Shortly before they moved to the boonies of Wonland County, Pippi took a Vigilance course at the nearly defunct Seventy-First Street End Rape Alliance down the block from their townhouse. In a half-empty indoor shooting range, she and six other women took orders from an enraged, grandmotherly instructor in a fuchsia track suit, on the Seven Deadly Signs of Home Invasion (number five: broken glass), the best time of year to plant land mines (summer) and where (below the first-floor windows but not too close to the foundation of the house), as well as the care and use of their sidearms. Underemployed for the first time in four decades—though she was still consulting!—Pippi threw herself into the classes with a gusto that Instructor Joan, an armchair psychologist, appreciatively dubbed “aggressive-aggressive.” Little did either of them know this was just the beginning of an education that would continue far from that boot camp for city-fleeing retirees, into Pippi’s own perilous manor home, during the days of the Siege.
But tonight, it’s that first Vigilance class that springs to Pippi’s mind the instant she hears the fateful chirp of the Ripples’ tastefully unobtrusive security system. She knows in an instant, faster than reflex, that it’s not a false alarm—the surveillance AI is a slumbering mental giant, easy to waken but hard to spook. This is real, and Pippi’s mind flashes instantly to Instructor Joan’s Rule for the Road: “Get the children out alive. Believe me, there’s no point if you don’t.”
Never mind that Pippi is still twitching with rage at Swan Lenore—literally, actually twitching, she can feel the muscle squirming unattractively under the taut skin near her right eye like a trapped leech. But she’s learned enough in the last nineteen years to understand Joan’s message now. When you’re an Old Mom, you go to war for the child you have, not the child you wish you had.
Pippi loads her sidearm, and as she slams the magazine into the handle, something inside her also snaps into place. Her senses quicken. It’s just like riding a bicycle: it comes back. She drops extra rounds into one pocket of her robe, a fistful of jewelry into the other. Oh, she’s ready.
What is it like to walk through a mansion, prepared to shoot on sight? Life takes on the saturated hue of a game it is possible to win or lose. And Pippi loves to win.
She doesn’t take the elevator, that gift-wrapped box for ambushers. She takes instead the servant stairwell, a dull, square-edged helical corkscrew of concrete, windowless but for a filthy skylight at the top, through which one can see as much bird excrement as stars. You can tell a lot about a home by the condition of its staff quarters. Pippi approves of Humphrey’s frugality to a point, but you don’t want to cut corners, not with a property like this. Pippi’s Bone-Soother slippers make no sound on the steps as she briskly and without incident descends.
When she exits onto the first floor, she nearly collides with Duncan Ripple, who screams girlishly until she grudgingly withdraws the gun barrel from his temple.
“Mama Law,” he gasps, either mispronouncing Mom-in-Law or deeply confused about the role of the preposition in speech.
“Where is my daughter?”
“I dunno, I thought she was with you. Look, we’ve gotta go. Torchies all over the place. With chain saws.”
It’s then that Pippi notices the Girl, hiding behind him almost successfully, clutching the leash of that awful dog. Pippi hadn’t bothered forming a mental image of someone so insignificant, but the Girl confirms all her worst suspicions. A pinkie finger of a person. And she is a Girl, not a Woman, despite the estrogen-ripeness that softens her boyish frame: Swanny was never so young. Strong men take pride in their lovers; weak men prefer to pity them. As the Girl’s little hand snakes uncertainly toward Duncan’s, Pippi strikes him across the face with her sidearm. It surprises her not at all that he hits the floor so easily.
“Hey!” he howls, rubbing his cheek. “You’re not my mom!”
“Shut up. How many are there?”
“I dunno, like, four? Five? Maybe more. They were breaking into the security booth—I guess they wanted maps of the house?”
Pippi steps over him and continues on her mission.
She knows better than to walk the Hall of Ancestors; there’s no cover in a corridor, and she’s not about to retreat if they have projectile-firing weapons in addition to the chain saws. It’s unlikely, of course. Bullets are so rare in Torchtown, the criminals have been known to pry them out of their wounds to resell for a profit. Yet another reason Pippi aims to kill.
Pippi remembers the first day of the Siege. She’d been up all night, listening to radio reports of the invasions. The power was out. The county had shut down the grid to discourage the raiders, who needed to recharge the batteries of their saws and the engines of their Road Daggers upon occasion as they plundered and pillaged from house to house. Pippi hadn’t bothered turning on the generator. She didn’t need an electric stove or a refrigerator for what she was doing. She didn’t even need lights. She sat in the dark with a machine gun in her lap, wearing the most invulnerable pantsuit that would fit over her six-months-pregnant belly—along with most of her diamonds. A box of grenades sat beside her on the couch cushion. Chet was in an induced coma in the bedroom upstairs. Shortly after dawn broke, she saw the first scouts from the raiding party making their way up the drive.
Now, in the Ripple mansion, Pippi cuts through the so-called hidden passage, really just a utility closet off the hall that opens up to the kitchen on the other side. Diodes and fuse boxes, wires and pipes, the house’s veins and bones and nerve endings: she’d wanted to gut the house in Wonland, but they hadn’t been able to afford it, and a good thing too. She can’t believe how much they sank into that manor, which now stands ownerless and hollow and uncontested, the great fortress of a battle long past. At least she packed the cow-shaped cowhide rug. A room can always use a little zip, a little something to say, “I’m here.”