The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (20 page)

Samjahnee crossed his arms. “You’re lovely.”

“I’m never buying my kid a jack-in-the-box. Maybe he won’t imprint on it and want the same thing his whole damn life.”

“Absolutely lovely.” He held his hand out.

Sylvie took it and yelped. The pain. If you set electricity on fire and drank it. That was the pain.

She said, without wanting to, “Pain.”

“
Is the wind that blows us
,” Samjahnee sang.

“Yeah, see,” Sylvia said, standing. “Things are always easier with a sound track.”

The baby can’t come out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“He’s suspicious,” Snyder said. They walked on the outer path, near the river. The temperature felt 10 degrees cooler, just a few hundred yards down from the ramparts. “Just like me.”

“It’s understandable,” McCallum returned.

“We thank you for your understanding.” Snyder walked a step ahead of McCallum, partly due to the thinness of the path, partly because she led. She seemed to have a destination.

“I’ve come a long way.” Snyder continued down the path. A small, stone shed sat at the end, with a black iron gate blocking an arched doorway.

“How long?” McCallum fished in his pockets.

“Hard to say, the way I travel. A little by train, a little by car, a little on foot. I begged rides all the way up here.”

“You must really like old forts.” He found his brush case and dug his fingers down.

“No, I really hated the place I left.”

“I take it this wasn’t an official transfer.” McCallum found his gray, gooey gum erasure.

They reached the iron gate. Snyder took out a key and opened the shiny new lock hung on the antiquated bars.

“No.” She swung open the gate and entered. “I left my employer without notice.”

“That’s uncommon,” McCallum followed her, brushing by the gate. “What is this?”

“We pump our water from here. I check on it every day to make sure of no leaks. I am a very cautious woman.” Snyder ducked around McCallum. She grabbed the gate and whipped herself out, using her momentum to ram the bars closed. McCallum caught the gate as it clicked.

Snyder smiled. “Who are you Eddie McCallum?”

“The name’s not enough?”

“John thinks you’re Ambyr Systems Security.”

“What do you think?” McCallum rattled the gate, banging the cross bar in its slot.

“I think you’re here for me.”

“Like I tracked you from wherever you’re from?”

“Eh. Maybe not. I know you didn’t come here to paint.”

“I’m not a blank canvas you draw your fears on.”

“Some time down here will help you remember.” Snyder held the lock and brought out the key. McCallum jabbed his hand through, knocked the lock off and slid the bar back. He pushed the gate open.

Snyder bent down and picked up the lock. She pinched the gum eraser stuck over the keyhole. “Who is paranoid?”

McCallum took the gum back. Then he took Snyder’s hand and kissed the back of it. “I couldn’t hurt you even if that was my job. Which it’s not.”

Their hands dropped. He didn’t let go.

“So you’re not here for me?”

“Trick question. It’s not how I started out, though.” He smiled. She didn’t smile back.

McCallum gently tugged Snyder back up the path, along the outside of the fort and the narrow walk between the walls and the river. The wet air and bright sun and the feel of the supple hand ensconced in his own, made him smile all the way, over the murders, the fear, the fact that he’d been made and nearly locked up. He realized he did not fully agree with John Raston’s view of the world. The company didn’t trap everything in its closed economy, wrapped so tight you can’t find a seam. They had yet to fully monetized fun, laughter, love, trust.

Trust. His first drawing teacher told him not to fight his hand, but to trust it. Let it lead lines in space. His hand. In Snyder’s, as if that could possibly be her real name. As if he had any right to know. He had been no more honest with her.

“John’s right,” McCallum said. “I came here to arrest him for murder.”

* * *

The train stopped at the butt of the city, where the river and creek met. That would be the easiest place to hop on board and stow away. They could ride, hidden, through the city, the suburbs and up into the Niagara Catchment. That’s why Systems Security watched the station so closely. Cameras, sensors, even real live ops patrolling the rails. With two fugitives from a chain gang at large, they were probably paying attention. Emory knew something about the local trains. They were part of his system. What used to be his system. Back when he made sponges. He sat at his computer and watched the delivery of raw materials, the creation of cakes and their return to Ambyr’s transportation web, always looking for ways to make things just a little bit better. He knew the train slowed before making the wide turn at the river and following it north. Slow meant 15 miles an hour.

Emory and Campbell sat inside a bush with too few leaves to cover them. The temperature dropped by the water. They hid in a restricted area. The voices of passing vehicles carried, burying any useful sounds, like those an approaching posse of ops might make.

“This is the only way,” Emory said.

“Yep.” Campbell stared at the tracks as if watching his house burn.

“The trains are smooth,” Emory explained. “Very aerodynamic. There’s only a couple of gaps, not much bigger than us.”

“Yep.”

“You’ve got to run and jump. If you miss…”

“Pizza cutters. Those wheels are like pizza cutters with 200 tons on top.”

“Pretty much.”

They saw the lights of the engine through the branches. Red, white and green, brilliant even on a brilliant day.

Emory put his hand on Campbell’s shoulder. “You don’t need to do this.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t need to go north. In fact, it would be better if we split up. You go back to the yards, near the mills. I bet ollies hop rails there all the time.”

Campbell watched the train approach. “We don’t know when there will be another. This is the one.”

Emory squeezed his shoulder. He looked at the side of the man’s head, half-shaven, tiny plots of earth still stuck randomly around his face, over his cheeks and forehead, the sides of his nose. He bent like a reed, his head having taken on too much extra weight. All the running and hiding and twitching at every sound. Emory had nothing left in his body; only Lilly and Lizzie pulled him along. He didn’t know what propelled Campbell.

The engine passed, with a rush of air and the eerie whine of steel on steel. A long, dull silver snake, with small breaks in the skin, at the links between cars. Emory couldn’t see the end. He wasn’t going to wait and try.

“Go,” he said.

He ran, eyes locked on the gap between the third and fourth boxcars. He couldn’t run as fast as the train. He could only run to meet that space. The soft ground grabbed at his feet, slowing him. Uneven, rocky, with a slight incline leading up to the track bed. There were no cameras here, no engineers watching out for hobos, because this was impossible. The train grew huge, towering, slippery, loud and slow. It slowed. Or, for Emory, time itself slowed.

He couldn’t look behind him. He couldn’t take his eyes from the gap, or change his momentum. This would be milliseconds. His legs cocked and released, hands clawing, just as the hand bars passed.

He screamed through the air. He hadn’t planned to. He’d never been the screaming type. The silver and black. The noise. He swore he could feel the gravity of the huge vehicle lifting and tugging. He smashed into the edge of the boxcar, his feet only inches off the gravel and rails. Pain exploded in his wrist. More followed from his chin and knees. Nothing overtook the fire in his right wrist. He clung to the handrail, unfurling his legs into the gap, onto the dirty steel platform on the front of car four.

He glanced back as Campbell leapt for the next gap. He struck the side, arms extended. He pivoted, turning on an invisible pin that stabbed through his middle and into the ground. For a moment, Emory thought he’d be tossed free. He’d drop and roll to the side. Safe. He knew, later, when he replayed the memory in his head for the 50th, 100th, 150th time, that it should have happened that way. He shouldn’t have curved back under the car, landing on the tracks to be sliced across the hips.

Chapter Twenty-Six

McCallum chopped onions for the soup. They didn’t make him cry.

“Irreverent clown,” the woman next to him said. Fiftyish, hair like silver cotton candy, limbs thin enough to snap between your fingers. She spouted something every five or six minutes, but nodding constantly. She nodded at sounds— hers, Synder’s, McCallum’s, the birds.

Snyder said, “Make that hearty soup tonight.”

The woman started pulling groceries from the larder. “Asshole cheese.”

“Still probably better than limburger,” McCallum said.

The woman nodded.

John Raston walked in, making a track for the coffee machine. He took a mug and filled it and McCallum continued to French the onions, cutting the orbs into small, shallow canoes. He liked to see the onions in his soup. John sat down across from him, elbows on the stainless steel table.

“You taking me away before or after dinner?” he asked.

“Don’t know. I think I’m going to want to taste this.”

“Donna does a pretty good job.”

Donna
, he thought. They should’ve been properly introduced. “John, you kill Geri Vasquez?”

“I don’t know who that is,” John said, “but I’ve never killed anyone, so I’m confident in saying no.”

“Yeah,” McCallum said. “Of all the people I’ve ever asked about an insubordination, not one as ever said ‘Yep. You got me.’”

“Yet you keep on asking.”

“You know the girl I’m talking about. Back in the fall. The night before you came here, I’m betting. Young, pretty.”

“Geri was her name, huh?” John took his huge glasses from his face. His head shrank, got pin-shaped. He pinched his hand across his eyes, squeezing the vision out of them.

“Grade 15. Marketing. Designed her own clothes on the side.”

“She was pretty. Even in that stupid coat.”

McCallum put his knife down, and placed his palms on the tabletop. Donna dumped hard potatoes into a kettle of water. He didn’t have a good way to make her stop.

John’s hands dropped. He gazed out through the window to his right. “She caught my eye as she walked. I was sitting in my truck. She was the kind of girl you watched walk, even if you’re not into girls. She passed in front of my car in that jelly coat and this guy comes out of nowhere. I mean nowhere. I’d been sitting there for a good quarter hour and had never seen him and he appears on the sidewalk, grabs her by the arm and stabs her right in the back. I couldn’t believe it. It… I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He pounded away on her, holding her up, then letting her drop and giving her one or two more for the road. Then he was gone. I’m getting out of my truck now. The shock’s wearing off and he’s gone.”

McCallum let him stare for a while, hold his coffee mug, suck some of the warmth out and stare.

“God damn blood leech,” Donna said.

“You know the stabber?” McCallum asked.

“Never seen him before.”

“Could you describe him?”

“Thin, about your age. Short, brown hair. Nothing special. He was no pro, I could tell that. He’d never stabbed something before in his life. He couldn’t get the knife out. He couldn’t decide whether to hold onto the poor girl or let her go. The whole thing was sloppy. Except his clothes. All black. He planned that part, what he was going to wear. He wanted to hide in the shadows. He got that part right.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this?” McCallum asked. “Why didn’t you stick around and help?”

John closed his eyes slowly, moving them while they hid under their lids, opening them to match McCallum’s gaze.

“Can’t say.”

McCallum leaned in, forearms flat on the steel. “What were you doing there?”

“Meeting a friend?”

“At an India Group bar?”

“It would seem.”

“What’s your friends name?”

“Can’t recall.”

“That’s the kind of thing guilty people say. You remember what coat Geri Vasquez was wearing and you can’t remember the name of the friend you were meeting?”

John slid his glasses back into place. “I’ve got lots of friends.”

“No you don’t,” McCallum said. “I’ve run your cuff. You’ve got nobody. And you haven’t called cross company in years. You’ve been paring down your life since Roger died.”

“You leave Roger out of this.”

“Killing off your old life, getting ready to hide out here. Then a girl’s murdered and you run. You put your plan in action. Why, John? What were you doing there?”

“Just meeting a friend.”

“You’ve got no friends. After Roger there’s no one. Nothing for you.”

“I had acquaintances.”

“Roger’s friends? They fade away with him? He was the fun one, right. You were the engineer. The sensible one. Work friends? They stay at work, don’t they? No job, no husband— what were you doing in that parking lot? Besides watching a girl get knifed to death.”

John made fists and skated them around the smooth stainless steel. McCallum pushed his kitchen knife farther right. John looked into his coffee, steam rising up into his face. He stood straight, hands spread and loose.

“Flying fudge,” Donna said, tossing a chunk of butter into a skillet.

“No freaking way,” Snyder’s voice rang down the hall.

“Way,” came another voice. Feminine. Sharp.

McCallum didn’t take his eyes off John. John didn’t lift his face from the coffee.

“You think because you’re pregnant I won’t take you down?” Snyder’s anger brought out her accent. Her threat sounded like a little song. McCallum didn’t give in to it and look.

“That’s exactly what I think. I’ve been waiting nine months to come here because I knew my baby would get me through.”

John looked up and over. McCallum risked the glance. A black-haired woman stomped through the kitchen, white sweater, white pants, white boots, white glasses. Snyder followed her closely. Another figure trailed them both, holding two orbs high, one in each hand. The disturbance fixated John, so McCallum took another glance. Cameras, he determined. That guy in the back had two video cameras.

The woman in white approached like a train. She walked with an odd gait, McCallum thought. She didn’t appear pregnant… until you caught her from the side. Big. Just about ready to go.

Snyder ducked around a table and zipped up the side, reaching McCallum and John first. Donna dragged McCallum’s cutting board from in front of him.

“Go, John,” Sndyder said looking at McCallum. “You’ve been sweet. Go now and I’ll take care of this.”

McCallum saw the determination in her hard, narrow face. Her dark eyes glowing. Her long thin lips pressed hard together, neck stretched out. A dare. A front.

The man with the cameras stopped behind Snyder. Dark skinned, dark hair, muscular but in the roundest of shape. Arms up, with one lens aimed at John, the other at the woman in white.

“Are you John Raston?” she asked him.

“Who wants to know?”

“Sylvia Cho. I’m making a film about the Milkman.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Fuck ‘em all,” Donna shouted, tossing onions into the skillet.

Sizzle.

* * *

Emory walked well off to the side of the highway. He needed more cover, more undergrowth. The trees and bushes hadn’t filled in yet so he had to cut through the thick of it to feel safe. Safer, he corrected himself. He hadn’t felt safe in months. Walking this way took longer. The brush tore at his clothes. The ground offered all kinds of rocks and downed branches and the odd hole to trip him up. He walked mostly with his head bowed, to keep from breaking an ankle. That meant the occasional whip across the forehead. It would get worse as the darkness came. He couldn’t drift too far from the road, though. He’d never find the fort without the road.

The cold would come, too. Walking briskly helped keep him limber. With the sun dropping, he could already feel the temperature going with it. No more solar warming, not enough energy in the air and ground to maintain a decent degree in its absence. He’d need a fire. They’d have a fire. John stood in the fort right now, fire roaring, a side of beef turning over it, dripping fat onto fresh bread.

Car. He crouched and let it pass. From that distance, if they saw him at all, they’d think he was a garbage bag tossed from the road. Unless they were specifically looking for someone in yellow chain-gang coveralls, they’d have little trouble picking him out of the brush. They were too dirty now, he wondered if even an op or the chief’s crew would spot him. He had to risk it regardless. He couldn’t last in this chill without a bit more protection.

Jugs of water. Not too cold. John Raston would have those, too, by the fire, and he’d pour them into his mouth and over his face. He’d dry himself near the flames as his hugged his Lillie and Lizzie.

Car. He crouched down again. He’d have to move farther into the woods. He’d never progress stopping every two minutes. A Civet. His heart buzzed. A silver Mahindra Civet, with a woman’s head up in the front window and a little head behind, in a car seat. His car. His girls. Lillian was so smart. She’d figured it all out from his stuttering, pitiful message, through a woman he’d almost frightened to death. Before Campbell died.

They would make it. They were only minutes from the fort now, traveling by car. They would be fine. John was there and he was so smart. He knew everything. Emory’s heart danced around. A fountain of energy — a reserve he couldn’t believe he had — opened and shot through him. He inched closer to the road. He needed more open ground. If he hurried he’d be only 20 minutes behind them. He could be kissing his girls in 20 minutes.

Car. He dropped. A pick-up truck, four-door utility style. White. Dirty and banged up on every surface. Two male heads bobbing inside, two more in back.

“No,” Emory said into his hands.

The sticker on the door said Ambyr Works. Four men from the chain-gang followed his girls. He knew those men. From 100 meters, looking at only silhouettes, he knew the special detail the chief had sent out to retrieve him. He knew them intimately.