"I was almost four," Adam said in his I-have-spoken-and-therefore-it-is-so voice that was too much like the Rev's for comfort. "I have clear memories of that time."
"You never told me," Zeb said. He was offended: Adam had not deemed him trustworthy. That hurt. They were supposed to be a team.
"You would have let it slip," said Adam. "Then who knows what they would've done?" He tossed his ball up, tapped it lightly over the net. "You could've ended up under the rock garden as well. Not to mention me."
"Wait," said Zeb. "They? You mean fucking Trudy was in on this too?"
"I already told you," said Adam. "There is no need to swear."
"Sorry, it just fucking slipped out," said Zeb. No way he was going to let Adam tell him how to talk. "Trudy the Good?"
"Must've been something in it for her," said Adam in his I-am-loftily-overlooking-your-provocation voice. "If only blackmail material. Or maybe she wanted Fenella out of the way, to clear her path. My guess is she was already pregnant with you. The Church of PetrOleum doesn't sanction divorce, what with the Holy Oil at the marriage ceremony. As we know."
So now it was Zeb's fault, the death of Fenella. For having the bad taste to get himself conceived. Shit. "How did they do it?" he said. "The two of them? Did they slip arsenic into her tea, or ..." Not a decapitation, he thought, ashamed of himself. They wouldn't have gone that far.
"I don't know. I was only four. I just saw the burial."
"So all that about her being whore-pill trash, deserting her baby and so forth, that was just ..."
"It's what the congregation wanted to believe," said Adam. "And they did believe it. Bad mothers are always a good story, for them."
"Maybe we should call the CorpSeCorps," said Zeb. "Tell them to bring shovels."
"I wouldn't risk it," said Adam. "There's quite a few Petrobaptists on the force, and there are a number of OilCorps heavies on the Church board. There's a lot of overlap because of the benefits to both parties. They're agreed on the need to crush dissent. So the OilCorps would cover up for the Rev over a pure and simple wife murder that didn't per se threaten its holdings, since they'd know there'd be much credibility lost through a scandal. They'd accuse the two of us of mental instability. Shut us away, use the heavy drugs. Or, as I said - dig a couple of new holes in the rock garden."
"But we're his kids!" said Zeb, sounding about two years old even to himself.
"You think that would stop him?" said Adam. "Blood is thinner than money. He'd hear a convenient voice from God, suggesting a son sacrifice for the greater good. Remember Isaac. He'd slit our throats and set fire to us, because this time God wouldn't send a sheep."
Which was about as dark as Zeb could remember Adam ever being. "So," he said. He was out of breath, although they'd barely been moving. "Why are you telling me about this now?"
"Because if what you've said about your successful cash-diverting activities is true, we have accumulated enough money," said Adam. "Also the Church might catch you doing the diverting. Time to go, while we still can. Before they send you off to die in the tar pits," he added. "It would be called an accident. Of course."
Zeb was touched. Adam was looking out for him. He always thought further ahead than Zeb did.
They waited until the next day, when the Rev had a board meeting and Trudy was heading up the Ladies' Prayer Circle. Then they took a solarcab to the bullet train station, exchanging fake info for the benefit of the driver's flapping ears. Most of those guys were snoops, formal or informal. The script was that Adam was on his way back to Spindletop and Zeb was seeing him off. Nothing unusual in that.
From a net cafe at the station, Zeb cleaned out the Rev's Grand Cayman hidey-hole account while Adam acted nonchalant and scanned for anyone who looked too interested. Once the Rev's funds were secured and transferred, Zeb sent the infected gonad a couple of messages, using a lilypad pathway to delay potential cyberhounds as long as possible. He hacked into a men's underarm deodorant video ad, clicked on the gleaming, depilatoried stud's belly button - he'd gone through that pixel wormhole before - then skipped to a home and garden site, appropriate under the circumstances, and chose a trowel. From it he launched his messages.
The first message said, "We know who's under the rocks. Don't follow us." The second contained the details of the Rev's thefts from the Church of PetrOleum's charity initiative funds, and another warning: "Don't leave town or this goes public. Stay put and await instructions." That would give the mildewed old bugger the idea that they'd be back in touch soon for blackmail purposes, which must be their motive, and he could lie in wait for them.
"That should do it," said Adam, but Zeb couldn't resist adding a third message: a copy of the details of the Rev's Feel-iT haptic site transactions. Lady Jane Grey had been his favourite: he must have decapitated her at least fifteen times.
"Wish I could watch," said Zeb, once they were on the train. "When he opens his mail. And even better, when he finds out his Cayman bank stash is gone."
"Gloating is a character flaw," said Adam.
"Up yours," said Zeb.
He spent the trip looking out the window at the passing scenery: gated communities like the one they'd just fled, fields of soybeans, frackware installations, windfarms, piles of gigantic truck tires, heaps of gravel, pyramids of discarded ceramic toilets. Mountains of garbage with dozens of people picking through it; pleebland shanty towns, the shacks made of discarded everything. Kids standing on the shack roofs, on the piles of garbage, on the piles of tires, waving flags made of colourful plastic bags or flying rudimentary kites, or giving Zeb the finger. The odd camera drone drifted overhead, purporting to be scanning traffic, logging the comings and goings of who-knew-who. Those things were bad news if they were hunting for you specifically: he'd gathered that much from web gossip.
But the Rev wouldn't be searching for them yet. He'd still be at the board lunch, gobbling down the labmeat hors d'oeuvres and the farmed tilapia.
Hackety-hack, railroad track,
Momma's in the garden, so don't look back,
Zeb hummed. He hoped Fenella's death had been sudden, with none of the Rev's more puke-making obsessions involved.
Beside him Adam was asleep, looking even whiter and thinner than he did when awake, and more like an idealistic statue of some annoying allegorical figure: Prudence. Sincerity. Faith.
Zeb was too high for sleep. Also jittery, despite himself: they'd crossed a big thick barbed-wire line, they'd robbed the ogre, they'd made off with his treasure. There would be fury. So he kept watch.
Who killed Fenella?
A really evil fella.
Hit her on the head,
Gave her quite a whack,
Everything went black,
Now she's fuckin' dead.
Something was running down his face. He used his sleeve to wipe. No snivelling, he told himself. Don't give him the satisfaction.
Once in San Francisco, Adam and Zeb decided to separate. "He won't sit still for this," Adam said. "He's got a lot of contacts. He'll put out a red alert, use his OilCorps networks. We're overly noticeable together."
True enough: they were too disparate. Dark and light, hefty and frail; anomalies like that were memorable. And the Rev's description would be of the two of them, not one at a time.
Mutt and Jeff, Zeb hummed to himself. Mute and Theft. Cute and Deft.
"Don't make that pseudo-musical noise," said Adam. "It draws attention to us. Anyway you're flat." He did have a point. Two points.
In a pleebland grey-market hourly-rental morph-your-backstory kitshop, Zeb crafted identities for them - cardboard, wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, time-sensitive, but good for the next stage of the trip. Adam went north, Zeb went south, each heading for camouflage.
He and Adam had agreed on a dropbox in space. It was the topmost rose being strewn by the zephyrs in a print of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, posted on a much-visited Italian tourism site. Zeb opted for the left tit nipple of Venus, but Adam overr
uled him: too obvious, he said. It would also be too obvious for them to attempt to contact each other for at least six months, he added: the Rev was vindictive, and by now he'd also be frightened.
Zeb pondered the likely consequences of this vindictiveness and fright. What would he himself do if two young wiseass descendants of his that he'd never liked anyway had made off with his foul secrets? The rage. The betrayal. After all he'd done for Adam. And for Zeb, because weren't his physical chastisements in the best interests of the lad's spiritual development? He was probably still deceiving himself with righteous barf like that.
Among other things, he'd hire some DORCS: digital online rapid capture specialists. They charged a lot but were said to produce results. They'd set up a search algorithm geared to detect likely profile matches online. So it was necessary to stay away from digital as much as possible. No surfing. No purchasing. No socializing. No wisecracking. No porn.
"Just don't act like yourself," was Adam's parting advice.
Deeper into the Pleeblands
Zeb cut his hair in San Fran. He was growing a moustache, and he'd bought some coolish contact lenses on the dark-grey market that not only changed your eye colour but also gave you astigmatism and spurious iris features. But though these might get him through a casual scan, he didn't want to risk closer scrutiny, and the Fickle Fingers of Fake fingerprint distorters he'd also bought were laughable in any professional sense, so it was better not to chance the bullet train again. Also, most of those riding it still believed in the legality of law and the orderliness of order, and might report anything suspicious, as they were constantly being nagged to do.
So he chanced the highways. He hitched south as far as San Jose, working the Truck-A-Pillar convoy stops for rides and trying to look older than he was. Some of the drivers hinted at blowjob payment, but he was too big for them to force it.
The other hazard was the quick-trick pros working the roadside bars. But the only sex he'd had so far had been online, via the haptic-feedback sites; he wasn't ready for actual flesh on flesh. Plus, he was wary of making connections with other people, however brief: who knew how many of them might be trading information on the side? Some of those hustlers were suspiciously well dressed and did not look hungry.
Then there were the diseases. The last thing he needed was to be stuck in a hospital - supposing his ID passed inspection - or enduring a working over from some HospitalCorps security thug, supposing it didn't pass, which was likely. Once the truth of who he was had been vise-gripped out of him, there would be a call to the Rev. Then disposal orders would be issued, or he'd be shipped back in plasticuffs to face the self-righteous music. I'll teach you to respect me, I have been set in authority over you, God hates you, you are morally worthless, repent on your knees, drink what's in the bucket, flat on the floor, hand me the two-by-four, you want it harder, I'll make you howl, and so forth and so on, the familiar religio-sado heavy-metal perv litany. Pre-bedtime amusements.
When the Rev had finished with Zeb's neurologically trashed, defenceless, quivering body, it would be into the rock garden with it, eventually; but not before he'd been scorched and zapped into betraying the digital pathway leading to Adam, and had been forced to plant some online lures and instructions for him, including the necessity of not going public with the Rev's fiscal and sexual misdoings and the urgent need for a physical meetup at which all would be explained. Zeb had no illusions about his ability to withstand the kind of implementation the Rev and his helpers would be more than willing to inflict.
So that was the hospital option, supposing he caught pube rot. The alternative to the hospital route didn't appeal either. Dick fester, stiffie shrivel, penis putrefaction: the internet scare sites on that subject were the greeny-yellowy stuff of nightmares. More than enough reason to avoid the beckoning sirens of the Truck-A-Pillar stops, no matter how plump and firm the thighs extending from their red leatherette hot pants, how high their fake-lizard platform shoes, how boldly engraved their dragon and skull tattoos, or how bimplanted the half-melons emerging from their black satin halter tops like rising dough. Not that he'd ever seen rising dough, up close. But he'd seen videos of it. Once-upon-a-time mommy retros that, to tell the truth, made him feel kind of weepy. Had dead Fenella ever done any dough-baking? Because Trudy sure as hell hadn't.
So when the smudgy-mouthed, crack-eyed, jelly-bummed beauties said, "Hey, big boy, how about a quickie, out behind the doughnut stand?" he did not say, Coming and he did not say, Meet you in heaven when I'm dead and he did not say, Are you out of your fuckin' mind? He said nothing.
In addition to the disease factor, he did not yet know how to navigate the dark and darker pathways of the pleeblands: he didn't want to hook up with a total stranger and then wander blind-eyed into some alley or sleazy motel or dubious knocking-shop washroom and come out on a stretcher or in a body bag, if that. More likely was, they'd toss him into a vacant lot and let the rats and vultures take care of him. Now that more and more of the once-public security services were privatized, there was no margin in the proper burial of a drifter like him, or in the apprehension - they liked to use that word, apprehension - of whatever scoundrels might have knifed him for pocket change.
His height and his budding 'stache were scant protection. He was green wood, an easy target; they'd get that at one glance, they'd beeline for him. The pleeblands were far from the school playgrounds of his youth, in which size really did matter. "The bigger they are, the harder they fall," the scrappy little bantams - more than one of them - had said to him then. "Yeah," he'd replied. "But the smaller they are, the more often they fall." Then a swift whack, not even a punch, and down they'd go.
But in the darkest pleeblands, there wouldn't be any verbal foreplay. No rattlesnake-warning quips and banter, just a rapid stab or slice or even a bullet from some obsolete, illegal firearm. The Linthead gang was especially vicious, according to the net. And the Blackened Redfish. And the Asian Fusions. And the Tex-Mexes with their drug-war tricks - the stacks of heads, the legless bodies strung up from old movieland marquees. He figured there must be a lot of Tex-Mexers controlling the Truck-A-Pillar highway heading south, it was close to their territory.
Despite these reservations, or, to be more honest, despite these cowardly fears, he knew that his best hope of cover in the short-term was in the worst part of town. Spending too much money would attract jackals; he was streetwise enough to know that. So once in San Jose he kept a low profile, stayed out of bars, and blended himself into the underclass that swirled around in the lowest pleebs like rats in a dump bin, scrabbling for whatever they could pick up.
For a while he slung quasi-meat products at SecretBurgers. It was ten hours and less than minimum, he had to wear the company T-shirt and a dorkwit cap, but SecretBurgers wasn't fussy about identities. And they had protection against the street gangs for their booth workers, and bought off both official nosies and non-official ones, so nobody hassled him. He felt sorry for the female workers: they were paid less than the guys, and they had to wear tight Ts and fend off customers and management alike. They should have been issued hard plastic visors for their tits.
But his sorrow didn't stop him from finally acquiring in-the-flesh carnal knowledge with one of the SecretBurgers meatbunnies called Wynette, a brownette with big, dark-ringed, starved-looking eyes. In addition to her alluring personality - a euphemism, he now has to admit, for her somewhat meagre snatch, which was the part that fascinated him, and he apologizes for that, but such is the case with hormone-sodden adolescent males, and it's nature's plan, and he thought he was in love, so fuckit - she offered the advantage of a tiny room.
Most of the SecretBurgers meatgirls couldn't even manage that: they shared overcrowded walkups, or squatted in repossessed and decaying houses, or hooked on the side to support some child or addicted relative or tinselly pimp. But Wynette was cautious and frugal, and hadn't squandered, and could afford some privacy. Her place was located above a corner store that sold alcohol
tasting of troll piss and paint remover, but Zeb wasn't too choosy at that time, so he used to grab a bottle of it to ply Wynette with before sex because she said it helped her relax.
"Was it as good?" asks Toby.
"Was what as good? As good as what?"
"Sex with Wynette. As good as the decapitated Lady Jane Greys."
"Apples and oranges," says Zeb. "No point comparing them."
"Oh, give it a try," says Toby.
"Okay. The Lady Jane Greys were repeatable. Reality's not. And since you're wondering, they're both good sometimes. But it can be disappointing either way."
Snowman's Progress
Floral Bedsheet
Sunlight wakes her, coming in through her cubicle window. Birdsong, the voices of Craker children, the bleating of Mo'Hairs. Nothing unhappy.
She pushes herself upright, tries to remember what day it is. The Feast of Cyanophyta? Thank you, Oh Lord, for creating the Cyanophyta, those lowly blue-green Algae so overlooked by many, for it is through them, so many millions of years ago - which timespan however is merely an eyeblink in Thy sight - that our oxygen-rich atmosphere came to be, without which we could not breathe, nor indeed could the other land-dwelling Zooforms, so various, so beautiful, so new each time we are able to see them, and intuit Your Grace through them ...
But on the other hand it may be Saint Jane Goodall's Day. Thank you, Oh Lord, for blessing the life of Saint Jane Goodall, fearless Friend of God's Junglefolk, who braved many a risky situation and also biting Insect to reach out across the Species gap, and through her love for and labour with our close cousins the Chimpanzees, led us to understand the value of opposable thumbs and big toes, and also our own deep ...