Free Cloud Country by Andy Futuro Page A

paradise—it looked familiar somehow. John’s face had grown gaunt and the wrists poking from the sleeves of his caji suit were skeletal. Shit, they hadn’t been flying that long. The best guess Saru could muster was that John’s psychic straining was burning up all his fat reserves, like an implant hijacking the body’s calorie fuel.
    “How you doing, bud?” Saru asked. Her voice felt too loud. There was an awkwardness between them, a feeling of too much information on both their parts, and the only privacy they had was in the quiet of their own heads.
    John opened his mouth and then shook his head. He closed his eyes and resumed his search. Saru closed her own eyes, trying to nap, but sleep wouldn’t come, only visions of bodies and viruses and cities spreading like a plague over the Earth.
    John gave a start, like an old man farting himself awake, and then made some hacking sounds that might have been laughter. He grinned at Saru, wide-eyed, and offered a thumbs up. The hack sound came again, and his lips fish-sucked up and down.
    “Got it,” he dared to whisper, as though the vibrations of his voice would snip whatever psychic tin can telephone he’d found. His breathing slowed until it settled into a recognizable tick-tock regularity. He kept just the tip of his pinky on the controls, guiding the plane with soft motions invisible to her. Saru tried not to burp, and sat still as possible, so her robed ass didn’t squeak against the tiger-skin leather of her seat. Her lips twitched into a yawn, and she let it out slowly to generate no noise. After about forty years she noticed the plane was going in spirals, the sun glare switching sides. The spirals closed tight, and the plane cut through the smog, and fluttered to the ground like one of those leaves that looked like a helicopter.
    They landed in a dump. An open-sky middle-of-nowhere littered with rusty oil derricks, truck bones, and chapped asphalt. Getting out of the plane the smell was a tarry reek worse than the gossiping alien plants. Saru kicked at a can. A tumbleweed of chicken wire and plastic bags rolled by in some kind of hurry, like its favorite show was on. The sky was dark with the approach of night or maybe acid rain, and the hills rimming the distance sported black-cloud afros. John was tippy-toeing around with elongated bird steps, and scratching at the ground with his feet like a chicken, apparently unafraid of the rusty nails and broken glass and tangles of barbed wire.
    “What’s up?” Saru asked him. Her voice was small. John ignored her.
    Saru watched him dance around like a chicken for a while, and then found some rocks that she chucked at an oil truck plopped on its side, abandoned after whatever drunken accident or shenanigan. The rocks made a satisfying gong as they hit, almost religious, in tune with the piss-whistle of beer bottles, and the chemical incense of decay. She guessed this place had been some sort of drill hub, abandoned with a dip in prices, or raided by outlaws or a competing firm. It felt old, ancient even, a roughneck burial ground from the early Americans. Cowboys and immigrants.
    She gonged harder, launching heavier rocks and cinderblocks, then the wind picked up and brought her the sound of humming. John had scratched out a circle in the dirt and was sitting cross-legged, mumbling snatches of a Pop40 song to himself:
    “You make me wanna jump and scream. You’re my favorite nasty dream…”
    “Hey!” Saru yelled.
    “You make me wanna cut and bleed. You’re the only one I need…”
    Saru winged him with a pebble. It bounced right off his head with a wooden donk . Huh. He didn’t even open his eyes. The pop song was dissolving with his repetition, the words turning into sounds without meaning, an unending, rhythmic hum.
    Surrendering to John’s madness, Saru wandered around for a bit, killing time, kicking at hoses and gears and other technological carcasses. A wheel-less Cadillac with a hood that wasn’t