The Peripheral

75

Homes would put you totally away, if they caught you trying to fab a squidsuit. More than printing parts to make a gun full-auto, more than building most drugs. She’d never expected to see one, except in videos, let alone be wearing one.

The night out back of Pickett’s seemed impossibly quiet, what little she could see of it from the suit. She kept expecting somebody to yell, start shooting, set off an alarm. Nothing. Just the wheels of this ATV, crunching over gravel. Electric, so new she could smell it. Paid for with some of Leon’s lottery win, she guessed, or that Clanton money. She could feel it had major torque, like if you put a blade on it you could grade this road up right. They’d run rappelling rope through the factory gear-anchors, to make it easier to hold on. Had those skeleton wheels, nonpneumatic. On the gravel they shaped themselves like mountain bike tires, but when Burton swung right, off the gravel, she saw them widen out. Even quieter on the grass.

“Macon?” Not sure he could hear her.

“Here,” said the gnat in her ear. “Getting you gone. Talk later.”

She couldn’t see where they were going. Burton’s suit was too close to the part of hers she was supposed to see through, so they were doing that mutual feedback thing, trying to emulate each other, ramping them both up into a headachy swarm of distorted hexagons. Ciencia Loca had had that on. Now Burton braked, cut the motor. She felt him swing his leg over, get off the ATV. Heard him rip his suit’s Velcro, then he reached over and ripped hers, near her neck. Night air on her face. He reached in, squeezed her upper arm. “Easy Ice,” he said. She could barely hear him, with the earplugs. She pulled the left one out, on the orange string. “Keep ’em in,” he said, “might get loud.” So she pressed it back in, turning her head to do that, and there was Conner, in his anime-ankled VA prosthesis, behind Burton, in the shadow of a metal shed.

Then she saw it couldn’t be him, because the torso and both limbs were all wrong. Lumpy, like someone had stuffed one of his black Polartec unitards full of modeling clay, too much of it. And had put, in dreamlike randomness, she saw, stepping closer, one of those shitty-looking Gonzales masks on it, the president’s iconic acne scars rendered as stylized craters across exaggerated cheekbones. She looked into the empty eyes. Blank paleness.

Carlos stepped around it, bullpup under his arm. All in black. Burton too, under the open squidsuit. Carlos wore a black beanie pulled down over his brows, his eyes solid black with night-vision contacts. “Need your suit for our guy,” Carlos said. She let it fall around her ankles, stepped out of it. Hex-swarm gone, it instantly did grass. Carlos picked it up and started undoing zips, more Velcro. Draped it over the big tall backpack she now saw the prosthesis wore. Burton was putting his own suit on it from the front, the Gonzales mask poking out through an unzipped slit. They worked on this, making little Velcro noises, joining the suits. If you did it right, the two suits wouldn’t do that feedback thing and hex out. The black of their clothes swirled on the squidstuff. When they were done, they both stepped back, and it became the shadow it stood in.

“Outfit’s go,” Burton said, to somebody who wasn’t there.

The thing took a first step, out of shadow. The mask was all you could really see of it, except for the ankles and feet. Like a glitch in a buggy game. The dog-leash man’s blood would still be on it somewhere. She couldn’t remember his face. It took another step, another. That gait she remembered, Conner going to the fridge, but leaning forward, here, under the weight of the pack. Tramping out, flat-footed, thick-ankled, to the gravel. She couldn’t see the mask now. It was headed back, toward Pickett’s ugly, flood-lit house. “What are you doing?” she asked Burton.

He raised an index finger to his lips, mounted the ATV, motioning for her to get on behind him. Carlos climbed on behind her, reaching around to grab a stretch of rappelling rope, and Burton took off, across the grass, away from the gravel road.

Pickett had a golf course, she saw, as Burton drove further from the house, the sheds and machinery. The moon was coming up. Smoothness of the turf, polymer or GM grass. She saw a raccoon freeze, seeing them, its head turning as they passed.

Beyond the green, the land slanted up, into uncut pasture with a few paths through it, maybe made by cattle or horses. She could see white up ahead, and then she saw it was that same ugly fence, but along a different stretch of road. Two figures in black rose up, as they drew closer, running to the fence, lifting a length of it between them and moving it aside. Burton drove through the gap without slowing, out onto blacktop Pickett must have paid the county to keep in such good shape, then they were on that, speeding up.

About half a mile on, Tommy was waiting by his big white car, in a Sheriff’s Department helmet and his black jacket. Burton slowed, pulling up beside him. “Flynne,” Tommy said, “you okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Anybody hurt you?” Tommy was looking at her like he could see inside her.

“No.”

Still looking inside her. “We’ll take you home.”

Burton got off the ATV, walked across the road, and stood with his back to them, peeing. She climbed off. Carlos scooted himself forward, to the driver’s part of the saddle, took the handlebars, started the engine, swinging around. He was gone into the dark before Burton could cross the road again, headed back the way they’d come, she guessed to pick up the other two.

Tommy opened the passenger-side door for her and she got in. He went around, opened the driver-side passenger door, then his own, got in. Burton got in behind him and they both closed their doors.

“You okay, Flynne?” Tommy asked, again, looking over at her.

She closed her door.

He started the car, and they drove for a while in the dark, opposite direction to the one Carlos had gone in. He put the headlights on.

“Pickett’s a dick,” she said

“Knew that,” Burton said. “Was it Reece?”

“Pickett said they’d kill him if he didn’t bring me. Said Homes could find him anywhere.”

“Figured,” Burton said.

But she didn’t want to talk about Reece, or whatever else it was that they were doing. She didn’t feel like she could talk to Macon through the bug, because they’d hear her, and Tommy was concentrating on the road. So it felt like a long ride back to town, and everything that had happened before felt kind of like a dream, but still going on.

They were almost to town when Burton said, to whoever it was that wasn’t there, “Do it.”

They saw the light from it, the fireball, behind them, throwing the cruiser’s shadow ahead of it on the road. Then they heard it, and later she’d think she could’ve counted off the miles, like after a lightning strike.

“Goddamn,” Tommy said, slowing. “What the hell did you do?”

“Builders,” Burton, said, behind her, “still managing to blow their own asses up.”

Tommy said nothing. Got back up to speed. Just looking at the road.

She hoped Reece hadn’t stopped at all, had got out of the county, headed someplace interstate, gone. She didn’t want to ask Burton about that.

“You feel like a coffee, Flynne?” Tommy asked her, finally.

“Too late for me, thanks,” she said, her voice like somebody else’s, someone none of this ever happened to, and then she just cried.