MARTians (19 page)

I look up at the television. I can’t look at Timmer.

There’s the moment when the crowd parts and the bag is sitting there. By that time, I was running down the block, not even noticeable because so many other people were doing the same thing.

Timmer touches my shoulder. He looks at me, but he doesn’t say anything. Timmer didn’t know that the plan had gotten so messed up. He didn’t know that I had failed to deposit the bag in the safety of the hospital bathroom. He knew stuff had gone down. Pineapple and Luck knew what they knew, which wasn’t where I was and what I’d done before I showed up tugging on the car handle and yelling at Timmer to Go! Go! Go! But now he knows I failed at my part. I ditched the bag and ran. I’m not the one to trust.

“The baby’s safe,” I say. “It’s a celebrity. See?” I point at the screen showing Bag Baby surrounded by toys donated by AllMART, because AllMART takes a special interest in the poor thing. Pretty soon the news segment will get to the part where AllMART is going to feature Bag Baby in a series of public service advertisements promoting better parenting. The money will be invested in an account to make sure that Bag Baby has a great start in life.

“And we protected Juliette.”

We stare at the clothes tumbling in the dryer. My adventure towel waves at me. A zipper clicks against the round glass window in the door.

The dryer stops. The clothes fall quiet.

When I get home from work, I watch myself on television while I take a shower under the sprinkler nozzle. I’m running away from the baby in a bag. That’s what I do when I’m on the news.

There it is, my bag. There are many like it, but that one was mine. It held my book and underpants. I poked air holes in it with a pen so the baby could breathe. And I let it go.

I can’t guess when Dolly Lamb touched that bag, but I know when Ms. Brody last held it. It was the day she gave it to me. My fingerprints are on there too. And Timmer’s, because he carried it the day he brought me away from Terra Incognita. Juliette held that bag until we got to the drop zone. Maybe Luck’s. Maybe Pineapple’s. Maybe we are all there, waiting to be identified, but as far as I know, none of us has been arrested and none of us has ever taught school. Our fingerprints aren’t in the database.

I take a deep breath. I feel safe — safe enough.

A message from SecurIt Safe-Keeping, to me and to 167 others: I’m about to delete it as old-style zombiespam, but my eye reads the first name on the list of other recipients and overrules that notion. The name is [email protected]. That’s the same Jyll who taught me and AnnaMom how to live like ghosts. She is the one who promised that she understood the story of family fun and could tell it perfectly. She is the one who took my birthday pictures off the wall and put them in a gray storage bin somewhere. She is the one I hate. AnnaMom waved that little wave and left me behind with virgin towels and some Yummy Bunny leftovers in the refrigerator. I blame Jyll for that.

I open the message and read:

I calculate the number of hours I will have to work to pay the total due: 383.
3
. The auction date will come and go long before those future hours tick away.

“I need help.”

Everyone looks up at me from where they are making s’mores around the chiminea — sort of. They are making s’mores s’more-or-less, which means they are smashing scorched marshmallows between slices of white bread. Timmer is squeezing hot sauce on his. I don’t know if that is because he prefers it or if it is because it is possible.

“Really, I only need Timmer, but now that I think of it, it would be helpful if one of you hung out with 5er for a couple hours. We’ll be back before he goes to sleep.” I don’t know if the others understand 5er’s bad dreams, but I know I hit the right buttons to shut down a lot of Timmer’s objections. “Can we talk?”

Timmer crams the rest of a slice of bread oozing burnt marshmallow and hot sauce into his mouth. He wipes his fingers on the back of his pants. “What?” he says.

I walk away a bit for privacy, then I turn and say, “I need a ride to 8700 Industrial Avenue. And I probably need some tools for breaking locks.”

“You need to break locks?”

“Yeah. I’m going to bring my perfect-score-prize-reward ball-peen hammer, but maybe you know a better way. Like maybe Raoul has the right kind of tool, so we can borrow it from his truck.”

“Raoul usually pulled the door off, you know, with a winch.”

“Will that work if the door is inside a storage unit facility?”

“Don’t think so, no. But I’ve gotta ask: Why are you interested in breaking locks all of a sudden?”

“I just need to get some stuff, my stuff. Personal stuff.” Then I add, “Useful stuff,” because that sounds more convincing than what AnnaMom is whispering in my head:
It’s your nest egg, ZeeZeeBee.

I’m banging on the hasp of the lock because I’ve decided that is the weak point of the system. Timmer holds his phone so I have light to see, and he leans hard against the metal door to deaden the noise. The light is little and the noise . . . the noise is the only result of my work so far.

“Ball. Peen. Hammers. Are. For. Working. On. Metal.” Each time I hit the lock hasp with the hammer, I say one word: “Work. On. This.”

A bouncing light. Someone is coming.

The place seemed deserted and unguarded. The electronic gate was open, since it was a dark neighborhood, so we just breezed right through and headed for Jyll’s unit. It seemed deserted, but that approaching light means someone heard us. We’re caught.

I grab Timmer’s hand and press his phone screen against my soft body over my heart. That is how to hide a phone in a hurry: faster than fumbling for a switch, just bury the light.
Zoë-babykins? Are you sleeping? You should be sleeping. It is the middle of the night, and all the good girls are sleeping. All their phones are sleeping too. It must be a spark of starlight or a little glowworm I see flickering in the crack under your bedroom door.

Hiding the phone doesn’t matter. The heavy boot steps are still coming. The main passage is filled with the shaking beam of light. Barking coughs, the raking gurgle, “Little Zombie Titties! Whatcha doin’, Zombie Titties?”

“Hi, Kral,” says Timmer. He doesn’t try to pull his hand away from where I’m holding it tight, but now I throw him away from me like it was his idea to be touching.

“Trouble with the lock?” says Kral. “I can fix that.” He is only a step away from us. He lifts the heavy tool in his hand and pushes the long lopper handles together. The bladed jaws nip right through.

“Whatcha got in there?” Kral throws the lock. It clicks and skitters away into the shadows. Kral flips the handle and the door to the unit rumbles up. His headlamp shows me what he sees: stacks of gray storage bins. Kral reaches out and pulls one down, tipping the stuff inside to the floor.

All of us freeze. There’s a snake. Kral drops his long-handled lopper and pulls out his gun and shoots it, three times. The sound echoes. The bullet fragments ricochet. Timmer turns and wraps his arms around me, curls around me, like that is going to protect me.

When the noise stops, Kral is snorting laughter. “The snake is a fake. Dead as a doorknob.” He pushes it with the toe of his boot and scans the rest of the stuff that fell from the spilled bin: framed pictures of strangers, a flyswatter, a mug that says
World’s Best Hookup.
“Junk!” he says. “You shoulda picked what’s behind door number three, kids. Tell ya what, you come give me a hand, and I’ll give you something worth the time.” Kral turns and heads down the passage. Timmer follows. And I follow Timmer.

When the unit door rattles up, I recognize the logo on the packing. The unit is full pretty much top to bottom of boxes of ammunition.

“I need to load this up,” says Kral. “Got me a hand truck, but now I got me some hands.”

Timmer doesn’t say anything. He just starts loading the boxes onto the hand truck while Kral supervises. Or maybe Kral is just making sure Timmer has light to see by. When it’s full, Kral and Timmer head off down the passage, and I’m left there, in the dark.

It seems like a very long time before I see the jumping light and I hear them coming back. Them. Both of them. Timmer and Kral.

“This is going to take a while,” says Timmer. He hands me his phone. “You can use this to look for your stuff.”

“Okay, but I can use my own phone. You keep yours.”

I wait until Timmer has filled the hand truck with another load of ammunition and they leave me alone in the dark again. Then I touch my phone and hold it out so it can make its small light in the dark place.

Jyll’s Safe-Keeping unit is larger than Kral’s. Toward the back there is a stack of crystal-clear coffee tables and a rack to hold large artwork. I recognize the frame of the painting that used to hang over the fireplace in my home in Terra Incognita. I pull it out and lean it against the stack of tables. I have seen this every day for most of my life. Or I could have seen it, if I had looked at it. I haven’t looked at it for a long time. That’s the way it can be with familiar objects.