Gold's Price Read online

  “She wants you to wrap your scarf like hers,” Uncle said, coming from the box by Li’s side. “She says we will come to a dusty area soon.” Uncle paused. “She is right to warn you. Sometimes there can be dust storms, from a large plain to our east. We have a blanket which should shield you from the worst, should we encounter a storm. But you would need to share it.”

  “She say all that?” Gold asked, though she suspected not.

  “No, she merely wanted me to warn you,” Uncle said.

  “Thank her, for me, please,” Gold said. Then, “Tell me about this plain.” She looked east, but it was hard to see anything beyond a range of hills, which looked to be sloping down. The buildings on the hillsides were all shattered, piles of masonry had cascaded down and lay in heaps. Long-overgrown debris choked all the streets in that direction.

  “It is a crater,” Uncle said. “Actually, three craters, overlapping.”

  Gold looked back at the hill. “Is that ridge the edge of the crater?”

  “Yes,” Uncle said.

  “Did somebody nuke this place?” Gold asked. She didn’t relish being this close to a nuclear crater, but supposed she’d been living in this place for several months. Plus, she didn’t think she needed to worry about a little extra radiation. She would heal. These others, though. She looked at Li. “Is it safe?”

  “These were not fission or fusion bombs,” Uncle said. “I have memories of this event. They were kinetic.”

  “Rocks?” Gold asked.

  “No, but you have the idea,” he said. “Large rods of nickel iron, milled from an asteroid. They fitted them with fins and dropped them from orbit. These craters are all about five miles wide and form a line, more or less, to the east and north. At one point the Earth was ringed with such weapons, for deterrence.”

  “As a deterrent for what?” Gold asked.

  “Actually, it was a threat, more than a deterrent,” Uncle said. “Deterrence was what the spacer propaganda called it. It was a threat. A loaded gun, I think the term is.”

  “What did they want, the spacers?” The ridge was lowering; erosion had done its work here, opening the city to the flat plain of the crater beyond. Dry out there, Gold thought. Dusty, and the breeze was picking up. It was growing cooler, with the breeze coming off the crater’s plain.

  “Originally, they had been colonies. But then, they grew self-sufficient, as colonies do,” Uncle said. “They had wanted supplies, but demand for that waned as they spread out. The Moon, then Mars.”

  “There are people on Mars?” Gold asked, curious.

  “Maybe. I am not sure. Whether they’re there. Or if they are people, anymore,” Uncle said. “Something happened to them.”

  Chapter Eleven

  They stayed together. After that first night, there was no more talk of splitting up. Silver catnapped, watching him sleep across the fire. The dog was next to him, and she caught the dog watching her once or twice. He looked like a sweet dog.

  She’d owned pets many times. Once, she’d even kept a lion as a pet, raised by a husband’s retainers for her. He was docile as a lamb with her, but later killed and tried to eat the man who cared for it. Her husband ordered it killed, poor thing. Pets were animals, and sometimes animals did unpredictable, animal things. People were also animals, so watch out, she told herself.

  Carter didn’t frighten her. She was sure she could defend herself against him, should he be such a fool as to try and harm her. But he was, she reminded herself, an unknown, and unpredictable. She turned their discussion over in her mind, listening to the wind in the trees. A coyote howled, high in the hills, and the dog’s ears flickered.

  He assassinated the President; he said. Then they caught him and sent him to an institution for what sounded like two centuries. The year he killed the president, or claimed to, was twelve years after their fateful raid on the data facility. The current idiot in office was on his second term, and fighting mounting political opposition, she recalled. But Carter said it wasn’t him. He died in office; he said. This guy was new, but like him. One of the original criminals’ sycophants. Worse. And he wouldn’t leave.

  The USA collapsed; it sounded like, there towards the end. This made sense. Somebody fought a war, she was sure of that. She’d flown over enough ruined cities. Some big craters. But most of them didn’t show signs of being attacked, but rather long abandonment and centuries of weeds and dust and erosion. The coyote howled again, answered by another one farther away.

  The next morning, she made coffee. She’d found the coffee in a bunker at the base in Las Vegas. Freeze-dried and sealed in foil pouches. She’d taken them all, still had hundreds of them stashed in the Dutchman. He scowled at her, as she passed him a mug. He looked into it and sniffed it. “Coffee,” he said, wrapping his hands around the mug. “You bring this with you from…wherever?”

  She sipped her coffee. Hot, but tasted like real coffee. She’d found those packets three stories down, on a shelf in a galley storage room for centuries. And they were fine. Amazing. The desert climate helped, and being stored in a locked room in the dark. That was a long time for something to remain edible. “The last coffee on Earth,” she said.

  He looked up at her. “Good.” He steeled himself for his question. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Somebody sent here me,” she said, ready with this answer. “He flicked his hand, and I was here.” She demonstrated.

  He looked at her. “You know,” he said, “maybe there are old coffee plantations we could find. Down south, or in Jamaica. You could drop me off, come back in a year or two, have fresh coffee.”

  “This is a true story,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy.” And so she told him over breakfast, and then lunch, and well into the afternoon. She told him everything, more or less. In abbreviated form. From her earliest memories, her enslavement by the gods and their dream-driven compulsions, always goading her to go here and do, all the way up to meeting Gold, and their strange relationship. She related the story of Smoke, as best as she could remember it, how he came from a nearby world, congruent with ours somehow. Or with hers, this one perhaps not being hers. How they had challenged the AI called Alpha, and, betrayed by Smoke and the Center, lost. Lost among the worlds, she thought.

  He stopped her many times, but never with the incredulity that Jessica, the last one she had told this story to, had shown. Carter, or whatever his name was, had seen a lot, and was old himself. This gave her a question for him, reminding her of something he had said, that she had filed away overnight.

  “You’re old,” she said. “How did that happen? You said you had a pill. What did that mean?”

  He frowned, not at her, but down, at his hands. He was quiet for a while.

  “I was in a bar, in D.C.” He sighed. “I met a woman, well-dressed, blonde, pretty. Not in my league, but I talked with her.” He looked up at her. “When a pretty girl talks to a middle-aged married man in a bar, well, you talk with her. It’s rare.” He looked off in the distance, remembering. “She was a spook, I’m pretty sure of that now. But there, to me, she was a pretty woman I talked with in a bar. Last bar I was ever in.”

  “She gave you the pill?” Silver asked, guessing this was true.

  He nodded. “We got to talking. Remember how in bars, there were TVs on, you know how bars always had TVs in them? What was the point of that? Why always have them on? Drove me crazy, screens on all the time with their stupid scrolling ticker of bullshit.” He shook his head. “Anyway, there was a story about the Bloom, the Chinese wonder drug. On the TV. About how expensive it was. Super exclusive. She laughed at it.”

  “Laughed?” Silver said, puzzled.

  He pursed his lips. “Not expensive, or hard to make, she said. Simple, she said, once you knew how to make it. And cheap. It was like diamonds, or whatever. Like fashion made in sweatshops in China, remember? This Bloom drug was cheap, she said. She had some.” He looked up at Silver. He had been talking to the space in front of him,
middle distance, like in a trance. “She gave me one. Little white pill.”

  Huh. Silver swallowed. “You take it?”

  “Then and there,” he said. “Then and there.” He laughed softly. “Kind of a stupid thing to do.”

  “Take a drug in a bar given to you by a stranger?” Silver said. “Uh, yeah.” Few women there would have done that. Or too many would have.

  “I’m not that smart,” he said. “Never was.”

  “What did you do?” she said. “For a job, I mean?”

  “Software product management,” he said. “Is that even a job?”

  “Sure, I think so,” she said. “You worked, right?”

  “Did a lot of things that looked like work,” he said. “Not much my father would have called work.”

  “What did he do?” she asked. She was always interested in other people’s families.

  “Mechanic. Cars.” He looked up at her. “Planes too. He was in the Air Force. In Vietnam. We moved around a lot. Philippines. Germany, Turkey, California.”

  “Where in Vietnam?” she asked.

  “You say that like the kids from Vietnam I grew up with said it. Viet Nam.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

  She shrugged. “I’ve was there once, on holiday,” she added. I wasn’t killing Americans when I was there, honest. “Where in Vietnam was he?”

  “Ben-Wah, or something,” he said. “During Tet. At an airbase. He was a mechanic.”

  So. She remembered it, out of the depths of her foggy memories, this one surfaced like a trout in a stream. Feet pounding across the tarmac with an RPG, the pop pop pop of small-arms fire coming from everywhere. People screaming. Planes taking off even as they were charging across the runway. She shook her head to clear her nose of the stench of jet fuel and cordite.

  “You haven’t asked,” he said, studying her.

  “Asked what?” she said. “The elephant in the room?”

  He nodded. “Why I did it?”

  “Why did you do it?” she asked. “I mean, sometimes it’s the only way, or one of the least-bad ways. But why you?”

  “He deserved it, and I had an opportunity,” he said. “We’d lost so much, that last decade had been a shitshow. He came into office promising a lot, I mean, look at the act he had to follow. Things were pretty fucked up to start with.” He smiled at her. “I guess I sound like an unreformed criminal?”

  She shrugged. “Or a patriot. Sometimes people can be both.”

  He peered at her. “You don’t care?”

  She waggled her head, scoffing. “Not American, me. Do I sound American?”

  He smiled, one of the first she’d seen from him. “So, yeah, I had reasons, I guess. A long time ago.”

  “Sounds like he had it coming, though,” she said, to keep him talking.

  “He did, and I was getting transferred out of D.C., so I would lose my shot, so to speak.”

  “How did you do it?” she asked. Professional curiosity, she thought to herself. Presidents had been hard targets. The hardest, not that she’d tried.

  And so he told her.

  Chapter Twelve

  I shot the President with an old Enfield 303 rifle. World War II vintage. My dad’s, and after he died, I drove it and a bunch of other junk across the country from South Dakota to Boston. I didn’t want to keep it, but he’d been proud of it, so I brought it home. The rifle was ugly, its brown stock scarred and pitted. I remembered that it kicked like a mule. I’d shot it a few times as a kid, and I remembered. The first time, I was twelve, and I hit an old whiskey bottle with my first shot at about thirty feet. A beast of a rifle to me, at least. A beast that loomed large in my mind, there in the trunk, and later stowed in a locked chest in the garage. When things got bad, I would think about that rifle.

  And things had gotten worse, for ten, twelve, fifteen years. First, and I’m sure you remember it, the reality star President, and his brood of sycophants and scheming children. That was bad, a turning point. If things had gotten back to normal, after him, gotten back to how they were before him, it would have been OK, and none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have been in D.C. Wouldn’t have met the woman who dosed me. Could have grown old there, back there on the coast, in our little blue house by the sea.

  But that’s not what happened. I was there, in D.C., working for a company. A stupid job, doing image recognition software for federal departments. Such jobs paid well, and we needed the money. Two kids needed college. College. Wow. I used to lie awake at night stressing about that. My kids didn’t go to college. Not after what I did. Not after I became who I became.

  I was so angry. Angry with these people, these liars and cheaters and thieves, that took my country away from me. They did that, oh yes, they took it. I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies. The USA was a beacon of hope for the world. I was a Boy Scout. I was in ROTC, but didn’t sign up. Got into punk rock instead. This was, well, rebellion. I was a teenager. My dad, it disappointed him that I didn’t enlist, but he never said so to me. But I knew. And later, when these bastards followed in the idiot’s wake, well, I got angrier and angrier.

  I got into social media. And YouTube. Jesus, I would spend hours reading story after story about how bad these guys were. And when the crackdowns started, when they arrested and murdered journalists, you had to dig for those stories to find out what happened. A scary time. The USA had become like Nazi Germany. Like the frog in the pot of water, we never noticed it was getting bad or bad enough. Too late.

  You’re nodding, so you see what I mean. Or not, since this would have been after you came here? Whatever, it was bad. A scary time. People went on like normal. I went on like normal. I had a wife and two kids and a mortgage. We all did. Nothing else to do? Protest? March? Riot? Those people disappeared. I had kids.

  So, I was working in D.C. And our garage, the building’s parking garage, was a recent construction. One day I pulled in, and I was late, so the only spots left in the lot were on the roof. I parked and got my shit together. The weather was cold, so I was pulling on my gloves when I looked up and realized I was looking at a patch of lawn with a sliver of a blue helicopter on it. The White House lawn and Marine One. From this one angle, from this one or two spots in the garage, I was looking in a straight line, down into the White House South Lawn. Where they take off and land with Marine One. Or did, I guess. I remember staring at that helicopter for a few minutes. Just lost in thought. That sight bothered me all day. That night, I didn’t sleep, replaying it over and over in my mind. The question I kept coming back to was how? How? I had an ancient gun that I had last fired as a teenager, and nine shells for it. I might get another rife. Practice shooting. All possible. But those guns would be traceable. To me. My dad’s gun, the .303 made by the Enfield Armory in England in the 1940s, would be untraceable. And it was a powerful rifle. The Enfield should make that range with ease. Half-mile on the outside. Or less.

  Mind you, this was all an academic exercise. I wasn’t going to do it. I would finish my contract and never come back to this office building with its odd line of sight to the White House. But I daydreamed about it a lot. I saw that parking lot when criminals, men who had defrauded our country, walked free. Pardoned. Slapped on the wrist. Lauded. Men and women who were stealing us blind to our faces, getting rich off their positions of power and prestige. I watched these things. Everyone did.

  One day, I found myself looking at the carbide-tipped drill bits at Home Depot. Remember Home Depot? Big orange store. Sold anything. But their wood was shit. Their wood was always junk. But they sold decent tools. Like a special drill bit for cutting metal, a little reciprocating cutter with a diamond blade. Black duct tape to cover up the hole in the back door of the minivan. A six-inch tall, two-inch-wide strip. Wide enough, and tall enough.

  I needed to measure how workable it was, so I figured I would go somewhere and shoot it a couple of times. With nine bullets. I needed to remember how it worked. The gun, I mean. And I did. I took it up to
New Hampshire, one Saturday. I told my wife I was going to IKEA, planned out a whole elaborate ruse, rushed up to Keene, some woods I found on the map. Hiked about a mile into them, found a clearing, and set up a few bottles on a log. I shot seven of those bullets. One of them was a dud, but the other eight worked. I shot three wine bottles I had saved. Missed four times, hit three. I saved one bullet. Sometimes I wonder about that. If I hadn’t practiced that day, I might have tried to use the dud. Or if I had picked the dud as the one I saved, the last one, I wouldn’t be here with you now. Or perhaps I would. By this point, I already had the Bloom in me, didn’t I?

  Anyway, that’s how I did it. I drove to the office garage. I backed the minivan in, rolled under a furniture blanket, poked open the duct tape with the nose of the rifle, and waited. I had checked his schedule. He was going to the Southern White House. The one that they impounded from the other guy, the crazy one. Like Camp David, but for rednecks. I suppose it’s underwater now.

  I watched the lights flicker on the helicopter, and I saw the door unseal. Not open, but depressed a little. I watched the stairs sway a bit, and there he was. He turned around and waved, smiling. And I shot him. Corrected for the distance, elevated the barrel a little, the tiniest smidge, and I shot him. Got him right in the face.

  I blew the back half of his head right off. Can you believe it? With my last bullet. Spread his brains all over the side of the helicopter. Blood all over the place. Gnarly. What the fuck? What the fuck was I doing? I was in a dream, but it was no dream. All of it was real. Real as fuck.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Silver was thinking. It was evening, and Carter and the dog were walking the perimeter of the farm, looking for rabbits. He had a snare, a net of braided nylon threads he had made, weighted with hefty bolts. He had shown it to her with pride. "Rabbits," he had said, and smiled, then taken the dog and said he'd be back before dark.