Читать книгу Rabbit and Robot - William Hughes, Andrew Smith - Страница 11

There are things that your friends will do for you that you just don’t have the guts to do for yourself.

Because, let’s face it: Cager Messer— me— I was a messed-up drug addict who had one foot—and probably most of the rest of my body too—in the grave by the time other guys were stressing over getting driver’s licenses, and losing or not losing their virginity.

Most people who were allowed to have an opinion on guys like Billy and me would conclude that I was a loser, and that we were both spoiled pieces of shit.

But Billy Hinman was my best friend. I know that now.

He saved me.

Unfortunately, saving me resulted in things no one could ever have foreseen.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking cruise ship.

Billy stared out the window as we drifted away on the R&RGG transpod, sad and bleary-eyed. Billy was terrified of flying.

He said, “Good-bye, California. Have a happy Crambox, Mrs. Jordan.”

It was two days before Christmas; two days before Billy Hinman and I would find ourselves trapped on the Tennessee.

It was also my sixteenth birthday.

Happy birthday to me!

Billy Hinman kept no secrets from me. He and Mrs. Jordan—our friend Paula’s mother—had been having sex since Billy was just fifteen years old.

Of course I was jealous, in a sickening kind of way. What sixteen-year-old virgin guy wouldn’t be jealous of a best friend who had actual sex as often as Billy Hinman did? He had sex with just about everyone.

But Billy Hinman still called Paula’s mother Mrs. Jordan, which was creepier than shit.

One thing I have never done: I do not go to school.

Grosvenor High School’s mascot was the Shrieking Weasel. We no longer had competitive sports in high school (a thing I understand was commonplace fifty years before our time), but at assemblies and career fairs the students of Grosvenor High School thrilled themselves by screaming the cry of the Shrieking Weasel, which sounds like this: Cheepa Yeep! Cheepa Yeep!

This past summer, Billy Hinman turned sixteen. Also, the United States of America was involved in twenty-seven simultaneous wars.

Twenty-seven!

And up here in heaven, we look down and watch the world burn.

I have this memory from a few months before Billy and Rowan kidnapped me. It was fire season in Los Angeles.

I have never set fire to anything.

Fire season lasted ten months out of the year. The two months that were unofficially not-fire-season were only less flammable because they tended to be a little too chilly for most arsonists—burners—to go outdoors.

Everything that could burn in California had burned, time and time and time again.

The city was on fire at the time. There was nothing left to burn on the naked, scorched hills, but houses, restaurants, schools, and tax offices still contained combustible components. What would Los Angeles possibly be without its fires and smoke?

“I can smell a school on fire, and a Korean restaurant too,” I said.

Billy Hinman and I were standing in an alley at my father’s studio, waiting for Charlie Greenwell to show up, so I could get high with him.

“I don’t get how you can do that,” Billy Hinman said.

I shrugged. “Neither do I. It’s just that nothing else smells like burning smart screens, or a Samgyeopsal-gui restaurant that’s been set on fire.”

“I guess so,” Billy conceded.

Charlie Greenwell wasn’t much older than Billy and me when he came back all messed up from War Twenty-Five, or whatever. He liked to hang out around the studio lot where they produced my father’s show. And, usually, Charlie Greenwell and I would smoke or snort Woz together in the alley while Billy just watched.

Neither of us liked Charlie Greenwell, so I never really understood why we’d listen to his shit stories about all the people he’d shot, and how great it was to be a bonk. But then again, the way things were, sometimes I’d put up with just about anything to get high, which is why Billy and Rowan, my caretaker, concocted a scheme to get me on board the Tennessee and clean me up before I killed myself with the stuff.

Billy was done arguing with me about it a long time ago.

Sometimes we speculated how we might have ended up if we had been born to a regular family—if we’d have ended up bonks or coders. I’m pretty sure Billy Hinman would have gone to war, just like Charlie Greenwell did, and that I would have gone to an industrial lab, but I always told Billy to his face that we would have ended up in the same place together.

Ending up in the same place together is actually exactly the way things turned out for me and Billy Hinman.

I make lists of things I’ve never done. I kept them as voice recordings on my thumbphone, until it stopped working on the flight to the Tennessee. This book is the list of my life adrift, compiled while we all make a hopeful attempt to get back home.

That’s really what all books are, isn’t it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done—a sort of deathbed confession where you’re trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

The big difference: It does not matter who my confession is written to, because nobody will ever see this—or, if someone does, it will probably be hundreds or thousands of years from now, and whoever picks this up won’t understand a goddamned thing about what it meant to be the last human beings left in the universe.

Anyway, who cares?

Something smells like human.

Cheepa Yeep!