The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [3]
Javier looks up worriedly. “It’s not selling,” he ventures.
“That was your thing, Javier, cake for breakfast. They followed you on that.”
Javier’s fingers grope around in his unruly hair. “Damn. It’s their own fault. They did it all wrong, Chas. It’s too dark. People want bright foods in the morning: fruits, juice, eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt.” He pauses, concentrating. His tongue bulges his lower lip from left to right and back. He holds out his hands, palms parallel, and stares into the space between them. “Drab morning foods need brightening,” he formulates.
Chas closes his eyes, presses two fingertips to his forehead. “Cereal gets milk,” he says. “Bagels get cream cheese. Toast gets jam.”
“Donuts get glaze or powder.”
“Did we tell them that? Was it in the report?”
Javier doesn’t answer for a moment. “It seems so self-evident,” he hedges.
Chas shakes his head. “Those people live in a lead-lined box. Their windows are darkened with sheets of Mylar. They breathe recirculated air. They can’t tell a falcon from a flying toaster.”
A tiny incubus wearing a Superman shirt totters up and clings to Chas’s dangling legs, clutching the creases of his slacks with small, grimy fists. Chas narrows his eyes and aims a forefinger-and-thumb pistol between the kid’s eyes.
“Pow,” he says thoughtfully.
The boy narrows his eyes as well, returning the stare defiantly until two little girls in ’N Sync and Ricky Martin shirts catch him and pull him away. He squirms between them as they kiss him all over his flushed, pudgy cheeks.
“Not much of a kid person,” Javier says, “are you, Chas?”
“So what?”
Javier whips an aquamarine silk handkerchief out of his trenchcoat and noisily blows his nose, then blinks dizzily from the exertion. “I’m totally a kid person,” he declares.
“The hell you are,” Chas says.
“I am. Kids are great. Kids can do anything.”
“Like what?”
“They can tie the skyscrapers into Krazy Straws. They can shake the sea and the sky into Seven-Up.” His long, nervous fingers agitate the air in front of Chas. “Kids are about possibilities,” he goes on excitedly. “Limitless possibilities. Know what I’m saying?”
Chas nods. “They’re dumbasses all right.”
A little overwhelmed by their routine, Ursula stares at the swarm of children, unfocusing her eyes. Her brain begins playing tricks on her the way it does when she stares at TV static, resolving the kids’ senseless caroming into neat helixes, rings, figure eights. The human brain comes hardwired with a mania for order, and Javier and Chas, she’s decided, have cultivated this unthinking compulsion into a weltanschauung, a metaphysics, an endlessly snarled and compendious street index of the human condition. They have theories for everything from children’s games to breakfast foods to the patterns of sneaker soles. She herself has been on the job less than a week and has only one theory so far, which is that when they were experimenting one day in their secret lab, Chas replaced his skin with a coat of Fleckstone, and Javier lopped off his arms and legs and attached a dozen industrial-strength rubber bands in their place, and ever since then they have been only nominally human: Granite Man and his sidekick, Rubber Man—superheroes, supervillains, superfreaks—two lurking, smirking, life-size action figures of themselves.
“Listen,” Chas says, “I want to make it up to Kyle with a good lead on kid food.”
“Kid food,” Javier repeats.
“I’m thinking candy in a gun.” The barest hint of a smile encloses his bloodless lips in parenthetical stretch lines.
“Candy in a gun,” Javier solemnizes.
“They could shoot it into each other’s mouth, that sort of thing. Refills would come in clips.”
He goes on smiling that subzero smile of his. Ursula has already acquired a healthy fear of the man. His logic is so efficient it could be something instinctive, reptilian. She resists an urge to jump up and warn the children, to gather them up and hide them away in a wildlife preserve.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Chas says to Javier. “Injuries.