The Starving Years (3 page)

What a shame. Javier was profoundly hot…though unlike most men who dug men, he seemed strangely resistant to Nelson’s charms. But, Nelson supposed, if he really felt like scratching that itch, it wasn’t as if he’d have trouble hooking up with someone else. There were always more fish in the sea.

And now he owed another dollar to his cliché jar.

He tied the bandanna over his eyes, and reassured himself that every minute of the conference he endured put him a minute closer to getting home and seeing how quickly he could find some pirate porn online. Unless a miracle happened, and Javier gave in and surrendered his phone number. Nelson wasn’t going to discount that possibility until he went home empty-handed.
 

“Team leaders, unwrap your clotheslines. Team players, check each other’s blindfolds and make sure they’re on good and tight. Anyone whose blindfold slips will be disqualified.”

A hand groped up Nelson’s arm, then felt its way up to the bandanna. He felt a body press close to his, and smelled shampoo and a hint of perfume—lady stuff. Marianne gave his knot a rudimentary check, then spoke in his ear. “That was nice, what you did with the blindfolds.”

Very observant. Plus, she’d won one of the stupid prizes. She’d probably get a callback. Nelson shrugged the arm she was holding onto.

“All set?” The blindfold cutting off Nelson’s vision made the announcer seem twice as loud. “Okay. Team leaders, take card number one, and look at the shape. Be the first to get your team to create that shape by arranging the rope without naming it, and you’ll all win—”

The pause went on longer than Nelson would have expected. Maybe he was showing the prize to the team leaders. Hopefully it wasn’t more of that Exotic Spices crap. The sound of people standing around quietly was louder with the blindfolds on, too. Nelson could hear the rustle of their clothes as they shifted, and a few indistinct whispers.

“Something’s wrong,” Javier murmured. He pulled off Nelson’s blindfold.

Something really was wrong. After a moment of disorientation, Nelson realized the room had gone dark. “It’s just some gimmick to test our problem-solving skills.” He could picture the doors he’d scoped out earlier. He and Javier were only a few yards away from the door in the divider wall. His patience had been teetering on the tipping point, and this latest insult, plunging them all into darkness just to see how they’d react, was the last straw.

His eyes adjusted grudgingly to the glow of a Canaan Products laptop a few yards away. People shuffled, disturbed by the long, awkward pause, though most of them had left their blindfolds in place. The event coordinator was at the edge of the stage, whispering to the presenter. Maybe the darkness hadn’t been planned, after all.

Javier moved through the crowd, sinuous and stealthy, without alerting the rest of the job seekers that something was wrong. He was at the laptop before anyone else even thought to remove a blindfold.

Marianne tugged Nelson’s sleeve. “What’s going on?”
 

He bent and spoke low in her ear. “Power failure, or some screwup like that. Take that thing off.” He pulled off her blindfold but kept his eye on Javier even as he spoke, thinking that if there were a downed power line, a rolling blackout or most any sort of electrical issue, the laptop would be useless. Yes, it had battery power. But the building’s wireless network wouldn’t.

A moment later, Javier realized as much. He gave up on the laptop and headed back toward Nelson, threading through the blindfolded crowd just as silently on his return trip. “You think it’s something bad?” Nelson asked. He could think of a dozen flavors of “bad,” including a bomb, a pandemic outbreak and a biological terrorist attack. Not that any of those things was likely, just that he was in the habit of looking at problems from every possible angle.

“I don’t know.” Even with one eye hidden, Javier’s expression said otherwise. “But we should play it safe.” He turned toward the main entrance.

“Not that way.” Nelson looped one arm through Javier’s, and took Marianne by the shoulder with his other hand. “That’s a bottleneck just waiting to happen.”

They were groping for the latch of the divider door when the first gunshots sounded.

Chapter 3

It might have been something other than gunshots—for instance, maybe a car was backfiring. Even Nelson, who normally couldn’t resist exploring every possibility, no matter how far-fetched, didn’t bother coming up with more examples of what else those bangs could possibly have been. Three sharp pops—
crack, crack, crack
—followed by a single, thin, faintly audible wail.
 

Whatever just went down…it was ugly.

The conference room crowd hadn’t quite figured out how to react. There was shuffling, followed by some indrawn breaths and a few disconcerted murmurs. Nelson let go of Javier’s elbow, grabbed the room divider latch, and pulled. Though it was locked, adrenaline gave him the strength to pull harder than the cheap mechanism cared to resist, and with a tiny, metallic pop, the divider door opened.

Since he still had Marianne by his other hand, he swung her around and propelled her through the door first. Then Javier—he wasn’t going to let that one get away over something as petty as a shooting spree. As he took his first step through the flimsy threshold himself, panic finally erupted in the conference room, and suddenly the crowd turned from a group of civilized men and women in button-up shirts, wool suits and sensible shoes into a troop of savage baboons.

Shoving ensued, and a few punches landed before everyone had even figured out they should probably take off their blindfolds—although given the lack of light, even ditching the blindfolds didn’t help their disorientation. Someone toppled into Nelson, slamming him into the doorframe so hard it knocked the breath out of him and caused the fake wall to flex.

A hand clamped on his shoulder and spun him around, away from the door. Nelson found himself face to face with Randy, whose blindfold was up around his forehead as if he thought he was the Karate Kid. Relief washed over Randy’s face as he recognized Nelson by the distant glow of the nearest laptop. “Hey, bro, was that a gun?”
 

Nelson tried to pull away, but Randy’s sympathetic nervous system was just as primed as his, and Randy clung so hard he split the shoulder seam of Nelson’s dress shirt. Nelson loathed that shirt and everything it stood for, which was probably why, in a burst of unexpected compassion, he said, “C’mon, we gotta get out of here.” It was tempting to add,
“Bro
,” though he could tell the sarcasm would be lost amidst all the noise.
 

The acoustical fabric of the divider wall didn’t totally muffle the sound of the growing panic, but it dulled all the sharp edges, and blended the chorus of frightened voices into a foreboding hum. The adjacent room was dark and vast, and it smelled like stale vacuum cleaner bags. Marianne’s cell phone was a beacon. It threw its small blue light over her frightened features, and illuminated the closest tables and chairs they were likely to trip over. “Nelson!” she cried. “Hurry!”

Nelson dodged a laminated table and a stack of molded chairs, and followed. Randy, firmly attached to his arm, was right on his heels.

Up ahead, Javier wove through the tables in the near-dark like a shadow, heading for the opposite side of the room. Nelson caught up with him at yet another acoustical wall, and shook Randy from his arm so he could help find the door. His hand brushed Javier’s—and for the first time that day…heck, maybe that year…he felt well and truly alive.

Marianne held her cell phone high, casting as much light as she could with the tiny screen. “Here,” Randy called. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as Nelson had thought. Or maybe he was just having a lucky day.

No, he did usher Marianne through before he cut off Nelson. Chivalry was not dead. Nelson took a cue from Randy and hustled Javier out the door before he went himself. He didn’t really get to touch Javier—not like when their hands had brushed. But his senses were so heightened that even the texture of Javier’s jacket was as good as an aphrodisiac.

One more empty conference hall, this one with all the tables clustered toward one end, in a mound that looked freakish and ominous by the light of Marianne’s phone. Everyone broke into a sprint and began groping at the far wall, searching for the exit, when the lights flickered on, burned low and brown for a few seconds, and went out again.

“There.” Javier groped for Nelson now, turning him toward the wall behind the tables. “The door was there.”

Nelson seized the opportunity to lock arms with Javier again and drag him toward the sea of tables so they could navigate it together. The tables were round, more suited for a banquet than a conference, and the faux woodgrain laminate tabletops were so dark they were nearly invisible, save for a thin crescent of reflectiveness at the edge of each one, a small gleam that winked in and out as Marianne began to make her way through the maze of plastic and metal.

A loud thud sounded to Nelson’s right. “Fuck!” Randy gasped. “Right in the nuts.”

It was dark, so Nelson allowed himself to smile. Although he might have done the same by the cold light of day.

Marianne reached the door first and pulled it open. A rectangle of muted light framed her. The door had been in a real wall, which led to a real hall with real windows. The city beyond the windows was gray…grayer than usual, with sleet pelting down to slant between the corridors of the skyscrapers.

They staggered out into the hall, blinking against the dim light. The sound of the rest of the conference carried from down the long hall, three room-divisions wide, and around the corner. Crashes. Shouting. Screaming. The sound of fear—all of it muted by yards and yards of acoustical fake walls.

“The stairs,” Marianne gasped. Good thinking. The elevators would all be stuck.

Marianne took the lead and pulled Javier along behind her. Nelson hung on to Javier and Randy clung to Nelson, and together they all pounded down the dark stairwell, six turns in all, until they came at last to a fire door, burst through it, and spilled into a shipping dock that led to Astor, where several leaky, reeking dumpsters waited for the garbage trucks to haul away their contents.

“Go,” Javier said, propelling Marianne forward, and Nelson and Randy strung along behind them. The roar of a crowd, punctuated by sirens and screams, and the electronic hollowness of the voices of authority projected over loudspeakers, swelled as they spilled onto Ninth and Astor at the edge of the mob.

A police van pulled up beside them and a dozen of New York’s Finest—in full riot gear—poured out. The cops ran past in tight formation, shields high. Nelson paused to look; he’d never seen a riot before. But he wasn’t interested enough to let go of Javier, who dragged him away from the deteriorating situation, and he in turn towed Randy along to bring up the rear.

They ducked beneath the green-striped awning of the declining Harlan Hotel on Lafayette, each of them flattening against the wall to allow whoever was involved on the periphery of the mob to stream by. More cops, more screaming rioters. One man with a car stereo, wires dangling, clasped to his chest. A woman in a gray skirt suit, bleeding from a cut on her eyebrow. A homeless man wearing bread bags for shoes, leading a smallish mongrel that wouldn’t stop barking on a frayed clothesline.

“It finally happened,” Randy said. Nelson was busy inching his grip down Javier’s arm with the ultimate goal of officially achieving a hand-clasp, so he didn’t pay much attention.

Marianne, however, seemed unable to ignore Randy—and she acted like she was still angry with him over the “plain manna” incident, as well. “What happened?” she snapped.

“Cotton. Cotton futures were supposed to go through the roof today.”

“Oh, you’re into the stock market.” Marianne rolled her eyes. “Figures.”

“Well…yeah. I’m a money guy.”

“Aren’t you all,” Marianne said.

Nelson’s fingertips slid onto Javier’s palm as he murmured, “Not really.”

Javier turned his head farther than most people would, since Nelson was standing on his blind side, and whispered, “You’re shameless.”

“Yep.”

“This is serious.”

“I know.”

Javier pulled his hand away and gestured toward the street, where a man on a bicycle had been trying to escape the crowd, and a dozen hands shot up from the masses and clawed him from his seat. “Look.”

Nelson looked, briefly, then zeroed in on Javier’s face again. “That’s messed up.” It made no sense for the crowd to detain the guy on the bike. They probably wanted it for themselves, so they could escape the chaos. A tire rolled out from the churning mass of desperate people. Now, no one had a bike. “So what do we do? Go inside, sit at the bar?”

“You can’t possibly be that desperate for a date.”

Nelson stifled a smirk. “Actually, I was thinking the four of us should get off the street before a twitchy cop with a billy club knocks our heads in.”

“Clothing prices are gonna go through the roof.” Randy spoke louder as if to make sure Marianne was listening to him, rather than Nelson and Javier. Or maybe because he was trying so hard to cover how nervous he was. “You wait and see. Pretty soon no one will be able to afford new clothes but the ultra-rich. It’ll be like World War II where women painted a seam down the backs of their legs because they couldn’t afford a pair of pantyhose.”

“That wasn’t because of the pricing,” Nelson said. “The armed forces needed the silk for parachutes.” Damn, the elusive hand-clasp was history. Javier had turned away from him and planted his hand against the side of the building to scan the milling crowd with his single eye.

“Right. There was a shortage.” That hadn’t been what Randy was implying, but in the face of Nelson’s better-reasoned argument, he’d course-corrected. “And that’s what’s going on now. All the old cotton farms are churning out alfalfa. It’s cheaper to grow, the government will always buy it, and it puts out a dozen crops a year.”

The way most non-scientists thought about the manna production process was
grass goes in, manna comes out.
It was refreshing to meet someone who actually knew something. Even if he was keeping Nelson from getting in a certain someone’s pants. “You’ll only get that many harvests in Arizona,” Nelson pointed out, since he couldn’t resist a good debate—even when he was trying to cop a hand-hold during a riot.