by Tim Scott
She still held the gun on me, but I sensed she lacked the same intensity. I took a step toward her just as the apartment door was kicked open.
As I turned, Nena threw me at the figure and I fell heavily across him. Then she was gone.
“Nena!” I called scrambling after her, but I was dragged back and then felt the cold prod of a gun at the back of my neck.
“Don’t even think about moving. You’ve got some talking to do.”
The voice was familiar, and for a moment my mind rifled through my past, scavenging memories of voices from anywhere it could find.
“Gabe?” I said. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s Gabe. And who the hell might you be?” he said, still with the gun firmly in my neck.
“It’s Huck. Huck Lindbergh.”
“Huck?” He turned me over. “It is you! And what is up with your hair?” Then he picked me up off the floor. “Huck!” And he hugged me and started laughing. “I should have guessed. My world turns upside down, and you appear for the first time in eight years. I’m guessing the two things are not a coincidence.”
“Gabe,” I said. “I’m sorry if I’ve dragged you into this.”
“Don’t be. It’s good to see you. Eight years. I thought you were only leaving the city to clear your head.”
“I know, that was the idea. It just never really happened. And I’m sorry to do this, too, but I have to go.”
“Go?”
“I have to find that girl. I’ll be back. Five minutes.”
“As long as it’s less than eight years,” he called.
“Yeah,” I said, and ran down the stairs.
When I got to the street, there was no sign of her. The drongles rumbled lazily by, and the normality of the scene was overpowering.
I ran a little way down and checked out some of the side alleys, trying to catch a glimpse of her. Eventually I kicked a pile of garbage in frustration. A kid saw me and shouted: “What’s the matter? Lost your fridges?” I turned and stared at him. “Lost without them, are you?” he said as he ran off.
I turned this over in my mind for a moment, connecting it with the fridge in the drongle, but then I dismissed it and headed back to Gabe’s apartment.
“You find the woman?” he said.
“No. She was gone.”
“Perhaps that’s just as well. It looked like she was trying to kill you.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. I tried to persuade her we knew each other, even though we didn’t, exactly. It’s a complicated story with some oversize bits missing.”
Gabe poured me some more coffee. It was warm rather than hot now, but I was happy with anything that wasn’t wonker. That was when I heard him laughing like a three-year-old. “What’s so funny?”
“It’s good to see you, Huck. I’ve missed you. And I’ve missed the chaos that always surrounded you,” he said, and finally sat down.
“Yeah. Is Marcy okay?”
“She’s away for a couple of days on business. She’s terrific. She’d love to see you.”
Even though I had not seen this man for eight years, I sensed we were picking straight up where we left off, and that was both touching and humbling.
“So, you know what’s going on at all?” I said.
“No. I’ve just been released from Head Hack Central and I’m missing a chunk of time, about a day. You know anything about that?”
“Only that I’m missing a chunk of time, too. What’s the date?”
“Friday the twenty-ninth.”
“Then I’m missing about a day as well.” I sipped the coffee. “Head Hack Central wipe your day?”
“Yeah, it’s a new directive. It came in three months ago.”
“This city is going to hell.”
“Yeah. And what about you? How did you end up here?”
“It’s a long story. I came around in a drongle with that girl, Nena. But I was wearing different clothes and I had this stuff in the pockets.” I pointed to the collection on the table.
“Okay,” said Gabe. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. That’s one of my suits you’re wearing. And one of my shirts. And you’ve a red patch, see? Right across the chest.”
I undid my jacket.
“Red is a restricted color. The cops have the franchise. So I’m guessing that was an arrested stamp that faded in the rain. Looks like they wiped your mind, too, but you came here before we were taken or you wouldn’t have that suit.”
“You should have been a cop. We could have spent seven years walking the streets of this city together,” I said, and I looked at him properly. There were more lines across his face now, and his hair had flecks of gray, but it was unmistakably the same Gabe with his inexhaustible supply of goodwill and patience.
“I’m sorry if I got you into this,” I said.
“And I’m just glad that you’re here. Real friends are hard to find in this world. I’ll make some fresh coffee, and then we’ll go through what we know. I’m guessing we have enough here to piece it together.”
When the coffee was done, he sat down and I explained exactly what had happened to me. How I had come around in the drongle with Nena and a fridge and a headache the size of Canada, to what had happened at the police checkpoint, how we had taken a trip to Head Hack Central, and how I had escaped with Nena and brought her back to his apartment.
“Okay,” he said, when I had finished. “Nothing fits.” Then he began laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I won’t say it’s been boring, but it’s been quiet. What have we got here?”
We picked over the things from my pockets. An envelope with two tickets to the fireworks that night. A brochure to an herb fair and a pile of head hack photos that had taken a battering.
Among them were several shots of Nena in a drongle, and one of her in a head hack room with a nurse and doctor lying prostrate on the floor.
“Look at this one,” I said.
“You think she knocked them out?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.”
And then I leafed through the ones of Abigail. “I must have had a long-term head hack. I don’t know why they would do that. I’m lucky to be alive.” The words resonated and hung in the air as I stared at the picture of Abigail.
“She was a wonderful woman,” said Gabe eventually. “These last years have been tough, haven’t they?”
“Yeah. I haven’t quite sorted them out.”
“Sometimes bad things happen.” There was a pause. “You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Sure. Why don’t you take a shower? I’ll get you another suit. That one appears to have been on fire.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I tried to pretend that the past with Abigail didn’t exist, and now here I am having lost the past for real.”
“Life does strange things to us. You take a shower. You’ll feel better. I’ll do a proper sweep of the apartment. If you’re wearing my clothes, then I’m guessing there may be other clues here.”
“Thanks, Gabe,” I said.
The water felt unbelievably good, and it washed away the remains of my headache. I got dressed in another suit Gabe had found, and felt a lot more human.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. What have you found?”
“You want to talk about Abigail now?”
“No. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure, take your time. So what have I found? Well, that’s new,” he said pointing to a blue bottle on the table.
I picked it up. It was a sample of healing balm.
“It’s from a healing fair that’s going on downtown at the moment. This map was out, too.” He opened it up, and the paper crackled as he flattened it on the table. A red line had been added by hand.
“And you see that?” he said. “I’ve never drawn on this map, and that route starts from just around the corner and ends up near Seneca. I know that a
rea a little. There’s a cop drongle warehouse there. I worked security there a few years back, and even then it was pretty much abandoned.”
“This entrance is close by?” I said, pointing to the other end of the red line.
“Five minutes.”
chapter
NINETY
The little blue lights of the drongles zipped by in the spitting rain, and across the street an advertising balloon on an apartment block bobbed and swung. We took a turn down an alley that was choked with garbage.
Eyes watched us from dark windows, but the street was deserted. Somewhere far away, a dog was barking. Perhaps at strangers, perhaps out of fear. A coffee table came sidling out a little way down.
“Want to buy an equity fund?” it said.
“No.”
“What about an index-linked pension with a stock option? Or a juicy portfolio?”
“No, thanks.”
“Okay,” it said, and scooted off.
The door to the tube system was painted black and red. And it had vast lettering on the side that said: “New Seattle Police Department. Hookup 489.” It looked stark in the night air.
“How do we get in?” I said, running my hand over the door.
“Plug into a feed and it opens automatically if you have clearance. Most of the cops have clearance. There’s no way we’ll force it.”
I looked down the alley and up to a window where a woman watched with folded arms. She turned away and stepped back out of sight when I met her gaze.
The alley smelled of burnt oil.
“So if we can’t get in now, how would we have gotten in earlier?”
“Maybe we didn’t,” said Gabe.
“Okay. So the leads we’re left with are the bottle from the herb fair and the cop drongle warehouse near the other end of that route. You want to check out the warehouse first? And then the fair? And if we don’t find anything at either, what do you say about heading over to Mending Things with Fire?”
“You still drink mojitos, then?” said Gabe.
“Yeah, some things are never meant to change. And drinking mojitos comes firmly into that category.”
“Sure. You mind if we walk? I need to stretch my bad leg.”
chapter
NINETY-ONE
For once, I didn’t mind walking.
My headache was still hanging on, and the evening had settled into a panorama of stars, whitewashed with a gray haze from the city lights. Around us, advertising balloons bobbed above the buildings, their tether chains occasionally letting out mournful shrieks that pierced the deserted alleys.
The main streets were more packed than usual, and it took Gabe a little while to work out that the fireworks were that night. So we kept to the back alleys, and they were quiet. We talked about Marcy and times past, and the scrapes we had gotten into together. And then, after a pause, Gabe said: “So why did you come back, Huck?”
“I couldn’t stop seeing the bad memories. And I thought that if I came back maybe I could start my life again from where it stopped.”
Up above, a group of ravens were disturbed from their roost and circled the sky.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time.”
“Yeah. I got stuck trying to pretend that I didn’t have a past. I thought that was the answer. It took me a long time to realize that if you try and fight what’s happened you’re never going to win, because to fight the past, you have to live there. And it’s a sad place to live. The same things happen all the time.”
“I guess they do.”
“Maybe I was always weak. And that made me vulnerable to events.”
“You weren’t weak, Huck. You were committed. And that made you vulnerable.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. It’s all about how you see things, Huck. You can see the world any way you want. That’s the choice we all have.”
“Perspective,” I said, and stopped.
“Yeah, what?”
I realized my legs didn’t have their usual tightness and I wondered when that had eased away. “Have you ever come across a place that serves a Fiorentina pizza, but without the egg?”
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I’ve had a Fiorentina pizza, but without the egg.”
chapter
NINETY-TWO
The small drongle warehouse office was in chaos.
Strewn piles of papers were scattered over the desk and unopened mail from years before lay like autumn leaves on the floor.
I followed Gabe as he threaded his way through the debris of discarded parts and scattered tools until we got to the main hangar at the back. It was a patchwork of shadows cast by the abandoned drongle shells, old smoke canisters, and piles of boxes.
I kicked a candle, and saw a little circle of them had been laid out on the floor.
“Hello?” I called, but my words stumbled through the dead drongle carcasses and then recoiled. “Anyone?” I called again. Then there was a slit of light over to our left, and I saw a tall object shuffle out from behind a pile of crushed cop drongles.
“Hey!” said the fridge. “You’re back! Is the Tiny Eiger with you, because we’re missing the top harmony.”
“The Tiny Eiger?”
“Yeah! Did you manage to get us any yogurt? You said you’d try.”
“Sorry, but we’re light on the yogurt,” I said.
“Are you feeling all right?” said another fridge, opening its door and spilling shadows out into the mass of the hangar. “Maybe you need some Primula. Processed cheese, straight from the tube. It’s a great snack!” And it opened its doors to reveal a tube so flat it looked as if it had been hit repeatedly on an anvil to remove the last of the contents.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“I know you wanted us to hide if anyone came by,” said the first fridge. “But we’ve been working out the harmonies to a song about sell-by dates. Do you want to hear it?”
“Not just at the moment. Just wait a minute—”
“Would you like your clothes dried before we’re quiet? I feel a spin coming on.”
“No.”
“Hooot!” said another fridge.
“Okay, look everyone, just chill out a moment.”
They all started humming furiously.
“How are we doing?” said another fridge. “Did you want your box back? I’ve been keeping it safe for you.” And it opened its doors to show a wooden box on the bottom shelf.
“Yeah, I meant just everyone calm down, okay?” I said, pulling out the box. It was heavy and it smelled bad. I pried open the lid. “Ah,” I cried.
“What?” said Gabe. I showed him and then I put the lid back on and slid it into the fridge.
“Lieberwitz. Poor bastard.”
“That explains how we got access through that door.”
“Yeah. But how the hell did we get hold of it?”
“Okay, so can you guys tell us what has happened to you over the last day?” said Gabe to the fridges.
“Sure.”
“We know all kinds of stuff,” added another. “We know the date of the Klondike gold rush. And we know the difference between a stoat and a weasel.”
“That’s useful,” said Gabe, “but let’s stick to events over the last day.”
“Hatchoo,” sneezed the other fridge. “Sorry. A peppered steak went bad on the top shelf. Still haven’t gotten over it.”
“Does anyone have anything that needs drying? I really do feel a spin coming on,” said the tumble dryer.
“Maybe later. Just tell us what has happened in the last day. Could you do that now?”
“Sure. Is Nena coming?” said the nearest fridge, and I saw it was a Frost Fox.
“Nena isn’t here right now.”
“And then we are going to Mexico?” said the other one, moving closer.
“Ah tequila!” the three of them sang. “La! La! La! La-la! La-la! La-la-la! La! La-la! La-la! La! Tequila!”
“Sh,”
I said. “Let’s keep the noise down. Just let us know what has been going on. It’s important.”
“Oh, I see. Sure,” said the Frost Fox. “It was like this. I had a tube of Primula, and the Cold Moose had a pizza, but he wasn’t letting on. We all knew, but he kept sticking to his story about having a carrot that was so bendy that you could tie a knot in it.”
“Hey, that wasn’t a story. I do have an old carrot,” said the other fridge.
“Oh, yeah. That’s right.”
“And some pesto. You forgot my pesto.”
“I was coming to the pesto. I was working up to it via the carrot.”
“Guys,” I said. “I’m guessing the food you each have is not the central part.”
“You think?” said the Frost Fox.
“Just bear that in mind as a possibility.” I leaned back on a drongle hood. There was just enough light coming from the open doors of the two fridges to throw huge irregular shadows over the roof.
“Sure. Well, the Ice Jumper had an out-of-date chicken fricassee,” the Frost Fox went on, “just in case you were wondering. He was pretty protective of it, too, but the Tiny Eiger had racks of test tubes with some sort of virus in them. And that was weird, particularly as he didn’t say anything. Anyway, we were holing up in a park, just chilling, and that’s when we first met Nena.”
The story took a while, particularly as there was a lengthy section about eating the pizza. And a slight holdup while the Cold Moose tried to be sure of the sell-by date. But in the end, the Frost Fox told us everything it knew. I got the whole sequence straight in my head—from the fridges being taken to the Halcyon motel by Nena to them meeting me, to being taken to the cold store by the cops and then being rescued. The Frost Fox described how they had walked to Gabe’s apartment and then come here through the big tubes. And then how Nena and I had left with the Tiny Eiger.
“You never said where you were going.”
“I really do feel a spin coming on. You sure none of you have anything that needs drying? Not even something small?”
“Not just at the moment,” I said, and tried to piece the whole thing together, but there were still bits missing, like where the envelope had come from with the money and why I had blond hair. But the key seemed to be finding out where I had gone with Nena and that fridge.