Lexicon by Max Barry

cracked them up for a while. They were pretty young.
    “I’ll make it worth your while.” There was a man coming: a big guy, with a shaved head and a black undershirt. “Real nice! Personal!” She didn’t know what she was saying.
    The boys headed across the street. She pulled her T-shirt back on, to avoid breaking the rule about reusing a technique. Charlotte said, “I hope you’re aware that should your proxies redirect multiple groups, that will count as a duplicate method of persuasion, and therefore a strike.”
    “Oh. Shit.” The boys were talking animatedly to the shaved head man, pointing at her. Behind them, a small group of elderly women approached. “Shit!”
    “Twenty,” said Charlotte, as the man with the shaved head crossed the street. “Persuasion by proxy.”
    “That’s enough!” she yelled at the boys. “Go away now!” But they were focused on the old women. “You . . . dicks!”
    The man with the shaved head reached her. His face was guarded; she had no idea what the boys had told him. Her bra was lying on the concrete, she noticed. She had forgotten it. “You okay?”
    “They attacked me.” She picked up her bra and clutched it to her chest. “Those boys.”
    While the man with the shaved head was beating up the boys, she got her bra back on. She pulled her hair free of the back of her T-shirt. The old women had backed up to the far corner and were waiting for the lights to cross. The sidewalk was otherwise empty. She had a minute. Charlotte said, “Diversion by physical threat. Twenty-one.”
    “Oh my God!” she yelled, because a pair of middle-aged women were coming now. “It’s Demi Moore!” The women stopped. Emily pointed at Charlotte. “Can I have your autograph?”
    Charlotte’s lips twitched.
    “There is a similarity,” Emily said.
    “Attraction by . . . feigned celebrity, I suppose. Twenty-two.”
    “What’s a pass, again?”
    Charlotte’s sunglasses regarded her. “Five.”
    “Five,” Emily echoed. She felt good. A teenage girl in big headphones rounded the corner, heading down the sidewalk. Emily had no idea what she was going to say to the little whore, but it was something. She opened her mouth.

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[FIVE]
    They left the freeway and passed through a series of snow-sunk towns. Wil fell asleep without meaning to and woke from guns and blood and dead girls. There was drool on his chin. In the high beams, the road glittered and vanished into night thick as a blanket. “Where are we?”
    “Safe.” Tom peered at the road. “Almost.” They were slowing. The pickup truck’s lights swung across a driveway. Wil saw a wire fence and wooden posts and a sign that said: MCCORMACK & SONS STOCK SALES . They came to a stop and the pickup gargled. “Hmm,” Tom said.
    “What?”
    “Do you trust me?”
    “Do I trust you?”
    “I phrased that badly,” Tom said. “I mean, if I tell you your life depends on doing exactly as I say, without hesitation, can I rely on you to do it?”
    “Sure,” Wil said, then, because that didn’t sound very plausible, added, “Maybe.”
    “That’s not really good enough.
Maybe
leaves you
maybe
alive.”
    “I thought we were meeting your friends.”
    “We are.”
    “So what’s the problem?”
    Tom gazed at the sign. “Nothing. There’s no problem.” He harassed the gearshift. The truck rolled into the driveway. It was thick with mud, dark tire tracks clearly visible. Tom pushed them forward two hundred yards, then paused at a fork. To the left, the road disappeared into darkness. To the right was a bare light on a pole. Within its sphere of illumination lay nothing but mud. Tom steered toward it. Their tires slipped briefly, found traction.
    “What is this place?”
    Metal railings appeared