Head Rush

by Carolyn Crane

  A dark look. “You don’t think he’ll like it—I see it in your eyes. Do you feel he’ll be insulted? Is that it?”

  “No, he’ll love it,” I say. “He won’t even have to think twice about wearing his hazmat suit or respirator in here. Wow.”

  “I had his room at the Midcity Arms done the same way,” Otto says. “And the church is being cleaned extensively, though with it being a historic property, there is only so much I could do as far as installing—”

  I put my finger over his lips. “It’s thoughtful. Wonderful. It is a big deal for him to come, and you’ve made it so much better.”

  He takes my hand and kisses it, then lets go and leans back contentedly.

  I give him a bit of mock anger: “And what’s this about women’s purses and shoes?”

  “More bacteria than a dirty toilet seat, according to the consultant I worked with. Mostly from public restroom floors. Apparently women put their purses down on the floors next to public toilets.”

  “Right,” I say. “Yuck.”

  “The germs from your purse are contained, and with this filter, we could drive through a cloud of nerve agent and be protected. Kind of nice.”

  I place my bonneted purse on the seat across from us. It’s not nice. It’s insane.

  Suddenly we’re zooming around the curves of the Tangle. I clutch the handhold, surprised that such a long car can take the hairpin turns, merging at such high speeds, and I’m struck with the crazy contrast of it all: Packard and me and our friends, down there just yesterday, covered in sludge and grime, and now Otto and me riding up here in this sterilized, hyper-clean pod. And down below, there’s truth, and up here, it’s just one lie piled on another.

  “One of these days,” Otto grumbles darkly. He means, one of these days he’ll get rid of the Tangle.

  “Messed up as it is, Midcity’s kind of known for it at this point, wouldn’t you say? The Tangle’s part of our heritage. Our mascot. We can’t kill it.” I think how it does seem alive sometimes.

  “The Tangle’s not something to be precious about, it’s something to be erased. We should bulldoze and bury it. Forget it was ever there. Getting rid of this monstrosity would make for an impressive welcome mat to new businesses. Of course, I’m sure the Felix Five would find a reason to keep the Tangle. I’ll bulldoze it all the same if I so choose.”

  We shoot off from the Tangle, heading west, leaving Midcity behind. “Good luck,” I say.

  He smiles his little bow of a smile, eyes calm. “You think I can’t?”

  Something in the way he says this stops me from the flip answer I was about to give.

  He watches my face, like he’s enjoying my discomfort. Or is that my paranoid imagination? “Don’t underestimate your fiancé, Justine.” He raises a finger. “And before I forget, look what La Patisserie sent over.” He pulls out his phone and scrolls through his e-mail. “Mmm. We’re nearly thirty minutes late.” This, like it’s my fault. Which it is.

  “It’ll be fine. Dad won’t even notice.”

  “I hope not.” Otto comes to what he’s looking for. “Behold.” He hands the phone to me. “Ten tiers.”

  With a silent sigh I look at the photo of our wedding cake, frosted and ready for tomorrow. It’s a flourless chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, draped with a white filigree of frosting lace and flowers. “It’s gorgeous,” I say, trying for a happy tone. “I might have to devour it all on my own.”

  He gives me a smoldery look, lush smile playing on his lips, the kind that used to put butterflies in my stomach. Now I just feel tense. “I might have to devour you all on my own.” He takes his phone from me, pockets it, and slides his hand over my thigh.

  “Not here,” I say, alarmed. “I mean, after you’ve done all this sanitizing?”

  “He won’t know.”

  “I can’t. We can’t.” I push his hand off, frowning. “And it’s disrespectful to his concerns.”

  “The threat of germs is all in his mind.”

  “How can you say that? How can you of all people say that? You hate when people doubt us about vein star.”

  “That’s because there’s basis to our fears, but there’s no basis to his germ phobia. Germs help build immunities, and there’s certainly no pandemic raging at the moment.”

  “When you fear something, that gives it more power. And it also makes it more powerful because of the negative visualization aspect, so that means he is more susceptible.”

  “Negative visualization. You only believe that when it’s convenient,” Otto says.

  I cross my arms and sit back with a huff. “I’m not going to argue with you about negative visualization the day before our wedding.” I like the way this small spat has taken the idea of sex out of the air. “I don’t want people doubting each other, or being disrespectful in any way for our wedding. Everything has to be perfect and beautiful. Like a fairy tale.”

  He’s silent a few beats too long. “Justine,” he says finally, “that bridezilla bit may have worked on Max, but it doesn’t work on me.”

  “Excuse me?” I say hotly.

  “I know that’s what you told Max. It simply won’t work on me. You’re not a bridezilla type.” He watches me, head cocked. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “What aren’t I telling you?” I echo stupidly. I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m enclosed in a small pod with the most brilliant detective in Midcity history, a man who tends toward paranoia. And he thinks I’m hiding something, which I am. Still, I look at him like he’s crazy.

  “Please. You have a tell when you’re holding something back. You make a certain face,” he says. “A micro expression.”

  “A micro expression? Like what?”

  “Now what fun would it be if you knew? Come now, my love.”

  I try to look neutral, but of course, it’s too late. I have a micro expression. I scramble for something to say, recalling what Packard said, that deep down, most men are frightened of a bride—even the men who are keen to get married. I straighten up. “Okay, here’s the thing. I have always dreamed of the day when I’d walk down the aisle toward the man that I love, wearing a beautiful, amazing, white princess dress, and a veil, with perfect hair and perfect everything. With a train trailing behind me. Pure white.” His brows draw together just the tiniest bit. I press on. “I'm not a bridezilla. But do I want my wedding to be perfect? Of course I do! Every girl dreams of this day. You want to know if something is going on? Yes, our wedding is tomorrow and everything is going wrong. There’s a curfew out, and dangerous cannibals roam the streets at night. I’m in hairstyle limbo, I have to rearrange the reception place settings, and one of my maids of honor will be wearing a chest full of straps and tattoos, a fur-trimmed cape, and a top hat.” Never have I been so thankful for Simon’s fashion sense.

  His brows draw together more. “Doesn’t the bride have some say in these matters?” he asks. “You don’t want him up there dressed as some sort of circus ringmaster.”

  “Like an S&M circus ringmaster? No, I don’t,” I say. We discuss my taking the hat away from him and hiding it. Putting a button on the cape. Otto still seems suspicious. I continue on to my dinner-seating quandary. I’m feeling so tense, and I really am acting like a bridezilla.

  “But more than anything, you’re worried about him.” He raises his brows. His knowing look. “Aren’t you?”

  My throat seizes up; I’m sure I look like a scared rabbit. And then I realize he’s talking about my father. Or is he? I choose to assume he is. “Well, yes,” I say. “Not just that he’s going to be dressed more appropriately for a radioactive cleanup site than a wedding, but he’s never been to Midcity. To him, it’s like venturing into a dangerous wasteland. It helps, what you did with his room at the Arms.” I swallow here—it’s as good as any time to break this to him—“I’ll try to have my room moved near to his.”

  He frowns. “What do you mean, your room?”

  “At the Arms. Have you never heard it’
s bad luck for the bride and groom to spend the night together before the wedding?”

  “You’re not superstitious.”

  “I’m a bride, Otto. I don’t want to jinx anything. This is what brides do. I’m staying at the Arms, and it’ll be my base of operations for getting ready. Everything has to be storybook perfect.”

  He watches me with steady eyes. Does he sense the lie? My tension goes high and shrill, as does my voice. “Is it so wrong to want the next time you see me, after our dinner with Dad, to be the next day when Dad’s walking me down the aisle? To have there be a little anticipation? I know I’m not the most regular girl in the world, but I still have certain things about my wedding fixed in my mind. I want it to be perfect!”

  His smile has a hawkish quality to it. “You’re not superstitious, and you’re not into fairytales.”

  “Today I am.” Heart pounding, I turn my face to the window, where run-down developments rise out of the muddy, snowy fields. And what the hell is my tell? “Excuse me if I want it to be perfect.”

  Nothing on the planet could make this wedding perfect. Then I get this new thought: I could be wearing tatters and standing in the Tanglelands in the midst of cannibal carnage, and things would be perfect if I were marrying Packard.

  If I were marrying Packard. I get this sick feeling in my stomach, thinking of him out there, searching for the glasses with all those maniacs after him. So determined, and really, so vulnerable, though he doesn’t think so. I only hope he stops when it’s curfew; being out after curfew will make things worse. For him, getting caught means death, or at best, eternal imprisonment.

  At a gas-station stop, Otto has Smitty buy him a water and a nonaspirin pain reliever. I watch him swallow three of them as we pull back out onto the road.

  “You’re only supposed to take one or two of those,” I scold, trying to sound normal.

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Not if you get liver failure.” I don’t ask if it’s his head.

  “I just need to relax the area. It’ll be okay.” His head, then.

  “I couldn’t even tell,” I say, a compliment we sometimes pay each other. At times it can be a point of pride, how well we conceal our freak-outs.

  “I can feel them, the force of their will. Railing against their walls.”

  His prisoners, I think. And just like that, the little bit of sympathy I felt over his headache drains away. I picture Helmut banging on the fun house window. Carter looking so small and drained. I know I should say something comforting like, It’s just the tension of the wedding. Just a stress headache. But I don’t. He’s hurting my friends, and it’s not wrong that he’s suffering for it.

  He bows his head, thumbs on his cheekbones, index fingers on his forehead. He stays like that for a long while. He expects me to put an arm around him, maybe rub his back. It would be smart if I did, but I keep thinking of Carter. Vesuvius. Helmut. Enrique. Packard’s severed head. Avery dead on the rocks.

  “It hurts, Justine.”

  My silence is getting weird. Grudgingly I hover a hand over his back, and finally force myself to settle it onto him. “I know.”

  “I feel them more strongly than ever. They’re clambering to get out, as if they’re physically inside my head. They don’t want to be in there, and they never leave me alone. I can’t remember the last time I felt peace.” A silence, then, “Maybe I never have.” He rubs his forehead. “I’ll be relieved when tomorrow is over and we can start our life.”

  I should say something, but I just stare at the top of his beret. I'll be relieved when tomorrow's over too. Unless I end up having to marry him. In spite of how Packard feels, if we can’t get the glasses, I am going to see this through. An agent on the inside is the best hope for our friends getting free. And if Packard weren’t so biased, he’d agree too. He makes a fabulous rebel leader, but he too has blind spots.

  “All that tension is getting constrictive, don’t you think?” he asks. Meaning, constricting veins in his head.

  “Possibly,” I say. “We don’t know.”

  He turns to me. I know what he’s going to ask, and it sours my stomach. “Will you…”

  “Of course.” I pat my thigh.

  He takes off his beret and settles his head on my lap, eyes closed. I place my fingers over his dark, curly hair and rub in light circles. It’s strange, having Otto so trusting and vulnerable to me, like a baby in my lap. Except he’s not vulnerable at all, thanks to his personal force field. Hell, even if I wanted to kill him, and had a knife in my hand poised to stab through his eye, I couldn’t. Would it even break the eyelid skin? Yet he’s suffering horribly. I grit my teeth, hating that I’m comforting him. Even the gentleness with which I rub seems like a lie, like he should be able to feel the anger and revulsion bleeding out of my fingertips.

  When did he create his personal field? Was he thinking about me when he did it? Or was it in response to Fawna’s prediction? And if so, could developing an awesome new power like that be enough to change the currents of fate?

  His eyelids twitch once, twice. Again. There’s almost a rhythm to it. I continue with my soothing and hate-loaded massage circles. Then I think of Packard’s severed head and I lift my hands up and off Otto’s head. I’ve lost my will even to be fake-kind.

  He sits up, brown eyes glittering darkly. “Thank you.”

  “Sure,” I say, feeling nervous about my tell.

  He turns his attention out the window, to the frozen fields rushing by. We pass a billboard for a burger joint. A billboard for a skating rink. His silence makes me nervous.

  “What thoughts, my love?” I ask. Usually his line.

  “Everything,” he growls.

  “Everything?”

  “And I am going to get rid of the Tangle,” he says. “I’ve just decided.”

  “Otto, seriously, you and every mayor for the last ten years has wanted to knock it down.”

  He turns to me. “The difference is, I really will.”

  “People will resist.”

  “Of course people will resist. It’s what people do.” He turns to me, seems to look right through me. “People resist what they think they can’t live with, but in the end, they come to live with it, even embrace it.”

  I nod and turn my head away. He’s right, of course. Horrifyingly right.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The best way to describe my father’s house is to say that it looks like an old shack that’s been buried up to its eyeball-windows, with a fringe of bangs made by a thatched roof. And right next to it stands a big, sturdy structure that looks like a concrete bunker with a garage door on it.

  And that’s exactly what it is.

  And if you’d spent your late-teen years there, as I did, you would know that plague-stricken intruders could break the shack’s windows or hack in through the thatched roof and not have a prayer of getting at the safe family in the living quarters that stretch far beneath the earth.

  “Don’t make a movement to shake his hand unless he offers first,” I remind Otto. “He’ll offer if he has his gloves on. And don’t stare at his outfit. I’ll warn you now, he always wears jumpers. Like he’s on a 1950s race-car pit crew.”

  I haven’t seen Dad since Christmas, three months ago, for a sad, little TV-dinner celebration. He gave me some awesome computer programs he’d developed, and a hot-pink stethoscope he’d ordered from Singapore. I gave him beautiful boots and an e-reader, and these polyvinyl gloves I had made. They’re really thin, and they’re dyed to the color of his skin, so that when he shakes hands with somebody, they almost can’t tell he’s wearing gloves.

  Smitty stops the limo in front of the garage. I pull the bonnets off my pumps as the big steel door lurches and lifts, revealing my dad’s brown boots, and then his gray zip-up jumper.

  And then his smiling face.

  I’m more relieved than usual to see him. “Dad!”

  “Justine McBean!” My dad has had a bald head ever since I can remember—a ple
asing, well-shaped bald head. His brown eyes are crinkly and warm, his ears stick out, and he gets two long, horizontal furrows in his forehead when he smiles, which he’s doing now.

  He grasps my hand—he has the gloves on—and I half hug him, clothes to clothes.

  Otto strolls up. “Mister Jones,” he says.

  “Call me Carl.” Dad grasps Otto’s hands with both of his. “Wonderful to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Likewise,” Otto says. “All good.”

  My dad waves this off. He probably can’t imagine my speaking fondly of him. True, there was a time, back in my early twenties, when I railed against him and rejected him quite bitterly. I’m much more understanding about him now, but deep down, I haven’t exactly forgiven him for not believing Mom was ill when she said she was ill, and also for being such a freak about germs, and moving us out here after Ben Foley ripped us off. And I suppose there are times I feel angry he never worked up the gumption to visit his own daughter in Midcity all these years; he never even got to see my little apartment. He only goes into Hobart, the neighboring town, where he wears a mask or respirator, depending on his level of germ anxiety. And most of all, I guess I’m angry he can’t be like other dads—that he can’t just be normal. I know that’s unfair of me. I’m just as challenged in the normal department as he is.

  I suppose you’re never quite fair to your family. And I love him anyway.

  “Can you stay a minute or two?” he asks. “I’ve made iced tea. Your driver can join us.”

  “We’d love to,” I say.

  Otto nods. “Sounds good. And don’t worry about Smitty. He enjoys a chance to game.”

  We go into the garage, walking between the armored Jeep and the ATV, toward the wall of locked steel cabinets, which I happen to know are full of firearms. I’ve told Dad that he shouldn’t bother hiding the guns and things that might be displayed—his future son-in-law isn’t going to arrest him for gun infractions—but he shouldn’t go out of his way to open gun cabinets.

  In the corner hangs the hazmat exoskeleton, looking like a modern-day suit of armor. The lighter biohazard suits are down below, but the hazmat exoskeleton weighs a good seventy pounds; it’s not the kind of thing you want to run up the steps in. Otto goes right to it. “Is this what I think it is?”