by Brian Hodge
Then Brannigan’s.
By the time the four trucks braked to screeching halts on the fourth floor of the parking garage, Travis was already getting the idea that it was too little, too late.
They didn’t they didn’t those fuckers they didn’t leave on me THEY DIDN’T LEAVE ON ME!
Not one car or truck remained. Even their makeshift water truck was gone.
Travis led his group in anyway, charging across the bridge—maybe it was just a ruse and they were all sticking their heads in the sand and their asses in the air. But up on the fifth floor, the situation looked every bit as bleak. Empty furniture, empty rooms. Most of their stuff was still in place, but enough of it was gone to look as if they’d snatched up what they could carry and cleared out, like frightened villagers fleeing before an approaching barbarian onslaught.
Travis tore through their bedrooms with a dozen other men, bursting through doorways with a fury that swelled with each vacant room they found. Travis smashed mirrors and splintered chairs; grabbed a machete and hacked one of the couches until the fabric was in tatters and wads of stuffing bled onto the floor. He used the shotgun to blast the windows from their frames, showering glass to the street below.
Travis raged until the worst of his fury was spent, then stood cradling the empty gun as everyone else stared at him. Watching. Waiting to be told what next.
What do they expect of me, huh? Just what do they all EXPECT?
But worst of all was Solomon. Peter Solomon, and his coiled-spring fury, and his wearily shaking head.
And his obviously growing disappointment.
* *
The old adage was truer than ever: You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone.
They’d lost half their living space and, as Rich had warned, a lot of privacy as well. The shipping outlet on Jefferson was a port in a storm, but no replacement for everything they’d left. Half a dozen separate rooms and offices could be converted to accommodate them, but that was as far as they could take it.
The entire building was dusty and thick with humidity, the air stale and musty after a year of being closed up. They hid their vehicles in the garage and filed inside after Rich and Jack. And although any number of tasks needed doing to make the place livable, especially considering everything they’d had to leave behind, not a one of them felt like getting started.
Not when the body of a thirteen-year-old girl lay wrapped in a sheet in the garage.
So they sat against the dingy walls or on unrolled sleeping bags, staring at the carpet or up at the skylight, trying to ignore the odor of too many sweaty bodies crammed into too small a space.
Erika opted for watching the skylight, where rain was beginning to spatter from a rat gray sky. She watched it hit with greater frequency, then greater force. After several moments she left through the garage, because Diane hadn’t come in yet. Erika found her on the south side of the building, eyes boring a hole into the asphalt. She wore a halter-top that was starting to soak through, and her hair was beginning to hang with moisture.
“I don’t want to talk,” Diane said, barely above a whisper.
Erika nodded. She scuffed about on the steaming asphalt, taking in the new surroundings. It felt less claustrophobic here than in the downtown area. The buildings here were shorter, squatter. There was a feeling of distance here.
“I’ll go back inside if you’d rather I did,” Erika said.
Diane shook her head without looking up. She wiped at her face, then stared at her hand. “Rain,” she said. “Makes it harder to tell I’m crying.”
Erika eased small steps in Diane’s direction until she was beside her. She offered her hand, tentatively, ready to pull it back, but Diane took it. There was so much she owed this woman. Diane had risked everything to bring her back…back to freedom, to health, back to life itself. There was no way to pay her back, or make them even, but the least she could do was offer a hand, a shoulder.
“I was so stupid,” Diane said. “So fucking smug and thoughtless. It all got to be like a kind of game I was playing, bringing Travis along. Just a game. No consequences. Just a lot of laughs.” She wiped rain and hair from her eyes. “I thought he was the stupid one all along. He must be laughing his ass off right now.”
Erika stood with bowed head, her hair as soaked as Diane’s now. Her T-shirt clung like a second skin.
Diane looked at her then, for the first time. Such a conflict raging in her eyes, grief and hatred. Fire and ice, silk and steel.
“I don’t think I can leave St. Louis as long as I know that man’s still alive,” she said. “I never thought I could hate anybody so completely, so totally. It feels like all I have left is to see him dead. Somehow.” After several long moments she said, “You know one of the things I like about you?”
“No,” Erika said, rainwater dripping from her nose, her chin.
“You know when to keep quiet.”
Erika stayed a few minutes longer, sharing the rain and the silence with her, until Diane decided that she really did want to be alone, this time for real. Nothing personal. So Erika turned and went back inside the garage, not feeling particularly social herself. The inside of the garage still fumed with exhaust from their arrival. She wandered from one vehicle to the next, aching for the sight of a red Mustang. Then she drifted over to a rectangular window and watched as the sky deepened with the first shades of evening, the rainy grays streaking with more ominous hues.
Erika remembered first what day it was: Sunday.
And then she remembered a long-ago promise.
9
The last hour of the drive was the longest sixty minutes of his life.
Jason knew he couldn’t have made it without the two thermos bottles of coffee to keep him perked up. Even so, he still had to pull over on the side of the highway now and again when he felt too drowsy to keep going. He would put the seat back and find that he couldn’t really sleep after all, and would instead drift in a muddled stupor until he felt he could continue.
The last leg of the trip was I-44, which cut a diagonal slash across Missouri from Oklahoma. Rain pelted the car’s roof most of the way, but did nothing to dampen his spirits as he rolled farther and farther east. When the skyline of St. Louis rose against the gray clouds, like a ship emerging from the mist, he felt an upward surge he hadn’t felt for months.
Still, there was plenty weighing on his heart. Lucas’s deathbed confessions echoed in his ears and nothing could drown them out. Jason had spent hundreds of miles telling himself that they were cheap and easy lies meant to tear him apart inside, and perhaps in the case of Erika’s rape it was true. It was the easiest thing in the world for some asshole to tell you how much fun he’d had with your woman. But the rest made too much sense. Maybe Travis and the rest did have her now, because of him. And Tomahawk? Surely that was the truth, because Lucas and the others shouldn’t have known about him to begin with. Yet they had.
Jason drove through the southwest county suburbs, left I-44 to make his way through the canyons of downtown. At his back, behind its veil of clouds, the sun was losing strength.
He felt like crying when he rolled into Brannigan’s parking garage and began the ascent. And very nearly did when he reached the fourth level and found it deserted.
He sat in the idling car, gripping the wheel with both hands, his eyes hot and grainy, his rump prickling from the endless hours in the seat. If he had to stay behind that wheel for five more seconds, he felt sure he’d end up ripping it loose from the steering column.
He tried not to think as he limped across the bridge, tried to blank out, convinced in his heart that there were dozens of logical reasons for all the vehicles to be gone. Sure. And there were just as many for them to have pulled the guards from the bridge.
But he couldn’t deny it any longer when he reached the fifth floor and stood amid ruined furn
iture, feeling a rain-fresh breeze blowing through the blasted windows. His mind conjured images of what must have happened here, nightmares of slaughter and rape. His stomach bottomed out, and if he’d had anything to eat since the day before, he probably would’ve lost it.
But there aren’t any bodies. And no blood…
At least out here.
It took every last ounce of will to search the bedrooms one by one. Some he found wrecked and others untouched, but all were empty. What the hell had happened here? It looked as if the place had borne the brunt of a furious temper tantrum.
He entered what had once been his room last, feeling oddly like he was stepping into a museum exhibit. The tiny cubicle no longer seemed a part of him. It didn’t look much different from the day he’d left, but the connections had been severed, leaving it forever in the past.
Jason dropped onto the bed and propped his head on his hands, his final hours here coming through again with haunting clarity. Those predawn hours…how he’d wished they would last forever. He’d slept less soundly than Erika, and had held her close as she nuzzled in next to him.
A lifetime ago.
He ran his hand over the rumpled covers, then fell onto his side to bury his face in them, suddenly needing to touch something that she had touched, to breathe her in, to make her real again. To bring her back. And now, finally, he did cry.
Sometime later, Jason wandered to the window, turning his bloodshot eyes upward to the deepening sky. Better get moving.
For it was Sunday, and nearing sunset, and he too remembered a long-ago promise. There hadn’t been time to explain to Gil their contingency plan, his urgency to get back before sunset today. He’d have to remember to explain himself when he got back to Heywood.
When we get back.
Jason pushed off with the cane, leaving the room, the floor, leaving Brannigan’s behind with the rest of the past. He left the car, too—it was running on fumes—needing only his shotgun and the cane and wanting nothing more to hold him back from whatever lay ahead.
And soon, after forsaking the shelter of the garage for the open street and the rain, he knew that if anything got between him and the Arch, he’d probably kill it.
* *
“So,” Caleb said. “How long you plan on staying here?”
Erika’s answer was immediate and firm. “Until it gets good and dark.”
He didn’t look happy, standing in the rain with his hands stuffed into his pockets and water dripping steadily from the baseball cap perched on his head. Erika preferred to sit on the steps leading up to the Arch, not caring that water was soaking through the seat of her pants. The car they’d taken here from Jefferson was parked below, on the levee drive, and it offered shelter, but what the hell. She was already wet from her talk with Diane. She and the clothes could both use a rinse.
Rich hadn’t been at all sold on the idea of them coming, especially given the circumstances of their evacuation from Brannigan’s. It had only been a few hours, he reasoned. The odds of Jason coming back in that interim were almost nil. Besides being a pointless risk, the trip to the Arch would be a waste of gas.
But, she’d argued, they’d given Jason their word. If it wasn’t kept this week, that would make it all the easier to skip next week too. A vicious circle was born. And soon they would realize they’d given him up as surely as they had Brannigan’s.
Under the Arch, at sunset, on Sunday. That had been their pact. Even if no one else believed in him anymore, she would keep her part of the deal, and remember.
“This place,” she said suddenly. “It’s become so important to us. It’s where you and I met, remember?”
“I remember, all right.” Caleb stretched to lean back and peer up at the huge silver parabola scraping the sky. He looked as if he might not be minding the rain so much anymore. “That’s one day I don’t expect to forget.”
“Me either. Ever since then I’ve wondered what really brought us together like that. There had to be a reason.”
“What we’ve been through so far…you don’t think enough reasons already?”
“I don’t know. Maybe those have just been little parts of a bigger picture.”
He nodded in his noncommittal way, and Erika wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with her or merely humoring her.
“If there is any more to it,” he finally said, “then I guess we’ll know it when the time comes.”
I guess we will at that, she thought. Hating the way that these mysteries of vision and intuition always seemed to work for her—helpless to do anything, usually, or at least never knowing the what and the why until the moment had come.
Erika blinked water from her eyes. Should’ve at least brought a hat, like Caleb. She’d left everything like that behind at Brannigan’s. She pushed her sodden hair back, draping it over her shoulders in a wet mass.
Maybe Rich had been right. Jason wasn’t coming, not this evening.
And a few moments later she wondered how she could ever have doubted.
Erika sensed him first, not Jason specifically, but a sudden onset of well-being. Peace. Like everything was going to turn out all right after all. She knew a moment later what had caused it.
When she turned and saw him moving between the mammoth legs of the Arch, she thought he was moving too fast for his own good. Oh he’s limping, she thought, and more than anything she wanted to hold him and make whatever hurts he must have go away. It was all written on his face, the past months. He was smiling, of course, the biggest smile she’d ever seen on that beautiful face, but it didn’t erase the strain. At best, it was a thin mask.
He was laughing and he was crying, and she thought she was too. She was up on her feet and running, sneakers splashing through puddles and then squishing wet earth as she left the concrete. She ran like people in the desert run toward mirages, and for one awful moment she wondered what she’d do if she reached him and kept on going, if he wasn’t actually there.
But he was real and felt gloriously warm and alive in her arms, and she pressed herself close, seeking to bring him into contact with every square inch of her. He dropped the two things he was carrying, a cane and a shotgun, and then his arms were around her. He was leaner, she thought, and harder, and every movement seemed stiffer…but he was here.
Erika’s face brushed through the wet curtain of his hair and their mouths locked tight, slippery from the rain and then from one another.
She was at once very glad that her mind had limits, that she hadn’t been able to seek him out wherever he’d been, as she’d wished on the bed where Solomon had kept her. Had she been able to, it would have leached the surprise from this moment. It would have diminished what was surely the most joyous instant of her life.
“You look awful,” she finally said, and they laughed until they had to hold each other up. As with Diane earlier, it was impossible to look at each other and know where the rain ended and the tears began.
“I love you,” he said, and it came out with such terrifying conviction that she started crying harder than ever.
“You’re hurt again, aren’t you?” she said.
He nodded, leaning to one side, as if his left leg were unsteady. “It’ll be worth it, you’ll see.” His fingers traced a path along her cheeks, her jawline.
She closed her eyes and sagged against him, her fingers lacing between his shoulder blades. Just promise me you’re right, that’s all I want.
So much to talk about, so much to catch up on. So much to put behind them. It would be a chore deciding where to even begin. But as they wrapped their arms around each other’s waists and walked toward Caleb and his indulgent smile, and Jason broke away to embrace him too, she knew they would at least give it their damnedest.
* *
They were watched from a couple hundred yards away. Through binoculars, from the cover of dripping trees.
&n
bsp; Hagar hadn’t known what to make of it when Jason had come trudging back out of Brannigan’s. He’d been psyching himself up to make his move and take the kid prisoner again and haul his skinny ass back to Union Station. But with him leaving again, looking like the weight of the world was on him, Hagar began to get the idea that lots of things may have changed since he’d been away. Not necessarily for the better.
He cursed his wet mop of fuzzy hair for falling into his eyes, and watched the happy little reunion under the Arch. A smile cracked across his blistered lips. Here was an even better chance for him to redeem himself, should things really be shaping up the way they looked.
He did the math: If the Brannigan’s commune was a thing of the past, then these folks under the Arch might lead him back to their new hidey-hole. And if Travis and Solomon didn’t know where this was—he hoped for his own sake they didn’t—then nobody could much mind their colossal screw-up in Texas. As the sole survivor, he was painfully aware that he’d be the only one to catch hell for it.
He watched their car start up and then moved for his own, just as the dead of night gripped the city.
SIXTH EPOCH
MAELSTROM
August 1988
1
The story of his past months spilled out like a bad dream. His audience sat crowded into the main office of the shipping center, each face yellowed by the light from the camping lanterns. As they sat, rapt with attention and all eyes fixed on him, Jason felt as if he were the storyteller in a Stone Age tribe. Coleman lanterns instead of campfires and walnut-veneered desks instead of logs, but the spirit was the same.
This time, at least, the story would have a happy ending. They had a destination now, a haven safe from the cruel realities of St. Louis and its ruling regime.
He’d been hugged, he’d been kissed, he’d had his hand pumped, his back slapped, and then he’d been hugged some more. Jason had never seen these people so fired up…although a few exceptions were painfully obvious. Diane seemed beyond the reach of joy, and Rich and Jack were equally restrained. He understood why. Erika had explained a lot in the truck on the way here, about Solomon’s growing hold on the city, about her capture, about Diane’s infiltration and her turnabout kidnapping of Travis, and its consequences.
