By midnight, Nathan could feel the ordeal coming to an end. The last of the camera crews were breaking down, and his final interview was playing on a local affiliate's late, late news program. Even with his recharge, Nathan was beginning to feel the physical effects of the day. He felt a strong thirst for a glass of nice, cold of beer. He knew, however, that his body didn't really want it. Phantom pangs, Jude had called them. But he could almost taste it...
As Nathan and Jude made their way to the elevator, the first reports of the fire came in. It was breaking news, interrupting Nathan's interview. Emergency services were responding to a four-alarm blaze in an abandoned building just west of the university campus. Glancing up at one of the TV crew's monitors, Nathan instantly recognized where the fire was. The memory of the planned Potluck flashed back to him. It was Madame Damnable's, Nathan knew with a sickening certainty. The view from the circling news helicopter was all too clear.
Eydie. Nathan's heart sank. Oh, no.
Nathan was faintly aware of the news crew around him. They were no longer tearing down their equipment, but instead, setting up for a new interview. Peters appeared out of nowhere and spoke softly but rapidly into Nathan's ear. Something about a bombing, something about domestic terrorism...
Nathan felt as if he was floating outside his body.
#
Nathan found his pants intertwined with Jude's underwear. He shook his pants free and slipped on the soft cotton. Indistinct, at the edge of his hearing, Nathan heard a soft noise, like a television somewhere in the suite had been left on. Grabbing his shirt, Nathan set out to find the source of the noise.
As he explored, he found Jude's cigarettes on the dining room table and shook one free from the pack. He lit it with her lighter and took a slow drag. As he dropped the lighter back down, he took in the full size of the grandiose table. What was the point of it? It made a nice surface on which to fuck, but no Stem had needed to sit down to dinner for over a decade – not with the WLI.
But what a table it was. It could seat at least a dozen. And here it was, still standard furnishing in a luxury apartment. Nathan smoked his cigarette as he contemplated the table. Perhaps it'd take a generation or more before such totems of an eating, drinking culture fell out of common use; before living spaces were converted to rework areas like dining rooms and kitchens into something more useful. Or maybe they'd always remain, like little Santeria shrines in everyone's homes. Silent memorials to the Stem's food-consuming past.
Nathan smiled until he remembered that faint noise still going on. What was it? It sounded like sobbing, like soft, muffled sadness. He walked this way then that, searching down the carpeted hallways of the penthouse apartment. Soon he had it triangulated, circling the noise like a sharp-eared bloodhound. It was coming from a closet just off the front door. Inside, someone was softly crying.
Nathan reached out slowly and turned the brass knob, pulling the door open. The closet was dark, but the eerie lights of the bustling city streaming in through the plate glass windows gave Nathan more than enough light to see Jude sitting inside amongst the shoes, wrapped in the thousand-count white sheet from the bed. A spent cigarette was clasped between two fingers. She was sobbing into her knees, as mascara ran down both cheeks.
"Jude," Nathan said softly with genuine concern. "What's wrong?"
Jude looked up from her knees and fixed Nathan with her bloodshot eyes. "Do you still love me?" she said, and let her head fall forward. A new wave of tears poured forth.
Nathan felt like he was floating outside his body, looking down at himself and Jude. He could see himself standing there with his chest bare. He knew he should say something comforting to the girl, but he could do nothing but stand there, her words ringing in his ears.
Chapter 12
"Fuck," Elder said, glancing nervously back over his shoulder. He faced forward and trotted to keep up with Eydie, but he kept glancing behind him. The fire that had started in Madame Damnable's was really burning now. Shadows of the smoke danced on the clouds in the evening sky about him. The sound of sirens wailing and the smells of the fire filled the air. They all had to be dead, Elder realized, they all had to be dead...
"Fuck," Elder said again.
It was only Eydie and Elder, and Elder stumbled to keep up with her. Each time he turned to look at the faint glow of the fire over the rooftops of the university, Eydie stepped ahead of him. She strolled forward with determination, like she was in a hurry to get where she was going.
Once they'd realized that Prime hadn't been seriously hurt by his inglorious exit from the basement bar, they attempted a quick escape from the alleyway. It was all out chaos in the street behind Madame Damnable's. The alleyway exit was blocked by a dozen police cruisers, but there were no officers around them. There was screaming down the street as a second explosion rocked Madame Damnable's. Thick curls of black smoke were rising out of the building's basement windows. People were running for cover as Elder, Eydie, Sweet Beat, Kevin and the Prime Administrator sprinted the long block towards the university campus.
Oddly, the only police they saw was a single officer standing in the center of a distant intersection, firing his pistol randomly at passing citizens. The officer was too preoccupied to witness the Pukes fleeing the explosion, and none of the group had the presence of mind to give the queer sight more than a passing glance. They sprinted for the cover of the campus, and once there, they tried to collect their thoughts.
After much "What the fuck?"-ing and "Oh my fucking God!"-s they decided to split up. Prime wanted to go back for his car. No one else thought that made a damn bit of sense, so he went alone. Kevin and Beat stuck together and headed northwest up Hippie Hill. Elder, feeling protective of Eydie, bustled her off south, cutting through Red Square, down Rainer Vista, around the fountain, and back up through the engineering buildings that had once been Elder's stomping ground.
Even though Elder felt like he needed to protect Eydie, it quickly became apparent that Eydie was taking care of Elder Tull. After several wrong turns, Eydie took it upon herself to lead the way. Soon, Elder was trotting to keep up with her as she navigated in and out of the campus pathways, keeping off the main roads, sneaking her way across campus, heading north. Elder might have felt more comfortable handing off responsibility for their escape had Eydie not been sobbing the whole time, tears and snot running down her face.
"Fuck," Elder said once more, pausing to look back at the false sunset the fire to the west created. They were at the precipice of a long staircase that led away from campus. When Elder turned his attention back to the stairs, he realized that Eydie was already halfway down, disappearing into the gloom below him. Elder threw himself forward, taking the stairs two or three at a time, suddenly fearful that he was being abandoned.
"Where are we going?" Elder asked when he reached the base of the staircase. Eydie was waiting for him on the footpath that followed the old railroad tracks that circled the campus. The path was almost completely lost in black, only intermittently lit by a streetlight here and there.
"The Candy Kitchen," Eydie sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. 'Candy Kitchen' was what the younger Pukes called the house where Prime squatted – it was supposedly where he lured, murdered, butchered and ate his Stem victims. In reality, it was less cannibal kitchen and more small, well stocked weapons cache. You were more likely to find a hand grenade than a human hand digging through the cupboards of Prime's kitchen, though Elder always paused involuntarily before opening the refrigerator, half expecting a Dahmer head hidden inside.
"They're..." Elder began, trying to say something comforting. "I'm sure they're all okay."
It was Eydie's turn to say "Fuck," and she stepped off into the night. Elder shivered, realizing he'd left his flea-bitten coat in the bar, and followed.
"It'll... it'll be okay..." Elder tried again, but even he didn't believe it. What the hell had just happened? Now that the adrenaline was beginning to wear off, some half forgotten part of Elder's brain
was starting to work again. It had been the cops coming down those stairs. With all the screaming and gas, it'd been hard to tell, but it'd definitely been the Seattle PD. This was new. Pukes had always been abused by the police, but attacked... that was new.
Elder adjusted the waistband of his jeans. If an old part of his brain had suddenly rebooted and was letting Elder reason again, it had also inadvertently kick started another part of Elder's physiology. Suddenly he had a raging hard-on for the first time in... well, Elder couldn't remember when. There'd been that tickle watching Beat fish the ButtyNut out of the refrigerator, but nothing like this. It was almost painful, pushing against the fabric of his jeans. He wanted to let it out and let it breathe, but even in the shadowy gloom of the footpath, Elder couldn't bring himself to do it. He hopped on one foot and tried to straighten it out, unsnapping his top button.
"What's wrong?" Eydie asked as Elder did his little dance beside her.
"Nothing, nothing..." Elder replied quickly, attempting a normal gait. "It'll... it'll be okay..." he repeated, mostly for his own benefit.
"Shut up, Elder," Eydie said in the dark, backing it up with a choked back sob.
"I really don't know what just happened," Elder admitted. He shifted his erection into a position that was less painful.
"I do," Eydie said and paused. "Steve."
"Steve?"
"Yeah." Eydie wiped her eyes. "He told them where to find us."
Elder Tull stopped mid-step. As Eydie slogged away, the events of the evening before came back to him in one great burst: Steve and those Stems, sitting and smoking in that Puff Club; Elder laying in wait; the cops; the ButtyNut. Like a jigsaw puzzle put together with no reference to the box top, Elder suddenly saw the image take shape. Steve, the Stems, the raid on Madame Damnable's...
"Fuck," Elder said one more time to himself in the dark.
#
The trail ended at the back of a strip mall parking lot. Eydie and Elder crossed the lot and jaywalked the four-lane road to a crescendo of honking horns. They were less than a block from the Prime Administrator's Candy Kitchen, a once luxurious home built on stilts over a wooden ravine, red-tagged long ago after a particularly serious earthquake. The floor of the house sloped like some Rogue's Gallery hideout, fifteen degrees down into the ravine. From the street, it looked totally derelict, but inside, Prime had carved out himself a small fortress of booby traps, video surveillance, homemade bombs and illegal guns. Prime had been passionately, meticulously constructing it for almost a decade in preparation for exactly the sort of event that had just transpired.
Of course it would be the place they'd all run to once the police finally came gunning for the Pukes. Prime stockpiled food and ammunition in readiness. The plan was in place, and everything was prepared. But something about the whole setup worried Elder. The shock of the SWAT raid had only just begun to reboot his mental operating system, and the exact nature of his concern was still eluding him, but as he and Eydie made their way carefully down the slope of the ravine to enter the Candy Kitchen through its only unrigged entrance – a sliding door into the basement – something nagged at Elder's subconscious. If only he could pull it to the front of his mind...
Elder and Eydie were apparently the first of the group to arrive. The lights of the house were still dark as they slid open the glass patio door. Elder shorted a patch cable that pirated current from the city grid, and the basement's fluorescents flickered to life.
Prime's IT setup dominated the house's old rumpus room. There was an industrial strength work bench sporting an array of six flat-panel monitors, and a full-sized, four-post rack full of blinking servers. Prime ran his whole online, anti-government revolution from that room, pumping out megabytes of anti-Stem propaganda, and mounting assault after assault on the server farms of the Big U Party, Whole Life, Inc. and any other entity that Prime designated as "in collaboration."
Elder clicked on the monitors and brought up the security feeds from the Candy Kitchen's many cameras. The house, the street in front of it, and the ravine behind all seemed quiet. Elder turned to tell Eydie this information, but found her balled up on one of the old, threadbare couches that lined the walls of the rumpus room. She was going catatonic again, Elder realized as he watched the mess of her dreads burrow into the smelly pillows of the couch. Elder opened his mouth to speak, but could think of nothing comforting to say. The opportunity passed as the sliding door opened and Kevin and Sweet Beat stumbled inside.
Beat had acquired a man's coat and a black handgun in her travels, but the sight of her shapely, slender legs did little to dampen Elder's still-rock hard erection. Kevin looked disheveled – more disheveled than normal – as he closed and latched the patio door behind him. Without a word, he crossed the room and opened the closet by Prime's computer desk. He reached in and came out with a long, chromed, pump-action shotgun. He worked the action and chambered a round, looking over at the bank of monitors and the security feeds.
"You two have any trouble?" Beat asked. She gently lifted Eydie's head off the couch, sat down, and returned Eydie's head to the comfort of her lap. She petted Eydie's hair and put the black automatic down on a side table. "Had to break a cop's nose to get that," she said. "Didn't even see me sneaking up on him."
"No word from Prime?" Kevin asked, looking over the monitors.
"Not yet," Elder confirmed.
"Him and that stupid, fucking truck. If he gets himself stemmed for that piece of shit..."
"How'd Damnable's look?" Elder asked. "Last you saw it?"
"Fucking inferno. The Stems weren't even bothering to put it out."
"Then... I mean, everyone was in there..."
"Fuck it," Kevin said softly.
"Yeah, fuck it," Beat agreed.
"What the hell is going on?" Elder demanded with too much force, startling himself.
As if in an attempt to answer, Kevin double-clicked something on Prime's desktop. A window popped up on one of the monitors and a TV broadcast began to play mid-stream. A news helicopter was circling the burning wreckage that had been Madame Damnable's, as the lights of police cruisers and fire trucks filled the streets around it. The news anchor's voiceover was speaking solemnly: something about a terrorist incident.
"What?" Elder questioned as he, Beat and Kevin watched the broadcast.
The news anchor recapped. There'd been an explosion in a derelict building in the University Distinct, no more than a block from campus. Early reports indicated over fifty dead. Apparently, the structure was in use by the city's homeless, un-implanted community at the time. City officials confirm that the SPD had been serving a warrant on the premises in connection with the federally-mandated internment of America's unmodified population when the blast occurred. Law enforcement casualties had not yet been reported. Officials refused to rule the explosion out as a terrorist incident.
They were so transfixed by the broadcast that no one noticed Prime on the next monitor over, moving gingerly up from the base of the ravine. By the time Prime came through the sliding, glass doors, even Eydie had lifted her head off Beat's lap to watch the monitors.
The breaking news cut away from the circling helicopter shot to an interview with a familiar face. In shocked silence, everyone in the rumpus room watched Steve on the monitor, talking to an off-camera reporter.
"...I know it's too early to call this a terrorist incident... " he was saying. It was Steve, but then somehow it wasn't. He'd shaved and had his hair cut, but he also seemed younger, more animated. Happier.
Elder checked Eydie's reaction. She watched the screen with a deep, unimaginable horror in her eyes. Elder could almost see the last of her sanity slipping away.
"But should this explosion be found to be intentional, it will not come as a surprise to me. While, by and large, the Puke community is peaceful and non-violent, there is an element within it that has always had the capacity for an act like this. An act not only despicable, but downright insane. Let's not forget that
Pukes died in this explosion. That's the sort of people we're dealing with here: people unconcerned with the lives of even their own kind. I hope the law enforcement community will do everything in its power to bring these people to–"
Prime cut the feed. He'd moved across the room, taking up residence in his desk chair. He closed out the television application, and a security camera view of the street in front of the Candy Kitchen replaced it. "That's enough of that shit," Prime said, opening a command prompt and reflexively typing something.
"Oh God... Steve..." Eydie sobbed.
Beat leapt up off the couch, picked up her gun and pointed it angrily at the screen, gangster-style. "No, fuck it! That wasn't Steve! Did you see him? It wasn't him. It wasn't fucking him!"
"But–" Was all Elder could get out.
"I know it looked like him! But what they've done to him... Ah, fuck it!"
"Terrorist incident? What's that bullshit?" Kevin added, still holding the chrome pump.
"There was no fucking bomb. It was a gas leak, I could smell it," Prime said, not looking up from his keyboard.
"Oh," The realization hit Elder Tull.
"But they're gonna saddle us with this shit!" Kevin said. "And what's this internment crap?"
"Haven't you been watching the news?" Prime glanced at Kevin.
"What? No! Fuck no!"
It was Eydie's small voice that answered, grabbing everyone's attention. "We won our appeal to the Supreme Court."
"Won? What appeal?" Kevin replied angrily.
"Turns out Pukes are people too. But, I guess that means we'd all be better off living in internment camps."
"Bullshit," Prime grunted. "Concentration camps... be sure to breathe deeply in the showers."
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Kevin fumed. He looked at Elder for a reaction. Elder could do nothing but shrug.
"Word is they were arresting any Pukes stupid enough to show up at a rationing center," Prime continued. "But this..." With a click, Prime brought the news feed back up. It had returned to the circling helicopter, and the smoldering remains of Madame Damnable's. "This was a raid. They were coming for us. I always told you people it would come to this someday: a knock at the door and a bag over the head. You idiots always called me crazy, but look at this shit. Look!" Prime tapped the monitor. "How crazy is this shit?"