by L. A. Zoe
An unworldly loveliness. Ice Queen. Shining blizzard bright.
Maybe a trap. Didn’t matter. He had to know for sure.
He pulled his boots back on. She needed him.
But lots of people did. He couldn’t watch over everybody, all of the time. No superhero.
She wasn’t his responsibility. He tried to put her up for the night. She walked out on him.
Lovely. But just another woman.
Maybe, maybe not.
He stuffed sandwiches into an inner side pocket of his winter coat. Having food close at hand could never hurt.
On such a night, not many scumbags prowled outside. Crack heads wanted to explode, but remained warm inside whatever dump they called home. As did rapists and muggers. The bars closed several hours ago, so the dedicated drinkers should be in somebody’s bed. In weather like this, both Greco and Ami cribbed. All but the hardest core, anti-shelter homeless sought refuge even if they had to sit through prayers and hymns.
Anybody trying to tough out the ice storm when the wind chill index reach fifty below probably wouldn’t leave their cardboard box. Or their head harbored so many psychoses they threatened only themselves.
Still, he took his K-Bar knife. They always came in handy. It didn’t include a compass or can opener like a Swiss Army knife, but he never knew when he might need to skin a deer or filet a trout.
She didn’t understand what fairy-born, starlike elfin beauty possessed her.
All the more reason to guard her, like a wild snowy egret flying across a mountain sky.
Although he believed in chivalry, he never felt inspired by the ideal of courtly love, worshipping a woman (married to another man, often the lord to whom he owed fealty) from afar, fighting for her honor.
Much smarter to stay inside. Although a condemned house, it provided shelter from the sharp-fanged wind. Warmth from the fire. Food from his stash in the corner. Solid walls to hide him from the prying eyes of the police and predators. A bag and blankets to sleep in.
After a long day of providing his protective services, including two near-scuffles, he needed rest.
Outside, nothing but his woolen long underwear and parka separated him from winter.
SeeJai was even more vulnerable. Less outdoors experienced, probably. Certainly had less body mass to conserve her body’s precious core heat with.
She could be hypothermic already.
Rhinegold pulled up his zipper, the metal and surrounding nylon stiff with cold.
He didn’t owe this woman protection or anything else. She didn’t pay him. He did his good deed for her, and she walked out on her own recognizance.
Into a marrow-freezing night, with Frost Giants crushing the Earth.
Rhinegold grabbed a long stick and poked and smashed the fire down to ashes. He couldn’t risk it burning out of control while he was away.
The flames dead, the darkness returned, reminding Rhinegold to take a flashlight, and carry extra batteries in his side pockets.
She wasn’t Princess Keara, but then, neither was Keara—not anymore
Besides, that was over. He had to give up the fantasy he could ever return to that castle and spirit Keara away from the king his father and the evil queen his stepmother.
Keara didn’t want him any longer. He had to accept her wishes.
Find a new princess? Why not?
He pulled on his gloves.
SeeJai?
Maybe, maybe not.
Thinking of her sexually almost made him laugh. Her tiny thinness with his big-boned frame?
Yet also made his groin clench with intense excitement, as though he sensed some buried passion there, too deep to understand.
So he slid through the alley, past garbage dumpsters, clumps of leafless bushes, one-car garages, wooden fences, and narrow backyards cramped and tiny.
A child of suburbia, Rhinegold wondered again what growing up and playing in such small, squeezed yards felt like. Even at six years old, he couldn’t kick or throw a ball within such short distances. Small wonder city kids played in the streets. with front and back yards no bigger than the patches on the knees of their jeans.
A neighbor’s dog howled.
From the alley, SeeJai turned onto the small residential street, then made her way to the business district along McAllister, which led her to Madmonkshighway, which ran north and south, cleaving Cromwell nearly in the middle. She turned north.
Heading for Arkham, the state mental hospital? She did say something about visiting her mother, didn’t she?
A long way to walk, but she had time. And she didn’t dare stop long to rest. Not in this weather.
And it would take her past Eyre Symphony Hall, by the old Bourbon Square entertainment district. Closed down for many years, no longer listed as one of the city’s tourist attractions, plenty of hookers and drunks still hung out in the vicinity.
The hardest part was keeping her in sight yet making so little noise she wouldn’t hear him. During an ordinary day, that wouldn’t be a problem. Traffic noise alone would cover him. But only a few hours before dawn, after inches of ice added on top of a thick accumulation of snow, no traffic roared through the empty streets.
Yet he didn’t want to hang back too far. If someone attacked or mugged her, he couldn’t intervene in time to save her.
Usually, when he protected people, he walked right beside them, just half a step behind their shoulder.
SeeJai was unusual in many ways. Not paying him. Not wanting him.
But he couldn’t stop.
Whether she liked it or not, Rhinegold was her golden knight.
Chapter Five
Crazy Georgie
Many blocks up Madmonkshighway, I leaned against the door of a Pizza Store, closed my eyes, and rested.
Closed tight, of course. Red, white, and blue sign dark. The counter dark. The big pizza oven a hulking shadow. Somehow, the odors of mozzarella cheese, marinara sauce, and baking dough lingered.
I already worked off the strength those three slices of pizza I ate with Rhinegold provided. My thigh, ankle, and lower back muscles ached from the unfamiliar effort of keeping my skeleton upright as I slid over the coating of ice.
Not far behind the line of storefronts, dogs growled and snarled.
Just great. I pressed my back closer to the Pizza Store’s door, hoping the smells would hide my body odor of fresh meat for feral canines. Or would they go for pizza?
A dull thump, a rip. Then savage barks as they fought. Several yipped, and ran up the alley, whining loud enough to shock zombies.
From the alleyway, more ripping and tearing and munching.
I forced my legs to move. Slowly, not making enough sound to attract the wild beasts—hopefully. I didn’t know whether or not given a choice they’d rather eat cooked pepperoni or raw woman flesh. And didn’t want to find out the hard way.
I wanted to survive, but also didn’t want to learn for myself why everyone feared the pain of taking a series of shots for rabies.
A dull light on the horizon bleached darkness from the air when I spotted the homeless old man a block ahead of me, sitting on the curb, shoulders heaving with dry sobs.
Behind him, a long hill sloped down to a concrete culvert running into a sewer pipe.
A Top Foods Supermarket shopping cart lay near the bottom, black and green garbage bags collapsed around and inside it. Papers, aluminum cans, and clothes lay scattered up and down the hillside.
The closer I approached the old man, the more I wanted to cross the street, and just avoid him and whatever problems and trouble he would cause me.
He had thick hair combed back off his forehead, hair so white in places it gleamed yellow, like a polar bear’s. White hair grew just as thick from his sideburns, cheeks, mustache, ears, and beard. He wore ragged khaki slacks, a thick, woolen red plaid jacket, and heavy black leather boots. He looked like a farmer performing winter morning chores.
And reeked of dirt accumulating on his skin since
the Gulf War.
I just hoped the cold would prevent fleas from jumping from his jacket onto mine.
Most homeless people harmed nobody but themselves, I learned in school. But maybe this dude was one of the harmful minority.
Areetha’s mother once worked in a homeless shelter, and said because most homeless people were crackheads, alkies, or paranoid schizoids, they lost their tempers a lot, had brain damage, didn’t possess self-control, and therefore sometimes became violent. Even in the shelter, feeding them and giving them a place to sleep, with lots of people to restrain them, some of them went nuts, and attacked others.
Still, all the poor man’s belongings lay in the snow.
“Demons jumped me,” he muttered as I drew closer. “Demons pushed me!”
Then he must have heard my feet sliding over the ice, because he looked up, then creaked to his feet.
“Young sir,” he said, so I should have been P.O.ed right away, “please help me if you would be so kind. See, the demons pushed me when I wasn’t looking.”
His breath hit me with a powerful punch of stale alcohol, week-old cheese, and ammonia.
Judging by the yellow, broken teeth in his mouth, some of the stench must come from tooth decay and gum rot.
I wanted to see Mom, but …
“I’ll get it,” I told him. Just don’t get too close to me.
I stepped over the narrow barrier strip of aluminum siding separating the hillside from the sidewalk. Right away, I nearly slipped and slid down on my ass.
I needed a walking stick. No, I needed a mountaineer’s pickax and a coil of rope.
I didn’t have anything but me, so I knelt down and braced my hands on the hard layer of ice, keeping a low center of gravity.
Not that the slope was any Mt. Everest. In warm, dry weather, full of grass, it’d be easy and fun to run and jump down.
I just didn’t want to slide all the way down to the culvert.
I turned sideways, and scuttled a ways like a crab, using the edge of my boots to gain as much traction as I could find.
I found a rhythm, and was halfway down the slope toward the old man’s overturned shopping cart when I heard voices above me, and made the mistake of looking back up at the street. I was right, that Rhinegold character stood right beside the homeless dude.
“You!” I shouted, then lost my balance, and fell over, landing on my side, and slid to the bottom of the culvert.
I rolled to my hands and knees, stunned. Slammed hard in the ribs and hips. Out of breath.
Above me, Rhinegold laughed so hard he looked ready to roll on the sidewalk.
The old man said, “Rhinegold, he tried to help me.”
At least somebody in the world still had appreciation and courtesy. And that smelly dirty alkie had more than Rhinegold.
“She’s a girl, Georgie. You couldn’t tell?” More guffaws.
“You’re so great, hotshot, why don’t you get his shopping cart?” I called up.
“Hang on to your saddle,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
“I don’t need your help, just get his shopping cart and things,” I said.
But before I finished, Rhinegold lost his balance on the hard ice, and slid headfirst toward me.
I tried to move to the side, but, still shocked and aching by my fall, couldn’t scramble fast enough.
So Rhinegold smashed into me, knocking the rest of the air out of my lungs.
The old homeless dude now laughed at both of us. “Rhinegold, I’ve been telling you you need a girlfriend, but knock them dead with your smile, don’t tackle them, it’s not a football game.” He cackled.
I lay panting.
Beside me, Rhinegold moaned, and held his shoulder. “I think I sprained it.”
“Serves you right,” I said. “I haven’t known you twelve hours, and you’ve knocked me down twice. Three times, and I kill you.”
“Didn’t you bring any mountain climbing equipment?”
My right knee felt as big as a watermelon, and hurt, but I could bend and flex it. Moving slowly, I gathered the pieces of clothing, encased in ice, near the bottom of the culvert.
Rhinegold made his way back up the hill on hands and feet like a rock wall climber, and retrieved the shopping cart. Then he went back down close to me, grabbed the things I retrieved, and took them up to the old man.
We fell and skidded, but eventually collected all the homeless guy’s clothes and things, and his aluminum cans. On the sidewalk, the old guy re-organized his cart.
Finally I handed him the last item, a grocery bag with a lightweight rectangle of folded newspaper. He grabbed it gratefully, opened the newspaper to check for damage, sighed happily, and quickly shoved it deep with another shopping bag in his cart.
I glimpsed an old-time photograph of an attractive young woman with black hair, and kept my mouth shut.
Rhinegold held up a bottle of Old Grandpa scotch whiskey, several fingers of light brown liquor still sloshing in the bottom. “Here’re the demons knocked your shopping cart down the hill.”
The old man grabbed for it.
Rhinegold jerked it out of his reach. He poured the whiskey out. It made small puddles on the sidewalk.
“Rhinegold, if you weren’t my buddy … “
“It’d all still be down the hill,” he said, handing the homeless guy the empty bottle. “Here, throw it in the first trashcan you come to.”
The old guy put the bottle to his lips, and his Adam’s apple jerked up and down. He lowered it, wiped his lips, and sighed, even though he couldn’t have tasted more than a few drops.
One more example why I swore I’d never be an alkie.
The old man stared at me. “You sure are a girl all right, missy, I apologize for calling you a boy.”
“It’s all right.”
He kept peering at my face. “And a darn sight pretty one, at that.”
“Thank you.” I began walking north again. I still wanted to see Mom in the hospital.
“Wait up, young lady,” the homeless guy said. He held out his hand. “Thank you so much.”
I shook it, glad I wore gloves. “It’s nothing.” I started to head back north on the sidewalk.
“Where you headed?”
I told him.
“All the way up there? Past Bourbon Square and the industrial wasteland? I’ll go with you to protect you. I’m Georgie, by the way.”
“Crazy Georgie,” Rhinegold said. “Don’t forget the crazy part, Georgie.”
“Mr. Georgie sir, to you,” Georgie said.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I really don’t need—”
“Dangerous, even early in the morning, right, Rhinegold? You tell her. Especially for a young girl, if you take my meaning.”
“He’s right,” Rhinegold said. “So I’ll protect you.”
“We’ll protect her together,” Crazy Georgie said.
Rhinegold had the nerve to wink at me, and said, “Sure thing.”
Rhinegold told Georgie my name, and finally we got going. Because of my bad knee, I pushed the shopping cart. Two of the wheels didn’t turn properly. They turned around and just dragged.
Georgie held on to the cart’s side, and that’s when I noticed he dragged his left foot.
“Lost a few toes to frostbite,” he told me when I asked.
A block farther, after I had a few minutes to think, it hit me.
“You followed me!” I told Rhinegold.
Rhinegold at least had the grace to look away and not say anything.
Georgie said, “It’s his business, SeeJai. He protects people.”
“I never paid him anything. I wanted to, but he wouldn’t take it.”
Georgie tried to punch Rhinegold in the shoulder, but couldn’t raise his fist that high, so he settled for Rhinegold’s ribs. “I told you to get a girlfriend. Good for you.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Rhinegold said in an amused tone of voice.
“I’m not his girlfriend!” I
shouted over the light clink clank of the aluminum cans. “I hate him!”
That kept them quiet for a while.
Although not a outdoors type, I could read the signs announcing the historical site of Bourbon Square.
Vomit frozen so solid Rhinegold kicked it into the street.
Against the red brick wall of a long out-of-business Ben Franklin Drug Store, a splotch of orangish-yellow urine, frozen before it could drip down.
“Think the dude left that has kidney damage, what do you say, Georgie?” Rhinegold said, laughing.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Georgie said.
Colorful gang graffiti covered the walls left standing over the two blocks of Bourbon Square. Crips. Marauders. Rocks. Bloods. Cuzzes. Dogs of War. Plus swastikas, occult symbols, and runes. Plus websites such as IHateYou.com and EatMyAss.org. And an online drug site offering Valium, Oxycodone, Phenobarbital, and Dexedrine (white crosses) via overnight, “anonymous” delivery.
Nobody lurked in the actual streets. Some might sleep inside the abandoned buildings. Not far inside, a small glass crack pipe lay on the sidewalk, on top of the ice.
Real estate developers talked of opening up new nightclubs, or a Wal-Mart, or a music history theme park, but nobody had yet succeeded.
Past Bourbon Square itself, I recalled, lurked The Mahogany Motel, where kids in my high school joked about spending the night after proms.
Infamous because once someone drove their car inside, nobody could see it from the outside. Take a married neighbor, an underage cutie, a coworker, a same-sex partner, or a hooker. Bring your own bottle, or buy one from the Mahogany Liquor Store across the street. Bring your own drugs, or score from a dealer hanging out in Bourbon Square. Remain totally anonymous. Pay for the whole night or just one hour.
Cash.
As soon as we strolled by, a man standing in front of The Mahogany called out, “Hey, Rhinegold, come here a minute, will you?”
He had his arm around the shoulders of an African-American woman who somehow appeared voluptuous despite wearing jeans and a heavy fur coat. Maybe the hair done up in a braided beehive and dyed bright orange helped. Or the neon-blue eye shadow and bright puce lipstick.