Daybreak would bring back the world where people had a place, and filled it well, and knew they belonged there.
Grady and Tracy had about half a ton of gold in the concealed second hold, but until there was a safe way and place to spend it, they planned to fish and do small trading; hard work, but climbing mountains and sailing long distances is hard work, so it would be nothing they couldn’t handle.
Grady handed her a beer. “Hard work is overrated.”
“Where did that come from?”
“The cooler.”
“No, silly boy, what you just said.”
“Oh, I was just thinking, the trouble with people who do hard work is that they think it entitles them to whatever they want. Every damn rice farmer in Asia wants to be able to buy all the cheap plastic crap his shack can hold—”
“Do they call them shacks?”
“They call them something in Chinese or some language, hon, it’s just an example.”
“I mean, is it something we’d call a shack or is it more like a hut?” That little smile he had loved madly since St. Albans quirked up the corner of her mouth.
He gulped some icy beer and said, “I did have sort of a point.”
“Okay.” She squirmed to sit up straighter and did her best to look very, very serious.
God, he thought, it’s good to be this in love with my wife after fifteen years. “Oh, just that Asian rice farmer—let’s call him Wong—”
“Fong.” The challenging twinkle in her eye meant You are so getting laid tonight.
“Fong it is. Anyway, Fong’s an example of someone who really overrates hard work. See, because he works like a sonofabitch farming rice, and his kids work hard and long making cheap plastic crap in the factory, he thinks he’s entitled to buy all the cheap plastic crap he can stuff into his shack. He doesn’t get that life is hard work, whether it’s picking rice or climbing Everest or managing a company. Hard work doesn’t have anything to do with it; you should work hard wherever you are and shut the fuck up. You see what I mean?”
“No,” she said. “Six minutes.”
“What?”
“Six minutes since you took over launching balloons, and you haven’t launched even one. You’re not even close to beating me.”
He laughed and said, “Now time me on this next one.”
“Go,” she barked.
He lunged for the next balloon and jar. One hundred four more tries, and he never beat her best time, but he was pretty bombed for the last thirty. “What a grand day,” he said, watching the last one sail off toward the California coast. “What a goddam well grand day, with a grand life to follow.”
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. ON I-90 EAST BETWEEN GILLETTE AND SHERIDAN. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Probably that nice hippie mechanic guy just didn’t realize that some younger girls like interesting older guys, Marshalene decided. He was a good mechanic, though, no question. According to the graphics on the dash, the gas engine had settled right on the peak of the power curve and was purring away in easy perfection, despite being an antique 2012 model, spinning power out to the wheel motors and filling up the batteries. Or maybe it always did that, but she preferred to think hippie mechanic guy did it. Especially if he was thinking about me while he did.
She had finished the chicken from the bucket and was well into the Doritos, her coustajam hookmix cranked up to the top, buzzing the two car windows that weren’t quite tight. Well, it was sad college hadn’t worked out, but right now she had food and tunes and open road ahead of her, and she was good at accepting what was good and not worrying much.
To her left, in the other lane, she saw a column of trucks drafting; the IBIS wireless system on the interstates, one of Prez Pendano’s big deals that her dad was always complaining about the cost of, let a whole big huge row of trucks work their brakes all together, so they could be almost on each other’s asses, taking turns breaking the wind for each other. It meant sometimes you’d have like five gazillion trucks passing you on the highway.
No worry about passing them because when they were drafting, they were doing like a hundred or better; that didn’t seem fair to Marshalene, but shit, life wasn’t fair. She’d just barely found her groove, living in Missoula, when they threw her out of her apartment and made her go home. The whole world was full of mean people, and like the sticker said, they sucked.
Behind the rear passenger-side motor, where Jason had planted them, the two black eggs were getting steady sunlight from the south, warmth from the motor, and a steady flux of alternating magnetic fields; as programmed, each of them kept resetting and streaming out slightly different versions of nanoswarm every hundred thousand copies or so, which was about every four seconds.
Almost all of the nanoswarm were caught in the slipstream as the air rushed around the spinning wheels, scattered into the wake in the air behind the Prius. The strong southwest wind off the mountains blew them in a thick cloud across the wide median; some landed in the dirt, many on the small, scrawny pine trees or in the brush, but millions of nanoswarm were sucked into the six-mile-long cyberlinked truck convoy, lighting in the engines and on grilles, finding energy sources and metal and beginning to feed and reproduce.
By the time Marshalene’s Prius had passed—only about two minutes, since they were going in opposite directions—all 562 trucks in the locked chain were infected, and for the next few hours, they covered Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho’s lifeline highway with tens of billions of nanoswarm, till a few peeled off the convoy; till their engines, electronics, and motors failed and stranded a few more; and till the rest piled at the foot of a cliff in Lookout Pass where IBIS had gone dead and so had the warning system.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Behind a boarded-up apartment building, Zach stripped off his coat, and with it the cheap whiskey smell; his dirty, ragged outer shirt; and his filthy dreadlocked wig and knit cap. He left the clothes on the old bicycle, to be stolen and carry the bug farther. The wig might look suspicious, so he threw it under the old, rotting deck—anyone who saw it would think it was a dead animal.
At the mall, Zach squatted in the stall till the men’s room was empty, then climbed at once onto the sink, pushed up the ceiling tile, and pulled down the white plastic bag. He jumped down and scrubbed the brownish blotchy makeup off his face, hands, and neck in the sink.
In the stall, he took clean shoes, shirt, pants, and a light jacket from the bag. He dug out the hotel keys and car keys from the pocket of his bum pants, and put his bum clothes into the bag. As he emerged from the stall, carrying the white bag discreetly by his side, a high-pitched voice declared, “I’m going to poop right in here,” and an indulgent adult male voice said, “That’s right, Malachai, that’s what we come here for.”
Zach nodded at the little boy and his harried father; the kid looked a lot like his firstborn, Noah, at that same age. Enjoy indoor pooping while you can, Malachai.