One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (28 page)

Bruegel just nodded.

“How do you know this shortcut, Slue?” Hieronymus asked from the back seat.

Slue kept her face pointed ahead, and Hieronymus had to struggle to hear her as she made no effort to raise her voice for him.

“Pete showed me this shortcut. We went to LEM Zone One about ten days ago to go see one of his favorite tellball teams. We were late, the traffic was bad, so we took his Prokong-90 through the same shortcut.”

As the Pacer inched forward, an opening appeared between cars and Bruegel steered them all directly onto the ramp at Exit 94. They turned onto Sheng Avenue, which was completely empty.

“I’m not sure this jalopy will be as fast as Pete’s Prokong-90,” Hieronymus muttered.

“Don’t worry,” replied Slue with a weary sigh, completely uninterested in the upcoming activities of the evening.

Sheng Avenue led through a dark and deserted industrial wasteland. Closed-down factories. Gray, low buildings with smokestacks. One old brick structure in the distance attracted a massive swarm of hummingbirds—thousands and thousands of them all flew in through a single window, then out through an abandoned doorway as if forming a single fuzzy dragon—colorless, white-gray in the distance, smoke-like, directionless. They passed a fence with incomprehensible graffiti sprayed on it. A bizarre odor permeated the air. Between two wrecked cars, a man appeared to be cooking something in a barrel. Flames lapped up, casting an orange glow in the dilapidated buildings that surrounded him. A white-furred moose drank from a filthy puddle. It looked up as the Pacer sped by. The beast had a bell around its neck, and a lowtoned clang was heard as the teenagers left it behind. They passed a car stripped of its many body parts—a shell of a vehicle, a Saturn-shaped machine no longer up on the edge of its wheel, but on its side, resembling a rusted version of the ringed planet that was more familiar—sitting among tall weeds, two or three filthy plastic bags futtering in the wind, caught on the destroyed frame.

They continued along this route for several minutes. They passed the seaweed farm and made a right turn into the open countryside.

Five minutes later there was no more neon, no roads, no sign of buildings, and certainly no other cars. Humanity was nowhere in sight, and all they could hear was the crunching of the dirt under the revolving rubber wheel of the Pacer.

Bruegel stepped on the pedal, and soon they were speeding. They were alone, and far up ahead loomed the silhouettes of distant mountains.

Hieronymus held his head between his hands, so angry about the way things had turned out, so hopelessly frustrated and furious at his friends. He felt like screaming. Of course, it was his own fault. He had to involve them. He could not go by himself—he had to ask for a dumb favor from his dumb friend who would ask for an even dumber favor in return, and this meant getting Slue, of all people, in on this ridiculous project of trying to get back to LEM Zone One by eight o’clock. So stupid. A circle of stupidity.

He punched the upholstery of the car’s back seat. He grabbed his own gut and gritted his teeth, but this was a waste of time. There was nothing, nothing, not a damn thing he could do about the simple harsh fact that they were late, and they were lost.

Of course, he knew that Windows Falling On Sparrows had left the Moon. He should have accepted it, but the uncertainty had driven him completely mad. He did not want to believe that the fourth primary color allowed him to see past the constraints of time. He did not want to believe in what he was capable of seeing. He wanted to be moderately normal. Just a little normal.

He sat in the Pacer, fuming at his bad and stupid luck, unaware that he was only half right. The ship that carried Windows Falling On Sparrows really did ascend into the Lunar sky, exactly where he saw it would. It did point toward the Earth. What he failed to understand was that everything pointed toward Earth. She went up. She circled the Moon. She returned, and he had no way of knowing.

“I know which eye of yours is real, and which one is false,” Windows Falling On Sparrows said to the doll-like man who sat next to her.

“How can you tell?” he asked very quietly.

“There are tears in the real one.”

“Indeed.”

“We are not going back to Earth, are we?”

“We are not. We are going to Aldrin City. I lied. It was a ploy. It was a trick so you would admit that you did meet a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. We are going to hold you there, at our station, and keep you here on the Moon until we catch him. The sooner you tell us, I don’t know, his name for example, the sooner we will reunite you with your mother and father, who are being kept under house arrest at their hotel. You might even make that flight out to your vacation resort after all.”

“My mother hates that hotel.”

“Indeed she does. Most unfortunate.”

“And the prospect of leaving the Moon for Chez Cracken San, I must be honest, is not too appealing.”

“It sounds like a dreadful place.”

“So why would I be in any hurry to help you locate the boy I met last night?”

“Beats me.”

“You don’t care if I tell you his name.”

“I don’t care. I’ll find him.”

“You’re a little like that cat tattoo on your hand.”

Lieutenant Schmet said nothing. Belwin announced something about landing. Windows Falling On Sparrows looked out the window by her seat. She thought of Hieronymus as the neon Lunar world grew, its bright colors and spiderwebbed highways looming below. I will see you again. She smiled.

Everyone at the station was very kind. Schmet did not even put her handcuffs back on, and as she was processed, Belwin talked to her about such subjects as consciousness and inanimate material and Lunar cinema. Lieutenant Schmet took great pains to make sure that her detention cell was very comfortable, and he paid for the delivery of dinner from one of Aldrin City’s finest restaurants. He forbid all personnel and all officers from the Ocular Investigative Division to interrogate her. She was not to mix with any other prisoners. No one was to know she was there, including her parents, and certainly not the Earth embassy. He knew that if he put his nastiest instincts forward and began a serious interrogation, he would have the name of the creature that looked at her without the goggles, but something prevented him. She was already so dear to him he couldn’t stand the thought of making her sad in the slightest. She apologized to him. That made her a golden fortress he refused to breech.

Schmet went home. He climbed into bed after taking the usual medications. He had the usual terrifying nightmares. He got up early the next morning and went to his office and spent the entire day calling scores of families with One Hundred Percent Lunar Boys who lived within a reasonable distance of where the incident occurred. Eventually, he came upon a name he recognized. From two years ago. The fish that got away.

Hieronymus opened his window, stuck his head out, and looked over at the Earth, which was no longer high in the sky but extremely close to the horizon. The distant silhouette of a cloud of hummingbirds drifted in front of it.

The unforeseen problem of driving in the open countryside of the Moon is that any vehicle can easily start driving in circles. Or end up driving in the opposite direction from which it intended to go. Especially if one is driving a car with a faulty navigation system, as was the case with Bruegel’s Pacer.

Bruegel and Slue were arguing.

“You stupid doofus!” Slue yelled at her date. “You mean to tell me that your car does not have a navigation system?”

“I do have one. But it’s broken. Anyway, I never needed one before.”

“Have you ever driven before?”

“Yes, I told you already that I have my license—”

“I don’t believe you!”

“Fine, don’t believe me. I don’t care what you think. Especially now that your directions have turned out to be such utter klud—”

“My directions are fine. I took this route a week and a half ago in Pete’s Prokong-90, and we got there in under an hour! But with you and this pile of skuk you call a car—do you realize that we have been driving for two and a half hours?”

Bruegel was silent for a few moments, then he retorted with what he thought to be a killer line, one that would put this fresh little fox right back in her fresh little cage.

“Yeah, well, don’t you go bragging about Pete right now. Pete is at this very moment in a motel with Clellen and you can be sure that they are fixing the steampipe to go bursting in a pigbarn with yo-yos going up and down, up and down…”

“What are you, completely retarded? What kind of a sentence is that?”

“Your friend Pete and his Prokong-90, he…he’s…doing the icebox firehouse maranga-style with that bag o’ box Clellen!”

“What kind of language is that? What are you, sick? Insane?”

“You think Pete is so hot, how come you’re not in a motel with him in Telstar like Clellen? You’re just a fake fox, you’re just a rusty nail, princess! Pete’s with Clellen because she gives out the showstopper, unlike you, you moldy old pig!”

“I should smack you! How dare you! You sick boy! I don’t give a damn what Pete and your weird friend Clellen are doing!”

Hieronymus brought his head back into the car.

“Let’s go home,” he said with extreme resignation in his voice. His eyes were still wide open and scanning the horizon for a glimpse of neon.

“Go home?” Slue declared as she glared back at Hieronymus. “Your genius navigator here has no idea where we are. How are we going to go home?”

“I say we skip LEM Zone One and head directly over to the Dog Shelter,” Bruegel announced, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that he had no idea where he was driving. “One of you can call the Earth girl and tell her to meet us there.”

A lull in the heated conversation quickly followed. Slue was aware that Hieronymus had a deep hatred of any kind of mobile communication device. One look at Bruegel, and she knew he probably didn’t bother with such things as well. As for herself, she simply left her mobile-screen and her watch phone on the kitchen counter by accident.

“Does this car have a phone?” she asked the driver.

He glanced over at her as if she had asked the most absurd thing imaginable. ”Phone? Absolutely not. That’s dangerous. You can’t talk on the phone while driving. People think they can do that, but they can’t…”

Slue cut him off.

“Great! No way to call anyone!”

“That’s not our fault, Slue.” Hieronymus sighed. “You always carry around phones and screens and communication watches. If you forgot to bring it, well, don’t blame us…”

“I don’t blame you and I don’t blame your moronic friend either, Hieronymus. I blame myself for even agreeing to go on this utterly stupid trip in the first place!”

“You should blame Pete,” Bruegel added in all honesty. “If Pete did not cancel on you so he can go…well, you know, with Clellen…then you’d be having a blast at Trapezoids Crunchdown instead of hanging out with us in my mother’s Pacer…”

“Just get me to any train station. First sign of civilization, just stop there and drop me off. I can walk from there.”

“Maybe you can walk from here?”

“Maybe you can shut your mouth and drive.”

“I am driving—unfortunately, I followed your directions.”

“My directions are sound—it is your bad driving and your car’s lack of proper navigation equipment that have gotten us lost.”

“Sorry,
Sluuuue
,” Bruegel retorted, dragging out her name, trying to make a mockery of it, but only sounding like a seven year old. “Sorry I don’t drive a
Proooookong Ninetyyyyyy…
”

“Hieronymus,” Slue said as she ignored the latest infantile burst from Bruegel and turned to face the dejected fellow in the back. “Where are we. Where are we?”

“Well, Slue, it appears that we’re just jackassing around the countryside in a crummy Pacer like three losers with nowhere to go.”

“Jackassing?”

“Yeah. Jackassing all the way out there, just to turn around and jackass all the way back.”

Their conversation on jackassing was about to go into greater depths of detail until they all heard it—a clanky metallic pop. It came from the engine, directly below the passenger compartment.

“Oh!” shouted Bruegel. “What in the name of the holy toilet was that?”

Slue covered her face in her hands as the car slowed down and then came to a complete dead and lifeless stop in the horrifying middle of absolute nowhere.

The silence was overpowering. The red sky appeared a little darker than normal. They were on a fat and endless plain. Mountains in the distance, on all sides. The only movement came from the distant hummingbirds moving in their gigantic clouds so far away. The ground was just gray dirt. Clumps of grass periodically spotted the bleakness. Not a single Mega Cruiser could be spotted. The Earth hung closer to the horizon, almost touching the world’s end. Slue knew what this meant, but she was too hesitant to point this dreadful conclusion out to the others. She stared straight ahead, and as her ears became accustomed to the quiet, she was certain she heard the fragile hiss of steam escaping from somewhere.