Life on the Preservation, US Edition (32 page)

The sudden light shift briefly animated the paintings, but it didn’t obliterate them. Ian breathed out, slowly turning, taking in his work. He could make this one room real, his Fortress of Solitude.

His head swam in the paint fumes, though.

He pulled on a pair of blue jeans, jammed his bare feet into sneakers, not bothering to tie the laces. He shrugged into his black hoodie in the hall. At the Rite-Aid on Broadway he bought a couple of fans, a box of Ritz crackers and a six-pack of Diet Coke. The parking-lot wall of Dick’s Drive-In once again wore his lame WHO CARES. Ian tried not to look at it.

He lugged the fans and Coke back to the apartment. The fumes were still bad, but he hated wearing the respirator. He positioned the fans in opposite corners of the main room, pointed at the open windows, turned them on full-blast, and headed out to the park to get some sleep.

A
COUPLE OF
hours later he woke on a bench across the street from his building, his head throbbing. He blinked at the blue sky. A figure moved close, blocking the sun. Ian turned his head. A tall, lean man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses stood over him. Ian’s skin prickled. He sat up, headache stabbing like a spike.

“What–?”

The stranger turned and walked away. Just another zombie android, Ian thought. But it didn’t feel that way. Ian got up and started following the man. The stranger passed by the fountain in the middle of the park. Mist from the geysering water drifted over him like sun-sparkled smoke. In the misty drift the shadow reflection of a much taller figure appeared, like an optical illusion.

Ian stopped dead, staring.

The illusion lasted only seconds. But that was enough. It was one of
them
. The Hunters. The ones who had taken Kylie.

Ian ran after the thing, shouting, “Hey, hey stop!”

The Hunter moved out of sight around the fountain. Ian pounded after him, but when he cleared the fountain the stranger was gone.

I
AN SPENT THE
rest of the day painting himself into a safe box, which was how he now regarded the apartment. The drugstore fans proved insufficient, so he reluctantly donned the respirator again. He drew hard at the saturated filters, sucking hot, oily-tasting air. The ceiling was the hardest part. He needed a scaffold. What he had was a bed, his futon. Standing on it he could reach the ceiling, but it was hard on his back.

First he conjured a black sun out of a nearly depleted Sabotaz can. Using markers, mashing their tips into the uneven plaster surface, dropping dead pens like expended cartridges, he sketched outward from this sun, discovering a doomed and dizzy perspective. He filled it all in using cheap brushes and True Value paint, ripping the alien sky out of his head like a paranoid dream. A wave of yellow pox stars bisected the ceiling. Muscled clouds bunched and crowded in from every corner. He had to take frequent breaks, his neck, back and arm aching.

He worked through the morning and afternoon, and by evening he was as done as he could get. Collapsed on the bed, exhausted, he stripped the respirator off his face and dropped it on the floor. He rubbed his eyes. Images of paranoia and isolation crowded him from the walls and ceiling – even the door to the hallway.

His safe box. Like retreating into his own head and armor-plating the inside of his skull.

He laughed, his sandpaper throat translating it into a gallows rasp. He could
taste
the fumes, like an oily film on his tongue and lips.

He sat up. The room was a shambles. He had dragged everything into the center of the floor, clearing wall space. His clothes and books and crap were everywhere. Kylie’s Judas locator device lay in a tangle of underwear. She had brought it in from the outside, so it didn’t re-gen. Her big mission to blow up the Dome.

Wait a minute.

Maybe blowing the Dome wasn’t such a bad idea.

He rolled off the bed and crawled to the locator, thumbed it on. The grid lit up. Okay, he could do this.

“I can
do it
,” Ian said, wrecked on paint fumes and exhaustion.

He stumbled into his jeans and sneakers, grabbed his sweatshirt and keys and banged out the door, slamming it behind him. The latch didn’t catch. The door bounced off the frame and swung back inward. He fumbled after the knob, missed it, snarled, “Fuck you,” and kicked the door hard enough to drive the inside knob through the wall.

He didn’t need no stinking safe box.

“I’m
out
of here.”

S
ATURDAY EVENING TRAFFIC
jammed him up on the way to Pioneer Square. He left the bike in a red zone on Second Avenue and walked the rest of the way. The fresh air cleared his head. He almost turned around, back to the apartment. Only his awareness of the utter futility of his existence prevented that retreat.

Triple Ex Girlz hunkered like a dilapidated bunker at the intersection of two empty streets. Phony graffiti looped and slashed across the plywood-boarded windows. Trash collected in the recessed doorway, but Ian knew the trash – like the graffiti – was camouflage. No bum ever slouched in
that
doorway.

He walked toward the building, bracing himself for the repelling field.
You can’t stop me, you can’t
even
stop me
. And it didn’t. Ian never felt the repelling force. At the door, he stood a moment, all his senses wide open. Nothing. No repelling force. Was the Curator luring him in? Fuck him, if he was.

Ian placed his hand flat against the door and pushed. It cracked away from the jamb and swung smoothly inward. A close, stale smell comprised of ancient piss and beer and sweat wafted out of the dark.

Ian experienced a moment of doubt.

He stood on the threshold of either a vacant and abandoned strip club, or the secret core of a vast alien power.

After a few moments, Ian spoke into the dark: “You can’t trick me, you bastard.” He drew Kylie’s EM detector out of his sweatshirt pocket and thumbed the power button. As a locator for the Preservation machine, the thing was useless. But Ian was certain the Hunters had used it to zero in on Kylie. Maybe they were still monitoring for non-Preservation-generated signals. Maybe they would get curious and drop into XXX GIRLZ. According to the Curator, they were hot to find this place. And Ian had a feeling the camouflage wouldn’t fool them, once they got up close. Let the Hunters blow the Dome and end it all. Even if it meant Ian had to spend eternity floating around without a body. That would be better than the way he felt now. It had to be.

He entered the club.

What little light filtered in from the open door revealed scattered tables with chairs upended on them, a bar backed by empty shelves. On a low stage two stripper poles gleamed dully. Ian’s doubts surfaced again and he pushed them down, strode between the tables, placed the EM detector on the stage, and retreated. He paused a moment before leaving the club, looked back at the gloomy interior. The pale blue grid glowed on the stage like a lost star.

A couple of blocks from XXX GIRLZ, in a slightly classier borderland of Pioneer Square, two shops side-by-side presented a pleasant invitation. One was a bookstore.
Biblio: Books New & Rare
. Tall, densely packed bookshelves stood in lamplight behind plate glass windows.

Ian angled toward the shop, hands balled in the pockets of his hoodie. But before he could even cross the street the bookshop’s interior lights winked out. A man in a blue button-down shirt exited the shop, pulled the door shut after him, turned with a set of keys and locked it.

The other shop wasn’t a shop at all but an art gallery. The big sign over the entry read: The Noble Gallery. Beyond the big window, soothing white space was interrupted by individually lit paintings, the details of which were indiscernible from Ian’s position across the street.

The bookstore man walked a few steps and entered the Noble Gallery.

Ian crossed the street. Modern mainstream art didn’t interest him with its self-conscious conceits and phony intellectualism. But bookstores always exerted an irresistible fascination, and he’d never heard of Biblio: Books New & Rare. He was glad the owner had left, though. Ian never wanted to talk to another android, never wanted to be faked out again.

He stood on the sidewalk a moment, peering through the window at the shelves. It was a small shop. In the real world he would have enjoyed browsing it, maybe buying a couple of books he’d never finish reading. But this wasn’t the real world. He pulled his hood up and stuffed his hands back in his pockets.

As he passed in front of the Noble Gallery he glanced over – and stopped. Each painting was like a window into an obscurely meaningful world. The scenes ranged from mundane depictions of toys and furniture to disturbing acts of violence. The paintings exerted something like magnetic attraction. Ian felt it even on the sidewalk. He leaned closer. It wasn’t the usual bullshit one-man show, or one-theme show. Every canvas presented startlingly different content from the others. What did an old-fashioned snow sled with red metal runners have to do with a blood-spattered shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair?

He touched the glass with his fingertips, obscurely sensing there was something
in
there for him. But the two fake humans chatting by the wine bar dissuaded him from entering. One was the Biblio man. The other, half turned away from Ian, wore a white jacket and a fawn-colored Kangol cap and was pouring white wine into a stem glass. There was something familiar about him. He handed the Biblio guy the wine, and Biblio guy noticed Ian staring at them.

Ian turned and walked away, fast.

Instead of returning to his bike, he cut through an alley and came out on the next block across from XXX GIRLZ. Immediately he could tell something was different. The building
looked
exactly as it had a few minutes ago, but...

A steel clamp seized Ian by the back of the neck and hoisted him off his feet. He kicked at whatever held him. The pressure on his neck increased until he stopped kicking. The pain spiked when the clamp swung him around. Now he was looking into the face of a giant. Bald, skin curd-pale, eyes black and without pupils, too big even for the too-big face. Ruby light gathered in the giant’s left eye and speared into Ian’s
right
eye. The giant held him perfectly still. The ruby spear penetrated like a hot needle. Ian screamed.

The steel clamp fingers opened and dropped him to the pavement. The giant strode away.

Ian pushed the heel of his hand into his eye. His head ached like murder. With his other hand he rubbed the back of his neck, which felt like it had been squeezed by steel vise grips. He stumbled upright, his legs shaky.

As if a vacuum opened in the sky, there was a sudden windy up-rush. Ian gasped after his breath. Yellow newspaper sheets, fast food wrappers and cups and assorted trash swept into the air. Above XXX GIRLZ something like a spinning sheet of glass manifested. The spin rate increased and the glass became a bright pinwheel light as big as a truck and blinding bright. Ian shuffled back, still covering his eye.

An energy beam stomped through the roof of triple XXX GIRLZ. The walls bulged. Ian turned to run, but the explosion caught him, lifting and hurling him into the alley across the street. Vivid green and red flames unrolled like a wave. Intense heat baking him, Ian crawled behind a garbage dumpster. He drew his arms and legs in and tucked his face down. The dumpster shuddered like something alive.

The fire retreated. Ian unfolded himself and peered around the dumpster. Where XXX GIRLZ had stood moments ago, there was now a glowing crater. But no spinning ship and no giants.

Ian got to his feet slowly, cringing, watching the mild evening sky, as if expecting it to crack apart at any second. When it didn’t, and he knew the Preservation machines hadn’t been destroyed, Ian fled to the far end of the alley and the street beyond. But he couldn’t outrun a nasty, burnt smell. His shoulder stung. He stopped, stripped his hoodie off. It was burned through, crisp and smoking. He dropped the hoodie and ran, shirtless.

The lights were off in the Noble Gallery.

Sirens began to wail from multiple directions. A news chopper hovered in, spotlight sweeping the crater.

Ian grabbed his bike, begged the engine to start. It did. He rode hard. Strange lights flashed out of the night sky. Buildings exploded, fires rolled up like flaming fists. In minutes chaos overtook the city. All he could think of was his room, his safe box, as if his brain was
telling
him to get there, even though it made zero sense. Ian dumped his bike in the alley behind his building. He made it to the third floor hallway. His door was still open, the way he’d left it, with the knob punched into the entry wall. He started for it and then the building shook violently. The lights went out – except for one in his apartment. The building shook again. Dust sifted through the rectangle of light that was his apartment doorway. Someone screamed. More doors opened, a flashlight swung frantically over the floor and walls, other tenants stumbling into the hall. Ian threw himself into his apartment, slammed the door and shot the bolt. His ‘safe box’ was a virtual gas chamber; even with the window open the paint and marker stink was miasmatic.

The green library lamp burned serenely on his desk. Cries and screams, the bedlam skirl of sirens entered through the open windows. Ian covered his ears with his hands but could still hear it. He stalked to the kitchen and slammed the window down. In the living room he hesitated briefly before the only other window. Except for the fires, every building within his range of vision was dark. He looked back at his lamp, which hadn’t even flickered.

“What is this?”

He pushed the window sash down. The lurid light of a fire played over his bare torso. He started to drop the shade, and the window burst, coughing glass into his skin and across the floor, fragments scattering like diamonds. He staggered back. From outside: screams and sirens and explosions.

Ian brushed nuggets of glass off his body, blood streaking from a dozen tiny puncture wounds. He stepped forward, sneakers crunching glass, grinding fragments into the hardwood floor. The closer he got to the window the louder the chaos. He picked up a spray can – Sabotaz ‘Signal Red’. It felt light as air but maybe he could get something out of it. A bizarre white light stuttered into the alley. Ian dropped the shade clattering in front of the open window. He triggered the spray can, coated the slats solid, grabbed a second can and looped out a random glyph. Did the same with the kitchen window.