Be Nice Page 5

  Janey finished her beer and twisted the can.

  Mr. Beams foot rolled his chair in front of them. “Now I know you want to be famous. You both want to be artists. You don’t want to be stuck on the W Line like your—”

  Janey cut in, “So why do you care so much?”

  “Janey…if you and Wallis are angry about something, whatever it is, then maybe others in Be Nice groups, maybe they’re also angry about something.”

  “So you’re sayin’ there’s other kids out there...like us?”

  “There are always mutations, there are always individuals, or groups of people, who don’t quite fit in. But what concerns me, Janey, is that your particular Be Nice group, they take care of Santa Monica. And if you and Wallis aren’t pulling your weight, maybe the others aren’t—”

  “But, sir, you’re mad at us for things we ain’t, y’know, really done,” Wallis said.

  “Yes, Wallis! Yes, you’re correct! It’s the potential of what you and Janey may do that concerns me! For example, let’s say when you get older, you and Janey don’t want to take your meds, or, let’s say, you don’t want to stomp the Sex Crimers or even the Race Haters—”

  “Are you scared because you think us kids might not do what you say anymore?” Janey asked.

  Mr. Beams sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Janey, you disappoint me. I was really hoping you were going to tell me that you and Wallis would try and get it together. That you both were going to commit yourselves to Be Nice—put an end to this asinine artwork of yours—”

  “No! Forget it! We’re gonna be artsy!”

  “Girl, listen to me! There is no outer space! There is only here and right now! There is only having fun and The Sacrifice later! You will either accept that, or you will pay the price!”

  “Pay the price?” Janey fumbled in her jacket and produced a bank card. “So where do I swipe this?”

  Mr. Beams violently yanked Janey in the air by her Afro puffs. “That’s it! It’s big time meds for the both of you! You want to be Dead? Well, that’s okay by me!”

  Wallis leaped out of his chair.

  Mr. Beams swung Janey in front of him.

  Janey lifted her twisted Dawg can backwards over her head and stabbed it through Mr. Beams’s right cheek.

  Spitting blood, Mr. Beams collapsed onto the far wall.

  “Shit!” Wallis cried out.

  “No one touches me but my man!” Janey screamed.

  Frantic, Wallis looked around the office. He picked up Mr. Beams’s chair and hurled it through the window behind his desk.

  Ms. Fallings and the six men stormed in.

  Wallis and Janey sprinted around Mr. Beams’s desk and jumped outside.

  They fell into the stadium and cascaded over the nosebleed seats. Ignoring the pain, they got to their feet, gathered themselves, and stumbled down the bleachers.

  From Mr. Beams’s office, using her eyewear, Ms. Fallings filmed them as they escaped across the foot-soc field.

  The sun dipped to the west behind the buildings, shops, and living pods on the Thirty-Third Street Promenade. The Promenade, an open air marketplace, was packed with unruly teens and parents who had just gotten off the day shift. Liquor, beer, and fast food signs came on and lit up the peddie walks. TV and movie ads became animated. Selli and TV salesmen eagerly pitched their wares.

  Wallis and Janey kept to the sides of the peddie walks and concealed themselves in the alleyways.

  Janey slowed her pace. “We can’t go back to our pods! They’re prolly gonna be there waitin’ for us!”

  “If we could get my hog, we could go! I mean, we could just get the eff outta here!”

  “Yeah, right! And where we gonna go?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “I cut him, baby! I cut his face bad!”

  “He was gonna do it! You heard him! He said he was gonna Dead us both!”

  Janey watched the sun disappear beneath the Pacific. “Wait! What about Water Town? We could go out there, we could hide!”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “You can’t swim?”

  “I never learned!”

  “The paddleboat tours, they go out at night. We’ll get on one of `em. Jump off in the ocean. We can find you a floatie and then hide out in—”

  “But what about what Mr. Beams told us? Sea creatures takin’ babies outta their cribs?”

  “He was just tryin’ to scare us, y’know, like that therapist?”

  Wallis noticed a SNACK-O-RAMA ROM grocery store sign. “You got any cash on your card?”

  “I got a little.”

  “Okay, we hide out, and then we get some more cash and the hog and we go.”

  Janey eyed the crowds; the kids playing, the oblivious adults doddering. “So do you really think there’s more kids out here just like us?”

  “There’s gotta be.”

  “You hungry? I’m hungry.”

  “We get some extra grub. We take one of the boats, jump out, and we hide.”

  “Then we go get the hog…and we go.”

  Wallis held her face in her hands. “Are you scared?”

  “Right now...I’m more like mad.”

  The tour boat dock was on the edge of the Promenade waterfront.

  Warning buoys in the ocean bobbed and flashed “NO SWIMMING, NO FISHING”.

  The Water Town Queen pushed through the rancid waves. It was an exact replica of a paddle wheel boat from the mid-nineteenth century. Adults roamed the bars and the gambling parlors, while their children wham-danced and fought with one another on the dance floors.

  Wallis and Janey anxiously stood at the guardrail on the main deck. Seven SNACK-O-RAMA ROM grocery bags, filled with supplies and foodstuffs, were piled in front of them.

  The Water Town buildings appeared, looming like giant, black tombstones over the skyline; centuries old office buildings and expensive hotels flooded by the Pacific.

  An ad sign floated in the water up ahead. Janey spotted it. She gently nudged Wallis.

  Wallis readied himself as the sign bumped against the side of the paddleboat.

  He closed his eyes, held his breath, and flipped back over the guardrail. He splashed into the polluted water.

  Janey lowered the SNACK-O-RAMA ROM bags onto the ad sign and then leaped over the railing.

  Wallis floundered, helpless, unable to get a grip on the sign.

  Janey grabbed his hand and helped him climb on top. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m good!”

  Stretched out on the ad sign, they swung around and took one last look at The Water Town Queen. It chugged away from them and vanished in the darkness.

  The Sea Breeze Hotel lobby was deluged with fetid seawater. Pieces of rotted furniture, doughy paper products, and lumps of human waste swirled in the black currents.

  Wallis and Janey kick-boarded the ad sign inside past the lobby doors.

  “Got-damn,” Janey said. “This place is nasty as shit.”

  Wallis eyed a floating mound of feces. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  They kicked past the submerged reception desk and came to rest on the first floor escalator stairs. They crawled off the ad sign, their bounty of grocery bags in tow.

  Janey wrung seawater out of her shirt. “Nope. I sure as eff didn’t see any sea creatures.”

  Wallis managed a smile.

  “Okay, let’s get some light up in here.”

  They searched through their SNACK-O-RAMA ROM grocery bags, took out a pair of flash wands, and turned them on.

  The hotel carpeting was a dark, muddy gray. Faint images of red roses and green vine patterns peered through.

  A conference room was open at the top of the escalator. Janey cautiously ascended the stairs to the second floor and shined her flash wand into the
room. She could see several rows of rusted chairs and a mold-encrusted podium. A sign attached to the podium read THE NEW YOU SEMINAR.

  “We should go higher,” Wallis said, as he hauled the grocery bags up the escalator stairs. “It’s prolly safer up top.”

  They hiked the fire exit stairs, but had to stop on the twelfth floor to rest and catch their breaths. Janey opened the door and aimed her flash wand. She illuminated a dank hallway bordered by locked hotel room doors.

  “I wonder what this place used to be like,” she said. “Y’know, during The Before?”

  “I bet you had to have big money to stay in here.”

  They continued up the fire exit stairwell to the top floor. Opening the door, they walked into a snug, private vestibule. Two hotel rooms were on either of side of the hallway.

  Wallis shouldered one of the doors open.

  Janey aimed her flash wand into the room.

  It was a luxury penthouse suite. A curved balcony window in the living room area offered a panoramic view of the ocean. Shielded from the corrosive air, the suite was surprisingly pristine. There were soft leather chairs, three bar stools, a marble coffee table, and a stocked dry bar.

  The master bedroom was eggshell white. White satin sheets were tightly wrapped around a king-size bed. Four squares of gold foil encased chocolates balanced on the pillows.

  A table on the balcony was adorned with red candles, SNACK-O-RAMA ROM food, and a half-dozen miniature liquor bottles from the dry bar.

  Janey tapped a wine glass with a silver sugar spoon. She had removed her wet clothing and set it out to dry. She was dressed in a fluffy, white, hotel bathrobe.

  Inside, Wallis exited the bathroom. Naked, he ripped a hotel bathrobe out of its plastic casing and tried it on. It fit. He stepped outside and sat beside Janey. Janey handed him a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey, she held a bottle of Absolut vodka.

  Seated in moldy, plastic lounge chairs, they toasted, leaned back, and put their eyes on the full moon.

  The surveillance camera viddi was grainy, a hazy blue and white. Wallis and Janey could be seen at the rear of the BURGER BURGER BURGER. They were later picked up on a surveillance camera at the 24/7 SNACK-O-RAMA ROM.

  Ms. Fallings studied the viddies as the Brennan transport cruised through Santa Monica. His cheek stitched and bandaged, Mr. Beams sat beside her. A burly Brennan sec guard, the driver, kept his eyes on the streets.

  “They’ve got plenty of supplies. They’ll most likely hide out for a while, go underground,” Ms. Fallings said.

  Mr. Beams winced as he spoke. “I knew those two were bad news as soon as I laid eyes on—”

  “So how far do you want to take this?”

  “What?”

  “It’s just two kids. They’re scared, they’re alone—”

  “I want them.”

  “Sir, I’ve dealt with a few of these types before. Not as extreme, but…”

  Mr. Beams ripped the bandage off of his cheek. “I said, I want them!”

  Janey snuggled into Wallis’s chest.

  She drew a blanket over their legs. “So what about our folks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We should at least try and call ‘em.”

  “No.”

  “My mom, you think she’s gonna get in trouble?”

  “She didn’t do anything.”

  “But she’s all I got.”

  “You got me too.”

  Janey was quiet for a moment. She sat up and faced Wallis. “They go to work, they make the money, they give us the money, we spend it, it goes back to the shops—”

  “What?”

  “But there’s no profit.”

  “What?”

  “Before my daddy was killed, he used to talk to me about it a lot, about profit.”

  “Why you thinkin’ about that?”

  “I don’t know. I was just thinkin’ about my dad.”

  “Well, I hear some people, like my pop, they can make more money on the line if they’re really good workers…but not that much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people, they aren’t allowed to make too much money.”

  “But why?”

  “People, they didn’t like to share a long time ago. They didn’t like to share, they talked out in the open and said really bad stuff—”

  “So you think that’s why Mr. Beams and everybody else thinks we’re angry?”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, it’s like...maybe they think that me and you want the old ways to come back again. Then we can talk out in the open and say and do whatever the eff we want.”

  “The whole world had it like that before, but they totally effed it up.”

  “But why?”

  “Maybe the same reason why this hotel is underwater. Because they were stupid as shit.”

  Sunlight burned through the curtains of the master bedroom. Wallis had Janey spooned against him. His eyes opened. Startled, he pushed Janey across the bed.

  “It’s okay,” Janey said. “Baby, it’s okay.”

  They put on their dry clothes.

  After eating, they exited the suite.

  “So how long can we stay in here? Because last night was kinda ice.”

  Wallis hugged her. “I know. But we gotta go get the hog and—”

  “And then we go go go.”

  They came out next to the conference room on the second floor. The ad sign was still lodged on the escalator steps. As they moved toward the sign, a light yelping sound caught their attention.

  “You hear that?”

  “It sounds like a dog,” Wallis said.

  The yelping got louder.

  Janey aimed her flash wand at the conference room. Bewildered, she and Wallis moved back.

  The conference room was filled with a colony of sea lions. They were asleep, a gathering of fifty or more.

  “Get out!” Janey exclaimed.

  The sea lions immediately jerked out of their deep sleep. A chorus of barks and sea lion calls reverberated through the hotel.

  Wallis and Janey leaped down the escalator stairs. As Wallis dislodged the ad sign…a killer whale surfaced from the waters of the lobby.

  “SHIT!”

  Janey screamed, “Baby!”

  Wallis slipped on the stairs.

  The killer whale launched out of the water, but missed him.

  Terrified, Wallis stumbled to Janey’s side. “Now that, that’s a sea creature!”

  A chopper lifted off outside the Brennan Learning Center annex and spun toward the ocean.

  Ms. Fallings conversed with the burly Brennan sec guard.

  Across from them, Mr. Beams sipped from a silver flask. He cringed, the alcohol stinging his wounded cheek. He checked an info pad in his lap. “Two kids, matching their descriptions, boarded a paddleboat for Water Town last night.”

  Ms. Fallings scanned her infopad. “There’s over one hundred abandoned buildings in that area alone.”

  Mr. Beams pocketed his flask. “What about the parents? What did they say?”

  “They thought they were on the Be Nice field trip.”

  “And the faculty?”

  “They told the other students Barber and Typermass were removed because of low test scores.”

  The chopper cruised to the edge of the Thirty-Third Street waterfront. It slowed and hovered over the office buildings.

  A scanner in the cockpit beeped.

  The pilot said, “Sir, it looks like we’ve got movement.”

  The chopper whirled east and settled outside the lobby of the Sea Breeze.

  A tangle of panicked sea lions swam out through the entrance.

  Mr. Beams yel
led to the pilot, “Take us around back!”

  The chopper flew to the rear of the hotel.

  The sec guard cried out, “Hold it!”

  The chopper hovered.

  The sec guard pointed to the penthouse suites. The balcony windows of one of the suites were open. The sec guard raised a pair of binocs. “I’ve got food wrappers, liquor bottles—”

  “Take us down!” Mr. Beams ordered.

  The chopper descended.

  “Sir, we can’t risk landing! It’s not sound!” the pilot warned.

  Mr. Beams raised a shock wand. “If it’s them, I’ll flush them out! Wait at the entrance!”

  The sec guard unsnapped a shock wand from a thigh holster. He joined Mr. Beams in the doorway of the chopper.

  Mr. Beams yelled, “They’re mine!”

  Ms. Fallings motioned the sec guard to sit.

  Mr. Beams dropped out to the rooftop.

  In the lobby, Wallis and Janey watched in amazement as a second killer whale surfaced at the bottom of the escalators.

  The remaining sea lions wriggled down the stairs.

  The killer whales picked off as many as they could.

  Wallis noticed someone standing at the fire exit.

  Mr. Beams looked on from the entranceway.

  Janey saw him.

  Wallis grabbed her by the hand.

  Mr. Beams followed them as they ran down a corridor next to the last conference room.

  They stopped at a dead end, a pair of broken elevator doors.

  Mr. Beams entered the corridor behind them, blocking their only way out.

  Wallis shoved Janey to the side and charged him.

  Mr. Beams dodged Wallis at the last second, and delivered a throat chop.

  Wallis held his throat and fell to the muddy carpeting.

  Mr. Beams caressed his wounded cheek.

  Janey braced herself against the wall and raised her fists.

  Mr. Beams rushed toward her.

  Janey unleashed a wild swing.

  Mr. Beams sidestepped the punch and cracked her in the forehead with his shock wand. He pushed the wand up to her throat. “The sun is the giver of all life! Not the destroyer! You’re both sick, you’re twisted!”