In Constant Fear (6 page)

I knew I had to take it real easy: it was more than a hundred miles to the first bit of power strip and we were unlikely to come across any gas. And maybe it was our slow progress, one too many degrees of boredom, that finally prompted Gigi to speak to me properly—though I gotta say, it wasn't the subject I'd expected.

“It was this guy on the garbage boat,” she suddenly said, as if I'd just asked her a question.

You didn't have to be a genius to work out what she was talking about, nor where the conversation was heading. I never said a word, nor even glanced her way, just in case it frightened her off.

“He started making these jokes about all the spies on the Island—kids and wrinklies—I guess seeing how I'd react. Slowly it became more serious—more of an ‘offer.' Not ‘spying,' just . . . keeping an eye on things.”

Those “guys” on the garbage boats, men and women, had a bit of a reputation. They'd been our only possible contact with the Mainland but something about them often hadn't seemed quite right. They'd trade you stuff, get it to order, but it'd arrive looking like it'd been sourced straight from a warehouse. Clothing or food, stuff you hadn't seen in years, providing you had something they wanted in exchange. At the time I assumed they were just taking the opportunity to make a little on the side, a dabble in the black market; since then I'd come to realize that some of them were probably working for Infinity.

“Didn't take it seriously at first—more fool them; I wasn't telling them anything everyone didn't already know—but the more it went on, the more they gave me, the more I got sucked in,” Gigi continued, her voice flat and emotionless. “Then one day, when I told them to leave me alone, that I wouldn't do it anymore, they threatened to tell all the other kids . . . I knew I was in deep shit.”

She spoke nonstop for about twenty minutes—which was about ten times longer than I'd ever heard her speak before, all about how they picked her up the night we escaped from the Island and briefed her about what was going on, the places she needed to hang out where she might be recruited by enemies of Infinity, where to report if she got any information. A few days later she was befriended by “the resistance,” taken to a kinda halfway house and kept there 'til they were sure they could trust her, then finally brought up to speed about their activities: how they were fighting back against Infinity, stepping up techno-terrorism to try to cut off the many tendrils of Big Sister.

It's funny how that expression came into use: “Big Sister.” Makes you realize how devious big business can be. For so long we used to talk about Big Brother, the government, spying on us, abusing our rights, ignoring our privacy, but then things began to change and it
wasn't so much
government
spying anymore as private enterprise. At first it was just to assist in their marketing, to direct the appropriate goods and services our way, but then it became something else. They used our secrets for all manner of reasons, and those they had no use for, they sold on to others. But the worst thing was they were watching us all the time, checking our techno-footprints, seeing what we were up to, making sure we did nothing to harm their commercial interests—“editing” us out of normal life if we did, making us “non-people.”

Sound familiar? You don't have to go too far from there to get to where Infinity are now: “cleaning up” their society, keeping it the way they want, the way it's easiest for them to manage and exploit.

It was them who came up with the expression “Big Sister,” the conglomerates—or probably some high-end ad agency they hired. They knew people'd find a nickname for their behavior and decided to invent one and plant it into the nation's consciousness before someone arrived at something more sinister. I mean, “Big Sister”? That's someone who's always looking out for you, who might take the odd unpopular decision but at heart she's always on your side, always there to protect your interests . . . Sneaky, huh?

At first Gigi didn't take “the resistance” too seriously—they were just this bunch of weirdoes and losers, right? She didn't
know
them, and didn't give a damn about informing on them . . . but the more they hung out, the more she started to respect them, to suspect there might be something in what they had to say. The only problem was, just like before, she'd already got in too deep and there was no way back—if she'd tried, she'd probably've had both sides after her.

Then, to make matters worse, this one time she went to the Infinity building, she came to the attention of Nora Jagger. She started to receive star treatment, little favors, luxuries she'd never known before in her life.

In the end, she'd just resigned herself to being a victim of circumstance, that she might as well carry on and enjoy her lifestyle as best she could. It was only when she infiltrated our world that her loyalties started jostling again, things finally coming to a head the
night we broke into Infinity. If she'd killed Nora Jagger, if I'd set my laser properly, that would've been an end to it, but as she didn't, just like me, she'd made probably the worst enemy she possibly could, and frankly, the very last place either of us should be heading was back to that City.

When she finally finished, when she'd said all she wanted to say, she lapsed back into silence with no ceremony whatsoever. If you'd nodded off on the back seat and just woken up, you wouldn't've known anything had taken place.

She hadn't
had
to tell me and I think she knew that, but I guess she'd wanted to get the story out, and being Gigi she'd made it all very matter-of-fact, like a long, articulated shrug. Or maybe she felt she owed it to me 'cuz we were on our way back to the City, 'cuz she knew how much I needed to trust her.

Not that I made a big thing of it. It was what it was and both of us knew that; no matter how long we lingered over it, it would never entirely sit right for either of us. I mean, the thing about human nature is that despite what some people tell ya, very few of us are one hundred percent good or bad, and Gigi's a perfect example: when she's in the light, you're not sure what's going on in the shadow; and when she's in the dark, you wonder where that glow's coming from. I mean, I
had
to trust her, that was all there was to it . . . but I had to keep an eye on her, too.

It took us more than three hours to reach the highway, and when we did, we were in for a bit of a shock. The power strip wasn't working. Well, I say it wasn't working, when I checked, it
was
working—it just wouldn't connect to
us
. I didn't know why; maybe there was something wrong with the limo's reader, or perhaps Doctor Simon had withdrawn the credit? Though I'd always thought he'd try to maintain any link with us he could, no matter how tenuous—well, not “us,” exactly, more Lena—and now, of course, little Thomas.

With Jimmy having taken out most of its technology, the limo wasn't talking to me or telling me what was going on, but the
read-out indicated we had less than a gallon of gas in the tank and would fail to reach the City by eighty-eight point three miles, though it had no answer to my question about where we might find more.

That didn't leave us with too many options: either we went as far as we could and then walked the rest, or tried hitching—which I didn't have a great deal of faith in, being as there were so few vehicles around. The only other possible alternative was to call on a few private dwellings and see if they had any gas.

We tried a couple of likely-looking smallholdings—being as I reckoned they'd be more likely to keep a store—but they'd been abandoned and stripped of anything of value.

“You gotta go where no one else's been,” Gigi told me. “Outta sight of the road.”

She was right, of course: all this stuff left in full view of everyone, like the occasional discarded vehicle—someone was bound to have checked it out. The next track that headed off the road and out into nowhere, I ventured down, taking it slowly, lurching left and right, trying to ignore a slight grinding noise coming from the back suspension.

It must've been the best part of three-quarters of a mile before we got to the farmhouse, but it was the same story all over again: the place'd been abandoned, ransacked, and Mother Nature was already starting to get to work, having her way with the upstart interlopers.

We gave it a quick once-over but there was nothing so I returned to the road, drove another couple of miles, then tried again, this time finding the homestead even further down the track.

The
good
thing was that this one wasn't deserted; the
bad
thing was that the residents weren't all that friendly. Even before we'd come to a halt they'd started shooting, sending bullets ricocheting off the limo's reinforced body. I reversed back as rapidly as I could, spun around when I had enough room, and got outta there a helluva lot quicker than I went in.

“You okay?” I asked Gigi.

She nodded, glancing over at the fuel read-out, obviously as worried as I was.

By the time that we got back to the road, the limo was flashing up that we had precisely twelve point four miles of gas. Either we could go that far down the highway and hope for the best, or try another track or two. A little further on, I made the decision for us, this time diving off on the other side of the road, almost immediately entering a thick pine forest.

“Fingers crossed,” Gigi commented dolefully.

“Yeah,” I replied, feeling a whole canyon away from a point of hopeful.

We came to this sun-starved clearing with a faded wooden two-story house and a coupla barns. Through the open double-doors of the nearest one I could see a large circular saw—in fact, going by the wood stacked everywhere, timber had obviously been—and maybe still was—the occupants' business. There didn't look to be anyone around. I went and knocked on the front door, then returned to the limo and started blowing the horn, but still no one appeared.

I gave a frustrated sigh and turned to Gigi, but she was staring into the nearby forest.

“What's up?”

“Thought I saw someone.”

Both of us stood there for several moments, scrutinizing the dense darkness of the pine trees, not able to see more than a few feet inside the tree line. I was concerned we were about to be shot at again and ready to jump back into the limo.

“Can't see nothing,” I told her. “Maybe a deer?”

Gigi shrugged and followed along behind me as I cautiously went to enter the nearest barn. Everything inside—miscellaneous tools, numerous parts, general junk, a workbench—looked like it had just been left, like the owner had walked out five minutes ago.

We immediately started to hunt around for gas; me going one way, Gigi the other, soon building up confidence and becoming more invasive, shifting stuff around in our search. Suddenly Gigi stopped, giving this little grunt and staring at the ground.

“What's the matter?” I asked, making my way over.

There was a large pool of dried blood soaked into the dirt, deep and dark, like it was several inches deep.

“Something got itself slaughtered,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied, not wanting to pay it too much attention; just at that moment we had other, far more pressing, things to worry about. I noticed this large tarp covering something bulky stacked up against the wall and went over to yank it off—to our delight, we were confronted by several large drums. I gave the nearest one a kick—whatever was in there, it was full.

I screwed the top off and took a sniff. Yep, it was gas all right.

“I'll get the limo,” I said, our mood immediately lifting.

I turned for the doorway, but stopped. There were two guys standing there, haunted-looking, pale to the point of sickness, one holding a rifle, the other an ax. For a moment we all stared at each other as if words were unnecessary, that we all knew what the situation was.

Finally the guy with the rifle broke into this sick, nigh-on toothless grin—the very image of a mass murderer you saw on the screen when you were a kid but no one would talk to you about.

“We got ourselves a girl,” he kinda sang, with just the hint of celebration.

His companion merely grunted; Gigi, with all her strange clothes and feathers in her hair plainly not to his taste.

“Fine by me,” the first guy smirked.

“We don't want any trouble,” I told them. “Just gas. We're happy to trade.”

“Oh, you'll trade,” the guy with the rifle sneered.

“She your daughter?” his companion asked.

“No.”

“So what you doing in here with her?”

“Ya dirty old bastard,” the first guy taunted.

He wasn't pointing the rifle directly at me, but it wouldn't take a split moment to swing it in my direction. And for sure I didn't like the look of the polished blade on his companion's ax, nor the thought that it might have some connection with the bloodstain on the ground.

“Come here,” the first guy ordered Gigi.

“Go fuck yourself,” she replied, as gutsy as ever.

“Whoa! I'm gonna enjoy this even more than I thought,” he purred, moving toward her.

“Leave her alone,” I told him.

He turned toward me, a look of irritation on his face, as if I was of about as much consequence as a single fly at a barbecue. “Shut up, old man,” he said.

“Leave her.”

“Why? . . . 'Cuz you can't manage it anymore you don't want me to either? Tell you what, you can watch,” he said, taunting me by sliding the zipper on his pants up and down.

I took a step toward him but he swung the rifle up and pointed it directly at my chest. “Ya know something, I really can't see the point of you.”

“Just leave her alone,” I persisted.

He almost burst into laughter, as if he couldn't believe I'd have the nerve, then braced the muzzle of his rifle hard up against me, so all it would take would be the lightest of touches. His smile grew with the slow tightening of his trigger finger, the expression he could see on my face, the fact that I was about to be blown all over the wall behind me.