Cottonwood (22 page)

T’aki tried to climb into her lap. Sanford pulled him back, but not before her eyes opened. She stared in agony and without comprehension at his room. Then she said and did a horrible thing. “Oh, thank God, I dreamed it,” was what she said. What she did was look out the window and see smoke.

He would have given much not to see the crumpling of her face in anguish and understanding. It was too much like his own heart throbbing, given hideous life in expression, too much like all that must be hidden for fear of provoking laughing men with guns.

She lunged up.

Sanford pushed her gently down.

“They’re burning!” she cried, fighting him.

“They’re burnt.” He waited, keeping careful pressure on her, until it had found her mind and latched. “They’re burnt, Sarah. It’s done.”

He had never used her name before, wasn’t sure he could pronounce it, but it came out just fine, as things so often do when you don’t think about them.

She stared at him, her eyes pouring water. Then she tried again to stand, her mouth working, cutting panic into words he doubted she planned. “We have to put the fire out. Help me. There’s hoses along the aqueduct. We have to put the fire out!”

She would not be still, so he followed her, catching at her arm when she stumbled, as she frequently did. He followed her to the crumbling wall and held her while she patted along it in confusion, seeking hoses that had never been.

“They’re supposed to be here,” she kept saying. “They’re supposed to…They… What…” She turned around, staring in glaze-eyed horror at the smoking ruin of Baccus’s home and hatchery. “
What is this place
?” she shouted, and fell over into Sanford’s awkward grip, braying tears.

He had nothing comforting to tell her. He took her back inside.

* * *

Security had orders to alert him the minute Miss Fowler returned, but she got in. She didn’t sneak in, she just walked in, past the empty desk, where a certain security guard had gone absent to cadge a smoke, and on up to the second floor and her own cubicle. She’d been quietly writing up paperwork for half an hour before Piotr noticed her on the cameras. He directed the girl to van Meyer’s attention and both went out to confront her.

They were almost on top of her before she looked up. She did it without hatred or anger or even indignation. She looked exhausted. She also looked as though she’d been packed in a barrel and rolled off a cliff. Van Meyer shot his hyena a hard stare, then gave Pollyanna a polite nod. “Are we paying you overtime, Miss Fowler?”

“Incident reports,” she said, with difficulty. Her mouth was swollen.

“Reports? Plural, do I hear?”

Piotr shifted, sneering.

“They might be related. I’m not sure. There was a fire. And I fell down.”

“Fell down,” Piotr snorted.

She looked at him again, her brows knitting as with confusion. She nodded. “I think so. Things got ugly with a…with a client.”

The two men exchanged glances. A bug, had she been about to say? Their Pollyanna?

“He gave me a shove off his doorstep. I tripped.” Her hand rubbed at her head. “I think I blacked out for a bit. Things get really confused. I can’t really…I know I was awake because I can remember…the fire…I couldn’t find the hoses on the aqueduct…I think I hit some of the…of the residents…and I’m all banged up. I just don’t know.”

“Well, don’t you worry about that,” van Meyer said slowly. “It is your health that concern us most. Are you very injured?”

“I don’t think so. I was going to go to Urgent Care in Wheaton…make sure.” Rub, rub at the head. “I figure it’s a weekend and I have time to just lie around and recover. I’m sure I’ll be back on Monday, I just…I just don’t know exactly what happened. I’m sorry, Mr. van Meyer.”

She was nearly in tears. Van Meyer waved slightly to push Piotr back, then gave the girl a broad smile, a grandfatherly pat on her shoulder. “Not at all. I want you to go—leave that, it’s quite complete enough—go down to the medical wing right here, Basement level, D-Wing, and have them look you over,
ja
?”

“I haven’t got my insurance paperwork back yet. I don’t think I’m covered.”

“But you turn it in,
nee
? Quite all right, I will see to all things. You go now. Go, go!” he coaxed, still grandfatherly, smiling.

She smiled back, her hand at her head, and got up. Her step was slow, but mostly even. She did not give Piotr more than a nod in passing.

When she was gone, the two men stood quiet.

“Well?” van Meyer said, no longer grandfatherly. “Do I just see Academy Award for Best Actress, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, about that…” Piotr avoided his eyes, unaccustomed to confession. “When she first came at us, I noticed she’d been kinda roughed up. Blood in her hair, that sort of thing. And she was sure acting hysterical, like maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly. I just assumed she was doing her Pollyanna, Queen of the Bugs bit, but yeah, she could have taken a hit.”

“Before or after you crack her skull?”

“That was Davis and he didn’t hit her that hard. One of the bugs must have given her a thump. The way she was carrying on…maybe she had a concussion.” Piotr shrugged one shoulder, his eyes still averted but narrowed with what seemed sincere confusion.

His hyena did not lie to his Master. If Piotr’s men had roughed over the girl, he would admit this thing, apologize, make amends. If he said now that there had been sign on her of some earlier altercation, then sign there had surely been.

“So.” Van Meyer picked up the incident reports and scanned them, not for content, but seeing haphazard lettering from a hand that had heretofore been neat, large gaps in memory, clumsy punctuation. “
Ja
,” he said at last, almost to himself. “We give this one benefit of doubt. But you watch her, Piotr. I have seen many good actress in my time and there is something about our little Pollyanna I do not trust. Not one whit.”

* * *

The medical wing at IBI was better manned and better outfitted than most hospitals Sarah had seen, even those on TV, which Sarah guessed only made sense if your patients got their arms ripped off on a regular basis. Van Meyer’s promise was apparently good; his name and a phone call got Sarah in to a doctor in just two minutes. He asked surprisingly few questions, just cleaned her up (she had six shards of rusty metal embedded in her back, which she hadn’t even known), gave her a few X-rays, a few bandages, and a shot of what he called ‘the good stuff’. The good stuff burned going in, but soon after soaked up all the ugly heat throbbing in her head and just kind of swirled it away.

They shaved her head in patches to get at the lacerations on her scalp for stitching. The one over her ear needed twenty-three of them and had raised a knot the size of a goose egg. Looking at herself in the doctor’s shiny metal cabinet was like looking at a funhouse mirror where her reflection was slowly replaced by that of a zombie. She felt a little like crying, except that she’d done enough of that today.

“Must have been a real adventure, eh?” the doctor said as he finished. “Still…no real harm done. I doubt your bug friend knew he was roughing you over quite as hard as he was. They’re not smart…one more…and they’re fearfully strong. The important thing…there we are!…is to know what you did to set him off. Do you?”

“He knocked my papers out of my hands,” said Sarah, having decided on this lie before she even went back to the office. ‘And you are such a wicked good liar,’ Kate would always say, admiringly. ‘People just look into that big baby-eyed face and can’t believe you even know what a lie is.’ “I lost my temper and shoved him.”

“Oh ho.”

“He shoved me back.”

“Yes, he did. Into a wall or…?”

“I’m not sure. I think I might have blacked out. Stuff happened—” Stomping. Screaming. Smoke. “—I don’t remember it very well.”

“Your memory might come back, but I wouldn’t worry about it if it doesn’t, dear.” He checked her eyes, checked her stitches, and finally let her climb down from the table. “But if your bug persists in his aggressive behavior, I can’t urge you strongly enough to report him and get him removed. I don’t mean to scare you. It’s likely he won’t single you out, they don’t have the memory for stalking any one specific person. Which is why an aggressive bug is so dangerous, he’ll be dangerous to anyone, and aggressive bugs don’t limit themselves to shoving matches.” He chuckled, checked her eyes again. “He might have given you a little tap to the zygomatic bone here.” He touched her cheek below her right eye, where Piotr had kicked her away from him. “It’s cracked, and I bet it’s painful, but it ought to heal up on its own in a few weeks. I advise you to pick up some liquid meals for a day or two, and don’t spare the aspirin, but you’re all right. Have you got a way home?”

“I walked.”

“I’ll send for a driver. You live on site?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “Then go home, get a good sleep, and try not to worry.”

And that was that. An armed man in a flak vest drove her home. He didn’t say a word to her. She took a long shower, scrubbing her hair with the contents of an entire bottle of shampoo to get the smoke out, but the smell seemed to linger even so. She made some soup for dinner, drank two swallows, and gave the rest to Fagin, who ate even less before deciding it was gross and nosing the rest unobtrusively into a corner. He came and sat on her foot, whining, while she sat in her living room and stared at the mirror over the fake fireplace.

The sun went down. The good stuff wore off. The sound of the eggs screaming haunted her. Sarah couldn’t stand it anymore. She got up, called Fagin, found her official IBI cap where she’d tossed it in the kitchen on her first day, and went for a drive.

She didn’t want to go for a drive. Her head hurt and her vision had a way of occasionally…well, not swimming, but wanting to, which made driving intermittently terrifying, particularly in a strange town. No, she didn’t want to drive. She wanted to make a phone call.

There was a gas station right outside of IBI’s residential area, but she ignored it. She ignored the community center and the clubs. She ignored everything in IBI’s happy little village and kept driving until she’d passed the outer gate and was thirty miles away in the sleepy Kansas town of Wheaton.

Beautiful night. Hot and muggy, full of teens out for summer fun. They gathered everywhere—great whooping mobs of them—the children of IBI and the teenaged townies, mingling in a glorious intergalactic rainbow of mutual trust and respect. Integrating.

Sarah found a McDonald’s and a few bucks in change, put on her hat so she wouldn’t scare the kiddies, and went to the phone bank. Old phones. No PAS hookups. No video screens. Just phones. Kate answered on the third ring, but sleepily. That sleepiness changed to sharp silence as Sarah began a calm retelling of her day that ended in fractured and half-hysterical tears after only a few minutes.

“They burned them alive!” she sobbed, leaning into the phone to try and disguise her breakdown from anyone who might be watching. “Who could
do
that, Kate? For God’s sake, who burns up a houseful of screaming babies and laughs about the s-sounds it m-muh-makes?”

“Calm down, Sarah. Is this your phone?”

“N-no.”

“Not your paz?”

“No.” She hadn’t thought about that out in the open, but then again, she must have thought about it on some level, because she’d left her paz at home to drive thirty miles to a payphone. A safe phone. One IBI didn’t own. “I’m at McDonald’s.”

“Good,” Kate said, again sounding distant. “Are you hurt?”

Sarah pulled her hat down lower, feeling the sting and itch of her new stitches, the heavier ache of the gash they closed, and the whole rotten throb occupying the front of her face. “No,” she said.

“No?” Kate’s sharpest voice came swooping down on her lie like a hawk. “They came and held you nicely while they burned that guy’s house, and then let you go and patted your head and said, ‘Take care,’ and left you waving them goodbye? I’m
hearing
you, Sarah, I
know
you didn’t stand there quietly, so how bad are you hurt?”

She wanted to start crying again. Kate could always do this to her, always strip away the safe walls Sarah put up around her and leave her naked in the spotlight with all her weaknesses on display. “They knocked me down,” she admitted.

“With what?”

“That’s all!”

“Jesus Hug-a-bear Christ! I may not be able to see you on this thing, but I can hear you! You’re talking at me through a mouthful of marbles and you’re slurring every third word, so how many teeth did they take out and how many pills are you on right now? You’re scaring the
shit
out of me, so cut the crap and tell me how bad they hurt you!”

She did start crying again then—huge, blubbery tears like a little girl cries, hating them and hating herself for always falling into them. “He kicked me in the face and someone knocked me out, I swear that’s all! I didn’t lose any teeth! I barely got a scratch and Baccus’s babies were stomped to death and set on fire! Like you even care!” she choked out, swiping furiously at her eyes. “They’re nothing but a bunch of bugs to you, you’ve made that perfectly clear! I don’t even know why I called!”

“They’re not a bunch of bugs,” Kate said softly. “I never thought that, any more than I ever thought working with
them
was the dangerous part of your job. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen to me, you just had to run off and—ah, Sarah, God damn it all, I wish you hadn’t
done
this!”

Silence between them, but not quite. Sarah sniffled herself under control, her breath harsh in her ears, and there was a low hiss of static on Kate’s end.

At last, her sister sighed. “Okay, Sarah, I’m going to ask you one question, just one time. I want you to think before you answer, okay?”

“Okay.”

Kate took a few deep breaths, then quietly asked, “Can you do any good there?”

“I—”

“Think before you answer.”

Sarah, miserable, thought. There was no good in Cottonwood. There were twenty-five thousand aliens packed into a landfill by men with guns, men who crushed their helpless children alive, men who dragged them out of their houses and threatened to shoot them…maybe did shoot them. Sarah couldn’t help them. Sarah couldn’t even bring them a burger and glass of clean water without getting fired. She was useless there. She was a part of the machine that ground them down.