Kellen held it up, feeling profoundly stupid. “Forgot to charge.”
Instantly, Jamie was smiling again, bending forward to kiss him on the forehead, which was where she always kissed him these days.
“Sorry about the money thing,” Kellen said, clinging to her smile. “I didn’t mean anything bad, I was just . . .”
“Establishing dominance. Very George Bush.”
“Dominance? I was about as dominant as . . . I was being nice. I was showing appreciation. Sincere appreciation. If not for those guys, we’d still be—”
The passenger door of the yellow car swung open, and Kellen stopped talking.
His first thought, as the guy unfolded onto the gravel, was that he shouldn’t have been able to fit in there. This was easily the tallest Italian Kellen had seen all week. And the thinnest, and lightest-skinned. The hair on his head shone lustrous and long and black. For a few seconds, he stood swaying with his back to them, like some roadside reed that had sprung up from nowhere. Then he turned.
Just a boy, really. Silvery blue eyes that sparkled even from fifteen feet away, and long-fingered hands that spread over his bare, spindly legs like stick-bugs clinging to a branch. The driver’s side door opened, and a second figure tumbled out.
This one was a virtual opposite of his companion, short and stumpy, with curly, dirty hair that bounced on the shoulders of his striped red rugby shirt. He wore red laceless canvas shoes. Black stubble stuck out of his cheeks like porcupine quills and all but obscured his goofy, ear-to-ear smile. He stopped one step behind the reedy kid. All Kellen could think of was prince and troll.
“Ciao,” said the troll, his smile somehow broadening as he bounded forward. Unlike everyone else they’d met here, he looked at Kellen at least as much Jamie. “Ciao.” He ran both hands over the hood of the rental car, then seemed to hold his breath, as though checking for a heartbeat.
“Parla Inglese?” Jamie tried.
“Americano?”
“Ye—” Kellen started, and Jamie overrode him.
“Canadian.”
“Si. Americano.” Bouncing up and down on his heels, the troll grinned his prickly grin. “George Bush. Bang bang.”
“John Kerry,” Jamie said, rummaging in her purse and pulling out one of the campaign buttons her mother had demanded she keep there, as though it were mace. She waved it at the troll, who merely raised his bushy eyebrows and stared a question at them.
“What?” Kellen said. “Non parlo l’Italiano.”
“He didn’t say anything, idiot,” Jamie said, then gasped and stumbled forward.
Whirling, Kellen found the reedy boy directly behind them, staring down. He really was tall. And his eyes were deep-water blue. Nothing frightening about him, Kellen thought, wondering why his heart was juddering like that.
“Mi dispiace.” This one’s voice rang, sonorous and way too big for its frame, like a bell-peal. From over the retaining wall, another one of those screams bloomed in the air, followed by a second and third in rapid succession.
“Howler monkeys?” Kellen said softly to Jamie. “What the hell is that?”
But Jamie was casting her eyes back and forth between the two Italians. The troll pointed at the hood of their car, then raised his hands again.
“Oh,” Jamie said. “The gas. My friend put in . . .”
The troll cocked his head and smiled uncomprehendingly.
Abruptly, Jamie started around to the gas tank and came back with the cap. She pointed it toward the troll. “See? Diesel.”
“Diesel. Si.”
“No diesel.” Forming her fingers into a sort of gun, Jamie mimed putting a pump into the tank. “Gas.”
For one more moment, the troll just stood. Then his hands flew to his cheeks. “Ohhh. Gas. No diesel. Ohhh.” Still grinning, he drew one of his fingers slowly across his own throat. Then he let loose a stream of Italian.
After a minute or so of that, Kellen held up his cell phone. “You have one?” He was trying to control his embarrassment. And his ridiculous unease.
“Ohhh,” the troll said, glancing at his companion.
Reedy boy’s smile was regal and slow. He said nothing at all.
“Ohhh.” Now, the troll seemed to be dancing as he moved around the front of the car. Instinctively, Kellen stepped a half pace back toward the retaining wall, just to feel a little less like he and Jamie were being maneuvered in between these two. “In America, auto break, call. Someone come.” He snapped his fingers. “But a l’Italia . . . Ohhh.” He smacked his palm to his forehead and made a Jerry Lewis grimace.
The troll’s grunting laugh – unlike reedy boy’s voice – simply annoyed Kellen. “They’ll come. You have?” He waved the cell phone again.
“Why are you talking like that?” Jamie snapped.
“You have one? This one’s . . .” He waved the phone some more, looking helplessly at his girlfriend. Friend, she’d said. “Kaput.”
“Ah!” said prickly guy. “Si. Si.” With another glance toward his companion, he raced back to the yellow car and stuck his head and hands inside the window. From the way his body worked, he was still yammering and gesturing as he rummaged around in there. Then he was back, waving a slim, black phone. He flipped open the face plate, put it to his ears, then raised the other hand in the questioning gesture again.
“I’ll do it,” Kellen said, reached out, and reedy boy seemed to lean forward. But he made no blocking movement as his companion handed over the phone.
“Thanks. Grazie,” Kellen said, while Jamie beamed her brightest naïve, Kerry-loving smile at both Italians. Kellen’s father said all Kerry supporters smiled like that. Jamie was quite possibly the only Democrat Kellen’s father loved.
He had his fingers on the keypad before he realized the problem. “Shit,” he barked.
The troll grinned. “Ohhh.”
“What?” Jamie asked, stepping nearer. “Just call someone. Call American Express.”
“You know the number?”
“I thought you did.”
“It’s on speed dial on my phone. My dad programmed it in. I’ve never even looked at it.”
“Get your card.”
“They didn’t give me that card. They gave me the Visa.”
“Mi scusi,” said the troll, stepping close as yet another of those long, shrieking cries erupted from behind the retaining wall. Reedy boy just looked briefly over his shoulder at the yellow car before returning his attention to Jamie and Kellen. Neither of the Italians seemed even to have heard the screams.
Tapping his red-striped chest, the troll reached out and chattered more Italian. Kellen had no idea what he was saying, but handed him the phone. Nodding, the troll punched in numbers. For a good minute, he stood with the phone at his ear, grinning. Then he started speaking fast into the mouthpiece, turning away and walking off down the shoulder.
“We’re pretty lucky these guys are here to help,” Jamie said against his ear.
Kellen glanced at her. She had her arms tucked in tight to her chest, her bottom lip curled against her teeth. For the first time, he realized she might be even more on edge than he was. She’d seen the same stories he had, after all. Same photos. The couple left dangling upside down from a flagpole outside the Colosseum, tarred and feathered and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. The whole Tennessee family discovered laid out on a Coca-Cola blanket inside the ruins of a recently excavated 2000 year-old catacomb near the Forum, all of them naked, gutted from genitalia to xiphoid, stuffed with feathers. The couple on the flagpole had reminded Jamie of a paper she’d written on Ancient Rome, something about a festival where puppets got hung in trees. The puppets took the place of the little boys once sacrificed on whatever holiday that was.
The troll had walked all the way back to his yellow car, now, and he was talking animatedly, waving his free arm around and sometimes holding the cell phone in front of his face and shouting into it. Reedy boy simply stood, still as a sentry, gazing placidly over Ke
llen and Jamie’s head toward the toll gate.
Overhead, the sun sank toward the retaining wall, and the air didn’t cool, exactly, but thinned. Despite the unending honks and tire squeals from the A1, Kellen found something almost soothing about the traffic. There was a cheerfulness to it that rendered it completely different from the American variety. The horns reminded him mostly of squawking birds.
On impulse, he slid his arm around Jamie’s shoulders. Her skin felt hot but dry, now. Her flip-flopped foot tapped in the dirt. She neither leaned into him nor away. Years from now, he knew, they’d be telling this story. To their respective children, not the children he’d always thought they’d have together. As an excuse to tell it, just once more, to each other.
At least, that’s how it would be for him. “Diesel,” he muttered. “Who uses diesel anymore?”
“People who care about the air. Diesel’s a million times cleaner than regular gas.”
“But it stinks.” He tried putting a playful arm around her shoulders, but she shook him off.
“You smell anything?”
Kellen realized that he didn’t.
“They fixed the smell problem ages ago. You’re just brainwashed.”
“Brainwashed?”
“Oil company puppet. George Bush puppet. Say W, little puppet.”
“W,” said Kellen, tried a smile though he still felt unsettled and dumb, and Jamie smiled weakly back, without taking her eyes off the placid face of the thin boy.
“Okay!” called the troll, waving. He stuck his head into the yellow car, continuing to gesture even though no one could see him, then reemerged. “Arrivo. Si? Coming.”
Jamie smiled her thanks. Reedy boy turned his head enough to watch the sun as it vanished. Shadows poured over the retaining wall onto the freeway, and with them came a chorus of shrieks that flooded the air and took a long time evaporating.
Squeezing Jamie once on the elbow in what he hoped was a reassuring manner, Kellen made his way around their dead rental, climbed the dirt incline that rimmed the superstrade, and reached the retaining wall, which was taller than it looked. Even standing at its base, Kellen couldn’t see over the top. The wall was made of the same chipped, ancient-looking stone that dotted excavation sites all over Italy. What, Kellen wondered, had this originally been built to retain?
Standing on tiptoe, he dropped his elbows on top of the stone, wedged a foot into the grit between rocks, and hoisted himself up. There he hung, elbows grinding into the wall, mouth wide open.
Without letting go, he turned his head after a few seconds. “Jamie,” he said quietly, hoping somehow to attract her and not the reedy boy. But his voice didn’t carry over the traffic, and Jamie didn’t turn around. Against the yellow car, the troll leaned, smoking a thin, brownish cigarette. “Jamie,” Kellen barked, and she glanced up, and the reedy boy, too, slowly. “Jamie, come here.”
She came. Right as she reached the base of the wall, the screeching started once more. Knowing the source, as he now did, should have reassured Kellen. Instead, he closed his eyes and clutched the stone.
“Kel?” Jamie said, her voice so small, suddenly, that Kellen could barely hear it. “Kellen, what’s up there?”
He opened his eyes, staring over the wall again. “Peacock Auschwitz.”
“Will you stop saying shit like that? You sound like your stupid president, except he probably thinks Auschwitz is a beer.”
“He’s your president, too.”
She was struggling to get her feet wedged into the chinks in the wall. He could have helped, or told her to stay where she was, but did neither.
“Oh, God,” she said, as soon as she’d climbed up beside him. Then she went silent, too.
The neighborhood looked more like a gypsy camp than a slum. The tiny, collapsing houses seemed less decayed than pieced together out of discarded tires, chicken wire, and old stones. The shadows streaming over everything now had already pooled down there, so that the olive trees scattered everywhere looked like hunched old people, white haired, slouching through the ruins like mourners in a graveyard.
Attached to every single structure – even the ones where roofs had caved in, walls given way – was a cage, as tall as the houses, lined with some kind of razor wire with the sharp points twisted inward. Inside the cages were birds.
Peacocks. Three, maybe four to a house, including the ones that were already dead. The live ones paced skittishly, great tails dragging in the dust, through the spilled innards and chopped bird feet lining the cage bottoms. There was no mistaking any of it, and even if there were, the reek that rose from down there was a clincher. Shit and death. Unmistakable.
In the cage nearest them, right at the bottom of the wall, one bird glanced up, lifted its tail as though considering throwing it open, then tilted its head back and screamed.
“You know,” said the reedy boy, right beneath them, in perfect though faintly accented English, and Kellen and Jamie jerked. Then they just hung, clinging to the wall. “The Ancient Romans sacrificed the pavone – the peacock, si? – to honor their emperors. They symbolized immortality. And their tails were the thousand eyes of God, watching over our civilization. Of course they also sacrificed humans, to the Larvae”.
Very slowly, still clutching the top of the wall, Kellen turned his head. The boy was so close that Kellen could feel the exhalation of his breath on the sweat still streaming down his back. Even if Kellen had tried a kick, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything on it. Jamie had gone rigid, and when he glanced that way, he saw that her eyes had teared up, though they remained fixed unblinkingly on the birds below.
“Larvae?” he asked, just to be talking. He couldn’t think what else to do. “Like worms?”
“Dead men. Demons, really. Demons made of dead, bad men.”
“Why?”
“Yes!” The boy nodded enthusiastically, folding his hands in that contemplative, regal way. “You are right. To invoke the Larvae and set them upon the enemies of Rome? Or to pacify them, and so drive away ill fortune? Which is the correct course? I would guess even they did not always know. What is your guess?”
That I’m about to die, Kellen thought crazily, closed his eyes, and bit his lip to keep from crying out like the peacocks beneath him. “So Romans cherished their dead bad men?”
“And their sacrifices. And their executioners. Like all human civilizations do.”
Carefully, expecting a dagger to his ribs at any moment, Kellen eased his elbows off the stone, let one leg drop, then the other. The birds had gone silent. He stood a second, face to the stone. Then he turned.
The reedy boy was fifteen feet away, head aimed down the road as he walked slowly to his car.
“Jamie,” Kellen hissed, and Jamie skidded down the wall to land next to him.
“Ow,” she murmured, crooking her elbow to reveal an ugly red scrape.
“Jamie. Are we in trouble?”
She looked at him. He’d never seen the expression on her face before. But he recognized it instantly, and it chilled him almost as much as the reedy boy’s murmur. Contempt. He’d always been terrified she’d show him that, sooner or later. And also certain that someday she would.
Without a word, she walked down the dirt incline, holding her elbow against her chest. When she reached the car, she stuck out a forefinger and began trailing it through the dirt on the driver’s side window.
Okay, Kellen urged himself. Think. They had no phone. And who would they call? What was 911 in Italian? Maybe they could just walk fast toward the toll gate. Run out in traffic. People would honk. But they’d also see them. Nothing could happen as long as someone was looking, right?
Then he remembered the way the men who’d helped them to the shoulder had vanished. His mind veered into a skid. They all know. The whole country. An agreement they’ve come to. They knew the yellow car, the location. The birds. They knew. They left us here. Put us here. Even the guy at the gas station, just what had he poured in the tank to suppo
sedly save them?
Peacock screams. A whole chorus of them, as the last light went out of the day. Kellen scrambled fast down the dirt toward the car, toward Jamie, who was crouched on the gravel now, head down and shaking back and forth on her long, tanned neck.
At the same moment, he saw both what Jamie had scrawled in the window grime and the two men by the yellow car starting toward them again. They came side by side, the reedy boy with one long-fingered hand on the stumpy one’s shoulders.
AMERICAN MORONS. That’s what she’d written.
“I love you,” Kellen blurted. She didn’t even look up.
The men from the yellow car were twenty feet away, now, ignoring the cars, the bird-screams, everything but their quarry.
Hop the wall, Kellen thought. But the idea of hiding in that neighborhood – of just setting foot in it – seemed even worse than facing down these two. Also, weirdly, like sacrilege. Like parading with camera bags and iPods and cell phones through places where people had prayed, played with, and killed each other.
This was what he was thinking, as the two Romans ambled ever nearer, when the truck loomed up, let loose a gloriously throaty, brain-clearing honk, and settled with a sigh right beside them.
“We’re saved,” he whispered, then dropped to his knees as the first and only girl he’d loved finally looked up. “Jamie, the tow truck’s here. We’re saved.”
In no time at all, the driver was out, surveying the ruined rental, shoving pieces of puffy, cold pizza into their hands. He didn’t speak English either, just gestured with emphatic Italian clarity. The cab of his truck was for him and his pizza. Jamie and Kellen could ride in their car. They climbed back in, and as the driver attached a chain and winch to the bumper, began to drag them onto the long, high bed of the truck, Kellen thought about blasting his horn, giving a chin-flick to the yellow car guys.
Except that that was ridiculous. The yellow car guys had called the tow truck. There’d never been any danger at all.
He started to laugh, put his hand on Jamie’s. She was shivering, though it was still a long way from cold. The tow truck driver chained them into place, climbed back into his cab. Only then did it occur to Kellen that now they were really trapped.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 35
