John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Janet covered her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, rocked in silent pain. Stoner went to stand beside her, put his arm over her shoulder. And then the implications hit him like a chilled spike: Brummel, extracted. Which meant that Lopez would soon be under surveillance.

Lopez, looking at him, saw it on his face and nodded. “We have to hurry. And I will be coming with you. They know about me now.”

Twenty minutes and they were all down in the lobby, bags sloppily packed, on the carrier beside Stoner, who was waiting at the desk for the Pakistani clerk to bring his credit card back. Wondering if maybe there was an APB out for him with a credit freeze tagged to it, which would mean the clerk’s credit reader would refuse Stoner access to his funds. And would alert the police.

Cindy was crying because she’d seen her Mommy cry; she clung to Janet’s legs, and Janet was trying not to cry, and shit, the clerk was taking too long to come back with that card. Why had he taken it into the next room, anyway? He’d slotted it into the desk reader, said it wasn’t working, he’d have to take it to the back room.

Oh, Lord. Stoner looked at Lopez. “I think there’s…”

“Yes,” Lopez said, “we’ll have to leave the bags.”

Stoner bent, took the small blue Tourister off the stack, handed Janet her night bag, said in a low voice, “That’s it, I’m sorry, honey, but that’s it. Come on.” She followed her husband, and Lopez across the lobby to the glass doors, looked over her shoulder at the bags they’d left. Just once. “Mommy, we have to take our bags,” Cindy said.

“Someone’s going to send it for us,” Janet told her, lying with an admirable cheeriness as they went out the doors onto the walk with its skating rink schmaltz music, the generic mockery of crowd sounds.

A neopunk boy in a fatigue jacket, an orange flight suit, and spiked boots approached Lopez. He had a pallid, longnosed face and needled eyes, and he wore a headset communicator. He said loudly, “Hey—ya moneyman, slide me a one forra train, huh?”

Stoner expected Lopez to brush him off and hurry on but he made a show of taking out his wallet, poking through it as the neopunk “panhandler” whispered, “Armando called down, says a Fed copter landed on the roof and a bunch of guys who look too much alike got out of cars and ran into the mall upstairs—about a minute ago.”

Lopez swore in Spanish, handed him a bill for appearance’s sake, and then said, “You find the way?”

The boy nodded and jerked his head: Come on. They followed him through the crowds to the door of an office with a dull black plastic sign, mall security. Lopez glancing at Stoner with that look of inquiry. Betrayal?

But they went past the door, around the corner into an alley littered with waxpaper cups, the wall graffitied: Jerome-X wins when he loses.

A small three-wheeled truck was parked there, the words mall security patrol on it in the mall’s colors, gold on dun. Another kid was in the driver’s seat, his zigzagged haircut looking odd under the Security guard’s cap. He wore a brown uniform.

Lopez, Stoner, Janet, and Cindy were ushered into the little truck—a van, really—and Janet gasped. Stoner looked, saw a man in yellowed briefs tied up in the back of the van, turned to the back door. Hands cuffed behind his back; ankles cuffed together. Breathing but gagged.

“Mommy…?”

“It’s okay, honey, he’s a… a bad guy. But they’re not going to hurt him, they’ll let him go soon.”

“Lay down in the back,” the driver said, a teenager’s voice.

God, we’re in the hands of children, Stoner thought.

They lay down side by side, Lopez at the rear beside the subdued guard, Stoner turned away from him, toward his wife, the two of them holding Cindy between them. “It’s really a kind of game, Cindy,” Janet said, inevitably making Stoner wince. Because he knew that Cindy wouldn’t fall for it.

She pretended to fall for it. She nodded and closed her eyes as the truck started moving. She was a good girl.

Hearing the electric motors droning, vibration coming through the floor; thinking that it was his fault they were here, undergoing these absurd contortions, he should have stayed out of it for his family’s sake or left them, the Company probably wouldn’t have… yes, they would have. They’d have picked up Janet in case she knew where he was. Maybe to use her and Cindy as hostages to get him back. To shut him up.

But somehow this was his fault. Dragging his family through this, making them feel like wetbacks lying on the floor of a truck. Maybe in the trunk of a car next, for God’s sake.

And this absurdity was made worse by its probable futility. They’d probably be busted; any second cops or CIA Domestic would stop the car, dourly smug faces would look through the front windows at them.

He felt the van descending a ramp of some kind, turning; he and Lopez nudged by inertia against one another, Cindy whimpering, Janet clutching her tighter, trying to smile at Stoner.

Maybe they’ll simply execute the lot of us. Cindy too.

The van was leveling out, probably in the underground parking lot.

The van stopped. Men’s voices. Stoner wondered if it would have helped if he’d brought a gun.

“If I knew where, I wouldn’t be out looking for them,” the kid driver said to someone.

Don’t come close enough to look in the back.

The van was moving again. Stoner realized that Cindy was squeaking with pain because he was holding her so tight. He loosened his grip, whispered, “Sorry, sweetie.”

Lopez hissed, “ Silencio!”

The van hummed along for ten minutes, and Stoner realized, We must be out! and as he thought it, the light shifted its quality, became streetlight, harsh blue-white. They were on the streets.

Ten minutes more and then the kid driver said, “Checkpoint. Lay still no matter what.”

The van grumbled and stopped. Clipped voice of a young by-the-booker who sounded like he’d just finished his stretch in the service. “You got a pass to—what the hell is that? In the back. Get out of the…” Then a rattling hiss. A bubbling uh-uhnk sound from the guy who’d stopped them. The van was moving again before Stoner realized…

It was Janet who said it aloud. “Oh, God, no,” Janet said. “He…”

“You must be quiet!” Lopez said.

“Oh, shut up, Lopez,” Stoner snapped. “Doesn’t matter now.”

There’d be a patrol car after them in minutes. The van wasn’t fast, maybe wasn’t even street-legal, was designed for trundling around the walkways of the mall. It stopped.

“Change vehicles fucking fast!” the kid driver yelled, banging the side door open.

They were up and moving. Glimpses of an industrial park, Cyclopean red light atop a tower, and then they were in a bigger van, thirty years old, its sides painted with surfer myth imagery, a bulging window blurrily shaped like an arrow on the side above a god-sized curl that never breaks. In the back, they sat on the metal floor.

Sirens.

“Oh, shit,” the kid driver said, putting the van in gear. A lurch and a growl, the van burning rubber. “Oh—he’s not on our road… I don’t think… just a mile to our airstrip.”

Stoner was certain that any second they’d come up against the roadblock or a Police Assault Van forcing them over, maybe taking out the rear tires with a neatly placed 20-mm shell.

But then a long, long curve as they turned off the industrial park road, down a utility road. Gravel crunched under the tires till they reached the tarmac of the airstrip. Stoner sat up, peered past Lopez, saw the Lear and thought, No, really?