“Ladies,” he said, as he walked inside the circle of revving hogs, clapping his boys on the back or the head, “do me proud, but come back in one piece.”
When he got to the end of the line, he laid a hand on the shoulder of his second in command and leaned in to the Spider’s ear.
“I need you to hang back with me,” Buzz said.
Spider let up on the throttle but squinted at Buzz to show his confusion. Buzz shook his head.
“Can’t be helped,” he said. “But I’ll make it up to you, I swear.” Then he stepped back to the next in line, the Elephant, and yelled, “Spider’s hanging back with me. We got some business. You’re in charge, Tubby. Keep the family circle.”
The Elephant nodded, both thrilled and frightened by the responsibility. Then he signaled with his pudgy hand and led the pack out of the lot and out of the Park, headed for some restorative mayhem.
Spider waited until all the boys had departed and the roar of the hogs was fading down Grenada. Then he leaned back in his mount and said, “The fuck, Buzz?”
Buzz chucked his deputy under the chin and said, “What’s the matter, boy? You ain’t getting enough?”
“I get all I need,” Spider said, shutting down his bike and climbing off to hover under Buzz’s chin.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Buzz said, slinging an arm across Spider’s neck to walk him back into the factory. “You barely got enough left for our girl.”
“I ain’t heard her complain,” Spider said.
“Well, now,” Buzz said, “complaining ain’t exactly Nadia’s style. Is it?”
Spider started to laugh and said, “I guess it ain’t.” And then they were both laughing, punching and poking each other, just a couple of irrepressible rebels, like in the old days back in Oakland, when they’d first gotten together. Back when the family was new and everything seemed inevitable. They’d met at a swap out in the hills of Berkeley, a kind of underground flea market for bikers and dopers and anarchists. Spider was buying a unit of crank and Buzz was picking up a case of test tubes and they almost came to blows over who would get the same issue of a favorite comic book.
Until that day, Spider had been a committed loner. On his own since the age of ten, he’d imagined himself the last individual, and he’d valued independence over any other virtue he’d ever sampled. But here he was, three years in, an Abomination. Another motherless brother, as the song put it. The thing was, Buzz had offered what no one else could — a shared independence. A liberty so radical it could scorch all the old freedoms and deliver an emancipation too real to refuse.
Spider wasn’t sure when he’d stopped believing Buzz Cote’s bullshit. Maybe it was Cincinnati. Maybe Louisville. But wherever it had happened, it was, he knew, the first time he’d experienced genuine grief. In the wake of that grief came the decision to split off from the family and form his own crew. And now, whenever the thought of fucking over Buzz and the boys started to bother him, Spider just remembered the fact of his own disbelief and the anxiety melted away instantly.
“You really think it’s a good idea, though,” Spider said as they entered the mill, “lettin’ the boys ride without me?”
“The boys’ll be fine,” Buzz said. “You got to have more faith.”
“But what was so important, you needed me to hang back?”
“It’s a bird problem,” Buzz said, his face as serious as his tone.
“A bird problem,” Spider said. “What the fuck’s that mean?”
“I’ll show you,” said Buzz, and he led the way through the first floor toward the rear of the mill.
The factory was organized by product makes and models, with each floor given over to the many shapes and sizes of a particular replacement part. The layout followed the logic of the human body itself: feet and legs were manufactured on the first floor; testicles and hips on the second; hands, arms, elbows, and shoulders on the third; all manner of oral implements — from tongues to teeth to palates — on the fourth; and eyeballs and sockets, ears and noses on the fifth. Skull plates, administrative offices, and research and development shared the top floor.
Buzz had poked around a bit up on six, rooted through R & D prototypes that had been left behind. He didn’t recognize everything he inspected, but some of the products left him with a queasy feeling that lasted several nights.
The work area of each floor was a plain of open space, made into intricate mazes by aisles of mammoth heavy machinery, all of it gunmetal gray or dull green. The floors were cold concrete, stained black by oil; the ceilings, a tangled canopy of wiring and piping. There were small, boxy windows fit into the brick here and there, but the glass was a heavy, opaque variety that let in little light. In addition, the windows were fitted, inside and out, with security grates, a black wire mesh, which gave a sense that the building could be converted from factory to penitentiary in a heartbeat.
The rear of the first floor was outfitted with a huge cafeteria. When the Abominations first colonized the Harmony, Buzz had the boys cart out all but the largest of the round, aluminum lunch tables and the bikers dropped their bedrolls and turned the room into a dormitory and clubhouse. They had running water and the Fluke had managed to jerry-rig some electricity to power the lights, stove, and refrigerator.
Beyond the cafeteria, at the very back of the mill, was a freight lift whose car remained locked up on the sixth floor no matter what the Ant tried. So, instead of elevator races for entertainment, the boys had begun climbing in the shaft, hauling themselves up and down like apes on the chains and wires that dangled into the blackness of the cellar.
As he moved through the central aisle between the gargantuan lathes, Buzz suddenly let out a war cry and started to sprint toward the shaft. Spider flinched but caught on fast and began to race after his leader. And when they reached the shaft, the two men flung themselves at the same time, catching different cables and lowering their bodies, hand over hand, into the bowels of the factory.
They emerged into the basement, a cavern of piping, storage, and furnaces that stunk of chemicals and sewage. Buzz pulled out a flashlight and clicked on a beam that revealed hundreds of drums of dyes and oils, countless barrels of paints and pigments. And though neither one of them said anything, they could both feel the rats breathing among the abandoned supplies.
In the center of the darkness sat a monster of an incinerator, a huge brick kiln, like a prison house for elves, with a cast-iron door on its face big enough for a man to climb through. The top of the oven fed into a steel funnel that tied to the factory’s main stack, which rose up through all the floors and, finally, through the roof.
Buzz put down the flashlight and took hold of the gear wheel on the furnace door as if he wanted to pry it loose from the incinerator. He made a face as though furious and constipated, then he used all of his upper body strength to budge the wheel. It groaned through years of rust but it turned, slowly and with a terrible sound. And when it could turn no more, Buzz took a breath, stepped back, and pulled the door open.
Spider hunched to look inside. He stared for several seconds but could see nothing. Straightening up, he looked at Buzz and shrugged.
“I need you,” Buzz said, “to climb in.”
It was a moment before Spider could laugh and, when he did, Buzz joined in. But when the laughing faded, awkwardly, Buzz said, “In you go.”
“The fuck you say?” Spider asked.