Brave New Love (11 page)

“Hey!” A dude. “You can come out—we ain’t gonna do ya no harm.”

Neither one of us moved a hair. Swearing, then thrashing noises, more swearing, louder as Truckdude crashed through the blackberries. He’ll never find us, I thought, and I was right. It
was his partner who snuck up on our other side, silent as a tick.

“Got ’em, Claude,” he yelled, standing up from the weeds with a gun in his hand. He waved it at me and Aim and spoke in a normal tone. “You two can get up if you want.
But do it slow.”

He raised his voice again. “Chicas. One of ’em’s kinda pretty but the other’s fat,” he told Claude. “You wanna arm wrestle?”

Claude stopped swearing but kept breaking branches and tearing his clothes on the brambles as he whacked his way over to us. I stayed hunkered down so they’d underestimate me, and so my
knife wouldn’t fall out from where I had it clamped between my thighs. I felt Aim’s arm tremble against mine as Claude emerged from the shadows. She’d be fine, though. Exactly
like on a salvage run. I leaned against her a second to let her know that.

The dude with the gun looked a little older than us. Not much older, of course, or he’d have already gone Otherwise, found his own pocket universe, like nearly everyone else whose brain
had reached “maturity”—at least that’s how the rumors went.

Claude looked my age, or a year or two younger: fourteen, fifteen. He and his partner had the same brown hair and squinty eyes; brothers, then. Probably.

I leered up at Guntoter. “You wanna watch me and her do it first?”

He spat on my upturned face. “Freak! You keep quiet till I tell you talk.” The spit tickled as it ran down my cheek.

I didn’t hate him. Didn’t have the time; I was too busy planning my next move.

“Hey, Dwight, what you think they got in here?” Claude had found our suitcase and given me a name for Guntoter.

“Open ’er up and find out, dickhead.”

I couldn’t turn around to see the rolly without looking away from Dwight, which didn’t seem like a good idea. I heard its zipper and the clink of steel on steel: chisels, hammers,
wrenches, clamps, banging against each other as they spilled out on the ground.

“Whoa! Looky at these, Claude. You think that ugly one knows how to use this stuff?” Dwight took his eyes off us and lowered the gun like I’d been waiting for him to do. I
launched myself at his legs, a two-hundred-twenty-pound dodgeball. Heard a crack as his left knee bent backward. Then a loud shot from his gun—but only one before I had my knife at his
throat.

“Eennngh!” he whined. Knee must have hurt, but my blade poking against the underside of his chin kept his mouth shut.

I nodded at Aim and she relieved him of his gun. Claude had run off—I heard him thrashing through the bushes in the direction of the road. “Be right back, Lo.” Aim was fine, as
I’d predicted, thinking straight and acting cool. She stalked after her prey calm and careful, gun at the ready.

I rocked back on my haunches, easing off Dwight’s ribs a bit. That leg had to be fractured. Problema. How was I supposed to deal with him, wounded like this? Maybe I shouldn’t have
hit him so hard. Not as if I could take him to a hospital. I felt him sucking in his breath, winding up for a scream, and sank my full weight on his chest again.

“Lo! You gotta come here!” Aim yelled from the road.

Come there? What? “Why? You can’t handle—You didn’t let him get his truck back, did—”

“Just come!” She sounded pissed.

Dwight wasn’t going anywhere on his own any time soon, but just in case I tugged off his belt and boots and trousers and took away the rest of his weapons: a razor poking through a piece
of wood, a folding knife with half the blade of mine, and a long leather bag filled with something heavier than sand. I only hurt him a little stripping off the jeans.

I got to my feet and looked down a second, wondering if I should shoot the man and get his misery over with. Even after years of leading salvage runs, I didn’t have it in me, though.

I loaded dude’s junk and Aim’s spilled-out tools in the rolly and dragged it along behind me into the bushes. When he saw I was leaving him he started hollering for help, like it
might come. That worried me. I hurried out to Aim. Had Claude somehow armed himself?

Claude was nowhere in sight. Aim stood by the truck—our truck, now. She had the door open, staring inside. The gun—our gun, now—hung loose in one hand and the other stretched
inside. “Come on,” she said, not to me. “It’s okay.” She hauled her hand back with a kid attached: white with brown hair, like his brothers. They must have been his
brothers—I got closer and saw he had that same squintiness going on.“Look,” I said, “leave him here and climb in. If they got any back-up—”

Boom!

Shotguns make a hecka loud noise. Pellets and gravel went pinging off the road. Scared me so much I swung the rolly up into the truck bed by myself. Then I shoved Aim through the door and jumped
in after her. Turned the ignition—they had left the key in it—and backed out of there fast as I could rev. Maybe forty feet along, I swung around and switched to second gear. I hit
third by the time we made the bridge, jouncing over pits in the asphalt. Some sections were awful low—leaky pontoons. Next storm would sink the whole thing, Aim had said. I told myself if the
thing held up on the dudes’ ride over here it was gonna be fine for us heading back.

I looked to my right. Aim had pushed the kid ahead of her so he was huddled against the far door. I braked. “Okay, here you go.” But he made no move to leave. “What’s the
matter, you think I’ll shoot? Go on, we won’t hurt you.”

“He’s shaking,” Aim reported. “Bad. I think he’s freaking out.”

“Well, that’s great. Open the door for him yourself then, and let’s go.”

“No.”

I sighed. Aim had this stubbornness no one would suspect unless they spent a long time with her. “Listen, Aim, it was genius to keep him till I drove out of shooting range,
but—”

“We can’t just dump him off alone.”

“He’s not alone; his brothers are right behind us!”

“One of ’em with a broken leg.”

“Knee.” But I took her point. “So, yeah, they’re not gonna be much use for making this little guy feel all better again real soon. C’est la flippin vie.” I
reached past her to the door handle. She looked at me and I dropped my hand in my lap. “Aw, Aim . . .”

Aim missed her family. I knew all about how they’d gone on vacation to Disney World without her when she insisted she was too old for that stuff. Their flights back got canceled, first
one, then the next, and the next, till no one pretended anymore there might be another, and the phone stopped working and the last bus into Pasco unloaded and they weren’t on it.

“Hector—” She couldn’t say more than his name.

“Aim, he’s twelve now. He’s fine. Even if your—” Even if her mom and dad had deserted him like so many other parents, leaving our world to live Otherwise, where
they had anything, everything, whatever they wanted, same as when they drank the drug, but now for always. Or so the rumors said. Perfect homes. Perfect jobs. Perfect daughters. Perfect sons.

“All right. Kid, you wanna come with us or stay here with—um, Claude and Dwight?”

Nothing.

I tried again. “Kid, we gotta leave. We’re meeting a friend in—” In the rearview I saw five dudes on foot racing up the road. One waved a long, thin black thing over his
head. That shotgun? I slammed the truck out of neutral and tore off. They dwindled in the dust.

Aim punched my shoulder and grinned at me. “You done good,” she said. I looked and she had one arm around the little kid, holding him steady, so I concentrated on finding a path for
the truck that included mostly even pavement.

Here came the tunnel under Mercer Island. Scary, and not only because its lights were bound to be out—I turned the truck’s on and they made bright spots on the ivy hanging over the
tunnel’s mouth. That took care of that. Better than if we’d been on foot, even.

But richies . . . more of them had stayed around than went Otherwise. Which made sense; they had their own drugs they used instead of Likewise, and everything already perfect anyways. Or
everything used to be perfect for them till too many ordinary people left and they couldn’t find no one to scrub their toilets or take out their garbage. Only us.

When things got bad and the governments broke down, richies were the law, all the law around. What they wanted they got, in this world as much as any Otherwise. And what they wanted was slaves.
Servants, they called us, but slaves is what it really was; who’d want to spend whatever time they had before they went Otherwise on doing stupid jobs for somebody else? Nobody who
wasn’t forced to.

We drove through the ivy curtain. I jabbed on the high beams and slowed to watch for nets or other signs of ambush. Which of course there were gonna be none, because hadn’t this very truck
come through here less than half an hour ago? But.

“Can’t be too careful.” Aim always knew what I was thinking.

The headlights caught on a heap of something brown and gray spread over most of the road and I had two sets of choices: A. speed up, or B. slow down more; A. drive right over it, or B. swerve around. I picked A and A: stomped the gas pedal and held the steering wheel tight. Suddenly closer I saw legs, arms, bloated faces, smelled the stink of death. I felt the awful
give beneath our tires. It was a roadblock of bodies—broken glass glittered where we would have gone if I’d tried to avoid them, and two fresh corpses splayed on the concrete, blood
still wet and red. A trap, but a sprung one. Thanks, Claude. Thanks, Dwight.

The pile of rotting dead people fell behind us mercifully fast. I risked a glance at the kid. He stared straight forward like we were bringing him home from seeing a movie he had put on mental
replay. Like there was nothing to see outside the truck and never had been and never would be.

“Maybe this was what freaked him out in the first place?” asked Aim. “You know, before he even got to us?” It was a theory.

We came out into the glorious light again. One more short tunnel as the road entered the city was how I remembered the route. I stopped the truck to think. When my fingers started aching I let
go of the wheel.

A bird landed on a loose section of the other bridge that used to run parallel. Fall before last it had been the widest of its kind in the world, according to Aim.

She cared about those kinds of things.

The sun was fairly high yet. We’d left our camp in the mountains early this morning and come twelve mostly downhill miles before meeting up with the kid’s brothers. The plan had been
to cross the bridge inconspicuously, on foot, hole up in Seward Park with the Rattlers and wait for Rob to show. Well, we’d blown the inconspicuous part.

“Sure you don’t wanna go back?” I asked Aim. “They’ll be glad to see us. And the truck’ll make it a short trip, and it’s awesome salvage, too . .
.” I trailed off.

“You can if you rather.” But she knew the answer. I didn’t have to say it. Aim was why I’d stayed in Pasco instead of claiming a place on the res, which even a mix had a
right to do. Now I had come with her this far for love. And I’d go further. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

Rob had better be worth it, though. With his red hair and freckles and singing and guitar-playing Aim couldn’t shut up about since we got his message. And that secret fire she said was
burning inside him like a cigarette, back when they were at their arts camp. He better be worthy of
her.

“Stop pouting.” She puckered her face and crossed her eyes. “Your face will get stuck like that. Let me drive. Chevies are sweet.” She handed me the gun, our only
distance weapon—and I hadn’t even gotten Dwight’s cartridges, but too late to think of that—then slid so her warm hip pressed against mine for a moment. “Go on. Get
out.”

The kid didn’t move when I opened the passenger door so I crawled in over him.

Aim drove like there was traffic: careful, using signals. Guess she learned it from watching her folks. The tunnel turned out clear except for a couple of crappy modern RVs no one had bothered
torching yet. One still had curtains in its smashed windows, fluttering when we went by. We exited onto the main drag—Rainier Avenue, I recalled. Aim braked at the end of the ramp.
“Which way?”

“South.” I pointed left.

Rainier had seen some action. Weed-covered concrete rubble lined the road’s edges, narrowing it to one lane. A half-burned restaurant sign advertised hotcakes. A sandbag bunker, evidently
empty, guarded an intersection filled with a downed walkway. A shred of tattered camo clung to a wrecked lamppost. Must be relics of the early days; soldiers had been some of the first outside jail
to head Otherwise, deserting in larger and larger numbers as real life got lousier and lousier.

“Wow. What a mess.” Aim eased over a spill of bricks and stayed in low gear to rubberneck. “How’re we gonna get off of this and find the park?”

“Uhhh.” Would we have to dig ourselves a turnoff? No—“Here!” More sandbags, but some had tumbled down from their makeshift walls, and we only had to shove a few
aside to reach a four-lane street straight to the lakeshore. We followed that around to where the first of the Rattlers’ lookouts towered up like a giant birdhouse for ostriches with
fifty-foot legs. A chica had already sighted us and trained her slingshot on the truck’s windshield. Her companion called out and we identified ourselves enough that they let us through to
the gate in their chain-link fence. Another building, this one more like the bunker on Rainier, blocked the way inside. Four Rattlers were stationed here, looking like paintball geeks gone to
heaven. We satisfied them of our bona fides, too, using the sheet of crypto and half a rubber snake their runner had turned over with Rob’s message. They took my knife. I didn’t blame
’em. They let us keep our gun, but minus the bullets.

“What’s in the back?”

I hadn’t even looked after tossing up the rolly. Dumb. When the sentries opened the big metal drums, though, they found nothing but fuel in them, no one hiding till they could bust out and
slit our throats.