"Someone will track it down someday," Rosina told Leo, comfortingly. "We ourselves don't know the full extent of Game activities, but there must be tens of thousands of buried traces... . Someone in the future, the next century maybe, with time on their hands and real resources for once and some proper database investigation, they'd be able to dig us all up and piece the story together." She smiled. "And utterly condemn us!"
"That's their privilege. A privilege we're giving to the future. Two great privileges-survival and innocence."
"That's why we're dead people now," Rosina said. "You know what we are, Jane? We are lifeboat cannibals. We did something terrible that had to be done, and now we're sitting here, sitting here on these couches right now in front of you, still smacking our lips on the shreds of meat from a dead baby's thighbones. We've done things that are way past sin and become necessity. We are vile little pale creepy creatures that live deep under the rocks, and we belong by rights with the anonymous dead." She turned to the man at the scanner. "How does it look, Red?"
"It looks pretty good," Red said. "Real quiet."
"Then I want to go first. Get this damned thing off me, somebody." She lifted her left arm. No one moved. Rosina raised her voice. "I said I want to go first! I'm volunteering! So who's gonna cut it for me?"
The very young man in the suit stood up. "You know what the hell of this is?" he said to Jane, his dark eyes like two oysters from a can. "The hell is that you bust your ass for five years finding some network doods that are truly elect, and then they turn out to be this crowd of middle-aged rich pols and lawyers! People who post way too much about academic political philosophy shit that doesn't mean anything, and then when it finally comes to taking some real action, it's always somebody else's fault, and they end up hiring some bent Mexican cop to do it for them. Jesus Christ!" He sighed. "Gimme that pneumatic. dood."
The second chess player reached under the leather couch and handed the young man a pair of pneumatic diamond-edged bolt cutters. "You want the safety goggles?"
"Do I look like I want fuckin' safety goggles? Wimp!" He hefted the bolt cutters and turned to Rosina. "Out. Out on the stairs."
The two of them left.
No one said anything for thirty seconds. They dealt cards, they studied the chessboard, Leo pretended huge interest in the broadband scanner. They were in anguish.
Rosina came back in, her wrist bare. A big bright smile. Like a woman on cocaine.
"It works!" gasped the second chess player. "Me next!"
The young man came in with the bolt cutters. The armpits of his suit were soaked with sweat.
"Do me next!" said the second chess player.
"Are you kidding?" said the very young man. "I know statistics. Let somebody else do it this time."
"I'll do it," Leo told the chess player. "If you'll do me afterward."
"Deal, Leo." The chess player blinked gratefully. "You're a straight shooter, Leo. I'm gonna miss you too, man."
They went out of the room. A minute passed. They came back in.
"We're real lucky," said the second chess player. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a canary-yellow washcloth he'd snagged from the bathroom.
"Either that," the very young man scoffed, "or they're not designed as well as we thought. What'd you do with the dead bracelets?"
"Left 'em in the hall."
"We'd better detonate 'em later. Wouldn't want anybody reverse-engineering that circuitry."
"Right," said Leo, with a glance at Jane. "You can see now why the Crimson Avenger became so integral to our group! Only nineteen years old-but there's one of those young rascals in every network; it happens to even the best of company."
"Why did you come here?" Jane asked the Crimson Avenger.
"I been in the Game five years now," the Crimson Avenger muttered. "It gets real old." His face clouded. "And besides, if I don't clear town but good, I'm gonna have to kill both my lame bitchfucker parents! With a fuckin' shotgun!"
Two of the poker players rose-the Asian guy and the second woman. They exchanged a silent glance heavy with deep personal meaning and the man took the bolt cutters and they left together.
Fifteen seconds later there was a loud explosion. Then, screams.
Everyone went white as paper. The screams dwindled to agonized breathy sobs.
The Crimson Avenger reached inside his jacket and pulled Out a snub-nosed ceramic revolver and walked stiff-legged to the door. He yanked it open, leaving it open behind him. There was a brief gabbling wail of anguished terror, and a shot. Then another shot. And then a long, meditative silence. And then another final shot.
Crimson Avenger came back in, with his suit lightly spattered with blood, flying little droplets of blood on the shins of his charcoal-gray trousers. He had the cutters-the diamond jaws of the device were blackened with impact. "Hers blew," he said. "We don't have to do his now. He's dead too."
"I think I've changed my mind," said the first chess player.
Without changing expression, Crimson Avenger lowered his pistol and pointed it at the bridge of the first chess player's glasses. "Okay, dood."
"Never mind, I'm going." He looked at Red, the radioman. "Let's do it."
"I'm going too," said Crimson Avenger.
"Why?" said the chess player.
"Because I got left over, and you're gonna do me last. And because if you wimp out and try to run off with that bracelet on, you're gonna do it with my bullet in your head." He sniffed, and coughed. "Dood, for a guy with three advanced degrees, man, you are fuckin' slow!"
They left. And they came back alive.
"I think a twenty-five-percent mortality rate is extraordinarily good under the circumstances," said Leo.
"Considering the extreme precautions taken to keep us from accomplishing this... yes, quite acceptable," said the second chess player.
The television, which had been showing snow, flickered into life again.
"Look, it's hitting Oklahoma City," said the first chess player. He turned up the sound a bit, and the six surviving Garners settled in on the couch, their faces alight with deep interest.
"Look at the way they've networked those urban securicams to catch that first damage wave coming in," said Red. "Not only that, but they are the very first back on the air! The staff at Channel 005 are really technically adept."
"Leave it on 005," said the second chess player. "They're definitely the best fast-response storm team in the country."
"You got it." Red nodded. "Not that we have any choice. I think everything else is still down." He began channel-switching the second set.
"Whoa," Leo told him. "Look at that SESAME satellite shot... . That's very odd, people. Oklahoma City seems to be under siege by a giant doughnut."
Rosina chuckled.
"That's a very odd shape, isn't it, Jane? What does it mean?"
Jane cleared her throat. "It means... it means that Jerry is right. Because I've seen that shape before, in his simulations. That's not a spike, it's a... well, it's a giant torus vortex down on the ground. I mean, you think of a tornado . .. and you turn it sideways and you put the tip of it into the top of it, like a snake eating its own tail.
And it becomes a giant ring, a tows. And it sucks in updraft from all directions outside the ring, and it spews downdraft out the top and sides, and it's stable. And it just gets bigger until all the heat and moisture are gone."
"What does that imply, exactly?"
Jane felt tears slide thinly down her cheeks. "I think it means that all my friends are dead."