The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (9 page)

She held his head, kissed him on the
lips, and then he saw a flood of warm light in his eyes as she
worked. Betty’s eyes were good enough for most purposes in low
light, but for this job proper illumination was best.

“
This is an
earpiece.”

Her warm, gentle fingers pushed it
firmly into place.

She took off his ball cap and threw it
away. She took his sunglasses for safekeeping. He changed coats,
finding the thing a bit short in the arms. It smelled of another
man’s aftershave.

“
You look a bit like him
in the photo on the driver’s license.”

“
If we get asked for I.D.
we’re done anyways.”

She ignored it. It was obvious enough.
The odd light in his eyes went off.

“
So what’s going to
happen, George, is that you are going to walk out of here. All on
your lonesome.”

His jaw dropped.

“
And you’re going to talk
me through it?”

Scott shook his head.

“
Nah. I mean, I don’t
think I can do it.”

He didn’t think it was humanly
possible. It sounded pretty damned crazy up there.

“
Scott.”

He sighed.

“
Of course I’ll do it.
Anything for you, dear.” It made a weird kind of sense. “Hey. It’ll
be fun.”

The logic was good. The cops couldn’t
care less what happened to him.

But if Betty was spotted on camera,
anywhere, they were both goners. And they’d be watching this place
like a hawk. In that sense, they were coming out of the Trojan
Horse. They were coming out openly, out of the ass end to
be sure, but it was the wrong guys, from the cops’ point of view.
It made a weird kind of sense.

“
So…ah, how is this
supposed to work?” Scott pulled her in close. “Don’t worry, Baby. I
ain’t skeered a nothin’. But…”

“
I’ll be right with you at
all times. At least until you get outside the gate. Here’s your
ticket stub, here’s your wallet and I.D.” The real problem with the
lapel cameras was the small lens, and in low light, with a lot of
distractions, Scott had better be prepared for anything.

“
Didn’t he have a
chip?”

“
Yes, Scott. But the venue
is temporary—and they don’t have a reader. I checked.”

The rave was a once a year thing, only
for the weekend. There would be some sort of shady promoter
involved, he realized. With all the dope on hand, booze, the
inevitable underage kids, no one saw much percentage in having
security too tight.

“
Hmn. Good
girl.”

Scott might be on his own, and all too
unexpectedly. As soon as he started to move the plan would go right
out the window.

He just knew it.

The wallet felt fat and heavy in his
hand. He could literally smell the thing, even in here. He opened
it up and had a quick riffle through it.

There was some money in there, a
couple of thousand at least. Kids these days.

“
Nice.” Scott wondered
what the guy's credit limit might be.

“
Put it away.”

He stuck it in his pocket. He gave her
his wallet. She’d have all of their luggage to deal with. What he
had in the small backpack wouldn’t get him very far. He had ditched
his empty shopping bags a few blocks from home, just cover to get
him out the door. All Scott would have would be water and the
minimal hard-ass rations. This was no place to munch on a cheese
sandwich anyhow.

Scott nodded in contemplation. The
plan would get him out the gate. They were safe enough at this
exact moment. The cops wouldn’t come on private property without a
complaint, for one thing. And for another, they would probably just
let the party go on. They would sit down the road and pull over
cars coming out, looking for prohibited drugs, off-the-cuff booze,
contraband of all sorts. But he, and Betty as well, would be clean.
Betty had boundless energy and could go across country for days. It
had interesting possibilities.

“
How are you getting
out?”

“
Down the tunnel, my
dear.”

“
So who’s this George
guy?”

“
He’s sleeping off a good
drunk, quite the chemical cocktail, actually.”

"Can he dance?"

She laughed. The humour in her
voice belied her own worries. If the cops knew her and Scott were
together, they’d pick him off by retinal scan or remote facial
recognition via the ubiquitous overhead
cop-drones, flying pigs people called them. And if
they had Scott, then they had her. But they would only zoom in
close for the retinal scan if something triggered their suspicions.
There were civil liberties and privacy issues involved, as Scott
recalled. They were still taking a chance, going out right past
their noses.

“
I’ll believe it when pigs
can fly.”

She slapped him on the
shoulder.

“
Don’t worry, George. I
promise not to tell your mother about all this.”

Scott snorted.

“
Yes, she would definitely
worry. All right. I go up the ladder.”

“
That’s right. I’ll lift
the cover for you, or at least help lift it. You step out. You’ll
turn exactly eighty-seven degrees to your left.” She had pinned a
miniature cam-phone-GPS pin to his lapel.

It was an open frequency that she
could monitor. All the kids had them now, that and the Googgles.
Apparently they could play games, chatter back and forth
constantly, and drive in a never-ending Disneyland. Shit like that.
Betty would follow the drainage tunnels, the ditches, and meet him
somewhere away from all the cameras. If only he could get there on
his own.

Once they were out of the city, it
will be like we never left it…because there is no
record….

Right?

We’re gaming the fucking
algorithms.

He’d heard somewhere that it was at
least possible.

Not being sighted himself, the whole
subject of gaming, and augmented reality, had always been a
crashing bore to Scott. He’d heard all about it, of course. People
loved that shit. They lived in an illusion. He’d been walking
around in front of those cameras for his entire life. He figured he
was pretty much invisible, as long as he had the stick and couldn’t
participate.

“
And then I just walk out
the front door.”

“
Yes. The cab will be
waiting when you get there.”

By her own information, streaming in
constantly over the net, the car was a scant six or seven blocks
away.

“
We’d better get
going.”

She took his hand and the pair
straightened up. Scott allowed the stick to fall from his hand. The
current, slight as it was in the dry season, carried it
off.

She lifted his left hand and put it on
a rung, half an inch thick and with the paint worn off from the
tread of a thousand work-boots. His right hand found the rung above
it.

“
Twenty-seven rungs,
straight up.”

Scott, or George now, lifted his right
leg.

“
In for a penny, in for a
pound.” He began to climb. “What the fuck, eh? Life is
beautiful.”

“
Scott.” She was climbing
right along with him, so close that if he fell back, he was
essentially trapped by her body. “Everything is going to be all
right.”

“
You mean George, don’t
you?”

No answer. He’d stumped her
algorithms.

He could almost hear it in his
head.

“…
in today’s top story,
Mister Scott Nettles and his girlfriend Betty Blue escaped from the
city…”

There was no way she was going to let
him fall. She was strong enough to make it work. She’d just
wrap an arm around him and carry him back down, one-handed. The
funny thing was, he really wasn’t scared.

This was necessary.

It was even a pretty good plan,
although he had no real idea of what came next. They’d talked about
it, of course. His ideas were wilder than hers. She was the one
with all the information.

His heart rate settled and he had to
be about six rungs from the top. Even the sound of his breathing
was different. Scott was in a vertical tube now, a steel one. He
was right there.

“
It’s okay, Baby. Can you
back off a bit? You’re crowding me.” He climbed another
rung.

He supposed it didn’t pay to get too
cocky, but—but.

The truth was, that they were really
doing this.

Scott Nettles and his girlfriend Betty
Blue were really doing it.

They were escaping.

Ha!

Would you imagine that?

Me. With a fucking
girlfriend.

Escaping. From Onion fucking
City.

“
George. I have to be able
to help you lift it, it’s really heavy—” Ninety kilos of high-grade
bronze is what it was, the city sparing no expense when it came to
sewers in borderline-suburbia.

This was no inner-city outreach
program for the disabled, the mentally-ill, the homeless and the
permanently unemployable.

***

“
Holy, Jesus! Where in the
fuck did you come from, man?”

At his feet, the manhole cover settled
quietly back into place.

The noise, perhaps music was too kind
a word, was horrendously loud. He cringed and grimaced.

There was no way to run.

Scott straightened fully. He waved his
arms a bit and shuffled his feet as much as he dared.

He made his head go back and forth
like a chicken. The shoes were squishing with water, which could be
a dead give-away if anyone really looked. He had to blend in.
Composing his features as best he could, he pondered the
question.

“
Yeah.
Where did you come from?” The voices were
everywhere.

He seemed to have popped up right in a
clump of dancers, mostly female.

This one was a guy. The young man’s
breath stung his nose.

The rushing as of winds was all around
him, and the smells, of cannabis, alcohol, perfume and sweat and
piss and shit and candy-floss, if one might believe it, were all
mixed up into one unforgettable fugue.

“
I’m not Jesus, although
the mistake is a natural one.”

Those nearest or paying any attention
at all laughed. Scott, or rather George, practically had to bellow
to be heard.

"Yeah, really, it happens all the
time." More laughs.

In his ear, Betty’s clear voice was
calm but insistent.

“
Don’t get distracted.
Just say excuse me and try and go north…to your immediate
left.”

“
Excuse me.” He raised his
voice. “Excuse me…coming through”

Trying desperately not to fall on
someone, making inevitable body contact here and there, with
flailing arms and limbs moving the air in tight little zephyrs up
around his face, and even with the odds and ends of someone’s hair
in his mouth as he opened it to speak again, he tried to force his
way through on lumpy, uneven ground.

“
Hey, man!”

“
I am so
sorry.”

“
Watch where you’re
going!”

“
I am really sorry. You
have my deepest apologies.”

The tone of that voice was really
angry.

“
You fuckin’
doof!”

“
It’s just that I’m blind,
you see, and I dropped my cane, and I just want to find the
gate.”

“
You’re what? What, are
you fucking blind…?”

The tone was incredulous, and Scott
wondered just how fucked-up this person was.

The time for bellowing was
now.

“
Yes. Yes, sir. I’m
fucking blind—now do you get it, Buddy?” Scott almost said
‘asshole’ there but stopped himself in the nick of time.

There was no such thing as silence to
be had in such a venue, but Scott had the impression the guy hadn’t
gone away.

“
My name is George. Can
you please help me get to the gate?”

A hard hand clamped on his upper
bicep.

“
All right, Bud. Sure, no
problem.”

In his ear Betty was encouraging him,
and the music was much too loud, and for a moment Scott felt real
fear. More real fear. As if he hadn’t had enough.

“
My name is
George.”

“
Yeah, I’m Sluggo. I’m
real glad to meet you, George.”

They must have gone fifty or sixty
metres, with Sluggo, what kind of a name was that? Sluggo was
leading him along, friendly enough now that he understood the
situation. His new acquaintance was drunk as a skunk, high on
everything, smelling of sweat and a few other things, but helpful
nonetheless. The guy’s breathing was loud enough. He must have been
dancing up a storm.