by Linden Storm
“I know when the game is. Why do you think I left my job to come down here and look for her?” Belle says.
William crosses his hands in front of Belle’s phone in a timeout gesture. “I’m going to talk for a second, okay?” He waits until both of the combatants nod. “We think Marina might be headed your way. Or maybe she’s already there.”
“I told you, she’s not here. Or, if she is in Oakland, she’s not letting me in on it. What makes you think she’s coming here?” Paul says.
“She left a message with a dealer at the New York New York,” William says.
Belle leans in toward the phone screen. “We’re coming to you.”
“I’m living in a shitty motel and going to a VA treatment center every day, by order of the court. Don’t come here.”
“We are coming,” Belle says. “This is too important for one person to deal with. We’ll see you in a few hours.”
Paul sighs. “No, you really…”
Belle disconnects.
William watches Nick, who is shaking out his arms and stretching. He’s also moaning and groaning. “I am not getting back on the road until I get a few hours horizontal,” Nick says. “My limbs are all asleep. If I tried to walk right now, I’d fall down.”
“You can sleep in the car,” Belle says. “We are driving to Oakland. It’s not that far.”
Chapter Five
You Can Feel This One
Slipping Away
Paul stands on the rickety deck outside his motel room and scans the cityscape. It’s a crappy part of Oakland—rundown buildings, an ancient freeway with a squatter settlement underneath, trash-strewn streets, overflowing garbage cans, dirty and desperate people dealing drugs and begging, prostitutes—and Paul almost feels safe here.
None of it is anywhere near as bad as Uzbekistan. People there were haggard, hungry, a different level of desperate. He’d been an Army sergeant, tasked with guarding a food truck and distributing provisions. The crowd was a sea of misery, a herd of prey animals transforming randomly into a pack of predators. Mostly wild-eyed men. They were pushing and shoving as Paul and the other troops formed a corridor with their bodies from the U.N. truck to the storefront where they’d stacked the bags of rice and pasta, the cans of nutritive sludge, the tins of dried vegetable protein, the meagre supply of powdered baby formula.
Inadequate, and they all knew it.
The men were fighting for their own survival and for the survival of their families.
Now, standing on the rickety motel decking, Paul smokes and remembers that day in Tashkent. The first blow struck by the kid in the baggy sweatshirt and balaclava, a rock to the side of his head, the shattering pain above his eye, along his jaw, the blood.
No, there had not been enough food or medicine. What they had was never enough.
The crowds were enormous, hungry, angry, filling the streets, surrounding them.
Through the corridor formed by the armored bodies, the soldiers let through one stringy man at a time, one half-starved woman. Paul’s heart broke as he watched them carry their meagre provisions out to the dangerous street, arms wrapped around the packages.
What chance did the small, weak ones have to make it back to their tent or shelter with the food?
Paul remembers fighting his own despair as much as he fought the looters and aggressors in the crowd. He felt guilty every time he ate his rations or drank a cup of hot coffee. But that kid he’d shot—that had been the worst thing. The kid was hungry. Paul feels shame roll over him again as he recalls pulling the trigger, the sight of the boy falling on the doorstep of the storefront.
The crowd had attacked, and all the guards went down or started shooting, using tasers, or clubbing people.
Then tear gas had come out. A full-blown riot, courtesy of Paul Boone, he thinks. He has the headaches, the dented head, and a chronic ache from his broken jaw to remind him.
When he came back to the U.S., he felt worse instead of better. Even now he often has an impulse to confess his depravity, to let strangers know what he’s really like, so they can stay clear of him. At the same time, he can’t bear to tell anyone his story. Few people know what he went through.
His parents still live in his hometown of Tucson, and although he keeps in close touch with them and he could have gotten permission to visit them, he can’t face them, and the last thing he wants is to run into his wife.
They’d only been married a month when he’d shipped out to Uzbekistan. Carolyn was a prosecuting attorney, just starting her career, but rising steadily. So smart, and very beautiful, but he hadn’t ever loved her, and although he pretended he did love her, she somehow knew he was faking.
Her hobby was self-defense—karate, Eskrima stick-fighting, kick-boxing. She was always afraid of the felons she’d jailed.
Right after he’d gotten back he’d had a traumatic episode, and she’d gotten scared and beat him up, but he was the one who ended up in court on assault charges. He had no memory of touching her, and she had no injuries, but who was going to believe him?
That’s how he’d ended up in the VA treatment center.
The treatment is helping, but not as much as the game does, as counterintuitive as that is.
Battlecraft’s close skirmishes dilute and divert his aggressive feelings—at least most of the time.
He’s convinced that his symptoms are also allayed by being part of the team—and by being friends with Marina.
She understands what he’s been through. She was there.
She knows he didn’t have any good choices.
Marina had been one of the people in line the day he’d knocked the kid to the ground. She'd helped pull him out of the pile of men pummeling him, dragged him into the storefront. If not for Marina, he’d be dead.
A year ago, he’d been surprised and pleased to see her when she’d approached him in the shopping mall adjacent to Luke Airforce Base near Phoenix. She’d hunted him down, of course, but he hadn’t realized it right away.
Now he leans over the loose metal railing at the motel and has a feeling he might fall. He’s tired.
Dawn is about to break, but for now the sky is dark. The street glows with greenish artificial light.
Most of the drug dealers and prostitutes are gone for the night. The homeless camp, though, seems to be stirring.
At the far edge of the used car lot across the street, Paul sees a flash of red. Marina wears red a lot. She has a favorite dress, a red, stretchy garment she’d brought with her from Uzbekistan. She’d talked once about its main feature: the ability to record her surroundings. Paul had asked her if she knew recording people without their knowledge was illegal in the U.S. She’d raised one beautiful dark eyebrow and shrugged.
Paul remembers her in the red dress after she found him at Luke Air Force Base. They’d gone to the Starbucks in the base food court, and she’d ordered a triple espresso. She’d been wearing red lipstick and black army boots with the dress. In her orbit, everything always worked together.
He peers into the shadows, but the flash of red is gone.
∆∆∆
Marina spots Paul on the balcony of the terrible motel. He looks tense and unhappy. Probably because of her.
She is busy rethinking her plan—and regretting it.
After Jimmy’s attack, when he’d lost steam and let her go, she had run.
On a bus heading toward Sun City, she’d been upset and angry, and that is never a good time to create plans.
It had seemed to her that her team had let her down. Her sister had certainly let her down.
She, Marina, had led the team to unimaginable heights, and they had a chance to win the whole thing, she knew they did. But they had to work together. The team had to trust her, to do what she said. So she’d decided to make them appreciate her. She would disappear for a time, encourage them to work together to find her.
But had she been lying to herself? Was she really hiding because she was angry at them? Would her d
isappearance make them realize how important she was to the team or would it make them reject her?
She still feels that her original reasoning was sound. If the team could learn to follow her—if she and Belle could work together—they could win. She knows it. But is this IRL chase—this game she’d invented to be played out on the vast map of America’s southwest—blowing their team up from the inside?
As she watches Paul return to his room, she rubs her sore neck and knows the truth. It flashes in her mind like a beacon. She’d been so frightened by Jimmy’s attack, she’d made a terrible mistake.
And she’d hidden from the team at least in part to get back at them for abandoning her, even though they hadn’t really known what she was dealing with. She’d kept it from them—the deteriorating relationship, the drinking, the violence—because she was ashamed and didn’t want to be the kind of person who needed help.
She hadn’t trusted them. Why had she expected them to trust her?
And now it’s probably too late to repair the damage. She shakes her head, willing her racing thoughts to cease. She can’t call them, not yet.
Chapter Six
Throwing Up Bricks
The scenic route from Vegas to Oakland is only twenty minutes longer than the trip south to pick up I-5 and then north again, so Nick talks Belle into taking U.S. Route 95. They situate themselves in the self-driving rental, Nick in the back, Belle and William in the front, and make an orderly exit north. As they pass the Stratosphere tower on the right, Nick watches the holos playing on its tall, stem-like pedestal. They pass low-income housing towers in the outskirts, connected to The Strip by monorail. Then they’re on Highway 95 North, curving toward powder blue skies and bare brown hills, miles of warehouses, scrub brush, and housing developments.
Nick’s nap in the casino had been just enough to interfere with his sleep cycle, and he’s wide awake now. He’s crammed in the small back seat, eating chips, cookies, candy, and turkey jerky, drinking Coke, and trying to read Marina’s journal. So far, there’s nothing in it besides Battlecraft strategy, a few reminiscences about her childhood, and a lot of notes about mathematics, from analytic geometry to linear algebra.
Every now and then he looks up and sees vast scrub on both sides of the highway dotted with mysterious large mounds of dirt. The blacktop extends like an endless ribbon to a hazy point in the hazy hills. They stop at the Area 51 Alien Center, which turns out to be a brothel connected to a large convenience store where you can buy t-shirts and hats and drink-cozies imprinted with green, big-headed aliens. Then there’s more desert, more mysterious mounds of dirt, more tan and white hills in the distance.
The sparse traffic gets sparser, until it seems there’s only them and a few autofreighters plying the highway from Vegas north. The road splits into two lanes, and the hills go rocky with dried clumps of brush pushing up through the rocks.
There’s a giant strip mine in the distance, and they enter a small town named Beatty. Beatty seems to be the center of the universe for broken-down trailer parks. An older couple walks along the side of the highway carrying small bags of groceries. There’s a VFW building with peeling paint, the Sourdough Saloon, and a weathered gazebo sheltering a faded map—Beatty’s attempt at a tourist information center.
While the car drives itself, Belle naps in the driver’s seat, ignoring the rule about drivers keeping watch on the AI autopilot. William sleeps soundly in the passenger seat. Nick tries to tamp down his anxiety.
They pass an establishment completely festooned with Western kitsch, with a couple of the slow charging stations in a vast dirt parking lot. He imagines the city council meetings, red-faced men saying things like, “Hey Bob, I bet these slow chargers’ll keep these here tourists delayed long enough to spend lots of money in our town!”
It’s not that Nick is unsympathetic to the plight of these places. Automation has changed everything, and the kinds of jobs these people have always done—in truck driving, farming, retail, and other services—are all gone. They can live on Basic, but just barely, even out here, and they’ve lost their sense of purpose. They need to change their goals—to become artists or philosophers—but most people aren’t up to such challenges, especially when they’re older. Most of these people are out here waiting to die, as Nick sees it, and it’s depressing as hell.
Nick peers at the dashboard and sees they still have ninety miles left on their car charge. He’s grateful. The car says there will be a more attractive, less horror-inducing town later where they can charge the car and take a break.
Then blue lights appear in the rear-view mirror.
“Wake up!” Nick says. “We’re getting pulled over!” A sick adrenaline rush blooms in his chest. It must be a mistake. They’re not doing anything wrong. Self-driving cars can’t break the traffic laws, even if you want them to.
“What?” Belle says. “Where are we?”
“Beatty, Nevada,” Nick says. “Basically, the butt cheek of nowhere.”
“What is he doing?” William says.
“It’s a county sheriff, isn’t it?” Belle says. “They’re the worst. I’m not taking any shit from this guy, just so you know.”
Nick gets a bad feeling. “Be nice, Belle. These guys can be punitive.”
The deputy, or whatever he is, is standing next to his car talking on a phone and motioning for them to stay in their car. He’s a thick-featured, burly guy wearing a tan and brown uniform, a brown billed cap, shined brown boots, and a yellow, star-shaped badge.
“Maybe I should talk to him?” William says, pushing the door handle down.
“He said to stay in the car!” Nick shouts. “You don’t mess with these county cops.” He’s never met a county cop himself, but social spaces are full of videos of these guys shooting people for no reason.
“I’ll talk to him,” Belle says, pushing her door open.
“No!” Nick says, his voice shifting up an octave. “Stay in the car.”
If Belle gets them in trouble, there’ll be another delay, they’ll miss Marina in Oakland, they’ll default on the tournament and get sued, his parents will disown him, he’ll lose his student housing, he’ll die alone in a squatter settlement…
Uh-oh. Shame spiral of death. He tries to stop the cascade failure, but he can’t.
“Please don’t get us in trouble,” he says. He can hear the whine in his voice. Belle won’t like that at all. He clears his throat, pushes the panic down, tries again: “We can’t afford a delay right now, right?”
“You can’t possibly know how much I hate small-town cops,” Belle says.
“That’s strange. A phone? Why isn’t he using his radio?” William says.
“That must be how they do it in Anus, Nevada,” Belle says.
She arranges her hair and Nick watches her face in the rearview as she plasters on her Cali-girl smile.
The cop is creeping up on the driver’s side as Belle reaches for the door handle. He pulls his gun. “I said, stay in the car.”
Belle opens the car door.
She slips quickly out of the car and gets right up in the deputy’s face.
The deputy gets angry or scared and steps back, placing his hand on his firearm.
Nick can’t see how they seem threatening at all, but the deputy pulls the gun and screams at them to get out of the car and drape their bodies over the scalding hot car.
They do it. Even Belle does it without argument. This deputy is scary.
Nick feels as if his face is being sautéed on a hot pan while the rest of his body roasts.
The deputy stands behind them, taking his time.
He handcuffs their hands behind their backs as he recites their rights.
After what seems like hours, he crams them in the back of his car.
Nick gulps air that seems too thick to breathe.
After an unbearably hot but mercifully short ride, they end up on the edge of town at the Bill Sullivan Justice Center, which to Nick’s eye is the only well
-maintained, well-built building in the town.
Inside, there’s cool air, and Nick is able to slow his breathing. In spite of the air conditioning, the place smells like stale sweat and chemicals. Nick begins to obsess about slow poisoning by airborne toxins.
William is silent while Belle keeps up a belligerent patter. The deputy tells them to sit in a row of plastic chairs against a wall. The chairs face half a dozen empty desks. The deputy goes to one of the desks and works on his tablet. He doesn’t take their handcuffs off.
Nick stares at Deputy Smith. He’s way too young to be doing such a job—probably nineteen or twenty. He’s wearing a perfectly pressed uniform. His head is shaved on the sides and slightly longer on the top. The skin on his face is shiny and pink.
“He looks like a cruel baby,” Belle says.
“He can hear you,” Nick says.
“I don’t care,” Belle says.
“I think he looks like a nice baby,” William says.
Belle guffaws. “If you say so.”
Nick groans. His arms and shoulders hurt from being pulled back by the plastic cuffs, and the plastic is cutting into his wrists. What if his hands swell up and his circulation is cut off and his hands get damaged? What if he has to live the rest of his life hand-less?
“Can we get these handcuffs off?” Nick says. “We won’t try to escape.”
The deputy ignores his question.
Nick’s stomach roils and cramps.
The door to the sheriff’s office is closed. There’s a brass plaque that says, “Sheriff C. Toledo.”
Nick can hear a voice from behind the thin wall, and he decides it’s the sheriff talking, but he can’t make out what’s being said. There are long silences punctuated by short speeches that have an insistent, argumentative tone. The voice is neither high nor low, so that Nick isn’t sure what the sheriff’s gender might be, but as he listens, something about the rhythm of the conversation tells him the sheriff might be female. This goes on for some time, and Nicks is getting bored, letting his gaze wander as he examines the room for clues.