Monty laughed, wiped his hands again. ‘You know, babe, sometimes drooling comes from riding things… as you know.’
Charlene smiled and then stuck out her tongue at him. ‘You should be so lucky — which you will be, if you get your muscular ass back here before two o’clock, ‘fore the kids get home. Deal?’
‘Deal, love.’
‘Good,’ she said, walking back into the kitchen, flipping up the towel to show off her shapely butt. ‘Now have a good ride and don’t get killed.’
Monty kept on smiling as he toggled the garage door opener. When the way was clear he straddled the bike and switched on the ignition, gave the start-up lever a good pop. The Harley roared into life with a satisfying thump-burble-burble and in a few seconds he was down the driveway and out on the road. He checked his Timex. A good four hours of quality driving time ahead of him, no highways, no urban centers, just get out into those blue country lanes that still crisscrossed this marvelous land of his, and he remembered those sweet last words of Charlene. Don’t get killed. Maybe a joke but there was a bit of seriousness back there, remembering what happened to him back on September 10th, that awful year. Monty liked keeping secrets from the civilians he worked for — made his image that much meaner and more mysterious — and he knew that everybody gossiped about the burn marks on his face. There were questions about where he had gotten burned — Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan -and everyone assumed that he had been torched in the line of duty, on some heroic mission, and they all assumed wrong. He had been burned on his day off, and in Mary-goddamn-land, when some kid with a week-old driver’s license had blown through a stop sign and punched through the side of another car in front of Monty. He had dumped the cycle, sliding into the car just as the gasoline cooked off and toasted part of his face. And the day and weeks after, when the hammer came down in Afghanistan, he had been stuck in a burn unit, cursing his luck, as his comrades went out and did a job that they had trained their entire lives for.
Not a heroic story at all, damn it.
The motorcycle now seemed like an extension of him as he drove east, not caring what particular road he took or where he was going. The trip was the destination, that was all, just the feeling of the wind in his face, the scent of things growing, the sights of the farmland out there, still being tilled, year after year.
Monty grinned, thinking of what it must have been like out here a couple of centuries ago. Some of those farm buildings had been out there then, fresh new, home to farmers and grazers, and Monty had no doubt that some of his ancestors had been out there as well, working for the Man, dying and living and praying out there in bondage, and here he was, a descendant of theirs, not only prospering in this country but actually sworn to defend it, and man, that was a good feeling.
He kept on riding.
All right, there was another feeling, the one that gave him a quiet warm glow every time, especially when he was around Charlene, the former Miss Charlene Taylor, second runner-up five years ago in the Miss Virginia USA beauty pageant. For when Monty had started dating that fine specimen of Southern womanhood he had been curious about her past and had done a little checking.
He leaned into a corner, felt the way the tires just gripped that pavement, like the firm touch of a masseuse, never letting go.
Okay, a lot of checking. Monty had always been interested in genealogy and had done a lot of work here and there, trying to trace his family back, which was easy enough until you got into the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then the records became spotty at best — and for good reason, of course, because the black men and women of the South back then had been like survivors in some post-nuclear-war landscape, wandering around shellshocked, trying to scratch out an existence in what was left of the Southern economy, fighting off hunger and cold and the nightriders and the Klan. Keeping good records for a safe and prosperous future would sure as hell have been low on their ‘to do’ list.
Leaned into another corner, really picking up speed, thinking for a moment what might happen if that damn vaccination program didn’t work. What kind of life would it be for his children? Growing up a dead country, scrambling around in the looted and empty cities, hearing tales of what it had been like to be the world’s only superpower, being here and now, starving, wondering what it must have been like to live when you didn’t go to bed hungry at night, every night…
Well, fuck that shit. It wasn’t going to happen to his children.
Then Monty laughed. He knew that he shouldn’t have. But his kids — Grace and Marilyn — wouldn’t Charlene’s ancestors have dropped dead from horror at the sight of those light-brown children? For during his genealogy work on his own side of the family, he had done some investigation into her side and had found out that one of her great-great-great-grandfathers had been a prominent slaveholder and a colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia. Monty had always gotten a big-ass kick out of how that proper Southern colonel would have probably shot himself in the head at the knowledge that one of his descendants would be marrying the descendant of a piece of his property.
And as he rode, the laughter kept coming back, as it always did, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Harley.
Victor Palmer walked into the store, almost sighing with pleasure as the smell of old paper and ink came to him. The store was in an otherwise unimpressive strip mall outside Greenbelt, with a Pizza Hut franchise, a Jiffy Lube franchise, a bunch of other franchises and this little store, called Pulp Planet. Sometimes when Victor came here he thought the only thing Americans were good for were setting up franchises so that a strip mall in Maine looked exactly like one in California.
He stood on the scuffed-up linoleum, looked around at the open bins set up against the walls. He walked slowly to the nearest bin, just savoring the anticipation of what lay before him. Rows and rows of old magazines in plastic sleeves were stacked in rows and he let his fingers brush over the plastic, looking at the brightly colored and lurid covers of the pulp magazines from the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Ah, he thought, that had been the time, back fifty and sixty years ago, when there’d been dozens of pulp-fiction magazines published each month, from westerns to men’s adventure to mystery to science fiction and fantasy. The colors were garish, the stories were often poorly written and the advertisements for becoming a ‘he-man’ or getting rid of blackheads were always hilarious. But there was an energy and spirit to the pulps that had always appealed to him, especially during the grueling days of med school and residency. For he enjoyed losing himself in the spirit of the pulps, written during the Depression and the Second World War and the opening decades of the Cold War when the stories had suggested that, no matter how grim the news, anything was possible. Anything.
Victor rummaged carefully through the magazines, look-ing for his particular favorite, Doc Savage, a pulp character that lived from 1933 to 1949. Doc was the subject of more than a hundred serialized novels, involving adventures all around the Earth, fighting crime, fighting evil, working to make the world a better place. A brilliant physician with the crime-fighting abilities of Sherlock Holmes, Doc kept his offices in the Empire State Building and had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Ridiculous stuff, Victor knew, but he loved these tales of black-and-white morality, about evil men with death rays and secret poison clouds, not with hijacked airliners and weaponized anthrax.