Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (20 page)

She woke up in the middle of the hands-down best visual trip she’d ever had in her whole life, because the whole room was wreathed in dancing flames.

She realized with a start that she was on the waterbed, and she called for Aida to see if she could see it too, but her voice was so small before the roar of the vision. Roshawn reached out and tried to grab one of the blue-gold snakes slithering across the headboard of their week-old bed. Her hand went right through it, but her hand jerked back and slapped her face and the pain had so much to tell her about how hot, how very real, the fire was, that she could only scream as it got closer.

The flames raced up the frilly canopy like spiders. Burning shreds of lace fell on her and sent her into fresh spasms of screaming, but now she leapt off the bed and bolted from the room, clawing the cobwebs off her face and trying to remember where the front door was.

The living room proved more than she could handle. The woman still sat on the barstool, still hog-tied, but she must have been splashed with gasoline, for all the fire pouring out of her. She sat upright like a martyr, with no face and the light pouring out from her hollowed skull and cracked ribcage. Roshawn could only conclude that Aida had been unable, as always, to decide what she wanted or needed, and so took it all.

Now, the novelty value of the fire had completely worn off, and Roshawn dove out the window and into the tasteful decorative landscaping.

The sad honk of the fire alarm brought sleepwalking adults and excited children out into the common area, but Roshawn was already gone, palming Aida’s spare key to the Fiero under the bumper and peeling out for the suburbs.

She got three blocks away before the shock of it hit her, before what happened and what it meant blinded her with tears. She pulled over and gathered herself, slotting the new developments into her life. Then she started the car.

She almost didn’t find it. The cul-de-sacs and twisting, junior-high poetry street names lulled her into a blind, slow-motion panic. The identical buff-stucco ranch tract houses rolled by on both sides like teeth in a jaw, only the colors and makes of the SUV’s and European sedans in the driveways to tell them apart. Roshawn was sure she was going in circles, mistrusting the hazy memory of the address, and then she saw it. The silver Volvo out front, but it might have been any Volvo, but for the fancy white leather purse on the roof.

Roshawn sat and looked at the purse, and suddenly had no idea what to do. Maybe if she had a line, if someone smarter was there to tell her what to do. If Aida was there—

The front door opened and they came out in their Sunday best. Twin towheaded boys chased each other around the Volvo until their older sister collared them, and Dad, sandy-haired and tanned like a movie star, with an expensive sweater on even though it was summer, told them to quit it or no brunch after church. Roshawn started to get out. Maybe she should tell them what happened, and go, before the cops came. Maybe she should just go—

And then she came out. She wore a smart, fashionably pious blue dress that Roshawn had seen her buy at Nordstrom’s. The children fell silent and got in the car as their mother smiled at the beauty of the morning, took her purse off the roof, and then fixed her gaze on Roshawn.

Roshawn’s hand went numb on the latch, slipped away. The woman’s eyes skewered her, though she couldn’t meet them for more than an instant. When only the two of them could see each other, the woman’s face went away, and she could see the real Aida. The mark had given Aida as good as she’d gotten, and what was growing back in its place was anything but flesh. It only took that long for those eyes to tell her exactly what she was, and send her on her way.

Roshawn followed the smoke back. The alley behind the condo was choked with fire trucks and ambulances, but they were already packing up. Nobody noticed her as she stumbled over the hoses and cables and the odd knot of die-hard fire-watchers to stand in the carport across from her condo unit.

The fire gutted their place, and ate most of the upstairs neighbor’s before they put it out. The firemen tramped around the upper floor, chopping down smoldering furniture, but there was nothing left to save. Not that any of it had belonged to her, anyway.

Something rustled in the shadowy carport behind her. The plastic tarp over a car crumpled and something breathed charcoal and cremated bacon on her neck.

“All she had to do, was ask,” said the woman.

Roshawn jumped and bit her lip. Policemen across the alley stood with the manager, who pointed at the burned-out ruin and mouthed,
junkies
.

“Your stupid friend hurt me so, and still almost fucked it up… All she had to do was ask.”

The police said there were no bodies, or maybe they said
nobodies
.

“What are you…?” Roshawn whispered. She turned and looked, and the more she looked, the more she saw Aida, and not an eyeless apparition of glowing bone embers and melted spandex dripping on the concrete. She looked no worse, now, than plastic surgery disasters Roshawn had seen in tabloids, and she kept changing. She didn’t have to work at it like Aida had, because her kind just got whatever they wanted.
The Elect—

“I’m myself, ain’t I?” said the mark. “And I guess you belong to me, now.”

Roshawn bit back a scream that would have brought all the police for miles. Empty sockets worked and blew bubbles that clouded and became gold-flecked, turning, burning eyes. “Come on, Ro,” she said. “Let’s go shopping.”

Life was not so unkind to Howell as it seemed to the world at large—it offered few surprises, and predictable rewards. Where there were explicit directions, Howell found he could go anywhere, do anything, but whenever and wherever he got lost, he found Atwater.

The first time it happened, he believed, at first, that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been. On his way to a business appointment in Burbank: he’d given himself plenty of time to get there, leaving the office in Mid-Wilshire an hour ahead of the departure time on the Triple A itinerary he’d printed out the night before. After living in LA for over a year, he still did this for any place he had never driven, and kept a binder and three map books.

Traffic shut him down within sight of his office. Parked on the 101, swimming in sweat, and he suddenly, absolutely, needed to pee. He couldn’t just give up and get off; it had to get better soon, but it got worse, so clusterfucked by Hollywood Boulevard that he couldn’t even get through the glacial drift of traffic to the exit. Watching as the time of his appointment came and went, and he wasn’t even in the Valley, yet he was committed. The southbound traffic was almost as bad. Howell left a message to reschedule with the client in Burbank. The secretary treated him like some idiot who’d tried to ride a horse into town.

Wondering which of the empty coffee cups at his feet he’d like to try going in, wondering why the sensible Volvo people had never tackled this crying need of the long-haul motorist, Howell crawled through the pass and into the Valley.

With a dramatic flare that must be truly impressive from a swiftly moving car, the 101 burst out into Griffith Park, and a blazing Catherine Wheel avalanche of sulfurous afternoon sunlight speared his brain. Cascades of shaggy green hills and shadowed black canyons of wilderness under glass lurched up to the shoulder and Howell was looking somewhere else when horns sounded behind him, and the road ahead was a vacant plain.

Howell whooped with joy and stomped on the gas. The Triple A directions had wilted into pasty slime from the heat and smog and sweat from his hands, pages stuck together. The damned thing was supposed to be foolproof, distances totaled out to the hundredth of a mile, but 42.62 crept by on his trip odometer, and no Burbank Avenue. No offramp at all, and then he saw from the baffling menu of interstate and city highway junctions in the southbound lanes, that he was on the wrong freeway, and headed east to Pasadena.

No one let him out of the left lane until he’d passed under the Golden State Freeway. With a defiant berserker roar, he kamikazed the next off-ramp and slammed on the brakes, power-sliding up a hairpin chute between blank brick walls. He skidded to a stop just short of the sign.

ATWATER, it said. No population or elevation, no explanation, no Kiwanis or Lion’s Club chapters. Just ATWATER.

He idled at the intersection for a good long time. No other cars came. There were no other cars. Anywhere.

In the middle of LA. No cars. No pedestrians, either. Howell waited for something, for a director to scream, “Cut!” and a crew to spill out from behind these painted murals of a ghost town to resurrect the scene he’d ruined.

On the three corners opposite the off-ramp, a 7-11, an AM/PM, and another 7-11, all abandoned, windows shattered, roofs askew and foundations cracked. All angles subtly off, and apartment buildings down the street had collapsed, crushing their ground floors or spilling their contents out into the street. All the entrances were swathed in CAUTION tape, and Condemned notices were pasted on all remaining doors. “By order of FEMA—”

The last real earthquake in Los Angeles was in 1993. Howell looked into this before taking the job and moving here. A decade later, and they never tried to rebuild? Unless it was a movie set… or something else happened here—

Imagination did nothing good for Howell. He let it go and set the Volvo rolling down the main drag.

Atwater wasn’t large; he could see the same brick wall cutting across the street only a few blocks from the offramp. The whole area was walled off from the rest of the city, a pitcher plant with only one mouth, into which he’d stumbled. The sounds of the city outside were almost completely muzzled. He heard only the hushed hum of distant traffic and something like electronic wind chimes, or a
Don’t Walk
alarm for blind pedestrians, but here, nothing moved. Fine then, he’d turn around.

A man threw himself across the hood of his car. Threw himself, those were the right words, because Howell certainly didn’t hit him—

“Please,” the man bleated, beating on the windshield, “please help—”

The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn’t locked it. He wore a navy blue suit and tie, shabby and shiny, the kind of thing an exceptionally cheap prison might parole its least promising inmates in, but he didn’t look like a bum, and Howell supposed he wanted to help, so he let the man fumble it open and fall into the passenger seat. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, “for someone to come…”

“Where the hell are we? Where’s everybody?”

“No onramp,” the man wheezed, hauling the door shut and turning to look at Howell. “We have to go back up the off-ramp, but nobody comes in here, ever… For God’s sake, let’s go!”

Something buzzed past Howell’s ear. He whipped his head around so fast something tore in the back of his neck, but he let out a sharp yelp and shouted, “Did you see it? You let a—let it in—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

Howell looked at the man’s face, at gaping pores all over his face and neck, tessellated hexagons like tiny, waxy mouths. Black, buzzing bullets oozed out of them. His head was a honeycomb.