With a Little Help (26 page)

Lee-Daniel shook his head in exaggerated disbelief and then MacDiarmid led them back out to the communal area.

Once they were gone, he flipped open his phone and called Joey Riel.

"What?" he said.

"You're fired," Lee-Daniel said. "I hate to do it, kid, but it's coming down from the investors. You, Elaine, all the customer service reps, all but the two most senior antennamen and switchgirls."

"What the
fuck
?" Joey Riel said.

"Keep it down," Lee-Daniel said. "Just keep it easy. They're coming out now to do a head-count and sort out the order for the firings -- they're going to do it in small groups. I wanted to let you know, because you've only just gotten your promotion, so you might get severance at the old salary-level, so I thought I'd give you a little extra time to make some calls and line up some money before the roadhouse cuts off your credit. You're going to need a ride, too."

"What?" Joey Riel said. He sounded
purple
, ready to bust. He cursed in three languages.

"You heard me. Keep it to yourself, OK? I gotta go." He snapped his phone shut, wondering how long it would take before everyone in the company knew: five minutes? Ten?

He called his lawyer.

#

It wasn't his idea to bring the investors along on the perimeter walk. This was a purely ceremonial event, only initiated once the real post-install survey had been completed and he was sure that there was network integrity. But networks must not only be integrated, they must be
seen
to be etc, so they split into four crews and walked the perimeter.

They used ruggedized videoconferencing tablets as they went, digital clipboards whose screen was divided into a two-by-two grid, each square with the feed from one of the crews. The data went over the localnet, and streamed out over the uplinks to residents of any other unwired sovereign that wanted to welcome the newest Rez to the party.

The four parties each took a direction and hiked out to the most-distant corner of the Rez and then began walking counter-clockwise, keeping in constant communication. A little blinkenlight in each quadrant mapped the throughput to and from that host, five bars all the way and not a single frame dropped if all went according to plan.

The investors were with Northeast party, along with Joey Riel, Meatloaf and Mermaid. Not Mac, he was on the bus, where he usually spent the dusks and dawns, in air-conditioned gloom out of the mosquitos' range. But the Series A and Series B men went Northeast, while Lee-Daniel took the opposite corner, Southwest, with Elaine and the hard-line girl from the gate on the first day and Cobra, who'd taken to watching the sunsets with him and sharing a pint of bourbon, not saying anything.

They reached the perimeter and began to pace it off. Over the audio on the videoconferencing tablets, he heard the investors' labored breathing, the slipping of their impractical Oxfords on the slippery humus that carpeted the forest.

It was a nice early-fall day, with bloody streaks of sunset on the horizon and the crisp smell of damp and wind and sap dripping from the maples. Lee-Daniel loved an autumn walk in the woods, hell, who didn't, and so he was pretty relaxed by the time he got half-way around the Rez, an hour later, in the growing gloom.

It was then that bright beams of light stabbed at them from all sides. Behind him, he heard Cobra curse and then he was shoved aside and down as Cobra and the girl took up back-to-back positions with their weapons -- a gas-fogger for her, a hunting rifle for him -- at ready.

"Surete," Cobra hissed. Surete du Quebec -- the Provincial cops.

He'd done the research, knew that the SQ and the Warriors hated each other. The Mohawk Warriors Society had been fired in a kiln bricked with SQ beatings, shoot-outs and gassings. But the Akwesahsne Rez had been at peace for almost three years! Why the hell couldn't this have happened
tomorrow
, when they were on the road?

Lee-Daniel knelt down and dialed down the screen brightness on his tablet, then peered at it. His own quadrant showed his long, narrow face, uplit like a Jack-O-Lantern by the screen, eyesockets black and deep, cheeks hollow and stippled with patchy three-day beard. Two of the other quadrants were black -- the tablets were offline or broken. The final one showed the Northeast party, skinny Joey Riel holding a thick branch in one hand and a rock in the other, ridiculous alongside Meatloaf and Mermaid, who had already fitted their masks and goggles and drawn their sidearms, crouching back to back against each other.

The investors hove into view, whey-faced, lips skinned back from their teeth, eyes crazy-white.

"Get down," Lee-Daniel said, leaning into the mic. "Head to the bus."

"It's dark," the Series A man said, jinking from foot to foot, making the camera sway seasick.

"The bus," Lee-Daniel said. "Get in the bus. Get everyone to the bus. This isn't our fight." He looked around for Elaine, but he didn't see her. Headed for the bus, that's what you did in an emergency. Fuck.

It was an emergency. There was an even tramping of feet ahead of him, behind him, to his left and right. He stood, slowly, and put his hands in the air.

"I'm not a combatant," he said, loudly, but in a steady voice.

He walked toward the bus, hands still in the air. "I am not a combatant," he said again. A laser dot climbed his toe, his leg, centered on his gut. He looked down at it.

"They will shoot you, you know," Cobra said. "They shoot. They think they're playing cowboys and indians." He sounded very calm.

"I am not a combatant," he said again, taking another step forward. A second red dot joined the first, climbing his leg and resting within inches of the first, dancing and bobbing like a firefly. From the woods, someone barked in French.

"I surrender," Lee-Daniel said.

"They don't speak English when they don't want to," Cobra said. "If I were you, I'd get down and stay down." Then he yelled something defiant in French. The girl behind him tittered nervously.

"Cobra's making them mad," she said, giggling again.

Lee-Daniel turned around slowly, getting away from the harsh white light. Green blobs swam in his vision. He began, very gently, to sink to his knees, when out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Elaine and two of her crew, in silhouette, up in the boughs of a maple that they must have climbed as soon as the SQ arrived on the scene. More steps from the brush, the light coming closer.

Cobra called out more French, three lights on him, his rifle at his shoulder. Two laser-dots danced on him, and Lee-Daniel had an irrational urge to slap them away, like horseflies.

The young girl hit her fogger, spraying a thick, opaque cloud of gas. "Cover your eyes," she said, and giggled again. Lee-Daniel pulled his shirt up over his face and dropped. He belly-crawled blindly, towards where he thought Elaine and her crew had been treed.

He knocked his head on a tree-trunk and gasped involuntarily, getting a lungful of the gas, which made him retch into the depths of his shirt, bringing on more gasps and more retching. He rolled for the clearing's edge, hit another tree and got to his knees, heaving like a dog. He still had hold of the tablet, and when he could open his eyes again, he looked into it, saw the investors still staring at him, wide-eyed.

"Go!" he hissed. "Jesus, get to the goddamned bus."

"Are you all right?" they said.

"I'm fine," he said. "Go go go!"

#

The CogRad drunk-ons were legendary. When you spent weeks at a time in the deep bush on dry reservations, lugging gear and fighting with bitch physics, you needed to unwind. On the off-days, it was traditional for a drunken riot to ensue. Lee-Daniel occasionally partook, enough to be friendly, but never so much that he lost control. He set a sane example, and the crew followed it, and so the most harm that a big booze-on would cause was a gang-wide neolithic hangover, swampy and hot and damp.

But the drunk-on that was proceeding when Lee-Daniel stumbled out of the dining-room was like a heavily sponsored Bosch painting. Elaine was alternately necking with and slapping Joey Riel; Mortimer was collapsed on a heap of still-steaming rum-toddy cartons; the Customer Service Reps were playing kick-the-can with their ringing cellphones. The aerostats and the advertorial screens had automatically adjusted to overcome the ambient noise level, and were consequently pitching their jingles and come-ons at megaphone levels.

The Series A and Series B men were huddled together out front of the roadhouse, along with MacDiarmid.

"That's some scene, huh, boss?" Lee-Daniel remarked as he stepped into the cool night, sucking up the fresh air and the moonlight.

"What'd you tell them?" the Series A man said.

"Tell them?" he said.

"They think they're all fired," MacDiarmid said. "Why do they think that?"

"Just road-crazies. Like when they thought they all had West Nile. They get worked up. Egomaniacs and social retards." He was speaking in the grudging half-sentences that Cobra had preferred. Talking like that made him feel crazy and brave and alien.

"What are you going to do about it?" the Series B man said.

"Nothing," Lee-Daniel said.

There was a crash from the bus. One of the surveyors had beaten in the safety-glass skylight and dropped down inside. They watched a headlamp's beam jump crazily around the bus's interior, high, low, left, right.

"What's he doing?" the Series A man said. Lee-Daniel knew that the surveyor in the bus snored, that he did tricks with a butterfly knife, that he sent money home to his little sister in Muncie. He couldn't remember his names. He was no good with names. But he knew his people.

"What you do, when you get fired. Stealing office supplies."

The surveyor crawled back out of the sunroof with a pillowcase stuffed with schwag, then lit out down the freeway's shoulder in the direction of Buffalo.

"He won't be the last," Lee-Daniel said.

"No," said MacDiarmid. "I don't expect he will."

"But they're
not fired
," the Series B man said. Lee-Daniel didn't know either of the investors' names. Fucking spear-carriers, fronts for unimaginable, implacable wealth, charged with returning 400 percent over three years on a national-budget-sized fund.

"Tell them," Lee-Daniel said. "They don't listen when they're like this." They don't listen to people like you, not ever.

#

"Get down," he said to Elaine. She was wedged into a crook and tied off with an improvised harness made out of nylon rope and carabiners from her vest. "We've got to get back to the bus!"

"They'll shoot us," Elaine said.

"They can't see us," he said. Laser sights danced in the fog. He heard the crack of Cobra's rifle.

"He's scared," Elaine said. Next to her, also tied off -- where did Elaine keep that many carabiners? -- was a young surveyor, one they'd just picked up in Montana, a kid with a shaved head who had shyly asked him for a job after meeting Elaine at the local Army-Navy store and getting a lecture on which gear to buy and why. He was wrapped around the branch like a serpent, locked at the ankles, thighs and wrists.

"So am I," Lee-Daniel said. "They're shooting. It's natural. Get him down. Push him off the branch if you have to."

"What about him?" she said, gesturing at the branch below her. There was another surveyor, a forty-something lunk who didn't wash enough and farted too much and blamed it on everyone. He was balding and his comb-over hung limply at one side of his head as he hugged the trunk.

"Push him too," Lee-Daniel said.

The tablet, stuck in his waistband, spoke. It was the Series B man. "Don't give them any more advice. You shouldn't be liable for what they do in this situation. Return to the bus."

Lee-Daniel shrugged up at her, caught a whiff of gas that set his eyes to watering and looked back at the clearing. Cobra was lying on his side, face away from them. The girl was holding his hand, face covered by a placid mask, but he heard her sob.

"Now! Back to the bus!"

Lee-Daniel climbed the tree. He got up to the first surveyor's branch, Ole Stinky, and he gave the man a shove. He fell like a stone. He stepped on Stinky's branch, grabbed the kid by an arm and yanked, hard. The kid dropped, too. "Down," he said to Elaine, and dropped, landing on the kid.