Fire Will Fall (20 page)

Tyler exclaims in horror, "How
did
he hack a USIC laptop?"

"How did you find their cell phone numbers and hack into their calls in March?" I say to him, just to shut up his chronic speaking. There are always ways. USIC warns against laptops, but guys out in the field like Hodji sometimes have no choice.

Like Hodji.
The air in the room turns dense as I think of the many e-mails I have sent him today. I tell myself that there are a hundred USIC agents in New York and New Jersey, and they could not be talking about him. But my sudden wheezing fit makes what comes on to the screen seem in slow motion, as if I am in a dream where I cannot run from monsters.

HotKeys:
Here is what I just pulled from one laptop. Are you ready?

VaporStrike:
I am.

HotKeys:
Are you sure?

VaporStrike:
Do not dawdle as if you are a small child.

HotKeys:
The unread e-mails read as follows:

VS in NJ today ... HERE tonight ... 1 mile from HERE.

VS has Fire. 911911911. Check script. 2 of Trinity 4 wandered into Colony 2 ... C2 very near to C1. New log-in Pasco spotted them ... Scott and Cora seen in C2 ... Cora and Scott are not in danger.

It falls out onto the screen in its entirety, in English, so that it takes over the room. I am seeing in double, then in sixes.

VaporStrike:
The v-spy used the word "HERE"? To describe my whereabouts?

HotKeys:
You had better run for cover. Run for your life.

VaporStrike:
My friend, you do not know me well yet. At times when most men run, it is not yet time to run. HERE? Find me an address and allow me to make good use of myself, being that I'm IN TOWN.

Abruptly, HotKeys exits, which could mean he is off to do his bidding, or perhaps he has been kicked off somehow. I doubt it is that second thing.

"I'm dreaming this," Tyler breathes. "He can't find us."

But he can. It could take ten minutes or all night, depending on how good a hacker he is. I wish so deeply for Nurse Alexa to return that I am afraid I will scream. As for Hodji, I try his busy phone again and wish to leave one more message, telling him he has no right to hear his son's bitter complaints at a time like this.

But his devotion to his ungrateful son is the least of his current frailties, I realize. He does not have wings, and even if I could tell him of this final twist, he would only suffer because of it, because there is no way he could get to us quickly.

"We need to find Roger O'Hare," I say. "We need to find another USIC agent. Maybe Miss Susan from my Trinitron days..."

Tyler stares at me as if I have two noses. "Give me another option. I don't actually like chasing down people to beg them to take information that could cost us our asses, especially when they refuse to thank us."

I have to agree with this. There is always my uncle Ahmer in Pakistan, who would at this time be opening his Internet café for the start of business. He is quick to serve but would have no better chance of reaching Hodji than we would.

"Let's call the police," Tyler suggests.

We look at each other, covered in these hideous, purple speckles that would defy explanation inside a police officer's realm of comprehension.

He laughs, which makes me feel better, and decides, "Nah, let's wait it out. Hodji can't stay on the phone forever with his kid. VaporStrike can't find us that fast."

OWEN EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
3:45
P.M.
THE POND

I
CHASED RAIN
down to this little pond after her dad gave her the bad news. The water was pretty, a serene place even though the clouds overhead were dark. I sat beside her on this flat rock that jutted out over the water. It wasn't raining yet, so I let her cry it out using my jeans as a tear catcher until they were soaked through in one spot. She had made me laugh earlier today, so it was my turn. But I was having aftershocks and couldn't think of anything.

"Where are the goats?" I finally settled on.

She blew her nose into a snotty tissue she found in her cut-offs. "I came out here and fed them when you were out of it. Now? I dunno."

She stayed slumped, studying the wet spot she'd left on my thigh from crying. She finally noted with a sniff, "You're sitting Indian-style."

Not
where I wanted this conversation to go. I could never sit Indian-style in high school. Too muscle-bound.

"Well, don't look," I told her.

"That doesn't bother you?"

I sighed, wishing I were a comedian, that I could just peel off the joke I couldn't think of that would make her laugh. "No."

She stared into my eyes incredulously. "You know what? Sometimes I think you don't care whether you live or die."

Yah, yah, yah.
She wanted answers to everything, and she wanted them to be what she wanted to hear. I wondered how she'd respond to my sudden thought:
I care whether I live or die. But I care more about
how
I live and
how
I die.
I don't know why out-there thoughts hit me more often than the other three—except that I'd spent a lot more time than they'd ever done thinking about the meaning of life. I was born thinking of the meaning of life, Mom said. I'd talk to her about how fulfilled she'd always felt, basically existing as a charity lawyer, while everyone in town was out making big bucks and trekking on down to Disney with their kids every year. We decided she was happier. One Saturday sophomore year we were talking like that. She reached over, tousled my hair, and said, "
Owen, if ever anything goes wrong, you remember I said it: You got enough oil in your lamp.
" I wished a lot lately that I'd asked her what that meant.

Rain didn't like my silence. "Listen to me! If you ever die, I'll kill you."

Okay, so she wouldn't like my intense answers. I could manipulate her into feeling better. "Well. I always feel better when
you
quit crying."

She patted my leg, going around the tear spot with her finger. She was thinking of something, and it wasn't what it does to a guy when a girl runs her finger in circles on his thigh. Or maybe she did know. After a long silence, she scooted over the top of my leg and wiggled her butt in between my ankles and my body so that I quickly straightened my legs. She tossed one leg on either side of me and put her arms around my neck. We looked like some seesaw contraption.

I knew she was going to kiss me next, and I put my hand over her mouth. She was trying to explain herself, but I just pressed my palm onto her blather and started talking myself.

"Rain, don't even go there. There's twenty-five good reasons not to go there."

Her eyebrows shot up when I didn't move my hand, and I got on with it.

"First, you're using me. You're upset about your car. And you really want Danny Hall, and I can't do anything about that, but I don't like thinking of myself as the red ribbon. You know how I've always hated red..." She rolled her eyes and made noise, but I clamped down and kept going.

"Second, Miss Haley was making some sense, whether we want to admit to it or not. I'm in worse health than you are. If you swapped spit with me, you would be getting the short end of the stick. I probably have more germs, and you could catch them. That's not a fair deal. Third..."

She was trying to chew on my palm, her lips doing some "screw you, let me talk!" thing, but if the only girl I'd been really good friends with throughout life was going into attack mode, I had a right to say my piece. This thing was not going to happen.

"Third, if you got pregnant, it could kill you. Fourth, if you ever die,
I'll
kill
you.
Fifth..."

I let go, because she found the fleshy part of my hand to bite into. She said, "What do you take me for? You think I was after the whole schmear?"

She meant she just wanted to kiss and make out, risk the passing of germs Miss Haley had warned about. I would love to say the thought gave me shudders, like kissing your sister would. It had been easier to keep Rain in the category of sister when I was distracted by three sports and a school full of others. "Remember our deal from eighth grade? We would never go out?"

Her right eyebrow kinked like it did whenever she got annoyed. "We said people who go out also break up and don't speak to each other, and we didn't want to ruin the convenience of living kitty-cornered to each other. It was about T-shirts and socks! What does that matter now—"

"I never borrowed your T-shirts," I stalled. "You borrowed
my
T-shirts—"

"You've still got half my Wigwams. I've bought, like, ninety pair over the years. You've bought six. Yet you've got half that didn't wear out, and I've got half. Don't make out like you got the short end of the stick."

"You stole my toothbrush."

"That was
my
toothbrush. My spare. You stole it from me first. I needed it back."

"What are we arguing about?" I drummed my fingers on her back.

"Elephants."

Sex. She was going to beat the tar out of the subject, and I was defenseless. "Right. You were saying you weren't after the whole schmear."

"Of course not. When did you decide I resemble a ho?"

I flinched warily and let air escape between my clenched teeth. "Never. But somehow I'm having trouble imagining you choosing a jumping-off point. You've been in a reckless mood for three weeks."

I should not have said it. It was half a yes, which was not what I meant to imply. The hardness of this rock was killing my hip joints and wearing out my back, and I'd just had two aftershocks on the way out here. But I was watching her, watching her lips moving in until her nose bumped mine, in awe of how much it would take to turn a seventeen-year-old guy into a no-can-do. I wasn't there yet, no matter how much pain I was in.

But it had always been some crazy comedy hour with me and Rain. We'd had a couple of moments of temptation in the past. We almost broke down one night on my living room couch freshman year—we'd gotten really close. And then she just started cracking up, and neither of us could stop laughing, and I don't even know why. We ended up in a fight about who laughed first and didn't talk for a week. The other time was out back of a house at a party in the fall, and she said, "Um ... you got a booger."

This time, her lips made a slow touchdown, and there she paused, probably imagining the thousand germs that would pass as soon as she pressed harder. It drove me mad. It's like every Dreaded Fifteen I'd intentionally left her out of backed up on me—kind of like I always knew it would. I wrapped my arms around her back, and all I had to do was push her toward me with one finger. Then

"
Fww-ay.
"

Rain's eyelashes almost got tangled with mine as we stared at each other. She turned in amazement as Sheep jumped up on the rock beside us.

"
Fww-ay. Fww-ay. Fww-ay.
"

Rain stared Sheep in the lips and asked incredulously, "Can't you go find something to do?"

"
Fww-ay. Fww-ay. Fww-ay.
"

I said, "Translated from goat speak, I think that means 'get a room.'"

Rain slumped with a sigh. "Do you believe in the devil?" she asked.

"
Fww-ay. Fww-ay. Fww-ay.
" Sheep was more vocal than the Professor.

I had to confess, "I believe in signs. I think ... that is a bad sign. Rain, I love you, girl. But if we were meant to be together, it would have happened a long time before now—"

"
Damn
it!" She unwrapped herself without my having to ask. I stood up slowly and stumbled down onto the little sandy beach. She jumped down beside me and kicked sand at Sheep, who backed away about ten feet but kept up with the noise.

We tried to ignore it, though as we walked along slowly toward the house, the goat followed, raising a ruckus, like, every fifteen seconds.

"All right, fine. But there's something you should know. You can ask Jeanine how many times I've said this, and she'll tell you a hundred. I have always said that I would date all sorts of guys. But when it came time to get married, I was after you."

I had never heard her say that before, and yet it's like I was hearing it for the hundredth time somehow. No news flash. I probably felt the same way. I settled on, "I'm flattered. But how can you think that far ahead?"

"Because I'm not ditsy. I know exactly what I want in life."

She was either saying I was ditsy or admitting to a number of people from school finding her ditsy. I was too confused to be sure. As we walked along, she took my silence to be something other than a third aftershock, which I was trying to hide.

"You're
flattered?
That's
all
you have to say to me? Ride the reality train, Charlie Brown! I've been up to my earlobes in boys since ... it mattered. I'm just persnickety, that's all. Don't accuse me of throwing myself at you in some fit of desperation—"

The aftershock passed in a long exhale, and I think she got the message this time, stopping with me and laying a hand on my shoulder. "Aw, Bubba," she muttered, her favorite words of sympathy to me over the years. And she shushed at the noisy goat.

I finally straightened up and started walking again. "I'm not accusing you of anything, Rain. It's just that your timing is atrocious."

"Actually, it's not. I think I'm running out of time. I'll take what I can get."

I knew where she was going with this, but I hadn't heard the spin she put on it. She said, "One afternoon in March the nurse let me go down to Godfrey's office when you were bad off. She said I could ask if they would override his no-morphine role in the case of your headaches. He was on the phone with that guy Frank from the CDC. I overheard him say, 'I'm going to do my best to save them all, Frank. But from my experiences with autoimmune diseases this ferocious? Statistically speaking, we'll end up losing one.'"

Sheep shut up for a moment. The breeze wasn't even blowing, and the silence made the impact she wanted.
She thinks I'm the statistic waiting to happen.
True, I would probably be voted least-likely-to-make-it by Godfrey, by anybody with eyes to see with, but I still had some fight left in me—just not for the same reasons the rest of them did. I was not so in love with this world that I totally wanted to stay in it when my mom was someplace better, when all my favorite saints lived up there, the ones I prayed to so often that I felt they were friends.