“Quinn Edward?” Mathis whispered.
Quinn lifted his head; the beetle dropped off the faceplate and scurried for cover.
“You got ’em all, didn’tcha?”
Quinn wormed out from under the bush, got to his feet, and headed back to the fallen tree trunk.
“Tonight, Quinn Edward. You gonna see my knife flash…and then fare thee well.” Mathis laughed softly. “It’s me she wants, man. She just told me so. Told me I can’t lose tonight.”
Late afternoon, and Quinn went about disposing of the dead. It wasn’t something he would ordinarily have done, yet he felt compelled to be rid of them. He was too weary to puzzle over the compulsion and merely did as it directed, pushing the corpses into the lake. The man who had tripped the flare was lying in some ferns, his face seared down to sinew and laceworks of cartilage; ants were stitching patterns across the blood-sticky bone of the skull. Having to touch the body made Quinn’s flesh nettle cold, and bile flooded his throat.
That finished, he sat in the clearing south of the ceiba and popped an ampule. The rays of sunlight slanting through the canopy were as sharply defined as lasers, showing greenish-gold against the backdrop of leaves. Sitting beneath them, he felt guided by no visionary purpose; he was, however, gaining a clearer impression of the queen. He couldn’t point to a single thought out of the hundreds that cropped up and say, “That one; that’s hers.” But as if she were filtering his perceptions, he was coming to know her from everything he experienced. It seemed the island had been steeped in her, its mists and midnights modified by her presence, refined to express her moods; even its overgrown terrain seemed to reflect her nature: shy, secretive, yet full of gentle stirrings. Seductive. He understood now that the process of becoming attuned to her was a process of seduction, one you couldn’t resist, because you, too, were being steeped in her. You were forced into a lover’s involvement with her, and she was a woman worth loving. Beautiful…strong. She’d needed that strength in order to survive, and that was why she couldn’t help him against Mathis. The life she offered was free from the terrors of war but demanded vigilance and fortitude. Although she favored him—he was sure of that—his strength would have to be proved. Of course, Mathis had twisted all this into a bizarre religion.
Christ!
Quinn sat up straight. Jesus fucking Christ! He was really losing it—mooning around like some kid fantasizing about a movie star. He’d better get his ass in gear, because Mathis would be coming soon. Tonight. It was interesting how Mathis—knowing his best hope of taking Quinn would be at night—had used his delusion to overcome his fear of the dark, convincing himself that the queen had told him he would win…or maybe she had told him.
Fuck that, Quinn told himself. He wasn’t that far gone.
A gust of wind roused a chorus of whispery vowels from the leaves. Quinn flipped up his visor. It was hot, cloudless, but he could smell rain and the promise of a chill on the wind. He did an ampule. The drugs withdrew the baffles that had been damping the core of his anger. Confidence was a voltage surging through him, keying new increments of strength. He smiled, thinking about the fight to come, and even that smile was an expression of furious strength, a thing of bulked muscle fibers and trembling nerves. He was at the center of strength, in touch with every rustle, his sensitivity fueled by the light-stained brilliance of the leaves. Gazing at the leaves, at their infinite shades of green, he remembered a line of a poem he’d read once: “Green flesh, green hair, and eyes of coldest silver…” Was that how the queen would be if she were real—transformed into a creature of pure poetry by the unearthly radiance of Fire Zone Emerald? Were they all acting out a mythic drama distilled from the mundane interactions of love and war, performing it in the flawed heart of an immense green jewel whose reality could be glimpsed only by those blind enough to see beyond the chaos of the leaves into its precise facets and fractures? Quinn chuckled at the wasted profundity of his thought and pictured Mathis dead, himself the king of that dead man’s illusion, robed in ferns and wearing a leafy crown.
High above, two parrots were flying complicated loops and arcs, avoiding the hanging columns of light as if they were solid.
Just before dusk a rain squall swept in, lasting only a few minutes but soaking the island. Quinn used it for cover, moving about and rigging more flares. He considered taking a stand on the rocky point at the north end: it commanded a view of both shores, and he might get lucky and spot Mathis as he crossed. But it was risky—Mathis might spot him—and he decided his best bet would be to hide, to outwait Mathis. Waiting wasn’t Mathis’s style. Quinn went back to the ceiba tree and climbed past the crotch to a limb directly beneath an opening in the canopy, shielded by fans of leaves. He switched his gun to its high-explosive setting. Popped an ampule. And waited.
The clouds passed away south, and in the half-light, the bushes below seemed to assume topiary shapes. After fifteen minutes, Quinn did another ampule. Violet auras faded in around ferns, pools of shadow quivered, and creepers seemed to be slithering like snakes along the branches. A mystic star rose in the west, shining alone above the last pink band of sunset. Quinn stared at it until he thought he understood its sparkling message.
The night that descended was similar to the one in the Rousseau print, with a yellow-globe moon carving geometries of shadow and light from the foliage. A night for tigers, mysterious ladies, and dark designs. Barnacled to his branch, Quinn felt that the moonlight was lacquering his combat gear, giving it the semblance of ebony armor with gilt filigree, enforcing upon him the image of a knight about to do battle for his lady. He supposed it was possible that such might actually be the case. It was true that his perception of the queen was growing stronger and more particularized; he even thought he could tell where she was hiding: the rocky point. But he doubted that he could trust the perception—and besides, the battle itself, not its motive, was the significant thing. To reach that peak moment when perfection drew blood, when you muscled confusion aside and—as large as a constellation with the act, as full of stars and blackness and primitive meaning—you were able to look down onto the world and know you had outperformed the ordinary. Nothing, neither an illusory motive nor the illusion of a real motive, could add importance to that.
Shortly after dark, Mathis began to chatter again, regaling Quinn with anecdote and opinion; and by the satisfaction in his voice, Quinn knew he had reached the island. Twenty minutes passed, each of them ebbing away, leaking out of Quinn’s store of time like blood dripping from an old wound. Then a burst of white incandescence to the south, throwing vines and bushes into skeletal silhouette…and with it a scream. Quinn smiled. The scream had been a dandy imitation of pain, but he wasn’t buying it. He eased a flare from his hip pouch. It wouldn’t take long for Mathis to give this up.
The white fire died, muffled by the rain-soaked foliage, and finally Mathis said, “You a cautious fella, Quinn Edward.”
Quinn popped two ampules.
“I doubt you can keep it up, though,” Mathis went on. “I mean, sooner or later you gotta throw caution to the winds.”
Quinn barely heard him. He felt he was soaring, that the island was soaring, arrowing through a void whose sole feature it was and approaching the moment for which he had been waiting: a moment of brilliant violence to illuminate the flaws at the heart of the stone, to reveal the shadow play. The first burn of the drugs subsided, and he fixed his eyes on the shadows south of the ceiba tree.
Tension began to creep into Mathis’s voice, and Quinn was not surprised when—perhaps five minutes later—he heard the stutter of an M-18: Mathis firing at some movement in the brush. He caught sight of a muzzle flash, lifted his gun. But the next instant, he was struck by an overpowering sense of the queen, one that shocked him with its suddenness.
She was in pain. Wounded by Mathis’s fire.
In his mind’s eye Quinn saw a female figure slumped against a boulder, holding her lower leg. The wound wasn’t serious, but he could tell sh
e wanted the battle to end before worse could happen.
He was mesmerized by her pervasiveness—it seemed that if he were to flip up his visor, he would breathe her in—and by what appeared to be a new specificity of knowledge about her. Bits of memory were surfacing in his thoughts; though he didn’t quite believe it, he could have sworn they were hers: a shanty with a tin roof amid fields of tilled red dirt; someone walking on a beach; a shady place overhung by a branch dripping with orchids, with insects scuttling in and out of the blooms, mining some vein of sweetness. That last memory was associated with the idea that it was a place where she went to daydream, and Quinn felt an intimate resonance with her, with the fact that she—like him—relied on that kind of retreat.
Confused, afraid for her yet half convinced that he had slipped over the edge of sanity, he detonated his flare, aiming it at the opening in the canopy. An umbrella of white light bloomed overhead. He tracked his gun across eerily lit bushes and…There! Standing in the clearing to the south, a man wearing combat gear. Before the man could move, Quinn blew him up into marbled smoke and flame. Then, his mind ablaze with victory, he began to shinny down the branch. But as he descended, he realized something was wrong. The man had just stood there, made no attempt to duck or hide. And his gun. It had been like Quinn’s own, not an M-18.
He had shot a dummy or a man already dead!
Bullets pounded his back, not penetrating but knocking him out of the tree. Arms flailing, he fell into the bush. Branches tore the gun from his grasp. The armor deadened the impact, but he was dazed, his head throbbing. He clawed free of the bush just as Mathis’s helmeted shadow—looking huge in the dying light of the flare—crashed through the brush and drove a rifle stock into his faceplate. The plastic didn’t shatter, webbing over with cracks; but by the time Quinn had recovered, Mathis was straddling him, knees pinning his shoulders.
“How ’bout that, motherfucker?” said Mathis, breathing hard.
A knife glinted in his hand, arced downward, and thudded into Quinn’s neck, deflected by the armor. Quinn heaved, but Mathis forced him back and this time punched at the faceplate with the hilt of the knife. Punched again, and again. Bits of plastic sprayed Quinn’s face, and the faceplate was now so thoroughly cracked, it was like looking up through a crust of glittering rime. It wouldn’t take many more blows. Desperate, Quinn managed to roll Mathis onto his side, and they grappled silently. His teeth bit down on a sharp plastic chip, and he tasted blood. Still grappling, they struggled to their knees, then to their feet. Their helmets slammed together. The impact came as a hollow click over Quinn’s radio, and that click seemed to switch on a part of his mind that was as distant as a flare, calm and observing; he pictured the two of them as black giants with whirling galaxies for hearts and stars articulating their joints, doing battle over the female half of everything. Seeing it that way gave him renewed strength. He shoved Mathis off balance, and they reeled clumsily through the brush. They fetched up against the trunk of the ceiba tree, and for a few seconds they were frozen like wrestlers muscling for an advantage. Sweat poured down Quinn’s face; his arms quivered. Then Mathis tried to butt his faceplate, to finish the job he had begun with the hilt of his knife. Quinn ducked, slipped his hold, planted a shoulder in Mathis’s stomach, and drove him backward. Mathis twisted as he fell, and Quinn turned him onto his stomach. He wrenched Mathis’s knife arm behind his back, pried the knife loose. Probed with the blade, searching for a seam between the plates of neck armor. Then he pressed it just deep enough to prick the skin. Mathis went limp. Silent.
“Where’s all the folksy chitchat, man?” said Quinn, excited.
Mathis maintained his silent immobility, and Quinn wondered if he had gone catatonic. Maybe he wouldn’t have to kill him. The light from the flare had faded, and the moon-dappled darkness that had filled in reminded Quinn of the patterns of blight on the island leaves: an infection at whose heart they were clamped together like chitinous bugs.
“Bitch!” said Mathis, suddenly straining against Quinn’s hold. “You lied, goddamn you!”
“Shut up,” said Quinn, annoyed.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” Mathis bellowed. “You tricked me!”
“I said to shut up!” Quinn gave him a little jab, but Mathis began to thrash wildly, nearly impaling himself, shouting, “Bitch!”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Quinn, growing angrier but also trying to avoid stabbing Mathis, beginning to feel helpless, to feel that he would have to stab him, that it was all beyond his control.
“I’ll kill you, bitch!” screamed Mathis. “I’ll…”
“Stop it!” Quinn shouted, not sure to whom he was crying out. Inside his chest, a fuming cell of anger was ready to explode.
Mathis writhed and kicked. “I’ll cut out your fuckin’…”
Poisonous burst of rage. Mandibles snapping shut, Quinn shoved the knife home. Blood guttered in Mathis’s throat. One gauntleted hand scrabbled in the dirt, but that was all reflexes.
Quinn sat up, feeling sluggish. There was no glory. It had been a contest essentially decided by a gross stupidity: Mathis’s momentary forgetfulness about the armor. But how could he have forgotten? He’d seen what little effect the bullets had. Quinn took off his helmet and sucked in hits of the humid air, watched a slice of moonlight jiggle on Mathis’s faceplate. Then a blast of static from his helmet radio, a voice saying, “You copy?”
“Ain’t no friendlies in Emerald,” said another radio voice. “Musta been beaners sent up that flare. It’s a trap.”
“Yeah, but I got a reading like infantry gear back there. We should do a sweep over that lake.”
Chopper pilots, Quinn realized. But he stared at the helmet with the mute awe of a savage, as if they had been alien voices speaking from a stone. He picked up the helmet, unsure what to say.
Please, no…
The words had been audible, and he realized that she had made him hear them in the sighing of the breeze.
Static fizzling. “Get the hell outta here.”
The first pilot again. “Do you copy? I repeat, do you copy?”
What, Quinn thought, if this had all been the queen’s way of getting rid of Mathis, even down to that last flash of anger; and now, now that he had done the job, wouldn’t she get rid of him?
Please stay…
Quinn imagined himself back in Dakota, years spent watching cattle die, reading mail-order catalogs, drinking and drinking, comparing the queen to the dowdy farm girl he’d have married, and one night getting a little too morbidly weary of that nothing life and driving out onto the flats and riding the .45-caliber express to nowhere. But at least that was proved, whereas this…
Please…
A wave of her emotion swept over him, seeding him with her loneliness and longing. He was truly beginning to know her now, to sense the precise configurations of her moods, the stoicism underlying her strength, the…
“Fuck it!” said one of the pilots.
The static from Quinn’s radio smoothed to a hiss, and the night closed down around him. His feeling of isolation nailed him to the spot. Wind seethed in the massy crown of the ceiba, and he thought he heard again the whispered word Please. An icy fluid mounted in his spine. To shore up his confidence, he popped an ampule; and soon the isolation no longer troubled him but, rather, seemed to fit about him like a cloak. This was the path he had been meant to take, the way of courage and character. He got to his feet, unsteady on his injured legs, and eased past Mathis, slipping between two bushes. Ahead of him, the night looked like a floating puzzle of shadow and golden light: no matter how careful he was, he’d never be able to locate all his mines and flares.
But she would guide him.
Or would she? Hadn’t she tricked Mathis? Lied to him?
More wind poured through the leaves of the ceiba tree, gusting its word of entreaty; and intimations of pleasure, of sweet green mornings and soft nights, eddied up in the torrent of her thoughts. She surrounded him, undeniable, as real a
s perfume, as certain as the ground beneath his feet.
For a moment he was assailed by a new doubt. “God,” he said. “Please don’t let me be crazy. Not just ordinary crazy.”
Please…
Then, suffering mutinies of the heart at every step, repelling them with a warrior’s conviction, he moved through the darkness at the center of the island toward the rocky point, where—her tiger crouched by her feet, a ripe jungle moon hanging above like the emblem of her mystique—either love or fate might be waiting.
Chapo, handsome twenty-three-year-old, with Aztec features, black hair, adobe-colored skin. Sitting on the cantina steps, gazing up at the unreal fire of the border: a curtain of shimmering blood-red energy that appeared to rise halfway to the stars before merging with the night sky. So bright you could see it for miles out on the desert, a glowing seam stretching from Texas to California, and in that seam were the old towns of Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Mexicali, and a dozen more, all welded into a single town of stucco bars and slums, of muzzle gleam and knife-flash, of paunchy whores and sleazy pimps and gringos on the slide from the fatlands of America: the Crust, they called it, the fucking Crust. Something useless and left over. But Chapo liked thinking of himself as part of that glow, that red meanness. At least that had been the case until three days before, when he had crossed over and come back with the gringa.
Now he wasn’t sure what he liked.
Somebody heaved a bottle toward the border, and Chapo tracked the arc. Violet lightnings forked away from the impact point. Throw a man into it, and you got brighter colors but the same result.
Zap! Not even ashes.
He fingered an upper from his pocket and swallowed it dry. Then he picked up his mesh shopping bag and headed for home. Music poured from the bars, swaying his hips, setting his fists jumping in little karate strikes. Battered old 1990s rides rumbled past, dark heads behind the wheels. Tang of marijuana, stink of fried grease. The red light shone everywhere, and shadows were sharp like they would be in hell.
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