theater. “I hate fucking good-byes.”
“Are you sure you don't want to?”
She shook her head. “God no! I'm crying just telling
… how do you think I'd do with them?”
He laughed gently. “Ah, Maxine, my Maxine… for a genetically enhanced killing machine, you don't seem very tough.”
“Well then help me preserve my image. You tell the kids good-bye for me.”
A smirk dug a hole in one of Moody's cheeks. “I guess this is one negotiation I'm destined to lose.”
They hugged one last time.
Before she left, Max called Fresca up into the projection booth and asked him to watch it for her until she got back from “a little trip” she had to take.
“Can't I come with you?” he moaned; even his freckles seemed to droop.
“No, I need you here. You're my
aren't you?”
“I am? I mean… I am!”
She shrugged with her shoulders and her mouth. “Well, then, kid— watch my shit for me. All I'm takin' is my bike.”
“No prob!”
She put an arm around him conspiratorially. “And I want you to do one more thing for me.”
“Anything.”
“Keep an eye on Niner. She seems like a good kid, but she's green… she needs a
to look out for her.”
Fresca seemed to pump up a little at the thought Max considered him a man. “Count on it!”
“And here, Fres— take this.” She handed him a wad of bills, about half what Moody had given her.
His eyes were like fried eggs. “Max, you're
right?”
“Put that in your pocket, and don't tell anybody that you have it, or where you got it.”
“Why?”
“Because everybody needs a secret stash o' cash… and that's yours.”
“Rad,” he said breathlessly, thumb riffling the thickness of bills.
“And always remember, Fres— you're my brother, too.”
He frowned in confusion. “‘Too'? You got another brother?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I'll let you know.”
They hugged, then she said, “Gotta blaze.”
“Better blaze then,” he said.
And she walked her bike out, and was gone.
Chapter Five
WELCOME TO THE
MONKEY HOUSE
THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY
EUREKA, CALIFORNIA, 2019
Like poison mushrooms, they sprang up all around the country after the Pulse, these villages of ramshackle shacks where people— little more than refugees really— came to live and, frequently, die. Named Jamestowns— after Michael James, the president of the United States when the Pulse hit— the ragtag hamlets were a twenty- first-century variation on the Hoovervilles of the previous century's Great Depression, those packing-crate communities named after another less-than-stellar president.
This Jamestown, located on the east side of Eureka, California, had been around since just after the LA Quake of 2012. What had started with only a few cardboard hovels had become— following a frontier pattern hardly new to the state— an actual town over the last seven years, complete with bars, trading posts, a church, and even a roughshod school. Covering acres that used to be the Sequoia Park Zoo, the Jamestown had incorporated the zoo's animal housing for its own varied purposes.
Though most of the zoo had been converted to human shelter, the monkey house had long since become a bar of the same name, also serving humans, at least technically. Bordering the Monkey House (which had a neon sign wired to its bars) were towering ravines of stately redwoods, which most people— even the rough sort who came and went to such Jamestowns— had the good sense to avoid at night. Though the village was more or less peaceful, the woods was where the majority of the bad things around here happened: the usual… murders, rapes, robberies. The foliage of the forest would never lack for fertilizer, thanks to the flow of decomposing bodies.
Across the main walkway from the Monkey House, army-navy surplus tents had been pitched around the former zoo's structures, providing temporary shelter for the hundreds of travelers who stayed anywhere from a day to three or four months, depending on their ability— financial and/or physical— to move on.
For the last few weeks, the tent city had been home to a band of barbaric SoCal bikers, descendants of a notorious pre-Pulse biker gang called the Hell's Angels. The New Hellions took their name seriously, were suffused with pride in their mongrel pedigree, and tried to live up to that image every day, in every way.
Strolling at twilight through this nasty-ass post-Pulse slum as if it were a benign street fair was a slim, beautiful, busty black woman with high cheekbones, a wide nose, and huge brown eyes shaded with blue eye shadow; her dark eyebrows curved with an ironic confidence that was no pose and her large, rather puffy Afro had been dressed up with a few pink stripes for good measure.
For a woman alone in a tough town, “Original Cindy” McEachin showed no fear… neither did she feel any.
Her pants were a second skin of leather, jet black, with an orange, midriff-baring top so tight it hardly needed the spaghetti straps, showing off not only her flat tummy but the tops of her breasts and bare shoulders, like a dare. Not surprisingly, many males took that dare, this striking female drawing goo-goo-eyed, drop-jawed stares from the few bikers who weren't already in the Monkey House.
better
she thought; her heels were spikes, but she couldn't have moved easier in tennies.
Crossing the walkway, shaking what God had given her, Original Cindy all but bumped into a biker couple exiting the Monkey House.
The burly man's automatic frown flipped into a yellow-green grin when he saw the shapely form he'd almost collided with; he had long, tangled brown hair, which may have been washed at some time or other, and wore only a ragged denim vest with his obligatory jeans and boots. Despite a hairy beer belly, the biker had arms rivaling the trunks of the surrounding sequoias, each bicep tattooed with snakes that curled around and undulated whenever he flexed.
“My bad,” Original Cindy drawled.
The guy had slithered one snake arm around his date, a thin little former prom queen in jeans and a black-
