Kipuka Blues

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

ERIC DROPPED me at Ceren’s, where I grabbed a quick shower and change of clothes. Once I’d washed off the corpse stink and dropped my death-infused outfit in the washing machine with extra bleach, I walked the empty residential streets to Jack’s to meet the girls for dinner.

The low ceiling at Jack’s, with its looming square wooden beams stained walnut-dark, makes it seem smaller than it is. On the white stucco walls, neon signs advertising brands of beer we’d never see again cast red-and-white shadows across the gleaming wood tabletops. Jack had yanked the jukebox to make room for another table, but left the dart board at the back near the restrooms. The evening crowd had just started to trickle in, and Jack was in his usual place between the long wooden bar and the mirrored wall. The shelves in front of the mirror that had once held dozens of bottles of liquor now stood empty and wiped clean. The mirror reflected only the room and the dozen or so people sitting in tight clusters around the bar’s tables. Eric and Vince usually played bouncer, but it was still early for them, so I walked right in.

I missed the jukebox, but it had streamed everything from the Internet. Those services were gone. Music had gone from ubiquitous to completely absent. Eric and I had found a few old CDs in some of the houses, but nothing any good—mostly techno or pop.

My absent Julie and Sheila were only the worst ache in my heart. Music was another—I missed my grandpa rock: the Stones, Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath. I would have cut someone for an hour of Pink Floyd. I missed relaxing in the evening with a beer and an old TV show, but all that had come from the Internet too. I missed absent friends and even the damn cat videos Julie always wanted to show me.

I missed my daughter’s enthusiasm, Sheila’s unfailing optimism.

I missed my friends. All the ties that made me human.

I hoped it wasn’t the flesh that made me human then or now, but the connection to others around me.

I had Alice and Ceren. Great kids. They said that they’d adopted me, but I had the feeling that they missed their families as much as I did.

If I kept musing, though, I’d plummet straight back into bottomless depression. I went straight to the bar, carefully sitting three empty stools from the black-veiled Rose Friedman. “Jack,” I said.

“Sheriff,” Jack said, ambling to stand right before me. Jack had once been a heavier man, but now his face seemed to drape off his skull. He’d lost his two front teeth in a bar fight years ago, and Absolute hadn’t restored them.

“Not the sheriff. Don’t go giving people the wrong idea. You have any Stroh’s left?”

Jack smiled. “Been saving the last six for you.”

I nodded. “Thanks. One, please.”

I don’t know what Jack had done before, but I guessed he’d studied at the Bartender Ninja School. The cold can materialized in front of me before I could take another breath. “Rough day?”

“Unpleasant surprise.” Stroh’s isn’t the best beer Jack still has, but the strawy taste makes Kevin’s life flash through the back of my brain. Dinner on the patio with his wife and daughter. Birthdays and holidays. A cooler on the sun-scorched beach, while little Julie worked with a tiny plastic shovel to dig a hole she’d want to bury him in.

Everything that had made life worthwhile and now made my throat clench harder. I forced down another swallow of Stroh’s.

All I had left of them was my wedding ring. And a home I couldn’t bear to enter.

I set the can back on the counter. “You hear of anyone missing?”

Jack blinked. “Everyone.”

I raised my eyebrows at him and kept silent.

“Ah, crap.” Jack grimaced. “You found someone.”

“Yeah.”

“Who was it?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“What about a picture?”

“Wouldn’t help.”

“Damn.” Jack shook his head. “I hear anything, I’ll let y’know.”

“Thanks. Use the walkie-talkie I left you.” I took another sip and made myself ask, “Any other news?”

Jack shrugged. “There’s some folks meeting up at the Big Boy by the Winchester for dinners. Someone ought to go take a look. The Perlstein guy you sent came by this afternoon.”

“Good. Glad he made it.” Eric and I had found Hans Perlstein yesterday. Like the rest of us, he’d awoken a month ago, terrified of the outside world. He’d barricaded himself in his one-bedroom house. Eric and I had spent an hour talking to him before he’d shifted the upturned couch from the window and let us glimpse his pale, gaunt face. Like most of the others we’d found, he only needed a few kind words. You’re not alone. There’s hope. We need to help each other.

Perlstein had run out of food the day before. He eventually cracked a window and accepted a protein bar before we headed to the next house.

Everyone we found got a protein bar. While people had raided the grocery stores and hoarded the cans, nobody before me thought to pillage the health food store. We didn’t know how long it took for one of us to starve before we began burning our brain as fuel, but we knew how badly things went when it happened. A protein bar would at least buy the person a day to overthrow their terrors. Hopefully, knowing that we were all out here, and all rooting for them, would help.

I’d festered in my—Kevin’s—house until Alice rescued me. She rang Kevin’s doorbell. I answered.

“You going up to the Big Boy?” Jack said.

I shook my head. “I’m doing the house-to-house. Someone else can go say hello.”

Jack nodded. “Fair ’nuff. I’m sure that Mista Woodward will be happy to go shake hands.”

“Dammit.” That jerk would be all too glad to go tell another group of people that he was in charge. I slammed a mouthful of Stroh’s, then cursed myself for forgetting to savor it. Five cans left. “All right, I’ll go up tomorrow.”

“Someone’s gotta,” Jack said. “Better you than him.”

“I thought Absolute only brought back the useful people,” I muttered.

Jack snorted and looked over my shoulder at the door. “Yours.”

I turned just in time to see Alice trot through the door. She had a fourteen-year-old’s energy, and today it bubbled over into her thin hands and pale face. “Kevin!” she said, skidding to a stop only a couple feet from me. “You’ll never guess?”

Alice had been one of Julie’s friends. Ceren had been Alice’s neighbor. We were living in Ceren’s house until I found us a better home to call our own. “You cleared Legacy from the game store.”

She shook her head. “I cracked it.”

I froze, then carefully set the half-full can on the cool bar. “You got into Legacy?”

Before releasing us, Absolute had grown a giant, organic-looking computer in Winchester Mall. Alice couldn’t keep away from it, spent her days working with a couple other people trying to extract useful information from it. Absolute had wanted us to find it—it had left two words echoing in everyone’s mind, and the word Legacy was one of them. The moment I’d seen the giant green bubbles, I’d known they were called Legacy.

We still had no clue what Immanence meant. I felt completely confident everyone would know it when we saw it.

But If my adopted daughter had cracked the alien library Absolute had left for us, I’d need that beer and more.

“Almost.” Alice flapped both hands, shaking enough to set her tight brunette ponytail bobbing. “There’s a pattern. The signals are grouped into packets. It’s not, like, Ethernet, but it’s a frame-based protocol.” Her voice raised at the end of each sentence as if she was asking a question. I hoped she wasn’t, because I sure didn’t have any answers. “Each frame is a few terabytes, but it’s definitely frames. Steve is building a machine big enough to collect the frames so Brandi can do some math.”

I smiled. “You cracked it.” Pride shivered in my chest, a tiny sliver compared to the pride I’d taken in my own Julie, but I nursed it. Alice was my responsibility, and I wanted to help her turn into the best person she could be. I also wanted to remind her to stop ending each sentence like a question, but this wasn’t the moment. “Good work, kid.”

“There’s a lot more to do,” she said. “But it’s like finding the corner pieces of a puzzle. You have to start somewhere.”

Alice hopped onto the stool next to me. “Steve said to ask you to keep your eyes open for computers. He needs some big ones. Really big ones.”

I glanced over Alice’s head at Rose Friedman. The veiled woman hadn’t stirred other than to lift her drink. “I can do that.” I had a notebook in my pocket for writing down interesting things Eric and I discovered. I hadn’t thought to list murder victim in there, but I doubted I’d forget. “Let’s get a table while we can. Hey, Jack, any chance you have a cupcake for my smart girl here?”

“I’ll make you one tomorrow,” Jack said. “Hey, Alice. I got no idea what you just said, but it sounds pretty good.”

“Thanks.” A white, toothy grin split her face. “Brandi actually smiled at me.”

“Wow,” I said. Brandi and her husband Steve normally only had time for their struggle to untangle one of the mysteries Absolute had left us. Steve seemed pretty mellow, but Brandi’s fierce intensity bordered on mania.

“I know, right?” Alice said.

Jack said, “I’ll put this day on the calendar.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” I said. “You ruin Brandi’s rep, she will come for you.”

“You’ll watch out for me,” Jack said.

“You think I’m getting between Brandi and anything?” I said. “Tell me, Jack, what’s it like walking around without a survival instinct?” I half suspected that one day I’d have to sit on Brandi, Frayville’s digital Valkyrie, but Alice’s success and a moment of banter shoved away the memory of a smeared body and a badly cleaned pool of blood.

Contentment never lasts. An annoyed voice from behind said, “What the f**k is wrong with you?”