Authors: Robert Onopa
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
How terribly everything had turned out.
Perhaps she could make a pet of Nell, perhaps Dr. Levich could drug the animal to make it tractable, perhaps Val could take it to New York and . . .
But once in her room, she understood that nothing was going to work out, not for the cowboy, not for Nell, not for her. She couldn’t get the smell of gun oil off her hands. Her scattered clothes and half-packed bags—her plane was scheduled to leave the next day at noon—seemed to mirror her psychic disrepair. When she tried to pack she found herself stationary at the foot of the bed, grasping lingerie in one hand, her boots in the other, weeping.
She finally knelt against the mattress and slowly twisted into a fetal position. She lay on her side that way, shivering for ten minutes, before she fell asleep.
When the siren wailed two hours later and the helicopters shook the heavy glass doors along the garden she was so disoriented that at first she thought she was in New York, at Kenneth’s apartment uptown, in the big bed. The rustic nightstand made her realize she was in Cabo; then the depths of sleep from which she was ascending suggested that she had just come awake from a dream, that the hunting trip with Cal had been a dream. But in the moonlight flooding the room she saw her dusty boots and bloody blouse, her scattered bags.
Past the sliding doors she could hear a raised voice, saw a shifting figure—a young man ran across the garden straight towards the foothills. A shaft of halogen white swept through the BioRange complex like an NYPD pass over Central Park West.
She remembered Nell in her stall.
She dressed quickly and ran down the walk past the mimosa trees, past the pool, through the lobby, through the other wing and past surgery along the gravel path to Nursery C. Just above the hills the inversion layer had moved closer to the resort, a low bank of clouds to the north, rolling like a wave on a long reef. A piece of heavy equipment ground overland away from the service road; one helicopter without lights flew so low that she was pushed sideways by its downdraft.
Lights were on in the nursery. The building door hung open. Its clinic rooms and hallways were empty, as if they had just been vacated.
And Nell was not in her enclosure. None of the animals were. Valerie fumbled with the lock to her stall, stumbled in and steadied herself in the straw. Her heart was pounding: the air was rich with the odors of dung and grass, hot with silence. She felt a draft of cooler night air—the outside gate to the exercise pen was open. She bent over and pushed through.
In the exercise yard, in the moonlight, what she saw seemed at first a jumble of dream images, some trick of perspective. Kangaroos were leaping over the fence. They were narrow-shouldered blues, fifteen, sixteen of them. She thought she saw Nell’s smoky blue tail among them. The animals were circling, running along the fence, gathering speed, vaulting over the fence without effort. Val stumbled forward—then shrank back when she saw three boomers cornered at the far end of the pen. They were big, rust-colored with white faces, had to be from the hills since there’d been none in the nursery. One of them was smeared with blood.
They were squaring off, fighting the staff. The Latino veterinary nurse with the mustache lay disemboweled along the fence, his intestines glistening wet plum and black in the moonlight. Over the fence with graceful leaps blue flyers soared one by one: pregnant females were escaping.
Dr. Levich was screaming, “Hold your fire.”
The blue flyers were running off with the children.
One of the women who’d been with Kai was holding her knee, gesturing at the hillside.
Cal’s ATV was there, its jacklights bouncing as he turned in concert with a helicopter’s spotlight—but the animal they sought would not quite freeze.
On the hilltop stood a large female with a scarred body. Out of her pouch protruded . . . a filthy face, streaked and blemished. It was not a joey’s face, but the unmistakably human face of a feral child of three or four, a boy or a girl, its hair long and matted.
It was the face of a human child.
Its shoulders came out of the pouch now—as if it was being born—its small hands clenched into waving fists.
Traffic
“He must go by another way who would escape / this wilderness, for that mad beast that fleers / before you there, suffers no man to pass. / She tracks down all, kills all, and knows no glut, / but, feeding, she grows hungrier than she was.”
—Inferno
I
W
HAT FOLLOWS, LIKE A SNAKING LINE OF CARS,
is the story of the first time I ever set foot inside a Nomad vehicle. It was one of those days: traffic was a bitch.
I was late for my analyst’s, and the usual ground-level routes through Studio City were tangled by busses and vans. The sidewalks along Moorpark were either stacked with illegal parking or in use as right turn lanes. I was creeping along in my Saturn, an old electric bomb, behind a silver Benz, a replica diesel; the Benz belched black smoke so dense I didn’t notice the gridlock at Coldwater until I was part of it. I backed through an alley only to find my path obstructed by an articulated trash hauler so huge, so sinister, I thought of Dante at the beginning of the Commedia, his way blocked by the she-wolf of appetite. And then, approaching the gridlock at Coldwater again via the drive-through lane of the Marcos Whiplash Clinic, I saw in the fluorescent blue haze blanketing the intersection a vision from Hell itself: out of the sea of traffic a red intake port began to surface, snout-like, lupine. The glistening black pickup on whose hood it was mounted was customized with enormous soft tires twice the height of a man. Sounding an airhorn it surged forward mightily, first bumping the Lexus ahead, then climbing the slope of its trunk and the Hyundai’s in the next lane, cresting over both cabins, bumping, gyrating, crushing its way forward.
Then it turned in my direction.
Only in L.A., I told myself, could it come to this.
So I swung through the telltale camp of shabby cardboard huts, the Nomad camp everybody was pretending not to see. I blew my horn, scattering two poor Nomad families in their earth-colored rags, then punched through to one of the abandoned ramps of what used to be called the Ventura Freeway. I was trying, as you may have guessed, to bypass the Coldwater mess by getting on a Nomad Interface, a section of urban roadway Nomads are permitted to cruise when they drop down off the Interstate, what they call The Way.
Usually Residents like me, even Residents like the madman in the truck, avoid the Nomad Interface. I had a pirated ambulance chip mounted on my firewall to get me through even undocumented barriers like this one—without the chip, of course, you fry. At the end of the trash-strewn lane of crumbling concrete I felt my old Saturn vibrate through the electronic membrane. I merged onto the Ventura as if I belonged there.
On the Interface the right lanes were thick with Nomad loadcarriers uncoupling on the fly. If the drivers ever stop, as everyone knows, they forfeit their rigs and wind up in cardboard shacks like those I’d driven through. Transfer cabs licensed to switch the loads to and from the city zipped around the middle lanes like house lizards in a world of brontosaurial thirty-two and sixty-four wheelers. I finally got up to speed on the viaduct over Sepulveda Boulevard.
That’s when my Saturn—with a sickening whump and sizzle from the front end—lost power.
I coasted onto the shoulder and made some calls on my cell phone. Under the hood I found my SunStar system and batteries fused into a blackened blob of polycarbon and ceramics. I couldn’t even find the socket for my chip.
Then the sirens went off, the ones in the membrane, the ones that announce the daily clearing of all Nomads’ vehicles from the Interface. A fine time for this, I remember thinking; you need a chip even to walk off.
That’s when I saw the Nomad rig, a white forty footer, creeping my way on the shoulder. A boy wearing an
EARTHQUAKE—’08
cap was leaning out, his hand on the door handle as the rig loomed toward me. “Hey Mister,” the kid yelled—I could see an old guy driving, his white hair long in the Nomad way—“you wanna upload?”
The sirens were wailing. Back a click down at the foot of the viaduct, Jurassic earth-moving equipment was already clearing the stragglers.
I’d never been so close to a Nomad vehicle before. I put my driving shoe on the brass footplate, grabbed the carved handhold, and swung through the open door.
* * *
The cab I tumbled into was dim with muted colors. My new silver suit, trendy in L.A., made me feel immediately self-conscious. I took a deep breath and almost gagged: organic fabrics, leather, grease, food, fossil fuels, and . . . what else? Was it true that Nomads never bathed?
“Hey!” the old guy yelled above the high-frequency wail. “You understand? We’re headed up the ramp.”
Now the hair rose on the back of my neck. As the old guy’d said, the big I-5 ramp, the ramp out of L.A, loomed in the tinted windshield. The Nomad swarm of vehicles funneled its way, glimmering under their diesel stacks and solar arrays. In the dusty red light a few illegal peds dodged police APCs, running for the shoulder, scattering along the membrane like it was the southern border, getting jolted:
ash in a flash
, as they say on the street. I started a quick inventory of my life but never got past the problems I was going to talk to my analyst about: tension at the architectural firm where I work, and my rocky engagement to Denise, a woman obsessed with parking spaces. Maybe what I needed was a short adventure.
“Boy, is my mom gonna flame when she finds out we loaded a porker,” the kid said. “I mean a parker. Sorry.”
“I fused my chip,” I told the old guy. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Then ride with us, stranger. There’re places we can get you back across. There’s Hubbard’s Cave in Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
We approached the abandoned toll booths. They marked a kind of border: to the east lay the InterState, true Nomad territory, disappearing into land darkening as with a change of weather.
Looking into the vast black heart of it, I swooned.
* * *
When I woke the next morning, I found myself in a bunk aft in the vehicle, a small patch of UV glass beside me, the creosote scrub of Nevada stretching to the horizon. The truth was, it was sublime. A range of mountains stood clearly in the distance, purple and clean. The electronic fence that kept the Nomads on the road and off the land was barely visible as a series of thin towers. Horrible though my dislocation was, I could see what the Nomads liked about their way of life: the space, the steady movement, the low-level atmosphere you could see right through.
And out there, well, traffic wasn’t that bad. The big rigs—the stupendously oversize vans, the doublewide trailers, the canvas-flapping Omars, the sedans, the commercial flatbeds—all moved like a herd of animals, in an orderly, coordinated way, our speed about as fast as a person can run.
Up forward, a graceful woman in her late twenties was driving. She wore the big Nomad earrings, the oversize tunic and chaps, the muted colors, and turned out to be the boy’s mother, Acura. I felt self-conscious about my silver suit again; when the light hit the fabric the right way, it actually reflected its surroundings.
I eased myself into the passenger’s seat with an ingratiating smile. Acura was attractive, even smelled good, spicy and floral at the same time.
I suppose I was a little intoxicated by her. Or disoriented by the experience of continuous motion. “Isn’t it maddening not to stop?” I blurted out, trying to be friendly. “I’ve always felt you people had a right . . .”
Her ice-blue eyes narrowed. “You people?”
“I’m sorry. I mean, um, you . . . folk.”
“Us folk? Just where are
us folk
supposed to demand our rights?” she asked, her lips tight. “Just where?”
She was technically correct about the Nomad human rights problem.
Nomad life first began, I remember reading, when the refinement of low-v solar rigs coincided with a movement among long-haul truckers to stay on the road all the time. In the cities, mobile offices had already hit the road in the shape of customized supervans, “transient architectural mechanisms,” wrote
Newsweek
, spawned by roads so choked that cities like L.A. or Bangkok took days to cross. During the housing crisis of ’07, commuters with long drives and low budgets abandoned their mortgages and started living full-time in enhanced RV’s, joining the thousands of Sioux and Arapaho on the Interstate who’d gone on trek in Winnebagos. The traffic, as they say, merged. Intermarried. When children were born on the road, Nomad Nation became history.
The downside was that native born, “indigenous” Nomads had no legal residence. Their disenfranchisement remained starkly visible: if Nomads got past the membrane, they were relegated to cardboard shacks on deserted freeway ramps. They joined those who’d stopped, the lot of them illegal immigrants unable to qualify even for survival welfare.
“I’m sorry,” I said, I was just . . .”
“You’re just lucky I was sleeping when they saw you.”
“I was in trouble.”
“I would have never let them pick you up,” she said, a vein throbbing on her forehead. “What were you doing out there, anyway? Taking a short-cut? You parasite.”
“The sirens went off,” I said sullenly. True, the problems I’d been driving to discuss with my analyst, particularly the problems at work, seemed trivial now. “They would have just scraped me into the Interface.”
“All Ryder could talk about this morning was how we had a porker on board.”
“The kid? His name’s Ryder?”
“You just leave him alone.”
Her anger made me ashamed. These nice people, I thought, could wind up living on an off-ramp. “I’ll get out of your way as soon as I can,” I said.
She turned to me as if to say something, but my suit had gone reflective and she started looking at me as if I was some idiot who’d become partially transparent. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hubbard’s Cave,” the old man, Mack, said. I could see Ryder behind him, rubbing his eyes.
Alongside us Nomad traffic moved as relentlessly as a big ocean swell.
* * *
All the Resident newsmedia—CNN, VNN, ABC—paint a picture of the Nomads as gypsy truckers, as transients with cattle trailers, as assorted other road trash. But I saw a different world out there on the Twenty Lane Trail.
To begin with, at the heart of the swarm aren’t transport herds but fleets of caravans driving clustered around mobile shops and services to make up moving communities. I saw curtains in windows, kitchen gardens under sliding skylights. Around noon we passed Nomads eating in a self-propelled restaurant, retro-styled as a railroad dining car, its power panels hidden in the silver of its roof. A long doublewide functioned as a repair center; your rig was raised into it like a dry dock. One supervan turned out to be a veterinary clinic (one out of every four Nomads towed animals). All the facilities were compact, and I’d guess you’d have to say, primitive, but there was a beauty to them, to the funky efficiency of wood and mylar docking ports.
That day I stuck to my compartment, ate lunch alone, staring out the window, eventually watching the light fade over the traffic and Utah. Ryder came by and invited me to dinner with him and his Granddad at a Nomad “Campfire”—we’d have to step over to a moving flatbed. Mack was behind him, said it was O.K., a place kids went to hang out, that I should see more of Nomad life.
I got up and stretched. “I’d love to,” I said.
“You can’t go like that,” Ryder said, waving his hand at my shiny clothes.
“This is all I have.”
Mack studied me for a long moment. “We’ve got some men’s clothes in the back,” he said.
He did indeed: from a locker beyond the galley he pulled oversize Japanese trousers, an organic fiber shirt, and a soft jacket, a nice one, of burgundy leather.
I saw the woman, Acura, briefly just as Mack docked, the moment before Ryder and I stepped over. I’d been obsessed with her ice-blue eyes all day, her sharp intelligence. Now her wavy brunette hair was loose around her shoulders. I thought she might smile with some sort of approval when she saw the earthtones of my borrowed clothes. But she only seemed startled when she saw me. Then she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
The encounter left me slightly shaken for reasons I couldn’t explain. I crossed nervously to a huge flatbed at the center of which burned an artificial fire of used railroad ties. There was a crowd, which took some getting used to—lots of teens, some of them couples, some of them chaperoned by their parents, older people, babies in cloth carriers, a Sioux chief in full regalia, a group of musicians. Dinner was a blur of wholesome simple food on non-slip plates. Afterwards there was singing, long simple chords and the warble of women’s voices. The company confirmed for me a sense that all of life was here on the road.
* * *
Acura’s eyes had a dark quality, as if she’d been crying, when I joined her up front after we’d reboarded. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then Mack stepped up to spell her at the wheel just as I was slipping off the burgundy jacket.
In a flash I realized whose clothes I’d been wearing: the jacket in my hands was much too big for Mack. The trousers, the coat, the shirt, they belonged to Acura’s husband.
As tactfully as I could, I asked about him.
“Why don’t you tell us?” Acura said bitterly. “Tell us about Kill a Nomad Day. Tell us about hospitals that have to keep moving. Tell us about living in cardboard teepees.” She pushed past me and disappeared into the back of the rig.
Mack looked at me after he adjusted the rearview mirrors. He nodded for me to stay in the passenger’s seat.
“He was shot by Residents?” I asked Mack.
He shook his head. “Wasn’t that. We had to leave him at the Mayo Exit, up on the I-94 in Minnesota. They sometimes help our kind—but they didn’t help Chevy.” His son-in-law, he explained, had died of kidney problems well beyond the capabilities of Nomad clinics. Chevy’s entry into a Resident medical center had been denied. The chance for help had meant abandoning him, but the help had not come.
Now I felt stupid again, really stupid. “It was very generous of you to let me board,” I said.
The next day I kept out of Acura’s way, out of respect. I played checkers with Ryder and watched the landscape of Wyoming slide by a streaked side window as if the white light mountains themselves were on the move. Then came the interminable rolling plains of Nebraska and Iowa.