by John Ringo
“You must come through here a lot. I hate to ask when you’ve already done so much for me, but could you recommend anywhere to eat and, well, stay that’s okay but not too expensive?” she asked, dropping her eyes and scuffing the ground a bit with a foot.
“Oh, like, no problem. I’m, um, meeting a friend, so I’m gonna be like totally out of the net until morning, no offense. Um… the cafeteria is totally bogus, so don’t even go there. They sell the food in Asheville Urb Calorie Credits, and they seriously scalp you on the exchange rates. Your best bet is probably the mall food court. The Taco Hell was okay the last time I tried it, but that was like a few months ago when I was majorly low on cash. For rooms, I’d tell a guy to take the no-tell motel outside the walls and leave all his stuff in the van, but if I were you I’d honestly pick up an Urbie dude for a one nighter before I did that ’cause it’s not exactly your high-rent district.” He frowned, scratching his chin through the beard and looking glum. “Shit. Why don’t you hang around until Janet gets here? Maybe she can, like, find you some crash space for the night. Urb hostel prices are, like, well, the bogosity is beyond belief, I kid you not.”
“Oh, no, it’s all right. I don’t want to horn in on your date or anything. I mean, I saved the bus fare up here, and I’d planned to stay overnight. I’ll be okay.” She put a hand on his arm and smiled reassuringly.
“Aw, hang around anyway. You can meet Janet and we can all walk in together. I can at least keep them from cheating you too bad when you rent your hostel room. Oh, ’scuse me.” He left her and walked over to a plump, middle-aged woman with a clipboard and a little red wagon with a bucket half full of water.
Cally went back to Marilyn’s romance novel on her PDA while Reefer and the restaurateur dickered and made their trade, leaning against the van as strains of music came drifting through the open window… dog has not been fed in years. It’s even worse than it appears but it’s all right. Cows giving kerosene, kid can’t read at seventeen…
After a bit the older woman dragged her wagon back off, bucket sloshing a bit as she went. Reefer stayed in the back, fiddling quite a while with the tanks while the afternoon sun sank to the edge of the mountains. Finally, he sighed and came around to her side, scratching the back of his head with one hand and looking up at the impending sunset.
“Um… look, it would be like a major favor if you could wait here for Janet for a minute while I go sign up for tomorrow’s convoy. I mean, like, she knows the van, so if you see her… uh, like she’s tiny, okay? And she’s got straight black hair about down to here, looks about your age. Do you, like, how do I say this? Have you ever heard of the Goths?” he asked.
“What, you mean European Franco-Germanic barbarian tribes from the dark ages?”
“Um… no. Not like that at all. Just… she wears a lot of black, okay? And silver jewelry. She’ll probably be wearing, like, lots of silver jewelry. And she has this really cool Celtic knot kind of bracelet tattooed around one wrist. Like, left, I think. You can’t miss her. So, if she like shows while I’m gone, which she probably will, could you tell her I’ll be right back?” He bit his lip and craned his neck back over towards the Urb entrance as if he could make her appear just by looking often enough.
“Sure, Reefer, I’ll tell her you’ll be right back,” she said.
“Awesome. Thanks, man.” He walked off towards the pack of semis that had made up the front of the convoy from Charleston.
The clouds had turned to brilliant splashes of hot pink, vermilion, and orange by the time Reefer got back with his convoy slot number for the morning. His face fell slightly when he saw there was nobody but Cally at the truck.
“Bogus,” he muttered softly under his breath as he opened the driver’s side door and grabbed his backpack. “I guess I made us wait for nothing. Sorry, Marilyn. I didn’t mean to be a dweeb. Uh, let’s go, I guess.”
Cally grabbed her own pack without comment and followed him towards the door of the Urb. The parking lot was cracked and pot-holed in places and clearly needed resurfacing, but the freshly painted lines on the faded asphalt suggested it wasn’t on the schedule anytime soon. Even from a distance, she could see that the walls of the entry level of the Urb were covered with graffiti, some fresh, some of which had flaked and started to peel over time, along with the building’s own paint.
As they approached the door, a couple in faded jeans and artfully ripped black T-shirts came out and started walking towards them. Reefer seemed to recognize them and missed a step, recovering and starting forward easily. As they reached each other, Cally noted the strain in the smile on his face.
“Well, like, cool. More people. Hi, Janet. Janet, this is Marilyn. Marilyn, Janet.” His voice had a slightly desperate edge to it. Cally stepped to his side and put an arm easily around his waist. Least I can do. He gave me a lift and he didn’t do anything obnoxious on the way. Besides, Marilyn’s sensitive.
“Oh, pleased to meet you.” Janet tilted her head back to look up at the skinny boy next to her. “Thad, this is that guy I was telling you about, Reefer. He’s a really good guy. Reefer, this is Thad.”
The kid unwrapped his arm from around her waist to shake Reefer’s hand. “Oh, like, cool. Janet says you’re a pretty rad painter, dude. Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, sure.” He clutched the hand Cally had put around his waist and shot her a grateful look. There was an awkward silence as they looked each other up and down. Thad’s red goatee clashed wildly with the electric blue spikes in his black hair. One shoulder, bared where the sleeves had been ripped out of the shirt, sported a tattooed head of a Posleen God King, crest erect, snarling. His forehead tattoo was a bright, metallic gold lightning bolt. His skin had the clear complexion typical of a generation that viewed acne with the same skepticism their grandparents had held for tales of walking through the snow to school in the mornings.
Cally broke the stalemate by pinching Reefer’s butt soundly and grinning when he jumped. “Hey, babe, we gonna grab some eats, or what?”
* * *
“Hey, Marilyn, like, I appreciate the support but you don’t have to do this.” Reefer nuzzled her ear, whispering, as they walked down the residential corridors to Janet’s suite, staying three steps behind his ex-girlfriend and the new guy.
“Shhh,” she placed a finger over his lips, “it’s allright.”
“We can just go up and check into the hostel, separate rooms and all, and if I look like a dweeb, well, you got me through a real bummer of an evening…”
“Shhh.” She stopped him again and nipped his ear whispering, “I’m not offering to do the deed, but I need a place to crash, you need some moral support, just chill out and shut up, okay?” And not having to check in anywhere is good tradecraft.
“Hey, you two, get a room,” Janet called back over her shoulder.
“We are. Yours,” Cally grinned back. “Well, okay, your futon, anyway.”
Beyond the inevitable futon, the first thing Cally noticed about the apartment was that the smoke detector inlet had been covered with duct tape, and filters cobbled together over the air vents. The second thing was the portable air scrubber over in the corner, plugged into the wall. The small den was shrunken even further by the dark holographic posters of various musicians and groups that papered most of the wall area. The exception was the square meter on which the thin vidscreen was hung. Black, red, and silver “fantasy fish” with various motifs programmed into their scale patterns swam back and forth in the screensaver program. Cally spotted an ankh, an elder sign (complete with electric blue flame), a spider’s web, and a star of David in a circle before she shook herself slightly and resumed cataloging the details of the room.
The futon was set up in couch mode against the wall opposite the monitor. Two rooms led off from the den. One was clearly the bathroom, from the bare Galplas floor. The other had to be the bedroom. A small makeshift kitchen sat on and under a desk in the same corner as the air scrubber. Microwave, big bowl, and gallo
n jug of water on top, small refrigerator underneath. Various convenience foods were jammed in a mishmash in the shelves of the desk. A clutter of dirty laundry, empty food wrappers, empty cans and bottles, and cube cases covered the floor.
“Y’all like movies?” Their hostess strolled in with sublime indifference and brushed the clutter from one of the two fabric and steel lawn chairs onto the floor, picking up a scattered handful of cubes and sorting through them, looking up at Thad. “Whaddya think, luv, Lair of the White Worm, Evil Dead II, or Night of the God King: The Return?”
“I dunno.” He walked over and opened the fridge and started passing out beer. “Maybe Lair, it’s pretty cool. Hey, Reefer, do you live up to your name, dude?”
The other man glanced at Cally nervously, but he must have decided it was okay, because he shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and pulled his clothes out onto the floor, pulling out a largish compressed pack vacuum-sealed in clear plastic. Janet perked up, pulling a small plastic scale out from under the futon and tossing the pack on it. “A whole kilo? For us? Damn, Reefer, you did score. Good shit?”
“Like, I shit you not, that is the most righteously awesome Jamaican Blue you will ever find coming up the pipeline,” he said.
“Not like I’d ever doubt you, dude, but I’ve heard that before.” The girl eyed the package speculatively. “All right, usual price up front, we try it, and if it really is good shit, and I mean seriously good shit, say, ten percent of the face over in dollars.”
“What, you mean you don’t trust me? Damn, Janet, haven’t I always brought you, like, the most truly fantabulous stuff on the whole route?” He clapped his hand to his chest in an air of injured innocence.
“Yeah, except for that shit cut with oregano,” she said.
“Okay, like, once, four years ago. And the truly heinous bastard who did it doesn’t, like, well, like, he’s gone. I mean, like totally gone, okay? And that was the last time I ever let somebody handle my shit out of my sight. And didn’t I make it right on the next trip? Didn’t I?”
“Well, yeah, Reef, I’ll give you that. Still, you didn’t have to listen to all the bitching I caught in the meantime. All right, twelve percent face over dollars, then.”
“Fifteen, FedCreds,” he countered.
“Reef, I gotta be able to sell at a price the customers can afford. You’re not the only guy on a convoy, you know. Ten in FedCreds is the absolute best I can do — eleven if you’ve got another kilo like it. And if it’s as good as you said,” she allowed.
He smiled slightly and pulled a second bag from the backpack, stacking it on top of the first on the scale. The buyer checked the weight and picked up a bag in each hand, comparing them carefully to make sure they looked the same, before setting them on the floor by the scale, nodding and going back to the bedroom. Cally heard a faint metallic click and the woman came back into the room with a large envelope, counting a mixed pile of dollars and FedCreds in front of her source, then another stack of FedCreds onto a milk crate with a plywood top that obviously served as an end table.
“Hey, Janny, if you’re through buying it, can we, you know, smoke some of it now?” Thad asked plaintively, taking the cube she’d dropped beside the chair earlier and popping it into the player below the monitor. “This is such a cool movie. I mean, to watch it, you’d never guess it was based on a book by some old dude,” he offered knowledgeably. “That’s what the credits say, anyway.”
The younger man moved a dirty T-shirt and picked up an older hardback from the floor, opening it to the middle, where a section of the pages had been cut away to make a box for rolling papers. Cally tilted her head enough to read Oliver Twist on the spine as he set it down and scooted over to hand a stack of papers to his girlfriend.
The girl put the full bag inside an empty, slit the seal with a razor, and took a zipper baggie from inside the milk crate, noticing Cally’s raised eyebrows as she stuck a paper on the scale and added a careful amount from it, and an equal amount from the bag she’d just purchased.
“Premium North Carolina tobacco. Best cut there is. My old man’s a bounty farmer,” she tapped the bag of marijuana with a finger, “but he sure don’t grow this. Too bad, but he don’t. Good enough source of papers, though.”
She rolled it with expert hands, lit it, and took a deep drag, holding it for a moment. She blew the smoke out, tilting her head consideringly and giggled a bit, passing it to her toy-boy.
“Damn, Reefer, you’re right. This is some primo shit,” she said, and nodded to him. He picked up the stack of FedCreds and stowed them in his pack.
When it was her turn, Cally noticed the two buyers watching her, and Reefer just as carefully not watching her. She grinned and took a long pull, holding it as she passed the joint on. The other three people relaxed slightly as Cally let the smoke out, allowing a silly-stupid grin across her face. Wonderful evening. The only straight in a roomful of stoneds. Well, at least it’s the next best thing to anonymous and I don’t have to do any of the three. In any sense.
The movie had played through its preview sequence and Cally scooted back to lean against the futon. At least it was a decent movie, and she hadn’t seen it recently. After the second joint made the rounds, Janet pushed the scale and rolling papers away.
“No more for me. The munchies are hell on a woman’s figure.” She looked Cally up and down critically. “You should probably stop, too, Marilyn. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re carrying a teenie bit extra on the hips.”
“Oh, I never get the munchies.” Cally smiled coolly, amused at the baseless slander.
“Well I do, dude.” Thad rummaged in the shelves of the desk and pulled out a bag, sitting back down beside Reefer. “Cheese curls?”
“Hey, sure, dude. Thanks.” He was clearly feeling more mellow as the drug took effect, and leaned forward to roll another one, skipping the tobacco.
“Ah, I’m not, like anal about weighing the stuff,” he laughed at the sour expression on his girlfriend’s face. “I love ya, babe, but you’re anal.”
She threw a cheese curl at him.
* * *
Cally sat on the opened futon and stared into the darkness, arms wrapped around her knees. Janet and Thad had gone to sleep, Thad completely out of it and Janet almost straight. Once the third joint had made the rounds, Reefer and Thad had got on like long-lost brothers. The older man now slept the sleep of the stoned, his snores competing with one of his music cubes to cut through the slightly irritating but completely nonintoxicating oak-leaf smoke. She sat in the darkness and didn’t know what she felt, whether it was coldness, or numbness, or tiredness. She lay down against his rather odoriferous arm and sighed up at the ceiling. After a whole day of it, she was getting a little tired of Reefer’s favorite songs… in again, I’d like to get some sleep before I travel, but…
She heard the snick of the apartment door unlocking and trained instincts must have warned her because she was already rolling off the futon, onto the floor by the door, as the door slid open and the two stocky women in security uniforms stepped through. What are the odds…
One of them tripped over Cally’s outstretched leg as she stood. The world had gone into slow motion as Reefer sat up and began to blink owlishly in the light the other woman had flicked on as she came through the door. Cally tripped over the falling woman, just happening to catch the second one, trying to maintain her balance, and bringing her down as well. On the way down, the top of her forehead “accidentally” bumped into the second guard’s temple, hard. Cally rocked back and sprawled on top of the first guard, just happening to be sitting on top of her shoulders, as she held a hand to her head and uttered a plaintive and bewildered cry.
“Ow!” She looked at a disbelieving Reefer blearily as Janet came hustling out of the bedroom. “I bumped my head!”
“Get off me, you stupid cow!” The first guard was swearing viciously. Cally shifted slightly on her shoulder blades and the woman jerked a bit and swore some more. She
had clearly fallen on top of her own shock baton. The second woman lay on the floor, unmoving, as Janet, in a pink T-shirt, rushed across the room with a gray plastic pack in her hand and yanked the first guard’s slacks away from one hip, jabbing her quickly with a hypodermic. She went limp. The dealer checked for a pulse on the second guard before breathing a sigh of relief and injecting her with another hypo from the pack.
“God, you were lucky. To knock someone out, you have to damn near kill them,” she glanced up and down the empty corridor outside the apartment and shook her head slightly, closing the door.
“Ow,” Cally repeated plaintively, holding a hand to her head as she got up off of the now unconscious guard and stumbled shakily to the bed.
“What in the hell happened?” Janet demanded, looking from Reefer to Cally and back at the guards on the floor.
“Um… I just heard a noise, and it startled me, and I tried to get up, but, well, I tripped. Ow.”
“You tripped?” she echoed.
“Like, wow. That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Reefer was rubbing his chin. “Yeah, Janny, I swear to god she tripped. It was, like, she was trying to keep her balance, and, like, there’s no room with the futon opened out and all, and they just all went over. Like… wow, just wow.”
“Do you have some Tylenol? I think I might have twisted my ankle, too.”
“Wait a sec, lemme see your eyes.” She held Cally’s chin with one hand and tilted it up to the light, looking in each eye in turn. “Well, you don’t look like you’ve got a concussion, I guess. Hell, your eyes look better than mine ever do after a night of partying. I think I’m jealous.”
“Uh… what about them?” Reefer had stood up and hoisted his boxers a bit, obviously torn between looking at the guards and looking for his jeans.