by Rob Dircks
Feeling not so alone anymore in my custom-made coffin, I grin and say aloud, “So this is what it feels like to be reborn.”
Bradline growls, “For the last time, shut the hell up, you idiot.”
11
Come on, Chuck. Have a look.
I can see nothing. I can hear almost nothing.
But I think we’re at the gate.
My casket – armoire – is jostled and lifted, and I assume placed near the rear of one of the giant tractor trailers that constantly drive in and out of Fill City One, mine being a last-minute addition. I hear muffled voices, irritated, climbing in and activating the trailer’s infrared scanners. They’re designed specifically for this scenario – to detect the body warmth of a hostage – I mean, that’s basically what we are, aren’t we? – trying to escape Fill City One. But Tom Bradline knows his stuff. My little foil compartment will show nothing, no heat, and the tiny air holes are situated such that any heat escaping will register on the infrared as a mouse or some other small varmint.
“Hey. Bradline. What’s this? An awful lot of metal showing in there.”
“Armoire. With a steel safe on the lower half. Mainlanders are idiots. They keep their trinkets, and then throw the safe out! You want me to open, unpack, repack, so you can have a look?”
My heart stops.
“Come on, Chuck, have a look. It’ll only take a half hour. You know what? If we hurry, twenty minutes.” Yes, Bradline has a bad attitude, but he’s no fool. He’s delivered me five minutes before outbound time, knowing that no security guard in their right mind will hold up the queue for twenty minutes unless there’s a clear and urgent problem. Plus they trust Bradline, maybe more than they trust the Gitanos – so I hear the guard harrumph and the trailer doors close. We move into the queue.
There’s no driver, of course, but each tractor trailer has cameras, sensors, and weapons defenses that are in constant contact with Command, detecting external danger – thieves and other malcontents – and more mundane obstacles like road conditions and bad weather. They constantly monitor the interior as well, for humidity, varmints, and things like me – a stowaway. Their countermeasures are elaborate and fearsome. I might get beyond Fill City One for the first time in my life, but I will not be out of the woods.
Without fanfare, the truck stops idling and starts moving. I feel it bounce over the tire spike strips, one, two, three, four…
I’m OUTSIDE!
A little yelp of excitement escapes my mouth, and I nearly pee in terror thinking the sensors have heard me and I’ve been caught a whopping hundred yards from the walls of Fill City One.
But no sirens blare.
I’m on the road.
Mainland.
The trip was supposed to take an hour until my rendezvous, and Bradline had told me it would get a bit warm. But it’s been over two hours now – my contact is late, very late, and a bit warm has become blistering hot. I’m boiling in my own body heat. In an effort to trick the infrared sensors, Bradline has sealed me in successfully, but in the process he’s created an oven. Water isn’t the issue, either. I have plenty. It’s just the heat. It’s getting dangerous. Extended temperatures like this will cook my internal organs. Sweat begins to pour off my body, and I feel my focus… getting blurry… desperately, I peel off my clothes and pour water onto myself.
It’s no use. A few more minutes… I’m going to faint… then die. I turn my head and vomit.
I feel a shudder as the trailer grinds to a halt. I’ve been discovered… it’s over… I’ll probably be dead when they find my body.
The last thing I remember is a strange vibration, a cool rush of air, and a woman’s voice.
“Well. Don’t you look pathetic.”
12
How I Met My Mother
The sounds of clanking.
I open my eyes. I’m lying on the side of the road, looking up into the open trailer. The moon is full, so I can clearly make out a woman, reconstructing the armoire to its original specifications, according to instructions, and packing it back up. Perfect.
The woman turns and looks down, noticing my eyes open. “Well look at you. Naked and covered in your own waste. Just like the first time I met you.”
“…Who… are you…?”
“I’m your mother.”
Ah, my mother. Sweet as saccharin. Just like I imagined.
I pull myself up to a sitting position, though my head screams for me to lay back down. “…You’re…”
“You look like your father.”
“You… say that like it’s not a compliment.”
“It’s not.” She returns to the packaging, putting the last of the tape around it. Inspecting it.
“Hey! Dad is a handsome man.” I pull my coveralls back on, and stand up, defiant. And fall to my knees.
She snickers. “Oh, okay. Sometimes. He had cute teeth when he smiled. I’ll grant you that. And nice blue eyes. Listen, I’m in a little bit of a hurry here.” She quickly looks at her watch. “Two minutes twenty. Time to wrap things up.”
Leaping from the back, down to the pavement, she locks the trailer doors. Connects some wires. Walks around to the front, climbs into the cab, and does God-knows-what. When she returns, she grabs my arm and lifts me back to my feet. I almost pass out again.
“Whoa. You can faint in the ditch. Let’s go.” And she pushes me towards a berm on the side of the road, maybe fifty yards away, into some tall grass, shoving me down.
I swat her hand away. “Gee, you’re a regular Florence Nightingale.”
“How do you know who Florence Nightingale is?”
“I read. I had a lot of books around growing up. You know, instead of a mother.”
“Oh for crying out lou- stop!” She looks down at her watch. Pushes my head down further into the grass “Get down! Not a peep!”
In that next moment, my eyes focus on her in the dark for the first time. This gray-haired, scrawny, leather-skinned woman has no connection to me, none at all, except… oh my. Her nose. We have the same nose. I’ve always wondered about that, where we got our good-looking noses. It’s a really nice nose. Though I’m positive it’s the only nice thing about her.
Suddenly the tractor trailer roars back to life. Its engines rev, floodlights swivel in all directions, sirens blare, and it ejects a cloud around itself, I’m guessing tear gas. “Stand clear of the vehicle! Stand clear of the vehicle!” it shouts over and over. After a minute or so of this, the sirens and the floodlights stop, and it silently moves on its way.
“How…?”
She smiles. “EMPs. It’s the only thing that’ll shut down all their systems at once without damaging them. After the electromagnetic pulse, which its sensors categorize as a weather event like a bolt of lightning, the trailer goes through a startup sequence, and it takes five minutes and forty-three seconds to get back online. Just enough time to drag you out, clean up your god-awful mess, get everything perfect and get the hell out of there. Then it goes through a one minute twelve-second inspection, for damage, inventory, stowaways, et cetera. Then back to the road.”
“You generated an EMP?”
She lifts a box, about the size of a shoebox, and points to three red switches on the side. “Yup. EMP pulse generator. Made it myself.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your mother. Jane. You’re into rockets, from what Harlon said, and I’m into… other stuff.”
“Oh, look at us, we have so much in common. Is this where we hug?”
“No.”
“Good. Now really – you made an EMP pulse generator?”
“Ahhh, I see. Not the vision of the abandoning mother you were expecting, am I? You were expecting some drug-addled drifter, or a prostitute, or some other lowlife, weren’t you? Well, how do you think someone like that gets out of Fill City One?”
“I don’t kn-“
“They DON’T. Damn, woman, you’re only the fifth or sixth one to ever leave, as far as I know, and you
had a lot of help. I did it on my own.”
“But… why?”
“No. I may have no right to call myself your mother, but you have no right to ask me that. I’ll leave it at this: I’m very good at what I do. I don’t always like what that means. But I am what I am. No regrets. Now I promised Harlon I’d get you to L.A. on time, and air travel’s for zillionaires only, so let’s get to the car.”
We crawl out of the ditch, this Jane person and I, walking through a field of soybeans onto the far side, to another ditch. A red… thing… greets us.
“What’s this?”
“A car.”
I’m not sure about that. Any car this resembles has been crushed into a stack of at least fifty in Fill City One’s junk yard and is rusting away to dust. This one looks like it belongs there too. It actually has a driver’s seat. “You have to drive? Manually?”
“I like to drive. It’s a 2038 Honda. One of the best engines ever developed. It’s still legal to drive yourself out here in the mainland, in most places anyway. Get in.”
I lean down to open the door, notice a movement, and jerk back. “There’s someone in there!”
“Relax. It’s Voomvoom.”
There he is, in the back seat, sucking on a lollipop, content, rubbing his eyes.
My half-brother.
“You left him out here in a field? Alone? He’s six! What kind of mother are you?”
She throws open the door and plops into the strange cockpit. “He’s seven. And I left the windows open. Jeez. See? That attitude? That’s why I should never have had kids.”
We both shout, “Hey!”, Voomvoom and I, at precisely the same moment, and that makes him smile. He leans forward and offers me his lollipop. “Voom voom.”
“No thank you. So, let me guess…”
“Yes. His name is Voomvoom because it’s his favorite thing to say. He’s perfectly normal otherwise. Aren’t you, Voomvoom?”
“Voom voom.”
I jerk my head around to him. “Wait! Give me that lollipop!”
Jane slams her hand on the steering device in front of her. “Lemme guess! You have a problem with me giving him lollipops, too!”
“No.” Voomvoom offers it to me again, and I hold it close to my nose, and breathe in deep. “Strawberries!”
She shrugs. “Well, artificial imitation strawberry flavoring, but yes. So?”
“Just strawberries! Nothing else! No methane! No rotting! Nothing!”
I run from the car, to the edge of the soybean field, and fill my lungs with the first truly fresh air I have ever inhaled. “It’s CLEAN!” I twirl around, hands in the air, breathing deeply in and out, in and out, and catch the scent of something else. A clump of purple weeds. “What is that?”
“Lavender. Go ahead. Stick your face in.”
I kneel reverently and touch the purple stalks to my nose.
Oh my God.
The aroma fills me completely. Sweet. Deep. Intoxicating.
I begin to weep.
I’ve discovered a new world already! Just two hours outside of Fill City One! The world of clean air, and sweet, unadulterated smells! And if I look up, I imagine even the sky is clearer, and that if I squint, up to the north and west a little, I can see Mars. Oh, the wonders of this world!
“Ahem.”
Oh. Except for my mother. She’s not so wonderful.
“Get back in, Pepper. Change those stinking clothes. We’ve got work to do.”
“My name is Paper.”
“Not for long.”
Minutes later, a card pops out of Jane’s homemade fake-identification-creating-machine.
“That’s me?”
“That’s the new you. Robin Smith. Photo, DNA code, address, interstate transport permissions, everything. And here’s the kicker: our DNA matches. There’s no way you can fake that. So when they check, take a swab, and believe me they do, you really are my daughter. It’s legit. It’s perfect.”
“Perfect. You and me. Ha.”
“You going to keep doing that? The passive aggressive thing? All the way to Los Angeles?”
“Yes. The entire way.”
“Oh joy.”
I look down at the name again. “Smith. Couldn’t think of anything better?”
“Smith. It’s the best name to use. Too many connections for them to check, too many false positives.” She guns the engine and shoots out of the ditch, onto the highway, leaving a trail of dirt in our wake. It’s strange to see her in control of the vehicle, this ancient car, without giving it audible instructions, turning the steering device and stepping on levers near her feet. It looks like a lot of unnecessary effort, and she can’t move from her spot, or shift her focus from the road, or turn around to talk to me, or her son in the back seat. Why not let the car do the work? Manual driving is stupid.
“Pepper, lemme see the thing. The scarab.”
“My name is Paper. Well, now it’s Robin. And no.”
“Suit yourself.”
We drive in silence for a while, listening to the leaves rush out of our way as we hurtle down I-80, seeing nothing in the dark but the few yards of highway ahead of us. I still can hardly believe it: this is the start of a journey that might – no, will – take me 140 million miles. To Mars. I feel another involuntary jolt of excitement in my gut, a feeling of certainty, that fate has placed me in the middle of something big, and that I have a job to do, a place to be, and there’s a reason it has to be me, and nothing is going to stop me. I look over at the woman driving the car, and have a pang of… something. “Thank you for doing this, Jane. But… you’re still not…”
“Your mother? Sorry to rupture the fragile little denial you’ve got going there, but biologically, you’re a hundred percent wrong. I’m your mother. Emotionally? Sure. Whatever helps you sleep at night. And you’re welcome.” Then she cackles and peers into the mirror above her head and shouts, “Who’s your mother?”
From the seven-year-old boy in the back seat comes the answer: “Voom voom.”
I look down at the ID card one last time before tossing it into my satchel, and think: Well, Robin Smith – is there any possibility this plan actually works? Fill City One keeps shoddy records, that just isn’t their thing, they never even established a DNA database like the government on the mainland – they prefer simple walls and guns and constant monitoring – so WasteWay management will see me on TV around the clock for months and never know the truth. As long as the folks back home cover my work, and put my identical triplet Scissors in my place when needed, and fake the necessary documents with Bradline and the other willing Fillers, I should disappear for a while, be back in eighteen months, then slip back into Fill City One with no one the wiser. Hopefully.
It’s not a fool-proof plan, not even marginally, I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s our plan. It’s the best we have.
I shift in my seat, getting comfortable, and reach back for the seat belt.
There is none.
13
Bologna Sandwiches
Morning.
I peel my crusty eyes open. “Can we stop?”
Jane laughs. “In forty more hours.”
I peek over at her tablet, with its little antenna vibrating away, an ever-present indicator of just how not smooth this ride is. It’s showing a live feed from the huge sweepstakes countdown clock mounted on the main Groupie Studios building – sixty hours. “We’ve got plenty of time to stop. Sixty hours to go two thousand miles. We’ll need to stop. For fuel. For rest. For food. I’m not living on lollipops for the next two days.”
“We’re not stopping.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Good for you.” She shifts in her seat, and harrumphs, like a younger version of Nana. Turns around, pointing to an old cooler in the back. “There are sandwiches in there. I hope you like bologna.”
“Did you butter the bread at least?”
“What am I, Zach Larson?”
Oh, well. At least it’s not egg salad. As sh
e turns her head back to the road, I catch a glimpse of something reflective on her opposite cheek. Weird. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She’s now actively NOT turning her head. I can’t see the thing on her cheek.
“Show me and I’ll show you the scarab.”
I spy a little smile curl her lip, and Voomvoom claps. She turns her head to me. “Okay, here’s your look. But you know what they say about curiosity.” There is a bright blue tube making its way out of her sweatshirt, along her neck, over her ear, and up her nose.
“That’s disgusting!”
“You wanted to see. Now show me the scarab.”
“Gross! What the hell is that?”
“Listen. We can’t stop. Yes, technically we have a little wiggle room, twenty extra hours or so, but you’re not in Fill City anymore. Things happen out here on the mainland. Have you ever met a toll monitor?”
“No. What is that thing coming out of your nose?”
“Jeez. It’s going into my nose. It’s a Meal-in-a-Bag.” She points to the pouch shape under her sweatshirt. “I made it myself.”
“Of course you did. Gross.”
“It’s not gross. It’s necessary. It’s got every nutrient and stimulant I need to get to L.A., and then some, without stopping, thanks to a secret ingredient or two. I’m calling it my Mars Blend. Now back to the toll monitor. Tolls ideally take a few seconds, a quick ID/DNA check and you’re on your merry way. But you hit a nasty monitor, for whatever reason, a bird shit in his coffee that morning, doesn’t matter, and he’ll take his sweet time with you. Hours. Overnight. We could easily miss our deadline. Easily.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair? Oh honey, did you think you’d escape Fill City and there would be nothing but endless fields of lavender?” She taps the tube up her nose. “I’ve got an extra one of these if you don’t like bologna.”