The Sacrifice Game

(2)

Marena’d texted me while I was in the middle of writing my Dear Doomed World letter. She said she was back from Belize, and she was in her house, and I should come by. Wow, now what? I thought. And what do I tell her, besides nothing? I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, though. She still had a hook in me. Well, let’s say a harpoon. And she knew it. Beeyotch. Anyway, I hadn’t even been to her house yet, so I guess it was on my bucket list. Okay. I got the tanks into self-maintenance mode. I had some Fluffernutter and, just for clarity, a shot of tsam lic. It was basically the same proportional combination of the same two molecules as the drugs that Jed 2 had buried in Oaxaca, except that they were now synthetic, of course, and each with a few pairs of hydrogen atoms added for ease of absorption. It rocked.

I cleaned up and even got out a sort of nice gray summerweight Dormeuil jacket. Wait, is that a moth hole? FUU-oh… it’s not. Just a speck of something. Polonium-210, probably. Whatever. I slipped on the jacket. Ahh. Now I’m an adult. Actually, since the unpleasantness at Disney World, I’d kept the garment all stocked up with my wallet, backup wallet, glasses, Purell wipes, SightSavers wipes, Q-tips, Twist-Em ties, Theraputty, Krazy Glue, grandessa, mandatory medication, optional medication, Adderall, OxyContin, Klonapin, clotting spray, wound dressing pads, blue Pilot Rolling Ball, Post-its, ToothTowels, Go-Between Plaque Stix, red astronomy flashlight, two competing telephones, the Gerber Suspension Butterfly Multi-Tool (which I much recommend), my real passport, my Warren-provided fake passport, nine blank checks from three different banks, about fifteen thousand U.S. dollars in premagnetic twenties, and a little nylon coin folder with twenty-five Krugerrands, which at the moment represented another seventy-five thousand, one hundred and two dollars. And a few other things, because, you know, one never knows. I checked the three working tanks again-I’d had Lenny replace everything after the Disney Die-off-and the apps on my phone that link to the tanks and the tank cameras, and then used the other new app to set the alarms and house cameras. I got my feet into a fully charged pair of Sleekers-just to show my support for the Firm, I rationalizedand selected an indoors-almost-appropriate hat. Wallet, keys, backup wallet, backup keys. Check, che Damn. I was feeling a subsonic throb version of the first two bars of “Transfusion.” The alarm on my 1 phone. Time for another shot. Right.

I rolled up my female-I mean, left-pant leg and found a new virgin target on my inner thigh. Dr. Lisuarte, from Warren, had set me up with a PowderJect system that looked, irresistibly, like a better-tooled version of the 1946 Daisy Buck Rogers U-238 Atomic Disintegrator Pistol, and I gave myself a Ject of recombinant coagulation factor IX. Fweeeeeeeeyup! Ow. Fuck this, I thought. Well, it’s not for much longer. Anyway, these days my clotting was nearly always up to at least seventy percent of normal, so if I wiped out on the Sleekers I’d still live to see the big quarter-second. In fact I barely worried about it consciously anymore, except still, if you’ve ever had any kind of hemophilia the whole world always feels a little different. Like for instance you’re always a little on the lookout for sharp objects. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re sitting shirtless on that butcher’s paper in a doctor’s examination room and you look at the waste container that says SHARPS. If you’re a bleeder, that feeling’s permanent.

I went out, let the door suck itself closed, and listened to the motion alarms beep on. The overcast and 102 degrees and 79 percent relative humidity and no wind made you feel like you were stuffed in a box with a half ton of styro-peanuts and left on somebody’s porch and not getting picked up. There was a top note of burning something in the air, over the bases of mold and fried crabgrass. Devil’s Night, I thought. Starting a little early. Amazingly, I remembered to let the jacket slide off before I eased into the 120-degree interior of the Barracuda Thermador. It was a metalflake-mango-orange hardtop 1970 Plymouth that I’d gotten ten months ago, with the original body, engine, and drive train, and I called it that because the inside had been scooped out and replaced with all-up-to-code everything.

“Please tell me your destination,” the car purred. Its voice was like the Stepmother’s from the Disney Cinderella.

“How can I turn you off?” I asked. It didn’t answer. Hell and corruption. It wasn’t even the right voice. If this car could really talk, it would sound like Amy Winehouse. Should hire her to do it. Just a few phrases and synth the rest. Where was I going? the car asked again. This time I told it, out of sheer weakness. It suggested I head west on Magnolia Street. I obeyed. Indiantown looked like a neighborhood from The Sims, if there were a “seediness” option and you slid it up halfway. And today it seemed to be deserted. Everybody’s hiding, I thought. Afraid of getting lynched by yahoos. Lately there’d been a rumor the Horror had been caused by some kind of Native American magic, and Indians had been attacked all over Florida. Sometimes I wondered whether that was what the “shoulder the blame” line in the Codex Nuremberg had been trying to mean. Except it didn’t seem really plausible. I mean, that’s too specific even for me to believe. Except, well, you never know. That One Ocelot was a pretty shrewd cat.

“Please make a… right turn onto Martin Luther King Boulevard,” Car Voice said. I did, even though I knew another way and even liked it better. Damn. Getting servile like the rest of the sheep-men. Should’ve kept the old dashboard. On the radio, which of course hadn’t really been a radio since 2003, a woman who kept telling you her name was Anne-Marie Garcia-McCarthy was saying how a mob had stormed the Fort Polk army base in Louisiana and may have been fired upon. The Nation of Islam had issued a statement saying that the U.S. had declared war on the black population, who had to fight back by any means necessary. Time for a new catchphrase, I thought. She said that Dick Cheney, the mind apparently behind the DWH-the Disney World Horror-was still missing, but probably somewhere in Pakistan. She said spot gold had hit a new high of $3,004 this morning and corn, as we know, hit a new high after-hours. She told us her name was Anne-Marie Garcia-McCarthy. Onto 710. It was pretty empty. Future Site of Rockingham Vistas, the first big video billboard said. That’s what we need, more GCs. That is, what we real estate buffs call gated communities. Windsor Forest-Based on the Masterpieces of Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light ^ ®. Coke ™… Life Tastes Good ^ ®. Take Back Florida/ George Prescott Bush/ Republican for Governor. An old Mustang with a scrolling LED bumper sticker: IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT. Pilgrim Homesteads, which I guess was code for a WASP-flight enclave. An antiabortion ad scrolled by with an upset-looking fetus on it. No worries, little guy. You didn’t miss anything. Anne-Marie was saying how analysts had thought that with statewide 30 percent unemployment more people would want to be police officers, but the opposite had turned out. Past the Baja Fresh and Fran’s Anemones. They both looked closed. Damn. Fran used to compete with Lenny but I still got brine shrimp from her sometimes. Federation Forest ™. Enterprise Estates ™. Those were both for aging Trekkies. Actually, I only knew about them because they’d been developed by the “Warren Intentional Communities Family.” They were big, but WICF’s biggest hits were still the Golden Year Gothams, which were like whole cities made of nursing homes, and the Special Youth Plantations, which I guess were like a cross between giant day-care centers and reform schools. Colonia Anos Dorados ™. Long John Silver’s. Future Site of Pandora ^ ®. I guess that one was going to be based on Avatar ™. Rancho Pasa de Uva ™. Or had I just made that one up? I looked back but couldn’t read it anymore. God, this is stultifying. Well, this might be the last time you have to deal with the ol’ Pike, I reminded myself. Even the last time you have to drive anywhere. Out over my left arm the big dirty orange sun touched the line of scrub behind dead orange trees. Six-forty P.M., I thought. Right on the dot. Just a hair west of west-by-southwest. Creeping toward the winter solstice on the Fourth Overlord. Which’ll be the last one. Ever. Ever, everer, even more ever, Everest. OMG, OM Cancel, my other side said. That is, I call it “my other side,” for convenience, but of course it can be either side, it’s just whichever voice speaks second in my internal dialogue. Cancel, my other side said. Think Pos.

Okay. I passed the strip mall that had Reefer’s Madness in it. They looked closed too. In fact the whole complex looked closed. Geez, it’s like I’m already the Omega Man, even without doing anything. I kept repeating the happy end-of-everything thoughts, but still the boredom was so overpowering that at the four-lobe cloverleaf onto the turnpike I came within a few synapses of taking the crate up to 170 mph and ramming it into the uprights. Instead I just pulled up at the checkpoint. It could have been an ordinary toll plaza from “plaza” from thirty years ago, except for the brighter light, more cameras, and a trio of Rolly PoPos edging between the queues of cars. One of them waddled up to me.