The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (40 page)

“There’s a ferry, too?”

“Two of them.”

“We could use them. And what sort of bastards are they?”

“Leprechauns.”

Jon smiled ear to ear.

* * *

A
suffocating cocktail of boredom
, anticipation and claustrophobia had driven Camille as mad as a jar of frogs. Thankfully, a woman entered MacIan’s room and began checking his vitals.

“Doctor?” said Camille.

“Oh, no, I’m not a doctor,” said the woman. “Sorry. But I did build this machine.” She pointed to one of many. “I’m a bio-regenerist. Self-taught, too. We’re helping him grow new tissue. I’ve put in a seeder patch from a pig’s intestine and some stem cells from his own fat — there’s precious little of that — a little cytoplasm from some sea creatures . . . I won’t bore you with the rest.”

Camille looked relieved. “How long will he be like this?”

The woman swiped her notepad. “He’s to be fully awake by six a.m. He’ll get to see the show.”

“The show?”

The woman grinned with anticipation, but Camille stopped her before she could elaborate. “So he’s going to be just like this for the next few hours?”

“He won’t move a muscle. I guarantee it.”

“So I can go out and look around?”

“You should. There’s nothing you can do right now. And let me tell you, he’s recovering like an adolescent. This guy’s breeding stock, my dear. I’ve seen his stats.”

Camille laughed smugly.

“Is he yours?”

Camille was flabbergasted, for two seconds. “Yeah. He’s mine.”

“Lucky woman. He’ll be right as rain. Give it a couple months. Maybe a year, tops.” She swiped her notepad, tossed Camille a smile, and left.

Camille padded around MacIan’s bed, then headed out the door. The lingering aroma of coffee had haunted her since they’d passed through the little town square, and she was sure she could sniff her way there and back.

A steady stream of people hurried past her, going the other way, most wearing painted coveralls and white hats with the upside down martini glass. In minutes, she was searching the town square for the coffee shop, but it was closed. To her surprise, a huge caldron of dark roast with a sign saying
Help Yourself
sat on a café table outside. She did, and it was exquisite.

She took a seat, topped off her cup, and watched the stream of colorful coveralls hurrying through the square. Every pattern, print, optical illusion and color block was represented, and she quickly realized that this convention had an enlivening effect upon the entire place. The cave-gray surroundings were less tedious with all this color on the move. But the decor lacked a certain sophistication she was attached to.

She polished off her coffee and fell in with the surging crowd. When they passed the hospital wing she stepped off and paused for a second. She had to see where they were going. She fell back in as the crowd wound up and through the most primitive part of the habitat she’d seen so far. They were obviously heading into the heart of the mountain and the caverns were growing more voluminous. She found herself gasping for the thin air in the long stretches that went up and up. The passage began to clog, and the crowd slowed to a crawl.

She took a closer look at the hand-colored overalls and was soon taken by a certain autobiographical motif. Nearly a third of the overalls were covered in illustrated stories, presumably biographies of their wearers. Some were expertly drawn and laid out, others were childlike. But themes of want and abandonment were equally clear and sad. Her stomach twisted into a claustrophobic knot.

“Excuse me,” she said, dividing the crowd with the backs of her hands. “Excuse me.” She pointed down the corridor as though she had a mandate to proceed. “Sorry,” she said to those whose toes she stepped on. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

But the crowd grew even thicker as she neared a set of large doors that stood wide open. She wasn’t tall enough to see what was going on, so she redoubled her effort to burrow through the crowd like a hedgehog, which flustered the naturally congenial nerds. Suddenly, a voice called to her, “Camille! Over here.”

A man she remembered from MacIan’s room, his coveralls painted with nautical flags, waved. “Over here.” He pushed his way, red-faced, toward her, shouting, “Camille. Make room. It’s Camille. She’s with the pilot.” A path opened.
That MacIan,
she thought,
he certainly makes an impression.
But she was unprepared for the sight beyond the doors.

The massive jubilant auditorium was a sea of colorful coveralls and white hats. The focus of their cheers was a cadre of players, mostly female, on a stage within a natural amphitheater from which dozens of gargantuan cube screens were projected. The crowd, mostly female, was following the action and responding to events beyond her comprehension.

Only one person on stage appeared to be an adult, and Camille immediately recognized him from the Nobel video — Tuke. His enthusiasm and good humor permeated everything. But what was he doing? And why was everyone so excited?

Her eyes drifted up to the many cube screens hovering above the stage, each with a different feed: a train station, a dance hall, a stadium crammed with dancers and . . . Max and Lily! In an airship.

* * *

A
irship One had taken
off from the Meadowlands parking lot with the winners of the Meadowlands dance-off, several in wheelchairs, just before 5:00 a.m. Lily steadied herself on the back of Mr. Leun’s steel bench. She could see that he had become more intent upon their success than she, or Max, had expected. Max roamed a bit, but kept returning to dust his face on the back of her neck. Suddenly, he remembered something important. “What’s a Tesla Coil?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “There’s a big picture of a guy named Tesla at the Serbian Citizens’ Society Club, back where I come from. But that couldn’t be him.”

Mr. Leun had been biting his tongue, and despite the animosity between him and Max, felt instinctively paternal toward these two; they were still children. He made an unusual hand gesture: left arm straight up and down from the elbow, hand balled into a fist, right hand fingers hovering over the fist and wiggling violently. He made a ghastly buzzing and crackling sound broken with several iterations of “Tesla, Tesla,” pointing his nose toward his pantomime coil, and shouting, “Coil, coil. Electric coil.”

Max and Lily stared blankly at his display.

Mr. Leun shouted louder, as though that might make them understand his broken English. “Tesla Coil. Electricity. AC/DC. You know AC/DC?”

Max’s confusion turned to vinegar. “I hate it when these guys come over here, don’t even learn our language, but they know more than we do.”

Lily glowered at him darkly. Max was forced to acknowledge the absurdity of that insight by laughing it off and mirroring Mr. Leun’s hand-puppet Tesla Coil, complete with sound effects. Lily did the same, and the trio broke down laughing.

Mr. Leun grew quiet, then faced Max, and said, “The dead man in the red coat. Helicopter crash in mountain. He fell out. Accident. Boss say, keep quiet. We clean away everything, leave him. Look like he fall off mountain.”

Max found it difficult to abandon his hate, but he knew Mr. Leun had no reason to lie. He kept his gruff expression, but nodded in acceptance. He looked away only when they tilted up and into a heavy cloud bank.

In early spring, warm air traveling up the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream clashes with cold air falling into the Hudson River Valley out of Canada and creates a cold-core low. A combination of clouds and fog the locals call The Mother’s Mist can blanket the Hudson all the way down to New York harbor. The lights on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge were just puffy blurs, and only the tops of the tallest buildings in Manhattan could be seen.

Lily’s eyes were riveted to the gauzy cityscape awash in splotches of glowing neon that stained the fog and cast a hazy silhouette of the mad kingdom. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Such beauty. Such isolation. She slid over to the edge of the windshield and held on to a grip welded to the wall. Airship One pitched and suddenly they were inside a cloud, visibility zero. Lily’s mouth popped open and she looked to Max with the most surprised face he’d ever seen.

He felt weightless. There she was, flying angelically in the clouds, freckle-faced and green eyed, face framed with golden hair. All his worries dissolved. No matter how this turned out, he’d known love. He could see it. He could touch it. It was right there. What could be better?

D
espite his comfortable aisle seat
, Fred had been fuming ever since the train rumbled out of Philadelphia — traveling backwards. All the seats were facing the wrong way and, according to him, that was tough to put up with. The Silver Streak’s Philadelphia platform didn’t allow for it to turn around. So it had, for over a hundred years, rolled with the seats facing forward from Chicago to Philadelphia. On the return trip, the track was switched behind it, an engine hitched to what had been the back of the train, and it rolled on up to New York with the seats facing backwards.

It was suffocating and boring, after the open-air Booby Duck and the wild flames he’d stoked all night. Every hair in his nose was charred black as Texas brisket, but he could still smell the stale aftershave, sour sweat, rotting molars, moldering beards, crotch-rot and toe-jam common in large herds of men.

His head had been freezing ever since he’d given Pastor Scott, who’d opted to stay in Philadelphia, his hat.
Damn it! How long is this going to take? Calm down, take a breath.
He could feel his pulse slowing as he let the cushy seat take his weight. But his impatience continued tightening the knot in his stomach. A funny feeling plagued him. Something about Max. Good or bad, he couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. It would only end when he saw Max. They’d never been separated before, and tiny parts of Max were becoming more memory than day-to-day, face-to-face reality. The equation had changed, too. Imagining Max without Lily was impossible.

But imagining Lily was quite pleasant. It reduced his aggravation. She had healing powers. So he held her in his mind’s eye . . .

It was still dark when Fred awoke, but he could feel the impending sunrise and clammy feeling he suffered at low altitudes. He stood, found his sea-legs, wobbled into the aisle, and walked through all the cars both ways several times. The snoring was abusive, just like it had been in the service. He lost himself in a fanciful invention that turned snores into electricity. The little nap had taken the edge off his nausea. He could look out the window without retching, but only when facing the direction of travel. The low-hanging fog drifting along the rows of shiny railroad tracks provided a mild distraction.

The vengeful oath he’d sworn when his wife didn’t come home was now just an embarrassing reminder of yet another promise he’d failed to keep. On a thousand tortured nights he’d lulled himself to sleep by composing the speech he would deliver to the faceless cowards who’d ruined the world. Who’d traded his wife for nothing. But over the years, Pastor Scott had convinced him that whatever blow he might strike against the corporate state could backfire and harm not just him, but also Max. So he’d set his revenge aside, for Max’s sake. But that festering scab suddenly itched like poison ivy.

Aw, shit,
he thought,
this tin can’s got me talkin’ to myself.

Most of the men were asleep, and a study of the inward gazes of the wakeful didn’t reveal much. Their eyes were far from dead, but stained with defeat. Or was it betrayal? They’d been reduced to ledger entries: profits in dollars, losses in lives. The thought stabbed him, and he yelled, “How long?! How much fucking longer till we get there?”

A thin man raised his hand and said with an educated voice, “We passed Trenton about an hour ago, so maybe forty-five minutes. But I hear we have to go to the tunnel in Weehawken. That should add about fifteen minutes. Let’s say an hour — give or take.”

The agony of an interminable journey vanished. All he needed was a number. He could hold on for another hour. He could hang from his toenails for an hour if it brought him to Max. He drifted into his seat, but when he looked out the window, the nauseating sensation of falling backwards returned. His eyes swept the car a little too fast, adding a surreal, streaking fisheye effect. All those backward-facing seats confirmed his worst fear.
My boy needs me — and I’m going the wrong way.