Hot Sky at Midnight Read online

  During the course of the morning he called Nick Rhodes, simply to tell him what had happened to him, where he was now, where he was heading. Carpenter hadn’t wanted to talk to Rhodes the day before, but now it seemed wrong simply to vanish like this, without a word to him. Otherwise, when Rhodes found out that Carpenter had been terminated by Samurai he might think that he had killed himself. Carpenter didn’t want that.

  Rhodes’ office android informed him that Dr. Rhodes was in conference. A little relieved, Carpenter said, “Tell him that Paul Carpenter called, that I’ve left the Company as a result of certain recent events and I’m going to Chicago for a few days to visit a friend, and that I’ll be in touch with him again when I know what my plans beyond that are.” He sidestepped the android’s request for a number where he might be reached. For the moment this was about as far as he could go toward making contact with the life he had left behind him.

  Carpenter was hoping now to reach Chicago late that night, or at the worst by dawn. The car didn’t ever get tired. All he had to do was sit still and let the miles float by in their merry hundreds. He didn’t have much in the way of food left now, but he didn’t have much in the way of appetite, either. Sit still, yes, let the miles float by.

  He passed through long stretches of terrible wasteland: slagheaps, ashes, blasted heaths. Smoke was coming from the ground in places: the remains of ancient fires burning down there, the subterranean world mysteriously consuming itself. An entire dark forest of dead trees covering a long brown strip of sharp-spined hills, with a rusting ski-lift descending out of them like a bad joke. A dry lake. A zone of dead gray earth, a tangle of blackened and twisted wires, mounds of junked cars—in the background, the skeletal traces of some abandoned city, structural girders showing, window-frames like empty eye-sockets.

  Things began to flatten out. The air was brownish gray. He was getting into dust-bowl territory now, the sad dry heart of the continent, where the vast farms once had been, before the summers became furnaces and the air went bad and the rain moved elsewhere. The spacious skies and purple mountain majesties were still there, yes, right there behind him in Utah and Wyoming, but now he was east of there, Nebraska, maybe even Iowa, and the fruited plain had gone to hell and he could find no sign of the amber waves of grain.

  Yet people lived here. Through the deepening afternoon he saw the lights of towns and cities on both sides of the freeway. Why anyone would want to make his home in this place was more than Carpenter could understand, but he realized that they had probably had no choice about it, they had been born here and saw no hope of going anywhere better, or else they had been cast up by the waves of bad fortune on this beach without a sea, and here they were. Here they would stay. R.I.P.

  But at least they had homes, he thought.

  Carpenter wondered what he was going to do when this long grim odyssey from nowhere to nowhere and back again was finished, and he was ready to begin the next stage of his life. What next stage? Go where, do what? There was no place he could call his home. Los Angeles? He scarcely knew the place any more. San Francisco? Spokane? The Company had been his home, moving him around from Boston to St. Louis to Winnipeg to Spokane as it pleased. Wherever he might be, still he had always been in the Company.

  And now he wasn’t. Carpenter could hardly begin to comprehend that. No slope at all. Off the curve entirely. Level Zero.

  Imagine that, he thought. What an accomplishment. The first kid in your class to attain Level Zero.

  Somewhere in the middle of Illinois, an hour or two west of Chicago, traffic began to back up on the freeway and the car told him there was a roadblock ahead. No vehicular traffic was being admitted to Chicago from the west or the south except through approved quarantine stations.

  “What’s going on?” Carpenter asked.

  But the car was only a cheap rental job, not programmed to provide anything more than basic information. The best it could do was flash him a map that showed a red cordon zone covering a vast swatch of the region from Missouri and western Illinois south all the way to New Orleans, and up the far side of the Mississippi from Louisiana to Kentucky and parts of Ohio. According to the car, the closest point of entry to the protected zone for travelers intending to reach Chicago was Indianapolis, and the vehicle proposed a detour accordingly.

  “Whatever you say,” Carpenter told it.

  He turned on the radio and got part of the answer. They were talking about an outbreak of something called Chikungunya in New Orleans and the fear that Guanarito or Oropouche might be spreading there too. Secondary occurrences were reported in the St. Louis area, they said. Carpenter had never heard of Chikungunya or Guanarito or Oropouche, but plainly those were the names of diseases: there must be an epidemic of some sort raging down south and the health authorities were trying to keep it from reaching Chicago.

  When he reached Indianapolis, around mid-morning, he was able to learn the rest of the story at the quarantine station while he was waiting to be interviewed. The diseases with the long names were tropical viruses, he was told. They were emigrants from Africa and South America and had become rampant in the new rain forests of Louisiana and Florida and Georgia—carried in nonhuman hosts, spread by ticks and other disagreeable bugs, moved along by them into the bloodstreams of the myriad gibbering monkeys and innumerable giant rodents, themselves refugees from the rain forests that once had existed in the valleys of the Amazon and the Congo, that now infested the wet, steaming jungles of the South.

  Everyone who lived in the new jungled regions had to be vaccinated constantly, Carpenter knew, as one virus or another went jumping from some animal that carried it into some hapless member of the human population, setting off yet another epidemic. But this was no rain forest, up here. Why were they worrying about jungle diseases like Oropouche and Chikungunya in the drier, cooler environs of Chicago?

  “Bunch of infected monkeys got on a barge full of fruit coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans,” Carpenter was told at the quarantine station. “Some of them got off at Memphis and started biting people. The rest stayed aboard until Cairo. Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now. We don’t know exactly which bug it is, yet, but they’re all bad. You get bitten, you puff up and turn into a bag of black blood, and then the bag breaks and what was in it runs along the floor like slime until it’s empty.”

  “Jesus,” Carpenter said.

  “We think we stopped the virus before St. Louis. If this stuff ever got to Chicago, the place would go up like a bonfire. Four million people all packed together like this? Disease that you can spread just by looking at someone the wrong way? Forget it! —Let’s see your route plaque, please.”

  Carpenter turned the record of his journey over for inspection.

  “No side trips to any part of eastern Missouri that don’t show up on the plaque? Any deviation into Tennessee or Kentucky?”

  “I came in by way of the north route,” Carpenter said. “You can see what day I left California. There hasn’t been time for me to go anywhere but straight across the mountains and through Nebraska and Iowa.”

  “You here on business?”

  “Business, yes.”

  A sticky moment. Carpenter was still sailing under Samurai colors: a Level Eleven salaryman, coming to Chicago for the Company. One phone call could spike that. But the Company still carried him on the roster. His megacorp affiliation got him through, on into the fumigation chamber, and on beyond it to the highway that led to Chicago.

  Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now.

  Highways closed, air routes shut down, nobody goes in, nobody comes out. Memphis and Cairo might just as well have vanished from the face of the Earth. Monkeys come out of the jungles of Louisiana, doing their job for the forces of chaos, and your city disappears from the world while you wait for the Oropouche viruses, or whatever, to get into your veins and make your body swell up and turn into a bag of black blood. Lord, have mercy, Carpenter thought.

  Christ, have mercy.


  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

  In Chicago, finally, about four in the afternoon, Carpenter phoned Jeanne Gabel at the Samurai headquarters at Wacker and Michigan, and got her after only about half a minute of hunt-and-seek maneuvering.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “In a parking lot at—mmm—Monroe and Green.”

  “All right. Stay there. It’ll be all right if I leave here early. I’ll come and get you.”

  He sat in the car, weary and bedraggled from his journey, staring in awe and dismay at the dark smoggy sky. The air in the city was a kind of oily soup that left black smears on the car’s windshield. It was fantastically splotched and streaked with dense patches of mottled color, yellow and purple and green and blue all running together, the color of a bad bruise, with the sun glinting vaguely through the curtain of crud like a small, rusty brass coin. Carpenter had not been in this part of the country for a very long time; he had forgotten what kind of poisons lived in the air here. Everyone he saw was wearing a face-lung. He put his on, making sure it fit snugly over his cheekbones and jaw.

  Jeanne arrived with surprising swiftness. Carpenter felt a surge of joy at the sight of her—the first familiar face since Oakland—and then, immediately, a crosscurrent of confusion. He had no idea why he had come here or what he wanted from her, this woman with whom he had maintained a kind of long-distance flirtatious friendship for nearly half a dozen years without ever once having kissed her on the lips.

  He would have kissed her now, but that was hard, wearing a face-lung. He settled for a hug instead. She was a strong woman, Oriental in some fashion on her mother’s side but no hint of Oriental fragility about her, and she held him tightly, a good hearty squeeze.

  “Come on,” she said. “You need a shower in the worst way. And then something to eat, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “God, it’s good to see you again, Paul.”

  “Me too.”

  “Things must be bad, though. I’ve never seen you looking this way.”

  “Things aren’t very good,” he said. “For sure.”

  Jeanne entered the car on the driver’s side and told it where to take them. As it slid into the traffic flow she said, “I checked with Personnel and Records. You don’t seem to be with the Company any more.”

  “I was terminated.”

  “I never heard of them doing that except for cause.”

  “There was cause, Jeannie.”

  She glanced across at him. “For God’s sake, what happened?”

  “I screwed up,” Carpenter said. “I did what I thought was the right thing, and it was wrong. I’ll tell you all about it, if you’re interested. The main thing is, it was lots of bad publicity and it got the Company in trouble with Kyocera, and so they threw me out on my ass. It was a political thing. They had to let me go.”

  “Poor Paul. They really stuck it to you, didn’t they? What will you do now?”

  “Take a shower and have some sort of meal,” he said. “That’s as much of a plan as I have, right now.”

  She lived in a two-room flat—a sitting room with kitchen, and a bedroom—somewhere off in one of Chicago’s western suburbs. The rooms were sealed so tightly that they felt practically airless and the cooling system was an ancient clanker, inefficient and noisy.

  There wasn’t much space for guests in the little apartment. Carpenter supposed he would have to find a hotel room for the night if he didn’t want to sleep in the car again, and wondered how he was going to pay for it. Maybe Jeanne would let him sleep on the floor. He took the longest shower he dared to allow himself, perhaps six or seven minutes, and changed into fresh clothes. When he came out, she had two plates of algae cakes and soy bacon on the table, and a couple of bottles of beer.

  As they ate, he told her the story, quietly and dispassionately, beginning with the distress call from Kovalcik and ending with his final conversation with Tedesco. By now it all seemed to him more like something he had seen on the evening news than anything that had actually happened to him, and he felt almost nothing as he laid out the sequence of events for her. Jeanne listened virtually without comment until the end. Then she said simply, “What a shitty deal, Paul.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you thought about appealing?”

  “To whom? The Pope? I’m out on my ass, Jeanne. You know that as well as I do.”

  She nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s so. Oh, Paul, Paul—”

  Indoors, in the hot hermetic atmosphere of the flat, they were wearing no masks. She turned toward him and he saw a look in her eyes that was bewildering in its complexity: expectable things like sorrow and compassion, and behind that what appeared to be a soft gleam of pure love, and behind that—what? Fear? Fear was what it looked like, Carpenter thought. But fear of what? Fear of him? No, he thought. Fear of herself.

  Carefully he poured more beer into his glass.

  She said, “How long do you plan to stay in Chicago?”

  He shrugged. “A day or two, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t want to be any kind of burden for you, Jeannie. I just needed to get the hell away from California for a little while, to find some sort of safe harbor until—”

  “Stay as long as you like, Paul.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I feel responsible, you know. Inasmuch as I was the one who got you that gig on the iceberg trawler.”

  “That’s bullshit, Jeannie. You were the one that got me the job, sure, but I was the one who turned those people away. All by myself, I did it.”

  “Yes. I understand that.”

  “Tell me about you,” he said. “What have you been up to, anyway?”

  “What’s there to tell? I work, I come home, I read, I sleep. It’s a nice quiet life.”

  “The kind you’ve always preferred.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss being in Paris?”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Let’s go there,” he said. “You and me, right now. You quit your job and we’ll get a little place near the river and we’ll sing and dance in the Metro for money. It won’t be much of a living but at least we’ll be in Paris.”

  “Oh, Paul. What a great idea!”

  “If only we could, eh?”

  “If only.” She took his hand in hers and gave it a quick little squeeze; and then she pulled back, as though the gesture had seemed too bold for her.

  Carpenter realized that he knew nothing about this woman at all, actually. She was warm and good and kind, but she had kept herself sealed behind glass at all times: a friend, a chum, but always a boundary rising between her and the outside world. And here he was within the perimeter.

  They talked for hours, as they had done in the old days in St. Louis: gossip about mutual friends, and Company rumors, and rambling discussions of world affairs. She was trying to put him at his ease, he knew; and probably herself as well. The undercurrent of tension in her was easy to detect. He was demanding a great deal of her, Carpenter realized— showing up out of nowhere like this, moving in on her, dumping the fragments of his shattered life at her feet, presenting himself without explicitly telling her what it was that he wanted from her. Which he could not do, because he didn’t know.

  About half past ten she said, “You must be very tired, Paul. After driving all the way from California practically nonstop.”

  “Yes. I’d better find myself a hotel room somewhere.”

  Her eyes went wide for an instant. Another enigmatic look flickered across her face, that same uneasy mixture of warmth and uneasiness.

  “I don’t mind if you stay here,” she said.

  “But there’s so little room.”

  “We can manage. Please. I’d feel like a shit, sending you out into the night.”

  “Well—”

  “I want you to stay,” she said.

  “Well,” he said again, smiling. “In that case—”

&nb
sp; She went into the bathroom and was in there a long while. Carpenter stood by the narrow bed, not knowing whether to undress. When Jeanne came out she was wearing a long robe. Carpenter went in to wash up, and when he emerged, she was in bed and the lights were out.

  He dropped his clothes, all but his underwear, and lay down on the floor in the sitting room.

  “No,” Jeanne said, after a little while. “Silly.”

  Gratitude and excitement and something that might almost have been remorse flooded through him all at once. He moved through the darkness, stumbling over furniture, and got delicately into bed beside her, trying not to brush up against her. There was barely enough room for them both.

  Then as his eyes adjusted he saw that her robe was open, and she was naked beneath it, and she was trembling. Carpenter slid his shorts off and kicked them aside. Gently he put his hand on her shoulder.

  She shivered. “Cold,” she said.

  “It’ll warm up.”

  “Yes.Yes, it will.”

  He moved his hand lower. Her breast was small, firm, the nipple quite hard. The beating of her heart was apparent behind it, so thunderous that it startled him.

  Odd hesitations came over him. Going to bed with strange women was nothing unfamiliar for Carpenter, but Jeanne Gabel was not exactly strange to him, and yet she was. He had known her so long, and he hadn’t known her at all, and they had been such good friends, and they had never in any way been intimate. And now here he was in bed with her with his hand on her breast. She was waiting. But she plainly seemed frightened. She didn’t seem any more sure of what to do than he was. Carpenter feared that she might be doing this out of nothing more than pity for him, which he didn’t like at all. And the wild thought struck him also that she might be a virgin: but no, no, that had to be impossible. She was at least thirty-five. Women who stayed virgin that long, if there were any such outside the convent, would probably want to stay that way forever.