Brave New Love (13 page)

“Oh, wow—” “Did you—” They started and stopped talking at the same time. Cute.

Dwayne had showed up in Aim’s wake. He stood to one side, hands in his front pockets, looking about as awkward as I felt.

Rob and Aim let go of each others’ arms. “Who’s this?” he asked her, bending his knees to put his face on the kid’s level.

“I’m Dwayne. I come all the way from Issaquah.” Which was nine times more words than I’d ever heard him use before. Maybe he liked white dudes.

“That’s pretty far. But I met somebody came even further.”

“Who’re you?”

“I’m Rob. I live in Fort Worden, other side of the Sound.”

“Issaquah is twenty-two miles from Seattle.”

“Well, this chica I’m talking about sailed to Fort Worden over the ocean from Liloan. That’s in the Philippines. Six thousand miles.”

“She did not!”

“I’m telling you.”

Here came Curtis over from the playground. He said hey and dragged Dwayne back with him with the promise of a swim, “—so you can get packed quick.”

The Rattlers wanted us gone yesterday. While Rob met with their committee to tell them the news out of Liloan—how the Philippines had been mostly missed by the EMPs and other tech-killers
thrown around in the first mass panic—Aim loaded her tools in the rolly and I went to find the truck. At the fuel shed they directed me up the remains of a service road. The twelve-year-olds
had parked at the end of it; they were just through filling in the hole they’d dug, tamping down dirt with a couple of shovels. The empty Likewise tubs lay on their sides in the dead pine
needles.

“Thanks,” I said. “We were gonna do that.”

“’S’all right,” the bigger one said. “Didn’t take long.”

“Yes, it did.” Her friend wasn’t about to lie. “But we’re done, now, and nobody drunk it.”

“Have you ever—” The smaller girl smacked the bigger one on her head. “Stop! I was only asking!” She turned to me again. “You ever taken any Likewise
yourself?”

Once. A single dose was low risk—I’d heard of adults with the same history as me, twenty-four, twenty-five, and still not Otherwise.

“Tastes like dog slobber,” I told her. “Like spit bugs crapped in a bottle of glue.”

“Eeuuw!” They made faces and giggled. I thought about the questions they didn’t ask as they brought me back down in the truck. About how Likewise felt, what happened when I had
it in me.

You could call it a dream. In it, my mom had never hit me and my dad had never got stoned. I was living in a house with Aim. The drug was specific: a yellow house with white trim, a picket
fence. We had a dog named Quincy Jones and a parakeet named Sam. The governments were still running everything. We had a kid and jobs we went to. I remember falling asleep and waking up and getting
maybe a little bored at work, but basically being happy. So happy.

Seemed like that dream went on for years. I was out for eight hours.

•  •  •

We could have driven all the way to Fort Worden, only Aim wanted to see the Space Needle. “C’mon, when are we gonna have another chance?”

I rolled my eyes. “You can
see
it from freakin
anywhere
, Aim. Ask
them
if
they
see it.” I pointed up at the chicas in the fifty-foot-high lookout.

“Okay. Touch it then. I mean touch it.”

Our first fight.

Of course Rob took her side. “Yeah, the truck; tough to let it go, but there’s no connections for us in Tacoma. Olympia either; can’t say who or what we might run into going
south. I told the captain up at Edmonds I’d be back in a week. Maybe he can stow it for us? And even if we’re early that’s our best bet. North. So the Space Needle’s not
much of a detour.”

Aim looked at me. “
All flippin right
!” I said.

I drove again. Aim took the middle seat, but it wasn’t me she pressed up against.

Rattlers had told us where to avoid, and I did my best. From Rainier I had to guess the route, and sometimes I guessed wrong. And sometimes my guesses would have been good if the roads
didn’t have huge holes in ’em or obstacles too hard to move out of our way. We didn’t see anyone else, only signs they’d been around: coiled up wires, stacks of
wood—not a surprise, since anyone on a scavenge run would have lookouts. Groups had mainly settled in parks where you could grow crops, and we weren’t trying to cross those.

We reached Seattle Center late. No time to find anywhere else to spend the night.

There’d been action here, too. I remembered the news stories, though they hadn’t made any sense. Not then, and not now—why would anyone fight over such a place, so far off from
any water? But tanks had crawled their way on to the grounds, smashing trees and sculptures, shooting fire and smoke back and forth. They left scars we could still see: burned-out buildings,
craters, bullet holes.

The Space Needle stood in the middle of about an acre of blackberries covering torn-up concrete—what used to be a plaza. Old black soot and orange rust marked the Needle’s once-white
legs. I tooled us under a pair of concrete pillars for the dead Monorail and backed in as close as I could get without slicing open a tire. “There you go,” I said. “Touch
it.” Which was a little mean, I admit.

Rob climbed out the window without opening the door and got up on the truck cab’s roof. He stuck his arm in and hauled Aim after him. I heard the two of ’em talking about chopping a
path through the thorns if they’d had swords, and how to forge them, and a trick Aim knew called “damascening.” Aim recited her facts about how high the thing was, how long it
took to erect, et cetera.

Then I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then her breath. I turned on the radio, like there’d be something more than static to cover up the sounds they were going to make.

One of them shifted and the metal above my head popped in and out. That gave me courage to hit the horn—a short blast like it was an accident—and open the door. Very, very
slowly.

Shin deep in brambles I unhooked from my trousers one by one, I took a blanket from the boxes of supplies the Rattlers sent us off with. Then I couldn’t help myself; I looked. They both
had all their clothes on and were sitting up. For the moment. Aim waved. Rob pretended to stroke a beard he didn’t have and smiled.

“In a minute,” I said, meaning I’d come back. Eventually. Give me strength, I thought, and I smiled, too, and waded carefully along the trail the truck had smashed.

She wanted to be with him. I loved her anyhow. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

I would follow her.

But tonight I would sleep alone.

•  •  •

At least that was the plan. When it came down to it, though, I didn’t dare rest my eyes. Dark was falling. The place was too open—bad juju. I had a feeling, once I
got out from under my jealousy. So I found a trash barrel, rolled it up a ramp in the side of some place looked like a giant scorched wad of metal gum. I set the barrel upright, climbed and
balanced on its rim, and scrabbled from there to lie on my stomach on a low roof—must have been the only flat surface to the whole building, even before the howitzers and grenade-launchers
and whatever else attacked it.

Me and Walter settled in to keep watch. The Rattlers had returned his magazine when they gave me back my knife, and there were seven rounds left.

Aim and Rob were maybe fifty feet south. I still heard ’em clear enough to keep me awake till Claude and his friends showed up.

Trying to be smart, the bridge dudes turned off the headlights of whatever vehicle they drove blocks away. The engine’s noise was a clue, and its silence was another. Insects went quiet to
my east in case I needed a third.

Starlight’s not the best to see by. I couldn’t really count ’em—four or five dudes it must be, I figured, same as yesterday. They zeroed in on Aim and Rob, who were
talking again.

“Hands up!” a dude commanded. How were they gonna tell, I wondered, but one of ’em opened the truck door and the courtesy light came on. There was Aim and Rob, a bit tousled
up. Too bad I didn’t want to shoot
them.
Couldn’t get a line on anyone else.

“Get your sorry asses outta me and Dwight’s—outta my truck.” That would be Claude.

“Daddy? Where’s Daddy?” And that would be that kid Dwayne? His age was all wrong for Dwight to be his dad, but who else was it rising out of from that supply box, pale-faced in
the yellow courtesy light?

The kid must have stowed away. He held out his arms and kicked free of something and Claude stepped up to grab and lift him and now I had a great shot. Couldn’t have been better. But I
didn’t take it.

Next minute I wished I had when dudes on either side yanked Aim and Rob out of opposite doors. I heard her yell at them and get slapped.

Someone else was yelling, too—not me, I was busy shimmying off the roof while there was cover for my noise. “No! Don’t hit her! No! Put me down!” Little Dwayne was on our
side?

Brightness. Someone had switched on the truck’s headlights. I ducked down. Aim was crying hard. They shoved her to the pavement. I hadn’t heard a peep outta Rob. When they marched
him into the light I saw one dude’s hand over his mouth and a shiny piece of metal right below his ear. Knife or a gun—didn’t matter which. Woulda kept me quiet, too.

Only four of ’em. Plus Dwayne. Seven bullets seemed plenty—if I didn’t mind losing Rob.

I didn’t. But Aim would.

Bang! Bang! Walter wasn’t quite loud as a shotgun. Glass and metal pinged off the pavement, flew away into the sudden dark. Only one round each for the truck’s headlamps. I was proud
of myself.

Light still came out of the cab from the overhead courtesy. Not much. I couldn’t see anybody.

But I could hear ’em shouting to each other to find the chica, and shooting. Randomly, I hoped. No screams, so Rob had probably got away all right.

I shifted position, which made the next part trickier, but would keep the dudes guessing where to kill me. I went round to one side, with the frame of the open driver’s door blocking my
vision. Walter stayed steady—I gripped him with both hands and squeezed. Got it in one. I was good. Total night, now. I squirmed off on my belly for a ways to be sure no one had a flashlight,
then crawled, then stumbled to my feet and walked. Headed north by the stars, with nothing on me but Walter, my knife, my binoculars. A blanket. Not even a bottle for water.

It was a shame to leave all the provisions the Rattlers had given us. And too bad I had to damage a high-functioning machine like that truck. Aim would cuss me out for it when we caught up with
one another at Edmonds.

Aim would be fine. She always was. Rob, too, most likely.

•  •  •

It took the rest of that night and part of a day to walk there. It was easy: 99 most of the way. The stars were enough to see that by, and the Aurora Bridge was practically
intact. I wondered what facts Aim would have told me about it if we were going over it together. All I knew was people used to kill themselves here by jumping off. Kids? Didn’t we used to
have the highest rates of suicide?

If Aim didn’t show up at Edmonds in a few days maybe I’d come back. Or find some Likewise.

I snuck in the dark past where they used to have a zoo, worried I might run into some weird predator. I didn’t. When the animals got out they must’ve headed for the lake on the
road’s other side.

The sky got lighter and I began to look for pursuit as well as listening for it. Nobody came. The stores and restaurants lining the highway would have been scavenged out long ago. I was
alone.

No Aim in sight.

Rain started to fall. I hung the blanket over my head like the Virgin Mary. Because of the clouds it was hard to tell time, but I figured I turned on to 104 a couple of hours after sunrise.

I went down a long slope to the water. Rob had said if we got split up to meet by a statue of sea lions on the beach.

This was my first time to be at the ocean. It was big, but I could see land out in its middle. Looked like I could just swim there.

Route 104 continued right on into the water. The statue was supposed to be to its south. The sand moved, soft and tiresome under my wet chucks. I spotted a clump of kids digging for something
further toward the water, five or six of ’em. They didn’t try to stop me and I kept on without asking directions. A couple of ’em had slings out, but I must not have seemed too
threatening; neither chica pointed ’em my way.

A metal seal humped up some stairs to a patch of green. Was this the place? I climbed up beside it. At the top, a garden. I could tell it was a garden since it wasn’t blackberries, though
I had no idea what these plants were. But they grew in circles and lines, real patterns. And more metal seal sculptures—okay, sea lions—stuck out from between them.

Definitely. I was here. I curled up in the statue’s shelter and the rain stopped. I fell asleep.

A whisper woke me. “Lo!” My heart revved. Aim? Eyes open, all I saw was Rob.

“You can’t call me that.”

“Sorry. Didn’t want you to shoot me.”

I sat up straight and realized I had Walter in my hand. Falling asleep hadn’t been so stupid after all.

Rob’s ice-cream throat had a red, inch-long slice on one side, so it had been a knife the bridge dude held there. He seemed fine besides that. “Is she around?” he asked.
“She and you came together?” I shook my head and he folded up his legs and sat down beside me. Too close. I scooted over.

We didn’t say anything for a long time. Could have been an hour. I was thirsty. And hungry. I wondered if maybe I ought to eat from the garden.

Rob held out his water bottle for me and I took it and drank. When I gave it back he didn’t even wipe the mouth off.

The clouds pulled themselves apart and let this beautiful golden orange light streak through. The sun was going down. I’d slept the whole afternoon.

“Look,” said Rob. “Look. I know you and Aim—”

“You can’t call her that.”

“Yes, I can! Listen. Look. You were with her before me and I don’t want to—to mess with that.”

As if he hadn’t. “And?”