Lurkers Read online

  ‘Sup,’ Lamar said, already scanning for the seat he’d abandoned.

  ‘Everything cool here?’ the cop asked. Sometimes—more often than not—I kinda wish cops could be a little more...urbane about things, like that mythical cleancut whitegloved shinedshoed cartoon from the Monopoly board; I’m not talking about sensitivity training so much as finishing school; call me hypocritical, but I don’t really need cops, who do in fact work for me, tossing out obscenities and slander at anyone, suspects or otherwise. But, in this case, the casual nature of the cop in question seemed about right.

  Lamar sat down again. ‘Ain’t no problem, officer,’ he said, overactively disinterested in the conversation.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ the cop agreed, then gave me a glance; I shrugged mostly with my eyebrows, and he nodded knowingly. ‘Just the same,’ the cop added, ‘let’s keep all the hands on top of the table for a while.’

  Lamar looked more worried now. ‘Y’all think I’m packen, officer?’

  ‘Seems like a fair bet. You okay with a patdown?’

  ‘Ah, man,’ Lamar said, ‘Shit I don’t need.’

  ‘Said it, man,’ Jamal agreed, starting to slide to his feet.

  The rearmost cop flanked Jamal. ‘Hold up there, son; one at a time.’

  Jamal deflated back into his seat; Lamar stood up, turned to the table, and interlaced his fingers behind his head.

  ‘Oh good,’ the first cop sang in a decent approximation of half the things Sam Jackson has ever said, ‘You know the position. Makes my job easier. Oh now that’s a shame: a fine black youth like yourself with a concealed weapon; wouldya look at that, Officer Davis.’ He pulled the pistol free of Lamar’s Adidas and handed it back expertly to his partner, who took it and set it quietly on the closest empty table. ‘You a one gun sorta guy, or do I wanna look in your socks for something else.’

  ‘That’s all I got, officer,’ Lamar said, ‘I cool.’

  ‘Oh you cool. You get that Davis?’ He patted Lamar down to his shoes anyway. ‘This one’s cool. We got us a cool little kitty here. How bout you,’ he asked Jamal, ‘How cool are you.’

  Jamal kept his hands on the table, standing up, then lifted his shirt by the collar to reveal his own waistline special.

  ‘Damn, Davis: we got twins.’ He zipcuffed Lamar quickly and nudged him back into his seat before stepping toward Jamal to take his gun too.

  Davis moved in to slip Jamal’s wrists into a ziptie. ‘How you ladies doing tonight,’ he asked.

  ‘Hey we just met these guys,’ Lamar’s chick announced; ‘we ain’t no bangers.’

  ‘That a fact,’ Davis asked, ‘Let’s keep the hands on the table anyhow. Sound good?’

  The first cop had arranged both guns into a square on the table, like shoes in a shoebox. He turned to me. ‘Anything you and me need to talk about?’

  I shrugged, this time with my shoulders. ‘I think you’ve got it worked out,’ I said, ‘Our illustrious morons here came in with an attitude, got verbal, started dancing a bit, and here you are.’

  He tapped one of the guns on the table. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got one of these for me.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I have.’

  ‘You mind if I see that for myself?’

  ‘A little,’ I said, ‘Unless you have a warrant or sufficient probable cause.’

  Anger flashed in his eyes for an instant, then the grin returned easily. ‘I wonder where I might find myself some probable cause.’ He looked to Lamar. ‘If only someone had seen this guy maybe reaching for something?’

  ‘He’s clean,’ Jessica said, appearing behind me, ‘He’s a regular; never been a minute of trouble.’

  I nearly laughed again. It’s probably better that I didn’t.

  NotDavis stared at her eyes for a second. ‘All right then: we’ll leave it at that.’

  Two more cops wandered quickly in and the four mumbled amongst themselves for a moment, occasionally glancing and nodding at roughly everyone in the restaurant; then Davis taking Lamar by the arm, NotDavis taking Jamal, and the two new ones cuffing and taking the two chicks, they all left again amidst negligible pleasantries.

  Jessica leaned toward me. ‘You probably have got a gun, huh.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I have,’ I said again; then I gave her a grin suggesting that I often eat babies.

  She laughed. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Coming right up.’ She took the emptyish pot and walked away toward the kitchen.

  I opened the laptop again.

  ‘I wish that guy’d tried that shit on me,’ Hutch lied.

  I shut the laptop. ‘Are you really still here.’

  ‘I’ve just got a real problem with those people,’ Hutch said, ‘Little bullies like that getting up in your face and shit.’

  I’ve discussed a couple matters with my legal staff; I won’t confirm or deny that I did in fact have a gun with me that night. What I will say is that I didn’t shoot Hutch.

  I reopened the laptop and tried to ignore the mouthy moron for a while.

  SEVEN

  ‘Thankalord!’ George shouted, knocking me out of the book I never finished; looking at the laptop’s screen for a moment, trying to remember how I’d hoped to finish the sentence I’d been on, I finished it probably differently and sat back, stretching my head to the side to crack my neck before scrolling back up to the beginning of that chapter. The clock in the lower right of the screen read 23.17.

  Leslie was looking at me, glancing also down at the back of the screen. I nodded, turning the laptop so she could see the book.

  ‘I didn’t bother printing it to PDF yet; just use the arrowkeys and try not to modify anything.’

  ‘Right.’ She pulled the machine closer and began to read, silently.

  I cleared my throat and gave her a look. Which she understood. I’ve got this policy for coffeechicks: you can read the book, but not to yourself; I can’t tell from over here what you’re reacting to every time you laugh, squint, or whatever. She deflated a bit, exhaling, and arrowed up to the beginning of the chapter before beginning again to read, this time aloud:

  ‘Chapter seven,’ she read, then cleared her throat a bit.

  ‘Yeah,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘Chapter seven,’ she read again, ‘The fires had begun to die along the pavement when Angie emerged from the trunk, dropping the jack to the side and falling to the edge of the road, exhausted from the stress alone. She glanced curiously at the tank under the car, surprised that it hadn’t exploded inches beneath her following the blast; she’d read some book once in which a car had exploded on impact, its empty fuel tank having retained enough fumes to blow up, flipping the entire machine onto its roof; like most people, she’d never had an opportunity to test the hypothesis.

  ‘Until now.

  ‘Now, her car remained intact, if scalded and dusty; ash drifted snowlike to the ground amidst the odd corner of paper and spore of foam rubber; dark, greasy shadows played along the vestigial patches of grass left green to the east of the vehicles which had protected them from the firestorm, the sun now setting in the west behind pillars of black, acrid smoke from the meaningless structures which had been the skyline minutes before.

  ‘If it had been minutes. It might have been years. Her watch had died, probably in the EMP; she pressed a couple buttons, hoping for a response, but got nothing. She didn’t bother to take it off: it probably didn’t matter either way.

  ‘Reclaiming her phone—her flashlight before it had died in there—she confirmed that it was as dead as her watch; still, she stuffed it into the front pocket of her jeans as she circled toward the door.

  ‘Her Zippo was still there on the seat, uncharred; she’d been wrong about that too: she got it to light on the first strike, laughing hopelessly as she glanced again at the flaming city behind her. Shaking a cigarette—’

  Leslie stopped for a moment, glancing downward, probably at the pagecounter to gauge how many p
ages remained between her and the end of what I’d written, which she’d have to get through now before escaping outside for a cigarette of her own. Then she returned to the book:

  ‘—loose from the pack she’d left on the seat with the lighter, leaving herself about three to go on, wondering if any remained unburned in any of the stores out there. It probably didn’t matter much anymore: if the blast had caused an electromagnetic pulse, it had probably irradiated everything in town, including the cigarettes, and including her. She inhaled deeply, waiting for her hair and teeth to fall out. They didn’t.

  ‘Her purse was in the footwell on the far side, probably shaken off the seat when the car had lurched in the shockwave. Feeling for the bump on her forehead, she sat behind the useless wheel and looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t bleeding; at least, not externally. The purse in reach, she picked it up and dropped her smokes inside before opening the glovebox for the stash of Reese’s Miniatures and a pack of Orbits she kept within. The chocolate at least had some sugar and carbs in it; the gum had no calories, but would keep the saliva going for a while.

  ‘Finally, the jacket she’d tossed into the backseat remained as unscathed as the Zippo had. It wouldn’t fit in her purse, and she didn’t need it yet; but she’d bring it along, tied to her waist, for the night ahead. She got back out of the car.

  ‘One last stop at the taillights. The jack had no immediate use, and she’d probably be able to find another one as needed. But she slid the iron free, testing its weight in her hand. It wasn’t much—almost certainly nothing against them. But, she supposed, there would be new enemies now: the other survivors, who as desperation began to set in would likely kill her for her gum alone. She smirked at it, missing her MSixteen; that was probably irreplaceable now, the base likely flattened and melted to glass by those fucking bugs. She closed the trunk, unable now to latch it, holding the lid in place with her left hand before smashing the tool into it, denting the steel impressively, gouging a hexagonal scar in the paint. It wasn’t an assault rifle, if even that would kill the damned things; but it would take out a human enemy if applied to the skull.

  ‘She held the thing up and told it, “You’re my new TripleA Club”; the army had conditioned her to name her weapon, to think of it as her only friend in the world; the habit had sunk in.

  ‘Her Nikes weren’t the jumpboots she’d have preferred, but at least she hadn’t worn heels today; another shake of the TripleA Club, and she launched into a casual jog back toward the remnants of town in which she’d find shelter for the night.’

  Leslie looked at me over the screen. ‘Is it cool if I go grab a smoke for a minute? I’ve got...fourteen pages left, and I’m not sure I can get—’ She saw me nodding quickly. ‘Thanks; be right back.’ And she grabbed her Lights and slid out of the booth, heading for the lobby.

  Behind her seat, a new party had occupied the table formerly held by the Flanders and the gangies: a couple of thirtysomethings, one losing his battle to grow hair anywhere but his throat and wearing an organic TShirt designed to make me feel bad about the lack of peace in Africa, the other wearing a corduroy jeanjacket and beads in her hair. ‘Are you a writer?’ the female asked.

  I reclaimed the laptop. ‘I have a writing implement.’ I know: I stole that from Naked Lunch. But she didn’t know that.

  ‘So how’s it end,’ the guy asked.

  ‘How’s what end.’

  ‘The book. The...I guess she’s a soldier?’

  ‘How should I know,’ I said, ‘I’m still writing it.’

  ‘You didn’t outline it?’ And now I knew what I was dealing with: one of those special little people which has convinced itself that it knows dick about the process and the industry.

  ‘Nope. I don’t do that. I start writing, finish the story, and stop.’

  ‘Not very professional,’ he said, not quite scolding, but not quite silent.

  ‘Don’t tell my readers,’ I said.

  ‘Have you got anything published?’ he asked.

  I don’t know why people ask me that, but they ask me that a lot. I suppose maybe that everyone kinda wants to be a writer, while most everyone sucks at it, and asking whether I’m actually a novelist or just some idiot with a laptop would then allow them to ask what manner of magic is involved in writing something good enough to impress a publisher. Which is pointless, because, in all honesty, I have no idea. I know what I did; I don’t know that what I did would work for anyone else; I don’t even know whether what I did would work for me, if I did it at this point in history. Was it pure luck? No; but, if it had been, I’d have been okay with that too.

  An auxiliary reason, probably correlated to the primary reason, seems to be next to ask what I’ve got published, either so they can read it and try to reverse engineer the magic, letting them know how to do it themselves, or just so they can pretend to know me well enough suddenly to ask for free copies, either to show off as evidence that they know me, to read and reverse engineer, or both.

  In any case: I’ve got stuff published; I suppose you reading this have figured that out by now. For this guy, though, I opened the laptop and went back to the catalogue—the list of stuff I’d written and released to date. For you reading this, since I never finished or released that, the list of stuff Also by Me is back on Page V, three pages before Page One; it’s the same list, since nothing released in the meantime has modified it. I turned the laptop so he could read the list from his seat.

  ‘And those are all published?’ he asked, stupidly.

  ‘Yeah. I write a book, finish it, and upload it to a secured server my publisher controls.’

  ‘Whoa. Aren’t you afraid they’ll just steal it?’

  ‘Not really. The version I upload to them is in PDF, edited and ready to print. I keep the original, uploaded to my own server, timestamped on completion. And why would they steal it? At this point, if they were gonna do something that stupid, they’d benefit more from stealing my name and applying it to something else. And, if they did that, I’d sue them to hell, probably end them, and go to a different publisher.’

  ‘You’re more trusting than I am,’ the idiot said.

  I moved back to the point at which Leslie had stopped reading and closed up the laptop again.

  ‘So it’s about a chick in the army?’ the female asked. I did have to give her points for using the word chick in a world of feministical fragility, if little else.

  ‘She’s not in the army anymore,’ I said, ‘She was, somewhere in the whole backstory; she’d been trying to get to the base she’d been stationed at when the—it’s a long story.’

  ‘So who blew up the city,’ the guy asked, ‘Le’me guess: terrorists.’ He rolled his eyes, having decided that it was true, and that terrorists as plotdevices were the most clichéd, improbable, unrealistic of all possible entities.

  ‘Aliens,’ I said.

  So he was wrong; now he gaped at me as though aliens attacking anyone was less likely than terrorists.

  ‘What,’ I said.

  ‘Why would visitors destroy a city.’

  ‘Because there’s a war going on.’

  ‘The visitors wouldn’t be at war with us.’

  ‘What visitors.’

  ‘Your aliens. They’re not warlike.’

  ‘Uh, yes they are,’ I said.

  ‘How can you say that; they’re a peaceful race.’

  ‘I can say that,’ I began, slowly, not really expecting the idiot to understand as readily as a small child would, ‘because I wrote the book.’

  ‘Then it’s a stupid book,’ he said.

  ‘Then don’t buy a copy.’

  ‘I won’t!’ And he stared at me, apparently waiting for me either to shout good, or to change my mind about something.

  I looked beyond him, to Hutch, who for once seemed to understand something about reality: he was squinting at the back of the guy’s head.

  ‘So,’ the guy began, nearly changing the subject but not enough, ‘You
think the visitors are warlike.’

  Steve Stirling once wrote, in Conquistador, that: There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot. And it’s a pretty good point: I’ve certainly written a few books with characters who, to pick one almost at random, thought that people on average might not be imbeciles allowed to survive not through natural selection but through inane, emotionally defended laws against killing, cooking, and eating most of them; those characters, for example, might conclude that this twerp was against all evidence to date a functional member of the species whose thoughts and opinions and batshit conspiracy hunches warranted our attention and funding for further lack of credible study; personally, I’d disagree with those characters, and I’d win, being their Creator, who works in mysterious ways.

  ‘I don’t think the visitors exist, outside this unfinished book you haven’t read.’

  ‘How can you say they don’t exist,’ he demanded.

  ‘The same way I can write that they do, though without typing anything.’

  ‘Well then...how do you explain the pyramids.’

  ‘Uh, maybe Quetzalcoatl did it.’

  ‘So you don’t have an answer.’

  ‘I have an answer: I just gave it to you. In fact, it’s stupid, unsupported by evidence, and relies on an animal never confirmed to exist through the scientific method; you should embrace that sort of thing.’

  ‘There’s evidence of aliens though,’ he lied.

  ‘Not real evidence. There’s testimony, and a mathematical probability that, amino acids factually compiling autopoietically in nebulae and probably seeding planets with the genetic buildingblocks for RNAbased life, things exist on other planets, parsecs from here; but there’s no evidence or indication that any extraterrestrial life has ever discovered Earth, let alone developed the means to get here and hang out in deserts and trailerparks without starting an interstellar war.’

  ‘But you’re writing a book about it!’

  ‘And it’s fiction.’