Chariot - [Millennium Quartet 03]

by Charles L. Grant

  The old woman walks slowly, and it makes Rick want to yell at her to hurry up. All that space between houses, it never looked so big before. Maybe . . . maybe he ought to go back to Boulder City. Maybe he ought to let those doctors do what they want. Maybe he should cross over and stand with Muriel, strength in numbers and all that crap.

  He almost does.

  He almost moves.

  But when he finally finds the courage, it’s too late.

  She’s here.

  “Buenos noches, Eula,” he says with a grin, and winces because he sounds like such a goddamn phony, and he knows she knows it, and it frightens him because he thinks that maybe she’ll just keep on going, ignore him for the fool he really is.

  “Evening, Ricardo,” she says. “You truly do look handsome this evening.”

  He locks his knees because he knows he’ll fall if he doesn’t. “Thank you, Eula. You’re looking awfully good yourself.”

  She laughs silently. “You flatter an old woman, but it sure do sound fine.”

  “Thank you, Eula, but it’s the truth.”

  “You a little older, boy, maybe I come over there and give you a kiss.”

  She laughs aloud this time, and Rick has never been so scared in his life.

  * * * *

  Not fair, Muriel thinks, fussing with her hair, fussing with her blouse, fussing with her waistband; not fair I have to be the last one. She almost weeps with frustration because everything she does to make herself presentable is undone by the wind. She must look like a harridan, like some kind of bum, and she curses under her breath when her eyes begin to water, and she isn’t sure if it’s the wind or tears.

  She holds her breath while Eula talks with Ricardo, not hearing everything, smiling nervously at the way he almost bows to the old woman he’s so nervous. She breathes again only when he takes a small step back.

  Her turn.

  It’s her turn, and she doesn’t know what to say.

  “Welcome home, Eula.” It must have been her, but it sure didn’t sound like her voice.

  “Why, thank you, Muriel, thank you. It’s good to be back.”

  Muriel feels so ungainly, so fat, she wishes the wind would just take her away.

  “If you want,” she says,” gesturing vaguely behind her, “I’ll fetch Lillian. I know she wants to—”

  “That’s all right,” Eula says kindly. “Poor child must be weary, all that exercise all the time.”

  “It does take a lot out of her, yes.”

  Eula winks. “Not to worry, then, dear. All in good time. All in good time.”

  Muriel feels there’s something else to say, but she doesn’t know what it is, and so says the first thing that comes to mind: “If you want something to eat. . .” Another gesture; a shrug. “They don’t feed you right on those airplanes, I know that. If you’re hungry . . .”

  “Well, I do thank you for that, Muriel,” Eula says, sounding a little surprised, a.lot pleased, “but I have already eaten my fill for today. Very kind of you, though, and I surely do appreciate it.”

  Muriel nods, blinking furiously at the hair the wind stabs at her eyes. She takes a step back, and watches as Eula continues on up the street, stopping only once more, to look at Freneau’s house and shake her head before turning up her own walk.

  That’s when Muriel remembers what she wanted to say, and realizes that probably it wouldn’t have been right anyway. She wanted to ask how Eula had known about Roger’s attack and arrest, and what she thinks about it now.

  Too late.

  Just as well.

  She has a definite feeling Eula didn’t want to talk about it; and if she did want to talk about it, Muriel is also pretty sure she didn’t want to hear it.

  She looks across the street, maybe Ricardo is looking for some company, but he’s already gone.

  She looks down the street, and all of them are gone.

  Oh Lord, she thinks, and hurries inside and locks the door.

  * * * *

  The rasp of sand driven through the grass.

  The low moan of the wind prowling around the corners.

  * * * *

  Jude sits at the kitchen table, choking on her sobs, holding in both unsteady hands a tiny compact that belongs to Starshine, looking in the tiny oval mirror. Her veil has been shoved up onto her hair. She’s glad the mirror is too small to show her whole face.

  This is wrong, she thinks; this is so wrong.

  “Momma?”

  The girls stand uncertainly in the doorway, fidgeting, unhappy.

  She wipes her face with the back of one hand, wondering why she deserved two daughters like them. They never flinched at her disfiguration, never made jokes, even loving ones, and were badger-fierce in her defense when someone else made a comment. Without them she would have died years ago.

  Starshine takes a tentative step into the room. “Momma, maybe you...she...” She takes a deep breath, lets it and the words out in a rush. “Momma, she isn’t one of those miracle people, Momma, she can’t do anything, she’s just an old lady who sings on the radio, that’s all, please don’t do this.”

  Jude looks in the mirror.

  A sensible woman, that’s what she’s supposed to be. A woman who’s put up with trials few others have suffered. They have hardened her. They have made her see the world as few others have seen it. They have, in the end, ripped hope to tatters to be taken by the wind.

  All because of the vengeful man who fathered her children, who drank, who sampled every drug on the street, who turned his brain into a pit of vipers. Who came at her babies with a blowtorch one night and got Jude instead.

  Who stepped in front of a train when he realized what he’d done.

  Too late.

  Too goddamn late.

  According to those who saw it happen, the train and the man, he was laughing, when it happened.

  She looks in the mirror.

  “Momma—”

  “Trey,” she says suddenly, looking up, their faces a watery blur. “I should talk to Trey.” She smiles; she nods. “Yes, I’ll talk to Trey, he’ll—”

  “He’s gone,” Moonbow says, misery and fury in her monotone.

  “What?”

  “He went away with that stupid old man. We saw him. They got into a car, I think that woman was there, too.”

  “He had a suitcase,” Starshine adds bitterly.

  “He’s . . . gone?”

  But they always were, when she needed them.

  They always were.

  She whispers, “He’s gone.”

  “Yes, Momma.” Moonbow tries to smile. “But he’ll be back real quick, I’ll bet.” She looks to her sister. “Right? He’ll be back soon.”

  Starshine turns away, heads for the living room without answering.

  “He’ll be back,” Moonbow insists. “Momma, please, he’ll be back.”

  Jude closes the compact so hard the cover cracks, and she tosses it angrily across the room, where it bounces off a cabinet and into the sink.

  Then she looks to her youngest. “Eula,” she says.

  Moonbow frowns. “Momma, Star’s right, you know that. That old lady can’t help you. You know that, Momma, you know that.”

  Everything hurts—the scars, the memories, the look on her daughter’s face, the fact that Trey has left again.

  “Momma?”

  Jude sits back, shakes her head slowly. Closes her eyes.

  “I have to try, ‘bow,” she says quietly. “Maybe you don’t understand now, but... I have to try.”

  * * * *

  Uncertain, unaccountably uneasy, Cable stands in the bathroom, not sure that what he sees in the mirror is what everyone else sees. The hideous pockmarks. Craters. Discolored flesh. The way some of it pulls down the lower lid of his right eye, just a little. The way it crawls into his hair. A movie monster. A comic-book fiend.

  Steph calls it a mask.

  Married eight years, she sat beside him through the worst of the Sickness, not
caring that he was infectious, crying at him, pleading with him to be one of the few, one of those twenty percent who didn’t give up and die. When the fever broke and the crisis passed, he told her he got well because he couldn’t stand the nagging anymore, and living was better than dying because if he died, she’d only nag at his grave.

  “A mask,” she told him. “People will know you’re just wearing a mask, they’ll see the real guy underneath, you’ll see.”

  They don’t.

  Most of them, anyway.

  They don’t.

  But Steph, she just keeps on dreaming. The bulldog of dreams. The pit bull of dreams. Grabs on, never lets go, doing enough work for the both of them, which lets him stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look at his face and wonder if there really is anyone else out there who thinks it’s a mask.

  He sighs, heads for the kitchen, changes his mind and goes to the living room, drops onto the couch so damn big it takes up most of the floorspace, and picks up the remote. He switches on the pregame baseball show, but doesn’t really listen to all the statistics and predictions, only catches a few words of the anchorman solemnly wondering how many seats will be filled in the park. Not many, probably. Too open. Too many people. Too many opportunities for infection, even in those cities the Sickness has already ravaged.

  He thinks instead of how pissed Steph will be when she gets home from the store and realizes she’s missed Eula’s return.

  He smiles. Proudly. Remembering how she had taken over yesterday, laying down the law, standing up to his self-pitying temper, thundering at him from the moment she got into the car until they got into bed. Beating him senseless with that damn dream of hers, until he couldn’t take it any longer and surrendered.

  In a way, he’s glad. It’s one of those things where he’s got nothing to lose, and what the hell, miracles happen. It happened to him once, right? He lived, right? Practically everyone else in the ward died, but he lived, right? So who says miracles can’t happen twice to the same guy?

  In a way, he’s angry. He knows Eula’s just a singer, one of those fat old gospel ladies who work up a hell of a gleaming sweat singing to the Lord. She can’t do nothing, except kill Steph’s dream.

  So he makes a decision while the anchorman announces that the Twins haven’t yet rebuilt their team, but are determined to get back into the season. He decides that if Eula is the fake he thinks she is, he’s going to kill her.

  Kill her, because of Stephanie. No way is he gonna let that fat black bitch hurt his Stephanie. No way.

  He changes channels.

  He listens for the car.

  He thinks that after he kills Eula, he’s going to kill himself because he just can’t stand wearing the mask anymore.

  * * * *

  Ricardo pulls off the glove and examines the withered hand.

  Nothing.

  No change; it’s the same.

  Oddly, he wishes Trey were around. He didn’t much like the guy, a little too weird for his taste, but at least the guy was someone you could talk to. He listened. He really listened. And he’s been around the block three or four times, been just about everywhere, seen just about everything, probably done it all more than once.

  Not that he’d say anything smart, but Rick figures just saying the words out loud, letting his doubts hang there in the air, would help him decide if he was being a jerk or not.

  He laughs a little.

  A jerk? Hell, sure he’s being a jerk. They were all being jerks. Thinking what they were thinking, and probably not thinking how much the old woman would charge.

  Now, Mr. I’m Too Good For A Regular Job Falkirk would probably laugh. Was probably laughing already . . . if he knew. Now there’s a real jerk, and Rick wonders what in hell made him think the guy would even talk to him about this. Man has nothing going for him but a streak of luck, and luck doesn’t last, and Rick realizes he’s trying to fold the bad hand into a fist, but the fingers only twitch and curl and it looks Like a claw mat’s been in salt water too long, and Rick swears and yanks the glove back on.

  Bastard, he thinks.

  That son-of-a-bitch bastard.

  * * * *

  Muriel stands over the stove, stirring a small pan of tomato sauce, her own creation, with a short wooden spoon. She hopes Lillian won’t come home before she’s finished, but it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. The girl wouldn’t appreciate it. In the old days she ate pasta like it was going out of style, packing herself with energy, stamina, she claimed, before she went to the hotel to ride in the show.

  In the old days Lillian actually called her “Mother.”

  Without the sneer.

  Definitely she’ll be angry because she missed Eula, which is all she talks about anymore. Eula, and that awful music, and walking again.

  Muriel tastes the sauce, grunts approval, and turns down the heat, wishing she had a gas stove. Like in the old days. Easier to control the heat that way. No guessing. You looked at the flame and you knew what you got.

  You looked at her, and you knew what you got.

  A bordering on bloated, middle-aged woman stuck with a crippled daughter who was a bastard.

  She frowns.

  She nods.

  Yes. A bastard. Didn’t matter the sex, the kid was born without the mother being married, the kid was a bastard.

  Sometimes, in more ways than one.

  “Now, now, Muriel,” she scolds. “Christian charity, remember? Hard times mean hard people. You can’t blame her, can you, after all she’s been through? Patience is the key. Patience. And a good hot meal.”

  She wipes her hands on her apron, checks to be sure everything on the burners is cooking the way it ought to, then hurries into the living room, looks out the window, hoping Eula didn’t know she’d been lying about Lillian being home, afraid she’s missed something important out there.

  But there’s nothing but blowing sand and dust, and that bum, Trey, is off his porch, didn’t even sweep it clean after last night’s blow. Once, Eula said in a joke that Falkirk would probably be improved by getting the Sickness. A man like that is nothing but a burden on the rest of the world. Muriel agreed, thinking at the time it wasn’t really a joke at all.

  She presses her cheek against the glass, the better to see down to the end of the street, but there’s no cab there. No Lillian. Some kind of extra therapy, she had said when she’d left that morning. Don’t worry about it, it’s free.

  Like Muriel cares how much she has to pay to get her daughter back on her feet. Although all those bills . . . and all those doctors who tell them over and over again that it isn’t ever, ever going to be back the way it was.

  Muriel believes it.

  Lillian doesn’t, not always.

  Why, she wonders, sniffing back a tear; why doesn’t someone like that bum Falkirk ever get hurt, and someone like Lillian, who lived for those silly shows, get hurt so bad she can’t ever ride? Why is that?

  She feels a tear slip down her cheek, catch the glass, and slip around her face toward the sill.

  Tonight, she thinks.

  It’s supposed to be tonight. Eula promised it would be the first night she came back, and tonight is it, and that’s why everyone was out there, smiling and chatting and ...

  She sighs heavily.

  Is it really that bad? Is it really so bad that they have to believe a woman like Eula can make things right?

  Lord, is it really that bad?

  * * * *

  Roger sits upright, stiff on the edge of the love seat cushion. He’s wearing his best suit, his skin glows from the scrubbing he gave it, his hair is about as neat as it’s ever going to get, his beard is trimmed to within an inch of its life, his nails are cut, his shoes are polished.

  He can’t move.

  He knows he’s supposed to go over there, to thank her for doing what she did, but he can’t bring himself to get up. He can’t do it because he still hasn’t figured out why she did it. All the time she lectures him about h
is drinking, praising him for his education, scolding him because he’s wasting it, and all the time he nods with a smirk and assures her with a lie that not even a rock would believe that he would straighten up and fly right, don’t you worry about me, Eula, don’t you worry, I’m changing the way I live with the next breath I take.