Afterland Page 10

  Miles squeezes down on the handle.

  “Who’s there?” Jonas whispers harshly. “Matron?”

  “It’s me, Miles.”

  “Shit, son,” the blond boy grins. “You scared me. The doors are unlocked?” He scrambles out of bed. “Is it everyone’s, or just ours?”

  Miles shrugs. “Dunno.”

  “We got to take advantage.”

  “Come on, then.” Miles is intent on getting into the courtyard. He wants to taste outside.

  Tiptoeing around, they find a conference area. Jonas turns on all the lights, draws a dick on the whiteboard. Miles thinks that’s dumb.

  “Don’t you know that’s all they’re interested in, our dicks?”

  “Gross. We’re kids.”

  “But we’ll grow up.”

  “Still gross. I’m never going to have sex.”

  “What about kissing?”

  “Extra gross.”

  “You know they keep jizz in the refrigerator in the lab?” Jonas grins at the confused expression on his face. “You know. Spunk? Splooge. Trouser gravy?”

  “Why?” Miles is baffled.

  “Going to try to get your mom pregnant.”

  “Bullcrap. She wouldn’t.”

  “Would too. She’s probably trying to get pregnant right now. She’s probably already pregnant!”

  Miles vision goes hazy and white, like Cancer Fingers’s musty moldy face.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!” He pushes Jonas hard and he crashes into the table. Something glass smashes.

  Then Miles is running, running back up the stairs. And he doesn’t care that Jonas is crying, he wants to get outside, he wants to bust out of here and go home. His real home, to their house back in Johannesburg with their cat and the people he knows.

  But then one of the soldier-nurses is grabbing his arm. “Hold it! Stop right there. You can’t be out of bed.”

  And he’s not crying. He’s not.

  13.

  Billie: Angry Cats

  This feels familiar. Being in a strange bathroom, cool white porcelain against her cheek, the rim of the sink biting into her collarbone, someone holding her head down. She’s been here before, Billie thinks. Eleven, the first time, when she was bent over the porcelain puking, the almond taste of the liqueur even more disgustingly sweet on the way back up. Cole holding her hair, wanting to call the ambulance, tell their dad, begging because alcohol poisoning was serious.

  He’ll send me to boarding school! You can’t tell him. Do you want to be all alone?

  Shifting the blame to the cleaning lady. Daaaad, why does Martha’s breath smell like marzipan whenever she cleans the dining room? And why does she always close the door? To vacuum, she knew, to get into all the corners. But it was enough to cast doubt. And that’s all you need, the whiff of doubt. Cole didn’t tell and Martha got fired, which was fine because she was always touching Billie’s personal private things and nagging her to make her bed. No use crying over spilt amaretto.

  The burn of disinfectant as Rico pours the whole damn bottle over the back of her head, bringing her back to the here and now. Billie yells, despite herself, chokes on the chemical taste of it, in her nose, her mouth. She tries to writhe free, bashes her head against the copper tap.

  “Ow, fuck!”

  “Like trying to bathe an angry cat,” Zara says in that flattened European accent. Oh great, she’s here too, Billie thinks. The whole gang. She should have recognized the cartoon skull tattooed on the web of the hand holding her down.

  “Calm down,” Rico says. “We have to get right in there. Clear the gunk out. You don’t want maggots, do you?” She scrubs a rough sponge into the wound. The pain causes sunspots in front of Billie’s eyes, like an orgasm, the loose-limbed heat, tipping into the void. The world gone and back again.

  “Hold her still, for fuck’s sake.”

  Slim fingers pressing against her scalp, sealing the skin down, someone globbing ointment over the wound. It smells like getting high. Huffing spray paint in the art supplies room at school with Amy Fredericks and Ryan Liu. Naughty little shits, I know it was you. The same chemical stink. Amy and Ryan blamed her, like she put a gun to their heads and made them do it. Assholes. Like her asshole sister. She’s losing track of where she is again. Puking amaretto, Cole holding her hair back. The porcelain is cool against her cheek. But it’s not Cole’s hand, her sister doesn’t have a cartoon skull tattooed on her (so white trash, Zara, so fucking hipster)…

  And then there’s a velcro rip. Someone tapes a bandage down across the back of her head. Her hair is caught underneath, pulling, a sharp, skewering pain. Zara releases her, abruptly. Done and dusted. She spits into the sink. Not even bile. Barely spit. When was the last time she drank anything? She raises her neck from the basin, feeling along the edges of the bandage, which is hard and plasticky.

  The girl with her mashed-potato head on the tiles. Easy to wash down. They were planning it. Could have been her. Might still be. It’s not fair. She doesn’t deserve this. It’s not her fault.

  “What do you think?” Rico is not asking Billie.

  “Concussion,” Zara diagnoses. Her eyes are hooded in her too-long face. “Almost certainly.”

  “Is it going to be a problem?”

  “What kind of a bandage is this?” Billie probes the dressing, keeping her head down. She might puke again and the sink is cool against her cheek. “I need stitches. I need a doctor!”

  Zara is noncommittal. “If the vomiting gets worse, or her vision distorts, it could be swelling on the brain. A CT scan would tell us, but that would mean a hospital.”

  “Yes. A hospital. I need a fucking hospital.” Billie hauls herself up onto her elbows, tilting her head to see in the mirrors, three overlapping circles, and the pair of them reflected, incurious stares from the Colombian blond, the shovel-faced brunette. Venn diagrams from hell. Miss NRA and War Grimes, she thinks. She wipes her mouth and tilts her chin to see the silver swathe across her head like a metal plate. Not a bandage at all.

  “Duct tape?” She wants to cry. “Fucking duct tape?”

  “Medical privileges are for closers,” Rico says. “You really let Mrs. A. down. The buyer is very disappointed.”

  She’s in the back seat of a car. Zara is driving, the cartoon skull on her hand resting on the steering wheel, desert scrub and brush through the windscreen. Rico has the other window down, smoking a cigarette. The smell is sucked right back into the car, makes Billie nauseous all over again.

  “Oh good, you’re awake,” Rico says.

  “Not dead,” Zara agrees, using the least possible number of words, so it’s hard to tell if this was the outcome she was hoping for.

  “Where are we?” Billie’s mouth tastes like a possum shat in there and then died a week ago.

  “More than halfway. The GPS says.”

  “Water.”

  “Cooler box next to you.” Rico stubs out her cigarette on the inside of the car. “Sandwiches too, we need you in fighting shape. And here. Speaking of…” She scuffles in her camo moon bag and reaches back with two small round pills offered up in her palm, one white, one hospital-ward green.

  “What are these?” But it’s a token protest. Billie is already washing them down with a Monster Energy drink, sickly sweet.

  “They’ll help with the pain. And keep you awake.”

  “Didn’t think you could get these anymore.”

  “Mrs. Amato’s contacts. The business is the business, and it will find a way.”

  “And you can pay,” Billie says, through the rising warmth. It’s proper stuff, this. Goddamn, Mrs. A., all is forgiven, she thinks. Fentanyl? Heroin? She doesn’t care. Although she probably needs antibiotics more than opiates. A hospital. Brain surgery to release the pressure so she doesn’t die out here with these two. The other pill is most likely an upper, to stop her sinking into the back seat, never to emerge.

  “There’s always a price,” Zara agrees, but time has skipped again, and
they’re pulling over. A gas station, middle of nowhere. Elko, says Rico, like that’s supposed to mean something. The desert sky is oppressive, a weight pushing down, too blue, too wide. They walk across the empty forecourt, no customers in sight, although the sign in the window says “Open” and “Ring for Service” and all the lights are blazing.

  “I’ll go ask,” Rico says.

  “Kid is probably dressed like a girl,” Billie reminds her.

  “That the car?” Zara points out a white SUV abandoned at the truck stop where the 18-wheelers have been left to die.

  “What does the GPS say?” Billie snarls. They chose the getaway car to be nondescript, the popular brand, like a thousand others on the road. All the evidence points to the contrary, but she can’t help hoping Cole is inside the car, taking a nap in the back. She hopes her companions shoot her. Not to kill, obviously. She would never wish that on her own sister. Jesus. But a flesh wound, they could shoot her in the foot, stop her running away, or maybe a clean shot through the fleshy part of her arm, to show her they mean business, show her how much she’s fucked everything up for all of them, and how you don’t mess with these people. Or just rough her up a bit. Make her sorry.

  The thudding is seeping back into her head, a djembe drum being played badly in the apartment next door. She would like more of those pills, please. She would like a hospital and a bed.

  But wait until Miles is safely in the car, she thinks. Don’t want to scare the kid. Even more. Because her sister has traumatized him already. How do you come back from that, seeing your mom trying to kill her sister? Cole needs help. She needs to be committed. And guess who is going to have to pay for it? This sucker over here. But she’ll do it. She’ll get her the best psychiatric care in the world. Mrs. A. will have contacts where they won’t ask questions, and she’ll look after Miles while Cole’s being taken care of. Not that she wants to. What does she know about teenage boys? But she’ll do it, because that’s the kind of sister she is. Not like that selfish cunt and she hopes, desperately, that she is in the car. She wants to see her sister’s face when she sees Billie is alive.

  But she’s not in the car. Of course she’s not, and by the looks of it, the back door gaping, the vehicle has already been given the once-over by someone who came before them. The glove compartment hangs slack-jawed above the road-trip discard of snack wrappers and empty water bottles. Zara tosses through it anyway. There’s a brownish smudge on the driver’s seat by the seatbelt clip: could be melted chocolate, could be blood. Her blood.

  “Fuck’s sake.” Billie is fingering the duct tape across the back of her head. She can’t leave it alone, trying to free the baby hairs on the back of her neck. “She’s not going to have left you a map, with Las Vegas circled in red.”

  “Would she go to Las Vegas?”

  “Why not? It’s a landmark. It’s in Nevada. We’re in Nevada. I could as easily have said Truth or Consequences. That’s also a place in Nevada. Or is it New Mexico?” The movie her boyfriend Richard rented, she remembers, when they were sweet sixteen, or at least she was. He was older. Twenty-four, on a gap year that had turned to several, living with his parents. Loser. But no one else in her year was dating a varsity-age man. They never watched it, like they didn’t watch any of the ones that they rented from the video store on Seventh Avenue, because they were too busy fucking. When he broke up with her, she stole her dad’s car and sat outside his house with a bottle of tequila for hours, until his mom sent him out to see who was parked there.

  Not just tequila. Matches.

  What are you doing out here, babe? It’s ten at night.

  Getting drunk enough to firebomb your house.

  He laughed. He didn’t believe her. They ended up drinking the whole bottle, tried to have sloppy, drunken makeup sex in the front seat, but he couldn’t get it up, and then the neighborhood watch guy tapped on the window with his flashlight.

  C’mon kids. It’s not safe.

  In Billie’s experience, nowhere is safe. Your own sister could turn on you, leave you at the mercy of these paramilitary hard-bitches.

  Rico returns, carrying a plastic bag of supplies, munching on an energy bar. “Lady works the day shift, says she hasn’t seen anyone like that, didn’t notice the SUV. People abandon their cars all the time. She wanted me to pay a fine for dumping.”

  “Did you?”

  “What do you think?” Rico smiles with her mouth full, teeth dark with caramel. “Any luck here, ladies?”

  “Las Vegas,” Zara says. “Maybe.”

  “Big city.” Rico drops the wrapper on the ground. “Easy to disappear. That’s where I’d go. You’re sure about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Billie snarks. “Let me check my sibling telepathic connection.”

  Zara punches her in the back of the head.

  “Fuck!” The black dots are back, with sparkles.

  “I would not like to say you are not cooperating.”

  “Well, stop asking stupid questions, then!” she snaps. “And don’t hit me.”

  “Maybe we don’t need you. Maybe you don’t want to help us.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m helping. Shit. You need me more than before. All you’ve got is an abandoned car. But I know how her mind works. I can get to her.”

  “Caught maybe,” Zara muses. “Local sheriff’s department took her in. That would be a bad result for you.”

  “The woman at the shop would have heard about it. Can’t be much excitement out here. Besides, Cole is too smart for that. Trust me.” Let that be true, she thinks, don’t disappoint me now. “That’s why she ditched the car, why she came this way in the first place, avoiding the coast, because the Department of Men will be going all-out to find her. You have a map?”

  Zara hands over her phone, one of those oversized monsters, practically a tablet, and Billie traces her finger across the states. “She could backtrack to Reno, but I think that’s still too close to California, too risky. If I were her, I’d go farther inland, make for Canada via Montana.”

  “Easier to disappear in Mexico. Down through Arizona.”

  “But Canada is a known quantity. It’s more familiar. Polite. She can speak the language.”

  “Oh man, you sound so convincing,” Rico says. “I’m almost convinced.”

  “You got something better to go on? Either she got a new ride, or she hitched one, but the next big city across is Salt Lake, here. We go there, because it’s better than sitting out here licking our asses in the middle of nowhere. A city will be anonymous. And we need somewhere with internet. So I can send her a message. I know how to get into her head. She’ll come to us. I know how to play her.”

  “Let’s see.” Zara taps her knuckles against the duct tape, but this time it’s not unfriendly.

  14.

  Cole: Philosophy dogs

  In the early morning light, the highway is a gray crayon swipe through the salt flats crossing into Utah, craggy mountains reflected in the water, eerily similar to the Karoo, that long arid stretch on the cross-country highway from Johannesburg to Cape Town. Wild Wests and savage lands, hostile alien territory where anything might happen. Landscape you can project yourself onto, or, disappear in, Cole thinks.

  Of course, she’s wary, especially of easy reassurances. Blame it on PTSD, and the rising dread as it becomes clear that they’re entering civilization proper, more cars on the road, banks of reinforced gray fencing lining the highway, a series of overpasses and the green signs that announce the closing distance. It’s a real city, the first one since they tried to leave Oakland and the shitshow at the airport. She’s never been a huge fan of authority, but hey, she was naïve enough to still believe in the fairy tale of justice. She still thought that “human rights” was a magic term that would protect you from oppression. “How very white of you,” Kel would have said. And then you’re confronted with the incontrovertible evidence otherwise: that the world has never been fair or just, especially not now. Fear makes mini-dictators
of us all.

  Bring on the anarchists, she thinks, as the weather mobile drives through the city streets, the buildings low and fat and friendly, the blocks neatly ordered, so very Midwest. She’s not sure what to expect. They’ve been almost completely isolated from friends and family and lawyers as guests of the US government, “for their own protection”—the multipurpose justification of choice. “Future-proofing” was the other. But the anarchists might have a network, be sympathetic to her situation.

  Careful. You trusted too many people once upon a time. You trusted your own sister.

  Yeah, yeah, she’s got it, thanks, Dev. No one is on their side. But it’s hard not to hope as Vana pulls up outside Kasproing House.

  The house is a two-story painted lady that has seen better days, rambling ivy, with a mismatched collection of wicker furniture on the front porch and a tractor parked out front, “The Future Is Female” spray-painted on the side. Someone has painted “Fucked” over the word “Female.”

  They park around back, in a gravel lot beside a white accordion aerial and a satellite dish tipped up hopefully toward the pale sky, both corralled in their own fenced-off pens. More weathering, Cole guesses, or maybe DIY Wi-Fi. The screen door bumps open to release a very fat yellow Lab and a hulking pitbull lumbering toward them with wagging enthusiasm.

  “Dogs!” Mila yelps in delight.

  “Are they friendly?” Cole says, too late, because Mila is already on her knees getting all the licks.

  “Oh sure. Spivak is the gentlest dog you ever met. Hypatia’s a bit snappy with the pregnancy. But you want to watch out for Nietzsche, that’s the yappy sausage dog. Come on, I’ll introduce you. To the humans, too.”

  The dogs barge ahead into the kitchen, thudding off their legs.

  “If Hypatia has puppies, can we have one?”

  “There’s not an ‘if’ in the first part of that equation. And there’s a definite ‘no’ in the second part.”

  “But Mo-om…”

  She’s smiling. They both are. It’s that kind of place, a million miles from the military base and regimented quarantine, or the gilded cage of Ataraxia that came after.