Alex watched as Buzzard plunged into his thicket of screens and menus. Alex guessed that he was tweaking the flow of data from distant Troupe weather instruments, but as far as Alex knew, Buzzard might as well have been bobbing for digital apples.
Buzzard worked a long time, in a glassy-eyed trance of efficiency, stopping twice to decant some dire herbal concoction into a paper cup.
Alex, testing his ingenuity toits limits, managed to pry open one of the Troupe's communication channels on a spare laptop. Rudy and Rick, in the Baker pursuit vehicle somewhere in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, were getting very excited about hail. Not so much the size of it, as the color. The hail was black.
"Black hail," Alex remarked.
"That's nothing," Buzzard said, tugging on the metal lump he wore on a thong around his neck. "Just means there's a little dust in it. It's gettin' real dry up in Colorado. Lotta dust, lotta haze up top... black hail. It can happen."
"Well, I've never seen black hail before," Alex said. "And it sounds like they haven't either."
"I saw a stone fall out of the sky once," Buzzard said. "It hit my fuckin' house."
"Really?"
"Yeah. And this is the one." Buzzard tugged the metal lump, sharply. "The biggest piece of it, anyhow. Came right through the roof of my bedroom. I was ten."
"Your house was hit by a meteor?"
"Cotta happen to somebody," Buzzard said. "Statistics prove that." He paused, stared into the screen in deep abstraction, then looked up. "That's nothin' either. Once I sawa ram of meat."
"Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me, do ya, kid? Well, go back in the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have seen in the past, falling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black bail. Black rain. Red rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow, black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."
"What kind of meat?" Alex asked.
"Shaved meat. No hair on it, or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno, sliced mushrooms or sliced potatoes or something, except it was red and bloody wet and it had little veins in it. It just kinda fell out of a dark cloudy sky one summer, fallin' kinda slow, like somebody throwing potato chips. A little shower of sliced-up meat. About as wide as, I dunno, a good-sized highway, and about eighty meters long. Enough to fill up a couple of big lawn bags, if you raked it up."
"Did you rake it up?"
"Fuck no, man. We were scared to death."
"There were other people seeing this?" Alex said, surprised. "Witnesses?"
"Hell yes! Me, my dad, my cousin Elvin, and my cousin Elvin's probation officer. We were all scared to death." Buzzard's eyes were dilated and shiny. "That was during the State of Emergency.... Most of middle America was one big dust bowl. I was a teenage kid in a suburb in Kentucky, and the sky would get black at noon, and you'd get a layer of airborne Iowa or Nebraska or some shit, onto your doors and windows, dry brown dirt in layers as thick as your fingers. Heavy weather, man. People thought it was the end of the world."
"I've heard of big dust storms. I've never heard of any shaved meat."
"I dunno, man. I saw it happen. I never forgot it, either. I think my Dad and Elvin managed to forget about it after a couple years, kinda block the memory out, but I sure as hell never did. Sometimes I get the feeling that people must see shit happen like that all the time. But they're always too scared to report it to anyone else. People don't like to look like they're .........nd you sure didn't want to do it during the State of Emergency, they were doing that 'demographic relocation' shit at the time, and people were really scared they were gonna end up in weather camps. It was mega-heavy, mega-bad. .
Buzzard glanced down at his screen. What the hell is this?" He dug down in the maze of screens and came up with a flashing security alert. "Hell, we got some kind of ground car outside the camp! Dude, run outside and see!"
Alex didn't run, but he left the yurt at a brisk walk and looked. There was an almost silent, spanking-new civilian truck outside the camp, a big cream-colored four-wheeler with tinted windows and an air-conditioned camper. The truck stopped well outside the perimeter in a spew of dust, exciting the goats, who bounded off timidly among the tepees.
Alex ducked back inside the command yurt. "Somebody's here, man! Some kind of fancy truck with a big aerial."
"Hell!" Buzzard looked annoyed. "Storm spotters, wannabes. You go tell 'em to get lost, man, tell 'em there's nothing going on here. If you need any help, yell, and me and Joe and Sam will back you up."
"Okay," Alex said. "I get it. No problem."
He walked deliberately into the open outside the yurt, waved his paper hat at the truck, and waited for them to open fire on him.
The strangers didn't shoot. Two men clñnbed peaceably out of their nice truck and stood there. His heart rate slowed. Life would go on.
Alex began to feel almost fond of the two men. It seemed very decent of them to be so obligingly normal, to just be a couple of guys in a truck, instead of nightmarish maniac structure-hit bandits randomly shooting up the camp while everyone else was in Oklahoma. Alex put his hat back on and strolled toward the strangers, slowly and with his hands in plain sight. He deliberately hopped the wire around the perimeter posts.
As he walked slowly closer he recognized one of the men. It was the black Ranger bush tracker, one member of the Ranger posse who'd visited camp a couple weeks earlier. The Ranger was in civilian gear, ragged jean cutoffs and a beat-to-shit yellow T-shirt with the legend NAVAJO NA11ON RODEO on it. No rifle this time, apparently.
To Alex's considerable surprise, he recognized the other man as well.
The circumstances came back at him with a sharp chemical rush.
He'd been in a backroom of the Gato Negro in Monterrey, with four of his dope-vaquero acquaintances. They were on a field trip from Matamoros, where Alex had been undergoing treatment at the time. The vaqueros were killing time waiting for their man from Monterrey to show with some of the medically necessary. So they were doing lines of cocaine off the marble café table, cocaine cut with one of Don Aldo's home-brewed memory stimulants, one of those blazingly effective smart-drug concoctions that bad so thoroughly fucked the ability of government and business leaders to function in the longer term.
Being dope vaqueros, their idea of a good time was to get really wired on this shit and then play a big-stakes tournament of the Spanish-language version of Trivial Pursuit. Cocaine gave Alex heart fibrillations, and he didn't drink, either, and thanks to enormous gaps in his education and his general life experience, he was dog meat at any kind of Trivial Pursuit, much less a Mexican version. But Don Aldo had favored him with a thumbnail's worth of the smart drug, and Alex hadn't quite dared to spurn the good Don's hospitality. He snorted it up and began placing little side bets on the progress of the game. Alex was a very good loser. It was the key to his popularity in these circles.
After about twenty minutes, everything in the Gato Negro had started to take on that false but radiant sense of deep meaning that always accompanied chemical memory enhancement, and then these other guys had come in. Three of them, very well dressed. They breezed past the muscle guy at the door, without being patted down for weapons. And this caused Don Aldo, and Juan, and Paco, and Snoopy immediate concern, for Monterrey was not their turf, and their own ceramic Saturday-night specials were in the possession of the house.
The three strangers had regally ignored the vaqueros and had sat down at the room's far corner, and had ordered café con leche and immediately plunged into low, intense conversation.