When Mercedes showed her the fourth attempt, the woman exclaimed, “Normal!” beaming at last. “Your abuela can tell you how to send the photo to me.” Then she was off, and the sounds of the courtyard rose up to reach their floor.
There was a small courtyard in Mercedes’s Chapel Street apartment complex, benches made of steel with wood lacquered over the seats framed the small gardens that had mulch and tiny trees sprouting from them. None of the few dogs that roamed the area, walking through the rays of red sun that shot through the slats overhead, was on a leash. But one of her neighbors walked around, gloved, with a plastic bag in his hand and more on his waist and scooped up their shit. The few residents left might have taken for granted how well maintained the place still was or might’ve believed it some sort of magic, but Mercedes knew that man cleaning up dogshit was the fairy godfather behind it. So was the woman who came by to maintain the temperature readers over each doorframe. At first, each unit had a dosimeter hanging outside like a doorbell, but those were too valuable and too easily stolen, so it became the type of thing that was waiting for you if and when you moved in. Like an amenity. To go along with the rec room and the gym and the solar-powered electricity.
One benefit, though, to the emptiness of the place was that Mercedes could play her reggaeton from her Flex at whatever volume she pleased. It was like her grandmother or her grandmother’s friends filled the space with her. A way to keep them near. If that were ever taken from her, she knew she’d have to move.
Sydney sat on a milk crate she must’ve brought with her, and Timeica stood, and like that, they formed a tight circle with Mercedes sitting on her bench. At her side was a little ceramic ashtray, white with a multicolored tile pattern blackened with ash.
“Horses,” Mercedes said at last after a puff. “You wanna steal horses?”
“It’s not stealing,” Timeica said, annoyed, like this was the hundredth time she’d had to explain this. “They wild. No stable, no saddles, nothing. Just roaming around.”
“What’re we gonna do with horses?”
Timeica shrugged. “I dunno. Feed them? Ride them? We’d be saving them. They looked like they need people to take care of ’em.”
Mercedes knew a project when she saw one. Usually, it was women wanting to fix one of these damaged men. The way these pendejos behaved sometimes was close enough to animals. And the woman would smash herself against the wall over and over and over again to save what didn’t want saving.
“So what do you say?”
“Cedes, if you just seen them,” Sydney said, breathless, in that voice so beautiful it hurt Mercedes to hear.
“Mira, I don’t know nothing about no horses. I can’t remember the last time I seen a horse, okay? But I know those things aren’t cheap. You need chavo. Where will you keep them? How will you feed them? Does anybody in this city even have straw?”
“So you do know what horses need to eat,” Timeica said, grinning.
“Mija, wait.”
“Apples too,” said Sydney. “We could get apples easy.”
“How many horses are we talking?”
“Three or four,” Sydney said.
“Is it three or is it four?”
“Five,” Timeica said firmly. And with that, it felt as though Mercedes had been drafted.
There was no resisting. They were gonna do this with or without her, so she might as well make sure they were safe. “The plan is easy. A bunch of us drive in—”
“With my car, of course.” Mercedes lit another cigarette.
“And we ride the horses back out.”
“You been on a horse before?”
Timeica smiled a “no but what could go wrong” smile.
Mercedes shook her head, cursed under her breath. “And we get the horses here. Where do we put ’em?”
Timeica lifted her chin resolutely. “I’ll talk to Bishop about that.”
“What’s Bishop got to do with … You know what? I’ll let that one go.”
“Good. Sydney’s gonna go on another Fairfield run, and she’s gonna get a good look at the horses again, make sure they’re still there and nobody’s gotten to them yet. Also gonna look for surveillance. It was pretty light on the way there, but you never know.”
Mercedes arched an eyebrow at Sydney. “You’re not going alone, are you?”
A grin split Sydney’s face. “I’m going with Linc.”
A snort escaped Mercedes before she could stop it. “Another fucking project,” she said out loud.
Linc and Sydney had left Bishop’s truck around some brush on the side of the Merritt Parkway and hidden it beneath vines and large leaves. Then Sydney had removed any part of it a scavenger might’ve deemed valuable—took off the rims, eviscerated what was under the hood, even twisted off the side mirrors—and scattered those pieces in nearby woods. She didn’t say why, but had a just-in-case look in her eyes. She’d done it all with practiced movements, looking like she knew what she was up to, like she knew how to put back together what was broken. Because she looked so confident doing it, Linc trusted her.
Bishop was always loath to part with his truck, but when Linc told him that Sydney wanted to take him on the next Fairfield run, Bishop had smiled at him and readily lent him the keys. Linc and Bishop both suspected that there was no more food to be collected there, that their vouchers were all useless, because there weren’t even droids to process their claims, that now the trucks came to them—whenever they did come—but he’d handed over his truck nonetheless. So that Linc could spend some time with his girl.
She had eyes for the greenery that consumed the roadway, the stuff that stuck up through the cracks in the concrete and twisted the underground magnetic lines into breaking. She seemed to spend most of her time with her eyes skyward, tracking the tree canopy. Linc couldn’t help but follow her gaze and catch the leaves at the beginning of their turning. Wind was cutting through the tunnel the landscape turned the roadway into, and Linc drew closer to her and slipped his arm over her shoulder. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t slip her arm around his waist like he’d hoped. Maybe it was because his knapsack was in the way. That’s what he told himself as they passed exit after blocked-off exit.
Barricades blocked most of the off-ramps, and it was clear from the imprints in the ground and the occasional buzzing in the air that, once upon a time, mechs had guarded the border of a dome here.
Thunder boomed distantly.
They both spent a few moments looking up at the sky and the suddenness of the gray before heading into the forest shelter. The rain would thicken the radiation, marrying the airborne dust of it together to make mud. Sydney pulled Linc deeper into the forest, away from the side of the road, again like she knew what she was doing, and Linc imagined they were both thinking about Bishop’s truck and whether they’d buried it deep enough to save it from the worst of the acid.
Before long, the soil squished, wet and noisy, under their boots. Running would’ve splashed the stuff all over them, so they walked as fast as they could until Linc heard the soft pattering of rain on something that wasn’t foliage. Cloth. He followed the sound, holding Sydney’s hand and only belatedly realizing. Then, in the middle distance, they saw it. A tent.
Their steps slowed, so that they could better listen through the rain for other sounds: a grunt, footsteps that weren’t their own, a gun cocking. But there was nothing. As Linc edged closer, box cutter in hand, he skirted the perimeter of the camp. The only other evidence that a human had been here was the graveyard of spent dragons behind the tent. He was a long time staring at them before Sydney appeared at his side. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen that many before, and it brought him back to a moment, a random moment, when he’d found himself waking up in an abandoned, bombed-out apartment building.
His eyes were open when the sun rose again and revealed what someone had done in the interim. Around the hand propping him up, emptied dragons. His whole body, bent as it was against the wall, felt stiff and brittle from the final edges of the high. Intermittently dotting the alley were piles: discarded wood, welded scrap metal, broken tools, cigarette packets, soda cans, trash, all politely organized. The rising sun threw their shadows against the abandoned building opposite Linc where several of the other stackers slept or didn’t. A wooden stepladder and shards of unwanted wood made a young girl with tousled hair and the silhouette of her dress flare out in a breeze that wasn’t there with her head angled toward the sky. A metal stand curved to hold balls of copper wire gilded by the sun made two faces silhouetted against the wall of the second floor, a man and a woman, bodiless, facing each other, on the verge of words. Two wooden stepladders and twined poles became two girls sitting on stools, slumped forward, one with her chin resting on the palm of her hand. Bags filled with shit formed dunghills on which rested black plastic trash bags and wood to make the shadow on the wall that of a young woman reclined against a rest with another woman’s head in her lap, the first looking forward while the second faced insouciantly skyward. Shadows play-acting at living.
