The Saffron Malformation (15 page)

Rain and Shine

             
Luck seemed to shine on Quey over the last few hundred or so kilometers of wasteland.  The truck ran better than it had in years, the AC blowing colder than he could remember, and the road remained without a hint of Once Men the rest of the ride.  He remembered making the shine runs with Cal, how his mentor had looked out at the barren landscape and told him, “I ‘member when dat side a da road dare, it was still green!  Den one year it was juss dull.  Den it was brown.  Now grey.”  His voice had trailed off, not wanting to admit what everyone knew.  “Now deese bits of waste are croppin up ever which where,” he added and shrugged.  “Hell I don’t know.”

Ryla was right.  That’s how it was going to happen.  How the planet was going to die without anyone batting an eye.  If it came all at once, happened in a single day people would do something, but a thing happens slow enough and people have a tendency to just accept it.  Like Cal, shrugging at the wastes instead of realizing what it meant.

It was a long transition, from baked ground and dry weeds to grass you could step through barefoot, and Quey found his worry melted at the sight of the first tree.

             
He’d been guilty of it too, watching the wastes expand an insignificant yet precious bit at a time, thinking eventually it’ll happen but somewhere inside he believed he’d be dead by then or it would somehow magically right itself.  Denial was a powerful and dangerous ally.

             
Looking at the world passing by his window, lush and green now, he wondered for how long.  There was a knot in his throat.  His mind spun.  What if it was five years?  Thirty-four was too young to die.  Would having seven be any better?  Thirty-six…?  No, that didn’t offer a whole lot of comfort.  Neither did thirty-nine.

             
A deep sigh helped calm him and he thought of Geo.  He wasn’t sure what the bot was going to do, but he hoped it would find good news.  Blue Moon had to have everything under control.  They were building those towers that were supposed to help.  They had too much invested in this planet to let it die.

             
Reaching back into the sleeping area of the cab he fiddled with the cold box behind the passenger’s seat and searched through what Ryla had filled it with.  Fresh fruit and sliced meat mostly, and with one hand on the wheel he snatched up a bottle of water before reaching for the sliced meat.

             
The road ahead curved and he saw Roader’s Dine Out coming up on the left.  Quey grinned and let the cold box close.  “Fuck cold cuts,” he said, settling into his seat and resting heavy on the accelerator. “I’m getting something with gravy.”  Seemed his days of worrying about what he ate were over at least.

             
Roader’s Dine Out was a small white building that housed only a kitchen—the tables were outside—in a vast patch of gravel surrounded by around a dozen vehicles.  Some were rigs like his, others were RV’s, and a few were regular old vans or cars but they all had one thing in common, the people inside were on the road for one reason or another.

             
Quey pulled off into the gravel and stopped around the side of the building.  Outside someone’s stereo played a guitar riff that he thought had to be Stevie Ray Vaughan’s.  The roaders were gathered together selling and trading whatever they had with whoever was interested.  Many of them laughed and joked while they were at it.  They also exchanged information about the road, where bandits were sitting these days, if the Once Men were migrating, that sort of thing.  He opened the door and allowed the breeze to pass over him before stepping from the cab and taking a long breath that smelled fresh and cool.  A welcome change from the hot dead stench of the wastes.

             
Gravel crunched under Quey’s dark boots as he crossed the lot to the building and stepped up to the window.

             
“What can I git cha?” a pudgy man in his forties with a greasy apron asked, spatula in hand.  Quey smiled, this was his kind of place.

             
Looking up at the menu and scratching his jaw he grinned, “Shit, you got shepherds pie and garlic toast.”

             
“Sure do.”

             
“Then that’ll do,” Quey replied.  The man called out the order to the other three guys standing in the kitchen and went to work while Quey watched the roaders.  Most were folks that had spent years grinding across pavement and they looked it.  In contrast, there was a young couple, possibly freshly married and heading toward a new life, though they might simply have been rolling through to nowhere particular.  There were a lot of off gridders these days, people who didn’t want to have anything to do with Blue Moon or the cities it built or the towns it registered.  They preferred to find a trade and way of life that was their own.  Hell, with enough water purifiers and a palate that didn’t mind meat well done you could find a patch and live with no one taking notice.  Many believed that was better than grinding away your life for corporate profits that’ll never benefit you while living for your bit of off time when you lose yourself in some hollow form of entertainment.

             
The whole system was brilliant, if you thought about it.  Wages were low but no one worked past four days a week and though no one had enough money to do anything other than work, nothing to put away for a vacation or to start a business of their own, the cost of entertainment was kept low as well.  In fact, every registered settlement or city was required to provide a free network signal to all their residents.  People loved it because they never had to pay to watch their favorite shows or browse the signal for the latest cute animal video.  Of course they never gave much thought to the why of it either.  It was done because so long as people are entertained they’ll remain complacent.  It doesn’t matter how bad things get, if they can go home and turn on a show, or play a video game they’ll just shrug it off.  You want to see the world get angry, shut down the network for a while, take out the Internet and communication devices and you’ll have a fucking riot on your hands.

             
“Git cha something while you wait?”

             
Quey turned toward the woman, probably the cook’s wife, who had stepped up to the other side of the window and asked, “Got anything to drink?”

             
“Nothin harder than a brew.”

             
“Dark?”

             
“Sure,” the woman said and filled a glass for him.  “It’ll be ten for the tab.”

             
Quey nodded.  “Prefer coin or credit?” he asked as a courtesy.

             
The woman shrugged, “Either’ll spend.”

             
He tossed her a pair of coins, large ones worth five each.  She tucked them in the drawer after checking them briefly.  Most roaders didn’t deal in credit at all but Cal had taught him, ‘though we don’t care to live under Blue Moon’s thumb, it never hurts to have some currency tucked away,’ so he had a card.  Cal also taught him never to be a fool so he’d had the tracker removed from it.  Still he tried to use it as little as possible because even with the tracker gone they’d be able to see the card scan and he didn’t like the idea of that.

             
“Order’ll be up in a jiff,” she told him as she passed him his beer.

             
Smiling, Quey took the glass and went to one of the many tables and sat down.  His attention landed and lingered on a small woman with delicate features and short black hair while he took a sip of what another world might have called Guinness.  The woman wore a skirt she probably made herself, judging by the look of it.  The garment was constructed of a dozen or so patches of different colored patterns and fabrics that shouldn’t fit together but somehow melded into an interesting display.  Her shirt was likewise, a tight fitting short sleeve that looked like she was wearing a Picasso painting.  She stood next to the opened side door of a blue van selling jewelry.  The van was a faded mess that looked like it might quit at any moment.

             
He watched her for a while, couldn’t help it, there was an energy she possessed that drew his attention.  She spoke fast and with her whole body in the most animated way he’d ever seen.  The group of three around her, a pair of men and a woman, laughed along with her as she finished saying something to them.  He watched her until both the men made a purchase and the woman in the middle benefited from the selection of the man to her right.

             
“Thata girl,” he said softly to himself before taking a sip of the brew.

             
She was short, even for a girl, no more than five feet, with an athlete’s body, thin arms but strong legs and a tight midsection.  He craned his head slightly as she said goodbye to one of her customers and took a gander at her ass, round and firm under her skirt.  To most she might seem gentle enough but Quey had been on the road long enough to know she wouldn’t be easy to push around.  There was a mass of tenacity packed into that tiny frame, like a feisty pixie unafraid of fighting a dragon.

             
Quey took a long refreshing sip of dark beer while he watched the woman sort her jewelry back into containers.  She leaned into her van a bit and it almost hurt him to look at the way her back arched and accented her curves.  Her waist was a V above the swell of her hips and the edge of her skirt was high on her firm thighs.

             
He imagined a slew of lewdness all at once and made a guttural sound of approval and longing before adjusting himself discretely.

             
She turned and sat on the edge of the van and he tried to make his staring less obvious, looking over here or there from time to time.  Just a man scanning the lot and waiting for his food.

             
She looked up and peered at him for a moment, studying him, before ducking back through the van’s door.  Then she was coming toward him, a bounce in her step and something shining in her left hand.  His heart didn’t know whether to speed up or stop beating entirely.  His breathing, however, halted.

             
“This one would be perfect,” she said, her voice high and musical and he almost laughed.  She really was a pixie.  She rested a necklace on the table next to his beer and rocked on her heels, her hands clasped behind her.

             
Quey looked up at her for a set of ticks, admiring her features and how alluring her presence was.  Finally he reached out and inspected the piece.  He was surprised.  He’d seen his share of roader’s jewelry before but this was actually good.  Mostly they were bits of twine with fake jewels or a string of cheap gold or fake silver with some sort of locket or pendant slung on.  This was a set of thin ropes, two silvers and one gold, braided together with what he suspected might be actual gemstones.  He let her know he was impressed with his expression then looked up at her and asked, “Really?  Think I’m sly do you?”

             
She laughed, bending over at the waist till her head was at his level then she sprung strait again and said, “No, not for you.  For your special lady.”

             
“Hmm,” he said, sitting back slightly, watching her rock on her heels with her hands clasped behind her and her shoulders squared, pushing the slight swell of her chest forward.  She was a real life cartoon character, he noted as he met her large eyes, vibrant green or maybe they were blue, it was hard to tell in this light.  She was smiling at him.  “Maybe I don’t have a special lady,” he proposed.

             
She cocked her head to the left and swayed her hips.  “Shame,” she shrugged.

             
Quey sat forward.  “Though I was planning on having a date with a lovely young woman in the not too distant.  I’m just not sure if this is her style.”

             
“I could find you something else.  How distant are we talkin?”

             
“Not sure,” Quey replied with a cocked smile, “What cha doin, say a few minutes from now?”

             
She laughed and threw her head back, “Ohh, I see.  So you are sly, just a different sort,” she pointed the index fingers of her clasped hands at him, playfully accusatory.

             
“Maybe I am at that.”

             
“Well I don’t date customers,” she told him nobly.

             
“Lucky for me I haven’t bought anything.”

             
She smiled at him.

             
“What’s your name?” he asked.

             
She thought for a moment, rocking slightly—she couldn’t stay still for anything—then answered, “Rain.”

             
“Really?” he asked surprised anyone would name a kid after any form of water on this planet.

             
“No, but when I was little we lived in a place where it rained almost every after noon and I always used to play in the yard so my mother would yell, ‘rain,’ from the front porch to warn me to come in.  I sort of started to think that was my name and it just stuck.  A nickname I guess.”