Life on the Preservation, US Edition (19 page)

Ian closed his eyes, head pounding. Without knowing how he got there, he discovered himself stumping past a bus-stop on Second Avenue, headed uptown, moving fast, hands stuffed in his pockets. The streets were deserted, filled with cold blue shadows of early morning. He slowed his pace then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, grasping at something important.

Zach?

He looked back the way he’d come. Something was going terribly wrong in his mind. Some kind of dissociative break. His memory felt breezy with holes – holes that were slowly widening.

Ian concentrated. Was it possible he was still asleep, dreaming? His mother’s suicide, Vanessa’s mental collapse. Certainly they had hallucinated, heard voices, spoken to the dead. Why not Ian, too? He recalled a chubby man with female breasts and a porkpie hat standing up in a bathtub. And a thing like a giant jellyfish swaying before him.

Jesus.

Ian walked all the way back to the Pike Place Market. Vendors were busily arranging their wares but it was still too early for many people to be around. A stake truck idled on the bricks, white clouds chugging from its tailpipe. Ian’s own breath condensed in the cold air. The day had just begun.

The Advent.

That word had nearly slipped into a memory hole, but now he had hold of it. The Curator called them “Advents”, these days that were all one day endlessly repeating in the Seattle Preservation.

“That’s fucking impossible,” Ian said out loud, and the Curator in his various manifestations (and
hats
) began to pull apart, lose the coherency of genuine memory. It all might have been something he dreamed or imagined.

He walked past The Pink Door. Post Alley was cold and mostly deserted, the bars and shops locked up. Purple irises trembled in flower boxes. On the next block a Seattle’s Best was already open and a couple of people came out holding disposable cups of coffee. Ian took out his cell phone and punched Zach’s number. It went straight to voicemail. Everything had seemed so urgent, bordering on desperate. Now Ian felt loose and unfocused. He needed someone to ground him, make him real. The only person other than Zach that he could think of was his sister. But of course she was outside... outside...
the Preservation
. Which meant she wasn’t anywhere at all. At least until it was time for her to drive into the city again, an android generated to fulfill that action at the same time of day the real Vanessa drove across the Aurora Bridge on the real October fifth.

“Jesus Christ, it’s all true, it’s true–” Ian stared at the ground, concentrating, trying to hold it together, the whole fantastic idea. But inexorably it began to pull apart again and slip away down memory-hole drains. What a moment ago was so
present
and real suddenly became a name he couldn’t quite remember.

His mind drifted back to Vanessa, a steady state. Recalling their conversation in the Pink Door, he cringed inwardly.
Two crazies sit down in a bar...

No. Not crazy.
Not
crazy.

He grasped at Ness like a drowning man to a life preserver. Preserve. Preservation.

That was the trick. Locate someone meaningful, someone part of the strangeness (hypnotized and sent ticking away like a windup toy) but separate from it, too. His sister. That continuity of relationship. Cling to her solid presence, and let the other memories build around her naturally.

Caffeine. If he ever needed coffee he needed it
now
.

He jogged up the alley to the Seattle’s Best. At the counter he stared at his cup and again
concentrated
. But already the memories had come apart, like oil separating on the surface of water. It was hopeless.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE BIG BOAT

B
ILLY LAY WHERE
he’d fallen in the road, mouth open, arms flung out, skin paled almost white. Kylie shut off the dumped Goldwing’s engine and ran to him. The bandage on Billy’s head hung away by one edge, like a big flap of infected skin. The revealed lump looked red and tender.

Billy wasn’t breathing.

She knelt beside him, tears blurring her vision. Shuffling footsteps approached then stopped. Kylie turned her head. The SAB, the LINDA-thing, stood over her. Kylie wiped her eyes. The breeze moved the SAB’s matted hair. Her eyes had ceased their wild swiveling and they stared half out of their orbits, big and popping-blue.

“He’s dead,” Kylie said. “I don’t know what to
do
.”

LINDA stared. Her skeletal hand, bones and veins sliding under parchment skin, moved toward Kylie in stiff little jerks and touched her shoulder. “Gown,” the skin-and-bone woman said, then resumed her shuffling progress down the broken highway. It was a while before Kylie realized she had said;
Go on
. Kylie would do that. But first she had to bury poor Billy.

K
YLIE STOOD BESIDE
a rough cairn she had erected over Billy’s body. It was a half-assed job at best. His booted feet remained exposed. It would have to do. Her fingers were bruised and scraped raw from lugging all the stones. “Goodbye, Billy.”

She hunkered next to the Goldwing. Using her knees and back, she pushed it upright. In the saddle she keyed the ignition. The bike rumbled. She wiped her eyes one last time then tweaked the throttle and rolled forward, cautious at first, getting the hang of it, weaving around the broken places, then gradually throttling up, building speed and distance. She passed Linda and never looked back. She was on her way to Bremerton – to the Big Boat.

Speed and distance felt good.

K
YLIE RODE SLOWLY
down the middle of Kitsap Way, in Bremerton. The breeze out of the south carried salt air off the Sinclair Inlet – the deep-water Navy port. Billy’s Big Boat was very near. Alone without Billy, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to see it.

Few structures remained intact on this commercial street. One of them was rhe Red White and Blue Diner. It stood nearly pristine, compared to the buildings around it. Kitsap Way was almost impassable with debris. Kylie weaved the Goldwing around overturned cars with skeleton passengers, downed power line poles – even a roof section that included an intact dormer window with a Bush-Cheney sticker in the corner. Kylie kept stealing glances at the diner. It looked so
normal
. She could almost imagine going inside and finding it bustling with waitresses and the lunch crowd.

Then she looked ahead and saw
them
.

Skin-and-bone people, at least a dozen of them. They shuffled and lurched and otherwise somnambulated out of the ravaged buildings and shadowed places, drawn by the sound of the Goldwing.

Kylie stopped. Once in the street, the SABs appeared at a loss. Most of them looked as bad as Linda – or worse. Starved
things
with eternal clock springs, bumping around the ruins.

An ear-piercing sound ripped across the sky. Kylie looked up. Three brilliant pinwheel lights accelerated bullet-fast and vanished to the east. When she looked down again a man – a normal man – was walking toward her through the milling SABs. He was dressed in a tan Navy uniform and black baseball cap with USS CARL VINSON stitched in gold letters on the front. Kylie let the bike idle in place. It was almost as if the restored world were walking toward her. The SABs, the destruction, The Judgment – all of it about to be banished by this perfectly mundane-appearing representative of The Way Things Used to Be. Only when he got closer did Kylie see his uniform was ill-fitting, dirty and worn through at the knees, and the man himself looked as sick as anyone Kylie had seen in Oakdale. Sicker than her mother by far. A patchy two-day beard shadowed his face. His eyes looked a million years old, red and rheumy. A couple of his fingernails were missing, the exposed skin pulpy – a later stage indicator of the sickness that killed everyone, eventually. Everyone but her. She guessed the man was about thirty-five.

“You don’t look so bad,” he said. “My name’s Wolcott.”

“I’m Kylie. I’m a pilot.” That was what Billy had wanted her to tell the Big Boat people, so they would let her stay. She turned the Goldwing’s engine off.

Wolcott removed his cap and blotted his fever-damp forehead with his shirt sleeve. His hair was patchy, the bald places red and scabrous. “Is that so,” he said. He grinned, revealing teeth yellow as banana skin – another sign of advanced-stage poisoning. Kylie had the feeling he hadn’t grinned in a long time.

“I used to be an engineer, before the world ended,” he said. “Not much left to engineer, lately. Except the
Penetrator
.”

“I know what that is. Billy told me.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s a jet.”

“F-18 to be precise. And you think you’re gonna fly it. That’s why you told me you’re a pilot, right?”

“My friend told me to say that, but it’s true. I’ve flown little airplanes.”

“Little ones, huh?” He flashed his banana teeth again.

“Back
off
,” Kylie said to a skin-and-bone man who was crowding her. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, filthy and ragged, the cuffs hanging in tatters around his wrists. A pair of wire-framed glasses sat crooked on his nose, like somebody had tried to slap them off his face and he’d just left them that way. The SAB didn’t seem to hear Kylie, but when she pushed at him he shuffled off.

“You don’t have to worry about these things,” Wolcott said. “They’re harmless. They aren’t even real people, we don’t think. More like malfunctioning biological robots.”

“Whatever. That doesn’t mean I want them all over me.”

“Where’s this friend you mentioned?”

“He died.”

Wolcott nodded. “Figures.”

“What were those lights that flew over us a minute ago?”

“Alien ships, we think. You notice they sped up all of a sudden?”

“Yeah.”

“They do that when they go through the Seattle Dome. They’re hitting Mach one or better. The idea is maybe we can do the same. Which is the whole point of the
Penetrator
. Not much chance of it, though. There’s only a few of us left on the
Vinson
. Six months ago we had a pilot, but he died. Before that, he was of the opinion that anybody trying to fly a jet off the deck of the
Carl Vinson
was committing the next best thing to outright suicide. The carrier’s heeled over like six degrees. It’ll take some real skill to get airborne. You got that kind of skill, Kylie?”

“No.”

In the distance a siren wound up. Wolcott replaced his hat. “That’s the P.O. He’s probably worried I’ll get caught in the rain. Anyway, you
have
flown before, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you might be our last chance, anyway. Me and the P.O. and Vina, we want to launch pretty bad. Our pilot’s name was Crenshaw. Nice guy. When he said that stuff about suicide? He was smiling. It’s the whole idea of initiating a counter-strike, even if it’s hopeless. They – whatever ‘they’ are – kicked our asses, and we never fired a shot. The
Penetrator
comes equipped with two Hellfire missiles.
Something
generates that Dome. We’d like to knock it out. Too bad Crenshaw croaked before the plane was ready. We’re
all
going to be dead soon. Be nice to kick back at least once. Don’t you think so?”

“I guess.”

“I like your enthusiasm, kid.” Wolcott grinned. “Come on. Let’s get you prepped for the mission.”

The way he said it, it was like a joke Kylie was supposed to get but didn’t.

T
HEY STOOD BEFORE
a wall of gray steel twelve stories high. The
USS Carl Vinson
heeled over in the black shallows that had been a deep-water port. A cargo net hung from a large opening into the hangar deck of the crippled carrier. “We have to go up there,” Wolcott said. Kylie looked at him doubtfully.

“Are you sure you can climb that?” she said.

He sniffed. “Are you sure you’re a pilot?”

“I’ve flown airplanes.”

“Little ones, you said. Piper Cubs and stuff like that, right?”

“Cessna.”

“What’s up there is not a Cessna.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

Two people appeared at the opening to the hangar deck, a man and a woman. The woman, in Levi’s and olive drab tank top, shouted down: “What have you got there, Barry?”

Wolcott cupped hands around his mouth and shouted back: “Cessna pilot.”

“Aren’t we lucky.”

The woman pushed a winch arm forward. A seat hung from it at the end of a chain. A squeaky metal-rolling sound started and the chair began to slowly come down.

“Bosun’s chair,” Wolcott said to Kylie. “So, no, I can’t climb the net. I’m too fucking sick. And I doubt you can fly the
Penetrator
but you’re all we got.”

T
HE
‘
AREN’T WE
lucky’ woman was a townie, a survivor. Her cheekbones were high and sharp under brown skin. Kylie guessed she was from south-of-the-border, like Argentina or someplace. Her name was Vina. After the shockwave mostly flattened Bremerton she’d made her way to the
Carl Vinson
. It was big and it was still floating and it provided shelter, not to mention food and potable water and a change of clothes. The man who had operated the winch was the only regular Navy among the local survivors. He had been a Petty Officer first class, not on the
Carl Vinson
but on the frigate
Montana
, which had been part of the escort supporting the
Vinson
. The
Montana
was now tits up on the bottom of the bay, the P.O. said. Everybody else was dead or dying. The crew deck of the
Carl Vinson
was rapidly turning into a morgue.

“Nobody comes up anymore,” the P.O. said. “We’re it.”

The four of them stood on the flight deck, which leaned a few degrees to port and was surfaced with skidless rubber.

“We can’t let this kid try and fly the
Penetrator
,” Vina said. “She’ll just crash it.” Vina’s face was hollow with sickness but her voice was strong, with a bitter edge of fury. She had large breasts, all but nakedly visible under the thin cotton tank top. Neither of the men seemed interested, though; they were just like the men in Oakdale. The poison rain or radiation or whatever it was had gotten their balls.