this chapter is dedicated to the mit press bookshop, a store i've visitedon every single trip to boston over the past ten years. mit, of course, isone of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the cam-pus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations i had when i firstset foot in it. in addition to the wonderful titles published by the mitpress, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech public-ations in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic antholo-gies on video-game design. this is one of those stores where i have to askthem to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.
mit press bookstore: building e38, 77 massachusetts ave., cam-bridge, ma usa 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249here's the email that went out at 7am the next day, while ange and iwere spray-painting vamp-mob civic center -> -> at strategic loca-tions around town.
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rules for vampmob>
you are part of a clan of daylight vampires. you've discovered thesecret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. the secret was cannibal-ism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walkamong the living.
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you need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay inthe game. if one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. once you'reout, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee — watch two orthree vamps to see if they're getting their bites in.
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251to bite another vamp, you have to say "bite!" five times before they do.
so you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bitebite!" and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles todust.
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you and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team.
they are your clan. you derive no nourishment from their blood.
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you can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms overyour chest. you can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you.
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this game is played on the honor system. the point is to have fun andget your vamp on, not to win.
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there is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winnersbegin to emerge. the game-masters will start a whisper campaignamong the players when the time comes. spread the whisper as quicklyas you can and watch for the sign.
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m1k3y>
bite bite bite bite bite!
we'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to playvampmob. we'd sent out about two hundred invites each. but when isat bolt upright at 4am and grabbed my xbox, there were 400 repliesthere. four hundred.
i fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. i descendedthe stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in theirbed. i locked the door behind me.
at 4:15 am, potrero hill was as quiet as the countryside. there weresome distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. i stoppedat an atm and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put arubber-band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low onthe thigh of my vampire pants.
i was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pantsthat had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits252and pieces. i had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and i'dteased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. ange wasbringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner andblack nail-polish. why the hell not? when was the next time i was goingto get to play dressup like this?
ange met me in front of her house. she had her backpack on too, andfishnet tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elab-orate kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silverjewelry.
"you look great!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietlyand stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets.
as i surveyed civic center, i thought about what it would look likeonce 400 vampmobbers converged on it. i expected them in ten minutes,out front of city hall. already the big plaza teemed with commuterswho neatly sidestepped the homeless people begging there.
i've always hated civic center. it's a collection of huge wedding-cakebuildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like city hall. thesidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. in the tourist guides to sanfrancisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like epcotcenter, futuristic and austere.
but on the ground, it's grimy and gross. homeless people sleep on allthe benches. the district is empty by 6pm except for drunks and drug-gies, because with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reasonfor people to hang around after the sun goes down. it's more like a mallthan a neighborhood, and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmenand liquor stores, places that cater to the families of crooks on trial andthe bums who make it their nighttime home.
i really came to understand all of this when i read an interview withan amazing old urban planner, a woman called jane jacobs who was thefirst person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with free-ways, stick all the poor people in housing projects, and use zoning lawsto tightly control who got to do what where.
jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of vari-ety — rich and poor, white and brown, anglo and mex, retail and resid-ential and even industrial. a neighborhood like that has all kinds ofpeople passing through it at all hours of the day or night, so you get253businesses that cater to every need, you get people around all the time,acting like eyes on the street.
you've encountered this before. you go walking around some olderpart of some city and you find that it's full of the coolest looking stores,guys in suits and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funkycafes, a little movie theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs.
sure, there might be a starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruitmarket and a florist who appears to be three hundred years old as shesnips carefully at the flowers in her windows. it's the opposite of aplanned space, like a mall. it feels like a wild garden or even a woods:
like it grew.
you couldn't get any further from that than civic center. i read an in-terview with jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhoodthey knocked down to build it. it had been just that kind of neighbor-hood, the kind of place that happened without permission or rhyme orreason.
jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, civic centerwould be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town atnight, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. in the interview, she didn't seem very glad to have been vin-dicated; she sounded like she was talking about a dead friend when shedescribed what civic center had become.
now it was rush hour and civic center was as busy at it could be. thecivic center bart also serves as the major station for muni trolley lines,and if you need to switch from one to another, that's where you do it. at8am, there were thousands of people coming up the stairs, going downthe stairs, getting into and out of taxis and on and off buses. they gotsqueezed by dhs checkpoints by the different civic buildings, androuted around aggressive panhandlers. they all smelled like their sham-poos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and armored in their worksuits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. at 8am, civic center wasbusiness central.
and here came the vamps. a couple dozen coming down van ness, acouple dozen coming up market. more coming from the other side ofmarket. more coming up from van ness. they slipped around the sideof the buildings, wearing the white face-paint and the black eyeliner,black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy boots. fishnet fingerlessgloves.
254they began to fill up the plaza. a few of the business people gavethem passing glances and then looked away, not wanting to let theseweirdos into their personal realities as they thought about whatever crapthey were about to wade through for another eight hours. the vampsmilled around, not sure when the game was on. they pooled together inlarge groups, like an oil spill in reverse, all this black gathering in oneplace. a lot of them sported old-timey hats, bowlers and toppers. manyof the girls were in full-on elegant gothic lolita maid costumes with hugeplatforms.
i tried to estimate the numbers. 200. then, five minutes later, it was300. 400. they were still streaming in. the vamps had brought friends.
someone grabbed my ass. i spun around and saw ange, laughing sohard she had to hold her thighs, bent double.
"look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. the square wastwice as crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. i had no idea howmany xnetters there were, but easily 1000 of them had just showed up tomy little party. christ.
the dhs and sfpd cops were starting to mill around, talking intotheir radios and clustering together. i heard a far-away siren.
"all right," i said, shaking ange by the arm. "all right, let's go."we both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered ourfirst vamp, we both said, loudly, "bite bite bite bite bite!" my victim wasa stunned — but cute — girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands andsmudged mascara running down her cheeks. she said, "crap," andmoved away, acknowledging that i'd gotten her.
the call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearbyvamps. some of them were attacking each other, others were moving forcover, hiding out. i had my victim for the minute, so i skulked away, us-ing mundanes for cover. all around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bitebite!" and shouts and laughs and curses.
the sound spread like a virus through the crowd. all the vamps knewthe game was on now, and the ones who were clustered together weredropping like flies. they laughed and cussed and moved away, clueingthe still-in vamps that the game was on. and more vamps were arrivingby the second.
8:16. it was time to bag another vamp. i crouched low and movedthrough the legs of the straights as they headed for the bart stairs. theyjerked back with surprise and swerved to avoid me. i had my eyes laser-255locked on a set of black platform boots with steel dragons over the toes,and so i wasn't expecting it when i came face to face with another vamp,a guy of about 15 or 16, hair gelled straight back and wearing a pvcmarilyn manson jacket draped with necklaces of fake tusks carved withintricate symbols.
"bite bite bite —" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped overhim and they both went sprawling. i leapt over to him and shouted "bitebite bite bite bite!" before he could untangle himself again.
more vamps were arriving. the suits were really freaking out. thegame overflowed the sidewalk and moved into van ness, spreading uptoward market street. drivers honked, the trolleys made angry dings. iheard more sirens, but now traffic was snarled in every direction.
it was freaking glorious.
bite bite bite bite bite!
the sound came from all around me. there were so many vampsthere, playing so furiously, it was like a roar. i risked standing up andlooking around and found that i was right in the middle of a giant crowdof vamps that went as far as i could see in every direction.
bite bite bite bite bite!
this was even better than the concert in dolores park. that had beenangry and rockin', but this was — well, it was just fun. it was like goingback to the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunchbreaks when the sun was out, hundreds of people chasing each otheraround. the adults and the cars just made it more fun, more funny.
that's what it was: it was funny. we were all laughing now.
but the cops were really mobilizing now. i heard helicopters. anysecond now, it would be over. time for the endgame.
i grabbed a vamp.
"endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've beengassed. pass it on. what did i just say?"the vamp was a girl, tiny, so short i thought she was really young, butshe must have been 17 or 18 from her face and the smile. "oh, that'swicked," she said.
"what did i say?""endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've beengassed. pass it on. what did i just say?""right," i said. "pass it on."256she melted into the crowd. i grabbed another vamp. i passed it on. hewent off to pass it on.
somewhere in the crowd, i knew ange was doing this too. somewherein the crowd, there might be infiltrators, fake xnetters, but what couldthey do with this knowledge? it's not like the cops had a choice. theywere going to order us to disperse. that was guaranteed.
i had to get to ange. the plan was to meet at the founder's statue inthe plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. the crowd wasn't mov-ing anymore, it was surging, like the mob had in the way down to thebart station on the day the bombs went off. i struggled to make myway through it just as the pa underneath the helicopter switched on.
"this is the department of homeland security. youare ordered to disperse immediately."around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching theirthroats, clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. it was easy to fake be-ing gassed, we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the parti-ers in mission dolores park going down under the pepper-spray clouds.
"disperse immediately."i fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the redbaseball hat folded into the waistband of my pants. i jammed it on myhead and then grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises.
the only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'dbeen just trying to get to their jobs. i looked around as best as i could atthem as i choked and gasped.
"this is the department of homeland security. youare ordered to disperse immediately. disperseimmediately." the voice of god made my bowels ache. i felt it in mymolars and in my femurs and my spine.
the salarymen were scared. they were moving as fast as they could,but in no particular direction. the helicopters seemed to be directly over-head no matter where you stood. the cops were wading into the crowdnow, and they'd put on their helmets. some had shields. some had gasmasks. i gasped harder.
then the salarymen were running. i probably would have run too. iwatched a guy whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face beforeheading south toward mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. hiscurses joined the choking sounds.
257this wasn't supposed to happen — the choking was just supposed tofreak people out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede.
there were screams now, screams i recognized all too well from thenight in the park. that was the sound of people who were scared spit-less, running into each other as they tried like hell to get away.
and then the air-raid sirens began.
i hadn't heard that sound since the bombs went off, but i would neverforget it. it sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turningmy legs into jelly on the way. it made me want to run away in a panic. igot to my feet, red cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: ange.
ange and the founders' statue.
everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. ipushed people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, head-ing for founders' statue. masha was looking for me, i was looking forange. ange was out there.
i pushed and cursed. elbowed someone. someone came down on myfoot so hard i felt something go crunch and i shoved him so he wentdown. he tried to get up and someone stepped on him. i shoved andpushed.
then i reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong handsgrabbed my wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought myarm back around behind my back. it felt like my shoulder was about towrench out of its socket, and i instantly doubled over, hollering, a soundthat was barely audible over the din of the crowd, the thrum of the chop-pers, the wail of the sirens.
i was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, whichsteered me like a marionette. the hold was so perfect i couldn't eventhink of squirming. i couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter orange. all i could think of was moving the way that the person who hadme wanted me to move. i was brought around so that i was face-to-facewith the person.
it was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by agiant pair of sunglasses. over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair,spiked out in all directions.
"you!" i said. i knew her. she'd taken a picture of me and threatened torat me out to truant watch. that had been five minutes before the alarmsstarted. she'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. we'd both run fromthat spot in the tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd258both been picked up by the cops. i'd been hostile and they'd decided thati was an enemy.
she — masha — became their ally.
"hello, m1k3y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. a shiver wentup my back. she let go of my arm and i shook it out.
"christ," i said. "you!""yes, me," she said. "the gas is gonna come down in about twominutes. let's haul ass.""ange — my girlfriend — is by the founders' statue."masha looked over the crowd. "no chance," she said. "we try to makeit there, we're doomed. the gas is coming down in two minutes, in caseyou missed it the first time."i stopped moving. "i don't go without ange," i said.
she shrugged. "suit yourself," she shouted in my ear. "your funeral."she began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, towarddowntown. i continued to push for the founders' statue. a second later,my arm was back in the terrible lock and i was being swung around andpropelled forward.
"you know too much, jerk-off," she said. "you've seen my face. you'recoming with me."i screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, butshe was pushing me forward. my sore foot was agony with every step,my shoulder felt like it would break.
with her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress throughthe crowd. the whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me aharder push. "run!" she yelled. "here comes the gas!"the crowd noise changed, too. the choking sounds and screamsounds got much, much louder. i'd heard that pitch of sound before. wewere back in the park. the gas was raining down. i held my breath andran.
we cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. i shook it out. ilimped as fast as i could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned andthinned. we were heading towards a group of dhs cops with riotshields and helmets and masks. as we drew near them, they moved toblock us, but masha held up a badge and they melted away like she wasobi wan kenobi, saying "these aren't the droids you're looking for."259"you goddamned bitch," i said as we sped up market street. "we haveto go back for ange."she pursed her lips and shook her head. "i feel for you, buddy. ihaven't seen my boyfriend in months. he probably thinks i'm dead. for-tunes of war. we go back for your ange, we're dead. if we push on, wehave a chance. so long as we have a chance, she has a chance. those kidsaren't all going to gitmo. they'll probably take a few hundred in forquestioning and send the rest home."we were moving up market street now, past the strip joints where thelittle encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets.
masha guided me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the stripplaces. she stripped off her jacket and turned it inside out — the liningwas a muted stripe pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hungdifferently. she produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it overher hair, letting it form a jaunty, off-center peak. then she took out somemake-up remover wipes and went to work on her face and fingernails. ina minute, she was a different woman.
"wardrobe change," she said. "now you. lose the shoes, lose the jack-et, lose the hat." i could see her point. the cops would be looking verycarefully at anyone who looked like they'd been a part of the vampmob.
i ditched the hat entirely — i'd never liked ball caps. then i jammed thejacket into my pack and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of rosaluxembourg on it and pulled it over my black tee. i let masha wipe mymakeup off and clean my nails and a minute later, i was clean.
"switch off your phone," she said. "you carrying any arphids?"i had my student card, my atm card, my fast pass. they all went intoa silvered bag she held out, which i recognized as a radio-proof faradaypouch. but as she put them in her pocket, i realized i'd just turned my idover to her. if she was on the other side…the magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. in mymind, i'd pictured having ange with me at this point. ange would makeit two against one. ange would help me see if there was somethingamiss. if masha wasn't all she said she was.
"put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on —""it's ok. i sprained my foot. no gait recognition program will spot menow."260she nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. i picked upmine and we moved. the total time for the changeover was less than aminute. we looked and walked like two different people.
she looked at her watch and shook her head. "come on," she said. "wehave to make our rendezvous. don't think of running, either. you've gottwo choices now. me, or jail. they'll be analyzing the footage from thatmob for days, but once they're done, every face in it will go in a data-base. our departure will be noted. we are both wanted criminals now."she got us off market street on the next block, swinging back into thetenderloin. i knew this neighborhood. this was where we'd gone hunt-ing for an open wifi access-point back on the day, playing harajuku funmadness.
"where are we going?" i said.
"we're about to catch a ride," she said. "shut up and let meconcentrate."we moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under myhair, coursed down my back and slid down the crack of my ass and mythighs. my foot was really hurting and i was seeing the streets of sanfrancisco race by, maybe for the last time, ever.
it didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for thezone where the seedy tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estatevalues of nob hill. my breath came in ragged gasps. she moved usmostly up narrow alleys, using the big streets just to get from one alleyto the next.
we were just stepping into one such alley, sabin place, when someonefell in behind us and said, "freeze right there." it was full of evil mirth.
we stopped and turned around.
at the mouth of the alley stood charles, wearing a halfheartedvampmob outfit of black t-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. "hello,marcus," he said. "you going somewhere?" he smiled a huge, wet grin.
"who's your girlfriend?""what do you want, charles?""well, i've been hanging out on that traitorous xnet ever since i spot-ted you giving out dvds at school. when i heard about your vampmob,i thought i'd go along and hang around the edges, just to see if youshowed up and what you did. you know what i saw?"261i said nothing. he had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. recording.
maybe ready to dial 911. beside me, masha had gone still as a board.
"i saw you leading the damned thing. and i recorded it, marcus. so nowi'm going to call the cops and we're going to wait right here for them.
and then you're going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long,long time."masha stepped forward.
"stop right there, chickie," he said. "i saw you get him away. i saw it all—"she took another step forward and snatched the phone out of hishand, reaching behind her with her other hand and bringing it out hold-ing a wallet open.
"dhs, dick-head," she said. "i'm dhs. i've been running this twerpback to his masters to see where he went. i was doing that. now you'veblown it. we have a name for that. we call it 'obstruction of national se-curity.' you're about to hear that phrase a lot more often."charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. he'dgone even paler under his makeup. "what? no! i mean — i didn't know!
i was trying to help!""the last thing we need is a bunch of high school junior g-men'helping' buddy. you can tell it to the judge."he moved back again, but masha was fast. she grabbed his wrist andtwisted him into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at civiccenter. her hand dipped back to her pockets and came out holding astrip of plastic, a handcuff strip, which she quickly wound around hiswrists.
that was the last thing i saw as i took off running.
i made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up withme, tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. i couldn't movevery fast, not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. i went downin a hard face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimyasphalt.
"jesus," she said. "you're a goddamned idiot. you didn't believe that,did you?"my heart thudded in my chest. she was on top of me and slowly shelet me up.
262"do i need to cuff you, marcus?"i got to my feet. i hurt all over. i wanted to die.
"come on," she said. "it's not far now."'it' turned out to be a moving van on a nob hill side-street, a sixteen-wheeler the size of one of the ubiquitous dhs trucks that still turned upon san francisco's street corners, bristling with antennas.
this one, though, said "three guys and a truck moving" on the side,and the three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of atall apartment building with a green awning. they were carrying cratedfurniture, neatly labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truckand carefully packing them there.
she walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied withsomething, then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the manwho was watching the van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt andheavy gloves. he had a kind face and he smiled at us as she led usquickly, casually up the truck's three stairs and into its depth. "under thebig table," he said. "we left you some space there."the truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridoraround a huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around its legs.
masha pulled me under the table. it was stuffy and still and dusty un-der there, and i suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among theboxes. the space was so tight that we were on top of each other. i didn'tthink that ange would have fit in there.
"bitch," i said, looking at masha.
"shut up. you should be licking my boots thanking me. you wouldhave ended up in jail in a week, two tops. not gitmo-by-the-bay. syria,maybe. i think that's where they sent the ones they really wanted todisappear."i put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply.
"why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the dhsanyway?"i told her. i told her about being busted and i told her about darryl.
she patted her pockets and came up with a phone. it was charles's.
"wrong phone." she came up with another phone. she turned it on and263the glow from its screen filled our little fort. after fiddling for a second,she showed it to me.
it was the picture she'd snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. itwas the picture of jolu and van and me and —darryl.
i was holding in my hand proof that darryl had been with us minutesbefore we'd all gone into dhs custody. proof that he'd been alive andwell and in our company.
"you need to give me a copy of this," i said. "i need it.""when we get to la," she said, snatching the phone back. "onceyou've been briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both ourasses caught and shipped to syria. i don't want you getting rescue ideasabout this guy. he's safe enough where he is — for now."i thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she'd alreadydemonstrated her physical skill. she must have been a black-belt orsomething.
we sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck withbox after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. i tried tosleep, but couldn't. masha had no such problem. she snored.
there was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridorthat led to the fresh air outside. i stared at it, through the gloom, andthought of ange.
my ange. her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her headfrom side to side, laughing at something i'd done. her face when i'd seenher last, falling down in the crowd at vampmob. all those people atvampmob, like the people in the park, down and writhing, the dhsmoving in with truncheons. the ones who disappeared.
darryl. stuck on treasure island, his side stitched up, taken out of hiscell for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists.
darry's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. washed up and in hisuniform, "for the photos." weeping like a little boy.
my own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disap-pearance to treasure island. he'd been just as broken as darryl's father,but in his own way. and his face, when i told him where i'd been.
that was when i knew that i couldn't run.
that was when i knew that i had to stay and fight.
264masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when i reached with gla-cial slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shif-ted. i froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting onehippopotami, two hippopotami.
slowly, her breath deepened again. i tugged the phone free of herjacket-pocket one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm tremblingwith the effort of moving so slowly.
then i had it, a little candy-bar shaped thing.
i turned to head for the light, when i had a flash of memory: charles,holding out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. it had been acandy-bar-shaped phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen com-panies that had subsidized the cost of the handset through the phonecompany. it was the kind of phone where you had to listen to a commer-cial every time you made a call.
it was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but i could feel it.
were those company decals on its sides? yes? yes. i had just stolencharles's phone from masha.
i turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, slowly, ireached back into her pocket. her phone was bigger and bulkier, with abetter camera and who knew what else?
i'd been through this once before — that made it a little easier. milli-meter by millimeter again, i teased it free of her pocket, stopping twicewhen she snuffled and twitched.
i had the phone free of her pocket and i was beginning to back awaywhen her hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fin-gertips grinding away at the small, tender bones below my hand.
i gasped and stared into masha's wide-open, staring eyes.
"you are such an idiot," she said, conversationally, taking the phonefrom me, punching at its keypad with her other hand. "how did youplan on unlocking this again?"i swallowed. i felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. i bit mylip to keep from crying out.
she continued to punch away with her other hand. "is this what youthought you'd get away with?" she showed me the picture of all of us,darryl and jolu, van and me. "this picture?"i didn't say anything. my wrist felt like it would shatter.
265"maybe i should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." herfree hand moved some more. her phone asked her if she was sure andshe had to look at it to find the right button.
that's when i moved. i had charles's phone in my other hand still, andi brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as i could, banging myknuckles on the table overhead. i hit her hand so hard the phoneshattered and she yelped and her hand went slack. i was still moving,reaching for her other hand, for her now-unlocked phone with herthumb still poised over the ok key. her fingers spasmed on the emptyair as i snatched the phone out of her hand.
i moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading forthe light. i felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and i had toshove aside some of the boxes that had walled us in like a pharaoh in atomb. a few of them fell down behind me, and i heard masha gruntagain.
the rolling truck door was open a crack and i dove for it, slitheringout under it. the steps had been removed and i found myself hangingover the road, sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktopwith a thump that rang my ears like a gong. i scrambled to my feet, hold-ing the bumper, and desperately dragged down on the door-handle,slamming it shut. masha screamed inside — i must have caught her fin-gertips. i felt like throwing up, but i didn't.
i padlocked the truck instead.