The Warlord w-1

by Jason Frost

  Not that he had anything to prove to anybody. Leo Roth had a reputation in Hollywood. You want funny, get Leo Roth. You want laughs, people clutching their sides, throwing up with laughter? Get Roth. At twenty, he'd dropped out of CCNY and sold his Datsun to raise plane fare, landed in L.A. fifteen hours after kissing his crying mother on the cheek and shaking his disappointed father's hand, and sold his first joke within the week. Phyllis Diller. Within the year he was adding jokes to troubled movie scripts, and within two years he was working on his own show. The rest, his mother liked to say, was show business history. At forty-one, still Mediterranean handsome and in good shape, a crown of black, curly hair clenched atop his tan face, only the slightest ring of flab hinting at his waist, he had been producer/writer of the highest rated show of the season.

  Until the earthquakes cancelled the season.

  Cancelled television. Cancelled Hollywood. Cancelled most of the audience. That was three months ago. Malibu was underwater, so was most of Los Angeles. So were most of their friends. Now all they had was the family: Leo, Cynthia, and their sixteen-year-old twin daughters, Cheryl and Sarah. And the damn horses.

  He'd bought the horses for his daughters, dark-haired beauties already. Both were expert riders, prancing along with as much straight-backed grace as any tight-assed skikse. During the last actors' strike, he'd sat in in his office at Universal and figured out that their riding lessons cost him eighty-three jokes a year. Not just eighty-three standup Comedy Store jokes, but eighty-three Prime Time, 40-share jokes. After that he thought of everything in terms of how many jokes it cost. Dinner: two jokes. Trip to Hawaii: thirty-five jokes. Braces: forget it, a whole new TV series.

  But that was before Richter became more important than Nielsen.

  Now the four of them were working their way toward San Bernadino to his Aunt Paula's home. He had at least a dozen relatives there and in times like these it was best to be with someone you could trust, family. Little Israel, Cynthia called it.

  "Whoa, you goddamn four-legged ape!" he hollered, yanking on the reins so sharply the horse reared to a halt too suddenly for Cynthia Roth to remember how to stop her horse. Instead of pulling the reins, she gigged her pinto's flank and he lunged forward knocking into the rump of Leo's appaloosa.

  "What the hell, Leo?" Cynthia said, struggling with the reins. "What the hell?"

  "Pull the reins, Mother," Cheryl suggested, an edge of contempt in her voice.

  "You heard her," Leo said, "pull the goddamn reins."

  "I am pulling the goddamn reins!" The pinto skittered to one side, then the other, his neck snapping to the left and right as Cynthia Roth jerked the reins back and forth, kicking, pulling, and trying to keep from sliding out of the saddle.

  Finally Sarah trotted her horse over, leaned in front of her panicking mother, grabbed the reins, and tugged firmly. The horse settled down with a snort of relief.

  "My God," Cynthia Roth said, pressing one hand against her temple. "I could have been killed."

  "Oh brother," Cheryl snickered.

  "You okay, Mom?" Sarah asked, handing the reins back.

  "Fine, dear. Fine. Thanks." She swallowed the stubborn lump in her throat and smiled bravely.

  "Where's Mr. Ed when you need him?" Leo joked, hoping to defuse his wife's fear… and anger.

  Cynthia glared angrily at him. "It's not the horse, Leo. It's you. Why'd you stop like that?"

  "I thought I saw something up ahead." He pointed through the woods.

  "Saw what? I don't see anything. What'd you see?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Something moving. I don't know."

  "Something moving?" She shook her head. "We're out in the middle of the woods, for Chrissake. Naturally something would be moving."

  "Probably a deer or something," Cheryl offered.

  "Maybe," Leo said, straining in his saddle as he studied the woods ahead. "But it didn't move like a deer. It moved kinda, you know, sneaky."

  "Oh, excuse us, Mr. Daniel Leo Crockett."

  "That's Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett."

  "Right!" Cynthia proclaimed triumphantly. "That's the kind of stuff you know. Information. Books. But what's a Reformed-Jew-turned-atheist from the Bronx know about the woods and deer, sneaky or otherwise?"

  "No need to take any chances,"' Sarah suggested. "If Dad thinks he saw something, we can double back and sweep around this place. Better safe than sorry."

  "Better safe than sorry," Cheryl mocked.

  "Knock it off," Sarah said to Cheryl.

  "Knock this off," Cheryl snapped back, flipping her middle finger.

  "Shut up, both of you!" Leo said, his eyes still intent on the woods ahead. It was his responsibility to provide for his family, his job to protect them. He'd done all right so far, saving the horses after the last quake, hiding them out in the Laurel Canyon home of his agent, who'd been killed in the first quake, the one they called Atlas. But this was different. This was trees and animals and fucking Nature. Cement he understood; moss was a mystery.

  "I don't like it, Leo," Cynthia said. "I don't like riding through the woods like this. Why couldn't we just take the freeway to San Bernadino? God knows there aren't any cars there."

  "We've already discussed why. The highways are unsafe. How many stories have we heard in the past couple months about bandits killing and robbing travelers? We've got to stay off the beaten track. Avoid people."

  "What do we do, Leo?" Her voice was contrite now, frightened. That other part of her, the whining, nagging part, only came out when she was scared. It was how her mother acted all the time, and she hated it as much as he did. Basically she was a good woman, a loving wife, a doting mother, and she was the best lay of any Jewish American Princess he'd ever gone out with. And he'd be lost without her.

  "Okay," Leo said. "We go on. It's gonna be dark soon and I'd like to chew up a few more miles before we make camp. Let's go." He waved his hand the way Ward Bond used to in that old series, Wagon Train. "Wagons ho-oh!" Ward used to say, and for a moment Leo was back on University Avenue in the Bronx, his legs tucked under him, his algebra book open, the TV glaring like a window out into space. He felt a tear drip down his cheek and quickly brushed it away.

  They rode single file, weaving around thick trees that Leo tried to name, but couldn't. He felt an anxious ticking in his stomach, tried to ignore it. Couldn't. He took a deep breath. The smell of charred wood was heavy in the air, not from any recent fire, but from the great fires that ravaged just about every town, city, and hillside after the last quake. The fires burned for weeks, day and night, the air constantly filled with smoke and a charcoal taste always on your tongue, at the back of your throat. With few fire engines available and many of the access roads unpassable, the fires burned until they ran out of fuel or just tired out. And whatever hadn't burned smelled as if it had. That tangy, bitter odor still clung to everything, stinging the nostrils with each breath.

  And the sky. Since the quakes it was always a kind of hazy yellow-orange. Except at night, when it turned pinkish-gray. Pretty, but spooky.

  Leo stared at every leaf, every twig as they rode by, searching the dense woods for any sign of what it had been that moved. A bear, maybe. Or a cougar. Did they have cougars in the woods?

  He reached back into his saddlebags and removed the slingshot. It was a store-bought kind that fit over his wrist and fired metal ball bearings. He dropped a handful of the ball bearings into his shirt pocket.

  "What's that for?" Cynthia asked.

  "Nothing. In case I see a rabbit or something. I thought some fresh meat might be a nice change."

  "Ha, David the Comedian versus Goliath the Bunny," she teased and they all laughed.

  "Who's going to clean it?" Cheryl asked, appalled.

  "We will," Cynthia said. "If your father can figure out how to actually hit something with that thing, the least we can do is figure out how to cook it."

  "You can do it, Dad," Sarah said.

  "You bet he can,"
Cynthia said.

  Actually, Leo was a pretty fair shot, having practiced with the girls on tin cans in the backyard. Still, that was different than a moving target, and a living one to boot.

  Cynthia was discussing ways to prepare rabbit when Leo thought he heard something rustle ahead.

  "Hear that?" he asked.

  "Hear what?" Cheryl said.

  "Nope," Sarah said.

  Cynthia was excited. "A rabbit?"

  "I don't know." Leo frowned, bit his lower lip. "You guys wait here. I'm gonna check it out."

  No one argued.

  Leo squeezed the slingshot handle and rode forward. Alone.

  Dirk Fallows snapped his fingers twice.

  A young man in blood-splattered fatigues ran over, slapped a pair of binoculars in Fallows' open hand, and retreated back to the fire pit to finish skinning the damn dog. He was the only one besides Colonel Fallows who wasn't down the hill hidden in the woods, though he'd have given anything to be crouching behind a tree with the others where all the action was about to take place. Anything other than doing this crummy job which they gave him because he was the youngest one there. Personally, eating dog made him nauseous, and once or twice he'd even sneaked off to the woods after they'd feasted on one to throw up. But Colonel Fallows had gotten a taste for them while in Nam and would as soon eat a German Shepherd as a rabbit or deer. And it wouldn't do to argue with the colonel. Not unless you wanted to end up worse off than the dog.

  "Very nice," Fallows grinned, as he peered through the binoculars at the scene below. The man was riding ahead, his head cautiously panning the woods. Searching. The three women sat on their horses and waited. Excellent. It had been close, they'd almost lost them. Someone had fucked up and made a noise that spooked them. They'd hesitated. If they'd turned back then, well, that would have been that. They'd have gotten away. But they didn't. And soon his men would do what they were trained to do. Simple as a stone sinks in water. And as inevitable.

  Fallows swept the woods with his binoculars, but saw none of his men. No rustle of leaves, no twitching branches. His thick lips stretched into a huge grin and square white teeth bloomed into view. Well done, Cruz, he nodded. Cruz was turning out to be a better leader than Fallows had anticipated. The men were deathly afraid of Cruz, sometimes even more than they were of Fallows. Certainly he'd given them occasion to be once or twice. Even Fallows was respectful of Cruz to some extent, but then only he knew about Cruz's past.

  They'd met in an Army stockade two months after Fallows was sentenced. Cruz worked in the library, filing books that he never read because he couldn't read. He got the job because he was the tallest man in prison, maybe the tallest man in the Army and could reach the high shelves without a ladder. He had to be almost seven feet, even in that hunched bearlike walk of his. Fallows had asked him once how he got past the Army's 6'8" height restriction and Cruz had answered coldly, "I lied about my size." Fallows had let it drop.

  Because Fallows was using the library's law books to mount his own legal appeals, he had a lot of contact with Cruz, who never offered a single word unless he had to, as if every word he spoke cost him money. A grunt or a shrug was the most you could expect from the man. And nobody pushed it because Cruz was not only tall, he was the most powerful man in the stockade. He lifted weights with awesome regularity, his muscles swelling and bulging under his clothes like hidden animals. Once Fallows had seen him working out in the yard doing arm curls with a 250-pound barbell. Cruz had been naked to his waist, his dark skin slicked with sweat like rain-soaked macadam. His chest was gigantic, quilted with solid muscles like layers of rock on a mountainside, all funneling down to a trim waist of maybe twenty-nine inches of corrugated steel. With each curl of the arm, muscles popped or stretched, thick drops of sweat plopped into the dirt. But the face remained serene, distant, the eyes thin slits covering shiny black marbles. It was as if Cruz had slipped out of his body, was wandering about somewhere else while his muscles worked on themselves. It was unnerving to everyone else, especially the guards, who did their best not to offend or annoy Cruz. The rest of the inmates just avoided him as much as possible. Only Fallows found him intriguing.

  It took some digging and paying some bribes, but finally Fallows managed to get a photocopy of Cruz's case history. It was worth every cent.

  His full name was Indigo Cruz, though no one called him anything but Cruz. His mother was a Yucatan Indian come to the United States after a flood had destroyed her village and killed her parents. She had managed to bargain her way across the border by dropping to her knees among the Rio Grande brush and allowing two border guards to relieve themselves in her mouth. Her knees had scraped on rough pebbles and rocks as they'd taken turns pumping their hips against her face, jerking in spasms as each clutched her long, black hair in clenched fists, finally shooting their semen into her mouth, across her tongue, down her throat. Not allowing her to rise until she swallowed and licked each clean like a pet cat. Laughing, they left her kneeling there, good for their promise at least, her knees imbedded with sharp gravel, skin shredded and bleeding. She kept the scars on her knees for the rest of her life.

  She was thirteen.

  Within two weeks, she became a maid in a San Antonio motel that catered to afternoon traffic from nearby office buildings. Mostly husbands and wives, though not each other's. One Wednesday she was changing the soiled sheets in Room 216 when the man in 217 came over. His jacket was off and his tie loosened. He had a huge, jowly face with a splotchy red nose blistered with fiery capillaries. Even Maria Cruz recognized the signs of an alcoholic, having seen many such men in her own village. Her own father had begun to show similar signs.

  "Yes, sir?" she'd asked, trying hard to pronounce each word properly. It was important to her to learn perfect English as soon as possible. Become a U.S. citizen. Its best citizen, she hoped.

  "What time is it?" the man barked, his words slightly slurred. "The fucking clock in my room is broke."

  Maria Cruz glanced over at the cheap radio/alarm built into the bedside stand. The laminated wood around the edges was chipped and scratched where someone had tried to pry it out of the table. "Eet sayas 1:20," she said, inwardly delighted at how much like an American she was already sounding.

  The man laughed, a thick, cruel laugh. "It don't say shit, gal. Ya gotta read it." And he laughed again, holding himself up against her laundry cart.

  Maria didn't understand the joke, but smiled anyway.

  The man stopped laughing abruptly. "Fucking twenty goddamn minutes after fucking one." He looked out over the ledge of the balcony, peering left and right. The railing sagged under his weight. "My lunch hour's almost over and that cunt still ain't showed up yet. My boss'll chew my ass like a dog with a rag if I'm not back in the fucking office on time again. Fucking cunt and her fucking excuses."

  Maria didn't understand everything the big man was saying so she just smiled and continued changing the bed. The couple who'd rented the room had only checked out fifteen minutes ago and the sheets were still wet. Maria stripped the bed with a couple of practiced motions, then checked the pillowcases. If they had lipstick or anything that could be seen on them, she changed them. But if not, her orders were to leave them. One pillowcase had a smudge of black eyeliner so she changed it. The other was clean.

  "You women are all alike," he drawled, scowling at Maria. "Nothing but slimy holes on two legs. You know why women have cunts? Huh, do ya?"

  Maria bustled the sheets into a ball in her arms. "Excuse, please," she smiled, heading toward the door and her laundry cart.

  "I'll tell ya why. 'Cuz if they didn't, there'd be a bounty on 'em." He guffawed, slapped the laundry cart with a huge, meaty hand, jarring a couple rolls of toilet paper loose. One tumbled off the edge of the balcony.

  "Ex-cuse, please," Marie said again, squeezing by him through the door. She flopped the dirty sheets into the bottom of the cart, then started off after the toilet paper. But a hand grabbed at her, snagged the ba
ck of her bra through her uniform, tugged her backwards.

  She spun away from him, her face red with anger, but her voice quiet and measured. "Must work, sir. Many rooms to finish."

  "Hell, girl, I'll pay ya for your trouble." He reached into his pants, fumbled drunkenly for his wallet. "Shit, I come here to fuck and I intend to do just that. Here's five bucks. Buys a shitload of refried beans." He held out a crumpled five dollar bill.

  Maria's nostrils flared, but she said nothing. Instead she turned around and began marching for the stairs to retrieve the toilet paper. Again, the hand grabbed at her uniform, held her bra, and jerked her backwards off her feet. Her breasts, slightly large for her age, were flattened painfully, the rough material scratching her nipples.

  "I ain't asking, honey," he growled, and wrapped his thick hand around her mouth. She tasted nicotine on his sweaty fingers. Panic sizzled along her skin and she felt vomit bubbling up in her throat as she struggled against his powerful grip.

  Quickly he dragged her into the room she'd been cleaning, slammed the door shut, and slipped the chain into place, all the time holding the kicking girl under his left arm. When the door was secure, he tossed her easily across the room onto the bed. "Strip!" he said.

  "Please, sir," she sobbed. "No, please."

  "Strip or I'll do it for ya." He was already unbuttoning his shirt.