“You want a piece of that quiff,” Aleem says, “better catch her soon. Longer it takes, more likely I’ll break her neck ’fore you can strip her down for action.”
“I’m up for that,” Kuba says.
“Up for that? Up for what?”
“Do what you need, then so will I, just so she’s still warm.”
“Man, you’re spookier than dead trees.”
Grinning, Kuba admits, “I got my ways.”
In the passenger seat, John sits at attention, the phone a rectangle of light in his hands. “What’s Michael doing?”
“Saving us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You’ll see.”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Only been a minute since he answered our post.”
“‘The ninth hour.’”
“Is it ever.”
The vast orchard seems to span a burnt-out world, the black and haggard trees with their tortuous rickrack of branches standing to monument the death of humanity in a last war of all against all, the gangbangers’ SUVs like robotic scourges prowling the aftermath to eradicate remaining survivors. Nina has never been so terrified as she is now. These barren but ordered woods evoke horrors as diverse as scenes in a James Cameron movie and Golgotha falling into midday darkness. Yet in peril, as also in loss and grief, she sees, as she always does, moments of strange beauty. Sweeping light silvers the water streaming down black bark. The air is briefly but richly diamonded with wind-tossed raindrops. For a moment, the twigwork of backlit branches seems to form logograms that float in the air with mystical meaning, like comforting messages in some language that she has known in a previous life and will know again in a life to follow this one. Some might say that it’s a fault—but she thinks it is a gift—to perceive beauty and the hope that it represents in even the ugliest moments of life.
Nothing is more desperate, with more potential for horror, than being pursued by Aleem and seven of his cold-eyed barbarians swanked out in their ornamental gold, each with two knives and more lethal surgeries to his credit than a death-camp doctor. If they take John, they will bring to bear their formidable powers of persuasion and intimidation as well as all the temptations of the flesh to turn him, warp him, corrupt him. He’ll resist. He is a good kid. But he is only a kid. And even if he resists to the point where they lose patience with him, he’ll end up in an unmarked grave. Such deranged men mock virtue, but in fact they fear it and won’t long tolerate its presence among them. As a gang boss, Aleem can’t afford for his legions to reach the conclusion that from his seed has sprung a young man of integrity and rectitude. Earlier this very day, he had said, I’ll kill you ’fore I see you brought down from a full man to some pathetic crawlin’ thing that shames me ’fore the world. That had not just been roo-rah. He meant it. Likewise, she entertains no illusions about her own fate if they catch her; as many of them as want will pull a train on her, and when they’re finished, they’ll kill her hard and jam her, naked, in a deep hole.
She’s never owned another vehicle and has put a hundred forty thousand miles on the Explorer, so it’s almost like an extension of her body as she takes evasive action through the maze of apple wood, waiting for Michael to work a miracle. In spite of the Explorer’s age, she has less concern that the vehicle will fail her than that the orchard will surprise her when a dead tree pulls its rotting roots out of the saturated soil and crashes onto her. Moments ago, she swerved around a fallen tree that half blocked an intersection. She has driven over several wind-shorn branches that clattered against the undercarriage, but they were rotten or already badly fractured, and they did no damage. Her luck is not likely to hold.
A rattling arises at the back of the Explorer, on the starboard side. Maybe the damaged fender is coming loose.
She doesn’t dare cut her speed. The bad boys in their glamour wheels have found other north-south alleys. Accelerating recklessly, they are pulling parallel to her once more.
Whatever Michael is able to do, Nina must escape the orchard. In spite of the ordered rows, this is unpredictable terrain that will throw her a hard surprise sooner than later.
Furthermore, she needs to get far enough ahead of her pursuers to have a few minutes to search the vehicle for the transponder they have planted on it. If she can’t find it quickly, she and John will have to continue from there on foot.
The rattling noise escalates into a violent knocking.
Kuba has his philosophy—think positive, don’t draw something bad to you by worrying about it—which Aleem dismisses with a term he once heard in a movie when he was streaming because he couldn’t sleep. Magical thinking. Reviews said the flick was hilarious, but it was about as funny as hemorrhoids. In it, one fool actor accused another fool of “magical thinking,” which Aleem immediately knew was a true, important concept. Most people he’s known engage in magical thinking to one degree or another; they are convinced that believing a thing is true in fact makes it true. He has many uses for people who go through life inventing their own truth; once you know what fantasy they live in, they are easy to motivate and manipulate.
Aleem’s philosophy is simply what the street has taught him: Shit is what it is, and people are what they are, and a lot of them can be bought off with money or guilt or fear. That’s how he keeps himself and his homeys out of jail—for the most part—even when their collection of rap sheets have to be maintained in ring binders. If a politician or a district attorney wants to believe you’re a victim of the system, you play the victim and manufacture convincing evidence against your accuser or the cop who arrested you; if the magical thinkers want to believe you’re an advocate against injustice, you talk the talk and donate money or hours of your personal time to the true-believing community-activist groups. On the other hand, if they have spines of butter and want to believe you’re all-powerful and too dangerous to confront, you reinforce their assessment by taking a page from The Godfather and putting severed horses’ heads in their beds. It’s never actually a horse’s head or a bed. Sometimes your family pet is chopped and put in your refrigerator, or your beloved sister spends an unexpected evening with a large man who devotes eight hours to the quiet and patient explanation of what her life will be like when she’s blind and paraplegic, or your neighbor’s house burns down with the family in it and at their funeral a mourner you don’t know takes a moment to tell you how terribly sad he will be if anything like that happens to you and your children.
Now, because Aleem is not into magical thinking, because he is about being real and meeting every challenge boldly and getting what he wants, he draws his Heckler & Koch Mark 23, which weighs more than two and a half pounds, has a ten-round magazine, and is loaded with full-metal-jacket .45s, the kind of serious gun that says you don’t have it just to plink rats at the city landfill.
“Damn it, Kuba, I don’t care about no shimmy, slick-as-ice spinout. Catch the bitch. Ram her now or you got consequences.”
“Consequences?”
“What’d I say?”
Kuba’s forehead suddenly has a shine. “Jesus, Aleem.”