At the Tango Market
Hal thought the Airbnb apartment was comfortable enough for the three of them, but not for a dozen. Or for several dozens. Or for a hundred. But the longer they waited for the others to arrive, the more convinced he became that Red probably was right. No one else had made it.
He had known from the beginning that some might not make it to the twenty-first. But how had his calculations been this wrong? At last count, a couple of weeks before he’d arrived here, his Crows had numbered nine hundred and forty-five. And only three had made it? Less than one percent?
He wandered around the kitchen, studying everything, all the appliances—the refrigerator, stove, microwave, can opener, dishwasher, and the thing called a garbage disposal that ground up leftover food. So many conveniences, so many things that made life simpler, easier.
Red and Squirt stood at the kitchen counter, emptying their packs, arranging items they’d brought with them in neat piles. “I’m so fucking hungry,” Squirt groaned. “And there’s nothing to eat here except these protein bars we brought with us that taste like dirt. And bread from this loaf that was left in the fridge.” He slapped it down on the counter, opened it, brought out two slices of seeded bread. “I need something to spread on it.”
“Try this.” Red slid a jar across the counter. “It’s called peanut butter. I tried it, delish.”
Squirt slathered peanut butter on his two slices of bread, bit into one, and his expression went ecstatic. “Fantastic. But I need real food. Let’s go shopping.”
“It’s the middle of the fucking night,” Hal said. “And because of the curfew they’ll be looking for anyone who is out and about.”
“So what? We can defend ourselves. And we’ve had plenty of practice skulking around.”
“Let’s try one of the other apartments first,” Red suggested. “Keep things safer and simpler.”
Squirt didn’t look too happy about it, Hal thought, but he usually went along with the majority. When Squirt initially had arrived at the warehouse six months back, a referred recruit three or four times removed, the equivalent of a distant cousin, Hal hadn’t thought much of him. He couldn’t imagine what kind of talent a young fat kid with glasses might have that could be useful to his group, his tribe of Crows.
“So let’s see what you’ve got, kid,” Hal had said.
“You have any targets?”
They’d been inside the small room in the warehouse where Hal had conducted his initial interviews with prospective recruits. A table, a few chairs, a computer. No targets. “Uh, yeah, we have targets. What kind do you need?”
Squirt poked at his glasses, nudging them farther up onto the bridge of his nose. “Preferably something living. Like a Normal.” Then he chuckled, a weird, low sound. “But I don’t suppose you have any of those.”
“Nope. How about an animal?”
“One we can eat?”
“Yeah.”
“That’ll do.”
Hal had taken him out back, behind the warehouse, where cloned fish lived in a pond surrounded by a field of cloned rabbits, chickens, pigs. Squirt nodded, grinned, rubbed his palms together. “Yeah, this will do.”
Then he’d snapped his fingers and an old-world Frisbee had appeared in his hands. He twirled it between his fingers, eyeing the moving targets. “That one.” He pointed at a large rabbit just beyond them, standing upright on its haunches, and let the Frisbee fly.
The disk moved so fast Hal lost sight of it. The next thing he knew, Squirt ran toward the field, and there in the fake grass, the fake field, the fake pool of sunlight, lay a decapitated rabbit. Squirt swept the body off the ground, held it high, and shouted, “Rabbit stew!”
A Lethal. Hal had recruited him on the spot.
Now Squirt darted across the hall to another apartment, Hal and Red close behind him. He rattled the knob, the door was locked. Hal moved up next to him, gripped the handle with both hands, and melted it. The door swung open into an apartment empty of people, probably evacuees, and they moved inside with the stealth of thieves, paused, listened. Then Hal flicked on the lights and they hurried into the kitchen, to the fridge.
Squirt jerked the door open and Red gasped. “My God, look at all this stuff.”
Hal stood behind them, staring, unable to absorb it all immediately. Milk—skim, almond, whole, vanilla—vegetarian eggs, rolls, biscuits, cheeses, fruits, veggies, raw chicken and beef patties, yogurts of every imaginable flavor, juices, gallons of water, flours, chocolates, and food items he couldn’t identify.
“Load it all up.”
Hal grabbed fabric bags from a rack on the wall next to the fridge, gave Squirt and Red one each, kept another for himself. Then the three of them emptied the fridge, the freezer, the pantry, and needed more bags. Red found some plastic bags in a cabinet and handed them out.
During their pillage, a black and white cat emerged from somewhere, mewing pitifully. Whoever had lived here had left the pet behind. Hal scooped the animal up in his arms, rubbed his face against its beautiful, soft fur, and whispered, “Go to sleep for a little while.”
The cat went limp in his arms, and he collected food, bowls, a litter box. When they returned to their apartment, Hal set the cat gently on the couch. He filled a bowl with dry cat food, a second bowl with wet food, a third bowl with water, and put the litter box in the bathroom.
Throughout his childhood, his mother had shown him images of cats, videos of cats, books about cats, and he had grown to love them without ever seeing a real cat. Now he stood by the couch, staring at this black and white male cat, petting it, stroking it, whispering to it, enthralled. And the cat woke up, took one look at him, leaped off the couch and ran for the kitchen, where the food was.
Red and Squirt, whipping up concoctions in the kitchen, laughed. “You freaked him out,” Red remarked.
“I saved his life.”
“Yeah. Probably. Bacon, eggs, and French toast coming up.”
“What’s French toast?” Hal asked.
“Bread saturated in butter and cinnamon and powdered sugar,” Red replied. “I just found a recipe on the back of the bread package. We’ve also got fresh orange juice.”
“We’ve never had oranges,” Hal said.
“Well, we do now.” Squirt filled three glasses.
They stuffed their faces and afterward, Hal could barely keep his eyes open. He stretched out on the couch and the cat jumped up and joined him, purring loudly, and settled in the curve of Hal’s arm. He felt loved. “I’m calling you Whiskers, you beautiful cat.”
Louder purrs. Whiskers licked the back of his hand, his tongue warm and rough against Hal’s skin. Hal dozed off to the sound of that purring, content and hopeful for the first time in his life, certain that when he woke, the others would be here.
But when he bolted awake, Red was standing over him, her expression skewed with anger, fear, irritation, fatigue. “Squirt left, Hal. He took off on one of the bicycles in the utility room.”
“Shit.” He swung his legs over the side of the couch, rubbed his hands over his face. “When? When did he leave?”
“I don’t have any idea. I was recharging, just like you.”
But not Squirt. “So he’s taking a bike tour of the goddamn island?”
“I think he headed for the Tango Market. I Googled it and it’s the closest grocery store.”
Hal drew his fingers through Whiskers’s fur, got to his feet. “How many bikes are left?”
“Two. Let’s get going.”
They hurried into the utility room and walked the bikes through the apartment to the front door. “A car would be faster,” Hal said.
“Not really. First we’d have to find a car, then we have to steal it. By then, Squirt might be seen. I, uh, found our faces on Google, Hal. Something called an APB has been issued on us, because of what happened on the ferry. It means we’re going to have to disguise ourselves in some way if we go out during the day.”
“I’m starting to hate this century’s Internet. You know how to ride a bike?”
“Sort of. You?”
“Sort of.”
“A car is looking like a better option.”
“Let’s give the bikes a try.” Hal opened the door and pushed his bike onto the front porch.
Outside, nothing moved, nothing whispered. The dark air was so still, the soft squeaks of the pedals on Red’s bike sounded preternaturally loud. Their bikes bumped down the porch steps, then they both mounted. Hal promptly fell off, but Red managed to stay on and pedaled, weaving, down the sidewalk. It irritated him that she showed off like that. He remounted, still shaky, the handlebars wobbly, but he managed to stay on and caught up to her.
“Where’s the market?”
She held up her phone. “Got it on GPS. I think we should get off this main road, though, use a side road.”
They turned onto a side road that didn’t have street lights, so the pooled shadows were deeper, darker. Seconds later, Hal heard the trundling noise of one of those monstrous vehicles the soldiers drove, and he and Red pedaled madly into the trees to wait until it passed. Yes, the two of them could take on that monster and whoever was driving it, but then sirens would shriek all over the island like they had last night after the ferry fiasco. Best to stay low until they found Squirt and the others had arrived.
The monster passed and they continued down the side road and came up behind the Tango Market. They stashed the bikes in the bushes and Red pointed at a third bike. “He’s here.”
“Little shit. He isn’t supposed to leave the group.”
“Don’t pull your dictator thing on him, Hal. He won’t like it.”
“I’m not…”
“Yeah, yeah. Talk to the hand, dude.” She held up her right hand and tiny flames shot from her fingertips.
“Fuck you, Red.” He hurried toward the back door, certain he would have to melt the knob and the lock to get in. But in the dim light from his phone, the door looked like it had been attacked by a wild animal, the knob sitting cockeyed on the wood, the lock sliced in half. What the hell had the kid thrown to do that kind of damage?
Hal touched the door with the tip of his right sneaker. It swung inward, the dim inner lights enough to illuminate the incredible abundance of fruits and vegetables in the bins directly in front of him. Even the dome farms had never looked like this.
“My God,” he whispered.
“Is it real?” Red sounded incredulous.
“Let’s go find out.”
He and Red moved quickly inside, into a richness of odors and colors that nearly overwhelmed him. Everything was labeled, too, the name and the price. He picked up something called a papaya and ran his hands over its skin, marveling at the deep gold. He brought out a pocketknife and cut two small slices from it. “Red, try this. Papaya.”
She took it, bit into the soft center, and nearly swooned. Hal nibbled at his slice and every bite melted on his tongue. He cut the papaya in half, scraped out the black seeds, handed one half to Red, and stood there savoring his half. Juice dribbled down his chin, tears burned at the backs of his eyes. Denied so much for so long, he thought.
When nothing remained but the papaya skin, he dropped it on the floor with the seeds and tried to decide what to savor next. Avocado? Tangelo? Grapefruit?
Red suddenly said, “Hal, I’ve been thinking. Maybe it would be smarter for us to just try to blend. We don’t know much of anything about how commerce here operates. We don’t have a clue about how to restock this store. We don’t know how businesses work here. I’d be perfectly comfortable just staying and trying to establish some sort of life.”
“That’s treasonous,” he snapped. “This place is our mission.”
Red flicked her hair off her shoulders. “It’s your mission. The only thing I ever wanted was to get out of the fucking dome.”
Hal marched up the aisle away from her, his fury so great he could feel the beast within slamming around inside him, screaming to get out, to melt Red. How could she talk like that?
But when he reached the cheese section, the fury leaked away. Squirt, whom he and Red had forgotten about completely, was sprawled on the floor, food spread out around him. He feasted on cheeses, breads, containers of freshly cut fruit, yogurt, anything and everything within reach. He was in such a blissful state that when he dropped his head back and looked up at Hal, his eyes were wide with ecstasy. He belched, then laughed.
“Oh my fucking God, Hal. They have… so much.” He burst into tears and kept right on stuffing his face.
“What the hell, Squirt.” Red came up alongside Squirt and patted his head like he was a beloved pet. “We can’t stay in here indefinitely and pig out. So load up one of those fabric bags with whatever you want and let’s get going.”
“I’m so stuffed,” he groaned.
Hal grabbed two fabric bags off a hook, thrust them at Squirt. “C’mon, man. Grab what you want.”
Hal nabbed two more bags, tossed one to Red, kept the other, and moved up and down aisles, selecting anything that looked good. Never mind that they already had enough food in the apartment to last for months. When you’d been deprived as long as they had, more was the way to go.
At one point, Red tapped his shoulder and pointed at a security cam mounted on the wall. He nodded and the monster within him leaped at it just as flames shot from her fingers. The poor cam, attacked on dual sides, melted in the space of a heartbeat, and the molten metal dripped down the wall, crackling with sparks. Then the last bit of it broke away from the wall and dropped into a bin of chocolate candy.
Hal flashed her a thumbs up, his anger toward her ebbing, and they both moved along their aisles, filling their bags. Squirt stayed where he was, gobbling up food as quickly as he could. When Hal reached the wine and beer section, he selected beer from Mexico, wine from Chile, Argentina, California. He was about to tell Squirt and Red they needed to leave when the air around the registers thickened with a mist like smoke that quickly swelled to black fog.
Two of his own stumbled out of it, skinny albino Nico and drop-dead gorgeous Trixie, her skin a rich black, her short black hair wild around her head. Nico fell to his hands and knees, gasping for breath. He sounded like he was choking. Red ran over to him.
“Didn’t think… I’d make it,” he gasped.
“Take it easy, Nico,” she said. “We’re here. You’ll be fine, keep pulling air into your lungs.”
Trixie lurched forward, clutching her trademark staff, then pitched forward and hit the floor on her side. Hal helped her to her feet. The staff she clutched transformed into a garden hose swollen with water, and she aimed it at Hal, dousing him.
He leaped back. “What the hell kind of greeting is that, Trixie?”
She looked beyond pissed. “Exactly what you deserve, asshole.”
The hose became a staff again. “We downloaded Jon’s latest column before we left. How do we fight an army, Hal?” She leaned into his face and he wrenched back. “The odds on that really suck. We never anticipated this kind of response. And we’re only five right now—you, me, Red, Nico, and Squirt. We never anticipated that, either. You told us there would be hundreds, with at least half of them Lethals.”
“More are on the way,” Nico assured them, and erupted in a coughing spasm.
The coughing fit saved Hal from having to respond and he noticed how really sick Nico looked. It wasn’t just because he was pale—he had always been thin and pale, with red eyes—but now he looked frail. His face seemed thinner, the wrinkles at the corners of his red eyes and in his forehead, were deeper, permanently etched into his alabaster skin.
“Yeah, sure,” Trixie exclaimed. “If they can get through. If they survive the journey. If, if, if.”
“I think we five are enough,” Hal said. “Especially with you and Nico here now.”
Trixie looked at him like he’d lost his mind, and exploded with laughter. “Yeah, sure, Hal. You’re either delusional or a naive optimist. Or you’re lying.” She paused and finally noticed Squirt sitting on the floor, gobbling up food. “Squirt, you made it! Don’t I get a hug?”
He grunted, wiped his arm across his mouth, and got clumsily to his feet. “I missed you,” Squirt said, and threw his plump arms around her.
“Ditto, kid.”
Trixie extricated herself from Squirt, scooped up an apple, bit into it, and consumed it. She flicked her hand and the apple core soared through the air and dropped into a nearby garbage can. Squirt clapped. “Love it when you do that, Trixie.”
“Do we have somewhere to stay?” she asked.
“An apartment,” Red replied.
“And now we’ve got plenty of food,” Squirt added.
“Frankly, I’d rather have plenty of our own kind,” Trixie said. “I’m not willing to even try to seize this island, Hal, until there are more of us.”
“Exactly how I feel,” Red agreed. “We could blend in here, create lives for ourselves.”
“That’s not the fucking mission.” Hal barely kept the anger out of his voice. “If that’s what you prefer, Red, then let’s part ways here. Go blend in.”
“Hold on.” Nico waved his thin white arms. “More are coming, we just have to be patient. I don’t want to have to blend in. I’ve been doing that my whole life. I want to live in a place where I can be who I am without fear.”
They all stared at him, then Trixie applauded. “Goddamn, Nico. Never thought I’d hear such passion from you.”
“Well, shit, isn’t that why we came here?”
“We came here,” Red said, “to escape life in the dome.”
Nico shook his head. “I came here to seize an island and make it ours. Somewhere we would be safer, where we could be who we are without hiding and pretending and sneaking around. As far as fleeing the dome… we could’ve done that with any of the Normals escaping to wherever they went.”
“And nothing would’ve change,” Red said. “They’d still be in charge.”
Trixie held a handful of grapes that she popped into her mouth one at a time. “Okay, deep breaths. We all need to calm down. Personally, I don’t want to sit around some apartment stuffing my face until the others arrive. With Nico, we can go anywhere on the island without being seen. So let’s explore.”
“There’re soldiers everywhere and they have weapons and monstrous vehicles,” Hal said.
“You’re afraid of them?” Squirt exclaimed. “You?”
Hal really wished the kid hadn’t asked that. It made him look bad to the others. “I’m not afraid of them. I want to win. The five of us could get into their headquarters and take out the lot of them before they would even know what hit them.”
“Then let’s do it!” Nico sounded as excited as a kid.
Hal shook his head. “We’re not ready yet.”
“Personally, I’d like to visit the bookstore Jon mentions in his column,” Trixie said. “It’s the middle of the night, we won’t be seen, we can get in. Let’s be fucking tourists for five minutes, okay, Hal? We all need a break.”
“A bookstore! Wow!” Nico exclaimed. “C’mon, let’s go! How far is it?”
Hal realized Nico was excited by everything here, by the prospect of experiencing anything in the twenty-first. “Too far to walk,” Hal said. “We need a car.”
“Then let’s find a goddamn car,” Trixie said, and headed for the door.
“You don’t lead here, Trixie,” Hal shouted after her. “I’m the….”
“The what?”
She spun around, threw her right arm into the air and Hal lifted up and shot into a shelf of cans and bottled juices that toppled to the floor and shattered. Some of the cans split open and the contents spilled as they rolled. Hal landed hard on his ass and the beast leaped out of him and everything in front of him instantly liquified.
“Enough!” Red shouted, and shot fire at Hal, the flames tall and hot.
Hal leaped to his feet. But now a wall of fire crackled and danced between him and Red, licked at the market ceiling, and set rolls of paper towels and packs of toilet paper on fire. The ceiling sprinklers whipped into action, the flames hissed and sizzled. Thick, noxious smoke filled the air.
Hal slipped in the puddles, arms swiveling for balance, but pitched backward into shelves of bread, rolls, biscuits, cookies, cakes, knocking everything to the floor.
“No more!” Squirt yelled, and hurled something at the ceiling sprinklers that cut many of them in half, pieces falling to the floor, the water going dry. “What the fuck. This is how adults act? Go ahead and kill each other. I’m going to find that bookstore.”
He waddled out of the market with a bag of food hanging from either shoulder. Trixie followed Squirt out the door, Red hurried after them. Nico went over to Hal, extended his hand, and Hal grasped it. “Thanks.”
Nico pulled him to his feet with surprising strength. “What a fucking mess, Hal. Look at this place. We really need to do better than this.”
Hal’s exhaustion was suddenly so great he could barely stand. All he wanted to do right then was return to the apartment and stretch out on the couch with Whiskers, his new pet. “Fuck this century. Fuck these people. Fuck this island. It was supposed to be our paradise. It’s tuned into our nightmare.”
“It’s not that bad, Hal,” said Nico. “We just need to take a break, do some sightseeing, have fun. You coming to the bookstore or not?”
“Yeah, I’m coming.” His drenched clothes clung to him and reeked of juices, smeared beans, spilled soups.
And, although he would never admit it, he welcomed the idea of entering a real bookstore for the first time in his life.
2
There were no cars nearby to steal, so they ended up walking from the market toward the bookstore. Even though they were loaded down with groceries, Hal welcomed the walk. It mitigated his fatigue. It felt liberating to move through the darkness on the hard-packed earth, breathing real air, beneath real stars, moving into and out of real woods. He filled his lungs with the rich, fecund smells of plants and trees and water and always that salty scent of ocean.
One time, his parents had taken him to a place in the south of the dome reserved just for government employees and their families. He supposed it was the closest thing to a resort the dome had—a swimming pool with a slide, a diving board, a fake river where adults could drift in a raft with drinks and kids had cold lemonades supposedly made from the lemon orchards at the resort. The fake river poured into a fake lake large enough for boats. He had tried to swim there, it wasn’t like he was clueless about swimming, but his life hadn’t depended on it so he hadn’t tried too hard.
The restaurants at that resort had served the best of the best grown in the dome. They had a large, comfortable room, room service, movies from the archives. But his favorite part had been a tour beyond the dome, into the outside world after a violent storm had swept through and cleansed the air.
He remembered the window for leaving had been small, calculated by the resort meteorologists who had kept tabs on these storms and the quality of the external air. Eight guests, with a pilot and navigator, had left the dome in a specially equipped vehicle that had been rebuilt from blueprints of the Mars Rover in the NASA archives. It had taken them to a spot about thirty minutes west of the dome, just outside a labyrinth of unexplored caves beneath a range of mountains.
As Hal had stepped outside the vehicle, his first time in the world beyond the dome, he had stood there between his parents, a kid of eight clutching their hands. He breathed real air, a real blue sky stretched over him from horizon to horizon, he felt real sunlight and heat on his face. His knees had buckled and he had sunk into the mountains of sand that covered the outer world like a skin. And he’d sobbed, he remembered that much, his eight-year-old self crying for the beauty of it, for its denial in the dome. In his grieving, he inadvertently had melted some strategic mechanism in the vehicle that the pilot hadn’t discovered until the group had prepared for the return journey.
The pilot had radioed for help, but the instruments had indicated the storm would reach them first. So he’d secured the vehicle by allowing it to sink deeply into the sand, the most singularly horrifying thing Hal had experienced up to that point in his life. They had sat in the absolute darkness, ten terrified people—the pilot and navigator, two couples, three teenage friends, and Hal, the only young kid—while the storm howled. The sound of the blowing, shifting sand was like the continual shattering of glass. At one point, the vehicle started shuddering and several women got hysterical, screaming they couldn’t breathe.
His dad, a man so black that his mother’s bone-white skin had diluted Hal’s blackness, moved toward the woman closest to him. He held her and that physical closeness calmed her. “A century ago,” his dad said quietly, “I can’t breathe became the battle cry of a cultural movement, a phenomenon called Black Lives Matter.”
And he’d remembered wondering what the hell they were talking about. Now he understood what it meant. When they had driven onto the ferry from Key West, the guy who had taken their tickets looked at Hal suspiciously. He was a black guy with a redheaded white woman and a plump white kid. He was driving a Subaru. Never mind that it was an older model and needed a lot of work. To this ticket guy, the Subaru was the equivalent of a Mercedes. So now Hal became a suspicious black guy driving an expensive car he couldn’t possibly afford.
Back then, he didn’t have a word for it. But the woman his dad had comforted, Hal’s mother, kept crying, softly, and Hal had struggled with the beast within from liquifying them just so they’d shut up.
Hal couldn’t remember how long it had gone on, how many mini dramas had unfolded. But when they finally had surfaced again, the landscape had changed. The storm had blown away sand that had covered a rock cliff and the mouth of a cavern. Months later, his mother had told him a group of scientists had explored the cavern and recovered artifacts from inside of it that dated back to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
He’d never left the dome again until he’d arrived here.
Squirt stopped just ahead and sat down on a rock. “Gotta rest a few minutes,” he said, breathing hard. “I think it’s the altitude.”
Hal stifled a laugh. “I doubt it. We’re maybe twenty or thirty feet above sea level.”
“’Cause of… time change.” Squirt slammed his fist against his chest and suddenly seemed to be breathing more easily. “What do they call it in this time, Hal? I know there’s a word for it. “
“Jet lag.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. I’m… really jet lagged.”
Nico and Trixie stopped next to him. She handed the kid a bottle of water. “You need to stay hydrated, Squirt.”
“I’ll carry your bags,” Nico offered, and slung them over his own skinny shoulders.
“You need to lose weight.” Red sat down on the ground next to Squirt. “Hon, it’s not the altitude. It’s the weight. I guarantee that if you get out and walk like this every day, those extra pounds will melt away in no time. C’mon.” She stood and held out her hand. “I’ll show you a great pace for losing weight.”
He grasped her hand, she pulled him up and he and Red started walking at a fast clip down the hill, still holding hands, Trixie and Nico right behind them. Hal hung back for a moment, watching the four of them. Yeah, they often irritated him, enraged him, but he felt a swell of familial love for them that surprised him.
He caught up to them and asked, “Will my cat be okay?”
The question wasn’t directed to anyone in particular, but Red answered. “Of course he will. He’s got food, water, a comfortable spot to sleep. And we’ll take him with us wherever we end up.”
Hal liked that idea. He remembered his mother once saying that she was envious of people in the past who had real pets because pets made a home complete. He picked up his pace, eager to see the inside of Mira’s bookstore.