Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  “I heard you, kid. But that’s not where they are now.”

  The certainty in Ed’s voice reminded Geck that the old guy wasn’t all the way human. “How do you know?”

  “This ain’t the boonies. This is Orlando. Communication channels are wide open.” Ed hopped over the barrier at the side of the turnpike and clambered down the embankment toward the bus stop. The driver saw them coming and throttled the bus up. Communication channels? Geck thought of the gleam in Ed’s eyes, and the way he’d disappeared the night before last. What the hell was he?

  Ed leaned into the bus with a palmful of silver. “I gather it ain’t your standard route, but we need to go up to the road over by the Jesus park.”

  “That’s Imad’s line,” the driver said. “His territory.”

  Ed looked over his shoulder at the empty parking lot. “I don’t see any Imad,” he said.

  “We got rules here,” the driver said.

  Ed took out one of his six-guns and cocked it without exactly pointing it at the driver. “Well, if it comes up next time you talk to Imad, you can tell him you got hijacked. How does that suit?”

  “Shit,” the driver said. He held out a hand while with the other hand he popped the bus’s emergency brake. “Give me the money.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later they were hustling across the Conroy Road bridge and down a worn footpath. Geck recognized the place even though he’d never been inside. “Kyle’s in JeebusLand?” Geck said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Looking for a dinosaur,” Ed said. He was moving fast, knees slightly bent as if he was expecting a surprise attack. Geck was quick but he had to hustle to keep up. They cut across the parking lot and Ed snapped the front gate off the heavy pins holding it to its frame with the heel of his palm. The clang and clatter would have let everyone within a half mile know they were there, but Geck could tell Ed didn’t care about finesse. Kyle must be in trouble. But how did the Boom know where Kyle was?

  Also, why did it matter?

  Geck felt for the gun he’d taken off Double Louie’s goon. It was there, but he had never fired a gun in his life. If there was going to be shooting he thought he would let Ed handle it. He followed Ed around a trio of crosses and across a sloping plaza that led down to what must have been a food court back when people still came to JeebusLand.

  Then he saw Kyle and Reenie and Tonya, and a guy dressed like some kind of prophet pointing a shotgun at them.

  “No, sir,” Prospector Ed said. “No, sirree.”

  6

  KYLE LOOKED OVER HIS shoulder at the sound of a new voice. Another old guy, with a gray handlebar mustache and a cowboy hat, stood with an ancient six-gun pointed at the preacher. Right next to him and a little behind was maybe the last person on Earth Kyle would have expected to see at that moment.

  “Geck,” he said.

  “Kyle,” Geck said. “What the fuck?”

  The preacher said, “This is a house of the Lord and you will keep a proper tongue in your head.”

  Kyle had to admit that took guts, given the circumstances.

  “Kyle Hendricks,” the cowboy said. It wasn’t a question. “Who are your lady friends?”

  “Um, Serena and Tonya.”

  “Which one’s bit?”

  “Tonya.”

  “Take your shirt off and wrap her up.”

  Kyle did. Tonya was clenching her teeth, but a quiet and steady stream of highly improper words leaked out. “Hold it there,” he said, folding her arm against her chest and putting her other hand on the loose end of the shirt.

  “How bad is it?” the cowboy asked. “She got all her fingers still?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said.

  “Any big pieces missing from her arm?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Let her be for a minute so she can get herself together. Now let’s get to you,” the cowboy said to the preacher. “Put the gun on the ground.” Without hesitation the preacher complied. “Have to tell you, it rubs me the wrong way thinking you was going to crucify these kids for trespassing,” the cowboy continued.

  “Why are you looking at me?” Kyle protested. “It was their idea.”

  “Son, you got a lot to learn about having a spine,” the cowboy said.

  “Bite me, Gramps,” Kyle said.

  “I’ll throw your ass in the pond, you want something to bite you,” the cowboy answered. “Now shut up. Your friend needs a doctor. You come into a place like this and open your bloodstream up, there’s no telling what might get in. Clear out while you can.”

  “Jesus, oh shit,” Tonya said.

  “We can take you to Doc Singh,” Kyle said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “This Doc Singh, he know about . . . ?” The cowboy cocked an eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said, assuming he meant nanos.

  “Then he’s the guy you want. Go on, now. You, preacher. What the hell is that thing in your pond?”

  “It used to be part of an animatronic dinosaur display,” the preacher said, looking at the still water. “The Boom . . . I think it got put together with an alligator.”

  “That’s what you should have shot,” the cowboy said.

  The preacher made a sound in the back of his throat. “You think I didn’t?”

  They all considered that for a minute. Then Tonya said, “Guys, my arm really hurts.”

  “Right,” said Prospector Ed. “Let’s get you to that sawbones.”

  * * *

  Waiting for Tonya to get stitched up, Geck felt like he should get a sense of what had been going on while he was down in Miami. He hadn’t seen Kyle in . . . a year? “So, Twin O Mine,” he said. “How’s Orlando?”

  “Same.” Kyle shrugged. “I figured you’d get killed in Miami. You back for good?”

  “Could be. No plan, really,” Geck said.

  “You walked with this guy two hundred miles. That sounds a little like a plan, Geck.” Kyle was hypersensitized to Geck’s wavelength of bullshit and he thought he was detecting it now.

  “Well, I kayaked for the first bit,” Geck said.

  That was Geck, Kyle thought. All evasion. “All right, never mind. You don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”

  Reenie hadn’t said a word since seeing Geck. Another wavelength Kyle had tuned into over the past five or six years was her Silences of Fury and he knew he was hearing (or not hearing) one now. She and Geck had been together for a couple of years before Geck took off for Miami. She’d had that whole time to stoke her resentment furnaces and now that he was back, Reenie’s emotional pressure gauges would all be in the red. Kyle was torn. Part of him felt bad for her and even for Geck, who was kind of an asshole but who was still his twin brother. But part of him was looking forward to the storm.

  They were at Doc Singh’s house, in the same gated community where Tonya’s uncle Hilario lived. Private security, nanite scrubbers constantly flitting through the night sky like bats, the whole panorama of showy elitism in the ruins. The gate guard knew Tonya or the rest of them would never have gotten in.

  “Kyle,” said Prospector Ed. “Come here a second.”

  Kyle walked over to the far end of Doc Singh’s patio, looking out over a lawn and a tangle of brush that hid a canal at the back of the property. Prospector Ed held out a bandanna. “You got her blood on you. And she was bit by the varmint in the puddle there.”

  Kyle got a chill. He’d been distracted by guns pointed at him and seeing his brother and wondering when Reenie would blow. It hadn’t occurred to him that if something had gotten into Tonya, it might have gotten into him, too.

  Uh-oh.

  “What I’m saying,” Prospector Ed went on, “is you ought to be careful of the, you know . . .”

  “Nanos?”

  “Those. Yep.”

  Kyle thought he saw something like frustration on Ed’s face. “Why don’t you say it, then?”

  “None of your goddamn business is why, boy,” Ed
said. “Anyway. This ought to take care of it. What I came to give you in the first place.” He held out an envelope to Kyle, who took it and looked it over. It was heavy, almost cloth-like, and sealed. There was no address or name.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Prospector Ed didn’t answer because he was gone. Like poof, gone, either into the shadows while Kyle was inspecting the envelope or through some kind of nano-magic Kyle was scared to wonder about.

  “He can’t say the word nano,” Kyle said, thinking out loud.

  Reenie tapped the envelope in Kyle’s hand. “Who cares what he can say? Open it.”

  “Yeah,” Geck said. “Open it.”

  Aha, Kyle thought. Geck knows the cowboy was looking for me and he wants to know why. He must think it’s something big. The whole situation had him spooked, though, and he was already convinced that whatever Tonya had bled onto him was going to turn him into some kind of Kyle-gator. Now there was this envelope handed to him by a cowboy who could make himself disappear.

  “That guy killed two people in Miami for looking at him wrong,” Geck said, which did nothing for Kyle’s emotional equilibrium. “If he wanted you to have that, man, you gotta check it out.”

  Kyle held it out to Geck. “You open it.”

  “Hell no.” Geck put his hands behind his back. “I’m not touching it. Open it.”

  Kyle did. Inside was a card, made of some kind of slippery material that might have been paper or plastic. It was iridescent, with black letters that seemed to float a little above the surface. Kyle blinked at what it said. Wordlessly he showed it to the others.

  “Jesus,” Reenie said.

  Greetings, Kyle Hendricks! You may present this card at any entrance to MONUMENT CITY. Upon presentation, your entry to MONUMENT CITY will be guaranteed. This card will assist you in your travels. It is not transferable. The City looks forward to your arrival.

  Warm regards,

  Moses Barnum

  “Monument City,” Geck said. “Is that place even real?”

  Kyle didn’t know. No one knew.

  * * *

  Once Tonya was stitched up, they got some beer and headed down to one of the little kettlehole lakes that pockmark central Florida. On his third beer, and with his typical subtlety when something was on his mind, Kyle said, “So. Monument City.” Then he had to explain to Tonya. Reenie sat perfectly still the whole time and never said a word.

  “Should have been me, I bet,” Geck said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’m the adventurous one. You never want to go anywhere or do anything. Why would Moses Barnum—and man, what a stupid alias that is—want you anywhere near his city? Me, on the other hand, I would make Monument City rock.”

  It worried Kyle sometimes, thinking that he and Geck had the same genome. They were the same all the way down to the molecular level. How could their personalities really be so different? Was he, Kyle, really the same kind of person as Geck was? Were all those sneaky self-centered qualities inside Kyle, too, waiting to come out? He hated that idea and hating it made him hate Geck a little, too . . . which was like hating himself because they had all the same genes.

  Alienated as they were, Kyle knew Geck well enough to tell when he was blustering and when he was really feeling something, and right then he seemed actually upset. They were twins. Maybe Geck was pissed that he hadn’t gotten the invitation. But what difference did it make? It wasn’t like Kyle was going to go.

  He’d never been more than twenty miles from Orlando except one trip down to Miami where he and Geck had nearly gotten killed. They’d been five, following their father on a prospecting trip in the drowning ruins. Dad had caught some kind of infection from something in the water and died about a week after they got back to Orlando. He’d known he was going to die. Only one thing I’d like you to promise, he said in his final delirium, mistaking them for older versions of themselves. Well, two. Take care of each other and bury me by the old Red Sox spring training stadium in Winter Haven. They’d agreed, but the minute he was dead the Boom was already decompiling him. Nobody was buried anymore.

  7

  SPADE WASN’T A CONSTRUCT, but he acted like one, dressing in a museum-piece suit and ostentatiously gesturing with a cigarette. He drove a covered wagon pulled by four horses, stamping and shaking their bridles in a parking lot below an approach ramp to the Bay Bridge.

  “We can follow I-80,” Spade said when they were across the bay and through Oakland. “Quickest and probably safest.”

  “You tell me,” Teeny said. “You’ve done it before.”

  “Sure, but what worked before might not this time. That a chance you’re willing to take?”

  She didn’t see that she had any other options, so she said yes. Which is how, a few days later, they got to Roaring Camp.

  * * *

  The roar came over the pass while they were still far enough away that Teeny thought it was thunder. “This is a weird spot,” Spade said. “A couple of stories and a real event all mashed together. You heard of the Donner party?” Teeny nodded. “How about Roaring Camp or Poker Flat? Those are the stories.” Teeny didn’t know them. “One’s about a gambler and the other one’s about a baby born in a played-out mining camp. Everyone thinks the baby is going to bring good luck. Then it dies in the end. But you watch, when we get there everyone’s going to be convinced their luck is about to turn. Especially because you’re a woman.”

  This set off warning bells. “Hold on,” Teeny said. “They’re going to expect me to have a baby?”

  “It’s the only story they know.” Spade twitched the reins and the horses turned off the road onto a winding dirt track. They passed a sign for Donner Lake. Then the path split and Spade reined the horses in. “Huh,” he said. “Wasn’t like this last time.”

  “Maybe we should keep going,” Teeny suggested. Could the Boom make her pregnant? What would be born? “Seriously. Spade. I don’t like this.”

  The track behind them was gone, overgrown by brush and young trees. Teeny swung her feet out of the wagon. “I wouldn’t do that,” Spade said, nodding ahead of them.

  A man appeared at the fork in the trail. “My name’s Oakhurst,” he said. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, rumpled and stained, with a two of clubs stuck in the hatband. “I’ll take you to Roaring Camp.”

  “We’re going to Poker Flat,” Teeny said, guessing that was the story about the gambler and wanting to avoid Roaring Camp.

  “Poker Flat,” Oakhurst repeated. “I’ll take you to Poker Flat.”

  “Constructs get confused.” Spade was watching Oakhurst as he spoke, but Oakhurst walked off like he’d already forgotten they were there. “You get right down to it, they’re made of stories, but the Boom isn’t so good at keeping the stories stable. It’s always retelling them and mixing them up. Same way it iterates on itself. Be careful around them.”

  They followed Oakhurst to a scattering of log cabins arranged in a ragged circle around a fire pit. “Stay the night,” Oakhurst said. “There’s grub.” A fire crackled to life in the pit and constructs appeared. They wore canvas overalls and leaned pickaxes up against the log benches around the fire. One of them laid strips of bacon on a griddle.

  “Spade,” Teeny said. “Get me out of here.”

  “No can do,” Spade said. “Only way out is through.”

  Even though she was starving and she loved bacon, Teeny refused it as politely as she could, fearing that if she ate it that it would let some of the story into her body. It was a futile gesture, since her every inhalation brought in wild plicks by the million, but all she had was will and intention, so that was what she used. She ate a cold empanada she’d brought from home.

  Teeny was put in mind of one of the last conversations she’d had with her foster mother. “It’s all going to be so much stranger than you can imagine,” Esperanza dos Santos had said. Tubes and splotches on her skin, before the Boom had cured her cancer only to turn her into part of a ba
seball stadium. “But it will still be people living in it. They never change.”

  When she mentioned this to Spade, he spat in the fire. “She didn’t understand the Boom.”

  “No, she did,” Teeny said. “She didn’t want me to forget that we aren’t the Boom.”

  The miners played cards and moaned about their luck. Oakhurst dealt every hand. He passed Spade a bottle, and Spade took a long drink. “Not terrible,” he said, holding it out to Teeny.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  Oakhurst pointed at a cabin. “That one’s yours. Sleep anytime.”

  A bunk bed stood in each corner of the cabin. All of the beds were draped with a single wool blanket. Teeny looked over her shoulder from the doorway. “Spade.”

  He left the campfire and followed her into the cabin. “I don’t want to sleep alone,” she said.

  “I get it,” he said. “But I don’t know what you think I’m going to do if the Boom decides you should have a baby. In the other story you’re a whore who freezes to death.”

  “Jesus,” Teeny said. She took two extra blankets and climbed into a top bunk. “Why did we come this way?”

  “Last time I made the trip this was all different,” Spade said. “The Boom saw you coming.”

  * * *

  In the morning it was cold. Teeny could see her breath when she came out of the cabin, and when she looked out over the slope down toward Donner Lake it struck her that she saw no evidence of the Boom. Everything before appeared natural. “Beautiful country, isn’t it?” Oakhurst said. “Seems natural. You look at it, you think this is what it looked like before the Boom. Before people, even.”

  He snapped his fingers and a flame appeared in his palm. “But watch.” He held the flame close to a pinecone dangling at the edge of a dead branch. Tiny shoots of green reached out from the pinecone. Some branched and some grew buds, as if the plicks inside all had different ideas about what kind of plant they wanted the pine tree to be. Soon the pinecone was a grapefruit-sized ball of entwined branches and buds. The branch sagged lower.

  Spade came out of his tent. “Cut that shit out,” he said. “You’re going to get us all turned into fucking giant sloths or something.”