“Yeah, right.”
“Well, all my mind is good for right now is little things, you can forget the big stuff. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not seeing any downside.”
“Fine.” She stopped walking along the side of the road, turned to him and started running her hands over his chest.
“Why are you doing that?”
“The only Zen I remember is about raking gravel. No gravel and no rake, so I’m combing your chest hair with my fingernails. Supposed to steady the mind.”
“I think we can count that as an act of kindness, being as it feels particularly good. Tell me when your mind is centered enough to do the thinking for the two of us.” He fixed her hair, pushing it behind her ears, and combing through it with his fingers.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying your mind centering thing. What do you know? It really works.”
She noticed he wasn’t blinking as he was fixing her hair. He moved on to massaging her face. “You trying to change how it’s shaped.”
“Kind a. It occurs to me that you’re actually a lot prettier than you look, if you relax some of these facial muscles.”
“I shouldn’t be encouraging your relentless quest to return to shallowness in the pretty curves of my face, but as it turns out, your fingers feel pretty good too.”
He did some more massaging. “Looks like my theory was correct.” He leaned in and kissed her. She averted her eyes and walked on. He caught up with her, walked by her side, and interlaced the fingers of his right hand with her left hand.
There was screaming laughter coming their way. They gazed up to see the pickup full of overgrown teens, men in their twenties and thirties, not exactly able to use experience for much character building. They looked pretty rough between the tats, the long hair and rifles and bowie knives. In the city they might have been able to carve out a niche for themselves as punk rockers. Out here in the country, they were just the next generation on line of redneck.
The pickup braked to give the boys a chance to taunt.
“Damn, man, you’re supposed to run from the creature from the black lagoon, not date her,” said longneck with the shotgun, standing in back of the pickup. From the way his finger was caressing the trigger of that shotgun, Jane was guessing these guys had outgrown knocking over mailboxes with baseball bats if nothing else, graduated to more stimulating roadside fare. There was a lot more than harmless taunts in his eyes and in his smile.
Amidst the laughs of his redneck buddies, she heard another one say, “I’d ask for some hip action, doll, if I could find the hips.” He was bearded, beefy, and more painted up than the rest. Not to mention his face tattoo that had the devil on one side, an angel on the other. He took out his pistol, which he was wearing under his belt in the small of his back, and played with the barrel of the revolver. His smile suggested he and his buddies were all playing a game not too dissimilar from the one Mike and Jane were playing. When one source of stimulation failed to arouse—in their case, hurling verbal abuse at people—there was always the next step up, hurling bullets at them. And maybe after that, enjoying sex with their dead bodies, as these goons continued to challenge one another to hop from one rung in Dante’s hell to another.
More laughs erupted from the human mongrels as Michael bit his lip and clamped down on her hand. And then, “Are those her feet, or is them flippers?” Thin and Scraggily Blond Hair said, laughing. He was scratching his temple absently with the tip of his six shooter. The gesture from his unconscious, were he not too dense to uncode it, seemed to scream that this road he was on was not going to rescue him from oblivion anytime soon, far less his fleeting ennui.
Michael let go of her hand. Sensing a shift in mood before she did.
“Enough small talk, boys,” Big and Bearded said, “We’re overdo for our turkey shoot. Being as these folks are the cause of the delay, can’t see them minding standing in for the turkeys.” All the guns started pointing to them at once.
Mike grabbed the pickup truck by the front undercarriage and flipped it, sending the six meatheads in the back flying and giving the two in the cab a real headache.
Without missing a beat, they all reached for the weapons that had spilled out of their hands. She guessed the booze and the redneck genes together were about as good at dealing with things not fitting quite right with their reality as any high level military training.
Michael continued banging the truck down on them until the last of them was flattened against the sidewalk. It didn’t matter that each of them got off at least one shot that connected with him. That fact didn’t even slow him.
Finally he dragged the driver out of the cab, and as Angel-Devil Face stood there wobbling in front of him, ripped off his one arm, then the other. He was still taking swings with his phantom arms at Michael before he realized his blows weren’t connecting and he looked at his arms and started screaming. Michael picked him up by the legs and tossed him against a tree, skewering him through the chest on a branch.
The other guy crawled out of the other side of the cab. He was at least a couple hundred pounds overweight. They could have stretched those body tats after skinning him to make one hell of a freeway underpass mural. Mural Man ran as fast as he could the other way. Jane grabbed Michael’s arm before he could give chase. “Small acts of kindness,” she said.
“Yeah, right. It’s so easy to forget now that my brain isn’t working, right. I guess we can thank that last shared moment of warmth between us for firing up the afterburners at least, huh?”
“Not sure ‘thank’ is the word I’d use,” she said, eying the holocaust scene. “Still, you were trying to protect more than my honor. So beneath all that childish tantruming that cost those people their lives was a genuine emotion worth preserving. And I have a sneaky suspicion it was all yours.”
He upturned the pickup truck, climbed in, and fired up the engine. She tried to squeeze in on the passenger side beneath the dented roof. “Surprised this thing still works,” she said.
“Must love itself a lot. We should take the hint.”
They regarded one another and laughed. He set the car in motion. “For the record,” she said, “I’m of the firm opinion that even lowlifes deserve life. Besides, they could have just been taunting with the guns, part of their sick little joke.”
He checked the carnage he’d left behind in the rearview mirror. “I’m sure both of us will be absolutely apoplectic as soon as there’s room enough inside our heads to entertain a greater sense of history past what just happened two seconds ago.”
***
The second Jane slid into the booth at the diner and glanced at the tabletop, thinking it could have done with a little more wiping down, Michael was all over it with a wet rag he yanked out of the waitress’s apron on her walk-by with a tray. The waitress was as flabbergasted to see him doing her work for her as the other couples were in the diner. There were four couples all in all, fairly well spread out in a largely empty establishment, all with their eyes on Michael’s chivalrous attempts to make things just right for her.
He picked up the coffee pot and poured her coffee and brought the cup over, not waiting for the waitress to do that either. Once again their attendant’s mouth dropped. He went behind the counter and started fixing grilled cheese sandwiches on the grill for the two of them. While he was doing that he was also straightening the counter and making the rest of the establishment look more presentable for Jane. That included some quick window redecorating after he finished tidying up the serving counter with the stools.
Responding to the latest bright idea, he ran and put flowers in everyone’s vases being used as centerpieces on each of the tables, drawing on the spare paper flowers he found behind the counter.
Somehow he whisked the entire place into picture perfect order without managing to burn either side of the grilled cheese sandwich and without taking any longer with it. By the time he brought the grilled cheese sandwiches back on plates, the other men in
the room were looking decidedly uncomfortable.
The waitress had taken to sitting herself on a stool and watching him go, only too happy to take a break, and pad herself down from the perspiration with her apron.
As soon as Michael set the dishes down on the table and took a seat himself, Jane rolled her head to stretch her neck out. He jumped out of his seat, came behind her and, seated in the adjoining booth and leaning over, he commenced with massaging her neck. The other males had decided by then they’d seen enough, and were slipping out with their dates before he made a mockery of their romance efforts. Jane bit her lip at the dispirited paramours in his wake, their girlfriends already showing signs of disgruntlement now that they had something to compare their boyfriends to, pulling their arms away and saying things like: “That’s not how you take a girl by the arm.” “Don’t know why we’re leaving now that class is in session. You could stand to learn a lot more from that guy.” “Quiet, let’s not disturb the mad man,” one of the boyfriends rebutted. “Figures you’d think there was something deranged about someone actually in love,” his girlfriend said right back at him.
By the time the last couple was out the door, Jane’s bit lip had morphed into an all-out smirk.
Michael’s countless little acts of kindness might not have gotten him any closer to the tipping point of falling in love with her all over again—only he could answer that—but they were getting a measurable response from her. The problem was, she found him increasingly cute and endearing, but that was all. His teenager-like attempts to impress her might have worked back when she was in her teens. Still, it was some kind of progress. It was left to be seen if they were climbing back up that hill to their former heights fast enough or not, fast enough to keep them alive before serious bad guys, and not just a truck full of rednecks.
TWENTY-TWO
“Where’s the footage coming from?”
Finelli pointed without looking up from his laptop screen at a camera up in a tree, and another on a roadside marker. Both points couldn’t have been more than a few yards from where they were standing.
Cronos couldn’t believe anyone would even bother to embed cameras there. What on earth could be worth capturing on camera out here? But then the footage Finelli was showing him seemed choice enough to warrant the Big Brother on steroids approach. “This post 9-11 Homeland Security environment is just making my job way too easy,” he said, watching a rather malnourished Hulk banging the shit out of some rednecks with their own pickup.
“I thought We-R-Intel said there was just one of these nano-weaponized guys running around.”
Cronos studied the footage more closely before answering. So far Finelli had looped it back three times, more for personal enjoyment than expecting to get any more out of it.
“No, this is the same couple,” Cronos said.
“No way.”
Cronos eyed the flattened bodies all around them as if they were standing where a bomb had landed. “Let’s just say he has a style all his own.”
“I’m not buying it, man. They don’t look anything like the last couple. Even if the nano was capable of it, they’re too specialized for warfare. Maybe he could hold the shape-shifting short term, but not for this long. That would require a different kind of hybridized nano altogether. And it still doesn’t explain her.”
“Yes it does. She’s infected herself with them too. Or he’s infected her. Let’s keep that little point between us for now. Not sure I want We-R-Intel knowing any more than they already do.”
“You’re worse than a politician for keeping his options open.”
“Run back the footage on the couple in the car at the bottom of the lake and you’ll see what I mean. How’d we get that anyway?”
“The scuba divers doing the filming were beaming it up to the internet as they were shooting. The resolution is too damn poor to see who’s in the car, though.”
“Just listen to the banter more closely. And how did we get that, by the way?”
“The car computer’s little black box. Some of the latest models have them now just like planes. Replays back everything. Video and audio is for shit is all.” Finelli stuck his earbuds in as he replayed the audio. “What are you hearing that I’m not?”
“They’ve fallen out of love and they have to get back in love in a hurry. His being shallow. Those are the kinds of things a woman would say after finding herself in another body that is no longer appealing to her male counterpart.”
“Shouldn’t they be looking to fall back into lust then, assuming they use sex to take the edge off? Can’t imagine either of them has time for love.”
“I agree, it’s a rather strange conversation, especially for a couple drowning people. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless love held some strategic value.”
“If you were fighting to stay alive, having to protect someone else along for the ride is a distinct strategic disadvantage,” Finelli said.
“Explaining my befuddled look. It’ll come to me. It’s the missing piece, whatever it is,” Cronos said, bending down to examine the bodies more closely, although he suspected there would be no more clues forthcoming there.
“I was in love once,” Finelli said, babbling absentmindedly as he continued to be far too engrossed in the replays of watching the rednecks getting their heads bashed in. “Don’t know what people see in it. Was like being on drugs. Couldn’t wait to quit the habit. Couldn’t think straight for months afterwards.”
The bells were going off in back of his head before Cronos could even figure out For Whom the Bells Tolled. Finelli processed his reaction out of his peripheral vision, and looked up. “What is it?” he said.
“The nano inside him is dependent on him for their survival too. A person in love, as you just got done pointing out, is a person on drugs. That kind of hormonal secretion could seriously influence the nano, perhaps making them addicted to the same neurochemicals. And when those brain chemicals aren’t there anymore…”
Finelli was nodding. “Major migraine, I’m guessing. Could explain the short-tempered treatment of the tattooed truckers.”
“What if it’s worse than that? What if he starts dying inside, rapid aging, early senility? I mean, everything inside him is accelerated and souped up thanks to the nano. So he’d likely fall apart even quicker than before once they started misbehaving.”
“If you’re right, now’s the time to nab them. Not once they’ve found their mojo again.”
“Nah. I want a fair fight.”
“You mean you don’t want a chance of winning against them, you suicidal fuck,” Finelli mumbled before realizing putting more of his mind on the video on his laptop and not enough on his mouth was not a bright idea. He looked up from the screen again and gulped. “Sorry, didn’t mean for that to come out.”
“Don’t worry about it. What if I said we’re going to switch sides for a while? There’s going to be all kinds of heat coming down on them soon enough. And I can’t have them taken out by the lucky timing of any old predator.”
“You’re going to take on every secret government agency, not to mention every competing corporate entity on the map? Hold that thought,” he said, reaching for his cell phone. He used his one touch dialing. The phone rang once and then Finelli was cleared to move his motor mouth into the fast lane. “Cronos is taking on every well-funded spook cum assassin cum kidnapper from here to Timbuctoo and back again. Yeah, Yeah. Get me down for another 5K.” He hung up. “The captain says he thinks he can get the betting pool against you up to 350K on the latest announcement. And by the way, he’s betting against you. So don’t take it personally if he sends some people after you as well.”
Cronos smiled weakly. “Appreciate you putting the call through for me. 350K might actually work for a retirement fund in this recession riddled economy.”
He took a deep breath to help him consider his next move. “Okay, what do we have on this robo-chic, Serena?”
�
��You mean besides the fact that we’re the only two on the planet who know she’s a robot, besides her makers? Couldn’t we start with an easier adversary? I don’t know, like the entire Russian mafia?”
“Don’t make me pull it out of your ass, unless you’re into that.”
“Nice. Real nice. Damn savage. Fine, hope you have a heart attack just dealing with the data dump, save all your friends the trouble of having to pray so hard for your death.”
***
Mitch was spoon-feeding his zombie applesauce, holding him cradled in his arms as he sat on his swivel chair at his desk.
Spalding looked at him from the row of desks over and shook his head.
“Enough with the attitude, already. I told you, he loves the stuff.”
“You might try plugging the holes in him first before the applesauce comes leaking out the side of his neck, brainiac.”
“I tried using some Play-Doh on them,” Mitch confessed. “Worked for a while. Anything more high-tech has to go through Serena, Wicked Witch of the West. How she can look at them and have no heart is beyond me.”
“I seem to remember not having a heart myself not too long ago, before I started in with all this bleeding heart shit. I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s making life damn difficult. You don’t think it could have been that blowjob in the john with the severed head, do you? Like maybe something rubbed off on me? Is compassion a virus? Maybe it’s more of a bacteria. Wait, I think I have some antibacterial pills in my drawer somewhere.” Spalding dug through his top drawer until he found them, took a couple. “Viral love. What kind of sick shit is that?”
“The whole office appears to be infected,” Mitch said wiping up the applesauce drool on Zombie Dan, and looking about the office. “And what’s with that humming sound inside my head? I can’t make it go away.”
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