– Beat it.
Raye napped on the chair beside Mac’s bed in the clinic, then helped his bruised ass onto the Greyhound that night and watched his white bandaged hand wave out of sight. She’d slipped the driver an extra $50 for keeping an eye on him, promised she’d join him when she could. Explained how she had some things to do and he nodded like he understood. Then she went back to the Sanctuary, changed into her jeans and Vans and got the rest of her things together, borrowed a Flyer from the rack in the hallway, and got on with Plan B.
Plan B was to stay and keep and eye on Gene because no one else could. She figured it out that last night in the trailer with Norma. Just seeing Norma there and how cut up she was about leaving helped Raye make up her mind. Because no matter what Norma said about Raye not owing her a thing, Raye knew better.
A life for a life, yeah. Thing is, person’s enemies are never all in the one place. Norma just didn’t see the whole picture. She figured Augustine would go for Raye to get back at her, but she missed something. Raye had seen it, though. The way Augustine had looked at Norma that night at Una’s when Rayed climbed after the knife. The want and the hate and the eternity of his intent. The knife he’d thrown for Norma, just so she’d see him. And when Norma looked right through him (because no one can see the whole picture, and sometimes the thing you miss, the hole in the whole, is the one you’ll get pulled into), Raye thought, uh oh. She’d learnt that on the streets. Some guys will do anything to make a girl look at them. They’re the ones you have to watch out for.
Besides, people like that really pissed her off, people who only figured out what they wanted after they threw it away. Like her mother maybe. Maybe not. Augustine may have thought he’d go for Raye at first, but then Gene came along. And Augustine saw how Norma looked at Gene. Augustine couldn’t help it. It was in his program. He’d do anything to make her look at him that way. Anything.
So Raye, who’d always known that what she wanted more than anything was not to be alone, belonged at least for now right here in Spill City, Norma’s wing girl.
Literally.
The time on her phone said 1:20 but when she got back on her Flyer the moon was almost directly overhead and the stars were still bright. She drove past the trailer, saw that it was empty, cleaned out. And that felt weird. Then she went to the cottage deep in the bamboo grove and saw through the window that it too was empty, although not vacated. Everything of his was there. It was only when she got out of the grove that she saw what she’d come looking for. There on the ground. Tracks in the dirt. Veelo ruts. Some big-ass ride with a side car. Augustine, who never went anywhere without his bitch.
Raye texted Bunny to find out if he knew anything but for some reason, the transmission failed. She choked off a sob, started the Flyer up again and just hoped the old A23 battery would last. She stopped at all the places Gene might have gone looking for Norma—Una’s, The Brew Box and finally got to the Wang. Jesus told her how Norma had sent him a strange text telling him to get Gene out of Spill City and how he’d done just that. When Raye said, was anyone else in the bar when you put Gene in the ride to Sonora, Jesus said no one and no one in the parking lot either except that he’d heard the rumble of a bike gang, and Raye was halfway to the checkpoints by then because she’d always travelled fastest alone. Her instincts and heightened sense of smell did the rest.
Augustine, standing beside the drains, had his back to her. She watched him leave with the lackey (who didn’t look too good) in the side car. Their big ride rumbled down the dirt road and disappeared. Raye got off the stolen Flyer and went down the embankment over to the middle drain. It was almost as tall as she was and there was a dark patch flowing from it. She bent down and touched the dark patch and her finger came up red. She reached in and pulled out the roll of hog wire (she was getting stronger) until she got it all the way out and it lay there, bathed in starlight. She started peeling the wire off with her hands but that was going to take too long, so she ran through the junkyard to the truck by the side of the road. She rummaged in the trunk until she found a pair of pliers, remembering a time from her receding past. The rumble of her grandfather’s station wagon on the gravel drive up at the farm, rolls of hog wire in the back and Raye waiting to help him in the cool of the garage (that smelled of coffee grounds and machine oil). There was a row of tools in their slots cut into the edge of a shelf. Raye had no real idea what any of them did, so she grabbed the pliers because she liked the look of them. That heft in her hands. That smell. The sound of gravel crunching. That Portland morning in June.
Raye took the pliers back to Gene and got to work on the sharp wire Augustine had wrapped him in tight enough to rend his flesh. Gene had had a good laugh. She’d stopped outside the hut that one time, heard him laugh and decided not to go in. Norma deserved this. She’d been searching for so long. The pliers were rusty. It was taking longer than it should. She could see all the blood that had been lost, and through the wire, Gene’s one eye staring up at the stars, the other a pulpy mass. She’d got here as soon as she could, she told herself and now she was here and it seemed like years or hours ago that they’d first met, her and Norma, in the bunk room that time. Norma’s hair falling in dark waves around her pale Picasso face. Eyes the color of rain, and so beautiful, Raye thought then, but wrong, rippling and out of sync like someone had taken her face apart and put it back together again but not quite. And so alone, the alonest person Raye had ever met, lonelier even than Mac who after all had his toys and Michael, but Norma had no one until Gene, and now here he was, huge and broken. Looking up at who knows what with his one good eye, the short fat pulses at his neck slowing. Three two one. Raye knew there wasn’t time to wonder if she could do it and no Norma to show her how, not anymore. Well it was starting whether she wanted to or not. The first convulsion nearly took her head off and her tongue when it unfurled, was blue, although Raye had to cross her eyes to see that. It felt on fire, throbbing and raw, the pain unending. She slid the pliers into her pocket and bent down to Gene’s face, the blue tip seeking a hole, any hole, and from there the shortest route to his concussed and bleeding brain. Any opening would do, a nostril or an eye socket, yeah, remembering what Norma had said about bringing back the innocent.
Like pulling pickles from a jar.
GENERAL GLOSSARY
The Catastrophes. Despite recent economic reversals between 2013 and 2015, between the winter of 2015 until Feb. 2030, the state was ravaged by Superstorms (2015), epidemics (fish and pig flu 2019), brush fires (2020, 2025), cholera (2023), and earthquakes (Ferdinand 2025, Isabel 2030), and, finally the oil spill of 2030 when a convoy of Alaskan oil tankers (these were dangerous times) sailing south and stopping in Vancouver to pick up thousands of shipping containers for worldwide distribution runs into heavy weather on a-yet-uncharted rocks thrown up by the aftershocks, and spills 30 million gallons of oil into San Diego Bay along with its load of empty shipping containers for worldwide distribution. The entire convoy is destroyed. A Cartel-run operation (along with brave go-it-alone locals) salvages a large proportion of the shipping containers, and to carry favor from the locals, distributes them for housing to those who for a multitude of reasons did or could not join the mass exodus from the Catastrophic Zone.
Comtrash: Short for communication-trash. Excess hand-held communication technology that piled up in manufacturers’ storage facilities, on the floor of San Diego Bay, or in Cartel/Consortium keeps during The Catastrophes. Brought back into circulation either for trade, sale or scrap.
ER: A Consortium of unknown origin and affiliation that purchased the state of California from Sacramento for an undisclosed sum in June 2028 (an election year) and renamed it Calco, a name that never took; the locals preferring the moniker Ctastrophic Zone. Wikileaked documents show not only that negotiations had been in effect since 2025 or earlier, coinciding with the SLA (Secessionist Liberation Army) ascendence, and a plot to assassinate the US president which Sacramento covered up to avoid being severe
d from the union, but also that ER secretly ‘auctioned’ the southern part of the Catastrophic Zone (see below) to the Cartels (multinational crime organizations) in return for them keeping out of the northern part of the Zone. Conspiracy theories argue that even without the SLA, Washington would have cut the Catastrophic Zone loose. Battered by earthquake, floods, and brush fires, besieged by homeland warfare between the SLA (who took responsibility for the Bombing of LAX in 2018) and counter terrorists (who were blamed for the coordinated arson attacks in the 20s), economic disaster, and a failure to maintain the integrity of its borders, the once richest state in the union had long become a liability.
The Fall (of the wall between Mexico and California). Jan 17, 2023. Celebrated as Day of Return. Still nominally in charge, Sacramento, in conjunction with ER, deployed reserves and mercenaries to set up a makeshift checkpoint at San Ysidro. These government forces were joined by cartel militia and SLA guerrillas (who had at that time set up base at Coronado Naval Base). Even after the guerrillas became public enemy No. 1, their presence still haunted the old border, and there were reported ‘recruitment drives’ as late as 2033.
Cruids. A portmanteau of the words cruel, deep, criminal, crude, druid and artist and cruise. Refers to a defunct countercultural mentality set dangerously adrift.
Purple Rain. The guerrilla arm of the SLA run by Niemen Van Aldren, gone to ground since Independence Day (Jan 17 2025), and rumored, among others, to be one of the members of ER. The SLA slogan, Separate or Die Trying (SODT) was as close to being outlawed as anything could be in the Catastrophic Zone, or New Territories, which extended from Oakland to Baja.
Quake-trash—n. goods left behind (or looted, stolen, extorted, etc) in an earthquake evacuation or kill radius and collected for resale or trade.
Tuk-Tuks: usually three-wheeled (four wheels are less common) battery, solar or hybrid vehicles for transporting paying passengers. Once a standard auto rickshaw of Southeast Asia and the subcontinent, but the vehicle run in Spill City looks more like the solar run transporters of Israel, Canada and the Gulf. Sometimes called Thukkers.
Thank you to the gang at Lazy Fascist, especially Cameron Pierce and Kirsten Alene; my tough smart agent Matt Bialer; the tough smart editors who published or publicized sections of this novel: Ellen Datlow, Cynthia Reeser, Brad Listi, and Zack Wentz.
Special thanks to Jerry Wilson for your careful reading and invaluable commentary. Ditto to Andiee Paviour, and for the many chin-clinks of love and time. Thanks also to workshoppers, friends, mothers-in-arms Helen Koukoutsis and Sarah Klenbort for being more than the sum of your parts.
To Russell Rowland who gave me my training wheels and to Kris Saknussemm who made me take them off.
To Matthew Revert for the stunning cover art.
To John, Jack and Isabella for being my family, the only monster that matters. Love to you know where and back.
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