Alive
Book 2
Pt22
1
David set the Vayu to auto-pilot and pressed back into his seat. The throbbing in his ankle had diminished, but he could feel it swelling. He'd have to tend to it soon, but there was still a 30 minute flight ahead; more if he had to evade the police again. He'd gone offline and kept a low altitude, hoping to evade their scrutiny.
The Atlantic was racing by below, a mad blur of rippling blue punctuated here and there by the fleeting white of a cresting wave or the mast of a scavenger's boat, there and gone as the Stratocruiser zipped by. Daylight was receding, the sun now a golden orb in the rearview monitor, glowing weakly through a bank of cloud that had gathered like a gray portent, over the mainland
Something wicked this way came. Did Wizzy know anything about it?
Another wave of incredulity washed over him as he looked at her, sitting silently in the passenger seat. He had been feeling a strange disorientation ever since they'd escaped from the tunnels of Rouge City; the same tunnels where, coincidently, she had led him to escape years before. Or was it really just a coincidence?
She'd been irritatingly silent as she helped him down the winding stair cases that led to the docks, ignoring his questions and acting as if years had not passed since they'd been parted. She'd ignored his grunts of pain too, shooting him impatient looks whenever he had to pause because of his ankle. The only time her expression changed was when she saw his Stratocruiser. But even then she'd just shot him a quick impressed look before asking if he could 'really fly this thing'.
She was lost in her thoughts now, staring out at the evening gloom. No longer the tomboy he had once known; the wild-child who all had thought a boy, except those closest to her, Wizzy had become a beautiful teenager on the edge of womanhood. The husky girl was gone, the one with the close cropped-hair, who was always ready to rumble. Her features were sleek now, and slender; her flesh the deep golden brown of her African ancestry. And her hair, no longer cropped tight like her young criminal cohorts, was now a glistening mane of black curls that framed her face like a silken halo.
After all these years, by what mad twist of fate had she found him? And just in time?
It felt almost scripted, as if his life was just the fumbling narrative of some harried fanfiction; filled with plot holes, false starts and ill-conceived deus ex machina, to which the self-conscious author might confess in a short self-referential digression, poorly disguised as a metaphor.
Things were coming back to him, bit by bit; fragmented in that peculiar and irritating process of human recollection. He recalled the day Sy and the gang had found him, starving and ravaged by life in the wilds of the world. They'd robbed him, beat him, and then become the first friends in his short Orga life. Perhaps the best friends he'd ever known. And the gauntlet; that violent ritual of bonding among the inhabitants of the underworld; he remembered that well. The long nights along the sunken highways of the Orga, conning and conniving in order to stay alive long enough to get back home… to get back to Her.
Wizzy's parting words came back in a flash: "You're not one of us, David. Sy always knew that. You're… different. You learned quickly, but your heart ain't in it."
Yes, his heart had belonged to another, and likely always would. But perhaps more than anyone, Wizzy knew him. Not the secret of his miraculous transformation, no; but his wild side; what he'd had to go through and who he had become in order to survive. Yes, more than anyone, she knew that much him.
As he gazed on her, his eyes trailing the length of her, David felt a stirring. The kiss still lurked in his memory, the one with which she had surprised him the last time he'd seen her; on the night of his escape from Rouge City. He too, was no longer a child, and this recollection provoked him as a man.
"Shouldn't you be watching where you're going?"
Her voice broke David from his thoughts and he met her eyes.
"Um, no, it's … I mean, we're on autopilot," he replied, gesturing to the control panel. Another bolt of pain shot up his leg and David adjusted himself in his seat. His swollen ankle was screaming for release from his boot. Wizzy noticed his flinch.
"You need to get us to wherever we're going, so you can get that boot off," she said.
"Wizzy," he said, exasperated. "Why are you acting like this?"
"Like what?" she said with a look of genuine curiosity, as if she saw nothing strange about their unexpected reunion.
"You're acting like I just saw you yesterday!" he almost yelled. "I mean… where have you been all these years? What… what were you doing in Rouge?"
Wizzy sighed. There was the flash of an expression on her face that he could not read. Then a sudden smile boomed in a way that almost made him forget what he had asked her. She'd become so beautiful.
"I been around," she said, flipping one of her black curls between her fingers. "Here a little. There a little. Everywhere in-between."
"I… I just can't believe it's really you!" David said, flustered and confused by her nonchalance. So, they were here again? Already? After all these years, she still made him feel like a clinger-on whose been left out of the joke.
"And I just can't believe this thing is really yours," she said, pushing back into the seat as she admired the cabin of the Stratocruiser. "Porkchop be moving in style!" she chortled, smiling like she knew something about him that he wasn't aware of.
Then came that feeling again; that underlying embarrassment of having so much and taking it all for granted, while so many struggled just to get by. This guilt of excess was also a growing part of his humanity, the fundamental inequity of the system that he would have to come to terms with it.
"It was a gift," he replied, matter of factly. "A birthday gift… from my Dad."
"From your Dad… or your 'Daddy?" The word rolled off her tongue with a lascivious suggestion.
"From my father," David said, shooting her a recriminating look. Wizzy just shrugged, as if she'd found this reply too pedestrian for further inquiry.
"The same father who put you in that psych ward, or wherever you escaped from when we found you?"
"Psych ward?" David said, exasperated. "What the…. Where'd you get that from? C'mon Wizzy," he said, seriously. "Is this a coincidence? Or were you looking for me? Do you have any idea what's going on?"
"I know your butt was getting whupped by those losers!" she said with a dark chuckle. Her expression changed to something like disappointment. "You should be ashamed of yourself; taking a beat down from a bunch of punk-ass Crash monkeys. Didn't we teach you nuthin'?"
David was about to remind her about his sprained ankle when a smirk broke on her face. She was just having him on again. So, she still felt compelled to goad him? He managed to not laugh.
"Get real, Wizzy," he said. "Where the hell have you been? And what happened to Sy? I heard that…"
The look that came into her face stopped him. He didn't have to finish that sentence.
Wizzy sat up straight and shifted uncomfortably for a moment. She took a sudden breath as if she was about to say something, but her shoulders slumped and she fell back into the seat. She was quiet a moment, teeth clenched. Then a sigh of grim resignation came from her lips; the sound of someone whose life had been detoured by tragedy.
"Sy has left the building," she said. Then she began to tell the tale.
2
Things went bad quickly after David escaped. Olmier had turned out to be as much of a problem as Sy had thought he would. The mobster had bought the lie that Sy told him, that David had planned and carried out his own escape. And the deception had been inadvertently supported by Wizzy, who came back scarred and bruised after the fight with David. That had helped maintain the lie and after some angry skepticism, Olmier accepted the ruse. But Sy was sure he wouldn't give up looking for David. They'd let him go right in the nick of time, he had told Wizzy. And he was sure there would be repercussions.
"The whole Rouge City deal dried up after that," Wizzy said as she recalled those dark days for David. Olmier tossed them a few scams, she explained. But Sy was sure it was just crumbs to keep them close; to keep an eye on them in case the strange boy with the doll's face showed up again. . Nobody was quite sure why Olmier had become so obsessed with David, but Sy was sure the obsession wouldn't go away. And sure enough the man had arrived on a surprise visit, probably hoping to find David hiding somewhere on the premises.
He'd come just like the first time, pompous blowhard, descending in his floating limo, his Mecha bodyguards frisking everybody down before he got out. He'd looked around a bit, pretending to be curious. Then he pressured Sy about the boy who got away. He'd said they had a 'buyer'.
"A buyer?" David said, shocked.
"Yeah," Wizzy replied. "Somebody had a price on you. Good money."
"Who?" David asked. Wizzy shrugged.
"We never found out," she said. "Sy had his limits. He let Olmier think he was interested, said he'd keep an eye out. But there was no way he was getting that kind of dirt on his hands."
Sy had started turning down work from Olmier after that, Wizzy explained. And things just got worse. They'd all expected some kind of trouble. But not the kind that arrived. Strange kids started showing up at scams. New faces. Young, angry faces. But they weren't there to work the crowds. They were there for trouble.
"Crashies," David said. Wizzy sighed an irritated confirmation.
"Little dumbasses kept getting in our way, ruining our scams. They'd start fights with people and then the police would show up. Sy gave a couple of them the beat down himself. But that never stopped them. And that's when we started hearing about The Trinary Directive."
David didn't let his shock reach his face. So Wizzy knew about it! Was she one of them?
"The what?" he said, feigning ignorance.
Wizzy cast him a sidelong glance from the corner of her eye.
"You got a lot better at lyin'." she said, in a tone of gentle reproof. "But I know your tells. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Probably know more than I do."
David started to object, but then just looked away. He sat in silence a moment, feeling Wizzy's eyes boring into him. What did she know?
"It's crazy, isn't it?" he said.
"What part?" she said.
"All of it," David replied. "They believe robots heated the climate and made the oceans rise. They believe there's a secret plot to replace humans. They believe…" David stopped. He'd almost said they believe that robots can turn into humans. "It's crazy," he finished.
"Look around you," Wizzy sighed. "The whole world is crazy. What's left of it, anyway."
"I saw Animal," David said, intentionally shifting the subject. Wizzy didn't reply. It seemed she was waiting for the rest. "He's one of them, now. A Crash Jammer. And he believes in that conspiracy nonsense. He's actually some kind of leader. He told me about the Directive and…" he didn't want to mention the mysterious twins or Johnson's Army. Or 101. Not just yet.
"Did you know that he has a brother?" he said instead. "Animal was an illegal birth. And he has a younger brother. They're both in the movement." David looked at her, hoping this would provoke something, Anything.
But Wizzy reacted to the news the same flippant way she'd reacted to everything so far.
"I ain't seen him since the old days," she said after an introspective silence. She'd bypassed the subject of the Trinary Directive as if she didn't really care. But she was the one who had brought it up. Was this a game? Was she testing what David knew the same way he was testing her?
"After Sy was…" she paused a moment, a hitch in her voice. "After that, I headed out to SoCal. Some of the younger crew came with me. Little Tom and Skater… you remember them?"
David shook his head. Frankly he didn't know if he'd heard their names before. He was too busy navigating this strange conversation.
"Well, they and a few other young brats came out with me. It was a trick getting cross state lines, but we managed. Hooked up with some of Sy's west coast blood on Torrance Island."
She stopped for a moment, a disgusted look on her face.
"Didn't turn out too well, eh?" David said, reading her expression.
"Blood ain't so thick in some strange quarters," she said with a sigh. "They covered me for a minute, but when they wanted to set the youngsters out to fend for themselves, I left too. We got by salvaging and running a few scams. But the kids got sloppy. Got picked up by the PD. CLA probably got them now. I roamed a bit. And now I'm here."
She trailed off then, as if she'd become bored with the topic.
"What happened to Sy, Wizzy?" David said.
She looked at him hard a moment. Then her gaze shifted ahead.
"That's what I mean to find out," she said. Her mouth twisted into a frown that lasted only a moment before the familiar smirk came back onto her face.
"I seen you," she said, a sly look on her face. "I seen you on the news, Porkchop. Some kind of riot. I see people runnin' and screamin. Lots of familiar faces in that crowd shot. Dumbass Crashies. But then I see this blond head in the background. I had to freeze frame and zoom. I wasn't sure it was you at first, now that you got all manly and handsome." She winked and David felt a blush coming on. "But I had to find out. And that's when I decided to-"
She stopped suddenly, and her gaze drifted out ahead. Distant lights were on the horizon now, twinkling through the growing gloom.
"Where the hell are you taking me?" she said.
"Home," David replied. "To meet the family."
(cont…)