Brian D'Amato

Brian D'Amato Page 14

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I sogged into the fauxskin. We said hi. The car smells, in descending order of magnitude, were vinyl, fruit juice, and something along the lines of Shiseido Zen. The car took off before the door shut. News6 was on in one corner of each of the twin dashboard screens, burbling at low volume:

  “—is Anne-Marie García-McCarthy. Hello, Ron, nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you, Anne-Marie, how are the kids?”

  “They’re doing great, thanks.” Anne-Marie beamed.

  “Well, that’s just fine, hello, everyone,” Ron said. He paused. “ Well, the Magic and the Jaguars kicked off their—”

  “Oh, Jed, this is Max,” Marena said. “Max, Jed. Who I told you about?”

  “Hi,” a low-tweenage voice said.

  I turned around and said hi. He looked like a little male Marena who’d had his hair curled and been dunked in weak tea. He was all strapped in, wearing Sony VRG goggles pushed up on his head and a big sweatshirt with a picture of Simba the Lion King eating Bambi. I guessed he was pushing nine. The backseat was drifted with healthful-snack-food wrappers. He looked at my hat, then at me, and then at my hat again. “It’s nice to meet you,” he remembered to say.

  “Look at this,” Marena said. She pointed to CURRENT SURROUNDING CONDITIONS on her dashscreen. “JACKKNIFED TRACTOR-TRAILER, RIGHT LANE,” it said, flashing an orange dot a centimeter ahead of us on at Port Mayaca. “WAIT ESTIMATE 45 MINS.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “South.”

  “Well, you could go back up a little and there’s a gravel road where you can cross over to Beeline.”

  “Good idea,” she said. She found a break in the median strip and swung the car left and around in a luxuriantly fluid U-turn, like a catamaran coming about. A soft alarm buzzed and big red warning letters came up on the windshield’s heads-up display:

  “WARNING, THIS ROUTE HAS BEEN DESIGNATED AS ILLEGAL/UNSAFE.” Marena entered a twelve-character password into the steering-wheel keypad. The heads-up and dashscreens went dark, but the alarm kept beeping.

  “Shi pyong shin, a shi!” she muttered, evidently cussing in Zergish.

  “I can do it,” Max said. He leaned over between the seat backs, thumbed at the keypad, and silenced the thing by switching the car to off-road mode.

  “Thanks,” Marena said as he settled back into his lair. “You have to put your seat belt back on.” He did. “So how are you?” she asked me.

  “I’m good, uh … I couldn’t find out much about what’s going on up there,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll check again later,” she said. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the kid.

  “I’m good at programming cars,” Max said to me. “I’m the car whisperer.”

  “Uh, yeah, evidently—”

  “Check this out,” he said. “Nigechatta dame da!”

  Wind roared in around us, and then light. He’d opened the sunroof.

  “ĄAy, muy listo!” I shouted back to him.

  “ĄDe nada!” he said. All rich kids speak a little Spanish.

  “That’s good, but we want to be able to talk,” Marena shouted. “Do you know how to close it?”

  “ Yeah, okay, watch,” he said. “Saite!”

  “That’s really something,” I said as quiet returned.

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Do you always wear that hat?”

  “Sorry?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t, no, I wear a few different ones.”

  “But do you always wear a hat?”

  “Well,” I said, “yes.”

  “But there isn’t anything wrong with your head, is there?”

  “Not that you can see, no, it’s just, some groups of Indians don’t feel right without a hat on.”

  “Do you have a hat with eagle feathers?”

  “No, those are different Indians. Maybe we used to have hats like that. But a lot of our old hats had stuffed animal heads on them.”

  “Do you get visions?”

  “Well, not yet,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Too bad,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you play Neo-Teo?”

  “Oh, yes. Sure, I love Neo-Teo.” My thumb was itching to flick open my phone but I squelched it.

  “What’s your shell?” he asked.

  “It’s, uh, thirty-two.”

  He sort of sniffed. “I’m seventy.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Hey, didn’t your mom make Neo-Teo?”

  “ Yeah,” he said. “What avatars do you have?”

  “Uh, just a Macaw House Blood.”

  He sniffed again. “Hhhn. Wanna do a jade quest in the canyons?”

  “Well, I’m not so good as—”

  “I’ll level you up.”

  “Well—”

  “I don’t think Jed really wants to play right now,” Marena said.

  “How about if we play a little later?” I asked Max.

  “When?” Max asked.

  “We’ll see,” Marena said.

  “I hate ‘we’ll see,’ ” he said.

  “If you move up a shell you can help Jed out even better when he comes in,” Marena said.

  Max made a huffing sound, plugged in his eyes and ears, and started making small purposeful movements with his joygloves. Every once in a while he puffed into the air in some direction or other, which meant he was using the blowgun function. At least he wasn’t spitting.

  “So, I bet you think I’m overreacting,” Marena said.

  “Well, no, any—”

  “It’s just, I’m a mom, so I’m a little jumpy, it was like, we got out of town on Monday, and now I’m like maybe we weren’t far enough out of town, so it’s—you know, it’s like you get this protect-your-young hormone. Anybody who gets near my den and looks funny at my young gets one of my tusks in his carotid artery.”

  “I think you did the right thing,” I said. Lame, I thought.

  She switched the dashscreen to CNN Local. There was a stock shot of the flowerbed Mickey face at Disney World.

  “Audio on,” she said.

  “—is Anne-Marie García-McCarthy resorting—reporting live from Winter Haven,” it went. “I’ll be back at six. Now back to you, Ron.”

  “All right, Anne-Marie,” Ron’s voice went. “Thanks for staying out there. We’ ll all look forward to seeing you then. Hello, I’m Ron Zugema in Orlando.” He paused. “Officials at the Orlando Parks District are reporting that over five hundred park visitors are receiving medical treatment for apparent food poisoning. Hospital officials are saying that eight patients have died as a result of the unknown toxins.” There was a tiny and almost nostalgic twinge of fear somewhere in my abdomen, that old friend not quite knocking at the door yet but just, say, texting you, letting you know he might want to come over sometime.

  “There is also an unconfirmed report of several deaths as a result of the incident, but these are as yet unconfirmed. At this point in time, residents and visitors are being warned to avoid the central park area and be on the alert for medical vehicles. This is …”

  Marena looked at me. This is not a hopeful development, her expression said.

  No, it’s not, I looked back. In fact it’s—

  She swung her eyes back to the road, cutting me off. Her driving style seemed a little casual to me, like maybe she trusted all the seat belts and airbags and newfangled whatevers to protect her. But I didn’t say anything.

  “This is Ron Zugema reporting,” Ron was going on. “Now over to you, Kristin.”

  “Thanks, Ron,” a blond head said. “Just a tragic situation shaping up there. Hi, everyone, it’s three forty-two P.M. here at WSVN TV. I’m Kristin Calvaldos. Well, it’s Midwinter Madness time again for soccer fans as—”

  Marena clicked it off.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a big—I mean, when people get killed, it’s always a—”

  “I know,” she said. “ Yeah, things do happen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, so, if it’s nothing, then, sorry to drag you out.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I love driving. Passengering.”

  “I’m going to ma
ke some calls,” she said.

  “Right.” I put in my own ear thing. Not to be outdone. I started calling and then e-mailing various friends. It turned out I didn’t have that many. I started calling businesses and institutions, like the Community Center and the Grace Rural School. Almost everybody was out. I didn’t know what to say, so I told them I just wanted to give them a heads-up and I’d call back. Meanwhile I tapped around on my phone, looking for anything fresh. The Net was sluggish and a lot of sites were 404. Finally I got onto a group called TomTomClub that’s kind of a local unofficial or almost underground first-on-the-scene muckraking news service favored by Libertarians, embittered veterans, high-end conspiracy theorists, and the Legalize Everything movement. It’s really just a couple of aging cracker hackers who monitor police and military-band communications, pick the best stuff, and put it up almost in real time, along with their own instant commentary. People were saying that whatever it was that actually happened at the park, there were a lot more deaths than were being reported. Emergency rooms were overloaded at Orlando Regional and Winter Park Memorial. Also, there was a fire in Kissimmee that might have been started by rioters. And supposedly people were trying to get out of Epcot and the guards weren’t letting them leave.

  “Okay, call me back,” Marena said. She pulled out her earbud and rubbed her ear. “Everybody says the problems are all in Orange County,” she said at me. “The best thing to do is keep going south.”

  I said something passive like how that sounded right to me or something.

  “Jeep, show times to Miami,” she said. A scroll came up on the dashscreen and said anything would take about twice as long as usual. I looked at her, but she looked ahead. From the side her face looked less cute and more regal. She took the exit onto 91 and cut in ahead of a huge Winnebago motor home. An odd-looking aircraft zwooshed over at less than two thousand feet. Max twisted under his seat belt. “What kind of plane is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marena said.

  “It’s a Grumman AEW Hawkeye,” I said. “The scoopy thing is an air sampler.”

  “Godless,” Max said. He was all the way turned around so he could see it out the back.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Hey, check this out,” Marena said in a lower voice. “The thing’s been tracking on the Magic Kingdom for at least an hour.” She touched two icons and satellite view came up on her dashscreen. “Passenger side,” she said to the onboard. It came up on mine too. I was expecting some outdated Google Earth thing, but it was a site called 983724jh0017272.gov, and it was a real-time view, and it wasn’t from one of those fuzzy NOAA feeds. It was military. 3-324CC6/92000 FT/W4450FT/ORLANDO CURRENT, it said. I recognized the profile of Lake Apopka on the left, but the view was too wide for me to see any landmarks.

  “Hey, that’s great,” I said. “I can’t get that.”

  “I bet you think I’m really working for the government.”

  “Well, you know, I think everybody—”

  “ You just need one line of code and you can get into it.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Can we zoom this?”

  “No, but it zooms itself every couple of minutes.”

  “That’s great.”

  She swerved around a half-crushed marsh rabbit. Send that to the Szechuan Palace, I thought.

  “So why is this happening today?” she asked. “Wasn’t the problem supposed to be yesterday?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t a few people get sick yesterday?”

  “I guess so.”

  “ Yeah.”

  “ You don’t really think it’s unrelated, do you?” she asked.

  “Well, not really,” I said. “Maybe it’s more—I don’t know, maybe whoever did it saw the Codex and had the same idea I did.”

  “Nobody’s seen the damn Codex. I mean, you can count the people who have on one hand. It’s just another diaperhead. I bet.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Marena made about fifteen calls in five minutes, to CNN Local, Bloomberg Local, the Civilian Early Warning Project, the Orlando police, the State Police, and the Parks District police. From what I could hear, they sounded inconclusive. She called Max’s grade school, the Warren offices in Orlando, and at least five friends, urging them all to get out of town. She made sure to add text to all the calls. She tried to call Taro, Taro’s lab, and their phones. Nothing. That didn’t bode well. Damn. I got inspired and texted No Way’s Mexico City mailbox and asked him to call back. I got Sra. Villanueva on the phone and told her to get herself and the family and any other people she knew into the truck and head south. She kept asking “żQué? żPor qué?” and finally, I just said, “Por favor,” and let it go at that. I tried No Way again.

  “I need to stop at an ATM,” Marena said.

  I asked whether she was talking to me. She was. “I have some cash,” I said.

  “No, I really ought to. I have like five cents.”

  “I’m serious. I brought my panic money, I really have, uh, a lot. You don’t have to stop. Besides, the machines might not be working. Besides, I know you’re good for it.”

  “What’s a lot?” she asked. I told her. She said okay, she wouldn’t stop. She seemed pretty relieved. There was a sort of generalized atmospheric feeling in the car that we were both too spooked to go back toward the Theme Park Capital of the World until after tomorrow, even if it was just a folie ŕ deux.

  “We are sorry,” a woman’s voice was saying on my phone. “The subscriber you are trying to reach is not available at this point in—”

  “Are you having trouble with your phone?” Marena asked.

  “Me?” I asked back. “ Yeah.”

  “… just fifty cents,” the synthevoice was saying, “we can retry your call at convenient two-minute intervals—”

  “I can’t get anybody,” Marena said. “I’m going to try your line, okay?”

  I said all right and clicked off.

  “Dial Jed DeLanda,” Marena said to her phone. Stupidly I held mine up like that would make them connect better, even though the signal had to go to an antenna and then up into outer space and then come back to another antenna and back to here. Anyway, it didn’t throb.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.” Maybe they, whoever they were these days, had pulled the collective cellular plug.

  I switched to Panaudio, which is a new service that runs through all the VoIPs and supposedly can reach anything. At least, the FBI uses it. Marena did the same thing, and we reached each other. It was a nice feeling. Outside the car, though, the communicationscape still seemed sketchy. I got through to a few people, but not my own phone, not anyone in Indiantown, and not No Way. Skype, UMA, and three of the other big VoIPs weren’t functioning. Face it, Jed, your window of being able to warn anybody, or get help from anybody, or do much of anything, has closed.

  I tilted my screen so Marena couldn’t see it and clicked up Schwab. Disney had already suspended trading. Bad sign. I checked out after-hours options on the Chicago exchange. Corn was jagging upward. Damn, those bastards catch on fast. One of the nice things about grains is that they always go up after a crisis, even a little crisis. If the president stubs his toe, corn goes up. On the other hand, if we’re heading into World Whatever Three, options aren’t going to get filled. Cash might devalue. And even gold and palladium and whatever can actually go down in a real crash because a big economic shock shakes all the PMs out of the—

  “Mom?” Max said near my ear. “Check it out, I got into the Ninth Hell! Mom!”

  “I can’t look at it right now,” Marena said. “That’s great, though.”

  “Yeah, that’s impressive,” I said.

  “I’ll look at it when we get there,” Marena said. “Hey, look at those.” She pointed out her window and up. A pair of Aeroscraft zeppelins were sliding overhead with their mooring ropes trailing like catfish barbels.

  Max looked. He sat back down, reentered the gameverse, and descended into Bolgia Nono. Just like the rest of us. I checked the DHS Civilian Alert site on my phone. “… ADVISING PERSONS NOW IN TRANSIT TO HEAD SOUTH OR SOUTHWEST,” the crawl
said. Well, that was what we were doing. “OTHER PERSONS SHOULD REMAIN IN THEIR HOMES OR PLACES OF BUSINESS.”

  Hell.

  I looked in on my home security system back in Indiantown. The doors were still locked, the generator was humming, and on the cameras everything looked okay. I checked the tank readouts. Damn. My gorgonian feeder farm was sick, sick, sick. The ammonia levels were way too high. For years I’d been tuning the place so that it could supposedly go on its own for a week, but in practice it never worked. Where the hell was Lenny? Three more days of this and it’ll be Love Canal II in there. I checked in with my sort-of posse on StrategyNet. Only two people were online, and they were in Japan. Please help me analyze data re. the current situation in Orlando area FL, I typed in. We are in the middle of it and I will forward any on-the-ground information. Urgent. Thanks. Jsonic.

 

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