David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

A clunk came from the door. But Leo was impatient and tried the handle again before it had finished and the door had fully unlocked. He saw the onion-shaped counselor come out of the front door of the main building and look his way. Leo dropped to a crouch on the ground. The girl opened the door from the inside, and it bonked into his head.

“Ow,” said Leo.

“What?” she said. “Where are you?”

Leo slithered around the car door and slunk into the passenger seat. He sat spinelessly and below window level, like an adolescent not wanting to be seen in a car with his mom.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Is there a man coming toward us from the main building?” he asked her.

“What man?”

“Guy looks like an onion.”

“Um, yeah, actually.”

“Okay, we gotta go.”

“Who is that guy?” the girl asked.

“No, I mean, right now.”

“Are you allowed to leave?”

“It’s not a locked facility. Go-go-go.”

So she did. She reversed zippily from the spot and then saw the man from the building quicken his stride. Briefly, she choked and forgot she was in neutral, and the engine roared unengaged. The onion man broke into a trot. “Shit,” she said. Then she found her gear and the little car leaped, and they flew down the leafy drive and walloped over a speed bump. Leo unslumped himself and tried to catch mirror glimpses of Quivering Pines receding.

“Okay, what’s that up ahead?” asked the girl, alarmed suddenly.

Leo looked. Something was happening to the next speed bump. It was rising from the surface of the drive, like a mechanical maw. The girl braked hard and skidded a bit and ended up stopped a yard from its solid jaw.

“You said this wasn’t a locked facility.”

“That was my understanding,” said Leo. In the rearview, he saw the Onion crest a hillock on a speeding Segway.

The girl reversed rapidly down the drive, looking for a break in the deep gutters that lined the sides of the road. Finding one, she shifted, and they left the road sharply. She was trying to go around the embassy-anti-car-bomb pie wedge. But once off the road, Leo saw that the potted cacti beside the drive were positioned in a pattern that prevented a direct path through the field beside the road. The girl had to slalom around the cacti at low speed. When they passed very close to one of them, Leo could see the large planters for what they were: steel and concrete vehicle blockers. The Segway was getting closer.

The girl managed to drive them between the planters. She got the Toyota back on the road beyond the raised pie wedge. Then she sped down the rest of the driveway and over the little railroad crossing that marked the boundary of Quivering Pines.

They came into the city on I-5, from the south, up over the long upper-deck stretch of the Marquam Bridge and down its poorly cambered and vertiginous far side. Mount Hood was clear in the distance, sharp and faceted, like the mountains on beer labels. The girl’s car smelled hotly of new and petroleum-based upholstery. He rolled down his window. A tumult of summer air whooshed through the car and buffeted his head, cooling the prickle of sweat that had broken on his brow.

He was visited by a sharp memory from childhood: Coming down the Henry Hudson Parkway in the backseat of a Volvo on a summer Sunday night. His dad steered a sirocco beside sheer walls of Manhattan schist, beneath the massive arched feet of the George Washington Bridge. The hot city air met the cooled layer of the river over the green verge of Riverside Park, smelling of Dominican barbecues and backed by an elm-ish funk.

Returning to the present, Leo tried to steady his mind. He had to rule out the possibility that this girl was a figment. If she was, then he had met the requirement for suicide; that was the deal he’d made with himself.

And yet — still. Here again was the world he had imagined; here was life. There was evil afoot and he was being asked to oppose it. Why had he been chosen for this counterintervention? Would Quivering Pines give chase?

They slipped along the concrete channels of the freeway like they were riding a log flume at a water park and exited onto a street of car dealerships — tubular wind-sock men and Mylar glitter bunting dazzling drivers-by. They passed the hospital and the derelict Wonder Bread factory, slated for demolition, backhoes and breakers waiting dinosaurishly in its fenced-off yard.

“I never introduced myself,” said the girl at a red light, the first they’d come to. “My name is Lola Montes.”

That was odd, he thought, she didn’t look Latin, and she’d paused between the first and last names.

“Leo Crane. Would you get in the left lane here?” he said. What would a sane person do now? “Bring me home and I’ll make us some coffee and we can talk.”

But when they rolled up to his house, he saw someone standing on his porch, so he didn’t tell Lola to stop there. When they’d gone a block, he asked her to pull over. Then he adjusted his side mirror until it reflected his porch.

“Something wrong?” asked Lola.

“That was my house back there. But the letter carrier’s lingering.”

Lola adjusted her rearview, and they both surveilled.

“Is that not your regular mailman?”

“I got a few. I must be on a crappy route. Sometimes it’s this very fit, too-tan lady. Sometimes it’s a Sikh dude who wears the whole outfit, you know? The cape and what I think may be a postal-issue turban. Sometimes it’s a slacker in, like, a Slayer T-shirt. But I don’t think I’ve seen this guy before.”

They both discreetly observed him as he left Leo’s porch and walked across the street to a little USPS minivan. He popped the lift gate at its back. It looked to Leo like he was sorting large envelopes back there and scanning bar codes, as mailmen sometimes did midroute. Then the guy got in the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the van. He unwrapped a sandwich and started to eat it.

Sure. Could be lunch, Leo thought. “Would you tell me more about your people,” he asked Lola, “the ones you said are resisting the thing?”

Lola seemed to collect her thoughts. “We’re called Dear Diary. Though I think that’s supposed to be ironic or something. I’m very new. Anyway, that’s just a sort of a placeholder, you know, as a name. We’re in a state of flux.”

“And there are lots of you?”

“There are tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”

“And the other side? The ones you’re resisting?”

“They’re called the Committee, and they’re building an extralegal, nation-replacing, wealth-protecting, fee-based data-rights system.”

“A system?”

“Yeah, like, ‘Hey, sign up now, richest point-zero-zero-zero-five percent of the world, for our data-protection plan. That way, when we cripple the electronic infrastructure, your shit is safe and everyone else is a fucking peasant.’”

“So is it as I described?”

“You embellished. The Scientologists aren’t involved. And it has nothing to do with your illustrious ancestors.”

Yes. He had bragged about his illustrious ancestors, written that he was descended from the American intellectual elite. How mortifying.

“But you were right about SineCo,” she said encouragingly, as if sensing his embarrassment. “Straw is using that search-and-storage empire of his for something very bad indeed.”

The search-and-storage empire. Yup, that’s what had first aroused Leo’s suspicions. “We’ll Keep It Safe” was the tagline for SineCo’s new, unwired socialverse. And Lola was telling him that SineCo was only the part you could see.

“It’s like a network or a club. The Committee owns some companies outright. Not just SineCo, but Bluebird — the private-army people — and General Systems, that company that makes thermostats and breakfast cereal and airplanes. And then there are hundreds of other assets that they just control — the word they use is claim . Dams and mines and airports and pharmaceutical companies and TV networks and hospital corporations and a couple of the big NGOs.”