That’s what would happen here, Eric realized. There was no way he could defeat all of them. Deena’s own bloodlust was clouding her thinking, but she was smart. Soon she would calm down and organize her gang into a better formation.
Eric released the rope.
Edgar’s body flip-flopped through the air, arms and legs splayed. He thumped into Deena and two other gang members, knocking them all down.
Eric ran. The night air cooled his skin. The fire along his spine was extinguished. He ran silently, bare feet barely grazing the ground before launching back into the air. He leapt broken tombstones, open graves, as if some automatic sense had kicked in. His twisted ankle didn’t even hurt. The running felt good.
“Over there!” Deena said. Heavy footsteps clomped behind Eric.
D.B. sprang out from behind a gravestone and fell in beside Eric. She was an excellent sprinter, matching Eric’s pace fairly well. However, he knew she wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long.
“Why’d you stop?” he asked.
“Wait . . . for . . . you,” she panted. She handed him the crossbow as they ran. It was cocked and loaded.
“Not bad.”
“I’m stronger . . . than I . . . look.”
“Keep running,” Eric said. He stopped suddenly, turned, aimed at the dark figures running toward him. Even in the dark he could tell which was Deena; the machete tight in her hand, the pony tail flipping side to side as she ran. He aimed the crossbow at her, his eye looking down the length of the bolt, lining up the sharp tip with her chest.
He swung the crossbow to her left and aimed at another figure. He couldn’t tell if it was male or female, only that it carried a rake. Eric fired and the bolt whizzed through the dark. The figure dropped to the ground.
Deena and the others kept coming.
Eric stood, turned, saw D.B. still standing there, staring at him. “I told you to keep running.”
She didn’t say anything. She fell back into pace, running alongside him. He could feel her unasked question: Why didn’t you shoot her?
Nothing was said. They kept running. D.B. began to fall behind and Eric hooked an arm around her waist and kept her moving. He looked down and saw blood coming from her left foot. She’d stepped on something sharp but hadn’t mentioned it. He didn’t either.
Soon the graverobbers began to drop away, exhausted. They didn’t have the stamina. Digging up graves all day wasn’t much training for running.
Only Deena was still chasing them and even she had dropped way behind. Then she stopped too.
Eric waited, listening. He could hear Deena’s loud panting, gasping for air. They had left the graveyard two miles ago. Now they were standing in a small patch of woods. A few abandoned bulldozers were scattered about. They had been in the process of clearing the trees for another housing project. Wishing Well Springs, according to the signs. A planned community.
“Okay, okay,” Deena yelled. She paused, still breathing heavily. “You’ve made it. But you ever come back here again, I’ll have your balls. And that,” she said, “is the California Promise.”
Eric and D.B. watched her turn and walk away.
Eric looked at D.B. “Well, ask and get it over with.”
* * *
5
“It’s almost ready,” Eric said, leaning over the fire.
“Hmmm,” D.B. said. “Cute buns.”
Eric straightened up, embarrassed.
D.B. laughed. “Some Warlord. Blushes at the slightest compliment.”
Eric stirred the concoction bubbling on the fire. “Keep your mind on what you’re doing.”
“Hey, you’re the Calvin Klein who designed these things. I can’t help it they’re so revealing.”
“We didn’t have much material to work with.”
“So you say.” She giggled.
He gave her a stern look, but she just laughed. He knew she was teasing him and he went along with it. It was nice to have her back to her old self, joking and singing, endlessly quoting song lyrics. Last night after Deena had turned back he’d expected D.B. to ask him why he hadn’t killed her. But she hadn’t. She ignored him, not in a sulky way, but more in a thoughtful way, as if she were wrestling with some internal confusion.
They’d spent the night exploring the woods. Over in the clearing they’d found the three rusted bulldozers, the gasoline long syphoned out of each. A t-shirt had been tied to the back of one of the seats and a dented hardhat lay nearby. Eric had taken the hardhat, the t-shirt, and stripped one of the seats of its vinyl covering.
The t-shirt was filthy, yellowed under the arms from old sweat. Across the chest it read: I don’t swim in your toilet, don’t you piss in my pool. Eric had cut the t-shirt into two loinclothes and a halter top. Despite the t-shirt being an extra-large, there wasn’t much material for all three garments, so all were a little skimpy. “Looks like a coupla jock straps,” D.B. had decided. Eric agreed. The halter top had been a concession to modesty rather than need. D.B.’s breasts were small and firm enough not to need support, but Eric’s resolve to maintain a fatherly relationship with her was hard enough as it was.
The hardhat was on the fire now, cooking some of the sap he’d gathered from a few pine trees. He could smell the turpentine evaporating as he stirred the thick resin left behind.
“Is it soup yet?” D.B. said, sniffing the fumes. She held the pieces of vinyl seat she’d been cutting with a sharp rock.
“It won’t harden until I add some wood ashes,” Eric said. He threw a fistful into the hardhat.
“So, Colonel Sanders, that’s your secret recipe.”
Eric removed the hardhat from the fire. He kept stirring. “Okay, get ready.”
D.B. stood, each foot planted on a hunk of vinyl. Carefully she wrapped one piece around her foot into a crude moccasin. Eric dipped the stick from the hardhat onto the vinyl, gluing the flaps down. They repeated the process with the other foot.
“Now hold it in place until I say otherwise.”
D.B. stooped, pressing the flaps together with the heels of her palms. “So this is how you like your women, squatting at your feet.”
“Right. That and at least ten years older.”
“Bullshit. I can see you like me. Remember Gary Puckett and the Union Gap? ‘Young girl, get out of my mind/ My love for you is way out of line.’ Or the Lovin’ Spoonful. ‘Younger girl keeps a roamin’ through my mind/ No matter how much I try I can’t seem to leave my troubles behind.’ See? Musical history backs me up. I rest my case.”
“Good. Now rest your mouth.”
She laughed. “You’re so easy to tease.”
“How’s the foot?”
She flexed it. “Not bad. The swelling’s gone down. How’s the shoulder?”
He shrugged it. The spear wound and the bite had been superficial. “I might not play power forward for the Lakers this season.”
She looked up at him. “I guess it’s San Diego next, huh?”
“They don’t have a basketball team.”
She frowned, gave him a serious look. “You know what I mean.”
“That’s where Fallows is and that’s where Tim is. So that’s where I go.”
“There you go again. It’s always ‘I.’ Why don’t you say ‘we,’ as in ‘we go’?”
“Because it’s dangerous. You don’t have to go, I do.”
She shook her head as if he were a slow student unable to grasp a simple lesson. “Forget it. Change of subject. What Deena said about Fallows. Why would he be buying gold? What good is gold or any of that junk in California?”
“I don’t know. I just want Tim.”
She put her glasses on and looked up at the sky. The sun was a long orange smear behind the Long Beach Halo, giving a yellow-orange tint to the sky. “It’s so pretty, hard to believe it’s poison.”
Eric barely heard her. He was already thinking of Dirk Fallows and Tim. It had been over a year since the quakes. Nine months since Tim’s capture. Eighty-four
days since Tim’s thirteenth birthday. The last time Eric had seen him he had grown a couple inches, had filled out some. But more important, he had changed inside. Just a little, but in the wrong direction. Dirk Fallows was a master of psychological conditioning. Brainwashing. Eric had seen him turn Cong prisoners around until they didn’t know what was right or wrong, only that Dirk Fallows was their god. Eric woke every day knowing that Tim was another day further from him and closer to Fallows.
D.B. was speaking to him. “That was some trick you pulled off last night, John Wayning it through the graveyard, knocking them around with that guy’s body swinging over your head. Ought to be an Olympic event. Hey, maybe we’ll have our own California Olympics soon. Nifty events like Power Gravedigging, Corpse Tossing, Teeth Yanking. Go for the gold.”
“I doubt whether most of them will be alive six months from now.”
“What?”
“You notice how pale and sickly they looked?”
She shrugged. “It was tough to tell in the dark. Deena looked pretty healthy.” She held her hands out from her chest to indicate the size of Deena’s breasts.
“She’s smarter than the others, more careful. They’ve been eating those dogs, sometimes after they’ve already been feeding off those older half-rotten corpses.”
“So?”
“A lot of those bodies are filled with embalming fluid. Once the dog ingests it, so will the people. That’s not too healthy.”
She made a disgusted face. “Jeez. That’s gross.”
Eric shrugged.
D.B. watched him for a minute before speaking. “That why you didn’t kill Deena? You figured she’d die anyway?”
Eric didn’t answer.
“I know it’s not because she’s a woman. You don’t discriminate in life, you sure don’t in death. And I know it’s not because of her missing eye or ear. Hell, we run into that shit all the time. Besides, she still managed to look like a knockout. So what was it?”
“The Civil War,” Eric said.
“Huh?”
“That’s when embalming became popular. Up until then, most people thought it was like mutilating a body. But after the war, the government had so many bodies to ship home they awarded contracts to embalmers so the corpses would be somewhat preserved on the trip.” Eric tossed a log on the dying fire. “Actually, embalming started a century earlier. There’s a famous case of Mrs. Martin Van Butcell, in 1775, whose will specified that her husband could keep control of her fortune only as long as her body remained above ground. The husband had her embalmed and placed in a glass-lidded case in a sitting room. He even held visiting hours.”
“You’re stalling me just like you stalled them last night.”
“I’m talking about death. What it means to different people. In Borneo, the dead were often kept among the living while the body decomposed. They were even given food and water. The Indonesians used to attach mystical importance to the body’s disintegration, carefully collecting the liquids produced by decomposition and later mixing them with rice and eating the rice.”
“Tell it to Uncle Ben.” She stood up, tested the moccasins. The glue held. “I don’t think I want to hear anymore.”
“Okay.” He dumped the rest of the glue from the hardhat. There hadn’t been enough vinyl for a second pair of moccasins.
D.B. walked over and stood in front of him. Eric had made the halter so the word don’t was visible over her left breast. She’d laughed when she’d put it on and kissed him on the cheek. There was no smile on her face now. “I lied,” she said. “I want to hear more. I like it when you act like a teacher.”
Eric smiled.
“I just hope you were clearer in the classroom than you are now.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “The point is, as a civilized people we make up rules, standards to live by. But those rules depend on need. Even concerning death, the one thing all people have in common, all people hold in awe. In some South American and European countries where space is relatively scarce, people often lease graves. Then after three or five years, the bodies are exhumed and the bones stuck in a communal grave.”
“Lease, huh? Not even an option to buy?”
“You see how that concept would be disgusting to some people? Or the Zoroastrians, who thought the human body so unclean that to bury it would contaminate the pure elements of the earth.”
D.B. looked into Eric’s eyes. “You saying that what those graverobbers were doing wasn’t wrong?”
“Capturing us was wrong. Wanting to sell us was wrong. The rest was survival.”
“I knew it,” D.B. said. “Last night I thought about it. ‘Why didn’t Doc Rock kill her?’ I asked myself. ‘Why didn’t he shoot that one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people-eater?’ I thought about it the whole night, even when we were out exploring.”
“Did you reach a conclusion?”
“At first I thought it was ’cause she was a looker. Even you must get horny sometimes. But nope, that didn’t figure. You could have had me any time you wanted. It had to be something else. Then it hit me. You looked at her and you saw yourself. Not what you are, but what you’re becoming. Or at least afraid of becoming.”
Eric threw another log on the fire. “Gold star.”
“I’m not dumb just because I’m a kid, you know.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I’m a singer, an artist. I’m sensitive to people. Like I know how hard you have to get to keep going after this Fallows guy. How you have to guard against becoming the same kind of guy he is. If you get to be just like him, then what good will it do Tim to rescue him. Right?” She turned away, kicked some dirt into the fire. “I tease you, but I know why you won’t sleep with me, even though I can tell there are times you want to. There’s a line you’ve drawn between what you have to do to survive, to get Tim back, and what you have to do to remain civilized, whatever that means. I’m part of that line. Touching a kid would be wrong and eighteen is still a kid. To you.”
Eric reached out both hands and grasped her shoulders, turning her to face him. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Not as much as before.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
Eric glanced up at the Long Beach Halo. D.B.’s insight had surprised him. But she had not gone far enough, not recognized how far he had already gone toward being like Deena. Like Fallows. There had been many, many nights he had considered sneaking off in the darkness and leaving D.B. behind. This quest of revenge and rescue was no place for her, he’d rationalized, knowing all along that if he left her, her chances of survival were greatly reduced. And sometimes not caring. There were times, in fact, when he wasn’t sure if he wanted Fallows more for revenge than to free Tim.
There were different kinds of survival. Survival of the body. But of what use was that if the person you had spent your whole life becoming was lost in the process. That was a kind of suicide.
Seeing Deena panting after them last night, her one missing eye sealed over with scars like rubber zippers, her missing ear a puckered hole, she had seemed like a new species of animal. Attractive, yet marked. Her life of amorality had made him want to run to her. Sign up for the program. And that moment made Eric afraid. Had he pulled his trigger then, it would have been for the wrong reason: because of what she represented to him, what he feared in himself. He’d had to let her live, to prove when confronted with such choices, he could still make the right decision.
So far.
Eric picked up his crossbow and slung the quiver of bolts across his chest. “Let’s see if we can scavenge some better clothing than this before it cools down tonight.”
“Actually,” D.B. said lightly, “what we’re wearing looks a lot like what fashionable couples wear on the French Riviera. Not that I’ve been there, but I’ve seen pictures in Cosmopolitan.”
She chatted on as they hiked, discussing certain singers she liked or didn’t like, talking about her record collection, which before the quakes had occupied two entire walls of her b
edroom, but after the quakes had occupied five 33-gallon garbage cans. Eric, as usual, was quiet, responding rarely. He found some prickly pears, peeled the sharp spines, and fed them both. He spotted some fresh rabbit tracks and traced them to a small pond. He filled the vinyl bag he’d made from the leftover seatcover with water.
They stayed away from any signs of people.
That night Eric made camp. While D.B. gathered firewood, he scouted ahead. A mile away he found a wide shallow grave. He dug up the bodies. Two women and four men were buried. The two women and three of the men had been shot. One man was dressed in camouflage fatigues and had a hole through his chest that looked like it had been made by an arrow. The bodies were almost completely decomposed.
Eric stared. The name stitched into the shirt of the fatigues was Driscol. Eric remembered the name, remembered the uniform.
It was the last time he’d seen Tim. Tim running toward Eric, gathering speed to leap the ravine and escape Fallows. Fallows squinting down the sights of his Walther at Tim. Firing. Tim’s leg kicking out from under him. Three of Fallows armed men rushing to his side, forcing Eric to flee. Fallows shouting, “He’s mine, Eric. My son now!” Eric diving for cover as the three men opened fire. But Fallows had called them each by name: Leyson, Rendall, Driscol.
Driscol.
It wasn’t hard to figure out. Fallows and his men had swept through here on their way to San Diego, found some people they could loot. Some ran, others fought. Those that fought died. But not before killing Driscol.
Eric stripped Driscol’s clothing off and those of the thinnest woman. He put Driscol’s clothes on, though they were tight around Eric’s muscular chest and arms. He returned to the camp where he’d left D.B. and tossed her the jeans and turtleneck sweater.
She didn’t ask where they’d come from. She just put them on.
She was learning.
* * *
6
The leaflets fluttered down from the sky.
“Here they come again,” D.B. said.
Jason Frost - Warlord 05 - Terminal Island Page 4
