“Listen,” Chevette said, “I’m not up for a night at Cognitive Dissidents, okay? I don’t think you are either. I just watched your friend here gum enough dancer to wire a mule.”
“Chevette,” Tessa said, “we’re up here to document, remember? We’re going interstitial.”
Saint Vitus sniggered.
“I think where we’re going is to sleep, Tessa. Where’s the truck?”
“Where we parked it.”
213 “How’d you get the balloons back here?”
“Elmore,” Tessa said. “Has one of those caps, and an ATV to go with it.”
“See if you can find him again,” Chevette said, starting down the ladder. “We could use a lift back.”
Chevette wasn’t sure what it would actually take to get Tessa to give up on Cognitive Dissidents. Worst case, she might actually have to go there, if only to make sure Tessa was okay. Cog Diss was a rough enough place even if you didn’t have your head buried in a pair of video glasses.
She went down the ladder and headed out onto the floor, where God’s Little Toy was already descending, under Tessa’s control. She reached up, got it tethered, and turned to signal Tessa, in the sound booth, to start bringing the others down.
And found hei-self looking, for however many dreamlike seconds, before he hit her, into Carson’s eyes.
Hard and in the face, just like he’d done before, and she saw those same colors, like a flashback; saw herself falling back, across the big beige couch in his loft-space, blood splashing from her nose, and still not believing it, that he’d done that.
Except that here she went over into a couple of Creedmore’s remaining audience, who caught her, laughing, saying “Hey. Whoa,” and then Carson was on her again, grabbing a handful of Skinner’s jacket- “Hey, buddy,” said one of the men who’d caught her, holding up his
spread hand as if to block the second punch that Carson, his face as calm and serious as she’d seen it in the editing booth at Real One, was aiming at her. And looking into Carson’s eyes she saw nothing there like hatred or anger, only some abstract and somehow almost technical need.
Carson tried for her, past that stranger’s upraised hand, and her protector yelped as one of his fingers got bent back. It deflected the blow, though, and gave Chevette time to twist out of that grip.
She backed off two steps and shook her head, trying to clear it. Something was wrong with her eyes.
Carson came after her, that same look on his face, and in that 214 instant she knew that she knew neither who he was nor what it was that was wrong with him.
“You just didn’t get it, did you?” he said, or that was what she thought she heard him say, feeling a tear run down from her swelling eye, her head still ringing.
She took a step back. He came on.
“You just didn’t get it.”
And then a hand came down on his shoulder and he spun around. And went down, the man behind him having done something that Chevette hadn’t seen.
And she saw that it was Rydell.
It wasn’t.
It was.
Rydell in a rent-a-cop’s black nylon jacket, looking at her with an expression of utter and baffled amazement.
And Chevette got it, right then and absolutely, that she was dreaming, and felt the most enormous sense of relief, because now she would wake up, surely, into a world that would make sense.
On the floor, Carson, rolling over, got to his knees, stood up, shook himself, brushed a squashed cigarette-filter from the sleeve of his jacket, and suckerpunched Rydell, who saw it coming and tried to move aside, so that Carson’s fist slammed into his ribs, rather than his stomach, as intended.
And Rydell screamed, in shrill animal pain, doubled over- And that was when the guy with the black leather car-coat, the
fresh-looking black buzzcut, black scarf knotted up high around his neck, this guy Chevette had never seen before, stepped up to Carson. “Mistake,” she thought she heard him say. He took something from the pocket of his black coat. Then: “You’re not on the menu.”