He reached over and unlocked the door and she climbed in. The truck started immediately and the sound of the diesel seemed very loud in the emptiness around them. It was the only mechanical sound at all.
He pulled out onto the road and ran west to Magneson's without incident. It was a relief. He didn't know how much fight was left in him. His hands were clammy and his vision kept crossing.
"Come with me," he ordered and got out of the truck. Magneson's house was clean, uncluttered as though the family were on vacation. He took her down the hall and into the bedroom where he opened the closet and took an arm load of dresses and pants that had belonged to Irene Magneson. He handed them to her and did the same thing with an arm load of Magneson's clothing and they went back to the truck.
"What happened to them?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" he barked at her. "What the hell do you think happened?"
"I mean it was so neat and clean in there, like she expected to come back."
"Ya."
The truck bounced over the field and he headed into the cut on the limestone ridge that wound in tight circles until it brought him to the point where he could descend. He turned the truck off and closed his eyes, his head swimming. But he knew he had to look, he had to put on the night goggles and crawl down through the trees and then with his binoculars pan the kill zone until he was certain no one was waiting for him. The day he didn't do it, they would be.
"Fuck," he gasped pulling himself along the ground. The cold ground was pleasant to the touch but the infrared glasses increased his labyrinthitis which had not resolved entirely. And when he switched to the binoculars he got so dizzy he felt vomit rushing into his mouth and he had to swallow it back which made it want to come up again.
For an hour he lay in the bush, surveying his house with the night goggles, sweeping the kill zone and panning across the tree line.
Fuck this," he said in disgust and stood up, brushing the debris from his clothes. He was back at the truck in a few minutes and she was sitting in the shotgun seat, wrapped in the Mylar, sound asleep. She jumped when he opened the door.
The truck bounced across the last field and came to a stop. He sat still, his ears ringing.
He turned off the circuit to the explosives and opened the door. The house smelled as he had left it, the faint odor of frying meat still in the air. He'd forgotten to wash his cup and it was already growing a little green fuzz.
She came in and stood in the doorway and he turned on a small lamp. The warm, incandescent light spread over the room and she looked around unable to speak. There were shelves with books, a table and chairs, a stuffed sofa...a kitchen stove...pots hanging from a rack.
"I have to eat," he said and staggered to the kitchen. He pulled open the refrigerator door - the refrigerator! - and removed a large wheel of cheese. He ripped the paper off it and bit into it without ceremony, almost choking. He broke a chunk off and gave it to her and slumped onto a kitchen chair. She sat down very slowly and took the cheese and looked at it. Then she began to eat it and neither spoke until it was all gone.
He did not recall filling the wood stove or turning the circulating pump on so there would be hot water in the morning. He did not remember walking to the bedroom or falling asleep, a deathly sleep. He did not remember waking twenty times, sitting upright with the 1911 cocked and pointed or releasing the hammer and falling back again.
He looked out the front door thinking there was no way he could go on like this. Even with George gone and the Militia off his back, there would be others. The house was undefendable. There was too much glass, it was open on all sides, the log walls could stop regular rifle fire - maybe - if it was far enough away but a .50 wouldn't even slow down on the way through. Every time he closed his eyes he woke in a sweat expecting someone to be coming in the door or setting up in the field. And now there were helicopters that could fly in, totally destroy everything in seconds and be gone before he never woke up again. Did they give these UN troops drones and even heavier missiles and F16s with napalm?
He let the water run down over his body until it started to run cold and then he stood in that for three or four minutes until his teeth were chattering.
When he returned to the living room she was sitting at the table, still dressed from the previous night, her face filthy and streaked and her finger nails black and grimy. She looked at him like he was some kind of apparition with his face shaved and his hair combed back wet.
"The water will be hot again in about an hour," he said. "If you want to take a shower."
He slapped bacon into an iron pan and the smell exploded in her nostrils and she almost vomited from the intensity of it. Then he mixed a bit of flour and water and created a kind of biscuit that he fried in the pan with the bacon. He made a pot of coffee and through all this she watched him, unable to speak. He placed two biscuits on a plate and gave them to her and poured some weak coffee into an enameled cup. She sniffed loudly and he thought maybe she was going to start crying, but she didn't. She ate silently and licked her fingers though they were almost dyed black with dirt and grime and probably her own body waste and gulped the coffee and wiped her mouth. Her eyes watched him he could not tell what she wanted.
"You are going to have to keep yourself clean around here," he said.
Her face crinkled with laughter, a harsh, unpleasant barking laugh that almost sounded like a warning.
"You can have the room on the left - after the bathroom. You clean it up and you keep it that way and I will tell you what you can do and not do around here and if you fuck with me even one time, you will find a hole in your head, right from this gun," he said, brandishing the big .45.
She nodded but she still didn't seem able to speak and he could see she wasn't the least intimidated. She was probably beyond fearing much at this point.
"I don't know why I let you come here," he said bitterly.
"Oh yes you do," she said finally and stood up.
She looked around the room again, not quite believing the order or the cleanliness that he had maintained in spite of the national paroxysm outside the door. But Albert knew that he would have to hold onto something the situation couldn't take away in order to stay alive. If he had to give himself a whore's bath in a stream once a day because he was on the run, he would do it.
"I'll tell ya what happens, Albert. Little by little it all goes to hell. First you stop shaving and then you don't wash and then you're wiping your ass and biting your nails and you can't stand up to them because you got no sense of being somebody...it's like they say you're nothin but a fuckin piece of shit and so you are, you get me? You think they don't know this? You think they don't make sure their people have hot water and chewing gum? You bet your ass they do. Look after yourself..."
And when they were first learning about the big rigs that they'd be driving back and forth across the country the instructors told them that nobody would look after them "out there" but themselves. They were warned of precisely the same entropic danger that took over men living on their own in all worlds, this and the next. And he saw plenty of it first hand, whether it was watching them haul a three-hundred pound naked truck troll out of his rig after he had died from a massive heart attack and finding three, desiccated, blue cats curled up in a corner of his bunk; or a driver discovered with a lot lizard tied up in the lower bunk who he claimed was his "wife according to law." Or Mickey who handed his credit card to a Mexican whore and vanished into the vacuum of Veracruz and was never seen again.
You must look after yourself. Carry your own damn water.
But Albert had not saved himself. He had saved someone, evidence was clear, but it wasn’t Albert Smythe. He had taken to killing with an alacrity he never would have predicted. The people he killed needed killing, of that there was no doubt so it wasn't a matter of conscience or guilt or a particular reverence for life or some ludicrous religious imperative or anything like that at all that troubled him about this new man. Albert, this surviv
or whose defiance hardens with each passing blow...is there any part of the old Albert left? Was Old Albert a disguise waiting to be torn off by circumstances, a sleeper cell personality activated by some trigger? It wasn't true of everyone. Many bowed before each successive fuehrer, held the door for him, polished his shoes, buried his feces in secret hiding places and slept at his door: Today Belfescu, tomorrow Lilliput so long as he may serve.
He cleared the table and washed the plates. It took three minutes and all was done. He should now mount up and survey the property, patrol all around the perimeter to apprehend the next wave of Luddites and leave their carcasses for the crows. But only luck would allow him to succeed. One man cannot patrol thirty acres night and day and at the same time sit quietly in his house and read random sections of Encyclopedia Britannica and dream over photographs of Arizona from 1952. It is the prey who may never sleep. They grab moments of unconsciousness always subtended by dreams of pursuit while the hunters rest easy, stretched out in the grass, stirred only by hunger or amusement.
He was getting very tired of the vigilance, of the wariness, but he could not simply acquiesce and wait for them to come and get him. He should be out now, armed and dangerous, slithering between the trees but he remained where he was except to pour another cup of coffee and then a second one and sit down again, listening to the hiss of the shower down the hall. Then the clunk as she turned the water off and the hum of the little electric pump filling the hot water tank. He heard the door creak and close and he heard her naked feet on the floor, the gentle slap and suck of flesh against the polished wood and a slight vibration in the air as she stopped. Then another door opened and closed.
The problem had multiplied in his absence, divided and multiplied to the point where he could no longer control his own kill zone. When it was just George Griggson and Dusty and their little platoon of armed clowns he was able to apprehend them and kill them or run them off. Unorganized gangs were never a match for a determined and rational man, especially one without the self-imposed inhibitions against murder.
Now he was facing organized, trained and equipped troops replete with armored transport, drone surveillance and air cavalry, huge steroidal insects with electric machine guns and flaming missiles and a fathomless hatred for him. And they had another advantage: their hatred was cool and rational, political whereas he hated with a fissionable contempt, a violent rage and outrage. He knew his rage, the hatred backing up in his cortex enabled his planning processes but now the odds were changed and his hatred was becoming a liability, not because it was wrong but because it was tiring him and making him want to abandon it. It had kept him alive and now it was trying to kill him.
He heard the door open and her footsteps again and felt the vibration in the room as she entered, her hair still wet and streaked back, like an otter and Irene Magneson's dowdy farm clothes just about the right fit. Her eyes were brown, her hair very dark with streaks of grey. Her face was angular and proportionate and she had been American pretty ten years ago.
"I presume that toothbrush was for me...?"
He nodded. She sat down on the sofa and ran her hands over the leather.
"I haven't had a bath in two months," she said. "I haven't brushed my teeth or-" she stopped and he was afraid she would start to cry but she didn't.
"I was just thinking how we never even thought about it before. Sometimes it was even a chore!"
"Would you like some?" he asked as he refilled his cup.
"Yes, thank you," she replied with mocking formality.
He handed her the cup and she held it in her lap.
"How did you do this?"
"What?" he grumped.
"How did you keep all this...I mean out there..." her voice trailed off.
"I kill everybody who sets foot on this property," he said. He caught her glance and grunted a laugh. "You'd already be dead, believe me," he said.
"George and Dusty talked about this place...said you had freezers full of meat and electricity and hot water...I thought it was just bullshit. You have no idea what's going on out there..."
Why do people keep saying that to him? He could see by her expression that she was afraid of him, expecting him to turn on her at any moment and it was difficult for her to sit there and pretend to be cool and nonchalant about her predicament. But what choice was there? What was she going to do to protect herself against people like George and Dusty who had taken over the farm one morning and explained to her in very simple terms how the new system worked.
"They drew lots," she said.
"Huh?"
"I know what you're thinking."
He didn't respond.
"I either cooperated or..." she shrugged. "I'm not apologizing for anything..."
"I didn't say anything."
Her face started to buckle but she held onto it and after a minute there was nothing more than a slight sheen in her eyes to indicate emotion.
"I watched you shoot them from the bedroom, the three of them..."
"You got any idea where George and his friends might have gone?"
She shook her head.
He became very silent, feeling the discomfort growing as he tried not to stare at her. But when she crossed her legs and a slip of white ankle flashed it hit his heart like a stone. She reached over to pick up the coffee cup and the cords in her neck stretched languidly.
"What are...you...going to do?" she asked.
"I don't understand," he said, grateful for some distracting conversation. "There's nothing to do except stay here and wait for them to come and bomb us."
"Those men in the blue helmets-?"
"-UN troops. To combat social unrest."
"Is that what this is..."
"I didn't know the Chinese had helicopters here, gunships. I don't think anybody expected that but why not, right?"
"So they're not even citizens?"
He laughed and shook his head.
"Citizens...well I guess they are citizens of the UN but they're not Americans, if that's what you mean. They're here for one purpose and that is to eradicate American resistance to this wonderful "New World Order," your Democrat friends are so impressed with.
"I'll admit, I voted for him. You telling me you voted for Rick Santorum?"
"I don't vote."
"New World Order is an expression, not a program. I wouldn't have taken you for a tin foil hat."
He finally couldn't help it and a smile broke his demeanor. She almost smiled back at him but it all faded without comment.
"Time to eat again," he said.
She rose from the sofa and carried her cup into the kitchen area.
"Let me do something," she said. "Can I set the table or...this is insane."
She sat down abruptly in a chair and stared at the table.
"You'll get over it," he said roughly.
She tried again, this time with less enthusiasm - it meant a shorter crash - and quietly set the table for two with some basic accouterments. He pulled a loaf of bread from the freezer and put it on the counter. He took a can of soup from a cupboard and poured it into a pot. He took down a jar of pears and popped the lid.
They ate in silence. Her hand shook slightly as she raised the spoon to her mouth. He pretended not to see, but he found himself glancing surreptitiously at her, watching the sleeve of her shirt move when she raised the spoon to her mouth. Her breasts were smaller than Irene's and the shirt hung a little loosely but when she twisted to take a piece of bread, the outline of her nipple was apparent.
"Do you know how to shoot?" he asked.
"A .22, sure. My father-"
"-Okay, here's a .22," he said, handing her the small, silver-barreled Ruger. It had a classical wood stock and a scope, but it was also something else.
"Fire at that tree over there," he said.
She raised the rifle to sight it and he pulled it down from her face.
"Against your tit. Get a good grip but don't strangle it. Okay."
She pu
lled the trigger and the barrel jumped as it spat a swarm of bullets into the tree. He had converted the standard .22/10 Ruger from semi-automatic to full automatic. It was now a machine gun that took thirty-round magazines. He flicked it back to single-shot and showed her again how to move the selector.
"If I were you, I wouldn't take a shit without this right there beside me."
He went back inside and selected a volume at random and sat down in the lazeeboy. A few moments later she came in and leaned the rifle against a wall.
"Would you object if I took another shower?" she said.
He ignored her and she took that as no objection and went down the hallway. In a few moments he heard the water hissing against the plastic shower curtain and he imagined it running down her and sliding over her. And her hands feeling the surface of her own skin, the back of her neck or her belly or her thighs, hands roaming around at will.
Oh yes you do.
He prepared another meal just after sundown and she was again overtaken with incredulity as she looked at the fat, little bowl of macaroni and cheese and the coffee cup with red wine.
"I can't help thinking I'm hallucinating," she said. "Wine? Wine?"
"What's the big deal. It's just homemade wine."
"I don't drink," she said.
"Okay," he replied and poured her cup into his own. "More for me."
"Children of alcoholics and all that," she explained.
"Did George kill your husband?"
"I get it: No personal stuff. Okay. No, Arthur died from the flu long before George showed up. It was okay for a while, when everything was still working but once the electricity went off..." she shrugged and pursed her lips. "Just ate MREs and drank rain water. That's all they did and if I wanted to eat..."
"Plenty of deer around, what with the human population culled like it is."
"Maybe they had some, I don't know. All I got was two of those packages every day."
They cleared the table of the few dishes together and placed them in the tub of clean water. He washed them out quickly and dunked them in rinse water and placed them in the rack. She stood to the side and watched, as though fascinated by the domestic drudgery. He knew it was coming but still he flinched when she touched his arm.
As Wind in Dry Grass Page 24
