Heavy Weather Page 4

  He'd struck home. "Oh, that's really good, coming from you, Alejandro. Yeah, I look like a derelict, don't I? I look like a displaced person! You know what you look like, handsome? You look like you washed up five days after a hurricane surge. You look like a goddamn Cadaver." Her. voice rnse.i'I just dragged you back from the brink of the grave! I'm dressed up for committing a felony, you moron!"

  "You used to dress for the couture circuit, Janey."

  "Once," she said. "I did a few designs, one season. Boy, you never forget."

  "Your hair's been red ever since I can remember."

  "Yeah? Well, maybe I needed red hair once. Back when I was into identity crisis.

  Juanita picked at her hair for a bit, then frowned. "Let's get something straight right now. I know you can go back over the border if you want to. I know all about your scene, and I know all I wanna know about your creep-ass little dope-smuggler friends. I can't stop you. I don't even much want to stop you." She snorted. "It's just that before you check back into the hospital-from-hell and elaborately croak yourself, I want to show you something. Okay? I want you to see exactly what's happened to me since the last time we met.~~

  Alex considered this proposal at length. Then he spoke up. "Oh yeah?"

  "Yeah! This car is going to take us into camp, and I'm going to show you the people that I live with. They're probably going to really hate your guts. They didn't much like me, either-not at first." Jane shrugged. "But they're alive inside, Alex. They have something to do that's really worth doing. They're good people, they really are. They're the only people I've ever met that I really respect."

  Alex mulled over this bizarre news. "They're not religious, are they?"

  She sighed. "No, they're not religious."

  "This is some kind of cult thing, though, isn't it? I can tell from the way you're talking. You're way too happy about this."

  "No, I'm not in a goddamned cult! Well, okay then- yes, I am. The Troupe's a cult. Kind of. But I'm not brainwashed. That's not the story."

  Alex parsed this statement and filed it away. "So what's the story, then?"

  "I'm in love." Juanita dug into her bag of granola. "So there's a big difference. Supposedly."

  "You're in love, Janey? Really?"

  "Yeah. I really am."

  "You?"

  "Yes, goddamn it, of course me!"

  "Okay, okay, sorry." Alex spread his hands. "It's coming clear to me now. I'm starting to get it. New boyfriend doesn't like red hair?"

  "I just stopped doing red hair. A year ago. It didn't fit anymore."

  "So what does boyfriend like? Besides you, presumably."

  "Boyfriend likes really big tornadoes."

  Alex sank into his seat.

  "His people are called the Storm Troupe. We hack h~eavy weather. And that's where I'm taking you now."

  Alex gazed out to his left. Dawn was smearing the horizon. The eastern stars were bleaching out, and lumps of dark poisonous gray green-cedar and juniper brush- were emerging from roadside darkness. Alex looked back at his sister. "You're serious about this?"

  "Yep! Been hacking storms quite some time now." She offered him her paper bag. "Have some granola."

  Alex took the bag, dipped into it, and ate. He was hungry, and he had no prejudice against government-issue chow. It had the complete recommended dietary allowances and the stuff was so bland that it had never irritated any of his various allergies. "So that's really what you're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?"

  "Oh, not for a living," she said. She reached down and clicked off the map light, then stretched, briskly tapping her fingernails against the fabric roof. She wore a short-sleeved shirt of undyed cotton, and Alex noted with vague alarm that her freckled arms were lithe with muscle. "That's for TV crews, or labcoat types. With us, it doesn't pay. That's the cool thing about it. If you're in the Troupe, you just do storms."

  "Damn, Janey!"

  "I like doing storms. I like it a whole lot. I feel like that's what I'm for!" Juanita laughed, long and high-pitched and twitchy. Alex had never heard her laugh like that before. It sounded like the kind of laugh you had to learn from someone else.

  "Does Papa know about this?"

  "Papa knows. Papa can sue me. You can sue me too, little brother. If you boys don't like how I'm living, then you can both kiss my ass!"

  He grinned. "Damn, Janey."

  "I took a big risk to do this for you," she told him. "So I just want you to know"-she placed her hand against the side of his head and looked into his eyes-"I'm not doing this for you because I think you're cute. You're not cute,

  Alex. And if you screw things up between me and my Troupe, then I'm finished with you, once and for all."

  "I never asked you to do any of this!"

  "I know you didn't ask me, but nevertheless, if you mess with me and Jerry, then I'm gonna break both your legs and leave you at the side of the road!"

  Alex found it hard to take this wild threat seriously, though she was clearly very sincere. It was the old story. As far as Alex figured it, all the trouble he'd had with his sister in the past was entirely her own doing. She'd always been the one barging into his room to bend his arms, break his toys, and bark out orders. Sooner or later all their encounters ended with him prying her fingers from his throat.

  He, on the other hand, almost never tried to interfere in the near hysteria that Juanita called her daily life. Just watching his sister go at life, repeatedly cracking brick walls with her head, made him feel tired.. He'd always allowed her to caterwaul her way to hell in any wayshe pleased.

  Now she seemed to think that she was going to run his life, since Mama was long dead, and Papa on the ropes. She'd soon be disabused of that notion.

  "Take it easy," he advised her. "Your love affair, or whatever it is that you've got happening now, is strictly your own lookout. I got nothing against this Jerry character." He chuckled. "Hell, I pity him.~~

  "Thanks a lot. His name's Jerry Mulcahey. Doctor . . . Gerald . . . Mulcahey."

  He'd never seen a look like the look on Juanita's face as she recited that name. It was like a cross between a schoolgirl's crush and the ultravampish look of a bad actress on a Mexican soap opera. Whatever it was that had bitten her, it had bitten her really bad. "That's fine, Janey," he said cautiously. "I don't have any grudge against him, or any of your hick weirdo friends. Just as long as they don't try to step on my neck."

  "Well, they will step on you, Alex, and I'm asking you to put up with it. Not as a brotherly favor to me or anything-I wouldn't ask for that-but just because it's interesting. Really interesting, okay? And if you can manage to stay upright for a while, you'll learn something."

  Alex grunted. He gazed out the window again. Dawn was becoming impressive. The Texas High Plains were bleak country by nature, 'but nature had packed up and left sometime back. The stuff growing by the side of the road looked very happy about this. They were passing kilometer after kilometer of crotch-high, tough-stemmed, olive-drab weeds with nasty little flower clusters of vivid chemical yellow. Not the kind of hue one wanted in a flower somehow; not inviting ot pretty. A color ort might expect from toxic waste or mustard gas.

  Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencing of a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun with mesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oil pump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texas crude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible tonnage of drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of the earth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for the geological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swatted greenhouse-effect mosquito.

  Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their tapered tin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dust empty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone. . . . They'd sucked the landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth in place, like the torn-off mandibles
of a tick.

  They'd mined the place of everything in it that could be sold on the market; and then they'd given up. But after that, the greenhouse rains had come. You could tell that the plant life here wasn't at all used to the kindness of rain. The plants weren't a bit better than humanity, really-just another ugly, nasty, acquisitive species, born to suffer, and expecting little. . . . But the rain had come anyway. Now the Texas High Plains were glutted with rain, and with rich, warm, carbonated air, all under a blazing greenhouse sun. It was Oz, for a cactus. Arcadia for mesquite. Every kind of evil weed that stank, stabbed, or scratched was strutting its stuff like nouveau riche Texas hicks with an oil strike.

  Juanita touched her music box.

  "Can you knock it off with that Thai stuff?"

  "What do you want me to play?"

  "Something a little less incongruous. Some kind of-I dunno-crazed lonesome fiddle music. Cedar flutes and bone whistles. Listening to that tropical stuff out here in the savage boonies makes me feel like I'm losing my mmd."

  "Alex, you don't know anything about surviving out here. You need enough imagination to at least think you're somewhere else, or the plains can really get to you." She laughed. "You'll get the Long Stare, brother. Just ride off into that landscape and kill-and-eat jackrabbits till you die. Hey, you want to really go run?"

  "Huh?"

  Juanita raised her voice. "Charlie?"

  "Yes, Juanita?" the car said.

  Alex was surprised. "Hey Janey, how come this car calls you Juanita?"

  "Never mind. Long story." She gripped his shoulder. "You buckled in tight? You feel up to this, right? Not carsick or anything?"

  Alex patted the smart cushions beneath him. "Not in a reactive seat like this one. I'd have better luck getting carsick on a living-room couch."

  "Yeah, well, you're about to learn why they installed that kind of seat in here." Juanita reached over, took the paper bag of granola from his lap, saw it was empty, then folded it neatly and stuck it in the waistband of her denim shorts. "Charlie, do a local map."

  The car extruded a flexible tongue of white screen from the dash. A high-definition map bloomed across the screen, topography at the meter scale. The map flashed briefly into a comparative series of ultradetailed satellite renditions. Juanita picked up the loose end of the map gently, examined the flickering imagery, then tapped the screen with her finger. "Charlie, see this little hill?"

  "Two thousand three hundred twelve meters north," the car replied, outlining the crest of the hill in orange.

  "Charlie, take us there, fast."

  The car slowed and pulled over off the road shoulder, its prow toward the hill.

  "Hold tight," Juanita said. Then the car leaped into the air.

  It got up speed in the first dozen meters, bounding, and then began to clear the tops of mesquite trees. The car moved in a wild series of twists and hissing pounces; it was like being blown through the air by jets. Alex felt the seat's support cells repeatedly catching him, rippling like the flesh of a running animal.

  "Look at those wheels now!" Juanita shouted gleefully, pointing. "See, they're not even rolling. Hell, they're not even wheels. The spokes are smart pistons. Feels like a hovercraft, right?"

  Alex nodded dumbly.

  "We're hovering on computation. The big power drain in this car isn't the engine. It's the sensors and the circuits that keep us from hitting stuff while we jump!" Juanita crowed with laughter. "Isn't this wild? God bless the military!"

  They cleared the last of the thick brush, and then the car slid unerringly up the cracked slope of the hill, its pistons barely raising dust. Alex could tell from the eerie smoothness of the ride that the car never skipped, and never skidded. The intelligent pads at the base of each spoke contacted the earth with a dainty and tentative touch. Then the pistons set themselves firmly and punched up against the diamond hub, lifting the car in repeated, near-silent, precise staccato, faster than any human eye or ear could follow. It was like riding the back of a liquefied cheetah.

  At the hill's crest, the car stopped gently, as if settling into tar. "Time for a stretch," Juanita announced, her hazel eyes glowing with delight. She put down the fabric top, and a morning breeze swept the now silent car. "Let's get out."

  "I got no shoes," Alex realized.

  Hell, I forgot. . . . Oh well." She jammed her sock-clad feet into her unlaced trail boots, opened the door, and stepped out alone. She shook herself cheerfully and stretched through some kind of calisthenic routine, then gazed across the landscape with one hand raised to her eyes, like a minor-league Sacagawea. To Alex, the view from the hilltop was dismally unimpressive; clumps of mesquite and cedar, sparse leathery grasses, and three distant, squalid little hills. The entire plain was ancient seafloor, flat as the bottom of a drained pond. The hills were tired lumps of limestone that, unlike the rest of the landscape, had not quite collapsed yet.

  "This car must have cost you plenty," he said.

  "No, it was cheap, considering! Government tries to keep 'em rare, though, because of the security threat." The vivid glare of dawn was spilling all across the landscape, the orange-yellow sun too bright to look at. "You can order a car like this to follow a map top speed, to any locale. And they're damn hard to spot, when they jump top speed cross-country, ignoring all the roads. With a big truck bomb aboard, you can structure-hit like nobody's business." She smiled cheerfully. "They did that a lot in the Malaysian resettlement wars-this is a Malaysian attack vehicle. War surplus. Of course, they're real popular with border smugglers now." Juanita turned to face the wind and ran both hands through her hair. "I think they're still technically illegal for civilians in the U.S. In some states, anyhow."

  "Texas?"

  "Heck no, anything's legal in Texas now. . . . Anyway, Texas Rangers love these cars. Cheap, fast, ignores roads-what's not to like? The only real problem is the batteries. They're superconductives."

  "Superconductives sure aren't cheap."

  "No, and they wear Out fast too. But they're getting better. . . . They'll be everywhere someday, cars like this. Just for fun. A car just for fun, isn't that a wild idea?" She strolled around the car, almost on tiptoe in her big but lightweight trail boots. "It's a mega-tasty design. Don't you love the look of it?" She patted the jointed rim of the wheel. "It's that truly elegant design that people always use when they make things to kill each other."

  She flipped open a small metal toolbox in back, behind the passenger compartment, and fished out a pair of sunglasses. The reactive lenses went dark the moment she slipped them on. "Charlie is my flying hell spider. . . . A real beauty, isn't he . . . ? I love him, really. . . . Except for the goddamned hopeless military interface!" Juanita scowled beneath her shades. "I don't know what morons the Pentagon got to hack interface, but they should have been choked in their bunkers!"

  "You own this car, Janey?"

  "Sort of," she said. "No. Not really. I wouldn't want it registered in my name."

  "Who does own it, then?"

  "It's a Troupe car." She shut and locked the toolbox, then opened the door and slid back into the driver's seat.

  Alex hesitated. "You know, I kind of like this car too. I could go for one of these."

  She smirked. "Right, I bet you could. . . . Charlie, let's go."

  The car picked its way gently down the slope.

  Alex examined a big tuft of torn-off yellow grass embedded in the right front wheel hub. "You'd think you'd get really airsick, considering the acrobatics, but it has a very smooth ride. Hell, I've been in wheelchairs that were worse than this."

  "Yeah? Well, they designed it for very smooth. So you can sight automatic weapons off the bumpers at full throttle. Charlie comes from commando stuff, death-by-darkness tiger teams and military structure hits and all that weird ugly crap. . . . But he sure has some killer apps in civilian life." Juanita ducked as the edge of a long mesquite branch whipped across the windshield, then she put up the roof again, with a jab of her thumb. "The T
roupe used to chase storms in old dune buggies. But we were punching the core once on an F-4, and the hail wrapped real hard, and hailstones just beat 'em to death, dented the hoods and roof all to hell. . . . But Charlie just laughs at hailstones."

  "You must be pretty big on hailstones."

  "Hailstones have been pretty big on me, Alex. In Oklahoma last spring I got caught in the open. They leave welts on you as big as your fist."

  "What's that mean, when you say 'punch the core'?"

  Juanita looked surprised. "Well, urn . . . it means you shoot the vortex when you're running the drones."

  "Oh," Alex said.

  CHAPTER 2

  The vertebrae of tall transmission towers stenciled the horizon.

  Juanita's people had set up their tent complex a kilometer from the highway, on a low limestone rise where they could keep a wary eye on any passing traffic. Morning sunlight lit a confusion of round puffy circus tents and the spiked cones of white tepees.

  Juanita had doze doff in the journey's last two hours, mopping up bits of twitchy, REM-riddled sleep like a starving woman dabbing gravy from a plate. Now Alex watched with interest as his sister became a different person. In the last few minutes, as they'd neared the camp, she'd become alert, tight-mouthed, warriorly, nervous.

  Juanita found a security cuff beneath the passenger seat, and she carefully strapped it on her left wrist. The cuff had a readout watch and a thick strap of tanned, hand-beaded, hand-stitched leather. Some of the beads were missing, and the leather was worn and stained, and from the look on Juanita's face as she strapped it on, Alex could see that she felt a lot better to have it back on again.

  Almost as an afterthought, she gave Alex a flimsy-looking plastic cuff, with a cheap watch sporting an entirely useless array of confusing little orange push buttons. "You'll wanna keep that on at all times so you can pass in and out bf camp," she told him.

  "Right. Great."

  Juanita's car rolled uphill through a last stretch of sparse grass and between a pair of electronic perimeter stakes.