by Weston Ochse
“You weren’t around,” Braun said, “so I let them know.”
“It’s not like you had a lot,” Kelly remarked.
“But they were mine. How did you know which ones were mine?”
“I could say that I looked for the ones that I rejected, but that would be mean,” Braun said, grinning. “Suffice to say I keep track of such things.”
“Without business, how am I expected to pay you back?” she asked.
“Good question.” Kelly turned to Kavika. “She any good in the sack?”
“What?” Kavika rose on the balls of his feet as anger flared through his cheeks.
“Easy there, Don Ho,” Braun laughed. To Kelly, he said, “He sure is a pretty thing when he’s mad, isn’t he?”
Lopez-Larou fumed, her arms crossed. “Leave it alone, Kavika. All he wants is to get a rise. Other people’s misery keeps him from remembering how fat he is.”
“Blam!” Kelly said. “A hit!”
Braun gave her a heavy-lidded stare.
“We’re going to be on lockdown soon, so if your boyfriend wants to go back to his pack of circus clowns, he needs to get going.”
“I’m not staying,” she said. “I have something to do.”
“You are staying. You’re my responsibility and the ghost of your mother would haunt me if I was to let anything happen to you.”
“I’m old enough to take care of myself, Tio.”
“She’s right, amigo,” Kelly said.
“You just want her clients,” Braun said.
“Best to get rid of the competition before they get too big. I didn’t do it with you and now look at you. You’re the biggest of us all.” He smirked. “In business, too.”
“Seriously, Tio. I’m not staying.”
“Fine. Check out a pistol, though. If you’re going to be locked out, I want you to have something other than this muscle-head backing you up.”
They left Braun and Kelly. Lopez-Larou went to a container used as an armory and selected a 9mm pistol and four magazines.
“Why don’t you stay here?” Kavika asked. “It’ll be safer.”
“Then who’s going to take care of you?”
“I can take care of myself,” he said, but she wasn’t paying attention.
They went to her container, where she packed a bag. They were gone within minutes. Kavika didn’t have a place of his own; as a Pali Boy, he slept wherever he wanted. But if there was one place where he knew she’d be safe, it was aboard the submarine. So that’s where they headed.
Ivanov gave her a room. It was cramped and smelled like body odor, but then that could describe anywhere in the sub.
Kavika and Lopez-Larou discussed their plans. They needed to check out the People of the Sun for Spike. Although it seemed certain she was dead, Kavika wouldn’t rest if there was any chance at all that she wasn’t. And if she was, he wanted revenge. Mr. Pak, and Abe Lincoln, had set them up. Mr. Pak had had his neck wrung by Wu, but Abe was still alive. The idea that he was still out there, walking around, made Kavika’s blood boil. But he and Lopez-Larou agreed that doing anything to Abe Lincoln might be too difficult, especially after Braun’s announcement that the zeppelin had brought in more Neo-Clergy with weapons and body armor. How a Pali Boy could succeed in the face of those odds was beyond him.
An hour later they were on the leper ship. Lopez-Larou had several clients who preferred to smoke themselves to sleep, and with the closing of business, they’d be hard-pressed to get fixes. They traded a small bag of marijuana for two sets of clean leper robes. Made of patches from hundreds of different sources, the robes were surprisingly colorful, and they were a lot like the orange robes worn by the Mga Taos in that they could hide every inch of skin if that’s what the wearer desired.
The two of them left the leper ship, shrouded in the robes. They ambled along an indirect path to the ships of the People of the Sun, eventually reaching the demarcation line of red-painted rails. They stepped past and continued unhindered, their hoods drawn completely over their heads. They walked hunched over to keep anyone from looking into their faces.
Halfway across the first ship, a man approached them. He spoke first in Korean, then in rough English. They ignored him, knowing that he wouldn’t touch them. He left, furious, but they didn’t see any more of him.
Pak had lived on the third ship. Kavika remembered the maze he and Wu had gone through before they’d found Spike. It had been so terrible to see her strung up like that, wounded and helpless.
KAJA WATCHED FROM up high. He had Akani, Oke and Kai with him, just in case. The People of the Sun had made explicit demands that they not use their ships for any stunting, but now that their cannibalism was public, all bets were off.
He glanced over his shoulder at the zeppelin. Its presence meant trouble. Although Kaja couldn’t read the future, he knew that something bad was coming, if it wasn’t already here. He’d put the Pali Boys on alert and ordered them to travel in pairs. Several of the other groups had closed their doors, including Los Tiburones.
He thought of the girl. He’d had his shot when Kavika was monkey-backed; he wondered why he hadn’t taken it. He liked the way she handled herself, and she was easy enough on the eyes. Watching them over the last couple of days, he knew that their relationship had changed. The fleeting touches, the stolen looks. Something had definitely happened and he could guess what.
But he was glad that he hadn’t tried to get with her. Kavika was a good kid. Princess Kamala liked him, that was clear. Normally she’d command someone to her bidding, but she’d let Kavika have his say, and had then left the door open for him to make his own decision. Secretly, Kaja hoped Kavika would. He hated the status quo. There were problems enough with living aboard a floating city without having a group dedicated to the manipulation and eventual destruction of all the others. Publicly Kaja couldn’t afford to do anything about it, but if there was any way he could help Kavika privately, he would.
He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye—Boxers. Kaja counted six of them, all armed with machetes. They were following Kavika and Lopez-Larou. Somehow they must have known the two weren’t real lepers beneath the robes.
Kaja slipped back to his Pali Boys.
THEY’D BEEN CURSED at, yelled at, and even spit on. The People of the Sun needed a lesson in politeness. Kavika thought he had it figured out, though. As human-meat eaters, the very idea of a leper sickened them. Lepers were tainted meat. There was probably nothing they hated worse.
All the better. When the next person came toward them, instead of ignoring her like they’d planned, Kavika angled towards her and made retching noises. The young Korean girl’s face twisted as she backed away, the idea of leper puke just a little too much for the pretty young cannibal.
They finally came to the door to Pak’s container. Lopez-Larou knocked, but there was no answer. Kavika didn’t wait; he jerked the curtain aside. It wasn’t Pak, but another Korean. Kavika recognized him from the battle at about the same time the man recognized him. His eyes went wide.
There was no one behind him, so Kavika pushed him into the room and knocked him down.
The man tried to ward off Kavika’s blows, but Kavika kicked his hands twice, hard. The man began to cry.
“Where is she, you cannibal fuck?” he demanded.
“Please—don’t.” Fear crumbled the man’s face. He held up his hands. “I don’t speak good English.”
“I don’t care, you shit. Who are you? Where is she?” Kavika reared back to kick again, but his target screamed.
“I’m Song. Please leave me alone. I do nothing.” Then he raised his voice and screamed in Korean.
Kavika smacked him hard across the face “Help isn’t going to get here in time to save you.”
Kavika knelt on Song’s chest and wrapped a length of rope around his neck. Then he stood, pulled his hood back over his face, jerked Song to his feet and pushed him out in front. To Lopez-Larou he said, “After you.”
She shook
her head. “No, after you.”
He pushed back out through the curtain, then whispered in his prisoner’s ear. “You are a dog on a leash. Get out of hand and I will pull you back. Understand?” He yanked back on the rope until Song nodded. “Now let’s go to her.”
Song refused to move.
Kavika punched the side of the man’s head and yanked hard on the rope. “Let’s go get her.”
Song began to take them the same way he’d gone before.
A pair of Korean men turned the corner, saw the trio, and turned and ran.
Kavika glanced at Lopez-Larou. “This is going to be fun. You ready for this?”
“Oh, yeah.”
They were once again led through a maze of containers. It was clearly constructed to prevent outsiders from seeing what was going on. The Pali Boys could have just looked inside, but the People of the Sun wouldn’t allow transit across their ship and the Pali Boys had respected that desire.
When they turned the final corner, Kavika was ready to see Spike’s body. But there was nothing there except for the bloody space on the wall and the pieces of metal that had been hammered through her hands to hold up her body.
“Where is she?” he hissed.
Song pointed to a door in the side wall, all but invisible except for the slightly imperfect seam of the door.
“Open it,” Kavika commanded.
Song turned to look behind them, which made Kavika turn. There was nothing there, but Song had been looking for something, or someone. He hoped this wasn’t a trap.
Kavika prodded Song, who opened the door. When he tried to step through, Kavika jerked him back. He held the rope tightly and made the Korean close it after the three of them had stepped through. The room was much larger than he’d expected, and it was cold. He glanced around at the shelves and the boxes and realized that this was a walk-in refrigerator.
“Where is she?”
Song pointed to the back corner.
Kavika passed the rope to Lopez-Larou. She grabbed it. Kavika drew his knife and stepped carefully forward. The place was so vast and there were so many boxes that there was no telling if someone was hiding somewhere and ready to strike.
Long, thick pieces of meat were hanging from the ceiling along the right side wall. It only took a moment before Kavika realized that they were human legs. He felt his bile rise a little, but he held it down.
He turned at the end of an aisle towards the far corner where Song had pointed.
“Over here, Song? Is this where she is?” he asked, loudly enough to make himself heard across the cold, crowded space.
“He’s saying yes,” Lopez-Larou answered.
Several boxes were stacked on top of each other, as tall as a man. If this was where she was, then there was no hope that she was alive. His gut sank with the knowledge.
“Is she in one of the boxes?”
“He says look behind the boxes.”
The space was cramped; he had to turn his body and slide himself past the boxes, almost knocking them over. When he was finally past them, he saw a shelf about waist high. There were a thousand things he’d seen in his life that he’d remember until he died, but the sight of the row of women’s heads resting on the shelf was something he wished he’d never seen.
“Did you find her?” Lopez-Larou called.
Kavika opened his mouth, but his voice didn’t work. The truth of her death sunk in. He’d known it in his heart for some time now, but had really hoped that he’d been wrong.
“She’s here,” he said, breathlessly.
“Is she...?” Lopez-Larou asked tightly. His silence answered her. “Oh.”
He heard a blow, and a body hitting the floor. In another moment she had joined him, her body pressed into his in the cramped and horrible space.
“Oh, Kavika.”
They stared at the face of the boy who’d spent his life trying to be a woman. In death, the muscles and flesh of the face had gone slack; her skin was gray with a hint of blue. All the heads had been shaven, although Spike had kept her head closely shaved anyway, so that her wig would fit snugly against her scalp. Her eyes were open and staring. A single gold earring still hung from her left ear.
Kavika found himself looking around for her wig. He wanted to put it on her head. She’d want to die a woman. But she’d been killed and decapitated somewhere else. It wasn’t there. But then it came to him. Like the earring, the wig was nothing more than an affectation, an accoutrement. Spike—or Leilani, which was who she really was—had already achieved what she’d wanted. She was a woman, and even in death they couldn’t take that away from her. The presence of her head beside those of the other women was an elegiac acknowledgment of a truth that Leilani had spent her last years trying to prove.
“What do we do with her?” Lopez-Larou asked.
“I can’t leave her here,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Hold on.” She slipped back into the main room, then after some rustling, returned with Song’s shirt. She tied the sleeves together and held out the material.
Kavika gulped as he reached over and grasped the sides of Leilani’s head. Her skin felt strange, more like a piece of overripe fruit than a person. But touching it helped, because he knew now that there was nothing left of her inside. This was not Leilani. This was just a reminder of her, of the life she’d once had.
The refrigerator unit hummed low in the background.
He lifted the head from the shelf and placed it in the fabric, and watched in silence as Lopez-Larou buttoned the shirt and tied the arms together. When she was done, she tied the bundle to her belt underneath her leper’s robe. “Now what?” she asked.
“What’d you do with Song? Is he...”
“No. But I should.” She glanced at the shelf. “For what he did.” She nodded at the heads. “For them.”
“Then do it,” Kavika murmured.
She looked at him sharply.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Do it. Kill him.”
“I...” she began to say something, then seemed to change her mind. “Fine.” As she turned, she slid a knife from the sheath at her belt.
Kavika followed her and watched as she knelt and placed the point of the blade at the top of Song’s spine. He began to scream, but didn’t move under the point of the knife, as if he was afraid to get cut. Pressing her other hand against the hilt to steady the blade, she pressed quickly, sinking into the skin and parted the spine. Song screamed once more. There wasn’t a twitch. His mouth was locked open.
Kavika felt nothing, standing in the cold container, holding his best friend’s head as he watched the deliberate murder, although the lump that had formed in his chest slowly collapsed.
She wiped her blade on the gray hairs of his bare chest, then sheathed it as she stood. “Too good for him, if you ask me.”
“Perhaps. But just like taking out the trash or squashing a bug, it had to be done.” Then he drew his own knife. “Better keep yours handy,” he said holding up blade. “By the way Song was looking, he was expecting company.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“My guess is that this was supposed to be a trap.”
“But the robes?”
“I doubt they’d do us any good now, except get in our way.” He removed his and tossed it on the floor.
She did the same. “Do we make a run for it?”
“I’m too damn angry to run, but if you feel you should, I’ll make sure they don’t come after you.”
“But there might not be anyone there.”
“There is,” he said firmly. The lump in his chest threatened to return. He swallowed hard.
“I don’t know how you can be so sure. Anyway, I’m not going. If you’re going to stay and fight, then so am I.”
“You don’t need to.”
“Leilani was my friend, too.”
Kavika stared at her, remembering the night he’d found them laughing after they’d fought in the morgue ship. He’d just been beaten
down and their combined good humor had saved him from doing something stupid. It was a good memory, one that he used now to fuel his anger.
He nodded. “Let me go first.” He slipped by her and gripped the inside handle of the door. He was as angry as he had ever been, but there was something else, a detachment that was new. He was above himself, outside of himself. Not the detachment he’d known while monkey-backed, no; more of a combining to become something new. This was a recognition of his anger and his desire to do murder, while embracing a cold, calculating tactical understanding of the situation.
He held his knife in his left hand, low and loose. He jerked the door open, shot his head out, saw what he wanted to see, then pulled the door open all the way.
“There are five of them,” he growled, then stepped outside.
Lopez-Larou followed close behind.
In the cul-de-sac, they placed their backs against the wall where Spike had been tortured. Five Boxers awaited them, dressed in their usual mufti, weapons ready. Neither a grin nor a scowl from any of them, just grim faces used to the business of death.
But Kavika wasn’t about to let them think this was business as usual. Lopez-Larou was on his left; he feinted to the right to gauge their movements.
They held steady. He dodged left, causing the center Boxer to separate from the others, and ran at the wall to his right. Just before he hit it, he jumped and ran along the wall and swung at the surprised Boxer nearest him, carving a line from his left eye to his right ear. The Boxer fell, blood gushing from his face, smothering a scream.
All four of the Boxers turned toward Kavika, as he alighted on the deck, standing over the body of the fifth.
Lopez-Larou made her move, duplicating Kavika’s tactics. She ran right at her target. He expected her to swerve back to the left, as did the Boxers opposite her, who held their ground. It wasn’t going to work; he wanted to shout out for her to stop, but he had no time. Her eyes widened as she came to the point where she should change direction. Instead, she launched herself into the air, catching the middle boxer in the jaw. His eyes went blank as he fell to the deck. She turned as she landed, the knife in her hand impaling the forehead of the Boxer standing between her and Kavika.
