Head Rush (27 page)

I should say something, but I just stare at the top of his beret. I'll be relieved when tomorrow's over too. Unless I end up having to marry him. In spite of how Packard feels, if we can’t get the glasses, I
am
going to see this through. An agent on the inside is the best hope for our friends getting free. And if Packard weren’t so biased, he’d agree too. He makes a fabulous rebel leader, but he too has blind spots.

“All that tension is getting constrictive, don’t you think?” he asks. Meaning, constricting veins in his head.

“Possibly,” I say. “We don’t know.”

He turns to me. I know what he’s going to ask, and it sours my stomach. “Will you…”

“Of course.” I pat my thigh.

He takes off his beret and settles his head on my lap, eyes closed. I place my fingers over his dark, curly hair and rub in light circles. It’s strange, having Otto so trusting and vulnerable to me, like a baby in my lap. Except he’s not vulnerable at all, thanks to his personal force field. Hell, even if I wanted to kill him, and had a knife in my hand poised to stab through his eye, I couldn’t. Would it even break the eyelid skin? Yet he’s suffering horribly. I grit my teeth, hating that I’m comforting him. Even the gentleness with which I rub seems like a lie, like he should be able to feel the anger and revulsion bleeding out of my fingertips.

When did he create his personal field? Was he thinking about me when he did it? Or was it in response to Fawna’s prediction? And if so, could developing an awesome new power like that be enough to change the currents of fate?

His eyelids twitch once, twice. Again. There’s almost a rhythm to it. I continue with my soothing and hate-loaded massage circles. Then I think of Packard’s severed head and I lift my hands up and off Otto’s head. I’ve lost my will even to be fake-kind.

He sits up, brown eyes glittering darkly. “Thank you.”

“Sure,” I say, feeling nervous about my tell.

He turns his attention out the window, to the frozen fields rushing by. We pass a billboard for a burger joint. A billboard for a skating rink. His silence makes me nervous.

“What thoughts, my love?” I ask. Usually his line.

“Everything,” he growls.

“Everything?”

“And I am going to get rid of the Tangle,” he says. “I’ve just decided.”

“Otto, seriously, you and every mayor for the last ten years has wanted to knock it down.”

He turns to me. “The difference is, I really will.”

“People will resist.”

“Of course people will resist. It’s what people do.” He turns to me, seems to look right through me. “People resist what they think they can’t live with, but in the end, they come to live with it, even embrace it.”

I nod and turn my head away. He’s right, of course. Horrifyingly right.

Chapter Fifteen

The best way to describe my father’s house is to say that it looks like an old shack that’s been buried up to its eyeball-windows, with a fringe of bangs made by a thatched roof. And right next to it stands a big, sturdy structure that looks like a concrete bunker with a garage door on it.

And that’s exactly what it is.

And if you’d spent your late-teen years there, as I did, you would know that plague-stricken intruders could break the shack’s windows or hack in through the thatched roof and not have a prayer of getting at the safe family in the living quarters that stretch far beneath the earth.

“Don’t make a movement to shake his hand unless he offers first,” I remind Otto. “He’ll offer if he has his gloves on. And don’t stare at his outfit. I’ll warn you now, he always wears jumpers. Like he’s on a 1950s race-car pit crew.”

I haven’t seen Dad since Christmas, three months ago, for a sad, little TV-dinner celebration. He gave me some awesome computer programs he’d developed, and a hot-pink stethoscope he’d ordered from Singapore. I gave him beautiful boots and an e-reader, and these polyvinyl gloves I had made. They’re really thin, and they’re dyed to the color of his skin, so that when he shakes hands with somebody, they almost can’t tell he’s wearing gloves.

Smitty stops the limo in front of the garage. I pull the bonnets off my pumps as the big steel door lurches and lifts, revealing my dad’s brown boots, and then his gray zip-up jumper.

And then his smiling face.

I’m more relieved than usual to see him. “Dad!”

“Justine McBean!” My dad has had a bald head ever since I can remember—a pleasing, well-shaped bald head. His brown eyes are crinkly and warm, his ears stick out, and he gets two long, horizontal furrows in his forehead when he smiles, which he’s doing now.

He grasps my hand—he has the gloves on—and I half hug him, clothes to clothes.

Otto strolls up. “Mister Jones,” he says.

“Call me Carl.” Dad grasps Otto’s hands with both of his. “Wonderful to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Likewise,” Otto says. “All good.”

My dad waves this off. He probably can’t imagine my speaking fondly of him. True, there was a time, back in my early twenties, when I railed against him and rejected him quite bitterly. I’m much more understanding about him now, but deep down, I haven’t exactly forgiven him for not believing Mom was ill when she said she was ill, and also for being such a freak about germs, and moving us out here after Ben Foley ripped us off. And I suppose there are times I feel angry he never worked up the gumption to visit his own daughter in Midcity all these years; he never even got to see my little apartment. He only goes into Hobart, the neighboring town, where he wears a mask or respirator, depending on his level of germ anxiety. And most of all, I guess I’m angry he can’t be like other dads—that he can’t just be
normal
. I know that’s unfair of me. I’m just as challenged in the normal department as he is.

I suppose you’re never quite fair to your family. And I love him anyway.

“Can you stay a minute or two?” he asks. “I’ve made iced tea. Your driver can join us.”

“We’d love to,” I say.

Otto nods. “Sounds good. And don’t worry about Smitty. He enjoys a chance to game.”

We go into the garage, walking between the armored Jeep and the ATV, toward the wall of locked steel cabinets, which I happen to know are full of firearms. I’ve told Dad that he shouldn’t bother hiding the guns and things that might be displayed—his future son-in-law isn’t going to arrest him for gun infractions—but he shouldn’t go out of his way to open gun cabinets.

In the corner hangs the hazmat exoskeleton, looking like a modern-day suit of armor. The lighter biohazard suits are down below, but the hazmat exoskeleton weighs a good seventy pounds; it’s not the kind of thing you want to run up the steps in. Otto goes right to it. “Is this what I think it is?”

My dad smiles. “If you think it’s an ambulatory bulletproof biosphere, then yes.”

Otto touches it, asks about the material, and Dad explains how the galvanized titanium plates connect, with titanium mesh at the joints. He points out the retractable tree-climbing spikes for the boot-and-hand parts. He tells how he constructed the armor over a standard hazmat suit, and engineered the self-cooling capabilities, and shows Otto the respirator, which fits over your head. It looks like an astronaut’s helmet, complete with a glass window to peer out of. Level-four protection with an air exchange. No self-respecting paranoid recluse would settle for anything less.

Otto asks all kinds of questions about battlefield applications of the suit, and its potential use during chemical attack. “This is fantastic,” he says at one point. “I wonder how hard it would be to manufacture these on a mass scale.”

Seriously?

I turn a baffled gaze to Otto. To my dad. To Otto.

We head into the shack, which is an indoor sprouting and hydroponic operation. Dad loves plants; he’d have been an excellent farmer if he didn’t fear dirt so much. Mom planted outdoor gardens every year while we were growing up in the suburbs, and Dad helped with them when he could. Indoor gardens, however, have become his forte.

Before I can stop him, he opens the latch in the low ceiling. Down comes the panel and the small ladder that takes you up the chimney, which is actually a machine-gun turret. I give Dad a look. The machine-gun turret qualifies as hidden and not quite legal, but Otto is impressed.

I feel grateful that I’d prepared Otto ahead of time for some degree of firearms infractions. “It’s all defensive,” I’d explained to him over coffee last week. “When you’re worried about pandemic-level outbreaks, your enemies aren’t just germs, but people carrying germs who overrun the countryside looking for shelter, food, and, you know…” I’d shrugged, attempting to keep it all sounding breezy, and not a big deal, “… escape from the crazed hordes. Stuff like that. Plague defense all through history had a military component.”

After Otto and Dad tear themselves away from the turret, we go down the stairwell, which, like a normal family’s staircase, is lined with family photos. These are mostly of my brother, Jimmy, and me. Otto examines each one, remarking frequently on my adorableness, though in truth, I was an unkempt child, a pimply, teen.

We stop for the longest time when we get to the picture of my mother. “You look just like her,” Otto says.

Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. It’s our favorite picture of her, taken in the yard of our old house. She’s dressed for a party. She forced Dad to be social, to push through his germ phobia. Her hypochondria had nothing to do with germs, of course. You don’t get vein-star blowout from germs.

She died of it a year after the photo was taken.

Dad shows Otto the TV room, the periscope ports, the pantry that holds six months of dehydrated food, and the cloak room, which is a euphemism for the place where there are more hazmat and bio-agent-resistant suits, plus a selection of firearms, though I’m happy to see that he’s thrown a wool blanket over the grenade-and-sonic-weaponry shelf.

I want to groan when Otto stops in front of the antibacterial spray booth. I remind everyone of the time. “Don’t you have tea, Dad? Are you packed?”

“What is this? A shower stall?” Otto asks.

“As a matter of fact, no,” Dad begins.

And with that we’re there for another ten minutes, and of course Dad wants to give Otto a demo, and Otto is happy to have his clothes, skin, and hair misted with antibacterial vapors.

And then it hits me:
I’m engaged to marry my father.

My father goes to crazy extremes to defend against tiny germs and organisms, and Otto goes to crazy extremes to guard against larger threats—antihighcap glasses, criminals, sleepwalking zombies, my own free will. Hell, he’s even fighting the currents of fate as predicted by Fawna, and apparently, he has more battles in mind.

“None for you?” Dad asks while Otto’s closed up in the booth.

“No thanks,” I snap, channeling my angry teenager. “I checked the weather and there’s no plague forecasted for today.”

“Just thought I’d offer, honey.”

God, what’s wrong with me? “Ignore me,” I say. “I’m just stressed.”

Dad lowers his voice. “He’s a good man.”

I look away. We can’t have this conversation.

“Is it the turret?”

I shake my head. “Drop it.”

“Wow,” Otto says, coming out. “That’ll hold me for a while, I’d imagine.”

I tell Dad how Otto made the entire back of the limo into a mobile clean room. Dad is touched, I can tell. Otto adds that the hotel room got the same treatment, and Dad is in love.

I’ve always imagined bringing a great guy home to Dad, and having him feel proud of me, and the three of us bonding. This is a perversion of that. We’re bonding, but it’s all bad.

After Otto tests the periscope and views the computer room, we head up to the kitchen and sit around the little table. Dad has used a tablecloth, something he is typically against on the grounds that tablecloths are unwipable.

“It’s cheery here during the day,” I say, pointing up at the skylight tube. “You get a good amount of natural light through there.”

We sip mint tea from tall glasses.

“Wait until you see Otto’s garden.” I tell him about the night flowers, and the domed roof. Suddenly Otto has to make a call. “Mayor stuff,” he explains. Dad walks him back up top, where he’ll get better reception.

I smile suspiciously when he returns without Otto. The best reception is down below; Dad made sure of that. “Why’d you make him go all the way up there?”

“You may be fooling your fiancé,” he says, “but you’re not fooling me.”

“What? They’re jitters. No big deal.”

“Your old dad isn’t stupid. You’re full of dread and it’s not wedding jitters. It’s him.”

“That’s silly.”

“What’s up?”

I look in the direction of the stairs. “Nothing’s
up
,” I say. “Nothing you have to think about.”

“Do you love him?”

I can't bring myself to say that I do. “It’s nothing to do with that.”

He nods, as though he expected this answer. “I haven’t been the model father,” Dad says. “I taught you all the wrong lessons, none of the right ones. but you’ve grown into a beautiful, brave young woman in spite of me—”

“Don’t,” I protest.

He puts up a stern hand. “You’ve grown to be a beautiful, brave, successful woman and you’re getting married and you’re worried about his reaction to me. I know that’s it. He’s a good man for acting impressed.”

“Believe me, that wasn’t an act, and my being jittery has nothing to do with you.”

“You’re telling me you haven’t been the least bit worried about being married in front of all Midcity’s elite and having your old pop giving you away while wearing biohaz gear?”

I smile. “That’s not my worry at this point.”

“I know that’s why you bought me the gloves, so that I wouldn’t embarrass you.”

“Dad, I got you the gloves so things would be simpler for you.”

“I want you to know that I won’t be wearing a hazmat suit and respirator or even a surgical mask when I give you away.”

I sit up, shocked. It’s unthinkable.

“Justine, I want to step up for you. It’s time I step up. While I may be covered in antibac and full of Fanarizin when I walk you down the aisle, I want you to know that I will look to the world like any normal father of the bride. I’ve been building up my immunities. I even visited Hobart in street clothes and no mask the other day.”