The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (15 page)

“I’m thinking this man, John Raston. He buys gasoline and he doesn’t use a cuff.”

“Well that would be against company policy now, wouldn’t it.”

McCallum pretended not to pay attention to the boys walking out of the store.

“I don’t care if you’re trading monkeys for moonshine, I just want to know if you’ve ever seen this man.”

McCallum followed the boys out of the store. The two kids walked fast, bottles dangling in their hands. Before they rounded the corner of the store, they both looked back.

“Ahem,” McCallum said. They flinched, the both of them. They each had the inclination to bolt but stifled it. The flinch told McCallum almost everything he needed to know. Almost.

“Boys,” he said. “If you don’t mind a moment.”

They looked terrified. He guessed local system security operatives must keep the leashes tight in this neighborhood.

“I’m looking for an ollie,” McCallum said. “With an off-roader. An old Jeep. Runs on gas.”

“Yeah, we don’t know what you’re talking about,” the taller one said. String bean kids, McCallum thought. Both in need of a hair cut. They’d picked Bourberry— a combination of fruit juice and whiskey. They were 14 or 15, he figured. Right at that age when they want much more than they can have, that phase of out growing the kiddie stuff and not fully understanding grown-up games. You don’t start drinking at 10 in the morning if you want to finish the day upright.

“Neither one of you, huh?” McCallum said.

“We don’t know anything,” the shorter one ventured.

McCallum took a step forward. The kids didn’t move. “You ever see me around here before?”

“No,” they both said.

“You suspect why that is?”

They shook their heads.

“I’m a different kind of op,” McCallum said. “I don’t patrol mini marts looking for double baggers or in-store eaters. I don’t care if you’re taking a personal day from school. I’m the kind of op that should something happen, like you get caught with your pants down somewhere, maybe doing something that ain’t exactly policy, you want me owing you a favor.”

The boys looked at each other. The taller one shook his head, but the other pecked a little, like he was punctuating a sentence that hadn’t been said out loud. The taller one shook his head harder.

“What does it matter?” the shorter one asked.

“It’s trouble,” the tall one answered.

“It’s like an extra life, man. I’m taking it. Cost me nothing. Besides,” he turned to McCallum. “He’s not going to like it anyway.”

Rosalie approached from behind him. He knew her walk, her rhythm. “Find a couple of new drinking buddies?”

“I make friends wherever I go,” McCallum said. “Now, boys, where have you seen the gas Jeep?”

The short one cracked open his bottle of candied bourbon. “You ever hear of Fort Niagara?”

Chapter Eighteen

An icy spray of excrement, urine, water, grime, with chunks and blobs Emory couldn’t indentify, plunged through the left tunnel, kicking his legs out from under him. He tumbled into freezing slurry, too startled to even yell anything but a single ‘oh’. He shut his mouth tight after that. And his eyes. He used one hand to catch the tunnel floor and the other to cinch up his suit under his neck. You didn’t want this stuff inside your coveralls. You didn’t want this stuff outside them, either, he thought as he tried to regain his footing.

Too slippery. The current pushed, where? Down the tunnel? The new section. Air. He needed air. He flapped for the wall. It had to be here. The junction was only six feet across. He rolled, hit the side, felt the water taking him and a squeeze on his forearm. Fingers. He swung his other arm over and grabbed the arm holding him.

Campbell hoisted him out of the torrent of crap. He pressed him to the wall with one arm, holding the edge of the tunnel opening with the other.

They said nothing. No stupid “are you Ok” which would have meant opening our mouth and awarding a creature stuck on your lip the chance to crawl in. They weren’t OK and they both knew it. They stood at the bottom of life, just above freezing, immune systems fighting on forty fronts, tired, hungry, and now unable to move as their senses shut down. The water drowned their work lamps, flooding them with darkness. They heard nothing but the roar of the sewer. Their noses plugged with snot in an attempt to keep out the millions of microbes scurrying the nostril rims. Their senses of touch quickly gave way to numbness.

Emory’s bracelet tingled. He looked at the face to see who called. A reflex. Silly. As if he were going to chat on the phone right now. Only the company had his number anyway.

“Tell them,” Campbell said.

Emory gave his wrist a quick twist and the foreman’s voice shot into his ear. “…ck’s happening up there? Can you hear me? What the fuck’s happened up there?

“It’s Leveski. We’re alive.”

“Not what I asked,” the foreman shouted.

“I don’t know.”

“You must’ve seen something. Sewage pouring in? You didn’t see a couple tons of raw sewage you fuckwad?”

“Yeah,” Emory returned. “From the west tunnel.”

“Fucking BCCA. The BCCA…” Emory could tell the foreman now shouted at someone else. “They opened up early. Get’em a message.”

Click.

* * *

McCallum had heard of Fort Niagara. He had a vague idea it sat somewhere north of the Niagara Falls catchment, at the end of the Niagara River. He learned about it in grade school, though the details had faded with sine and cosine and how to diagram a sentence. He didn’t want to do a search on the topic, because it could be traced later, if the company had the desire. They’d know he had an interest and no other historical inquires in which to hide it. He decided to research the Niagara Gorge — any landscape artist within 500 miles would — and hope he found a plausible tributary running to the Fort.

The gorge was a deep cut in the earth, running from Niagara Falls to Lake Ontario. Seven miles of declining ridge, starting at about almost 200 feet. Steep walls of rock and shale, the waters roared and swirled at the bottom, rolling over rocks, churning in whirlpools. He imagined it would be interesting to paint. Natural energy always commanded attention. Nature stood as the companies’ last obstacle.

The end of the river made two corners of land. One side had a village, the other an old fort. Not the kind with high walls and towers and parapets that a grade three investment technician would have taken over. Fort Niagara laid low in the ground, with chunky stone walls built into thick mounds of earth. To McCallum they looked like giant, fat, lazy basset hounds asleep for so long moss had grown over their backs. The front of the fort, as approached by land, formed a long, foreboding point. If you were attacking on foot, with a gun that held one little ball of lead, he could see how the place might be defensible. You’d have to run up hill across open fields as the resident enemy fired at you from the shed-like buildings dotting the ramparts.

Inside the walls, behind the lumps of green, was what they called the parade grounds. The army paraded around? With no one watching? McCallum didn’t fully understand the term, but he could figure out the purpose. Stone buildings lined the field. Those were the warm, safe places. Where the higher-ups lived. Generals and colonels and the people they liked best. The foot soldiers, cannoniers, blacksmiths and cooks, they lived out in the open, in tents, in winters white and withering.

The photos he saw of the fort were decades old. He knew no one had bothered with the places since the Buy-Ups. Many modern military properties went to the weeds. 300-year-old stone and mud ruts designed to fend off muskets? They became the perfect place to hide.

McCallum almost called up the most recent satellite image of the Fort. His finger circled the command button on his cuff like a hawk. His inquiring would leave an electronic trail, electron breadcrumbs leading them to him.

Them
, he chuckled. He was them. Under other circumstances, at least. He stood up from his recliner and stepped back. The drawing of the fort filled his wall, blue lines on cream. Rough, but full. All the right and necessary details. Artists given such assignments never seemed to get any credit, even when their work is done so well it survives centuries, from paper to graphic file, from pen stroke to streams of ones and zeros.

He turned and looked at the easel in the middle of his living room. Charcoal arcs across canvas, of a young woman face down in the street. He had sketched the bar into the background. Frosty windows. He’d make them glow warm and friendly when he painted. People drinking, touching, unwinding, rewinding— oblivious to the horror outside? Ignorant?

They don’t care to see
, McCallum said to himself.

No one wants to know what’s living in Fort Niagara. All the psychotic, delusional, disturbed minds that proved too much for the company. Too much time, too much money, too much care. Care didn’t figure too heavily into anything. Except his painting.

The dead girl lay prostrate, right arm off the curb, in the gutter. Bubbly orange jacket hacked to raged strands, flaps of her skin pulled up through the rubbery material. It looked as if she might bounce back up at any moment. Just joking. A bad horror movie. Her young flesh and hip coat so resilient death ricocheted like a tennis ball.

McCallum reached for his case of oil paints. He’d make the outerwear and wounds appear wet, a billiard ball effect. The death would shine. This would be his best painting in years. He could see it all now, as if the canvas painted itself and now all his hand merely had to catch up.

And Aga Graber would love it. And it would anchor his first solo show. And posters would rave about his haunted captivating vision and toss photos of his work around the globe, as offers came in for this piece, and others, and commissions from low grades who wanted a McCallum over their baby grand pianos, to point at with Champagne flutes and smile because they were now so fucking cool to own an original. All thanks to that pretty dead girl on the street.

McCallum smashed the canvas on the top of the easel, where the three legs met in a point. The thin wooded spires tore through the cloth and charcoal like a knife through a back.

* * *

Sylvia sat behind her bamboo desk, up on the edge of her seat, legs slightly spread, per the baby’s dictates. How to sit, where to sit, duration and why all came from the baby. Her other new boss. Which infuriated her. Life is a ladder of bosses. Life’s purpose is escape. Climb as many runs as you can, trying to get to the place where you stand all wobbly with nothing but the wind and weather to worry you. It’s everyone’s raison d’être: break the shackles. Parents, educators, supervisors. Freedom is not your potential or goal, it is your duty.

Now here she sat with not one, but two insidious, illogical supervisors telling her where, how and when to sit, like she was a well-dressed malamute.

And her jeans didn’t fit and her boots strangled her calves. She wore a white T-shirt, because the office had the temperature of an orchid house. It smelled like soil. Not a scent that bothered her, on its own, but here it reminded her that her office also served as a potting shed. Mortimer Clive put her desk in a room also used to repot plants, mix fertilizer and store chemicals, tools and pieces of crap no one had the guts to toss.

“You’ve got to get me out of here,” Sylvia said into the monitor. The sheet of glass sat propped by an easel on the desk. Marshall St. Claire’s face filled half the screen.

“I’m doing everything I can, dear,” Marshall said, fist against his cheek, already tired two minutes into their call. “What’s Gavin doing? He can’t be happy.”

“Who knows what jollies him up. Besides, Samjahnee’s doing the rough edits as we speak, so Gavin feels the movie’s progressing. Even though I should be there, making the decisions, making sure he’s not fucking things up beyond belief. I’m sure he’s trashing gold right now. I know it. He’s got the narrative sense of a cabbage.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“As a camera man. He gets shots. But stringing the shots together?”

“Only the great Sylvia Cho can do that.”

“On the nose,” Sylvia said. “On the fucking nose. This little detour is draining my soul.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I had to wash the tractor.”

“Ha,” Marshall belched. He shot upright and laughed through his astonishment.

“Mortimer figures the low grade who plopped me here just wants my name on the project. The fact that I don’t pick out a single begonia or blade of grass matters not. As long as I worked here, this was a Sylvia Cho production.”

“Amy Beauregard,” Marshall said. “The low grade who’s responsible for the building.”

“That’s my fan who hates me, huh?”

“It is a strange sort of love.”

“Have you pinged her?”

“Not directly,” Marshall said. “I’m still putting together a dossier.”

“What else do you need to know?” Sylvia huffed. “I’m here. She did it. Can we get her to do something else now.”

“Exactly. Can we? I’d lose my small fortune betting on the motivations of the fairer sex. I’m not convinced I understand Ms. Beauregard. I’m quite convinced the benefactors behind your film project already tried to pry you loose. So something else is at work.”

“The world is not that dramatic.” Sylvia slumped back in her chair. “That’s why it needs people like me. To give it shape and dynamic. The boring, petty little plays people live through. She saw my name on her list one day and plucked me like the juiciest grape on the vine.”

“Perhaps,” Marshall said. “Or pruned you. Did she place you here or take you away from someplace else?”

That concept made Sylvia stop.

“Either way,” Mortimer’s voice came through the speakers. “She works for me.”

Sylvia iced up. She shook, frightened. The fright turned to anger. She’d let someone like Mortimer frighten her? Embarrassing. Now. How much had he heard? Did it matter? Did he listen in on all of her calls, read her mail and messages?

Marshall said, “That is about the rudest thing I’ve ever—”

“Then try this,” Mortimer said. Marshall’s image on Sylvia’s screen went black. “I’d like the soil sample report by 11 a.m.”

Sylvia’s screen returned to a chart showing acidity rates.