To further my ends, I found a fairly good-sized splinter of wood and started scraping regular lines with it into the seat of the pew. As each day passed, I put another one into the seat. Pretty soon I was up to three weeks. (I knew I was off by a few days, but I figured the general count was about right.)
On the twenty-second day, Theophilus brought Bathsheba back to the church. Bath was about eighteen or so, with mid-length honey-brown hair and luminous brown eyes. She wore a plain white t-shirt and oversized jeans with black leather mid-calf boots. Even in the two seconds before I officially met her, I understood that she was painfully naïve. She thought Theo was going to save her right up until the point where he backhanded me to keep from telling her to run like hell. Then she tripped trying to get out of the church, and Theo got hold of her. I tried to get to them because I wanted to help Bath. (Incidentally, Bathsheba wasn’t her real name; unfortunately, I never got her actual one.) I was able to drag the pew absolutely zero feet and zero inches because it was, as I’ve said, bolted to the floor. So I had to watch while Theo tried to “save” Bathsheba. She got a few good shots, including one to the testicles that infuriated him in a whole new way, but it was clear that she was the underdog. After a while, I couldn’t look anymore.
So when Theo was done, Bathsheba was dead. I don’t think Theo truly expected her to die, but it didn’t excuse his actions. I wished I knew what her real name had been. I wasn’t going to suddenly remember it as I had done with the housekeeper’s.
That was the moment when Theo took exception to what he’d done and promptly blamed me. If I hadn’t tried to warn Bathsheba, it would have been super-duper. Bath would have been saved, and Theo would be golden in the eyes of God. Therefore, it was my fault. It was further made worse by the fact that I was a woman and argumentative. Bad, bad Hasadiah. Out came the plum flower chain whip again, and the rest of that day kind of blurred away from me.
The next morning I opened up one swollen eye and saw that the sun was spilling in the lead glass windows in the front of the church. From its position in the sky, I assumed it was the next morning, but it might have been two days later. (Three days?) A snore from nearby had my eye rotating around to see Theo passed out still holding an empty bottle of the communion wine under one arm. In his religious fervor he had liberated the church’s store of the sacramental wines. He wouldn’t wake up for hours.
However, what was more interesting was that Theo was passed out within reach of me. By that time, I had a very good idea how far the length of my chain would reach.
I slowly sat up and gathered my strength. I was weak and needed water, pain pills, and food, pretty much in that order. I looked toward the front of the church and saw that Bathsheba was still there, lying on her back, with one pitiful hand reaching toward the exit. Theo hadn’t bothered covering her up when he had finished.
Very carefully, I gathered up the length of my chain, looping it over my arm and shoulder like I was coiling a rope. When I had all the excess draped over my body, I moved toward Theo. I took cautious step after cautious step, painstakingly letting the chain uncoil as I needed more length. Each time I allowed the chain to gently touch the hardwood floor, making the minimal amount of noise as it went down. Within ten steps I was standing over Theo, and I had about three feet left of the inch-thick chain between my hands. The manacle to which it was attached was also attached to my right ankle, but I had more than enough slack.
“Theophilus,” I whispered. “Wakey, wakey, eggs, and bakey. Someone’s come to visit you.”
Theo grunted and rolled to his side. The wine bottle fell out of his grasp and rolled away. It clunked against the legs of another pew. I waited, but he didn’t open his eyes. After another minute he began to snore again.
It’s funny how a second of clarity can bring everything into a terrifying focus. I knew right then I hadn’t been the person I could have been. I hadn’t used the golden rule about other people. You know the one that says you should treat people the way that you would want to be treated. But I could apply the rule to Theophilus AKA Martin AKA Psycho Killer Whacko. He wanted to beat up on women and occasionally kill them, then voila, the same could be applied to him.
My back screamed with pain as I looped the chain around Theo’s neck and scrambled onto his back. I forced him onto his stomach as I proceeded along, and I yanked both ends of the chain with all my strength. I knew this was my only shot, and I didn’t have a gun.
Theo took about ten seconds to come to blaring consciousness, and I reinforced my position on his back, shoving him into the hardwood floor. “Let’s see if I can save you, Marty!” I yelled into his back. “Let’s see what God has to say about this!”
Theo braced himself on the ground and managed to get up onto hands and knees. In immediate reaction, I wrapped my legs around his midsection and squeezed as hard as I could. He bucked once and twice as he tried to gain his feet. If he got up, he would have probably tossed me over into the nearest wall and made mincemeat out of me. I used my thighs and compressed his trim waist to the point where my muscles protested tremendously. His response was to groan in a way that told me I had the upper hand for the moment.
Something in Theo’s neck gave a little, a little sickening crunch, and I took up about three inches of slack. He reached up and flayed at me with his arms, trying to grab my hair or the sackcloth. I bent my head back out of his way, and the sackcloth ripped apart in his fingers. Bad choice of apparel for the savior. After all, one couldn’t save himself if he couldn’t catch hold of the savee.
“Are you praying yet, Marty?” I shouted at him. “You should be praying now! Maybe God will listen to you!”
Theo made a noise that was like a bunny caught in a bear trap, or maybe that was a bear caught in a bunny trap. It worked for me. His shoulders began to tremble and the sound became a rasping choking noise as he struggled for air that he wasn’t getting.
My arms and shoulders and back were a tsunami of excruciating agony as I yanked at him. All I could think was that if I let up even by a millimeter, then I would be deader than Bath, and I’d probably suffer for a while before I got there. Consequently, I ignored the torture as I wrenched the chain backward.
“Hope you’re praying now, chum,” I said in a calmer voice. “Hope God is waiting for you. Hope He knows exactly what you’ve done. If that’s the case, then I know exactly where you’re going.”
I planted a foot alongside Theo’s head as he started to go down and cinched up the slack that followed. When his entire body relaxed, I didn’t. I held the chains in my hands and pulled until I couldn’t stay upright any longer.
Lulu’s Wretched Present Again
The Present - Colorado
Wakey, wakey, eggs, and bakey, I thought. Someone was moving around me. I thought I would open my eyes and discover that I was back in Sunshine in the little 800-square-foot house that I didn’t share with anyone but the firefly pixies and my imagination. I lifted one eye just the sparsest amount and discovered the dim light of lanterns. It was a dark place with murky shadows.
I decided that I was still in the bubble. My thigh was throbbing like the speakers in the back of a vintage muscle car. My head hurt a little. There was another throbbing in my shoulder where someone had…shot…me with a bloody Taser. Stuff worked in the tech bubble. Tasers worked. Tate. Tate had done this to me.
In the interim of unconscious time, I had been extracted from the sharpened stake, pulled out of a pit trap, and dragged somewhere dark. It felt like someone had applied a bandage compress to the big hole in my leg. I cautiously opened my eyes a slit and surreptitiously felt for Mr. Stabby. Mr. Stabby was my bosom buddy and would make most things a whole lot of better. (The status of the moment: Always “listen” to the firefly pixies AND bring extra knives because a girl could always use an extra knife or two.) I couldn’t find my trusty knifey buddy, and I was mildly dismayed.
“Whatever are you doing?” someone asked from beside me.
I turned my
head slightly and saw a man sitting there. This was Landers. We’d first met him on the train traveling east to D.C., and he’d become a tick on Sophie’s butt from then on. Honestly, he had been on our side the whole time, however, he didn’t trust us anymore than we’d trusted him. He had an interesting power in that he could speak psychically to any one he’d met previously. More interesting was that he didn’t seem to have a limit on the distance, which made him a walking-talking-human shortwave radio. Or maybe that was a walking-talking-human longwave radio. The President had used Landers for communication. What we hadn’t known was that the President and his Navy lackey had been blackmailing the humans who had special connections. Landers hadn’t a choice in what he did or didn’t do.
In the aftermath of what had happened in D.C., Landers had fled with us as we raced for Sunshine. Then he had stayed on, along with many of the others. I often saw him fitting into the new society by figuring out what needed to be done and then organizing how it was to be done. I wasn’t a leader, so I didn’t go that way, but I volunteered to do whatever needed to be done. When the interim council at Sunshine decided to actively look for tech bubbles, I undertook the activity. A small group of firefly pixies decided to join me. (Sometimes I was Cranky-Knifey-Man-Stealer. Other times I was okay and a boon companion, especially when I was digging out earthworms for them. Sometimes the pixies were dorks who didn’t communicate as well as they should have.)
“I said what are you doing?” Landers said.
I looked at him. I don’t know what I saw in him. He could be a kind of a jerk sometimes. In the before world, my father probably would have liked him. My mother would have asked how much money his family had. I would have wondered if he knew the difference between a Burberry and a Ferragamo tie. I decided that I had been a clueless twat.
Simply describing Landers would be like saying that the exterior was better than the interior. That was what Louise Ambrosia would have thought. Landers was the whole of himself. He was only an inch or so taller than I was with hair that I might have killed to have if the clock had turned backward. It was a pale blonde that was very nearly white. It was the color toddlers kept until their hair started to darken about the time they began going to school.
When we had first met Landers his hair was shoulder length. When he didn’t want it in the way, he tied it back with a leather cord. Sometimes he let Zizi, who was one of the women at Sunshine and a former hair stylist, braid it. The braid made me want to run my fingers through it and let it loose. The inclination made me want to slide my hands in my pockets. Now it spilled down his back.
And his eyes were an icy blue that went well with the hair. The man looked like a human version of a white Siberian husky. He was strong and well formed, and that was just the exterior. The inside was something else. He was a person who liked to get things done. He had an affinity for the people who were truly changed, the psychics and the ones with new connections. I don’t think he had a lot of time for me, who was neither. Sure, the Tinker Bells (what a boy in the Redwoods Group called the pixies) liked me, but I think I’d grown on them. I was an acquired taste, to be sure. I could tell Landers didn’t know exactly what to make of me. I’m pretty sure that my first impression was similar to what Landers thought when he stepped in a pile of manure.
I suppose that could have been my own insecurities. I had been one thing. I knew that I needed to be something else. From the moment of my failed attempt to break up Sophie and Zach, I knew I had to step back from the relationships I had formed in the before and learn to stand only on my own two feet.
I listened. I asked people to teach me valuable skills. I volunteered. I provided whenever I could. I did without asking. I became the person I needed to be. I didn’t do it simply so that I could be accepted. It was because being Louise meant that I was slowly killing myself. Perhaps not literally, but psychologically.
Landers always seemed to look at me like he was looking at Louise, not Lulu. I suppose I was taking it too personally, but in the world of psychics, who really knew?
“Lulu,” Landers said again. His handsome face concentrated on me. It looked like it was worry distorting his features. “What…are…you…doing?”
“Lying here trying not to bleed,” I snapped. “You? Eating ice cream again? You know that Luna—” she was the best cook at Sunshine— “is going to make half of us diabetic and the other half fat.” Luna really was a very good chef. She was almost as good as the one with the Redwoods Group. I really wanted some of that ice cream, and I wanted it right at that moment.
“Bleed?” Landers repeated. “Where are you?”
I looked around. “I’m not exactly sure. I expect I’m inside the tunnels at Cheyenne Jr. I think I won the dice toss, but I’m not sure if I won or I won. There was an occurrence of eeny meeny miny moe that might not have been in my favor.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Sorry,” I offered insincerely. It dawned on me that I wasn’t really awake and that Landers wasn’t sitting beside me and that I wasn’t really having a conversation with him. That was kind of a bummer. I kind of liked the hint of worry in his voice. It meant someone cared about what happened to me. “Hope you’re having a better day than I am.”
“I’m not,” he said. “Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs?”
“Cheyenne Junior,” I corrected. “It’s a few miles away from the other one. Ask Penn. He read the magazine article about it. He was all riled up afterwards; wanted me to put it on my list at the very top, but I had other places to go first.”
Landers nodded, but impatience and concern radiated out from him. “That explains a few things,” he said mysteriously. “You’re hurt. How badly?”
I looked down at my leg. I wasn’t sure if this was the real leg or the dream leg. “Oh, it’s not good. I lost a lot of blood. I don’t think I’m walking anywhere anytime soon.”
“Are you dying?” Landers asked, and I heard a certain note in his voice.
I looked up at him again. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t think any arteries got sliced, but it isn’t a good situation.” It was much more than that. Sometimes the pixies could help with wounds. “The girls can’t get to me.”
“I know,” Landers said. “They told me.”
“There’s a man here. A bad man,” I said. My voice trembled. I had run into bad men before. Some were worse than others. I didn’t have the best of luck in that area. I had been faster before or more cunning or Sophie had made me wear a bulletproof vest or I’d had a handy chain at an opportune moment.
“We’re coming,” he said. “I’m coming.” Landers frowned at me. I wanted to touch his forehead and ease the lines there, but I clenched my fists together and let them remain at my sides.
“It’s a hundred miles and change,” I said.
“I know,” he snarled at me.
I blinked. I hadn’t seen Landers lose his cool before. He played with Delphine when he thought no one was looking. He looked in on a few of the elder members of the community, and I knew because the pixies had told me. He’d been annoyed with Sophie because she didn’t behave the way he thought she should have behaved, but he wasn’t like this typically. Even with someone yelling at him about some stupid community issue like a lack of water on one side of town, he hadn’t been rattled.
“I made a mistake,” I said. “I should have watched longer. I should have listened to the girls. I’ve done this so many times I thought I knew better.” Louise wouldn’t have known better. Louise would have thrown herself at Tate and then said, “Whoopsie doodle! What was I thinking?”
“You’re not Louise,” Landers barked, and it was almost the same as the snarl before.
“Well, that and a quarter won’t buy me a cup of coffee,” I snipped. My eyes narrowed at something that was behind Landers. It was a door that was all black on the inside like light was not allowed to go there. It beckoned to me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I was about to ask Landers about
it when someone shook my shoulder, then Landers was gone. So was the black door.
Chapter 6
Lulu Knock, Knock, Knocking
on the Devil’s Door
The Present - Colorado
I opened my eyes for real this time. For a moment I saw Theophilus standing over me with the plum flower in his hands, ready to teach me that I needed to be saved by him. The links glinted in the meager light of the lanterns, forewarning me of the pain that would come. A rush of nausea threatened me, choked the middle of my throat, and I hoped that I wouldn’t barf all over myself before the whipping began. Then, it wasn’t Theo but Tate standing over me, and he held a bottle of water instead of the plum flower. Oh, the sad comparison that went through my mind at that moment was that one would beat me to death, and the other one would kill me so that he could devour my flesh. It was all con-con.
Jerking backward, my head hit something soft, and I tried to gain my hands and feet to scuttle away. However, my injured leg chose that moment to remind me that all was not well in the land of the changed. The muscles in my leg convulsed, and the resulting cramp nearly incapacitated me.
Tate took a step backwards as if I had startled him. “You won the moe,” he said mildly. “Your leg is bandaged. You got a shot. I sure hope you’re not allergic to penicillin or the family. I can give you a Percocet or a Vicodin. I think we’ve got some other pain pills if you know what works for you. Oxycodone does wonders if you’re in severe pain. I ought to know. I think I killed about four bottles of it that time someone cut off my arm.”
Forest of Dreams Page 5
