Leather Lungs’s hot-dog cart bounces away along the pavement, into the molten heart of what’s giving off thicker and thicker clouds of pollution. When he’s ten feet away, the diodes on Ripple’s collar start to flash.
“Ow!” Ripple jerks his head and slaps at the collar. “Fuck! It bit me! Ow! Fuck! It did it again! Ow! Fuck! Why does it keep doing that? Ow! Fuck! It fucking hurts!”
“Electricity!” Abby is berserking, but she isn’t wrong. The shocks get worse the farther off Leather Lungs gets—sizzling, shivery disturbances that feel like Ripple’s body is misaligning with his soul. Ripple sprints after him.
“Pro, wait up! Wait!”
* * *
Swanny was assembled in a lab out of spare parts of her parents. Now and then, her mother disparagingly referred to the way babies were “traditionally made,” as though procreation of the ordinary sort were a quaint affectation of the old-fashioned, despite the fact that there was a better product on the market—in this case, a customized one. Pippi selected for maximum intelligence (no guarantees, of course, but the doctors knew the genetic markers), keen senses, and, when it came down to picking among specific embryos, Swanny’s amber-colored, almost golden eyes.
“People act as though it’s some kind of witchcraft, but there’s always selection in the womb,” Pippi said. “Shark fetuses gobble up their siblings till only the strongest survives. That’s nature, darling. We could wring our hands over might-have-beens, but what for? You came into this life a winner.”
It’s Swanny’s eyes Abby stares into now. And though Abby knows nothing of the beakers and centrifuges, the cryocrypt where the recipe for the baroness in question spent its existential Before, she sees something in the particular hue of those irises that is not of God’s manufacture.
“You’re working for the People Machines,” Abby whispers. “Maybe you are a People Machine.”
“What are you muttering about? They have such strange accents where you come from. You don’t sound like anyone at all.”
“You want him to go. You want him to die in a fire.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m plotting against him with some sort of mercenary…fog-nozzler. Honestly, why bother to live in a city if you’re afraid to breathe the air?”
Abby repeats Katya’s words: “You’ll have babies, but you’ll never make love. You’ll have your babies in a Toob.”
Swanny’s mouth falls open, exposing the second row of teeth that half-doubles her lower jaw. Then her eyes narrow. “How dare you say that to me.”
“People Machine!”
“Empty-headed slut!”
“People Machine!”
“Shopworn dollymop!”
“People Machine!”
Swanny grabs Abby by the hair. “I’m not frigid!” she yells in Abby’s face.
Hooligan clamps his mouth onto Swanny’s pajamaed calf, and Swanny yanks her hand free of Abby’s scalp, cursing, taking several long blond strands with it in the process. The dog releases Swanny in turn, and she angrily inspects the indentations on her leg for blood. Finding none, she tugs Hooligan’s leash out of Abby’s hands with a vindictive jerk.
“All right,” Swanny says. Her eyes are dying suns, red-rimmed from the smoke. “Duncan’s all yours. Go and get him.”
* * *
“I don’t think you’re supposed to ride the elevator when the building’s on fire,” Ripple says.
Leather Lungs presses the button for the library’s top floor without responding. Looks like he has two good hands after all. The doors slide shut. Now only the hot-dog cart stands between him and Ripple in the enclosed space. Leather Lungs respirates steadily through his mask. Maybe Ripple should try to get on this guy’s good side. Assuming there is a good side. Independent extinguishment contractor—that’s like a bounty hunter for fires.
“You didn’t have to put the collar on me,” Ripple continues. “I would’ve gone with you willingly.”
“The hell you would have,” says Leather Lungs. “If you wouldn’t face danger with those girls watching, you wouldn’t do it at all. A man’s always bravest in front of an audience.”
“Harsh. And untrue. I’m brave whenever. Mostly.” Ripple thinks of fleeing the mansion, the hours walking underground. He checks his LookyGlass: still no response from his dad. “Hey, you work for the police department. Do you think you could get them to send some cops up to the Heights to check on my family?”
“What happened to your family?”
“My mansion got broken into—fucking HomeShield. I think my parents got to the panic room in time, but I want to make sure they’re OK. Torchies. Not cool.”
“Where were you when this happened?”
“That doesn’t matter. Can you do it or not? I’m helping you out.”
“Under duress.”
This is a really slow elevator. “I used to want to be a fireman, you know. I talked about it on my show, Late Capitalism’s Royalty. I’m on the record about this.”
“Didn’t have what it takes?”
“Come on. They shut that shit down when the fire chief got barbecued. Obviously you know that, it’s how you got your job.” Leather Lungs doesn’t answer. It feels weirdly mournful, like an impromptu moment of silence, until Ripple goes on: “So I got into other stuff, like gaming and damsels. Did you see my girlfriend? The hot one, not the other one. The other one’s my wife.”
“You’ll need this.” Leather Lungs takes out a second gas mask and offers it to Ripple. Ripple can’t imagine strapping it to his face; it’s nasty and old, a feed bag for breathing.
“Um, I’m good, thanks.”
Leather Lungs turns to him slowly, and for the first time Ripple sees the glint of eyes behind those eyeholes. “The brainpan is a skillet, son. It doesn’t take the heat. When you get out there in the smoke, the fumes, the threat of more death raining from above, this mask will be the only thing holding your body and soul together. Top of the line, vetted the brand myself.”
It’s a pretty stirring endorsement.
“Maybe I’ll hold on to it just in case.” Ripple turns the mask over: TARNHELM reads a little metal tag on the inside lining. So weird to bother branding something that isn’t even stylish.
“When someone offers you a gas mask, you take it. And you never take it off.”
“Not ever?”
“Not until it’s safe.”
“Right.”
“Now, when we get up there, you’re going to look out on the roof and it’s going to look bad. It’s going to look like the end. You have to remember, you write this story. You’re the one who forges that path through the flames. You’re the one who survives. Man’s braver when there’s an audience, but there’s always an audience.”
Sure, that big camera crew in the sky. “God?”
“God is a fairy tale for cowards and fools. History. History. What do you want history to remember from this day?”
“That I…didn’t die?”
“That you lived.”
“Yeah, that too.”
The elevator lets them out upstairs. Leather Lungs lifts something from the hot-dog cart: it’s a backpack made from a multigallon water tank, with a trigger-pulled hose. He slings it onto his shoulders, then hoists out another one for Ripple.
Leather Lungs leaves the hot-dog cart behind and vaults up the steps to the roof access at the end of the hall. He must be feeding off the fire’s energy. The closer he gets to it, the faster he moves. A whoosh of hot air rushes inside as he throws open the emergency exit.
Leather Lungs is deploying Ripple to a prime battlefield in the war against oxygen. The surface of the library roof actually appears to undulate, a smokescape of ever-fluxing plasma: no place for a sane man to tread. Ripple loiters in the doorway. As Leather Lungs shimmers toward dematerialization, Ripple shouts after him, “I can’t breathe out here!”
Leather Lungs stops and turns back with eerie calm. He taps the snozzle of his gas mask. Ripple takes a deep breath and pulls the leathery, rub
bery hood over his own face.
* * *
Humphrey Ripple watches the home invaders on the surveillance monitors in the panic room. They’re chainsawing his employees. His staff. His people. When the emissaries from the Quiet Place arrive, they chainsaw them too. Red blood on white lab coats. The invaders maraud around from screen to screen, pissing on Humphrey’s rugs, spray-tagging his portrait, loading his possessions into crates that they carry down a secret passage to the sewer: guns, currency, silver, single malt. They take the jewelry off Pippi Dahlberg’s corpse. Humphrey hired a private security firm years ago. He put faith in their technology and hope in guessing that they’d be more responsive to calls and less amenable to bribes than the city’s notorious police force. But he guessed wrong. No one is coming to save them. A man’s home is his castle, and Humphrey has been dethroned.
Osmond and Katya are playing Hangman. Osmond wins every game. Katya guesses the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order. Even after all these years, her voice still lilts like a sexy child’s.
“F?”
“The noose tightens, Princess Phonetica. For charity’s sake, I’ll give your effigy hands and feet this time.”
“G?”
Humphrey’s embarrassing wife, a masturbation fantasy he had to introduce to colleagues, once upon a time. His embarrassing brother, an invalid-carriage loaded with druggy contempt for the world of the waking. Both of them avoiding the most embarrassing topic of all: the embarrassing disappearance of his embarrassing son. i know u r mad but let me know. As if Humphrey would ever dignify that with a response, even in the best of times. He feels old and depressed. As a young and then not-so-young zillionaire playboy, he always thought that someday he would get around to ruining himself, before anyone else could do it. He would bet wrong on purpose. He would burn through his net worth in a single day. He would prove to everyone that he didn’t need the money, the mansion, the name, and he would vanish into legend. But then, somehow, he’d had a family instead. What had he been thinking? If only he’d lost it all when he had the chance. Then it would be his forever.
“Kindred, I beseech you, spare us both this bimbo abecedarian’s recitations and throw your postiche into the ring. I’ll play you three out of five.”
“This is no time for word games, Osmond,” says Humphrey, pale in the doom screens’ glow.
“Our world is ending and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is precisely the time for word games.”
Humphrey taps one of the monitors with his finger, as if it might startle the figure there out of what he’s about to do.
“What’s happening here?”
The Ripples watch as the invader splashes the Hall of Ancestors with a jagged zigzag of liquid from a gas can. They watch as the invader lights a match.
“That’s it. Get me the Dignity Kit,” says Humphrey.
“I refuse to indulge such blatant hypocrisy from the likes of you. As a brother of mine once said, ‘I’m here to talk you out of killing yourself.’ ”
“You didn’t listen to me either.”
“Hummer,” murmurs Katya, “isn’t there still a chance we can get out alive?”
“For once, I agree with your temptress bride. If we survive, we’ll still have the fortune to rebuild this estate twice over, and with adequate soundproofing this time. Our corpses will be charred either way—why not try leaping through the flames?”
Humphrey turns back toward the monitors, a worshipper at a radiant shrine. The fire spreads from panel to panel. Soon it will be inside the walls of the house.
“I want my Dignity,” he says.
Humphrey twists the combination lock—it’s the Empire Island area code, 777—and opens the lid of the heavy black box. Inside are a bottle of pills, some golf pencils, and a pad of End-of-Life Checklists. He ticks off his “Reasons Why” (ruin, check; imminent destruction, check; loss of loved one, check), initials the bottom, and opens the pill bottle.
“I’d offer you something to wash those down,” grumbles Osmond, “but I don’t want to waste a perfectly good bottle of Gulden Draak.”
“I’ll take them dry.” Humphrey shakes two tablets into his hand, then offers the bottle to the others.
“Not my drug of choice.” Osmond’s voice is an un-Dignified croak.
“You go first,” Katya says quietly.
The Ripples watch as Humphrey swallows the pills. They watch as he slumps back, his mouth filling with blue-green froth, pop-eyed and surprised by the death he explicitly requested.
“Now all is revealed.” Osmond raps Katya on the thigh with a thwacking cane. “We needn’t have secrets from each other any longer, Wundelsteipen. You never wanted to admit you were after his illustrious fortune, but now I know that you’re willing to risk immolation to have a chance at it. Ha! I thought I would be repulsed when I learned for certain how base and crass your motives always were, but now that the truth is out, I find I actually sympathize. Because you and I are the same. Selfishness alone sustains us, and such selfishness is a curse, an insomnia of the soul that holds eternal rest forever out of reach, though we go mad with dreamlessness. Because we cannot bring ourselves to die. Not even when all is lost. Not even for a reason.”
“You don’t know me,” says Katya. She reaches for the pill bottle. “You’ve never known me at all.” She knocks back the pills, then studies Humphrey’s suicide memo. “Who was the ‘loved one,’ do you think? Was it Pippi? Or his son?”
“If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t tell you.” Thus spake Osmond Ripple, watching his sister-in-law die.
17
THEM THAT LIVE
It never occurred to Swanny that the city would be empty. Pippi’s accounts of mayhem, riots, and looting always made her picture a carnivalesque atmosphere, one where, as in the days of old, the rich and poor could mingle freely, masked in the darkness of the hour. Swanny imagined streets firelit and full of secret hideouts, lovers coupling in doorways, and sweaty, jaundiced druggers succumbing to madness in wildly quotable blank-verse soliloquies. Since girlhood she’s concocted intimately detailed narratives about the life and times she would have in such a place, the way she would conduct her business and her passions. Now, as she trudges the empty skyscraper canyons, staring down at slippers soaked through with mother blood and bird excrement, begrimed with chalky ash, the full weight of Duncan’s duffel bag digging into her shoulder, she wonders if anything ever existed at the other end of her pining, anything at all. She is the child bride of a gone world.
In the dwindling warmth of late afternoon, Swanny sits down on a bus-stop bench and exhaustedly pats the seat beside her. Hooligan stands up on his hind feet and sits down like a human, roguishly crossing his legs. He rests his hand on her knee. She slaps it away, scanning the street for imaginary traffic. Swanny has never before in her life suffered the indignity of walking for too long, and what’s more, she has absolutely nothing to show for it. She hasn’t even had a chance to sell the dog.
Then she notices the limo. It’s the same model as the one she and Mother took from the service, or nearly, but this one has its engine still intact, purring with the gluttonous consumption of fossil fuels: a sleek, sated beast. Swanny watches it roll up the deserted street, between the hollow dioramas of gutted storefronts and the scraps of man-made detritus—newsprint, fabric, cellophane—that litter the pavement, foliage from a different kind of fall. The limo eases to a halt right in front of where she’s sitting, and one tinted window in the back yawns down.
“Here’s a tip,” the man inside says. His voice is raspy, abrasive, more personality disorder than accent. But she can barely see him there, ensconced so deeply in the limo’s dusky cavern. “That bus ain’t coming.”
“I know that. I’m only resting for a moment. To get my bearings.”
“Good thing. They’d never let you take that mutt on board.”
“I thought you said the bus wasn’t coming.”
The pause that follows is all the more troublin
g, accompanied as it is by a lapping, wettish sound Swanny at last identifies as the man’s chewing.
“Let me give you a ride,” he says.
“Actually,” she replies, “I’m not entirely certain where I’m going.”
“Get in the car, we’ll talk about it.”
“Actually, I’m waiting for my husband, also.”
“Get in the car.”
The door swings open, as though of its own accord. Flying machines never come for Swanny, only these long dark cars, like hearses.
“Excuse me,” she says, “but my pet is very protective of my personal safety. I’d hate to have him bite you.” She glances at Hooligan, who’s chosen this moment to start grooming his pubic region.
“Leave him. He ain’t gonna get run over.”
Swanny weighs her options. She could make a dash for it on foot, but he’s in a vehicle—and where could she go? Besides, to be entirely honest, there’s a good deal of curiosity mixed in with her trepidation. Even…attraction. Having a limo, one in working order, no less, implies a level of wealth and social standing that might make a person worth talking to. One shouldn’t judge a stranger on his ominous comportment alone.
Perhaps he’s not brutal, only intense.
“Stay,” Swanny instructs the dog sternly. Hooligan raises his sullied hands in confusion, as if to say Where would I go? “And watch the bag. I’ll be back shortly.” Frankly, she wants neither Ripple’s bag, nor his dog—it was enough to deprive Abby of both. With what little poise she can muster, Swanny climbs into the car.
The inside of the limo is cool and dark, both cleaner and more lived-in than the musty vehicle that the service sent to claim Swanny and her mother. The leather upholstery has upon it the living sheen of human skin. The tinted windows reveal a twilight version of the world Swanny just exited, a world that, in an instant, begins gliding away.
“I thought you looked lost,” he says, where she can see him this time.
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