Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,101

song about respect. Yes, that one. Yes, yes. I prefer to use the term African-American but have it your way. You sent the picture? I haven’t received anything. It was a video? Well, that’s going to take fucking forever. While I’m waiting for that to download, what is our next turn? This road is blocked by what appears to be a pile of burned cars. We’re still going to the elementary school, right? Yes, I understand it’s no longer a school. Okay, then Google Maps should still get us there. Hang on, I’m going to take the phone away from my head for a few seconds—I think the video came through and I need to take the phone away from my head so I can watch it. I won’t be able to hear you. Don’t hang up. Stand by.”

Pete lowered the phone into the sweet spot of his reading spectacles and wrestled fruitlessly with its UI, which had been terrible twenty years ago. He caught Sophia trying to sneak a peek and actually flinched as he angled the phone away from her. The video had no soundtrack except for the hugger-mugger of prairie wind buffeting a microphone. Sophia had copped a brief glimpse but it hadn’t been what she’d expected and so she was still trying to make sense of it. She’d expected an unshaven Methodist zip-tied to a lawn chair, or something of that genre, but instead had seen a weird silhouette against bright sky, foreshortened and stretched out in a way that triggered a memory she couldn’t quite nail down.

“We’re good to go,” Pete announced, clapping the phone back to his head. “Yes, Joseph, I already told you we have the Wet Wipes. All one hundred pounds. Spring Breeze. Like you asked for. Okay. Okay. See you there, Joseph.”

Pete hung up and then noticed Sophia looking at him strangely. “Joseph has hemorrhoids,” he explained.

Apparently a key part of the ceremony was that Pete had to go to where this Joseph character was currently hanging out and deliver the Wet Wipes and have a beer with him. Joseph’s base of operations turned out to be a former school on the edge of an abandoned town. The playground had become an RV encampment ringed by portable toilets that were no longer portable in that they’d been hooked up to a system of PVC pipes that ran over the ground without any clear destination; they must have led somewhere but the terrain was so flat it wasn’t obvious which way gravity would take them. The school building proper was occupied by people of higher status. Joseph must have been in there somewhere. But Sophia would never actually know. For, being female, she was not invited. Upon arrival she was trotted out like a homecoming queen at a Rotary Club meeting and introduced at a great distance. Then she got back in the SUV, which bucked and clunked as the trailer was detached from it and simply abandoned in a parking space that was still marked, in weathered paint, as being reserved for the school nurse. Sophia never got to meet the hemorrhoid-plagued chieftain or to see his lair. But Pete came back out half an hour later smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and Bud Light. In one hand he was carrying a bouquet of locally sourced ditch daisies, which he handed off to Sophia—apparently a token of Joseph’s esteem for the warlady. Then he peeled off a pair of blue nitrile gloves he’d pulled on before getting out of the car “because you never know about residues.” He fastidiously turned these inside out and then used one of them to withdraw from his shirt pocket a new cell phone that was displaying a map. “Let’s roll,” he said. “Our guy is five point seven three miles away and was alive and conscious thirty minutes ago when they put him up.”

It was an interesting 5.73 miles—especially the last .73 miles or so, as they climbed to the top of a rise that had, judging from bullet-tattered signs, been a county park at one point. More recently it had become one of those cult sites where people put up crosses, bundled them in fuel-soaked rags, and burned them at night.

Or so Sophia had been telling herself for most of the day, ever since she had spied a row of these things on the far side of the Missouri. Even then, a skeptical voice in the back of her mind had told her that