Homeland (35 page)
"What happened?" I said.
"You were de-arrested," Ange said, matter-of-factly. I looked around. A guy with wild dreadlocks beside me was wearing what looked like a police-issue gas mask and carrying what was definitely a police-issue riot shield. Behind him, a short woman was wearing a police helmet. A few more police helmets bobbed around the crowd.
"What did they do to the cops?" I said.
Lemmy shrugged. "Not much. Took their stuff as they retreated. Don't worry, no one beat up a cop or anything."
We were still on the march. The crowd took another shuddering step toward Market Street. The mask over my face made it hard to breathe, and my goggles were fogging up. I was just about to clean them when the gas fell.
They were dropping it from nearly invisible, nearly silent black aerostats, little toy blimps that used whispering electric motors to keep themselves in place. I'd helped build some at Noisebridge once, a side project of the space-program team, who had also launched a lighter-than-air weather balloon with two cameras into the upper atmosphere, snapping pictures of the planet below it, curving away like the ball we knew it to be but could never see. The aerostats were as light and flimsy as a dry cleaner's plastic suit bag. The way they hovered in place was eerie -- prod one with your finger and it would waft away like dandelion fluff, then return to the exact same location with tiny, precise bursts from its little fans. The ones I'd played with had reminded me of jellyfish, and not in a good way. They were like brainless, drifting aliens, and I'd instinctively feared them. Like they might have a sting waiting for the unwary.
The gas canisters slung under their bellies released their payloads with little near-synchronized
pop
s, popcorn kernels detonating in a pan, and we all looked up at once, then --
-- Panic.
The gas had been released from four or five yards over our heads, far enough up that it formed a drifting cloud that you could actually watch for a moment, which we did, and then as the reality of the falling chemical poison sank in, we all tried to simultaneously hit the ground
and
run away, anything to get away from the floating, descending toxin.
I was jostled this way and that, knocked to the ground, stamped on -- one hard boot landed on my head, another got me in the kidney -- dragged to my feet by anonymous hands, shoved, knocked down again, picked up again.
Then the choking started, and with it, choked screams. Then vomiting. Maybe there was something in the gas to make you puke, or maybe it was its victims' bodies trying desperately to expel the noxious foreign substance from every orifice. I was splashed with puke from all sides, and I slipped in it as I got to my hands and knees, then to my knees, then to my feet.
I'd caught some of the gas through my painter's mask, but not much. I was having a little trouble breathing, and my eyes were watering inside my goggles from the irritants that had climbed up my sinuses. I was half blind and it was dark, and there was only one thing I could think:
Ange
.
I scanned for her, but couldn't find her. A few other people had gotten to their feet, and I heard and then saw quadcopters and gliders start to crisscross the airspace over our heads again. I was sure they had their nightscopes on and were getting lots of footage. I supposed they'd be able to get nice, long, clear pictures of anyone who showed up with goggles and masks -- "troublemakers" who'd come expecting that the police would deploy chemical agents against them for having an opinion.
I called Ange's name through my mask, and it came out muffled, and when I breathed deep to shout louder, I caught a mouthful of the chemicals clinging to the mask's outside, sucked through its pores and around its sides, and doubled over coughing, swallowing hard to keep from vomiting. I did
not
want to vomit into my mask, and I did
not
want to take my mask off and show my face.
I started grabbing the people on the ground around me and helping them to their feet. I had no idea where Ange was, but if she was one of those people thrashing in their own vomit on the ground, I hoped that someone was helping her up.
I reached for a big guy with a short, military brush-cut who was holding his head and groaning, and something stopped me, rooted me to the spot with an irrational icicle of fear stabbing me right in the spine. I squinted at the man, and then it hit me -- an ugly gnarl of scar-tissue that ran from the crown of his head to his thick neck. I'd seen it before, in the back of an all-black luxury car whose back doors had no handles. It was Knothead, the Zyz goon.
Uncle Hugo's (Minneapolis, MN); RiverRun (Portsmouth, NH); Gibson's (Concord, NH); Busboys and Poets (DC)
This chapter is dedicated to
four
stores -- and what's more, I've never been to any of them! So perhaps some explanation is in order. My publicist at Tor Teen, Patty Garcia, keeps a list of all the stores that have invited me in to give talks and signings. These stores not only asked, they
begged
, and made it clear that they have done everything they could to hand-sell the heck out of my books in the past. These stores have been enormously generous and supportive, and I'm delighted to say that I'll be able to visit three out of the four on the tour for Homeland (Uncle Hugo's, in Minneapolis, is top of my list for my next trip to the Twin Cities)
He was only a few yards behind where I'd been. Close enough to keep a good eye on me, if that's what he'd been doing there. Far enough away that he couldn't have quite reached out and grabbed me, if that was his goal.
I took a step backwards, landing on someone's fingers, jerking my foot up, nearly skidding on a slick of used food and toxic chemicals. I caught my balance, took another step. Knothead hadn't spotted me yet. He wasn't wearing tactical black, but I saw that his blue jeans had a couple of bulging cargo pockets, and there were a few little bulges around his waistline.
I took another step and looked carefully around me. Would Knothead have been here alone? Would he have had Timmy with him? Zyz didn't strike me as the kind of organization that sent its goons out on their own. I looked all around me, finding new reservoirs of panic and fear, searching the crowd for guys who could be Timmy, wondering if he might be wearing a wig or some other disguise. I didn't see him, but I
did
spot Lemmy helping an older guy who was limping, his arm around Lemmy's shoulders. I started to move toward him, and then I felt a hand take mine. For a glorious moment, I thought Ange had crept up on me and grabbed my hand -- somehow, I could feel that these were a woman's fingers.
Then the fingers grabbed hold of my thumb and did something awful and painful to it, something that made my head snap back in pain. I cried out, the sound muffled by my mask, and tried to squirm away from the terrible, wrenching pain. That only made it worse. I went up on my tiptoes, in agony, and managed to twist around and see who was the author of my suffering.
It was Carrie Johnstone, dressed like a sitcom housewife doing the grocery shopping in track pants, a loose SFSU sweatshirt, her hair tied back in a scrunchie. It was such a great disguise, so utterly unlike her efficient, ruthless persona, that I couldn't figure out where I knew that stern face from at first. When I did, I gasped harder. "Hello, Marcus," she said, and relaxed her grip on my thumb, just a little, so that I could catch my breath and focus for a moment. She watched my eyes carefully and when she was convinced that I was paying full attention, she brought her other hand out from beneath her sweatshirt. In it, she held a little two-pronged, pistol gripped tactical black gizmo. A tazer.
"I'd prefer not to use this," she said. "Because then I'd have to carry you. That would be conspicuous. And I might have to drop you. You wouldn't like that. Am I being clear?" I nodded and swallowed a few times behind my mask. She made the tazer vanish. "Smart boy. Come along now. We've got to move."
It was full night now, and as the people around us regained their feet, there was chaos -- shoving and pushing in the dark, crying and some screams and retching. Every now and again, I'd hear someone shout, "Mic check," and some weak echoes as people tried to establish order, but Carrie Johnstone always steered me away from those places, pushing me ahead of her like a battering ram, still gripping my thumb but hardly twisting it. Instead, she pulled it this way and that, steering me with it as if it were a joystick.
Somewhere behind us, I could hear the police bullhorns giving orders to sit down and put your hands on your head, and then I heard Johnstone curse, and she started pushing me faster.
The night blurred past, but something was nagging at me. Carrie Johnstone and Knothead had been at the protest, looking for me, I suppose, and they'd have been caught in the HERF burst. They were all about tactical this and tactical that, but would they have thought to put their clever devices inside Faraday pouches? Johnstone said the reason she hadn't tased me was that she didn't want to carry me, but really, would it be that hard for her to drag me out of the crowd? Would it be that conspicuous? I was willing to bet that Johnstone could bench-press a water buffalo.
And the million-dollar question: was there enough electronic circuitry in a dumb little tazer to make it vulnerable to a HERF blast?
I crashed into an old man whose face was streaked with dirt and tears, his face looming out of the night, eyes wide and surprised. He barely had time to register the fact that I was about to collide with him before we were going down in a tangle. As we fell, I felt Carrie Johnstone's grip tighten on my thumb, try to wrench it into that special configuration of torment, and slip.
I coiled my legs under me and sprang into the night like a jackrabbit, scrambling to get away, using hands and feet to get through the crowd, running blindly in the darkness. Behind me, I heard outraged cries and wondered if they were from the people I'd hurtled past, or from people who were being tossed aside by the vengeful hands of Carrie Johnstone. I ran so hard I lost my breath and couldn't catch it, couldn't get even a sip of air to pass my throat, but I forced myself to run on, even as my vision blackened around the edges, telescoping again.
I had been running west, and something about the buildings around me made me think I was getting away from the protest's center, out toward the edge. Soon I might escape to the real world, a place away from relentless pursuers and gas and crowds. Keeping that in my mind, I forced one foot in front of the other, gulping like a fish in my wet, claustrophobic mask.
It wasn't going to work. I wasn't going to make it. Any second now, I was going to fall to my knees and a second after that, Carrie Johnstone would have me. Even without the tazer, she was going to have to carry me -- things inside me were wearing out, bursting, breaking, and once I stopped moving, I wouldn't be able to start again.
But there was the edge of the crowd, I could see it. See the place where the wall of people ended and the city began. Just a few more steps. The lights ahead glittered in my foggy, steamed-up goggles. I was so fixated on them, I didn't even see the police line that divided the protest from the real world, a line of helmeted men wearing bouquets of plastic handcuffs at their waists, hard-faced, hands encased in black gloves. I almost stopped myself then, but I didn't. Maybe I couldn't have. In any event, I was pretty sure that Carrie Johnstone couldn't kidnap me from jail.
One step, two steps, and then I was crashing into a policeman -- I actually smelled his cologne and the hamburger on his breath as he absorbed the weak momentum of my last stumbling rush. He steadied me, took in my mask and goggles, spotted the plastic handcuff around one wrist, grabbed hold of the loose cuff, jerked my arm around, grabbed my other arm, and cuffed it. I was handled as impersonally as a sack of potatoes as another cop stepped forward out of the line and directed me to one of the waiting buses I'd spotted from the sky.
Before he put me inside, he patted me down, reaching for my phone, then stopping when his gloved hand encountered some of the vomit I'd been spattered with. He said, "That a cell phone?"
"Yeah," I said. "It's dead though."
"Right," he said. "They'll take it from you when you get processed anyway."
There were already a couple dozen people in the darkness and quiet of the bus. Some were young, some were old, some were brown or Asian, some were white. It was laid out like a school bus, the kind of thing I'd ridden a thousand times on school trips, except for the steel mesh separating the driver's seat and back of the bus from the rest of the interior. Each seat held two people, and they were loading us from the back forward. I was halfway down the bus's length, and I had a seatmate, a guy in black jeans and sweatshirt. He was unconscious and breathing shallowly. The officer who led me to him didn't say anything as he guided me down into the seat, with an impersonal air that was neither hostile nor friendly. I jostled the guy and he made a whimpering noise, like a hurt animal.
"I think this guy needs medical help," I said, squirming in my seat to find a comfortable way of sitting with my arms lashed together behind me.
"He'll get it," the cop said. "Soon as he's processed."
There were murmured conversations around me, the voices tight and scared, like the voices of kids hiding from a killer in a slasher movie. I stared out the windows, looking for any sign of Carrie Johnstone or Knothead -- or Ange or Lemmy, for that matter. At five minute intervals, I remembered that I had forgotten to write a lawyer's phone number on my arm and thought about what an idiot I was. Against all odds, I actually drifted off to sleep for a while, leaning forward with my head against the back of the seat in front of mine. I guess my body had used up so much adrenaline that there just wasn't anything left to keep me awake. On top of everything else, I had the mother of all caffeine withdrawal headaches. I would have happily eaten a pound of espresso beans and asked for seconds.
I woke up when someone was plunked down in the seat in front of mine. I looked up groggily and saw that it was a girl about my age. She was Middle Eastern looking, with designer clothes and long hair that had mostly escaped from its ponytail. She had a look of utter, grim determination.
"Hey," I said to the cop. "Hey, are we going to get to go to the bathroom soon?"
"After you're processed," the cop said.
"When's that?"
"Later."
"Come on, we've been in here forever. Could you at least take my cuffs off?"
"No." The cop turned on his heel and left. The weird thing was how impersonal the whole thing had been. The guy could have been telling a panhandler that he didn't have any spare change.
"How long have you been in here?" the girl said.
"I don't know," I said. "I nodded off. A while. Do you know what time it is?"
She shrugged. "I think it must be after eleven."
"What's going on out there?"
"Oh," she said. "They're questioning everyone. If they don't like your answers, you go behind the fence."
"The fence?"
"You didn't see it? There's a big area, a block square. All fenced in with movable barriers. They don't like you, they put you there. Then they talk to you some more. If they still don't like you, they bring you here. You didn't go to the fence, huh?"
I thought about explaining that I'd been chased into a cop by a psychotic war-criminal merc. I said, "Nope. Just got grabbed and put here."
She shook her head. "Not me. They grabbed me, checked my ID, penned me in, checked my ID again, put me here. Bastards."
"Why do you think they grabbed you?"
She shrugged again. "I don't know. Racism? These days, having an Egyptian last name is like being called Jasmina Bin Terrorist Al Jihad. Or maybe it's because I belong to ECWR."
"What's that?"
"Women's group," she said. "The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights. Solidarity with women in the Middle East. The women came out for the revolutions, helped overthrow the dictators, spilled their blood. Then the new 'revolutionary' governments sent them back home, started running around talking about 'modesty' and 'a women's place.' So we talk about it here, have discussion groups, produce literature about what the Koran actually says about women. We call them out for their bullshit." She shrugged again. "So maybe that's it. I don't know. I tried to call my family when I was in the fenced area, but my phone didn't work. No one's did."
Huh. "Do you have a lawyer you could call?"
"No," she said. "But my mother would know someone -- once she got over having a heart attack about me being arrested. What does it matter, though?"
I dropped my voice to a whisper. "I have a working phone."
The unconscious guy next to me stirred. He cracked one eyelid and said something indistinct.
"What?" I said, leaning in.
"415-285-1011," he said. "National Lawyers Guild number for San Francisco. If you've got a phone, I'd appreciate it if you'd call them for me."
There was a guard sitting at the front of the bus, on the other side of the heavy wire mesh that enclosed us. He wasn't paying much attention. Or maybe he had a hidden mic and was listening to every word through a headphone in the ear I couldn't see.
"Right," I said. "Do you think you could get your fingers in my pocket if I move around so you can reach?"
He shifted, made a hissing noise like a teakettle. "Don't think so. I expect my arm's busted."
I looked more closely. The arm closest to me was definitely at a funny angle. He must have been in agony. I turned back to the girl ahead of me. "Do you think you could get the phone out of my pocket?"
She craned around to look at me. "Maybe," she said, doubtfully. "How are we going to dial it?"
"Dunno," I said. "Let's burn that bridge when we come to it."
I twisted around to get my hip to stick out in the vicinity of the girl's bound hands. I jostled the guy with the broken arm in the process and he made another hissing sound, but didn't say anything when I said "Sorry."
The next part was really hard. We had both moved so we were sitting on the seats with our legs in the aisle. My phone was in my front pocket, so to get it close to her, I had to turn around so I wasn't facing her anymore and scootch backwards to where her hands had been. Then she had to find my pocket with her bound hands, working blind, facing away from me.
"Ew," she said.
"It's not mine," I said. "Someone puked on me."
"That's so much more comforting, thanks."
She got her thumb and forefinger into my pocket, pushed in farther, gripped my phone, started to tug it out of my pocket. She got it most of the way out and lost her grip and I thought the phone was going to fall on the floor, but I kind of twisted my hip so that it ended up slipping back. She tried again and this time, she got it out.
