The Altonevers (41 page)

“
I hope,” slips from his
mouth.

“
What? See, there you go.
Next time say it louder and to her. Have you ever?” she
asks.

“
What? well yeah. Of course
I have,” he says, though he hadn’t. Neither has she, each wanting
to avoid any sort of that subject.

“
Well yes of course,
darling. You’re grown. And all that time on the road together must
lead somewhere. But, have you ever told her how you feel? what you
think of her?” Vivian says leaning into her old friend. Who
slouches in his chair, smoking as fast as she is.

“
No, but I don't think. I
mean, I think she knows already. She's a clever chic. She must
already know.”

“
Chic that's for the
others, not the one on your arm, that’s your woman. Though don't
worry darling I'll civilize you yet.”

“
Civilized? Daisy kicked a
priest from a third story window.”

“
In a well mannered way I'm
sure,” Vivian says. A silence stands for a few seconds.

“
What do you like about
her?” the Baroness asks.

“
I don't know”

“
Oh don't be such a caveman
about it. Man up about your feelings will you. To me, there’s
nothing more beautiful to a dame than a man who's strong enough to
show himself to her. To lay himself bare to his lover,” Vivian says
then drifts of into her own thoughts.

“
I don’t know...the way I
feel lighter when I’m around her. That every thought when I'm away
from her is about her. How my mind washes away when I hear her
mousy voice calling my name. That my favorite thing to see, of all
the things I’ve ever seen, is her smile. Just the thought of it
makes my toes tingle and pulse in my palms. Filled with flight or
fight at the sight of her eyes, and waking up next to her is like
pulling off the greatest job, every second I’m beside her. She
reminds me that I'm alive, a person and not just a...that I can
feel,” he says.

“
Well that's not too bad.
Do you want me to send it in for a quick punch up?” Vivian asks.
Cider laughs with his friend of playful banter and platonic
admiration of the others plutonic ways.

“
No thanks.”

“
I was just kidding dear.
Things like that must only come from one’s heart to another. You do
have a heart don't you?”

“
It's what she reminds me
is there.”

“
She is a sweet
girl.”

“
When she wants to
be.”

“
Probably your fault when
she isn't?”

“
Eh, sometimes.”

“
Aahh, enraptured hearts. I
suppose one isn't truly alive until they've had one. I had one
once,” Vivian trails off to a quiet moment of each in consternation
of the apple of their own eye. In his case a Carrot.

“
A few more Ribbits than
usual, and some of the red ones here and there,” Vivian
says.

“
We got it under control.
Daisy's meeting with the mayor went better than thought,” he
says.

“
I think it's due to all
the fun you’ve been having with Daisy and the Vaudevs. It's been
all over the InterAltonews. They've been televising the whole damn
thing. Get the television will you?”

“
The television?” he
asks.

“
Yes. Wheel it over will
you please,” she asks, as an order.

“
I can only see a fraction
of the cities spectrum from my window, so I've been incessantly
watching the news,” Vivian says with shaky voice.

Bwink! The television blinks on the
InterAltonews coverage of, “The rising studio syndicate
showdown.”

“
Oh, it's terrible,
terrible. I can hardly stand to look. I'm going to faint. Oh! oh
my!. They're effacing my city by the hour, my....oh my dear it’s
just, atrocious, what they’ve done,” Vivian says clutching her
chest. Shifting in her chair, fanning her face with one hand and
holding the other on her forehead feigning a fever spell, wavering
as though she’s about to faint, while drinking down a full glass of
vodka.

“
I can't look, I just
can't,” she says mortified, trying to look away but she can't
resist peeking to the televised scenes of her splendidly rendered
spectrum metropolis erupting into an array of monochrome spreading
chaos. Showing the whole of the city spectrum from the bird’s eye
view of a news helicopter that's evading rifles and rockets fired
at it for sport by both sides.

“
Breaking news!” shouts the
television as the broadcast switches to the anchorwoman in the news
copter, who's reporting with the cadence of a horse track
announcer, while wearing a splotch stained yellow rubber
raincoat.

“
It is absolute devastation
out here. The desolation of the Drabs are creeping ever closer to
the edge of the city. Boulevards are burnt to the ground. Hues are
dripping from the ceilings. Be on the lookout for color sweating
from the surfaces around you, a tell tale sign of the draining and
dripping of hue. When the colors on the walls are boiling out and
evaporating around you, it is likely too late seek shelter, it will
become blank in a matter of minutes. Always seek shelter on higher
ground, upstream of rushing floods of running hues. Throughout the
spectrum, storm drains are filled, there are puddles and small
lakes of mixing chroma overtaking whole counties. Panchromatic
flash floods are gushing like raging white water rivers, flushing
through whole stretches of avenues, sweeping swathes of the city
into the frigidly toned Bleaks and Fades. In some places the
grizzly grisailles of the growing Bleaks can range up to two square
miles in diameter. Refugees have been spilling out from the fading
counties in droves, seeking shelter in the remaining Brights. In
the soul vivifying grace of our boss, the only boss as far as the
audience is concerned, The Lord High Baroness, her vividness
Vivian, and may her resplendence radiate for now, and forever.
Whatever you do stay away from bleached or burned out sections of
town. That is where combat is most likely to be the most intense.
And always beware of the miscreants lurking out from the ugly darks
of monochrome.”

The broadcast cuts back to
the chopper’s view of the achromatic craters, and the colorful
citywide carnage of the chromatic Alto awash in the blood and gun
smoke of the studio syndicates at total war. The savagery of the
combat is making the white and black of the blighted and fading run
with red all over town. The camera focuses in on the pastel
thruway, an elevated highway whose color shifts abruptly to another
shade every four hundred feet or so, that cuts through the matte
side of town.
The camera lens zooms in on
a very high speed chase. Of three police cruisers in pursuit of a
super sport ninja bike racing after an armored car speeding in the
left lane. Protected by a cream colored convertible with its top
down filled with hoodlums and a hot rod pickup truck, also filed
with hoodlums. Driving the motorcycle is a tall man in a beige suit
with a black tie flapping against the face of a woman, sitting with
her back to his wearing a black dress suit with her lavender tie
flapping in front of her face. She's relentlessly and precisely
letting bursts and volleys from a gold plated assault rifle,
interchangeably aiming between their lawful pursuers and the hoods
they’re pursuing.

With a stroke of her arm she strafes
lead death across the windshield of one of the front two police
cruisers. The two cars collide, one pushing the other through the
cement side barrier of the freeway to fall thirty feet onto the
houses below. Another burst from the two on the motorcycle takes
out two goons in the beige convertible, then throwing a spray to
hold the police at bay, then another. The motorcycle driver and the
shooter react smoothly, as though in sync with the others
movements. At a closer look it’s obvious their acting in
anticipation of each other, easily releasing two of the goons in
the hot rod and it’s driver from life.

The chase comes to a massive entangled
interchange, where eight six lane highways meet and split into
sprawling curves of on-ramps and off-ramps. Forming into hundreds
of ascending and descending spirals and loops. They vanish under
the breadth of its hundreds of intermingling levels, though
occasionally popping in and out of the camera’s view. Straddling
the ups and downs of the rounding roads ribboning into hundreds of
interlaced lanes of color shifting pastel asphalt. The whole of it
resembling the fruit of life from the bird’s eye view of the aerial
Internews broadcast.

“
Is that...it isn't?” Cider
says with his jaw dropped in disbelief.

“
It is, darling,” Vivian
says in delight of watching his surprised face.

“
They're good ain't they,”
he says.

“
The best.”

The anchor woman’s voice captivated
the two, saying from the screen “The duo on the sports bike have
been identified as InterAlto lindy hop champions, Harley and
Popper, last names unknown, of the notorious juice box gang,” the
camera switches to shows the duo gloating in their mugshots, her
smiling lips without lipstick and his eyes comically open with
shadowed eyelids. And their bounties with two other portraits,
Cider's who's has the biggest bounty and Anna's surprised face with
the least.

“
They are to be considered
armed and extremely dangerous. These two are prone to creating
carnage wherever there are found to be,” the anchor
says.

“
The juice box gang?”
Vivian sniffles.

“
Not my choice. I don't
even think cider is a juice,” he says.

“
Now you have Anna, so you
won't be a third wheel to their motorcycle,” the Baroness
laughs.

“
Hey, that smarts a bit,”
he smirks.

“
At least the group is
named for you. I mean you are the most notorious of the bunch, and
there are a few others aren’t there?” Vivian says.

“
Somewhere, sometimes, in
some places, I suppose.”

The two in the theatre watch the scene
on the television screen of the duo on the ninja bike acting in
almost perfect unison. When he leans to swerve and squeal the
tires, she punctually strafes lead death with deadly accuracy to
the most opportune target. Then draining a drum magazine at the
armored car and reaching into a black satchel around his shoulder
for another.

“
She's a big reader isn't
she,” he says.

“
Ha” Vivian chuckles “You
always do make me laugh.”

“
My pleasure to please,” he
says.

The duo race up to the rear, nearly
touching the back left bumper of the bullet riddled cream
convertible. The woman holds the shoulder of the driver and jumps
like a flying squirrel onto the trunk and rolls into two dead
bodies in the backseat next. Then quickly pulls the trigger of a
pistol on the driver at point blank range. The car veers toward the
right side barrier as the woman climbs to the center console and
grabs the wheel to steer.

The man jumps from the motorcycle,
diving into the backseat with a satchel around his front. He aims
the assault rifle with a clip of his own and fires a straight line
of armor piercing bullets into the side of the armored car. The
armored car tries to ram them in response, but the woman of
unwavering nerve stomps on the break and narrowly evades, then
speeds up to stay the course. Several passes of the man’s straight
streams, so precise they're like laser beams of lead, puncture a
basketball sized hole in the side of the armored cars three inches
of steel armor. The man digs through the satchel for a minute, then
lights and pitches a Molotov cocktail through the hole into the
armored cars carriage, which bursts into flaring orange flames a
second later. The cream convertible slows, cruising behind their
prey like a hunter tracks a wounded animal.

A rocket flies from the rooftop of an
art deco tower toward the news chopper sudden scrambling in air
throwing the camera's view into a spiral and fills living rooms
with the news woman screams instead of her hasty report. Seconds
after the near hit the view stabilizes.

“
I'd like to end this
broadcast by having a moment of silence for jack, the weatherman.
He passed away in a tragic accident, a hail of gunfire thi...”
Bwink! Vivian turns the television off by remote.

“
Yes, well I invited them
to pitch in a bit. And because I just knew you'd be delighted to
see them. Besides we’re having a masquerade party this Friday, and
well, the more the merrier. Until then keep up the good work. Oh,
and be a dear and wheel that television set away will you please.
It’s stressing my hair gray” she says and waves Cider to lift a
finger.

“
Sure thing
Viv.”

Malice
masquerade

A raucous celebration of reveling mad
Vaudevillians, the chaotic scene is all the rage of a riot as it
rages all around the theatre. A round of applause for Harley and
Popper, who're bowing and taking their seats with the others after
breaking a sweat dancing to the big brass ensemble. The band plays
on, though on a makeshift stage elevated on a small island dead
center in the middle of the white clothed dining tables. Daisy is
sitting to Harley's right with Vivian to the right of her, and
Cider to Popper's left and Anna to the left of him.