by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Catastrophic Consequences
The black sky was lightened with small gray clouds, like fingerprint smudges, when Prissi landed in the overgrown back yard of a burned-out house three blocks away from Allen Burgey’s home. Despite her exhaustion, the winger scurried across the yard to hide in the deeper shadows of the skeletal remains of the back porch. As she waited for her breathing to slow, she listened.
She had flown from Nancy’s with her flite-lites off, which if she had been caught, would have cost her her license for a year. Since it was long past rush hour, there had not been a lot of wingers in the air. In fact, there had been so few, that it had been relatively easy for her to slalom back and forth to keep away from the paths of the other flyers without going too far astray from her flight plan. As she flew, to keep bad thoughts from coming, Prissi had focused on the beauty of the night.
The lights of other flyers seemed to flicker on and off as their wings beat up and down in a way that reminded Prissi of those nights in Dutton’s soccer fields when they were constellated with fireflies. On the ground far beneath her, thousands of lights of all colors and forms glowed—the algae green parallel lines of the aquaphorous street lights, round red ladybug taillights chasing after the blue white beams of headlights. The random pattern of yellow, white and blue vid screens made houses look like space stations.
Like many other fledglings, when Prissi first began to fly at night, especially when she was away from the lumen intensity of the city, she would sometimes become disoriented and think that the lights below were the heavens above. Her flight instructor had called that kind of disorientation sirening. This night in her flight there had been many moments of confusion, but none were about what was earth and what was sky. When those wrenching moments had tried to overwhelm her, Prissi had fought back by using the lights, the numbing chill of the air, the clean smell high above the earth and the infinite shades of black and blues above and below her as weapons.
Arriving over Verona, the newly cautious Prissi had circled over Burgey’s dark and apparently empty and unharmed house twice before deciding to land in the overgrown yard behind the stark remains of a nearby burned-out house.
Ten minutes after landing, Prissi was calmer and re-invigorated. And more confident. Her flight and reconnaissance hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. With her wings slightly flared to keep them from rustling, Prissi began hop scotching from shadow to shadow back toward Burgey’s house. Having reasoned that if anyone were expecting her, it would be from the air, she had decided to make her way on foot; however since most of the homes were likely to have MDs or secu-cams, she was very careful as she made her way along the winding street. Bars of light, like spectral marimba, hung in the dark outside steel-shuttered windows. From the colors of the bands of light, Prissi could tell which rooms held vid screens—wall-sized screens filled with the life of the world outside brought inside to edify and entertain the vidiots hidden behind their secured windows.
Burgey’s house was dark and, as she had noticed during her first visit, ridiculously under-secured. She couldn’t see a single motion detector. When Prissi found a small window at the back of the house unlocked, her first thought was that Burgey was either senile or dangerously defiant. Her second thought was that maybe the window was unlocked because it had been forced open by whoever had killed the old man. That thought led to whether the killer might still be in the house. Which led to Prissi’s wondering why there was no evidence that the hawks had been at the house. Which led to being slammed full force when it suddenly hit her that it was still the same day she had begun in a hospital bed. Which led to the thought that she was leaving a parade of physical evidence on a house that contained an undiscovered dead man.
Prissi took her fingers off the window sill and let them float there as she tried to guess which of the possibilities she had just enumerated were most likely to be true.
Finally, the lure of finding something—debit card, credit card, uni-stamps, jewelry, even cash, and, least likely, but most valued, an explanation—pulled her through the window.
She landed with her head up, back arched, wings tightly compressed and her hands deep in a sink of dirty dishes. Despite feeling incredibly vulnerable, she snorted when it struck her that she probably looked like a lizard waiting for its lunch to come buzzing over a swamp. Prissi worked her hands out of the sink onto the counter’s edge, then, slithered forward until all of her was on the kitchen floor. Being careful to protect her wings, Prissi got to her knees and pulled herself up using the chipped edge of the ancient granite counter top. Once up, she took a deep breath.
The house smelled like one of those mixed scents that has no name—dust, lonely cooking, skin flakes, ancient soap, loss, bitterness—Prissi flailed her arms in a sweeping crisscross to stop her list of adjectives. She told herself that before she got too deeply involved in the quality of the old man’s emotional life, she should determine whether his body was still in the house. Although she could feel fear sniffing around her, she reminded herself of all the bodies she had seen in Africa dead from unease, disease and worse.
The LEDs of a half-dozen appliances emitted enough light that Prissi could see an archway leading out of the kitchen. Standing just behind the arch, she could make out a large ovoid shadow. Gliding into the darker space of what she assumed was the dining-room, she stared at the bee-hive hut until it revealed itself to be an oval dining room table stacked high with papers. A second archway at the far side of the dining room led to a hallway. Prissi tiptoed forward. To the right was the front door. To the left, a couple of meters back, a steep staircase led to the second floor. Prissi slunk across the hallway and paused under the arch to the room beyond. She opened her eyes wide, then, squinted as she tried to see into the blackness of what she assumed was a living room. So little light came through the heavy curtains from the street aquaphors that Prissi could not make out more than an indistinction of black and even blacker shapes. She had just started to ease into the room when she heard a noise.
The high strung girl froze. The noise was so slight that in the ensuing silence she wasn’t even sure she had heard anything. But, the prickling of her skin told her better than her ears that she was not alone in the house. Her heart started pounding so furiously that she was sure it was going to cause her feathers to rustle.
There.
Definitely something.
A step.
And again. And this time Prissi was almost sure the noise was coming from behind her. From the dining room. The thought that she had walked past someone hiding behind a door or curtain caused her stomach to surge up and down like a dinghy in a following sea. She slid into the living room knowing as she did so that she was going farther away from any means of escape.
She tentatively touched the first shadow before her.
Leather.
She carefully skirted left even though she was terrified that she was going to catch a foot against one of the chair’s legs or something the old man had left on the floor—a mahjong set, a huge bag of marbles, a set of cymbals, or a ten pound bag of potato chips.
The snigger at the idea of stumbling onto a hassock-sized bag of potato chips, something she had already done earlier in the day, with a murderer in pursuit was past Prissi’s lips before she could squeeze them tight. She knew, now for sure, that she was hysterical.
A small clicking sound. Coming closer. Pause. Closer.
Prissi took two more steps. Suddenly, something touched her leg. She lurched away. Her knee caught the edge of a table. As she hurtled forward, the black was torn by a horrible shriek. Prissi threw out her arms to break her fall. The table and whatever was on it fell with a loud crash. She landed on the floor. Something landed on her for a split second. Then, was gone.
All was quiet. After a five second eternity of nothing, Prissi clicked on her flight lights. Caught in its beam, the world’s scraggliest cat—back arched like Robin Hood’s bow, fur electrified, broomstick tail twitching
—stared back at her with eyes as big as the crown jewels.
“Freeieekin feline. Are you nuts? Omagoodgollygod, my neurons will never be the same. I ought to take three or four of your lives. Hesus Jay Seuss.”
The world’s scraggliest cat cocked its head in a way that made Prissi guess it might have grown alongside a litter of black Labrador puppies. When she walked her fingers toward it, the cat held its ground for a couple of seconds to show that it wasn’t afraid before bounding from the floor to a chair arm, to the chair back, then, onto Prissi’s back and, finally, out the way it had entered.
As soon as the cat was out of sight, Prissi, in between huge choking pants and maniacal laughs, pushed herself to her knees, flicked on a table light and looked around.
The living room was definitely lived in. The leather chair she had touched as she had entered the room was as brown and creased as a desert dweller’s face. The arms of two upholstered chairs, maybe once in the distant past, forest green and tufted, were gray and smooth. The floors were scarred; the table tops dusty. At the far end of the room was a glass-paned door covered with a yellowing sheer curtain. The crystal doorknob turned, but when Prissi pushed it, the door refused to open. There was a deadbolt keyhole, but with no key in it. Prissi pulled the curtain aside and saw that what had begun life as a screened-in porch had been converted to a bedroom/office. Prissi guessed that as Allen Burgey’s disease had progressed, he had adapted his house to fit his limitations. Despite the murky light, she could see that the bed had a handrail and the funnel and tube of a facsi-lav so he didn’t have to get up during the night. Past the un-made bed was a huge desk covered with a mountain range of papers. Even through the locked door, those papers tugged at Prissi like filings to a magnet. With the memory of her successes earlier in the day guiding her, the manic girl wrenched the doorknob back and forth before slamming her hip into it.
Nothing happened.
The more she thought about it, the weirder it seemed to Prissi for the door to be locked. Regardless of what scenarios she conjured, it just didn’t make sense for the bedroom door to be locked—especially since Burgey seemed to be so nonchalant with the security for the rest of the house—unless the geri had left. If, indeed, he had gone, then, maybe, he was alive. That thought felt like the first good thing to happen to her all day…except for the lox and cream cheese omelet. She stood still for a moment the better to savor an image of the old man, stubbly chin resting on crippled hands, looking across a table at an old friend who had offered him shelter.
That moment soon passed. Prissi looked around the living room to see what she was going to use to smash a pane in the door before it hit her that some deadbolts needed a key on either side. Breaking a window wasn’t going to help. She about-faced and hurried from the living room. In the kitchen, the world’s scraggliest cat was slunk down over the sink sniffing plates. When Prissi took a step closer, the cat ejected through the open window. Prissi flipped on the overhead light and began opening drawers. Dull water-stained knives, bent spoons, a spatula with a partially melted handle, greasy glasses, a baking dish with a black crust of something in the corners. The remnants of a set of flatware…but no key.
Prissi scanned the room, which looked so forlorn in the miserly yellow light. The basement door. Before she even took a step, Prissi knew that the key would be hanging on a hook just inside the door. Somehow, Prissi was not surprised when she found a key that had a tag and on the tag were the initials PL.
Although her nerves were firing off like popcorn because of her excitement and fear, Prissi tried to be methodical as she sifted and sorted through the stacks of papers on the desk. A set of worn old-fashioned spiral notebooks seemed to be details of the symptoms, progress and treatment of the old scientist’s disease. There was a Pisan tower of print-outs dealing with Allen Burgey’s financial affairs. She was surprised to see how Burgey’s first name was spelled. She thought the usual spellings were Alan or Allan. The balances on these financial statements seemed large to Prissi, but she guessed they might not be unusual for a person who hadn’t spent his life in a decrepit city in equatorial Africa. Prissi entered Burgey’s account numbers in her mypod, even though without PIN numbers, the information was useless. Suddenly feeling more exposed than she had since the cat’s attack, the jittery teen gathered up the papers, jumped up from the desk, switched off the old-fashioned puter and made her way in the dark back to the hallway. Using her mypod’s glow to guide her, Prissi climbed the stairs.
The second floor had an old-fashioned granite and glass bathroom, which looked like it hadn’t been used in ages. There were equal-sized bedrooms on either side of the landing. As soon as Prissi entered the bedroom on the left, she saw the same beaded bag Burgey had handed to her the day before sitting on the top shelf of a scarred wooden bookcase. Her hand was trembling as she picked it up. Since it would have taken the crippled man considerable effort to climb the stairs, Prissi was sure that Burgey had left the bag for her as a clue, just like putting her initials on the tag on the key. Burgey had anticipated that something would draw her back here. Prissi’s eyes watered with the idea that someone, even if it was an old crippled man, was trying to help her; however that intuition seemed to be misplaced when she opened the bag and didn’t anything inside. It wasn’t until she turned the bag inside out that she saw there was a tiny opening on the seam at the bottom of the lining. She worked her finger into the gap and felt something stuck to the bag itself. A second later she peeled away a tiny piece of sticky tape. When Prissi held it close to her eyes, she saw written in spidery letters: COLDEST GREEN.
Although she was positive that the message was meant for her, the phrase sparked nothing in Prissi’s brain. She rubbed the words with her thumb as if it were a magic lantern which would reveal its secrets given the proper care. When that failed, she used her fingers to rub her face as if she had made a mistake and it was her wan worn visage that was the genie’s lamp. When nothing came, the exhausted teener sat down on a corner of the bed so that she could hang a wing on either side.
COLDEST GREEN
Prissi thought that if Nancy were around her first thought would be that it was an anagram. After ten minutes generating STEER GLEN COD and other variations, with none bringing an ah-hah moment, Prissi decided to take a different tack.
She pretended that her memories were a slide show. She scanned backward until she was seeing the house for the first time. The canted sidewalk, the sagging porch, her surprise at how unsecured the house was. Clik. Clik. The murky face through the screen. Clik. The old man leaning precariously as he mounted the porch perch. His conversation. Clik. Back inside. The wait. Then his return with the bag. She had removed the crystal…but distractedly…because of what he was saying about danger…but there was something that had tweaked her attention at the time…and that was…was….
Prissi squeezed her eyes tight better to recapture the moment she had received the bag. He didn’t have it in his fingers…because they were so twisted. Instead, the bag had been nestled in his palm and he had tipped his hand over, like a water dipper, to let it fall into her palm and it had been…it had been…cold. When she removed the crystal it had been cold, too.
Cold.
Much colder than room temperature.
Prissi bounded off the bed and half-fell, half-glided down the staircase.
With its bright light and ancient squeezers of condiments, the refrigerator reminded Prissi of a reliquary. There were no green vegetables, nor vegetables of any color in the bins. There were a few small unlabeled, suspicious looking containers. Since there was so little food, the teener wondered what the condiments were for. The freezer, however, was much more promising. Spinach, kale, broccoli, peas, green beans—a whole assortment of health in dozens of geri pak portions. Prissi pulled everything green from the freezer. Not knowing what, if anything, the old man might have left for her, she was unsure how she should proceed. Would mike or halo heat or running water or infra be more apt to be harmful? The pe
as, broccoli and green beans would be easy—open and sort. The spinach and kale would be frozen in blocks. Anything hidden in them would be like nuts in their shell.
Taking a second to think about it, Prissi decided that using the easiest and quickest method might have been on Burgey’s mind. She decided to infra everything. Ten minutes later the kitchen sink was filled with defrosted vegetables and the air was filled with the smells of the world’s healthiest vegetable soup. Prissi herself was filled with hope as she was in possession of the PIN to a money market fund, a second set of numbers which Prissi took to be co-ordinates and a postscript from Burgey letting Prissi know that though he was sick, he was well and on his way to a safer place…as he hoped she was, too.
Despite knowing that Burgey would be assessed an outrageous bill, Prissi began shoving the soggy mass of vegetables down the Insingerator. After everything was turned to ash, Prissi locked the kitchen window. In the office, she shaped cushions and blankets to look like someone sleeping before closing and locking the door. Upstairs, she unlocked the window in the left bedroom, lifted the screen, then closed and relocked the window. After washing up in the bathroom, she came back into the bedroom. She closed the door and pushed and heaved and pulled the bed until it was tight against the door. She went back to studying Burgey’s financial statements. She looked at the balances on his accounts and wondered why he had decided to help a stranger. It wasn’t until she leaned over to write the PIN number on a piece of paper in case her mypod failed that Prissi had her epiphany.
She was writing out the number on the same sheet that she had used to write out the combinations of COLDEST GREEN.
STEER GLEN COD.
Allen Burgey. G L E N L A U R E B Y. Glen Laureby.
Allen Burgey was Glen Laureby, her mother’s partner, the man who had been holding her mother’s hand in the pix.
Prissi exploded out of bed, deconstructed her stronghold and began wandering through the house. Thirty minutes later, not having found the pix she was sure must be there, the desolate girl was back in the bedroom. With the last of her strength, she wrestled the bed back against the door. Hiding in the dark and under the covers, Prissi emitted a long deep sigh that morphed into searing anguish which triggered the sobbing that she had been holding off for hours.
Her father had never been warm and cuddly. Kind and cool had been his style. He had become even more reserved after Prissi’s mother had died. But, despite that emotional distance, Prissi never had doubted that he always had her best interests at heart. She knew with certainty that he did those things for her even though raising a teener girl by himself was not something that would have been at the top of his wish list. But, he had done it and done it with dedication, consistency and without complaint. And… Prissi started to think of their relationship from the other side, her side. She had depended upon him while she flouted her independence. She had felt secure in his attention while giving him almost none. His age, ills, wounds, losses, hopes and wishes had been of very little concern to her.
As Prissi fought between going forward with her thinking or turning back toward a less distressful path, something knotted behind her breast bone and began to ache.
…The way his head had felt. His neck so useless. His look so helpless. The whisper for her to go. Thinking of her escape, her well-being, rather than concentrating on the last moments of his life.
Prissi bawled.
Like a baby. With sobs so deep, she feared for her next breath. Loud wounded noises. Bubbles of snot blowing out of her nose and dripping down her lips.
She had been so horrible to him. She was so horrible. And she was so alone.
Finally, her body ran out of the energy to express her grief and remorse. She rubbed her chest where the bone felt as if it had been broken. Next, a half-dozen whimpers. A tightly held handful of blanket. And, finally… finally, so many, many hours after waking up in the hospital and eating a lox and cream cheese omelet, sleep. Exhausted blessed sleep.