Montezuma Strip (10 page)

Down under the massive concrete pilings where damp sand stunk of dead sea-things, paint cartridges, spraywall buckets, and
salt-resistant polycarb binders, his boat lay concealed beneath a tarp stained with crusted liquid waterproofing. He hit the
battery-powered pump and waited for it to inflate. Two minutes later he was dragging it out onto the beach, gazing
at the Christmas lights of the towering codos that lined the coast all the way down to Guyamas.

There was little wave action this far up the Gulf. Salt water slapped his legs as he pushed the inflatable into the water.

Jumping aboard, he turned to activate the tiny electric motor. It wheezed to whispery life and pushed him seaward. It wouldn’t
make much speed, but he was in no particular hurry. His destination lay more than a hundred kilometers nearer than the cross-Gulf
town of San Felipe.

Like a fiery medieval fortress, the Puerto Peñasco desalinization plant loomed out of the dark water on immense pilings, adrift
on an onlooker’s imagination like something from another world. It groaned and complained, the vast metallic guts emitting
prehistoric sonorities. It looked as if at any minute it could abandon its footing deep within the sands of the Gulf to stride
toward the land, like some monster from an ancient entertainment vit, to smash the codos and their inhabitants to pulp and
rip apart the factories that stretched north along the highways.

The plant and others like it supplied fresh water to the states of Sonora and Arizona and the industries they supported along
the southern portion of the Strip.

Beneath the plant itself, clinging to the near impenetrable jungle of intake tubes and valves, switching pumps and cleaning
stations and filtration tanks, were isolated habitats. Thrown together out of scavenged wood and metal and plastics, they
were home to those few individuals independent and resourceful enough to eke out an existence underneath the facility.

If you could work fast enough and camouflage your place well enough to avoid the attentions of company Security, you had access
to free sewage in the form of the Gulf below and plenty of fresh water, which could be unobtrusively drawn off from the check
taps on the major pipes that snaked toward the beach from the east side of the plant.

There was food, too. Fish congregated near the surface, away from the disorienting sonics that made underwater life
around the deepwater intakes untenable. Except for the threat of an encounter with Security, you were safe. But you had to
like the salt smell of the Gulf, the perpetual dampness, and be able to tolerate the rattle and boom of the plant, which never
stopped, never shut down.

Wormy G tied his boat up beneath the gaping maw of an old, broken piling that looked like a leviathan’s half-extracted tooth.
It was too much trouble for the company to tear down, so they left it hanging and rusting for future maintenance specialists
to worry about. He took the weighted end of the rope he carried aboard and threw it up and over the lowermost pipe. The weight
pulled the rope, which was attached to a nearly massless nypron ladder. After securing it with a quick-release clip, he ascended.
Legs straddling the pipe, he flicked the release and pulled the ladder up after him.

Monkeylike, he made his way up through the dense, rusting forest of pipes and conduits until he reached a service walkway.
A quick glance revealing that it was unoccupied, he vaulted the railing and hurried along homeward.

His shelter was constructed of plastic panels epoxied to the circular interior of an old transfer pipe. It was tall enough
to stand up in, and the opening could be closed by a hinged section of pipe he’d cut out with a borrowed torch long ago. No
passerby would suspect that someone was living within.

After latching the doorway, he turned on the air cooler. Out in the Gulf this time of year, there was no need for heat at
night, only cooling. As always, it was humid and sticky. Tomorrow he could look forward to another day of temperatures approaching
forty degrees and humidity up around ninety.

The cooler struggled manfully. Eventually he slept.

He spent the morning working on the bioprobe he’d invested six months in rebuilding. When his eyes began to hurt, he decided
to go for a visit, carefully avoiding maintenance and tech crews until he reached the big globular float that hung
suspended from a single cable over a patch of dark, roiling water. Three times he rapped softly on its eggshell-white flank,
paused, then repeated the pattern.

The unsuspected opening in the old float’s side gaped, and he was greeted by a wary Taichi-me. He had his glasses on as usual,
Wormy noted disapprovingly.

“You got to cut down on the vits,” he told his friend as he climbed inside the converted float. “I keep telling you, you spend
too much time sucking that slop. Your brain’s gonna turn to tapioca.”

Taichi-me wore a sheepish look as he removed the Muse lenses. He owned at least a dozen pairs, all tuned slightly differently,
including a powerful Keemsang arc unit that Wormy had reluctantly helped him to restore. It could pick up direct Sat broadcasts
instead of just the local air pollution.

Next to his friend, Wormy G loomed large. Taichi-me was a skinny, bony half-Korean, half-Mex kid who kept himself in vit wafers
and food by selling ashore what he could fish from the waters beneath his float home. Not seafood, but industrial salvage
that drifted down with the current from the plants farther north. Sometimes he even came up with stuff that had made it all
the way out the mouth of the Colorado. It wasn’t much, but Taichi-me didn’t need much. He hardly ever even went ashore anymore,
preferring to lie snug and secure in his float, mezed by his glasses, bungoed out on vits.

He was also the nearest thing Wormy G had to a best friend.

“So how’d it go, G?” Taichi-me never called his friend Wormy. “Did you get to see her? Did you get to talk to her.” His eyes
got wide. “Did you get to
touch
her?”

“Fair. Yes. No. Are you kidding? I just tagged along the way I always do.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
“She
did
look at me once, and I know that she saw me, and she didn’t say anything to that stupid neg Paco.”

“Hey, that’s great, that’s plus, that’s
muy
solid!” Delighted, Taichi-me leaned back on some of the moldy pillows that lined the interior of the float.

“Better than getting beat up.” Wormy grinned.

Taichi-me turned to rummage through a pile of smelly equipment, produced a box of five-centimeter-square LCD screens.

“Look what I netted this morning. What do you think, G?”

Wormy took the plastic container and broke the seal. Most of the screens inside had sustained some water damage, but those
in the center of the pack had been protected by the ones on the outside and might still be capable of accepting a charge.
He told Taichi-me as much.

“I thought they might be worth a couple of bucks.” The skinny kid sounded hopeful. “Are they color?”

“Let’s see.”

Wormy moved to Taichi-me’s box and plugged one of the salvaged screens into an unused vit port. It flickered but lit. The
resultant picture was serviceable but not good. The second one was better. The rest were useless.

He had to explain it all because, as an infant, Taichi-me had lost his sight in an accident, and the cheapjack job his long-since-gone
parents had bought into provided for the cheapest of replacements. So Taichi-me’s thirdhand prosthetic lenses permitted him
to see the world only in black and white. He retained a few pitiful early-childhood remembrances of color, which were fading
rapidly with age.

Wormy agreed to take the two usable screens into town and sell them at Moritake’s. Since they were color, they might get as
much as three dollars for the clean one, a buck for the slightly damaged. Come evening he bid his friend good-bye, then boated
back to shore to conceal his deflated craft and hunt up the Teslas.

He had a new song for Anita, but first he played back his favorite wafer for his own enjoyment. He always did that before
broadcasting to her. It was his little secret. Theirs revolved around the songs he composed and transmitted only to her. She
was the only one who could hear them because he aimed his directional transmitter only at her glasses. He
knew she received them because, when each had ended, she would turn to glance back at him. Occasionally she even smiled.

He lived for those smiles, for the sight of her backturned face with its reflective eyeshadow highlighting her beautiful green
eyes and the thermosensitive lipstick whose color intensified with the minutest rise in her body temperature. Wonderful were
those special moments, as if the two of them were playing a private joke on the rest of the gang, on the whole world.

Because only Anita could hear his songs. The little device he had built, had cobbled together out of bits and parts and scavenged
knowledge and the skills inherent in his small, delicate fingers, was that precise. She could be leaning right up against
that crazy Paco, and he wouldn’t hear a thing. Only his Anita.

He eased it out of his shirt and aimed it, using the little add-on telescopic unit to line it up, and then he transmitted.
He saw her twitch once, glance back in his direction, then look away. Her glasses rode her face. She was hearing the wafer,
he knew. Hearing the song he’d composed only for her.

He never knew if she liked them, but she must have liked something about them because she didn’t complain, didn’t send Paco
or any of the other ninlocos back to smash the sender. He always trembled slightly when he was transmitting for fear she might
do just that someday, or that he might otherwise accidentally offend her. But what was there to offend? He was careful not
to reach too far, too high in his lyrics, not to make demands or even requests. In the songs he sent, he did not exist. Only
her. They extolled her beauty, that was all. Her grace and her light. What girl could find such compliments displeasing, irrespective
of their source?

He followed at a respectful distance as the gang ducked under a particularly insistent clot of ambient advert neon. Tendrils
of light reached for them, clutching at their hearts and their pockets. They ignored it and strode through, the
advert colors illuminating their slick shirts and brazenly colored shorts and boots, reflecting metallically from the receiver
suspenders the guys wore.

Suddenly they halted, as if on command. Wormy frowned. Unified responses were alien to the gang. Surely they weren’t reacting
to an ad. He approached closer than usual, trying to see what had so caught their attention.

When chaos took over, he found himself swept up in the middle of it.

Sangres. A dozen or so of them, out for a night’s mischief stroll, looking to cause some midnight miseria. There was no time
for talk, for discussion, for reason. Clever homemade weapons magically appeared on both sides; the knives, the delicate little
vibratos the girls carried in their culottes, the blue-and-purple titanium-niobium jewelry honed to razor sharpness for double
duty.

Wormy found himself caught, swept up in the
terremoto,
unable to break clear. He hunted desperately for a way through, simultaneously trying to protect himself and his precious,
irreplaceable transmitter, his one link to his beloved Anita. Spotting a garbage bin, he managed to slip the transmitter under
its support rack, where it would be out of harm’s way.

Someone must have smashed him from behind, or maybe he was tripped and he just hit the pavement wrong. In any case, he went
down hard and out.

When the sleep went away, strange faces hovered like orbiting satellites above his own, haloed by bright lights. But they
were no angels. They wore blue cool caps with integral snap-down, light-amplifying nightshades, short-sleeved blue shirts,
and tropical blue slacks over running shoes. Federales.

One of them held an object in a Teflon glove. Half of it was clotted with something like stale honey. The pointed half.

“Why’d you do it, kid. Won’t you crazies ever learn?”

“Do what?” Wormy mumbled dazedly. He sat up slowly, gaping dumbly at the knife.

There were a couple of speedbikes and a cruiser nearby,
and lights. Lots of lights, which did nothing to illumine the intimidating mutter of adults talking in low tones. The Teslas
were gone. So were the Sangres, except one. He lay on his back, one leg crossed comically across the other, arms splayed on
the pavement. Fleshy archipelagoes in a sea of his own blood.

“Come on,
niño,
let’s go.” Strong hands under his shoulders, lifting him up. As consciousness returned, he began to make connections.

“Hey, that’s not my knife,” he told them anxiously. “I don’t even own a knife, homber. I don’ kill nobody. You the ones who
are crazy.”

Another fed showed him a micropolaroid. “Prints on knife. Your prints. Knife in your hand. Sorry,
niño.
We got a match. You got shit.”

Wormy was waking up real fast since someone had started running his guts through a garbage disposal. “Hey, that’s crazy, homber!
That don’ make no sense.”

“I didn’t think you ninlocos liked to make sense,” the tech replied. “I thought you liked to make crazy.”

“No, hey, no.” He began to kick, to howl, but he had about as much chance of breaking free of the big fed as he did of winning
the Sinaloa lottery.

They threw him in the back of a cruiser and let him scream all he wanted to in the soundproofed compartment, let him pound
on the opaqued glass and dig at the nyproy upholstery. By the time they reached the station, he was exhausted from fighting,
unable to cry.

He let them lead him through the bureaucratic maze, refusing to respond to questions, ignoring the faces that poked into his
own with varying degrees of concern, hostility, boredom. Let them book him for murder. Allowed them to put him in a holding
cell, where he ignored the cheers and jeers of fellow juvie inmates. The other occupants of his cell ignored it all in favor
of continued sleep. It was late. One rolled over, squinted indifferently in his direction, coiled back to sleep.