m sweating bullets. Corina is walking next to me. We hold hands while we walk around the lake.
She thinks it’s really pretty. The lotus flowers are just starting their first blooms, the turtles and birds are everywhere. She wants to rent a pedal boat, but I can’t even think about doing that.
I’m too messed up by being this close to home.
It’s like nothing’s changed here at all. My family being gone hasn’t brought even one part of life here to a standstill.
All the normal feels personal and it hurts.
There’s no sign of Cassandra.
We go to Elysian Park. We’re on the old road that runs from Scott up toward the conference center when I hear someone familiar nearby.
It’s not anybody I recognize from LA.
“Something’s not right,” I whisper to Corina.
“What?” She looks around. She’s as nervous as me.
I don’t know. We scramble down into some bushes and wait.
Minutes later, we see it.
“There!” I point back up at the road. It’s not much bigger than a bumblebee, but it flies too straight for any bug. They’re called dragonflies because of how they look, but nobody says that—we call them flying pigs.
She squints, then sees it. “Well, shit,” Corina whispers. “Is it here for us?”
“Don’t think the cops’d be using theirs to watch an empty park trail.”
“Shit.”
We hold still, careful to stay quiet as it flies past on the road. Moments later, Bicycle Man comes into view, walking slowly, watching the air in front of him where the flying pig’s camera view is being projected.
“Fuck,” I whisper without meaning to. “How’s he here?”
Corina shakes her head, reaches for the scar on her arm where her patch was. “I don’t know.”
We
go silent, holding perfectly still as he passes close to us. When he’s past, we scoot deeper into the trees to hunker down until it’s dark, when I move us to another place I know—a tight-knit grove of trees and bushes that has a hollow place in the middle. We called it the Den when we were kids—it’s where we used to hang out. Nobody ever came here but us because it’s up a steep hill that doesn’t look like it has a trail.
All night long, we can hear the soft buzz of flying pigs as they circle around, looking for us. In the morning, as I’m looking for a place to go to the bathroom, I catch sight of the trail below us.
Bicycle Man’s standing there, looking down the hill toward the grass.
I stay where I am and wait for him to leave, praying that Corina doesn’t choose this moment to come looking for me.
He’s following us, and I don’t know how. He doesn’t seem to be able to pinpoint us, but he’s able to get a general location. It occurs to me that he might be using face-rec from public cameras, so he would have seen us coming into the park, but can’t figure out exactly where we are. If that’s the case, we’re never going to be able to get clean away unless we stop him. I sit still, wait for him to leave, think about what to do. By the time he’s gone and the air around us is quiet, it’s been so long my legs have fallen asleep and my bladder feels like it’s going to explode.
Corina and I come up with a plan. We wait for Bicycle Man to come back along the trail below us. I hear his music before I see him, and we brace ourselves. When he reaches the outlet of the coyote trail that leads to us, Corina makes a noise.
He stops, looks up to where we are, smiles, then starts up the hill, scrambling right past where I’m hiding.
He doesn’t see me until it’s too late. I kick his feet out from under him and he falls face-first into the dirt.
I bring up the concrete I’ve found. It’s heavy, the size of a football.
I drop it on his head. It lands with a thud. His instrument jangles like broken strings and he makes a sound like a sigh, then he’s quiet, his music no more than a faint reverb. We run to the road, where we meet the guy in the minivan. He was only going home to Highland Park, but I helped him want to drive us east.
On the way, I use his son’s screen to send a message to the reporter:
Sarah,
Tell my auntie that I love her and that she was right about Sabazios. He’s working with the LOCUSTS!
Tell everyone that Sabazios is trying to get us all to use Live-Tech because when it’s connected to people it lets the Locusts know where to go.
When everybody has it, they’re going to all come at once and make us slaves and food.
Jordan Castle is going to give a speech for MtLA where she’s going to blow the cover off of everything and she’s going to say that Sabazios and Live-Tech are the answer, but she’s WRONG and you have to tell people. Jeffrey Sabazios is THE ENEMY!
I don’t know if she’ll listen to me, but I have to try.
We ask the driver to drop us at the rest stop. It felt like a good place to get ourselves together.
To get cleaned up.
I get up off the toilet and go look for Corina. I hear her before I see her.
She’s still scared. She’s scared of going to jail. She’s afraid of dying. She’s still scared for me. I can hear it in her music.
The wind is whipping hard and my hood fills with air. I turn away from the wind, toward the mountains on the other side of the rest area.
They look familiar. They look like something I’ve seen before.
I turn to find Corina. I see her standing by herself near the tables. She’s looking at the mountains, too.
I walk up to her. I approach her slowly so I don’t scare her.
She looks at me. “There’s no water.”
“Not on this side,” I say. I reach for her hand. She gives it to me. I lead her down to the building where the bathrooms are, where there’s a map.
I point at it. I point at the big blue spot. “The Salton Sea,” she reads.
I nod.
Fifty-Six
I open my eyes, still in the hotel room in LA. I know what I’m going to do, and the weight of it falls on me like concrete. I’m going to kill someone, and it’s locked in. I can already feel my ability to make choices slip away. The formfitting glass prison descends.
Zombie Time.
Fifty-Seven
I’m still looking at the rest-stop map of the Salton Sea when I de-Zombie. The first thing I notice is the noise—the Jungle comes crashing back. To make sure, I take a deep breath, then jump up and down. I slap my face.
Corina looks at me. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’ve been a Zombie,” I tell her. “I self-witnessed back when we first got to LA.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
I don’t answer for a minute because I really don’t know what to say, but then: “I was scared, I guess. I wanted to know what would happen.” I reach for her and pull her toward me. She comes, but she’s just going along with it, which makes me feel even worse.
She pulls back and pushes me away, turns to face me. “That was idiotic!”
“No—”
“Yeah,” she interrupts. “Yeah it was idiotic—you went to a future but you didn’t know what future you were going to, did you? You didn’t have any way of knowing that you weren’t going to see a future where we die or where the Locusts and Sabazios and them get away with it.” She brings her hands up in front of her. “You didn’t even think of that, did you? Did you?” She claps the back of her hand with each word and it’s all I can do not to flinch.
“It’s not like that.”
“Really?” She raises an eyebrow.
I want to argue, but I know she’s right. I turn to look in another direction while I get myself under control. When I’m ready, I say, “We need to go to the Salton Sea.”
I don’t look to her, but from the corner of my eye I see her purse her lips and nod. “Get us a ride.”
I do. A trucker who doesn’t speak English. He gives us a ride and a few bucks—he doesn’t have much. He also buys us lunch, which is cool. I don’t really understand how I’m supposed to act around people I’ve rewritten. I end up saying thank you a lot.
Corina rides in silence. She just says, “I don’t speak Spanish,” and looks out the window.
The driver talks in Spanish and I pretend to understand more than I do because hearing him talk makes me feel closer to home than I’ve felt in a while. I smile some. I laugh when he laughs. But all I can think about is what a mess I’ve made of things.
We’re on the road that runs against the east edge of the sea. I can feel the heat pushing in against the air-conditioning through the windows.
We’re past the last field, the last turnoff, the last sign of civilization besides the road itself and the railroad tracks that run on the left side of it when Corina says, “Stop.”
I look out her window.
It’s the view from the picture.
The driver pulls over on the shoulder and we get out. He says something, waves, drives off.
It’s as hot as I have ever felt it and the air smells like dead things. It’s almost unbearable. Even so, the water’s pretty—brilliant blue against the dead brown that’s all around it.
“That way.” Corina points.
I follow her down an old unpaved road that has other roads branching off it. They’re spaced evenly, but there’s nowhere for them to go. “What is this place?”
“How would I know?” she says. Still, she stops and looks around. “Maybe they thought people would want to live out here or something.” She wrinkles her nose and wipes her forehead.
I laugh. So does she. A weight lifts.
We follow the road to the beach. Corina pulls the photo out of my pack. She studies it and then hand
s it to me.
In the picture, Cassandra and I are standing next to each other with our backs to the water. There are mounds of white sand all around us. I look down. I’m wearing the clothes I’m wearing now. I feel my hair. It’s the same length as it is in the picture. I look up and Corina’s looking at me. She’s shaking her head slowly. “That’s some shit.”
I nod. We walk down the short hill to the beach.
The sand on the beach isn’t sand, it’s little tube shells. Millions of them. Billions. They’re stacked two feet high in some places.
There are piles of dead fish, too, some fresh, some just skeletons. The smell makes me ill. The whole place feels as alien as the Locusts’ planet I saw in the telescope. I find the place where I’m standing in the picture. I look out across the water and up at the mountains on the other side.
“Alex?” Corina says.
I turn around.
Someone’s coming.
Fifty-Eight
We stand there on the hot beach, smelling the smell and sweating. My mind is strangely still. There is no life nearby aside from us and together we sound empty like a cowboy’s harmonica against a night campfire. “It’s her, isn’t it?” I ask Corina because I can’t stand the waiting in silence.
“I expect so.” She’s nervous, and if it weren’t so hot, I’d put my arm around her.
It feels like it takes forever for Cassandra to reach the small hill that leads down to the beach. Close up, she looks different than she did when I witnessed her—her hair is longer and it’s curly, like an eighties rocker chick. She’s wearing the same loose white tank top, black lace bra, and black jegging-style pants that she had in the picture. The same black Converse.
She stumbles a little bit coming down the hill. Neither of us makes any move to help her.
“Hey,” she says, standing up. She looks Corina up and down and then turns to me and smiles. “You’re just as cute as I knew you’d be.”
I flash on an image of her from my witnessing, lifting the covers as she turned. My stomach tightens and I try to change my thoughts, but I can’t. “Hey,” I reply, wishing I was better at coming up with things to say.
Strange Days Page 27
