Lexicon

by Max Barry

  The world lifted. He became an object. A thing with no control over its motion. The ground revolved and unexpectedly slapped him and everything went quiet.

  He swallowed. He blinked. These were things he could do. He tried to move his head but the gravity was wrong. It was tugging him sideways. He went to rub his eyes and missed. A lot was wrong with this situation and he wasn’t sure where to start.

  “Gug,” said Tom. Tom was leaning over the steering wheel. He must be having some problems with gravity, too, because he was above Wil’s head. Maybe that was why he was hanging on to the wheel.

  Lights moved across the dash. Not good lights, Wil recalled. He fumbled at his seat belt, got it, and fell against his door. The window was painted white. It took him a moment before he identified it as snow. Snow on the ground. The pickup was lying on its side. He tried the handle, just in case, but the ground didn’t move.

  “We have to go.” Tom wasn’t holding on to the steering wheel, he realized. The wheel had come out of the dash and was holding Tom. “Are you okay? What do I do?”

  “Gug.”

  He got a foot on the dash and strained past Tom for the driver’s side door. When he did this his shoulder collected Tom’s face and his knee went into Tom’s ribs and Tom groaned. But he got his arms out of the truck and levered his body into the freezing night air. The animal transport was completing a turn, its lights sweeping the ground. “Hey. Tom. I’ll lift you out.”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Come on. You need to get out of there.” Light splashed him. He looked up. Silhouetted before the transport was a shambling figure. The man. His arms hung. One leg dragged. He reached a torn place they had made in the cattle yard’s railing and began to painfully climb through. “That guy is coming.”

  “Gug.” Tom’s head bobbed toward the footwell. Wil saw the butt of the shotgun. Not gug, he realized. Gun.

  “I’m not going to shoot people. Let me help you out.”

  “Gun.”

  The straggly-haired man negotiated the wrecked railing and began to wade through the snow. That would become a lot easier soon, Wil saw, because in about ten feet there was a nice, cleared path where the pickup had returned to earth and started sliding. The snow there was red, drenched by the pickup’s taillights.

  “Take. It,” said Tom.

  “No!” The straggly-haired man reached the rear of the pickup and began to climb. Wil heard his shoes scraping against the tailpipe. “I’m not going to murder him!”

  Hand slapped against the tailgate. The man’s head appeared.

  “Shit,” Wil said, and pulled the shotgun from the door. He raised it to his shoulder and set it there. “Stop, you asshole!”

  “Shoo im,” Tom said.

  The man’s torso flopped onto the side of the pickup’s bed. He swung a leg up and Wil saw the jeans were dark with blood, the denim poking out in odd places. The man strained. His leg slipped off the pickup and he began trying to swing it up again.

  “Stop fucking climbing!”

  “Safe . . . ty,” said Tom. “Button. On. Side.”

  “I’m Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!” He took a hand off the gun, squeezed it into a fist for circulation. “Stop, you motherfucker!”

  The man rose on one leg and balanced awkwardly. His face was caked with dirt and blood. He looked intent and focused and not at all concerned about the gun Wil was pointing at him. He began to navigate along the side of the pickup’s bed.

  “Fuck,” Wil said, and pulled the trigger. The gun boomed. The man fell off the truck. Wil dropped the shotgun without thinking. “Goddammit fuck!”

  “Good,” said Tom.

  The transport’s engine bellowed. Its exhausts hissed; its wheels began to turn.

  “Now,” said Tom. “Help me, please.”

  Wil reached down and grasped Tom’s wrist. By the time he got Tom out of the cabin, the transport was close. They jumped into deep, shadowed snow. He began to forge forward. He made it out of the shade of the pickup and his shadow stretched out before him, long and thin and sharpening at the edges, coalescing into something vulnerable. The ground shook. There was a shriek of metal and Wil thought, It’s through the railing; it’s thirty feet away, and he didn’t need to turn and verify this but did anyway. The transport bounced toward the pickup and swatted it aside. The idea of running suddenly seemed very stupid to Wil, because the transport was as big as a mountain. It was going to run him down no matter what he did.

  Tom grabbed him by the ear. The transport hit deep snow and threw it up in a wave. Wil hadn’t factored in the snow: That would slow it. He realized he could survive, or could have, had he thought of this about ten seconds ago. The truck plowed toward him, fountaining snow. It slowed and stopped. Its tires spun. Wil reached out and touched its bull bar.

  Tom climbed the grille and raised the shotgun. The driver was a woman, Wil saw. Early forties. Glasses, kind of bookish. Not the sort of person he would have expected to try to kill him with an animal truck. She looked at Tom with an expression of mild intent and reached for a pistol that lay on the dash.

  Tom fired through the windshield. Wil looked away. In the light, the snow was diamonds. A trillion tiny diamonds.

  Tom dropped beside him. “Move.”

  He trudged through the snow. They didn’t speak. Beyond the reach of the transport’s headlights, the snow grew waist deep. Wil’s breath steamed. Eventually, he said, “I can’t keep going.”

  Tom looked at him. There was something terrible about his face. Tom looked at the cattle yard. Then, abruptly, he sat. He began to dig shells out of his coat pocket and feed them into the shotgun.

  Wil sat beside him, panting. The transport was perhaps five hundred yards away, its lights blazing. He could see the hole in its windshield. “Was that Woolf?”

  Tom looked at him. “What?”

  “That woman.”

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Oh.”

  “If that was Woolf, I would be weeping hot tears of joy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your hometown, Broken Hill? Woolf did that. Not a chemical spill. Woolf. I would be dancing a jig if that was Woolf.”

  “Got it,” Wil said.

  “Not Woolf,” Tom said. “Not Woolf.”

  They sat in silence. Nothing moved but the wind. “Did you know that woman in the transport?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she try to kill us?”

  Tom didn’t answer.

  Wil shivered. He was wearing a T-shirt. “I’m cold.”

  Tom dropped the shotgun and lunged at him. Wil yelped, falling backward, and Tom grabbed his shirt, pulled him up, thrust him back to the snow, pulled him up again, and shoved him down. “What,” Wil gasped. Tom grabbed a handful of snow and mashed it into Wil’s mouth.

  “You’re cold?” Tom said. “You’re cold?”

  He released Wil. By the time Wil sat up, Tom had resumed his position and was facing the distant truck. Wil brushed snow from his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “You need to be better than this,” Tom said. “You need to be worth it.”

  Wil folded his hands beneath his armpits and looked at the sky.

  “So far, you’re not worth shit.”

  “Okay, look, I didn’t ask to be kidnapped.”

  “Saved, is another way of putting it.”

  “I didn’t ask to be saved.”

  “Go, then.”

  “I’m not saying I want to go.”

  “Leave. See how long you last.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “You useless fuck,” said Tom.

  “I did shoot a guy. I mean, not to overstate my contribution, but I did just fucking shoot a guy.”

  Tom exhaled.

  “And I pulled you out of the pickup.” A deep, numbing cold sunk into his body. He opened his mouth to give his jaw muscles something to do. “You didn’t run over those people.”

  Tom looked at him.

 
; “We could have gotten away. You just had to run over them.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said.

  “Why didn’t you?” Tom didn’t answer. “You shot that woman.”

  “Brontë.”

  “What?”

  “Her name was Brontë.”

  “As in . . . Charlotte Brontë? A poet? I thought they were poets.”

  Tom didn’t reply.

  “Okay,” Wil said. “I get it. That guy called you Eliot. You’re Tom Eliot. Right? T. S. Eliot. You’re a poet.”

  Tom sighed. “Was.”

  “You were a poet? What are you now?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tom said. “Ex-poet, I guess.”

  “Why did your friends turn bad?”

  “They were compromised.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Woolf got to them.”

  “What does—”

  “It means she’s very persuasive.”

  “Persuasive? She’s persuasive?”

  “I told you, poets are good with words.” Tom stood. Snow fell from his coat. “Time to go.”

  “You’re telling me Woolf persuaded them to try to murder us? As in, she said, ‘Hey, how about you trap your buddy Tom Eliot in a cattle yard and try to run him down with a truck,’ and they did? Because she’s persuasive?”

  “I said very persuasive. Get up.”

  There was nothing but snow in every direction. “Where are we going?”

  “I had a thought,” said Tom. “Maybe the plane really is here.”

  • • •

  They trudged through blackness and snow until Wil could no longer feel anything. His nerves retreated somewhere deep inside, where there was still warmth. His nose was a memory. He had not only never been this cold, he had not understood this degree of cold was possible. He began to hope poets found them, because whatever happened at least it would be warm.

  He stumbled. “Aha!” said Tom. “Runway.” Wil couldn’t see him. “Let’s try . . . this way.”

  After a few minutes, the stars began to vanish. There were noises. Tom took his arm and he found steps. At the top of those, the air was different. Warmer. Dear God, warmer.

  “Sit,” said Tom. “Don’t do anything.”

  He sank to the floor, wrapped his arms around his legs, and pressed his face into his arms. Tom was banging around somewhere up front, flicking switches. After a while, Wil began to feel alive. He raised his head. A yellow glow emanated from what he assumed was the cockpit. He massaged his feet. Could you get frostbite that quickly? Because he felt like he had frostbite. He decided to walk around, to save his feet.

  The cockpit was a cramped nest of instruments, a single seat surrounded by dark panels. Tom was buckled in. “You can fly this?” Wil said.

  “It’s not brain surgery.”

  “You can’t even see where you’re going. It’s pitch-black out there.”

  “I will assume we’re currently pointed in the right direction,” Tom said. “And drive straight.”

  “Uh,” Wil said.

  Tom ran his thumb across a dial and finished up on a worn black button. “I think we’re good to go.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s been a while since I did this.”

  “You said it wasn’t brain surgery.”

  “It isn’t. But the penalty for errors is high.”

  “Maybe we should think about this.”

  Tom waited. Wil thought he was reconsidering. Then he realized Tom was watching something. He followed his gaze but saw nothing but night sky. One of the stars was moving.

  “What is that?” he said, and realized. “A helicopter.”

  “Yes. Go sit down.” He depressed the button. Something went click. “Hmm.”

  “Was that supposed to happen?” Tom didn’t answer, but clearly no. “Did they sabotage the plane? Do you think they—”

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” Tom murmured to himself, poring over the controls. Ahead, the star grew. The ground beneath it began to twinkle. A searchlight swept snow.

  “It’s getting closer.”

  “Get out!”

  “I’m just letting you—”

  “Get out of the cockpit!”

  He groped through darkness until he reached seats. He dropped into one and felt for the belt. Nothing happened for a while. He glanced behind him. He could make out shapes back there. Something in the seats. He couldn’t sit still, so he got up and made his way toward them. He found a metal suitcase on one seat, gleaming faintly in the gloom. He slid his hands around it and found clasps.

  He couldn’t see, so he explored with his fingers. Something clinked. He felt fabric. He discovered something tubular and tried to pull it but it wouldn’t come. He pulled the case out of the seat and took it toward the front of the plane. When he was close enough to see, he peered into the case. Some of the equipment he didn’t recognize. Some he did. Syringes. Drill bits. In the center, its blade sheathed in plastic, lay a scalpel.

  When he entered the cockpit, Tom was lying on his back, buried up to his elbows in the underside of the instrument panel. Wil held out the scalpel. “What is this?”

  “Not now, Wil.”

  “Look at this.”

  Tom’s head appeared. His expression did not change. He disappeared beneath the panel again.

  “What were you going to do to me?” He had to raise his voice over the rising thrumming of the chopper. “That guy said you were going to pull my head open. That’s what he said. Pull my head open. And I’m starting to wonder, Tom, whether that was an expression.”

  “Will you fuck off?”

  “Were you going to kill me?”

  “I’ll kill you now if you don’t get out of here.”

  Wil moved forward with the scalpel. He wasn’t going to stab Tom. He just wanted to be taken seriously. But Tom’s hand flashed out and grabbed Wil’s wrist and twisted the scalpel from it. He tossed the scalpel into the back of plane, looked at Wil condescendingly, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

  Wil said, “You owe me an answer.”

  “We were going to do whatever was necessary.” Tom flicked a row of switches. “If we could get the word that destroyed Broken Hill from you without requiring us to crack open your head, terrific. We’d go that way. If not, the other. It’s better than what the other side wants for you.”

  “It doesn’t fucking sound better.”

  “I know Woolf,” Tom said. “I’ve known her since she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Trust me, this is better. Sit the fuck down.”

  Light burst in the windshield. Wil raised his arm. The searchlight had found the plane. Beneath its gaze, the runway looked like black glass. The thrumming overhead was like thunder.

  “Well, now I can see.” Tom thumbed the black button. The engines thumped. A low whine of power began to build. Something above Wil’s head went thwack thwack thwack. The plane began to trundle forward.

  “They’re shooting at us. Are they shooting at us?”

  “Yes.”

  They bumped forward, gaining speed. “You know there’s a chopper up there.”

  “I know.”

  “So even if we get off the ground, how are we going to get away from the chopper?” The plane’s momentum pressed at him. He seized the back of Tom’s chair. He was going to regret not sitting down. But he wasn’t leaving. “How do we get away from the chopper, Tom?”

  “Planes are faster than choppers.” Tom pulled on the yoke. They lifted off.

  SUICIDE CULT CLAIMS SIX

  MONTANA: Police discovered the bodies of six people on an isolated ranch outside of Missoula on Tuesday, victims of an apparent suicide pact.

  The dead included the owner of the ranch, well-known local herder Colm McCormack, 46, and his wife, Maureen McCormack, 44. Colm McCormack ran unsuccessfully for local office last November.

  No further details were available.

  [SIX]

  Word filtered around that Kerry had won New Hampshire. He was goin
g to be the Democrat nominee for president. “There it is,” said Sashona. She played with the end of her beaded dreadlocks. “Four more years of Bush.”

  Emily sat in the back row. She didn’t join in these discussions. She was kind of a loner.

  “Why would we back Bush?” argued a boy. “Kerry’s pro-media; he’ll be better for us.”

  Because Bush is polarizing, thought Emily. “Because Bush is polarizing,” Sashona said.

  • • •

  She had sixteen classes per week. In between, she was expected to study and practice. Not on other students. That was a rule. Her first day, wearing a uniform that still smelled of the plastic wrapping, she’d stood in Charlotte’s office and taken a lecture. There were many rules, and Charlotte took her through each of them, patiently and in detail, like Emily was retarded. At first Emily thought this was because Charlotte was carrying a grudge, but as the lecture wore on, she realized no. Charlotte just thought she was that stupid.

  “This is a nonnegotiable rule of the school,” Charlotte said. “Indeed, of the organization as a whole. Should you break it, there will be no excuses. No second chances. Am I making myself clear?”

  “You’re making yourself clear,” Emily said.

  At this point, she didn’t know what practicing meant. It took her months to find out. She thought they were going to teach her persuasion; instead, she got philosophy, psychology, sociology, and the history of language. Back in San Francisco, Lee had given her a little speech about how this school would be different because it taught interesting, useful things, and that was a joke, in Emily’s opinion. Grammar was not interesting. It was not useful to know where words came from. And no one explained it. There was no overview. No road map. Classes were eight to twelve students of wildly different ages, all of them ahead of Emily and no one asking the obvious questions. She had to stay up at night, staring at textbooks, trying to figure out why any of this mattered.

  She learned Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was the order in which people optimally satisfied different types of desires (food-safety-love-status-enlightenment). She learned that leverage over people’s desire for knowledge was called informational social influence, while leverage over people’s desire to be liked was normative social influence. She learned that you could classify a person’s personality into one of 228 psychographic categories with a small number of well-directed questions plus observation, and this was called segmentation.