Chapter 1
Still no nearer to landing this Phineas Fairfax and stuffing him in her knock-off Leda Marx Cleopatra clutch bag, Bella still knew that, come sundown, Dr. Sheena Lypotrope would expect a report radioactively aglow with success.Fortunately for Bella, back in those girlhood months at MAXIFAX Laboratories (somewhere in the American Southwest), the head of her knowledge-infusing team had jotted down indefatigable in the margins of her file.So, even while keeping her eyes on the road (and scarcely missing a small herd of Angus cattle that had wandered from their paddock), she knocked again on the metal wall behind her to rev up the teamwork machine.
Her passenger, though, did not answer.
She knocked again.“Hey, how’re you doing?”
Again, no answer.
“How’re those air holes?”
But only silence, deafening silence.
Bella sighed.Maybe she should not have kept her down payment low by declining that pesky escape button in the trunk.But thinking that a quick dose of atmospheric oxygen might haul this kid back from the brink, she kept an eye out for a convenient pull-out, and lo! and behold, what came into view, but a gas station?
Rolling into the lot, she sighted a half-acre or so of asphalt at the far end.But she was kept from one of her trademark big-rig swoop parking jobs by a black mid-90s SUV hogging an adjacent parking space.Still, she parked more or less perpendicularly and stepped out into the May morning, only to find not birdsong embroidering the air, but the snorting of passing log trucks, the chugging engines of the local motorcycle club (The Merryweather Boys read the steel-stud names across their recently FedExed leathers), and the thumping of an urban bass beat from a jacked-up ghetto ride, its fresh-faced young driver sporting an FFA T-shirt and purposely distressed MAGA ballcap tilted microscopically off-center. Bella could not grasp the allure of country life.
As Bella makes for the rear hatch to check on her companion (or hostage), let us award prizes to readers who can most vividly picture our protagonista.Carrying home the blue ribbon will be the one who sees a woman in age anywhere from a mature twenty-five to a well-sustained fifty-one.As to race, well, what with years of tanning, bronzers, anti-melanoma supplements, and long lunches at the mole-removal clinic, that is still open to debate.As for build, gaunt in general and somewhat, well, rebuilt, for want of a better word.Atop her stiff, even cadaverous form sits a mess of half-straightened beach-blonde hair and if Bella Freestone had any wrinkling about the eyes, it is withheld from public view by the strategic armor of sunglasses (the latest in Nigerian technology, not those archaic blue-blockers).Caparisoned for the day in a string-top to catch the sun, she accents her top with a caiman-leather belt (the caimans eat some endangered waterfowl, so it was ecological justice to make them into high-end accessories) and below, an above-the-knee skirt exposing a faint purplish cartography of varicose veins.(This skews the odds against her being a mature twenty-five.)
With the awards ceremony at an end, we now see Bella pausing at the rear of her rig with the concerned expression that her passenger might be among either the quick or the dead, that is: he might either scream his head off or be down for the count.Either of these would land her in the clutches of either the local boys in blue or of Dr. Sheena Lypotrope—and she knew which hands had the crueler claws.
But before opening the hatch, she scanned the parking lot for any pesky witnesses.In the SUV beside her, the driver, some goateed fellow with glasses, was just sitting there enjoying the spring day through his half-open car window.He looked absorbed in an obscure periodical.(Bella guessed maybe GAL Pal, the Journal of the Modern Guanaco-Alpaca-Llama Fancier, or ¡Bienvenido!: Human Resources Management of Your Migrant Workers.)Safe enough.
As she opened back hatch, the hot air gusting up into her face left her expecting the worst.
Focusing into the gloom, she made out a young fellow with muffled mouth and hands and feet tightly gyved with zip-ties, in a lab coat and sporting thick sweaty blondish unkempt hair and a few days’ stubble.He bent his head grumpily at Bella, stared at her through the one lens of his glasses (the other lens and the frames were now bent irreparably out of shape, victims of the recent drop to the ground by Felipe); through the gag he was murmuring something.Bella decided that since their eyes had met, they had formed a professional bond, and she beamed like the captain of the varsity booster squad.“Looks like you’re holding up pretty well.You’ll need to put on a good show for this Fairfax quack, when we find him.”
Without much team spirit, the young fellow only grunted.
“Well, you’re still alive.”
He grunted something else.
“Listen,” said Bella, stowing away the pep.“I hum, you sing along.When I come back, we’ll strategize about finding this funny farm.”
But as she slammed the trunk shut, he let out a muffled shriek, and Bella gave an anxious glance at the SUV next door.The driver rolled his window up, which Bella took as a sign that he did not want to share in the messy domestic dispute playing out in the next vehicle over.Then, to ensure that no drone was skimming by, she took in the blue sky, only to find towering white clouds, bounteous with moisture.Ugh, she thought.Nature.
Since no one seemed the wiser, Bella headed for this gas station’s mini-mart to grub up some nutrition and gave to all who saw her the unsettling impression of a glossy gray shark making for the beach.
Meanwhile, back in the trunk, the young man, Bobby Lumbar by name, swallowed up once again in superheated darkness, was left wondering whether he would end up on the Death Channel’s flagship show, No One Will Miss Them.
Then, though, he told himself that It Was All Right.
Staring through what was left of his glasses into the hot plastic darkness, with his thoughts swirling like goldfish caught in a draining sink, Bobby Lumbar held on to the one thought, no, the one hope, that maybe she was in those shadows, watching him, proud of his sacrifice, praying for his success, and making ready for his homecoming.She was his princess in a Petri dish, his pleroma of Pleiadean pulchritude pulsing unseen in the darkness, moving the forces of the world.Certainly, she moved his world.
Yes, Bobby Lumbar would endure all of this, since this was her will and her wish: the will and wish of Dr. Sheena Lypotrope, Electrolyte Demigoddess.
