The Bells of Ys Chapter 8

[Beginning of Story]

Kira

The bar had seen better days, though Kira suspected that they had probably been in her great grandfather's time. Ancient beat-up pickup trucks, many sporting the old Ford logo from a time before it had been bought up by GM, formed an obstacle course in the mud-soaked parking lot. Even out there the country fusion could be distinctly heard, and the smell of mud competed with beer and piss in equal measure.

This was not what she had in mind for getting dinner, but the long, slow depression had hit especially hard in these areas. The mom and pop eateries were all gone now, as gone as the small towns that supported them. Those people who were left were generally too poor or too stubborn to leave, and so spent the evenings spending what little they did have at dives like this one.

She couldn't do anything about the car other than part it out of the light - it practically screamed that she was from a different social strata than anyone here, but she was able to pull on a grungier sweater and pair of jeans, leaving the electronics in her purse. She'd not pass for a native, but at least she wouldn't look like she was nouveau rich slumming.

The noise and smell hit her like a while as she opened up the screen door of Nick's Bar and made her way inside, stale beer and sweat and urine and hopelessness masquerading as a good time. She wasn't the only woman, thankfully, though she suspected, given the amount of skin exposed, that more than a few of the women here used this as their professional base of operation. She made her way through the crowd and found a small table in the back just being vacated, and she took it just as the waitress came to clean up the last couple's mess.

"Do you have anything to eat?" she asked, practically shouting to be heard.

"Grill's still open," the waitress replied, a faux blonde who looked like she also occasionally moonlighted on the side, but she returned Kira's haggard smile with a ragged one of her own. She pulled out a laminated menu, still slightly damp from being recently wiped down, then hurried off in summons from a bellow in the kitchen. "I'll be right back, sweetie."

It wasn't the Four Seasons, but Kira was vaguely surprised at the fact that the menu actually had more than popcorn and peanuts. When the blonde waitress, Charlene (according to the nametag just visible in the low light of the bar), came back, Kira ordered a mushroom omelette and some coffee. She normally wasn't one for eggs and coffee this late at night, but a bad feeling nagged at her that she'd need the calories and caffeine in the hours ahead.

Her escape had been too easy. The ruse that she'd used was intended to buy her time, nothing else. They wanted to avoid arresting her in a way that she'd have some chance of at least notifying her protectors that she was in danger. They'd forced her to react, to run to the most obscure place in the region, and she could easily meet with an accident along the way. She was probably paranoid for thinking like this, but paranoia was an easy thing to succumb to right now, especially as the feds had a habit of "disappearing" people who asked too many questions.

Charlene came back with her dinner/breakfast a few minutes later, and even in the dark she could tell that the waitress was no more a blonde than she was. In many ways it was comforting; the blondes that she knew were too California for her, even Tina. It was a part of what had eventually ended their relationship. Tina was intelligent, much more intelligent than she gave herself credit for, but the journalist was what she thought of as a "sun-person", someone who deliberately played down her intelligence to appear perky and sunny to fit into the whole female news-anchor schtick.

Kira ate in silence, deliberately not thinking about her current predicament. Even if the crest wasn't coming, Tina wouldn't have a job for much longer. She did ask questions, the wrong sort of questions, and more than once she'd lost out on that chance at being picked up by one of the nationals because she was something of a rarity - a journalist who actually who actually did investigate things, rather than being a talking head.

She glanced up at one of the TVs playing a news feed from FOX. They used sims for most of their "desk" reporting, computer generated news agents that had been carefully constructed to appear more perfect than humanly possible, with teams of marketing psychologists tailoring these news droids to appeal to this demographic or that one. They weren't obviously CG - she had to give their programmers credit for that at least - but to an eye trained for dealing with modeling and simulations they were obvious. And as the kinks were worked out on the high end, they would come down in price, and Tina, intelligent, thoughtful Tina, would be yet another victim of the great race to virtualization.

Kira would have missed the story, having turned back to her dinner, except that she caught Charlene suddenly freeze mid-stride as the waitress glanced at the TV. Following her gaze, Kira watched stunned as she saw her own face looking back at her on national TV, with the caption "Suspected Terrorist" written in large letters above and below her visage. Straining, she could just make out the male sim's deep authoritative voice.

"... wanted in connection with an explosion at the University of Washington that killed three students, Kira is considered armed and dangerous ..."

A shot showed Kraner hall, with major blast damage as paramedics carted away sheet covered bodies away from her ... her office, visible from the outside. The screen then switched to photos of the three students, and Kira couldn't help the gasp that left her. Her students. Janice Wright, Lisa Blane, and Mark ... oh, god, not Mark! The fork slipped from her hand and clanged too loudly on the plate, but she just sat there, paler than a ghost.

Then there was an arm shaking her, Charlene's arm tugging at her while trying not to be obvious about it.

"Come on, we need to get you out of here. Several police cars just pulled up outside."

"Wha-?"

"Girlfriend, move it!"

Shaking the shock from her face, Kira let the waitress pull her to her feet, then they both lurched toward the bathroom. Once the door locked behind them, Charlene pulled the blonde wig off her head to reveal a close-cut haircut, her natural hair a coppery red, and handed the wig to Kira. She also slipped off the apron, and, palming a key from the apron's pocket, stuffed it into one of the small storage lockers that were obviously used by the waitresses to store their clothes.

"Why?" Kira started to ask, but Charlene held her hand up.

"No questions, not now. We're two punk chicks, out for a little fun, and neither you nor I saw the waitress or the wanted terrorist."

"I - ... yeah," Kira said, quickly stepping into the role.

They went back outside, holding hands, and walked right past the three policemen that had just walked inside. One of the gargolyes, stood at the bar, backed turned to her, talking to the bartender, and Kira hurried faster. She had no doubt that he would recognize her, wig or no, and Kira felt an urgent desire to put as much distance between her and the gargoyle as possible.

They walked past a couple of other cops, Kira listening intently to a story Charlene was telling about her brother's latest escapades with the rain, which involved, among other things, waking up after a flood to find that his bed had floated out of his trailor and was now perched atop the hen house. One cop eyed them briefly, but then shook his head and went inside.

They made it to Charlene's truck, a battered old Buick that was probably on its third antique restoration job, and after an agonizing minute of listening to the ancient starter turn over, the truck kicked into gear. Charlene drove it casually out of the lot until there were out of sight of the bar, turned onto a small side-road, then she floored the accelerator until the truck's old analog speedometer was pushing the hundred mile an hour marker.

All this time, Kira sat silently, not really even aware of the breakneck speed they were making over the gravelled roads. A few turns later, Charlene stopped the truck, reached under her seat, and pulled out a petite, and no doubt very lethal, revolver and pointed it at Kira.

"I've just made myself an accessory to a felony, Kira Livingston. Tell me you had nothing to do with what I just saw on the TV, or we go back, and I add kidnapping to the rap sheet."

"I just lost three students, among them a very close friend, to ..." Kira swallowed hard. "I ... I didn't do that. Oh, God, I couldn't do that."

The wave of grief hit her then. Mark was gone, Janice and Lisa. Janice was ... had been ... a very shy but bright young woman who was studying to be a physicist. Lisa had been bitten hard by the weather bug, and was studying ecological science. Mark ... her personal computer nerd, a friend who'd helped her program some of the simulations for the paper, and who was due to graduate this year. She was their teacher, their mentor. Was she responsible for their deaths?

She looked up, with tears in her eyes, and realized that Charlene had lowered the gun and was threatening to cry as well. "What happened?"

Kira collected herself, wiped her tears on her sleeve. "I'm a professor at the University. I wrote a paper recently warning that the earth's climate system was in imminent danger of collapse, probably within no more than a few months tops. Someone in the government apparently realized that if I went public with this, all of his business ventures would collapse, and so he sent some agents after me today to make me disappear. Several of my colleagues that I've been collaborating with have died mysteriously, and I suspect I was next."

Charlene looked at her, nodding. "Go on."

"They came for me, but I'd installed surveillance systems in my office because my dad had been killed by some of the same people, and they were afraid that they'd be picked up on record and cause more than a minor political embarassment. I left shortly after they showed up, managed to elude pursuit. I suspect they planted a bomb to wipe out any recordings of them, and to provide a convenient excuse to pick me up legitimately. I swear, I had nothing to do with ...."

Without another word, Charlene put the gun back under the seat and started the truck back up.

"Where ... where are we going?"

"We need to put as much distance between us and your friends as possible, and need to find new wheels. It won't take them long to realize that they let the two of us walk out under their noses, and when they do they'll be pissed."

"You ... believe me?" Kira asked, fighting hard to regain her composure.

"Sweetie, I believed you the moment I saw your face staring at that damn TV set. I got my own issues with the Man, going way, way back."

She didn't say another word, and they drove into the night.

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