End Game

Picnic

"I'll take care of this, shall I?" Emmy-Lee took the picnic basket from Husk, hunched down next to it and began unpacking, beginning with a large checked tablecloth. This she laid out on the ground, before kneeling down again by the basket to continue sorting through its contents.

"I wouldn't have thought of you as a vegetarian?" She spoke in an amused tone as she extracted a selection of salads in recyclable containers.

"Not me, just the restaurant who put this together."

"Hmm," she responded, as if pondering whether this was a detail to include in her article. If there ever was to be an article.

She unboxed a polystyrene container that proved to hold a chilled bottle of wine, handing it to Husk for opening. "Champagne – the ideal present for a naughty girl, or so I've heard it called." Her repertoire included a variety of girl-next-door impersonations. She gave him the sassy version.

Finally satisfied with arrangements, she turned around, parking her hindquarters on a corner of the tablecloth next to the basket, leaving room for Husk on its other side. While a well-dressed woman suddenly transported to a natural setting can't help but look just a little bit ludicrous, Emmy-Lee did better than most at retaining her dignity. She leaned back, her bestockinged and expensively shoed legs extending outward with as much elegance as their pastoral circumstances allowed. The park Husk had chosen had the form of a shallow valley with a well-maintained lawn and a scattering of trees. The high rises of downtown were visible in the distance, but beyond that little of the city intruded through the encircling greenery. The occasional jogger or walker aside, they had the place to themselves.

Emmy-Lee surveyed the scene. "Is this the world you're planning to save? It hardly seems necessary."

"That's a very short-sighted comment," said Husk, taking her question seriously. "Perhaps you're too young, but there was a time when this state was considered a harbinger of the future, a preview of where the rest of the world would be going. Now it's a besieged enclave of how things used to be. The real world is out there, and it's nothing like this."

"So where do the coffins come in?"

"No details, I'm afraid. Those kids – they stumbled onto me by chance so I gave them jobs to keep them quiet. I could do the same for you. Real work too. The project is getting toward the stage where some PR will be needed."

"I won't be much good at PR if I'm not allowed to say anything."

This made Husk laugh. "Saying nothing at great length is exactly what public relations is all about. Isn't it?"

"You want to buy me off, just like those kids?"

"Buy you in. The soul of a gossip columnist? What's the going rate for that, I wonder?"

Emmy-Lee had been around much too long to be genuinely offended by anything so mild. Still, she let out a note of disapproval, leaving Husk's words to hang.

"Listen," he said, pulling out his phone. "I've got the PR spiel here. One I wrote myself." He brought something up on screen and began reading.

"There is a world, it's the world you live in, and it's full of people and things. Full of people talking at you and over you and through you. Full of things going right and things going wrong. Things that matter and things that don't.

And then there's another world. A world that is entirely yours. A world full of people, but they are your people. A world full of things, and they are all your things.

Don't you deserve Time Out?"

"Well," he said. "What do you think?"

Driven not so much by Husk's words as by his body language (or rather, the lack of it), the wheels inside Emmy-Lee's head had been turning rapidly. Coming to a stop, their conclusion was illuminated by bright flashing lights: 'The man's insane. For god's sake, play along!'