Robert Wilson - Burning Paradise

Buffalo was a prosperous city, but that prosperity had bypassed these old South Side buildings. Leo’s low-rise squatted on its corner lot like a tired troll, tattooed by coal smoke that had drifted in from the mills and refineries of West Seneca and Lackawanna in the decades before the EPA mandates. She had to be careful here, in case the simulacra had come or were coming for Leo. She tugged open the sheet-metal outer door and stepped into the foyer of the building. The air inside was warm but smelled like cabbage and sour milk. She examined the bank of electrical bells—a row of buttons with the names of tenants printed beside them. One of the buttons had come loose and dangled from its socket like a poked-out eye. Just below it was the button marked BECK, LEO.

“Is it safe here?” Thomas asked, echoing Cassie’s own thought.

During their walk she had told Thomas about the sim who had been killed by a car on Liberty Street. What it meant was that she and Thomas had to get away even if Aunt Ris couldn’t join them. So where are we going? Thomas had asked, but Cassie didn’t have an answer. It depends.

I have to go to school.

Not anymore. We’re sort of on vacation.

But Thomas was too perceptive to be easily consoled. And no, it wasn’t safe here; she couldn’t honestly say so. Leo Beck might be dead on the floor of his single-bedroom apartment for all Cassie knew. But it was her duty as a Society survivor to warn the nearest potential victim, if that was possible. She kept an eye on the stairs beyond the foyer’s inner door, ready to run at the first sight of a suspicious stranger. She pushed the buzzer again.

After a moment Leo answered, and he wasn’t pleased. “Whoever the fuck you are, push that buzzer one more time and I’ll be down there kicking your sorry ass.”

Thomas went owl-eyed. “It’s Cassie Iverson,” Cassie said hastily. “I need to come in, Leo.”

Silence. After a long pause the electronic lock on the inner door clicked open. Cassie hustled Thomas up the stairwell to a second-floor corridor lined with peeling floral wallpaper. Leo’s apartment was 206. She knocked lightly, not wanting to wake the neighbors.

But it wasn’t Leo who opened the door—it was Beth Vance.

Cassie supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. She had seen Leo and Beth together at the last survivors’ meeting, acting more than friendly toward each other. Beth was the daughter of John Vance, whose wife Amanda had been a tenured professor at NYU and a member of the Correspondence Society. Amanda Vance had been one of the victims of the 2007 attacks.

Beth was only a year older than Cassie, though she tried to appear vastly more sophisticated (and usually succeeded, Cassie had to admit). Beth was tall, dramatically skinny, and she wore her straw-yellow hair fashionably short. This morning she was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt that looked as if she had just thrown them on. The shirt might have been one of Leo’s. She gave Cassie a condescending glare.

“I need to talk to Leo,” Cassie said.

Beth rolled her eyes but called out, “Yeah, it’s the Iverson girl. And her little brother.”

Leo’s voice came from elsewhere in the apartment: “He r what?”

“Litt le brother!”

As if Beth didn’t know Thomas’s name.

Cassie pushed past Beth and tugged Thomas inside. Leo came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing black denim pants and a sleeveless undershirt. He was twenty-one years old and a little over six feet tall. Conventionally good-looking but there was something odd about his eyes, Cassie had often thought: the way they turned down at the corners, as if they had been installed upside-down. It made him look smug.

But he wasn’t actually smug and he certainly wasn’t stupid. He looked at Cassie, at Thomas, read their expressions, then took a breath and said, “Oh, fuck. It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Cassie managed to nod. “Again.”

“And you came here first?”

“Aunt Ris is out. Yeah. We haven’t talked to anyone else.”

She told him the story of what she had seen from the kitchen window, sparing no details even though Thomas grew visibly more frightened as she spoke.

“Okay,” Leo said, frowning massively. “Thank you, Cassie.” He turned to Beth. “Anything you want to keep,” Leo told her, “get it quick and throw it in the car.”

“The car?”

“We’re leaving.”

Thomas sat next to her on Leo’s grubby sofa while Leo and Beth finished dressing.

She wondered how much he understood. Aunt Ris hadn’t neglected Thomas’s education. He knew about the 2007 massacre, at least in general terms. He knew he shouldn’t discuss certain subjects, like the death of his parents, outside of the family. He knew the suitcase under his bed had been put there for a purpose. That burdensome knowledge had made him more reserved and cautious than most twelve-year-olds. Thomas seldom talked about any of this, but he occasionally came to Cassie with questions that troubled him: Is it true the radiosphere is alive? Or, How does the hypercolony hear us when we talk on the phone? Or, Wh y does it want to kill people? Cassie had always tried to answer as honestly as she knew how. Which meant Thomas had to be satisfied with a whole lot of I-don’t-know.

Beth remained skeptical, and Leo Beck came out of the bedroom still talking down her objections. “Cassie wouldn’t lie about something like this,” Leo said, gratifyingly. “It’s code-fucking-red.” He jammed a few items of canned food into a sports bag along with his spare clothes. “We knew this could happen.” He added, “At least we’re together,” which Cassie guessed was meant to mollify Beth, though she gave him nothing in return but a queasy stare. The process of packing up was brief and efficient. Leo didn’t seem to own much, from what Cassie could see of his apartment, apart from a couple of shelves of books. All Beth had was her overnight bag, which Cassie suspected amounted to little more than a makeup kit, emergency tampons and a couple of condoms.

“So where’s the car?” Beth asked.

“Parked a couple of blocks away. Anything else you think we need?”

Beth looked around unhappily, then shook her head.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“What about them ?” Beth asked—rudely, but Cassie had been wondering the same thing.

“Can’t leave ’em here. Is that all right, Cassie? Do what you like, but you’re probably better off with us than out in the street.”

“Yes,” Thomas said before Cassie could answer. Cassie just nodded. Leo knew the drill as well as anyone; what ever else he might be, he was the son of Werner Beck, the most influential man in the Society. They would be safer together.

They left the building. Outside, the first light of morning raked the street. A few workers had begun to trickle out of these old residential buildings, burly men and a few women, most of them bound for the Lackawanna and West Seneca production lines. Once, driving through this part of the city with Aunt Ris, Cassie had wondered aloud whether the men then trudging home really believed the world was as prosperous and forward-moving as her high-school civics classes had made it sound. “Probably not,” Aunt Ris had said. “They don’t look terribly inspired, do they? They’re not rich by a long stretch. But they have jobs. The mills and machine shops pay a living wage plus benefits. A lot of these men could probably afford to live somewhere better if not for liquor or alimony or bad luck. Their lives might improve in the long run. And if they need help, they can get it.” In other words, the civics classes had been mostly right.

Aunt Ris had always been scrupulous about giving the devil his due.