Mona Lisa Overdrive

39 - Too Much

What kind of place was this, anyway?

Things had gotten to a point where Mona couldn't get any comfort out of imagining Lanette's advice. Put Lanette in this situation, Mona figured she'd just eat more Memphis black till she felt like it wasn't her problem. The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

They'd driven all night, with Angie mostly out of it -- Mona could definitely credit the drug stories now -- and talking, different languages, different voices. And that was the worst, those voices, because they spoke to Molly, challenged her, and she answered them back as she drove, not like she was talking to Angie just to calm her down, but like there really was something there, another person -- at least three of them -- speaking through Angie. And it hurt Angie when they spoke, made her muscles knot and her nose bleed, while Mona crouched over her and dabbed away the blood, filled with a weird mixture of fear and love and pity for the queen of all her dreams -- or maybe it was just the wiz -- but in the blue-white flicker of freeway lights Mona had seen her own hand beside Angie's, and they weren't the same, not the same, not really the same shape, and that had made her glad.

The first voice had come when they'd been driving south, after Molly'd brought Angie in the copter. That one had just hissed and croaked and said something over and over, about New Jersey and numbers on a map. About two hours after that, Molly'd slid the hover across a rest area and said they were in New Jersey. Then she'd gotten out and made a call from a frosty paybooth, a long one; when she'd climbed back in, Mona'd seen her skim a phone card out across the frozen slush, just throwing it away. And Mona'd asked her who she'd called and she'd said England.

Mona'd seen Molly's hand, then, on the wheel, how the dark nails had little yellowish flecks, like you got when you snapped off a set of artificials. She oughta get some solvent for that, Mona thought.

Somewhere over a river they'd left the highway. Trees and fields and two-lane blacktop, sometimes a lonely red light high up on some kind of tower. And that was when the other voices had come. And then it was back and forth, back and forth, the voices and then Molly and then the voices, and what it reminded her of was Eddy trying to do a deal, except Molly was a lot better at it than Eddy; even if she couldn't understand it, she could tell Molly was getting close to what she wanted. But she couldn't stand it when the voices came; it made her want to press herself back as far from Angie as she could get. The worst one was called Sam-Eddy, something like that. What they all wanted was for Molly to take Angie somewhere for what they called a marriage, and Mona wondered if maybe Robin Lanier was in it somewhere, like what if Angie and Robin were gonna get married, and this was all just some kind of wild thing stars did to get married. But she couldn't get that one to work, and every time this Sam-Eddy voice came back, Mona's scalp would crawl. She could tell what Molly was bargaining for, though: she wanted her record cleaned up, wiped. She'd watched this vid once with Lanette, about this girl had ten, twelve personalities that would come out, like one was this shy little kid and another'd just be this total bone-addict slut, but it hadn't ever said anything about how any of those personalities could wipe your slate with the police.

Then this flatland in their headlights, blown with snow, low ridges the color of rust, where the wind had torn away the white.

The hover had one of those map screens you saw in cabs, or if a truck driver picked you up, but Molly never turned it on except that first time, to look for the numbers the voice had given her. After a while, Mona understood that Angie was telling her which way to go, or anyway those voices were telling her. Mona'd been wishing for morning for a long time, but it was still night when Molly killed the lights and sped on through the dark ...

"Lights!" Angie cried.

"Relax," Molly said, and Mona remembered how she'd moved in the dark in Gerald's. But the hover slowed slightly, swung into a long curve, shuddering over the rough ground. The dash lights blinked off, all the instrumentation. "Not a sound now, okay?"

The hover accelerated through the dark.

Shifting white glare, high up. Through the window, Mona glimpsed a drifting, twirling point; above it, something else, bulbous and gray -

"Down! Get her down!"

Mona yanked at the catch on Angie's seatbelt as something whanged against the side of the hover. Got her down on the floor and hugged her furs around her as Molly slewed left, sideswiping something Mona never saw. Mona looked up: split-second flash of a big raggedy black building, a single white bulb lit above open warehouse doors, and then they were through, the turbine screaming full reverse.

Crash.

I just don't know, the voice said, and Mona thought: Well, I know how that is.

Then the voice started to laugh, and didn't stop, and the laugh became an on-off, on-off sound that wasn't laughter anymore, and Mona opened her eyes.

Girl there with a little tiny flashlight, the kind Lanette kept on her big bunch of keys; Mona saw her in the weak back-glare, the cone of light on Angie's slack face. Then she saw Mona looking and the sound stopped.

"Who the fuck are you?" The light in Mona's eyes. Cleveland voice, tough little foxface under raggy bleachblond hair.

"Mona. Who're you?" But then she saw the hammer.

"Cherry ... "

"What's that hammer?"

This Cherry looked at the hammer. "Somebody's after me 'n'Slick." She looked at Mona again. "You them?"

"I don't think so."

"You look like her." The light jabbing at Angie.

"Not my hands. Anyway, I didn't used to."

"You both look like Angie Mitchell."

"Yeah. She is."

Cherry gave a little shiver. She was wearing three or four leather jackets she'd gotten off different boyfriends; that was a Cleveland thing.

"Unto this high castle," came the voice from Angie's mouth, thick as mud, and Cherry banged her head against the roof of the cab, dropping her hammer, "my horse is come." In the wavering beam of Cherry's keyring flashlight, they saw the muscles of Angie's face crawling beneath the skin. "Why do you linger here, little sisters, now that her marriage is arranged?"

Angie's face relaxed, became her own, as a thin bright trickle of blood descended from her left nostril. She opened her eyes, wincing in the light. "Where is she?" she asked Mona.

"Gone," Mona said. "Told me to stay here with you ... "

"Who?" Cherry asked.

"Molly," Mona asked. "She was driving ... "

Cherry wanted to find somebody called Slick. Mona wanted Molly to come back and tell her what to do, but Cherry was antsy about staying down here on the ground floor, she said, because there were these people outside with guns. Mona remembered that sound, something hitting the hover; she got Cherry's light and went back there. There was a hole she could just stick her finger into, halfway up the right side, and a bigger one -- two fingers -- on the left side.

Cherry said they'd better get upstairs, where Slick probably was, before those people decided to come in here. Mona wasn't sure.

"Come on," Cherry said. "Slick's probably back up there with Gentry and the Count ... "

"What did you just say?" And it was Angie Mitchell's voice, just like in the stims.

Whatever this was, it was cold as hell when they got out of the hover -- Mona's legs were bare -- but dawn was coming, finally: she could make out faint rectangles that were probably windows, just a gray glow. The girl called Cherry was leading them somewhere, she said upstairs, navigating with little blinks of the keyring light, Angie close behind her and Mona bringing up the rear.

Mona caught the toe of her shoe in something that rustled. Bending to free herself, she found what felt like a plastic bag. Sticky. Small hard things inside. Took a deep breath and straightened up, shoving the bag into the side pocket of Michael's jacket.

Then they were climbing these narrow stairs, steep, almost a ladder, Angie's fur brushing Mona's hand on the rough cold railings. Then a landing, then a turn, another set of stairs, another landing. A draft blew from somewhere.

"It's kind of a bridge," Cherry said. "Just walk across it quick, okay, 'cause it kind of moves ... "

And not expecting this, any of it, not the high white room, the sagging shelves stuffed with ragged, faded books -- she thought of the old man -- the clutter of console things with cables twisting everywhere; not this skinny, burning-eyed man in black, with his hair trained back into the crest they called a Fighting Fish in Cleveland; not his laugh when he saw them there, or the dead guy.

Mona'd seen dead people before, enough to know it when she saw it. The color of it. Sometimes in Florida somebody'd lie down on a cardboard pallet on the sidewalk outside the squat. Just not get up. Clothes and skin gone the color of sidewalk anyway, but still different when they'd kicked, another color under that. White truck came then. Eddy said because if you didn't, they'd swell up. Like Mona'd seen a cat once, blown up like a basketball, turned on its back, legs and tail sticking out stiff as boards, and that made Eddy laugh.

And this wiz artist laughing now -- Mona knew those kind of eyes -- and Cherry making this kind of groaning sound, and Angie just standing there.

"Okay, everybody," she heard someone say -- Molly -- and turned to find her there, in the open door, with a little gun in her hand and this big dirty-haired guy beside her looking stupid as a box of rocks, "just stand there till I sort you out."

The skinny guy just laughed.

"Shut up," Molly said, like she was thinking about something else. She shot without even looking at the gun. Blue flash on the wall beside his head and Mona couldn't hear anything but her ears ringing.

Skinny guy curled in a knot on the floor, head between his knees.

Angie walking toward the stretcher where the dead guy lay, his eyes just white. Slow, slow, like she was moving underwater, and this look on her face ...

Mona's hand, in her jacket pocket, was sort of figuring something out, all by itself. Sort of squeezing that Ziploc she'd picked up downstairs, telling her ... it had wiz in it.

She pulled it out and it did. Sticky with drying blood. Three crystals inside and some kind of derm.

She didn't know why she'd pulled it out, right then, except that nobody was moving.

The guy with the Fighting Fish had sat up, but he just stayed there. Angie was over by the stretcher, where she didn't seem to be looking at the dead guy but at this gray box stuck up over his head on a kind of frame. Cherry from Cleveland had got her back up against the wall of books and was sort of jamming her knuckles into her mouth. The big guy just stood there beside Molly, who had her head cocked to the side like she was listening for something.

Mona couldn't stand it.

Table had a steel top. Big hunk of old metal there, holding down a dusty stack of printout. Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up that metal hunk, and -- one, two, three -- banged them into powder. That did it: everybody looked. Except Angie.

" 'scuse me," Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder into the waiting palm of her left hand, "how it is ... " She buried her nose in the pile and snorted. "Sometimes," she added, and snorted the rest.

Nobody said anything.

And it was the still center again. Just like that time before.

So fast it was standing still.

Rapture. Rapture's coming.

So fast, so still, she could put a sequence to what happened next: This big laugh, haha, like it wasn't really a laugh. Through a loudspeaker. Past the door. From out on the catwalk thing. And Molly just turns, smooth as silk, quick but like there's no hurry in it, and the little gun snicks like a lighter.

Then there's this blue flash outside, and the big guy gets sprayed with blood from out there as old metal tears loose and Cherry's screaming before the catwalk thing hits with this big complicated sound, dark floor down there where she found the wiz in its bloody bag.

"Gentry," someone says, and she sees it's a little vid on the table, young guy's face on it, "jack Slick's control unit now. They're in the building." Guy with the Fighting Fish scrambles up and starts to do things with wires and consoles.

And Mona could just watch, because she was so still, and it was all interesting stuff.

How the big guy gives this bellow and rushes over, shouting how they're his, they're his. How the face on the screen says: "Slick, c'mon, you don't need 'em anymore ... "

Then this engine starts up, somewhere downstairs, and Mona hears this clanking and rattling, and then somebody yelling, down there.

And sun's coming in the tall, skinny window now, so she moves over there for a look. And there's something out there, kind of a truck or hover, only it's buried under this pile of what looks like refrigerators, brand-new refrigerators, and broken hunks of plastic crates, and there's somebody in a camo suit, lying down with his face in the snow, and out past that there's another hover looks like it's all burned up.

It's interesting.