Sometimes Uncle Marty will start having conversations with people in other cars, even if we’re only actually beside them for a few seconds and the windows are up and of course they can’t actually hear him and aren’t even looking at him. Once we’re past he’ll tell us about it, but when it’s a beige Luxauto he doesn’t, or he’ll just tsk and look sad or upset, so I think that makes it clear my bias isn’t unreasonable. Family baggage distilled down to car brand hate.
Anyhow, the sun is still up, the roads aren’t crowded, Marty is happily chatting with four or five imaginary people in the back seat, still at his party, so we’re good. Last time we did this we went west, so this time we go east, and other than that we got no plan. Or at least, I don’t.
“I was thinking,” Dave says, all casual conversation, and I think right, here it is, “I’d still really like to see the redwoods.”
Yeah, so do I, but I don’t have the heart to tell Dave that some jackhole burned the entire damned forest down nine years ago. Scientists are working on new groves, in better places now that the climate has shifted so much, but they don’t want anyone to know where those are and besides they can’t be more than a few feet tall yet, right? “They’re off-limits,” I say.
“We could sneak.”
I snort, which doesn’t sound at all girl-like, but who the hell is gonna care? “You’re a sixty-pound robotic head, Dave. Sneaking is kinda beyond our means.”
“I just think it would be nice for me,” he says, and what he means is he likes things that are very old and very big, because—as he put it once—they resonate with him. He forgets he’s not real. Sometimes I think the fact that I’m the only one of the three of us with any kind of decent grip means I’m the one losing out. Meanwhile I’m dodging potholes and watching the yes/no machine stuckied to the dash get brighter, and it’s worrying me, so I’m not feeling too charitable about any of it.
“Yeah?” I ask. “Why’s that?”
“Because it’s hard when you’re two hundred million years old and everything around you is teeny tiny and fleeting,” he says.
When I cracked Dave open to see if I could fix him, after I moved in to take care of Marty and was exploring the junk in the yard, I’d found his serial number plate. Dave was made when I was two years old. But if I say that the rest of this trip will be sullen silence and now that we’re out and moving I’m kind of getting into the idea of the trip after all.
With reservations, though. We’ve had the redwoods convo a bunch of times and I always say no, and Dave knows this even if he doesn’t know why, which means it’s a dodge.
“We’ll see if we can find something else,” I say, and if that’s not the answer Dave wanted, at least he seems to be okay with it.
I tap the hexagon face of the yes/no machine, hoping it can give us the all-clear by the time we have to make a pit stop. It was an expensive thing, but I like to think it’s saved our asses a couple of times. It’s got a built-in GPS and it collates data about your location on the fly, economic data and crime data, education, air and water toxicity, and key words in social media posts from or about wherever you’re driving through, and it does whatever magic math it does with that and produces a six-metric rating that is displayed as colors. Right now we’re on the highway, but whatever shit place we’re passing through on the other side of the vine-strangled trees is hot red and yellow. The other colors are there too, but fainter. It’s funny that they called it the yes/no machine because it’s about as far as it could be from giving you a clear yes or no answer to whether you should stop somewhere or floor it ’til you’re out. I mean, I suppose if the hexagon stayed clear that would be a yes, but that never, ever happens. And if it did I’d assume the thing was busted.
“Maybe if we head more south, it’ll get better,” Dave says from the passenger seat.
“Yeah?” I ask. “What’s south of here?”
Dave fixes one big fake eye on me. “It was just a random suggestion,” he says, and by his insulted tone I can tell it wasn’t any such thing. But if he has more to say, he’s still not saying it. I fumble one of the new plastic dollar coins out of the collection of candy bar wrappers in my ashtray and, one hand still on the wheel, flip it. Heads I let Dave get his way and head south, tails I be the Girl In Charge and we go due north instead.
Head wins, damn him.
“Fine,” I say, “south it is.” When the next big interchange comes up I slow down and take the exit, bump over the vehicle scanner and scale, and then we’re merging onto another pothole-riddled highway heading south.
The yes/no machine fades to a lighter pink, paler yellow, and that’s at least something.
We drive for about two hours then stop at a roadside service stop so I can usher Marty into the men’s room; he can’t always tell me when he needs to go, but I noticed him being antsy in the back seat. Anyway I want to load up on some cheap packaged snacks. The old lady behind the counter seems nice enough, but with most food regs now entirely voluntary, I don’t trust anything not wrapped, stamped, and safety-sealed while I’m on the road, which is too bad because the pot of chili she has simmering near the counter smells really fucking good.
Another hour later and we’re nearing a gate city named Middleton, hidden from view behind the highway walls, and even though the yes/no machine is pretty optimistic about it, I know better than to stop. When everything went to shit and most of the middle class got stripped broke, those who were left circled their wagons into tight little protective clusters, though what they were protecting other than their schmancy boring-ass lawns and their inbred kids I dunno. Nonresidents routinely get targeted for all kinds of fees and harassment, and I’ve heard stories where if you couldn’t cough up ridiculous money you’d find yourself working for the city ’til you paid it off, which with compounding interest and fees on fees you never ever would. Middleton doesn’t have that rep, but I’m not keen on risking my own freedom on it; I’ve got things to do.
“How about here?” Dave peeps up, the first word he’s said in over half an hour, as we approach the first Middleton exit.
“Gate city,” I say. “Nope.”
Dave can’t purse his lips, because he’s fucking animatronic and no one thought he’d need that, even though they apparently thought they should make him smart enough to read and be argumentative as hell. For educating children, sure. So instead he does this thing where he just lightly clacks his jaws open and closed, tap tap tap tap, except he’s a giant head so it shakes the whole damned car. “We’re not stopping here,” I say again, just to be sure he gets that this is nonnegotiable.
Marty in the back seat has gotten quiet, and I glance at him in the mirror and he’s frowning and looking around as if he understands where we are. My uncle might be on another planet most of the time, but not long ago he was one of the sharpest people I knew, the only one who could go toe to toe with my mother in the brains department—macrotech versus nanotech—and he knew everybody and everything.
“We’re not going to stop here, Uncle Marty,” I tell him, and the anxious look eases. “Just passing through.”
Dave is silent for a bit, then starts clacking again, and this time I do glare at him. “You have a problem?” I ask.
And then, like a goddamned omen, up ahead, half-leaning on the guardrail, I see the falling-down highway billboard for Middleton Prehistoric Playland. I had totally forgotten about it, but I have doubts it’s coincidence that we’re here.
I keep driving, paying no notice to the billboard as if very busy instead of keeping a safe eye on the faded yellow lines on my side of the road. There is a small metallic chuffing sound I have come to identify as a cough, and then Dave says brightly, “Well, hey!”
“Hey what?” I say.
“I just saw a sign for another dinosaur park, right here. What amazing luck! We should stop.”
Yes, Dave sucks at poker, too. “Gate city,” I say again. “We’re not stopping. Besides, it’s been closed for decades, so it’s not like
we could go inside.”
“We could look around, though,” Dave says. “Maybe we could sneak in.”
“Sneak in?!” I laugh. “You? You must be shitting me. No.”
“I heard they might have another Euhelopus there,” Dave says.
“You heard? So you knew this was here all along?” Of course I already know the answer, but it has to be asked.
“I saw a brochure,” Dave says.
“You saw a brochure? Where?”
“Somewhere in the house, in one of the paper piles,” Dave says.
“And you couldn’t just ask me if we could come here?”
“I knew you’d say no,” Dave says. “You don’t know what it’s like being extinct. It gets lonely.”
I’ve already gone down the argument hole with Dave about the Euhelopus thing, a name he picked up off some TV kid doco and decided was him (rather than the Generic Sauropod Model C (XXXL) his maker-plate reads) and I made the mistake once of telling him his kind wouldn’t be extinct until our toaster and microwave died, and that got ugly. Ugly enough that Uncle Marty got upset, which is where I draw the line.
“Look,” I say, “we can’t just go right into a gate city. I can try to find out who owns it and if we can visit, and then try to find us a resident to sponsor us—”
“I think it’s outside the gates, on the far side of Middleton,” Marty speaks up from the back. “I once tried to buy some parts off the guy who owns it, to fix Dave’s stuck knee, or maybe barter my time helping him for what I needed, but he wouldn’t even give me the time of day because he was gonna fix it all himself, even though everything in his park was just rusting to heck untouched.”
“Then he’s not gonna let us in anyway,” I say.
“Can we maybe just go look?” Dave asks. “I mean, even just drive around it even if we can’t get in?”
Marty is leaning forward from the back seat, and he’s one hundred percent here, which doesn’t happen too often anymore. “Fine,” I say. “If it’s outside the gates, and if we can get to it, and if the yes/no machine doesn’t give us a hell no, we’ll drive around it.”
“Okay,” Dave says, and is quiet after that.
Sure enough the Playland exit is right after where the high walls that line the highway finally taper down and away and we leave Middleton behind. Middleton, it seems, didn’t want to take the park with them when they redrew their town lines in concrete. I take the exit and the yes/no machine flickers only slightly brighter. Maybe we’ll even find somewhere independently certified to eat out here and a safe place to either stay or park the car overnight.
The sun is low in the sky; I’d forgotten how long we’d been driving. The yes/no machine is still not telling us to get out, as I pass over the road scanners and into the abandoned roads of old Middleton.
Playland is not hard to find. There’s a bunch of defaced billboards and signs pointing the way, and already I can see the big fake palm trees up ahead over the cramped streets and low buildings. Only a few houses have barbed wire around them.
When we hit the street with the park on it I slow down, and because there is no traffic behind me I brake in front of the wide front gates.
They are open.
“Can we go in?” Dave asks.
“No,” I say immediately. “There’s no way that should be open. What if someone is robbing or vandalizing the place right now? We don’t want to get in the middle of that.”
“It looks pretty quiet,” Dave says.
“Sure does,” I say. “Doesn’t make me like it better.” In point of fact, it made me like it a whole lot worse.
“I can’t see from here,” Dave complains. “Can’t we just, you know, pull in a little bit? Just enough for me to see if there are any more of my kind there?”
“No,” I say again. I pull ahead, and park the car on the side of the road just past the gates. There’s a convenience store across the street, lights on and open sign lit. “I’ll go ask if they know what’s going on here, okay? If the park’s not supposed to be open like that they can call the local police, if there are any. You two wait right here. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dave says.
“I’m trusting you,” I say.
“I know.”
“Okay.” I get out of the car, lock it, and skip across the street. The sun is below the skyline now and a streetlight comes on just as I run under it. I glance back and I can see Dave and Marty in the car right where I left them, so I go through the metal detector into the shop. The back half is all hard liquor and edibles, in a cage, with an employee on the far side who looks up from a magazine when I walk in, but I’m not interested in anything in there, so the man loses interest in me just as fast. The woman behind the counter barely moves from where she’s leaning against the counter as I walk up and put a few bags of snacks on the scanner. You get better info if you’re not asking just for free.
She rings it in, and scans my phone. We wait for it to report that it’s not a stolen ID, then report that I’m not a wanted criminal or a tax escapee, then finally sends the charges.
“You’re all set, honey,” she says when it rings through. Been a while since I’ve been broke enough to get declined, but I still have that sharp bite of relief every time I don’t.
“Thanks,” I say. “Hey, I was noticing the gates of the dino park are open. That guy didn’t get off his ass and finally start fixing the place up, did he?”
She snorts. “Kurt? Fix something? Not a chance. Sold it a month ago, though. Never heard someone complain that much about getting so much money for shit before, but that’s the kind of man he was. Haven’t met the new owner yet.”
“Thanks, I just wondered,” I say, and pick up my things.
“I loved that place when I was a kid,” she continues. “You could go in and talk to the dinos and they’d talk back to you and it was magical. Makes me sad every day to see it falling apart along with everything else in the world. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though I’m probably a third as old as her and the world’s been falling apart as long as I’ve been in it. At least I know what it’s like to have a dinosaur talk back to me, except mine is full of moping and complaints rather than handy, cheery facts about ginormous Pleistocene bugs.
I leave the store, and wait for a lone van, rusted out and smelling of old-school gasoline fumes, to pass. Dude behind the wheel is looking at me, and if I didn’t have my arms full of chips and candy bars I’d’ve flipped him the finger just on principle. But he keeps going, and I start across the empty street and am halfway across before I realize Marty is standing about halfway between the car and the gate, moving back and forth in agitation.
I run.
Marty sees me coming and recognizes me, and I get to him before he can run into the road to meet me and get him back safely on the sidewalk. “Cassie!” he says.
“You okay?” I ask. He doesn’t look hurt, just confused. “What happened?”
Marty points. The passenger car door is open, and Dave is gone. “He told me I had to help him,” he said.
“He went into the park, didn’t he?” I say. It’s not really a question. I check the trunk, and sure enough the modified furniture dolly with big rubber wheels that Dave uses to get his head around outside is gone.
“He told me I had to,” Marty says again. He is wringing his hands between bouts of flapping them, and I throw the junk food into the back of the car, get Marty’s sweater out, and wrap him up in it. It’s not cold, but the weight of it usually helps him calm down. This time, it takes a while.
It’s getting dark out, and there’s no way I’m leaving Marty in the car alone. “We can come back for Dave tomorrow,” I say.
“No, no!” Marty shouts, and starts shaking again. “We have to go get him now! What if we leave and they won’t give him back?”
“Okay, okay,” I say. “It’s all right. I’ll go get him.”
When Marty is calm again I lure him back into the car with a ca
ndy bar, and then I stare at those gates for a minute as if I can make Dave get his ass back out here on his own by force of fury.
When that doesn’t work, I get behind the wheel, back the car up, and I drive through those goddamned fucking gates to go get that goddamned fucking asshole dinosaur head.
The parking lot is larger than it looked from the outside; Playland must have been popular in its prime. I’m halfway across it when the sensors for the lot lights figure out I’m there and come on, lighting the place up one empty, Dave-less row at a time until I can see the actual park entrance, dead ahead, and next to it a far-too-familiar beige, armored Luxauto. I yank the wheel hard to the left and turn, accelerating, but already the gates we came in through have swung closed.
Bastard. I should have known it was a trap, but I didn’t think even Dave would be this dumb. Or this selfish.
I turn again and head toward the Luxauto. I can see my father now standing beside it, arms crossed over his chest, and even though it’s still too dark I know all too well the smug-ass smile he’ll have on his face. For a half-second I think about just ramming the Luxauto—pretty sure my ex-cruiser is a decent match for it—but I’ve got Marty with me, so I don’t. I do park close enough that he has to get out of the way or get trapped between the two cars; I missed kissing his side mirror with mine by about a centimeter, because I’m that good.
I get out, and so does Marty, and it takes a second for Marty to figure out what’s happening. “Ted,” he says, and the word is as close to a swear as anything I’ve ever heard him say.
“Martin,” my father says. “Still alive, I see.”
“At least one of us has to outlive you, so someone can spit on your grave,” Marty says. “I owe my sister at least that.”
My father shrugs, as if to say he doesn’t care, which he doesn’t and never has. I don’t know how my mom fell for him at all, much less for so long, since it’s clear as day to me that all he ever wanted was to undermine and steal her work to preserve his own stupid empire, but people can be incredibly smart and stupid at the same time, especially when the heart is involved.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 28