The Saffron Malformation

by Walker, Bryan

  He nodded, remembering.

  “It was Leone, wondering where I was, if I was okay. Also I was tracking Stone and I could see he was on the move. Closer.” She took the water back from him and drank deeply. She looked over at the room where Leone and Arnie were sleeping in adjacent beds and tears bubbled in her eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “At the Dine Out, before I saw that Stone was moving toward us, I really thought it was over. I thought our father had… that he’d just let us go.”

  Quey wanted to take her hand and he thought if he tried she’d let him, something in the way she sat beside him led him to think she was ready to collapse against him if he’d just move things in that direction but that would only work toward stirring up a batch of complications they didn’t have time for. Instead he sat and listened.

  “We could have been killed yesterday,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s been hard on the road,” she told him. “I’ve seen a lot of bad things over these last years but that,” she shook her head. “He’s coming at us harder than I thought even he would be able to.”

  Thoughts tickled Quey’s mind and left him with curiosities. Something about the situation with this Stone guy and Richter Crow wasn’t sitting with him. If Richter wanted her found this badly why wouldn’t he just mark her as a missing person? Why not just send the security forces to find her? Why use a brigade of bandits like the Angels of the Brood?

  “Where’d your father get this guy?” Quey asked.

  Rain shrugged. “Just showed up one day. At first he was a personal assistant of sorts, but that cover didn’t hold long, not to the people closest to him. Remember years ago, shit it must be a decade now at least,” she added thoughtfully, “when those scientists were killed. Sticklan Stone will break your bones-”

  “And death will follow after,” he concluded.

  She clicked her tongue and pointed a finger gun at him with a wink. “That’s when I started to get curious about him. See, he’d been gone from my father’s side while those murders were taking place. He’d never been away like that before. So I did a bit of poking about and later learned those scientists had discovered something about the planet, something my father didn’t want getting out. He had logs claiming he was sending Stone out on a tour of some facilities, to learn the way Blue Moon worked from the inside. Shortly after his departure some of those scientists were dead and others mysteriously changed their minds about the conclusions they drew from their data. All of a sudden everything was going to be okay, it was just going to take a little time and some money.”

  Quey nodded and thought of the tower. Blue Moon had spent billions constructing those things. What did they do?

  He thought of what Ryla had learned on her own and what Geo’s new data might lead her to conclude. More importantly he wondered about the data from the tower and what that would turn up. Of course he wouldn’t know that for another thirty-two hundred kilometers, give or take, so he turned his attentions back to the here and now. “That’s what your father does? He sends this guy out when he needs something messy handled?”

  Rain nodded.

  “You think he gives him exact orders?”

  Rain shook her head. “Their messages are vague, to say the least. And this Stone guy isn’t on the payroll.”

  Quey furrowed his brow, “How do you know?”

  When she spoke it was an admission the likes of which he suspected she meant to keep until her deathbed. “Because when I was fourteen I snuck into his office and hacked his computer. I did it a number of times. At first I just read his messages and looked through some files. Then I found the real stuff, a separate hard drive he kept secret. I copied everything.” Quey was about to speak when the tears came with heavy sobs. “It was me. I wanted to say it but my mother looked at me and shook her head, she could see it in my eyes. She didn’t know what he was going on about but she saw I did and she told me no, with a look she told me to shut up and stand there. I’d never seen my father like that. He was scary, accusing her of what I’d done.”

  Quey sat quietly, letting her sob for a moment before he touched her hand. She looked at him, tears spilling the little eye liner she’d applied sometime yesterday morning down her cheeks in a thin dull trail of black. She squeezed his hand once and let go. “Then he gave her to him,” she said hollowly.

  “Your father? To Stone?”

  Rain nodded slowly. “My father had been changing for a while but I think my mother believed, somewhere deep down he was still… him.” She shook her head and looked down at the pavement. “But he was gone. She saw it that night when he gave her to Stone and I saw it years later the first time he came for Leone.”

  Quey didn’t ask what had happened and she was grateful.

  “This mess with the Brood has the stink of mister Stone on it,” he finally said and she looked at him. “Your father didn’t get where he is by being sloppy and this is sloppy, sending the Brood looking for us, it’s the work of madness not the calculated nature of someone who’s savvy.”

  “So?” Rain shrugged. She was too exhausted to draw conclusions on her own.

  “So,” he began. “I think your father picked up this Stone guy, a madman of some sort and tried to hone him like an attack dog. I think he spent a great many years functioning on his leash but I think it’s beginning to fray. Sticklan Stone could have done any number of things to find you but he chose to send brutes. Why?” he asked rhetorically. Rain was hanging on his words because they gave her something else to think about. “Because this is what he really wants. He likes the carnage,” Quey answered. “Towns are sacked and burn, the Brood dies or we die, it’s fun for him either way.”

  Rain took a final sip of water and passed the bottle back to Quey as she hopped from the trunk—it didn’t rise even a bit. She took two steps away, toward her motel room door, when she stopped and turned, peering at him. “Is this place, where Ryla is…” she trailed off for a thoughtful moment. “Is it safe?”

  “I believe it is,” he assured her with confidence. Before she could turn away he added, “I won’t let anything happen to him.”

  She walked to him and stood in front of him, even with him seated she was forced to look up at him but when she did the intensity radiating from her intimidated him. He knew then that if it came to a scrap he wouldn’t want any part of her. “Promise,” she demanded. “You promise me that.”

  “I promise,” he replied submissively.

  Her eyes wavered as she went on. “Even if-”

  “Nothing is going to happen to you either,” Quey told her.

  “If something does,” she insisted. “You keep him close, until this is done. Don’t know how that’ll ever be the case but you do that.”

  “What about Arnie?” he asked and regretted the question before he’d even finished with it.

  Maybe she understood why he’d asked it, or maybe she was too tired to deal with the bullshit but whatever the reason she ignored the potential dig. “I love Arnie,” she said sincerely and there was no question about it, no doubt in her at all. “When things are quiet,” she continued, “He’s perfect. He’s everything I want in my life. But things aren’t quiet. In times like that, you and your friends… well you’re the sort I need. Understand?”

  Quey sat up on the trunk of the car and it was his turn to radiate a bit of his own intensity. “They’re in my crew. Same as Dusty and Rachel and Reggie. Same as you.” She met his eyes and was taken back by how fiercely they burned with emotion. “Nobody gets left behind.” Her eyes glanced away from his so he took her face in his hands and she looked back to him. “Nobody dies.”

  Rain felt her heart racing, not from fear but exhilaration because she could finally sleep with both eyes closed safe in the knowledge that there were other pairs to look out for her when she did. Growing up in the Crow house with her brothers and father, going through the private schools meant to build children into business savvy adults, she’d never known a feeling like this be
fore. All she knew, all she was shown, was what it took to succeed. Everyone, ally or foe, would stick a knife in your back if it helped them even a little. Friends were as fair weathered as they came and should a storm brew in your general direction they would steal your umbrella and leave you naked and alone. These people, Quey and his group, were another breed. Their way was to huddle up around you and keep you warm until whatever it was passed. They looked out for one another because they knew what it took, not to succeed but to survive. She fell against him and hugged him tight because there were no words of gratitude great enough. Little more than a day ago she’d given up hope, sure in her belief there was no one in the world that could help her. Now there was a whole group and they’d come, all of them willingly, not because of what they would get out of it for themselves but because one of their own was in need.

  She was sobbing against him, knowing there was no way for her to pay this back. Worse yet maybe was the knowledge that not a one of them would ever ask her to try.

  “Thank you,” she was repeating over and over but she wasn’t thanking Quey, she was thanking the universe for allowing him and his kind to exist.

  He must have recognized this too for when he finally peeled her off of him and wiped his thumbs over her tear slathered cheeks, as she inhaled deep through her nose and snorted snot back up her nasal paths, he simply smiled and assured her, “It’s going to be okay.”

  She nodded and laughed because she believed him.

  “Now go on inside,” he told her. “Get some sleep.”

  She left him alone in the parking lot, sitting on the trunk of Reggie’s car. Inside her room she ran over to the bed where Arnie was stirring. He’d been roused by her coming back inside and looked at her with one open eye. “Where’d you go?” he asked dull.

  “Just outside,” she replied jumping into bed beside him.

  “I thought you didn’t want to sleep together with Leone in the room,” he said looking at her and now he noticed her face and recognized she’d been crying.

  “It’ll be fine,” she assured him. “I’ll move over in a little bit.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Smiling she shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “You’ve been-”

  “It’s nothing,” she assured him then gripped his hair and pulled him to her. She kissed him with longing and passion and she wished they had the room to themselves but alas they were forced to separate and settle for lying together in each other’s embrace.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” Arnie asked.

  “I am,” she replied, then added, “And I think we will be.”

  Quey sat on the back of the car for a long while, lost in his thoughts. The immediate was simple enough, get back to Ryla and see what the data says, especially the stuff from the tower, but what then? Say they discover what he suspects, which is that Blue Moon is incapable of saving the planet, what then? Broadcast the information to the people, hope they believe it over whatever spin Blue Moon puts on it?

  “Not much of a plan,” Quey muttered and thought briefly but seriously about finding a stiff drink. Instead he finished his bottle of water.

  Say they did believe it. Say an uprising occurred and say it was bigger than what happened on South Continent all those years back when Reggie was still a young man, still believed in what Blue Moon had sold him, what then? Even if they weren’t wiped out by superior numbers or better weapons, what would come after the toppling of Blue Moon?

  Quey felt his taste for a drink grow fierce but took a deep breath instead. The further he looked into the future the more desperate things became but hiding from it at the bottom of a bottle wasn’t going to stop it from coming for him. In the end that would just lead to it sneaking up and taking him off guard.

  His mind spun wildly as fatigue settled on him. There were questions and they needed to be sorted through soon, but for tonight all he was doing was spinning his wheels in the mud so he returned to his room, took another piss and then collapsed onto the bed. He barely had the blankets pulled over him when sleep dragged him under.

  Morning came with a bang and shattering glass. Quey sprang up in his bed and snatched the gun off the nightstand in one swift motion. Another set of pops, low caliber something-or-other, followed by more glass breaking. Cautiously he moved to the window and pulled the drapes back ever so slightly. He couldn’t see a fucking thing from that vantage point.

  “Come out come out wherever you are,” he heard a voice shout. It was familiar too. It was Render. “Fucking assholes,” the Brood leader barked.

  “Fuck,” Quey chided himself for being so sloppy. The lot where their cars were parked didn’t face the road but they still should have made more of an effort to hide them. Then another thought crept through and chilled him. He wondered if Natalie’s call had given them another way of tracking him. He’d had the UD chip removed from his sheet but it still did link up with the signal and that might give them an approximate area. Fuck, he wished he knew more about that sort of shit.

  “We’ll burn this fucker to the ground, just like we did your ranch shiner,” Render shouted.

  Quey took a moment to think but Render had spent his patience on this long ago. “Fuck it,” Quey heard the man say and then more glass shattered. Then his window shattered as a bottle hurtled through and crashed against the wall on the far side of the bed. It struck just to the right of the bathroom door and spewed flames across the other side of the room. Remaining calm, knowing he only had a minute, maybe two, before the room was an inferno, Quey looked through the peep hole in the door and finally saw them, standing on the far side of the parking lot behind a car stopped sideways for cover. He watched one of the Broodlings toss another Molotov cocktail, this one at the room right of his. The room Reggie was in.

  Gunfire cracked from the motel side of the parking lot and the Brood hurried behind the car. Quey yanked open his door and dashed out, taking cover behind the trunk of the car. There was movement left and right of him as he made his way and when he looked he saw Broodlings peeking out from the sides of the motel. They fired and Quey rolled under the back end of the car. He was surrounded.

  Dusty and Rachel had awoken with the first shot and the sound of their window shattering. The bullet dug into the wall opposite the bed with a thwamp. They exchanged a glance and hurried out from under the covers and cursed themselves for being caught so off guard. Both of them were naked.

  Dusty pulled on his paints and Rachel slid into some jeans and one of Dusty’s T-shirts while Render shouted at the Motel.

  By the time Rachel was pulling her hair out of the neck of her shirt and tying it into a tail Dusty was handing her a rifle. She took it, checked the chamber, then pulled the bedside table away from the wall and knelt behind it. She leaned across the table and propped her elbows on it, using it to stabilize the rifle she aimed at the window. The drapes had been closed but the wind was coming through the broken glass and they flapped slowly in the breeze. Through their occasional parting she could see the car parked across the lot. Then she saw men stepping toward the motel.

  Dusty had just checked his pistol when shots rang out from their side of the parking lot. Rachel looked over at him and he shrugged.

  Reggie liked the Brood as an enemy. They were bad people and they were stupid. They had a rudimentary understanding of tactics that played to his favor. When the Molotov cocktail came through his window and shattered on his floor he didn’t hesitate. He collected his rifle and pistol and moved to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. There was a good sized window on the wall opposite the door, he’d noticed it when he first checked the room the night before. Calmly he slid the window up and peeked out, waiting for a minute to determine if anyone was going to shoot at him. When no one did he climbed out onto a bit of grass. He stood with his back to the wall and scanned the area. No Brood. To his right was the road and to his left was an endless expanse of grasslands.

  Smiling, Reggie started toward the
grasslands, meaning to come around the side of the building to the parking lot. He paused for a moment at the corner and peered around. He almost laughed. Thirty or so steps of wall before there was another corner where a broodling stood aiming a rifle into the parking lot, completely oblivious to what might be behind him.

  “Hey bub,” Reggie said. The man spun toward him and his face barely had time to register surprise before the gun in the big man’s hand cracked loudly and the Broodling’s face exploded in a puff of clumpy red mass that splattered to the pavement as he crumpled to the ground.

  Rain sat up in bed as the first gunshots went off. She looked first to Leone who was looking back at her, eyes wide. She felt a brief pinch of embarrassment when she realized she’d never made it to the other bed. Leone knew they shared a bed from time to time, probably knew a lot more than that, but still he hadn’t seen it first hand before.

  More pops cracked the morning, and the window beside the bed where Leone was sitting shattered.

  It didn’t matter, she decided, and pulled him from the sheets to the floor between the beds. She reached over and snatched the pistol from the bedside table and checked it, loaded and ready to fire.

  “Come out come out wherever you are,” Render taunted.

  When the bottle with the burning rag stuffed in its neck came through the window and landed on the bed beside Arnie, Rain went to the window and fired. She ducked down and saw Arnie holding the bottle. It hadn’t shattered.

  Rage spread across Arnie's face and seemed amplified by the light of the cocktail flames shimmering in his eyes. He crossed to the door with purpose.

  “What are you doing?” Rain asked as he yanked the door open and hurled the bottle back at the car the brood had taken cover behind. It slammed into the trunk of the car and spilled fire across the vehicle.