Crazy old bat, she thought.
But he did look unfinished.
And of course she knew just what he needed.
What we both need, Willa.
“Do you really think…”
Pm absolutely sure.
“I don’t know, I…”
How you gonna know ’less you explore the potentials?
“Well,” she said hesitantly. “Maybe just once.”
More would be unsalubrious, said the Black Clay Boy.
She came to her feet effortlessly, as if the idea was a power, and she went rummaging through the kitchen drawer until she found the perfect accessory, long and sharp and silver. She wedged the handle into the crotch of the Black Clay Boy, jammed it in, and tried to wiggle it…It held firm. She’d always hated the bottomland for the hold it exerted, but now she was grateful for this quality.
God! She felt twenty-two again, all heart and hip, all nudge softness and clever muscle.
She picked up the Black Clay Boy, held him at arm’s length, and went whirling into the living room, each whirl bringing her hot thoughts closer to a boil. Oh, she was mad, mad as the pattern on the wallpaper, mad as the wind shaping her name from the eaves, saying Willa, Willa, Willa, with each and every spin, mad and whirling among the dark armoires and the huge iron-colored sideboard and the Victorian mahoganies. The shadows watched her, and the furniture was leaning together, gossiping, and in the folds of the drapes were cores of indigo that she recognized to be the cores of ghosts waiting to live their wispy lives once she had done.
“Won’t be a minute,” she told them gaily, and went whirling into the bedroom where the Black Clay Boy would have her once and silent, where love would once more be red and biting. She lifted him high. His silvery member was God’s measure of a man, flashing with moonlight, tipped with pure charge…and the measure, too, of Eden’s curse. She knew that clear, now. Knew that Eden’s bones and dry flesh and even drier spirit infused this little devil she held in her hands. She could smell his meager scent of talcum powder and stale sweat, could sense his spirit hovering inside this loamy shell, and she knew she could expect only an Eden’s worth of pleasure from his embrace, but that was so much more than she had for years, well…She not fell but floated down onto the bed, sinking into its bridal deep, and oh, she was eager, and oh, she could scarcely wait.
“Love,” she said.
You never had it, Willa, whispered the Black Clay Boy.
“Love!” she cried. “Love, love, love.”
Forever, said the Black Clay Boy, his voice acquiring a male sternness, a tone of command.
Forever, she thought she said, the word soft as a pillow. Love forever, Love for now, pin me deep and darling into the bottomland. Split me wide, and take me where the pleasure lies.
Lies, echoed the Black Clay Boy.
He quivered in her hands, wanting her, but she held him off, tasting the delicious anticipation of the pure silver moment of going inside.
Now, Willa, now!
“When I’m ready,” she said, laughing, teasing. “When I’m ready and not a moment before.”
Now!
“Yes!” she said, arching toward him, her eyelids fluttering down. “Yes, now!”
With the powerful thrust of a man, with all the violent sweet force of a man’s need, she pulled him to her hard, and there was pain, yes, there was pain, but it was filling and deep and real, and if she’d had the strength, she would have plucked him out and pulled him in again and again and again.
Forever.
The perfect companion of that perfect gentleman, that perfect lover, the Black Clay Boy.
His strange blank face was inches away, his eyes appeared to widen. Maybe, she thought, this was the beginning of another memory.
Not hardly.
“Oh,” she said sadly, and she could see the word come white from her lips like a spirit, like the white poor thing of her life, her need, her sorrowful ending. Like a blown kiss.
Better luck next time, he told her.
“Next time?” she said, hopeful. “You mean…”
Just kidding, Willa, said the Black Clay Boy as he winked shut first one silver eye and then the other.
Ain’t it weird, soldier boy?” said the voice in Quinn’s ear. “There you are, strollin’ along in that little ol’ green suit of armor, feelin’ all cool and killproof…and wham! You’re down and hurtin’ bad. Gotta admit, though, them suits do a job. Can’t recall nobody steppin’ onna mine and comin’ through it as good as you.”
Quinn shook his head to clear the cobwebs. His helmet rattled, which was not good news. He doubted that any of the connections to the computer in his backpack were still intact. But at least he could move his legs, and that was very good news, indeed. The guy talking had a crazed lilt to his voice, and Quinn thought it would be best to take cover. He tried the computer; nothing worked except for map holography. The visor display showed him to be a blinking red dot in the midst of a contoured green glow: eleven miles inside Guatemala from its border with Belize, in the heart of the Petén rain forest, on the eastern edge of Fire Zone Emerald.
“Y’hear me, soldier boy?”
Quinn sat up, wincing as pain shot through his legs. He felt no fear, no panic. Although he had just turned twenty-one, this was his second tour in Guatemala, and he was accustomed to being in tight spots. Besides, there were a lot worse places he might have been stranded. Up until two years before, Emerald had been a staging area for Cuban and guerrilla troops; but following the construction of a string of Allied artillery bases to the west, the enemy had moved their encampments north and—except for recon patrols such as Quinn’s—the fire zone had been abandoned.
“No point in playin’ possum, man. Me and the boys’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes, and you gonna have to talk to us then.”
Ten minutes. Shit! Maybe, Quinn thought, if he talked to the guy, that would slow him down. “Who are you people?” he asked.
“Name’s Mathis. Special Forces, formerly attached to the First Infantry.” A chuckle. “But you might say we seen the light and opted outta the Service. How ’bout you, man? You gotta name?”
“Quinn. Edward Quinn.” He flipped up his visor; heat boiled into the combat suit, overwhelming the cooling system. The suit was scorched and shredded from the knees down; plastic armor glinted in the rips. He looked around for his gun. The cable that had connected it to the computer had been severed, probably by shrapnel from the mine, and the gun was not to be seen. “You run across the rest of my patrol?”
A static-filled silence. “’Fraid I got bad tidin’s, Quinn Edward. ’Pears like guerrillas took out your buddies.”
Despite the interference, Quinn heard the lie in the voice. He scoped out the terrain, saw that he was sitting in a cathedrallike glade: vaults of leaves pillared by the tapering trunks of ceibas and giant figs. The ground was carpeted with ferns; a thick green shade seemed to well up from the tips of the fronds. Here and there, shafts of golden light penetrated the canopy, and these were so complexly figured with dust motes that they appeared to contain flaws and fracture planes, like artifacts of crystal snapped off in midair. On three sides the glade gave out into dense jungle; but to the east lay a body of murky green water, with a forested island standing about a hundred feet out. If he could find his gun, the island might be defensible. Then a few days’ rest and he’d be ready for a hike.
“Them boys wasn’t no friends of yours,” said Mathis. “You hit that mine, and they let you lie like meat on the street.”
That much Quinn believed. The others had been too wasted on the martial-arts ampules to be trustworthy. Chances were, they simply hadn’t wanted the hassle of carrying him.
“They deserved what they got,” Mathis went on. “But you, now…boy with your luck. Might just be a place for you in the light.”
“What’s that mean?” Quinn fumbled a dispenser from his hip pouch and ejected two ampules—a pair of silver bullets—into his palm. Two, he figured, should get h
im walking.
“The light’s holy here, man. You sit under them beams shinin’ through the canopy, let ’em soak into you, and they’ll stir the truth from your mind.” Mathis said all this in dead earnest, and Quinn, unable to mask his amusement, said, “Oh, yeah?”
“You remind me of my ol’ lieutenant,” said Mathis. “Man used to tell me I’s crazy, and I’d say to him, ‘I ain’t ordinary crazy, sir. I’m crazy gone to Jesus.’ And I’d ’splain to him what I knew from the light, that we’s s’posed to build the kingdom here. Place where a man could live pure. No machines, no pollution.” He grunted as if tickled by something. “That’s how you be livin’ if you can cut it. You gonna learn to hunt with knives, track tapirs by the smell. Hear what weather’s comin’ by listenin’ to the cry of a bird.”
“How ’bout the lieutenant?” Quinn asked. “He learn all that?”
“Y’know how it is with lieutenants, man. Sometimes they just don’t work out.”
Quinn popped an ampule under his nose and inhaled. Waited for the drugs to kick in. The ampules were the Army’s way of ensuring that the high incidence of poor battlefield performance during the Vietnam War would not be repeated: each contained a mist of pseudoendorphins and RNA derivatives that elevated the user’s determination and physical potentials to heroic levels for thirty minutes or thereabouts. But Quinn preferred not to rely on them, because of their destructive side effects. Printed on the dispenser was a warning against abuse, one that Mathis—judging by his rap—had ignored. Quinn had heard similar raps from guys whose personalities had been eroded, replaced in part by the generic mystic-warrior personality supplied by the drugs.
“’Course,” said Mathis, breaking the silence, “it ain’t only the light. It’s the queen. She’s the one with the light.”
“The queen?” Quinn’s senses had sharpened. He could see the spidery shapes of monkeys high in the canopy and could hear a hundred new sounds. He spotted the green-plastic stock of his gun protruding from beneath a fern not twenty feet away; he came to his feet, refusing to admit his pain, and went over to it. Both upper and lower barrels were plugged with dirt.
“’Member them Cuban ’speriments where they was linkin’ up animals and psychics with computer implants? Usin’ ’em for spies?”
“That was just bullshit!” Quinn set off toward the water. He felt disdain for Mathis and recognized that to be a sign of too many ampules.
“It ain’t no bullshit. The queen was one of them psychics. She’s linked up with this little ol’ tiger cat—what the Indians call a tigrillo. We ain’t never seen her, but we seen the cat. And once we got tuned to her, we could feel her mind workin’ on us. But at first, she can slip them thoughts inside your head without you ever knowin’. Twist you ’round her finger, she can.”
“If she’s that powerful,” said Quinn, smug with the force of his superior logic, “then why’s she hidin’ from you?”
“She ain’t hidin’. We gotta prove ourselves to her. Keep the jungle pure, free of evildoers. Then she’ll come to us.”
Quinn popped the second ampule. “Evildoers? Like my patrol, huh? That why you wasted my patrol?”
“Whoo-ee!” said Mathis after a pause. “I can’t slide nothin’ by you, can I, Quinn Edward?”
Quinn’s laughter was rich and nutsy: a two-ampule laugh. “Naw,” he said, mocking Mathis’s corn-pone accent. “Don’t reckon you can.” He flipped down his visor and waded into the water, barely conscious of the pain in his legs.
“Your buddies wasn’t shit for soldiers,” said Mathis. “Good thing they come along, though. We was runnin’ low on ampules.” He made a frustrated noise. “Hey, man. This armor ain’t nothin’ like the old gear…all this computer bullshit. I can’t get nothin’ crankin’ ’cept the radio. Tell me how you work these here guns.”
“Just aim and pull.” Quinn was waist-deep in water, perhaps a quarter of the way to the island, which from that perspective—with its three towering vine-enlaced trees—looked like the overgrown hulk of a sailing ship anchored in a placid stretch of jade.
“Don’t kid a kidder,” said Mathis. “I tried that.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Quinn said. “Smart peckerwood like you.”
“Man, you gotta attitude problem, don’tcha? But I ’spect the queen’ll straighten you out.”
“Right! The invisible woman!”
“You’ll see her soon enough, man. Ain’t gonna be too long ’fore she comes to me.”
“To you?” Quinn snickered. “That mean you’re the king?”
“Maybe.” Mathis pitched his voice low and menacing. “Don’t go thinkin’ I’m just country pie, Quinn Edward. I been up here most of two years, and I got this place down. I can tell when a fly takes a shit! Far as you concerned, I’m lord of the fuckin’ jungle.”
Quinn bit back a sarcastic response. He should be suckering this guy, determining his strength. Given that Mathis had been on recon prior to deserting, he’d probably started with around fifteen men. “You guys taken many casualties?” he asked after slogging another few steps.
“Why you wanna know that? You a man with a plan? Listen up, Quinn Edward. If you figgerin’ on takin’ us out, ’member them fancy guns didn’t help your buddies, and they ain’t gonna help you. Even if you could take us out, you’d still have to deal with the queen. Just ’cause she lives out on the island don’t mean she ain’t keepin’ her eye on the shore. You might not believe it, man, but right now, right this second, she’s all ’round you.”
“What island?” The trees ahead suddenly seemed haunted-looking.
“Little island out there on the lake. You can see it if you lift your head.”
“Can’t move my head,” said Quinn. “My neck’s fucked up.”
“Well, you gonna see it soon enough. And once you healed, you take my advice and stay the hell off it. The queen don’t look kindly on trespassers.”
On reaching the island, Quinn located a firing position from which he could survey the shore: a weedy patch behind a fallen tree trunk hemmed in by bushes. If Mathis was as expert in jungle survival as he claimed, he’d have no trouble discovering where Quinn had gone; and there was no way to tell how strong an influence his imaginary queen exerted, no way to be sure whether the restriction against trespassing had the severity of a taboo or was merely something frowned on. Not wanting to take chances, Quinn spent a frantic few minutes cleaning the lower barrel of his gun, which fired miniature fragmentation grenades.
“Now where’d you get to, Quinn Edward?” said Mathis with mock concern. “Where did you get to?”
Quinn scanned the shore. Dark avenues led away among the trees, and as he stared along them, his nerves were keyed by every twitching leaf, every shift of light and shadow. Clouds slid across the sun, muting its glare to a shimmering platinum gray; a palpable vibration underscored the stillness. He tried to think of something pleasant to make the waiting easier, but nothing pleasant occurred to him. He wetted his lips and swallowed. His cooling system set up a whine.
Movement at the margin of the jungle, a shadow resolving into a man wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying a rifle with a skeleton stock—likely an old M-18. He waded into the lake, and as he closed on the island, Quinn trained his scope on him and saw that he had black shoulder-length hair framing a haggard face; a ragged beard bibbed his chest, and dangling from a thong below the beard was a triangular piece of mirror. Quinn held his fire, waiting for the rest to emerge. But no one else broke cover, and he realized Mathis was testing him, was willing to sacrifice a pawn to check out his weaponry.
“Keep back!” he shouted. But the man kept plodding forward, heaving against the drag of the water. Quinn marveled at the hold Mathis must have over him: he had to know he was going to die. Maybe he was too whacked out on ampules to give a shit, or maybe Mathis’s queen somehow embodied the promise of a swell afterlife for those who died in battle. Quinn didn’t want to kill him, but there was no choice, no point in delaying t
he inevitable.
He aimed, froze a moment at the sight of the man’s fear-widened eyes; then squeezed the trigger.
The hiss of the round blended into the explosion, and the man vanished inside a fireball and geysering water. Monkeys screamed; birds wheeled up from the shoreline trees. A veil of oily smoke drifted across the lake, and within seconds a pair of legs floated to the surface, leaking red. Quinn felt queasy and sick at heart.
“Man, they doin’ wonders with ordnance nowadays,” said Mathis.
Infuriated, Quinn fired a spread of three rounds into the jungle.
“Not even close, Quinn Edward.”
“You’re a real regular-Army asshole, aren’t you?” said Quinn. “Lettin’ some poor fucker draw fire.”
“You got me wrong, man! I sent that ol’ boy out ’cause I loved him. He been with me almost four years, but his mind was goin’, reflexes goin’. You done him a favor, Quinn Edward. Reduced his confusion to zero”—Mathis’s tone waxed evangelic—“and let him shine forevermore!”
Quinn had a mental image of Mathis, bearded and haggard, like the guy he’d shot, but taller, rawboned: a gaunt rack of a man with rotting teeth and blown-away pupils. Being able to fit even an imaginary face to his target tuned his rage higher, and he fired again.
“Aw right, man!” Mathis’s voice was burred with anger; the cadences of his speech built into a rant. “You want bang-bang, you got it. But you stay out there, the queen’ll do the job for me. She don’t like nobody creepin’ ’round her in the dark. Makes her crazy. You go on, man! Stay there! She peel you down to meat and sauce, motherfucker!”
His laughter went high into a register that Quinn’s speakers distorted, translating it as a hiccuping squeal, and he continued to rave. However, Quinn was no longer listening. His attention was fixed on the dead man’s legs, spinning past on the current. A lace of blood eeled from the severed waist. The separate strands seemed to be spelling out characters in some Oriental script; but before Quinn could try to decipher them, they lost coherence and were whirled away by the jade-green medium into which—staring with fierce concentration, giddy with drugs and fatigue—he, too, felt he was dissolving.
The Ends of the Earth Page 42