Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (13 page)
Read Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief Online
Authors: Alexander Jablokov
His voice was completely calm, as if Bernal had never been. Bernal shifted his weight. The knife pressed firmly against his throat. He could feel the tips of the serrations pushing through his skin. He barely breathed.
“So, let me know.” Ignacio folded his phone and calmly put it back in his pocket.
Jesus, Bernal thought. This guy could kill me. And he had no idea why. Ignacio was jumpy and paranoid about something. Bernal didn’t think it was just car parts. God only knew what Bernal had been near, there at Ungaro’s stuff.
A golf cart like the one Patricia had been loading things into zipped down the aisle. It slewed sideways suddenly and ran into the bottom of a stack of wheel rims. They toppled over, and Ignacio dodged out of their way, releasing Bernal in the process. The wheel rims hit the concrete in a succession of rings, bounced, and rolled off in all directions.
Bernal took the opportunity and ran. He dodged around struts that stuck out of the shelves at irregular intervals. Behind him he heard footsteps, then a crash and a shout.
He took a chance and turned to look.
Ignacio had struck his head against a strut. Blood poured out between his fingers, and he sank to his knees. “Oh my God. .. . Patricia! Where are you?”
Patricia came up to him and, heedless of the blood, put her arms around him. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to Bernal.
Someone stood next to him. It was the young guy with tattoos. He shook his head at Bernal.
“Don’t ruin the payoff,” he said. “Things only get really bad around here when you ruin the payoff.”
Bernal followed him out of the yard, not daring to glance back again.
_______
Bernal glanced in
his rearview mirror as he pulled out of the parking lot, and slammed on the brakes.
A bunny in a bonnet dangled right in his field of view. He pulled off into a rougher parking area, down below the yard, maneuvering carefully between two concrete blocks with rusty tangles of rebar sticking above them like failed comb-overs.
It wasn’t a threat. The thing hadn’t been hung there to scare him.
He instantly recognized a message from Muriel. He yanked the rabbit off the pink ribbon that suspended it from the roof and examined it. There was nothing in the basket of Easter eggs, or under the bonnet, or printed on the linings of its long ears.
How the hell had she gotten the thing into his car? She’d known he would be at the yard, of course—she had sent him there. So she had sent some minion, or just hired some high school kid adept at breaking into cars.
She really was pushing it.
He turned the bunny over again and this time saw the button on its back. He pushed it.
Vaguely, through static, he could hear the tinkle of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Then it cut off, and there was silence.
“Bernal.” The fidelity wasn’t good enough to recognize a voice, but it had to be Muriel. “.. . sorry . . . been out of contact... no chance ...” Then it got clearer. “Talk to Jord. He’s a drug dealer in Creek Hollow. He’s worried about the Easter Bunny . . . someone dumping drugs in abandoned places ... as bait...” More static. “.. . information ... say you talked to me ... pay attention . . ” Then clearer again. “I’ll try to find another way to talk to you. This will be blocked soon. And Charis ...” The static sounded like a waterfall. .. trust her... .”
And that was it. Peter Cottontail finished up.
He listened to the message a couple more times.
Jord the drug dealer, and the Easter Bunny. Was this just another attempt to get him killed?
Ignacio’s Devices & Desires loomed above him like a fortress with walls of rust-streaked corrugated metal. Chunks of concrete littered the steep hillside. New supports had been poured here and there to keep the fence from losing its grip and tumbling down the slope. This last winter had dug a particularly deep gully. Bernal followed it up with his eyes. Water had eroded the earth under the yard’s asphalt, and, unsupported, it had collapsed.
The gap looked at least a couple of feet high.
Well, that was just great, but there was certainly no way he was going in there again. Let those people do to each other whatever they wanted to do.
He had an appointment with a drug dealer.
The identical three-story buildings of Creek Hollow stretched along the road in clusters of three and four. Hooded teenagers in doorways watched Bernal’s car as he drove past. A woman pushed a stroller with one malfunctioning wheel up the hill, plastic shopping bags from Food World dangling from the handles.
“Hey,” he said to a couple of teenagers, one black, one white. “Where’s Jord?”
They didn’t say anything, their faces impassive in their hoods.
“He’s, like, a friend of a friend. Um, Muriel Inglis said to talk to him.”
Finally, still not saying anything, one of them jerked a thumb to the left, toward a courtyard.
_______
“That’s really a
question, isn’t it?” Jord was thin, lightskinned, and looked barely out of high school. He wore a red shirt, open to expose a hairless chest. “Really a question. The Easter Bunny. But, now, I got one for you.”
“Okay.” Bernal couldn’t quite believe he was here, talking to this guy. It was bold and scary, but he was doing it because it made sense to do it.
He’d have to feel impressed with himself later.
“How you hear? Why are you interested in who’s dumping drugs around? I know you guys, I see you. Not your thing. I see you, I be moving you along, you’re nothing but a tourist. No offense.”
“No, of course not. A friend of mine, a woman named Muriel Inglis. She asked me to check up on this for her.”
“Well, hell, aren’t you a nice friend, though.”
The secret to Jord’s success was obviously the fact that he could make any phrase sound pleasant and ominous at the same time. There was no way to tell what was going on behind his smooth face.
“I don’t have any interest in interfering with your operations.”
Jord laughed. “I don’t think you’d be interfering for long. Not scared of that. I’ve run into Muriel. Smart lady. And balls. I seen her poking in boilers in abandoned buildings and shit. The Easter Bunny. Well, and look at that.” He turned to look at something across the parking lot. “Hey. Hey! Spak! Come over here, will you? The gentleman’s got an important question he needs answered.”
It would have been impossible to load any more black garbage bags into the shopping cart. They were piled so high that even a sharp turn would have sent them cascading. A few had ripped, and clothes poked out of the holes. A heavy black man trotted along behind it. It was impossible to tell how old he might have been. He moved with buttock-wiggling vigor but did not make much progress across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.
For a moment, it looked as if he wasn’t going to react, but finally, he shifted direction and drifted toward them.
The shopping cart was from Caldor’s, a discount chain that had vanished some years before. It was amazing that he’d kept it functional all that time. Jord winced as it seemed to be about to run into the fender of his perfectly polished Lexus, but Spak had more control than it looked and stopped a foot or so short.
“Tell him, Spak. Tell him what you’ve found for me. The man has, like, an interest in my business. How it works and shit.”
Spak wore sunglasses with one lens missing and brightly colored medical scrubs.
“They got . .He was out of breath. He yanked at the neckline of his scrubs. “Someone dumped a whole bunch of these. Found ’em the other night where I was sleeping. We could all wear them.”
Jord grinned at Bernal. “Not my kind of fashion statement, Spak. Tell us about the Easter Bunny.”
“I don’t know nothing about no Eoster Bunny.” Spak didn’t want to look at Bernal. “I don’t want to do it anymore, Jord. Don’t wanna do it.”
“Why not, Spak?” Jord sounded perfectly reasonable. “Doesn’t the extra money keep you in clothes?”
“Don’t need more clothes. Got plenty of clothes. People throw the most amazing shit out. Like .. . look at this—”
“I don’t want to look at any frickin’ underwear you pulled out of some landfill, Spak.”
Spak finally looked at Jord. He adjusted his glasses, as if having one sunglass lens gave him the proper stereoptic view. “People now shoving ... machines, strange shit, out there. Still working. Can hear ’em hum, you put your head right up to ’em.”
“That what you see while you’re looking for the drugs? You still see it once you find what you need?”
Spak looked stubborn. “I know what I seen.”
Jord turned to Bernal. “Since he’s being kind of shy . . . The Easter Bunny. That’s what the street folks call him, her, whatever, anyway. Someone floats around and, get this, gives drugs. Gives ’em out! In, like, a little scavenger hunt thing. Hides the drugs places. Packet of H. A few pills in a baggie. Even weed. All over the place. Well, not in your normal kind of place. Old buildings, like I saw your friend checking out. Abandoned cars. In culverts. Spots people like my bud Spak like to hang out.”
“Hate culverts,” Spak said. “They flood.”
“Smart.” Jord was getting bored. “Real smart.”
“Bad for business?” Bernal guessed. “Too much free product floating around.”
“Nah. Not so much. Demand is, like, big. A few free samples don’t put a dent in it. But, my question is: who’s moving in? I think that’s my explanation. I mean, some stores, you know, they give stuff away free to get people to come, buy other stuff. You ever hear of that?”
“Sure. Free samples. Loss leaders.”
“Loss leaders? Nice. I got some free skin cream the other day. Kind of greasy, though. You use skin cream?”
“I’ve been known to.”
“What?” Jord eyed him with what Bernal was startled to see was a new respect. “What do you use?”
“Skin So Soft.”
“Skin So Soft. You like it?”
“It seems to do the job.”
“I’ll have to try it. Particularly in the winter. But I don’t like that greasy shit. Even though it was free. Got it in the mail, in a little bag. You ever get those? In the mail?”
“Sure.”
“I hate all that crap I get in the mail.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Long time, I think. Maybe a year. Someone moving in, they’re taking their sweet time about it. But I keep an eye on it. Through people like my man Spak here. He’s been keeping an eye out for me. But it sounds like he’s finding all kinds of useless shit instead.”
“I been
looking,
”Spak muttered. “I ain’t going down the Black River no more. Don’t need those gadgets. Don’t need no frosted bowling balls.”
Jord sighed, having gotten bored. Bernal wasn’t sure the question of the Easter Bunny had any real interest for him to begin with. It was more a professional concern, something he knew he should keep an eye on.
“Get going, Spak. Have a nice day.”
Bernal and Jord watched Spak trot away across the parking lot.
“Twitches his butt like a cheerleader,” Jord said. “What’s up with that, d’you think?”
“It’s all related, buddy, it’s all related. Peace-loving, animal-loving Europeans are our honored ancestors. Might look weird at first, not like what your prejudices I want you to believe, everyone’s on ‘colonialism,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘slavery,’ all that crap, but it fits. I won’t say all the Bald Chimps bought into that line, though. There was a diversity of opinions. But, actually, you know, I don’t got much time. Lights out is pretty soon, and they can get kind of rough with infractions.”
“I’ll try to move it along,” Bernal said.
“One of the guys learned what she was doing in that lab. Experimenting on chimps. On their brains. That makes for good PR, you know, chimps with skulls sawed open, that kind of weird stuff. Scientists.”
“Chimps,” Bernal said. “What were the experiments? What was going on?”
“Who knows, really?” George sounded disgusted. “We were going to go in, grab a bunch of stuff, take pictures of the chimps, all that, have a press conference, present the evidence, really get some mileage. But we had some cowboys on the team. They were going to show exactly how much stuff like that disgusted them, so when we got in there, they set a fire. You know, some old files, binders, crap like that, a squirt of lighter fluid, and
foof,
you got a little fire. I was yelling at them, they were crazy, that sets the alarms off, so that’s what you do last, if you feel like it. Dead last.
“I think that place was kind of unregulated, if you see what I’m saying. Corners being cut, inspections not being done. Anyway, the alarms didn’t go off. And the fire spread like hell. I mean, isn’t everything supposed to be flame retardant these days? This kinda crap only happens in movies. But the place went up fast.
“But that’s fine, because there wasn’t anything there, nothing like what we were looking for. No cages, no food, no live-animal gear. Believe me, there’s a lot of it. You got to keep those things alive in order to experiment on them. All there was was a whole lot of stuff that seemed to be cooled with liquid nitrogen.”
“What?” Bernal said. “You recognized that?”
“You still think that because I care about animals I must be kind of a moron.”
“No,” Bernal said. “I don’t think that at all.”
“Well, don’t think it, because it’s not true. Yeah. Cooling equipment, big humping bunches of it. A line of coolers. And stuff hooked up, you know, wheeled carts, manipulator arms. Robotics stuff, not like you’d expect to find in a place like that at all. And here’s the thing . . .” Bernal waited.
“I was looking around, trying to figure out where the hell those supposed chimps were, when something touched me on the back of the head. Well, that scared the crap out of me, as you might imagine. I might have jumped. Screamed, even. Don’t know. It happens. No sense in pretending it don’t. And, okay, that might be what panicked the guys. Everyone was already on edge, you know, and they might have jumped the gun on the fire because of that. That’s pretty much what they claimed afterwards, anyway.
“It was one of those damn arms. It kind of stroked the back of my head. I felt like there was something there. Something watching me. Something real, something that understood things. Maybe that’s me ‘claiming afterwards,’ just like those morons with the lighter fluid. How do I know? I only got this brain, and I’m like inside it, so it’s not like I can go back and run the tape. I’m stuck with the rumors behind the news. Anyway, that’s when things got out of control and we had to bail.
“We got nothing. And I mean nothing. There weren’t even any chimps there, or at least none that I saw. Just a bunch of stuff. Turned out all the records were there, everything, even the backup disks, the whole works. After it was all over, she’d lost every bit of research, and no one had a damn idea of what she had been working on. Weird, huh? It must have depressed the hell out of her, because she left right after that. Sat up a tree, I hear. A victim of out-of-control animal-rights activists, was the story. There’s always a story. We got pulled in, questioned, the works, they weren’t nice to us, not a bit, but there was no proof. Everything. Everything was destroyed. They had to let us walk.
“We didn’t get along too well after that, us Bald Chimps. Chimps are aggressive too, you know. Don’t think they aren’t. Kill each other over a nice piece of jungle. So I broke off, moved back to the Midwest, joined a group over at the University of Illinois. Champaign. And that last little mission ... well, let’s just say, I’ve had a lot of time to think things over in this here five-to-ten aftermath. There’s a lot to think about.”
At the risk of having the lights go out and never hearing the end of it, Bernal waited. George would tell on his own, or he wouldn’t tell at all. All Bernal could do was listen and hope.
“I did grab something when I ran.” George’s voice was almost inaudible.
“What?”
“Oh, shit, wait.” Bernal heard George yell, “Just a second, for God’s sake. I’m learning . .. I’m learning how my old man really died. What? Yeah, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you first.” His voice got closer. “Sorry. Narrative, you know. That’s our main medium of exchange, made up or not. How my dad died is actually kind of interesting in itself. . . .” He paused. “Dog heads. Soviet. I mean old stuff, you’d think it would be something we’d know about by this time. On a VHS videotape. All jerky and out of focus, like the worst home movies you’ve ever seen. And no sound, like they didn’t manage to figure out how to work a mic.
“Now, people pretty much know that somebody over there used to chop the heads off of dogs and keep them alive, all hooked up to tubes and stuff. But this was about something else, something after that. It had big tanks of some kind of liquid with mist spilling off of them. And down inside you’d see . . . the heads, the dog heads, only with wires coming out, not tubes. Then the scene cut, and you saw some kind of vehicle with tracks. Ugly, welded piece of crap, lousy gas mileage, probably broke down once an hour. It didn’t have a crew. It tore around this field, made turns, maneuvered past obstacles, all without anyone on it. Now, maybe it was radio controlled, like a model car or something. But I think it was that cylinder you could see on some kind of framework above the engine. The one with the mist coming off it.”
“You think it was a frozen dog head, or something.”
“Look, I don’t know what I think. But, yeah, maybe these guys figured that instead of messing with a bunch of complex electronics they’d have to buy from us anyway, they’d just take something that was already pretty good at maneuvering across unmarked terrain, chop its head off, and stick that nice little hardware/software combo onto some Soviet crapwagon as a guidance system. If things had turned out different, we might have been facing God knows what across a battlefield somewhere.”
More voices, someone yelling.
“Hey, look,” George said. “Gotta go.”
“Thanks for talking to me,” Bernal said. “The tape ..”
“Hell. My brother. Frank. Frankie. He wanted to . .. well, he did a video of himself and this girl having sex. It goes on for a long time, and you can’t really see anything, but he taped the damn sex scene across my Soviet cyborg stuff. Nothing left. Just a girl with jiggly boobs bouncing up and down on what looks like a half-inflated sea monster beach toy but is, God help me, my little brother. He pops up a couple of times to take a swig of beer, and if you know him, you can recognize him.”
“That’s too bad,” Bernal said.
“Yeah. She keeps yanking up on her boobs, like that will make them ride higher or something. Nothing you really want to look at. I’m glad he found someone, though. Everyone should have someone. Right?”
“Right.”
“You think about that stuff, in here.” George sniffed. “A lot.”
“I understand,” Bernal said.
“No, you don’t, buddy. No way you could.”