Hey You picked up a flat-head screw and then got back down on her knees and pretended to feel for more in the shadow under a workbench where she used the screw to scratch off a line marking the ninety-seventh day she had been at the garage pretending to be stupid. Her real name was Marci, although no one had called her that in ninety-seven days, and ninety-seven was a guess. She might have scratched the same day twice, and she was sure she’d missed it a few times.
Eckmann and his crew of sixty had worked for four years to keep the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from Singapore Airlines ready to fly, lacking only a pilot who knew the plane. The Dreamliner in the hangar was the only functional plane at LAX. The twenty-eight planes still parked at the terminals would never fly again. The last planes to escape flew off over three years ago and even if they had landed safely somewhere, there was no way to let anyone know, or, as Eckmann said, no reason.
Then the Canadian showed up at the perimeter, in uniform, with airline identification. He hadn’t sought verification at the DMV but said he wanted to fly away. Eckmann trusted that with enough time in the cockpit, the Canadian’s skills would return, but he couldn’t make sense of the cockpit no matter how many hours he sat in the pilot’s seat and finally Eckmann gave up forcing him to try. Eckmann threw the Canadian off the hangar roof. With no pilot or prospect of escape, the hangar crew was afraid that Center Camp would send a raiding party, but Eckmann promised them that Chief knew Eckmann would blow up the Dreamliner before he surrendered. In the days of chaos, a battalion of national guardsmen had surrounded the airport with land mines and rockets—in the interest of national security—to keep anyone from hijacking a jet. Then the national guardsmen, without authorization, took two jets and left the airport to Eckmann.
Marci had been a flight attendant for United Airlines, based in Atlanta, and was on turnaround at the airport the day the first infected plane came in from Seoul. She joined the community of the hangar, sweeping up the floor.
After killing the Canadian, Eckmann told Marci to meet him on the runway when it was dark. “This isn’t for sex.”
Marci found him on a blanket in the middle of the long runway that only needed to be swept of debris to be ready for the jet to take off. Eckmann offered Marci a small bottle of Absolut Vodka. There weren’t too many of those left and he never offered the Absolut except to reward someone for a great contribution to the community. Marci wasn’t sure of what she’d done to deserve this. He was in one of those moods, she knew, in which it was better to let him speak instead of asking him questions. He told her to lie down and open her arms.
She expected a kiss, or more, but nothing followed. “Now look up at the sky and pretend you’re looking down. And instead of thinking that you’re held in place by whatever keeps us on the ground, you’re about to fall off the ceiling and you’re going to keep falling.”
“I can do the part where it feels like I’m looking down, but not the part where I feel like I can fall.”
“I always feel like I’m ready to fall.”
“You knew Chief,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“A little.”
“Tell me about him.”
“I haven’t talked to him in four years. He wanted control. He wanted me to work for him.”
“Why didn’t you do that?”
“I have my team. He has his. He’d let me get the plane ready and then he’d kill me. For sure if he knew he could fly out of here, he’d handpick the best people in the Systems Committee, who could fix and run the machinery wherever they landed, and it wouldn’t take long for everything here to turn back to desert. That Canadian wasted our time. He didn’t want to do the work. He wanted to read the flight manuals, but reading the manuals isn’t enough. Good ideas come slowly these days, Marci. And now I have a good idea.”
She waited for the idea while he opened another small bottle of Absolut.
“I want you to go to the DMV motor pool, pretend you’re a Driftette, work for them, and wait until a pilot is verified.”
“Why me?”
“You’re good at sweeping up. You’ll be doing a lot of that.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. If a pilot does get verified, we have to grab him before he’s taken behind the Fence. Once Chief has a pilot, he’ll find a way to attack us and win.”
“If they attack us, we’ll just blow up the plane. Won’t we?”
“We’d like Chief to think so. But if Chief gets a pilot, he can sit with him until we run out of food. We have enough for a year, maybe a little more. The Fence has food and supplies to last twenty lifetimes, forever.”
Marci tried to feel the difference between a year and forever. “How do you know a pilot is going to get verified?”
“I don’t.”
“How will I find out working in the motor pool?”
“I can’t get you any closer to the DMV and I can’t get you into Center Camp. The DMV sends the verified to the Playa on the Christina and the driver comes from the motor pool. It’ll be news. We’ll set you up with radios and we’ll always have a team nearby.”
“I don’t know how to be a Driftette. What do I have to do?”
“The weakness of the First Wave is that they’re lazy about cleaning up after themselves and they’re always happy to let someone else sweep up around them. Be eccentric in your work and endearing in your manner. Dance a jig to music only you can hear. Make them laugh at the way you move but don’t let them see you connect the laughter to the gesture. Don’t talk more than the chattiest Drifters, and don’t be noticeably better at your work than the most competent Drifters around you and not at all better than any Second Wavers. Make yourself wanted by helping and not asking for anything. Amuse the First Wavers. Come and go at random times. Make them happy to see you again. Be their dog. Be their little puppy dog who likes to run away sometimes.”
“Do puppies run away?”
“I saw it in a movie.”
“This could take a long time.”
He pointed to the sky. “One of those lights is a space station. There are six men and a woman in there, from America and Russia. After communications stopped with Houston and Russia that first November, they watched the lights of the cities go out. They watched planes crash and boats sink, saw the fires and the oil slicks spread over oceans. They had enough food and water to last eight more months and might have starved to death but after Earth’s second silent month, one of them opened an airlock while the others were sleeping. We’re in a space station here and we have to get away. I don’t want to live in a world ruled by the First Wave.”
“How do you know it’s going to be different anywhere else?”
“Will you do the job or not, Marci?”
She didn’t answer, distracted by the dead astronauts in the tomb of the space station, forgotten by the people who put them there.
“How do you know how the astronauts died?”
“That’s a good question. That’s why you’re right for the job.”
“But how do you know they died like you say if they couldn’t talk to anyone on Earth?”
“It’s what I would have done.”
“Why did this have to wait until dark to tell me?”
“You’re a Drifter now. Drifters don’t ask questions.”
Eckmann led Marci through the minefield the next night. She went downtown first, where she slipped into the crowds of Second Wavers and Drifters who were always out until dawn, and from there walked to Hollywood and the DMV.
When the motor pool crew arrived in the morning, they saw nothing special about the quiet Driftette in the hooded parka with the fake wolf-tail trim, sweeping the sidewalk with a broom.
After ten days of this, AutoZone missed her when she disappeared and was happy to see her when she showed up again. Marci came in early each day because she liked having the company. She let
Carrera teach her how to pick up the metal parts that rolled on the garage floor. She jumped from one foot to the other, attempting a broken rhythm, her idea of what she thought Eckmann meant by a jig.
So it was on the ninety-eighth day, by Marci’s markings—not by what was strictly accurate—that Seth Kaplan was verified. AutoZone took the call from Erin. “Fire up the Christina. They just verified a doctor.”
“It’s my turn,” said Carrera, grabbing the white cap with the braided gold anchors above the black brim. He put on the admiral’s jacket from the Paramount costume department.
Seth, Dr. Piperno, Erin, Carrera
Carrera narrated as he steered. “The Christina is sixty-five feet long, and we are twenty-five feet above the road. It was made of wood in 1965 and was a pleasure craft cruising the Santa Monica Bay. I control it from where we are, which is called the bridge, just the way the owners of the craft controlled her on the water. The Founders brought her to the Playa and left her to us on the truck chassis.”
“Dr. Kaplan was a surfer,” said Erin. “That’s what his T-shirt says.”
Seth wanted his Silent Voice to tell him what to do, but the Voice was quiet.
“There’s the Fence now,” said Carrera as the boat turned a corner. “It changes color in different light. What color would you say it is today, Doctor?”
“I don’t know.”
“I couldn’t tell you either.” Carrera pushed a button on the control panel and the air was filled with the sound of three high notes in anxious harmony.
“You don’t have to do that,” said Erin. “It scares the newbies.” She explained to Kaplan: “Newbies are new. You’re a newbie. Did he scare you?”
Seth’s Silent Voice woke up. “What was that?”
“What is that?” Seth asked Carrera.
“They called it a foghorn. And we call this the Fence, but it’s really a wall, isn’t it? Calling it the Wall, though, Chief says makes it sound too important. But look at it. A thousand miles around, ten thousand feet high, steel plates, cinder block, and reinforced concrete and protected from attack by poisoned electricity. What happened to the builders, you ask?”
“He didn’t ask,” said Erin. “And I think your numbers are wrong.”
“Do you know the right numbers?” asked Carrera. “I don’t think you do. June Moulton, Mythology Committee, introduce yourself, fascinating woman, she tells us to tell the Drifters that the Wall, or Fence, what have you, was built by whoever built the world. I say, ‘Why isn’t the Fence in any of the old pictures?’ And June says it was painted out. This is my way of saying, the Mythology Committee isn’t to be trusted, and you can quote me on that. It’s like the numbers that Erin here says aren’t real. Doctor, the truth is nobody knows.”
“June says we need the Fence if we’re going to hide the life inside from the eyes of the world.”
Carrera took his hands from the wheel to applaud himself. “Erin is making my point for me, Doctor. June is just spreading this story for the benefit of the Drifters who aren’t verified. She doesn’t know who built it and we don’t know. We’re telling you this because you’re one of us now, Doctor. Welcome to the East Gate. Life here is beautiful and you’ll be an important part of it.”
Carrera called out: “New doctor!” to the guards in the gun towers. The steel gate rolled sideways, Security let them pass, and the gate closed behind them.
They entered the Fence to the cheers of the Gatekeepers, Systems Committee members without assignment, Inventory Committee members back from search-and-collect convoys, and Security Committee members home from patrolling Figueroa. Systems usually wore their utility kilts, heavy brown cloth with deep pockets for tools and a few cans of beer, and the Inventory members usually wore the newest clothes because they were first to find them. This was the crowd that liked to gather around the gate and offer their cheers to the newbies, for fun and also to make fun of the idea of fun. Most were on bicycles, and as the boat parted them—as it once parted the waves—the gatekeepers biked alongside.
“Welcome home,” said Erin. “Let me give you a Center Camp hug.” She wrapped her arms around his back and put her feet between his and pressed her face into his chest, an embrace due a returning hero long thought dead. “You’re home now. It takes a while to see the differences between what’s out there and life in here. And I don’t think a Drifter would understand them so I won’t give you a headache by trying. We’re on our way to the hospital at the University of California in Los Angeles, which is also called UkLa, which is spelled U-C-L-A, which is on walls and T-shirts and bumper stickers all over California. The area we’re in now used to be a city called West Hollywood. The next city is Beverly Hills and after that is Westwood. But just before Westwood is the Playa. It used to be called the Los Angeles Country Club. It was a golf course and now the trees and grass are gone and it’s an open field and in the center are The Man and The Woman. Drifters don’t have anything like it.”
“What man and woman?” asked Seth.
Carrera hit the foghorn button for a short blast. “He doesn’t know about The Man and Woman, Erin. You see?”
Erin wasn’t sure what she was supposed to see.
The Christina continued down the streets, where houses and smaller buildings had been torn down or the windows to the fifth floors had been sealed with cinder block.
They passed Barneys and Saks and Neiman Marcus, the old department stores—now empty, but kept open as party halls. And at the other end of Beverly Hills, Seth saw the head of The Man above a line of trees, and then as the boat drove past the trees to the cleared golf course, he saw the whole Man and, beside him, The Woman.
Seth touched the brand on his arm. Erin saw this. “That’s right, it’s the same thing, except he’s six stories tall,” said Erin. “And she’s just a little shorter.”
The Man was made of stainless steel, with unarticulated legs that anchored in the ground and arms raised overhead as though he was cheering. A staircase wound around his left leg, or the leg to the left of Seth, because The Man was the same on both sides; his face was a featureless oval. The stairs went into The Man’s trunk, and then rose to a platform inside his chest. The Woman, beside him, was almost as tall, made of metal mesh, and, unlike the stiff Man, she was realistic, naked, and balanced on one foot, arms lifted in the posture of someone dancing alone, unwatched, and free. There was a door in her standing leg and small handholds leading to a viewing chamber in her head.
His Silent Voice said, “I’ve never seen that.”
The bicycle escort left the Christina and rode onto the Playa. The riders left their bikes and joined the crowd around the base of The Man and Woman, First Wavers walking slowly, some bowing toward the statues, stiffly from the waist, palms pressed together in front of their chests.
“The Founders left The Man and The Woman for us,” said Carrera. “June says no one could have built them without help from outer space. There’s things she says that are wrong, but I believe she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to The Man and Woman. And look, at the foot of The Man, isn’t that Chief?”
“I think it is,” said Erin. “You’re nothing but lucky, Dr. Kaplan. Most newbies don’t see Chief the first time they see The Man and The Woman.”
Carrera said, “With Chief there, we can’t stay. You see, everyone is outside the circle now.”
“Circle?” asked Seth.
“When Chief visits The Man, everyone has to give him room.”
Carrera and Erin were quiet after passing the Playa and in a few minutes the Christina pulled up to the emergency room of the hospital at UCLA.
“This is where you get off, Doctor,” said Erin. “I may not see you for a while. You’ll be busy with Dr. Piperno.”
“Who?”
“Him.” Erin pointed to the man at the entrance to the building. He had a long beard, mostly gray, and he wore
a white coat and three stethoscopes around his neck.
Seth climbed the ladder to the ground and with a blast of the foghorn, the Christina backed up, turned around, and went wherever it was going.
The Woman, The Man, Chief
Chief waited on the Playa until the sun set. He liked to wear his brown kilt when he visited The Man. Chief didn’t carry tools and he didn’t like beer, but to dress like a Systems worker was to look competent. He wanted to look competent for The Man. Before he approached The Man for help, he called for the Lamplighter Guild, who lived by themselves in tents on the far north side of the Playa. Their faces shaded by the deep hoods of their robes; they walked in double file carrying torches. They touched their flame to the oil lamps atop the tall poles that defined the perimeter. When they finished, they returned to their tents, and Chief talked to The Man. “I’m not sleeping well. Something is wrong. I can feel it. What do you think it is? I don’t expect an answer right away but it’s good to ask the question. It’s good to hear myself ask a question I’d be afraid to answer if someone else asked me the same thing. People are watching me now. They wonder what I’m doing here. I thought of clearing the Playa so there would just be me and you and The Woman, but I’m afraid I would look desperate, and I’m afraid of enough things without adding new fears. Nobody knows what I know. And I’m not sure I do, either.”
He felt The Woman trying to tell him about The Man, about something The Man didn’t know. So it felt to him, and he wasn’t sure but he had to trust in something.
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