"Yeah? Well, they designed it for very smooth. So you can sight automatic weapons off the bumpers at full throttle. Charlie comes from commando stuff, death-by-darkness tiger teams and military structure hits and all that weird ugly crap... . But he sure has some killer apps in civilian life." Juanita ducked as the edge of a long mesquite branch whipped across the windshield, then she put up the roof again, with a jab of her thumb. "The Troupe used to chase storms in old dune buggies. But we were punching the core once on an F-4, and the hail wrapped real hard, and hailstones just beat 'em to death, dented the hoods and roof all to hell... . But Charlie just laughs at hailstones."
"You must be pretty big on hailstones."
"Hailstones have been pretty big on me, Alex. In Oklahoma last spring I got caught in the open. They leave welts on you as big as your fist."
"What's that mean, when you say 'punch the core'?"
Juanita looked surprised. "Well, urn... it means you shoot the vortex when you're running the drones."
"Oh," Alex said.
CHAPTER 2
The vertebrae of tall transmission towers stenciled the horizon.
Juanita's people had set up their tent complex a kilometer from the highway, on a low limestone rise where they could keep a wary eye on any passing traffic. Morning sunlight lit a confusion of round puffy circus tents and the spiked cones of white tepees.
Juanita had doze doff in the journey's last two hours, mopping up bits of twitchy, REM-riddled sleep like a starving woman dabbing gravy from a plate. Now Alex watched with interest as his sister became a different person. In the last few minutes, as they'd neared the camp, she'd become alert, tight-mouthed, warriorly, nervous.
Juanita found a security cuff beneath the passenger seat, and she carefully strapped it on her left wrist. The cuff had a readout watch and a thick strap of tanned, hand-beaded, hand-stitched leather. Some of the beads were missing, and the leather was worn and stained, and from the look on Juanita's face as she strapped it on, Alex could see that she felt a lot better to have it back on again.
Almost as an afterthought, she gave Alex a flimsy-looking plastic cuff, with a cheap watch sporting an entirely useless array of confusing little orange push buttons. "You'll wanna keep that on at all times so you can pass in and out bf camp," she told him.
"Right. Great."
Juanita's car rolled uphill through a last stretch of sparse grass and between a pair of electronic perimeter stakes.
"What's the drill?" Alex asked.
"I have to go talk to Jerry now. About you."
"Oh good! Let's both go have a nice chat with Dr. Jerry.~~
Juanita glanced at him in nettled amazement. "Forget it! I've got to think this through first, how to present the situation to him... . Look, you see those people over there by the kitchen yurt?"
"By the what?"
"By that big round tent. The people with the tripod and the pulley."
"Yeah?"
"Go over there and be nice to them. I'll come fetch you later when I've cleared things." Juanita threw the car door open, jumped out, and half trotted toward the center of camp.
"I got no shoes!" Alex yelped after her, but the wind whipped his words away, and Juanita didn't look back.
Alex pondered his situation. "Hey car," he said at last. "Charlie."
"Yes, sir?" the car replied.
"Can you drive me over to that group of people?"
"I don't understand what you mean by the term group of people."
"I mean, twenty meters, urn, northwestish of here. Can you roll across that distance? Slowly?"
"Yes, sir, I could perform that action, but not at your command. I can't follow the orders of any passenger without a security ID."
"I see," Alex said. "She was right about your interface, Jack. You are totally fucked."
Alex searched through the car, twisting around in his seat. There was no sign of any object remotely shoelike. Then his eyes lit on the cellular phone mounted on the dash. He plucked it up, hesitated over the numeral "1," then speed-dialed "4" instead.
A woman answered. "Carol here."
"Hi, Carol. Are you a Storm Trouper?"
"Yeah," the phone replied. "What's it to ya?"
"Are you presently in a camp on a hillside somewhere off the side of Highway 208 in West Texas?"
"Yeah. That's right." She laughed.
"Are you standing in the middle of a bunch of people who are trying to haul some kind of animal carcass up on a tripod?"
"No, man, I'm in the garage yurt working repair on a fucked-up highway maintenance hulk, but I know the people you're talking about, if that's any help."
"Could you get one of them to bring me a pair of shoes? Size eight?"
"Who the hell are you?"
"My name's Alex Unger, I'm fresh in from Mexico and I need some shoes before I'm gonna leave this car."
Carol paused. "Hold on a sec, Alex." She hung up.
Alex settled back into the seat. After a moment's idle~. ness, he whipped up the phone again and dialed Informaciôn in Matamoros. He asked for the current alias of one of his favorite contacts and had no trouble getting through.
He hung up hastily, though, in the midst of the ensuing.conversation, as a woman approached the car.
The stranger, a black woman, had short black braids cinched with wire, over a broad, windburned, cheerful face. She looked about thirty-five. She wore a paper refugee suit that had been spewed through somebody's fulL color printer, with remarkable results.
The woman handed Alex a pair of sandals through tlK~ open door. The sandals were flat soles of thick dark green vinyl, with broad straps of white elastic cloth freshly glued across the top of the foot.
"What are these?" Alex said. "They look like shower mules."
She laughed. "You need a shower, kid. Put 'em on."
Alex dropped the impromptu sandals on the ground and stuffed his feet into them. They were two sizes too big, but they were more or less the proper shape of his feet and seemed unlikely to fall off. "That's not bad for two minutes' w&rk, Carol."
"Thanks a lot, dude. Since you and your sister are both richer than God, feel free to give me several thousand dollars." Carol looked him over skeptically. "Boy, you're all Jane said you were, and much, much more!"
Alex let that one hang for a moment. "Juanita said I should stay with those people over there until she came back."
"Then that's what you'd better do, man. But do 'em a favor and stay downwind of 'em." Carol stepped back from the car. "And don't mess with our phones anymore, okay? Peter gets real nervous when amateurs mess with our phones."
"Nice to meet you," Alex said. Carol spared him a half wave as she left.
Alex decamped from the car and stepped carefully across the West Texas earth. The narrow-leafed prairie grass looked okay, but the sparse, pebbled ground was scattered about with a scary variety of tiny, wire-stemmed little weeds, all chockablock with burs and hooks and rash-raising venomous bristles.
Alex minced carefully to the group at the tripod. They were busy. They had a velvet-horned buck up by its neck, at a pulley mounted at the junction of three tall tepee poles. There were four of them: two men in long-sleeved hunter's gear, and two hard-bitten women in bloodstained paper and trail boots. One of the men, the one with glasses, had an electric rifle over his back. They were all wearing Trouper cuffs.
"Qué pasa?" Alex said.
"We're butchering Bambi," the second man told him, grunting as he cinched off the end of the pulley rope.
The hunters had already cut the entrails from the animal and dumped them somewhere along the trail. Alex closely examined the animal's lean, swaying, eviscerated carcass.
The taller woman drew a bowie knife of ice-pale ceramic and stepped up to her work. She took each of the buck's dangling rear legs in hand, then slashed out some meaty, ill-smelling gland from within the hocks. She tossed the bloody glands aside, wiped and holstered her bowie knife, and fetched up a smaller knife about the length of her thumb.