The Larion Senators e-3

by Rob Scott

  Hannah boosted herself up on the hood of the car and took him into her arms.

  Steven ran his hands across her back and down to the waist of her jeans. She wore the same blue sweatshirt she had worn the last time he had seen her here, but she too was thinner. He could feel her ribs pressing out through the soft cotton weave. ‘What happened to you?’ he said.

  ‘Never mind.’ She slipped a hand through his hair and pulled his face into the nape of her neck.

  Steven inhaled. Lilacs. This has to be the only place left in the world where I can smell lilacs. The dizziness returned, this time getting the better of him, and his knees threatened to give way. He let her go, pressed his palms on the hood – it was still warm – and held himself up.

  Hannah kissed him, soft at first, then harder, ardent, fierce, and he locked his knees, propping himself up so he could hold her, feel her move around him. She was squeezing his hips between her thighs, rubbing herself against him; he could feel heat rising from the engine. It was warmer than the night air in the foothills.

  Pushing him back a little, not far, Hannah slipped the blue sweatshirt over her head and unfastened her bra. Steven tugged at it, all at once wanting it gone, out of the way; it caught on one shoulder, just for a second, then slipped free.

  ‘Help me with my jeans,’ she whispered.

  He fumbled for the button while Hannah reclined, arching her back over the warm steel bed, luxuriating in the heat.

  Her jeans were hard to unfasten. Steven struggled to stay focused; his own jeans were ready to burst. Pressing his bulging erection against the car, he tugged until Hannah’s buttons came open and she lifted her hips far enough for him to slide the jeans down to mid-thigh, not far enough, but Steven couldn’t wait. Yellow and red flares were bursting in the space behind his eyes, blinding him, and he blinked, let go for an agonising moment to rub his head.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Hannah whispered, her silky hair splayed across the hood of her car. ‘Get up here with me.’

  Steven swallowed. His throat was dry. Pressing himself harder against the car, he finally worked his own jeans open, slid the zipper down and tugged to get free. Struck by the hilarity of losing a wrestling match to a pair of pants in a public parking lot, Steven started to laugh. Hannah joined him, reaching a hand down and spreading her fingers across her lower abdomen.

  Like an artist’s rendition of the Rule of Three, Hannah’s jeans were pulled open and askew across her lower thighs, her panties, cream-coloured and rolled over, a tangle of netting, and milky skin, dark hair and that glorious musty aroma that mingled with the smell of oil and exhaust, the smells of fallibility and home.

  ‘I’m gonna come,’ he said thickly. ‘I’m not even gonna make it up there.’

  ‘Yes, you will.’ She touched herself, briefly, before sliding her panties and jeans over her knees. They fell to the ground at Steven’s feet.

  A dog padded around the front of Hannah’s car, stopped to look at them and then continued on. It was a big dog, like a wolf, and Steven yelped when he saw it. ‘Jesus whoring Christ,’ he cried, ‘did you see that?’ He let go of her thighs and watched the dog wander towards the far end of the parking lot, as if giving them a minute alone.

  ‘What?’ Hannah tried unsuccessfully to cover herself with her hands. She sat up, propped up on one elbow and strained to see. ‘Is someone there?’

  ‘No,’ Steven said, calming, ‘no, it was just a dog, someone’s lost dog, some big mutt out wandering around. It’s gone now.’

  ‘Well, good.’ Hannah ran her fingernails across his hips and down beneath his boxers. ‘Let’s get you out of these.’

  He kissed her. ‘Yes, let’s do that.’

  Steven moved his hips, letting his own jeans fall into a heap beside Hannah’s, then pulled down on his boxers. He was ready to burst; he just hoped he wouldn’t explode all over the side of her car. That’d be all he needed: to embarrass himself and have to find an all-night carwash in Golden.

  The first of the spider-beetles crawled from the waistband of his boxers and, scurrying up his stomach, they fanned out on either side of his navel, like scouts for an invasion force.

  ‘What the hell?’ he shouted, and that was the cue for the others to come, all at once. Hundreds of beetles crawled, leaped or skittered down his thighs, up and around his erection, beneath his scrotum and between his legs. They were all over his stomach now, inside his navel and crawling under his sweater, digging for his chest and neck.

  ‘What is this? Jesus, help me! Hannah, what is this?’

  Sitting naked, one hand splayed across her lower stomach, Hannah said, ‘You have to wake up, Steven. Wake up!’

  ‘What?’ He couldn’t hear her. Terror paralysed him as he felt the swarm – not stinging yet, still deploying – crawling over his body.

  ‘Wake up!’ Hannah insisted.

  He screamed, losing himself to panic, swatting at hundreds of mutant spider-beetles, nightmare insects with hairy, spindly legs and coloured constellations dotting their tiny thoraxes. Steven’s mind ran away from him, left him stranded, half-naked with a hard-on in a parking lot, screaming as a regiment of tiny demon sentries explored every inch of his pallid flesh.

  His hand was bleeding, as if something had bitten it, puncturing a vein. The blood ran in a stream, not pumping, like it would from an artery, but rather, pouring out, like water through a hose. Then his neck bled, and it was worse. Trying to brush away legions of bugs, Steven swathed himself in blood, spreading it over his body like a balm, but nothing did any good.

  The dog, still watching from the far side of the lot, trotted around the car and bit Steven just above his left ankle. The pain was astonishing, a white-hot needle of agony, but it shocked Steven awake. ‘Ah! Jesus Christ, help me!’ he screamed before falling backwards to the pavement.

  ‘Ah! Jesus Christ, help me!’ Steven screamed, rolling over before slipping back into a stupor.

  ‘I’m losing him,’ Gilmour muttered. ‘This isn’t good.’ The Morning Star took another wave badly, crashing hard into the trough.

  ‘Marrin,’ Captain Ford whispered, ‘what in the names of the Northern Gods are you doing up there?’

  Gilmour looked up at him. ‘Go; it’s all right. There’s nothing you can do for him. Send Garec down, or Kellin or Brexan – I need some water and some bedding, anything to make him more comfortable. But you see to the ship.’

  ‘The spell you mentioned, the one keeping us…’

  ‘Out of their attention?’

  ‘Yes, that one.’ He made certain to step on the spider-beetle at least once more. ‘Will it keep going? Or did our plans just go exceedingly wrong?’

  ‘We should be fine,’ Gilmour said. He didn’t want to sound insecure, not this close to Pellia. Get them going, and they’ll go on for ever, like the Twinmoon. He cradled Steven’s head in his lap. ‘It’ll be all right, Captain.’

  Steven had rolled in the puddle of his own blood, and now looked as though he had been dipped in crimson paint. Captain Ford backed against the bulkhead, sidling towards the stairs through the main hatch. ‘Good luck,’ he said softly, heartfelt.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Captain,’ the Larion Senator muttered, wiping Steven’s face.

  Captain Ford nearly crashed through the handrail as the Morning Star lurched over a wave. As he fought to keep his balance, he shouted, ‘Marrin! Will you rutting well watch where you’re going!’ He reached daylight, and stopped short. Marrin was at the helm, as ordered, but there was something very definitely wrong. Garec, the partisan killer, had an arrow drawn full, aimed right at his first mate.

  Garec was shouting, ‘Correct our course, Marrin, now!’

  Confused, Captain Ford started to reach for Garec, then he checked their heading. The Morning Star was bearing down on a Malakasian fishing trawler, the biggest one they could see working the shallows. It looked horribly like Marrin meant to ram them.

  ‘What are you…’ He was stunned. Should he tackl
e Garec and try to disarm him? Or mount the quarterdeck and slap some sense into his first mate?

  Garec shouted again, ‘Correct our heading, Marrin! Do it now!’

  Steven was running. It was the day of the half-marathon, his favourite day of the year, and he, Hannah and Mark had joined the four thousand other runners to do the thirteen-mile course from Georgetown, down the canyon, to Idaho Springs. Each summer, he tried to improve on his previous time. Despite the altitude – the Georgetown starting line was almost 9,000 feet above sea level – after a two-mile loop through Georgetown, the rest of the course was little more than eleven miles of downhill running, making this one of the easiest half-marathons on Steven’s dance card. All he did was get to the initial slope, point himself downhill and let go. Gravity did most of the work. The only drawback was the sun. Running east down the canyon, there was nothing between the runners and the morning sun rising over the prairie east of Denver, and it was a merciless running partner. Every year, it seemed, Steven managed to run beside some fool who had forgotten sunglasses, some complainer determined to ruin the race by bitching about it all the way down the hill.

  This year, it was his turn.

  ‘I can’t believe I forgot the goddamned things,’ he muttered, looking down to avoid being blinded. ‘This is no kind of view to have, eleven miles of macadam. Christ.’

  He had left Mark back about a mile. His friend was an accomplished swimmer, but he was no competitive runner. He didn’t enjoy long races like Steven did, but came along for the workout, and the view – not the spectacular natural beauty of the canyon; rather, the appreciation of the number of healthy, trim, female backsides that filled the course.

  ‘There’s never a bad one,’ he always said, ‘it’s a goddamned summer camp for great tail. Follow one for a while, get bored with it and pick another. Sometimes she’s up ahead a bit; other times, I slow down and let her pass. It’s worth all the training, all those miles and all that pain just to be able to jog along behind this crop of perfectly formed women. There’s not an excess ounce of fat for thirteen miles.’

  ‘What about your own?’ Steven asked. ‘Do you imagine any of those women – or men, for that matter – are out there jogging along behind you, taking in your caboose? How does that make you feel, Mr Politically Incorrect?’

  ‘Goddamned great!’ Mark didn’t hesitate. ‘Let ‘em look – if they enjoy the view, hey, it’s a party! If we all find someone to follow out there, it’ll be a raving hootenanny!’

  Thinking about Mark and his voyeuristic urges made Steven speed up. Ahead, a hundred yards or so, he thought he caught sight of Hannah; she’d left him and Mark at mile eight, determined to cut time off her personal best. Steven dropped his hands, squinted into the sun and ran to catch up.

  He couldn’t. A quarter-mile further on, she was still a hundred yards out. ‘Yikes, Hannah, but you are motoring today,’ he panted.

  She was running alone. With her hair pulled into a ponytail and looped through the one-size-fits-all band on the back of her baseball cap, Hannah looked like ten thousand women Steven had followed along dozens of courses over the past five years. Even from this distance, running hard and sucking wind, Steven loved the look of her: the way her clothes fit, the way her hair bobbed up and down, the delicate taper of her tanned legs. Wearing a cropped T-shirt that just brushed the waistband of her shorts, Hannah was an unreachable mirage in the distance, lost periodically in the glare. When he could find her without squinting, Steven did stare, watching her run, wanting to feel her press against him as she slept. He was getting horny; that had never happened during a race before.

  ‘Get your head on straight, dipshit. Pay attention to what you’re doing,’ he chided himself. ‘Catch up to her if you’re that hot and bothered.’ He dropped his hands, lowered his shoulders a bit and speeded up. He would be near death at the finish line, blind and dehydrated, but he wanted to catch her. Panting, he cursed the sun for rising and cursed himself for forgetting his glasses. ‘When you’re running, run,’ he said, and thought that notion felt somehow familiar, like an old blanket he might have thrown over himself, over his friends and their ship.

  ‘Ship? What are you thinking, dipshit? Let’s go, move it! What ship? You’re getting delusional! Drink some water.’

  Hannah ran on, the balls of her feet barely touching the broken yellow line, but Steven slowly closed the distance, passing people, lots of them, hundreds of runners, all plodding along at the same pace.

  Mile ten.

  ‘I can’t keep this up,’ he gasped, and moved to the side of the road. At least there he could use the bit of shade from the ponderosas to clear his vision. ‘She’s too fast,’ he told himself.

  At mile eleven, he saw the dog, someone’s wolfhound, broken free from its owner. Loping along at an easy jog, the dog ran beside him, uninterested in the other runners, apparently unwilling to leave the struggling bank administrator behind.

  ‘What do you want?’ Steven asked, coughing up a bit of phlegm. ‘A dog biscuit? A bone or something? Why don’t you drop back a stretch so my horny roommate can check out your tuckus?’ The dog ignored him. ‘Nah,’ Steven said, waving a hand dismissively at the animal, ‘you’re not his type.’ He passed two runners, chatting about something he couldn’t hear, then three singletons, and finally a husband and wife couple wearing matching gear. All the while, the dog kept pace.

  ‘You see that woman up there?’ he said. ‘She’s the one in the hat with the tan legs? No, of course you don’t. Well, regardless, I’m trying to catch her, but I can’t seem to do it. She’s running too hard, and I’m just not up for it today. So why don’t you run up there and get her to slow down a bit. Bite her leg for me, will you? Go on. Head up there and look all cute, and maybe she’ll stop to pet you. What do you think?’

  The dog cocked an eye at him, then turned back to the downhill course.

  Mile twelve.

  ‘All right, time to kick,’ Steven muttered. ‘You ready? Although I don’t know how much kick I have left.’ He scoped out a path to Hannah, a spot about a quarter-mile along where he would overtake her. He could sprint that far; he knew it. Once there, he would rely on whatever reserves of strength he had to finish the race. ‘I’ll take her hand and she can drag me to the line,’ he told the wolfhound. He wiped his blinded eyes on the tail of his T-shirt, nodded to the dog and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  Running a quarter-mile fartlek this far into a half-marathon was like squeezing orange juice out of week-old peel, but to Steven’s pleasant surprise, it was working. He knew he would pay at the finish line, for his legs, lungs and lower back were operating on some kind of biological overdraft programme. The moment he stopped running, he would collapse, roll over in that puddle of blood staining the deck and maybe pass out. There were paramedics at the finish line, however. They’ll get an IV in me, hydrate me and make sure I don’t die. I can’t die, not today, he thought; he was running too hard to speak. If I die, they’ll take the blanket off. They’ll see us. All of them. I can’t die.

  He caught up to her, slowing to appreciate the narrow pear shape of her bottom, tucked just above the stitched hem of the tiny running shorts he hoped she had chosen just to drive him mad. Steven inhaled several times before coming alongside.

  ‘Hi-’ All he could manage on the shot-glass of breath he had sucked in; anything polysyllabic would have taken his legs out from under him.

  In black and white now, an old photo, Hannah smiled. She wasn’t panting, or sweating; she wasn’t about to collapse or to require medical attention. She wasn’t even wearing sunglasses, but she didn’t seem to mind the harsh morning light. Instead, as she ran along, less than a half mile from the finish line, she said, ‘You have to wake up, Steven!’

  The spider-beetle crawled from her ear and skittered on jointed, hairy legs across her cheek. It paused against the perfect tan backdrop of her face, pale grey in the photograph, then crawled with surprising speed over her lip and into her mouth.


  Steven stumbled and fell, tumbling over the macadam. He felt his knees and elbows tear open and start bleeding. His chin struck the pavement, scraping itself bare, as did one shoulder and a hip.

  Hannah ran on, oblivious.

  Steven felt blood seeping from the back of his hand and his neck, not from his cuts and grazes. It pooled in a black puddle around him and he mopped the street with his T-shirt. He looked as though he had been doused with a bucket of heavy syrup.

  Too hot, too tired, too dehydrated and too battered to get up, Steven lay in the street, the legions of runners he had passed stepping over or around him as they made for the finish line, most of them awkward, moving in jerky stops like figures in a silent movie. The dog stayed with him, sitting on its haunches, until it finally padded across the road and bit him on the wrist.

  Light and colour returned. ‘Ow, fucking shit! What did you do that for, you bastard? he shouted.

  The voice rang in his head. Unlike Nerak’s, which had boomed from everywhere at once, this was small, plaintive. Wake up, Steven.

  Things went runny, gelled and shifted, some fading while others shone stark and bold; runners drifted across Stanley Avenue towards Clear Creek. Steven was lying beneath a pair of oak trees that had grown beside the road. They blocked the sun, allowing only flickers of dappled yellow to reach him. Blinking, he sat up and surveyed the damage to his wrist. It wasn’t bad. Everything hurts, though. My arms, legs, lungs, back, knees, chin; fuck, even my eyes hurt, for Christ’s sake.

  Wake up, Steven.

  Dogs can’t talk.

  I know that, silly.

  Just let me rest. Leave me alone for a second and let me rest.

  The boat’s going to crash.

  What boat? What…? The blanket. You mean the blanket? The boat under the blanket?

  Wake up, Steven.

  THE INLET

  ‘Come about, Marrin,’ Captain Ford said, calmly, sensibly. Garec had been shouting. ‘Make your course zero-six-zero. You can see it. We have to round that point.’