Wally had left Burbank after stealing his boss's Mercedes, but had ditched the thing after an hour. The car had so many alarms and digitized personal warnings ("No Smoking in the Vehicle." "Sit up straight; good posture means good digestion." "Profanity is the last resort of a little mind.") that it was driving him crazy. Wally stole a red El Camino in Rancho Cucamonga, hoping that the weather-beaten antique would be free of the ubicomp smart systems that plagued the rest of his life. No such luck. The car started squawking the moment he popped the ignition and hotwired it, bypassing the ignition ID switch.
In the building desert heat, taking hits off a ketamine inhalor, Wally was sweating like a stripper pole-dancing in a Bikram yoga joint. His jacket and tie started yakking at him, reminding him that they'd need to go in for dry cleaning ASAP. Blasting the El Camino up I-15, Wally tossed the tie out the window as a warning to the suit.
Beyond Barstow, Wally relaxed. The highway was open desert pretty much all the way to Vegas. His cell phone started ringing. The stolen Mercedes had scanned Wally's cell phone ID and relayed the info to his boss who was probably dialing the cops on his other line. Wally tossed the phone out the window and watched it in the rearview mirror as it flew to pieces on the highway.
Wally took another long snort of the ketamine. A chip in the tube warned him that he was exceeding the daily limit for the stuff and was in imminent danger of an overdose. It then warned him not to mix the medication with alcohol. Good suggestion, thought Wally, remembering the pint of Sapphire gin lying on the passenger seat. Things were going well, he thought, all things considered, as a police chopper swung into view out the driver-side window. The El Camino warned him again to slow down. Wally waved to the cops.
Wrestling out of his sweat-soaked jacket, Wally tossed it out the window. Tailor-cut Hugo Boss. He'd loved the thing when he'd bought it. Back then he was happier, and the suit didn't try to push him around so much. None of his appliances did until he became abusive, and then it was all over. Depression and chatty microwave ovens didn't mix, he discovered. Neither does a swimming pool and a tv that won't shut up about how much porn Wally had been watching now that Nikki had left him. The drowning tv had shorted out most of the neighborhood. Appliances all around the cul-de-sac began screaming as they were booted off their networks. Wally unscrewed the white gas canister from the barbecue, splashed it around the living room ("Caution. Do not open gas canister indoors."), flicked a match and stole his neighbor's SUV. He hadn't boosted a car since he was eighteen. It felt pretty good to drive away in someone else's car, watching his ranch-style condo go up in flames.
There were a couple more choppers tailing Wally down I-15 now. He waved to his new buddies. Wally swore that the El Camino's chip voice was shrieking at him to slow down and give himself up. The car's brain would have cut the engines, if he hadn't already clipped most of the self-defense system. He just couldn't find the damned power source for the voice system.
His PDA was the next thing to go out the window. It wouldn't shut up about some meeting he had with the board of directors. The device told Wally that holding it out the window of a moving vehicle could void its warranty. He let it go.
Next he popped open his boss's brief case. Wally looked out at the choppers. Did they want him or the case? What had his boss told them? Then he tossed a fistful of cash out the window, all hundreds, maybe ten thousands dollars cash. What was his boss doing with a case full of cash in his office? What was Wally doing loading it into the boss's car and driving to Vegas? Wally knew in his heart of hearts that he couldn't spend it. He couldn't even gamble with it. The ID codes embedded in the bills would have given him away before he could shout, "Hard eight!" at the craps table. Taking another fistful of cash, he let the bills slip slowly between his fingers, out into the hard desert wind. Maybe this was what he'd had in mind all along.
Hard, amplified voices were coming from the police choppers, but Wally couldn't understand what they were saying over the blasting wind and the chattering devices in the car. His David Eden alligator shoes were whining about needing to be polished. The El Camino's state-required breathalyzer started barking when it smelled gin in the car.
Wally wondered if he could make Vegas if he kept his foot plastered to the floor. The idea of getting that far was more appealing, though less likely with each passing second. His head swimming form the heat and the Vitamin K, Wally leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. The cross-current caught the loose money in the attache case and the bills blew around the inside of the car in a mini-tornado. Wally giggled, half-blind, cutting the car hard to the right to avoid a jack rabbit loping across the highway.
Airborne at 110 mph, Wally heard the El Camino say, "We have left the mapped portion of the road." As the old car began a lazy corkscrew in the air, Wally had a moment of clarity and wondered if the smart appliances back in his charred house and nattering away in the car had souls and, if so, was there a Bardo realm for cell phones and microwave ovens? He hoped not. It would be nice to have a little peace and quiet, he thought as the front bumper of the El Camino caught the edge of a boulder, spinning the car end over end. It slammed into the hard-packed desert floor, snapping both axles, popping all the glass and crushing the passenger compartment flat.
When the police reached the wreck a few minutes later, a trail of hundred dollar bills led from the highway to where Wally's mangled body lay, still strapped into the driver's seat. The El Camino was no longer shouting warnings, but purring a seductive bass beat. Some local ad bot had taken over the car's onboard sound system. The King was on a loop singing "Viva Las Vegas" over and over as Wally's spirit left this world and passed into the light of the Bardo realm. It wasn't peace and quiet, but it wasn't half bad.
THE END
What Goes Around
Heather didn't want to go to day care. She didn't want to move to this new town; she didn't want to leave all her friends behind; she didn't want her mommy and daddy to make her promise not to tell her special secrets. But all these things had come to pass, so, Heather sat alone by the Tinker Toys at the Enchanted Peach Tree Kids' Center.
Heather was angry as she jammed the green dowels into holes along the edge of the Tinker Toy wheel. She was still angry when she added an axle and a base, making sure the growing toy tower was always in balance. Though a child, Heather knew secrets. Secrets her parents didn't like her telling. Sometimes, Heather would show her secrets without saying a word. Mostly when she was angry.
Heather worked all through nap time and juice time. She didn't join in when the kids sang camping songs, even on the B-I-N-G-O part, which was her favorite. It was dark when Heather stopped working. She was sweaty and trembling a little.
The little girl looked up when she realized that the other children were staring at her Tinker Toy tower, almost as tall as the room. Mrs. Myers, their teacher, was staring, too. But Heather was still angry. She put her hand on the tower and pushed it. With a pleasant wooden clack, the tower spun. All the children laughed and even Mrs. Myers seemed pleased. Everyone was happy except for Heather's mommy, who had just come in. Her eyes widened at the sight of the tower.
Mommy grabbed Heather's hand and began to lead the child out of the classroom. Heather said, "What's it called, mommy?"
Heather's mommy turned to Mrs. Myers. "I'm sorry. We won't be coming back tomorrow."
"Tell her the name, mommy. I can't say it."
Heather's mommy looked at her daughter sadly. "No, dear. There's no such thing as perpetual motion." She took Mrs. Myers' hand. "I'm very sorry." The mother scooped her daughter into her arms and hurried away.
Mrs. Myers looked back at the toy tower. It had been spinning now for some ten minutes and showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, it might have been spinning a little faster. Mrs. Myers put her hand out to slow the thing, but a protruding rod caught her palm and tore the skin. Surprised, Mrs. Myers pushed a Lincoln Log into the outer spinning latticework, knocking off a small section of dowels and woode
n hubs.
The toy tower wobbled, off balance, and began to spin quickly, erratically. One of the children screamed. A dark finger of smoke rose from the top of the wobbling tower. "Everyone go to the parking lot and wait there!" shouted Mrs. Myers. As the kids filed out, the teacher grabbed a large wooden chair, one of the ones reserved for visiting parents, and threw it at the tower with all her strength. The chair stuck in the missing section of latticework, but was ground up by the Tinker Toy gears at the heart of the tower. Smoke was filling the classroom. Mrs. Myers crawled to the hall and joined the children in the parking lot.
The fire at the Enchanted Peach Tree Kids' Center went to four alarms before the fire department could get it under control. Even after the roof collapsed, a tall, charred structure stood in the middle of the wreckage, turning slowly on a blackened central axle. Mrs. Myers took an axe off one of the fire trucks and chopped the thing to pieces to make it stop. Later that night, when she called Heather's house, the phone had been disconnected. The family had left no forwarding address.
THE END
Zombie
When he was nervous Dexter fingered the scar at the base of his skull. His friends, even his family, told him it was from the motorcycle accident. But Dexter knew that was a lie. He'd received the scar when he'd lost his soul in a rigged poker game with some hellspawn disguised as Rudy Clouson's cousin Billy. He was now just a husk of a human. The living dead. It really sucked.
Over the years since he'd lost his soul, Dexter would occasionally see it attached, like a Siamese twin, to some son-of-a-bitch who'd no doubt purchased or stolen it from hellspawn Billy. If he could get to the person, Dexter would offer to buy it back. Though he always tried to be reasonable, the people would usually play dumb and threaten to call the police if he didn't leave them alone. Dexter reconciled himself to life as a zombie.
The whole brain-eating thing didn't work for him. Neither did hanging out in cemeteries and haunting the woods. Brains made him puke and cemeteries fell into two categories: either they were dead boring (no pun intended) or full of horny goth kids who threw rocks at him when he'd go into the slow, lurching zombie walk he'd seen in movies and practiced at home in front of the mirror. Haunting the woods was even worse. He was almost shot by some drunken deer hunters. Dexter might be the living dead, but he wasn't stupid. The one good thing he'd noticed was that becoming zombified had improved his night vision. Probably it had something to do with the brain hunting he was supposed to be engaged in, he figured. Dexter got a job as the head night shift security guard at the mall.
The job was pretty easy. At night, the entire mall was closed except for the little combination bar and video-game arcade on the south side of the complex. Dexter made his hourly rounds, practicing his living-dead walk in the big plate glass windows in front of J.C. Penney's before ending up back the arcade. One night, Dexter saw a guy in a red Pendleton shirt going into the arcade wearing his soul. He followed the guy inside.
Almost everyone in the place was wearing a stolen soul. The hijacked spirits held onto their new bodies like blind children, or perched on shoulders like parrots in some cartoon drawing of a pirate. Following Mr. Red Pendleton into the back, Dexter saw his soul slip off the man's back and into a glass case. The case was an old arcade game, one of those claw machines where you try to grab a camera or a gold watch, but usually end up with a pair of foam dice. This game, however, was full of souls. He saw his at the back of the case, staring at him mournfully. Dexter fished around in his pocket, withdrew fifty cents, and dropped it into the machine.
He got nothing on this first try. Or on the second. On his third try, he hooked a plastic tiara from the pile of toys at the bottom of the machine. He ran out of quarters soon after, and had to get more change from the bartender. When he'd run through the rest of his cash, Dexter got out his ATM card. After an hour, he'd blown through most of his life savings, which at just over three hundred dollars would be kind of pathetic under normal circumstances. Considering that Dexter was one step removed from worm bait, it wasn't that bad.
When he was down to his last three dollars, Dexter snagged his soul. He smiled as it crawled from the tray on the side of the claw machine and into his empty interior. But something was wrong. It didn't fit or something. It felt awkward, like a T-shirt that had shrunk in the wash. Dexter used the last of his cash to grab the soul of Wayne Shelby McCarthy, the captain of his high school swim team and class treasurer in their senior year. Filled with a sense of well-being and purpose from his new soul, Dexter quit his guard job the next day and re-enrolled in community college.
Dexter's abandoned soul wandered the mall for weeks, until it applied for his old security guard job. The soul never became popular, either with the local merchants or his work mates, who thought of him as "distant" and "spooky," but he never took a sick day and there were almost no break-ins when he was on the job.
Over the years, Dexter's soul discovered that the other night staff at the arcade, the ex-cheerleaders on late shift at the Dairy Queen across the highway and the Happy Donuts crew down the road, were also abandoned souls. They began meeting on a regular basis to play mini-golf and ride the go-carts at the Playland Fun Park out by the airport. Dexter's soul took up with the soul of Roxy Boudreaux, one of the DQ cheerleaders. They moved in together and Dexter's soul took over running the arcade when Sonny Simmons, the soul who'd been in charge of the place for twenty-odd years, lost big on a Houston Rockets' game and ended up back in the claw machine.
Dexter's soul runs the arcade to this day. He keeps waiting for the night when Dexter walks back in. Hanging out behind the bar and mixing himself a cherry Coke, copping a bag of barbecue-flavored Doritos from the snack stand behind the counter, he looks around his little kingdom of lost souls and hopes that things have worked out as well for Dexter as they have for him.
THE END
Table of Contents
About the Author
Table of Contents
A Cautionary Tale
Amnesia: Mist Memoir
Bad Blood
Black Neurology
Chronalgia
Concrete Bouquet
Confessions of a Mnemonist
DMV
Dark Jubilee
Dog Boys
Field Trip
Food Chain Blues
Hall of the Phoenix Machines
Heat Island
Herzog's Benediction
Horse Latitudes
Ice House
Interspecies Communication
Iron Wit
Jump Start
Kabbalah Cowboys
Larks' Tongues in Aspic
Le Jardin des Os
Lotus Alley
Master of the Crossroads
Mementos
Mouse Lights
Mudrosti
My Exquisite Corpse
Opener of the Ways
Pembroke's Saga
Pleasure Cruise
SETI
Second-Floor Girls
Singing The Dead to Sleep
Speaking Up
Still Life with Apocalypse
Surfing the Khumbu
The Arcades of Allah
The Birth of Athena
The Diseases of Purgatory, Pt. 6
The Enigma Event
The Götterdämmerung Show
The Index of Refraction
The Mad Hatter
The Silk Road
The Tears of the Moon
Ubiquitous Computing
What Goes Around
Zombie
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Collected Short Stories Page 14