7. Dots

Friday night found the women ready to hit the road. Kandhi had packed two suitcases full of necessary junk, leaving just enough room in the trunk for Klehre's knapsack.

"I thought we're only going for the weekend", Klehre said, eyeing the luggage.

"Yep", Kandhi chirped, "but you never know."

"I usually do", Klehre muttered to herself. She had made it through the patch of anticipation over the past few days. Now there was just the patch of reality to navigate. Kandhi had filled their shifts with endless tales of life growing up in the Southland. It seemed her childhood was a long and glorious event, involving an endless series of amusement parks, beaches, road trips and slumber parties. She had so many friends that she still even kept in touch with, after all these years. Of course, she was only twenty-one so that wasn't a huge stretch. The amazing thing was that she'd ever left L.A..

"I wanted to see the world", she explained one day while chattering nonstop at the information desk. "I just didn't get very far."

Klehre had spent the week wishing she had never agreed to this little jaunt. It was bad enough having to hear about Kandhi's entire life as if suddenly, by virtue of volunteering, she was best friend forever as well as confessional, there was also the matter of Chris and Tom.

Tom had been hugely disappointed that Chris was not going with Kandhi on the trip. He'd assumed he would be and didn't understand why he wasn't. Tom didn't trust Kandhi and he didn't trust Klehre with his inventions or his plans. He'd stayed up nights in a row fitting the laser tagger into a very nice thin stick, a small madrone branch he'd meticulously peeled the bark off of and drilled precision holes through. He'd affixed the required velcro trigger pad with krazy glue and made sure its aim was true. He'd also worked on the device screen to provide much greater resolution, as well as memory, zoom and more precision positioning. They were both of them things of beauty, and as he handed them to Chris, only to see Chris study them, and hand them back, he was speechless as Chris explained the social mechanics.

"Kandhi and Klehre?", Tom stuttered. "Kandhi and Klehre? But why? Why Klehre? Why not you? I thought that you."

"Well", Chris said patiently, "Think about it. How could I explain it to Laurie? It would be like that time I went to Germany with Uta while I was still involved with Magnolia in Denver. Maggie didn't go for it, not one bit. I kept telling her it was completely innocent, even that one night. No go. So I'm not going to go anywhere near that kind of situation now."

"But Laurie's on Mount Everest", Tom exclaimed.

"But she'll be back", Chris said. "And that's the problem."

Tom was unable to talk to either Kandhi or Klehre, but he had to instruct them on the usage of the devices. It was incredibly important. He tried to talk through Chris, but that was just as awkward. The four of them had gathered in the stock room and Tom talked only to Chris, and Chris turned around to repeat the words but Klehre interrupted and said,

"I can hear you, you know. I'm not fucking invisible here".

Kandhi was more polite.

"It's okay, Tom", she said. "Just keep telling Chris and I'll write down everything you say so we don't forget it later," and she did just that. Tom went over the stick and the device, but he was so flustered by the presence of the young women that he left out some rather critical details.

Klehre discovered this for herself as they were driving away from the store. She let out a whoop of joy as Kandhi lowered the roof and the cool fog breeze swept over her. She was holding on to the madrone twig, admiring its polish and color, when she decided to point it at random pedestrians and click away. That was when she noticed that every time she clicked at someone, another orange dot appeared on the screen of the device. Before she knew it, there were ten or eleven dots glowing and pulsating, each going their separate ways, making the map zoom out to keep them all in sight. Pretty soon the screen had expanded to cover half the city.

"Oh shit", Klehre muttered, and louder she yelled, "how long did he say these dots stick around?"

"Forty eight hours", Kandhi shouted back. "Give or take, he said."

"Fuck", said Klehre, hoping there would be some kind of workaround. They were about to head south on the freeway and the auto-zoom was taking the picture wider and wider by the second. At this rate, she thought, we might as well be in outer space for all the good it'll do us to find one of those dots.

Back in the city, waiting for a train in the metro station, Tom was seeing for himself what Klehre had done. He had a second device which was synchronized to the first.

"I knew this would happen", he said to himself, not without some pride. He used his own pointer stick, a bit of manzanita culled from the Coastside, and, double-tapping, removed each orange dot, one at a time.

"Huh", Klehre said, watching them vanish on her own device. "I thought he said forty-eight hours." Then she realized what was up.

"He's got a doomsday device", she said to Kandhi, who didn't hear. Klehre didn't bother repeating herself. She was mulling over the fact that Tom was watching them, and wondering if he had secretly tagged the two of them with a different type of laser.

He had. On his device, two little blue dots sat side by side as they hurtled towards the valley.