He noticed them right off because they wanted to be noticed.
“This,” he said, “’s like that scene in Silverado when Kevin Costner knows there’re people on either side of the saloon doors, so he comes out backwards and plugs ’em.” He paused to stare outward at nothing in particular, pull a pair of expensive sunglasses from inside a vest pocket, and slide them on as though he were the center of a spinning, cinematic panning shot just before the action scene started. Dude actually stood there, waiting for a response.
Desiree and Neon gave one another the frown of WTF but snapped eyes right back to him.
His moment not coming, he asked, “What faction are you?” He did this without turning around. Bit of residual momentry.
Now he turned. The one on the left, Cubana maybe. Latinx. A little weathered. One on the right, straight-up black-magic bombshell. Like Pam Grier’s younger time-traveling sister bombshell. Left wasn’t that tall, right was his height, both had seen and done things that would make Rutger Hauer write speeches for them, plain and clear.
There wouldn’t be any action sequence here ’cause they’d whup his ass.
“Seems we have shared interests,” said Desiree, arms folded, back never leaving the building. “Should we walk and talk?”
“You mean like did I plant a bomb or something? Naw, it’s cool. Unless you’re worried about being on camera.”
“Not especially,” said Desiree.
“What were you gonna do in there?” said the Hellbilly.
“Randomly block all incoming and outgoing signals in perpetuity,” said Desiree. “You plan to stop us?”
He shrugged.
“What’d you do?” asked Desiree.
“Unlike you, I’m not honest.”
“Oh, that wasn’t honesty, bruh. That was you’re coming with us.”
“Forward as hell,” he said.
“A little rude, too,” said Neon. She threw defensive hands at Desiree’s wilting stare. “Just saying. Talk later.”
“I’m just here to take care of some business,” he said. “You ladies and me, we got no business. Why’s she keep looking at me like that?”
“My friend’s sensitive to weirdness,” said Desiree.
“He’s spiking.”
“You’re spiking.”
“I haven’t done anything yet,” said Scrawny McConaughey.
“Somebody says yet, they’re mailing the invitation,” said Desiree. She still hadn’t moved. If they didn’t move, he couldn’t move.
He got antsy.
“I got no truck with all this faction shit,” he said. “I do my thing and I go home. Done.” They didn’t appear to understand the finality. “Done.”
And then it dawned on him who the hell they had to be. It would not do to put a hoodoo on them and have the Agents of Change on his ass the rest of his days.
Desiree read his sudden body language change and the unspoken fuuuuuck… in the silent deflation of his chest.
“We understand each other now,” she said.
“I got a mission to carry out and you don’t give a fuck what happens to them anyway, so…” He intended to take his hands out of his pockets to raise them in emphasis.
“Keep your hands in your pockets, dude,” said Neon.
No raised voices. No angry glares. The world moved past and around them per normal.
“I have a friend who doesn’t believe in serendipity,” said Desiree. “You, me, same objectives, same time, same day—means way more than chance. Makes me think we ought to sit for a minute.”
“I’m flattered. Got places to be.”
Desiree pushed off. He held his ground even though in his mind, he ran. Neon stood beside Desiree. “As of now,” said the captain, “this city no longer appeals to you.”
Florida sucked! On top of that, fucking Jetstreams and Agents and a fucking standoff. Wrenches in works were not cool; he couldn’t handle wrenches thrown his way.
Time, he decided, for some bass in his voice. ,He took the sunglasses off two-handed, looking dead at Neon. Then he regarded the steely mofo lady. “The Hellbilly,” said this wiry dude with a bad haircut, “will not be denied.”
“Wait,” said Neon. “He called himself ‘the hellbilly’?” She needed immediate clarification on this.
“Yes, he did,” said Desiree.
“Sweet Jeebus in the rock, I’m through,” said Neon.
“What’s your name?” said Desiree. “Please don’t say Hellbilly. I’m trying to get her to stop laughing so much on missions.”
“Look,” he said, “this is a Nonrich building. You’re clearly not Nonrich. Not Thoom. I know you’re fucking Agents of Change, because the Vamphyr wouldn’t come out dressed like that, and you’re for damn sure not looking for the Hellbilly’s tenacious D. I don’t give a fuck. I’m walking.” He turned to move in the direction in which he’d come.
“Tell you what,” said Desiree, coming alongside him. Neon flanked. “Two blocks down, there’s a table with two women. They wouldn’t mind you joining. Neon, you picking up any additional weirdness?”
“Naw, I think I got his baseline. Weird fye in this dude.”
“It’s okay,” Desiree said to her. The lady had come a long way in a short time with these psychic abilities. “Just let me know if he goes past spiking into shooting his weird wad.”
Neon couldn’t stifle the grin. “I swear to all gods,” she said, “It’s not just a job; it’s an adventure.”
He went with them because Desiree assured him Yvonne wouldn’t have a problem blasting him from two blocks away, then giving tourists directions.
At the table, he looked at them; they looked at him.
“So, what do we do now?” said the Hellbilly. “Hellbilly got no time—”
“Dude,” said Neon.
“Hellbilly,” he overrode, “got no time for world-savers. Particularly when we’re both fucking up the same people.”
“Well,” said Desiree, “next week you might be after us.” She glanced at Neon.
“Nothing,” said Neon.
He circled his head with a finger. “This,” he said, “is my business. My business mainly involves me not getting my ass kicked, you feel me? Hellbilly—”
“Please stop talking third person,” said Desiree.
“—ain’t tryin’ to get involved with your kung fu or whatever you do. There’s a reason I’ve never come for y’all.”
“And that is?” said Desiree.
“See previous statement,” he said. “I coulda laid it on each one a’ ya by now if I wanted to.”
“Ew.”
“Thank you,” Desiree said to Neon.
“Fro lady and sergeant feel me on this, I can tell. I got no beef.” He wished he had his sunglasses on, but his inquisitor had made him take them off. He shrugged. “I don’t even plan reporting I ran into you. Got no bearing on my paycheck.”
“This just seems too coincidental,” said Desiree.
“I wasn’t looking for you! Y’all bushwacked me.”
Desiree said nothing. She steepled her fingers, chewed her cheek, unsteepled, slowly spun her bracelet, looked out over his shoulder, then asked, “You wanna go to Atlantis?”
“Captain, we can’t just grab people off the streets,” said Yvonne.
“We didn’t. We’re having a conversation. And he’s not people. He’s the Hellbilly.”
Hellbilly, sensing an opening, slid his glasses on, leaned back, and responded “Hell yeah.”
“Hell yeah, you wanna go?” said Desiree, “or hell yeah, you’re the Hellbilly?”
“Mostly the second one, but yeah. Fuck it. Gimme a reason to go, I’ll go.”
“What’re your next targets here?” said Desiree.
“Sweetie, we just met. I don’t even have your digits. I ain’t givin’ up everything. I’m here another day, I’ll tell you that.”
“All right.” Desiree stood. Her crew stood. “Meet us here in a day.” She tapped the table. “Same time. You don’t tell
the Thoom we’re here, we don’t kick your natural ass. Equitable?”
“Fair as a good fuck,” he said upward, shading his vision—even with the glasses now allowed on—from the hazy sun. “We tell each other happy hunting?”
Desiree pulled forty dollars from her purse and placed it on the table. “How about I pay for our drinks and tip, we call this meeting to a close?”
The Hellbilly head-bobbed to that.
“Cap’n? I seem to recall two sumbitches in stow as being two more sumbitches than we wanted to allot for,” said Yvonne.
“I know, I know. I’m trying something. Nobody wants to be an asshole on purpose, right? Given all their druthers, an asshole would rather be brought in than kept out. Theoretically.”
“Point of practicum: punks jump up to get beat down,” said Yvonne. Neon and Keita nodded, finding no fault in Yvonne’s logic.
“Gospel truth,” said Desiree. “Those idiots from Atlantis, though, helped us.”
Sharon, idiot one, did the dishes behind them while Compoté, idiot two, put the leftover food away.
“Rude,” said Neon.
“They tried to blow up my boat.”
Sharon scraped stubborn food goo with a fingernail. “No offense taken.” Merely hearing her heinous crime aloud again made her feel like the boorish American farting in the presence of the Mona Lisa.
“These are people with no real stake in the bullshit they thought they were behind,” said Desiree. “They’re not Thoom sleepers with the bullshit hidden deep. The very fact that those two are currently on this ship means they were consciously bullshit-aware the whole time with Nonrich doctrine. They knew it. This fucking hillbilly—”
“Hellbilly,” corrected Neon.
“Matthew McConaughey’s heretofore-unknown crack baby,” Desiree went on, “would probably be a helluva asset to the world under Bubba Foom’s guidance rather than drawing a paycheck off the Thoom. I’m not saying I’m trying to rehabilitate anybody.” She hooked a thumb toward the galley counter. “These fuckers did not care. Again, no offense.”
Sharon and Compoté, at their respective tasks, retreated into their comfortable thought-spaces.
“I’m saying,” Desiree continued, “we don’t have to fight every person who steps in front of us. It’s us saving ourselves some energy. We fucking need it.”
“You ain’t ever lied,” said Neon.
“Folks who’re intent on a fight, we kicks that ass. This hellbilly fucker—”
“Can we start calling him that?” said Neon.
“No. He’s not interested in fighting us or being an impediment.”
“An…ally?” said Keita.
The entire galley, except Compoté and Sharon, gahhed with heads back and eyes rolled.
“So, this coalition of the trifling—” said Yvonne.
“Unwilling,” said Desiree.
“We lead them into triumphant battle, then what? We let the world spin with loose hellbillies roaming it and enemies who’ve done our dishes?” said Yvonne.
“He was already roaming it,” said Desiree.
“But now he’ll be roaming it with more knowledge of us,” said Neon.
“Y’know,” Keita mused, “I’ve kinda often thought that people needed to know we’re fighting out here, without it being attached to monetary interests or public-interest pieces, y’know?”
“Other people do that all the time. It’s the only reason this planet hasn’t exploded yet,” said Desiree.
“Oui, but we literally truck with angels and devils. No offense, Karen,” said Keita.
“Sharon,” said Sharon.
“This guy somehow trucks with chaos theory,” said Desiree. “That might be way more crucial to explaining the world’s shitstorms than the idiot Thoom have ever considered.”
“You notice we’re all saying truck,” said Keita. “Perhaps his influence.”
“Neon?” said Desiree.
“I think he’s too far away. I got nothing,” said the junior psychic.
“If you guys don’t mind, we’re gonna head back to our cells,” said Sharon.
Desiree thanked them as they left.
Yvonne waited till assured the first two members of the Coalition of the Unwilling were out of earshot before leaning in and telling Desiree, “Desiree Quicho…you are a soft bitch.”
“I—”
“You just thanked them for doing the dishes!”
“Home training,” said Desiree.
“By the way,” said Neon, “I wanna bring up that you, Captain Majestic, have been rude and twitchy.”
“Well, y’know, they tried to blow up my boat.”
“Nobody loves a good This Time It’s Personal more than me, but my psychic shit ain’t a hundred percent. And I have no idea what Flowerpot was picking up on her scanner”—Neon held a hand up to waylay Keita’s explanation—“but what if dude was just a dude? We could’ve finessed that a helluva lot better. I’m just trying to avoid adding extra punches to our already-full fight card.”
“Noted, which is the same thing I’m doing,” said the captain.
“Wait, is this a Godzilla Let them fight moment?” said Yvonne.
“Yes, but only under tight supervision. We’re not trying to rebuild Tokyo, Manhattan, or the entire state of Florida,” said Desiree.
“Wellll…” said Neon of the last.
“If nothing else, we take him to Atlantis and make him a non-player here,” said Desiree. “Unless anybody thinks he’d try to become Hellbilly Ruler of Atlantis. Neon?”
“Doesn’t have quite the same gravitas as God Emperor of Dune,” said Keita.
Neon shook her head at Desiree’s final statement. “No, I get the feeling—taken out of his milieu—dude would just sit around fishing.”
Intermission
What are we moving toward? thought the Hellbilly. Do I really wanna live in a world of huge compromise? I, the Hellbilly, walk alone. Yet my counsel enters from outside me. Pulled to and fro by the currents of foreign desires, I am buffeted. Buffeted like fuck. I need the counsel of elders.
He pulled out his own untraceable personal phone. Madam Thoom had no reason to know about the person—nay, god—on the other end of the line.
Hellbilly called the New Age Mack. He set a meeting with him. The sky was doing its best to distract people from the knowledge they were still in Florida, all softly dramatic purple-oranges above a fading sun. How the Mack could live there, Hellbilly’d never know.
But dude was the only dude he’d ever seen rock a dashiki tighter than a tailor-made tuxedo, even in this humidity. That kind of cool existed to be respected.
The audience went well. The next day, at the prearranged meeting with the danger honeys, the Hellbilly laid out his terms: he wouldn’t do anything until they’d met with the New Age Mack.
While Neon pinched the bridge of her nose to mutter “Jesus fucking Christ,” Desiree rolled her head back to say “Jesus fucking Christ” to the sky, leaving Yvonne’s curse of Jesus fucking Christ unspoken save for her eyes, as Keita simply placed her scanner on the table and stared dumbfounded straight at the Hellbilly’s face.
The Hellbilly waited this moment out.
“You truly don’t hear yourself?” said Desiree.
“If he says you’re cool, you’re cool,” said the Hellbilly. “This ain’t negotiable.”
The captain blew an unruly, burbling stream of air. “Okay. When and where?”
“He goes to this one strip club to meditate—”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
That night, in—well, it wouldn’t do to say the seediest part of Tampa, because fucking Tampa—the dark confines of a gaudily lit “gentleman’s” club, Desiree and Neon practically made men dead faint from their Fuck with me and I’ll end your world vibe stronger than the mix of BO, Axe body spray, and whatever cologne was popular among the C-level rappers rapping about it, exuding from the skins of the patrons inside. Old white men in Paco Rabanne had to be a sign o
f some kind of apocalyptic certainty, but Desiree quickly wove past them so that she wouldn’t have to find out which. The Hellbilly’s trout-belly-pale skin caught various flashes of neon light as he led them to whatever father-figure mentor-type his obviously lacking childhood had pushed him toward, putting Desiree in mind of being in Willy Wonka’s nightmare tunnel, except with lots of boobs in the peripheral.
“Does he have his own booth?” Desiree’d asked before entering.
“Nah, he’s a man of the people.”
And he was. The Hellbilly stopped at a small table among other small tables, some with a full complement sitting raggedly at them, some one or two.
The Mack sat alone, eyes straight at the stage. Desiree immediately noticed there wasn’t a single glass on his table.
The Hellbilly pulled a chair and sat beside the Mack, who barely acknowledged another presence.
The woman on stage moonwalked in stilettos then dropped it like it was very, very hot.
“Mack, these are the ladies I told you about,” the Hellbilly said close to the few grey hairs coming out of the older man’s ear. The contrast between the two men was a stark one. Pale as milk Hellbilly, dark—under the quaint atmosphere—as last year’s carpet stain New Age Mack.
“Is there somewhere we could talk?” Desiree said, not happy that she’d had to raise her voice over the booming bassline accompanying the dancer’s Olympic-level agility.
“Shh,” shushed the New Age Mack. He pointed to the stage. “That woman right there? Doing the Lord’s twerk, yes indeed.”
“Look, we just need to talk to you for a minute,” said Neon.
“Most people just ask for a second,” he said without looking at Neon.
Desiree leaned closer to him, knuckles on the table. “Let’s say we’re a little more thorough than them,” she said. “Your titty show will be here when you get back.”
The New Age Mack finally regarded these ladies who were bold enough to block the views of men who—despite the alcohol in them—remained smart enough not to say a damn thing, although the angrily appreciative looks at both women’s asses were plentiful. He immediately considered his position: the younger one was not happy. The primary speaker wasn’t feeling particularly patient and clearly restrained herself from not suffering fools. And they definitely weren’t dressed for a night of New Age’s possibilities.
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