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  “Yes. It is not a problem. The mother still has a fetus, you see? There’s no enzyme spike, no change in blood volume. So she misses nothing.”

  A kind of remorse led her back to the nursery. Today she found Nell lying on her side in the stall bloated with supplements, her suture line an angry red from being picked at. Val changed her straw, cleaned her water dish, and groomed her with a fine-toothed steel comb. She caught up with the changes in her chart and talked with the veterinary nurse about treating the swelling with a diuretic—already on his mind, he told her. With her help he injected the medication into the animal’s forearm. Its onset was rapid: brighter eyes, less labored respiration. But within hours Nell turned hostile again, fouling the stall, baring her teeth beneath an inscrutable gaze. Val wished the nursing was as easy as law; she could handle cool screens and paperwork better than an animal’s waste. At least, she told herself, she had the sense to leave Nell in the hands of BioRange personnel. Her own child was doing well; the word they used after the last sonogram was “thriving”; that was what mattered.

  What she hadn’t counted on was the power Kenneth still had over her. She’d thought she was immune.

  His Holofax Tableau was delivered to her at poolside while she was sharing a good-bye margarita with Kai. Kenneth apparently now was into guerrilla theater. The Tableau, breathtakingly expensive to transmit even at off-peak rates, was time-stamped the night before. Val and Kai watched Kenneth perform in bed with a short brunette, a tart Val recognized from research. The scene shimmered obscenely from atmospheric signal noise generated by a high inversion layer over the desert.

  She’d been naive enough to believe him when he’d said he still wanted to see her. Naked, he looked like a bull, like the boomer she’d seen on the hillside near Cortez.

  The Latino driver who’d brought her in on the first day stopped her in the lobby, saw she’d been crying. “Don’t let him get the better,” the girl in the plum-colored shirt said after she’d sat Val down and they’d talked. “You have to be strong.”

  * * *

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” Cal said when she located him in the motor pool.

  “Tell me about the hunting,” she said.

  “Now don’t get excited. We only cull the wild mobs, the surplus animals destroyin’ the range. They overgraze like goats. That’s why the ranchers wiped them clean out of Australia, if you wanna look into it.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. I want to ride with you tonight.”

  Cal gave her a wry smile and sucked his teeth.

  “Don’t be nervous. I just want to take one shot. If you let me ride with you, listen: I’ll make it up to you in a way you’ll never forget.” She stepped close, placed her palm flat on his chest, slipped her fingers between two buttons. “That’s a contract. You take me and I’ll take you—on another ride.”

  Cal passed her a bottle of tequila when they set off.

  She could see the inversion layer to the north, the bruised quality in the twilight sky against which helicopters hovered in the distance. At one point in the holofax Kenneth had looked straight into the ’corder, his eyes blank as shell casings, between rounds of frantic sex. “This is for you, Val,” he’d said, pointing his index finger at the lens, pulling his third finger like the trigger of a pistol. “This is for you.”

  * * *

  Under infrared nightscope Val watched the kangaroos grazing in groups of three to five, munching vegetation like cows. Their oversize ears tracked the low rumble of the ATV, but they weren’t afraid. They didn’t run away.

  “I see why you don’t have a tan,” she said flatly, “why you’re never around until mid-afternoon. You’re out here at night, like them.”

  Cal shifted into low gear and moved within 50 meters of the central group, composed of a large male and five females. Then he froze them with the jacklight. The huge male could have been the same boomer they’d seen before: shaggy hair, his sex heavy between his muscular loins.

  “You know how to handle that thing?” he asked when she’d pulled the weapon from the case. “That’s an old-fashioned rifle you got there. No laserscope or anything.”

  Swinging its barrel through the windshield space, she pulled the Mauser up to her shoulder and smelled gun oil. “I took lessons in Wyoming. I’m an old-fashioned kind of girl.”

  “Whoa . . . That’s the bull you’re aimin’ at. You’ll spook the whole herd.”

  She squeezed the trigger gently, exhilarated, blinked when something in the crosshairs shimmered. Then the ATV cab filled with noise and 50 meters away a kangaroo slammed backward, stood erect one last time, and folded to the ground.

  Val pulled the rifle down with a flush of success. The rest of the kangaroos took off with great graceful jumps. She caught a flash of red.

  “You missed ’em. You got yourself the flyer behind ’em.”

  “What?”

  “Give you a good skin, though. I could never hit anything with that damned thing either.”

  Val was numb with confusion. She shivered in the cool night air when they walked over, only then realized her skin was covered with a sheen of perspiration. Her mouth was dry.

  The blue flyer was stone dead, her chest blown out. Something moved at her pouch, something small, smaller than her thumb. It was only the size of a mouse when it emerged, pink and hairless. The immature joey had arms and legs, articulated digits.

  “Oh God.”

  “You wanna step on the skull,” Cal said. “It’s the best way. No chance it’d survive, see? You wanna be quick.”

  Its pink flesh was like gum rubber. She couldn’t do it—when she turned away her stomach burned with pain.

  In the still of the night, she heard a sound like the crushing of an eggshell.

  * * *

  She was back at her wing of the hotel by one-thirty in the morning. In the end, she’d been saved from her sexual promise to Cal by a fluke: the alarm on his pager had gone off, and he’d just had time to drop her at the foyer before he drove off into the night. A night clerk’s leer, for which she might have slapped him two days ago, now seemed hopelessly innocent.

  How terribly everything had turned out.

  Perhaps she could make a pet of Nell, perhaps Dr. Levich could drug the animal to make it tractable, perhaps Val could take it to New York and . . .

  But once in her room, she understood that nothing was going to work out, not for the cowboy, not for Nell, not for her. She couldn’t get the smell of gun oil off her hands. Her scattered clothes and half-packed bags—her plane was scheduled to leave the next day at noon—seemed to mirror her psychic disrepair. When she tried to pack she found herself stationary at the foot of the bed, grasping lingerie in one hand, her boots in the other, weeping.

  She finally knelt against the mattress and slowly twisted into a fetal position. She lay on her side that way, shivering for ten minutes, before she fell asleep.

  When the siren wailed two hours later and the helicopters shook the heavy glass doors along the garden she was so disoriented that at first she thought she was in New York, at Kenneth’s apartment uptown, in the big bed. The rustic nightstand made her realize she was in Cabo; then the depths of sleep from which she was ascending suggested that she had just come awake from a dream, that the hunting trip with Cal had been a dream. But in the moonlight flooding the room she saw her dusty boots and bloody blouse, her scattered bags.

  Past the sliding doors she could hear a raised voice, saw a shifting figure—a young man ran across the garden straight towards the foothills. A shaft of halogen white swept through the BioRange complex like an NYPD pass over Central Park West.

  She remembered Nell in her stall.

  She dressed quickly and ran down the walk past the mimosa trees, past the pool, through the lobby, through the other wing and past surgery along the gravel path to Nursery C. Just above the hills the inversion layer had moved closer to the resort, a low bank of clouds to the north, rolling like a wave on a long reef. A
piece of heavy equipment ground overland away from the service road; one helicopter without lights flew so low that she was pushed sideways by its downdraft.

  Lights were on in the nursery. The building door hung open. Its clinic rooms and hallways were empty, as if they had just been vacated.

  And Nell was not in her enclosure. None of the animals were. Valerie fumbled with the lock to her stall, stumbled in and steadied herself in the straw. Her heart was pounding: the air was rich with the odors of dung and grass, hot with silence. She felt a draft of cooler night air—the outside gate to the exercise pen was open. She bent over and pushed through.

  In the exercise yard, in the moonlight, what she saw seemed at first a jumble of dream images, some trick of perspective. Kangaroos were leaping over the fence. They were narrow-shouldered blues, fifteen, sixteen of them. She thought she saw Nell’s smoky blue tail among them. The animals were circling, running along the fence, gathering speed, vaulting over the fence without effort. Val stumbled forward—then shrank back when she saw three boomers cornered at the far end of the pen. They were big, rust-colored with white faces, had to be from the hills since there’d been none in the nursery. One of them was smeared with blood.

  They were squaring off, fighting the staff. The Latino veterinary nurse with the mustache lay disemboweled along the fence, his intestines glistening wet plum and black in the moonlight. Over the fence with graceful leaps blue flyers soared one by one: pregnant females were escaping.

  Dr. Levich was screaming, “Hold your fire.”

  The blue flyers were running off with the children.

  One of the women who’d been with Kai was holding her knee, gesturing at the hillside.

  Cal’s ATV was there, its jacklights bouncing as he turned in concert with a helicopter’s spotlight—but the animal they sought would not quite freeze.

  On the hilltop stood a large female with a scarred body. Out of her pouch protruded . . . a filthy face, streaked and blemished. It was not a joey’s face, but the unmistakably human face of a feral child of three or four, a boy or a girl, its hair long and matted.

  It was the face of a human child.

  Its shoulders came out of the pouch now—as if it was being born—its small hands clenched into waving fists.

  Traffic

  “He must go by another way who would escape / this wilderness, for that mad beast that fleers / before you there, suffers no man to pass. / She tracks down all, kills all, and knows no glut, / but, feeding, she grows hungrier than she was.”

  —Inferno I

  WHAT FOLLOWS, LIKE A SNAKING LINE OF CARS, is the story of the first time I ever set foot inside a Nomad vehicle. It was one of those days: traffic was a bitch.

  I was late for my analyst’s, and the usual ground-level routes through Studio City were tangled by busses and vans. The sidewalks along Moorpark were either stacked with illegal parking or in use as right turn lanes. I was creeping along in my Saturn, an old electric bomb, behind a silver Benz, a replica diesel; the Benz belched black smoke so dense I didn’t notice the gridlock at Coldwater until I was part of it. I backed through an alley only to find my path obstructed by an articulated trash hauler so huge, so sinister, I thought of Dante at the beginning of the Commedia, his way blocked by the she-wolf of appetite. And then, approaching the gridlock at Coldwater again via the drive-through lane of the Marcos Whiplash Clinic, I saw in the fluorescent blue haze blanketing the intersection a vision from Hell itself: out of the sea of traffic a red intake port began to surface, snout-like, lupine. The glistening black pickup on whose hood it was mounted was customized with enormous soft tires twice the height of a man. Sounding an airhorn it surged forward mightily, first bumping the Lexus ahead, then climbing the slope of its trunk and the Hyundai’s in the next lane, cresting over both cabins, bumping, gyrating, crushing its way forward.

  Then it turned in my direction.

  Only in L.A., I told myself, could it come to this.

  So I swung through the telltale camp of shabby cardboard huts, the Nomad camp everybody was pretending not to see. I blew my horn, scattering two poor Nomad families in their earth-colored rags, then punched through to one of the abandoned ramps of what used to be called the Ventura Freeway. I was trying, as you may have guessed, to bypass the Coldwater mess by getting on a Nomad Interface, a section of urban roadway Nomads are permitted to cruise when they drop down off the Interstate, what they call The Way.

  Usually Residents like me, even Residents like the madman in the truck, avoid the Nomad Interface. I had a pirated ambulance chip mounted on my firewall to get me through even undocumented barriers like this one—without the chip, of course, you fry. At the end of the trash-strewn lane of crumbling concrete I felt my old Saturn vibrate through the electronic membrane. I merged onto the Ventura as if I belonged there.

  On the Interface the right lanes were thick with Nomad loadcarriers uncoupling on the fly. If the drivers ever stop, as everyone knows, they forfeit their rigs and wind up in cardboard shacks like those I’d driven through. Transfer cabs licensed to switch the loads to and from the city zipped around the middle lanes like house lizards in a world of brontosaurial thirty-two and sixty-four wheelers. I finally got up to speed on the viaduct over Sepulveda Boulevard.

  That’s when my Saturn—with a sickening whump and sizzle from the front end—lost power.

  I coasted onto the shoulder and made some calls on my cell phone. Under the hood I found my SunStar system and batteries fused into a blackened blob of polycarbon and ceramics. I couldn’t even find the socket for my chip.

  Then the sirens went off, the ones in the membrane, the ones that announce the daily clearing of all Nomads’ vehicles from the Interface. A fine time for this, I remember thinking; you need a chip even to walk off.

  That’s when I saw the Nomad rig, a white forty footer, creeping my way on the shoulder. A boy wearing an EARTHQUAKE—’08 cap was leaning out, his hand on the door handle as the rig loomed toward me. “Hey Mister,” the kid yelled—I could see an old guy driving, his white hair long in the Nomad way—“you wanna upload?”

  The sirens were wailing. Back a click down at the foot of the viaduct, Jurassic earth-moving equipment was already clearing the stragglers.

  I’d never been so close to a Nomad vehicle before. I put my driving shoe on the brass footplate, grabbed the carved handhold, and swung through the open door.

  * * *

  The cab I tumbled into was dim with muted colors. My new silver suit, trendy in L.A., made me feel immediately self-conscious. I took a deep breath and almost gagged: organic fabrics, leather, grease, food, fossil fuels, and . . . what else? Was it true that Nomads never bathed?

  “Hey!” the old guy yelled above the high-frequency wail. “You understand? We’re headed up the ramp.”

  Now the hair rose on the back of my neck. As the old guy’d said, the big I-5 ramp, the ramp out of L.A, loomed in the tinted windshield. The Nomad swarm of vehicles funneled its way, glimmering under their diesel stacks and solar arrays. In the dusty red light a few illegal peds dodged police APCs, running for the shoulder, scattering along the membrane like it was the southern border, getting jolted: ash in a flash, as they say on the street. I started a quick inventory of my life but never got past the problems I was going to talk to my analyst about: tension at the architectural firm where I work, and my rocky engagement to Denise, a woman obsessed with parking spaces. Maybe what I needed was a short adventure.

  “Boy, is my mom gonna flame when she finds out we loaded a porker,” the kid said. “I mean a parker. Sorry.”

  “I fused my chip,” I told the old guy. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Then ride with us, stranger. There’re places we can get you back across. There’s Hubbard’s Cave in Chicago.”

  “Chicago?”

  We approached the abandoned toll booths. They marked a kind of border: to the east lay the InterState, true Nomad territory, disappearing into land darkening as with a chan
ge of weather.

  Looking into the vast black heart of it, I swooned.

  * * *

  When I woke the next morning, I found myself in a bunk aft in the vehicle, a small patch of UV glass beside me, the creosote scrub of Nevada stretching to the horizon. The truth was, it was sublime. A range of mountains stood clearly in the distance, purple and clean. The electronic fence that kept the Nomads on the road and off the land was barely visible as a series of thin towers. Horrible though my dislocation was, I could see what the Nomads liked about their way of life: the space, the steady movement, the low-level atmosphere you could see right through.

  And out there, well, traffic wasn’t that bad. The big rigs—the stupendously oversize vans, the doublewide trailers, the canvas-flapping Omars, the sedans, the commercial flatbeds—all moved like a herd of animals, in an orderly, coordinated way, our speed about as fast as a person can run.

  Up forward, a graceful woman in her late twenties was driving. She wore the big Nomad earrings, the oversize tunic and chaps, the muted colors, and turned out to be the boy’s mother, Acura. I felt self-conscious about my silver suit again; when the light hit the fabric the right way, it actually reflected its surroundings.

  I eased myself into the passenger’s seat with an ingratiating smile. Acura was attractive, even smelled good, spicy and floral at the same time.

  I suppose I was a little intoxicated by her. Or disoriented by the experience of continuous motion. “Isn’t it maddening not to stop?” I blurted out, trying to be friendly. “I’ve always felt you people had a right . . .”

  Her ice-blue eyes narrowed. “You people?”

  “I’m sorry. I mean, um, you . . . folk.”

  “Us folk? Just where are us folk supposed to demand our rights?” she asked, her lips tight. “Just where?”

  She was technically correct about the Nomad human rights problem.

  Nomad life first began, I remember reading, when the refinement of low-v solar rigs coincided with a movement among long-haul truckers to stay on the road all the time. In the cities, mobile offices had already hit the road in the shape of customized supervans, “transient architectural mechanisms,” wrote Newsweek, spawned by roads so choked that cities like L.A. or Bangkok took days to cross. During the housing crisis of ’07, commuters with long drives and low budgets abandoned their mortgages and started living full-time in enhanced RV’s, joining the thousands of Sioux and Arapaho on the Interstate who’d gone on trek in Winnebagos. The traffic, as they say, merged. Intermarried. When children were born on the road, Nomad Nation became history.