Cottonwood (29 page)

“I never seen one of these,” the guard said, frowning at it and her suspiciously.

“What can I tell you?” Sarah lied smoothly. “I put ‘em up, they tear ‘em down. But it’s all completely legit. That’s my authorization and it’s approved. Now please let me in. My ice is melting.”

“I better check with the boss,” the guard said, reaching for his paz.

“Go ahead. I’ll be just inside. Just keep right and follow the smell of barbeque.” And she rolled her window up and drove through.

He didn’t stop her, but he was on that phone before the gate was shut behind her. There was going to be trouble later on, she knew it and she was ready for it, but what was important now was to get too far along for anyone to stop her.

Sanford had the tables set up all along the causeway, smack down the middle of the road. They didn’t look like much—pressed aluminum over sawhorses, old doors balanced on oil drums, mismatched lumber nailed haphazardly into shape—but they were stable and it looked like he’d brought enough.

He’d also brought friends. A double-row of aliens lined the causeway, standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the road, looking like nothing so much as crowd-control at a concert. Or a riot. The throng of aliens beyond them numbered in the hundreds, but they were a quiet throng, shifting restlessly as they watched her park the van, but making no move to advance on her. The security crew, if that was what they were, did not acknowledge her presence, but some of her clients came over to help unload. Sanford, of course, who opened every plastic tub of food and solemnly inspected the contents before carrying it to a table. Byrnes, who casually punched two bags of ice into pieces for the coolers and wrapped the rest in thick plastic sheets to keep them from melting so fast. And Samaritan, astonishingly, who took the charcoal and started up one hell of a fire under the hood of his car; he’d even built a grill for it out of what appeared to be a grille, appropriately enough. In twenty minutes, the tables were filled, the van was almost empty (just the soda that wouldn’t fit in the coolers) and the size of the watching crowd had grown. Some of them were carrying food chits; she could see Sanford and some of the others moving quietly among them, telling them to put their money away.

They had just put the first batch of patties on the grille when the armored vans pulled up.

“Here we go,” Sarah murmured, swiping sweat from her brow. She finished pouring the last two bags of chips into a plastic tub and went to face the music.

It was van Meyer’s personal shadow jumping down from the lead van, Piotr Lantz in the flak-vested flesh. She hadn’t been expecting that. Instantly, she adjusted her internal thermostat from indignant and defensive to innocent and subtle. “Hi!” she called, slapping on a grin. “Come to help set up?”

“Shut it down!” he bellowed. He marched towards her, guards at his back, red-faced and plainly furious. “All of it! Right now! You know the fucking rules!”

“I followed the rules,” she said mildly, trying to look confused.

“No gifts, you numb cunt!” he shouted, now inches from her face. “No gifts! None! You pack this shit up right now or I’ll personally kick your slats all the way back to Mayberry!”

She hadn’t had to feign her jump when he’d called her a cunt, but she wasn’t nearly as flustered as she pretended to be when she pulled out the same authorization papers and postings she’d shown at the Checkpoint.

“What the fuck is…” He snatched them up and held them side by side before him, his eyes darting from one to the other, less like a man reading than a man comparing mugshots. At last he lowered them and stared at her, his expression one part disbelief to two parts rage. He crumpled them deliberately in his fists and threw them at the ground.

Sarah bent down and retrieved them before they could blow away, expecting at any second to feel his elbow or the butt of his rifle or even his boot crash down on her spine. It didn’t happen. “It’s completely legal,” she said, straightening up. “Community events are allowed under the bylaws and it’s been posted for ten days—”

“You liar. Where did you post it?”

She gave him her widest eyes. “Here, of course.”

“What fucking good does that do? You were supposed to post it in Corporate Headquarters!”

“Was I?” Sarah went to the van for her case and put it on her hood to flip through it. “I’m pretty sure it said to post in the affected area, and since—”

Piotr grabbed the lid and slammed it shut with enough violence to have taken off a few fingers, if only her reflexes had been just a little slower. The case went flying into the road and she went banging down backwards on the blister-hot hood of her van with Piotr’s face right in front of her, his hand digging at the neck of her shirt. “You pack this shit up right now,” he spat. “I’m not telling you again.”

“No,” she said.

“This is an illegal gathering!”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve been approved.”

“You may have snuck this past a bank of fucking computers, but that doesn’t make you smart, little girl.” He snatched up the crumpled authorization slip and slapped it against her face, shoving it into her cracked cheekbone until tears of pain sparked in her eyes. “Even if this little party qualified as a community event, which it
doesn’t
, this permit you’re so proud of applies to your clients only!
Only
!” One final painful shove and he let go suddenly and backed up, waving the business-end of his rifle at the gathered aliens as he snapped, “Every bug you feed more than that is in violation of the Fair Nurture Act. That means I can arrest them
and
you, smart girl! Now you got one more chance to pack it the fuck up or I take you in!”

“And their families,” said Sarah, pulling her shirt down.

His beady eyes narrowed. “What.”

She found the papers on the ground, smoothed them out, and turned them around to show him. “It allows for community events to be held on behalf of my clients and their families. Excuse me.”

Piotr backed up slowly as she walked on straight, if watery, legs over to the nearest alien she recognized, and put her hand on him. “This is Abraham Levin,” she said. “My client.”

“Funny, he don’t look Jewish,” one of the soldiers said, and Piotr silenced their laughter with a savage look.

“And this is his brother, Ephraim,” Sarah lied, taking a total stranger’s arm. “This is his cousin, Dom. This is his uncle, Larry.”

“Family means maggots
only
, you fucking moron!” Piotr roared.

“It doesn’t say that.” Standing her ground between him and her party, Sarah held out her tattered authorization. “It doesn’t say that anywhere, Mr. Lantz. If you want, I’ll get you my employee manual and you can look it up. Family is never defined, not in the Fair Nurture Act, not in Cottonwood’s Residential Code, not in any bylaw of the International Bureau of Immigration. Neither is community event. Now I—”

A quiet scraping sound distracted her: Samaritan, calmly turning the burgers before they burned. When she looked back, Piotr and his goons were staring too, and not just at Samaritan, but at all of them. In their faces, she saw the first realization that they were four men staring down a street full of hungry aliens. She could feel herself wanting to smile and made herself stay cool. She wasn’t out of this yet, not until they were back in their toy trucks and away.

“Now I followed every rule,” she continued. “And unless you can come up with a legal reason why I shouldn’t be here, I’d like you to leave. This event is for my clients and their families, and you, sir, are neither.”

Now he looked at her. It was not the look of a defeated man. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” he snarled. “But you’re going to find out that I am just as smart as you are.”

“I wouldn’t be too proud of that,” she said evenly. “Apparently, I’m a fucking moron.”

Some of the aliens behind her made that grinding-scuttling laughter. Piotr looked furiously in that direction, then marched up to the nearest table and swung at the first thing he must have seen. Perhaps he thought it was a box of chips, or even a stack of paper dishes, bundled up in plastic to keep from blowing away. If he’d just dumped the table over, he might have started a movement with his soldiers, but no, he had to march over and dramatically backhand it.

The sound of his hand cracking into six solid blocks of ice was not loud, not loud at all, but plenty dramatic.

“Oh wow!” gasped Sarah, completely forgetting that she was on the opposite side of the moral fence from this barking little junkyard dog. More of the aliens laughed, but she ran over to catch unthinking at Piotr’s sleeve. “Did you break it? Let me s—”

He slammed his elbow into her throat and shoved her off onto the ground. “Back in the van!” he bellowed, stalking away. “And I warn you, little girl, you put one foot out of line and I will personally cut it off and fuck you up the ass with the stump! You have no fucking idea who you’re dealing with!” He looked at his hand, flexed it, and swung swearing up into the van’s cab.

In another minute, even the dust from their tires was gone.

Sarah slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, still rubbing at her neck, but smiling. “Well,” she croaked. “That was easier than I thought it would be.”

“Day ain’t over yet,” Samaritan remarked, plating the first burgers. “Everyone line up. Keep it quiet, don’t get greedy,
eat fast
and get out of here.”

“And try to relax,” Sarah said, climbing to her feet and gathering up what she could of her windblown case and papers. “This is supposed to be a party.”

* * *

Shortly after dark, they turned the spy-light on them. Apart from some muttering and shaded eyes, the feast roared on in good spirits. There was little in the way of supervision, but so far, everyone was behaving. Even Sam restrained himself to only the occasional cuff and shout. Nobody had gotten hurt and everyone had been fed.

Sanford checked two empty containers on a table and set them aside to make more room for chicken and drinks. The bread was long gone and the vegetation likewise. Someone had emptied the last bags of what Sarah called ‘chips’ into a single plastic tub and now even that was down to a thin layer of crumbles. The last of the ice had been broken—some of the younger ones had made a game of it, bashing away in teams to be the first to fully crush their block, with much cheering and wagering around them—but the drink cases were just as full as ever. Word of the feast had spread. People were bringing beer to chill, meat to cook. The crowd had doubled in size, even though those fed lingered only a little while before fading back to let others in. Many were parentless children; they’d scavenged under the tables for bones, soaking up brown sauce from the empty bucket with paper and eating it until someone coaxed them over to the plates of real food. Now they were fed and running with T’aki up and down the causeway, playing Catch-Banner and squealing laughter. Only one person kept apart and ate nothing.

She sat in the shadowy interior of her vehicle, with the long door open and her back braced against it, watching. If she tapped eyes with someone she knew, she bobbed her head and smiled, but otherwise did not move. As the hours had stretched out, she had become, to his eye, more pale, less animated. Tired, perhaps.

He had taken only three steps towards her before Sarah saw him, smiled, and tried to wave him back. He continued another two steps and was passed by his son in full flight, who leapt up into the vehicle and settled boldly on her lap. She laughed, rolled her eyes, and put her arm around his son.

“Do you want to come play?” T’aki was asking when Sanford reached them. “There’s lots of us.”

“No, that’s okay. I’m happy right here.”

“You don’t look happy,” T’aki said, and flinched when Sanford gave him a tap to the ear.

“Come and eat,” Sanford said, setting his insensitive son back on the ground.

“I couldn’t. There’s not enough.”

“You can have the chicken in red sauce,” T’aki chirped. “No one likes it!”

Sanford gave him another tap and a hard click to send him away. When he looked back, Sarah was staring into the interior of her own vehicle, her shoulders slumped. ‘Tactless boy,’ he thought, and came to stand just a little closer.

Neither of them spoke for a while. The feast continued, making up the words they didn’t have. The spy-light swept steadily back and forth across the crowds.

“This was a pretty stupid idea, wasn’t it?” she said at last.

Startled, he looked at her and saw only a tired discouragement. “No,” he said, amazed that she would think so.

But she nodded, not meeting his eyes. “They are never going to let me do this again. This was it, my one chance. I didn’t know you all hated sweet stuff. I wasted fifty pounds of chicken in barbeque sauce.”

“Someone will eat it.”

“Well, of course someone will eat it. I saw someone trying to eat roadkill out of the treads of a tire once. You’re starving, but I still got the wrong food.” Now she looked at him, and then beyond him, to the crowds. “And it’s running out. Honestly, I thought it was going to run out two hours ago, but they still keep coming. If only I’d known about the sweet stuff, I could have done more.” She sighed. “I should have done more.”

“You are one person,” he pointed out. “And you have done the best you could.”

She pulled a face—such an exceptionally pliant face—and looked away again. “I don’t actually enjoy sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, but what am I supposed to do? I’ve been watching people sneak in here for hours. No matter how many people come and have a good time, more of them keep coming. And then it hits me that there are twenty-five thousand people in here and what am I doing throwing a party for some of them while all the rest starve?”

“You are doing,” he said, sternly now, “the best you can. And biting at your hands for what they can’t carry achieves nothing.”

T’aki returned, carrying a plate of chicken in red sauce and a great heap of cookies with three cans of the cloyingly sweet drink. He put them in the van and crawled up to sit beside Sarah, antennae low and concerned.