Cyberpunk (14 page)

woods, the trail wound on. And on. And on. Around .27 miles, I noticed

that my suitcase was getting
real
heavy. That, and Payne and the rest of

the kids were moving a lot faster than I was. I’d already lost sight of the

group; even the Style Statement wimp who was bringing up the rear.

(How he ever managed to move that fast in
those
shoes, I don’t know).

At .56 miles, I started to flash on them all being in on the scam.

Yeah, that was it. Dad had paid them all off. They’d flown me up here

just to ditch me in the woods, and now they were back at the plane,

laughing hysterical.

At 1.12 miles, I came out of the woods and into The Academy.

The basic layout was a bunch of long, low, prefab buildings lining

the sides of a big rectangular field. The forest came right up to my end

of the field; at the other end they’d stacked a mess of the prefabs to

make a vaguely high-schoolish looking building. There was also a sort

of reviewing stand or something out in front of the big building, with

two flagpoles, a Canadian flag, and a U.S. flag even bigger than the one

at Perkins. Something bothered me about that, and I kept looking at

those two flags until I traced it down.

The flags were the only splash of bright color in the whole scene.

The sky was a kind of a washed out pale blue, with the occasional fluffy

white cloud scattered around. The woods were a lush, deep, mottled

green, tall pine trees stretching on forever. The underbrush came right

up to the edge of the Academy, like a thick, dark green wall. The grass

on the field was cropped short and sunburned a greenish-tan; the

buildings were green, the reviewing stand was green, every damn rock

and garbage can was painted green. There must have been two hundred

guys around the buildings or out on the field, and every single fritzin’

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one of them was dressed head-to-toe in green!

Except for two electric blue mohawks at the tail end of a line going

into a large, low building. I walked over and rejoined my group.

Step by step, we filed slow into the building. The McPunk who’d

done all the laughing was still in Sputter ‘n’ Snicker mode so he wasn’t

much use, but after awhile I got the other one talking. Turned out his

name was Scott Nordstrom, and he was from Iowa or Illinois or

someplace with an I like that.

“How’d you wind up here?” I asked him. He ejected the CD from

his boombox and handed it to me.
Angina Pectoris:
The bimbette who’d

made the tatterblouse famous. I’d never thought much of her music, but

Lisa really grooved on the image. “So?”

Scott shrugged. “My folks are like, Springsteen dweebs, y’know? I

mean, Big Time. Souvenir decanters, paintings on black velvet, the

whole bit. Like we even went to Asbury Park for our vacation last year.

Christ, it was a pilgrimage.”

“So?”

“So we mixed it up the other night, y’know? I’m listening to

Diamonds from the Veldt
, and they start getting on my jammy about how

Angie is so yoko, total trash, and all the rest of that metal, y’know? Then

they go into the usual spew about how I should be listening to some

Genuine Boss and getting in sync with the working classes.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said. I’d lucked out. My olders had never had it

that bad. They’d just collected every version of
Born to Run
ever

recorded.

Scott pointed to the CD label. “So I program my boombox to be

playing track #3 ninety-nine times in a row. Then I crank it to def

volume, lock it in their bedroom closet with all the sweetleaf plants, and

leave the house.” He smiled. “I take the closet key with me.”

I looked at the disk. Track #3 was,
Brucie B Dead (And I Glad He

Gone)
. I handed the CD back to Scott. “No sense of humor, huh?”

Scott shrugged. “I expected them to get messed, y’know, but they

smoked their voice coils! I was hanging out in front of Mickey D’s with

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my homeboys when eight sides of bacon rolled up in their stymobiles,

and we all wound up spending the night in the drooler’s lockup. The

boys got out the next morning, but my dad refused to take the call. Max

dweeb!”

Scott calmed down. “It took the bacon a week to get my folks to

admit they
were
my folks, and by that time Dad’d jammed through the

academy admit. I went straight from Vagrant Heaven to the airport, to

some private slammer in Seattle. My luggage caught up with me there.

My folks sent along some clothes, my skateboard, my boombox.” Scott

took the Angie Pectoris disk back from me. “And
one
CD.”

I started to mumble something sympathetic, but he threw me an

interrupt.

“You want to know what’s
really
yoko?” Scott blurted. “Listen!” He

cranked up the boombox’s volume control and started spinning through

the FM dial. “Zippo, man. Flat nothing!” He shut the boombox off. “I

don’t know what state Canada is in, but we are a zillion miles from

anywhere
I
want to be.” By this time we’d shuffled up to the door of the

shed. Scott turned to step inside.

“The Von Schlager Military Academy,” he grumbled. “Hah! They

should call it Absolute Fuggin’ Nowhere.”

A little flag went up in my head. “Break! A nano back you said—

Scott, you
know
something about this place?”

He turned back to me, surprised. “Don’t—? Uh, sure. Like you

never heard of the Von Schlager Military Academy?” I shook my head.

“Oh, bummer. Look, dude, this place is def bad. I don’t mean ‘baaad,’ I

mean
bad
. I mean, the Fundies don’t send their kids here, ‘cause they

don’t like the way they think when they get out. Even the
Posse
don’t

send their kids here.” A look of big concern took hold of Scott’s face.

He pointed to himself. “It’s like, I’m not worried about myself, ‘cause I

am so together, y’know? But if you’re going into this cold blind ... ,” he

shook his head and frowned.

I grabbed his sleeve. “Scott, you gotta tell me—”

“Will you two wimps kindly get your candy asses in here?”

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Somebody grabbed hold of Scott’s other arm and dragged him inside. I

got pulled along in the cavitation.

The room was small, windowless, and dusty hot airless. Four big

kids, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, were standing just inside the

door. One grabbed Scott’s suitcase as he came in and ran with it out the

door on the other side of the room. Another grabbed Scott’s boombox

and threw it on a folding table, while a third started going over Scott’s

body with an airport detex. The fourth one—a big, red-haired guy with a

face like a pepperoni pizza—just stood back and looked mean.

“Hey dudes,” Scott said, as boombox batteries went rolling all over

the floor, “this is not cool.”

Nobody answered. The guy who’d taken the boombox pulled out a

screwdriver and started cracking open the case.

“Hey, man! You’re wrecking my tunes machine!” Scott started to

move, but Pizza Face stepped forward.

“‘Hey, man!’,” Pizza Face said, on maximum mock. “We won’t

break your ‘tunes machine’.” He smiled, nasty, and added, “We let your

bunkies do that.”

“Relax,” the guy with the screwdriver said, a little friendlier. “I’m

just checking for contraband.”

“Riiight!” Scott said, all smiles. “ContraBand. I heard of them; salsa

group out of Miami, right?” Nobody smiled.

“Well, he’s clean for metal,” the guy with the detex said, “but the

sniffer’s picking up something.” He waved the loop around Scott a few

more times, then announced, “
D
-Lysergic. Right front pants pocket.”

Scott never had time to react. Neat and businesslike, the two

inspectors dropped their tools and pinned his arms, while Pizza Face

reached into Scott’s pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. “Hey dude,”

Scott said, “if you needed to blow your nose, you just hadda ask.”

Pizza Face whipped out this enormous thing that looked like a cross

between a Bowie Knife and a ripsaw and split the kerchief along one

seam. The kerchief turned out to be made of two sheets of thin fabric,

with a thick layer of soft white paper in between. “Oh, crud,” Scott said,

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quiet. Pizza Face sheathed the knife, pulled a plastic lighter out of his

shirt pocket, and fired it up. When Scott realized what was happening,

he made one more desperate lunge to break free. They had him solid.

Fighting was getting nowhere, so Scott tried talking. “Hey look,

dude. That’s five hundred dollars worth of really def blotter there. Let

me go and I’ll have my homeboys put some maximum ‘roids in the next

load. You look like a dude who’d appreciate some really fine ‘roids.”

Slowly, Pizza Face brought the lighter to the paper. He was enjoying

this.

“No, really, I’ll get you top drawer shit,” Scott said. “Make you feel

like Rambo.”

Pizza Face touched the flame to the edge of the blotter.

Scott started to cry. “C’mon, dude! I traded my
Casio
for that!”

Pizza Face smiled at him. “Toughski shitski. From now on, you go

straightedge.
Everybody
here goes straightedge.” The flames enveloped

the blotter. Scott just stood there, watching and whimpering, until it was

all gone.

They let go of him, and the guy with the detex made one more pass.

“Clean,” he announced. The other guy collected all the pieces of the

boombox and handed them over, and they pushed Scott through the door

at the other end of the room.

Pizza Face turned around, smiling. “And now for
you
.”

Don’t misunderstand; I was still in orientation mode, looking sharp

for an escape hatch, and not at all interested in being cooperative. Only,

this didn’t seem like a good place to
prove
it, y’know? When Pizza Face

moved forward I stood total still, raised my hands slow. The baggage

guy came back into the room and ran off with Mom’s suitcase. Pizza

Face took a step back and let the other two guys start working me over

with the detex. Honest, I was trying my best to ride out the flow!

Until the detex beeped as it went over the inside pocket holding my

Starfire, and the scanners dropped their tools and pinned my arms to my

sides.

Maybe it was ‘cause I was fierce hungry. Maybe it was ‘cause I was

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burned-out tired. Maybe it was ‘cause I had this horrible flash forward

of ham-hands with the screwdriver trying to take apart my Starfire, or

maybe it was ‘cause I’d spent most of the last 24 hours getting my arms

pinned by various kinds of gestapo and I was just real tired of being

grabbed like that. Anyway, Pizza Face came swaggering over, saying,

“Let’s see what he’s got, shall we?,” and reaching for my jumpsuit