Chapter 1
With so much of the land around Merryweather getting buried beneath housing developments, it should have been simple to find a holdout like the Orphis New Life Exit-Counselling Clinic.But this was not the case.
Ms. Mirabella Damson-Freestone (known to her pals and assorted foreign mercenaries as Bella) was steering her outsized snow-white Mercedes G Class SUV down road after country road and considering the dire fate awaiting her if she did not find Dr. Phineas Fairfax and his weird little sanatorium.
But at least she would not face the executioner alone.
Without taking her eyes from the farmlands beyond her tinted windscreen, Bella knocked a wrinkle-free knuckle on the specially-constructed corrugated barrier blocking her compartment from the rest of the vehicle.“Hey, kid, how’re you doing?”With a ringing voice, she asked, “Kid?Hey, kid?Come on, now, no playin’ possum.”(Bella had seen an awful lot of roadkill since dawn and decided that the country was no place to be a wild animal.)
Just then, a knock came obligingly through the merciless metal wall and Bella guessed that since the fellow on the other side was bound and gagged, he must be thumping his head against it.At least the air holes were working, she thought.She did not want him ending up like the last one.
“Hey, kid,” she shouted again as she swerved around a pair of retirees in spandex training for a 35K bike marathon.“Sorry you’re still tied up, but the cops did show up, so I had to go for Plan B.”(In Bella’s world, Plan B was Don’t Get Caught.)“So, you know where this Orphis place is, right?”
No knocks.
“OK, whatever,” she said.
At least the little guy was alive and she returned to finding this Dr. Phineas Fairfax.
But as Bella meandered about this May morning, she could not believe the ignorance of local geography among these locals.At every gas station, roadside tamale stand, and silage-spray-machinery cleaning yard, she mentioned “Orphis,” “Fairfax,” or the ever-popular “Don’t you speak English?”, only to be met with evasions, sagging jaws, and uncomprehending gazes.
This scene was typical: Bella pulls her albino juggernaut up in front a spacious ranch house shaded by mighty pioneer poplars.A pair of silos, an aluminum barn, a dog kennel, and sundry other outbuildings populate the background.From around the house the master of this manse, a man between middle years and old age with a steady and unhurrying gait, walks up to her vehicle.As he comes nigh, Bella lowers her window, props up a smile, and, playing the part of the happy wanderer wandering happily through these parts, asks with a bend of the head, “Say, I’m looking for Orphis?”
But our hazelnut baron simply pushes up the bill of his herbicide-manufacturer-man-swag ball-cap, assumes a mask a silent cogitation as if spying a threatening cloud on the horizon, and breathes in ominous silence.Bella guesses that he is avoiding the question and she hauls down her smile like a circus tent, raises her tinted window, and drives off in a cloud of gravel dust.
So, Bella drives on, looking for another lead, but feeling none too chipper, not only because this mission had begun with a lack of sleep, but because she knew that the warm air playing about her neck was not due to a malfunctioning air conditioner.No, that steamy breeze was the impatient panting of Dr. Sheena Lypotrope, Electrolyte Demigoddess, the she-demon who had so impolitely wakened Bella about eight hours ago…
At 03:35, the hum-along ringtone of Bella’s smart phone had rudely roused her out of the beauty sleep that Dr. Helsingfors had very thoughtfully prescribed.After flipping on a light, Bella had brought her phone close to her bloodshot eyes, made out the name of the caller, and groaned, “Ah,” an innocent syllable that in this case sounded like the brazen gates into the underworld rustily opening.From her subterranean lair on Level VIII, deep below MAXIFAX Laboratories (located somewhere in the American Southwest), Dr. Sheena Lypotrope, Electrolyte Demigoddess, was reaching out to her.
Blinking awake, Bella had sat up in her suddenly much-less-cozy bed, brought the device to her ear, and heard, “Freestone, you remember Fairfax.”(When wearing her Empress-of-the-Universe hat, Dr. Lypotrope tended to deploy surnames.)
Bella gave a hypnogogic grunt and mumbled a bald-faced lie.“Sure, I remember Fairfax.”
Dr. Lypotrope had said, “You’re going to find Phineas Fairfax for us.”Immediately Bella’s handheld beeped as a fresh message with an attachment arrived and whilst Sheena Lypotrope had carried on detailing What Needed To Happen, Bella sleepily tapped the attachment open.She squinted at what was must have been an enlarged snapshot, grainy, at least twenty years old, of a young fellow with a ferret face hedged with a ratty red beard.Over a build both sticky and doughy hung an ill-fitting but regulation white coat of a MAXIFAX staff scientist.With little mental strain, Bella deduced that this was Dr. Phineas Fairfax in the old days.
Bella brought the phone back to her ear.Dr. Lypotrope was Maxim-gunning at her a bandolier of precise details, something about “Merryweather,” “Orphis,” “5:00 a.m. behind the E-Z Fuel Plaza,” “Darshan and Felipe,” “the plant,” and “kid gloves” and other bullet points that were probably vital.Throughout this fusillade of information, Bella managed a few yes-ma’am noises, until Dr. Lypotrope capped her expositoria with, “This needs to happen.I want you to have something to look forward to.”
Suppressing a yawn, Bella asked, “What do I have to look forward to, Sheena?”
“Dr. Lypotrope.”
“Sorry: Dr Lypotrope.”
“I want your next restoration to occur on schedule, Freestone.Tell me, what does Level VII means to you?”
Bella’s pupils had widened 1/32nd of an inch and she said nothing, her silence as frigid and dark as interplanetary space.Bella did remember Level VII: very subterranean, professional, sterile, and well-appointed with spacious stainless-steel tables with troughs to catch any fluids, drone lasers to do the messy work, and walk-in freezers for easy storage, all boxed in by ominously dark, light-absorbing windows, behind which Dr. Sheena Lypotrope might or might not sit enthroned, watching the fun.Imagining just where the laser saw would begin its work, Bella found herself instinctively feeling her neck.
The voice of Dr. Sheena Lypotrope returned like the convex waves of a supernova.“Redistribution’s not a pretty word, I know.But if it’ll light a fire under you...”And without any parting pleasantries, she had hung up.
Bella’s handheld had then given out and officious beep with the message, We think Fairfax is here, with a tiny map, like a misplaced postage stamp.Its road pattern was as meaningful as worm tracks in the mud, with place names in 2-point type hovering over intersections of country roads.But one beefy moniker shimmered larger than the others: Merryweather.
“Merryweather, Merryweather…” she mumbled.“Oh, Merryweather.”Martie and Baba had places in Merryweather, living the good life, away from it all, and just a couple of hours away, if she laid it on the accelerator.
After cursing both her fear of death and ownership of a vehicle with a high-tonnage towing capacity, Bella told herself that after this bit of hatchet work, Sheena Lypotrope would rubberstamp Dr. Helsingfors to work another of his minor miracles—a touch-up on the creases and corners, and while he was at it, maybe a new hyoid bone, whatever that was.(Baba had had hers replaced last year, a reward for having taken out that cypto-currency trader in Zagorsk.)
After averaging 102 mph up the interstate, Bella had reached the E-Z Fuel Plaza as the dawn began to shimmer over the horizon.And just as she had found a good parking space and settled in to watch the eighteen-wheelers cruise in and out of the fuel bays, her handheld beeped with a text, Head for the field
As Bella arrived along the asphalt edge of the E-Z Fuel Plaza, down from the pink clouds of dawn descended a helicopter that splayed out the dewy grass with the wind from its rotors.(This particular whirlybird was Willendorf I, Sheena Lypotrope’s private airship.She hoped to have a whole contingent of them patrolling the skies one day.)While the pilot yelled fruitlessly at her out of the cockpit (Bella guessed that this was Darshan), a second goon (by default, Felipe) was shoving her accomplice out of the chopper like a unicorn out of the side of the Ark.Just then, a sheriff began maneuvering his patrol car through the parking lot of the E-Z Fuel Plaza toward these questionable activities.As the anxious Willendorf I rose rapidly away and curled off into the rising sun, Bella—not wishing for any officer of the peace to get wrist strain writing reports—hustled up to the bundled body in the grass, dragged it to the back of her car, and gunned it herself across the field, breaking through a fence and coming out on to some pavement and, she hoped, on to freedom.
As she had caught her breath and began zigzagging through a maze of country roads (a great way to lose a pursuer, but also to get lost), Bella thought that just like her pals, Baba and Martie, someday she should get away from it all, too.And being lost in a tangle of country backroads, maybe she already had.
