Factory Floor
Cherry’s still screaming. »Somebody shut her up,« Molly says, where she’s standing by the door with her little gun, and Mona thinks she can do that, can pass Cherry a little of her stillness, where everything’s interesting and nothing’s pushing too hard, but on the way across the room she sees the crumpled Ziploc on the floor and remembers there’s a derm in there, maybe something that’ll help Cherry calm down. »Here,« she says, when she gets to her, peels the backing off and sticks the derm on the side of Cherry’s neck. Cherry’s scream slides down the scale into a gurgle as she sinks down the face of old books, but Mona’s sure she’ll be okay, and anyway there’s shooting downstairs, guns: out past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly’s yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on? That had to mean the lights downstairs, because the lights up here were plenty bright, so bright she can see fuzzy little beads, traces of color, streaming off things if she looks close. Tracers. That’s what you call those bullets, the ones that light up. Eddy’d told her that in Florida, looking down the beach to where some private security was shooting them off in the dark. »Yeah, lights,« the face on the little screen said, »the Witch can’t see. . . .« Mona smiled at him. She didn’t think anybody else had heard. Witch? So Gentry and big Slick were tearing around yanking these fat yellow wires off the wall, where they’d been stuck with silver tape, and plugging them together with these metal boxes, and Cherry from Cleveland was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, and Molly was crouched down by the door holding her gun with both hands, and Angie was — Be still . She heard somebody say that, but it was nobody in the room. She thought maybe it was Lanette, like Lanette could just say that, through time, through the stillness. Because Angie was just there, down on the floor beside the dead guy’s stretcher, her legs folded under her like a statue, her arms around him. The lights dimmed, when Gentry and Slick found their connection, and she thought she heard the face on the monitor gasp, but she was already moving toward Angie, seeing (suddenly, totally, so clearly it hurt) the fine line of blood from her left ear. Even then, the stillness held, though already she could feel raw hot points in the back of her throat, and remember Lanette explaining: You don’t ever snort this, it eats holes in you. And Molly’s back was straight, her arms stretched out. . . . Straight out and down, not to that gray box, but to her pistol, that little thing, and Mona heard it go snik -snik -snik , and then three explosions, far off down there, and they must’ve been blue flashes, but Mona’s hands were around Angie now, wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longest way away. »Hey,« Mona said, nobody to hear, just Angie toppling across the corpse in the sleeping bag, »hey . . .« She glanced up in time to catch a last image on that vid screen and see it fade.
After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn’t like the not caring of the stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn’t like crashing, just this past-it feeling, the way maybe a ghost feels. She stood beside Slick and Molly in the doorway and looked down. In the dim glare of big old bulbs she watched a metal spider thing jittering across the dirty concrete floor. It had big curved blades that snapped and whirled when it moved, but there was nobody in there moving, and the thing just went like a broken toy, back and forth in front of the twisted wreck of the little bridge she’d crossed with Angie and Cherry. Cherry had gotten up from the floor, pale and slackfaced, and peeled the derm from her neck. »Tha’s maj’ muscle relax’nt,« she managed, and Mona felt bad because she knew she’d done something stupid when she’d thought she was trying to help, but wiz always did that, and how come she couldn’t stop doing it? Because you’re wired, stupid, she heard Lanette say, but she hadn’t wanted to remember that. So they all just stood there, looking down at the metal spider twitching and running itself down. All except Gentry, who was unscrewing the gray box from its frame over the stretcher, his black boots beside Angie’s red fur. »Listen,« Molly said, »that’s a copter. Big one.«