After the Zap Read online

  Over by the door I idly noticed the bartender talking to a man and a woman, both wearing red armbands and carrying nasty-looking little submachine guns. I turned around, finished my beer. I glanced over at the bartender, wished he’d quit talking to the people with the guns, and come get me a beer. The bartender pointed at me, and I gave him a little half-wave, then realized he was pointing me out to the people with the guns.

  A fly crawled across my neck, and I reached up to swat it. Something cool and smooth wrapped itself around my hand. I pulled it down, felt resistance, turned, looked up at Blue Braid, her hair coiled around my hand.

  “Dance?” she asked.

  I blushed. “Not really . . . I’m kind of clumsy,” I said.

  “Dance,” she said, and yanked me to my feet. I had to lift my chin to look at her; even with the boots, she had about three inches on me, and I’m almost six feet. I let her pull me to the dance floor. She took my hands in her hands—Johnny and the Oosiks were doing a slow number and couples were bobbing like drunk buoys in desperate embraces—and whispered in my ear.

  “Those folks with the guns are KOMs, kid. They’re after your hot little buns.”

  “Me?” I asked. “What did I do?”

  “You read, dumbskull, is what you did. You read in public in Kodiak, which is about the fastest way to make yourself lunch. Let’s ease over to the edge here.”

  Blue Braid and I worked our way from the center of the bar and up onto the carrousel, to a small arc of the dance floor before the band. Blue Braid jerked her head toward a hallway that a hole in the outer wall of the carrousel was opening up to.

  “Head for that hall,” she said, pointing with her chin at the hole.

  “They really would make me lunch?” I asked.

  “Or slave you,” she said. “You want to stick around and find out?”

  “Not really,” I said, thinking of the crack of whips from the basement. I looked down the hall, saw what she had in mind. If we could get to the hallway before the KOMs, the inside wall of the carrousel would move around behind us and cut them off. I looked back into the crowd, saw the two KOMs pushing their way around the rim of the carrousel, knocking people aside, kicking over chairs. “Yeah, maybe we should leave.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Blue Braid started shoving her way through the crowd like she might have had to do this once or twice before; good for her, I thought. I liked that. I liked a woman who knew how to get through crowds. I stayed in her wake, trying to jostle people so they’d bunch up behind us. The hole in the inside wall passed over the hallway, opening about halfway. We jumped through it just as the carrousel creaked around one more notch.

  The hall went about five feet and ended in a door with a lock and chain wrapped around the push bar, and a red flap of tape over the handle that was supposed to keep people from opening the door, I guess. There was faded lettering on the door that read EMERGENCY ONLY: ALARM WILL SOUND, which didn’t bother Blue Braid a bit. She shoved the door open and smiled as the tape snapped apart. Some alarm. No bells, no lights, just a gust of cold air blasting into the hall. I hung on her heels and we slipped through and out onto a patio. The carrousel turned another notch. I saw one of the KOMs poke an arm through the door, then yank it back as the hallway behind was cut off by the slow revolution of the rim.

  Out.

  There was a high fence around the patio, and the patio was covered almost to the tops of the tables in snow. That fence didn’t mean anything. It was wood slats over gridlike metal. Blue Braid kicked at a slat with those bright orange cowboy boots, got a toehold, climbed up, then reached down with that braid and wrapped it around my wrist. I pulled, got a toehold, then looked back. There was another door leading onto the patio. I jerked my wrist away from her braid, jumped down, ran over to one of the picnic tables.

  “Come on,” Blue Braid said.

  “Got to block that door,” I said. I thought I heard someone pounding from the inside. I flipped the table over, snow falling onto my pants, flipped the table once more, jamming it against the door.

  “Move it!” she yelled.

  I ran to her, jumped up at the fence, grabbed for the braid. She jerked her head forward, I scrambled for a hold, and then we were over the fence.

  The back of the St. Herman’s Club was on a road that went along Kodiak harbor and up into the mountains, I remembered from when the Orca had docked earlier. That might be good, I thought. The KOMs would have to get out the front door and swing around to get us, and if we were lucky, we’d be gone.

  I stopped to catch my breath. Blue Braid looked back at me, motioned for me to keep going.

  “We’re not free yet,” she said.

  I leaned over, hands on my knees. “Why are you helping me?”

  “Because you’re kind of cute,” she said, smiling. “And because I need a reader.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe I like readers,” she said. I stood up, glared at her. “Okay, I need my name read.”

  “Okay,” I said. Reason enough, I thought. Hadn’t the oracle said, “Joy in movement induces following?” I’d follow. I’d follow her, even if she was poison. Women often were. Lots of women had given me that line before, that they wanted something read. Oh yeah. What they had wanted was . . . well, not words exactly. Blue Braid might be different. She might want the word alone. I smiled at the thought. If she wanted a little more, well, she’d be worth giving it to. In any case, I’d follow her if it meant getting away from the KOMs. Better that than becoming lunch.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Up there,” she said. She pointed up and to the south, to a flat mountain. Orca Captain had pointed it out to me when we came into Kodiak: Pillar Mountain. A little red light blinked from the top. The road behind the club–DEAD ROAD, a charred metal street sign said—led straight to the bottom of Pillar Mountain. We took off down it, Blue Braid leading.

  It was maybe a mile to the mountain, and by the time we got there I was half out of breath. Blue Braid was hardly panting. I looked down Dead Road and couldn’t see anyone coming. The KOMs might have gone to get help, might be sneaking up the road right then just waiting for us to make a move. I caught my breath, looked up Pillar Mountain.

  We were at the bottom of a trailhead that switchbacked up the side of the mountain, just to the right of a big landslide scar that made the mountain look like a giant grizzly had slashed its face. A rope dangled over the scar. Some big boulders from the landslide littered the ground near the trail head.

  “We go up?” I asked her. Blue Braid nodded. “How?”

  She reached into her big purse, threw me a hunk of webbing. “Put this on,” she said.

  I took it from her, untangled it, saw that it was a harness of some kind. I watched Blue Braid put a similar harness on, copied her. The straps of the harness wound under the crotch, around the shoulders, across the back, and connected at the chest.

  “You ever use a monkey harness before?” she asked. I shook my head. “Better get used to it—we hang from them a lot on the blimp.”

  “Hang? Blimp?” I asked. I thought the bartender had been joking.

  “Yeah, blimp,” she said.

  Blue Braid pulled out a little flashlight from her purse and clicked it on. Batteries. She had batteries. I hadn’t seen a battery smaller than a six-pack since I’d thrown away the little battery from my old watch four years ago. I was pretty damned impressed. Blue Braid flicked the flashlight on and off a few times. A light flashed back at us from the top of the mountain, and then something dark moved. Something big. Something huge.

  Something rose up from the mountaintop and came toward us. A white light flicked on its nose, red light on one side, green on the other. The thing grew larger and larger and black, indigo black, three colored lights on the thing sharp and distinct against the night.

  It rode down the side of Pillar Mountain away from the top until it hovered over us. It was like a whale, a floating whale, larg
e enough that when I put my thumb up I could not blot out its shape. The thing floated toward us, humming, a searchlight now lit on its belly, the shaft of light shining down at us.

  It hovered over us, a cloud, or a flying mountain, perhaps 600 feet long, with a thing like a leech stuck to its belly. I could see windows in the leech thing, and people moving behind the windows. The big part of the thing was like a sausage, taut and bursting. Four fins, like a rocket, were at the end, and two little wings were at the front. The searchlight stabbed, thrust, and found us.

  Two words were painted on the side of the blimp: WONDER and some word starting with B that had faded away; the sides of the silver blimp were lit by floodlights. Little dots of blue and orange and green and red and yellow were painted on the blimp. One orange circle had three black triangles in it, a mandala, the mandala of radiation.

  I heard a rumbling sound behind me and saw the light from a horse-drawn jeep coming toward us. The car braked to a halt, and the horses reared back. In the light of the jeep’s weak battery headlights I could see four figures with red armbands jump out and point up at the blimp. KOMs. Blue Braid and I hunkered down behind a boulder. I put an arm around her, pulled her tight—I don’t know why. I think I wanted the warmth. If I got my guts shredded into spaghetti, I wanted to die in someone’s embrace. Blue Braid shrugged her shoulder slightly, looked at me as if she were going to pull away, then smiled and nestled closer.

  The searchlight swung from us to the KOMs. One of the KOMs held up a rifle and fired a round at the blimp. The tracers flashed up at the bottom of the bag, made thunk-thunk sounds. A machine gun flashed from a turret near the bow of the blimp; bullets kicked up snow in front of the KOMs’ jeep, and the horses reared up, whoofing steam and neighing. The KOMs ducked behind the jeep. A standoff, and we were in the middle.

  Things like angels fell down from the blimp on spider web ropes. They had human faces but glowing eyes—headlamps — on the top of their heads. The headlamps threw little circles of light onto the snow. I was held by the big light from the blimp and the little lights from the blimpers. The searchlight switched to the KOMs, blinding them in brightness, and that machine gun on the blimp blasted another round over the KOMs’ heads.

  The blimpers came down, walked toward us, still attached to the ropes, submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Their boots made little crunching sounds in the snow, the sound roaches make when you step on them. Crunch and crunch and crunch.

  Blue Braid ran up to them, grabbed a slack rope in front of them. She motioned me to her. I slipped out from behind the boulder, ran to her, and helped with the rope. She clicked a big snap (she called it a biner) on the end of the rope to my harness, then hers, so we were hanging face to face. She put her arms around me, smiled a thin grin.

  “Almost home free,” she said.

  I could feel the backwash of the Wonderblimp’s propellers, blades barely turning against a slight headwind so that the great ship hovered over us, barely moving. I thought that any minute a wind would blow the blimp away, yanking me off my feet, whipping the air with loose ropes, but it didn’t happen. Blue Braid clicked her flashlight on and off, and then I felt the rope pull taut and I was yanked up.

  I spun around on the end of the cable, cold wind whipping me through the night. It was like twirling at the end of a swing, a swing wound round and round tight, and then let go. Kodiak whirled slowly below me: the harbor, the mountain, the sea, the town; harbor, mountain, sea, town. The two other blimpers were being pulled up below us. The KOMs were still standing crouched behind their car, caught in the light and the gaze of the machine guns. The KOMs never fired a shot— kind of them, I thought. I was pulled up and up into the blimp toward an open hole of light.

  CHAPTER 2

  When I came up and inside the blimp, someone stuck a gaff out to the rope and pulled me over to the deck. I was in a room about the size of a small cabin, some sort of hangar or deck. A guy who could have been a bear if he had had a bigger nose slipped the sling off of me and then put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. The way the fingers clutched my shoulders, I got the impression the hand might do more than steady me if I gave it a reason to.

  “Who are you?” the guy attached to the hand said.

  “He’s a reader,” Blue Braid said. “The KOMs were after him.”

  “You can read?” the guy asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We’ll see.” He brushed shaggy bangs out of his eyes, smiled at me with teeth like glaciers. He pushed me aside, turned to the open hatchway, and helped the two blimpers who had come up behind us into the hangar. One of the blimpers walked over to a handle on a bulkhead and cranked the bay doors on the hatchway shut.

  “All clear?” a man’s voice asked from a speaker on the bulkhead right of a passageway.

  “We’re back, Nike,” Blue Braid said, punching a button next to the speaker. The props roared louder from outside, and I wobbled a bit as the blimp moved forward.

  “Okay,” said the big guy, “let’s see if you can read.” He laid his right hand on my shoulder, and with his left hand gave me a tattered card, one of those cards made out of that hard plastic stuff. It had a picture of an animal on it and little raised letters and a black strip of some shiny material on the back. The little raised letters said “Walter Abercrombie.”

  I read the words at the top aloud: “Brontosaurus Oil Company Credit Card.”

  He smiled. “That’s my name,” he said. “You can read. Call me Bron.”

  I smiled to myself. He was a Bron, not like the dozens of Brons I’d met before. I didn’t have the heart to tell him his name was Walter. He didn’t look like a Walter. Bron slid his hand down from my shoulder and grabbed my hand, lightly, firm but not like a vise.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. “My name is Holmes. Holmes Weatherby, Aye-Aye-Aye.”

  “That’s an odd name,” Blue Braid said.

  “It’s my name,” I said. “When I woke up after the Zap, I found a card in my wallet with my picture on it. Under the picture were the words, Holmes Weatherby, I-I-I.”

  “What’s the I-I-I mean?” Blue Braid asked.

  “Three I’s,” I said. “Orca Captain—this guy who gave me a ride up here on his ship—said it means the past I, the present I, and the future I.”

  “Well, glad to meet you, too,” she said. She stuck out her hand, the one without the glove, and I shook with her, too. “Welcome aboard the Wonderblimp.” She turned to the other blimpers. They had taken the headlamps off, set the submachine guns down, and were removing their harnesses. “Levi, Ruby,” she said.

  “Hi,” Levi said. He was young, maybe twenty, with a pasty white face and yellow-blond hair cut short around his ears like shorn wheat. A pigtail hung down his neck to just above his shoulder blades.

  Ruby looked as young as Levi, but her hair and her eyes contradicted her face. From the roots to the nape of her neck her hair was almost white, but from where she had gathered it into a braid to her waist it was jet black, like she had dyed it and was letting the gray grow out. Her eyes were milky white in the center, dark brown on the rim of the iris, with fine wrinkles cracking at the corners of her eyelids, like she had been squinting into sunlight for ninety years. Young face, old eyes, old hair the texture of corn silk . . . Ruby’s face seemed confused about its age.

  She seemed to stare through me, her face going blank for a moment, then expression returning. “I had a thought,” she said. “Maybe a message, but nothing. Pleased to meet you, Holmes.” Ruby looked at Levi, took his hand with a hand gloved like Blue Braid’s. “We should go see if Nike needs our help.”

  I watched her go with Levi, stared at the young-and-old hair. A thought occurred to me. “What’s your name?” I asked Blue Braid.

  She looked down, the braid swishing before her face. “I told you: I don’t have a name,” she said.

  “We call her Blue,” Bron said. “Why do you think she picked you up?”

  “You really want
me to read your name?” I asked.

  Blue nodded. “Please?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Later,” Bron said. “We better go up and see the captain.” Bron turned, moved forward, and Blue and I followed him.

  We walked up a short passageway to the bridge, a low room at the bow of the nacelle—the name for the structure stuck on the bottom of the blimp bag, Blue told me. Ruby sat at a console, and Levi stood before a wheel at the very bow of the room. A man in blue coveralls, with graying hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and long slender fingers sat in a big chair just aft of the ship’s wheel. He wore a tattered blue baseball cap that had a design like a checkmark on it, with the word NIKE above the mark. He turned as we came in, looked at me, snorted.

  “Blue,” he said, “What’s this?”

  “A reader, Nike,” Blue said. “You told me if I ever found a reader to grab him.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nike said. “The last two ‘readers’ you picked up wanted to get into your pants, not into books.”

  She blushed, the red of her skin highlighting that Maori mask. “Nike, this guy can read. I saw him.”

  “He read my card,” Bron said.

  “Oh yeah?” the guy asked. “Read this, kid.”

  He reached into a pouch on the side of his chair, threw a book at me. The pages fluttered, and I caught it by the binding, holding the book open. I turned the book over, looked at the title: Moby Dick, by some guy named Herman Melville. There was a picture of these men in a boat going after a big whale. I turned to the page I’d caught, page 307, stabbed my finger halfway down, and read aloud.

  “But, to this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.”