EDUCATIONAL HISTORY:
entered Chaminade HS, Mineola, NY, 5 September 1982; withdrew two months short of graduation; no further formal study indicated
CREDIT HISTORY:
labyrinthine; no credit history as Paul Donald Throtmanian after 1982
MILITARY HISTORY:
none recorded; inventory suggests advanced weapons training
WORK HISTORY:
various; all apparently virtual except for a summer job as shipping clerk, K&K Chemicals, Syosset, NY, as Paul D. Throtmanian, 1985
TAX HISTORY:
none, any jurisdiction
ARRESTS:
1 April 1986, Old Bethpage, NY: Suspicion of Arson (NYS orphanage), as Paul David Throtmanian; dismissed LOE; file open
COMPLAINTS FILED:
none, any jurisdiction
CONVICTIONS:
none, any jurisdiction
WARRANTS OUTSTANDING:
none, any jurisdiction
Chapter 6
Grok and Roll
“There is no point in mobilizing the authorities,” he said. Upstairs, the Throtmanian/Metkiewicz computer reformatted its hard drive three times and then boiled its own ROM; flames began whispering in two nearby floppy disk caddies, two filing cabinets, a lockbox under the bed in the master bedroom, and at three points in the basement.
“There isn’t even any point in chasing that pair ourselves,” she said. “We need to phone home.”
His shoulders tensed, then slumped as he realized he agreed. Centuries of success, ended. Only the third full-scale Red Alert in their entire tenure, and the first time they had ever needed to yell for help.
The day had begun so well…
Their own vehicle, a generic grey Honda Accord, was parked immediately across from Chez Metkiewicz, and their clothes had finished regrowing themselves by now. Nonetheless they left the building by the discreet route, and circled a total of seven blocks to approach the car. They would have abandoned it, but it was registered to his current identity. Several local residents and pedestrians passed them as they reached it, and they were alert and ready with the tasp…but it proved unnecessary, as everyone’s attention was focused on the smoke and flames emerging from the shattered door of the house across the street.
They left that block with care, scanning the sidewalks to make sure no disaster fans would need notice them to cross the street safely. Even after turning the corner he drove just enough above the speed limit to avoid being conspicuous, and maneuvered conservatively, until he found a spot on West 10th where an Accord could remain parked indefinitely without attracting interest. The distant sounds of the fire engines leaving the substation were audible as they got out of the car; for once that fine brigade would be too late. They rounded the corner and walked south at a speed appropriate to their personas, and for another twenty meters into the dark mews between West 10th and West 11th. They stopped abruptly there, and stood in perfect silence and stillness for five seconds, making quite sure they were unobserved.
Then they became invisible and rose into the air and flew southwest at barely subsonic speed.
Like circling seven blocks to get the car, stashing it felt like a waste of time and energy. But the roundabout method got them home nearly two full minutes sooner, without compromising security.
There they found no good news.
Chapter 7
Woolgathering on the Lam
Paul said, “I think it’s time to stop underestimating these people.”
June, involved with a “footlong” sub (nineteen centimeters, counting projecting silage), did not respond. They were in the safest place they could think of to dine at 10 P.M.: on a bench by the harbor at Jericho Beach. An overhanging tree shielded them fairly well from the intermittent rain. People approaching on foot could be observed for hundreds of meters in silhouette before they reached small-arms range; there were a hundred and eighty directions in which to flee at need; innumerable cloutable cars were parked nearby; there were even cloutable boats moored at hand, and three different places of concealment to which one might swim underwater if need arose. The twinkling panorama of Vancouver’s downtown—the Emerald City indeed—was arrayed on their right, with Stanley Park jutting out into the water to the left of it like Nature’s Last Stand. Distant lights twinkled and shimmered at the tops of the ski runs across the water in North Vancouver. A tiny Asian man waded with rolled trousers at the water’s edge well to the west, ignoring the drizzle, stalking tomorrow’s breakfast. Dark water lapped at the shore, too gently to obscure approaching footsteps.
“I think it’s time to change tactics, too,” he went on. “I’ve been on the defensive for over an hour, now, and that raises my lifetime cumulative exposure to damn near a whole waking day. I think it’s time we scared the shit out of them.”
“Paf ’ime,” she said, then swallowed and repeated, “Past time.”
“So we need a plan,” he said, and took a bite of his own sub. He hoped that she would take up the conversational ball while he chewed, but she took another big bite of her own food. When he had cleared his mouth again, he tried, “So what are our assets?” and took another mouthful.
“I come up with bugger-all,” she said.
“Zheevuf, Zhu’,” he said, and then, “Jesus, June!”
“Am I missing something? As an asset, a hot car has the shelf life of a donut. We have to consider both of our addresses blown. All three cars gone or useless. Every ID we have is hot, including passports. Chump change. No weapons. No good way to get out of town without new ID. Three real friends in the world, each of whom would regard us as radioactive typhoid HIV-positive lepers with Ebola fever if they knew what’s after us. And I wouldn’t blame them.”
“Hell, I don’t know what’s after us. Maybe we’re all of those things. All I know is, I’m a dog who just got chased out of his own damn house, and if I don’t do something about it I gotta lie down and die.”
“I agree,” she said. “I simply said we have no assets. Except fear, terror, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope. So how would you like to start?”
He looked down at his sandwich, and gave thought to pitching it into the sea…following it, perhaps, with the portion already consumed. Then he sighed, and took a deep breath, and bit off another hunk.
“Okay, no asshetsh,” he said, chewing vigorously. “Exshep Key Wesh, maybe, if we cang ’et there…”
“I think we have to consider that blown, too,” she said.
“Not for awhile, maybe,” he said. “There’s no paper on it back there at home.”
“It’s in the computer.”
“Jesus, June, the fucking NSA couldn’t hack into my private partition in less than a week: even you might have some—” His voice trailed off. “Oh.”
She nodded. “We’ve already seen them do things the NSA couldn’t do.”
“I said I was going to stop underestimating them. Right.” He resumed eating, frowning.
She corrected him. “What you said was, ‘It’s time to stop underestimating these people…’ Maybe that’s doing it again.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve stopped assuming they’re people.”
He spat out a mouthful of sandwich and stared. After a moment, he wiped his mouth and said, “What, then? Martians? Sauron of Mordor? Cthulhu? Christ, Scientist?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t have any labels for what’s after us. And I’m not looking for any. If I think of them as humans, I’ll be subconsciously expecting them to have human limitations. If I let myself think of them as Martians, I’m liable to hunt them with a water pistol. If they’re Sauron, I’ll start looking for the Ring—you see? I can’t afford preconceptions: this is more than our lives on the line.”
“There is nothing more than our lives.”
“Yes, there is!”
“Not so loud—”
She lowered her volume to a passionate whisper. “I’d rather the bastards rape me and torture me to
death and crap on my corpse than monkey with my mind. They’re welcome to anything else they’re smart enough and strong enough to take from me, including my life—but they can’t have my memories. Those are all I’ve got out of all this.”
He kept silent, from surprise at her passion and confusion at her words and a general instinct to lower their average sound production. He had known that what had happened to June was very bad; awful, sure. He had not realized until now it was skin-crawling…
Well, which was more important to him? Staying alive? Or preserving the integrity of his mind? You can live, Mr. Throtmanian, but you’ll never be able to trust your own memories again as long as you live…never know for sure what has been or will be taken from you—or, if you prefer, we can put you out of your misery right now…
What finally brought him out of his thoughts was the classic Sub Eater’s Dilemma. (You’ve finished the sandwich; your hands are greasy; the paper napkin you were using is a sodden, useless mess; you have another napkin, but can’t get it without soiling your shirt by reaching into your pocket for it with greasy hands.) He solved it as he did most problems, impatiently, running his fingers through his hair until it lay flatter and his hands were clean. June regarded him with fond distaste. “Can’t take you anywhere,” she said softly.
“Do we even know it’s a ‘they’? Do we know for a fact that there’s more than one…Jesus, we have to call it something—more than one monkey demon?” He knew she would get the reference, having lent her the book. In Richard Fariña’s novel BEEN DOWN SO LONG, IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME, the monkey demon was the symbol of all ancient evil; it had no limitations.
“Good point. Let’s think it through using one, and see if we stumble. Okay: I trip over the demon in the woods, and I—” She hesitated. “—I have an orgasm, and it takes over my mind. It interrogates me until it’s happy, disposes of my damp underwear, and lets me go. It doesn’t need to follow me any more, any more than it needed to follow Angel Gerhardt. But now it knows I phoned you. It knows everything I said. It wants me to erase the message, but I have no way to do that because your machine is so primitive. So it goes to your place, but you’re not there, you’re out cleaning the sci-fi people. So the monkey demon stakes you out.”
He held up a hand. “Interesting point. Why? Why not just enter the house, find out everything it can about me, and wait inside for me to come home? Or just erase the phone machine and tiptoe away?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “and it’s the first thing like a limitation we’ve spotted on it. Maybe it could smell your alarms, and decided to let you turn them off. Mark for later analysis; onward. Then you come home—but it doesn’t know you have, right away, because it doesn’t know about your back way in, because I didn’t—you’d hinted you had a bolt-hole, but you never showed it to me. For all we can prove, there was a second demon behind the house, with no idea you were strolling by under his feet.”
“There was a back door alarm too,” Paul said, “and I never heard it go off.”
“To notice you were home only after a while suggests the demon or demons were monitoring the house with something like thermal gear, from outside: it took time for you to set it off. They thought I was in there alone, waiting for you.”
“Okay, I buy that. I still see only one set of tracks.”
“You’re right,” she said. “There’s no reason to assume there’s more than one monkey demon. On the other hand, there’s no reason to assume there aren’t fifty. And my mother is dying.” At the non sequitur, she flung the heel of her sandwich from her, so heedlessly that it fell short of the water, providing not even the satisfaction of a splash. “So what I say is, screw the bastard or bastards. You want vengeance; I can relate. Let’s deal with it in our next lifetime. Let’s abandon our luggage, figuratively and literally. Forget Key West. Forget any plans we ever had that got as far as being spoken aloud. Forget anybody we ever knew. Let’s just hit the restart button on our lives, right now. Make it didn’t happen. Go someplace we’ve never been and create new personas and go back to what we were doing: educating the gullible. Yellow alert: I think the distant silhouette approaching from the west is a cop.” Her voice did not change in pitch or tone in the slightest, on the last sentence.
Paul scratched his neck and peeked. “Still a ways off.”
“Alone. Fat. Moving slow. I think he’s just strolling his beat.”
“Back to business, then: can we do that, you think? Just walk away?”
“There’s only one weakness I’ve noticed about the monkey demon. I don’t understand it, but I’m sure of it: somehow, despite all his power, he’s as afraid of The Man as we are. He could have taken either of us out at any time, with anything from an axe to a nuke—but he doesn’t want to attract attention to himself for some reason. I won’t be terribly surprised if he sends a fucking curse after us…but he can’t put out an APB. I don’t think that cop is looking for us. About forty meters away now.”
Converting that laboriously in his head to a hundred and thirty one and a quarter feet, a hair under forty-three and a quarter yards, Paul decided the metric system could stand to be damned one more time. “And maybe if the monkey demon notices we’ve disappeared, and after awhile nothing he doesn’t like has happened, he’ll decide we’re not a threat and let us live. It plays. So let’s see if it’s safe.” He stood and walked like a numbskull directly toward the cop.
June sat still, and discreetly put a hand into her purse.
“Excuse me, Constable,” Paul said, pitching his voice just a little too loud for the time and place, the way a real numbskull would do. “My name is Ralph Metkiewicz, and that’s my fiancée June Cleaver, and we’ve been talking about our relationship for hours, you know how it is, and we were just starting to wonder, sitting here trying to remember, whether we turned the gas off before we left my house, or…what I’m getting at, I’m sorry to bother you, I know this must sound stupid, but have you heard anything about a house fire or some kind of commotion up on West Thirteenth tonight?”
June held her breath. That’s my warrior, she thought. A hair trigger—everywhere except in the rack, thank God! Hope it doesn’t get us killed…or even pinched. This is a lousy time to be trapped in a known location and have our faces on the news.
The cop sized him up. After an endless few seconds, the registers of his eyes displayed: Numbskull. “Friend, if it doesn’t concern this particular stretch of shoreline, I tend to get most of my local news from the TV, just like you. I was in your shoes, though, I think I’d conclude it was something worth going home to check on.”
“You know, you’re probably right,” Paul told him. “Joan—Miss Cleveland there—excuse me, honey, Ms. Clevelyn—was just saying something like that. Risk versus game, or something like that. Weren’t you, honey?”
“The term ‘honey’ is a demeaning sexist put-down, you know that, Ralph,” she said. “It is not flattering to be compared to something wild bears paw and slaver over. And I think the constable is quite right—aren’t you, Constable?”
For her the cop took no time at all: Numbskull. “Well, ma’am, all’s I’m saying is, it wouldn’t hurt to go check. I hope everything turns out alright for you both. Goodnight, Ms. Clevemumble—good night, Mr., uh, Metka…”
“Meskavitz,” Paul said. “Thank you, Constable. Have a nice night.”
“Anybody ever tell you you look like that starship guy on TV?”
“What guy?”
“Never mind. Good night.”
Paul and June left their bench and headed west, listening carefully to the tired footsteps behind them. When Paul calculated that the fat cop was once again a shade under forty-three and a quarter yards distant, he murmured, “See? Good news: we were right about something.”
“I said I didn’t think he had us on his hot list,” June said, a wonderful sentence to hiss through one’s teeth.
“And that was good enough for me…‘honey.’ What would have been better: wait a few ho
urs for the morning paper to come out? Now we know we’re not law-type hot, and we can plan our getaway.”
“Fine. Go ahead.”
“Jesus, do I have to do everything around here? You start. We want to go far far away. Tell me where.”
“Not there.”
“Huh?”
“Far far away is where the monkey demon will expect us to go. We want to get clear, sure—but some place so close to the known Danger Zone that only a numbskull would run that far and then stop. The monkey demon thinks he knows we’re not numbskulls: that’s our secret weapon.”
He snorted. “By that logic, the smartest thing for us to do is pick up some marshmallows and wieners and go back to my place to toast ’em. We can join the crowd and ask in a loud voice if anybody’s seen a monkey who can suck your brain and make you forget you saw him.”
“Maybe that would be the smartest thing we can do,” she said dryly. “I have a feeling the least threatening place we could be right now, in his estimation, is in a nice snug VGH mental ward with heads full of thorazine. It’s something we know that makes us dangerous to him, and mental patients don’t have any information anyone else cares about.” She stopped, confused; instead of being squelched, he looked almost cheerful.
“You think he considers us ‘dangerous’?” he said.
She suppressed an urge to smack him. “Amend that to ‘annoying,’ all right, Tarzan? ‘Worth hunting and mindraping.’ You want to pick up those marshmallows and franks? We’ll have to pull a short con on a Seven-Eleven guy…”
He sobered. “As Oberlin Bill used to say, it never pays to be too smart. Maybe a shade less audacity wouldn’t hurt anything. Okay, nearby, but not too near—someplace we can get to without leaving a record or passing a security camera, with no ID and chump change. Well, I know one last good border crossing I think I can afford to use up—but I’m afraid we’re going to arrive in the Land of the Fee smelling just like everything else that comes out of that pipe. Let’s try and clout something with two changes of clothes in it—”
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