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  “We should go,” said Ramielle clutching two duffel bags and a small animal carrier.

  “What is that?”

  “I can’t leave Mercurius.”

  “Mercurius?”

  “My cat,” she explained lifting up the carrier.

  “I hear sirens,” Devin remarked.

  Ramielle lugged the bags and carrier over to the lone window and peered out. Her multi began to buzz.

  “We’ve got to go,” She ordered as she read the text on her multi. “They’re at my brother’s house.”

  Ramielle pulled Devin up off the sofa, shoved him into the hallway and onto the elevator. She pressed the ‘G’ button fifteen times before the doors finally closed and the elevator descended. When they stopped, the door did not immediately open.

  “Are they out there waiting?” Devin asked.

  “Shhh!”

  “I wish I had a gun.”

  “Shut up!” Ramielle extolled. “If they even so much as think you’re armed they will kill the three of us dead.”

  The door remained fixed.

  “Are they scanning us? Maybe we can fit up through the ceiling and climb out while they wait?” Devin asked pointing upwards.

  The floor indicator flashed again. Then the doors slid partway open. Ramielle pushed Devin back from the door. She peeked through the crack but could see nothing. She listened. There was nothing but the sound of the normal street traffic and distant sirens.

  “Get ready to meet your maker,” she remarked as she jammed her fingers into the space between the doors. With flexing, bare arms, she yanked the doors open revealing…revealing an empty parking garage.

  They scrambled to her electro and piled her bags and Mercurius into the back hatch and themselves into the front seats and made their way out of the garage.

  They whizzed down the highway steering clear of the vortices induced by the roaring steel diesels that blew past them at 150km/hour. It was hot and clear except for the NaPol dragonflies that buzzed in the sky above. Devin counted fifty of them spread across the heavens in all directions like a swarm of black locusts in the air.

  The cooling mechanism of the plastic car was useless, blowing only warm air into their faces. They couldn’t roll down the windows either because the flimsy car would pulsate as the rushing air swirled through the passenger compartment. They drove in sweaty misery.

  “I can’t believe Indians can’t make an electro with a working AC,” Ramielle complained.

  They arrived at the Appian Truck stop a little after noon. The complex was a sprawling pasture of asphalt and diesels. The two hundred or so tractor/trailers there were tightly packed into diagonal lots. Most were filthy and badly rusted relics. Some were rolling out onto the highway carrying mystery loads to unknown destinations. Almost as soon as those trucks left, new ones rolled in to claim their spaces in the bustling sea of asphalt.

  “There’s the lot for electros,” observed Devin.

  Ramielle made a hard right which squealed the thirty centimeter rubber tires. They pulled into a space a mere quarter mile from the restaurant/diner/convenience store/motel/casino.

  Ramielle set Mercurius in the shade and they walked towards the diner. Devin’s strength was returning as he inhaled the sweetly tainted diesel air. It felt good to be unshackled and out of doors and in the sun.

  Ramielle pulled open the glass door and they went in. Inside, several fans spun away churning up the hot dry air. There was seating inside for a hundred or so but the restaurant was only half full. They took a booth in the corner.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” came the raspy voice of their waitress.

  “I’ll have a soda,” answered Ramielle.

  “I’ll have coffee. Nothing like a hot cup of coffee on a ninety degree day,” answered Devin sarcastically. The waitress sneered.

  They sat nursing their drinks and watching the wall-mounted holovisions for half an hour. Then they ordered. Ramielle ordered soycakes and a synthefruit cup. Devin got a tofu burger without tomatos which were still in shortage and extra, un-hydrogenated, freedom fries. They finished and paid their $3,000 with tip.

  To kill time, they went back to the car where Ramielle checked on and fed Mercurius. They walked him as well, if you could call it that, down into an adjacent drainage ditch that flanked the perimeter of the parking lot. Mercurius eventually did his business, was returned to his cage and placed him back in the shade.

  After heading back to the diner, they checked out the attached trinket and convenience store. There was a collection of Elvis plates that captured Ramielle’s attention. The black leather Elvis was her favorite.

  “God he was a good looking man,” she remarked.

  Devin spied a collection of miniature, vintage gascars. There was a Mustang and a Camaro, a Chevelle and a Firebird, a Nova and an El Camino.

  “Splendid,” Devin thought.

  He examined the tiny cars closely, being reminded of them on vintage holovision programs, rogues and antiheros recklessly driving their magnificent machines down lonely country roads at obnoxious rates of speed with hapless cops in pursuit. He compared these tiny replicas of petrol gurgling, steel machines to the plastic, bubble-shaped electros of the present day.

  The muscle cars were the apex of the automobile, he thought. They were an art form— icons of an era unencumbered by politically imposed resource constraints, social engineering agendas, or ecological hysteria. The muscle car represented the triumph of liberty in mechanical form. They were uninhibited, guiltless forms of self-expression and individualism from the pre-egalitarian era.

  Perhaps it was fitting that one of America’s only art forms was a mechanical one. They were a physical testament to the supremacy of capitalism over the choking, stifling poison of the busybody nanny-police-state. The car was inextricably interlinked with liberty. Its death was the barometer for liberties’ demise.

  Americans were eventually emasculated, dumbed-down, and beaten into state-worshiping drones; prodded and corralled and tagged until they morphed into sheeple. The muscle cars were the last death spasm of individualism before Americans became Amerikans and cashed in their souls for mind-numbing, electronic gadgets and the illusion of security.

  Cars were mechanized freedom and the State had to rein them in for how could the State expand the reach of its power while simultaneously tolerating machines that enabled people to escape its grasp? The car had to be destroyed or at the least gelded.

  “Look at how much gasoline costs.” “Look at how much pollution you create.” “Look at those enlightened Europeans and New Yorkers.” “Don’t you want to be like them?” “Don’t you want to ride public transit and be freed from the shackles of your cars?” “Look at the ugly roads and parking lots and sprawling suburbs we must build for you.” “Look at how you rape mother earth!” “You are selfish.” “You are wasteful.” “You are evil.” “Cars are evil.”

  The campaign was far more effective than any Maoist re-education camp. Americans, being by their nature guilt-afflicted and Calvinistic, accepted it with nary a whimper. They handed over their keys and traded freedom and personal expression for the herd-like regimentation of public transport. They traded in their internal combustion engines that could carry them nonstop across six hundred kilometers of highway for flimsy electric bubbles that could go no further than down to the local organic market and back without the need of a three hour recharge.

  Americans celebrated and held hands and sung joyful songs as their glorious symbols of liberty were crushed into cubes of steel and melted down into girders for some State-aggrandizing edifice.

  Americans had become Amerikans. In less than a generation, the delicate Republic devolved into a Democracy and then the Democracy devolved into a pandering mob of welfare statists. Then, as the economy disintegrated, the mob devolved into a tyranny as it tried to hold the crumbling racket together. Consensus replaced principle and ideology and opinion polls defined the morality. Finally, in the interes
t of efficiency, consensus too was ditched in favor of rule by the enlightened elite.

  In the interest of saving America, “tired ideas” were tossed aside and the old system of checks and balances was scuttled. The Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches were replaced with a new, cooperative structure: the Governmental, the Corporate and the Financial. It was a symbiotic triumvirate with government enforcing the laws, corporations writing them, and the bankers printing the money necessary to fund the entire scheme.

  “I understand, now. I really must get home,” Devin remarked to himself in a moment of total clarity.

  “What? Who are you talking too?” Ramielle asked. “Hey, I think The Bear is here.”

  “I think his name is ‘Bear’, not ‘The Bear’,” Devin remarked as he set down the toy mustang. “Where’d you see him?”

  Ramielle led Devin to the threshold of the trinket store and carefully pointed out a heavy set man with a balding head and a frizzy white beard that had the texture of steel wool.

  “Look at his shirt,” Ramielle pointed. Devin looked at the back of the man’s black t-shirt. It read “Sons of Anarchy” which was what the Bear was pictured to be wearing on the multi Roth sent. “It’s got to be him, doesn’t it? It looks like him…same shirt.”

  “I’ll go check it out. Wait here.”

  Devin strolled over to the diner and took the stool two over from the burly fellow. He grabbed a menu and surreptitiously glanced over at him. The man paid him no heed. He scrolled through the menu and found the burger that he had just ordered and finished a few minutes earlier. He carefully glanced at the man again over the side edge of the menu. A waitress appeared and took the big man’s order and left. Devin glanced over to Ramielle and gave a faint shrug of his shoulders.

  “Can I take your order?” Came a startling voice in his left ear.

  “I’m still looking, thanks.” He quickly glanced again at the big man. The man paid no attention. He looked back over at Ramielle. This time she shrugged her shoulders. Devin leaned towards him.

  “Excuse me are…”

  “Yes.” He interrupted.

  “How did you know what I was going to…”

  “I know who you are and your Oriental friend over there.”

  “Okay, then. That’s great. What should we do?”

  “Just sit there and try not to look suspicious.” Bear mumbled. “Try to blend in a little more. It’s bad enough that you’re mulling around here looking out of place but you’re black, too, and there ain’t no other black folk in here. Know what I mean?”

  Devin became suddenly aware of his blackness.

  “This is the twenty first century, you know.”

  “Just try not to look so black.”

  “How do you suggest I do that?”

  “Don’t be lookin’ these rednecks in the eye. Keep your head down and don’t walk so straight up tall either. It draws attention. The first thing these rednecks think of when they see a black fella struttin’ around is, ‘there goes another one of them welfare coons’. Then they go get on their multis and start taking pictures and doin’ searches to see if you’re wanted for anything. Hell, they’re already profilin’ ya now.”

  “Profiling me? Why? Why do they hate black people?”

  “Don’t know. Lot’s uh reasons I guess. I imagine some think you’re probably on the welfare and they definitely don’t like handin’ over seventy percent of their pay to keep your people livin’ in free housing that’s probably nicer than the dumps they pay for.”

  “My people?”

  “You asked me a question and I’m just answering it. It’s that whole Balkan thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, one ethnic group hatin’ the other. The only thing keepin’ whites and blacks and Mexicans from killing each other is their combined hatred of those god damn Hajis.”

  “What do you think, then?” Devin asked, not sure if he wanted to ride five thousand kilometers with a bigot.

  “About what? Blacks?”

  “Yeah, blacks.”

  “The only color I see is green. And the farther off the grid the job is, the greener it looks to me, if you know what I mean.” Bear glanced over to Devin’s left. “See that asshole over there with the white ball cap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t look. He’s dialin’ you in right now with his multi. Keep that menu up over your face.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Don’t look suspicious. Here, take this card.” Bear nonchalantly slid him a card which Devin promptly put in his shirt pocket. “Walk out of here with your girlfriend and yer head down, go get your stuff, and find my rig. The description’s on the card. The passenger door’s unlocked. Hop in and wait for me and don’t touch nothin’. I’m gonna grab a supper and I’ll be out in a half hour. Then we’ll go.”

  “How do I know you’re…”

  “Because if I was a nat I would’a pulsed you by now. Now, get your black ass on out a here before they dial you in.”

  Devin set his menu down and slid out of the diner with Ramielle. They strolled back to her car by a circuitous route just to be safe. She grabbed her two duffel bags and her cat while Devin read the business card. It read simply ‘Old Glory’.

  “I’m ready,” Ramielle exclaimed. Devin scanned the ocean of big rigs. Their vantage point from the parking lot fringe was poor. They started walking down a row of trucks but reached the end of the row before spotting Bear’s rig. They turned and started back down the second row.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “All it says is ‘Old Glory’,” Devin explained.

  They walked halfway down the row when Ramielle pointed excitedly. “Is that it?” she asked, gesturing towards a diesel with the stars and stripes painted in streaks emanating from the front grill and back along the sides of the cab.

  “Let’s check it out.”

  They went up to the truck’s passenger side. Devin tried the door and it opened. Ramielle put her duffelbags and Mercurius inside and she and Devin got in and closed the door.

  It was quiet inside. The interior was finished in brown faux leather and wood accents. There were two captain’s chairs in the cockpit. The dash was covered with instrumentation panels and various compartments. Behind the cockpit was a cabin containing a bunkbed, a small seating area, and a refrigerator.

  “This is pretty nice,” observed Devin.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” Ramielle asked.

  They waited quietly for twenty minutes or so until they heard heavy footfalls of someone approaching. They waited. The door locks clicked and the driver side door opened. For a moment, Devin wondered if he was in the right truck. He was relieved to see Bear’s Santa-like face appear from over the driver’s seat as he crawled in.

  “How you folks doin’?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “Good. Make yourself at home. Let’s fire this thing up and get the hell out of here.” Bear tapped some numbers into a keypad on the dashboard. Lights glowed on the windshield and the diesel engine roared to life.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What do you think, Jack?”

  “I’m thinking a three iron, Mr. President.”

  “Axel?”

  “I’d say a four iron.”

  The golfing foursome included Director Morgenthau, Jack Marsh, CEO of Numenor Corp, Oatfield Brown, Secretary of Defense, President Theodore Mellon and their caddies.

  “Four-iron it is,” answered the President decisively.

  His milquetoast caddy, who was all of maybe fifty kilograms soaking wet and wearing boots, handed him the appropriate club grip-first which the President rudely yanked from his hand.

  “You know, you could always use my satellite guided range-finder just to be sure,” offered Jack. Jack was always exploiting opportunities to dazzle the President with Numenor’s technological gadgetry, gadgetry that was brought to life by spectacularly advanced Chinese processors. Jack never knew for sure
if some government program that funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into the development of some inane device might be expanded a hundredfold in the event the President took a fancy to it.

  “I don’t need your Chinese cheat,” answered the President. “I’m a man of principles.” He took three practice swings, addressed the ball, readjusted his feet and swung. The steel club head shaved the tips of the grass and, with a crack, sent the ball careening low and fast like a miniature cruise missile rocketing across the fairway. It bounced off a tree with a thwack and into the deep rough.

  Without even calling for a mulligan, President Mellon, self proclaimed man of principles, beckoned his spindly caddy to hand him another ball. He dropped it fairly, but to his dismay it rolled into an old divot. Unsatisfied with the lie, he reset the ball softly on the tips of the grass. He took three more practice swings and then hit the ball perfectly, sending it flying up the fairway like a white tracer, slightly fading to the left, and then bouncing three times before rolling up to the fringe of the green.

  “Nice shot, Teddy,” congratulated Jack.

  “You should be able to make birdie,” Axel observed as they started walking towards the green.

  “So Axel, tell me, what did you find out?” asked the President as he shoved his club back into his caddy’s face.

  Axel’s leathery face flushed with excitement. He had been waiting patiently for several weeks for the President to ask that question. It was not wise to bring these things up on the golf course as President Mellon was prone to automatically shoot them down in this venue.

  “As you know, sir, we picked up an exile we had been tracking and brought him in for conditioning. We did a full workup on him. We chipped him, hotwired him, applied non-torture and aggressive interrogation, you know, the works.”

  “And?”

  “We’ve come to the conclusion that The Delivery is…is a bluff.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on the fact that he didn’t give us anything despite us working him over pretty good.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know anything?” suggested Oatfield.

  “Shut up, Oat”, Axel thought. “We think he did. He maxed out on all the psych-parameters. He had three deviation scores on anti-authority-responsiveness. His brain dump rated just as high as any anti-pat that we’ve ever hotwired. Higher even than the Los Angel…”