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shit problems, so far.”
Actually, the Tennessee didn’t have any glitches yet because it was new and it had never carried any human passengers besides the few coders who’d gotten it online and powered up. I’d visited it one time, before it was fully operational.
Billy Hinman stretched out in the seat, extending his legs over to my side, so our feet touched. Billy Hinman was always horny. I kicked him.
He said, “Well, you’d never get me up on one of those shit things. Cruises are what old people do right before they die. Trust me. I learned that.”
Billy wasn’t entirely wrong about cruises either. When we were both ten years old, Billy and I went with his parents on an ocean cruise across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was a very long cruise. Five octogenarians died before we got to Australia.
Cheepa Yeep!
I calculated that at about the same time Billy Hinman and I finished our fourth beer of the afternoon, the twenty-eighth war started.
Twenty-eight!
And it was my sixteenth birthday, too.
Like Charlie Greenwell told us, wars don’t just fight themselves.
Bonks were on the move, and this time the boys got to stay close to home. During beer four—or possibly five for Billy—the Canadian Navy sailed across Lake Erie and pounded the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania with artillery.
Canada was really mad at us. They had their reasons, I’m sure.
Not too many people cared about it, outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that is, but the event did provide an opportunity for some undeployed bonks to get to work.
“We should leave this shithole,” Billy said.
We drank beer in Mr. Messer’s attic office. Well, to be honest, Billy Hinman was doing most of the drinking. I did have some beer, though, just because it was the right thing to do, us being best friends, and it being my birthday and all. Of course Rowan was in on Billy’s conspiracy—he got the beer for us—but Billy Hinman was convinced that in drinking beer I’d finally grown some balls, as he put it, and come to my senses about how useless and boring our lives were. Not that I didn’t agree with him that our lives were useless and boring. But they were about to get a lot more exciting.
I had no idea.
“You mean we should get out of Los Angeles?” I asked. “It is kind of a shithole, isn’t it?”
Billy nodded and burped quietly. I was lagging behind him in the number of empty cans I contributed to our pile on the office floor. It tasted awful, but I was already feeling a bit dizzy and energized.
“I’m drunk,” I announced.
“Good,” Billy said.
“And now I want some Woz,” I said.
Billy said, “You practically OD’d in Rowan’s backseat last night.”
“Oh.”
“But if you want, I’ll ask Rowan to take us over to Charlie Greenwell’s so you can hook some up. Then let’s go somewhere and have fun.”
“Where?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Billy lied. “Somewhere.”
This would be fun, right?
Charlie Greenwell’s place was a deranged lunatic circus.
Charlie lived in an old hotel in the east end of Hollywood that had been converted to a kind of rehab home for bonks who’d come back from their various wars with holes in their brains. The news about Canada had really cheered up the residents at Charlie Greenwell’s complex. The place reeked of Woz smoke. Guns and flags were everywhere.
As we walked into the lobby, Billy Hinman said, “I wonder if Charlie and the other ex-bonks are getting turned on, thinking about killing Canadian rabbits.”
He was a little drunk, and he said it a little too loud.
“Rabbits” was what bonks called other bonks.
It was weird, but it was one of those slang words that nobody who wasn’t a bonk was ever allowed to use. The unwritten social code: Only bonks can call bonks rabbits. Charlie Greenwell didn’t mind if Billy or I used the word around him, but then again, Charlie Greenwell’s ability to care about shit had been blasted out of his head four or five wars ago. And “Rabbit” was even in the title of—and the main character in—my father’s television program, which was all about getting kids to embrace their inner bonks and coders. Or, at least, that’s what I knew about the program, despite never actually having watched it.
Well, to be honest, never is an exaggeration. How could anyone not catch a glimpse of Rabbit & Robot here and there, a few seconds at a time, even if it’s just out of the corner of an eye? The show was on almost constantly, in virtually every country of the world, even in most of the twenty-eight we were at war with.
In fact, my father’s show was playing on one of the wall screens in the lobby of the Hotel Kenmore when Billy Hinman and I walked in, which was when Billy asked, a little too loudly, a rhetorical question about Canadian rabbits and horny bonks.
The other wall screens in the lobby were playing muted coverage of Canadian rabbits on the rampage in Ohio.
Unfortunately for Billy and me, there were two ex-bonks sitting together in a pair of vinyl reclining chairs watching Rabbit & Robot when he said it. One of them—he was shirtless and wore thick eyeglasses with one of the lenses blacked out so you couldn’t see the vacated eye socket that was inevitably behind it—stood up right away and puffed out his hairless, tattooed chest. His nipples were pierced with silver barbs that looked like hunting arrows, and he was also holding some type of machine gun.
I have to admit that I felt so nonmasculine for my lack of nipple piercings, as well as my inability to recognize specific models of firearms. It seemed like every boy in America—future coders and bonks alike, thanks to Rabbit & Robot—knew the precise make, caliber, and specs of every gun in existence, even if none of our boys could accurately point out more than two or three countries on a map of the world.
Grosvenor was an outstanding school system.
Cheepa Yeep!
“Hey!” The old ex-bonk with a missing eye and a tattoo of the state of Texas on his belly jabbed a finger at us. “What did you just say, little fucking Canadian queer boy?”
All bonks were trained to—or at least pretended to— hate homosexuals. It was so fifty-years-ago, but clinging to the past was what armies are good at, right?
And now they hated Canadians, too.
Billy Hinman wasn’t exactly queer, though. Billy would have sex with anyone if he liked them well enough. Most people I knew were like that, which made me feel rather odd and isolated. And Billy wasn’t Canadian, either. So, kind of wrong on both assumptions.
“Um, your friend doesn’t have trousers on,” Billy Hinman pointed out.
Billy was right. In the tension of our drunken entrance, I hadn’t noticed that the other insane ex-bonk who’d been watching Rabbit & Robot beside the guy with Texas on his stomach was completely naked except for his old army-issue corporal’s shirt and cap. He did have boots on, though.
This was life in the Hotel Kenmore. We’d been there enough times before that seeing such things wasn’t ever surprising to Billy and me.
I put my hands up as a conciliatory gesture, and also because everyone knows that putting your hands up when a pair of half-naked insane people are pointing