Vineland (33 page)

The sturdily enhanced Nomad, beginning now to run into some grades, rushed along in the rain, while the guys navigated, blinking little pocket flashes on and off, seeking a route of ascent to the Third, or Mesopotamian, Freeway implied by the other two that ran the lowlands to east and west. Through suburbs and pasture and forest they sped—from concrete to blacktop to macadam, at last to a gullied and boulder-strewn glacis, or defensive slope, behind a chain-link fence that they winched up enough of to get through. After locking the wheels and switching over to 4WD, “Hang on,” advised DL, and away they began to roar, smoke, and climb, pops from the terrain sending everybody bouncing and banging their heads on the roof of the rig, the landscape out the windows seesawing violently around. Once or twice they nearly went over, but at last the Nomad scraped through a breach in the guardrail and gained the deserted old highway.

Every hundred feet or so, just off the shoulder, was a slender pole holding a medallion about the size of a party-size pizza, with a face on it, not something generalized to represent, say, the Ordinary American, but a particular human face, looking directly at the viewer with a strangely personal expression, as if just about to speak. Inscribed at the base of each pole, in some weathered metal gray as an old zinc wartime penny, was the story that went with the face.

“Virgil (‘Sparky') Ploce, 1923–1959, American Martyr in the Crusade Against Communism. Lt. Col. Ploce was the first American of many who have attempted to clear from the face of our hemisphere that stubborn zit known as Fidel Castro. Undercover, posing as an ultrazealous Cuban Communist, ‘Sparky' soon charmed his way into the bearded dictator's confidence. His plan was to have offered to Castro, and then lit for him, a giant Cuban cigar that actually contained an ingenious bomb of ‘Sparky's' own design, made of plastic explosive, detonator, and a length of primer cord. Unfortunately for freedom-loving people everywhere, an accumulation of manufacturing errors had caused the head and the tuck of the cigar to appear virtually identical, so that when the fuzz-faced Latin tyrant bit off the wrong end and pulled out the primer cord with his teeth, security guards were immediately alert to the danger. Overseers of a typical Red Slave State, they apprehended and executed Lt. Col. Ploce on the spot.” The face above this was young, clean-shaven, and short-haired, and seemed to be smirking.

As they discovered when they got moving and one by one new stone-colored medallions appeared through the rain, in their headlight beams, each of these folks' images had been given eyes designed to follow whoever was driving past, so the Nomad's progress was observed, perhaps appraised, by silent miles of oversize faces, set a little higher than the average passenger vehicle stood. Had they been meant somehow for the long jammed and crawling hours of flight from the City, something inspirational to look at, to assure them all in a way not immediately clear
it is not the end
, or
there is still hope
 . . . ? was it only some travel game for the kids, to keep them occupied, to pass the time till the sudden light from behind, the unbearable sight in the mirror?

They arrived at the fence, about where the maps said it would be, well before dawn, during the hour of the rat, when the body sleeps deepest even if awake, still following the same cycle, most vulnerable. DL slipped into a black jumpsuit and ski mask. A cold wind blew down off a ridge someplace, bringing the smell of trees. Howie and Sledge gave her the old 24fps kissoff, “Be groovy or B movie,” one minute watching the highlights spun off her pale eyeballs, the next trying to see where she'd gone.

Later, of course, doing the bookkeeping on this caper, filling in logs after the fact, she could appreciate how broadly she'd violated the teachings of her sensei. She had not become the egoless agent of somebody else's will, but was acting instead out of her own selfish passions. If the motive itself was tainted, then the acts, no matter how successful or beautifully executed, were false, untrue to her calling, to herself, and someday there would be a payback, long before which she would understand that by far the better course would have been to leave Frenesi where she was.

She followed the fence till she saw lights, the bleary all-night cyan blue flooding over everything, revealing a wide-open field of fire between the gate and the nearest barracks, about a hundred yards inside it. She moved quickly toward the sentry, keeping her eyes on his own, which were aimed downward, reading to pass the dark watch, till she was too close for it to matter anymore. It was one of Inoshiro Sensei's proprietary whammies, based on a well-known ninja invisibility technique known as
Kasumi
, or The Mist. By wiggling her fingers precisely in his face, she selectively blinded him to her presence—he could go on with his life, but without DL in it. She was already inside, away along the fence, becoming its harsh woven shadow, watching for patrols, scanning the distant barracks, nocking and setting herself, archer and arrow, her passage through the turquoise glare untimed, unthought. In the building's penumbra, not even breathing hard, so elegantly that you couldn't say jimmied, she more like Jamesed the side door lock with a needle of antique ivory the sensei had given her long ago, and slipped within, into night's last act, where dozens of sleepers, alone and paired, lay on the wood floor on thin government mattresses, snoring, snuffling, calling out, flailing around, and, what DL was looking for, wide awake—a face lit by reflection off the floor, one she then remembered from Berkeley, from the old Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective. “Just happened to be passin' through, lookin' for Frenesi was all.”

He hesitated, not long but long enough. “You here to bring her out?”

“Want to come along, you're sure welcome.”

“Oh thanks anyway, it's no worse in here than where I was.”

“But you're a political prisoner.”

He smiled out one side of his mouth. “I firebombed a car with a bunch of FBI in it—they all got out OK, I figured, hey, groovy, I total the car, they stay alive, so long dudes, have a nice violence-free life—only they must've saw it different.”

“You showed disrespect.”

“If I split with you now, they'll put me on the Ten Most Wanted, have me back inside in a day—not worth it.”

“Nice seein' you again, brother, and now it's time for a little rewind and erase on ya, nothing personal. . . .” In the green and blue shadows she repeated the procedure she'd used on the gate guard. Directed then by soft whispers, perhaps not themselves voices of the waking, from pallet to pallet among the sleepers, she came at last to a dim figure lying prone, her hands beneath her, pressing, squirming, sighing, wearing only a blue chambray work shirt with half the buttons missing, streaked dark with her sweat. DL, who already knew it wasn't Frenesi, went to one knee beside her, the girl crying out, shrinking away from the black apparition, hands across her breasts. “I'd love to,” DL smiling behind her mask, “but I'm in sort of a hurry, maybe you could just tell me where she is.”

The girl gazed, lips apart, wet fingers at her throat. “They took her to the Office.” It was nearby, in the camp's administrative center. Hard to get into? You bet. The girl, under DL's coaxing, told her what she could, relaxing, dropping her hands to her lap.

Again DL violated procedure. Taking the small face in her hand, “And the reason you're in her bed finger-fucking yourself is that you love her, have I got that correct?”

Her wrists and arms growing tense, her averted face darkening with blood, “I can't stand it without her . . . think I'm dying.” She sought DL's eyes in the ultramarine night.

DL went on ahead before the girl could react, leaned in, lifting the mask, and kissed her open mouth, soon enough feeling the unhappy little tongue come fluttering forward. DL let her have a quick nonlethal taste of the Kunoichi Death Kiss, which is ordinarily the setup for a needle swiftly thrust into the brainstem of the kissee but was here meant only in malicious play, to stun her victim into rethinking her situation. . . . Spanish guitars ringing in her mind, DL slipped the girl's shirt off and with a black-gloved finger traced a big letter Z—above, between, below her breasts. “
Hasta la próxima, querida mia
,” and over the señorita's balcony she did vanish, emerging, as a matter of fact, right between two sentries making their rounds, unseen, unheard, though perhaps, who could be sure, not unscented.

The administration building was all concrete and local river rock, in a Corps of Engineers style not noted for whimsy, raised up on a long sweep of steps at least as high as it was, with rows of white columns suggesting national architecture and deathless temple, intended to reassure, to discourage too many questions, to turn to use whatever residue of nation-love might be hidden among the tens of thousands of traumatized nuclear refugees it had been designed to impress. DL prowled its perimeter till she found a marshal on watch and before he even saw her got rid of his weapon and punched into a sequence of his trigger points the subroutine
Yukai na
, or Fun, a low-order limbic pleasure cycle that would loop over and over as long as the officer behaved himself. They strolled into the facility smooth as Daffy and Bugs and got on the elevator down to a subterranean complex known as the Office. It was as if they descended into the rodent hour itself, no way to tell how fast they were falling. DL felt herself counterpopping her ears and had to nudge the marshal, whose whole body by now was a shit-eating grin, to remind him to do the same.

They were down in the Cold War dream, the voices fading from the radios, the unwatchable events in the sky, the flight, the long descent, the escape to refuge deep in the earth, one hatchway after another, leading to smaller and smaller volumes. Sleeping compartments, water, food, electricity, curtailed possibilities, an extension to life in a never-ending hum of fluorescent light and recycled air. And right now, still this side of the Unimagined, also offering deep privacy for whatever those in command might wish to do to people they brought down here. Would the magnitude of the fear that had found expression in this built space allow them to use it in ways just as uncontrolled and insane . . . thinking it authorized them somehow?

The place smelled of office solvents, paper, plastic furniture, cigarette smoke in the carpeting and drapes. DL's guide brought her smartly through a set of right-angled turns at last to a door, around which she slid ninja-style, blocking the outside light, leaving the marshal purring and indisposed to move.

Frenesi told DL later that the dream she'd wakened from was one she'd mentioned to her friend before, the one, recurring for her almost on a lunar basis, that she'd named the Dream of the Gentle Flood. A California beach town, the houses tightly crowded, nearly all of glass, huge windows that were really glass walls, all trembling at the wind off the ocean, would be partly engulfed by a tidal wave, long announced, daylit transparent green, flowing smoothly in, with plenty of time for people to get to higher ground, bringing the sea in up the hillside exactly to the level of the house Frenesi was in, observing. Though everyone in town was safe, the beaches were gone, and the lifeguard towers and volleyball nets, and all the expensive beachfront houses and lots, and the Piers, all covered by the cool green Flood, which almost paralyzed her with its beauty, its clarity . . . for “days” she could watch nothing else, while around her the town adjusted to its new shoreline and life went on. Late at “night” she went out on her deck and stood just above the surf, looking toward a horizon she couldn't see, as if into a wind that might really be her own passage, destination unknown, and heard a voice, singing across the Flood, this wonderful song, the kind you heard stoned over at some stranger's place one night and never found again, telling of the divers, who would come, not now but soon, and descend into the Flood and bring back up for us “whatever has been taken,” the voice promised, “whatever has been lost. . . .”

With no transition her eyes came wide open and there was DL stripping off the mask and shaking out her hair, DL's face in the interior sky, slowly connecting with her name and memory, lost in the flare-ridden night after Weed died.

“Howdy,” DL smiling, “you awake? 'Cause we have this sort of time problem. You have shoes someplace, a pair of pants?”

Frenesi groped around. “He's not here,” she kept mumbling. “He left here hours ago.”

“Too bad, I was hoping for the pleasure at last, another time perhaps—you ready?”

“Are you sure this is—”

“I'll get you out, don't worry.”

“No, I mean. . . .” DL had her by the arm and out of the room by then, and after she reactivated the marshal they all proceeded up and then out to the motor-pool area, where DL selected a stock jeep with a two-way radio and got them out in the wind. When the lights of the compound were only a heavenly blur above some ridgeline, she stopped and took the marshal off his limbic subroutine. He sat weaving in the dark, white showing all around his irises, trying to readjust, figure out what was going on. . . .

“Say, Officer,” clapping her hands in his face, “talk to us. Shit, I thought I set it on low.”

He croaked and swallowed for a while before saying, “Listen, would you like to go out sometime, maybe, for drinks? I mean I'm like a white-wine person myself, but, you know, whatever.”

“Hrrumph”—DL, rolling her eyes, rattled open a map, snapped on a penlight—“this road here, coming out the north end of the reservation, near the creek?”

All sheep's eyes, he directed them onto a turnoff that connected with the road out. Radio traffic stayed routine, and soon they'd passed the unmanned gate and were back in public mapspace again. DL put on the brakes and nodded at the door.” 'Fraid you'll have to hike back into Dodge, Marshal.”