He offered her a beer. She couldn't think of anything she wanted less at that moment than a beer-especially one from some cheap Oklahoma microbrewery called "Okie Double-X"-but she was very dry-throated from shock, so she drank some. Then she~wiped her bloodied face with the towel, which hurt a lot more than she had expected.
Alex skulked off again. Hunting something, out in the black pitching mess of trees. What on earth was he looking for? An umbrella? Galoshes? A credit card, and working fax machine? What?
Not two minutes later Leo Mulcahey showed up, and rescued her.
LEO mivm IN an aging Texas Ranger riot-control vehicle, a big eight-wheeled urban chugger with a peeling Lone Star over black ceramic armor. What the hell a Texas Ranger vehicle was doing this far out of Texas jurisdiction was a serious puzzle to Jane, but the thing was a bitch to drive and Leo was in a tiny captain's chair looking through some virtuality blocks and wearing a headset. Jane sat slumped in the back in a cramped little webbing chair, shaking very hard. Leo was very occupied by the challenge of driving.
They drove maybe ten kilometers, a lurching, awful trip, pausing half a dozen times to work around or smash their way over downed trees. Then Leo drove the vehicle down a wet concrete slope into an underground garage. A steel garage door slid shut behind them like an airlock, and the torrent of noisy wind ceased quite suddenly, and fluorescents flicked on.
They were in a storm shelter.
A privately owned shelter, but it was a big place. They took stairs down from the garage. A nice place, a regular underground mansion by the look of it. Thick carpeting underfoot, and oil paintings on the walls, and designer lighting and a big superconductive someplace to keep all those lights burning. Outside, hell was raging, but they bad just sealed themselves in a big money-lined Oklahoma bank vault.
Leo stepped into a small tiled room with a compost toilet, and opened a pair of overhead cabinet doors, and offered her a thick canary-yellow toweL As if in afterthought, he pulled a pair of foam plugs from his ears, then ran one hand through his disordered hair. "Well, Juanita," he told her, smiling at her. "Janey. Well met at last, Jane!"
Jane rubbed at her hair and face. Filthy. And her nose was still bleeding a little. It seemed a real shame to put blood on such a nice thick dry towel. "How'd you find me, out there?"
"I heard your distress call! I scarcely dared to leave the shelter, but there came a break in the weather, and you were close to the shelter, and well"-Leo smiled-"here we are, both safe and sound, so the risk was well worth it."
"My brother's still out there."
"Yes"-Leo nodded-"I did overhear that. A shame your brother-Alex, isn't it?-didn't have the wisdom to stay with the vehicle. When it dies down, maybe we can make a try to find young Alex. All right?"
"Why not rescue him right now?"
"Jane, I'm no meteorologist, but I can read a SESAME report. All hell is breaking loose out there. I'm very sorry, but I won't comb a patch of woods far a missing boy while the landscape swarms with tornadoes. You and I were lucky to get back here alive."
"I'll go alone, I can drive that thing."
"Jane, don't be troublesome. I don't own that vehicle."
"Who owns it, then?"
"The group owns it. I'm not here all alone, you know. I have my friends! Friends who strongly disapproved of my leaving this shelter in the first place. Would you think this through a bit, please? Consider this from my perspective."
Jane fell silent. Then she couldn't restrain herself. "My brother's life is at stake!"
"So is my brother's," Leo said sternly. "Do you know how many people have died in this horror already? It's already leveled five towns, and the F-6 is headed right for Oklahoma City! Tens of thousands of people are going to die, not just one person that you happen to know! It's a holocaust out there, and I don't propose to join in it! Get a grip on yourself!" He opened a tall closet. "Look, here's a bathrobe. Get out of that wet paper, Jane, and try to compose yourself. You're in a storm cellar now, and that's where sane people are supposed to be, during a storm. We're going to~y here now! We won't be leaving again."
He shut the ck~&r and left her alone in the bathroom. Alone again, she began shaking violently. She glanced at herself in the mirror. The sight of her own face sent a chill through her. She looked terrifying: a madwoman, a bloodied gorgon.
She tried the faucet; a thin trickle of ill-smelling water emerged. Very chlorinated. If you were rich in Oklahoma, you could drill a big hole in the ground and put a mansion inside it, but that still wouldn't get you decent water. She stoppered the sink and rinsed her face, quickly. Then she put a cupped handful of water through her hair. Something like a kilo of rust-colored Oklahoma dirt dripped out of her hair and into the sink. And her paper suit was smeared with wet dust.
She stepped out of the paper suit, and put it into the sink and ran a little water over it, and washed her hands and wrists. Then she pulled the suit out again and wiped it with the towel, and the paper suit was pretty darn clean. It dried out in no time. Good old paper. She stepped back into it and zipped it up.
She -opened the bathroom door again. There were distant voices down a sloping corridor. Jane tromped down the corridor in her trail boots. "Leo?"
"Yes?" He handed her a mug of something hot. Café con leche. It was very good. And very welcome.
"Leo, what on earth are you doing in this place?"
"Interesting question," Leo admitted. "It's no accident, of course."
"I thought not, somehow."
"Even the blackest cloud has a chrome lining," Leo offered, with a tentative smile. He led her into an arched, bombproof den. There was a sitting area with low, flowing, leather couches in a conversation pit. The walls were stuccoed ceramic and the roof was a thick blastproof stuccoed ceramic dome, like the inside of a roe's egg. A brass chandelier hung on a chain from the top of the dome. The chandelier swayed a little, gently.
There was a media center with a pair of silent televisions on, and an old rosewood liquor cabinet, and a scattering of brass-and-leather hassocks of brown-and-white furred brindled cowhide. There were a pair of Remington bronzes of mustached cowpokes on horseback doing unlikely horse-breaker things, and a pair of awesome octagon-barreled frontier rifles were mounted on the wail.
And there were eight strangers in the shelter, counting Leo. Two women, six men. Two of the men were playing with an onyx Mexican chess set, off at the far end of the conversation pit. Another was gently manipulating a squealing broadband scanner hooked to an antenna feed. The other four were playing some desultory card game on a coffee table, pinochle or poker maybe, and munching from a red lacquered tray of microwaved hors d'oeuvres.
"Well, here she is," Leo announced. "Everyone, this is Jane Unger."
They looked up, mildly curious. No one said much. Jane sipped her warm coffee, holding the mug with both hands.
"Forgive me if I don't make introductions," Leo said.
"You know what would be a really good idea, Leo?" said one of the chess players, mildly, looking over his rimless glasses. "It would be a really good idea if you put Ms. Unger back outside."
"All in good time," Leo said. He turned to the silent televisions. "Oh dear, just look at that havoc." He said it in a voice so flat and numbed that Jane was taken aback. She set her coffee mug down. Leo looked at her. She picked the mug back up.
"It's pretty much leveled El Reno," remarked the other chess player, cheerfully. "Pretty danm good coverage too."
"Have they structure-hit that broadcast tower outside Woodward yet?" Leo said.
"Yeah. It came down three minutes ago. A good hit, Leo. Real solid hit. Professional."
"That's great," Leo said. "That's splendid. So, Jane. What would you like? A few spring rolls with hot mustard? You do like Thai food, don't you? I think we have some Thai in the freezer." He took her elbow and led her to the open kitchenette.
Jane pulled her arm free. "What the hell are you doing?"
Leo smiled. "Short explanatü
n, or long explanation?"
"Short. And hurry up."
"Well," said Leo, "shortly, my friends and I are very interested in dead spots. This is a big dead spot, and that's why we're here. We've put ourselves here quite deliberately, just like you and your Troupe did. Because we knew that this area would be the epicenter of damage from my brother's F-6."
"Leo, I gotta hand it to that brother of yours!" called out the second chess player, with what sounded like real gratitude. "Personally, I had the gravest doubts about any so-called F-6 tornado, it seemed like a real reach, a real nutcase long shot, but Leo, I admit it now." The chess player straightened up from his board, lifting one finger. "Your brother has really delivered. I mean, just look at that coverage!" He pointed briskly at the television. "This disaster is world-class!"
"Thanks," Leo said. "You see, Jane, there are many places in America where human beings just can't -live anymore, but that's not true for our communications technologles. The machines are literally everywhere. In the U.S.- even Alaska!-there's not one square meter left that's not in a satellite footprint, or a radio-navigation triangulation area, or a cellular link, or in packet range of nemode sites or of wireless cable TV. . . . 'Wireless cable,' that's a nasty little oxymoron, isn't it?" Leo shook his head. "It took a truly warped society to invent that terminology...."
Leo seemed lost for a moment, then recovered himself. "Except, Jane, not here, and not now! For one shining moment, not here, not around us! Because we are inside the F-6! The most intense, thorough, widespread devastation that the national communications infrastructure has suffered in modern times. Bigger than a hurricane. Bigger than earthquakes. Far bigger than arson and sabotage, because arson and sabotage on this huge scale would be far too risky, and far too much hard work. And yet here we are, you see? In the silence! And no one can overhear us! No one can monitor us! Not a soul."
"So that's why you overheard me in my car? My distress call? Because you're paying so much attention to broadcasts?"
"Yes, that's it exactly. We're listening to everything on the spectrum. Hoping, aiming, for perfect silence. Luckily, we have the resources to help the project along a bit-to take out a few crucial relays and especially solid towers, and such. Because God knows, the damned repairmen will all be back in force soon enough! With their cellular emergency phone service, and the emergency radio relays, and even those idiot ham operators with their damned private services out of ham shacks and even their bathroom closets, God help us! But for a little while, a brilliant, perfect silence, and in that moment all things are possible. Everything is possible! Even freedom."
Someone, lackadaisically, applauded.
Jane swallowed coffee. "Why do you need that much silence?"
"Do you know what 'electronic parole' is?"
"Sure. When they put, like, a government wrist cuff on prisoners. With a tracker and a relay inside. My Trouper cuff is a little like that, actually." She held up her wrist.
"Exactly. And all of us here, we all have similar devices."
She was amazed. "You're all out on parole?"
"Not the common kind. A special kind, rather more sophisticated. It's more accurate to say that my friends and I are all bonded people. We gave our word of bond. But we're in a Troupe, of a sort. A Troupe of people in bondage."
"Excuse me," said the man at the broadband scanner. He was a large, hefty, middle-aged man, with short brush-cut hair. "May I see that device, please?"
"My Trouper cuff?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Jane unbuckled it and handed it to him.
"Thanks." The man rose, examining Jane's cuff carefully, then walked into the kitchen. He placed the cuff carefully beside the sink, opened a kitchen drawer, swiftly removed a meat-tenderizing hammer, and smashed Jane's cuff, repeatedly.
"Why are you doing this?" Jane shouted.
"It's a big world," Leo said, between his friend's precisely judged hammer blows. "It's an old world, it's a sad and wicked world. . . . We in this room, we are definitely people of the world, Jane. We're a very worldly lot!" The radioman carefully ran sink water over Jane's shattered cuff.
"We've done some of the work of the world, in our day," Leo said. "But you can't acquire that kind of power without responsibility. Power doesn't come without an obligation, without an account to pay. The people who put these cuffs on us-well, you might say that we all quite voluntarily put them onto one another, really-these bracelets are badges of honor. We thought of them as badges. As fail-safes, as a kind of moral insurance. As talismans of security! But after the years roll on . . . It doesn't ever stop, Jane, time just keeps going on, consequences just keep mounting up." He lifted his arm and looked at his watch. It looked just like any other watch. Nothing too special about Leo's watch. Just another metal-banded businessinan's watch. Except that the skin beneath the watch was very white.
"We've come here to stop being what we are," Leo said. "There's no way out of the Game, no way outside the code of silence. Except for death, of course; death always works. So we've found a kind of silence now that's an electronic, virtual death. We're going to cut our bonds away, and we'll die in the world of the networks, and we'll become other people, and we'll leave and vanish for good."
"Like evacuation freaks?"
One of the poker players burst into laughter. "Hey! That's a good one! That's dead on. Evacuation freaks. You mean those weird poseurs with no ID who just haunt the camps, right? That's good, that's very good. That's us right to a T."
"Leo, what have you done that's so horrible? Why do you have to do anything this weird and elaborate?" She looked into his eyes. They were not cruel eyes. They were like Jerry's eyes. They only looked very troubled. "Leo, why don't you just come to the Troupe camp? We have our own people there, we have resources and ways to get people out of trouble. I can talk to Jerry about it, maybe we can straighten all this out."
"That's very sweet of you, Jane. It's very good of you. I'm sorry I never had a chance to know you better." He lifted his voice to the others. "Did you hear that? What she just offered? I was right to do what I did." He looked into her face. "It doesn't matter. In any case, after this meeting you'll never see me again."
"Why not?"
He gestured at the ceiling-at the storm outside their bank vault. "Because we are far beneath the disaster now. We're all just empty names now, in the long roll call of the dead and missing from the F-6. Everyone you see here-we all died inside the F-6. We vanished, we were consumed. You'll never see me again; Jerry will never see me again ever. We're cutting all ties, annihilating our identities, and Jane, we're the kind of people who know how to do that, and are good at doing it. And that's the way it has to be. There's no way out of what I've become, except to stop being what I am. Forever."
"What on earth have you done?"
"It's impossible to say, really," one of the women remarked. "That's the beauty of the scheme."
"Maybe you'll understand it best this way," Leo told her. "When your friend and colleague April Logan was asking the Troupers about when the human race lost all power over its own destiny-"
"Leo, how do you know about that? You weren't there."
"Oh," said Leo, surprised. He smiled. "I'm inside the system in camp. I've always been inside the Troupe's system. No one knows, but, well, there I am. Sorry."
"My brother's an academic, academics never pay any real attention to security updates."
"I'll say," said another of the shelter people, speaking up for the first time. He was big and dark, and he was wearing a charcoal-gray tailored suit, and Jane noticed for the first time that he was very young. Younger than twenty. Maybe no older than seventeen. How had this boy . . .
And then she looked at him. He was very young, but his eyes were like two dead things. He had the skin-creeping look of a professional poisoner.
"You see," said Leo, "the human race still has a great deal of control over our destiny. Things are by no means so chaotically hopeless as people like to pretend. The g
overnments can't do anything, and our lives are very anarchic, but all that means is that the work that the governments ought to do is shrugged onto vigilantes. There are certain things, certain activities, that transparently require doing. What's more, there are people who recognize the necessity to do them, and who can do them, and are even willing to do those things. The only challenge in the situation is that these necessary things are unbearably horrible and repugnant things to do."
"Leo," said the first chess player, in weary exasperation, "why on earth are you dropping our pants to this woman?"
One of the women spoke up. "Oh, go ahead and tell her, Leo. I'm enjoying this. It doesn't matter. We're free now. We're inside the big silence. We can talk."
"That's you all over, Rosina," said the first chess player in disgust. "I hate this bullshit! I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like some teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals. for Christ's sake, and she's just some prole. Don't you have any pride?"
"She's not just anyone," Leo protested. "She's family.
She's my sister-in-law."
"No, I'm not," Jane said. "I didn't marry him, Leo."
"Details." Leo shrugged, irritably. "Jerry will marry you. I suppose you don't realize that yet, but he'll do it, all right. He'll never let you go, because he's pulled too much of you inside of him now; and besides, you're too useful to him, and he needs you too much. But that's fine, that's fine, I like that idea; you'd never do anything to hurt Jerry, would you? No, I can see that. Of course not. It's all right it's all just fine."
"You are being a complete moral idiot," said the chess player.
"Look," Leo snapped at him, "if I wanted to stay in the Great Game, do you think I'd have gone this far? Do you know anybody else who could get that danm cuff off you? Then shut up and listen. It's the last time you'll ever have to hear me out."
"Have it your way," the chess player interrupted, with a calm and deadly look. "Jane Unger, listen to me. I can see that you're a very observant person. Stop watching me so very observantly. I don't like it, and I won't have it. It's boring and clumsy to threaten people, but I'm threatening you, so listen." He pulled his manicured hands from the chessboard and steepled his fingertips. "I can commit an act in three seconds that will make you a clinical schizophrenic for eighteen months. You'll hear voices in your head, you'll rave about conspiracies and plots and enemies, you'll paint yourself with your own shit, and that can all be done in three seconds with less than three hundred micrograms. Dead men actually do tell tales sometimes but madwomen tell nothing but pathetic lies, and no one believes what madwomen say, about anything, ever. Am I clear? Yes? Good." He moved a bishop.
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