Nisi Shawl
“Let’s cross it while it’s still floating.” Aim was always in a hurry these days. Nineteen, and she didn’t figure she had a whole lot of time left before she’d go Otherwise.
“Hold up,” I told her, and she listened. I listened, too, and I heard that weird noise again above the soft wind: an engine running. That was what cars sounded like; they used to fill the roads, back when I was only thirteen. Some of the older models still worked—the ones built without no chips.
A steady purr, like a big, fat cat—and there, I saw a glint moving far out on the bridge: sun on a hood or windshield. I raised my binoculars and confirmed it: a pickup truck, headed our way, east, coming towards us out of Seattle.
“What, Lo?” Aim asked.
If I could see them, maybe they could see us. “Come on. Bring the rolly; I’ll help.” We lifted our rolling suitcase together and I led us into the bushes crowding over the road’s edge. Leaves and thorns slashed at our pant legs and sleeves and faces—I beat them away and found a kind of clear area in their middle. Maybe there used to be something, a concrete pad for trash cans or something there. Moss, black and dry from the summer, crunched as we walked over it. We lowered the suitcase, heavy with Aim’s tools, and I was about to explain to her why we were hiding but by now that truck was loud and I could tell she heard it, too. All she said was, “What are they gonna think if they see our tracks disappear?”
I had a knife, and I kept it sharp. I pulled it out of the leather sheath I’d made. That was answer enough for Aim. She smiled—a nasty smile, but I loved it the way I loved everything about her: her smell; her long braids; her grimy, stubby nails.
I thought we’d lucked out when the truck barreled by fast—must have been going thirty miles an hour—but then it screeched to a stop. Two doors creaked open. Boot heels clopped on the asphalt. Getting louder. Pausing about even with where I’d ducked us off into the brush.
“Hey!” A dude. “You can come out—we ain’t gonna do ya no harm.”
Neither one of us moved a hair. Swearing, then thrashing noises, more swearing, louder as Truckdude crashed through the blackberries. He’ll never find us, I thought, and I was right. It was his partner who snuck up on our other side, silent as a tick.
“Got ’em, Claude,” he yelled, standing up from the weeds with a gun in his hand. He waved it at me and Aim and spoke in a normal tone. “You two can get up if you want. But do it slow.”
He raised his voice again. “Chicas. One of ’em’s kinda pretty but the other’s fat,” he told Claude. “You wanna arm wrestle?”
Claude stopped swearing but kept breaking branches and tearing his clothes as he whacked his way over to us. I stayed hunkered down so they’d underestimate me, and so my knife wouldn’t fall out from where I had it clamped between my thighs. I felt Aim’s arm tremble against mine as Claude emerged from the shadows. She’d be fine, though. Exactly like on a salvage run. I leaned against her a second to let her know that.
The dude with the gun looked a little older than us. Not much older, of course, or he’d have already gone Otherwise, found his own pocket universe, like nearly everyone else whose brain had reached “maturity”—at least that’s how the rumors went.
Claude looked my age, or a year or two younger: fifteen, sixteen. He and his partner had the same brown hair and squinty eyes; brothers, then. Probably.
I leered up at Guntoter. “You wanna watch me and her do it first?”
He spat on my upturned face. “Freak! You keep quiet till I tell you talk.” The spit tickled as it ran down my cheek.
I didn’t hate him. Didn’t have the time; I was too busy planning my next move.
“Hey, Dwight, what you think they got in here?” Claude had found our suitcase and given me a name for Guntoter.
“Open ’er up and find out, dickhead.”
I couldn’t turn around to see the rolly without looking away from Dwight, which didn’t seem like a good idea. I heard its zipper and the clink of steel on steel: chisels, hammers, wrenches, clamps, banging against each other as they spilled out on the ground.
“Whoa! Looky at these, Claude. You think that ugly one knows how to use this stuff?” Dwight took his eyes off us and lowered the gun like I’d been waiting for him to do. I launched myself at his legs, a two-hundred-twenty-pound dodgeball. Heard a crack as his left knee bent backwards. Then a loud shot from his gun—but only one before I had my knife at his throat.
“Eennngh!” he whined. Knee must have hurt, but my blade poking against the underside of his chin kept his mouth shut.
I nodded at Aim and she relieved him of his gun. Claude had run off—I heard him thrashing through the bushes in the direction of the road. “Be right back, Lo.” Aim was fine, as I’d predicted, thinking straight and acting cool. She stalked after her prey calm and careful, gun at the ready.
I rocked back on my haunches, easing off Dwight’s ribs a bit. That leg had to be fractured, Problema; how was I supposed to deal with him, wounded like this? Maybe I shouldn’t have hit him so hard. Not as if I could take him to a hospital. I felt him sucking in his breath, winding up for a scream, and sank my full weight on his chest again.
“Lo! You gotta come here!” Aim yelled from the road.
Come there? What? “Why? You can’t handle—You didn’t let him get his truck back, did—”
“Just come!” She sounded pissed.
Dwight wasn’t going anywhere on his own any time soon, but just in case I tugged off his belt and boots and pants and took away the rest of his weapons: a razor poking through a piece of wood, a folding knife with half the blade of mine, and a long leather bag filled with something heavier than sand. I only hurt him a little stripping off the pants.
I got to my feet and looked down a second, wondering if I should shoot the man and get his misery over with. Even after years of leading salvage runs I didn’t have it in me, though.
I loaded dude’s junk and Aim’s spilled-out tools in the rolly and dragged it along behind me into the bushes. When he saw I was leaving him he started hollering for help like it might come. That worried me. I hurried out to Aim. Had Claude somehow armed himself?
Claude was nowhere in sight. Aim stood by the truck—our truck, now. She had the door open, staring inside. The gun—our gun, now—hung loose in one hand and the other stretched inside. “Come on,” she said, not to me. “It’s okay.” She hauled her hand back with a kid attached: white with brown hair, like his brothers. They must have been his brothers—I got closer and saw he had that same squintiness going on.
“Look,” I said, “leave him here and climb in. If they got any back-up—” Boom! Shotguns make a hecka loud noise. Pellets and gravel went pinging off the road. Scared me so much I swung the rolly up into the truck bed by myself. Then I shoved Aim through the door and jumped in after her. Turned the ignition—they had left the key in it—and backed out of there fast as I could rev. Maybe forty feet along, I swung around and switched to second gear. I hit third by the time we made the bridge, jouncing over pits in the asphalt. Some sections were awful low—leaky pontoons. Next storm would sink the whole thing, Aim had said. I told myself if the thing held up on the dudes’ ride over here it was gonna be fine for us heading back.
I looked to my right. Aim had pushed the kid ahead of her so he was huddled against the far door. I braked. “Okay, here you go.” But he made no move to leave. “What’s the matter, you think I’ll shoot? Go on, we won’t hurt you.”
“He’s shaking,” Aim reported. “Bad. I think he’s freaking out.”
“Well that’s great. Open the door for him yourself then, and let’s go.”
“No.”
I sighed. Aim had this stubbornness no one would suspect unless they spent a long time with her. “Listen, Aim, it was genius to keep him till I drove out of shooting range, but—”
“We can’t just dump him off alone.”
“He’s not alone; his brothers are right behind us!”
“One of ’em with a broken leg.”
“Knee.” But I took her point. “So, yeah, they’re not gonna be much use for making this little guy feel all better again real soon. C’est la flippin vie.” I reached past her to the door handle. She looked at me and I dropped my hand in my lap. “Aw, Aim….”
Aim missed her family. I knew all about how they’d gone on vacation to Disney World without her when she insisted she was too old for that stuff. Their flights back got canceled, first one, then the next, and the next, till no one pretended anymore there might be another, and the cells stopped working and the last bus into Pasco unloaded and they weren’t on it.
“Hector—” She couldn’t say more than his name.
“Aim, he’s twelve now. He’s fine. Even if your—” Even if her mom and dad had deserted him like so many other parents, leaving our world to live Otherwise, where they had anything, everything, whatever they wanted, same as when they drank the drug, but now for always. Or so the rumors said. Perfect homes. Perfect jobs. Perfect daughters. Perfect sons.
“All right. Kid, you wanna come with us or stay here with—um, Claude and Dwight?”
Nothing.
I tried again. “Kid, we gotta leave. We’re meeting a friend in—” In the rearview I saw five dudes on foot racing up the road. One waved a long, thin black thing over his head. That shotgun? I slammed the truck out of neutral and tore off. They dwindled in the dust.
Aim punched my shoulder and grinned at me. “You done good,” she said. I looked and she had one arm around the little kid, holding him steady, so I concentrated on finding a path for the truck that included mostly even pavement.
Here came the tunnel under Mercer Island. Scary, and not only because its lights were bound to be out—I turned the trucks’ on and they made bright spots on the ivy hanging over the tunnel’s mouth. That took care of that. Better than if we’d been on foot, even.
But richies…more of them had stayed around than went Otherwise. Which made sense; they had their own drugs they used instead of Likewise, and everything already perfect anyways. Or everything used to be perfect for them till too many ordinary people left and they couldn’t find no one to scrub their toilets or take out their garbage. Only us.
When things got bad and the governments broke down, richies were the law, all the law around. What they wanted they got, in this world as much as any Otherwise. And what they wanted was slaves. Servants, they called us, but slaves is what it really was; who’d want to spend whatever time they had before they went Otherwise on doing stupid jobs for somebody else? Nobody who wasn’t forced to.
We drove through the ivy curtain. I jabbed on the high beams and slowed to watch for nets or other signs of ambush. Which of course there were gonna be none, because hadn’t this very truck come through here less than half an hour ago? But.
“Can’t be too careful.” Aim always knew what I was thinking.
The headlights caught on a heap of something brown and gray spread over most of the road and I had two sets of choices: speed up, or slow down more; drive right over it, or swerve around. I picked A and A: stomped the gas pedal and held the steering wheel tight. Suddenly closer I saw legs, arms, bloated faces, smelled the stink of death. I felt the awful give beneath our tires. It was a roadblock of bodies—broken glass glittered where we would have gone if I’d tried to avoid them, and two fresh corpses splayed on the concrete, blood still wet and red. A trap, but a sprung one. Thanks, Claude. Thanks, Dwight.
The pile of rotting dead people fell behind us mercifully fast. I risked a glance at the kid. He stared straight forward like we were bringing him home from seeing a movie he had put on mental replay. Like there was nothing to see outside the truck and never had been and never would be.
“Maybe this was what freaked him out in the first place?” asked Aim. “You know, before he even got to us?” It was a theory.
We came out into the glorious light again. One more short tunnel as the road entered the city was how I remembered the route. I stopped the truck to think. When my fingers started aching I let go of the wheel.
A bird landed on a loose section of the other bridge that used to run parallel. Fall before last it had been the widest of its kind in the world, according to Aim.
She cared about those kinds of things.
The sun was fairly high yet. We’d left our camp in the mountains early this morning and come twelve mostly downhill miles before meeting up with the kid’s brothers. The plan had been to cross the bridge inconspicuously, on foot, hole up in Seward Park with the Rattlers and wait for Rob to show. Well, we’d blown the inconspicuous part.
“Sure you don’t wanna go back?” I asked Aim. “They’ll be glad to see us. And the truck’ll make it a short trip, and it’s awesome salvage, too….” I trailed off.
“You can if you rather.” But she knew the answer. I didn’t have to say it. Aim was why I’d stayed in Pasco instead of claiming a place on the res, which even a mix had a right to do. Now I had come with her this far for love. And I’d go further. To the edge of the continent. All the way.
Rob had better be worth it, though. With his red hair and freckles and singing and guitar-playing Aim couldn’t shut up about since we got his message. And that secret fire she said was burning inside him like a cigarette, back when they were at their arts camp. He better be worthy of her.
“Stop pouting.” She puckered her face and crossed her eyes. “Your face will get stuck like that. Let me drive. Chevies are sweet.” She handed me the gun, our only distance weapon—and I hadn’t even gotten Dwight’s cartridges, but too late to think of that—then slid so her warm hip pressed against mine for a moment. “Go on. Get out.”
The kid didn’t move when I opened the passenger door so I crawled in over him.
Aim drove like there was traffic: careful, using signals. Guess she learned it from watching her folks. The tunnel turned out clear except for a couple of crappy modern RVs no one had bothered torching yet. One still had curtains in its smashed windows, fluttering when we went by. We exited onto the main drag—Rainier Avenue, I recalled. Aim braked at the end of the ramp. “Which way?”
“South.” I pointed left.
Rainier had seen some action. Weed-covered concrete rubble lined the road’s edges, narrowing it to one lane. A half-burned restaurant sign advertised hotcakes. A sandbag bunker, evidently empty, guarded an intersection filled with a downed walkway. A shred of tattered camo clung to a wrecked lamppost. Must be relics of the early days; soldiers had been some of the first outside jail to head Otherwise, deserting in larger and larger numbers as real life got lousier and lousier.
“Wow. What a mess.” Aim eased over a spill of bricks and stayed in low gear to rubberneck. “How’re we gonna get off of this and find the park?”
“Uhhh.” Would we have to dig ourselves a turnoff? No—“Here!” More sandbags, but some had tumbled down from their makeshift walls, and we only had to shove a few aside to reach a four-lane street straight to the lakeshore. We followed that around to where the first of the Rattlers’ lookouts towered up like a giant birdhouse for ostriches with fifty-foot legs. A chica had already sighted us and trained her slingshot on the truck’s windshield. Her companion called out and we identified ourselves enough that they let us through to the gate in their chain-link fence. Another building, this one more like the bunker on Rainier, blocked the way inside. Four Rattlers were stationed here, looking like paintball geeks gone to heaven. We satisfied them of our bona fides, too, using the sheet of crypto and half a rubber snake their runner had turned over with Rob’s message. They took my knife. I didn’t blame ’em. They let us keep our gun, but minus the bullets.
“What’s in the back?”
I hadn’t even looked after tossing up the rolly. Dumb. When the sentries opened the big metal drums, though, they found nothing but fuel in them, no one hiding till they could bust out and slit our throats.
Four of those, and the rest of the bed was filled with covered five-gallon tubs: white plastic, the high grade kind you use to ferment beer in. And that’s what was in the ten they checked.
“Welcome home,” one chica maybe my age said. Grudgingly, but she said it. She walked ahead to guide us into their main camp.
Didn’t take her long. A few minutes and I saw firepits, and picnic tables set together in parts of circles, tarps strung between trees over platforms, a handful of big tents. We pulled up next to their playground as the sun was barely beginning to wonder was it time to set. The chica banged on our hood twice, then nodded and scowled at us. Aim nodded too and shut off the ignition.
The kid opened the truck’s passenger door. Aim and I looked at each other in silence. Then she grinned. “I guess we’re there yet!”
Maybe it was the other littles on the swings and jungle gyms that got through to him. He slid to the ground and walked a few steps toward them, then stopped. I got out too and slammed the door. Didn’t faze him. He was focused on the fun and games.
“What have we here?” A longhaired dude wearing a mustache and a skirt came over from watching the littles play.
Aim opened her door and got out too. “We’re a day or so early I guess—Amy Niehauser and Dolores Grant.” I always tease Aim about how she ended up with such a non-Hispanic name, and she gives me grief right back about not having something made-up, like “Shaniqua” or “Running Fawn.” “We’re from Kiona. In Pasco?”
Dude nodded. “Sure. Since Britney was bringing you in I figured that was who you must be. I’m Curtis. We weren’t expecting a vehicle, though.” He waved a hand at the truck.
Britney had hopped up on the bed again while we talked, lifting the lids off the rest of the plastic tubs. “Likewise!” she shouted. “Look at this!”
Aim and I leaned up over the side to see. Britney was tearing off cover after cover. Sure enough, the five tubs furthest in were all at least three-quarters full of thick, indigo blue liquid with specks of pale purple foam. I had never seen so much Likewise in one place.
Curtis lost his cool. “What the hell! We told you we don’t allow that—that—” He didn’t have the vocabulary to call the drug a bad enough name.
“No, it’s not ours—we stole this truck and we didn’t know—” Aim tried to calm him down. She tugged at the tub nearest the end. “Here, we’ll help you pour ’em in the lake.”
“You seriously think we wanna pollute our water like that?”
“Look, I’m just saying we’ll get rid of it. We didn’t know, we just took this truck from some dudes acting like cowboys on the other side of the bridge, the little dude’s big brothers, and they had a few friends—”
That got Britney’s attention. “They follow you?”
“Not real far,” I said, breaking in. “Since when we took this we left ’em on foot.” And they hadn’t shot at us more than once—the fuel explained why. “They ain’t the only trouble you got for neighbors, either—I’d be more worried about Mercer Island if I were you than them bridge dudes—or a load of Likewise we can dump anywhere you want.”
“Right.” Curtis seemed to quiet down and consider this. “Yeah, we’ll dig a hole or something….”
No one had proved a connection between Likewise and all the adults talking about living Otherwise, then disappearing. No one had proved anything in a long time that I’d heard of. But the prisons where it first got made were the same ones so many “escaped” from early on, which is the only reason anyone even noticed a bunch of poor people had gone missing, IMO. News reports began about the time it was getting so popular outside, here and in a few more countries.
Some of us still cooked it up. Some of us still drank it. How long did the side-effects last? If you indulged at the age of sixteen would you vanish years later, as soon as your brain was ready? Could you even tell whether you went or not?
The ones who knew were in no position to tell us. They were Otherwise.
Britney went to report us to the committee, she said. A pair of twelve-year-olds came and showed us where to unload the fuel drums. I helped Aim lower the rolly from the bed—how had I got it up there on my own? My arms were gonna hurt bad when the adrenaline wore off—and she handed them the keys. They drove to the bunker with the Likewise for the sentries to watch over.
Aim had to head back to the playground after that. The little dude seemed thoroughly recovered: he’d thrown off his jacket and was running wild and yelling with the other kids like he belonged there.
The Rattlers’ committee met with us over dinner in this ridiculous tipi they’d rigged up down by the swimming beach. Buffaloes and lightning painted on the sides. I mean, even I knew tipis were plains technology and had nothing to do with tribes in these parts. But, well, the Rattlers acted proud and solemn bringing us inside, telling us to take off our shoes and which way to circle around the fire, and damn if they didn’t actually pass a real, live pipe after feeding us salads plus some beige glop that looked a lot worse than it tasted. And tortillas, which they insisted on calling frybread.
Tina, their eldest, sat on a sofa cushion; she looked maybe Aim’s age, but probably she was older. Trying to show the rest of the committee how to run things when she was gone Otherwise, she asked about folks at Kiona: who had hooked up with who, how many pregnant, any cool salvage we’d come across, any adults we’d noticed still sticking around. Aim answered her. There were two dudes, one on either side of Tina—husbands, maybe?—Rattlers were known for doing that kinda thing—and a couple younger chicas chiming in with compliments about how well we were doing for ourselves. I waited politely for them to raise the subject they wanted to talk about. Which was, as I’d figured, the five tubs of Likewise.
They decided to forgive us and opted to pour ’em in a hole like Aim suggested.
Tina had brains. “What’s interesting is that they were bringing this shipment out of Seattle.” She stretched her legs straight, pointed her toes up and pushed toward the fire with her wool-socked heels. August, and the evenings were on the verge of chilly.
“Not like the whole city’s sworn off,” one of the chicas ventured to say.
“Yeah.” I had the dude that agreed pegged for a husband because he wore a ring matching the one on Tina’s left hand. “That crew up in Gas Works? They could be brewing big old vats of Likewise and how would we know?”
The second dude chimed in. “They sure wouldn’t expect us to barter for any.” He wore a ring that matched the one on Tina’s right.
The young chica who’d already spoken wondered if it was their responsibility to keep the whole of Seattle clean, suburbs too. Husband One opined that they’d better think a while about that.
“Next question.” That was Tina again. “What are those bridge boys gonna do to get their shipment back?” She looked at me, though it was Aim who started talking.
We hadn’t told Claude or Dwight where we were going, or made a map for ’em or anything, so I thought the Rattlers were pretty safe. Plus I had hurt Dwight, broken at least one bone. But the committee decided the truck was a liability even if they painted it, and told us we better take it with us when we departed their territory. Which would have to be soon—“Tomorrow?” asked Husband Two.
Aim folded her lips between her front teeth a few seconds in that worried way she had. We’d expected more of a welcome, considering her skills. Kinda hoped she’d be able to set up a forge here for at least a week. Were the Rattlers gonna make us miss her date with Rob? But according to the committee’s spies he was close, already landed on this side of the Sound and heading south. He’d arrive any minute now. So we could keep our rendezvous.
Dammit.
Then I finally got to find out more on where all those corpses in the tunnel came from: richies, as I’d suspected. Didn’t seem like the committee wanted to go further into it, though. The dead people were who? People the richies had killed. How? Didn’t know. Didn’t think it mattered; dead was dead. And why were they stacked up on the road all unhygienic-like instead of properly buried? Have to send a detail to take care of that. And the two fresh ones? Tina said she figured the way I did that they were fallout from Claude and Dwayne’s trip through the blockade.
So why? Well, that was obvious, too: use the dead ones to catch us, alive, to work for ’em.
It became more obvious when Curtis took us to where we were supposed to sleep: a tree house far up the central hill of the park’s peninsula. He climbed the rope ladder ahead of us and showed us the pisspot, the water bucket and dipper, the bell to ring if one of us suddenly took violently ill in the night. Then he wanted to know if we’d seen his little sister’s body in the pile.
“Uh, no, we kinda—we had to go fast, didn’t see much. Really.” Aim could tell a great lie.
“She had nice hair, in ponytails. And big, light green eyes.”
Anybody’s eyes that had been open in that pile, they weren’t a color you’d recognize anymore. Mostly they were gone. Along with big chunks of face. “No, we, uh, we had to get out of there too fast. Really didn’t see. Sorry.”
He left us alone at last.
Alone as we were going to get—there was a lot of other tree houses nearby; dusk was settling in fast but we could see people moving up their own ladders, hear ’em talking soft and quiet.
“Lie down.” I patted the floor mat. She came into my arms. I had her body, no problema. I did hurt from heaving the rolly around, but that didn’t matter much. I stroked her bangs back from her pretty face that I knew even in the dark.
“What’d they do with Dwayne?”
“Who?”
“Dwayne, you know, the little dude?”
Right: Claude and Dwight’s kid brother. “That what you wanna call him?”
Aim snorted. “It’s his name. He told Curtis. I heard him.”
My fingers wandered down to the arches of her eyebrows, smoothing them flat. “You worried about him? He looked happy on the playground. They must have places for kids to sleep here. We seen plenty of ’em.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” The skin above her nose crinkled. I traced her profile, trying to give her something else to think of. It sort of worked.
“Why don’t the committee care more about the Mercer Island richies? That was—horrible. In the tunnel.”
I laughed, though it wasn’t the littlest bit funny. “Fail. Mega Fail—they were supposed to be protecting these people here and the richies raided ’em. I wouldn’t wanna talk about it either.”
I felt her forehead relax. “Yeah.” She reached up and tugged my scarf free so she could run her hands over my close-clipped scalp. That was more like it. I snuggled my head against the denim of her coat.
That was our last night together as a couple.
She only mentioned Rob once.
•
Next morning my arm felt even sorer. And my shoulder had turned stiff. And my wrist. Was getting old like this? No wonder people went Otherwise.
Aim and I woke up at the same time, same as at home and on salvage runs. “Good dreams?” I asked. She nodded and gave me a sheepish half-smile, so I didn’t have to ask who she’d dreamed about. It wasn’t me.
What kind of universe would Aim make if she went Otherwise? It wouldn’t be the same as mine.
Curtis had pointed out a latrine on the way to our treehouse. We dumped the pisspot there and took care of our other morning needs. It was a nice latrine, with soap and a bowl of water.
Down we went, following the trail to the main camp. Aim held my hand when we could walk side by side. Sweet moments. I knew I better treasure ’em.
I helped set out breakfast, which was berries and bars of what appeared to be last night’s beige glop, fossilized. Aim retrieved the rolly from where we’d left it under a supply tarp. She cleaned the gun, which she called Walter, and shined up her tools. Soon enough she attracted a clientele.
First come a dude could have been fourteen or fifteen; he wanted her to help him fix up an underwater trap for turtles and crayfish. Then he had a friend a little older who asked her to help him take apart a motor to power his boat. Actually, he had taken it apart already, and wanted her to put it together again with him.
Aim called a break for herself after a couple hours of this so she could go check out how Dwayne was doing. And she wanted to bring him a plum from the ones I collected for snacks. I waited by the tools for her to come back. A shadow cut the warm sun and I looked up from the dropcloth.
“Hey.” A dude’s voice. All I could see was a silhouette. Like an eclipse—a gold rim around darkness.
“Hey back.”
“You’re not Amy.”
“Nope.”
He sat down fast, folding his legs. “Must be Dolores, then? I’m Rob.” He held out a hand to shake, so I took it.
Now I could see him, dude was every bit as pretty as Aim had said. Dammit. Hair like new copper, tied back smooth and bright and loose below a wide-brimmed straw fedora. Eyes large, a strange, pale blue. Freckles like cinnamon all over his snub-nosed face and his long arms where they poked out of the black-and-white print shirt he wore. But not on his throat, which was smooth as vanilla ice cream and made me want to—no. This was Aim’s crush.
His hand was a little damp around the palm. Fingers long and strong. I let it go. “Aim’s around here somewhere; she’ll be back in a minute, I think, if you wanna wait.”
“Sure.” He had a tiny little stick, a twig, in the corner of his mouth. His lips were pink, not real thin for a white boy. Dammit.
“Where’s your guitar?” I asked.
“Left it back home, at the bunkers. The Herons’ll take care of it for me; too much to travel with. But I packed my pennywhistle.” He swapped the stick for something longer, shiny black and silver. He played a sad-sounding song, mostly slow, with some fast parts where one line ended and the next began. Then he speeded up, did a new, sort of jazzy tune. Then another, and I recognized it: “Firework.”
Aim recognized it, too. Or him, anyway—she came running up behind me shouting his name: “Rob! Rob!” She hauled him up with a hug. “I’m so glad! So glad!” He hugged her back. They both laughed and leaned away enough to look each other in the eyes.
“Oh, wow—” “Did you—” They started and stopped talking at the same time. Cute.
Dwayne had showed up in Aim’s wake. He stood to one side, hands in his front pockets, about as awkward as I felt.
Rob and Aim let go of each others’ arms. “Who’s this?” he asked her, bending his knees to put his face on the kid’s level.
“I’m Dwayne. I come all the way from Issaquah.” Which was nine times more words than I’d ever heard him use before. Maybe he liked white dudes.
“That’s pretty far. But I met somebody came even further.”
“Who’re you?”
“I’m Rob. I live in Fort Worden, other side of the Sound.”
“Issaquah is twenty-two miles from Seattle.”
“Well, this chica I’m talking about sailed to Fort Worden over the ocean from Liloan. That’s in the Philippines. Six thousand miles.”
“She did not!”
“I’m telling you.”
Here came Curtis over from the playground. He said hey and dragged Dwayne back with him with the promise of a swim, “—so you can get packed quick.”
The Rattlers wanted us gone yesterday. While Rob met with their committee to tell them the news out of Liloan—how the Philippines had been mostly missed by the EMPs and other tech-killers thrown around in the first mass panic—Aim loaded her tools in the rolly, and I went to find the truck. At the fuel shed they directed me up the remains of a service road. The twelve-year-olds had parked at the end of it; they were just through filling in the hole they’d dug, tamping down dirt with a couple of shovels. The empty Likewise tubs lay on their sides in the dead pine needles.
“Thanks,” I said. “We were gonna do that.”
“’Sall right,” the bigger one said. “Didn’t take long.”
“Yes it did.” Her friend wasn’t about to lie. “But we’re done, now, and nobody drunk it.
“Have you ever—” The smaller girl smacked the bigger one on her head. “Stop! I was only asking!” She turned to me again. “You ever taken any Likewise yourself?”
Once. A single dose was low risk—I’d heard of adults with the same history as me, twenty-four, twenty-five, and still not Otherwise.
“Tastes like dog slobber,” I told her. “Like spit bugs crapped in a bottle of glue.”
“Eeuuw!” They made faces and giggled. I thought about the questions they didn’t ask as they brought me back down in the truck. About how Likewise felt, what happened when I had it in me.
You could call it a dream. In it, my mom had never hit me and my dad had never got stoned. I was living in a house with Aim. The drug was specific: a yellow house with white trim, a picket fence. We had a dog named Quincy Jones and a parakeet named Sam. The governments were still running everything. We had a kid and jobs we went to. I remember falling asleep and waking up and getting maybe a little bored at work, but basically being happy. So happy.
Seemed like it went on for years. I was out for eight hours.
•
We could have driven all the way to Fort Worden, only Aim wanted to see the Space Needle. “C’mon, when are we gonna have another chance?”
I rolled my eyes. “You can see it from freakin anywhere, Aim. Ask them if they see it.” I pointed up at the chicas in the fifty-foot-high lookout.
“Okay. Touch it then. I mean touch it.”
Our first fight.
Of course Rob took her side. “Yeah, the truck; tough to let it go, but there’s no connections for us in Tacoma. Olympia either; can’t say who or what we might run into going south. I told the captain up at Edmonds I’d be back in a week. Maybe he can stow it for us? And even if we’re early that’s our best bet. North. So the Space Needle’s not much of a detour.”
Aim looked at me. “All flippin right,” I said.
I drove again. Aim took the middle seat, but it wasn’t me she pressed up against.
Rattlers had told us where to avoid, and I did my best. From Rainier I had to guess the route, and sometimes I guessed wrong. And sometimes my guesses would have been good if the roads didn’t have huge holes in ’em or obstacles too hard to move out of our way. We didn’t see anyone else, only signs they’d been around: coiled up wires, stacks of wood—not a surprise, since anyone on a scavenge run would have lookouts. Groups had mainly settled in parks where you could grow crops, and we weren’t trying to cross those.
We reached Seattle Center late. No time to find anywhere else to spend the night.
There had been action here, too. I remembered the news stories, though they hadn’t made any sense. Not then, and not now—why would anyone fight over such a place, so far off from any water? But tanks had crawled their way onto the grounds, smashing trees and sculptures, shooting fire and smoke back and forth. They left scars we could still see: burned-out buildings, craters, bullet holes.
The Space Needle stood in the middle of about an acre of blackberries covering torn-up concrete—what used to be a plaza. Old black soot and orange rust marked its once-white legs. I tooled us under a pair of concrete pillars for the dead Monorail and backed in as close as I could get without slicing open a tire. “There you go,” I said. “Touch it.” Which was a little mean, I admit.
Rob climbed out the window without opening the door and got up on the truck cab’s roof. He stuck his arm in and hauled Aim after him. I heard the two of ’em talking about chopping a path through the thorns if they’d had swords, and how to forge them, and a trick Aim knew called damascening. Aim recited her facts about how high the thing was, how long it took to erect, et cetera.
Then I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then her breath. I turned on the radio, like there’d be something more than static to cover up the sounds they were going to make.
One of them shifted and the metal above my head popped in and out. That gave me courage to hit the horn—a short blast like it was an accident—and open the door. Very, very slowly.
Shin deep in brambles I unhooked from my pants one by one, I took a blanket from the boxes of supplies the Rattlers sent us off with. Then I couldn’t help myself; I looked. They both had all their clothes on and were sitting up. For the moment. Aim waved. Rob pretended to stroke a beard he didn’t have and smiled.
“In a minute,” I said, meaning I’d come back. Eventually. Give me strength, I thought, and I smiled, too, and waded carefully along the trail the truck had smashed.
She wanted to be with him. I loved her anyhow. To the edge of the continent. All the way.
I would follow her.
But tonight I would sleep alone.
•
At least that was the plan. When it came down to it, though, I didn’t dare rest my eyes. Dark was falling. The place was too open—bad juju. I had a feeling, once I got out from under my jealousy. So I found a trash barrel, rolled it up a ramp in the side of some place looked like a giant scorched wad of metal gum. I set the barrel upright, climbed and balanced on its rim, and scrabbled from there to lie on my stomach on a low roof—must have been the only flat surface to the whole building, even before the howitzers and grenade-launchers and whatever else attacked it.
Me and Walter settled in to keep watch. The Rattlers had returned his magazine when they gave me back my knife, and there were seven rounds left.
Aim and Rob were maybe fifty feet south. I still heard ’em clear enough to keep me awake till Claude and his friends showed up.
Trying to be smart, the bridge dudes turned off whatever vehicle they drove blocks away. The engine’s noise was a clue, and its silence was another. Insects went quiet to my east in case I needed a third.
Starlight’s not the best to see by. I couldn’t really count ’em—four or five dudes it must be, I figured, same as yesterday. They zeroed in on Aim and Rob, who were talking again.
“Hands up!” a dude commanded. How were they gonna tell, I wondered, but one of ’em opened the truck door and the courtesy light came on. There was Aim and Rob, a bit tousled up. Too bad I didn’t want to shoot them. Couldn’t get a line on anyone else.
“Get your sorry asses outta me and Dwight’s—outta my truck.” That would be Claude.
“Daddy? Where’s Daddy?” And that would be that kid Dwayne? His age was all wrong for Dwight to be his dad, but who else was it rising out of that supply box, pale-faced in the yellow courtesy light?
The kid must have stowed away. He held out his arms and kicked free of something and Claude stepped up to grab and lift him and now I had a great shot. Couldn’t have been better. But I didn’t take it.
Next minute I wished I had when dudes on either side yanked Aim and Rob out of opposite doors. I heard her yell at them and get slapped.
Someone else was yelling, too—not me, I was busy shimmying off the roof while there was cover for my noise. “No! Don’t hit her! No! Put me down!” Little Dwayne was on our side?
Brightness. Someone had switched on the truck’s headlamps. I ducked down. Aim was crying hard. They shoved her to the pavement. I hadn’t heard a peep outta Rob. When they marched him into the light I saw one dude’s hand over his mouth and a shiny piece of metal right below his ear. Knife or a gun—didn’t matter which. Woulda kept me quiet, too.
Only four of ’em. Plus Dwayne. Seven bullets seemed plenty—if I didn’t mind losing Rob.
I didn’t. But Aim would.
Bang! Bang! Walter wasn’t quite loud as a shotgun. Glass and metal pinged off the pavement, flew away into the sudden dark. Only one round each for the truck’s headlamps. I was proud of myself.
Light still came out of the cab from the overhead courtesy. Not much. I couldn’t see anybody.
But I could hear ’em shouting to each other to find the chica, and shooting. Randomly, I hoped. No screams, so Rob had probably got away all right.
I shifted position, which made the next part trickier, but would keep the dudes guessing where to kill me. I went round to one side, with the frame of the open driver’s door blocking my vision. Walter stayed steady—I gripped him with both hands and squeezed. Got it in one. I was good. Total night, now. I squirmed off on my belly for a ways to be sure no one had a flashlight, then crawled, then stumbled to my feet and walked. Headed north by the stars, with nothing on me but Walter, my knife, my binoculars. A blanket. Not even a bottle for water.
It was a shame to leave all the provisions the Rattlers had given us. And too bad I had to damage a high-functioning machine like that truck. Aim would cuss me out for it when we caught up with one another at Edmonds.
Aim would be fine. She always was. Rob, too, most likely.
•
I took the rest of that night and part of a day to walk there. It was easy: 99 most of the way. The stars were enough to see that by, and the Aurora Bridge was practically intact. I wondered what facts Aim would have told me about it if we were going over it together. All I knew was people used to kill themselves here by jumping off. Kids? Didn’t we used to have the highest rates of suicide?
If Aim didn’t show up at Edmonds in a few days maybe I’d come back. Or find some Likewise.
I snuck in the dark past where they used to have a zoo, worried I might run into some weird predator. I didn’t; when the animals got out they must’ve headed for the lake on the road’s other side. The sky got lighter and I began to look for pursuit as well as listening for it. Nobody came. The stores and restaurants lining the highway would have been scavenged out long ago. I was alone.
No Aim in sight.
Rain started to fall. I hung the blanket over my head like the Virgin Mary. Because of the clouds it was hard to tell time, but I figured I turned on to 104 a couple of hours after sunrise.
I went down a long slope to the water. Rob had said if we got split up to meet by a statue of sea lions on the beach.
This was my first time to be at the ocean. It was big, but I could see land out in its middle. Looked like I could just swim there.
Route 104 continued right on into the water. The statue was supposed to be to its south. The sand moved, soft and tiresome under my wet chucks. I spotted a clump of kids digging for something further towards the water, five or six of ’em. They didn’t try to stop me and I kept on without asking directions. A couple of ’em had slings out, but I must not have seemed too threatening; neither chica pointed ’em my way.
A metal seal humped up some stairs to a patch of green. Was this the place? I climbed up beside it. At the top, a garden. I could tell it was a garden since it wasn’t blackberries, though I had no idea what these plants were. But they grew in circles and lines, real patterns. And more metal seal sculptures—okay, sea lions—stuck out from between them.
Definitely. I was here. I curled up in the statue’s shelter and the rain stopped. I fell asleep.
A whisper woke me. “Lo!” My heart revved. Aim? Eyes open, all I saw was Rob.
“You can’t call me that.”
“Sorry. Didn’t want you to shoot me.”
I sat up straight and realized I had Walter in my hand. Falling asleep hadn’t been so stupid after all.
Rob’s ice cream throat had a red inch-long slice on one side, so it had been a knife the bridge dude held there. He seemed fine besides that. “Is she around?” he asked. “She and you came together?” I shook my head and he folded up his legs and sat down beside me. Too close. I scooted over.
We didn’t say anything for a long time. Could have been an hour. I was thirsty. And hungry. I wondered if maybe I ought to eat from the garden.
Rob held out his water bottle for me and I took it and drank. When I gave it back he didn’t even wipe the mouth off.
The clouds pulled themselves apart and let this beautiful golden orange light streak through. The sun was going down. I’d slept the whole afternoon.
“Look,” said Rob. “Look. I know you and Aim—”
“You can’t call her that.”
“Yes I can! Listen. Look. You were with her before me and I don’t want to—to mess with that.”
As if he hadn’t. “And?”
“And—and we were talking.” Among other things. “And she was saying if we got married—if she got married she would want to marry both of us.”
I stared at him hard to make sure he was serious. Me and Aim had teased each other about being married ever since we met in gym class. Even before people over twenty began going Otherwise.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one it was more than a joke for.
“So would you?”
“Would I what?” But I knew.
“Would you freakin marry me! Would you—”
“But I’m a lesbian! You’re a dude!”
“Well, duh.”
“And only because you wanna hook up with my chica? Unh-unh.”
“Well, it’s not only that.”
“Really?” I stood up. He did too. “What, you’re in love with me? I’m fat, I’m a big mouth, a smartass—”
“You’re plain old smart! And brave, and Aim thinks you’re the closest thing to a goddess who ever walked the earth.”
“What if I am?” I wanted to leave. But this was where she would come. I had to be here. I wrapped the blanket around me and tucked my arms tight.
“Yeah. What if you are? What if she’s right? I kinda think—” He quit talking a minute and looked over his shoulder at the beach. “I kinda think she is. You are.”
If he had tried to touch me then I would have knocked the fool unconscious.
Instead, he turned around and looked at the beach again. “That’s him,” he said. “Captain Lee.” He pointed and I saw a bright yellow triangle sailing toward us out of the west. “Our ride’s here ahead of time. I have to go meet him and tell him we need to wait for Aim.” He left me alone with my wet blanket.
It was almost dark by the time he came back, carrying a bucket. “Here you go. Supper.” I was ready to eat, no doubt. Inside was a hot baked yam and some greens with greasy pink fish mixed in. I washed it all down with more of Rob’s water.
We took turns hanging out at the statue. Rob had connections with the locals, the Hammerheads and this other group, the Twisters. He stayed with them, and I bunked on Lee’s boat.
Three days dragged past. I got used to a certain idea. I let him put his arm around me once when we met on the stairs. And another time when he introduced me to a dude he brought to pick some herbs in the garden—they were for medicines, not that nice to eat.
And another time. We were there together, but with my binoculars I saw her first. I shouted and he hugged me. Both arms. I broke away and ran and ran and yes, it was Aim! And Dwayne, which explained a lot when I thought about it afterwards, but I didn’t care right then.
“Aim! Aim!” I lifted her in the air and whirled us around and we kissed each other long and hard. I was with her and it was this reality, hers and mine and everybody else’s, not one I created just for me. I cried and laughed and yelled at the blue sky, so glad. Oh so freakin’ glad.
Of course I had known all along she’d make it.
And then Rob caught up with me and he kissed her too. She held my hand the whole time. So how could I feel jealous and left out?
Well, I could. But that might change, someday. Someday, it might be otherwise.
•