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  “It’s locked.” whispered Clint, crouching by the door.

  “Good.” said Honor. “It means it’s empty.” and she drew a length of spring steel from her hair and slid it into the lock with the practiced detachment of a senior nurse inserting something embarrassing. And her logic was sound — if the door was even still on its hinges it meant that the grocery store had escaped invasion and they could shoplift at their leisure. So when thirty seconds later Honor popped up the ratchet and slid the doors apart and the three shoppers strode casually in they were disappointed to see that the entire wall perpendicular to the door they’d just meticulously bypassed was gone, assuming it had ever been there. They were looking from the door of the grocery store into the adjacent parking lot, through a wall that had been long ago reduced to little cubes of safety glass, as though the store had experienced a spontaneous and short lived and very localized hail storm.

  Further undermining Honor’s premature contention that the store was neutral territory were the dozens of young men and women scattered indiscriminately across the floor of the store, sleeping the sleep of the stuffed to bursting with party snacks and uncooked vegetables and, in the shrouded blue darkness, looking indistinguishable from the morning after a Florida frat party.

  Via a complex rotation of frenetic gestures and mimicry, mainly the shush sign and exaggerated strides, Tom and Honor and Clint silently communicated to one another that they should continue with the plan, just very quietly and with their eyebrows raised like surprised team mascots. And they found that if they restricted their shopping to what could be acquired around the edges of the store they could avoid stepping over any sleeping cavemen.

  The edges of the store, however, were largely dedicated to accommodations provided to those customers who, by the time they had made their way from the parking lot, found themselves too winded to do any actual shopping without the services of a café, podiatrist, pharmacist or one of the small fleet of mobility scooters lined up from the credit card kiosk to the travel agency. Honor and Clint and Tom were forced to strut on their toes to the back of the store where the more practical suburban family size sacks of cereal-shaped sugar and crispy salt were kept on shelves built like a Tokyo efficiency hotel.

  The back of the store was much darker than the front and had the unmatched disadvantage of exactly no exits but it was hidden from sight and, more importantly, vacant. The scavenger hunt proceeded largely as planned until Clint, climbing to the penthouse level of a shelf of breakfast cereal, knocked a bale of crunchy balls of toasted corn tumbling to the floor where it exploded like a piñata at a calorie-camp and spread a thick and unbroken carpet of crispy, honey-flavored marbles from the back wall to the front door. To Honor and Tom and especially Clint the impact sounded like a plate-glass window being struck violently by another plate-glass window but neither the sound nor the balls of partially hydrogenated fats flowing around them like bright orange lava had any noticeable impact on the sleeping fraternity brothers.

  An extended silence followed, scored only by the sound of sugary cereal fusing itself to a polished floor. Clint climbed down the shelves and performed an elaborate apology in interpretive dance and Honor and Tom signed back that he was forgiven, particularly in light of the fact that no harm was done, but that he should try to be a little more careful in future and in particular not attempt such heights.

  They filled the rucksack with oranges and loaded themselves with the least perishable and hence most artificial food-like products they could reasonably carry. Shopping carts were considered and abandoned in light of the risk of the notoriously squeaky wheels alerting the sleeping sentries. They took only what they could carry stealthily which meant, above all, no crunchy cereals. Firmly balanced and burdened and holding their breath, they peered around the corner of their protective shelf like escaping POWs and determined that the way remained clear and the guards asleep. Then they stepped onto a minefield.

  Each crunchy corn ball exploded underfoot like a shotgun and the combined blast was, consequently, very much like a lot of shotguns. The fraternity began to stir and Tom and Honor and Clint, in their haste to maintain their balance promptly lost their balance and began stamping on the fully charged cereal as though they had a vendetta against it. The result was deafening. The fraternity was awake and quick to take up arms against an invasion of their fertile lands. They organized themselves with alarming speed and precision and moved like a crunchy, crispy wall toward the back of the store and as they passed through housewares they armed themselves with knives and rolling pins and bigger knives.

  Clint chapter 4

  Tom and Honor and Clint quietly set their loot on the floor and receded into the shadows offered by the pharmacy and credit card kiosk. The roused and ready occupying army marched toward them on a field of crispy toasted corn and the cascading crunching came to them like the sound of a thousand soldiers marching only slightly out of time. There may as well have been a thousand because armed with a single sidearm and a spear gun and the wit to hide in the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint were little match for the fraternity party of twenty or thirty prepared to defend their grocery store with the sharpest objects from Kitchen and Bath.

  The army approached blindly, unaware of the nature of the threat to their territory and doubly threatening in their own right because they clearly didn’t care. From the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint watched the portion of grocery store that they could call their own grow rapidly smaller and smaller until the wall came to a confused stop. The wall knew that it was under siege, possibly by heavy and flat-footed monsters, but there they all were almost at the back of the store and so far all they’d encountered was a thick, honey-scented, sticky crust. There was clear evidence of an invasion presently underway but no sign of invaders. They looked about, at each other, at the ceiling and the cereal, and decided with a communal nod to attack the darkness.

  And at that moment three mobility scooters zipped out of formation and at a dizzying 20 mph skidded out of sight behind the final row of shelves and again fell silent. A long moment of simmering quiet followed before the fraternity fell into a frenzy and broached the final wall only to be thrown into mass confusion by the whirring and whirling of scooters handled with such a complete lack of skill and planning that they seemed to be attacking in their hundreds.

  Tom and Honor and Clint drove wildly off in different directions, running interference for one another and pausing just long enough to draw chase before tracing the aisles and standing like circus acrobats on their mounts to scoop fruit and cereal and snacks off the shelves and into the wide wire shopping baskets fixed to the front of their scooters. When her basket was full of oranges and apples and grapefruit Honor began navigating a circuitous route toward the missing wall, honking the rubber bubble of her mobility horn to which Tom and Clint honked a lively reply from the darkness, like mute clowns playing a frantic, life-and-death game of Marco Polo.

  But the wall was impassible and in fact it had reformed itself as the backlit silhouette of a mob of groaning, moaning, mouth-breathers who sensed food and had armed themselves with the implements of the urban harvest — crowbars and axes and razor-thin aluminum parking lot signage that could easily function as either. Honor took a sharp right and honked her new intentions to her colleagues as she found herself herded by the crowd and the meat counter into an almost entirely black corridor which echoed her horn such that she couldn’t say for certain whether or not Tom and Clint were behind her.

  So they were all honking emphatically when they escaped the hall into the vast and glimmering gallery of a modern shopping mall and found themselves bombarded with choice, had they been in the market for mobile phones or pressed-tin jewellery or posters or fashions for the dangerously thin or heart-stoppingly fat. Blue light from the gallery skylight made sharp, detective-movie contrasts on the varnished tile mall and its indoor garden and water features and sunglasses kiosks and, above all, the hundreds of shoppers who’d been going about thei
r business when they all forgot everything they ever knew and who were sleeping soundly when three mobility scooters violently woke them with frenzied honking and, in some cases, by driving over their extremities.

  Before Tom and Honor and Clint knew where they were or what they were doing, really, they were being pursued through a Del Rey shopping center in the middle of the night by hundreds of starving automatons who suddenly and intractably associated honking and scooters and honking scooters with food, and it was getting away. The mobility scooters offered a top speed of slightly faster than the average person can run and much, much faster than the top speed of the average California mall patron, but were slowed considerably by a retail environment almost wholly unsuited to off-track racing. Consequently the scooters maintained only a thin lead over a snowballing stampede of overweight suburbanites in patterned shirts and Bermuda shorts stumbling over each other in an uncannily accurate impression of a Shriner’s parade that’s spent its entire promotional fund on rum cocktails.

  The epicenter of the shopping mall was the junction of four wings of retail and restaurants and beauticians and banks, crowned by a stagnant fountain hosting several people who had managed to drown in it. The scooters approached from the south and circumnavigated the fountain once like a Paris roundabout before selecting the east hall as the least threatening and most likely to provide an exit through the high glass doors swinging freely on their hinges.

  And so in a minute they were racing through the hot night air across the obstacle course of a parking lot with the equivalent of the population of a small village for the morbidly obese dogging their wheels. Staying ahead of them, so long as the batteries on the mobility scooters held out, would be exactly as simple as not driving into anything. But Tom and Honor and Clint needed to lose them entirely before trying to return to the boat if they were going to avoid it being overwhelmed and, probably, sunk before they could make way. For the moment, then, they dared not return to the marina but instead followed Honor as she led them to the sidewalk and turned toward the Ballona Wetlands.

  And then she stopped. Tom and Clint zipped past before stopping and looking back to see Honor apparently losing her mind. She was throwing her oranges at the crowd or, more precisely, she was lobbing oranges and grapefruit high into the trees, seemingly unaware or unconcerned that the mob was seconds from overtaking her. And then monkeys were dropping from the trees, following the fruit and then joining the pursuit of Honor as she returned to the relatively sober act of driving a mobility scooter into the Ballona Wetlands while throwing oranges and grapefruit over her shoulder. By the time the mad parade turned onto Fiji Way, the border between the marina and the wetlands, it was in chaos. The shoppers were puffing and wheezing and the monkeys were chattering and screeching and the effect was not at all dissimilar to the sound generated in a church basement when a bingo caller announces the same number twice.

  It was seconds before Honor’s plan bore its first horrible fruit as a half-dozen hyenas bounded over the shrubbery dividing the road from the wetlands and scurried across the road snatching monkeys up in their jaws like a team of precision-synchronized purse-snatchers. The rest of the parade immediately twigged to the dangers ahead but it was already too late and dangers lay behind them, too. Panthers had invisibly formed in the shadows on either side of the road and were struggling to select the fattest and weakest and slowest in the herd, a challenge the pride of lionesses dispensed with altogether by loitering at the back of the procession.

  Even people with no active memories of their own names or loved ones or civic order harbor a hard-coded and healthy feral fear of animals with long teeth and longer claws. And this was the catalyst that effectively disintegrated the already less than streamlined hunting party of monkeys and fraternity siblings and shopping mall parade floats stumbling in pursuit of three mobility scooters through a warm Los Angeles night. Most scampered back to the relative safety of the shopping center and others ran fatally onto the wetlands while those remaining behind occupied themselves with being eaten, and Tom and Honor and Clint whirred alone into the darkness and back toward the marina.

  “It was hardly worth it.” said Tom, carefully handing the eclectic haul of puffed rice and powdered chocolate and nacho chips and sun-dried tomatoes and what was now barely a handful of citrus fruits up to Honor on the bow of the yacht.

  “You want to go back?” she asked, “I had my eye on an espresso machine.”

  The engines started with a burst that drowned out Tom’s considered response and he swung himself up the ladder with a leaking summer camp sized bag of cereal over his shoulder like an emaciated Santa who’d fallen on hard times.

  Clint’s nautical expertise had improved to the point that he was able to dislodge the yacht and back it directly into the dock on the other side of the marina. He cut the engines again and relied on what he hoped was a newly acquired power of telekinesis to maneuver the boat into a position from which he could steer more or less directly through the access channel and back to the ocean. Honor and Tom joined him on the bridge.

  “Nice work.” said Honor, “You want me to drive for a while?”

  “I think I’m getting the hang of it.” said Clint. “Anyhow I’m working on something. Look, we’re turning toward the channel. A little slowly but that’s how I like my yachts to turn.”

  “Shouldn’t we refuel?” asked Tom, pointing out that the yacht had just bounced off a fueling station.

  “Not an option, I’m afraid.” said Honor, “There’s no power. The pumps won’t work. Anyway there’s an auxiliary fuel tank and enough juice to get us well up the coast before sunrise.”

  “In that instance.” said Tom, “I’m going to get some sleep. I’ve had the longest day in memory.”

  “Do that.” said Honor, “We’ll wake you well before sun up for our dip in the ocean, if it comes to that. I’m just going to see Captain Columbus into open waters and turn in myself.”

  The yacht moved smoothly out of the marina and onto the eerily placid waters of the Pacific Ocean before pursuing a wide arc to the north and an easy course described by the entirely unlit silhouette of the California coast. In a few hours they were clear of Los Angeles and Clint reduced speed to almost nothing before turning soft to starboard and tying off the wheel. He descended to the main deck and stopped briefly at the stern to pull a length of mooring rope from the storage chest by the diving platform. Then he padded softly through the salon and into the corridor where he tightly tied the handle of Tom’s stateroom to his own before continuing to the below-decks hatchway.

  Honor had been right, it was far too dark to get through the engine room door, even with a key. So Clint tightened the bulb in the wall lamp and light filled the tiny corridor and he produced the key from his back pocket. Descending the short narrow ladder he pulled the little chain and brought a gently swaying light to the engine room. He sat on the ladder and bent forward almost upside down so he could reach beneath his perch and pull out a white, square plastic box, like a very large lunch pail with a luggage tag on which was written “Dr. Thomas Spivic.”

  Clint closed the door to the engine room and turned out the lights and waited in the dark, listening to the churn of the propellers and nothing more. Satisfied, he returned to the corridor of state rooms and knocked lightly on Honor’s door.

  “Are you awake Gale?” he said, “It’s me, Ray.”

  Clint chapter 5

  The pre-sunrise glow had turned the sky a cobalt blue and the tips of the San Gabriel mountains were already burning with the first layer of bright orange when Clint cut the engines and hopped down the ladder to the stern and poked his head into the salon.

  “Up already?” he asked Honor, who had installed herself at the banquette table with a bowl of dry cereal. She was dressed in a fuchsia bikini and a sarong and had one naked leg up on the other bench.

  “It’s almost showtime.” she said, “I didn’t want to miss it. I also didn’t want to have my memory wiped clean. In fa
ct, on balance, I especially don’t want my memory wiped clean.”

  “You won’t miss anything. Nice outfit by the way.”

  “I found it in my cabin. I didn’t think you’d mind much.” Honor stood and modeled her bikini in 360°.

  “Not much. I’ve seen it all. I’m sorry that you don’t remember what an item we were in the psycho ward. They tried keeping us apart but you seemed to enjoy the challenge.”

  “That sounds like me.” said Honor, “Shouldn’t we be getting started?”

  “There’s time. The instructions say the closer to the event, the better. Don’t worry Gale, I’ll take care of you.”

  “Call me Honor. I’m relaunching my career. Speaking of which I’m curious, how long have you known that you were Ray?”

  “I thought that was clear.” he said, “I never stopped knowing I was Ray. When I woke up on the yacht I really had no idea what I was doing there but that was down to drinking a crate of whiskey washed down with a vat of champagne. Initially I made up the name Clint because I couldn’t remember Marmalade and Apricot and I didn’t know that they didn’t know that Ray was a wanted man. When I saw LA in chaos and then that you and Spivic didn’t recognize me I just continued being Clint Hardcastle.”