Hardwired (21 page)

Sarah tips her head back and swallows. The beer is dark and just a little sweet. She nods her approval and wipes her lips. One of Ivan’s laughs floats up from the barbecue. Sloe turns her long eyes in his direction. “Ivan’s going to die,” she says. “That’s why we follow him.” She turns back to Sarah with a Mona Lisa smile. “We always follow the doomed ones. The ones who show us the way.”

“Ethical Nihilists?”

Sloe nods. “You’ve heard. Good.”

“Sometimes they come down to where I live in Florida and set fire to themselves or something. It fucks up the nightly totals. Die with style, and hope the world follows, right?”

Sloe’s voice is soft, gentle in its certitude. “The world will follow, no matter what. We just want them to accept that. Go with a little dignity, a little forethought.”

“You’re a little old for this, aren’t you?” Putting the blades in her voice.

Sloe shakes her head. Shining through the tree leaves behind her, the sunlight is printing moving data on her face like a memory of Ivan’s tattoos. “No. Just a little uncertain of how I want to go. I can only do it once, and I don’t have Ivan’s feeling for it.”

“Go down fighting, I’d say.”

Sloe looks at Sarah with her gentle smile. “That’s not my style,” she says. She reaches out and takes Sarah’s hand. “Maybe I want to go out in the arms of a stranger. With scars and a suit of armor and my scarf knotted in her hands.” Sloe takes Sarah’s hand and places it over her jugular. Sarah can feel the pulse in Sloe’s throat before she takes her hand back.

“No,” she says.

“That’s all right,” Sloe says. “If you don’t want to.” She gives a sudden ferocious giggle. The lights of sunset dance in her eyes. “Don’t think I ask every stranger, either.”

“I know.” Snarling, “It was love at first sight.”

Sloe’s answer is soft. Her eyes are suddenly uncertain. “Maybe it was.” She rises, her glance drifting over the encampment. Ivan is pouring beer down his throat. The overflow runs in brown streams down his chest.

“His family were migrants,” she says. “Lost their farm between the erosion and the blocs. Walked all the way across the country and back looking for work. Died, eventually. Of bad luck, I guess.”

Sarah says nothing, stares stonily at the river. Cowboy, shirtless, walks purposefully out of the water, his jeans plastered to his long legs. His tan is deep and uniform over whatever parts of his body she can see. She thinks about tanning lamps and wonders if Cowboy has one, buried with his treasure trove in Montana. She sips her beer.

Sloe wanders away, trying to look as if she has a destination in mind. Cowboy collects his shirt from a bush and walks toward her.

“I’m getting good and sick of these people,” she says, and offers him her beer. Cowboy doesn’t ask her why.

“I’ve been trying to talk to them about the war,” he says. “Tempel and Arkady and everything. Thought they could do us some good.” He sighs and brushes droplets of water from his arms.

“But they won’t,” Sarah says. “They’re Buzzard Cult, right?”

“Ethical Nihilists. That’s their story.”

“Has one of their girls asked you to kill her yet?”

Cowboy looks at her in surprise, then shakes his head. “Just wait,” Sarah promises. She takes the beer from his hand and tips her head back.

There’s a sudden roaring on the river, and Cowboy and Sarah both turn to see a pair of patrol hovercraft thundering south, flying Illinois flags and heading for the Ohio and tonight’s panzer. Sun flickers red off perspex turrets. Cowboy looks at them with a slight frown, watching them in a cool professional way with his calm eyes.

“Old-fashioned pulse guns,” he says. “Won’t work on crystal, but before we shielded ’em they used to mess up our engines some. Those sheaf missiles are damned nasty, though, if they hit.”

Sarah feels a sudden uprush of gratitude at his presence, the knowledge she isn’t alone here--- that he’s calm and reasonably sane and smart enough to play his panzer across the country in the face of things like those thundering craft on the river, that he can gauge the opposition and play the odds and accept the fall of the dice.

It means she can relax from time to time, knowing he’ll pull in the slack. She finishes her beer and puts the old bottle down. Her stomach is growling for its supper.

She stands up and moves toward the barbecue. She can feel her shoulder muscles easing, knowing there’s someone looking after her back.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LOSES PATERNITY SUIT

“MY LITTLE ANDROID HAS A NAME,” SOBS GRATEFUL MOTHER

KOROLEV I.G. OFFERS NO COMMENT

The Silver Apaches take them across the Wabash the next day, cutting straight across Illinois to the Mississippi. Ivan leaves them with a little barbecue in each ruck. Sloe, lying languid in her saddle, looks at Sarah with cool eyes.

As they stand on the bank Sarah sees that Cowboy is gazing toward Missouri like a man watching an enemy he respects. They cross the bridge into Hannibal, and the customs people, used to migrants, don’t give them a second glance.

Their next ride comes from two men in a stretched-out truck filled with torn, cast-off furniture. Cowboy sits next to the driver in front, Sarah shares the cramped second seat in the back. The men are big, tanned, with callused hands. It turns out they want to talk about Jesus. Sarah only gives them a hostile glare, but Cowboy apparently understands their language and gives them hope of a conversion as long as the ride will last.

The driver wants to give them food and a place to stay for a few days and turns off toward his commune. He doesn’t seem to hear Cowboy when he says they want to go west, not north. Sarah looks at the two men and wonders how far they’re going to push this. She feels her muscles tingle and thinks about riding a stolen truck all the way to Montana. This should be easy, she thinks.

“Stop,” Cowboy says. “We go west from here.”

“Let me just give you a meal first.” Sarah watches the back of the driver’s thick neck and makes claws of her hands. Knock out the one in the back, she thinks, take the driver from behind. Then her eyes turn to Cowboy. Let him play it, she thinks. See what he does.

“No,” Cowboy says. “We’ve got all the food we can carry.”

The driver licks his lips, flashes Cowboy a nervous look. “You’ll like it. Wait till you meet the Sir.”

There is a flash of motion in the front seat, hardwired nerves responding with a motion Sarah’s eyes can’t quite follow. The short barrel of Cowboy’s belly gun presses against the driver’s ear.

“You can see Jesus later,” Cowboy says, not bothering to raise his voice or even look at the man in the back seat, “or you can see him in the next ten seconds. Your choice.”

A minute later, as they stand in the truck’s dust and watch it face toward the vanishing point, Cowboy smiles and puts the gun back in his belt. “I heard about them,” he said. “Barracks and bobwire, towers on every corner with guards they call the Hounds of Christ. I would have been working in the fields all day and you would have been putting old furniture back together until their Sir got you knocked up.”

“Sorry I missed it. I could have given their Sir a surprise or two. ”

He gives a laugh. “One of my friends, a guy named Jimi, took his panzer through their place one night. Knocked down a couple towers, trampled their wire. I heard a lot of their converts took the chance to run for it.” He shakes his head. “Jimi’s a crazy man. It wasn’t even his fight, just something he did for fun. ”

Cowboy adjusts his ruck and looks at her with amusement. “Hey. I thought you were my bodyguard. Supposed to keep me out of situations like that.”

“You were doing fine by yourself. I would have kept the truck, though.” They start their hike along the rutted dust.

Cowboy shakes his head, a little negative twist of the chin. “No. Don’t want to attract any attention in this state. If I get picked up here, I get shot.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“Because some weeks ago I blew up sixteen privateers, and they’re kind of upset about that.”

“You’re
that
panzerboy?”

Cowboy says nothing, just watches the horizon from under the bent brim of his hat as he walks. Sarah tries to decide whether or not she believes him, concludes it’s the only way things make sense.

“No wonder they’re after you.”

“I’ve got friends,” he says.

“Friends like Reno? In your position friends don’t happen, Cowboy. The most you’ve got is allies.”

Cowboy doesn’t answer. Sarah watches him as he walks, seeing the sweat running down his neck from under his dusty wig, still feeling the flush of surprise at this revelation, seeing bits of the mosaic falling into place. He’d become too powerful, and even the people he’d been useful to had seen that. And they’d quietly moved to swat him before he realized just how much power he had. Even now he had enough to last a while against them, maybe even cut a deal that would let him retire with his life.

But not enough to win. Sarah knows she’s walking behind a man who’s about to lose his first, his biggest war. She feels the dry, cool fingers of sadness touching her. No way to win without becoming one of them.

Sarah wonders if he knows it, if he’s just playing on because it’s all he knows how to do, or if he really thinks he has a hope. In a strange way she wants him not to know, to keep believing in his own star for a while longer, so as not to lose it all at once, all he ever worked for or dreamed... She knows too well how that feels.

But then she remembers that look he had only once, that last day in the panzer, the knowledge of his own hopelessness and desperation, and she knows that he’s entirely aware of what’s going to happen to him when he gets where he’s going. He’s playing a game with himself, pretending that there’s only friends and money at the end of this trip, and a fighting chance...that he’s walking west because it’s the only way he knows to go.

For a long moment she hopes the trek will last forever, that the destination, the hopeless, losing war both in the West and Florida, will forever recede. She looks again at Cowboy, seeing his long legs marching to the destination they both see too clearly, and feels her heart turn over.

Cowboy raises his head, watching the sky from under the brim of his cap. He seems to sniff the air. “It’s going to rain,” he says.

And walks on.

IF IT’S HOB, IT’S REAL...

IF IT’S REAL, IT’S MARC MAHOMED

There aren’t any more rides that day, and through the early afternoon they watch vast tumbling thunderheads coiling up above the prairies like cobras rising and spreading their hoods. The afternoon darkens, and lightning begins to jump from one cloud to another like the ball the team kicks around before the game.

“I think I know a barn near here,” Cowboy says, but he’s a little out of his reckoning, and the rain begins to come down in warm waves, trying to beat them down, drive them into the mud. Sarah feels the breath knocked out of her by the impact. They walk blindly through the featureless black, and it’s only a lightning flash that reveals the long concrete ruin they’re looking for. Further flashes reveal the roof beams packed with the mud nests of swallows, the corners filled by the dung of rats. The farm to which it once belonged is crumpled like a house of cards, fallen into its basement. They find a dry place near the door and stretch out their sleeping bags. The darkness closes around them like wet felt. Leaks pour onto concrete in the interior, molten gold streaming in the black.

“Sorry. Thought it was closer.” Cowboy’s disembodied voice echoes from the concrete walls.

“Not your fault. Do you know every old barn in Missouri?”

“I’d better, if I want to survive.” A small pause in the black emptiness. “I’m used to traveling across this country at a higher rate of speed, though.”

Thunder explodes over their heads and Sarah sees the silver sheet of water pouring down outside the broken barn door, Cowboy slumped against the wall with a rueful smile, the buttons in his head reflecting the lightning in blue-white pattern, silver and turquoise, like eyes gazing inward, into his head. Sarah feels a sweep of sadness for Cowboy, the dispossessed panzerboy, his boots leaving tracks in the dust above which he once flew with his mind flicking at the speed of light. She reaches out to take his hand, sees in the night the blue of Daud’s eyes, the azure of Danica’s soft sheets, the translucent inexorable color of the long Gulf rollers as they sweep slowly onto the darkening land.

“You’ll ride your panzer again,” she says. Her throat aches at the words.

She can sense him leaning forward, reaches out another hand blindly and touches his neck, feeling warm skin, cold rain. She laughs. “It’s not fair,” she says. “You can see in the dark and I can’t.”

“Talk to me,” Cowboy says. “Tell me why you’re doing this.” His voice is very close. She can feel the touch of his breath on her.

“It means we’re walking west,” Sarah says. “And at the end of the trip we’ve got things to do. Alone.”

“Okay.” He hesitates for a moment, and she can hear his throat working at words that won’t come. “Are we friends, Sarah?” he asks. “Or just allies?”

She feels a laugh coming, low in her throat. “A little of both, Cowboy.”

“I’m glad.”

He leans forward and she can feel his cheek pressing against her neck. His arms come around her and he holds her, not moving. She runs her fingers through his short hair, seeing again the blue of the Gulf, yearning for the touch of that wide endless purity.

Cowboy’s hands begin to move. Sarah accepts the salt azure comforting touch.

Chapter Nine

The Rockies are sweating in the afternoon heat, cleft by deep shadows. The still air is filled with clouds of gnats and the scent of sagebrush scrub. Cowboy studies the old line shack and feels the presence of the belly gun stuck in his jeans.

Sarah crouches in cover fifty yards away, the machine pistol focused on the weathered paint of the line shack. Cattle at the water hole behind them call to one another. Cowboy knows the next move is up to him.

He shrugs and takes a long breath of the laden air, then stands and walks down the slope to the shack. It’s a frame building shingled with cedar and painted the color of red sand, built low to the ground against winter winds. A cord of wood is stacked neatly against the west wall. There’s a four-stall stable standing empty nearby. Cowboy unspools a stud from the metal doorframe, puts it into his head, and gives the lock the code.