Hawk was followed.
It was expected, and more a part of whatever was going down with Larry Powers and the white suit brigade. They pulled the first car over within ten minutes of Hawk leaving Phoenix. The second, third, and fourth cars were more subtle about things. Hawk relayed three of their license plates to Larry, and added that there was a fourth, and she was going to let it follow her.
"Why?" he said.
"It's an Alex thing," she said. "I can't stop him from putting more cars on me, so having you get the state troopers on the other three will make them think they got away with something. Telling them we let them follow me will take some wind out of their sails."
Larry chuckled. "Where are you going, anyway?"
"I have a college who is the human version of a raccoon on crack. They've hoarded enough scientific equipment to tempt the ghost of Albert Einstein and the only time they talk about Willheim is with 'that fucker' attached. Why?"
"I'm thinking I'll head on over to check in on you later tonight." Larry said.
Translation: Larry was going to give Hawk's tail enough time to settle in for a nice distant surveillance, and then give a hired merc a heart attack. "They really pissed you off, didn't they?"
"Well...Hawk, did you know how many people died yesterday, that didn't have to? Eight people. Nine, if we count the old woman."
"Elizabeth Cummings." She paused. "Can you give me their names, too? The eight that died."
"I will. Even the baby had a name. Did I tell you that? They named him after me. I was the one who helped that woman deliver, and I stood there with this tiny little dying baby in my hands and listened as the doctors counseled the parents for palliative care. Because they weren't getting that baby to an ICU in time and every single person in that parking lot knew it except the parents." A pause. "And we still tried."
She tried to imagine it, a baby with unfinished skin in Larry's big hands. They weren't that big in any other context, but here they were enormous. Hams. Elephants. Skyscrapers towering over a person whose skin is barely paper-thin, whose bones are still more rubber than ivory, whose lungs can barely breathe. This was the world where they wrap babies in plastic because the softest fabric would sandpaper their skin away, and in this birthing-place there was only harsh sky and dull asphalt.
It's the part of a disaster people never see. The secondary deaths. These aren't the people at ground zero, trapped by dust and rubble, bleeding. These are the people who would be safe at home, but for the heart attack, the car crash. Sudden labor. Anaphylaxis. Emergencies whose space is now filled by triage. They have to wait. And time is ticking down for them, too. Every bed filled by a survivor of an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or nuclear disaster, is one that cannot be filled by someone with a more mundane ailment. And mundane did not mean "non-lethal." You can die from a paper cut, if the infection goes untreated.
"We're gonna make this count for something, right, Hawk?" Larry said.
"We're going to try. And if all we accomplish is better transparency...that's still pretty good." Her voice broke a bit on the last.
"What's got you still upset, Hawk?" Larry said.
"I keep thinking of historical parallels. It took international pressure to get the USSR to evacuate Prypiat, days after Chernobyl blew up. And they didn't have a for-profit corporation running the thing."
"They also didn't have the internet and tik-tok. Listen to me, kid. This is fucking everywhere right now. Not the disaster, but the dead people at the hospital. We haven't heard jack shit about why, but it wouldn't take a lot to get the old woman's name to the press."
And they would go to her house. Which would be good, if her house wasn't lethally contaminated. "Don't do that." She said. Very fast. "Or...at least, don't do that yet. If we have to, we have to. And I think we will have to. But...this shit's worse than radiation, Larry. It's more lethal, and Willheim's people are treating it with essential oils...and it's working."
"Like what? Rubbing a boil with orange oil? I got an aunt who does that shit. Always smells like somebody dumped a box of pointy swords on her air freshener," Larry said.
"And I hear the down-home boy in your voice. You're lying," she said. "You know how bad that is, same as I do."
"Laws of physics say a bottle of orange oil shouldn't do jack shit, except maybe make fleas bite someone else's dog, and patchouli is how you cover up weed smell. So if suddenly these things are doing more..."
"It's almost like we're breaking the laws of physics. Which we can't actually do. So that means this stuff might just behave whole new laws that we haven't discovered before--and that, sir, scares the shit out of me."
"Justifying MLMs now, huh," Larry sighed.
"I only know of two of those that pitch essential oils. You won't make money at either, and the founder of one drowned his own baby. So regardless of what the oils are doing to the unknown energy, we can safely say there is zero justification for joining a multi-level marketing scheme to sell essential oils." Hawk took a breath. "So now that you have the PSA, can we get three of my four tails off my ass, please?"
She started seeing flares of cherries and berries within five minutes of that phone call. This would almost have been fun...if she weren't waiting for a text from Larry with eight new names to memorize.
But when she was almost at Emile's house, she watched a curious drama occur with her tail. It was a pedestrian white sedan, the sort that had "Rental" printed all over it. Too clean. Too impersonal. She watched as a 1950s era Chevy pickup truck slowly pulled up beside the tail. The tail flashed hazards and then began to drop back, allowing the chevy to take its place.
As a test, Hawk flashed her own hazards at the unknown. They flashed back.
Uh-huh.
She called Alex. He answered with a "Yo, got honey ants?"
"Honey and tails. You wanna do me a favor? Look up Willheim and see if he's got any photos of himself with a mint 50s truck. The kind with the big ass wheel wells."
She didn't have to wait long. Alex muttered a litany of Lambo, Lambo, Porshe, Firebird, and then 0whistled. "1957 Chevy Cameo, baby blue, whitewall tires. That's beyond mint. I don't give a shit about this guy anymore, Hawk. That's a beautiful car."
"I know," she said, starting to smile. "I can see its grill in my rear view mirror."
She hung up. Kept driving, comfortably paced by the blue Cameo. No rush. The game had been played to its ending. She and Alex had danced sufficiently for the emperor's amusement. Now it was time to seek his favor.
It was enough to make you spit.
Except she didn't think Kaiser was entirely happy with how this had ended. Because She and Alex were supposed to be dead, right? Or if not dead, at least severely hurt. He'd wound them both up to audition for his little club, and left out the important warnings. What better way to eliminate awkward witnesses?
Emile's house was lit up like Christmas when she got there. Complete with...she blinked as the sound truly reached her. Diggy...diggy...hole? She listened and yes. It was a heavy metal group singing "I am a Dwarf and I'm digging a hole/Diggy Diggy Hole/Diggy Diggy Hole." And there might have been some other verses in there, but her brain had just jumped the tracks hard enough to leave divots in her cranium.
