Virtually True (15 page)

Reiner, clipping along at ninety-five, dodging potholes, fissures, and other obstacles, takes her eyes off the road. “You have to pull the thing down manually. I turned off all the electrical gadgets except the engine.”

True tries to pull down the window down. It stays stubborn, shut. “How?”

“I rigged it. Hold the switch down and pull on the window at the same time, it’ll open.”

True does, and dank air hums in, clouded in burnt rubber, chemicals, and singed earth. There’s fire in the sky, pockets of blood on the horizon mixed with darker hues—brown, deep purple, sticky sickly green, mauve.

“See that?” Reiner points through the front glass. “There’s a cult here that sees that kind of atmospheric disturbance as proof there’s a new world order. Old Tokyo, old Edo, is dead. Long live Tokyo. These Hari-Krishna Rajaneeshy Sun Myung Meow Bows think the quake was more than a quake. Like God’s way of wiping out the old and foisting upon this world the new.”

“Maybe they’re right.”

“Maybe.” Reiner offers this doubtfully.

The night’s not dark. Fires lick spastically at buildings and rubble. The car’s lights wash out tracts of road as Reiner slaloms around potholes, turns hard to the left, to the right. Dog skitters and slides in the back. True can tell Reiner enjoys playing race car driver. They exit onto another expressway, the
Kosoku Dori
, and after swerving around a ramshackle shack constructed on a tiny island separating the Tokyo’s two main road arteries, they’re surrounded by a motorcycle gang, matching Reiner’s frantic speed. Rising Sun flags parachute behind the dozen or so bikes, engines rattling. Gas engines. No electric whirrs here. No helmets either, just pompadours.

Reiner looks back. “Shit.
Bosozoku
.”

“What?

“Speed Tribes. Nipponese Hell’s Angels.”

Reiner drops an anvil on the accelerator and the car leaps over a gaping pothole, hits the ground skidding, and maneuvers around a snaking fissure that takes up most of the highway’s six lanes. When she straightens out the car, True hears a knock on his door. There: a bosozoku, close enough to touch, his hair crafted to his head, frozen in gel even as wind rages around him. Even his ponytail stays stiff. The biker reaches into his jacket.

True paws at the window.

Reiner screams, “Pull up the fucking window!”

As True’s about to seal them safe, the biker pulls a pistol. Reiner veers; there’s a crunching thud and the bosozoku’s sent sprawling. There’s a moment where the wheels turn on the flipped-over bike, and True thinks he sees a leg twitch through the rear view mirror. Then an explosion.

Other speed tribesmen pull up behind, slowing to fire old-style rifles, machine guns, grenades. An explosion rattles the car. But since they can’t ride and shoot at the same time, and with the windows closed, the car is bullet- and laser-resistant, True and Reiner, for now, are safe. The last of the bikers recede into the distance.

Reiner says, “You don’t have much of a survival instinct, do you? How did you get by in a DMZ like Luzonia? Here are Reiner’s Rules of Order for a successful holiday in post-quake Japan. Take notes. Rule one: Do exactly as I say. I do not want to have my head blown off because you cannot roll up a fucking window. Rule two: Do exactly as I say. Tell me everything you know about what happened to Rush. Rule three: Do exactly as I say. I call the shots here. It’s my turf.”

She checks the rear mirror, then enters a code in the car’s keyboard. “Hate to waste the power, but this should tell us if anyone else is packing weapons nearby. Finding charges ain’t easy.” Almost as an afterthought: “So, tell me.
Was
Rush the target, or were you?”

“What makes you think I was?”

“You’re here twenty minutes and already there’s trouble. Besides, Rush couldn’t stir up trouble if he was the lone man in a women’s prison. Figure you were on to something but the hit went awry.”

True lets his eyes mist, his vision blur around a pachinko parlor, shiny chrome and electric lights dazzling, an elongated blur. Reiner’s words catch his attention.

“Rush is like a cat I once had. Whenever I’d come home, he’d race out, jump in front of me while I walked down the path to my door. It was funny. He’d be looking back at me as I walked, slowed to a crawl, until I stepped on him.”

“You sound like an ASPCA poster girl, Reiner. What other fun things have you done? Changed channels on Alzheimer patients to see if they’d notice?” True senses Reiner’s feelings can’t be hurt. Rumpled perhaps, but never hurt.

“C’mon. What were you on to?” Her voice drips insistence.

True stares through the window again. Another glassed-in pachinko parlor. The only lighted buildings around. “How come pinball parlors get power while the rest of Tokyo is dark?”

“They’re run by yakuza. Practically the only places open for business are run by organized crime. Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not sure what I was on to yet.”

“Fill me in.”

True blows heavy air. “No.”

Reiner swivels her head. “No? No? You’re telling me ‘no’? After I saved your ass? You owe me. Quid pro fucking quo.”

“You don’t know those bikers wanted me.”

She pounds the brake and the car screeches still. “If you won’t come clean, get out, get the fuck out of my car.”

True elbows the door open. Dog leans forward, frantically prods the earthy-smelling air with her nose. Something is burning. Still, True feels alive, all five senses accounted for. He doesn’t trust Reiner, can’t trust anyone he can’t read, is spooked how she found him. The need to escape, to get on his own until he can make sense of things, overwhelms.

He gets out without closing the door, heads toward a distant patch of undulating lights. The thud of a car door, rubber squealing on asphalt. Instinct commands him to turn, to face the oncoming headlights, and his heart flutters as the light grows, two eyes in barely camouflaged terror. He stands unmoving, knows he can’t outrun or dodge a hurtling car, and as the distance between him and Reiner shrinks—to 50 meters, then 20, 10, the hood now taking up most of his field of vision—he’s suffused with a sense of serenity, knowing Reiner can never stop in time. He criss-crosses his arms in front, feels the protecto-vest under them.

A rush of air brushes past. She’s gone around him, and in the process, with the accompaniment of a sickening, crunching noise, heaved over a gasping pothole. She sacrificed her car’s undercarriage to make a point.

The car rumbles away until it’s a tiny speck in the distance, the size of a grain of sand, then a micro-microchip, finally a particle of light. Then infinity, or nothing.

CHAPTER
12

True’s been walking for hours, his legs and lower back throbbing. The remnants of Tokyo are eerily still. Still, he’s surprised he’s seen so few people about. No traffic, no apartment complexes, only lonely roadside restaurants gutted like trout and burned charcoal black. Empty. Nowhere to rest or eat, just an arrow-straight stretch of road leading to faraway, ebullient lights. The scenery is of a land ransacked by war, where anything of value has been stripped bare. What remains are the shells. The devastation. The memories. ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pics, an example of how far Tokyo has plummeted, how far it would need to go to bounce back. A painful lesson, a reminder of what happened and what would undoubtedly happen again.

True passes some makeshift shanties heaped together from scraps of plastic gleaned from appliance boxes, wood, sheet rock, and glass. Clothes are stretched over sticks, scraps of metal, plastic, wound like a web and covered with blankets and comforters. The lights dim then brim, alternate between ivory gasps and beige flickers, not magnetic like the blinding white lights that get closer with each step. True studies the prefab materials used to construct the post-quake ghetto. Silent children play in the debris. Adults prepare meager meals or reinforce their new homes. But they are ill-equipped to deal, unprepared to build lives and homes from scratch, to hunt, scavenge, or fish for food, to deal with the lack of imposed structure on their lives. Technology removed them from the land; the death of technology is as much to blame for their malaise as the quake.

Behind him, gas engines grumbling. He tenses, ribs rubbing against the flak jacket. The bosos are back and there’s going to be trouble. He keys in on the wrist-top, struggles to make sense of the “new and improved” hardware, and after agonizing confusion (in which he accidently accesses a telesex line and a portable shopping network), he runs a weapons check on the approaching bikes.

Correction: bike. A lone rider packing what the wrist-top refers to as
light arms
. A 20th century-style rifle, a laser pistol critically low on power, and a nine-inch steel knife, Japanese-made, with a footnote explaining that in Japanese the word for “nine” is the homonym for “suffering.” As the varooming nears, True crosses the line from walking to running. Closes on the electrical oasis, hopes it offers something he can use. He’s on the ramp that feeds into the lights, a long, unfurled yarn of road-ramp leading to a high stone fence. About 100 meters up the road, he figures, is the entrance. The bosozoku blows closer. Cursing himself for being out of shape, True sprints to the lights. His limbs turn to gelatin, like in the dreams he sometimes has, the ones where he’s running to Eden, searching for her, and all of a sudden he’s running
from
something, as if something in his dreams draws life from him; and he runs, getting weaker, and just before he’s about to fall to oblivion, he awakens, sweating and cold, less alive, he’s sure, than when he went to sleep.

A motorcycle beam catches True and he sees his shadow become elongated. Surrounding revs. A boot clanks against the backside of True’s protecto-vest. He stumbles and stops. Glances at the fence, but knows he can’t fly. The biker is filthy, his hair stiff with road grit. It’s fitting, True thinks, that he’s parked on a pile of rubble. He waves True over, palm-side down, and when True inches closer he notes his eyes, bloodshot, red lines spoking crazily from the center like two Japanese Imperial battle flags superimposed over one another.

“Money.” A voice all edge.

True checks the rubble under and around the bike: bits of glass, plastic, a metal rod. He moves closer, reaches into his pocket, and as he does the bosozoku grabs his rifle. True’s fingers caress sky. The boso nods and True slowly extracts Piña’s cash card.

The biker’s broken smile. Greed.

“You can’t access the card without me.” Even though True’s assailant isn’t versed in English, True doesn’t show the wrist-top obscured under his sleeve. But his leathery adversary understands the magic of a gold and onyx-gilded card. Only the keyed-in user, conscious and alive, can access money.

The biker produces a debit machine from his saddlebags, and, the rifle slung under an arm, enters an amount, holds it up. True deletes it and types in a lower sum. They go back and forth, quibbling over the amount, and True casually nudges the steel rod with his foot, inserts it between spokes. When the biker hands the machine back, True jams it in his face and grabs the rifle. He takes the chance because he knows death or injury will ruin the extortion hunt.

True wrests the rifle away, sprints away, and javelins it over the wall, watches it disintegrate in a crackling wisp. The engine grouses, and True looks in time to see the bosozoku lurch forward, then flip, the steel rod lodged securely between his fork and spokes.

The entrance is near. As True turns, the ground gives way and he trips. He rolls off the road, down the embankment, whirling, spinning. When he stops, he’s looking into the dizzying symbol of the Ouroboros propped up on two pairs of boots. Around, men in various degrees of undress are showing off a rainstorm of tattoos; the Ouroboros, the biggest and best, belongs to the apparent leader. Beyond, a fake medieval castle etched with nuclear neon and halogen. True hears the bosozoku’s bike, knows he must have gotten back on to finish the pursuit. But before he can scream down into the parking lot, he’s fired on. The bosozoku crashes, his bike tumbling over him. When he’s able to get up, he has to dodge laser spizzes from a roof-mounted rifle. Really only warning shots, but he retreats anyway.