The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (19 page)

Snyder said, “It had been a while, huh.”

McCallum rested his head back down on the pillow. “You could tell?”

She rolled and pecked him on the lips. “You did nothing wrong. That’s not what I meant. No, you did nothing wrong at all. I could just tell. That’s all. Like you knew I wasn’t from around here.”

“I make love with an accent?”

Snyder smiled. “Everyone does. Most people are not as good as reading them as me.”

“That’s quite a skill.”

She put her palm on the side of McCallum’s face. Her eyes focused on his, unblinking, her mouth parted and he knew he would hear something important.

Snyder closed her mouth and her eyes and sat up. “I promised you coffee.”

“Can I go? I don’t—”

A rumbling sound grew on the far side of the parade grounds. A machine. Metal and movement. McCallum couldn’t place it at first. A garbage disposal, with a spoon stuck in its maw? He walked naked to the window and followed the sound as it rounded the tents and huts and approached.

A red Jeep, with a tan colored top chugged into view, propelled, he guessed, by a gasoline burning motor. It drove without haste skirting the shantytown and pulled up not too far from the window.

“Fuck.” McCallum backed up, remembering his lack of clothing. “My ride’s here.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

McCallum emerged from the oak door, still stuffing his red cotton shirt into his jeans. He carried his jacket in his teeth. He took the time to tie his boots. As a patrolman, he learned never to short change the footwear. He walked up to the Jeep. Its tailgate swung open and the back window was rolled up and fastened with a strap. A man unloaded boxes of canned goods and sacks of rice. Tan work pants, a fur-lined coat an airship pilot might wear, with a matching leather hat. He had glasses, black plastic, thick enough to use as a pry bar if needed. Whip thin, he moved with jittery speed and precision.

“Let me help,” McCallum said.

The man glanced at him. “I won’t say no.”

“I’m Ed.” McCallum went to the back of the vehicle and grabbed a burlap sack.

“John.”

McCallum lifted out the last of the boxes and set it down on the grass. “Where do these go?”

“I’ll show you.” John tossed a sack over his shoulder and went back through the oak door McCallum had just exited. McCallum followed, toting a case of cans.

Once inside, they turned left and stopped in a long, narrow kitchen. Mismatched shelves and sinks. Two steel tables, with various pots and pans leaning in loose stacks or hanging above. The scent of fresh coffee filled the room. John dropped his rice on the first table and continued to a stainless steel coffee machine, an industrial grade four-potter. He grabbed a mug as McCallum set his box down.

“You passing through?” John poured.

“Probably.” McCallum took a mug and waited.

“We appreciate the help just the same.”

“Least I can do.”

John sat down on a stool. He cuddled his coffee cup in both hands and watched McCallum find a stool on the opposite side of the table.

“Is that your tent out there?” John asked.

“You’re very observant,” McCallum answered.

“It stuck out. We haven’t had any new homesteads in a while.”

“Spring is in the air,” McCallum said. “I like your Jeep.”

“Junior? Thanks. The restoration took me 15 years.”

“And now you use it to haul groceries.”

John grinned. “I think, sometimes, it was the plan all along. Even if I didn’t know it.”

“You all seem to have survived the winter just fine.”

“Lost two to TB. Lucky it wasn’t more.”

“TB?” McCallum pondered. “Tuberculosis. Didn’t think that still made the rounds.”

“Not in the corporate world. Out here, I’ve seen folks die of cuts and bruises.”

“Awful.”

“Eh,” John said. “Some of them died happy. Free of that final tether. They didn’t die hostages.”

“Doesn’t sound like they had to die at all.” McCallum took a big swig of his coffee.

John leaned forward over the table, studying McCallum like he’d switched lenses on a microscope. He’d selected a stronger set. McCallum studied him right back. He’d met killers in his career and they all surprised him in some way. Hidden anger or hidden remorse, a pall of pride in a unique accomplishment or an off-handed iciness. Human appliances, he came to call the latter. Human-shaped dehumidifiers that kill. If John Raston was a killer, he’d be the most surprising one ever.

“Ollies don’t take to prying,” John said. “A man’s business is his own. That’s an unwritten policy. Just about the only one. But if I may be so presumptuous, let me give you a piece of what I’ve learned off line. Healthcare makes you a hostage. That fantasy the companies give you about a lasting, perfect life holds no more water than a leprechaun’s pot. It’s pixie dust. Something’s going to get you. Not even Grade Ones live forever. But you’ve got to understand that to let it go. The doctors and drugs. If you can’t say goodbye to them, you can’t be an ollie. You’re going to have to strap on your kneepads, go back to whatever job you despised, and grovel.”

“If I may be so presumptuous,” McCallum said. “That’s some kind of pain.”

“Pain’s the kin that knows us,” Snyder said. She walked like a cat. None of McCallum’s senses warned him she was coming. Green work pants, tight white shirt, she tied her still wet hair in a tail as she neared. McCallum couldn’t do anything but stare.

“
Pain’s the wind that blows us
,” John sang.

“It seems you’re getting along with John.” She took a mug and filled it with coffee.

John said, “You make that sound like a miracle.”

Snyder sat down. “Sometimes men a…” She splayed the fingers on both her hands and meshed them together like cogs. “…click. Sometimes, not so much.”

“How about you?” John mimicked her gesture. “You two clicking?”

Snyder turned to McCallum and curled her lips into a wavy smile. “He’ll do.”

“Do what?”

“I’ll wait to see what comes next,” Snyder said.

McCallum raised the coffee mug to his mouth and said, “me too” before he took another long, warm, invigorating sip.

* * *

The Ambyr educational system recognized Emory’s talents from the tests he took at age twelve. He planned. He organized. Their tests discovered his innate propensity for hierarchy and mathematical methodology. They put him on track to be a systems engineer at age 13. He never struggled with his destiny. He actually found some comfort in it, the regimen and the logic.

Now that logic told him to run.

“We will never have a chance like this again,” Campbell said. He stood in grimy yellow overalls, black plastic boots pulled up over them, his face wet with underground moisture and nervous perspiration, holding specs of sewer waste like glue.

Emory peered back down the pipe. The next crew had yet to start out. He held up his bracelet. Egg white ceramic, an inch thick, he knew it was supposed to survive a cave-in. It would tell the company where the trouble lay when the workers were uncommunicative paste.

Emory reached up and released the cross brace. The bar retracted into itself a few inches. He lowered it to his shoulder and put his left wrist against the chipped, curving wall of the tunnel.

“Crank it,” he said.

Campbell reached across him and turned the winch-like lever, pressing the foot of the brace against Emory’s cuff. The crack startled them both. Emory pulled his hand out and they switched positions. He crushed Campbell’s ceramic band and it fell to the puddle at the bottom of the tunnel, next to his.

“We’ve got about four minutes,” Emory said. Campbell started back down the sewer pipe. Emory grabbed his arm. “That’s what they’d expect.” He started running into the old section of the sewer, the section to be replaced over the next few weeks.

“A… yeah,” Campbell said. “Because it’s the only way out.”

“Actually, I think there’s no way out. But it’s too late now.”

Emory had charted out exactly how he’d ask Lillian to marry him, determining the perfect time and location to generate maximum romance. He chose the swings, on her school’s playground, at dusk, in autumn. The scent of fallen leaves in the crisp air. Now, he concentrated on that smell, pulling it hard from the back of his memory. He could, by the power of his will, overcome the stench of crap. Urine, feces and rot filled his nose, splashed up by their running feet. Their flashlights slashed back and forth across walls, barely cutting the darkness. Emory’s heart fought his breastbone. His mouth sucked itself dry. He stumbled, recovered, caught the reflective eyes of a rat in his light, and kept running.

“You… know…,” Campbell huffed, “there’s a cut off. A… barrier.”

“And…” Emory squeezed out.

A rusty slab of metal cut across the tunnel. A large, riveted ring edged the pipe. Little streams of water shimmered and fell from two spots around the top. Emory ran right to it, turned and bent over. He grabbed his knees, giving himself a moment to breathe.

“A ladder.” Campbell panted next to him.

“Figured,” Emory said. “Hoped, really.”

Emory climbed the iron rungs embedded in the concrete, next to the seven-foot valve. The round iron plate covered the top of the manhole. He managed to jostle it, but couldn’t get the lid up out of its impression.

“Can’t,” he said.

Campbell climbed the ladder, as Emory swung to the side. They both grunted, pushed and lifted the round, waffled hatch out of its nest. They slid it sideways, skidding it on the pavement.

A car screeched. They heard a bang. The twinkle of a glass shower. The light blinded them. They scrambled out, as people— two men maybe — shouted. They emerged into an intersection, downtown. Cars paused at the corners, some obeying the traffic lights, others blocked by the accident.

“Hey!” Emory heard, directed at them. He paid no attention. He saw a parking garage a block back in the direction they had just come, but above ground.

“This way,” he told Campbell.

“That’s back towards the dorm.”

“You arguing with me now?”

“Your luck’s gonna run out.”

They ran down the sidewalk. The city air tasted wonderful. Emory felt the prick of sun on his cheeks and, even though his stomach shrank and wanted to throw out what little it had left and his lungs had become pincushions, he felt it. The good in it.

They ran halfway into the parking garage, snuck between two sedans and collapsed. Emory looked at Campbell, his dirty face, a long string of drool clinging to his lower lip. They both heaved huge amounts of air in and out.

After his breathing steadied, Emory stripped off his yellow overalls. He rolled them in a ball and put the mass under his arm. He might need them. The temperature couldn’t have been 50. The concrete began to leach out the heat he’d generated in his run. Campbell looked ready for a nap.

“We can’t stay here,” Emory said.

“Where we gonna go?” Campbell rubbed his eyes.

“Aren’t you the one who said we could walk away whenever we wanted? We always had the right to quit and go home?”

“Technically.”

“I know. I know. The numbers. The chief would rather have two accidental deaths than two resignations.”

“I don’t even have a home to go to,” Campbell said.

Home
, Emory thought. That’s the other thing they’ll do. He said, “The chief will send somebody to my house.”

“It’ll be all right.”

“No, it won’t, but there’s nothing I can do. Nothing. I’m worse than useless. I’m making trouble.”

“No,” Campbell said. “You saved my life.”

Emory took that in. Like the air and the light, the tiny scent of spring eking its way through the city.

“Those assholes are going to my house,” Emory said.

Campbell nodded. Emory cupped his hands over his face. He wanted to punch the door of the car behind him. Such a waste of energy, though. He couldn’t waste the energy.

Chapter Twenty-Four

McCallum found John Raston on the wall, river side, next to a small pile of clothes and a cooler; the kind McCallum would’ve used to keep beer cold at a beach. John ran a pair of jeans up and down a piece of corrugated steel, spraying suds.

“What are you doing?” McCallum asked as he approached.

“Washing my clothes,” he replied.

“Was that another company chain? The washing machine?”

“Of a sort,” John said. “Everything is. Every material thing. You get my age and you hate them all a little. Once the shine wears off.” He put a wet shirt in a plastic bag and picked up a pair of jeans. He began running them up on and down the bumpy board, working up more foam. “Synder says you’re an artist.”

“Aspirational.”

“This is a good place for that. There’s time and beauty. You don’t find those two cohabitating everywhere.”

“It does seem seductive.”

“We could certainly use you. I can’t trust a lot of these guys with the wine.”

“You’ve got a lot of boozers.”

“Some. Not too many,” John said. “It’s the distribution that’s more the problem. Bottling, loading, driving around, that type of thing.”

McCallum let his surprise show. “How much wine are we talking?”

“150 barrels. We collect surplus grapes from the local wineries. It’s much easier for them to claim a few acres of vine didn’t produce than they lost a barrel or two. We make the juice ourselves, then make the wine. We donate some back to the vineyards. We trade the rest for food and supplies.”

“Barter?”

“Yep. The big ‘B’, as in the best way I know to kick the companies.”

“Plural? You’re kicking the companies?”

“You shave a little from all three and you reduce your chances of getting noticed. They each have holdings in the area, so it’s pretty damn easy. Grapes are grapes.”

“It’s elaborate.”

“It’s work. A lot of work. Especially with a bunch like this.” John nodded towards the parade grounds. “The companies don’t care that any of them are here for a reason. Snyder’s good, though. She finds a way for every whack-job out there to pitch in.”

McCallum gazed out over the huts and tents and trails of mud. A man near the gate sat on a log slicing his hands back and forth over each other. An older woman walked by tossing her hands in the air. Others sat in little groups, sewing, whittling, fidgeting in ways McCallum couldn’t discern through the distance.

“Is it worth it?” he asked.

“Hell yes,” John said. He put his jeans in the bag with the shirt and picked up another pair for washing. “When you’re with a company, everything you do you do for them. There’s no other choice. I’m not talking the work. That’s the obvious part. I’m talking about every call you make, note you send, every meal, every sip of water is to their benefit. Even protests, weak and pitiful as they are, generate activity, which generates revenue. Let’s say you post a complaint. A mess of people glom on. That makes the evening news happy, whipping up interest, which is great for the advertisers. Let’s say the complaint really touches people, so much that they want to protest. That brings security. Maybe even overtime. The ops are thrilled. Maybe one guy buys a motorcycle with his extra dollars. From the same company that started the whole problem in the first place.” John shook his head, running wads of soaked denim across the corrugated steel. “It’s all theirs. All you can do is try and get out.”

“But why go ollie? Why not just enjoy your retirement?”

John stopped washing and looked up at McCallum. The look poked him, McCallum thought.

“The velocity of money,” John said. “In the economy, I’d still be spending, even if it was all for my own pleasure, not to mention survival. Every dollar you spend is worth several to your masters. You know why they don’t work people day and night anymore? You know why they offer vacations and personal days? Holidays? They need to keep the money churning. They need consumers as much as they need workers. They need people like you to go to the store and buy paints. They want people to buy your paintings. Circulate that dollar. They need the guy at the paint store to watch a movie and they need that movie actor to buy a boat. There’s no more growth for the companies. That ended with the last Buy Up. They can try to take from each other, but they end up giving just as much to do that. The whole natural world strives for equilibrium, including the economic one. I think they’ve reached it.”

“There’s always something new,” McCallum said. “That’s growth, isn’t it?”

“New doesn’t mean revenue,” John said. “I’m an engineer. Trust me on that one. Innovation used to give companies a shot at profit. Not any more. You invent something, the other two swipe it. You sell it to your own employees, but that probably means they stop buying something else. Some Grade 5 smiles, as people buy his whatsit. Another frowns, as people stop buying hers. There’s no new money. Only the velocity of the money we’ve got.”

McCallum said, “So you don’t spend.”

John nodded. “Get off line. Freedom. The only way to fight.”

John Raston wasn’t in hiding, McCallum realized. He wasn’t holed up in this ancient fort because he killed a girl. He chose this. Planned this. John Raston was making a stand. Rebelling.

McCallum had a picture in his head that didn’t work, didn’t resolve. Maybe the Vasquez girl decided not to run off with him? Maybe she knew too much about this enclave and its black market? Had Vasquez and Raston ever had contact before the stabbing? McCallum had never established any connection and connections were hard to hide.

Were this on canvas, he’d squeeze out some Gesso, white it all out and start over.

“What made you think I’m retired?” John asked.

McCallum lowered his head to meet the man’s eyes.

* * *

“That’s a Ford Thunderbird,” Campbell said. “A BCCA brand. I like our chances.”

Emory did not. Running from the chain gang was one thing, assaulting an innocent person was quite another. Stealing cars, kidnapping people, forcing them into servitude— it never worked. Not in real life. People were too connected.

“Connected,” Emory said. He couldn’t hijack a person and a car. He could ask for a voice call. “This way,” he told Campbell.

They walked to the edge of the parking ramp. People strolled past. Couples. Small groups. A few singles. Harsh daylight made him uncomfortable. Their clothes reeked of chain gang and sewer and desperation. Any semi-intelligent person would press and hold their cuff seeing Emory and Campbell from twenty-feet out.

So they couldn’t be seen. Emory pointed to either side of the human-sized entrance to the parking ramp and they waited. Standing, unable to lean relaxed against the concrete wall, Emory felt the wait in his insides. Bugs, flesh-eating termites gnawing and scratching his guts. He had to reach Lillian. They were coming for her. A select group of deviants from the Alternative Work Detail, so thrilled to be out in the fresh air, seeing a woman for the first time in months, years, a life time. The Chief’s men. Emory knew them intimately. Their musky smells, their calloused hands. The way they slapped, crushed and coupled. And they were headed for Lillian. And Elizabeth. His sad, unsuspecting family. His girls, who didn’t even know the horrors that lived under the city. Innocent. Sweet. Doomed. The bugs ate into his lungs and he had to breathe faster to get more air to make up for the leaks in the holes they chewed.

“Hey,” Campbell said, glancing over his shoulder.

Emory clenched and unclenched his fists.

A woman strolled into the ramp. Mid-forties, fit, a professional skirt and jacket, all prim and blue. Her heels tapped the pavement quickly.

“Excuse me,” Emory said. She turned, crossing her feet, almost falling over. Her mouth, shielded in glossy pink lipstick, formed a tight circle. She recovered and kept going, watching to see if Emory followed.

“We just need you to make a call.” Campbell stepped in front of her.

“Oh, sure,” she said from a trembling mouth, as if this were a normal request. As if everyone in the world didn’t have a phone strapped to their wrist all the time making this akin to asking for some air or a share of sunlight. She moved to slap her fingers across the phone and leave them until the emergency operator inquired as to her status.

Emory grabbed her wrist and yanked her arm around behind her back.

“AAAAAA— mmmm” Campbell pressed a hand against her mouth.

“We are sorry,” Emory whispered. Like the chief’s boys whispered to him, though never apologizing. He held her like the chief’s boys held him. “We really only need you to make a call.”

“I’m going to bring the bracelet up,” Campbell said, “and take my hand from your mouth, OK? If you scream, this event will become something different. Blink twice for OK.”

The woman shivered. Emory could feel it through her body.

Campbell took his hand from the woman’s mouth. She made a warbling sound. It reminded Emory of his little girl, when she was just about done crying.

“Call Lillian Leveski,” Emory said.

“C-C-Call Lillian Leveski,” the woman barely got out.

Emory placed his ear on the woman’s. She made one, tiny whine. She smelled clean, like fresh vegetables, in a garden, with hints of tropical flowers.

“No Lillian Leveski local, India Group.”

Emory said, softly. “Ambyr Consolidated, 93 Calumet, Buffalo Catchment.”

The woman repeated the information. Campbell watched the area, a hawk on a pole. Emory heard the ring in the woman’s ear.

“This is Lillian?” came the answer. Emory gulped a ball of air.

“Ask her where she is?”

“Where are you?” the woman asked.

“Who is this?”

“I’m calling for Emory,” Emory said. The woman repeated it.

“Oh God, what’s wrong?”

“You’re in trouble,” Emory said. The woman said nothing.

Campbell said, “Someone’s coming.”

“Tell her she’s in trouble,” Emory hissed.

“You’re in trouble,” the woman said.

“What’s this about?” Lillian demanded. “Where’s Emory?”

“Tell her to get Lizzie and run.”

“A man,” Campbell tried to whisper, watching the sidewalk behind Emory and his captive.

“Run? This is crazy?”

“To the place in John’s picture. That last one he sent me,” Emory’s voice shook and bubbled. “Tell her to run to the place in the picture.”

The woman complied, fast, mumbled, Emory wasn’t even sure if Lillian understood.

“Time’s up,” Campbell said.

They let go of the professional woman in the now wrinkly blue skirt and jacket, and ran, full out, away from the entrance. She stood and screamed. They heard it all the way down the street.

Sylvia couldn’t move. She sat in the hotel room chair, upright, horizontal positions were out of the question, face down, on your back or sideways, it all hurt. It all forced an acidy fire out of her squished stomach and into everything else. She hated sleep. She hated food. She hated anything other than the baby and his or her imminent departure.

The baby must come out. The baby can’t come out.

She volleyed the phrases in her head, a thoughtless mantra that can come to replace sleep. She’d heard that people who didn’t sleep went insane. Always figuring she was more than three-quarters of the way there already, this current dream drought would finish the job. She’d go nuts, trying to sleep upright, because the baby got in the way.

Never in the way. She’d promised herself. She promised her bosses in a silent, they’ll-never-know kind of way. Movie and baby. The show must go on. The baby must come out and baby can’t come out.

The hollow knock of a hotel room door. Flesh rapped on glue and dust pressed and printed to resemble wood. No resonance. No firmness. No cheery ‘Company’s here!’

“Yes,” Sylvia said as she lifted herself out of the chair. It took all of her upper body strength. She waddled to the door, flicked up the handle and waddled back without looking to see who she’d let in.

“You’re looking well,” Samjahnee said.

“As are you,” Sylvia said. “Did you have your eyes done? A little lift and tuck under the chin?”

“Not until I get my bonus for this gig,” he said. “If I get a bonus.”

Sylvia lowered herself back into the chair, careful not to get the creature within active again. He was obviously filming some kind of martial arts film in her womb. The apple wasn’t going to fall far from the tree. If it ever fell.

The baby must come out. The baby can’t come out.

“Your concern warms my cockles,” Sylvia said.

“Can you do it?” Samjahnee asked.

“Have to,” she answered. “They want a Sylvia Cho movie. That means Sylvia Cho snagging the Milkman.”

“I can do this. We can edit you in later.”

“Inauthentic. Not what they signed up for. I don’t know who these people are. I do know what they want. They want what every financier in the movie business wants: the same thing only different. They want my last movie, changed enough to make even more money. They don’t want new, fresh, artistic, clever or anything other that what worked before. They want Tobacco Road about milk. They want me finding this nut bag and getting his face to pop in surprise. A fucking jack-in-the-box. That’s all anybody ever wants. The fucking jack-in-the-box. A nice, safe surprise. Set to music.”