Cyberpunk (13 page)

bunch of kids who’d not only seen
Managua Blood
, they’d
identified

with that pathetic slab of revisionist history!

Just back of the wing there was an open seat on my left, next to a

freckled kid with a semi-friendly expression on his face and the name

“D.K. Luger” stenciled on his shirt. I wrestled my suitcase up to the

baggage rack, wedged it in between all the camo duffel bags, flopped

into the seat. The freckled kid scanned me over a few seconds, then

offered a handshake and drawled, “Hi, I’m -- “

“Don’t talk to him, Deke,” someone behind us hissed. “He’s an

Involuntary.” D.K. Luger got embarassed, pulled his hand back, and

turned to look out the window.

“Aw, c’mon Deke,” I said. (Actual, I whined it, just like Georgie.)

“Ten hours ago my olders crashed me and stuck me on a lear. Okay, so

I’m an Involuntary. Can you cancel that for a nano and—”

“Cryminelly,” the kid behind us grumbled. “We got us’ns a

cyberpunk
.”

I cancelled the hot retort and tried again in Ultra CleanSpeak.

“Deke, could you please tell me where we’re going?”

“To Pleasure Island!” Payne shouted in my left ear, damn near

startling me into the luggage rack. “Where we turn naughty boys like

you into jackasses!” I uncringed my neck again and turned around to

look at him. For a flash, Payne’s face softened a little, maybe. “And

once in a great while we turn jackasses into decent men,” he added.

The softness flashed off. He spun around, walked up to the front of

the plane, went into the pilot’s compartment. A second later, one of the

engines made a
chunk!
and a whine and started turning over. Soon’s it

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caught, they fired up the other. Two minutes later we were rattling out

onto the runway, and five minutes after that we were groaning into the

air.

When we finished climbing and banking the sun was shining straight

in Deke’s window. Okay, we were going north. The sunlight bugged

Deke, so he closed the shade, pulled an analog book out of the camo

gym bag (also stenciled D.K. Luger) beneath his seat, and buried his

freckled nose in reading. I tried to look around for somebody else to talk

to, but nobody’d look me in the face. By and by, my stomach started

reminding me that it was expecting breakfast.

Great. I was hungry. I was tired. I was cold, now that Deke had

closed the shade. And I was flying into Canada with a bunch of

depressed punks and twenty junior jarheads who were treating me like a

total zero.

I didn’t have a clear idea yet of what I was gonna do to Dad when I

got back, but it was gonna be
good
.

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Chapter 0/ 8

After the bleary eyes wore off, most of the jarheads started to get

real chatty. I managed to tap part-way into a couple of the conversations

going on around me—the engine noise put some garble in everything,

but I caught enough to make sense—and I picked up we were going to

someplace called The Academy. With capital letters. I also learned that,

while none of the kids had actually been There before, a few had friends

or older brothers who’d gone last summer.

I detensioned a little. So it was a summer camp. Not a life sentence.

Further, the story going around was that the friends/ brothers had

had nothing but non-stop fun at The Academy. Just when I started to

think this might be worth an actual look forward, I picked up that fun

meant exercise, drilling, and playing soldier. Jarheads define things

weird, I decided. When the kids in front of me started talking about war

games at The Academy I tried to crack in and tell ‘em all about my

Battle of Peshawar program, but they clammed and pretended not to

hear me.

Okay, if that’s the way they wanted it, I could go into silent mode

for awhile. Their idea of war gaming sounded pretty lame, anyway.

Around 11:0/ 7:0/0/ , Deke lifted the shade again. Then he reached

down and pulled a sandwich out of his bag: Bologna on Wonder—not

something I’d eat, normal—but I was starting to get real concious that

it’d been 17 hours since my last meal, and I’d have eaten a dead mouse

on rye if he’d had one and offered to share it. Never taking his eyes off

his book, Deke unwrapped the sandwich and started to munch it, slow. I

watched him until it was gone. I watched his cheeks pouch out and his

jaw grind; I watched every crumb that fell into the book. I chewed my

nails and tried to get up the nerve to beg half of it off him.

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No, cancel that. I needed to make a friend out of
somebody
on that

plane, and I’d already made Deke squirm once. Pushing myself in D.K.

Luger’s face was not gonna make it any better.
Derzky
was how I needed

to be. I’d be derzky, I’d be smart. I wouldn’t push him. He’d loosen up.

About the time he finished the sandwich, the plane started nosing

down and the wheels groaned into landing position. Still trying to keep

cool, I casual looked around Deke and got a peek out the window. All I

could see was big trees, small lakes, and more trees. No roads, no

houses, no smokestacks; nothing but tall pine trees coming up
fast
. Just

when I was starting to do a little worry about whether this landing was

planned, I saw a bunch of plowed fields flash by the window and then

we set down in a clearing.

Or maybe it was another plowed field. We hit the ground, bounced

hard, hit the ground again. The pilot reversed engines, braking us, and I

kept looking out the window, trying to get some idea of what The

Academy looked like. Still nothing but trees.

When we’d almost stopped rolling, I finally saw some buildings: A

pathetic little shack covered with camo netting, a couple green

corrugated tin sheds that might’ve been hangars. I didn’t get more of a

look, though, ‘cause that was when Payne stuck his face into the

passenger compartment and yelled, “Plane’s on fire! Clear and take

cover!
Now!
”

The jarheads went crazy. I would’ve too, if my brain hadn’t been

running on five-second delay. Sudden, everybody was up and clawing

for their stuff. Deke pulled the gym bag out from under his seat, climbed

over me to get his duffel bag off the overhead rack, knocked my suitcase

down. Missed my head by about two inches. The plane stopped moving;

the propellors stopped turning. Someone popped the front and rear

hatches, and then it registered.

Jesus Mary and Joseph FIRE?
Most of the other kids were already

compressed into two tight jams around the front and rear hatches; looked

like the Ticketron booth the day Stag Preston tickets went on sale.

Someone near me got a bright idea and popped the emergency exit over

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the wing. I hesitated a second, then got a good grip on Mom’s suitcase

and dove through.

Just for laughs, sometime, find yourself a nice big slab of aluminum

and jump on it, face first. They make it look so
easy
on video.

I lost hold of the suitcase, of course; it went sliding down the wing

and I went rolling after it. The suitcase and I flipped off the back edge of

the wing together. It bounced one way and I bounced the other, but

together we put a pretty good dent in the ground. When my headchips

reseated themselves in their sockets, I flagged everybody was running

for the woods like they were being chased by a pack of LowerTown

rollerbladers, so I decided I’d look for the charred remains of the

suitcase later. Stumble-running after the jarheads, totally expecting to

feel a blast of flames behind me at any second, I reached the edge of the

airstrip, closed my eyes, and dove headfirst into the weeds.

Silence.

Incredible,
awesome
silence. I could almost
feel
my ears growing, as

they struggled to grab some audio they recognized. The first sound that

soaked through to my brain was my own heavy breathing.

Then a nervous young whisper or two. Then birds chattering up in

the treetops; a rustle of wind seeping through green leaves. Some kind of

insect buzzing by, slow, droning, and erratic, like it was flying drunk.

A minute or two more and I realized the plane was continuing to not

explode, so I opened my eyes and looked back. Payne had lowered the

boarding ladder, and he and the pilot were taking a nice, leisure stroll

towards the camo net-covered shack. There wasn’t any fire. There

wasn’t even any smoke. I remembered the thing Payne had said back in

Seattle about liking to keep us disoriented, and fed that to the inference

engine in my head. It kicked out the idea that this was going to be one

long
summer. If I didn’t get out.

The pilot went into the shack and started talking to someone. Payne

stayed outside and brayed, “Fall in!” When the jarheads and most of the

punks had trotted over he looked straight at me and shouted, “Are you

waiting for an
invitation
, pissant? Or do you like lying in poison ivy?”

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Poison ivy
? Oh, just fritzing terrific.

Slow, gingerish, trying not to touch one more leaf than I absolute

had to, I started getting up out of the weeds. Payne turned back to the

rest and began barking out orders. “Ten-
shun
! For
mup
! By twos! Rye

face
!” All that kind of military babble stuff. A couple seconds later most

everybody had collected their bags and gone trotting off down a jeep

trail into the woods, except for me and the two McPunks. I was just

standing there, wondering what the Hell I was ‘sposed to do about

poison ivy now that I’d been lying in it, and trying to figure out how

cooperative I felt. The McPunks were staring at the rutted, weedy dirt

trail, and fondling the wheels of their skateboards.

One of them started giggling. The other one got a fierce scowl on his

face and punched the giggler on the shoulder, but that just made him

giggle harder. He kept building up, and building up, until finally he was

laughing and howling like he’d gone full-blown nutzoid. Then he took a

big spinning windup and threw his skateboard off into the trees just as

hard as he could throw it.

The other one stared at him a minute longer, then shrugged, grinned,

and followed suit. Laughing Boy settled down long enough to program

his Casio for a funky marching rhythm, and then the two of them started

off after Payne and the rest.

Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I walked over to the plane,

picked up Mom’s suitcase, reset the mileage counter in my right shoe,

and followed them.

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Chapter 0/ 9

Up and down, twisting and turning through the deep shadowy