The Saffron Malformation (32 page)

             
Quey nodded slowly.  “I don’t know how much we can help you.”

             
Arnie wiped his eyes and cut Quey off.  “I’ve got money.  Some of it mine.  The rest is Railen’s emergency fund.  The Brood’ll be gone from Fen soon.  I’ll get it,” the boy trailed off.  “Should get me somewhere to set up.”

             
Reggie and Quey nodded.  Quey offered, “We could give you a ride at least.”

             
“I’ll be fine,” Arnie replied.

             
“You’re sure,” Dusty said and Arnie nodded.  That was the end of it, Arnie was on his own and suddenly felt like an outsider at the table so he stood and headed for the door.

             
“Arnie?” Quey called and the boy stopped.  He turned and looked at Quey who took a moment to collect himself.  He understood where Arnie was coming from.  The years he’d spent making and peddling moonshine were the same as the ones Arnie would have spent rolling with Quey and his crew in that they weren’t him.  They weren’t what he was looking for.  The boy knew what he wanted and despite the circumstances he was brave enough to try and have it.  “Be careful.”

             
Arnie looked back at him and whispered, “Thanks,” then stepped through the door.  Conversation didn’t continue until the chime of the bell over the door faded into oblivion, taking with it a man they’d counted as one of them.

             
“So Reggie and I will get the car and gear and Rachel.  You get the truck?” Dusty proposed.  Quey nodded and after a moment the men were up and moving.

Time and Space

             
Morning broke over the treetops to the east as a set of gunshots rang out over the crumbling road running north along the coastline and the last three Once Men who’d gathered around the charred remnants of the Pickens and Zaul truck dropped to the pavement in crumpled heaps.  They lay twitching with the two or three dozen others the Brood had gunned down when they rolled through the day before.

             
Reggie and Quey were sitting atop the beaten up mover Leapin Larry had sold him.  Of course when Quey returned to Larry after news of events made their way around town, Larry was suddenly much softer when it came to negotiating a price.  Probably didn’t hurt that Quey left the heel of the gun sticking out of his waistband visible.  The truck didn’t look pretty, full of dings and scratches and in need of some form of paint, but the engine was good and that’s really all they needed.

             
The three fresh bodies twitching on the pavement were stragglers, remnants of a once great savage tribe.

             
“You know he was right,” Reggie said with a matter of fact shake of his head.  “It’s always something with us.”

             
Quey nodded solemnly.  The big man spoke truth, as Arnie had the night before when he’d said it.  It’s always something.  The Sherriff had given them the night and they’d taken a few hours of it to grab some sleep before heading off.  Still, to be fair to a man that had been that and more they’d rolled out before dawn.

             
“Hey man, how long is this thing gunna take?” Dusty shouted from the car parked beside them.  Rachel was resting in the back seat.  She’d been awake for most of the drive out here and seemed to be doing well but it would be a while yet before she’d have more than a few good hours without need of a nap.  The doctor had given her three bottles of pills and told her how and when to take each of them.

             
Quey shrugged and shook his head in answer to his friend’s question.

             
“Yeah, well I don’t exactly want to sit around in savage country waiting to see what happens first, does it show up or do we get eaten.”

             
“Look at the road,” Reggie hollered.  “Ain’t no more savages out here.  Just stragglers, confused and twisting in the wind.”

             
Quey looked out at the bodies and felt ill.  It wasn’t the death that churned his guts but the idea that he’d accepted a life like this for so long.  He remembered when he was a boy his parents had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and even at ten years old he had answered with certainty.  Now, as a man, sitting atop a truck with a rifle beside him, looking out at all that flesh and blood rotting on the pavement and in the brush that lined it, he couldn’t remember what it was he’d said.  The only certainty he had left was that it wasn’t this.

             
Suddenly he felt that hunger in his belly no food could vanquish.  It manifested as a taste on the back of his tongue, bitter and burning down the back of his throat.  He wanted a drink and he thought on that desire for a bit.  He felt it now and again and he’d always given in.  Hell, rolling with a truckload of the finest moonshine on the planet it was an easy thing to do.  It made what his mind was carrying manageable and for the first time in his life he began to wonder if maybe that wasn’t his problem.

             
“You got this?” Quey asked, his voice hollow.

             
Reggie looked over at him for a split before answering, “Sure.  You good?”

             
Quey nodded.  “Just need to check on something.”  With that he climbed off the roof of the truck and onto the hood and from there he made his way to the ground.

             
“Something up?” Dusty called and Quey waved him off before climbing into the cab and closing the door.  He pulled his computer off the dash and opened the planetary network.  The page with the image of Rain was bookmarked now and he looked at her and smiled slightly.

             
‘Where is Rain?’

             
Quey reached behind his seat and picked up one of the few bottles of shine that still remained.  He took a sip while Sticklan’s voice ran through his head again, ‘Where is Rain?’

             
Another sip.  “Wherever you run little raindrop, you better sink in good,” he whispered to her smiling face.

             
The device pinged and across the screen appeared, ‘Incoming Ryla.’

             
Brow furrowed (she’d never called him before) he capped his bottle and stowed it before tapping the screen.  Ryla appeared, hair pinned back, clothed in a simple slip.

             
“Hey,” he said.

             
“I don’t mean to bother you-”

             
“No bother,” he interrupted.

             
“I was wondering if I could add something to my list of things for you to get,” she finished as if he hadn’t spoken.

             
“Sure.  Send them through text.”

             
A moment passed.  He was about to say good-bye when she asked, “How are other things?”

             
He smiled at her.  “Your robot is fine, far as I know.  We’re waiting for him to finish up and come back.  Then we’re on to plan B.”

             
“Plan B?”

             
“We’re heading to my place, it’s not much of a detour with plenty of stops for Geo along the way.  I mean to clear out a few bits and say farewell to the old place before taking the road again.”

             
“I don’t understand.”

             
“The way things are going I think its best for me if I’m not somewhere I’ve been,” as he said the words he trailed off.  “She knew,” he whispered.

             
“I don’t understand.”

             
Quey looked at her.  “I just can’t go home again.”

             
“No,” Ryla said.  “She knew.  I don’t understand.”

             
“Oh,” he replied.  “How did you…” he let it go.  “Someone I met on the road.  It’s complicated,” he added dismissively.

             
“Oh,” Ryla looked down for a moment.  “Okay.”

             
Quey peered at her.  “You want to know?”

             
She shrugged.  “Don’t friends want to know?” she asked looking at him again.

             
He’d forgotten that.  They were supposed to be friends.  “Yeah,” he said.  So he told her the bit about the brood chasing the girl and him getting in the mix—though he left out why exactly.  As he went over it again he remembered the look on Rain’s face when she was sitting in the van reading something on her sheet.  She’d known someone was coming, probably the guy in the suit.  That’s why she didn’t want to ride with him.

             
Ryla glanced down, away from his gaze while she asked softly in her already delicate voice, “Where will you stay?”

             
Quey looked out at the landscape, the grasslands rolling toward the ocean to his right and the fields waving gently before the bushes and trees packed tightly to his left, “Might be best to just keep on moving, you know.”  He shrugged, “But I haven’t quite gotten to that part yet.”

             
Ryla was looking at him again.  “When you get back with Geo you’ll have to stay here until I’m done analyzing the data,” she informed him.  Then she swallowed hard and watched him.  She didn’t know why she felt so strongly about that but she did and she dreaded that he might protest.

             
Quey nodded, “Of course.  You got me lugging this thing all over the continent, you better believe I mean to find out what it’s all for.”

             
She nodded and her eyes seemed to lighten into relief.  “Good.  And you can still get the things on my list?”

             
He chuckled and nodded, “Yes, plan B isn’t all that different from A, save there’s no moonshine to deliver and the trucks a bit smaller.”

             
“Oh, that’s good.”

             
“Can I ask you something?” he posed thoughtfully.

             
“Yes,” she replied.

             
“When you go to town, do you take Bowserbot with you?”

             
“No,” she replied.  “I take Mechaganon.”

             
“And he’s shot people.”

             
“Only if they violate a basic defense gate.”

             
Quey nodded.  “You kill people for accidentally touching you.”

             
She looked at him, trembling slightly and he thought he knew.

             
“You kill people because you’re afraid of them.”

             
“No,” she replied.  He was about to speak again when she said, “I have things to do.”  The screen cut out.

              Sitting in her compound, Ryla pulled the pencil from her hair and let it fall across her shoulders with a sigh.  She was agitated.  Who was he to say such things?  He was supposed to be her friend.  Was that the sort of thing friends would say to one another?

             
Truth was she didn’t know.  Maybe she should look it up, to be sure he wasn’t deceiving her.  If he was…

             
She didn’t finish the thought.  She hated talking to him.  She never knew what he was going to say or ask.  She hated more that she wanted to talk to him all the time.

             
With a sigh she buried her face in her hands.  Things would be so much easier if she could just understand.  On the computer before her, in the center of the second floor project room, was text and video examples explaining humor and joke telling to her.  She was beginning to get that but there was so much more that came after.  If only the people in the compound had been nicer, then they might have been able to teach her.  It was too late to think about that now.

             
She could hear some of the small bots playing Nintendo in the other room.  She looked over at the door.  She wanted to go join them but she wanted something else too, she just wasn’t sure what that was exactly.  For a moment she considered calling Quey back, but dismissed the thought as soon as it came to her.

             
As she looked around at the parts lying on the tables, at the bots roaming the compound, and listened to the ones in the other room playing, she remembered how it had been when Quey was there.  He’d show up in rooms unexpected, did things she didn’t anticipate, said things that may have been hurtful to her at times but still they were different.  She thought maybe what she wanted was company she didn’t understand so completely.  The robots were her children, in a way, and she loved them each as such, but none were her equal.

             
Ryla began searching through the computer database, looking at the old files kept by the men who had run the compound before.  She began formulating calculations in her mind as she scanned the research and data.  She knew it was possible to make a robot that actually thought and learned and interacted organically, after all, it had been done at least once before.

             
The nervous energy she felt made it hard to concentrate and she felt a strong desire to do something.  To move.  So she shifted the computer to another program and selected a piece of music, a piece by a man called Mozart, her favorite composer.  As the piece swelled she moved gracefully to an open space in the room, and then, as the music swarmed the room around her, she began to dance.

             
Sticklan had lost count of the years, twenty or so, since Richter Crow had pulled him out of the asylum.  Twenty years of taking his little pill and honing his particular nature for the whims of another.  He remembered being a young man somewhere in his twenties, in the days before Richter and his pill when he’d do as he pleased, with motives he understood.  Now it was about politics and cover-ups.  Scaring scientists into reporting what Richter needed them to, and letting anyone important enough to matter riding the fence between support and uncertainty, know the consequences of not getting off on the right side.

             
He’d been supplied with clothes, money, cars, a house and girls no one would miss.  He wondered what Richter would do if he found out about the children Sticklan found on his own.  He laughed at that thought, the look of horror on his face if he walked into that basement in the farmhouse right now, the look as the smell wafted over him.