When Angie wiped the steam from the shower room mirror, she barely recognized the face looking back at her. This time it had nothing to do with inner turmoil or what was missing that had once been part of her. It was just, plain...
"Who the fuck is that?" she thought as she considered her reflection.
The face was haggard, eyes bordered by dark something that looked more like tattoos than anything else. Eyes so bloodshot the brown seemed to be turning mahogany. And the hair... whatever possessed me to hack it off like that? Freed from the weight of its former length, it stood out in whatever direction it pleased. I had to be a freaking philosopher, she thought and finally muttered aloud in disgust "Shit. I look like shit."
"Honey we all look like shit. Whoever doesn't look like shit gets shot as a collaborator."
Angie saw Maggie leaning into the shrinking center of the circle of mist to smirk at her. She'd been too fried even to notice anyone in the adjacent shower.
"So what's up with the Geek Squad?" Maggie inquired as she dragged a comb through her wet hair.
"You first, what's going on in the outside world?"
While Angie, New Todd, and Willie had been sequestered in the computer room, Maggie had been out scouting new camp locations with Tyler, Caleb, and Donovan.
Maggie sat on the bench built into the opposite wall and pointed to the space beside her. "I'm too beat to talk standing up." When Angie sat she continued, "The meeting with Martin wasn't good news, as if we expected any, right? The lizard bosses are fed up with guerrilla warfare and have decided to go scorched earth... a sweep along the coast to ten miles inland, about twenty miles north and south of the city. Aerial blasting along the beach, and search and destroy on land. They've already started evacuating the 'friendlies'. Whatever magic spells you geek wizards have been working on better be push-button ready and fast.
"Shit!" Angie exploded in dismay. "We've figured out the code and the carriers and Todd got the app written that will disperse to all the levels of the Visitor communications that interface with us low-tech humans. Willie's pulled out and translated a few thousand of the key receivers we should hit, the rest we decided weren't worth bothering with."
"Great!" Maggie whacked Angie on the arm. "Just push the button, and sink 'em!" But her friend had dropped her head into her hands and was shaking it back and forth.
"Oh you knew it couldn't be that simple..." she sat up again and looked at Maggie with a groan. "Willie had a few thousand receiver addresses he got from the data modules on a read-only display and narrowed them down a little. Very little. We got two terminals jury rigged to transmit."
Maggie wiped her hands over her face and stared at Angie. "And you're going to tell me they don't talk to each other."
"You got it. Roughly two thousand addresses to enter manually. Two terminals to enter on. Do the math."
Both women rose and dressed in silence. As Angie pulled the door open to leave, Maggie pushed it shut again.
"Look, there's gonna be another meeting later tonight but you should know now... they're gonna empty the camp tomorrow. Everybody out, nothing left behind but rubble. We're gonna do a little scorched earth of our own."
"But we're not ready," Angie protested.
"Better find a way to tell them that," Maggie jerked her head in the general direction outside of the room. "Because the plans are all set."
The overwhelming absurdity of the situation hit Angie. On the verge of getting it done, and they were supposed to pull it all up and start over? There was no way they could disconnect, move, reconnect, it was all too fragile to begin with. She threw her head back and hooted with laughter. After a moment she looked Maggie in the eye and asked with faux-dismay, "Why is the Geek Squad always the last to know?"
Maggie eyed her suspiciously. "Y'know I think Tyler's right... you are crazy." But she was smiling as she opened the door and led the way into the corridor.
"He told me not long after we met that crazy is the new language," Angie recalled, then observed archly, "Might as well be fluent in that as any other."
Ham Tyler slogged to his quarters, considering what he'd heard. A coast-long lizard sweep, fifty miles more or less, born of lack of specific knowledge of the exact location of the West Coast Resistance but driven by the certainty that recent attacks had originated from the coast. Gooder's lizard contact Martin had told them as much, intelligence being shared with the others on the tactical team. Farber, who he trusted with his life and more, and Elias, whose street smarts were worth all the good intentions of most everyone else he'd encountered so far, were convinced and that was enough for him.
All of it had meant another reconnaissance expedition that had taken him, Gooder, Maggie and Caleb to the north. They'd spent the past twelve hours scouting out a series of safe points where the rebels could work their way inland and northward to where the lizards wouldn't be looking. Maps had been drawn out and lists of supplies to be acquired and transported had been assembled. They had relied on that lizard Martin's information to figure out what the safe points might be. Tyler had to admit that lizard or no, he'd never turned them the wrong way. South was a bad bet; the Mexican rebellion cells on the coast had long abandoned their positions for those to the south. The ones he'd helped to establish, Tyler remembered with a tug at his gut. Those two months had meant a lot more than tactical progress. The ways he and Angie had bound from the core since his return was proof of that.
He thought of Angie and her Geek Squad, locked up in the computer room for the last day and a half, coming up with the kinds of assault plans that Tyler couldn't hope to connect to. Oh, he'd been well schooled in the realm of high tech weapons design and guidance, the fancy tech that could predict and place where the ordnance would be the most effective, and the high tech communications that brought it all together. But the stuff that wrecked things without going "boom"… though deep down he accepted its tactical usefulness he'd never really been able to understand the process. Thing "A" triggering thing "B" to go boom made sense. But things that worked silently to cripple the high end planning, somehow they just didn't seem as real. He'd forced himself to accept their value, but for the life of him Tyler would never get to Angie's level of commitment. She gripped digital data like he gripped a gun, hard and determined and with a dead aim. The only reason she'd never insisted he learn her skills as she'd learned his is that she knew hers took longer than aim-and-shoot to deliver, so his crude understanding was enough. True mastery was for the Geeks alone.
After he'd showered and shaved (okay, trimmed, because removing the beard wasn't a priority) and closed the door behind him Tyler saw Angie staring fixedly in the cracked mirror that hung over the beat-up chest of drawers that had been there probably since WWII.
Damn was she always this small? The "boniness" he'd observed when he'd returned from Mexico seemed somehow more real, as if she'd given up something physically for every part of herself she'd had to swap for survival.
"I look like a raccoon," Tyler heard her whine, whether to him or herself he couldn't tell. "No, a ferret," she corrected.
He stood behind her and peered over her shoulder. "Nah. An ostrich." He stood back and looked her up and down with a serious eye, making sure she could still see his face in the mirror. "Yup. Ostrich. Definitely. Got that long scrawny neck," he approached again and ran a hand down her nape. It didn't make her shiver as it usually did, but he continued anyway, "got that knobby head," he trailed his fingers over its shape, more distinct now that it was covered with short, unruly shocks of hair that refused to agree on a common direction. He stepped back as Angie turned to glare at him, the "not funny" look nailed hard onto her face.
"Oh yeah... Been workin' on those beady eyes, too."
"Try badger," Angie told him as she brushed him aside. "Because I heard what's in the play book, and I am digging in."
Tyler greeted this announcement with a shrug. "Look Angel I know you and the Geek squad have a plan, and for all I can understand it, it sounds like a good one. But it'll have to wait another couple days is all. You're not the only one been working overtime here... we've got a new location ready to set up..."
Angie gestured impatiently. "Maggie told me what's going on. And the fact is that if you pull the plug now, we are back to square one. Less than square one, because there's no guarantee that the files we've constructed and the pathways we've tracked will survive a disconnect. Hell even the module we used, you know, the one I almost got killed for..."
"You almost got us all killed for," Tyler reminded her.
"Yeah that one, well that's nothing but random pieces now that Willie's gutted it for the files we built."
Tyler threw up his hands in defeat. How could he debate something he didn't even understand? "Okay, so you can't just unplug and plug it in again. Push the right buttons before we go, end of story." The look on her face told him he was about to find out "not that easy" would be an improvement.
Angie explained, as she had to Maggie, the time consuming grunt work that could neither be avoided nor rushed.
"It's not as bad as it sounds," she lied. "Todd and me, we're total keyboard jockeys."
"Which means?" Please make it be plain English.
"Todd bangs out 80 words a minute and me," she wiggled her fingers proudly, "one hundred and ten."
Tyler couldn't believe what he was hearing. Months of battles, raids, destruction and running, and the whole shooting match was going to depend on... fucking secretarial skills?
Angie took his silence for agreement. "So, you're gonna back me up at this last camp meeting whenever it is." No question mark.
"In an hour. And I don't think so." He headed her off before she could start up again with the Geek speak .
"Lady we are gonna empty this camp and what we don't take is gonna be blown up. And even if the three horsemen of the Geek Apocalypse were left behind," he took a step and glared meaningfully, "which they will not be, even then where do you propose to set up shop? Under the picnic tables by the lighthouse?" He turned away, discussion over. "There's crazy, and then there's crazy."
Angie was too tired and too set on the plan, (their plan, hers Willie's and Todd's, the only plan they had left) to pretend to be reasonable.
"Bomb shelter, dumbo. Generators, hidden entrance, all the power we need. Why do you think we set the computer room up there to begin with? Underground, harder to trace, blah blah blah. All we need outside is that itty bitty antenna on top of the lighthouse."
Did she just call me "Dumbo"? That wasn't all that pulled him up short.
"Antenna? What 'antenna'? Now you're hallucinating."
"So you really think that sailor-with-a-spyglass weathervane is a weathervane?" Angie saw something she'd seldom seen: Tyler, ambushed by facts. "It's probably the only communications hardware you didn't hook up yourself. We managed it all on our little geek own."
"Okay, James Bond." Tyler threw himself into the worn armchair by the window, nearly breaking a leg off of it. "What's the rest of your foolproof plan?"
He's really, honestly, listening. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, Angie dove in and laid it all out. Short and sweet, and when she was finished even the Fixer had to admit it could work.
"But what if none of us can make it back?" Julie argued. "Assuming the stormtroopers will believe nobody's here, assuming they won't bother to blow up anything more than we do before we leave, assuming they don't already have access to the plans for the original Coast Guard training station and know about the bomb shelter..." the list could go on forever, so she finished with, "you won't know if or when it's safe to come out. Your communications are strictly one-way. What if nobody can make it back to get you?"
Willie looked at Angie and New Todd then informed the camp meeting, "We will hear the attack above ground. We will wait for three days after this. Then we will look. If they are gone, we will find our way."
"I dunno, Willie, that's not a very refined escape plan," Donovan remarked. "Don't get me wrong, the first part sounds pretty good, getting the data transferred and sending it off, sending a message to Martin when it's done. But if the sweep has already gotten this far, he can't help you. It'll be up to us, or you. No guarantees. You could end up stuck here, no way out, no vehicle, nothing."
At this, Angie smiled. "Been there, done that. All of us have. What's one more time? Besides, they think I'm dead. If the stormtroopers catch up with us I'll just say 'boo' and scare the crap out of them."
Donovan wasn't convinced. "I still don't like it." He looked straight at Tyler, who could always be counted on to support tactical logic. This time, though, he didn't disagree.
"It's a little shaky in places," Tyler acknowledged, "but it's all we got."
Chris Farber jumped in before Tyler was forced to debate further, "Kinda like this whole operation, pretty shaky but it's all we got."
Still, none of the people at the head table looked happy. Robert, Caleb, Elias, Julie, Donovan, Tyler and Farber. Not happy at all, but nobody had any better ideas.
Robert declared, "This is our last shot and if this is the only way to get it done, we have to trust the people who put it together. New information tells us it could take another two or three days for the Visitors to reach this camp. So we start packing up at dawn. Farber and Donovan will direct the demolitions. Tyler, Elias and Maggie will go on ahead and work with the fifth column to set up the new camp. Willie, Todd, Angie, will stay behind to finish the data transfer and transmissions. We'll have provisions set in the bomb shelter before we go." He stood up and took a decidedly shaky breath. "Okay guys. Try to get a good night's sleep. We don't want to fall down in the home stretch."
Nobody had anything to add, so they all went to gather their temporary lives to be moved again. Win or lose, it would be for the last time.
"Tell me," Angie slurred sleepily in the dark.
"I love you, crazy or sane," Tyler whispered, but felt her head move side-to-side against him.
"No. The other thing, tell me…"
"Almost there, Angel, the other side. When we're there you can stop."
"You'll be there," she raised her head from his shoulder. "Other side."
"If I'm breathing I'll be there."
"Me too."
Please, please, on that other side, you gotta be there.
Just far enough away from the real world and clear thinking, Angie snuggled into Tyler as close as she could, losing herself in his heartbeat and breathing and the smell of him.
Gun oil and leather... how could the smell of war have become everything I live on?
Tyler didn't wake her when he rose before dawn. He decided it was better to leave things where they'd begun. In silence, and without questions. But never again without connection.
When Angie woke a short time later she dressed quickly and tried not to look around the room that had become the facsimile of a life she and Tyler had made for themselves. Soon it would be ashes. She hadn't expected the sharp sensation the knowledge caused her.
No. This is just a place. It's not us, it's not beginning or ending. It's just a place.
When she grabbed her notebook from the table something fluttered to the floor. It had been tucked between the pages of notes and numbers and hastily scrawled file-trees: the torn-off cover of a bullet box. On the back was written in the crisp, severe capitals she'd seen only once before:
"See you on the other side."
Smiling, Angie jammed the scrap of cardboard in her back pocket and headed for the bomb shelter. She didn't bother to close the door.