Paradigm (16 page)

“Right,” he said, removing them and glancing at Phyllida. “Thanks for your help.”

He turned to go, but a slender hand pulled him back.

“Hey, where d’you think you’re going? Hit me.”

“What? No.”

“This has to look convincing. Hit me.”

“I’m not going to hit you, okay?”

“Wuss,” she hissed. “Tie me up, then.”

Sam rolled his eyes and looked around for something to use. There was a coil of greasy-looking rope on one of the shelves. He got it, put the box down and pointed toward a broken swivel-chair.

“Sit over there.”

“Isn’t there anything else? That rope’s dirty.”

“No, there isn’t, and I don’t care. I’m supposed to be a desperate man tying up a hostage. So sit.”

Phyllida sighed and stomped over to the chair.

“Why are you doing this, anyway?” asked Sam as he bound her hands to the back of the chair. “I thought you worked for Bast?”

“I work for me,” said Phyllida. “I’m not first families. Things go wrong, I ain’t got no rich daddy to go crying back to. I was born in the outlands. Everything I’ve got I worked for.”

“Including the mayor?”

“Especially the mayor. If that’s not work, I’d like to know what is. That’s too tight!”

“Sorry.” Sam loosened the knot.

“People look at women like me and they see a gold-digger, which is true. But they also see stupid, which isn’t. The way things look now, Bast is going to get tired of pretending Longford’s in charge and just take over the whole city, in which case it would be best for me if she sees me as an ally. On the other hand, things can change on a dime, so I need to keep all my options open.”

Sam stood up.

“Seems smart. Should I gag you?”

“You are not putting some filthy rag in my mouth!”

“I don’t see how you could stop me,” he grinned. “How do I open the gate?”

“Keys. Smallest one should work.”

“Right,” he picked up her keys and the box. “Well, like I said, thanks. And good luck.”

“You too, kid.”

Sam made his way over to the gate and inserted Phyllida’s key. There was a pause, then a rasp and the groaning of metal-on-metal as it slowly slid back into a pocket in the wall. He ran to the nearest car, found the right key and turned the ignition. The engine coughed and gasped a couple of times, but eventually fired up.

“Yes!”

He threw it into gear and drove out into the yellow daylight, speeding through the streets as fast as he could get the old rust-bucket to go.

He opened the window. It felt good to be free, to see the sky unfettered by skyscrapers, and to feel the wind in his face. But the feeling wasn’t quite the same as it had been before. This time there was a dark hole deep inside him, full of sorrow and guilt.

The last time he’d done this drive, Nathan had been with him. In the months they’d traveled together, they had argued and disagreed more than they’d got along, but Sam couldn’t bear the thought of his friend alone in that cell. He tried to imagine what it had been like for him, and wondered what was worse—facing death alone or believing that you’d been abandoned by the one person who was supposed to look out for you.

He shook his head sharply as he took the turn up the hill, as if that simple act could drive the blackness out of his mind. It didn’t, but he soon had something else to think about as the temperature gauge in the old police car suddenly began to climb.

“Great,”
he thought. “
That’s all I need.”

He pulled over once and let it cool a little, but as soon as he set off again the needle soared into the red. It limped along for a while, before he let it coast to the side of the road and started to walk. He reckoned he was more than two thirds of the way up the road to the old observatory, but soon regretted the decision to leave the car. The sunlight that had made the day so inviting when he’d finally left Century City, beat down on the hillside like a laser, burning the cracked asphalt, which bounced the heat back up in smoldering waves. Sam took off his coat and vest, but it didn’t do much good. By the time the top of the remaining observatory dome came into view, his face was dripping with sweat and the twin burdens of box and wool had taken on the proportions of some Sisyphean boulder.

Still, if he could see the dome it meant he was almost there. He put his head down and slogged up the last hundred yards. There it was! The glint of red—the old GTO.

And then he froze. The driver’s door was ajar and the hood was open. Someone was messing with his car!

He dropped the box and rummaged through the pockets of the coat as he ran.

“Get away from the car!” he yelled, stopping a few feet away and pointing the gun.

The would-be thief made some sort of muffled response. Sam took another step forward.

“I said, get away from the fucking car! I’ve got a gun and I
will
use it!”

“Sam?” The voice was still muffled by the hood, but it sounded familiar…and surprised.

“I said—”

“I heard you, you moron! It’s me!”

Sam felt the grin spread across his face as the owner of the voice stepped out from in front of the car.

It was Nathan.

Chapter 14

“W
hat are you…
? I thought you were dead!”

“Yeah, well, I heard you were…y’know…off your head or something.”

“I’m fine.”

“Me too.”

They stared at each other for a moment. Sam wondered how on earth Nathan had managed to get out of the cell in City Hall, then out of Century City, through the outlands and back up the hill to the observatory without apparently breaking a sweat, but there were more pressing concerns.

“We’d better get out of here.”

“Right.” Nathan slammed the hood and threw the keys to Sam. “You drive.”

“Where’d you get—”

“They were under the car. You must’ve dropped ‘em when you got that kicking.”

Sam threw his coat and the box into the back of the car and settled in behind the wheel. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, inhaling that old car smell—the heady mix of oil, gas and whatever was rotting on the floor behind the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?”

He opened his eyes and grinned at Nathan, then inserted the cigar lighter, closed his eyes and turned the key. There had been a few moments in the last few days when he’d thought he’d never hear that sound again—the throaty animal roar of the old engine as it started up and settled into its noisy idle. He put it into gear and eased it away from the observatory and down the hill.

“Where are we going?” asked Nathan.

“As far away from California as we can get.”

“Good plan.”

The car rolled through the outlands and away across the arid plains that had once been home to so many but were now little more than dust, then up the rise past the customs and immigration outpost and off into the Wilds. Sam pointed the car east and retrieved a tootsie-pop from under the seat.

“So,” he said, “How’d you do it?”

“Get away?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t me.”

“Vincent?” Sam glanced at Nathan. He didn’t doubt that Vincent was capable of breaking out of a rickety jail like the one in city hall, but he couldn’t believe he’d help Nathan. Last Sam saw, Vincent was getting some genuine jollies making Nathan squirm.

“No. He got hauled off for his flogging around noon yesterday. It was Alma.”

“Alma?!”

“She said Bast had fed you some poison or something and you wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You shoulda seen her, Sam, it was beautiful. She made no more noise than a cat. Slipped in, right past the cops on watch, opened my cell and next thing I know, I’m on the back of her bike heading out of town.”

Sam was stunned. The more he found out about Alma, the less he understood her. She’d virtually admitted that she wasn’t working for Bast, which made her some kind of spy. But who for? And why?

Well, actually, he could think of lots of reasons why someone might want inside information on Bast’s organization, but not why they’d send a sixteen year old girl to get it. And what was she thinking anyway? Like her situation wasn’t dangerous enough without waltzing around breaking people out of jail. He bit down on the tootsie-pop until it cracked—he’d gone from impressed to angry in the space of moments.

“So what’s your story?” asked Nathan.

Sam told him most of what had happened, leaving out the part about how he opened the safe and exactly why the fish toxin hadn’t worked. He needed more time to think about those. He did mention the locule thing, though…and the fact that Drake had used the same word.

“What does it mean?”

“Beats me. It’s something to do with the plex, though.”

“With Mutha?”

“I’m not sure. Bast asked me if I could hear the plex. I said I couldn’t.”

“But you can?”

Sam tossed the tootsie-pop stick into the back seat. This was it. He was going to say it out loud. From now on it would be real.

“Sam…can you hear the plex?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I hear…I think I hear voices. I mean, sometimes it’s just a buzzing, but…”

“Voices?”

“Yeah.” Sam was beginning to wish he’d kept this to himself too. “It depends. It seems to be worse when I’m near stronger datapoints, like the digivends or Bast’s central control.”

“Sam, voices isn’t good. I met a guy who heard voices once. He ended up killing his whole family.”

“They’re not like that. They’re not telling me to do stuff. They’re just…talking.”

“And you think it’s Mutha?”

“No. I don’t know what it is…It’s like traffic, y’know? Like I’m listening in to other people’s conversations.”

“But it’s something to do with whatever a locule is?”

“I guess.”

Sam tried to ignore Nathan’s eyes, which were staring at him as if he’d just announced that he had a second head in the middle of his back. He decided to concentrate on the road instead, which was one of the worst preserved that he’d seen, with massive potholes and large sections where the asphalt had completely disappeared, leaving little more than a gravel track.

The car jounced across the landscape as it slowly changed from grassy scrubland to rolling hills and then to the craggy mountains that ringed the Los Angeles basin. Sam rolled down his window and let the wind blow in his face. It felt good to be out and even better to be far away from people. It was people that were the problem. They had caused the four collapses and brought the planet to the brink of destruction, yet still they plotted and schemed and strained to find ways to have one over on the other guy.

His parents had been right to stay away from the city states. It was better to be out here, eking a living however you could, than back in so-called civilization. At least in the Wilds you could make your own future. In the cities everyone, even people like Bast and the mayor, were cogs in someone else’s machine, grinding through the days in return for a few creature comforts and a roof over their heads.

Once the car reached the crest of the mountains, the country started to change. Trees and grass were replaced with parched earth and tumbleweed, and the air became hot and oppressive.

“Holy crap!”

Sam had never seen anything like it. Stretched out below them along both sides of the old highway and up into the hills on either side were huge rusted metal poles. It was like a forest after a fire, when nothing remains but the trunks of once-great trees.

“Wow,” said Nathan. “A wind farm.”

“A really big one,” muttered Sam.

He let the car coast most of the way to the valley floor and then drove slowly through the ranks of turbines. He’d seen plenty of wind farms before, of course, but nothing quite on this scale. His dad had told him that most of them managed to keep functioning for years after the fourth collapse, but eventually the lack of maintenance and the failure of the chips embedded within them had led to their wholesale destruction. The main culprit was the wind itself, whipping through the hills at over a hundred miles an hour. The turbines had been designed to shut down in high winds, but with that ability gone, the storms were able to spin them faster and faster until the housings and blades tore themselves from the poles and ricocheted through their neighbors scything them down as they went.

There were places like this all over the Wilds. Long abandoned reminders of just how many people there had once been. Sam had always wondered what it would be like to live then, with people everywhere and cities sprawling without walls.

“So…how did you open the safe?”

Sam glanced at Nathan. He’d hoped the question wouldn’t occur to him. Particularly considering how well he’d taken the “voices” thing.

“It wasn’t locked,” he mumbled, unconvincingly.

“Bullshit. How did you open it?” Nathan’s voice suddenly had an edge to it, a hardness that hadn’t been there before.

“ I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. How did you do it?”

“Nathan, I don’t know. I just…it’s all new…that is…” His voice trailed off. The fact was, he didn’t know what to say, how to make it seem reasonable and not as scary as it really was.

For a while neither of them spoke and Sam just drove along the dilapidated highway, past rank upon rank of the rusting white poles, hoping that Nathan would be able to drop the whole thing. None of it mattered. They were away from the city, away from all those datapoints that made his head scream, away from the things that made him seem different. Here in the Wilds they could just go back to what they’d been doing before Nathan had his stupid light bulb idea.

He knew it wasn’t possible, but a part of him still hoped.

“So the safe was locked. Then what?”

Sam sighed. Once he’d got an idea in his head, Nathan was like a dog with a rabbit.

“Well?”

There was that tone again, that steely bite to the question that made it seem more like an accusation. Sam knew he’d have to answer, but how could he explain something even he couldn’t begin to understand?

“I touched it,” he said. “That’s all. Just touched it…and there was a feeling…a prickling, kind of. And then I lay my hand on it, flat…y’know?”

“Uh huh.”

“And I could see it, inside. No…that’s not right…I couldn’t see it, well I could, but…it was more like I
was
it. I was the lock and I could move it as easily as I can move my legs or hold a glass of water.”

“And it had never happened before?”

“No, never. Nothing like that. Um…except for the pulse.”

“Wait…the pulse? The electro-magnetic pulse in the clearing? That was you?”

“Yeah. My dad taught me to do it. He said it might come in handy.”

“Your dad? Could he do it, too?”

“I guess. I mean he couldn’t have taught me if he didn’t know how to do it himself, right?”

Nathan looked at him long and hard, then sat back in his seat and gazed out of the window as the car ate up the miles. That was worse than the questions.

“So what d’you think?” asked Sam, when he couldn’t stand the oppressive quiet any longer.

“I don’t know.”

They drove on in silence, stopped for gas in Blythe and then on into Arizona. The old “welcome” sign still stood at the border, battered and bent, but it was enough to make Sam feel as if a weight had been lifted. By dusk they had reached the tiny desert town of Quartzsite, which seemed to be home to about twenty people, clustered in small dwellings around an ancient general store.

“I’ll see if I can get some food,” said Sam. “Why don’t you ask around and find out if there’s a good place to set up camp.”

“Sure.”

Sam took an immersion blender and a couple of pocket generators from the trunk and sauntered into the store.

It was like most general stores in the Wilds, long and narrow with rows of shelves holding very little and an ancient fridge holding even less. Sam selected some long-expired cans of food, a couple of large bottles of water, a bag of oats and some honey. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with the oats, but they were there so he thought he may as well buy them.

The guy behind the counter eyed him suspiciously.

“What d’you plan on paying with, kid?” he rasped.

“This,” said Sam, placing one of the pocket generators on the counter.

“What is it?”

“It’s a pocket generator.” Sam plugged the immersion blender into it and fired it up.

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“Pretty cool, huh?”

Sam unplugged the generator and handed it over. The storekeeper turned it over in his hands as if he couldn’t believe it.

“How does it—?”

“Solar,” said Sam. “But not the old cells. My friend made special cells. They store up to thirty times the juice.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the man again.

“So are we good?”

“Sure. Man, this is amazing.”

Sam was about to offer him the other one in return for an old sleeping bag he’d seen near the back of the store, when the door suddenly burst open.

“Sam!”

It was Nathan, and he looked terrified.

“Sam, it’s them! We have to go!”

“Who?”

“Come on!”

Nathan scooped up the purchases and hustled Sam out into the hot desert evening. Sam stumbled briefly, then looked up and saw them: two ancient trailers, a dilapidated late twentieth century RV, and three pickup trucks. Rovers.

“I thought you said they never left California.”

“They don’t. Not normally.”

“Then why—?”

“Who gives a crap! Just get in the car!”

Sam rolled his eyes. He still had no idea why Nathan was so terrified of the Rovers. Sure, they kinda looked like they veered towards the shady side, but they’d shown no sign of being genuinely dangerous.