Survival

by Ed Gorman

  There was a block of two-story brick buildings. On the roofs you could see warriors with powerful binoculars and even more powerful auto-shotguns. I imagined, if I looked hard enough, I'd also find some grenade launchers.

  Six black men raised their shotguns. "God," Polly said, "are they just going to shoot us down?"

  "Hopefully, one of them will recognize the mobile' here and realize it's me."

  "Yeah," she said anxiously, "hopefully."

  I circled the roofs one more time and in the middle of the circle the shotguns lowered and two of the men started waving at us. Somebody had radio'd headquarters and described our skymobile and headquarters had okayed us.

  "Feel better?" I said.

  "Sorry I was such a candy ass. I was just scared there for a minute."

  "So was I."

  Hoolihan is a black man.

  I know, I know-his name is Irish; as is his pug nose, his freckled and light-skinned face; his reddish curly hair; and his startling blue eyes. But he's Negro-which you can tell, somehow, when you see him.

  Hoolihan, by my estimation, has personally killed more than two thousand people. I reach this conclusion by simple mathematics:

  365 X 6= 2190

  He's been the warlord of East Zone I for the past six years. I figure, probably conservatively, that he's killed one person each day. As I say, simple math.

  This day Hoolihan sent his own personal vehicle for us, an ancient Army jeep painted camel-shit green with a big red H stenciled on the back panel. He uses the H the way cattle barons used to use their brands.

  Hoolihan lives in a rambling two-story red brick house. Easy enough to imagine a couple of Saabs in the drive, a game of badminton going on in the backyard, steaks smelling wonderful on the outdoor grill. Suburban bliss. The effect is spoiled somewhat, however, by the cyclone fencing, the barely controllable

  Dobermans, and the armed guards in faded Army khaki.

  In case none of that deters you, there's one other surprise: a front door that detonates a tiny bomb just big enough to render the visitor into several chunks if he doesn't know the password.

  The guard knew the password. "Your Mama," he said.

  Hoolihan had a nasty sense of humor.

  The door was buzzed open and we walked in.

  What Hoolihan's done with the interior of his house is pretty amazing. He's turned it into a time travel exhibit: the world as it was before the Christers got hold of it. Sore sad eyes can gaze at length upon parquet floors and comfortable couches sewn in rich rose damask and Victorian antiques and prints by Chagall and Vermeer; and sore sad ears, long accustomed to the cries of the dying, can be solaced with the strains of Debussy and Vivaldi and Bach.

  Hoolihan, whatever else he is, is no fool.

  He made us wait five minutes.

  He enjoys being fashionably late.

  He also enjoys looking like a stage fop in a Restoration comedy. Today he swept in wearing a paisley dressing gown, and his usual icy smirk. Oh, yes, and the black eye patch. Dramatic as hell until you realize that it keeps shifting eyes. Some days it's on his right eye and some days . . ."

  "Nice," he said, referring to Polly. "I don't suppose she's for sale."

  "I don't suppose she is," Polly said.

  "Too bad. I know people who'd pay a lot of money for you."

  That was another thing about Hoolihan. He had a sophomore's need to shock.

  "Martini?" he said.

  "Beer would be fine," I said.

  "The lady?"

  "Beer," she said.

  He nodded to a white-haired man in some sort of African ceremonial robe. The man went into the next room.

  "We found a supermarket that had been contaminated so long people gave up on it," Hoolihan said. "I sent some men in last week. And now we have enough beer to last us for a long, long time."

  "The land of opportunity," I said.

  He said, "The palm of my hand is starting to itch."

  I had to smile. He was a melodramatic sonofabitch but he had the brains to kid himself, too. "I wonder what that means," I said. "It means my right hand wants to just walk over there and grab that brief case."

  "We need to cut a deal first."

  "I take it you don't want drugs, little girls or boys for sex, or the latest in weaponry my men took from that National Guard Armory in Cleveland last month."

  "None of the above. Why don't we just cut the bullshit and you tell me if you've got one for sale."

  The elderly man with the intelligent dark eyes returned with our beers. I've never been much for servants. I felt funny accepting it from him, as if I should apologize.

  "Please," Hoolihan said, "let's sit down and make this all very civilized. We're not making some back alley deal here."

  We sat. But I'm not sure how civilized it was. Not considering what the product happened to be.

  "I've got five on hand at the moment," he said from his throne-sized leather chair across the room from where Polly and I sat on the edge of an elegant couch.

  "We need one right away."

  "I've got them out in a shed."

  Polly muttered something nasty under her breath.

  Hoolihan smirked. He'd aggravated her and he loved it. "Don't worry, pretty one. It's a perfectly civilized shed. Clean, dry and protected not only from the elements but from Zoners. They're much better off in my shed than they would be wandering free."

  With that I couldn't argue.

  "Now how much is in that briefcase?"

  "$100,000. It's all yours as long as you don't dicker."

  "$100,000," he said. "My, my, my, my. I wish my poor old broken-down nigger daddy could see me now."

  That's the funny thing about the warlords. Even though they know that the currency is absolutely worthless, they still revel in getting it.

  Hoolihan's father had served three terms in prison for minor crimes and had never known a day's happiness or pride in his entire life. Hoolihan had told me all this one night when he'd been coasting on whiskey and drugs. And he'd broken down and cried half way through. He was bitter and angry about his father, whom he felt had never had a serious chance at leading a decent life.

  He was probably right.

  His old man would have been damned proud of his one and only son.

  One hundred thousand was now his. Didn't matter that it was worthless. It still had an echo, a resonance, money did, at least to those of us who could remember how everything used to be before the Christers went and screwed it all up.

  A tear rolled down Hoolihan's cheek. "I miss that old fucker, you know?"

  Not even Polly, who obviously didn't care much for Hoolihan, could deny him this moment. Her own eyes teared up now.

  "Let's go get her," I said, "before it gets dark."

  Kerosene torches lit the blooming gloom of dusk; a chill started creeping up my. arms and legs and back; a dog barked, lonely. You could smell and taste the autumn night, and then smell the decay of bodies that hadn't been buried properly. Even though you couldn't see them, their stench told you how many of them there were. And how close.

  The shed was a quarter mile through a sparsely wooded area that a dog-maybe the same one barking-had mined with plump squishy turds.

  Two guards in khaki stood guard in front of the small garage that Hoolihan called the shed. Hoolihan, by the way, had traded his foppish robe for an even more foppish military uniform. He had epaulets big enough to land helicopters on.

  The guards saluted when they saw Hoolihan. He saluted them, crisply, right back. "C'mon in and you can pick one," he said merrily enough, as if he were inviting us on to a used car lot.

  We went inside. He'd been telling the truth about the tidiness of the place. Newly whitewashed walls. Handsomely carpeted floor. Six neat single beds with ample sheets and blankets. At the back was a table where food was taken. The place even smelled pretty good.

  There were four of them and they sat on their beds watching us, their outsize heads tottering as th
ey gaped at us. For some reason I don't understand this sort of thing I leave to Young Doctor Pelham their necks won't properly support their heads. They were all female and they all wore little aqua-colored jumpsuits that resembled pajamas. They're mute, or most of them are anyway, but they make noises in their throat that manage to be both touching and disgusting. They were little and frail, too, pale and delicate, with tiny hands that were always reaching out for another human hand to hold.

  "Where the hell's the dark-haired one?" Hoolihan said. The guard got this awful expression on his face as his eyes quickly counted the little girls.

  Four.

  There were supposed to be five.

  "Where the hell did she go?" Hoolihan said.

  The children couldn't answer him; they couldn't talk. And the guards were no help. They'd somehow managed to let one get away.

  Hoolihan walked over to a window at the back of the garage. A small wooden box had been placed directly under it.

  Hoolihan put pressure on the base of the window. It pushed outward. It was unlocked.

  The kid had gone out the window.

  As he was turning around to face us all again, Hoolihan took a wicked-looking hand gun from his belt and shot the guards in the face.

  Nothing fancy. No big deal.

  One moment they were human beings, the next they were corpses.

  Anxiety started working through me-surprise, shock, anger, fear that he might do the same to me–and then, as I looked at the children, I felt the turmoil begin to wane.

  They stared at us.

  They said nothing.

  They started doing their jobs.

  A few moments later, the worst of the feelings all gone, we followed Hoolihan out into the dark, chilly night. "We're going to find that little bitch," Hoolihan said.

  Chapter 4

  Well, we found her all right, but it took two hours, a lot of crawling around on hands and knees in dark and tangled undergrowth, and a lot of cursing on Hoolihan's part.

  The little kid was a quarter mile away hiding in a culvert.

  When we found her, got the jostling beam of the flashlight playing across her soiled aqua jumpsuit, she was doing a most peculiar thing: petting a rat.

  This was a big rat, too, seven, eight pounds, with a pinched evil face and a pair of gleaming red eyes. He probably carried a thousand kinds of diseases and an appetite for carrion that would give a flock of crows pause. After the Fascist-Christians had their way with the world, rats became major enemies again.

  But there he sat on the little girl's lap just the way a kitten would. And the little girl's tiny white hand was stroking his back.

  There was some semblance of intelligence in the girl's eyes. That was the first thing that struck me. Usually the saucer-shaped eyes are big and blank. But she seemed to have a pretty good idea of who and what we were.

  Then Hoolihan shot the rat and the little girl went berserk.

  The rat exploded into three chunks of meat and bone and gristle, each covered with blood-soaked flesh.

  The keening sound came up in the little girl's throat and she quickly got on all fours and started crawling down the culvert as fast as she could.

  Hoolihan thought it was all great, grand farce.

  I wanted to kill him-or at least damage him in some serious way-but I knew better. He had too many men eager to kill anybody white. With Hoolihan gone, Polly and I would never get out of here.

  Polly went after the kid.

  I was still trying to forget the kid's terrible expression. They establish some kind of telepathic link with their subject, that's what the kids do, and so the relation becomes intimate beyond our understanding.· Rat and little girl had become one. So then Hoolihan goes and kills it.

  "You look pissed, man," Hoolihan said.

  "You're scum, Hoolihan."

  "Just having a little fun."

  "Right."

  "I like it when you get all judgmental and pontifical on me, Congreve. Kinda sexy, actually."

  "You knew what the little girl was doing."

  "Sure. Linking up." The smirk. "But maybe I have so much respect for her I didn't want her to link up . with some fucking rat, you ever think of that?"

  I grabbed his flashlight.

  He started at me, as if he was going to put a good hard right hand on my face, but my scowl seemed to dissuade him.

  I didn't find Polly and the girl for another fifteen minutes and I probably wouldn't have found them then if it hadn't been for the dog.

  He was some kind of alley mutt, half-boxer and half-collie if you can imagine that, and he stood on the old railroad siding barking his ass off at the lone boxcar that stood on the tracks that shone silver in the moonlight.

  I could hear her now, the kid, the mewling deep in her throat. She was still terrified of the rat exploding.

  I climbed up inside. In the darkness the old box car smelled of wood and grease and piss. A lot of people had slept in this, no doubt.

  Polly was in the comer, the kid in her lap. Polly was sort of rocking the kid back and forth and humming to her.

  I went over and sat down next to her and put my hand to the kid's cheek. It was soft and warm and sweet. And I thought of my own daughters when they were about this age, how I'd see their mother rocking them at night and humming the old lullabies they loved so much.

  I thought of this and started crying. I couldn't help it. I just sat there and felt gutted and dead.

  And then Polly said, "Why don't you take her for a little while? She's calming down. But my legs are going to sleep. I need to walk around."

  I took her. And rocked her. And sang some of the old lullabies and it was kind of funny because when my voice got just so loud, the mutt outside would join in and kind of bark along.

  Polly jumped down from the boxcar. I imagined she needed to pee, in addition to stretching her legs.

  When she came back, she stood in the open door, the night sky starry behind her, and the smell of clean fresh rushing night on the air, and said, "God, that'd make a sweet picture, Congreve, you and that little kid in your arms that way."

  And then I got mad.

  I put the kid down-I didn't hurt her but I wasn't especially gentle, either-and then I stalked to the open door and said: "No fucking way am I going to go through this again, Polly. I don't want anything to do with this kid, you understand? Not a thing."

  She knew better than to argue.

  She went back and picked up the kid.

  She came back to the open door.

  I'd jumped down and stood there waiting to lead the way back to Hoolihan. Polly was pissed. "You think you could hold the kid long enough for me to jump down?"

  "Don't start on me, Polly. You know what I went through."

  "I love it when you whine."

  "Just hand the kid down and get off my back."

  She handed the kid down.

  I took her, held her, numbed myself to her as much as possible. It wasn't going to happen again.

  Polly jumped down. ''That Hoolihan is some piece of work."

  "Dreamdust."

  "That's an excuse and you know it. He would've done that if he was straight. It's his nature."

  "Nothing like a bigot."

  "I'm not a bigot, Congreve. There're lots of white people just like him. I'm starting to think it's genetic."

  "Here's the kid."

  She didn't take her right away but put her hand on my arm. "I know how hard it is for you, Congreve, after what happened and all, with the little one here I mean."

  "I appreciate you understanding, Polly. I really don't want to go through it again."

  "I'll take care of her."

  "I appreciate it."

  "We're saving lives, Congreve. That's how you have to look at it."

  "I hope I can remember that." Now she took the kid. Cuddled her. Looked down

  at her. Started talking baby talk.

  It was sweet and I wanted to hold them both in the brisk night winds, a
nd then sleep warm next to them in a good clean bed.

  When I got Polly and the kid in the skymobile, Hoolihan said, "I heard about what you did."

  "Yeah, well, it happens."

  "You're a crazy fucker."

  "Look who's talking."

  "Yeah but I got an excuse. I'm a warlord. I got to act crazy or people won't be afraid of me."

  "I guess that's a good point."

  He nodded to the kid inside the bubble dome. "You think you'll do it again?"

  "This time I won't have anything to do with her."

  "I'd still like to buy that chick."

  "No, you wouldn't. She's too tough for you. You want somebody you can beat into submission. You couldn't beat her into submission in twenty years."

  He laughed. "She sounds like a lot of fun, man. I love a challenge."

  I got in the skymobile.

  He leaned in and looked at Polly who was completely captivated by the small child in her arms.

  "I'll see you both soon," he said, wanting to get one more shock in. "You know them little ones never last very long."

  Chapter 5

  Young Doctor Pelham and his number two Dr. Sullivan put her right to work.

  Polly gave her the name Sarah and fixed her up a nice cozy little room and then proceeded to wait on her with an almost ferocious need.

  She also dressed her differently, in jeans and sweatshirts and a pair of sneakers that Polly had dug up somewhere in the basement.

  Pelham started Sarah on the most needful ones first, which only made sense. He knew not to ever yell at her or push her-as I'd seen him do with a couple of them-but he was never tender with her, either. To Pelham, she was just another employee.

  Polly, Sarah and I started taking meals together in the staff mess on the lower level. Polly fussed with everything. Made sure Sarah's food was heated just-so. Made sure her drinking glasses were spotlessly clean. Made sure that with each meal-which was usually some variation on chili-there was at least a small piece of dessert for Sarah.

  In that respect, Sarah was a pretty typical kid. She lusted after sweets.

  But that was the only way Sarah was typical. Autism is the closest thing I can liken her condition to. She was with us in body but not in spirit. She would sit staring off at distances we couldn't see. And then she would start making a kind of sad music in her throat, apparently responding to things far beyond our ken.