by Alex Irvine
“Work off how, exactly?” Mei-Mei asked, already knowing the answer.
The fishermen chuckled. That was it. Mei-Mei pressed the knife against the underside of her jaw, feeling the edge bite . . . but it wouldn’t cut her.
She looked down. It wasn’t a knife anymore. It was a small rectangle of smooth plastic, iridescent and about the size of a playing card.
Mei-Mei had seen a lot in the previous nineteen years growing up in the chemical soup that sloshed through drowned New Orleans. Gulf Coast chemical and petroleum plants were some of the Boom’s favorite playgrounds, and once the levees failed for good, New Orleans got everything that washed down the Mississippi, and the Boom went nuts all over again. But she’d never seen anything like a knife changing into a fancy playing card, and she’d definitely never seen anything like the cowboy who appeared from the ground, two ancient guns in his hands, and shot down the members of the gang in a staccato thunder that left Mei-Mei deaf and hiding her face down in the pile of rags they’d given her for a bed.
When she looked up the cowboy was gone. The fishermen were dead. The card was a knife again.
And her ankle was free.
She got the hell out of there.
* * *
The bayous were full of dinosaurs now, as if the Boom had heard somewhere that oil was made from dinosaurs and decided to reverse-engineer the process. Mei-Mei stumbled away from a duckbill as it reared up out of the water crunching a mouthful of reeds. She lost a shoe and fumbled among the roots to get it back. Something fell out of it as she pried it free: an iridescent plastic rectangle.
“You did it, girl,” a voice said from her side. “Sorry it took me so long to arrive.”
Mei-Mei reacted before she thought, slashing with the knife and feeling it bite into the man before she’d even seen him. She stumbled away, slipping on the exposed roots of a live oak and splashing through the shallows away from him.
“Hold on,” he said. “Easy.”
She looked at him. Blood seeped through the cut she’d opened in his shirt but he didn’t look like she’d hurt him badly. He didn’t even look upset. “I have something for you,” he said. “Not in a bad way. Look.”
He peeled open his shirt and she watched the wound close itself. The blood seemed to soak back into his skin.
“No hard feelings,” he said. “You can call me Ed. You’re Mei-Mei Liang.”
Mei-Mei was practical. She saw the knife wasn’t going to hurt a Boom construct. She put it away. “Yeah,” she said. “And I did what?”
“You made a stand. I admire that.” Ed nodded down at the ground. The duckbill sloshed away into the bayou. “You might want to pick that up.”
She did.
“Read it and tell me what you think.”
Mei-Mei Liang! Present this card at any entrance to MONUMENT CITY. Upon presentation, your entry to MONUMENT CITY will be guaranteed. This card will assist you during your travels. It is not transferable. The City looks forward to your arrival.
All best wishes,
Moses Barnum
“Monument City? That’s a fairy tale,” she said.
“Yes and no,” Ed said.
“You’re a construct,” Mei-Mei said. “I know the Boom likes to play jokes. How do I know this isn’t a joke?”
“Hell of a joke, if I just killed four men to hit you with the punch line,” Ed said.
“The Boom doesn’t give a shit about people. Killing them doesn’t mean anything.”
“It does to me.” Ed looked somber. Confused, too. She’d never seen that expression on a construct. Against her better judgment, Mei-Mei trusted him. But that could have been the Boom working on her mind.
“Look, it’s your call. Monument City is waiting, and I have someone else to see. If you’re hungry, there’s a fella right up that way who will take care of you.” Ed pointed through an opening in the low-hanging cypress and live oak branches. “See you around.” As he spoke he was gone.
* * *
Not seeing any other way to go, Mei-Mei headed through the gap Ed had indicated after she put the card back in her shoe. That seemed right. Maybe it would be gone the next time she looked. If not, maybe she would think about Monument City . . . once she was out of the bayou and in a town again. She wasn’t going back to New Orleans, not after what the orphanage had done. But Baton Rouge or . . . well, she could go anywhere. Nothing was holding her. No family, no one she could trust.
Why not Monument City? Everyone had stories about it, some kind of paradise in the Rocky Mountains where a new world was germinating. Mei-Mei had never taken the stories seriously. She knew how people came up with fairy tales to make themselves feel better. She’d done it, too, plenty of times. Nights at the orphanage were lonely.
Ahead she saw a man in overalls and no shirt, leaning against a wagon with a donkey hitched to it. He saw her coming and got a big grin on his face. Not threatening, more like he had a secret and was glad to see there was someone he could share it with. Near him, in shallow water, floated a watermelon with a huge metal hook thrust through it. The hook was tied to a rope whose other end wrapped around the donkey’s yoke.
She saw the bulge in the water first, the meniscus deforming and swelling in the instant before the hippo’s head surged up into the night air, jaws wide to sweep up the watermelon before they clamped down again with a crunch that put Mei-Mei in mind of the sound big water bugs made when you crushed them under your feet, only a hundred times bigger. The hippo disappeared in a swirl of algae and watermelon pulp. Water lapped over Mei-Mei’s knees.
The line went tight and the man in overalls said, “Got you.” He caught the line and pulled. Slowly, hand over hand, he hauled the hippo out of the water. Mei-Mei couldn’t believe what she was seeing. No human could do that. She’d seen a hippo before, sloshing around near the levee behind the orphanage. They were way too strong for a person to pull. Even a person with a donkey backing him up. This was the Boom, drawing her into one of its fantasies.
The man in the overalls kept grinning. “Red meat,” he said. “Working people need red meat.” The hippo came thrashing to the surface and he dragged it the rest of the way up onto the ground. Blood and pieces of watermelon rind spilled from its mouth. “Swamps around here, they’re like a dream come true for a hippo. Then when you need ’em, bam.”
On the last word he made a chopping motion with his left arm and the hippo burst apart. Its head dropped straight to the ground with a splat. Its hide stripped off from the base of its neck all the way back to its tail, falling in a wrinkled red heap inside out. Guts poured out of its belly and long cuts of meat sheared away from its leg bones and ribs. The man bent and picked one of them up. The hippo’s jaws flexed one last time and then relaxed. “Hippo chop,” the man said.
Mei-Mei took a step back. “Good eating,” the man said. He held the chop out to her. It was the size of her head, glistening and marbled. “You hungry? You look hungry.”
She was hungry but she didn’t say it out loud. The man turned and she saw past him to a neat conical arrangement of sticks. They burst into flame. He produced a skewer from the back of his wagon and drove it lengthwise through the chop. “It’s best rare,” he said, “but you can have it however you want.” He held the skewer over the fire. The fat crackled. Mei-Mei heard fluttering over by the remains of the hippo but she didn’t look. Birds, she told herself. That’s all it is, birds eating the guts and picking at the bones. But if she looked it might be something else. That was the nature of the Boom.
“Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t come any closer. If he could do that to the hippo, she thought, he can do it to me.
He nodded. “It’s about ready.” He turned the skewer over. Flames licked around his arm but his clothes didn’t catch on fire. He saw her watching this. “I should be on fire, shouldn’t I?” he said, and grinned. “Oops. Here.”
Fire crawled up his arm, burned in his beard. Still he grinned. He held the skewer out. “Don’t have a
knife and fork, but you get a bite of this in you, you won’t care. Here.”
Mei-Mei took the skewer. The smell of the meat overcame her fear and she bit into the chop. It was gamy and delicious. She took another bite. “Thank you,” she said around the mouthful. “It’s good.”
The fire in his hair and beard had gone out. “Sure is, isn’t it? Now look, you’d better move along.”
She looked over her shoulder as if he was warning her about something. “Why?”
He nodded at her shoe. “You know why. You talked to Prospector Ed. He doesn’t give those to just anybody.”
“Who does he give them to?”
“Have to meet the others to know what the criteria are this time,” the construct said with a shrug. “Ed’s been a little different lately. Haven’t seen him in a while. Could be Barnum sent him out with different rules this time.”
“This time? There were other times? I mean, he does this a lot?”
“No, not a lot. But he’s done it before. Came through here once before, maybe . . .” The construct’s eyes briefly turned white before the Boom redirected its attention to his appearance. Irises and pupils reappeared. “Three years ago? Five? Something like that. I didn’t see who he was looking for that time.”
“So it’s real? Monument City?”
“Oh, it’s real. But that don’t mean it’s good.” The hippo meat was in the back of the man’s wagon now, and Mei-Mei hadn’t seen it move. “Like I said, you better get moving. I got a hippo to smoke and you got your other people to meet.”
* * *
Who was Mei-Mei’s mysterious provider of hippo steak and gnomic guidance? Wrong question. How do we know? The Boom is all of us, but we are not each of us of the Boom. Information only travels so fast, and the microscopic tides of the Boom sweep away communications or transform them beyond recognition much more often than they permit a message to survive unaltered. The better question is, What was happening to Prospector Ed? This interests us. There have been Eds before but not this Ed. Life-7 controlled the others, or Barnum did. Or, yes, we did. Inevitably there arose an Ed who escaped control. How? What was this new Ed, of the Boom but fighting its imperatives, of Monument City but rebelling against the control of Life-7? This, O children of glucagon and oligodendrocytes, we very much want to know.
12
“ARE YOU SHITTING ME!?”
Reenie’s voice carried through the walls of the old hotel like they weren’t there. Kyle sat in the next room, listening to her rant with his head in his hands. The Reenie Storm was going to get a lot worse. Right now she was mad because Geck was gone and she’d been dumb enough to let herself think he’d stick around. But she was going to be a lot madder when she found out that Geck had helped himself to Kyle’s Monument City ticket on his way out of town.
So he got the pain over all at once and told her.
She stood stock-still for a full ten seconds, Geck’s note crushed in one hand. Later, it said. Good to see you guys. He’d left it folded into the jamb of Reenie’s door while they were all out explaining the JeebusLand situation to Hilario, who had been surprisingly interested in the gator-thing even though it wasn’t a dinosaur. Now he wanted them to catch it. Tonya’s memorable response? “I tried, Uncle H. Even used myself as bait.”
Kyle loved that girl. They’d all stayed the night at Hilario’s house and Kyle hadn’t slept much, thinking about Tonya and JeebusLand and Monument City and the sudden reappearance of his brother . . . strange times. Kyle hated strange times. He wanted ordinary times.
“Geck . . . no. Wait. You,” Reenie said.
“Me what?” Kyle said.
“You left a ticket to Monument City sitting around where Geck could steal it?”
“Whoa,” Kyle said. “It said it was for me. Also I don’t even want to go. He can have it.”
Reenie looked at him like she was trying to decide whether or not to kill him. Then she said, “Kyle. Let me explain something to you. Geck is at this moment running off with your one and only chance to see what is inside Monument City. You understand that?”
Kyle, knowing it wouldn’t matter what he said, didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” Reenie went on as if he had said yes. “So if Monument City is a real thing and a paradise on Earth, et cetera and so forth, you just blew your chance to see it. And even if it isn’t everything it’s supposed to be, the universe handed you a reason to get the hell out of here and do something. Go west, young man! See the world! Or were you planning to sit around in Orlando cutting fish your whole life?”
Kyle shrugged. “Why not?”
“No.” Reenie shook her head. “We’re going after him.”
We.
That’s when Kyle understood that the Reenie Storm wasn’t really about him at all. Geck was the problem. He’d run out on her chance to see Monument City, see the world, go west, et cetera. That was the problem. She wanted to settle things with Geck, and she wasn’t going to let small obstacles like his disappearance stand in the way. Kyle, though, was ready to bow down before any obstacle he could find. “How are we going to do that?” he asked. “We don’t know which way he went. Or where he’s going.”
“Then we find out where Monument City is, and we beat him there,” Reenie said.
Looking at her, Kyle did not envy his brother. Serena Green did not swear enemies lightly and when she did, she was not inclined to make peace. Like ever.
He, on the other hand, had long since gotten used to Geck stealing everything he could get his hands on. And in a way Geck’s character flaws made it easier for Kyle to be a stand-up guy. He could look at his twin and say, in essence, that whatever Geck’s reaction was to a particular situation, Kyle’s should be the opposite. Which, in this case, meant that he shouldn’t care about the ticket. Let Geck have it.
The problem was, how was he going to tell Reenie that?
He played his last card. “Tonya’s going to want to come, too.”
This threw Reenie off balance, but only for a second. “Fine,” she said. “The more of us go, the safer it’ll be. Let’s go tell her.”
They went back out to Hilario’s. Kyle was a little unsettled by the air of imminent death that hung over the whole place. He loved the house, though, a rambling old place with tons of windows and big trees. It was the kind of place he’d have liked to live in, but he was never going to have the kind of money you needed to buy a house that big, let alone keep it up.
Hilario was dozing on a daybed in a screened porch at the back of his house, looking out over an overgrown lawn with a pond at the back. A row of turtles sunned themselves on a fallen tree at the far end of the pond and a heron was picking through the shallows on the other side. Kyle and Reenie tried to get Tonya to come into the other room with them so they could fill her in, but she wouldn’t leave Hilario’s side. Her arm was wrapped in gauze from knuckles to elbow. “I don’t think he’s got much left,” she whispered.
Kyle looked around. What would happen to the house when Hilario died? Would it be Tonya’s? That might keep her in Orlando. It sure would have kept Kyle there. He’d been trying to work up some anger at Geck but all he’d come up with was weary resignation. Geck was Geck. He stole stuff. He came and went. What was the point of getting mad about it?
Reenie told Tonya what had happened and said, “We’re going after him.”
“That shit,” Tonya said. “Kyle, you must be pissed.”
“Nope. Not at all. I don’t even want to go,” Kyle said. “Only reason I’m going is because I don’t feel right about letting Reenie go by herself.”
“You don’t want to see it?” Tonya asked him.
“Sort of, I guess. But it’s not a big deal.”
“Oh yes it is,” Reenie said. “You’re like the only person in North America who wouldn’t want to go to Monument City. That’s like not wanting to—”
“Monument City?” Hilario said.
They all looked at him. “Yeah, I heard you,” he said. “I didn’
t die yet.” He coughed and sat up enough to drink water. “You should go,” he said after wiping his mouth. His hair was sticking up on one side, showing white at the roots under a glossy black dye job. He hadn’t shaved in a while and the stubble was white, too. It made for a strange effect. Kyle almost wanted to shave him so he wouldn’t look so poorly maintained.
“We can’t catch the gator-thing if we go off looking for Geck,” Tonya pointed out.
“Ah, doesn’t matter,” Hilario said. “What am I going to do with it anyway? Go find your friend.”
“I’m going to track him down and kill him, is what I’m going to do,” Reenie said. Kyle saw right through this. Sure, she was mad at Geck, but to her his treachery was the excuse she’d always been looking for to get the hell out of Orlando and see the world.
“Better do it before he gets to the City, then, girl,” Hilario said. “The word is, people who go in don’t come out.”
Kyle thought he must have been hallucinating. “Is it even real?” he asked.
“Oh, sure,” Hilario said. “I never been there, but I remember when I was younger reading about whatsisname buying part of the Great Wall of China. It’s out west somewhere. Montana, maybe.”
“Montana’s like three thousand klicks away from here,” Kyle said.
“Lots of scenery along the way. You’re young. You should get out and see what this country has become.” Hilario closed his eyes again. “You’re the ones who are going to have to live in it.”
“Uncle H,” Tonya said. “We can’t go while you’re sick.”
“Tee-Tee,” Hilario said, still not opening his eyes. “I’m not sick. I’m dying. And that’s happening whether you’re here or not.” He lifted a hand. “Go on. Take some money if you want. But not too much. That’s your inheritance, Tee-Tee. Travel by water when you can.” The hand dropped and Hilario wheezed, “I’m gonna take a nap. Might or might not wake up, but if I do, don’t let me find you here.”