Max Collins - After the Dark

Shrugging, she said, “Not much. Small lead. Maybe.”

Dix and Luke came in next, Luke carrying a small black box in his arms like it was a new puppy. Max cocked an eye; the “puppy” seemed to be smoking from one end.

Luke looked up, tears in his black eyes. “This little box has broken every code I’ve ever turned it loose on.”

“It doesn’t look so good,” Max said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Dix admitted. “We’ve what you might call a setback.”

“Yeah?”

Luke, nodding, said, in the voice of a school kid who’d been beaten up on by a playground bully, “Logan’s computer burned up my codebreaker.”

“What?”

“Burned it up! Tied it into some kind of loop that kept going faster and faster until the poor baby finally overheated and just... burned up.”

Max grunted a laugh. “Logan’s a smart cookie.”

“I thought my little box was pretty smart, too,” Luke said, walking off with the smoking box, possibly to bury it.

“So you got nothing?” Max asked.

Dix shrugged. “Does a migraine count?”

Mole came in next, his head down. “Bling says Logan swore him to secrecy.”

“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Max said.

“Can I watch?” Alec asked.

But Mole was shaking his head, saying, “I don’t think he knows anything, anyway. Bling’s a pretty tough character — and he’d just go into a yoga trance while we pulled out his toenails with pliers or somethin’.”

Max said, “I have the pliers.”

“Not worth the trouble,” Mole said, and relighted his stogie. “Anyway, Bling said Logan never let him know that kind of info — figured Bling was too obvious a target, and if somebody did torture him or use truth serum on ’im or somethin’, best Bling not know anything important.”

Joshua straggled in last, carrying a pillowcase like a sack. Whatever the shaggy transgenic was lugging looked heavy.

“What did you find, Big Fella?”

“Nothin’, Little Fella. Sorry.”

Max felt sick to her stomach. She had the name of the town, and that was a start; but there could be ten thousand or more people in Appleton. What were they going to do, go door to door?

“If you didn’t find anything,” Alec asked, “what’s in the pillowcase? Kibble?”

Joshua shrugged. “Not kibble, Alec.” He gazed mournfully at Max. “Logan had some of Father’s books out, so I brought them along. But I couldn’t find anything else.”

“Let’s see the books,” she said.

Joshua emptied the pillowcase onto the map table, and the volumes clattered like big hailstones.

A dozen books lay in front of them. At Max’s instructions, everybody picked one out and started flipping through the pages, in case Logan had made a stray note in one of the margins. Max knew Logan well enough to realize he didn’t trust his own memory — bright as he was, Logan still felt the need for pneumonic devices, so he was always leaving himself cryptic little notes.

The third book Max picked up was Gulliver’s Travels , a hard-back edition of the classic satire, similar to one she’d had when she was living in the projection booth at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. On the inside of the cover, next to where Father had inscribed it for Joshua, Max saw a doodle — a pencil-drawn little apple...

Appleton?

Had Logan, looking for a new name for Ray White, absently plucked one from a book? This book?

“We have a name or two to try,” she said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

She could stand the despair... It was the hope...

“Get me an uplink,” she said. “We’re going to see if the tiny town of Appleton, Washington, has a ‘Gulliver’ family, or maybe a ‘Swift,’ or even ‘Lemuel’...”

“Max,” Alec said, “you’re grasping for straws...”

“And if we come up blank, we try every other ‘Appleton’ in the U.S. and Canada... Alec, grasping at straws is the only way to find a needle in a haystack.”

With night falling, they commandeered Logan’s car and were on the road toward the upstate hamlet of Appleton.

It had been easier than she had thought to locate Ray White. She just needed the right cryptic clues and a little insight into Logan and, oh yes, some luck; if a man named Moody hadn’t given her Jonathan Swift’s great book to read, years ago, they would not have this chance tonight to save Logan Cale.

Accompanied by Alec, Mole, and Joshua, Max drove through Seattle, using her old Jam Pony ID and claiming to have an emergency delivery. When the sector cops asked why it took four messengers to deliver one package, she jerked her thumb toward Joshua and Mole in the backseat.

“It’s radioactive, with a potential leak,” she said. “The transgenics are the only ones who are able to deal with it without dying.”

The prospect of leaking radioactivity was plenty to convince every sector cop they encountered. Max and crew and their hazardous materials were allowed free passage. And once they cleared the checkpoints in the city, the rest was easy.

As they whipped down the highway, Mole had the wheel with a foot mashed down on the gas. Max rode shotgun, studying the map even in the dark, her cat eyes still able to make out the details. In the back, Joshua and Alec tried to catch some rest and the two of them leaned into each other as they slept, a boy and his dog... his really, really big dog.

Glancing over her shoulder, Max wished she could take a photo of the two sleeping warriors; it wasn’t often she was presented with an image that was on the one hand warm and fuzzy, and on the other, perfect blackmail material.

Leave it to Logan Cale to come up with a literary alias for Ray White. Lemuel Gulliver traveled between two worlds, and so had Ray. Max remembered the book fondly from nights when it lulled her to sleep back at the Chinese. That book had been the one possession she regretted leaving behind in Los Angeles when she’d left, seeking Seth in Seattle.

Max missed her Chinese Clan family, Moody, Tippett, and especially Fresca; but they were dead, and revenge, such as it was, had been taken. The book, though — Gulliver’s Travels — had stayed with her. Like memories of a childhood she’d never had, the book was always part of her.

She wondered if Logan had remembered her talking about the book when he picked Ray White’s alias. If so, she’d planted the very clue she’d been able to interpret; the irony of that made her smile, a little. Maybe she would ask Logan about that when she saw him...

If she saw him.

The first order of business would be convincing the boy’s aunt — now using the name Sara Gulliver and pretending to be the boy’s mother — to help them. Max knew the woman would be reluctant to get involved, and risk the boy’s safety; but perhaps to help rescue the man who had saved both her life and Ray’s, she might consider it.

Once Max had the name, tracking the pair down on the Internet had been surprisingly easy. The Internet was getting better every day, more and more like the heyday in the early ’00s, especially here on the left coast, farther from the reach of the Pulse.

Things were less screwed up here than on the East Coast, and businesses were making a comeback. Even though that pirate Jared Sterling had made millions bilking the public as he rebuilt the Internet, his death had signaled a new freedom to build; and the Internet was playing a large role in renewing commerce within the United States, if mostly out West.

The Internet also provided more information than it had at any time since the Pulse. Now, Max not only knew where the Gullivers lived but where Sara worked, where Lem went to school, and even what kind of grades the boy was getting — not surprisingly, considering his genes, straight A’s.