"What"s out there, toxic-wise?"
"Discarded asbestos from the shipbuilding industry. Marine antifouling paints that are full of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too."
"Great."
"I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission."
"Well, since you put it that way," Y.T. says, and grabs the mask. It"s a big rubber-and-canvas number that covers her whole head and neck. Feels heavy and awkward at first, but whoever designed it had the right idea, all the weight rests in the right places. There"s also a pair of heavy gloves that she hauls on. They are way too big. Like the people at the glove factory never dreamed that an actual female could wear gloves.
She trudges out onto the gla.s.s-and-asbestos soil of the Zone, hoping that Ng isn"t going to slam the door shut and drive away and leave her there.
Actually, she wishes he would. It would be a cool adventure.
Anyway, she goes up to the middle of the "drug-taking site." Is not too surprised to see a little nest of discarded hypodermic needles. And some tiny little empty vials. She picks up a couple of the vials, reads their labels. "What did you find?" Ng says when she gets back into the van, peels off the mask.
"Needles. Mostly Hyponarxes. But there"s also a couple of Ultra Larninars and some Mosquito twenty-fives."
"What does all this mean?"
"Hyponarx you can get at any Buy "n" Fly, people call them rusty nails, they are cheap and dull. Supposedly the needles of poor black diabetics and junkies. Ultra Laminars and Mosquitos are hip, you get them around fancy Burbclaves, they don"t hurt as much when you stick them in, and they have better design. You know, ergonomic plungers, hip color schemes."
"What drug were they injecting?"
"Checkitout," Y.T. says, and holds up one of the vials toward Ng. Then it occurs to her that he can"t exactly turn his head to look.
"Where do I hold it so you can see it?" she says.
Ng sings a little song. A robot arm unfolds itself from the ceiling of the van, crisply yanks the vial from her hand, swings it around, and holds it in front of a video camera set into the dashboard. The typewritten label stuck onto the vial says, just "Testosterone." "Ha ha, a false alarm," Ng says. The van suddenly rips forward, starts heading right into the middle of the Sacrifice Zone.
"Want to tell me what"s going on?" Y.T. says, "since I have to actually do the work in this outfit?"
"Cell walls," Ng says. "The detector finds any chemical that penetrates cell walls. So we homed in naturally on a source of testosterone. A red herring. How amusing. You see, our biochemists lead sheltered lives, did not antic.i.p.ate that some people would be so mentally warped as to use hormones like they were some kind of drug. How bizarre."
Y.T. smiles to herself. She really likes the idea of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. "What are you looking for?"
"Snow Crash," Ng says. "Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen."
"Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes," Y.T. says. "I know that. What"s the Ring of Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?"
"Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a detector that would enable us to find cell wall-penetrating compounds in the air. But we didn"t count on heaps of empty testosterone vials being scattered all over the place. All steroids-artificial hormones-share the same basic structure, a ring of seventeen atoms that acts like a magic key that allows them to pa.s.s through cell walls. That"s why steroids are such powerful substances when they are unleashed in the human body. They can go deep inside the cell, into the nucleus, and actually change the way the cell functions.
"To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air."
Y.T. doesn"t quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because in her opinion, Ng needs to pay more attention to his driving.
Once they get out of that really creepy part, most of the Sacrifice Zone turns out to consist of a wilderness of dry brown weeds and large abandoned hunks of metal. There are big heaps of s.h.i.t rising up from place to place-coal or slag or c.o.ke or smelt or something.
Every time they come around a corner, they encounter a little plantation of vegetables, tended by Asians or South Americans. Y.T. gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves around them.
Some Spanish-speaking blacks are playing baseball on a broad flat area, using the round lids of fifty-five-gallon drums as bases. They have parked half a dozen old beaters around the edges of the field and turned on their headlights to provide illumination. Nearby is a bar built into a c.r.a.ppy mobile home, marked with a graffiti sign: THE SACRIFICE ZONE. Lines of boxcars are stranded in a yard of rusted-over railway spurs, nopal growing between the ties. One of the boxcars has been turned into a Reverend Wayne"s Pearly Gates franchise, and evangelical CentroAmericans are lined up to do their penance and speak in tongues below the neon Elvis. There are no NeoAquarian Temple franchises in the Sacrifice Zone.
"The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went," Ng says rea.s.suringly, "so the fact that you can"t use the toxics mask won"t be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes."
Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. "You mean Freon?" she says.
"Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/retailer on the West Coast."
Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng"s van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those s.h.i.tty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bone-chilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon.
For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng"s body. Y.T."s driving around with the world"s only Freon junkie.
"You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?"
"Until now, yes. But for the future, I have an arrangement with someone else."
Someone else. The Mafia.
They are approaching the waterfront. Dozens of long, skinny, single-story warehouses run parallel down toward the water. They all share the same access road at this end. Smaller roads run between them, down toward where the piers used to be. Abandoned tractor-trailers are scattered around from place to place. Ng pulls his van off the access road, into a little nook that is partly concealed between an old red-brick power station and a stack of rusted-out shipping containers. He gets it turned around so it"s pointed out of here, kind of like he is expecting to leave rapidly.
"There"s money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says.
Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses.
"Jeez, couldn"t you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky."
"This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with."
"Because we"re all pond sc.u.m, right?"
"No comment."
"What is this, a quadrillion dollars?"
"One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know."
"What do I do?"
"Fourth warehouse on the left," Ng says. "When you get the tube, throw it up in the air,"
"Then what?"
"Everything else will be taken care of."
Y.T. has her doubts about that. But if she gets in trouble, well, she can always whip out those dog tags.
While Y.T. climbs down out of the van with her skateboard, Ng makes new sounds with his mouth. She hears a gliding and clunking noise resonating through the frame of the van, machinery coming to life. Turning back to look, she sees that a steel coc.o.o.n on the roof of the van has opened up. There is a miniature helicopter underneath it, all folded up. Its rotor blades spread themselves apart, like a b.u.t.terfly unfolding. Its name is painted on its side: WHIRLWIND REAPER.
It"s pretty obvious which warehouse we are looking for here. Fourth one on the left, the road that runs down toward the waterfront is blocked off by several shipping containers-the big steel boxes you see on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. They are arranged in a herringbone pattern, so that in order to get past them you have to slalom back and forth half a dozen times, pa.s.sing through a narrow mazelike channel between high walls of steel. Guys with guns are perched on top, looking down at Y.T. as she guides her plank through the obstacle course. By the time she makes it out into the clear, she"s been heavily checked out.
There is the occasional light-bulb-on-a-wire strung around, and even a couple of strings of Christmas-tree lights. These are switched on, just to make her feel a little more welcome. She can"t see anything, just lights making colored halos amid a generalized cloud of dust and fog. In front of her, access to the waterfront is blocked off by another maze of shipping containers. One of them has a graffiti sign: THE UKOD SEZ: TRY SOME COUNTDOWN TODAY!
"What"s the UKOD?" she says, just to break the ice a little.
"Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers," says a man"s voice. He is just in the act of jumping down from the loading dock of the warehouse to her left. Back inside the warehouse, Y.T. can see electric lights and glowing cigarettes. "That"s what we call Emilio."
"Oh, right," Y.T. says. "The Freon guy. I"m not here for Chill."
"Well," says the guy, a tall rangy dude in his forties, much too skinny to be forty years old. He yanks the b.u.t.t of a cigarette from his mouth and throws it away like a dart. "What"ll it be, then?"
"What does Snow Crash cost?"
"One point seven five Gippers," the guy says.
"I thought it was one point five," Y.T. says.
The guy shakes his head. "Inflation, you know. Still, it"s a bargain. h.e.l.l, that plank you"re on is probably worth a hundred Gippers."
"You can"t even buy these for dollars," Y.T. says, getting her back up. "Look, all I"ve got is one-and-a-half quadrillion dollars."
She pulls the bundle out of her pocket.
The guy laughs, shakes his head, hollers back to his colleagues inside the warehouse. "You guys, we got a chick here who wants to pay in Meeses."
"Better get rid of "em fast, honey," says a sharper, nastier voice, "or get yourself a wheelbarrow."
It"s an even older guy with a bald head, curly hair on the sides, and a paunch. He"s standing up on the loading dock.
"If you"re not going to take it, just say so," Y.T. says. All of this chatter has nothing to do with business.
"We don"t get chicks back here very often," the fat bald old guy says. Y.T. knows that this must be the UKOD himself. "So we"ll give you a discount for being s.p.u.n.ky. Turn around."
"f.u.c.k you," Y.T. says. She"s not going to turn around for this guy.
Everyone within earshot laughs. "Okay, do it," the UKOD says.
The tall skinny guy goes back over to the loading dock and hauls an aluminum briefcase down, sets it on top of a steel drum in the middle of the road so that it"s at about waist height. "Pay first," he says.
She hands him the Meeses. He examines the bundle, sneers, throws it back into the warehouse with a sudden backhand motion. All the guys inside laugh some more.
He opens up the briefcase, revealing the little computer keyboard. He shoves his ID card into the slot, types on it for a couple of seconds.
He unsnaps a tube from the top of the briefcase, places it into the socket in the bottom part. The machine draws it inside, does something, spits it back out.
He hands the tube to Y.T. The red numbers on top are counting down from ten. "When it gets down to one, hold it up to your nose and start inhaling," the guy says.
She"s already backing away from him.
"You got a problem, little girl?" he says.
"Not yet," she says. Then she throws the tube up in the air as hard as she can. The chop of the rotor blades comes out of nowhere. The Whirlwind Reaper blurs over their heads; everyone crouches for an instant as surprise buckles their knees. The tube does not come back to earth.
"You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h," the skinny guy says.
"That was a really cool plan," the UKOD says, "but the part I can"t figure out is, why would a nice, smart girl like you partic.i.p.ate in a suicide mission?"
The sun comes out. About half a dozen suns, actually, all around them up in the air, so that there are no shadows. The faces of the skinny man and the UKOD look flat and featureless under this blinding illumination. Y.T. is the only person who can see worth a d.a.m.n because her Knight Visions have compensated for it; the men wince and sag beneath the light.
Y.T. turns to look behind herself. One of the miniature suns is hanging above the maze of shipping containers, casting light into all its crannies, blinding the gunmen who stand guard there. The scene flashes too light and too dark as her goggles" electronics try to make up their mind. But in the midst of this whole visual tangle she gets one image printed indelibly on her retina: the gunmen going down like a treeline in a hurricane, and for just an instant, a line of dark angular things silhouetted above the maze as they crest it like a cybernetic tsunami. Rat Things.
They have evaded the whole maze by leaping over it in long, flat parabolas. Along the way, some of them have slammed right through the bodies of men holding guns, like NFL fullbacks plowing full speed through nerdy sideline photographers. Then, as they land on the road in front of the maze, there is an instant burst of dust with frantic white sparks dancing around at the bottom, and while all this is happening, Y.T. doesn"t hear, she feels one of the Rat Things impacting on the body of the tall skinny guy, hears his ribs crackling like a ball of cellophane. h.e.l.l is already breaking loose inside the warehouse, but her eyes are trying to follow the action, watching the sparks-and-dust contrails of more Rat Things drawing themselves down the length of the road in an instant and then going airborne to the top of the next barrier.
Three seconds have pa.s.sed since she threw the tube into the air. She is turning back to look inside the warehouse. But someone"s on top of the warehouse, catching her eye for a second. It"s another gunman, a sniper, stepping out from behind an air-conditioning unit, just getting used to the light, raising his weapon to his shoulder. Y.T. winces as a red laser beam from his rifle sweeps across her eyes once, twice as he zeroes his sights on her forehead. Behind him she sees the Whirlwind Reaper, its rotors making a disk under the brilliant light, a disk that is foreshortened into a narrow ellipse and then into a steady silver line. Then it flies right past the sniper.
The chopper pulls up into a hard turn, searching for additional prey, and something falls beneath it in a powerless trajectory, she thinks that it has dropped a bomb. But it"s the head of the sniper, spinning rapidly, throwing out a fine pink helix under the light. The little chopper"s rotor blade must have caught him in the nape of the neck. One part of her is dispa.s.sionately watching the head bounce and spin in the dust, and the other part of her is screaming her lungs out.
She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area, providing a fine vantage point for a sniper.
But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng"s van. It doesn"t do anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its exhaust. She doesn"t care, she"s kicking her way down the road now on her plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower.
There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper"s perch, up in the water tower"s access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing through the ironwork of the water tower. Just before she kicks her way back into the maze, a dustline whips past her, snapping rocks and fragments of broken gla.s.s into her face. It shoots into the maze. She hears it Ping-Pong all the way through, kicking off the steel walls in order to change direction. It"s a Rat Thing clearing the way for her.
How sweet!
"Smooth move, Ex-Lax," she says, climbing back into Ng"s van. Her throat feels thick and swollen. Maybe it"s from screaming, maybe it"s the toxic waste, maybe she"s getting ready to gag. "Didn"t you know about the snipers?" she says. If she can keep talking about the details of the job, maybe she can keep her mind off of what the Whirlwind Reaper did.
"I didn"t know about the one on the water tower," Ng says. "But as soon as he fired a couple of rounds, we plotted the bullets" trajectories on millimeter-wave and back-traced them." He talks to his van and it pulls out of its hiding place, headed for I-405.
"Seems like kind of an obvious place to look for a sniper."
"He was in an unfortified position, exposed from all sides," Ng says. "He chose to work from a suicidal position. Which is not a typical behavior for drug dealers. Typically, they are more pragmatic. Now, do you have any other criticisms of my performance?"
"Well, did it work?"
"Yes. The tube was inserted into a sealed chamber inside the helicopter before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed."
"How about the Rat Things?"