Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (29 page)

Still, she was had pressed to imagine
anything so dramatic happening here now. The crowd that she
saw—big, several thousand big—just looked excited for the pomp and
circumstance. As the procession made its way down the line, she
waved like a hometown pageant queen. In spite of everything, in
spite of her demotion and Rimmler's heir apparent status, she was
beaming with pride. She had waited too long for today to do
anything but.

Those comprising the front of the crowd were
not vagrants or incidental passer-by. These were moneyed interests
from back east. D.C. politicians in velvet hats, and Parisian
socialites with their fingers on the pulse of international
culture.

As they continued on towards the factory,
Susanna could see the crowd was even larger than she had first
thought. This herd melted into a sea of bowler caps and dark
dresses towards the horizon, and stretched on in all directions
like rows of corn. In recent days, she'd heard that shopkeepers and
ranchers alike were renting out spare rooms for visitors.

The convoy pulled up to the front doors of
the factory at last. Wayne left the Mark II running while he got
out and waved to the cheering crowd with both hands. He rounded the
other side of the car, and opened the door for Susanna. She put out
her hand, delicate, and allowed him the photo op of leading her
down from the car. Then she turned to the crowd and waved. Finally,
the couple, along with Sheriff White and his chief deputy,
proceeded through the front doors of the factory while a staffer
drove the Mark II away.

She was struck with the impression that she
was the bride in an exceedingly strange wedding. There was a
cathedral quality to the factory, in fact. The Cole Automotive
plant shot taller into the sky than any other structure in
Bridgetown, with great big glass windows that let light rain down
into the nave. Just as cathedrals had been erected to overwhelm
one's senses with the glory of the hereafter, this factory had been
erected to overwhelm one's senses with the glory of Man's
achievements in industry.

She and Wayne had never actually had a
wedding ceremony, of course: their cover story had them married for
some time before arriving in Bridgetown. In a way, today was an
iron-clad monument to the raw driving power of their union, more
sweeping and grandiose than any mere wedding could have aspired
to.

To look upon the interior of the factory from
her vantage point was to see a massive, deep-reaching backdrop of
complicated, incomprehensibly dense machinery. The assembly lines
spat forth from dark machine-mouths and towards an elevated stage
built for this gala. The wooden stage was dressed in dark maroon
carpet, with gauzy curtains draped from the ceiling allowing only a
suggestive hint of the labyrinth of technology in the
background.

I built this.

Susanna and Wayne broke their formation at
the front of the stage. Wayne went left, up the stairs to the
podium, and Susanna went right, to the row of seats where she and
the other leadership figures who weren't Wayne were to wait their
turn.

Once she was seated with the others, a band
started playing a brassy rendition of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."
Susanna sat patiently while the piece played out, and exchanged a
brief glance and a smile with Sheriff White, who was standing in
the wings.

When the band reached its rousing climax and
denouement, streamers fluttered down from above. The audience burst
into applause. Wayne stood up, which summoned another thundering
wave of claps and whistles. He bowed a few times, glowing like
Hamlet at curtain call, and indicated with an open-palmed hand
towards the others onstage.

He then took up the mic. The tinny P.A.
system that carried his voice was, naturally, a Cole Co.
product.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began. "Today, we
mark an historic occasion. In five years' time, I have been proud
to oversee a company that has introduced the radio, the telephone,
and over twenty other innovative products to the common
marketplace."

Susanna looked out at the crowd, and saw
their faces in a similar kind of quiet, anticipatory gaze. They
were transfixed, leaning forward to fully absorb every word Wayne
said.

Wayne went on. "Cole
Company is expanding. We're already selling our products in England
and France, and our vision for a better tomorrow will soon touch
Germany, Spain, and Japan. On the heels of all this, today I
introduce to you something so unprecedented, it required building
an entirely new kind of factory. A new approach to what it means
to
make
."

Wayne broke from the podium, pacing a few
steps towards the center of the stage.

"No doubt you're familiar with the horseless
carriage," he went on. "But likely few of you have ever had the
chance to ride in one. I can almost guarantee that none of you own
one. That's because they're expensive. Prohibitively so. And
dangerous, difficult to maintain, and often limited in range. At
least, that's been true thus far. But not after today."

Wayne's arm shot out in a proud gesture
towards the rear of the stage.

The curtains parted, and revealed an
automobile rotating on a showroom dais.

Compared to the Mark II, this one's lines
were smoother, its profile minimized to the only the most essential
of the basic sedan form, as if Le Corbusier had designed a car. Its
wheels were thin and primitive compared to the Mark II prototype.
Susanna knew this was a compromise Wayne had made in order to keep
the production model affordable. She'd been privy to endless
tableside laments as his vulcanization team had struggled to get
the formula just right.

In almost every other way, however this car,
with its chrome accents shimmering before her and a thousand
wide-eyed souls under the factory lights, was a philosophical
quantum leap over the open-air buggies being hand-built in Germany.
Electronic tail lights signaled turning and braking, and eliminated
the need to make gesture-based signals while operating the car.
Seat belts were standard, and a trustworthy Cole Co. radio was
available on the Futura trim level. Wayne had registered over two
thousand new patents in the last few years, ensuring Cole Co. would
be collecting royalties for a very long time.

"Today," Wayne bellowed from his stage, "Cole
Company is proud to introduce the Everyman car. The Mark III
Touring Sedan, the most significant miracle of modern science and
industry!"

The sea of applause nearly drowned out
Wayne's line, and Susanna shared in the pride. She looked over to
where the sheriff had stood, but found he was no longer there.

"Sheriff," came a worried voice at Errol
White's feet.

White looked down from his spot at the side
of the stage, and saw a familiar ruddy face. It was that fellow
from the saloon, the one who'd stabbed his friend in that barroom
fight. What was his name?

"McInnis, sir," the man said, out of breath.
"From the saloon."

"Yes, I know who you are. What's the
matter?"

"Someone intends to shoot Wayne Cole dead.
Here, now."

Reflexively, White's eyes scanned the crowd,
as though hoping to spot the assassin. He quickly realized that was
nonsense—the room was packed full.

Think straight,
Errol
.
Take a
breath and think straight.

White stepped down from the stage, with as
much apparent calm as he could muster, and grabbed Fitzgerald
firmly by the arm. "You're gonna help me find him."

White heard Wayne's voice booming over the
speaker system. "This is the summation of my life's work," the
industrialist said. "Now, it's my pleasure to introduce you to the
man who helped make it possible, my chief engineer, Harris
Burrows."

The sheriff talked directly in McInnis' ear
so he could hear him, but no one else could. "How do you know
someone's out to kill Mr. Cole?"

"He was talking about it, down at the
saloon," the old drunk slurred, as he hobbled along on his peg,
struggling to keep pace. "Said he was prepared to die if it meant
dragging Cole down to hell with him. An' you know how fellas get,
but then I seen him here just a few minutes ago, and he gave me a
wink, you see, and flashed me his pistol under his jacket."

"What's he look like?"

"Oh, about your height, white, two eyes, a
nose—"

"I get the picture. Where was he?"

"Making his way up the center of the crowd,
from the back of the house. I think he's making his way slowly,
tryin' not to be noticed"

A wave of applause ran through the crowd,
starting at the front and rippling out to where they were. Wayne's
engineer stepped down from the podium, and signaled for another man
to come up.

Susanna declined to join in the applause as
Howard Rimmler and his stupid beard walked up to the podium. If she
could claim one small, hollow victory, it was that the applause had
become more tepid than it had been for Wayne or the chief engineer.
Apparently assembly line methodology was too esoteric to rouse this
crowd's emotions.

Rimmler spoke for a few minutes. She tried
not to listen to any of it. Her bitterness came roaring back. Here
were all these people, witnessing history play out on the stage
before them. And she was playing second fiddle.

"—Susanna Cole," Rimmler announced.

Susanna suddenly shot to the ready, realizing
her archenemy had just called her up to the podium. Another wave of
applause broke out, this time bigger than the one either Rimmler or
Burrows had received. Being a regular feature in the gossip column
got you more goodwill with the public than actual achievement
did.

Rimmler didn't move away from the podium as
she stepped up to it. Susanna wondered what the big idea was.
Rimmler leaned into the microphone:

"Now, Mrs. Cole and I have not always had the
warmest of working relations," he said. The crowd was quiet,
focused. Susanna give him a look.

"No, no, it's true," he went on. "You see, I
may be the Project Manager here at the factory, but it wasn't
always that way. Mrs. Cole is a very smart, very capable worker in
her own right. And I wouldn't be doing right if I didn't
acknowledge that she poured just as much blood, sweat, and tears
into these bricks as any of us men did."

Well
, Susanna thought,
you got it
half-right, at least
.

"Now," Rimmler went on. "I want to give her
and this dirty old denim suit of hers a fair chance to speak. Thank
you, Mrs. Cole."

With that, Rimmler stepped away, leading the
crowd in applauding her.

His words had been, at their base, still
condescending—still inadequate. But, she had to admit, she wasn't
expecting even that much from her. It was a start.

She cleared her throat, and brought her lips
to the microphone. "Thank you, Howard," she said, the words
sounding alien to her ears. Then she pulled her speech out of her
pocket and unfolded it. She recognized the anger-fueled
determination with which those sharp, angular letters had been
written days earlier.

"Today we stand on the precipice of the
future," she began. "A glorious world awaits that, to many of us,
might seem only fantasy. Heavier-than-air vessels will conquer the
skies. Diseases that take all too many lives today will be cured.
Our children will watch mankind step foot on the moon. How can I
predict such things? Because they are part of an inevitable march
of progress that I have seen in my dreams."

She took a breath, reflecting on the utter
truth of her words that no one else present, save for Wayne, could
possibly understand.

"But progress means more than new factories,"
she went on. "Progress includes the recognition of all peoples'
contributions. When we step backwards in this quest, for fear of
retribution from the closed-minded, we silence the ideas of
innovators of all ages, creeds, and genders.

"I have seen this firsthand. These walls,
these windows, these assembly lines—I lived and breathed their
construction for over a year. But some backwards individuals feared
what that would mean for the women now fighting for an equal voice
in our society, for the right to vote and to determine the course
of their lives."

Susanna felt murmurs throughout the crowd.
Support and discord alike, no doubt.

"Such men have tried to silence me."

She could picture Wayne
rubbing the sweat from his forehead right about now.
She can't be serious
,
he'd be thinking.

"But I will not be
silenced. Not for some vain sense of posterity, but because this
place will make the future, and it is up to us to make sure the
future we fashion is the correct one.
May
this factory be a monument to human ingenuity, and a symbol of new
beginnings for men and women around the globe."

She took a deep breath. "Thank you all." With
that, she stepped away from the podium, feeling lighter than she
had in weeks. The sound of applause washed over her like the golden
honeydew light that transported her into this world all those years
earlier.

White's eyes scanned and flitted about the
front of packed house.

"Any sign of him?" White asked McInnis.

"I'm looking, I'm looking," the old man
said.

White's attention drifted to one person in
particular. In a crowd filled with grey-haired politicians and
foreigners dressed in their clothes that were different a subtle,
implacable way, this one stood out. He wore a long cloak that hid
the outline of his body, and which looked far too warm for August.
Wispy blonde hair sat tucked under a broad black hat and the
shoulders of the cloak. And while the others clapped, his right
hand stayed hidden under that cloak.