6. It seemed likely they could track me from a distance. Maybe a tracer implanted when I had surgery in Germany.
7. They were serious enough to kill a federal agent. They used a rifle like mine, possibly. Setup or coincidence? An unrelated murder? Sure, there are snipers everywhere.
But it all pointed back to the big question: Why me? There were probably a hundred thousand people who could shoot a rifle as well as I can. A small fraction of them would probably shoot a stranger just for the thrill, or for the hell of it, let alone for a roll of G-notes. (Thriller writers sometimes assumed there were people on the government payroll who would do this sort of thing, but I always doubted they could keep it secret. A civil servant whose morals allowed him to murder on assignment could also be bought by a tell-all journalist.)
When Kit got up she read over the list. “Number 6, the implant. I guess we’ll find out about that. If they show up now, they must be physically tracking you.”
I thought for a second, and agreed. “In a city, even New Orleans, we’d be on security cameras enough for them to follow us by face recognition software. They caught those spies that way in Chicago.” It had been fodder for a lot of Big Brother Is Watching You editorializing. The Ramirez couple had even had cosmetic surgery, but it didn’t fool the software. They should’ve left the city instead.
Florida would be safe from that. Their courts had followed North Dakota’s lead, and declared the ubiquitous camera network an unreasonable invasion of privacy.
“But New Orleans is still bothering me,” I said. “Suppose that is why the cops picked me up—computer sorting of routine security images. That’s not the real mystery—I mean, hell, we were on the run. Using false identities, working for cash. They might have picked me up on general principles.”
She nodded. “And so?”
“So the real mystery is not why they picked me up, but why they let me go! The cops talked to someone back at the station, on the car radio, and immediately pulled over and uncuffed me and let me go. What did someone, headquarters, say to them?”
“Maybe that what they were doing was illegal. They can’t just grab someone off the street.”
“Yeah, but they can, if you’re a criminal. They definitely were sent to pick me up, or us. I didn’t think fast enough. I should’ve asked to see a warrant or something.”
“They’d just invoke Homeland Security.”
“But how could they? Homeland Security didn’t know where we were! I hadn’t talked to the DHS woman for two minutes before the god-damned cops showed up!” Though maybe two minutes would be enough, if we were on the right list.
She got up and split the remaining coffee between us. “Maybe it was somebody else in the DHS. They’re not just one woman with a phone up in Illinois.”
“Yeah, and it may not have been Homeland Security business at all. Maybe the guy who sold me the gun ratted on me.”
“Yeah,” she said, glowering theatrically. “Ya shoulda plugged the sumbitch.”
“Next time, Muggsy.” We both laughed.
4.
We dozed till noon and then picked up a cheap cell at a convenience store next to the motel, just to make two calls. Didn’t want our families to worry enough to call the authorities—all we needed was state troopers from Iowa to Mississippi sharing their databases, looking for us as missing persons.
From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans. It wouldn’t fool a government agency—or the Enemy, presumably—but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.
Dad wasn’t home, so I left a message saying Kit and I were leaving the New Orleans heat on a road trip up to New England. Kit’s father answered and she improvised a little, saying that we’d probably visit an uncle up in Maine, verifying his address. Didn’t know when we’d get there; she’d be in touch.
I checked my e-mail one last time and there was a note from my agent saying hey, no big rush, but Duquest wants to know how the monster story is coming along.
“Let’s get into Mississippi,” I said. “Find a place in the middle of nowhere and stay for at least a day. I’ll write up another little chapter.”
“And maybe print it out?” she said.
“Yeah, if we find a place.” I was getting nervous, too, not having a paper copy. I did e-mail the manuscript to myself every couple of days, but the dime store computer’s word-processing program was Neolithic and had a small mind of its own. I eased the thing shut and for about the thousandth time regretted not spending a few bucks more, for a machine that could talk to a thumb drive or something.
I’d mailed a paper copy home when we first got to New Orleans, but I was at least thirty pages past that now, and had made changes in the earlier chapters as well.
“Should you call the Underwood woman or somebody?”
I wasn’t sure. “Maybe not. Let’s see what happens if we don’t make it easy for them. But maybe . . .”
“Maybe what?”
I opened the phone and contemplated it. “We’ve got nine thousand some dollars. Enough to go maybe nine months?”
“I think so,” she said, “living simply, under the grid. With no emergencies.”
“Still not enough. Let me call my agent, see if she can wire us another ten grand or so.”
She was with another client, but called back in a couple of minutes. I told her I was in a real jam, a legal problem I was advised not to tell anybody about.
“Ten grand?” she said. “Jack, if I had ten thousand dollars to spare it would go to the rent on this god-damn place. I’m way overextended.”
“It’s really serious.”
“Life or death?”
“I think it could get there.”
“Want me to try your movie guy, Ronald Duquest? He’s got millions, and I can pretend he owes me a favor.” I said sure.
Hooray for Hollywood. Duquest told her he’d consider it an additional advance against the movie rights—pretty generous, considering that ten grand was all he’d actually paid anyhow. He took a penny away for some IRS thing, and deposited $9,999.99 in my PayPal account.
I couldn’t exactly shake the computer until the cash came out, but it would stay there until we needed it. Once in Key West, I could use nested firewall proxies and retrieve at least 80 percent of it without leaving any trail.
Outside the motel room I gleefully stomped the cheap phone and bundled its mortal remains with our trash and tossed it in the parking lot dumpster. Pure paranoia. There was no way the Enemy could have put a tap on a random phone from a convenience store—but could our benevolent government? Every phone in every cheesy little store? Could the Enemy know everything the government did?
I could worry about it or I could get a new phone next week.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hunter slept for twenty hours and awoke around midnight, pale lunar light filtering through drapes. The warm trailer still had a stale smell of roasting meat. Sharp sweat tang.
He had a painful small erection, which he couldn’t see over the mound of his belly. He pulled on it until it emptied, and lay thinking, calculating.
There was enough meat in the freezer for about ten days of his normal diet. Two weeks if he stretched it, but he knew if he got too hungry he might do careless things.
The woman’s purse held enough money for months of food, five or six sides of beef. The idea of nonhuman meat turned his stomach now, but when he was hungry enough he would eat anything. Anything animal. The closest he could come to a vegetarian diet would be eating vegetarians.
Which he had probably done. Not Ms. Cooper. Out of curiosity he had squeezed out the contents of her large intestine, and could see that she had been a meat-eater. Too little fiber in her diet. It would have killed her one day, much more slowly.
What had he lived on before he cam
e to Earth? His dentition was similar to a human’s, though presumably a dentist could tell he was different. He could crack bones with his molars, and his jaws were strong enough to tear apart humans and other animals. Clothing was sometimes too durable; he could break a tooth on a zipper or bra clasp. Though it was peculiarly satisfying to tear into people through their clothing, and it made the remains look more like an animal attack.
But his little talks with them were probably more interesting when they were naked. They were more frightened, which made them taste better. He knew the Chinese would beat dogs before they butchered them, partly to tenderize the muscle, but also for the endocrine tang of fear. When he had taken humans by surprise, killed them without warning, their flesh had been relatively bland. Much better to play with them for a while, and let ductless glands work their magic. The taste of hope, and the loss of hope.
Thinking made him hungry. In the back of the refrigerator he had a pair of hands in a large jar of dill pickle juice. He fished one out and had it with bread and butter, gnawing around the small female bones. Then he threw the bones into the stockpot simmering on the stove.
That pot had enough evidence to hang him four times over, in this state. He would ask that they do it without the hood. He wanted to see their faces when he plunged through the trapdoor and hung there alive, smiling, at the end of the tether.
He grinned and picked bits of Ms. Cooper from between his teeth.
5.
Kit quietly closed the top of the computer. “Maybe let’s not have breakfast.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”
“Okay. Just don’t order a hand sandwich.”
“Or finger food?”
“Seriously . . . don’t tell me that scene’s going to be in the movie.”
“I guess not,” I admitted. “Wrong genre. No chainsaws or goalie masks. But the book has to go a little further than the movie.”
“So what does he eat in the movie?”
“Well . . . that particular scene isn’t in it. Later on, he ladles a spoonful of broth and sips it.”
She smiled. “That’s a distinction. You’re grosser than Ron Duquest.”
I shrugged. “Different medium. Besides, you want to be over the top on the first draft. Easier to cut stuff than to add it.”
She nodded microscopically, not looking at me. “Yeah, you explained that.”
Storm signals. “It bothers you that I would even think of such horrible things.”
She didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, lower lip between her teeth. “Really, it’s all right. You’ve seen worse, I keep forgetting.”
I tried not to think of yards of intestine unspooled across a dusty road, the owner festering in a ditch, arms wide in dumb supplication. Why was that so close to the surface?
She put her hand over mine. “If you want to talk about it, we could.”
Actually, we couldn’t. There was no vocabulary. Smell, heat, pain, always the edge of nausea. Just the smell of diesel exhaust made me clench my teeth. The somatic memory of it back behind the sinuses, shit burning in diesel, rot, the buzz of fat flies. Mud spatter, blood soaking desert sand. The guy had looked like a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, mouth open in dark bloated features. The second dead man I had seen, but the first had only been a dusty bundle.
“Honey? You want to lie down?”
Actually, I wanted a drink. But maybe I’d better not say that. “Naw. Get some chow.”
She smiled. “Okay, soldier. Make a mile first?”
“Check the map.” I unfolded it and found our motel. There was the Burger King across the way, but nothing else on the map for about twenty miles. “Let’s see what they’ve got across the street.”
“If it’s hands, we go someplace else.”
“Deal.” We rolled up yesterday’s clothes and repacked the bikes in about a minute. The air was cool and clean, and if it had been just me I would have gone on down the road. But if she doesn’t have breakfast she turns into something dangerous, so we crossed to the Monarch of Mediocrity.
In truth, Burger King wasn’t half as bad as McDonald’s. I got three little hamburgers and fries while she had some egg thing. On impulse I asked for a salad. The high-school girl behind the counter acted like I had asked for a human hand. Would you like guts with that? She wrinkled her nose and said it was breakfast time. Hamburgers, sure. Salad, no.
There’s something weirdly satisfying about hamburgers for breakfast. Some would disagree. Kit made a face when I squirted mustard and catsup on them. “Caveman,” she said.
“Og like meat. Meat with blood and the yellow stuff.”
“Your internal clock is off. Hamburgers and fries?”
“I suppose.” Actually, she knew I didn’t like regular breakfasts unless I fixed them myself. Eggs completely dead, no evidence of their actual origin . . . which isn’t all that appetizing, if you think about it. Og not eat that. It come from bird’s asshole. Cloaca. Same difference. An asshole by any other name, the poet said, would smell just as sweet.
The sun was still low behind us when we took off down the service road that paralleled 90. Not much traffic, no wind or weather. It would be a great vacation if we were on vacation. Riding alongside quiet bayous, wading birds oblivious to us, stalking breakfast.
But I couldn’t not think.
How deep shit were we in, and with whom?
Besides the Enemy, we were in at least shallow shit with the forces for good in the universe, Agent Underwood and her ilk. Presumably they would understand why we had dropped out of sight.
Kit was reading my mind. “Should we let somebody know where we are?”
“Maybe. Who would be safe?”
“God knows. If they’re tapping phones, they probably have our parents covered, and your agent. But you say they can’t tap a random phone from the 7-Eleven?”
“No way. Not unless they had possession of it first, got at its software.”
“So why did you destroy that one this morning?”
“Just caution.” I was on shaky ground—I’d researched it for High Kill, but that was four or five years ago. “They couldn’t tap the phone, but maybe they could track it. Given the information they could pick up from our parents’ phones.”
“Think so?”
“Well . . . at the very least, they could call us back and as soon as we answer, they know where we are.” Or where the nearest booster antenna is? “Wish I’d taken some engineering courses.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Amazing how little help quantum electrodynamics is in real life.”
We switched places; my turn to lead. I preferred following, since all I had to do then was keep an eye out for her and drop back when she came into view. I was a stronger cyclist, so if I was in front I tended to pull away steadily, especially if there were hills—power up and streak down. On the level like this, I had to keep an eye on the speedometer, keep it below thirteen or fourteen miles per hour.
If it were only about logic, it would be sensible for her to lead all the time. We found out in a couple of hours that that didn’t work; she pushed herself, trying to stay in my comfort range, and was dead tired by noon. Whether that was competitive or accommodating, I wasn’t sure.
It bothered me a little that she was upset by the direction the novel was taking. I wanted to stick to my guns, though. The first stuff I really loved reading was the horror fiction of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century—Stephen King and Peter Straub and those guys. Though it started with Poe, which must often be the case—books your parents let you read because they were in somebody’s canon, even if they were more dire in their own way than horror movies or slasher comix.
When I was in grade school I read to the other kids on weekends and in the summer. There was a construction site at the end of my road; when the workers weren’t there we’d crou
ch in the shadows with a candle and stolen matches, and I would intone Poe in the spookiest voice my short unformed vocal cords could manage. For the love of God, Montressor! In a squeaky voice.
I hadn’t thought about that in years. How much different is what I do now? The stories aren’t spooky, I suppose, except when they are.
If I’d known then that I was going to be a soldier, killing people and getting shot myself, I would have been thrilled. And then you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a small room pecking away at a keyboard. No, Montressor! For the love of God, no!
One of the guys in our outfit—I don’t remember his real name; his radio handle was Hotshot—he was going into the private sector after he separated, hiring out as a mercenary soldier. They were getting about triple our pay, doing stuff that looked less dangerous.
Still, we all agreed that he was fucking crazy. He laughed and agreed, too. But you could tell he really loved the work. His eyes actually gleamed; he smiled when other people looked grim. Loved guns and grenades—and guys, you had to suppose. In a thoroughly manly way.
Though that must be cyclic. One thing Grand-dude despised about the army in his day was the aggressive locker-room masculinity of it. Brutal hazing for anybody who was quiet or intellectual. I guess we had some of that; I took some ribbing for always carrying a book everywhere in Basic and AIT. But in actual combat all of the men were more quiet. More serious and introspective. Repeated exposure to death and suffering plays hell with your sense of humor. Or tilts it in a gallows direction, anyhow. Like putting a lit cigarette in the ruined face of a napalm victim, between his bright teeth. We laughed so hard we almost shit. But I guess you had to be there. It’s not so funny in the recollection.
Cyclic, cultural. When I taught the short workshop in Iowa, none of the kids had heard of the Grand Guignol. But then when I was their age, the image of an audience laughing at nipples being cut off with lawn shears was pretty extreme. They probably do it on soaps now.
Before I finish the book I should spend a couple of days watching daytime television. Kit is shocked by the things that go through Hunter’s mind, and life. But she’s no more mainstream than I am. Maybe they’re eating babies on prime time now.