The Starving Years (4 page)

“Whatever—and so what’ll happen is, clothes will get tighter, more revealing.” Randy’s eyes raked down Marianne. “Less fabric to go around. I give it a year before we’re all walking around in skin-tight bodysuits.”

In his dreams. The fiber content of fabrics might shift to emphasize cheaper man-mades—Nelson could name two dozen that had been invented since the Stars and Stripes were raised over Iwo Jima—but it would never again come down to rationing. Not in the richest country in the world, where even the folks below poverty level all owned cell phones. And in another place, another time, he would have bought that asshole Randy a beer and argued the implications and ramifications for hours…but pseudo-smart guys who liked to argue for the sake of hearing their own voices could be found in any corner gin mill. Javier, on the other hand, seemed precariously close to making his escape. And Nelson
still
hadn’t scored his phone number.

Given the eruption of bloody bicycle parts from the churning riot, Nelson figured the time for subtlety was long past. He grabbed Javier’s hand firmly and wove their fingers together. “You don’t want to hit the bar—that’s fine. But the tide’s coming in, so we’d better decide which way we’re gonna swim.”

Chapter 4

“Keep an eye on Eighth Street.” Javier said. He dragged Nelson into position to watch the intersection, while Nelson pondered what he would ever do if he accidentally told Javier to “keep an eye” on anything. The potential for awkwardness just kept building. “Watch for a yellow truck.”

“Like a pickup truck? A dump truck? Or what?”

“A truck with a red bandanna tied to the door. That’s all I know.”

The sound of breaking glass sparkled over the top of the crowd’s roar. Nelson scanned the street once, twice, and back again—and only on the third pass did he notice the red bandanna. “There. It’s a moving truck.”

As he pointed—wondering if he should adjust for Javier’s monocular vision—a bulky item lobbed from the crowd hit the wall beside Marianne’s head. Chunks of plastic flew in several directions, and a shard of the brick façade sloughed off. A piece of upholstery with straps attached came to rest at Nelson’s feet: an infant car seat. The crowd was suddenly way too close. “Come on,” Javier urged. “Let’s go.”

The crowd edged nearer still, and more people broke away—people who’d been normal people once, people in suits, people in office casual, people in uniforms—but the gunshots, the riot, whatever had happened caused them to change. Now they were dirty, bloody, desperate and confused.

Nelson led the way this time, tugging Marianne along behind him. It was like dodging the plastic laminate tables in the dark conference room—except these obstacles were moving, and they had trampling feet and flailing fists—and some of those fists held sticks and pipes and anything else they could clutch that might crack someone’s skull. One of those fists held a knife.

He crouched and scuttled toward the truck faster, now dragging Marianne so hard she staggered and lost her footing, regained it, and pumped her legs with all her might to keep up.

And Javier? Nelson spared a glance over his shoulder. He spotted Randy first, in his tailored blue shirt and conservative tie, punching a guy wearing construction coveralls in the face. He bent and helped Javier to his feet—
Javier was getting trampled?—
and the two of them forged on toward the truck.

“Nelson!”

Nelson spun back toward Marianne. Some guy in a suit with wild eyes and blood around his mouth was hauling at her hair. A kung fu move Nelson had learned from his twelve-year-old sparring partner took over, and the heel of his hand connected with the crazy guy’s chin. The snap sounded louder than the gunshots. It did its job, too—the guy let go of Marianne’s hair to clamp both hands over his bloodied mouth, howling.

As Nelson pulled away, he began to shake. He’d never actually hit anyone before. Not like that. Not for real.

Finally, finally they made it to the truck, Marianne with a broken heeled shoe and a torn earlobe missing its earring, Nelson with a sleeve of his polyester-blend dress shirt torn mostly off at the shoulder, and his khaki pants splattered with blood. Someone else’s blood. Hopefully.

He dragged Marianne up to the driver’s side and pounded on the tinted window. It rolled down. An angular guy in his twenties with dark hair and a couple weeks of ragged stubble was at the wheel. He looked at Nelson hard, sinews cording in his neck as he swallowed, waiting to hear what Nelson had to say for himself. “Red bandanna,” Nelson gasped—he hadn’t realized he was out of breath. And he hadn’t realized his hand was throbbing.

“Javier?”

Nelson turned to make sure Javier was still there, and spotted his black hair and black eye patch among the crowd.

The guy clarified: “Are you Javier?”

“Me? No, I…” shit, was the guy going to bolt if Nelson admitted he wasn’t? The whole yellow truck / red bandanna scheme suddenly seemed way too convoluted. “He’s coming. He’s right there.”

This time it was Randy who almost went down, tripping over God-knows-what, maybe even a trampled body. Javier yanked him up.

“Which one?” demanded the driver.

“The, ah…Hispanic—”

“The guy with the eye patch,” Marianne shrieked. At least, Nelson thought, he hadn’t been the one to say it.

The driver frantically gestured to Nelson to come around the passenger side, and leaned across to unlock the door. “Get in, get in.”

“Go,” Nelson snapped. He shoved Marianne toward the door, and jogged back into the crowd to wrestle Javier (and, he supposed, Randy) from the pandemonium. He grabbed Javier by the arm and hauled him out of the crowd that was trying to suck him toward a silver compact coupe, where the crowd had swarmed the car like ants around a dropped hunk of coconut-flavored manna. They pounded the windshield with the flats of their hands, and beat the roof and the hood with their fists. When that didn’t result in whatever they’d been trying to achieve, they began rocking the car.
 

A scream pierced the crowd, mostly muffled by the closed windows, but Nelson still heard it. A woman’s scream.
 

The
whump
of helicopters sounded—overhead, or maybe the noise of the blades was being thrown through the corridor of the tall buildings—when finally Nelson pulled Javier from the throng, and Javier towed Randy out behind him. They sprinted toward the truck and climbed in, one after the other. Randy, who was last, collapsed in the passenger seat, breathing hard. Half his face was swollen and red, and would no doubt bruise green, purple and blue in a few hours. Javier and Nelson ducked into the space between the seats and crammed into the back of the truck, where Marianne had already squeezed herself among a bunch of cardboard boxes as if she was trying to be invisible.

The driver’s head appeared in the gap, sizing up his passengers. “Javier?” he said.

“Yes…you’re Tim, right?”

“Right.” Tim looked Javier up and down, panicky eyed, then looked Nelson up and down, too. “Who are you?”
 

“Nelson Oliver.” As if that explained anything at all, but Nelson owed the guy his name, at least. Tim stared at him for a good, long second, then turned and threw the truck into gear.

Nelson looked out through the windshield and took in the sight of the crowd rocking the…no way, they’d overturned the silver coupe. Then he navigated through the boxes in the cargo hold and peeked out the tinted back window. “I’d back up and go the other way if I were you,” he shouted as the truck started to move. Tim checked his mirrors, stomped the brake, then did just that: he threw it in reverse. The truck thumped against something—or maybe something thumped against the truck—and Tim went a lot faster and a lot farther in reverse than any sane driver should have.

What had Tim hit? It sounded suspiciously like a person. Nelson’s stomach lurched, and he assured himself that it wasn’t necessarily a person. It could have been a trash can. Or an A-frame sign with daily specials on it. Or a…a…his brain didn’t seem to be working and he felt like he was going to puke.
 

He pressed his cheek against the rear window and struggled to see if they were mowing anyone down in their hurry to save their own skins. There was a flash—gunfire? He didn’t know. He’d only seen gunfire on TV, and unlike most people, he knew better than to believe everything he saw on the idiot box. Another thump that sounded exactly like a person being hit by a truck, and Nelson saw a planter roll away, spraying soil and beer cans and stunted flowers and cigarette butts. Thank God.

Thank God.

More flashes—and it wasn’t gunfire, Nelson realized. It was his own fucking head. Pins and needles, that’s what he’d always called it, because it looked the way your foot feels when you’ve been sitting on it playing video games too long. White flashes. Sparkles. Shapes sometimes, shapes that you might give names to, in the way some people lie on their backs, stare up at the summer sky, and find animals and faces in the clouds.

Nelson’s pins and needles were far less benign than cloud shapes; they were the aura that heralded his worst migraines.

He turned away from the window and knuckled his eyes, even though he knew the visual disturbance had zero to do with his eyes and everything to do with his brain. He groped in his pockets to see if his magical dose of Peritriptan was still there. It was. While he hadn’t exactly been
expecting
a migraine, he’d been worried today might be the day the next big attack reared its ugly head. He’d been sleeping badly, and eating badly, and worrying about defaulting on his student loans. Add to that the stress of the Canaan Products seminar and the ridiculous office drone costume he was wearing….

“Hey.” He touched Javier on the shoulder. Javier was crouched beside Marianne’s hidey-hole, speaking to her in low, soothing tones. He turned to look up at Nelson. Such pretty cheekbones. Exquisite, even. Nelson didn’t suppose he usually thought of a man’s facial features as exquisite. It must have been the eye patch, or the scars it was hiding, that sent Nelson’s mind into a flurry of compare-and-contrast that made the beautifully-formed features that were still intact even more appealing by comparison.

“Well? What is it?”

Staring. Right. “Timing sucks, but I gotta take a pill.”

“Okay.” Javier said it cautiously, with undertones of
and
why are you telling me?
shot through it.

“A migraine’s coming. A bad one. I’ll be totally useless, either with the pill or without it. Stupid thing costs about a month’s salary.” His current salary, anyway, as a movie rental clerk. “If I take it, I’ll be high as a kite for a couple of hours. If I don’t take it, I’ll be a basket case for a few days.”

“Then take it!”

Nelson pulled the precious, single pill from its wrapper and dry-swallowed it. “I might say things.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just the serotonin flooding my brain. It gets pretty trippy.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll probably mention that I think you’re totally hot and I’m dying to sleep with you.”

“Oh.” Javier almost smiled. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The truck braked again, suddenly, and they all lurched sideways. Marianne and Javier fell into boxes, but Nelson would have gone sprawling into the spaces between, if Javier hadn’t reached out and grabbed him. Gears shifted. Now the truck sprang forward, turning sharply, and Javier fell back into Marianne, Nelson forward onto Javier.

Way to jumpstart the serotonin-rush. Nelson’s chest was pressed into Javier’s, and all of them were frozen in place, bracing themselves on anything their hands and feet could shove against. “Do me a favor,” Nelson said over the ominous rattles, screeches, screams and thumps.

“What?”

“Just in case the worst-case-scenario happens while I’m out,” and he could think of at least fifty ways they’d all die before the Peritriptan wore off, “let me take one good memory with me.”

Javier hesitated. Nelson dreaded the refusal for just a moment before he resigned himself to it, and began to pull back. Javier was still holding onto him, though. Instead of letting him pull away, Javier dragged him forward and covered his mouth in a kiss.

A real kiss, hard and wet. Nelson felt his lips part in surprise, and Javier’s tongue slid into his mouth. The truck jostled, and their teeth clacked together. Their mingled saliva was metallic with adrenaline. Nelson clutched something—he couldn’t even tell what. Javier’s hip? His thigh? A wad of his sportcoat? It didn’t matter, nothing mattered but the kiss.

When it seemed to Nelson that he might be pressing his luck, that he should probably disengage even though it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, Javier slid a hand around the back of his neck, gently cupping the ridge of his skull. The wiseguy façade Nelson kept so carefully in place slipped for a moment at the unexpected tenderness, and he moaned without meaning to. The sound was lost in the vibration of the truck bed, the panicked din of screaming people that carried through the metal walls, and the screech of the tires biting into pavement.

Javier might have felt the moan as a subtle vibration against his lips and tongue. Nelson supposed he would never know.

Chapter 5

Nelson Oliver. It was a good name, Tim decided. Like Nelson Mandela. And Oliver Twist. Nelson Oliver would be a good superhero name—although it would be the hero’s street name, the identity he used while he navigated the mundane world. His crime-fighting name would be something sleeker. Something that showed fierceness, but intelligence, too. Dark, but not evil. Something that hinted at power, without being too overt….

“I fink my toof is loose,” Randy moaned.

“Don’t wiggle it.”

“Oh fug. Definitely loose.”

Tim dodged a garbage can with smoke streaming out of it rolling down the middle of the street. How could a garbage can manage to roll and burn at the same time? “Stop messing around with it—leave it alone. If you were a dentist, would you have your office open right now? Because I wouldn’t. I’d be home. Or locked in the basement.”

Randy groaned in dismay.

Four people. Tim had expected to pick up one person outside the Canaan Products protest, and he’d ended up with four. He supposed he should be glad for the support, but he’d never been all that good with people.