Reapers (21 page)

He moved his hands to a drawer of the desk. "You're pretty calm for someone reporting a disaster."

"I may have made a spectacle, but I doubt I made anything worse." She peeled off her socks, smelled her foot, and made a face. "I grilled one of their men. The raid was a dry run. They can't compete with your prices, so they're looking to muscle you out instead."

Until then, Nerve's face had been a taut mask. Now, it came to life. He walked around his desk for a better look at her. His hands were empty. "He said that? How'd you get him to talk?"

"I guess I got a face men want to confess to. How
do
you import so cheap?"

"Efficiency. We measure and analyze every dimension of our business. Streamline every link of your chain of trade by 2%, and you wind up 20% ahead of the competition. Kono tries to cut costs by using slave labor, but slaves are inefficient. You have to devote a whole new infrastructure to capturing, buying, and guarding them. Hiring doctors to keep your investment healthy. Not to mention the motivation problem."

Lucy scuffed her feet around on the carpet to wipe off the sweat. "And the whole 'slave' part."

"That's the Konos' philosophical problem." Nerve pulled a chair across from her and seated himself, crossing his legs at the knee. "Say they try to conquer us. The risk is off the charts. They could wind up wiped out themselves. The only guarantee is that both sides' operating costs will rise—you have to hire troops, equip and feed them, deal with attrition. If they invested that money into their business instead, they're building a much safer long-term projection. To put it another way, would you rather invest in the market? Or in the lottery?"

"Man, it is a bad move to assume you're the only dude in town with both halves of his brain. What if their boss is just as smart as your boss? He's put his eyeball to the figures and seen he can't keep up if he plays by your rules. So he makes his own. Instead of coming after your bottom line, he comes for your throat."

"I don't think Hector Udall is that smart. I
know
Ash isn't. But you make a point."

"They're desperate. They just can't keep up with you." Lucy laughed. "They said you got ice in July. How'd you do that?"

"Ice isn't as fragile as you think. It insulates itself." Nerve pointed to the wall where a map of the United States and Caribbean was studded with pushpins. "Our trade network runs all the way to Venezuela and beyond to the tropics. We have access to goods no one else has. And ours never go out of season."

"Yeah, but unless you stashed UPS away in a bunker during the Panhandler, your shipping costs got to be crazy."

"Do they? What does it cost to ship goods?"

"I dunno, what about fuel?"

He shook his head. "Wind is free."

"Labor costs," Lucy said.

"We don't employ most of these people. They profit from the trade itself. Additionally, what is the
real
cost of employing a person to steer a ship from there to here?"

"Food and water."

"That's right. And before you object that no one would work for food and water, let me inform you that most former Americans now in their twenties and thirties spent the pre-collapse as students, receptionists, and customer service reps. Their entire lives played out in small rooms while older people told them what to do."

"After that, a life on the open sea sounds pretty sweet," Lucy followed. "And you're all too happy to exploit their thirst for adventure."

Nerve raised one brow. "They get a cut of the goods, which we're happy to exchange for liquor or bullets or anything else they think they need. The larger point is that it costs much, much less to sustain one life today than it did six years ago. Distro was the first to figure that out and build a network around it. Our lead is too big for the others to close."

"I'm sure Rome thought the same thing about the barbarians."

"Yet parts of it lasted a thousand years." Nerve leaned back and tugged a loose thread on the seam of his pocket. "Back to business. Considering your results, I don't know whether I should be rewarding you, but I checked in with my people. Your friend's with us."

Lucy swung up her head. "Tilly? Where is she?"

"Safe. You can see her in three days."

"You got a deal."

"Unfortunately, you've destroyed most of your value to me. I'm transferring you to security. If the Kono are on the warpath, we need to ramp up our scouting. Report to Major Deunsling two piers down."

It sounded exciting. It wasn't. Major Deunsling was a major pain in the ass, a humorless bitch who could stand to cut down on the fried fish. Lucy's new duties, such as they were, consisted of sitting on a rooftop overlooking Twelfth Avenue. In addition to binoculars, she was decked out with an analog bullhorn and a red lantern. If she spotted anything resembling an approaching war party, she was to light the latter and scream into the former.

Boring as hell, but she did her duty. Couldn't risk screwing the pooch when she was three days out from Tilly. She did some pushups to prevent herself from going crazy, and spent much time contemplating the tower that dominated Midtown, but mostly she watched the streets and waited for the Kono.

It was a good thing she'd made the trip. She'd figured Tilly would be in over her head, and she was right. Distro was too slick for the Kono to handle with anything but gunplay. The island was about to be drenched in blood. If the underpowered Feds jumped in to try to calm things down, it could wind up a three-way war.

Not exactly where Lucy had expected to end up. But she owed it to Tilly—and to Tilly's dad. Freshman year, Lucy's mom got worse than ever. She'd go missing for two, three days at a time. Seemed like she had a new boyfriend every month. Once when she left to get the groceries—a rare event, after she'd sold her car—Lucy went into her room and found the pipe and the baggie of crushed-up white crystals. Lucy thought about busting the pipe and flushing the meth, but left them intact. They would only help kill her mother faster.

You had the screaming matches. A few times, she and her mom scratched and punched each other and Lucy stayed home from school until the bruises faded. She made a few friends from similar circumstances; they liked drugs and older boys, who bought them beer and cigarettes and condoms. Even the 22-year-olds didn't quite know what to make of Lucy, keeping one eye on her, wary in the same way a man walking his dog after dark watches a skunk. But she knew it was only a matter of time.

Because she was on a Path. Same one her older sister, already pregnant again, had taken. Same one her mom had taken. It didn't necessarily lead straight to the Reaper, but it wound through his world. A world of lowness and predation not all that different from the one they'd all come to live in after the plague.

Before the end times, still in freshman year, she began to run away. First time, she slept in a park; on her third night, a man pulled a knife and who knew where it would have gone if Lucy hadn't screamed and a good man hadn't come sprinting in to run the other man off. Second time, she went to stay with one of the older boys, but he only wanted her to pay rent in one way, and he tried to get it through vodka and blunts. One night, drunk on shots, he'd taken it out and tried to make her touch it and when she wouldn't he yelled at her and stomped to his room to take care of it himself. After, he passed out in bed with his shirt on and pants off. Lucy had a wicked buzz, but she'd scooped up her clothes and laced up her shoes and ran. Left the front door open, too. With any luck, someone would stab him.

When she got home, her mom was sitting in the dark on the couch, pipe clutched in her hand, wreathed in the smell of burnt cleaning spray. "Who says I want you back?"

"Who says I want to
be
here?" Lucy said.

"How much longer before you go out and don't come home? He sniffs you out and he finds you. The police find you in a ditch with eyes so round they'll never close."

"You're crazy."

"
I'm
crazy?" The woman stood, unleashing an odor of sweat and a semi-sweet chemical stink like the disinfectant wipes she used to use on the counters. "I know why you're out there. You want to wind up like your sister? You that mad for children? Or do you just love the taste of sperm?"

The red curtain fell over the window of Lucy's eyes and her hands shook like branches in a winter wind but she went to her room and locked the door. When her mom pounded on it, Lucy put in her headphones and turned it up until she could hear nothing but the music. In the morning, her mom was gone. Lucy stole the change from her drawer and jogged out the front door.

She didn't want to go to school where her mom might find her so she hung around the library instead, surfing around the internet, then walked across town to the Burger King and ate a double cheeseburger and then sat there until an employee not much older than herself asked her if something was wrong.

She didn't head back to the park until after dark. No one saw her. She got through three nights that way. On the fourth, as she bundled up beneath a metal slide, shoes scuffed through the chips of red wood bedding the grounds. The slide blocked the man from the thighs up. His shoes were hard-worn brown boots with black laces so new the aglets hadn't yet begun to fray.

Silent as an owl on the wing, Lucy drew the knife she'd stolen from one of the older boys. The blade was five inches long and the pommel was the head of a dragon.

"Hey," the man called softly. "You in there, Lucy?"

She blinked. "Who is it?"

"Vic Loman. Tilly's dad."

"I know you. What do you want?"

He swung his head below the slide to get a look at her. His gaze moved over her blanket, her pack, her knife. "You all right there?"

"Why, you looking to move into the neighborhood? Rent's cheap, but the schools ain't shit."

Mr. Loman continued to hang there, head sideways. "Tilly told me where you were. Come on out."

"I ain't going home."

"Who said anything about going home? You can come stay with us. What you can't do is live under a slide like a lost Yorkie."

She combed her greasy hair back with her nails. "If my mom finds out, she'll cut your nuts off."

"Let me worry about my nuts," he said. "What do you say?"

She said yes. And her life changed. Not to say it got perfect. She was still too different from the other kids, and she'd missed so much school she had to talk to both principals and the cop they kept around for security, and getting that sorted out was such a to-do she didn't see why she should bother at all. Also, after the first three days, Mrs. Loman made Vic spruce up the garage so Lucy could sleep there instead. Not that Lucy minded the space itself; it was clean of spiders and she had her own TV. But the fact Mrs. Loman didn't want Lucy in the house made Lucy want to piss in her closet.

But it got better. Stable. It set her on a new path, one that ran away from the man with the scythe. Lucy never forgot who to thank for that. And when the plague came, and Vic got sick, and he asked Lucy to look after Tilly, Lucy had sworn on her life that she would.

Tilly hadn't always made it easy on her, but so far, she had honored her promise.

Two crisp fall days dribbled past. After her shift, she climbed down from the roof and walked to the pier to check in with Nerve, but Kerry brushed her off. Lucy was miffed, but decided to give them one more day before raising any hell.

Next morning, she reported to the security building as usual. Kerry stood on the pier, arms folded. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Work. You heard of it?"

He scratched the back of his shaved head. "Thought you wanted to see your friend."

Lucy grinned. "Quit teasing and show me the way."

He grabbed his bike and headed toward the tower at the island's heart. The last few days had been cold and dreary, but the morning light was as sharp as chipped glass and as amber as honey dripping from a spoon. Often the Empire State Building was hidden behind the cliff-like apartments and offices, but at intersections its spire pierced the sky.

It felt even taller up close. So big that going near it felt wrong, like it could wake at any moment and squash you as flat as the tarry gum cemented to the sidewalks. Lucy tipped her head to take in its vertical lines and nearly toppled backwards.

She quit gawping and focused. If Distro restricted its residents' movements, she and Tilly might have to leave in a hurry. The inside was a palace of marble floors and plentiful sunlight. Armed men loitered around the lobby, rifles hanging from their shoulders and leaning on their chairs. The troops eyed Kerry and nodded him through. His footfalls echoed along the patterns zigzagged on the stone floors.

"She know I'm coming?" Lucy said. She had her day-pack and umbrella and the pistol she'd taken from Duke's dead friend.

"Don't think so," Kerry said. "She was across the river until an hour ago. Dragging firewood up from Jersey. She drives one of our wagons."

He opened the door to the stairwell. Dim electric lights gave it the look of a movie theater before the lights went all the way down.

"How are you gonna have power in a building like this and not run the elevators?" Lucy said.

"If you want, we can go home."

"What floor?"

"Eighth."

Lucy brushed past him and clopped up the stairs. All she'd need to do was convince Kerry to let her have a private moment with Tilly. Imply a lesbian angle, if that's what it took. Because if she could explain the score, by all appearances, she and Tilly would be able to walk right out the glass revolving doors.

Worse came to worst, she'd pop Kerry in the head, grab Tilly by the hand, and run downstairs before anyone was the wiser.

They reached the eighth story. The floor was cool granite that seemed to suck out all the light from the few lit bulbs. Kerry got out a piece of paper, glanced at it, walked down to 822, and rapped the door with the back of his knuckles.

Muffled steps from inside. Lucy couldn't help her grin. The door opened and there, at last, was Tilly.