Then again, exposing the interior of the RV to the storm directly would as like to have had him shredded on the spot.
As suddenly as it had started, the storm stopped, as if a switch had been thrown.
Even in a terrain of desert heat punctuated by violent squalls and flash-floods, weather shouldn’t happen this fast. Something inside insisted, blindly, that the sheer speed of the transitions was wrong.
Little Deke-and you’d better believe that no one made jokes about his name to his face-had explained all this to Eddie once.
They had been grabbing a couple of cool ones after junking the almost complete wreck of a Malaysian caterpillar-treaded logging rig deposited up on the mesa by a particularly violent storm. This was back in the days when things had been cool between Eddie and Deke, and Eddie was working for food and a place to sleep behind electrowire.
Eddie had advanced the proposition that the shitstorms were maybe being done to the world by aliens-to the vague extent of what he imagined aliens to be. It seemed to be about as strange and pointless as corn-holing rednecks out of their pickup trucks and messing around with cows, that was for sure.
“What the fuck would aliens be doing, going around dropping shit on folk?” Little Deke had told him. “They got all those there laser cannon and tactical nukes and shit. Or they would have if they even existed in the first place. But they don’t. Not like you mean. They proved it. There’s nothing out there in space we can use. It’s empty. That’s what space means.”
Little Deke was the richest man Eddie knew, and he knew things. One of his first acts, on settling down in his junker’s yard outside of Las Vitas, had been to install an array of parabolic dishes, hooking him into the global datanet, TV-syndication and all manner of other shit. Eddie had been forced to bow, outwardly at least, to his wisdom.
“So where does it come from?” he’d asked Little Deke. “I mean, what causes it?”
“Skyhooks.” Little Deke had gestured in a direction that to Eddie, who had less sense of compass-direction than of how you were supposed to tell one gangcult from another, could have been anywhere.
“Shit they’re building out in Florida,” Little Deke explained, “up there in Boston, whole bunch of other places. Run a monomolecular wire down from a satellite and you can run shit up and down it like a fuckin’ elevator.”
“If there’s nothing up there in space,” mused Eddie, who thought he had spotted a logical flaw, “then why do the guys need an elevator to go up there?”
“Fuck should I know? Maybe all them rich corporate folks from the compound blocks like the view.”
Deke took another pull on his Corona, noticed it was empty, scowled and flung it at a ferroconcrete stanchion, where it shattered. Most of the shards fell in a sawn-off oil drum that half-heartedly served as a recycling bin.
“All I know is, they seriously fuck up the weather,” he said. “‘A step-system of microclimatic tiers existing on the point of localised catastrophic cascade-collapse’ or some such happy crap from Discovery Weather Channel. All I got from that was that the weather round these parts is frankly screwed. These days anything can fall out of the fuckin’ sky.”
Microclimatic tiers on the point of catastrophic cascade-collapse or not, Eddie still found it hard to imagine what kind of storm could pick up a bunch of tools and the suchlike from Smolensk, or wherever, transport it halfway around the globe then and dump it on some out of the way spot in New Mexico.
Or how it could be caused by someone just hanging what was basically a string from a satellite down in Florida. He just couldn’t imagine the through-line of how it could be possible.
The point about that, though, was that when it actually happened, imagination was not required.
It was like the way that if the Lord God Almighty were to suddenly turn up, spraying lightning from his fingers and demanding sacrifice, you wouldn’t start debating your belief in him or otherwise; you’d be casting around like a bastard and wondering where you could find the nearest fatted calf.
The engineered algae that permeated the blacktop of the main highways, and kept them in a state of constant self-repair, was doing its stuff. Holes punched in the surface by hail and debris were knitting themselves together, the debris itself sinking as though dropped into a pool of engine oil.
Eddie could never quite work out how the algae knew the difference between garbage and, for example, a battered old Kraut Karrier piece of crap that was barely one step away from being garbage at the best of times. He worried about that, sometimes. He had visions of the blacktop yawning open one of these days and swallowing him up.
In any event, it was fortunate that Eddie had decided to risk the highway, as opposed to sticking to the dirt roads. A shit-storm out there would have churned the ground to mud, leaving him bogged down and stranded-whether for hours or days, it didn’t matter in the present circumstance.
Even minutes might be too long.
Eddie turned the engine over and swung a glance back into the RV, which was more than somewhat cramped. The old guy was lying on the sprung fold-down bunk that had served as Eddie’s bed these last few years, coma-still body loosely wrapped in mirror-reflective polymer sheeting like a pot roast in a microwave.
Tubes and wires ran from under the sheeting to modular portable medpacks, their inner workings pumping and whirring away with a sound like the insides of a notebook computer. Their displays were shut down to eke out the power remaining in their cells.
Eddie had lugged the old guy into the van and installed the med-packages under the semi-lucid instruction of the girl in the nurse’s costume.
On first seeing her, he had assumed she was just that-a hooker in costume, hired by some rich old guy to go with the clinical technology that actually did the job.
She had known her business, though, even while going about the business of dying from the wound in her gut. Eddie had wondered if she couldn’t have used some of the old guy’s medical crap on herself, but she had insisted, quite vehemently, that there would be no point. The important thing was to get her charge to GenTech.
Her name, so Eddie gathered when she was lucid, was Trix Desoto.
Now Trix Desoto lay, curled up foetally and clutching her belly, on a couple of garbage sacks containing the old clothes that were pretty much all Eddie owned. Still alive, but in a bad way.
The sense of sheer sex she exuded, in collision with the bloody horror of her wound, made Eddie feel weird. It was like patching into a descrambled movie channel and suddenly realising you were watching pay-per-view snuff.
The wound beneath her interlaced fingers had stopped bleeding. Eddie knew enough, having seen enough people die even in his few tender years, to know this meant one of two things: blood-loss, shock and coma-or, if there was enough blood left for the heart to pump, lingering on for hours and days before the infection from her messed-up insides finally took her down.
She seemed to be going the second route. Burning and shaking with fever-and this seemed a little odd. It had just come on too fast, like the way that shitstorms came and went too fast to be possible, like a switch being thrown.
It was just in his mind, but he felt like he could feel the heat she was putting out, pulsing over his face like the radiation from a thermal element.
“Storm’s over,” Eddie told her. “We’re moving again. Listen, you’re not looking so good…”
“ Talekli lamo da ti saso ma, hasi de lospadretnaso tik de lama… ” The girl was babbling with delirium. “ Masa tu so gladji beri rama… ”
Somebody had once told Eddie that English was his second language, and he didn’t have a first one. Even he could tell, though, that this wasn’t any kind of language you could find on Planet Earth. It was like that Speaking in Tongues shit they did over at the Dog Soup Tabernacle up in Silver City.