The Subprimes (22 page)

“Let's see what they want,” said the boy. “Maybe they want to parlay.”

“Surrender is more like it,” said Vito.

“They wouldn't send little girls,” said Tom, “for anything.”

As the girls drew closer, both now shading their eyes, their faces gray and black from the ash-fall, the boys could clearly see they really were just kids. Like themselves. This was the first
time any of them could remember that a couple of kids showed up in Valence without parents.

Tom felt an unwarlike sympathy for these new arrivals. What must they have been through to have arrived here without a vehicle or parents?

The Gorillas stood up, revealed themselves.

“Halt!”

The girls stopped, looking up through the blanket of falling cinder.

“Halt! Where do you think you're going?”

“We're lost.”

“Well, you're in Valence now.”

“Do you have water?”

Emmett said, “Why should we give you—”

Tom interrupted, “Yeah, here,” and held out an aluminum canteen.

The girls each gulped greedily. “We were in a trailer area.”

“You came from enemy territory,” said Emmett. “We need to debrief you.”

Ginny said, “You're not touching us.” She held up her scarred arm. “I've fought a coyote.”

The boys studied the scar, the tooth marks.

“You were attacked by a coyote?”

“By a bunch,” Ginny said. “So don't think you can mess with me and my sister.”

The boys were unsure; none of them had tangled with a coyote. Tom stepped back to confer with his fellow Gorillas and came to a decision. “We're going to take you back to see the grown-ups,” he said. “Sargam will know what to do.”

The boys led the way through the gently contoured earth, behind scrub lines and into the narrow ravines that only they knew, the girls scrambling and struggling to keep up. The Gorillas
were as proud as if they had captured their first prisoners, and were about to deliver them to the authorities who would extract valuable intel on enemy troop movements.

As they passed from the outer undeveloped reaches of Valence to the irrigated fields of vegetables, the fruit tree orchards, and the chicken and goat coops, the girls were stunned at the lush wonderland they had wandered into. Even the ash-fall appeared to have abated, allowing them a clear view of what seemed an oasis in the middle of this desert. Men and women working in the fields paused at their pulling and planting, trying to figure who these girls belonged to. The dogs ran out barking from the houses, howling out toward the returning boys. As they drew closer to the ranch houses, they could see women working over tables, chopping vegetables. There were large pots on the boil, children playing soccer.

The boys brought the girls to a pretty woman in white who was removing a splinter from a dog's paw. The woman looked up at the girls and smiled and they smiled back.

“Where are your parents?” Sargam asked.

“Our dad took us and brought us here, well, not here, but over there.” Ginny pointed in the direction they had come. “He said we were going to meet Pastor Roger.”

“How did you end up here?”

“We got lost.”

They had walked across the desert, through the ash, and come upon the boys hiding behind some rocks. They were thirsty, their throats sandpaper rough from inhaling ash, and their eyes stung.

Sargam collected bottles of water for the girls, and a plate of figs, and listened as they laid out a story as bizarre as any she had heard. Their father was some kind of financial criminal—she had heard his name before, she believed—and their mother had taken them to Santa Monica, and he had followed, and, at least
to her ears, it sounded as if he had kidnapped them to take them to see Pastor Roger.

The story was complicated and several times Sargam stopped the girls and asked them to back up, but still, she was struggling to put together the whole picture.

“Where's your mom?” she asked.

“Oh, she's going to come get us.”

There were already a half-dozen Valence folks waiting for her counsel. She would figure out what to do with the girls later. She saw Vanessa walking by, carrying a bucket of water.

“V, can you take these two, Ginny and Franny, back to your place for a few hours?” she asked. “Tell Bailey to look after them. They came wandering through the desert without any parents but we're expecting their mom to show up.”

The girls followed Vanessa down the row of houses, past the kids playing soccer and across a field of onions that smelled faintly of wet dirt, to a house where Tom sat on the back step, shaping sticks into arrows.

“You brought 'em here?” the boy said. “Why?”

“Sargam told me to bring 'em.”

Tom looked at the girls. “So I'm stuck with you? Do you play soccer?”

GEMMA DROVE OUTSIDE OF HENDERSON
on the way to a place called Valence to get her children back from Arthur. While she empathized with how Anya may have felt about her kids being taken, she resisted drawing any direct parallels between their situations for the simple fact that Arthur
was
a criminal philanderer, while Richie, seated beside her, picking his nose, was, well, what was he exactly?

Not a failure, nothing that definitive could be said about him.
He still had talent, though it was unsteady and too often deployed wastefully, but there were flashes of poetry and insight. Oh, and she had to admit it, she was sweet on him, despite knowing that he was bad for her.

The Prius's air conditioner barely dried and cooled them, so hot was the sun blasting down on the two-lane. They ran up behind another dilapidated subprime vehicle every mile or so, as families were still trying to make it to Valence despite the fact that the entire community had been ordered to vacate. People helping people was a powerful message, and for thousands who had nothing left to lose, it was the promised land.

Her cell phone rang. She picked it up, taking the wheel with one hand.

“Do you have the girls?” Arthur asked.

“No, you dipshit,” Gemma said. “You took them.”

“Hm,” Arthur said. “Are you sure you don't have them?”

“Yes, I'm sure,” Gemma said. “Arthur, don't tell me you've lost—”

Arthur hung up.

Gemma turned to Richie. “He's lost them!”

Jinx immediately leaned forward. “He's lost Ginny and Franny?”

“Apparently,” Gemma said and began breathing heavily.

“Let me drive,” Richie said.

Gemma pulled over. They paused for a few moments, staring ahead at an old Explorer making its way down the secondary, trailing a puff of road dust and exhaust. They could see plastic bins tied down to the roof, a family's possessions mounted on the rack. Around them was the same desert they had been driving through for what seemed like forever. There was nothing but hot road cutting through dry country, a million square miles and not a drop to drink.

“We'll find them,” Richie said.

“He really is an idiot. Who kidnaps children and then loses them?”

Richie smiled. At least he hadn't managed that particular fuckup.

He pulled back onto the secondary and picked up speed.

JINX WON'T SHUT UP ABOUT
Ginny and Franny. Gone. Vanished. All because of an idiot father.

“We're gonna find them,” I tell her and Gemma.

“It's an adventure!” says Ronin.

I am about to admonish him for putting too much of a positive spin on a potentially tragic situation. But I reconsider, because he's right. This is an adventure, or that's how I have to look at it. These may be the last few days of my life as a father. As soon as Anya secures custody, they could be gone forever, tucked away into sanctuary while I sink with the rest of California. How can I make enough memories to last them a lifetime in just a few days of a road trip? I suppose an adventure, a search for some missing girls, is a potentially richer trove of childhood memories than any trip to Disneyland. We must make do with what we have.

“You know,” I say to Ronin and Jinx, “I want you two to know that this little trip, my taking you with us, is not going to save you forever. I mean your mother will find us and then, well, I have probably hurt my position more by this little operation here.”

“We know,” said Ronin.

“I'm sorry I'm not a better father,” I say, turning to make eye contact with my kids.

“Watch the road!” Ronin shouts, and I turn back just in time to swerve us back into our lane.

“You ARE a good father,” Ronin says. “You try to be.”

“You listen to us,” Jinx says. “Mom doesn't. She just tells us what to do.”

“We need you,” Ronin says.

I'm about to cry. I can't imagine these kids being taken away from me. I mash the gas harder. The Prius doesn't have any more to give.

Gemma's phone rings; it's a television reporter who got her phone number through Sargam from Franny.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Gemma says. “Tell them we'll be there very soon.”

She puts down her phone. “The girls are fine, they're in Valence.”

“Let's go get them!” shouts Jinx.

And off we go.

COMMUNE CAMP UNDER SIEGE; PROGRESSIVES VOW TO STAND GROUND; CULT LEADER: “WE WILL DEFEND OURSELVES.”

The story was being shaped very much in the manner that Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters envisioned. A lunatic cult leader convinces a bunch of subprime savages to squat on private property, creating an unsavory, unwashed den of druggie, hippie squalor. This cannot be allowed to stand. State police were arriving, joining the private security forces already deployed by HG Extraction. Reality producers were swarming. Concerned pundits were admonishing. Nothing must stand between the Joshua and its juice. And now that the media narrative was shaping up as People of God versus Atheists, makers
versus takers, job creators versus subprimes, the Pepper Sisters would be able to unleash their Valence-clearing operation and wipe away the squalid encampment. Pastor Roger felt it wasn't only that they were obstructing access to shale oil, it was more importantly the principal of the matter: if these subprimes were allowed to set up their own city, then subprimes everywhere would feel empowered to undermine authority, and then what kind of society would we have? That would be an undermining of the basic foundations of capitalism. The dark forces of progressivism never rested. Pastor Roger from the platform had drawn up charts, mapping the direct lineage from William Jennings Bryan to Theodore Roosevelt to Samuel Gompers to Eugene Debs to Leon Trotsky to Ernst Röhm to Adolf himself. History was very clear on where communalism ended. First, the reestablishment of the minimum wage, and then? The particular object of Pastor Roger's sermonizing was Sargam, “the She-devil of progressivism,” a leather-clad harlot who came from nowhere to advocate the rise of a new socialist Reich. He warned that we were surrounded by progressives, who controlled the media, entertainment, technology, even the military, the forces of progressivism were so powerful they were crushing the real America. The evidence: the TV cameras seemed to love showing this Madame Trotsky every chance they got. Even now, as he sat in a rocking chair in his tour bus, reading over the income statements from this week's tithe, he trembled at the thought of this media genic woman who seemed to be on TV even more than he was.

Steven Shopper leaned forward and urged calm. He observed in Pastor Roger an anxiousness he'd never seen before. The pastor was not as steady with his focus on the many, many matters of Freedom Prairie Church, on the finances, the many battles they were fighting on many fronts.

THEY DROVE THROUGH THE MEDIA
encampment, Richie slowing down as they passed the Bloomberg satellite truck.

“I could be covering this,” he said.

“Maybe you're too close to the story,” Gemma suggested.

“Objectivity, or reporting in general, has never been my strength,” Richie said.

He wove around the media vans, the Freedom Prairie trucks, the HG Extraction semis all in a row, left wheels up on the pavement. Dead ahead, state police were standing huddled in the afternoon light, the white flaking ash-fall accumulation atop truck cabs and trailer roofs appearing almost as a beautiful snowfall atop some kind of
Dr. Zhivago
village.

Richie slowed to a crawl as a security tech waved at them to halt. The tech approached in tandem with a tan-uniformed Nevada State Police officer. The tech was already making a downward-facing circle with his index finger to indicate that Richie should turn around.

He rolled down the window. “Hello there.”

“Nowhere to go,” the officer said. “Road's closed.”

“We need to get to Valence,” Richie said.

The officer shook his head. “No one's going to Valence. It's closed as far as we're concerned.”

Gemma leaned forward. “My children are in there. I've come to get them out.”

The officer read the concern on her face.

“One way or another, I'm going to get my girls,” she said.

The officer looked at Jinx and Ronin in the back, and Richie said, “Those are my kids. I'm just the driver. But, here, my press ID—does that help?”

The officer studied it. “You can drive in, and then you better drive right out. You don't want to be in there too long.”

He waved them through.

The visibility limited by the cinders, it was slow going across what seemed a no-man's-land until they saw a few bonfires and the bare outlines of a settlement in the last of the daylight.

DARREN AND THE REST OF
the men watched the approaching vehicle, a sedan, the front end casting twin beams closer together than a security-tech SUV. No vehicles had come through in three days, the techs and the cops having shut down Valence in an attempt to restrict supplies and reinforcements coming in from the many well-wishers and supporters that their cause had picked up over the last few weeks. Now they were truly on their own, though a half-dozen reporters, deciding to stick it out with the subprimes, were still inside Valence.