Cut Off (4 page)

Ness glanced over his shoulder. "What just happened?"

"I vouched for you," the man said. "Please tell me my instincts are as impeccable as always."

"What are they telling you?"

"That you come from far away, and thus would be interested—and willing to pay for—the services of someone who knows the scene."

The scene, at that moment, consisted of a man seated on the reception desk while another committed a shameless act upon his person. Ness' new guide waved to the seated man, who waved back.

"Sounds like a gamble on your part," Ness said evasively.

The man honked with laughter. "I see what you have done there. You can call me Sprite. Like the soda. And you are?"

Ness thought about spitting out a fake name, but he couldn't see the point. Most every human he'd ever known was dead, and the few who weren't were a quarter of the way across the globe. "Ness. Say, were those guys blowing each other?"

"It's a brave new world. A 'reception desk' means something else now. Good to meet you, Ness. Come to see the fight?"

"Could be."

"Either you did or you didn't." Sprite fixed him with a delving look, then grinned crookedly. "Do you even know what this place is?"

"Someplace fun, judging by the lights. I'm a moth for pretty lights."

The man chuckled, footsteps echoing across the stone lobby. Men and women were gabbing and laughing from further inside the building. "You might not have noticed, but I'm a hustler. These days, who isn't? But unlike the madding crowd, I believe those who hustle together hustle most profitably. You can shear a sheep a hundred times, but only eat it once, and all that. So here's the score: you've stepped out of the world and into the Galaxy. Right now, there's a pretty good chance you don't leave without being robbed, assaulted, or murdered."

"What's the difference between that and the rest of the world?"

"Because you don't know this piece of it, do you, white boy? That makes your odds much worse. So here's the deal. Make it worth my while, and I'll show you the ropes."

Ness moved into the shelter of a pillar. Two young Chinese woman clopped past on heels, followed closely by a bodyguard with a rounder face who had chosen to take advantage of the carnivalish atmosphere by dressing in a leather duster, black shirt, and pants, and who made no secret about the pistol on one hip and the katana on the other.

"Dude looks like the guy in
The Matrix
who gets killed before you learn his name," Ness muttered. He reached into one of his pockets and produced a metal disk the size of a grasshopper cookie. It was heavy and damascened, etched with a language not of this earth. He held it up. "You know what this is?"

Sprite leaned close to it and shut one eye, mouth hanging open. "Where did you get this?"

"I travel a lot."

"And what does it do?"

"Shows the ladies you boosted it off an alien."

Sprite nodded thoughtfully. "I will accept this fine...thing. Along with thirty percent of anything you win tonight. I assume you came for the fight?"

"I'm here to see anything weird."

"The fight it is," he grinned. "Right this way."

He led Ness down a spacious hallway past multiple ballrooms. Most were dark. In one, twenty people gathered around four tables that were islands of light in the vast, gloomy space. Colored chips lay around the edges of the tables. A playing card flashed white. Much later than he ought to have, Ness realized the place was a casino.

A set of doors opened to a sprawling courtyard. Men and women chatted at candlelit tables. Waiters brought drinks while large men stood in the shadows watching the action. At the center of the courtyard, the ground was sunken, as if a large fountain had been busted up and removed; a wire fence had been erected to protect the construction.

Sprite grabbed a table and Ness perched himself on a spindly chair that looked more like a sketch than a physical object. A woman in a butler's uniform came around. Sprite spoke to her and she departed with a smile and a nod.

"You looked like you could use a drink," he said.

Ness watched the waitress go. "Yet again, your instincts are flawless."

"That time, I cheated.
Everyone
can use a drink. We'll watch the games, have a laugh, then I'll show you around."

The waitress returned with two green bottles of beer. The labels were in Chinese and appeared to have been hand drawn. Sprite paid with two red poker chips and a yellow one for her. The bottles were sweating and when Ness went to pick his up it was cold. He yanked his hand away as if stung.

Sprite snaked out a hand to steady the bottle. "Oh yes, my friend. Refrigeration. Enjoy."

He did. He knew how to make beer, and thus had an expert's irrelevant opinions about how it should be done, but the truth was this stuff was pretty good, if slightly metallic, and he hadn't had a beer in forever, let alone a cold one, and that made it even better. Sprite asked him about his life pre-virus and post- and Ness answered with a mixture of truth and lies. He felt a vague impatience, but sitting in a warm courtyard with a cool drink and no immediate worries felt good.

Soon enough, he began to feel out of place. Sprite was only asking him questions because Sprite was on the clock and expected Ness to spend the rest of the night in a frenzy of drunken gambling. Even if he'd had something to gamble with besides priceless alien tech, he wouldn't be having fun. He didn't care about these people, their silly vices.

But he knew someone who did. Sebastian didn't really think the casino had anything to do with the reports of an alien presence. He just wanted to learn what those curious humans were up to now. With this realization, Ness swigged his beer, intending to chug it, apologize to Sprite, and be on his way, but at that moment, a man walked up to the fenced-in fountain bearing an acoustic megaphone. A spotlight shined on him. He began to speak in Chinese, voice amplified across the grounds.

Over the span of the hour and three beers Ness had spent in the courtyard, it had filled with dozens of people. Most were Chinese, but a minority of whites and Filipinos were present as well. All turned to face the man at the fence, who spoke with the intensity of a sports announcer.

"The undercard," Sprite explained. "Both very accomplished fighters. Classic showdown between Shaolin and Wu-dang. Any other night, this would be the main event."

"What makes tonight so special?"

Sprite wagged a finger. "In time, impatient one."

A few minutes were then devoted to the placing of bets, the ordering of drinks, and the introduction of the two fighters, who entered the fenced-in area and spent the next twenty minutes beating the holy crap out of each other. At the end, the Wu-dang champion dropped his opponent with a jaw-cracking elbow strike and was presented with an oversized red belt, to the great dismay of roughly sixty percent of the bettors. Ness was a bit drunk and more content to spectate than he'd been earlier, yet he was looking forward to making an awkward exit as soon as the next fight was over.

The announcer returned to shout into his megaphone. Sprite smiled a lot and said very little. By now, the courtyard was virtually packed—it was the first time Ness had seen a legitimate crowd anywhere in the last year since the tribal warfare in Los Angeles—and the onlookers placed a crescendo of bets while the security guards looked on.

The first fighter marched into the fenced arena. The announcer drew out his name like a wrestling hype man. The warrior, a bare-chested man whose etched musculature would once have made Ness feel inferior, produced two swords: one short, one long. He put on a good show, hopping around the ring, blades flashing in the lights, but Ness thought there was something manic about his movements.

The cause of the man's unease became clear a minute later. The crowd shushed. A spotlight beamed down from the roof of the casino and illuminated a team of men dragging an alien to the ring in chains.

3

In the parking lot of the Ace, Tristan kept the cart between herself and the stranger. "Exactly what city is this supposed to be property of?"

The man lowered his browns, nonplussed. He was no older than her and his nose was crooked from a couple of breaks. "Are you new here?"

"Are
you
? I've lived here five years. Never seen you once."

"I'm here now. And I represent the city of Lahaina."

"I've been coming here for years, Mayor McCheese. Never had any trouble before."

"Times change. This area is now under the stewardship of the Guardians of Lahaina. If you wish to take salvage from the city, you will now be required to submit a request for the materials—and, if approved, to pay a reasonable tax on them."

She glanced at Alden out of the corner of her eye. He held his fists clenched by his hips, as if he were afraid of what he might do if they were open to be used.

Tristan turned back to the young man. "I left my wallet in the apocalypse. Right now, I've got work to do. Send me a bill."

The man shook his head. "There's an order of operations here. Walking away is the same thing as stealing."

But he had already spent too much time talking for her to believe it. She sighed. "You want to draw down on us, go ahead. See how much tax
that
gets you." Keeping one eye on the man, she gestured at Alden. "Let's move."

Alden nodded, leaning into the cart. It squeaked and lumbered forward. Tristan pushed with her left hand, her right hanging beside her hip. The man bared his front teeth, fingers curling. The cart rumbled across the hot asphalt. Lumber rattled on its metal bed.

The man wagged his head side to side. "It would be within my rights. We know where you live, girl."

He turned on his heel and stalked away through the rusting cars with their dirt-streaked windows. Tristan and Alden moved the cart to the road and continued north, glancing from side to side, sweating under the steady sun, stopping several times per mile to drink water, catch their breath, and adjust the contents of the cart, which were vibrating loose. Between the noise and their sluggish pace, it would have been a simple matter for another "representative of the city" to come after them, but three hours later, they turned off the main road and into the subdivision on the way up the mountain.

They stopped to rest in the shade of a house. They were making good time and only had another three miles to get home, but it was all uphill and some of the roads were dirt. She had the feeling it was going to be brutal.

A cardinal moved on the roof of a house, drawing Alden's eye. "Why didn't you shoot him?"

"Because I'm not a psychopath?"

"He had a gun. He was acting threatening. It would have been within
our
rights."

Tristan frowned at him. "You're going to shoot people the first time they disagree with you?"

He shrugged. "If that's what it takes to stay safe."

"You leave that to me," she said. "He talked too much for me to think he meant to hurt us."

"If that's what you think." Alden rubbed his arm, then smiled, lopsided. "But you skipped out on the salvage tax! What if they audit us?"

She eyed him. It was funny, the things he remembered; he'd never paid income tax in his life and never would. "I don't want any run-ins after this. Once we finish the shack, we're done scavenging from town."

"Logically, whatever they're asking in tax has to be worth less than what we're taking."

"It isn't the cost, it's what that tax means. They're building a new
community
." She gestured in the rough direction of the mainland. "Remember what those were like?"

He laughed. "They sucked."

"Exactly. They're about serving the interests of the inner circle while exploiting everyone they can frighten into subservience."

"Sometimes I feel like I should be paying you."

"What for?"

He grinned. "For all these college lectures you keep giving me."

She snorted, panged by memory. Even kids might have known about the IRS, but Alden had barely been a teen when the Panhandler hit. He wouldn't have had the context to understand what a liberal education sounded like.
That
had come from their dad. Grumbling around the dinner table about how wonderful it was that Tristan had successfully learned everything.

She'd berated their father too hard, she knew, clubbing him over the head with sociological theories of sexism and equality. At the time, such concepts had seemed vitally important. The keys to a fairer, better world. Now, sitting in the yard of a dead millionaire, on a tropical island where the people had gone quiet but the birds and the waves went on as if nothing had changed, it felt hopelessly obscure, like the instruction manual to an obsolete machine or the appendices of the
Silmarillion
.

"Come on," she said. "We've got a long, shitty day ahead of us."

Between the sun, the heat, and the midday lack of wind, Tristan thought pushing the cart up the rest of the way to the house qualified as "grueling." More than once, she thought about waiting for evening. It wasn't like they had a deadline, or anything here worth stealing.

Yet something made her press on. The sense of unease for what was in the crater. More than that, her desire not to be defeated. Not by the weather, nor the weakness of her body. This was nothing compared to what she'd gone through in the year after the plague. To Alden's credit, he didn't complain.

In time, they grunted their way up to the house, rolled the cart into the garage, and flopped down in the shade. Once Tristan felt able to stand, she inventoried exactly what they'd taken and went to the lanai to sketch out plans. Drawing it out, it was clear they would be short on chain link and lumber.

The next day, they returned to the hardware store, wary for another sight of the stranger, but were left in peace. Tristan augmented the materials with two cans of dull green paint, along with rollers and brushes and pans. Once they were past the highway and moving into the hills, Tristan left the cart in Alden's care and backtracked to see Helen.