Heiresses of Russ 2013 Read online

  Aim had to head back to the playground after that. The little dude seemed thoroughly recovered: he’d thrown off his jacket and was running wild and yelling with the other kids like he belonged there.

  The Rattlers’ committee met with us over dinner in this ridiculous tipi they’d rigged up down by the swimming beach. Buffaloes and lightning painted on the sides. I mean, even I knew tipis were plains technology and had nothing to do with tribes in these parts. But, well, the Rattlers acted proud and solemn bringing us inside, telling us to take off our shoes and which way to circle around the fire, and damn if they didn’t actually pass a real, live pipe after feeding us salads plus some beige glop that looked a lot worse than it tasted. And tortillas, which they insisted on calling frybread.

  Tina, their eldest, sat on a sofa cushion; she looked maybe Aim’s age, but probably she was older. Trying to show the rest of the committee how to run things when she was gone Otherwise, she asked about folks at Kiona: who had hooked up with who, how many pregnant, any cool salvage we’d come across, any adults we’d noticed still sticking around. Aim answered her. There were two dudes, one on either side of Tina—husbands, maybe?—Rattlers were known for doing that kinda thing—and a couple younger chicas chiming in with compliments about how well we were doing for ourselves. I waited politely for them to raise the subject they wanted to talk about. Which was, as I’d figured, the five tubs of Likewise.

  They decided to forgive us and opted to pour ’em in a hole like Aim suggested.

  Tina had brains. “What’s interesting is that they were bringing this shipment out of Seattle.” She stretched her legs straight, pointed her toes up and pushed toward the fire with her wool-socked heels. August, and the evenings were on the verge of chilly.

  “Not like the whole city’s sworn off,” one of the chicas ventured to say.

  “Yeah.” I had the dude that agreed pegged for a husband because he wore a ring matching the one on Tina’s left hand. “That crew up in Gas Works? They could be brewing big old vats of Likewise and how would we know?”

  The second dude chimed in. “They sure wouldn’t expect us to barter for any.” He wore a ring that matched the one on Tina’s right.

  The young chica who’d already spoken wondered if it was their responsibility to keep the whole of Seattle clean, suburbs too. Husband One opined that they’d better think a while about that.

  “Next question.” That was Tina again. “What are those bridge boys gonna do to get their shipment back?” She looked at me, though it was Aim who started talking.

  We hadn’t told Claude or Dwight where we were going, or made a map for ’em or anything, so I thought the Rattlers were pretty safe. Plus I had hurt Dwight, broken at least one bone. But the committee decided the truck was a liability even if they painted it, and told us we better take it with us when we departed their territory. Which would have to be soon—“Tomorrow?” asked Husband Two.

  Aim folded her lips between her front teeth a few seconds in that worried way she had. We’d expected more of a welcome, considering her skills. Kinda hoped she’d be able to set up a forge here for at least a week. Were the Rattlers gonna make us miss her date with Rob? But according to the committee’s spies he was close, already landed on this side of the Sound and heading south. He’d arrive any minute now. So we could keep our rendezvous.

  Dammit.

  Then I finally got to find out more on where all those corpses in the tunnel came from: richies, as I’d suspected. Didn’t seem like the committee wanted to go further into it, though. The dead people were who? People the richies had killed. How? Didn’t know. Didn’t think it mattered; dead was dead. And why were they stacked up on the road all unhygienic-like instead of properly buried? Have to send a detail to take care of that. And the two fresh ones? Tina said she figured the way I did that they were fallout from Claude and Dwayne’s trip through the blockade.

  So why? Well, that was obvious, too: use the dead ones to catch us, alive, to work for ’em.

  It became more obvious when Curtis took us to where we were supposed to sleep: a tree house far up the central hill of the park’s peninsula. He climbed the rope ladder ahead of us and showed us the pisspot, the water bucket and dipper, the bell to ring if one of us suddenly took violently ill in the night. Then he wanted to know if we’d seen his little sister’s body in the pile.

  “Uh, no, we kinda—we had to go fast, didn’t see much. Really.” Aim could tell a great lie.

  “She had nice hair, in ponytails. And big, light green eyes.”

  Anybody’s eyes that had been open in that pile, they weren’t a color you’d recognize anymore. Mostly they were gone. Along with big chunks of face. “No, we, uh, we had to get out of there too fast. Really didn’t see. Sorry.”

  He left us alone at last.

  Alone as we were going to get—there was a lot of other tree houses nearby; dusk was settling in fast but we could see people moving up their own ladders, hear ’em talking soft and quiet.

  “Lie down.” I patted the floor mat. She came into my arms. I had her body, no problema. I did hurt from heaving the rolly around, but that didn’t matter much. I stroked her bangs back from her pretty face that I knew even in the dark.

  “What’d they do with Dwayne?”

  “Who?”

  “Dwayne, you know, the little dude?”

  Right: Claude and Dwight’s kid brother. “That what you wanna call him?”

  Aim snorted. “It’s his name. He told Curtis. I heard him.”

  My fingers wandered down to the arches of her eyebrows, smoothing them flat. “You worried about him? He looked happy on the playground. They must have places for kids to sleep here. We seen plenty of ’em.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.” The skin above her nose crinkled. I traced her profile, trying to give her something else to think of. It sort of worked.

  “Why don’t the committee care more about the Mercer Island richies? That was—horrible. In the tunnel.”

  I laughed, though it wasn’t the littlest bit funny. “Fail. Mega Fail—they were supposed to be protecting these people here and the richies raided ’em. I wouldn’t wanna talk about it either.”

  I felt her forehead relax. “Yeah.” She reached up and tugged my scarf free so she could run her hands over my close-clipped scalp. That was more like it. I snuggled my head against the denim of her coat.

  That was our last night together as a couple.

  She only mentioned Rob once.

  •

  Next morning my arm felt even sorer. And my shoulder had turned stiff. And my wrist. Was getting old like this? No wonder people went Otherwise.

  Aim and I woke up at the same time, same as at home and on salvage runs. “Good dreams?” I asked. She nodded and gave me a sheepish half-smile, so I didn’t have to ask who she’d dreamed about. It wasn’t me.

  What kind of universe would Aim make if she went Otherwise? It wouldn’t be the same as mine.

  Curtis had pointed out a latrine on the way to our treehouse. We dumped the pisspot there and took care of our other morning needs. It was a nice latrine, with soap and a bowl of water.

  Down we went, following the trail to the main camp. Aim held my hand when we could walk side by side. Sweet moments. I knew I better treasure ’em.

  I helped set out breakfast, which was berries and bars of what appeared to be last night’s beige glop, fossilized. Aim retrieved the rolly from where we’d left it under a supply tarp. She cleaned the gun, which she called Walter, and shined up her tools. Soon enough she attracted a clientele.

  First come a dude could have been fourteen or fifteen; he wanted her to help him fix up an underwater trap for turtles and crayfish. Then he had a friend a little older who asked her to help him take apart a motor to power his boat. Actually, he had taken it apart already, and wanted her to put it together again with him.

  Aim called a break for herself after a couple hours of this so she could go check out how Dwayne was doing. And sh
e wanted to bring him a plum from the ones I collected for snacks. I waited by the tools for her to come back. A shadow cut the warm sun and I looked up from the dropcloth.

  “Hey.” A dude’s voice. All I could see was a silhouette. Like an eclipse—a gold rim around darkness.

  “Hey back.”

  “You’re not Amy.”

  “Nope.”

  He sat down fast, folding his legs. “Must be Dolores, then? I’m Rob.” He held out a hand to shake, so I took it.

  Now I could see him, dude was every bit as pretty as Aim had said. Dammit. Hair like new copper, tied back smooth and bright and loose below a wide-brimmed straw fedora. Eyes large, a strange, pale blue. Freckles like cinnamon all over his snub-nosed face and his long arms where they poked out of the black-and-white print shirt he wore. But not on his throat, which was smooth as vanilla ice cream and made me want to—no. This was Aim’s crush.

  His hand was a little damp around the palm. Fingers long and strong. I let it go. “Aim’s around here somewhere; she’ll be back in a minute, I think, if you wanna wait.”

  “Sure.” He had a tiny little stick, a twig, in the corner of his mouth. His lips were pink, not real thin for a white boy. Dammit.

  “Where’s your guitar?” I asked.

  “Left it back home, at the bunkers. The Herons’ll take care of it for me; too much to travel with. But I packed my pennywhistle.” He swapped the stick for something longer, shiny black and silver. He played a sad-sounding song, mostly slow, with some fast parts where one line ended and the next began. Then he speeded up, did a new, sort of jazzy tune. Then another, and I recognized it: “Firework.”

  Aim recognized it, too. Or him, anyway—she came running up behind me shouting his name: “Rob! Rob!” She hauled him up with a hug. “I’m so glad! So glad!” He hugged her back. They both laughed and leaned away enough to look each other in the eyes.

  “Oh, wow—” “Did you—” They started and stopped talking at the same time. Cute.

  Dwayne had showed up in Aim’s wake. He stood to one side, hands in his front pockets, about as awkward as I felt.

  Rob and Aim let go of each others’ arms. “Who’s this?” he asked her, bending his knees to put his face on the kid’s level.

  “I’m Dwayne. I come all the way from Issaquah.” Which was nine times more words than I’d ever heard him use before. Maybe he liked white dudes.

  “That’s pretty far. But I met somebody came even further.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “I’m Rob. I live in Fort Worden, other side of the Sound.”

  “Issaquah is twenty-two miles from Seattle.”

  “Well, this chica I’m talking about sailed to Fort Worden over the ocean from Liloan. That’s in the Philippines. Six thousand miles.”

  “She did not!”

  “I’m telling you.”

  Here came Curtis over from the playground. He said hey and dragged Dwayne back with him with the promise of a swim, “—so you can get packed quick.”

  The Rattlers wanted us gone yesterday. While Rob met with their committee to tell them the news out of Liloan—how the Philippines had been mostly missed by the EMPs and other tech-killers thrown around in the first mass panic—Aim loaded her tools in the rolly, and I went to find the truck. At the fuel shed they directed me up the remains of a service road. The twelve-year-olds had parked at the end of it; they were just through filling in the hole they’d dug, tamping down dirt with a couple of shovels. The empty Likewise tubs lay on their sides in the dead pine needles.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We were gonna do that.”

  “’Sall right,” the bigger one said. “Didn’t take long.”

  “Yes it did.” Her friend wasn’t about to lie. “But we’re done, now, and nobody drunk it.

  “Have you ever—” The smaller girl smacked the bigger one on her head. “Stop! I was only asking!” She turned to me again. “You ever taken any Likewise yourself?”

  Once. A single dose was low risk—I’d heard of adults with the same history as me, twenty-four, twenty-five, and still not Otherwise.

  “Tastes like dog slobber,” I told her. “Like spit bugs crapped in a bottle of glue.”

  “Eeuuw!” They made faces and giggled. I thought about the questions they didn’t ask as they brought me back down in the truck. About how Likewise felt, what happened when I had it in me.

  You could call it a dream. In it, my mom had never hit me and my dad had never got stoned. I was living in a house with Aim. The drug was specific: a yellow house with white trim, a picket fence. We had a dog named Quincy Jones and a parakeet named Sam. The governments were still running everything. We had a kid and jobs we went to. I remember falling asleep and waking up and getting maybe a little bored at work, but basically being happy. So happy.

  Seemed like it went on for years. I was out for eight hours.

  •

  We could have driven all the way to Fort Worden, only Aim wanted to see the Space Needle. “C’mon, when are we gonna have another chance?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You can see it from freakin anywhere, Aim. Ask them if they see it.” I pointed up at the chicas in the fifty-foot-high lookout.

  “Okay. Touch it then. I mean touch it.”

  Our first fight.

  Of course Rob took her side. “Yeah, the truck; tough to let it go, but there’s no connections for us in Tacoma. Olympia either; can’t say who or what we might run into going south. I told the captain up at Edmonds I’d be back in a week. Maybe he can stow it for us? And even if we’re early that’s our best bet. North. So the Space Needle’s not much of a detour.”

  Aim looked at me. “All flippin right,” I said.

  I drove again. Aim took the middle seat, but it wasn’t me she pressed up against.

  Rattlers had told us where to avoid, and I did my best. From Rainier I had to guess the route, and sometimes I guessed wrong. And sometimes my guesses would have been good if the roads didn’t have huge holes in ’em or obstacles too hard to move out of our way. We didn’t see anyone else, only signs they’d been around: coiled up wires, stacks of wood—not a surprise, since anyone on a scavenge run would have lookouts. Groups had mainly settled in parks where you could grow crops, and we weren’t trying to cross those.

  We reached Seattle Center late. No time to find anywhere else to spend the night.

  There had been action here, too. I remembered the news stories, though they hadn’t made any sense. Not then, and not now—why would anyone fight over such a place, so far off from any water? But tanks had crawled their way onto the grounds, smashing trees and sculptures, shooting fire and smoke back and forth. They left scars we could still see: burned-out buildings, craters, bullet holes.

  The Space Needle stood in the middle of about an acre of blackberries covering torn-up concrete—what used to be a plaza. Old black soot and orange rust marked its once-white legs. I tooled us under a pair of concrete pillars for the dead Monorail and backed in as close as I could get without slicing open a tire. “There you go,” I said. “Touch it.” Which was a little mean, I admit.

  Rob climbed out the window without opening the door and got up on the truck cab’s roof. He stuck his arm in and hauled Aim after him. I heard the two of ’em talking about chopping a path through the thorns if they’d had swords, and how to forge them, and a trick Aim knew called damascening. Aim recited her facts about how high the thing was, how long it took to erect, et cetera.

  Then I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then her breath. I turned on the radio, like there’d be something more than static to cover up the sounds they were going to make.

  One of them shifted and the metal above my head popped in and out. That gave me courage to hit the horn—a short blast like it was an accident—and open the door. Very, very slowly.

  Shin deep in brambles I unhooked from my pants one by one, I took a blanket from the boxes of supplies the Rattlers sent us off with. Then I couldn’t help myself; I looked.
They both had all their clothes on and were sitting up. For the moment. Aim waved. Rob pretended to stroke a beard he didn’t have and smiled.

  “In a minute,” I said, meaning I’d come back. Eventually. Give me strength, I thought, and I smiled, too, and waded carefully along the trail the truck had smashed.

  She wanted to be with him. I loved her anyhow. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

  I would follow her.

  But tonight I would sleep alone.

  •

  At least that was the plan. When it came down to it, though, I didn’t dare rest my eyes. Dark was falling. The place was too open—bad juju. I had a feeling, once I got out from under my jealousy. So I found a trash barrel, rolled it up a ramp in the side of some place looked like a giant scorched wad of metal gum. I set the barrel upright, climbed and balanced on its rim, and scrabbled from there to lie on my stomach on a low roof—must have been the only flat surface to the whole building, even before the howitzers and grenade-launchers and whatever else attacked it.

  Me and Walter settled in to keep watch. The Rattlers had returned his magazine when they gave me back my knife, and there were seven rounds left.

  Aim and Rob were maybe fifty feet south. I still heard ’em clear enough to keep me awake till Claude and his friends showed up.

  Trying to be smart, the bridge dudes turned off whatever vehicle they drove blocks away. The engine’s noise was a clue, and its silence was another. Insects went quiet to my east in case I needed a third.

  Starlight’s not the best to see by. I couldn’t really count ’em—four or five dudes it must be, I figured, same as yesterday. They zeroed in on Aim and Rob, who were talking again.

  “Hands up!” a dude commanded. How were they gonna tell, I wondered, but one of ’em opened the truck door and the courtesy light came on. There was Aim and Rob, a bit tousled up. Too bad I didn’t want to shoot them. Couldn’t get a line on anyone else.