They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (27 page)

The Mother smiled at me with missing teeth and bad gums. "All right, well," he/she stuck out her/his thumb the right. "Camp's that way. You can hang out here until night if you're tired of walking in the heat. I don't know if the heat affects you or not. The family here will be coming 'round soon, but they won't give you any trouble. They'll cook you something if you're hungry."

I put on my best sincere, shit-faced face. "I mean it. Just let me know if I can help. I owe you guys, really. You got me out of custody. I owe you, and I pay my debts." I just needed for one of them to let me in and this whole fucking thing would go
tumbling down
. I just needed this fucker to buy my bullshit.

The Mother smiled again.

Take the bait, asshole.

"I'll mention it," she/he said. "That's nice of you to offer."

Fuck
ni
ce. Take the bait, you asshole.

She/He put the top back on the Basil Hayden. "And, last thing, those nanites in your head that were preventing anyone from reading your thoughts, they were deactivated when you got here."

Aaaaand,
fuck
.

"They did their job keeping the cops and everybody out of your head and keeping you healthy, but we don't need secrecy like that here, so they're turned off. Back to being an open book, bud."

Fucking son of a whore.
This whole fucking time they had Silvy reading me.

"I'm going to go," the Mother said. "I've got some wiring to get back to. Any time you're ready to leave the canopy here, feel free."

My head reeled
from this shit
. "Wait, hang on, is the Ghost gonna let me walk away?"

Her body went limp without answering.

The little girl came to across the table from me and started crying and coughing her lungs out.

I kicked the table leg and up-ended the bottle of Johnny Walker into the sand with a "Fucking
shit!
"

The Many Colors of the Shit Rainbow

Three hours and a sunset later, I
was still si
t
ting
in my chair
under that canopy. I had to let the whiskey I'd drank back out a few times, and
when I did,
I just pushed to the edge and unloaded in t
he sand. The three assholes knew they couldn't trust me. T
hey knew exactly how I felt about them
and what I would probably do to them if I got the chance
. The look
on Two-Stroke's
face had said it all. They knew I wanted to fuck them over. I
n
my chair
,
I
wondered how long they would let me live. I watched my hand for ten minutes trying to see the nanites I swore I could feel crawling all over me. They were inside me, too, in my fucking head.
For all I knew, they could hit Control + Alt + Delete and give me a goddamn aneurism.

F
lies gathered on the piece of Tracey's ass
I had been left with. I waved them away
every few minutes
, and they
buzz
ed around and eventually settled
back on i
t until I
decided to scatter
them again.

I stared at the wood grain of the table.
"You're a stupid fuck," I told myself.

The Mexican family cooked me up a plate of some kind of
meat
, tortillas and beans. I choked it down to help sober me up. The father pestered me constantly with broken English questions about my powers.
Apparently,
Uncle Bob had promised to make him like us 'supermans' after the experiments were finished. Then he would go to the 'magic city' that had appeared in the desert the night before. He begged me to light one of his cigarillos with my mind.

"Very useful,"
he said, watching the tobacco burn. "
I may choose your fires."

I kicked his chair out from under him so his chin came down on the table
. "If you ever let Bob or those other two take control of you daughter again,"
I seethed at him, "I'm gonna come back here and put a bonfire in your lungs
.
"
I didn't know if he understood me, but he
sure as shit
went back into his shack with his tail between his legs.

At sundown,
the glow of lights had kicked
on past a rise on the horizon
. The magic city. That's where I was supposed to go, but I would be damned if I was gonna just walk into something like that completely blind, in the dark, with a sniper flying above me. If they wanted me, they could come fucking get me.
Hell, the Ghost had to be an old man. I would probably outlast him if I stayed up 'til nine.

"The Ghost can shoot you even through the canopy."

"I know," I said. "But I'm not gonna make it easy for him." I puffed on my cigarette. "Wait, who the fuck am I talking to?"

"HeY, fIrE bEaSt
," Psycho Silvy said in my head with a voice stolen from a memory of my first girlfriend. "BeEn A lOnG tImE, hAsN't It? AmStErDaM, rIgHt?"

Aw, shit.

"I kNoW. 'sHiT.' dOn'T tRy AnY oF yOuR fAlSe CoUrAgE wItH mE, eItHeR, bAbY. iT dOeSn'T wOrK."

I flicked my cigarette away. "What do you want, Silvy? You come to--"

"tHaT's WhAt YoU'rE aFrAiD oF, mE kIlLiNg YoU?" She pulled my string, and I hit myself in the face. Right in the bridge of my nose with a fist.

"
Fuck
, Silvy!"

"sTaRt WaLkInG. eVeRyBoDy'S iN tOwN."

"Are they gonna--"

"nObOdY's GoInG tO kIlL yOu. UnLeSs YoU dOn'T cOoPeRaTe."

"That's not what I was gonna--"

"It WaS wHaT yOu WaNtEd To KnOw."

"Why are you--"

She made me stand up. "To MaKe YoU wAlK."

God damn, I fucking hated psychics. They never let you get a sentence out.

"aNnOyInG, iSn'T iT?"

"Y'know what, shut the fuck up, Silvy."

"aRe YoU gOiNg To WaLk oR aM i GoInG tO hAvE tO mAkE yOu?"

I took a step out of the canopy. The Red Ghost didn't take a shot at me.

"SeE? nOw WaLk. YoU'rE wAsTiNg My TiMe WiTh ThIs. AnD, yEs, I dId EnJoY mYsElF iN cHiCaGo. YeS, i Am A cRaZy BiTcH."

"I'm not talking to you," I said. I
took a step back and didn't hear or feel anything. She must have left. "Silvy?" Nothing. I went back to the table, wrapped
the
hunk of Tracey
up tight and brought it with me.
It didn't seem right to just leave it there. The family would probably cook it or something.

I
n the dark,
ignited a hovering flame to light my way.
I asked
"Silvy?"
again, but still didn't get a response. She
was
just
an errand-girl; they used her even for piddly shit like getting me
walking
. Who the fuck were these guys and how the fuck did they get somebody like Psycho Silvy to jump when they said?
What did they promise her? And why the fuck did I seem to be the only person not just going along with all this shit?

I got back to the ruts and followed them toward the lights.
Down
the
road
a little bit
, an overturned
semi
trailer laid on its side like a beached whale. Spray-painted in red on its
top
was what looked like the same three sentences over and over in every language, or at least the popular ones. I expanded
my
fire to the length of the trailer to read it.
'Do not be misled by what you see around you or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideas. But you are not part of that world.' - Sai Baba.

Same thing that had been painted on the wall in the bunker. Same damn thing. This
bullshit
had been on Bob's mind for years.
God damn, if this was the reason he killed people, man--did he carve them up for this reality code shit? What had those other books on his coffee table been about? One of them had been about reality or something. And quantum something.
I
read and re-read
the words
on the trailer
until my cigarette died, then I lit a
nother and got back to walking.

"How much did the shit we stole back for you help?" I said. "Did we give you the last piece you needed?"
I stopped walking. Yeah, okay, it was me asking
myself those questions.

I asked
"Silvy?"
again, accidentally thinking 'you rabid bitch somebody needs to put down' after it. If she was listening, she would have known that too. Fuck, I hated psychics. But she didn't reply. Tracey's
Blood seeped through the newspaper onto my fingers. I wiped
it off
on Red's jeans. I guess it shouldn't have bothered me, though, since me and the piece of ass weren't actually separate
from each other
and didn't really exist.

"See if my foot exists when I ram it up your ass," I said like a badass to nobody in the dark.

Up ahead, w
ay
above
the glow of the lights, fliers chased each other with glow-sticks and flashlights. They dropped empty bottles and whatever else they could haul up there to smash agai
nst the ground. Trucks off-roaded through the desert, their headlights bouncing up and down. A beer bottle landed a few feet from me, and two others followed. I was fucking target practice
for somebody
.
Welcome to
the goddamn
'magic city.'
The place
was a town full of plain buildings that
looked like government housing spread out with
cracked streets and half-dead grass
filling the space between them
. Fucking magical.

Sports cars tore ass through the streets; the sound of engines redlining and gears being badly shifted echoed everywhere. Somebody plowed a Ferrari into
a
mobile generator, knocking out some of the
harsh white lights
that were bright as fuck
. The streets
and
grass
ended in a smooth line that circled the town. L
ike the whole thing had been cut out from somewhere else.

Tracey had teleported a whole damn city.

Shit. Somebody was gonna notice that.

Posters
milled around everywhere
, drinking and smoking and yammering the fuck on in a bunch of different languages
.
I had never seen so many of us in one place before. The whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen.

My feet
went from sand to
grass in front of a tall, red metal tower
mounted
on a brick base. A pale green piece with a white anchor painted on it stuck out
to the side
. Beneath white letters in Russian or some shit,
a
set of block letters read: 'PYRAMIDEN.'

Next to the
tower
was another tagged trailer.
'The dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.' - Herman Hesse
. And then sprayed on the side of a building a stone's throw from it:
'Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?' - Stephen Hawking
. Like a fucking nerd ghetto.

Under a
nother
canopy like the one
out
by the shack, some loud white boys blasted Tupac
around a keg
. One of the shirtless jackholes came down from doing a keg stand to cock his visor sideways on his spiked hair and put his designer sunglasses hanging backwards off his ears. He told nobody to fuck with his cup and headed my
direction
.

He jerked his chin at me. "'Sup, bro? You American?"

"Yeah."

"A'ight, cool, cool. I was expecting you a while ago.
Beast of Fire
, right?"

Fuck, man. I was a household name now. "Yeah, that's me.
"

"Ha, yeah, cool." He stood there grabbing the crotch of his shorts like an idiot. "Okay, here's the run-down fast 'cause I don't trust
those faggots back there
," he said loudly, "
with my drink
!
"