The Starving Years (29 page)

Tim’s head spun. He looked at the printouts on the table. What evidence was there of him hacking into Canaan Products? His netbook. The desktop. And about fifty reams of printouts. That was all that needed to go in the truck. Not Nelson—because as far as anyone knew, Nelson Oliver and Tim Foster had never even met.

“I’m the one they want.” Tim took a deep, unsteady breath, and said, “I’ll go.”

Marianne said, “We have to stick together,” while Randy said, “I’m coming with you,” and the foreman said, “Then get going.”

Tim turned to Marianne. “I’m sorry. It’s safer for you if I leave—and I take the printouts with me.” The construction guys would probably think he was pulling some kind of scam on them if he tried to take the desktop, but he could set the hard drive to overwrite itself with a string of zeroes, no problem. “I’ll drive down to Chinatown and see if Nelson’s family is okay. You stay and take care of him.”

The foreman relented. “All right. If he’s that sick, then we got no choice but to let him stay. But, Tim Foster—you need to go, now.”

Tim’s heart hurt, physically hurt, when he thought of that blue vein pulsing on Nelson’s temple. And Javier being hauled away in handcuffs. And of kissing them. Both of them.
 

He wished he’d had the stones to say, “I love you,” since now it might be too late.

***

Javier stared into the camera. At his side, a police officer held a sheet of paper from the laser printer at chest level announcing his name as Timoteo Foster. If the Internet had been functioning, he would have been taken down to The Tombs—Manhattan Central Booking—and been processed for real. Or, more likely, someone would have figured out by now that there was no such person as Timoteo and resumed the search for the real Tim. But the Internet wasn’t only down in the private sector—it was down everywhere. It seemed that the Internet was more egalitarian than Javier had ever realized.

Thanks to whatever had killed the Internet, the officers at the Midtown North precinct would need to make do. They had searched him thoroughly and taken his belt, his shoelaces, and even his eye patch—either because they thought he would strangle someone with it, or they were worried he’d hang himself with a foot of flimsy elastic. The mug shot would be quite the photograph with the hideous, milky blue eye in its bed of blotchy scars. If “Tim Foster” was to have the riot pinned on him, no doubt the mug shot would even make the news…if anybody from a news station came over in person to collect the photo. Since the riot was probably the biggest news anyone would see in their lifetime, maybe some intrepid reporter would actually take time to obtain the photo, despite the fact that it couldn’t be conveniently downloaded. Javier would’ve liked to think his own journalistic instincts were that good, though he suspected they never really had been.

If his lovely mugshot did make the news, they’d likely show it over and over again, in the same way they rotated a few clips of film while the newscaster tried to make sense of breaking stories. Maybe Felicidad would even see it. Despite himself, Javier smiled slightly over the unexpected opportunity to give that bitch a good reason to be mortified.

As the smile touched his lips, the camera clicked. The officer behind the camera said in Spanish, “Turn to your left.”

Was the right side of the face always the one to be shot—or were they just making sure to preserve Javier’s most monstrous side for posterity? He turned, the officer held the
Timoteo Foster
printout in place again, and the shutter clicked.

Another officer led him to be fingerprinted, and after that, someone else offered him a disposable white adhesive patch in a paper packet to cover his damaged eye.
 

Javier considered refusing it, since he’d be less likely to be chewed up and spit out by a detainee with a chip on his shoulder if he was staring out at everyone else through the hideous eye. Or possibly the plan might backfire, and cause him to be the target of violence from a badass with something to prove. Since half the room looked hazy and indistinct, and since it interfered with the monocular vision he’d grown accustomed to, Javier accepted the adhesive patch, peeled it open and pressed it on.

He could always remove it later, if it seemed he might need to, though he doubted he could use it to kill himself or anyone else. Unless he forced it down someone’s throat.

The holding cell was crowded. Rioters? Looters? Probably plenty of those. The majority of the two dozen men inside were black and Hispanic, no big surprise. But very few of them had the looks of repeat criminals. Some, maybe. Many, though, looked like otherwise-normal men, the types you’d see at a bar, or in line at the bank, or riding the subway. Javier’s gut relaxed at the notion that his whole internal debate over whether or not to wear the adhesive eye patch was based on stories he’d heard about prisons full of hardened criminals, and not a local precinct’s holding cell.

The door clanged shut, and immediately someone approached his blind side and said, “Where you from?” in Spanish.

And Javier realized his brief spike of optimism had been entirely unfounded.

He turned slowly to get a look at whoever’d been asking, to try to see if he looked Mexican, or Cuban, or Puerto Rican, or Ecuadorian….

No tattoos were showing. No obvious African ancestry mixed in. Straight hair. Wispy mustache. Solidly-built, muscular, looked like he could handle himself in a fight. But nothing telegraphed his nationality.

The guy could have been from anywhere.

Most other Latinos had no quarrel with Costa Ricans, not in general, although you never knew when you’d come across someone with a personal score to settle. “San Jose,” Javier answered—and left it to the other detainee to determine if he meant California or Central America.

“I’m Carlos. From Chicago.”

Well. How exotic. Javier continued scanning the room to ensure that no one was flashing gang signs or edging around in an attempt to jump him, but it appeared as if no one was particularly interested in him, other than a few curious glances at his eye patch. “Timoteo,” he said, pleased that Carlos from Chicago hadn’t given a surname, so he didn’t have to give the unlikely name of
Foster
to a person who’d actually notice he wasn’t half-Anglo.

“What happened to your eye?” Carlos asked.

“Chemical burn.”

“You got a kid?”

Javier almost lied and said he didn’t, then decided he’d be a fool not to play up the assumption he was straight. “Not here. A daughter.”

“I got a baby boy. Thank God he’s back home with my lady. Some fucked up shit going on here.”

Sofia. Javier hadn’t seen her for nearly two years. What if she saw that hideous mugshot on TV, since they watched American news back home to keep up with the money font of Alejandro’s Manhattan business and investments. She’d be six now, almost seven.

“Fucking cops hauling off people’s kids,” Carlos went on, still in Spanish. “My homie’s neighbor got beat up bad trying to keep ’em from taking his boy.”

Almost seven. It had been so long. Would she have recognized him anyway…even without the scars?

“Then I got into it with ’em—’cos that’s his
boy
, you know? Ended up throwing a punch. And here I am.”

If Sofia didn’t recognize her
papito
, Nana Felicidad would make sure she did. She’d make sure to remind the girl what a monster he was, too.

“I been here nearly twenty hours,” Carlos said, “nearly a whole day. Ain’t had nothing to eat since last night. Fucking starving. Where’s the maná?”

Of course, it really had nothing to do with his eye. The scarring was simply the outer manifestation of his inner evil. A sign from God. It never would have happened if he hadn’t quit the family business—quit the
family
—to become a reporter and run off to Gaza for that news program.

With that man.

The man who’d broken up with him in an Israeli hospital, and left him there to rot.

“You know what time it is?” Carlos said. Pleaded, really.

Javier considered how long he’d milled around the station while they attempted to process him without any online access. “Maybe eight o’clock.”

“Damn, I’m so fucking hungry.”

Javier had eaten around midnight, tapenade and gruyere, but he supposed that despite the numb crush of despair, he could eat again.

Carlos strode over to the barred wall closest to the front desk, pushing between a couple of biker-looking Anglos with tattoos and shaved heads. He pressed his face between the bars, and yelled in English, “When you bringing the maná? We’re hungry!”

One of the bikers went paler than he already was and backed up. “Get the fuck away.”

Carlos left off begging for food and turned toward the biker, bristling. “I didn’t touch you, man.”

“Are you sick?”

“No, I ain’t sick.”

“Getting hungry. Real hungry, all the time. That’s how it starts.”

“How what starts?”

“The baby plague.”

Javier could see Carlos was hungry and fatigued enough to start throwing punches just for the sake of giving his pent-up hostility somewhere to go—and as his new amigo, “Timoteo” would be expected to join in…and probably be flattened by the husky biker with the chain links tattooed around his neck. Except that the biker was busy making sure Carlos wasn’t within punching range. And Carlos was more concerned about this “baby plague” than he was with defending his besmirched honor. “For real, man?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“I didn’t hear nothing. I been in this fucking dump all day and all night.”

Javier leaned forward. He realized he was holding his breath. Then he realized that all the other men in the holding cell—the homeless guys, the black teenagers, the unlikely-looking businessman, the Filipino gang-bangers, the assorted riffraff and thugs…they were all holding their breath, too.

The biker, realizing his audience was hanging on his every word, lowered his voice dramatically and said, “They don’t know how it’s catching—through touching, or breathing the air, or a parasite, or what. But what happens is, people keep getting more and more hungry, like they’ll never get full. And little kids—either it hits ’em harder, or they just can’t control themselves. But if you don’t stuff ’em full of food ’til they’re ready to fucking pop, they’ll turn around…and start eating each other.”

Laughter rippled through the group—because surely, this was some sort of joke. But the laughter was uneasy. And a few men were just staring, and not laughing at all—and not just Javier, who’d had so little to laugh about, for so long, that he’d forgotten the very feel of laughter.

The biker scanned the group, meeting the eyes of each and every one, then nodded his head somberly and said, “It’s true. Hand to God.”

The businessman started to scoff, but everyone else was murmuring to whomever they’d glommed onto during their time in the holding cell, and the Filipinos were translating for one another in Tagalog with bits of English here and there as if to verify they’d just heard what they
thought
they’d heard.

Carlos returned to Javier’s side, crossed his burly arms in front of his chest, and muttered, “I’m not sick,” in Spanish. “It’s just been a long time since I ate anything. That’s all.”

Was he sick? Was anybody?
 

Or was it just the manna?

Chapter 27

The spike strips, patrol cars and sawhorses were no longer blocking the streets. That was a relief. Traffic signals were working, traffic itself seemed no worse than a typical rush hour with a little extra aggression thrown in, and Tim and Randy made good time. But even a half-dozen blocks from Chinatown, the smell of smoke began seeping through the vent on the truck’s dashboard.
 

“Holy shit,” Randy said. “Is that a parking spot?”

Tim pulled over and slammed the transmission into park. “I guess more people are trying to get out of this neighborhood than get in.”

“Don’t be such a downer. We found a spot. That’s what counts.”

They were less than two blocks from Nelson’s apartment. A short jog, then turn the corner…and Tim jerked to a stop as if he’d run into a plate glass window. The scene in front of Nelson’s building was like something out of an old war movie—a movie where a bunch of wailing Vietnamese villagers armed with garden tools had been fired upon by tanks and machine guns.

There were no moving vehicles on this block. A pair of fire trucks barricaded traffic. Of the cars and trucks that remained, either parked, or in the middle of the road as if they’d just been driving in the wrong place at the wrong time, not one looked as if it was capable of getting out of there without the help of a tow truck. Windshields were webbed with cracks. Hoods dented. Roofs caved in. And a dozen car alarms whooped and wailed, ensuring that no one could hear well enough to figure out what the hell was going on.

A news crew filmed at one end of the block. The Red Cross had set up a tent at another, but the way people around it were pushing and shoving, it didn’t look like anyone was being helped.

“Come on,” Randy shouted, above the screaming and the car alarms and the sirens. He grabbed Tim by the upper arm and dragged him forward. Tim tripped over something, and righted himself. It was a brick. In the middle of the sidewalk. He looked around, between the feet of the people pacing up and down the sidewalk calling their loved ones’ names, or the people simply wandering in shock, and he saw another brick, and another, and several more. The entire street was littered with bricks.

Randy didn’t seem to notice them. He hauled Tim along with a grip on his arm so hard it hurt. “Hey,” he said to an Asian man who refused to make eye contact. “I’m looking for….” He lost his train of thought when the man wouldn’t pause, but he didn’t let it daunt him; he simply started again with the next person in range. “Do you know the white guy who lives in this building? I’m looking for his family. A Vietnamese lady around fifty and a boy named Bobby.” He turned and began running after someone else. “Hello? Do you speak English? Do you know the white guy with long hair who lives here?”

Where Randy seemed to be thriving on the act of doing something—anything, whether or not it was effective—Tim struggled to wrap his head around the chaos, the wailing of men and machines, and the smoke, and the water from the fire hoses streaming along the gutters like small rivers swirling with random items—a teacup…a TV remote…a pack of disposable diapers.