The Crimes of Orphans

by Obie Williams

  In approval of Rain’s threat, Lita returned and knelt down once more to yank away Jonas’ necklace, sending bits of the chain flying this way and that. “And if we don’t make it in time, you get to reap what you’ve sown.”

  With that, Lita stepped over her old partner and walked away, Rain following right behind. Jonas didn’t say a word. He couldn’t think of words. It wasn’t until after they were gone that tears filled his eyes and he whispered, “Goodbye, Killer.”

  As soon as they were out in the hallway, Lita spun around and cracked Rain across the jaw with a hard left hook. He took it well, only stumbling back a step.

  “Putting a knife to my throat is not my idea of dancing, and if you ever want to find out what is, you will never threaten me again. Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Rain replied as he rubbed his jaw. “One question though.”

  “What?”

  “Do we get to have sex every time you hit me?”

  “Oh my fucking god!” Lita exclaimed, then turned around and pounded down the stairs.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I

  As they neared the southern outskirts of Maple City, Rain shifted gears and lit a cigarette while Lita ran her hands over the flawless leather upholstery by her legs.

  “How have you kept this car in such good shape?” she asked.

  “Alex helped a lot,” Rain replied. “I had plenty of knowledge of vehicle maintenance and construction stored away in my head, and with his knack for practical application we were able to work wonders.”

  “So you spent some time reading up on cars?”

  “Not just cars. Everything. In one of the countries that existed before the Last War, there was a library that stored a copy of nearly every book in existence. When it was abandoned after the war, I lived in it for a few years before coming to Ayenee. I’d spend most of every day working through the stacks.”

  “And you remember every word?” She still couldn’t wrap her mind around the seemingly endless amount of knowledge he had managed to amass.

  “Everything I read, yes. I was able to reproduce schematics and Alex made them work.”

  “So you can just look at something once and it’s there, sealed in forever?” Rain nodded. “Even faces? If you closed your eyes—don’t, your driving is shit enough as it is—but if you did, you could describe every detail about me?”

  “I could do that without perfect memory,” Rain replied, paying her a glance as he took a pull off his cigarette.

  Lita smirked. “That’s a good line. You read that in one of your books?”

  “Yep. How to Pick Up Hard-Nosed Killers. I was saving it for just this occasion.”

  Lita scoffed. “Figures. But don’t call me that. I don’t like it any more than you like being called a vampire.”

  They exchanged a look and Rain nodded.

  There was silence for a time, and then Lita went on. “But I guess there’s no denying it, huh? I mean, hell, five years of tending bar and I jump back on the horse at the first sniff of a contract like no time has gone by. Sneaking into that palace felt normal as breathing. I didn’t want to be doing it, but goddammit if for the first time in years I didn’t feel like…like me, you know?” She sighed and slouched in her seat, trying to ignore the urge to reach for her bottle.

  “You’re a predator, just like me,” Rain said. Lita shot him a look, but he held up a hand, then took a long drag off his cigarette before going on. “I’ve spent a long time being something I don’t want to be, and it took me years to realize that the only way to live with that is to come to terms with it. A predator is what you are, and nothing you can do will change that. But being a killer is a choice you make. That’s the dilemma of free will. You can’t change your nature, but you can decide how to act on it.”

  “Five years, and I’m still making the wrong decisions,” Lita said, looking back down.

  “I don’t see any fresh blood on your hands.”

  She stared at them hard, opening and closing her fists. Then she looked back at Rain, her eyes shimmering with a glassy sheen.

  “Your nature brought you to that girl,” Rain went on, “but you made the choice to help her. You probably saved her life, and if everything Jonas said is true, we stand to save countless more before this night is over.”

  “You honestly think I can change?” Lita asked, her voice unsure—not of his faith in her, but of her own faith in herself.

  “I think you’ve already started,” Rain replied. “You just still have a long road ahead.”

  “A lonely one,” Lita sighed, looking out ahead of them.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Rain said. Their eyes met for a moment and Lita couldn’t help mirroring the tender smile that he offered her. They each had been alone on their own roads for so long that they hardly knew what to do with another by their side. But whether they meant to or not, they had already begun to press on together.

  Rain finished his cigarette and pitched it, then rolled the window up. Quiet fell in the car once more. But this one was not uncomfortable. In it, they rode for some time, each mentally preparing for what might come when they reached their destination. At least, that’s what they told themselves they were doing. Really, a deeper part of their minds was mulling over what might come ahead between them. As they made their way along the seemingly endless dirt road, trees whipping by them in the dead of night, they stole brief glances at one another. Taking turns, each would look to the other for just a little bit, then dart their eyes away right before the other did the same. They both nearly convinced themselves that they were the only one doing it, but some remaining part knew that the other was as well. It knew, and it made them feel special in a way neither of them had felt in a long time, if they ever had at all.

  It made them feel wanted.

  Lita looked at Rain’s hands—pale, slender, and unmarred by the years they’d spent building things and turning pages. Rain looked at Lita’s hair—wavy and vibrant in the beauty that she tried to ignore. She saw his coat—wondering where he’d gotten it. He saw her cheek—wondering how warm it was. Both of them pondered what the other’s hand might feel like in their own, but they could not bring themselves to make it a reality. Not yet. Just a little more time.

  II

  Coming around a wide curve in the road, Rain eased the car to a stop and leaned forward, peering intently out where the headlights cut though the black of the forest.

  “You need to see the map again?” Lita asked, reaching for where it sat folded by the gearshift. Rain gave her a sidelong glance. “No, I guess you wouldn’t,” she said, then unfolded it to look for herself.

  “It should be a bit farther up on the right,” he said, his eyes scanning the stretch of road that looked no different than what they’d been on for hours.

  “I don’t see where we’re at,” she said as she eyed the rudimentary, hand-drawn map.

  “It’s upside down,” Rain said, not moving his eyes from the road. Lita scoffed sheepishly and turned it around. “Okay, that still doesn’t help—” Rain reached over and tapped a spot on the map, still without looking. “Oh, alright. Now I’ve got it.”

  “Good, now help me look,” Rain said. He started driving again, but kept it at about ten miles per hour.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Disturbed vegetation. They may have tried to cover the entrance to the path, but it will likely still appear unnatural. I’m watching the grooves in the road, looking for any sign that they turned—”

  “Or it could just be that turnoff right there,” Lita said, pointing.

  Rain blinked and brought the car to a stop once more. “Cleric must have felt very sure we wouldn’t follow him.”

  “He had no reason not to. Jonas has never defied a direct order before. Hell, even I’m surprised.”

  Rain nodded and pulled off the main road, onto a narrow path that amounted to little more than a pair of ruts winding off into the forest. Once clear of the road, he gunned it, tear
ing through the woods at speeds no human would dare on a path like this.

  Given Rain’s sharp senses and his love for this car, Lita knew she was probably in safe hands, but still felt nervous at the speed they were travelling. Averting her eyes from the road, she looked to Rain and initiated conversation to keep her tension at bay.

  “What was the world like before the Last War?” She wasn’t sure why she chose that question in particular. It was standard primary school knowledge that she could easily read about in the Maple City Library. Thinking of that place, she suddenly found herself also thinking of snow, and she had no idea why. Regardless, it wasn’t textbook knowledge she was after. She wanted to know more about Rain and the things he’d seen.

  He chuckled ruefully at the question, and then answered with the first explanation that came to mind. “There were a lot more people.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. More than nine billion,” he paused for a beat, “but I guess that doesn’t really put it into context. Tell me this: if you wanted to go a week without seeing another human being, how hard would it be?”

  Lita shrugged. “Not at all. There’s lots of places I could go with no one around.”

  “Exactly. You couldn’t before. Humans crammed themselves into cities ten times the size of Chicane. They lived in rows of houses as far as the eye could see. If you wanted to be alone—truly alone—you had to go to the desert, the middle of the forest, or the top of a tall mountain. Even then, you’d often run into somebody else looking for the same thing.”

  “That sounds fucking terrible. I hate people.”

  “So did they. So much so that they just plugged themselves into televisions and computers and music players so that they could pretend no one else was around them.”

  Lita nodded. She understood what he was saying, but those pieces of technology were abstract concepts to her. She had read enough to know that motion pictures and music had been streamed into every corner of every household, and she had seen computers and monitor screens during her tenure at the Maple City Hospital, but the notion of these things being a part of everyday life was completely foreign to her.

  “Well, after the war, none of that stuff went anywhere, right? I mean, we still salvage a lot of it now. So why didn’t people rebuild it like it was, the way Amelie said Michael seems to want?”

  “Numbers had a lot to do with it,” Rain said, then lit a cigarette. “There just aren’t enough people around to keep the whole machine running like it used to. But I think there’s another reason too. It’s my own theory, if you care to hear it.”

  “May as well. Seems like you’d have as good of an idea as anybody, what with having seen it firsthand.”

  “Survival,” Rain said, then cracked his window and flicked some ash out of it. “Before the war, humans were at the top of the food chain. Most of them never really had to question their own survival. They had no reason to fear that someone or something would drag them off and kill them in the night. Without that fear to give their lives focus, they were left to their own devices and created a world full of things they didn’t need. It’s different now. Knowing you could die at any time puts things into perspective.”

  “So you’re saying that my need to sleep with a gun under my pillow means I’m not wasting my life?” Lita asked skeptically.

  “I’m saying that before the Last War, people romanticized a life like yours. They wrote books and made films about it. That’s how boring and meaningless their lives were.”

  “That’s…” Lita grimaced “…ugh. Forget I asked.”

  “Look at it this way,” he said, “at least you—”

  Without warning, Rain suddenly grabbed the hand brake and yanked. It made a decisive click. Lita felt every muscle in her body tense. One hand grabbed the dashboard and the other hit the ceiling as the car began to skid, spinning to the right. She felt a yelp escape her when it bumped violently over the raised center between the ruts in the road, then once more when it happened again. The car continued its forward motion as it spun, finally stopping its revolutions at two-hundred seventy degrees, leaving Rain’s door facing back the way they had come. It continued to slide sideways along the those ruts for a moment longer, but Rain was already out of the car before it stopped, leaving his door wide open as he sprinted down the road, his long coat billowing out behind him. His half-smoked cigarette threw up a shower of embers where he dropped it on the ground.

  Lita’s breath came in short, ragged heaves. It took her nearly thirty seconds to withdraw her hands from their locked positions and to finally convince herself that they had stopped moving and were not, in fact, dying in a fiery wreck. With that realization came her trusty rage, and the only thing that kept her from screaming at him as she climbed out of the car was the knowledge that they may be nearing enemy territory.

  She had to squeeze to get around the back side of the car, it was so close to the trees and bushes bordering the road. Breaking into a jog, she hurried to where Rain was crouched in the road nearly fifty yards away. “Are you fucking insane?” she asked as she reached him. Dropping her hands to her knees, she bent forward and looked over his shoulder to where he appeared to be rubbing a pinch of dirt between his fingers. “You want to tell me what the fuck that was all about?”

  Rain smelled his fingers and then held them up for her to see. “This is Alex’s blood. It stretches back almost a mile.”

  Lita’s stomach dropped and the color drained from her face. “Is he…”

  “No,” Rain said. “There’s not enough here. I think he did this on purpose.”

  “He knew you’d find it?”

  Rain nodded and stood, starting back towards the car. “We’re close.”

  “You know,” Lita said, following him, “I’d have to be a goddamned idiot to get back in that car with you.”

  Rain didn’t say anything, and Lita knew he didn’t have to. He could have wrecked the car and she still would have gone the rest of the way with him on foot.

  Back in his seat, Rain dropped the emergency brake and slammed the gearshift into reverse.

  “You’re really close to the trees,” Lita warned as she buckled her seatbelt. “You’re going to want to—”

  Rain revved the car backwards and it stopped abruptly with a loud crunch. Lita grunted, but he barely seemed to notice. He shifted into first, yanked the wheel hard to the right, and peeled out back onto their path.

  “That works too,” Lita said, wincing at the thought of what the back bumper must look like.

  They drove in silence after that. A cold resolution began to wash over both of them. Each knew the lengths they might have to go to when they arrived, the vows they would have to break. They knew, and they could live with it. Damnation wasn’t a foreign concept to either of them, and if it meant saving Alex and Amelie, whatever they did that night would be just another drop in the bucket.

  III

  Then, as though somebody had pulled back a curtain, Maplewood Forest was no more. Rain brought the car to a stop, killing the headlights, and they both stepped out to survey what lay before them. Lita let out a low whistle and even Rain, with his centuries of experience, was awestruck by what he saw.

  Fifty feet past the tree line, the earth dropped away in a sheer hundred-foot cliff. Below and ahead of them, as far as Lita could see, was utter wasteland. The Blacklands extended out twenty-five miles from where they stood until it reached the Atlantic Ocean. Its dead, calloused surface stretched over three hundred miles of Ayenee’s southeastern coastline. Seventy-five hundred square miles where nothing lived, the scar left behind from the great world war over who would get to call this young continent their own.

  Lita opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, but Rain pointed to the answer before she did. To their right, the ground slopped down more gradually from the edge of the cliff. There, a slender road snaked its way back and forth in tight, hairpin turns until it reached the basin of the Blacklands.

  “The Construct is
about ten miles out,” Rain said, peering out over the cliff once more. “I can see its fires burning.” From here, he could even smell the salt of the ocean beyond that.

  “So we know where we’re headed,” Lita said, then eyed the way down cautiously. “And we get to go by the lovely scenic route. Who says you don’t take me anywhere?”

  Rain smirked in spite of himself. “We’ll have to do it with no headlights. We can’t risk them seeing us coming. You won’t be able to see where we’re going, but I promise you, I can make it down.”

  “I trust you,” Lita said, and looked at him with startling earnestness. The truth was, she really did. It was terrifying.

  It took Rain a moment to gather words after that, but he finally said carefully, “I can get us down, but you have to know that there’s no guarantee we’ll make it out of this. If we don’t, or if one of us doesn’t, I need you to know that I—”

  Lita held up a hand. “Whatever it is, Rain, it can wait until after. We’re going in, and we’re coming back out. I’m in a spin over you enough as it is. Don’t fog things up more for me now. Not until we’re clear of this.”

  Rain looked taken aback, even hurt. In that moment, Lita felt something give inside her. Something that had remained barricaded and hard her whole remembered life finally sighed and collapsed under the weight of everything that had happened over the last few days. She approached him and laid a hand gently on his arm, rose up on her toes, and planted a soft kiss on his cool lips.

  “If it’s what I think it is,” she said, her emerald gaze swimming in the blue sea of his eyes, “I never wanted to hear it until today. Now, I’d kill for it. Let me use it to get us through this. Let me look forward to it.”

  Rain managed a small smile and a nod. Lita nodded as well and then turned to head back to the car. Suddenly, Rain took hold of her arm and pulled her in for a fierce hug. She tensed for a moment, her hand instinctively moving towards her gun. But with a shaky sigh, she relaxed against him, then slipped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. If she had ever been hugged before, she had no memory of it. It was a strange feeling, but one she thought that maybe she could get used to. It was certainly better than the empty feeling that followed when they finally released each other and reluctantly returned to the car.