“Everyone gets one chance to learn there’s no escape,” she said.
“What happens after the second try?” Tristan said.
“His Majesty’s mercy takes a vacation.”
Winslowe locked the door behind her. The bedroom had no books, no stereo, nothing to divert Tristan. Her ribs were still too sore for full kung fu practice, so she drilled her forms instead.
Yvette didn’t return for another two hours. Without a word, she began folding her laundry, eyes intent on the lavender-scented linen.
“Why would you yell?” Tristan said.
“They’d beat me if I didn’t.”
“Just give me a one minute head start.”
“You shouldn’t try to flee from the man who safeguards your well-being,” Yvette murmured.
“You don’t really believe that.”
“That he wants to keep us healthy and safe? Why does he feed us? Clothe us? Guard us from raiders?”
“As a cheap source of docile labor?”
Yvette gave her a side-eyed glance, then flicked her fingertips at the world beyond their room. “And survival out there is so simple and carefree.”
“Right now?” Tristan said. “It’s easy enough. There’s enough food left in the houses to keep all the survivors alive for years. I’d rather feed myself through robbery than prostitution.”
Yvette smoothed a camisole and threaded its straps through a hooked hanger. “He’s gentler than you’d think.”
Tristan watched her fold another strapped shirt. “You want to be one of them, don’t you? That’s why you yell.”
Yvette pursed her lips and turned to her socks. “You’d rather scrub dishes and mop floors ten hours a day?”
“I’d rather hop that fence.”
“Please don’t. I don’t want to yell again. Our lives could be worse, Tristan.”
Tristan let her have the last word. Less than a year ago, Yvette’s capitulation would have outraged her, filled her with a hapless fury and the irresistible urge to lecture her about the dangers of accepting the assumptions of a patriarchal hierarchy designed to keep everyone with a vagina underpaid, undervalued, and permanently available for uncompensated childcare. Not that she would have used all those terms, exactly, but neither had she considered her position the slightest bit extreme. As if wanting more than 15% of the seats in Congress or equal pay for the same job was so “radical.”
But that had been the Tristan of another world. She no longer had the time or energy to convert this woman. Not if she wanted to escape and find Alden. There was a bitter edge to her mindset, too. Yvette wanted to serve up her body in exchange for meals and a roof? Then that was what she deserved.
Escape, however, proved quite impossible. Tristan was locked up all night. All day, Yvette followed her like a judging shadow—while they worked, while they ate, even while she went to the bathroom. The young women and boys in the upstairs bedrooms hardly gave Tristan a second look, but Yvette’s eyes never left her.
Neither did those of a twenty-something man who acted as squire to the knights, which meant, given their propensity to hang around the pool table drinking canned beer, that the young man spent as much time in the clubhouse-palace as he did out tending to the horses. When he was inside, he waited at the lounge wall, one eye on the knights in case they wanted another Bud, while his other eye followed Tristan on her duties. He had a lined jaw and active eyes that seemed to carry as many answers as questions. After enduring three days of his wordless gazing, Tristan finished vacuuming, coiled up the cord, and walked right up to him at the wall.
“What?” she said.
The young man smiled. “Just watching you move.”
“That’s creepy.”
His eyebrows shot up. “No, not creepy-watching. I’m trying to see if I can believe you beat down those two guards.”
Tristan shrugged. “All they had were guns.”
“So it’s true?”
“All housemaids know kung fu. Guild by-law.”
He laughed, corners of his eyes crinkling. “My name’s Colin, and I like you.”
She stared at him levelly. “Let me know when that will do me any good.”
“That depends on what you want,” he grinned.
She glanced at the knights. One leaned over the pool table, cue plunging forward and back as he sized up his shot. Another sat on a leather loveseat, one arm wrapped around the waist of the woman seated in his lap, the other hand moving rhythmically beneath her dress. Tristan hadn’t yet figured out which of the harem were off-limits and which were literally up for grabs. This was how Dashing sustained the knights’ loyalty, she supposed. The woman’s gaze was a million miles away.
“To find my brother,” Tristan said lowly.
“That’s why you came here?” Colin said.
“I heard His Majesty had boys who looked like him. Even if my brother weren’t here, Dashing might have had an idea where to find him.”
“What’s he look like?”
Tristan described Alden, named him, mentioned the circumstances of their capture. “Why? You know a lot of teenage boys?”
“The universe is a mysterious place,” Colin said. “You never know when it will burp up what you want.”
She frowned at him. Yvette stared at her from across the room. Tristan rejoined her, accepting a thick-bristled brush to swab out the fireplace with.
Days disappeared into the past. She rose before dawn to clean the kitchen while the angry old woman who ran it cooked homegrown vegetables and mixed them in with canned goods. After she and Yvette brought the meals to the women upstairs, they returned downstairs with the harem’s dirty sheets and washed them in big plastic garbage bins—the clubhouse had power, but no running water. Afternoons they spent cleaning the palace, dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming each room on a weekly cycle.
After dinner, they were locked in their room, which was placed on the second floor of the clubhouse. Windowless. An old storage closet or something. It locked with a key; the screws on the lock plate were on the outside of the door.
Two weeks into Tristan’s confinement, Lady Winslowe entered with two guards. Yvette looked down at her stitching. Winslowe went straight for Tristan. “Stand.”
Tristan uncoiled slowly. One guard kept a pistol trained on her while the other hauled her mattress from the box spring. Tristan’s heart raced with angry despair. The guard handed her shiv to Winslowe, who examined the sharpened plastic comb with open disgust.
“What was this for?” the woman said.
“Flossing,” Tristan said.
“With a blade?”
She lifted her lip, revealing the two-tooth gap on the left side of her mouth. “I get whole pigs stuck in here sometimes. Have to stab them till they wriggle out.”
Winslowe gazed down on her with the air of a husband who’s caught his wife’s new dog shitting on the rug. “Or perhaps you fancied a room to yourself.”
She departed with the guards. Yvette threaded another cross through her pattern. “Is that true?”
“That you sold me out?” Tristan said. “Most definitely.”
“That you planned to stab me.”
“Why would anyone want to stab a sweet young thing like you?”
Yvette glared up from her fabric. “Because they want to run off. In silence. Bought with a knife.”
“It wasn’t much of a knife.” Tristan lugged her mattress back into place. “I was going to have to work pretty hard to get your head off.”
Yvette’s mouth dropped open. “You’re a monster.”
“I wasn’t really going to cut off your head. It would take too long. All you need is a line across the throat.”
“A king doesn’t let monsters walk free through his castle. See what you get.”
Tristan went still. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see. You’ll see what you get.”
She did, and very soon. Winslowe returned with a set of prison-issue leg bracelets. The
guards held Tristan down while the Lady Winslowe clamped the chains around her ankles. At full extension of the chain, Tristan almost but couldn’t quite take a full step. Running was out of the question. Each step jerked just short of what she was used to. She could have throttled Yvette. Beaten her as the man in Flagstaff had beaten Tristan. Winslowe left the cuffs on her at all times. Even when Tristan complained that she needed to change her jeans, Winslowe simply had one of the knights cut them right from her legs, along with her underwear. Tristan crouched in a corner, envisioning how she would break their arms with thrusts of her palms, collapse their throats with chops from her hand’s edge, burst their eyes with flicks of her fingers.
Winslowe clicked back out into the lobby and tossed a dingy cotton dress in her face. “That should come off and on easily enough.”
The knight who’d cut off her jeans grinned. “Want me to give that a test?”
“Oh, Vincent. Don’t you have enough toys upstairs?”
“They’re getting worn out,” he pouted.
“Women don’t get ‘worn out,’“ Winslowe said without a hint of humor. “Though I’ve known some men to grow soft with age.”
The man went red. The other knights laughed. Tristan returned to her mop, chains scraping the marble floor.
Colin watched from across the room. He’d seen the whole thing, of course. When she went to clean the lounge, he detached from the wall, keeping his eyes on the knights in case they had some urge or desire for him to quench.
“I heard they found a shiv in your room,” he said.
Tristan rubbed at a stubborn smear on the otherwise shining tile. “You hear a lot.”
“Question is, do I hear right?”
“They didn’t chain me up for washing whites with colors.”
He chuckled, rubbing his stubble. “Why exactly does a chambermaid need a shiv?”
“Roommate troubles.”
He met her eyes. “For real?”
She snorted. “Do you intend to stick around here forever, Colin? I’m a little more ambitious.”
“Oh, I’m not so content with my lot in life, either. Or hadn’t you noticed I have a shadow, too?”
Tristan frowned. He nodded across the room. Another young man sat on a bar stool reading an old copy of National Geographic. She’d seen him before, and always around Colin, come to think of it, but hadn’t put two and two together.
“Last question,” Colin said. He leaned close enough for her to smell his Irish Spring. “Would you have done it?”
She stared into his sky-blue eyes. “Nothing will stop me from finding my brother.”
He nodded, smiled at his shadow seated across the room, and turned away. A moment later, a knight demanded another “ale,” and Colin disappeared into the kitchen, smile still seated on his lips.
She watched him go, allowing herself to hope, however guardedly, that he had something up his sleeves beside arms as leanly muscled as her own. A week later, and her hopes were as dead as the yellow corn stalks the peasants continued to clear from the golf course in preparation for the spring planting. Rains swept in from the sea. The temperature plunged to the high forties. Without warning, King Dashing ordered a party for the next day. Tristan’s heart sank—had she grown so inured to the passage of time?—but when she consulted a calendar, she discovered Christmas was still a week away.
She and Yvette were conscripted to pluck chickens and prepare the dining hall for feasting. The old woman swore over pots of boiling stock, back door open to suck out the steam. Tristan lingered there, watching the sea, then returned to the hall to scrub down the walls. By the time they finished stringing bunting and whomping out the royal carpets, she was too exhausted to even think about slitting Yvette’s throat.
The feast was scheduled for mid-afternoon. Tristan hauled folding chairs from a shed out to the patio, grass snarling her chains. Lady Winslowe demanded row after row of seating, concentric half-circles facing a wooden throne erected by the knights, who had been forbidden from drinking until completing their task.
“Just how many people does Dashing expect to show?” Tristan said. “What’s he announcing, the resurrection of the NFL?”
Yvette wrestled another chair into place. “His Majesty has invited the peasants.”
“I didn’t think they were allowed within smelling-distance of the palace.”
The atmosphere of pregnant excitement swelled through the morning. At noon, the knights broke out coolers of Budweiser and set up a ping pong table with Jose Cuervo and salt and limes. Ragged clouds streamed in from the sea. The humidity staved off the worst of the cold, but Tristan had left her coat in her room. Going back would mean convincing Yvette to come with her, trudging up the stairs in her chains. Instead, Tristan worked harder, keeping her blood flowing.
Shortly before two o’clock, a man in a pheasant-feathered cap walked to the throne and faced the palace of the clubhouse, a trumpet glinting in the thin sunlight. He piped a three-note blast, the final note dying in a blatter of spittle. Peasants filtered in from the fields, faces scrubbed and suspicious. The knights continued to joke, drink tequila, and ignore everyone else in sight. Even the harem was let outside, dressed modestly in sweatpants and jackets; some went to sit up front and take shots with the knights, while others sat alone in the back rows and pulled their jackets around their shoulders.
“Citizens of the Kingdom of Better San Diego!” the trumpeter hollered from before the throne. “Be seated, one and all!”
Tristan sat at the edge of one of the back rows. Yvette sidled past her and took the next seat.
“Now rise for your king!” the herald said. Tristan rolled her eyes and stood, chains scraping. The crowd craned their necks toward the palace doors. Dashing emerged onto the patio, a knowing smile embedded in his face. He strode down the strip of AstroTurf carpet and took the throne.
“So kind of you all to come.” He smiled at himself, eyes glittering from within the dark circles surrounding them. “Yesterday, a messenger came to me with a little bit of news. I’ve spent the last day deciding how to break it to my loyal subjects. With the pomp and drama it deserves? Teasing you, one hint at a time, bringing you closer and closer to understanding until you’re screaming for me to finish?”
King Dashing smiled again, absorbing the laughter of the knights. “But sometimes you’ve got something so big you just can’t hold back. So here it comes, people. We took down the fucking aliens.”
His words struck the crowd into total silence. A moment later, they rose and roared. Caps flew into the air, feathers flapping. Knights grabbed harem-girls and swept them into deep kisses. Colin caught Tristan’s eye and grinned.
“We knocked their mothership right into the sea,” Dashing said once the crowd quieted enough to hear him. “It’s sticking out of Santa Monica Bay. Smashed. Wrecked. The bodies of those monsters tumbling in the breakers. We got the bastards. Earth is free.”
They cheered again, voices climbing so high they thundered in Tristan’s chest. She remained cold. Since her escape from the camp, the aliens had been a peripheral concern. A link to Alden, little more. Now that the invaders’ power was broken, what would they do with their remaining prisoners? Execute them, flee into the remote corners of the world, isolate themselves from humanity? That’s what she would do. Their efforts to finish humanity with a second plague had failed. It was time to cut their losses.
And she was trapped by madmen.
The knights passed out beers. Someone switched on a stereo, blasting Snoop Dogg and Deadmau5 and Boston. Tristan tried to go inside, but Yvette, wanting to dance, complained to Winslowe, who reminded them the celebration was to be enjoyed by all. She ordered the knights to chain Tristan to a post while the others drank and danced.
Cleanup took two days. There was trash to rake. Chairs to fold up. Great chunks of turf to reseed. Post-alien life at the country club went on with little difference besides a few more visitors from the roads and more numerous sojourns of the knight
s into the surrounding lands. Tristan scrubbed sheets and floors and plates. She grew used to the gait required by her chains, which were never removed, even when she bathed. Yvette stuck to her as closely as the shackles.
Dashing seemed content to screw his harem and boss around the peasants, who cleared the old cornstalks from the golf course and seeded it with new kernels. A clean slate, all the world’s resources at his disposal, and this was what Dashing chose to do with it. Construct a pleasure-pen, laws enforced by half-drunk men with horses and guns. Keep some servants in chains and others imprisoned through simple fear. This was how it would always be, wasn’t it? Even if Dashing had the vision, splitting the spoils of the land equally among his free people, it would collapse as soon as he died—or, more likely, was assassinated. All it took was one selfish or venal or mad leader to rot the whole fruit from the inside. This rot was inevitable. Unstoppable. Every bit of good would someday be undone. It didn’t matter if King Dashing would rather lead a life of easy leisure than struggle to shoulder a better way. Even if he built a city on the hill, it would only die like everything else.
Tristan began to consider suicide.
Colin came to her while she was hanging wash from the lines. Yvette had gone back for more water, trusting Tristan’s chains to keep her in place. It was February, but no one had told the weather; hot sunlight poured from the sky, slicking Tristan’s bare shoulders with sweat.
“How’s life?” he said. “Everything you would have wanted?”
“I’ve been having a tough time lately,” Tristan said. “Should I hang myself? Or kill Dashing first, and let the knights end it for me?”
Colin laughed, then covered his mouth, blue eyes gone wide. “You’re serious.”
“I’m a slave, Colin.”
“Well, that answers my question.”
She could barely bother to ask. “Which is?”
“Do you want to leave?”
She raised her knee, jangling her chains. “Turns out my wants aren’t as strong as steel.”
Colin nodded, rubbing his stubble. “Well, if you ever want out of those, just let me know. I know where the key is. Oh, and one more thing.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 133