NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  Marci screamed, “No, don’t go! Come back! Come back! I want to go with you!” as the plane rolled away from them.

  Franz let Eckmann call out the speed of the plane while he held on to the wheel, waiting to pull it back. From 60 to a 125 to 150. The end of the runway wasn’t visible except on the panel, and he looked down at the controls and not out the windows, to avoid being confused by reality.

  Eckmann couldn’t help himself. “Now? Shouldn’t you start flying now? Aren’t you supposed to pull back? Aren’t you supposed to bring the nose of the plane up? Do you know what you’re doing?”

  Marci chased the plane as it lifted and kept running until it was over the ocean. She dropped to the runway, whipped by regret. “I made a mistake,” she whispered. “I made a mistake. I made a mistake.”

  “No,” said Seth. “We love each other.”

  “We better go,” said Marci. “There’s nothing for us here.”

  Pippi

  The telescope was sharp and Pippi saw the lights shining on the jet’s tail. The sound didn’t cross the basin until the plane was lifting off the ground.

  Eckmann, Spig Wead, Franz

  The plane banked over the ocean and turned back over the city. They followed the bright beads of light along the Fence. There was the wide lagoon of fire across the Burn Zone and, beyond that, the lights of Figueroa.

  Franz said to Spig, “You want to take a look?”

  “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  Eckmann protested. “You can’t go over downtown. The fire, the smoke, the ashes, they can hurt the engines.”

  He was ignored as Franz lowered the plane to three thousand feet.

  Shannon, Chief, Bottle Bangers

  Shannon saw the plane and dropped her bottle and then the sound came, the whine of jet turbines mixed with thunder mixed with the windstorms of fire rising from the Burn Zone.

  Erin saw the visions snap shut, the Virgin of Guadalupe disappear.

  Now the jet was overhead, banking at a harsh angle, wing almost pointing straight to the ground. The Drifters stopped their banging. Some threw their bottles at the plane, as it continued to pivot around a stem of energy rising out of the chaos below.

  Erin saw in the crowd’s puzzlement that they needed Shannon to tell them what to do, that they didn’t want her to separate herself from the coincidence of her performance and the plane’s arrival. They wanted her to enlarge her role by leaving nothing in the immediate arrangement of the world outside of her intentions. So they blamed her for the plane, blamed her for their fear.

  Bottles were thrown at Shannon, at the bus.

  From the roof, Chief called Erin’s phone but there was no answer.

  Looking down at the crowd, Franz slapped Spig Wead on the back. “This is great. This is fucking great.”

  “The best,” said Wead.

  They watched the Drifters retreat from Figueroa, run into the shadows between the buildings, and disappear into the underground parking lots.

  Shannon called for the Drifters to come back.

  Erin said, “They can’t hear you.”

  The plane stopped circling and flew north, away from city and the Burn Zone.

  “Fuck them all,” said Spig Wead. “Just fuck them all. Franz, let’s go over them one more time, all the way fast. A hundred thousand miles a minute.”

  “We’ll burn fuel,” said Eckmann.

  “We’ll go slow after this.”

  On the roof: Chief knew that if he blamed anyone for the failure to stop Eckmann, someone would tie him to a bus and drag him to the desert. Or that’s what he wanted to do to himself.

  On the street: Erin had seen what the heads of the committees missed by staying on the roof. The ash from the Burn Zone was falling over them, maybe, she thought, drawn from the Burn Zone by the vortex of the spiraling airplane.

  The plane turned over the San Fernando Valley and Franz pushed the throttle full forward as he brought the jet lower to a straight run over Figueroa to the Ritz-Carlton.

  On the hotel roof: the Fence elite lowered their heads to save themselves from the leading edge of the wings. Only Siouxsie Banshee, standing alone with a bottle of red wine in her right hand and a glass in her left, didn’t bother with more than the quick glance she might give a squeaking hinge.

  After passing over the crowd, Franz turned the jet to the east and set it to climb to thirty thousand feet. The cockpit door was open and he looked backward down the length of the cabin for the first time since leaving the ground. He went on the public address system and read from the manual: “The seat belt light is off which means it is now safe to walk about the cabin, but for your safety, please keep the belts buckled in case of unexpected turbulence. Thank you for flying Singapore Airlines. Relax and enjoy your flight.”

  Pippi

  The smoke cloud over the fire, blown southwest by the wind, did not obscure the jet or muffle the sound. From the prison of her terrace in the hills, Pippi—with Royce Hall and Go Bruins—was the last person in Los Angeles to see the jet before it disappeared. Go Bruins and Royce Hall continued to gripe about missing the Shannon Squier concert.

  Watching the jet made Pippi want to change her name again. Her stiff red pigtails belonged to someone who had little idea of what she really wanted from life and now that she had seen the jet, she needed to shift the idea of herself to be someone who wasn’t waiting for rescue. She had to choose a name and story for herself that didn’t come from the wallpaper in a child’s room. She wanted to name herself secretly and let them call her Pippi. It didn’t matter what they called her and maybe it was even better that they called her a name she no longer called herself. That was her mistake from the beginning of this second consciousness after rehab and after Chief claimed her.

  She laughed at the thought and Go Bruins asked her what was funny. She knew that whatever she told a guard would be told immediately to Chief, but she still answered with what she was thinking. “I made the mistake of identifying with my identity. If that’s not a mistake, I don’t know what is.”

  For the first time in this part of her life, she thought about the future.

  Chief, Vayler

  Chief called for Vayler but no one could find him. “This wouldn’t have happened if he’d done as I asked and sent a few thousand Drifters on a simple overnight run to carry back supplies. Where is he?”

  Erin, Shannon

  Erin brought Shannon into the rear bedroom of the tour bus and helped her out of the costume and into a dress for the party on the roof. “Although I doubt there’s going to be a party now,” she said. Shannon ignored her.

  AutoZone brought the bus to the hotel’s front door, where Security protected them as they walked from the bus to the elevators. Chief was in the lobby. He thanked Shannon. “I’m sorry to put you through this exercise. The Drifters should have been out of the city, but Vayler Monokeefe wanted them and of course I was right and they couldn’t take the noise.”

  Erin carefully asked him, “Did you feel anything before the jet, from the crowd?”

  “Once I saw the plane, I had other things to worry about than the music.”

  “It was too far to see anything, and it doesn’t matter.”

  Erin didn’t want to tell him that Shannon restored old feeling, or rather, she wanted to tell him, because he was Chief, but found it better to lie.

  “Let’s go to the party,” said Chief.

  When they got to the roof, Toby Tyler stopped them. Erin expected Chief to turn away from her but he let her stay, which showed that he trusted her now.

  “Toby, tell me.”

  “Report on the Burn. It jumped the barrier in three places, and the fires were put out. The center of the Burn Zone is already ashes. It’ll smolder for a week, and we’ll smell it for a long time.”

  “At least something went right. And we’re bet
ter off with Eckmann and company gone. Planes are a distraction; escape is pointless.”

  “Gunny Sea Ray gave me his report and he told me to tell you that a Drifter who’d been trapped inside the zone rode his bicycle through the fire.”

  “Did anyone try to stop him?”

  “Too hot.”

  Frank Sinatra, Siouxsie Banshee,

  June Moulton, Chief, Shannon

  Frank Sinatra asked Redwings to find Vayler. “What does he need from Security to get the Drifters back and settled?”

  “This was a night to be ashamed of, Frank, if you were to ask me what I thought.”

  “And why is that?”

  “First, we missed that they had a plane. Second, we didn’t get the Drifters out of the area.”

  “There’s always a lesson, Redwings. Radical self-reliance means radical self-examination so the next time isn’t just the next time.”

  Siouxsie Banshee offered Sinatra a glass of wine. “This is expensive, Sinatra. I checked it on the wine menu. Eight hundred dollars a bottle. It’s from Australia.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It gets the job done.”

  “I can’t move you to my house inside the Fence, but this is pretty close.”

  “This is nice, Sinatra, but it’s just another downtown publicity party. People in good clothes smiling at each other. You see the pictures in the old magazines.”

  “I don’t read those magazines and doubt I ever did.”

  “That’s why you’re not the conversationalist you could be.”

  “Everyone here knows everyone else except for you. They assume you’ve just been verified. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, but a recent verification is embarrassing. It reminds them that they owe their place to luck, that they wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t been in the system. That, and someone else’s opinion of them.”

  “Opinion or evaluation.”

  “Well said. Evaluation, judgment, estimate of worth. They’re watching me talk to you, which makes you interesting to them in a way that you hadn’t been interesting before.”

  “Why aren’t they talking about the plane that almost hit the building?”

  “In a world without memory, it’s easy to forget things even while they’re happening. Not just easy, convenient.”

  “You haven’t forgotten the Drifter who threw a man from that hotel.” She pointed to the Hilton where Hopper killed Tesla.

  “Maybe I have, but Chief hasn’t. We don’t get many murders around here.”

  “And what about the people killed when the pilot was kidnapped?”

  “That’s not murder. That’s war.”

  “You kill Drifters when you drive them to the desert and leave them there. Is that war?”

  “Self-defense.”

  “Why not shoot them?”

  “Chief doesn’t want to give anyone a taste for blood.”

  “They still die.”

  “But we don’t see them die. Radical self-reliance. That’s what Chief calls it. They’re on their own.”

  “Sinatra, don’t lie to your Siouxsie. Siouxsie wants the truth. Siouxsie hears you personally shoot Drifters on the spot if they match certain criteria.”

  “That’s also self-defense.”

  “You’re not really on Chief’s side.”

  “How do you get to that thought?”

  “You have a detached sense of the world. That’s why you like talking to me.”

  “And how are you the expert on my loyalty, or lack of it, to Chief? You’re not an expert on politics. You know art and furniture.”

  “Yes, exactly, I’m an expert on artifacts made in the past and I can see that you were made in the past. You have a frame that’s authentically old, not pressboard like everyone else in this new version of the world and you’re a work of art, Sinatra. You want to know things for their value that only other experts can appreciate. Chief’s taste, you know it’s bogus. He’s looking at art books. He’s looking at the things that people collected. But he’d never come down here and walk through the warehouses to separate the good from the bad from the ugly. Not him. But you? Yes, you. You know the difference.”

  “Tell me more about the Drifter who killed the Bottle Banger.”

  “I knew he was different.”

  “How?”

  “He didn’t talk but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t like the Drifters any more than I did. And he didn’t like the people who were giving the orders. The people who work for the Fence. He tolerated them. Drifters don’t get impatient with First Wavers. They don’t have a sense of time’s passage so there’s no sense of time’s waste. He was looking for something.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he found it.”

  “What did he find?”

  “Something in one of the houses.”

  “Furniture, art?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So how do you know he found something that you know he was looking for?”

  “He walked away from us and went into one of the houses. Then he came back and he did his job better than he had before.”

  “Do you know which house?”

  “No. And even if I did, what good will that do you? It’s smoke, Sinatra.”

  “Someone was seen inside the Burn Zone riding a bicycle out of the fire. It could have been your friend.”

  “It could have been a Drifter who’d fallen asleep in a house he’d claimed for shelter.”

  “It’s my experience as chief of Security that the Drifter’s degraded condition subtracts from him the energy to save his own life.”

  “There she is! That’s really her.”

  Shannon Squier was at the entrance with Chief and Erin.

  “So jets don’t impress you but Shannon Squier does?”

  “Why not both?” said Siouxsie Banshee, not afraid of any shifts in Sinatra’s opinion of her.

  Chief raised a hand for everyone’s attention. He was in a mood to tell lies that his people believed.

  “The Burn is going well. The Drifters are coming back. And we’re done with the problem of LAX. They had a pilot. They had a pilot all along and then when we verified a pilot they came up here and killed him in an ambush. Why did they do that? I’ll tell you why. They didn’t want anyone to follow them. Let them go. We have a fine thing here that we made for ourselves and keep making but you’d all rather bang your bottles than protect yourselves. You like parties more than work.”

  “Everyone likes parties more than work,” said Shannon Squier. “And you threw the party so why are you complaining?”

  “He gets this way,” said Erin. “It’s just him.”

  Chief smacked Erin on the side of her head with an open hand. No one, at least in this life she’d known since waking up from rehab, had ever hit her, and the insult to a dignity she only discovered with the slap hurt more than the modest pain.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Shannon. “That was not a good thing to do.”

  Chief saw it in her eyes, a knowing defiance that didn’t need to act on its justifications but could wait.

  He said, simply, “I’m sorry.”

  Erin saw the way Chief relented. This was something new, as was the way Chief turned his own embarrassment into anger at Sinatra.

  “There was a murder, Frank Sinatra. What have you done to find the killer?”

  Siouxsie spoke: “He’s done a lot.”

  Chief looked to Sinatra and asked, “This is the one you told me about?”

  “My name is Siouxsie Banshee. I’m an art curator with a specialty in midcentury modernism and I do a better job at finding what you want than the people who work for you.”

  “And that makes you the specialist on finding the murderer of a First Wave motor pool mechanic?”


  “I have great taste.”

  “That still doesn’t make you one of us.”

  “She should be one of us,” said Sinatra.

  “We’re not in the Fence,” said Siouxsie Banshee. “There’s no rule against my being here, is there?”

  “Technically, no,” said Chief.

  Sinatra took control. “I can find the killer for you, Chief. And I apologize for the way our guest is speaking.”

  “If she can help you find the murderer, she can live,” said Chief.

  Sinatra saw that June Moulton was right. Yes, everything in the world of the Fence was about to change, because Chief was scared.

  He would respect Chief’s insistence on proving that a mysterious stranger affected their world. Chief would demand that he stay on the phantom’s pursuit so long as Sinatra relayed to Chief his confident assurance that the case was going to break any day.

  And then, if Chief was right and there was someone out there who wanted to harm him, would it be so terrible for Frank and Siouxsie if they allowed the stranger to find his way through the Fence?

  He now had to convince Chief that he took this threat seriously. But to do that, he had to believe it, or else Chief would suspect him. Chief was shrewd and his insight severe.

  Vayler

  Vayler Monokeefe knew they would look for him, and he knew they would find him. But he had already worked a plan to delay the inevitable.

  Hopper

  The ash-filled sky blurred the dawn when Hopper came back to the river. He sat down next to Madeinusa’s clothing, neatly folded under a layer of gray flakes. Tucked inside the folds were the three power bars he’d left for her. His Silent Voice asked, “Do you think she’s dead?”

  Hopper said, “We haven’t seen anything to say she is or she isn’t. We just haven’t found her yet. I didn’t expect to find her in the house.”