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

Goog mewled that he was famished. They all were.

“What about his hands?” Willing asked his great-aunt.

“This town is so barmy,” she said, “nobody’s going to look twice at duct tape.” Goog’s titular bondage was already loose enough to qualify as a bracelet, and Willing had seen him more than once shove the stretched bangle back on.

So they stopped at a family restaurant called Final Feast. In reception, a five-year-old was whooping it up in a replica of an electric chair, which gyrated and vibrated and shot real sparks. The menu was designed around the last meals requested by inmates on death row. The John Allen Muhammad: chicken with red sauce and strawberry cake. The John Wayne Gacy came with KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) and shrimp. Or you could choose lighter fare: the John William Elliot was a cup of hot tea and six chocolate chip cookies; the James Rexford Powell, one pot of coffee.

“This is completely tasteless,” Nollie said, surveying the entrees.

“How can you tell without ordering something?” Goog said. She rolled her eyes.

“I’m going for the Ron Scott Shamburger,” Willing determined: nachos with chili, jalapeños, picante sauce, grilled onions, and tacos. “This guy cut out in style.”

“Howdy!” Like her coworkers, their waitress was kitted out like a prison guard, with a shiny badge on her breast that said BETSY. “What can I get you?”

“I’ll start with a Lethal Injection,” Goog said.

“Great choice!” Betsy exclaimed, though the brandy, moonshine, and grenadine drink sounded vile. After taking the rest of their order, she asked companionably, “You folks defectors?”

“If we were,” Nollie said, looking at the girl askance, “why would we tell you?”

“Only making conversation, honey. Don’t you notice,” Betsy directed to the men, “how these old dears tend to get paranoid?”

“Is there any good reason to be paranoid?” Willing asked.

“I know what you’re asking, sweetie,” Betsy said. “It’s what you all want to know. But the crossers never come back. Make of that what you want. We do get repeat customers, but it’s mostly folks who got cold feet at the last minute. Sometimes puts them in a right pickle, ’cause they’ll have used up the reserves on their chip in a big casino blowout. You see them on the street, panhandling for chip transfers to get back home.”

“You get a lot of these defectors?” Goog asked suspiciously, like the scabbie they sometimes forgot he still was.

“Oh, the pilgrims have really picked up the economy round here! I’ll be right back with your grub.”

After their late lunch, they returned to the highway and then pulled over. About a mile down 58, straight like the interstate it paralleled, Nollie’s fleX indicated the border with Nevada. Sure enough, some sort of edifice rose at the end of the road—it was hard to tell from here how high, or to discern whether guards with snipers’ rifles crouched atop it. Willing and Nollie agreed that getting any closer in a populous area was a mistake. Better to steer farther south on small, local roads, and explore the nature of federal defenses in the middle of nowhere.

“Look, I know we haven’t always got along,” Goog told Willing from the backseat, as dust rose around the car. “That doesn’t mean I want your brain to burn out like a light bulb. Can’t we call a truce? This trip has been a hoot. Turn around, maybe we can dip into Colorado on the way back. I’ll even pay the larcenous fee the platefaces charge to see the Grand Canyon. Really, it’s on me, for all three of us. I promise I won’t turn you guys in. I won’t report the abduction. I’ll even let you keep your yunk pistol.”

“That’s incredibly generous,” Willing said.

“I can never tell when you’re being sarcastic,” Goog snarled. “Listen, why risk mental meltdown? The US—it’s not so bad!”

“Isn’t that what the founding fathers had in mind,” Willing said. “A country that’s not so bad .”

“Not so bad is better than splug!” Goog implored. “I know it’s rough going for a while, but once you hit the age of sixty-eight it’s a free ride! Just put in your time!”

“Why don’t you come with us?” Willing said.

“No way,” Goog said. “You don’t know the Bureau like I know the Bureau. These guys are not joking around. You think they wouldn’t stroke out noncompliant taxpayers ? In a heartbeat . Hell, it’s amazing they’re not already staging public executions. And not because we’re goons. The regular public—they’ve got no appreciation for how desperate things are. The budget. It’s a biggin’ catastrophe. A miracle we can keep the Supreme Court in sandwiches.”

After they’d traveled far enough out of town, Nollie cut west again. The pitted dirt road resembled the one that had led to the underground silo. Associations: not good. Goog made unfunny cracks about Nollie’s homing instincts for corpses.

Yet as they approached what the GPS identified as the end of the world as they knew it, no Great Wall rose up to meet them. Their vehicle did not explode from tripping a landmine. Where Nollie stopped the Myourea and they all got out, two strands of rusted barbed wire stretched limply across the road between listing, poorly anchored posts. The fence continued along a north–south axis in both directions. On the other side, a hand-lettered sign read, “Welcum to the United States of Nevada.”

Hands on hips, Goog surveyed the notorious border with disgust. “I can’t believe this.”

“That fence,” Nollie said, “wouldn’t keep chickens out.”

Ten yards beyond the barbed wire sat a small red clapboard house. On the porch, an old man tilted back in a rocker, smoking. Rarer these days than an SUV, his rollie looked like a real cigarette. Willing waved. The old man waved back.

Willing advanced to the right-hand fence post. The ends of the wires were looped, and hooked around up-tilted nails.

“STOP!” Goog shouted, as his cousin reached for a loop. “It makes total sense to me now! They’re happy to let unchipped shrivs like Nollie totter out of the country. Grateful, even. They cost a fucking fortune. But as for all-give-and-no-take taxpayers like you, Wilbur—there’s only one possible reason there’s no wall, and no guards, and no mines: they don’t need them . If you want iron-clad evidence I’m right about the self-destruct, this sad-ass fence is it.”

Willing unhooked both wires and walked them out of the way of the car—staying in the US of A. Nollie resumed what she insisted on calling the driver’s seat, glided into the land of treachery and secession, and parked.

The line was now drawn literally in the sand. A dare.

By God, it was touching: Goog covered his face with his hands. “I can’t watch this.”

With no further ceremony, Willing stepped into the Free State.

The loud cackle from the red clapboard’s porch was startling. Willing had been fairly sure, but that wasn’t the same as certain. So he had stood there for a moment, sizing matters up, doubtless wearing the expression of patting his body down after an accident: being here, and continuing to be here, with an intense awareness of one point in time connecting to the next that one seldom appreciates. Maybe from the outside it looked funny.

The old man slapped his thigh. “I swear,” he cried, “no matter how many times I watch, it still cracks me up.”

Despite protestations that he didn’t want his cousin’s head to detonate, Goog looked consternated that it hadn’t. “Okay, then,” he said, only two feet away but still in the USA, “what about the cannibalism?”