Bullettime by Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online

slides back into her smirk, and with a hand cupped to her ear pantomimes listening closely for footsteps or a motherly holler from downstairs, but nothing is forthcoming. “She must be sleeping it off, the poor dear,” Erin says. Then she shuffles across the room, dragging dirty clothes along her ankles, and plops onto the bed. Dave holds the bag of flour in his lap and looks at her, glances at his monitor, then looks at her again.
    “Whatcha up to?” she asks. “Cybersex?”
    He blushes. “Homework.” Then the computer sings a downbeat song of defeat.
    “Ah, your
Battle Station Mars
homework. You are a scholar and a gentleman, even if you are an abusive father.”
    “Uhm.” A steady stream of flour puddles by his feet. “Erin? Why are you here? We’re not even in Health this semester, and I’ve only ever seen this flour thing on TV.”
    “Yeah, that’s where I got the idea from too. Why do you think the school district doesn’t want us to have flour? Do you think people would sneak cocaine into the schools?”
    “Erin—”
    “Or guns! Handguns in the flour. Do you think there are a lot of guns in school, Dave? I’m very nervous. I hate my parents for moving out here.”
    “Where are you from, anyway?”
    “Will you protect me from the gangs, Davey?” Erin pleads. Then she laughs at him, not even bothering to pretend to laugh with him. Dave briefly considers the immense psychosocial, linguistic, intersubjective, and formal determinants of whether one is laughing with or at someone and whether he can actually know what Erin’s doing since she is so obviously crazy and probably on drugs herself, but he puts all that aside and just says, “Maybe you should protect me from them. I don’t even think anyone’s in a gang, really. I mean, gang members are busy during the day and stuff; they have no time to learn about the American Revolution.”
    Erin is serious, like the face on a nickel. “Could you really use some protection?” She smiles and leans back, shifting subtly to make the bottom of her shirt rise, showing off a bit of tummy.
    “Well, not from you—”
    “Oh, you already have some protection, I see.” She’s not smiling. “Can I see it?”
    “What are you talking about?” Dave is flushed, sweating, actually trying to make himself annoyed and humiliated enough to gain some sort of upper hand. The bag of flour in his lap is a small blessing. “Small blessing.”
Christ, I thought like my mother, and that was without any cough syrup—but she won’t even let him have that.
“Drop the bag, come over here and sit next to me on your bed,” she says and he does, so eager for something.
    She turns to him and says, “I have a proposition for you. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m propositioning you.” This he laughs at half-authentically; it sounds like the sort of wordplay a sophisticated person would appreciate, so he tries to. She touches his wrist like in the movies, but he should be doing it, he knows, and the knowledge burns in his cheeks.
    “Let’s you and I,” Erin says, her tongue an eel, “form a secret society. Just the two of us. Tell nobody.”
    Dave asks, “Who would I even tell?” and imagines trying to explain all of this to Oleg—that guy who wears a fedora every day—and Erin says, “Aren’t you friends with that fedora guy?” and Dave says, “Not really,” and Erin says, “Good.”
    “We’ll communicate in code. Meet secretly. Make plans. Learn to read one another’s thoughts. Chart the course of world events, eventually, with the school as a test of concept.” Erin reaches out and Dave waits for a kiss, paralyzed, but she stretches past him to take hold of a blanket piled up at the corner of the bed. She gives it a dramatic magician yank and smiles as it fills the space before the bed and gently eases to the floor.
    “The initiation is simple. I will entirely remake your personality to better serve the needs of the collective, and through a lifetime