Лайонел Шрайвер - The Mandibles - A Family, 2029-2047

“Barking up the wrong coward,” Willing said, milking the false humility a bit.

“I’m doing you a favor, bud. Thought we might keep this all in the family. Turn in the sidearm—and we both know we’re talking about that forty-four you were always waving about Citadel whenever some skinny wayfarer came near your precious potatoes. What with your benevolent intercession and all, I bet I can get the cops to drop it. They just want the gun.”

Nollie’s story about the weapon having been left behind by squatters would never wash with Goog, who was present in Prospect Park when the Shadow notched its seminal two fatalities. Nor would he believe his annoying cousin would have pitched his protection into the East River. Willing was debating the best method of stonewalling when Goog’s eye was drawn by a battered carton on the floor.

“ Foul matter ,” Goog read from the carton’s side, and something clicked. “Only times I’ve seen you drag along that grubby box, Auntie, are when you’re planning a one-way trip.”

“I’m old,” Nollie said. “Getting dotty. Sentimental. Some writers travel with lucky fountain pens. I need my printouts.”

“This is way too much crap for Mount Rushmore,” Goog said. “And that new Myourea out front. Yours?”

“Getting rash, too,” she said. “You know those dementia sufferers. Irrational. Impulsive. Can’t be trusted with money.”

“Speaking of money: where’d it come from?” Goog never left his work at the office.

“I earned it,” Nollie said with fervor. “I got a good idea, I worked very hard to realize it, I paid taxes on the rewards of my labor—rather high taxes, or so I imagined at the time—and however improbable you may find this now, afterwards I had two cents to rub together.”

The entire scenario was bound to strike any scabbie worth his salt as highly irregular. But for once Goog Stackhouse’s imagination was inflamed by something other than fiscal malfeasance. “You could hop a U-pod for a fraction of the price. Old ladies don’t buy state-of-the-art hydrogen sedans to play tourist for a few days.”

“Last I checked, it was legal to drive across the land of the free without getting a permission slip from your own grandnephew.”

“It’s legal with one exception. If I even suspect an intention to defect to the USN, you two aren’t going anywhere.”

Willing was a master of the impassive. Nollie was less adept. It didn’t help, either, that her fleX was stiffened on the coffee table, its open GPS app already programmed for the route to Reno. Pity she didn’t do updates. In current versions of Google Maps, a search on “Nevada” brought up the name of a street in Greenwich, England. The state itself was missing.

“Wilbur, aren’t you the type,” Goog said, after a victorious glance at the fleX. “Intoxicated by an idea of yourself as having a direct line to Jesus, or whoever’s voices you’ve been hearing since you were a maladjusted kid. Just the sort of loser who used to sell his soul to Scientology—since the so-called Free State is just another fringy, goofball cult. And always so cozy with that fruitcake rabble-rouser Jarred. Makes perfect sense you’d snuffle the wacko’s trail, searching for the pothead at the end of the rainbow. Sorry to poop your pipe dream, but I’ll be flagging your chip. Drones from the Bureau will descend from the sky the moment you leave the tri-state area. As for you,” he told Nollie. “Conspiracy to defect to the USN is one of the few statutory justifications for forced chipping. So you might start shaving the back of your neck.”

“How convenient,” she said. “Its hairs are already raised.”

“Later, you’ll both thank me,” Goog said. “No nonagenarian with writer’s block would ever have scaled a considerable improvement on the Berlin Wall. And your head, Wilbur, would have splattered over the sand like a busted watermelon the moment you crossed the border.”

“Really? I guess we’ll find out.” Willing had to admit he felt yunk, pointing an X-K47 Black Shadow at his cousin. It simply didn’t feel serious. All the same, in seconds he had ratcheted up the stakes of this encounter in a manner that was difficult to ratchet back down. When you’ve pointed a gun at someone, you pretty much have to keep pointing it. You can’t put it back in your pocket and return to calm, interested discussion of your travel plans.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Goog said, with a quaver in his voice. “I’m not only your cousin, which obviously doesn’t mean much to you—”

“Or to you,” Willing said.

“I’m also a Scab agent.” Interesting slip. “Any idea what happens to you if you shoot one of us?”

“Nothing worse,” Willing calculated easily, “than if I don’t shoot you. The difference between drudging at Elysian for next to nothing and drudging at an outsourced prison for absolutely nothing? Negligible.”

“I came here to be nice ,” Goog hissed.

“You came here to be disarming ,” Willing said. “It always pissed you off that Jarred didn’t trust you with the guns.”

“But what are we going to do with him?” Nollie said.

“We could tie him up,” Willing supposed. “But there’s food and water to consider. Unlikely, but he might do something resourceful. And this is the last housewarming present I’d want to leave Fifa.”

“Nuts,” Nollie said. “You mean we have to bring the prick along. And I had been looking forward to this trip.”

“They only include a manual setting for emergencies,” Willing advised.

“Remember what I told you about preserving your dignity by breaking the rules?” Nollie said, struggling into what no one even called the driver’s seat anymore. “That goes double for driving your own fucking car.”

“People your age insisting on controlling the vehicle are the only reason anyone has accidents anymore. It’s two and a half thousand miles.”

“You want to drive?”

“I don’t know how.”

“No one does. It’s pathetic.”

Willing had always liked his aunt for her obstinacy. So he couldn’t object when she wouldn’t comply with his wishes, either. He suppressed a tremor of trepidation in the seat beside her. This whole venture was a suicidal careen toward a sheer cliff. If they slammed into an interstate meridian midway, the truncated expedition would simply be more efficient.

They set off with their reluctant passenger in the backseat, de-fleXed, wrists duct-taped graciously in his lap rather than uncomfortably behind his back. They allowed Goog to expend his vexation by listing the many crimes they were committing: abduction, false imprisonment, obstruction of the official duties of a federal employee. Yet as they retraced the route their family had trod in the cold, wet spring of ’32—east on Atlantic Avenue, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up West Street—even the captive got caught up in reminiscence. Its personnel much reduced, the second Mandible migration was blindingly swift in comparison to the one on foot. Oh, mobes in gang formation did veer into the road with no warning (crazed blithers on motorized trikes having long ago replaced the comparatively anodyne cyclist as the New Yorker’s anathema). Yet a shrunken, flat-lined GDP had done a spectacular job of thinning vehicular traffic. After its fifty-some years of snotty road-hoggery, only grinding poverty coast-to-coast had put the kibosh on the hulking sports utility vehicle by about 2040. When Willing pointed to one up ahead, the sighting was rare. “Still chugging!” he said. “It beats me where they get the gas.”