Rex didn’t do a whole lot better. All he could manage to say was, “Roberta?!”
Claudia and I had met Roberta that winter at a Chimerica training outpost called Lonely Island. It had been a strange situation. One minute, Claudia and I were being chased across Pennsylvania by Howard Wells’s thugs, then next minute we were being whisked to safety by Chimerica operatives—Sly and Roberta—who took us to this tiny, snow-covered Canadian island in Lake Huron. I was grateful at first, until the Chimerica people informed me I had to stay there. Which I had no intention of doing. It was an incredibly awkward few hours, but the worst part by far was Roberta, who was an antagonistic, belligerent bully, especially toward me, because I wasn’t spliced.
Rex hadn’t been there with me at the time, but I knew he’d been to the island before, and apparently he knew Roberta from his previous visits.
Except now, apparently, she was with CLAD, and not Chimerica.
“Hey, Rex,” Roberta replied, as he climbed past her. There were two bench seats in the back. She sat in the one closest to the front. She looked the same as the last time we had seen her: big and strong, with coarse fur from a black-bear splice that brought out both the paleness of the skin underlying it and the unpleasantness of her personality. She was even wearing the same tactical black as the last time we had seen her.
She curled her lip at Claudia, then turned to me and said, “Hey, Nonk.”
Rex caught my eye with a questioning look.
“Oh, great,” said a stranger on the sidewalk behind us. “Now there’s a whole van full of them.”
“You folks know each other?” Ogden called out to us from the driver’s seat. “That’s great, but you can catch up on the way. We need to get out of here.”
“I’m not getting in there with her,” Claudia said.
I felt the same way, but this was too important to get hung up on the fact that Roberta was an absolute jerk and I despised her.
I let out a sigh and climbed in.
“Jimi, seriously?” Claudia called after me.
“In or out, kitty cat,” Roberta said. “Out’s fine with me, but either way, I’m closing the door.”
Claudia growled and climbed in, squeezing into the rear seat with Rex and me rather than sitting with Roberta.
“You didn’t tell me this part,” Claudia said in a loud whisper.
“I didn’t know!” I replied.
“How do you know each other?” Rex asked.
“Lonely Island,” I told him.
“Oh. Right.”
Roberta looked at Rex. “So you finally came to your senses and left Chimerica, huh?” she said. “Better late than never, I guess.”
He shook his head. “I’m still with Chimerica.”
“I guess they kicked you out?” I said to her. “Because of your bad attitude and being an asshole and everything?”
Claudia snorted. “Or was it for sleeping on the job?”
Roberta’s face turned a deep red. The last time we had seen her, she was sleeping off the effects of a dart gun.
“No,” she snapped. “I left Chimerica because it’s a useless organization filled with nonk-loving apologists who don’t know how to fight for people with splices.” She glanced at Rex and shook her head.
Claudia turned to me and said, “They totally kicked her out.”
“By ‘fight for’ chimeras, you mean, like, blowing them up?” I said.
She glared at me, then looked away.
I was surprised to see Roberta, but I wasn’t shocked she’d been kicked out of Chimerica, or that she had ended up with CLAD. Frankly, it reinforced some of my worst suspicions about CLAD.
Rex stared a question at me, I guess wondering what the animosity was about. I shook my head. I didn’t want to explain it in front of Roberta. If he knew her at all, surely, he knew she was a jerk.
Ogden looked back at us, like he was trying to understand the dynamic, as well, but he turned back around when Roberta barked at him, “Just drive.”
EIGHTEEN
We took the I-95 Smart-route south into Delaware and exited just past Wilmington, turning onto a series of progressively smaller roads. We drove by a row of tall vertical farms, converted from old office towers, glowing green from the low sunlight shining horizontally through the racks of crops growing inside them. We also passed an energy farm with turbines and solar panels, then the small town that it was powering, little more than a commercial intersection surrounded by a few square blocks of houses, all tied together by a network of old, first-generation super-efficient transmission lines. In Philadelphia and most other places, the Super-E lines were underground, but some of the early adopters had simply installed them where their old lines had been, on utility poles up in the air. The town didn’t look like it had ever been particularly scenic, but with the bulky transmission infrastructure, black against the setting sun, it was downright ugly.
Before long, we turned onto a windy and pitted country road, past another small town that at one point had probably looked almost identical to the earlier one, but without the Super-E lines or energy farm. The main drag had a bar, a small grocery store, and a self-serve diagnostic clinic, each with a cluster of solar panels on the roof.
The residential streets leading away from them were gap-toothed where the houses had been torn down. The ones that remained were sagging and slouching in on themselves, clearly abandoned and left to fall apart. A haze of smoke hung in the air from a wildfire somewhere not too far away. Mom told me that when she was a kid, wildfires were unheard of in our region, but now they were a part of summer. The smoke and the fading light combined to make the town even more depressing.
Just past it, we entered an agricultural zone, with rolling farm fields on all sides. A couple of miles later, as the sun finally set, we came to a property surrounded by a tall metal fence.
“This is it,” Ogden said, easing off the accelerator.
We had agreed we would circle the property once to get the lay of the land before we tried to enter. According to Ogden’s information, there was an outer fence surrounding the entire property, then an inner fence around the facility itself.
We drove for what seemed like miles, up and down over the rolling landscape, the fence extending on and on beside us, rising and falling with the road. When the fence veered left, we did, too, following it for another long stretch before we saw a crossroad up ahead, bathed in dim artificial light.
A pair of large gates, an entrance and an exit, flanked a guard booth set in the median between them. To the right was a large sign that said WELLFOOD PROTEIN SERVICES—POULTRY DIVISION. Underneath it said SECURE FACILITY: NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
We didn’t slow as we passed it, but we all craned our necks, studying it as it slipped by then receded behind us.
“Poultry division?” I asked when we were past it. “Howard Wells is doing food now?”
Ogden nodded and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s supposed to be some kind of chicken processing plant.”
“You mean real live chickens or VGP?” Almost all the chicken in grocery stores was Vat-Grown Poultry. Only rich people ate real chicken anymore.
“Real chickens,” he said.
I guess if you can afford a Wellplant, you can afford real chicken.