by George Foy
The beeper read out a number and a single name in matte LCD type; ‘Francesca.’
When he called the number, from a payphone, and asked for Francesca, he got a pleasant female voice with a shade of Spanish to it which told him to go to a bar called ‘La Ronda’ in the Dominican section of Central Park North at nine p.m. that night.
La Ronda was very dark, with flashing colored circus lights on the sign outside and blue-tinted mirrors within. It was a guerrilla smoke bar, one of scores of such places that flouted the Federal ban on public tobacco use. In the faint haze from Vantages and Camels two men played Santo Domingo love songs on over-amped guitars. No one spoke English. Everyone stared at the pilot. The sound of Spanish and guitars reminded him of his Chileans. He scratched his fake moustache and wondered what had happened to them.
A woman came up to the pilot and said, ‘Skeed?’
Gershwin’s contact turned out to be short, blonde, and cute in a well-fed tabby sort of way. She smoked cigarettes called ‘Dillons’ that were sponsored by a soap star and aimed at the younger female market. She smiled with one side of her mouth, and half closed her eyes when she talked. She had just smuggled fifteen grams of jisi yomo from Nassau through Kennedy Airport in three condoms up her vagina. She was mentally flying on Fundador and purloined jisi, and the high of just making it through. She put her arms around the pilot’s neck and said, ‘This is from Gershwin.’ Her breath was warm, and sweet from the brandy. ‘Aloysius van der Lubbe, Breslau, Western Silesia. The “Kneipe Spargnapani.”’ She spelled it out from memory. ‘Also, Daftar Daud Khan, Chitral, Pakistan. All Hawkley people. Wha’ choo need, Gershwin said.’ She cocked her head, and kissed him. ‘Creo que esta todo, babe. Choo wanna drink?’
The pilot bought a Fundador. The guitar players took a break halfway through his drink. In the silence of their rest, a long, low howling noise rose, and vibrated in the strings of the wind outside. The sound was so deep, so far past the modulation of electronics, so full of anguish it seemed to soak the world.
‘Coño de la Santa Vierga,’ the blonde girl said. Her eyes had gone from brown to black. ‘What de fock was dat?’
‘Un lobo,’ the bartender told her. ‘A wolf, from the zoo. They have shot all the others. That one has been singing all night. Last night too. He is all alone now, I think.’
The girl’s eyes filled. She was tough, but the jisi had resensitized her.
‘They killed them?’ the pilot asked the bartender. ‘Why’d they do that?’
‘Peligrosos.’ Dangerous. The bartender shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. The pilot walked down Broadway, toward PC’s, his mind dark from the howling. It was best that Lobo had given the wolves one last shot at running the way they liked to run – the wolves, the cheetahs, the bear and wolverine too – but it struck too close that they should be shot down so summarily. It made his stomach shrink into a little ball, with empathy, with loss, and extrapolated fear.
He felt disappointed, also, by Gershwin’s message. There were a number of Hawkley groups around, smuggling ‘nodes’ that believed in the pseudo-religious and political newsprint in which Hawkley wrapped his fishy info; he could have dug up one or two himself, given time.
But, even if Hawkley really existed, the groups had no relations with him. They simply followed his rituals, as Eltonjohn had done. He was so deep in imagining what might make ‘van der Lubbe, Kneipe Spargnapani’ any different that he almost missed the croak coming faintly from the doorway of a tiny pet shop on the south-west corner of 104th and Broadway.
‘Hegel, mariCON!’
The memory circuits woke first, and stuck an elbow into the side of his consciousness. He stopped short on the busy sidewalk. A young mother, snarling behind him, rammed him with her stroller. A pair of panhandlers saw him stop and lurched in his direction, holding out card-swipers, hoping conscience was giving him second thoughts concerning their urgent need for credit.
In the window of the pet shop, a parrot with a two-foot tail scratched its beak and muttered to itself. The greens and blues of its feathers were so brilliant that for the first time in all the long dying of fall the pilot felt that spring truly might be possible again.
‘Dialectico del diablo,’ the parrot commented.
‘Goddam,’ the pilot whispered to the window. ‘You Hegel bird! You made it!’
The sign on the window said; ‘Rare Macaw, $3,000.’
He went inside the pet shop, feeling for his UCC-card.
*
No one was at PC’s when the pilot got back with the Hegel bird. There was a note in Rocketman’s neat handwriting announcing news, and supplies.
He fed both the macaw and his rat with sesame seeds he’d bought at the pet shop. God sniffed at the macaw’s cardboard cage, long but without comment.
PC and Rocketman came in just before midnight, arms full of plastic shopping bags.
‘Did you find your friend?’ PC asked. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing much,’ the pilot replied, tensing his face to keep from betraying the extent of his disappointment. ‘A couple names, in Poland, or what used to be Poland. Asia, too. Not what I hoped.’
‘Wooo-eet,’ the Jesuit bird whistled from the corner. ‘Chinga tu madre, carajo.’
‘What the hell is that?’ PC exclaimed, dropping his bags.
‘A parrot,’ Rocketman said, in wonder, carefully setting down a case of beer.
‘A macaw,’ the pilot corrected him. ‘A Spix’s macaw. It’s one of the birds I brought in, trip before last. I could tell, ’cause he speaks Portygee. And he doesn’t like Hegel.’
‘Who?’ PC said.
‘Pretty bird,’ Rocketman cooed at the cage.
The parrot cocked his head at the big human.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said.
‘He seems to have picked up some English,’ the pilot added.
‘Aaaah, well,’ Rocketman said, turning back. Remembering the news he wanted to tell, he smacked one fist into the other. ‘Listen, we gotta make a trip.’
‘I took a sabbatical,’ PC butted in, ‘from my job. I’m free!’ But PC did not look free, or even happy. He simply looked nervous.
Rocketman ignored PC. He stepped closer to the pilot, towering over him. ‘I found her,’ Rocketman insisted.
‘Who?’
‘Hawkley’s daughter.’ The grin came in, subtle as August sun. ‘I figured she probably got married, seeing as she’s in her mid-twenties by now. So I looked up the newspaper. They checked the wedding announcements for me. The Indianapolis Online-Star.’
‘Indiana?’ the pilot closed his mouth on the stupid question. He felt he was playing straight man in a comedy everybody got but him.
‘The girlfriend,’ Rocketman explained, with the air of an amateur conjurer flipping over the third card. ‘Martha Cahoon. She was from Lakewood. That’s near Indianapolis. That’s where she went, when they split up. Her daughter still lives there. We gotta go to Lakewood.’
‘Well, dag,’ the pilot said, in surprise, not displeasure.
‘We could leave now,’ Rocketman suggested, ‘right this minute.’
‘Wait a minute,’ PC protested. ‘I mean, what’s the big rush?’
‘You don’t want to come,’ Rocketman turned back in his direction, ‘it’s OK, nobody asked you anyway.’
‘He can come if he wants,’ the pilot said.
Rocketman looked at the pilot again. PC lifted his chin.
‘I only meant,’ he said. ‘Why should we just drop everything like that?’ He picked up his shopping protectively. ‘I’d have to make arrangements. I got bills to pay. I need to e-mail my broker, and the bank. I have to talk to the super. There’s a thousand things to do. I got to call a couple women—’
‘Shit,’ the pilot interrupted him. ‘PC, man, you shouldn’t leave now, this minute – you should leave about two years ago.’
‘It’s better fast.’ Rocketman shone on PC the kind of stare he once used on junior metallurgists who want
ed to pour flanges on only two sets of simulations. ‘We find out fast, this way. Because if Hawkley’s girl doesn’t know where he is, no one does.
‘Plus,’ he added, ‘the quicker we move, the harder it’ll be for them to find us, when they come a-lookin.’
‘Who?’ PC said. His face was all frown.
‘The Feds,’ Rocketman told him, with grim satisfaction. ‘You been harboring fleeing felons. You’re an outlaw now, just like us. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
PC just looked at him. The Hegel bird chuckled to itself.
The pilot went to pack.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘At first glance, everything looked the same . . . it wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.’
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
PC, Rocketman, the pilot, God, and the Hegel bird drove to Indianapolis in fifteen hours straight, motorvating linear down the interstate, doing exactly the speed limit in the old Chevy the pilot had bought in Bayou Noir.
PC wanted to take his Bavarian sports car, but Rocketman insisted the Chevy would be more anonymous. The sports car, innocuous in the city, would stand out in the Midwest, he said.
Also, like all late-model vehicles, the Bavarian car had an anti-theft transponder that would send PC’s full name, UCC number, and a hundred other details blooping onto the activator screens whenever they passed through a tollbooth or got within a quarter mile of a state police post. If BON had somehow managed to link PC to the pilot, they would be picked up within a hundred miles of New York.
The Malibu, on the other hand, could not be linked with the pilot, since he’d kept the old tags, which were registered to a crippled woman in a godforsaken bayou in Louisiana. He’d bought the car under a false name in any case.
When, around eight o’clock the following night, they got to the area of Indianapolis indicated in the wedding announcement they found most of that suburb was taken up by a huge covered shopping mall.
The mall was a wall-mall – built in the new style, with three floors underground and five over, incorporating not only shops but clinics, an arboretum, a motel, a bus station; surrounded by razor wire, perimeter lights and interlocking-arc security cameras.
Behind the perimeter, the building itself controlled the suburban landscape. Built of brick and concrete, it resembled a gigantic two-dimensional slime mold that had grown and reproduced in right angles over a geological epoch. Its reptilian back was almost a mile long and covered with thousands of individual square growths, like scales. It excreted black asphalt – at any rate it was surrounded by three square miles of it – and was serviced by boxy metal creatures that drove in and out twenty-four hours a day to pick up nourishment in white plastic shopping bags or drop it off in large brown cardboard boxes.
Large neon signs flashed arrows whenever they approached. ‘Parking available Level 7-G!’ the signs insisted.
They drove around the mall, looking for someone from whom they could ask directions, but no humans were visible. Only two or three souped-up drag-jousting cars that periodically would scream out of the black depths of the asphalt and hurtle around the old Chevy. The drag-jousters were late-model Trans-Ams and Land Cruisers with truck engines and tractor shocks. They had multiple exhausts and twin or quad chromed carbs sticking out of their mirror-polished hoods. They sported silver wheels, and darkened windows.
Painted flames and dragons’ teeth made snarls of their wheelguards and grilles. The long, hydraulic jousting booms were strapped down on support braces, for car-jousting was too deadly to practice at, and the booms were used only in official competition. Instead, arms gloved and clad in black imitation-leather twirled a heavy chromed chain from the passenger’s side of each car. No other features were visible.
Once one of the drag-jousters came close enough to whang his chain on the hood of the Chevy, before tearing off again into the cold yellow light.
Yet someone must have been watching because at that point the wall-mall’s anti-terrorist gates retracted and two cream sedans pootled out of the entrance to the underground parking lot, and gave chase. They flashed the pink lights of vigilantes and tore past the Chevy at forty or fifty miles an hour. Their drivers had white hair that streamed in the blast of the cars’ heaters. The words ‘Service Corps of Retired Executives – Security Div.’ were stenciled on the doors. In the Midwest of today, with three-quarters of the population over sixty-five, old people queued up for any kind of work, and SCORE guards were as common as cops.
Behind the SCORE cars, a couple of Safety Volunteer Saabs pulled up in the sodium light, waiting for their crack at the dragsters.
‘Fuck,’ the Hegel bird screamed. ‘Fuck Hegel!’
‘Mebbe we better go inside,’ PC suggested.
Inside they found a wasteland of a different order. The entire 280 acres of mall was flooded with neon and classic nineties music. There were hundreds of people in the main avenues, shopping or exercising or just riding the glassed-in escalators. The people wore earphones and some even had half-suckers strapped at eye level. These walked with the curious gait that showed they were moving mostly in a different environment from the one physically surrounding them. A few, showing the unmistakable first symptoms of TDF, wore three or four walkmen besides the usual brace of cellphones and beeper belts; they congregated by the screens of a VR arcade, a 3-D multiplex, a robot-sumo parlor, watching the screens that showed the virtual dramas, or mechanized mayhem in the arcade behind.
The pilot thought of Presley, the wiry informer on Sandworm Cay, and felt guilty, a little.
The shoppers would not talk to them. The mall-milers were too busy putting in their distance – up and down, up and down the warm bright tiled concourse in gaily-striped plastic shoes – to give them the time of day. The shop assistants offered little help once they realized the three men were not here to buy. Most of them seemed to have no idea of the geography of Indianapolis in any case. An ancient SCORE guard told them, ‘You used to be able to get to North Lakewood down the Fairview ’pike that way, but now they built that Interstate, you can’t get on or off of it, and you gotta go all the way to Greenfield, now.’ He stroked the stock of his Tech-9, absently. ‘That’s five mile west of here, an’ I dunno how to get there, then.’
They got back into the Chevy. Rocketman drove. The old man’s directions were the only guide they had so they followed them. Half a mile from the wall-mall the four-lane was blocked at a much larger highway. A huge overpass rose into the confused night. Obviously it had been started ten or fifteen years before and never completed. Flashing signs guided them sideways around the detour. The concrete structure hung halfway over the interstate; its truncated end, bandaged in tarps and plywood, was a take-off ramp to nothing.
In Greenfield they found a sign reading ‘North Lakewood; 2.5 miles.’ They drove down streets that all appeared exactly identical; half-acre lots, dead clipped lawns, hardwood trees evenly trimmed every thirty feet. Ranch houses with vinyl siding. Many of the houses had a satellite-dish antenna or two, usually air-brushed with scenes of impossibly quiet lakes and mountains, in impossibly vivid colors. It was a comfortable suburb. Outside each dwelling, a telephone pole carried the yellow junction boxes of B-Net cable.
Two cars per house, on average. Kids’ toys on the driveway. Dog barking out back. Sit-down mowers, remote-control garage doors, electric dog fences. Servo-mechanisms. The alien blue flicker of television behind each curtained window. Sometimes, the mirrored flash of a TV screen was visible, reflected against the goggles of a full face-sucker.
Every quarter-mile or so they passed a church. The only difference between the churches and the ranch houses was a short steeple, a bigger driveway, a larger dish antenna.
One of the churches was a Johnsonist chapel. A giant billboard, with Jimmy Hoffa’s face raised toward the light and his hands, filled with UCC-cards, raised higher, dominated the parking lot.
‘Goddam,’ the pilot said wonderingly. ‘I feel like we’ve g
ot lost, and ended up in another country. Or aliens have taken over. Or something. I mean, where is everybody?’
‘It’s weird,’ PC said.
‘We haven’t seen a single person since the wall-mall, ’cept in cars.’
‘But that’s exactly what happened,’ Rocketman said. ‘The aliens have taken over. Don’t you watch videos?’
‘Oh, no,’ PC groaned. ‘Please, Rocketman, don’t give us the pulpit.’ But Rocketman ignored him.
‘It’s true,’ Rocketman continued. ‘It’s been happening for fifty years. Slow but sure. Picture it. Every sci-fi movie since the early fifties.’ He made a camera viewfinder with his hands, framing one of the ranch houses in palm and finger, steering with his knees.
‘Quiet suburban town,’ he began in a weighty tone. ‘Dead center of America. Milk, apple pie, and defense electronics. Nothing happens, ever. But suddenly you feel something has gone wrong. You can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just you. But your neighbors seem – aaah, different. Unreadable. There’s strange noises, odd lights, just beyond the range of normal perception. The kid looks at you like you’ve grown another head. The dog whines and hides under the porch.
‘And one day, something does occur – something so horrible, so grisly, you will have to shut it up inside you forever. It’s an event you can’t even describe, yet it tells you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what has happened. A force that is cold, and infinitely distant, and fundamentally strange has taken over, not just your suburb, not just your neighbors, but you. They’re here!’
A Safety Patrol slowed down to look at the Chevy. The volunteers noticed the lack of car-helmets, and jotted down their license plate number. However this was not yet a stoppable offense in Indiana, so they continued on. Rocketman did not even notice the Safety Volunteers. He was getting into it; he was bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat.
‘The aliens are here,’ he yelled. ‘They’re inside you, they’re inside me. They have yukky scales and abdominal suckers. And you know what they are? Huh?’ Rocketman with one hand grabbed the dashboard in front of him and squeezed so hard he tore the Naugahyde.