He felt a pressure in his stomach, and he quickly lifted his gaze from her nipples. He had suddenly wondered what one of them might feel like between his teeth.
Her full-lipped mouth parted. “Do you like what you see?”
“A flashlight!” one of the dirtwarts offered. “I’ll give you a flashlight for her!”
Roland didn’t respond. This woman made him think of the pictures in the magazines he’d found in the bottom drawer of his father’s dresser, back in his other, long-ago life. His belly was tightening, and there was a pounding in his nuts as if they were being squeezed by a brutal fist. “What’s your name?”
“Sheila,” she answered. “Sheila Fontana. What’s yours?” She had determined, with the cold logic of a born survivor, that her chances were better here, with this punk kid and the man with one hand, than out in the dark with those other things. The one-handed man cursed and dumped the rest of Rudy’s pack on the ground.
“Roland Croninger.”
“Roland,” she repeated, making it sound like she was licking a lollipop. “You’re not going to give me to them, are you, Roland?”
“Was he your husband?” Roland prodded Rudy’s body with his foot.
“No. We traveled together, that’s all.” Actually, they had lived together for almost a year, and he’d done some pimping for her back in Oakland, but there was no need to confuse the kid. She looked at Rudy’s bloody throat and then quickly away; she felt a pang of regret, because he had been a good business manager, a fantastic lover, and he’d kept them supplied with plenty of blow. But he was just dead meat now, and that was how the world turned. As Rudy himself would’ve said, you cover your own ass, at all and any cost.
Something moved on the ground behind Sheila, and she turned to look. A vaguely human shape was crawling toward her. It stopped about seven or eight feet away, and a hand covered with open, running sores lifted a paper bag. “Candy barsssss?” a mangled voice offered.
Roland fired the automatic, and the noise of the shot made Sheila jump. The thing on the ground grunted and then made a sound like a yelping dog; it scrambled to its knees and scurried away amid the junked vehicles.
Sheila knew the kid wasn’t going to turn her over to them, after all. Hoarse, garbled laughter came from other, hidden pits in the dirt. Sheila had seen plenty of Hell since she and Rudy had left a coke dealer’s cabin in the Sierras, where they’d been hiding from the San Francisco cops when the bombs had hit, but this was by far the worst. She looked down into the kid’s goggled eyes, because her height approached six feet; she was as big-boned as an Amazon warrior, but all curves and compliance when it met her needs, and she knew he was hooked through the cock.
“What the hell is this shit?” Macklin said, leaning over the items he’d pulled out of Sheila’s backpack.
Sheila knew what the one-handed man had found. She approached him, disregarding the kid’s .45, and saw what he was holding: a plastic bag full of snow-white, extra-fine Colombian sugar. Scattered around him were three more plastic bags of high-grade cocaine, and about a dozen plastic bottles of poppers, Black Beauties, Yellowjackets, Bombers, Red Ladies, PCP and LSD tabs. “That’s my medicine bag, friend,” she told him. “If you’re looking for food, I’ve got a couple of old Whoppers and some fries in there, too. You’re welcome to it, but I want my stash back.”
“Drugs,” Macklin realized. “What is this? Cocaine?” He dropped the bag and picked up one of the bottles, lifting his filthy, blood-splattered face toward her. His crewcut was growing out, the dark brown hair peppered with gray. His eyes were deep holes carved in a rocklike face. “Pills, too? What are you, an addict?”
“I’m a gourmet,” she replied calmly. She figured the kid wasn’t going to let this crazy one-handed fucker hurt her, but her muscles were tensed for fight or flight. “What are you?”
“His name is Colonel James Macklin,” Roland told her. “He’s a war hero.”
“Looks to me like the war’s over. And we lost… hero,” she said, staring directly into Macklin’s eyes. “Take what you want, but I need my stash back.”
Macklin sized the young woman up, and he decided he might not be able to throw her to the ground and rape her, as he had intended until this instant. She might be too much to take with one hand, unless he wrestled her down and got the knife to her throat. He didn’t want to try and fail in front of Roland, though his penis had begun to pound. He grunted and dug for the hamburgers. When he found them, he flung the pack to Sheila, and she started gathering up the packets of coke and the pill bottles.
Macklin crawled over and pulled the shoes off Rudy’s feet; he worked a gold Rolex wristwatch from the corpse’s left wrist and put it on his own.
“How come you’re out here?” Sheila asked Roland, who was watching her pack the cocaine and pills away. “How come you’re not over there, closer to the light?”
“They don’t want dirtwarts,” Macklin replied. “That’s what they call us. Dirtwarts.” He nodded toward the rectangular hole a few feet away; it had been covered with a tarpaulin, impossible to detect in the darkness, and looked to Sheila to be about five feet deep. The corners of the tarp were held down with stones. “They don’t think we smell good enough to be any closer.” Macklin’s grin held madness. “How do you think I smell, lady?”
She thought he smelled like a hog in heat, but she shrugged and motioned toward a can of Right Guard deodorant that had fallen out of Rudy’s pack.
Macklin laughed. He was unbuckling Rudy’s belt in preparation to pull the trousers off. “See, we live out here on what we can get and what we can take. We wait for new ones to pass through on their way to the light.” He motioned with a nod of his head toward the lake shore. “Those people have the power: guns, plenty of canned food and bottled water, gas for their torches. Some of them even have tents. They roll around in that salt water, and we listen to them scream. They won’t let us near it. Oh, no! They think we’d pollute it or something.” He got Rudy’s trousers off and flung them into the pit. “See, the hell of all this is that the boy and I should be living in the light right now. We should be wearing clean clothes, and taking warm showers, and having all the food and water we want. Because we were prepared… we were ready! We knew the bombs were going to fall. Everybody in Earth House knew it!”
“Earth House? What’s that?”
“It’s where we came from,” Macklin said, crouching on the ground. “Up in the Idaho mountains. We walked a long way, and we saw a lot of death, and Roland figured that if we could get to the Great Salt Lake we could wash ourselves in it, clean all the radiation off, and the salt would heal us. That’s right, you know. Salt heals. Especially this.” He held up his bandaged stump; the blood-caked bandages were hanging down, and some of them had turned green. Sheila caught the reek of infected flesh. “I need to bathe it in that salt water, but they won’t let us any closer. They say that we live off the dead. So they shoot at us when we try to cross open ground. But now—now—we’ve got our own firepower!” He nodded toward the automatic Roland held.
“It’s a big lake,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to go through that encampment to get there. You could go around it.”
“No. Two reasons: somebody would move into our pit while we were gone and take everything we have; and second, nobody keeps Jimbo Macklin from what he wants.” He grinned at her, and she thought his face resembled a skull. “They don’t know who I am, or what I am. But I’m going to show them—oh, yes! I’m going to show all of them!” He turned his head toward the encampment, sat staring at the distant torches for a moment, then looked back at her. “You wouldn’t want to fuck, would you?”
She laughed. He was about the dirtiest, most repulsive thing she’d ever seen. But even as she laughed, she knew it was a mistake; she stopped her laugh in mid-note.
“Roland,” Macklin said quietly, “bring me the gun.”
Roland hesitated; he knew what was about to happen. Still, the King had delivered a command, and h
e was a King’s Knight and could not disobey. He took a step forward, hesitated again.
“Roland,” the King said.
This time Roland walked to him and delivered the pistol to his outstretched left hand. Macklin awkwardly gripped it and pointed it at Sheila’s head. Sheila lifted her chin defiantly, hooked the pack’s strap over her shoulder and stood up. “I’m going to start walking toward the camp,” she said. “Maybe you can shoot a woman in the back, war hero. I don’t think you can. So long, guys; it’s been fun.” She made herself step over Rudy’s corpse, then started walking purposefully through the junkyard, her heart pounding and her teeth gritted as she waited for the bullet.
Something moved off to her left. A figure in rags ducked down behind the wreckage of a Chevy station wagon. Something else scrambled across the dirt about twenty feet in front of her, and she realized she’d never make the camp alive.
“They’re waiting for you,” Roland called. “They’ll never let you get there.”
Sheila stopped. The torches seemed so far away, so terribly far. And even if she reached them without being raped—or worse—there was no certainty she wouldn’t be raped in the camp. She knew that without Rudy she was walking meat, drawing flies.
“Better come back,” Roland urged. “You’ll be safer with us.”
Safer, Sheila thought sarcastically. Sure. The last time she’d been safe was when she was in kindergarten. She’d run away from home at seventeen with the drummer in a rock band, had landed in Hollyweird and gone through phases of being a waitress, a topless dancer, a masseuse in a Sunset Strip parlor, had done a couple of porno flicks and then had latched up with Rudy. The world had become a crazy pinwheel of coke, poppers and faceless Johns, but the deep truth was that she enjoyed it. For her there was no whining of might-have-beens, no crawling on her knees for forgiveness; she liked danger, liked the dark side of the rock where the night things hid. Safety was boredom, and she’d always figured she could only live once, so why not blow it out?
Still, she didn’t think running the gauntlet of those crawling shapes would be too much fun.
Someone giggled, off in the darkness. It was a giggle of insane anticipation, and the sound of it put the lid on Sheila’s decision.
She turned around and walked back to where the kid and the one-handed war hero waited, and she was already figuring out how to get that pistol and blow both their heads off. The pistol would help her get to the torches at the edge of the lake.
“Get on your hands and knees,” Macklin commanded, his eyes glittering above his dirty beard.
Sheila smiled faintly and shrugged her pack off to the ground. What the hell? It would be no worse than some of the other Johns off the Strip. But she didn’t want to let him win so easily. “Be a sport, war hero,” she said, her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you let the kid go first?”
Macklin glanced at the boy, whose eyes behind the goggles looked like they were about to burst from his head. Sheila unbuckled her belt and started to peel the leopard-spotted pants off her hips, then her thighs, then over the cowboy boots. She wore no underwear. She got down on her hands and knees, opened the pack and took out a bottle of Black Beauties; she popped a pill down her throat and said “Come on, honey! It’s cold out there!”
Macklin suddenly laughed. He thought the woman had courage, and though he didn’t know what was to be done with her after they’d finished, he knew she was of his own kind. “Go ahead!” he told Roland. “Be a man!”
Roland was scared shitless. The woman was waiting, and the King wanted him to do it. He figured this was an important rite of manhood for a King’s Knight to pass through. His testicles were about to explode, and the dark mystery between the woman’s thighs drew him toward her like a hypnotic amulet.
Dirtwarts crawled closer to get a view of the festivities. Macklin sat watching, his eyes hooded and intense, and he stroked the automatic’s barrel back and forth beneath his chin.
He heard hollow laughter just over his left shoulder, and he knew the Shadow Soldier was enjoying this, too. The Shadow Soldier had come down from Blue Dome Mountain with them, had walked behind them and off to the side, but always there. The Shadow Soldier liked the boy; the Shadow Soldier thought the boy had a killer instinct that bore developing. Because the Shadow Soldier had told Macklin, in the silence of the dark, that his days of making war were not over yet. This new land was going to need warriors and warlords. Men like Macklin were going to be in demand again—as if they had ever gone out of demand. All this the Shadow Soldier told him, and Macklin believed.
He started laughing then, too, at the sight in front of him, and his laughter and that of the Shadow Soldier intertwined, merged, and became as one.
Thirty-five
The waiting Magnum
Over two thousand miles away, Sister sat next to the hearth. Everyone else was asleep on the floor around the room, and it was Sister’s night to watch over the fire, to keep it banked and the embers glowing so they wouldn’t have to waste matches. The space heater had been turned low to save their dwindling supply of kerosene, and cold had begun to sneak through chinks in the walls.
Mona Ramsey muttered in her sleep, and her husband shifted his position and put his arm around her. The old man was dead to the world, Artie lay on a bed of newspapers, and every so often Steve Buchanan snored like a chainsaw. But Sister was disturbed by the wheeze of Artie’s breathing. She’d noticed him holding his ribs, but he’d said he was okay, that he was sometimes short of breath but otherwise feeling, as he put it, “as smooth as pickles and cream.”
She hoped so, because if Artie was hurt somewhere inside—maybe when that damned wolf had slammed into him on the highway about ten days ago—there was no medicine to stave off infection.
The duffel bag was beside her. She loosened the drawstring and reached inside, found the glass ring and drew it out into the emberglow.
Its brilliance filled the room. The last time she’d peered into the glass circle, during her firewatch duty four nights before, she’d gone dreamwalking again. One second she was sitting right there, holding the circle just as she was doing now, and the next she’d found herself standing over a table—a square table, with what appeared to be cards arranged on its surface.
The cards were decorated with pictures, and they were unlike any cards Sister had ever seen before. One of them in particular caught her attention: the figure of a skeleton on a rearing skeletal horse, swinging a scythe through what seemed to be a grotesque field of human bodies. She thought there were shadows in the room, other presences, the muffled voices of people speaking. And she thought, as well, that she heard someone coughing, but the sound was distorted, as if heard through a long, echoing tunnel—and when she came back to the cabin she realized it was Artie coughing and holding his ribs.
She’d thought often of that card with the scythe-swinging skeleton. She could still see it, lodged behind her eyes. She thought also of the shadows that had seemed to be in the room with her—insubstantial things, but maybe that was because all her attention had been focused on the cards. Maybe, if she’d concentrated on giving form to the shadows, she might have seen who was standing there.
Right, she thought. You’re acting like you really go somewhere when you see pictures in the glass circle! And that’s only what they were, of course. Pictures. Fantasy. Imagination. Whatever. There was nothing real about them at all!
But she did know that dreamwalking, and coming back from dreamwalking, was getting easier. Not every time she peered into the glass was a dreamwalk, though; most often it was just an object of fiery light, no dream pictures at all. Still, the glass ring held an unknown power; of that she was certain. If it wasn’t something with a powerful purpose, why had the Doyle Halland-thing wanted it?
Whatever it was, she had to protect it. She was responsible for its safety, and she could not—she dared not—lose it.
“Jesus in suspenders! What’s that?”
Startled, Sister looked up. P
aul Thorson, his eyes swollen from sleep, had come through the green curtain. He pushed back his unruly hair and stood, open-mouthed, as the ring pulsed in rhythm with Sister’s heartbeat.
She almost shoved it back into the duffel bag, but it was too late.
“That thing’s… on fire!” he managed to say. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure yet. I found it in Manhattan.”
“My God! The colors…” He knelt down beside her, obviously overwhelmed. A flaming circle of light was about the last thing he’d expected to find when he’d stumbled in to warm himself by the embers. “What makes it pulse like that?”
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