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  As blood dripped from her forehead, Janey mumbled, “We...we didn’t do nothin’.”

  Mr. Beams activated the shock wand and placed it between her legs.

  Wallis snatched him by his ponytail and yanked him down to the floor.

  Mr. Beams choked as his ponytail was wrapped around his neck.

  Wallis secured his legs across Mr. Beams’s midsection and pulled.

  Mr. Beams tried to fight back, flailing with the shock wand.

  Janey kicked the wand out of his hand.

  Mr. Beams’s eyes bulged.

  Wallis tightened his strangle hold. “Like she said! No one touches her but me!”

  There was a muffled crack…and Mr. Beams’s body went limp.

  Janey tugged at the front of her shirt, fanning air over her breasts. “Got-damn!”

  Wallis released Mr. Beams and shoved him to the floor.

  The sound of the chopper thundered from the lobby.

  Wallis led Janey to the fire exit stairwell.

  “We can’t get out!” she said.

  “We have to go out back!”

  They dragged the mattress off the bed in the penthouse suite. They pushed it to the bedroom patio window and lifted it over the railing. The mattress plummeted eight floors and splashed into the sea.

  Wallis and Janey held each other and jumped.

  Ms. Fallings tapped the side of the pilot’s helmet. “Go back around!”

  The sec guard switched on his shock wand and bailed out to the roof.

  Wallis and Janey paddled the mattress away from the rear of the hotel and disappeared in the shadows of the neighboring hotels and office buildings.

  On the roof of the Sea Breeze, the sec guard dragged Mr. Beams’s body outside and, with little regard, picked it up and tossed it in the chopper’s rescue basket.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The mega-casinos dominated the Vegas landscape. Animated characters beckoned on ad signs while strobe lights rhythmically flashed and pulsed. On the strip, electric car and truck engines whined in traffic, their sounds mixing with the jazz funk beats from the discotheques.

  The five Star Line bullet trains were lined end to end in the Vegas rail yard. The shades had been drawn on the passenger cars. The emanations of good times echoed from within.

  Ms. Garner, the art teacher, DJ’d on three turntables at the front of the first train. John Tom, Becky, Pete, and Abe sucked down Dawg beers, smoked cigarettes and joints, and danced with the other students.

  The lights went out. A bright red light came on.

  Ms. Garner shut off the music as a voice boomed from the ceiling speakers. “Students, please proceed to your first class assignment. Students, please proceed to your first class assignment. Be Nice Santa Monica, New Venice, and Westwood will be running the exercise.”

  John Tom, Abe, Becky, and Pete put on their Be Nice masks.

  The students came to attention.

  John Tom placed his right hand over his heart. “The black mask is the depths of outer space: all that matters. The yellow is the sun: the giver of all life. The red is the blood: the blood of the us, the all, the chosen few.”

  The students responded, “BE NICE!”

  The New Venice and Westwood Be Nice leaders, masked young men and women, gathered outside the bullet trains. Groups of students assembled in line behind them. John Tom, Becky, Pete, and Abe led their group out. The New Venice and Westwood Be Nice leaders flashed gang signs. John Tom cocked his head and flashed them back.

  A stream of black minivans, with tinted windows, coiled into the train yard.

  The living pods of Henderson, Nevada, had been constructed off the Lake Mead Parkway. They made up a quiet suburb of clean streets and manicured front lawns. Children played on the sidewalks, weary over-thirty-fives struggled home from the day shift, and cliques of older teens smoked and drank on the street corners.

  A black minivan arrived. A second, followed by a third.

  The older teens stopped smoking and drinking. They put on ratty Be Nice masks and yelled, “Be Nice!”

  John Tom descended from the second minivan. He was armed with a shock wand. Abe, Becky, Pete, and the other Be Nice leaders ordered the students to the streets.

  The Be Nice teens on the corner waved to them and indicated a section of living pods.

  John Tom elevated his right hand and extended his index finger.

  The students went berserk. They bypassed the little children playing on the sidewalks and crashed through the front doors of the living pods.

  Over-thirty-fives were hauled out on their lawns. They were kicked and stomped and punched into the freshly cut grass.

  Becky and Pete wrestled a frail, old woman to the ground.

  A group of kids held an old man down and stabbed him repeatedly.

  A group of kids stomped an older couple into the curb.

  A group of kids ran out of two of the living pods. They carried confiscated pistols and shotguns. Another of the kids, armed with an ax, chopped the guns into pieces.

  Abe twisted a beaten man’s head and made him watch.

  Ms. Garner had her shirt unbuttoned. The jazz techno was deafening.

  The Be Nice leaders from Westwood and New Venice jumped on the train and celebrated with the students.

  John Tom signaled to Ms. Garner. She turned off the music.

  John Tom drunkenly swigged from a bottle of cognac. “Okay, y’all, pay close! We meet up with Be Nice in Kansas, Be Nice in Tennessee, and Be Nice in hot as all eff Mississippi next! Then we go to Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York!”

  The students responded, “BE NICE!”

  “The old ways scummers that’re still left—they can try and hide their guns and their hate, but we’ll find them! We’ll hunt them down and we’ll weed them out!”

  “BE NICE! BE NICE! BE NICE!”

  John Tom stood on one of the seats. “We still have work to do! We still have work to do here and around the world! Shit, ya’ll, we still got bizness to take care of!”

  The students clapped and cheered.

  “And, look, look. Some of you, you showed me and the other Be Nice heads some niiiiice work tonight! Trust me, some of y’all gonna be gettin’ a call reeeeal soon! Some of y’all gonna be Be Nice sooner than you think!”

  “BE NICE! BE NICE! BE NICE!”

  John Tom put his right hand over his heart. “The black mask is the depths of outer space: all that matters! The yellow is the sun: the giver of all life! The red is the blood: the blood of the us, the all, the chosen few!”

  Ms. Garner flipped on the music.

  The students roared and danced.

  John Tom jumped off the seat.

  Ms. Garner left her turntables and met him in the aisle. John Tom finished his cognac and stared at her. She fell to her knees and unzipped his fly.

  Wallis and Janey’s high school ID photos beamed from a wide screen tele-viewer. Their Soc Sec numbers and phone numbers appeared below. The burly Brennan sec guard typed keys on a keyboard. Ms. Fallings lit a cigarette and closed her selli.

  The sec guard coughed and waved away the smoke.

  “I just got the call. Be Nice HQ has put me in command.”

  “Congratulations, ma’am,” the sec guard replied. He noted the tele-viewer. “Wallis Barber was recruited by John Thomas Martinez about six months ago. He and Barber had gotten in a fight over the girl, Janey Typermass. Barber apparently lost the fight, but Martinez was impressed with his overall tenacity.”

  Ms. Fallings studied Wallis and Janey’s ID photos. “All they needed was a good talking to.”

  “You ever had any other children do something like this?”

  “No. Nothing like this. But there must be something else. Something special I’m missing about these two.”

 
; “Typermass’s father, he was executed when she was eleven. It was for Profit Crime.”

  “Rebelliousness, it runs in her family.”

  “Barber’s bad news; I have no doubts. But I don’t know. I think we should go through their pods, see if we can find—”

  “I’m surprised, Mr…?

  “Dylon, ma’am.”

  “I’m surprised, Mr. Dylon.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “What you just suggested is illegal.”

  “But getting results isn’t illegal.”

  “I like the way you think, Mr. Dylon, however, we both have to answer to Be Nice. If they were to find out we searched their members’ pods without the proper authorization…”

  “Barber and Typermass now qualify as criminals, ma’am.”

  “Not without a trial.”

  “Or unless we had evidence. Some type of irrefutable evidence we could release to the public. And what about the members of their crew? Maybe we should question them. There’s a chance they may know something. And it’s also not a bad idea to stir the pot.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Stir the pot, muddy the water. I’ll think of something. Just give me a little time to—”

  Ms. Fallings glanced at her wrist implant. “Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven…”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You said you needed a little time. You now have less than one minute.”

  Two Brennan sec guards waited in an SUV across from Wallis’s living pod. One of them gulped down a synth burger, the other sipped a slushy.

  “You hear what happened?”

  Without answering, the second guard loudly slurped the bottom of his slushy.

  “These two kids we’re lookin’ for—they killed Mr. Beams.”

  Wallis and Janey crept out of a neighbor’s open car port. Janey kept watch on the SUV as Wallis fed a long strip of cloth into the spout of a cooking oil can.

  The sec guards sniffed the air.

  Smoke was coming from of one of the living pods.

  The guards made a selli call and leaped to the street.

  Wallis ran from the other side of the burning living pod and threw the lit cooking oil can through the passenger windows of the guards’ SUV.

  The sec guards charged back across the street.

  A motorcycle engine revved.

  Wallis and Janey, on the back of Wallis’s hog, blasted out of his garage.

  Wallis guided the hog onto the Pacific Coast Highway and opened the throttle.

  Janey yelled over the engine. “Where we goin’?”

  “To see the folks!”

  “What?”

  “We need to get their bank cards!”

  “But they’re on the W Line! The night shift!”

  “It’s the last place they’ll look!”

  Shelby Industries demolished Pepperdine University’s administration buildings, classrooms, theaters, and student areas and replaced them with three army-green colored airplane hangars. The hangars, resembling army-green rolls of French bread aimed toward the ocean, were on the land side of the PCH.

  Wallis used the employee driveway. He killed the hog’s headlight, went off road, and vanished in a thicket of trees.

  “Baby, are you sure about this?” Janey asked.

  “I was here once before.”

  “You were here before?”

  “I wanted to see what a W Line was like.”

  Janey stared at the airplane hangars through the trees. “My mom’s in one of `em, I guess, but I don’t know which one.”

  “You find her, I’ll find mine.”

  “But all she’s got is her bank card.”

  “She’ll get another one.”

  “Right. And as soon as we use those cards, Be Nice’ll find us. You know over-thirty-fives get tracked.”

  “We hit the Malibu mall then we’re gone. We use the cards as backup, only if we need `em.” Wallis climbed off the hog.

  “Wait a sec.”

  Wallis stopped.

  “Baby, tell me…where are we going?”

  “East. We’re gonna head east.”

  “East? But there ain’t nothin’ but rocks, heat, and a lotta sand out east. And all the big cities, they’re packed with Be Nice.”

  “We’re gonna get us a tent, some clothes, some grub, and we’re gonna live out under the stars.”

  Janey rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll figure out somethin’, okay?”

  “Seriously, baby, I think—”

  “What, before you was all, like, ‘Let’s just go’. So, we’re going!”

  “But I’m thinkin’ clear now.”

  “You need to think about bein’ Dead.”

  “So either we starve and die with the rocks and the sand, or be Dead?”

  “Girl, just go in there and get your mom’s card!”

  “We’re not done with this.”

  “We’ll talk on the road!”

  “I’m just sayin’ we need to have a plan if—”

  “I said, we’ll talk on the road!”

  “Okay, stop. This whole raisin’ your voice at me thing—”

  Wallis grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the thicket.

  The Shelby hangars had no security.

  Using an unlocked bathroom window, Wallis and Janey entered the third hangar. Harsh neon lights, tiered walkways, and twelve assembly lines of conveyor belts greeted them. Under-thirty-five managers lorded over the hundreds of over-thirty-five workers who diligently manufactured solar panels, shoelaces, and pedal bikes.

  A side door connected to the second airplane hangar. Watching the under-thirty-fives on the tiers overhead, Janey sneaked over to the door and crept inside.

  On his knees, Wallis crawled under one of the conveyor belts. He scurried between the pant legs, skirts, shoes, and boots of the workers and stopped at the last work station. He lay on his back and poked his head out.

  “Pop!”

  Startled, his father peeked between his work boots.

  “Hey, Pop.”

  “Wallis! What on Earth are you—”

  “Pop, just shut up and pay close.”

  “Wallis, what happened? Why aren’t you and Janey on that field trip? Do you realize some important people came looking for you—”

  “Pop, I need cash! I need to use your bank card!”

  “Okay, you hold on. What have you gotten yourself—”

  Two solar panels jammed. A red light came on. An alarm bell rang.

  An under-thirty-five manager yelled from one of the tiers, “Barber, what’s the hold up down there?”

  “Sorry, sir! It’s my son! He’s here and he says he needs to use my bank card!”

  “Pop!”

  The manager sprinted for the stairs.

  Wallis crawled out from under the conveyor belt. “I’m sorry, Pop.” He spun his father around and shoved him over the belt. He searched through his pockets and found his wallet.

  The manager blew a piercing whistle.

  Wallis pulled his father off the belt and hugged him. “Janey and I are going bye-bye for a while. You and Mom, you take your meds and you be good.”

  As the manager cleared the stairs, Wallis ran for the exit.

  Janey peeked under the rows of stalls in the Ladies room. She was relieved to find an orange moo-moo and a pair of heavy black feet in slippers.

  “Mom! Hey, Mom!”

  The moo-moo ruffled. The toilet flushed. The door unlocked. Her mother, carrying a fashion magazine, stepped out. “Girl, what are you—”

  “I need your bank card!”

  “My what?”

  “Woman, I swear, I don’t have time to—”

  “Girl, why didn’t you go
on that field trip? You know some very important people came looking for you the other day? You and that Barber boy—”

  “Mom, I’m pregnant!”

  Stunned, her mother clutched her heart. She threw her fashion magazine to the floor, hugged Janey, and squeezed her between her ample bosoms. “Oh, my baby! My baby girl!”

  “Mom!”

  Irene banged on the stall doors. “My girl’s pregnant, my baby girl’s pregnant! We’re gonna have a baby!”

  The women in the stalls applauded.

  “Mom, I need your bank card. I’m gonna need lots of money.”

  Irene lifted an old leather wallet out of her bra. Janey took it and popped out the bank card. “Okay, Mom. There’s one more thing I have to tell you. Me and Wallis, we’re moving. We’re moving to, uh…to San Diego—”

  “San Diego? Oh, baby, isn’t that wonderful? I’ll buy some new dresses, a new hat, a new purse, and I’ll come down—”

  Janey kissed her on both cheeks. “Praise the Jesus.”

  Irene’s eyes widened.

  Wallis gunned the hog to the entrance of the second airplane hangar. Janey burst through the front doors and hopped on behind him.

  A group of managers, waving shock wands, exited the first hangar.

  Wallis hit the gas and scattered them to the walkway.

  The Malibu Mall was on the water side of the PCH. It was a massive construct built on reinforced stilts high over the Pacific.

  Wallis hurled a rock through the display window of the Men’s department.

  No alarms went off.

  Wallis took Janey’s hand. “We’re good. Be Nice usually keeps the peace around here, but everybody’s on the field trip.”

  They passed the clothing shops, the electronics boutiques, the book stores, the bed and bath store, and ran up the escalator to the second floor.

  They came to the sports outlet. Wallis smashed a trash can through the display window.

  Janey pushed a shopping cart in the aisles as Wallis pulled items off the shelves. He threw a cooking plate, two canteens, two large hunting knives, four flash wands, a pair of jackets, pants, shirts, shorts, T-shirts, and wool caps in the cart; the last item was a collapsible camping tent.