Typical Eddie.
Probably trying to walk his way into a freebie at the Cat’s Paw. He’d tell her he was scouting things out, laying low. He’d probably snuck in something of value without telling her because that would be just like him. Something he could trade for five sweaty minutes between the thighs of some woman who would look at him at nothing more than a meal ticket, something to be endured so she could stay alive a little longer.
What did she care? They were through. If he wanted to bust his nut and pick up a case of herpes for his efforts, that was his business now. There hadn’t been a formal breakup, no papers signed, but they were through. They hadn’t had sex in years; he was nothing more than the annoying roommate she couldn’t get rid of. His parentage of Will hardly mattered to him so even that bond was shaky at best.
As she looked for him, she could feel herself running a system check, searching her hard drive for something acknowledging the death of her time with Eddie, other than the objective certainty of it. Grief, heartache, regret, a twinge of nostalgia for the good times gone by. Something. But there was nothing.
She didn’t know if she should feel good or badly about that. It was probably a good thing, because theirs was a world that didn’t treat kindly those who dwelled in the past. There was a lot that could crawl out of the swampy fog of the past, grab you in its clutches, pull you down, drive you mad. Much had been lost forever, things far better and more important than her relationship with Eddie and to spend too much time wandering through the muddled remnants of the past was to invite ruin. They couldn’t pretend to keep living in the old world, they couldn’t even keep living in the ghost of the old world. It was like letting go of that first love, the one that had shown you the wonder and electricity possible in the universe and the one you’d held onto for too long, long after you were the only one still holding anything.
She did a quick loop of the midway, passing all manner of vendors pushing salt, medicine, ammo, biofuel, some food. There were green onions, wilted and thin, baby lettuces, even some rhubarb, heartier crops waging valiant battle against their bizarre climate. A few booths hawking canned goods, a little salted meat. Not much though. A chill ran along the nape of Rachel’s neck. It was more than a bit frightening.
The brothel set up shop in a small trailer at the far end of the quad, about a hundred yards from the Market entrance. Rachel hated the place but couldn’t help but respect it in some twisted way. Men were stupid, still thinking with their dicks, apocalypse or not. and the place helped level the playing field a bit. They’d all done things to survive, things they never could have imagined a decade ago, but things that had to be done. The arguments that might have had a place in pre-plague America simply did not hold water anymore.
Last time she’d been here, Rachel had chatted with the proprietor of the Cat’s Paw, a smooth-talking, pale-skinned woman named Vania. She was short, her hair cut short, and she talked a million miles a minute. Each of her arms was tattooed with bullet holes, red ink spatter skirting thick black dots from elbow to wrist. She and Rachel smoked cigarettes and she explained to Rachel what was what.
“This here?” she had said, pointing between her legs. “Doesn’t mean nothing. This,” she went on, pointing to her stomach, “is what matters. They’re stupid, morons. I own them. I lie down for thirty minutes and I eat for a week. They call me bitch and slut and whore and they think I give a shit about that. They really think that matters. They’ll keep coming back until they have nothing and then they’ll die, and I’ll still be here. I’ll tell you, I ain’t in no hurry to die, I want to be an old lady. I didn’t live through all this shit to starve to death now.”
The self-assuredness of it all was what had stuck with Rachel. This woman would do what she had to do, same as Andy, same as her. Funny how priorities changed over time. Maybe the way they had lived in the past was the real lie; maybe tying that to emotion or self-worth had been the mistake in all this. You used what nature gave you, up to and including the thing that made men stupid.
A few minutes later, she had made her way to the Paw. There was no doubt he was here because Eddie was stupid and he would compromise his own safety and well-being and that of everyone around him for a quick squirt. Sometimes she wondered if men forgot they could take such matters into their own hand, literally. Then again, these were men she was talking about.
Idiots.
As she stood awkwardly near the entrance, in between it and the gambling tent next to it, because how else did one stand at the threshold of a whorehouse, she heard a harsh yell, male, followed by an explosion of shouts. Some kind of scuffle. The voices swirled together, making it impossible to understand what was being said.
She slipped around the corner, toward the main entrance, where she saw someone rushing into the crowd. A few seconds later, Eddie staggered behind him. He was bleeding from a deep laceration on his forehead and his lip was split open. At first, Rachel was so taken aback by his appearance she didn’t notice it. Only after she had a moment did she see.
The briefcase was gone.
10
“Eddie, where’s the case?”
He ignored her, pulling up the tail of his jacket and pressing it to his wound. It was bleeding heavily, flowing like a ruptured water main. Her father had taught her head wounds were the worst, home to countless capillaries buried below the thin skin; even minor cuts were messy.
She stared at him as he tended to his wound, wondering not for the first time how the man could be so stupid. She squeezed her fists tightly, hard enough that she could feel her nails digging into her palms. She wanted to scream at him, smack the ever-living piss out of him, but she couldn’t because then he would clam up and they’d waste the precious time she would need to sort out the mess he’d made.
“Eddie!”
“Guy jumped me. Fucking believe that?”
“Who?”
“I don’t know! He took off. Leave me alone!”
She swept the crowd, men and women coming and going, but the case was nowhere to be seen. Gooseflesh popped up across her body as panic set in. Just like that, it was gone. The one thing that might have been in the same galaxy of justifying the carnage out on I-80 that morning was that it would help save them, save Will, and Eddie had been stupid enough to let it get away.
She left Eddie to lick his wounds and bolted into the crowd. This kind of inattention could mean the difference between life and death now. Stupid, stupid.
The crowd kaleidoscoped around her as she made a loop through the midway, all at once becoming a swirl of faces and clothing and bags and guns, until she couldn’t tell where one person ended and another began. Sweat slicked her body, even in the chill of the late morning. Her stomach lurched, and she began dry heaving. She hadn’t eaten in more than a day, so nothing came up as her body quivered and heaved. When she was done, her stomach muscles were tight and her jaw hurt.
She began to cry, and this time she couldn’t stop the tears from falling. God, she hated to cry, but the hopelessness of it all roared up and washed over her like a rogue wave. Hopelessness on top of hopelessness. Did it even matter that they’d lost the case? So they died two weeks from now instead of two months from now. What difference did it make? Dead was dead.
But it made a lot of difference. It wasn’t just full bellies food provided. It bought probably the most important resource – more time. More time to get their shit together. More time not suffering. More time to find food. More time with Will.
She wandered the grounds of the Market fruitlessly, her hope of spotting the briefcase fading like a dying candle. There weren’t any tears left by the time she made it back their spot. Eddie sat on the ground cross-legged, smoking a cigarette. The bleeding had slowed significantly if not stopped entirely; thick red blood had caked around his eyebrow, and his lower lip had puffed up. He looked pathetic, when you got right down to it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes cutting downward, but flitting back up every second or
two, in that way of his, looking for instant forgiveness from her. He wasn’t really sorry. He just didn’t want her to be mad at him. He wanted outside confirmation for his deeply held belief that he never did anything wrong.
She wanted to yell at him, but she didn’t have the energy for it. Her shoulders ached and a headache was coming on like a hurricane nearing shore; her head was throbbing, pulsing, her brain pushing right up against her skull.
A sensation of being watched washed over her; she glanced to her left and saw Andy taking it all in. He was loving this, she bet, he loved it when others crashed and burned.
“What?” she snapped.
“Nothing,” he replied sweetly.
Rachel raked her hands across her face, through her hair, before crisscrossing her arms across her chest.
“You’re gonna have some explaining to do,” Andy said.
“Meaning what?”
“While you were all out,” he said, nodding toward Eddie, “doing whatever it was you were doing, I found who you were looking for. She wants to meet with you.”
“Not much point now, is there?”
Andy’s jaw went tight, and his typically dour visage grew even more so. His lips tightened and his eyes went blank. A chill ran through Rachel; she had never seen this side of him.
“I went to a lot of trouble setting this up,” he said. “This is not someone I mess around with. And by the transitive property, I am not someone that you mess around with.”
“What are you going to do, kill me?”
He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to the side.
“Fine,” Rachel said, sighing. “Let’s get this over with.”
“She’ll meet you at sunset.”
#
The next four hours drew out slowly, like a slow drip. A front moved in during the afternoon, bringing wind and rain and cold temperatures. People huddled together in ponchos, under umbrellas and tents, drinking bitter coffee and smoking old cigarettes as the chilly rain pelted down.
Rachel and Eddie hovered near Andy’s booth. Eddie complained about his head hurting, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it, and she didn’t care much anyway, so she said nothing. Part of her, and not a small one, reveled in his suffering. He deserved it. He brought it on himself.
The meeting dominated her thoughts.
They could be in a bad way here. People were killed over much less. She could make a break for it. Just up and haul ass out of here. Let Eddie meet with the woman, explain to her how he’d managed to lose the briefcase while getting his dick wet. She scanned the area, looking for a clear line of escape, but one that would give her cover in the event Andy went off and started shooting.
But could she really leave Eddie behind? They’d probably kill him, and she tried to feel guilty about it. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This line she feared she would someday cross, she was on its precipice every day, the front lines of a terrible civil war raging inside her soul. But could she leave him? Right now, at this moment she could.
Ask me again in thirty seconds, I might have a different answer for you.
Eddie would probably leave her, because he was that kind of person. And not because he would be thinking of Will’s welfare, but because he’d be looking out for Numero Uno.
“This cat got a name?” she asked Andy, breaking a lengthy silence.
“Priya.”
“Who is she?”
“Just somebody.”
“She must be somebody special, put a scare like that in you.”
“I’ve seen how she does business.”
Rachel pressed the index and middle finger of each hand to her temples.
“Can you cut the cloak-and-dagger bullshit and tell me who she is.”
He guffawed.
“She’s a goddamned nightmare.”
Rachel gave up.
Obviously, Andy stood to benefit from this somehow. Possibly paid off in food. Whoever she was, she wielded a certain level of clout, as Andy was more likely to tell you to kiss his ass than say boo. She worked it over in her mind as the hours drifted past, but she couldn’t think of a happy outcome to all this.
As the sun set, a buzz began building in the crowd, people ready to blow off steam after a hard day’s work. Around them, people loaded their remaining inventory into their vehicles for the night and turned their attention toward the recreational portions of the festivities. Andy sat on a chair under his tent and worked a cigar while he sipped a foul-smelling liquor. The industrial stink of the thick smoke made Rachel’s eyes water. She found cigars repellent, the way they sat nestled in the V of fat sausage fingers, the sheen of saliva on filters gnawed and chewed within an inch of their lives, the crutch of insecure men who wanted to seem anything but.
As the day’s last light faded away, Rachel felt that void growing in her belly; she and Eddie hadn’t eaten since splitting a stale protein bar earlier that morning. They had a bit of food in their pack, but they really needed to make their meager supply last.
Tomorrow, you can wait until morning to eat, but the more she repeated this mantra, the hungrier she got. Her head began to swim and her hands trembled as her blood sugar reached critical levels. Her mouth watered, her hunger so sharp her Pavlovian reaction hadn’t even needed any sort of trigger. Ten minutes, she would wait ten minutes and this wave of hunger would crest and fade. She needed to fight through it.
But ten minutes came and went and instinct kicked in, focusing on a can of black beans in her pack. All her thoughts zeroed in on quelling the beast in her belly, on shutting it right the hell up. She opened her pack, ran her fingers on the can, heavy and feeling just right. Her will broke. She pulled the pop tab, the smell of the beans tickling her nose. There was no spoon, so she ate with her hands, not caring one whit or whittle about etiquette or how she looked. Even cold, the beans were a revelation, the feeling of the beans breaking down under her teeth, the sensation of her belly filling orgasmic, better than that because sex had never felt this good.
When she was done, a small part of her regretted it because she could be dead by the end of the night and the food would have been wasted. But the rest of her made excuses, about needing to be on her game for this impending meeting, about needing strength, about playing the long game. This meeting was something new, and anything new was a risk, anything out of the ordinary was dangerous. Life was dangerous enough; these kinds of encounters distilled them into a concentrated broth of peril.
The evening progressed, but there was no sign of Priya. Rachel looked up and down the midway, looking for someone to pop out, for some sign their wait was coming to an end. She paced, she chewed her nails. Her stomach roiled; maybe the beans had been a bad idea. The meeting consumed her, the way things often did. When she became focused on something, it was at the expense of everything else. She had never understood people who could bury themselves in work or Netflix or gardening to keep their minds at ease. It didn’t make your problems go away. The problem going away made it go away.
“Christ, sit down, you’re making me nervous now,” Andy said, his words running together a bit.
He’d been hitting the sauce pretty hard, which only served to make Rachel even more nervous. He was scared and he didn’t have anything to be scared of.
“Good luck getting her to do that,” Eddie called out.
“Shut up, both of you,” Rachel replied, her attention zeroing in on two men approaching the tent. They wore jeans and black leather jackets. One was black, about her age, the other white and quite a bit older. Andy was out of his chair before the men reached the tent, his hands clasped together at his waist. Rachel had never seen him take such a submissive pose.
“This her?” asked the younger man.
Andy nodded.
He curled two fingers toward her.
“Let’s go.”
She looked at Andy, who simply shrugged his shoulders.
“Where?”
“Now.”
Eddie
slowly rose to his feet, sighing as he did so. Jesus, she wanted to punch him. He was going to be a pain in the ass about this, not out of any sense of rebellion, but because he was being put out. Her jaw clenched.
“Eddie, now,” she hissed.
“Fine, I’m coming, I’m coming.”
“Let’s have the weapons,” the older man said.
She looked to Andy once more, for what she didn’t know, perhaps a sign of encouragement, but he gave her nothing but a blank, stony stare. She handed over the M4, and Eddie relinquished his Glock pistol.
Perhaps sensing her discomfort, the man added: “You’ll probably get them back.”
Rachel and Eddie followed the men down the midway to the Cat’s Paw, where the bouncer admitted them without comment. She had never been inside before. The muffled sounds of whispered conversation and desperate exertion filled the air. It was dim but not dark. The interior smelled faintly of bleach and sweat, not particularly pleasant but not offensive. She followed the men to a small room in the back.
“Please sit,” a pleasant female voice said as they entered the room.
The men guided Rachel and Eddie to a pair of chairs.
“Are they clean?” she asked.
The men held up their confiscated weapons.
“Good,” the woman said.
They sat in silence. Rachel concentrated on her breathing, on keeping her heart rate steady. Footsteps on the tile floor. Then a woman sat down in a third chair.
“Let’s have a chat, shall we?” the woman said, lighting up a lantern.
An Indian woman’s face appeared in the soft glow of the lantern. She appeared to be in her thirties, thin and strikingly beautiful. She was quite tall, taller even than her two male companions. She wore jeans and a heavy coat. Rachel was struck by how put together the woman was, like she was headed out for an evening of cocktails with friends.
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