“People Machine!”
Swanny grabs Abby by the hair. “I’m not frigid!” she yells in Abby’s face.
Hooligan clamps his mouth onto Swanny’s pajamaed calf, and Swanny yanks her hand free of Abby’s scalp, cursing, taking several long blond strands with it in the process. The dog releases Swanny in turn, and she angrily inspects the indentations on her leg for blood. Finding none, she tugs Hooligan’s leash out of Abby’s hands with a vindictive jerk.
“All right,” Swanny says. Her eyes are dying suns, red-rimmed from the smoke. “Duncan’s all yours. Go and get him.”
* * *
“I don’t think you’re supposed to ride the elevator when the building’s on fire,” Ripple says.
Leather Lungs presses the button for the library’s top floor without responding. Looks like he has two good hands after all. The doors slide shut. Now only the hot-dog cart stands between him and Ripple in the enclosed space. Leather Lungs respirates steadily through his mask. Maybe Ripple should try to get on this guy’s good side. Assuming there is a good side. Independent extinguishment contractor—that’s like a bounty hunter for fires.
“You didn’t have to put the collar on me,” Ripple continues. “I would’ve gone with you willingly.”
“The hell you would have,” says Leather Lungs. “If you wouldn’t face danger with those girls watching, you wouldn’t do it at all. A man’s always bravest in front of an audience.”
“Harsh. And untrue. I’m brave whenever. Mostly.” Ripple thinks of fleeing the mansion, the hours walking underground. He checks his LookyGlass: still no response from his dad. “Hey, you work for the police department. Do you think you could get them to send some cops up to the Heights to check on my family?”
“What happened to your family?”
“My mansion got broken into—fucking HomeShield. I think my parents got to the panic room in time, but I want to make sure they’re OK. Torchies. Not cool.”
“Where were you when this happened?”
“That doesn’t matter. Can you do it or not? I’m helping you out.”
“Under duress.”
This is a really slow elevator. “I used to want to be a fireman, you know. I talked about it on my show, Late Capitalism’s Royalty. I’m on the record about this.”
“Didn’t have what it takes?”
“Come on. They shut that shit down when the fire chief got barbecued. Obviously you know that, it’s how you got your job.” Leather Lungs doesn’t answer. It feels weirdly mournful, like an impromptu moment of silence, until Ripple goes on: “So I got into other stuff, like gaming and damsels. Did you see my girlfriend? The hot one, not the other one. The other one’s my wife.”
“You’ll need this.” Leather Lungs takes out a second gas mask and offers it to Ripple. Ripple can’t imagine strapping it to his face; it’s nasty and old, a feed bag for breathing.
“Um, I’m good, thanks.”
Leather Lungs turns to him slowly, and for the first time Ripple sees the glint of eyes behind those eyeholes. “The brainpan is a skillet, son. It doesn’t take the heat. When you get out there in the smoke, the fumes, the threat of more death raining from above, this mask will be the only thing holding your body and soul together. Top of the line, vetted the brand myself.”
It’s a pretty stirring endorsement.
“Maybe I’ll hold on to it just in case.” Ripple turns the mask over: TARNHELM reads a little metal tag on the inside lining. So weird to bother branding something that isn’t even stylish.
“When someone offers you a gas mask, you take it. And you never take it off.”
“Not ever?”
“Not until it’s safe.”
“Right.”
“Now, when we get up there, you’re going to look out on the roof and it’s going to look bad. It’s going to look like the end. You have to remember, you write this story. You’re the one who forges that path through the flames. You’re the one who survives. Man’s braver when there’s an audience, but there’s always an audience.”
Sure, that big camera crew in the sky. “God?”
“God is a fairy tale for cowards and fools. History. History. What do you want history to remember from this day?”
“That I…didn’t die?”
“That you lived.”
“Yeah, that too.”
The elevator lets them out upstairs. Leather Lungs lifts something from the hot-dog cart: it’s a backpack made from a multigallon water tank, with a trigger-pulled hose. He slings it onto his shoulders, then hoists out another one for Ripple.
Leather Lungs leaves the hot-dog cart behind and vaults up the steps to the roof access at the end of the hall. He must be feeding off the fire’s energy. The closer he gets to it, the faster he moves. A whoosh of hot air rushes inside as he throws open the emergency exit.
Leather Lungs is deploying Ripple to a prime battlefield in the war against oxygen. The surface of the library roof actually appears to undulate, a smokescape of ever-fluxing plasma: no place for a sane man to tread. Ripple loiters in the doorway. As Leather Lungs shimmers toward dematerialization, Ripple shouts after him, “I can’t breathe out here!”
Leather Lungs stops and turns back with eerie calm. He taps the snozzle of his gas mask. Ripple takes a deep breath and pulls the leathery, rubbery hood over his own face.
* * *
Humphrey Ripple watches the home invaders on the surveillance monitors in the panic room. They’re chainsawing his employees. His staff. His people. When the emissaries from the Quiet Place arrive, they chainsaw them too. Red blood on white lab coats. The invaders maraud around from screen to screen, pissing on Humphrey’s rugs, spray-tagging his portrait, loading his possessions into crates that they carry down a secret passage to the sewer: guns, currency, silver, single malt. They take the jewelry off Pippi Dahlberg’s corpse. Humphrey hired a private security firm years ago. He put faith in their technology and hope in guessing that they’d be more responsive to calls and less amenable to bribes than the city’s notorious police force. But he guessed wrong. No one is coming to save them. A man’s home is his castle, and Humphrey has been dethroned.
Osmond and Katya are playing Hangman. Osmond wins every game. Katya guesses the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order. Even after all these years, her voice still lilts like a sexy child’s.
“F?”
“The noose tightens, Princess Phonetica. For charity’s sake, I’ll give your effigy hands and feet this time.”