World-Mart (20 page)

“Your eye!” Charlotte exclaimed.

Shelley felt the swollen mass, her throat going tight
.  She felt dizzy, and she held onto Charlotte’s arm as they made their way to one of the other sand-cruisers.  Charlotte helped Shelley onto the back seat, putting Shelley’s hands on the driver’s waist.  “Hold on tight or you’ll fly off!” she warned.

Shelley held onto the young man’s waist, fighting tears
,
her continued shock over the deviant’s punch
seizing her trembling body
.  She turned to Charlotte, wanting to go home, but the fiery redhead had already mounted Dean’s sand cruiser.  All at once, the sand
-
cruisers took off toward the north, and Shelley cringed as they passed the dead bodies of the deviants who had chased after her and Charlotte.  Both were sliced pretty badly, and the sand beneath them was dark with their blood.

The sand-cruisers all came to a stop at the district border, just outside a sizeable crowd of teenagers and young adults
drinking and mingling
on the beach.  Shelley followed, staying as close as she could to Charlotte as the group left their vehicles and joined the crowd.

“Who are all of these people?” Shelley asked.

Charlotte pointed to an older man in the crowd.  The man was completely gray, with a receding hairline
and a two-foot-long beard.  He
didn’t look like he had the strength to lift a dumbbell, let alone control a group of rowdy, jaded young adults.
  No one seemed to care that he wore not the conventional pants and polo or blouse, but a toga, a blue and red striped tie, and a cowboy hat.

“Homer will give us all the details as soon as enough people have arrived,” Charlotte said, staring over at the man with admiration.

Shelley looked around, apprehensive about what to expect next.  A group of people nearby was gathering driftwood for a bonfire, while others were admiring the blood still on Dean’s
knife
. 

“Who could have guessed that deviants didn’t have blue blood, to match their sickly eyes?”
Shelley
could hear Dean say, flashing the knife with reflections of his magnanimous efforts.

The crowd
cheered
.

A young man produced a Molotov cocktail from nowhere and lit it, sending it into the teetering pile of driftwood.  Shelley jumped as an explosion of flame set the bonfire alight.  The crowd cheered, and Shelley worked to recover part of her dignity by joining in on the commotion.
  Someone handed her a bottle and she took a swig, swallowing with a tight grimace.

Homer raised his arms into the air.  Before he could speak his first word, the crowd went completely silent.  The waves crashing into the beach somehow became louder, and shadows fell across the mass of people as the bonfire fought to break the darkness that now surrounded them all.

“I see a couple of new faces this evening,” Homer said, surveying the crowd.  “It’s always good to see new faces.  Sponsors, raise your hands, if you will.”

Charlotte, as well as two other people in the crowd, raised their hands.

“Come and see me after the meeting,” he said, and then quickly shifted his focus back to the entire group.  “I just got the latest from a news associate, right before I came here.  It seems that the deviants have waged another set of attacks.  It looks like another wave of the HD-1 virus may have been let loose, potentially infecting another several dozen innocent human beings.  Enough is enough!”

The crowd responded by yelling out in disgust and calling out hateful slurs.

“How many of you have lost loved ones to deviant misdeeds?” Homer asked.

Shelley and a handful of other people raised their hands.  All eyes searched through the crowd, tallying the numbers.

Homer hurried over to Shelley.  “What did the deviants do to you, my dear?”

Shelley looked around, fighting tears.  Another bottle came to her hands.  She took a heavy swig of moonshine. 
“They killed my mother!
”

“And you would like to see the deviants responsible pay for what they did?” Homer asked, his tone implying that he already knew her response.

Shelley nodded.

Homer turned toward the rest of the crowd.  “Who else would like to see them pay?”

The crowd cheered.

“Why hasn’t one deviant been arrested for these murders yet?” Homer continued.  “I’ll tell you why—because Corporate is incompetent!  What other choice do we have but to take matters into our own hands?”

Shelley wiped tears from her eyes, hoping no one saw them as they threatened to spill over onto her cheeks.  What she heard terrified her, but it also made some sense.  Why wasn’t Corporate controlling the deviant problem better?  If people had acted earlier, might her mother still be alive today?  Did she really
have
any choice but to stand up for what was right and put the deviants back in their place?  Still, in the back of her mind, Shelley had to wonder: was it okay for a person to feel so hatefully vindictive?

“I need three groups of ten,” Homer said.

Everyone, save Shelley and a couple of the other new faces, raised their hands.

Charlotte, who eagerly had her hand up, nudged Shelley.  “Raise your hand!”

“What are we volunteering for?” Shelley asked, still hesitating.

“We’ll find out when he’s briefing us.”  Charlotte grabbed Shelley’s hand and put it in the air.

Shelley pulled her hand back down and began to back away.  “I need to see if Kurt got home!  I’ve got to go!”

Charlotte followed as Shelley hurried down the beach.  “
Come on, Shelley!  Stay just a little longer!
” Charlotte
said
as she caught up to her.

“I shouldn’t have come here!” Shelley
crie
d as she continued south along the shore.

“You know Homer is right.”

Shelley refused to turn back, but she also felt the need to say, “I know.”

There was the sound of a motor starting up in the distance, and within moments, Dean caught up to the girls on his sand-cruiser.

“Is something the matter?” Dean asked.

“Shelley’s just getting cold feet,” Charlotte said.

Shelley shook her head.  “You don’t understand.  I left my brother—”

“Let me give you to a lift back to your end of the beach,” Dean interrupted, his voice strangely pleasant.  “Homer said he’d see you next week, no hard feelings.  It’s obvious you have been through a lot.”

“But the party!” Charlotte sulked.

“Go ahead.  I’ll be back
soon
,” he said, then motioned for Shelley to get on the seat behind him.

Shelley got on, still feeling uncertain.  She grabbed Dean’s shoulders when the cruiser started moving, and it zipped across the beach, toward her end of town.  She shuddered as they passed the bodies of the deviants Dean had killed.  Her mind flashed back to their attack.  Her eye was almost completely swollen shut, and it hurt to try to focus.  She wondered if she would be dead right now, had Dean and his friends
not
shown up when they did.

Dean stopped at the appropriate landmark.  “See you around, I hope.”

Shelley dismounted the vehicle.  “Thanks for the ride.”  She turned to start her trek to the tunnels leading to Housing, but she paused when he did not immediately drive off.

“Charlotte tells me you’re looking for work,” he said.  “Is that true?”

She turned back, surprised.  “
Maybe.
”

“What kind of work are you looking for?”

She shrugged.  “I . . . guess I’d like to find some kind of writing job.”

He stood motionless for a moment, watching her, suddenly looking just as perplexed as she
did.
 
“
Well,” he finally said, “I don’t think I can get you anything like that immediately, but with your pretty face, I could probably get you into an entertainment
job
of a different sort.”

She could sense that something was wrong, and she backed away a step as he hopped off the sand cruiser, eyeing her intently.

“I need to get going,” she said
then
ran off toward the distant tunnels.

He did not follow her, and yet she felt her anxiety grow the closer she got to home.
  Why did it seem she could never catch a break?
 
Her thoughts began to play against her. 
What would she do if Kurt hadn’t returned?  Their father was probably beside himself, and Shelley was sure she would get an earful no matter where Kurt happened to be.  She felt her swollen eye, the skin stinging as she touched it, and she cursed her poor judgment.  She made her way along the dark trail, and it began to snow when she got about halfway to the shuttle garage.

As the snow began to stick to the ground, the dark trail got slightly lighter and made it easier to follow.  Shelley had on neither a hat nor a scarf, and she wore thin-soled shoes.  She shivered, keeping up her pace despite the combination of pain and numbness that began to weigh down her feet.

By the time she got to the shuttle garage, she was positive she had frostbite.  As she moved through the slightly warmer tunnels, the feeling slowly returned to her toes, and she stopped for a moment as a hot, burning sensation shot through her recovering nerves.

She froze as she heard footsteps coming up from behind her.  Not wanting to chance the possibility of running into a security associate, she continued down the hallway as quickly as her aching feet would take her.  No one gave chase, but she still felt compelled to run the rest of the way to the shuttle garage.  The garage had few people left in it, and the last few shuttles of the evening were boarding.  She hurried to catch the last shuttle to Housing.

Chapter Nineteen

GEORGE
sat in the dark kitchen, frozen with indecision and angst.  His interview with the deviant in the file played over and over in his mind, interrupted every few minutes by a moment of worry over Shelley and Kurt.

The deviant was young, with short curly hair and an unkempt face.  He sat across a short table from George, with a security associate watching by the door.  He was skinny for a male deviant of his age, as most of them bulked up quickly from the manual labor they typically worked.  George’s initial impression was that perhaps the young man was a job-deserter.  Now he wasn’t so sure.

“I was a programming associate for Power-Corp before the HD-1 virus changed me,” the deviant insisted.