Ángel's voice overrode him. "Your Barracudas, Hejaz. Are they ready?"
"Ready. Have been for a week."
Stone closed his eyes. Tanya's voice whispered, "Easy." Snake and Eagle were an echo. "Easy," they chimed in.
Hejaz continued. "We're passing in and out of the emergency crews, all of us in raineralls so it's hard to tell one from another. We heft a sandbag now and again, making sure the 'Darmes recognize us, know we're there. Then we disappear and nobody notices. We're mostly at the south central cyclery now. Dispensing ammo clips and closing the information circuit."
Suddenly, Cuza leapt to his feet and pounded the table again. "Man, did you see that shit bounce and fly?"
Stone steadied a bushing that threatened to leap off the table, then he sank onto the crate again. Eagle's wing-flutter cooled his brain. And slowed his racing heart.
Ángel gently pressed Cuza back into his seat and, with his eyes closed, began a meditative massaging of Cuza's shoulders. "The 'Darmes will double their surveillance tonight, so be certain, Hejaz, that all is ready by evening mess. Everyone is to show up there. We shall all report normally to evening classes and meetings, or stay in our units reading, being accommodating prisoners." He smoothed the hair back from Cuza's forehead. Cuza sat rigid under that touch. "Tell them, Brother Hejaz," Ángel continued, "to sleep tonight if they can."
Hejaz' wiped his forehead. "O-eight-hundred hours, Ángel. The cuntlickers won't ever see a check-in like tomorrow's will be!" He moved to the trapdoor. "I'm taking the tunnel to the north sediment fields. I can daylight there."
"Watch your back, Hejaz," Stone said.
"I will." Hejaz smiled at Stone. Then he clapped Cuza on the shoulder. "For freedom, brothers!" He slipped down the floor passage and was gone. Ángel withdrew his hand from Cuza and sat in the empty chair by the table. He began saturating a small rag with oil. "Brother Stone," he said, "did you confirm receipt of the coded message? Anything from Hanoi?"
"Yes. And no, nothing yet." Stone jockeyed his arms into the top half of his coveralls.
"Get back to Comcentral. Stay on the board to get Hanoi's acknowledgement."
"Can't," Stone replied, sealing his coveralls. "My shift is long over." He fitted his cap to his head. "Eftimiu has the board. He will notify you when Hanoi confirms." He rolled up his sleeve just to the edge of Snake's poised head.
"Ah. Then, good." Ángel turned to Cuza. "Victor." Cuza's head snapped up. "Get to Maimonides. He's to alert all the messes in every quadrant that it's time for the Djelfa ginger in tonight's kaskasa. Then those who are with us will know by nightfall that tomorrow is the day."
Cuza set his beret at a rakish angle, grinning. "Djelfa ginger!" He lunged toward the trapdoor.
"Cuza!" Cuza froze. "Slowly, Cuza, slowly!" Ángel reached up casually and touched the man's cheek with his forefinger. "There's no rush, Brother Victor." He looked steadily into Cuza's wide eyes. "Is there, now?" Cuza shook his head. "Good," Ángel whispered. Cuza shuddered. "Walk with dignity, Victor Cuza. A strong man always walks with dignity."
"Yes, Ángel," Cuza croaked.
Ángel nodded slowly, smiling. He dropped his finger and spread both hands wide in the movement of release. "Good, Brother Victor!"
Cuza swallowed visibly, then moved carefully past Ángel, his eyes fixed on the trapdoor. In an instant he was gone.
Stone turned away from the interaction, his innards quieting a sudden nausea. Pounding rain drove its clamor against the distant outer walls of the building. He could hear it gust and recede. I'm riding the storm, he thought, and there's no stopping it now. As if in response, the blustering wind rose again, deafening him with the authority of its destiny, the tumult of its urgency. "Now it comes," murmured Snake and Eagle. "Trust yourself," Tanya whispered.
Stone leaned toward Ángel and started to speak.
Ángel preempted him. "So, Brother Stone," he said, still watching Cuza's exit, "what did you mean by your pronoun?"
"My--"
"You said, 'Eftimiu will notify you when Hanoi confirms.'" Ángel began removing the uzi's long barrel. "Did you mean he will notify 'us'?
Stone met Ángel's eyes. "No," he said steadily. "I meant he would notify you."
Ángel waited.
Stone spoke slowly. "Count me out, Ángel." His tattoos started dancing.
Still Ángel waited.
Stone leaned further over the table, his eyes level with those of the shorter man. "Out, Ángel, out!" he rasped. "I want no part of it!"
Languidly, Ángel tested the fit of a nine millimeter barrel into the uzi, removed it, and sighted against one of the candles down the short bore.
In the next instant Stone half rose from the crate, his hand fisted and drawn back. "Baragiali!" Tanya shouted. For a moment he stood outside his body, in his softself. "Breathe!" said Tanya. He dropped his fist and clasped his left forearm, his shoulders hunched.
Ángel blew into the barrel and held it up to the candle again. "There's no getting out, Brother Stone. You are already in too deep."
Stone leaned on the table. "Then lock me up," he whispered tightly, "so I can't rat on you until the whole thing's over."
Ángel laid down the uzi part and examined his thumb. He frowned, then scooped free a curl of dirt from under a fingernail. "You know I wouldn't do that, Brother Stone." He rolled the dirt between his thumb and forefinger, then wiped it carefully on the rag.
Stone was on him in an instant, his hands seizing the front panels of Ángel's fatigues. He dragged the chunky man to his feet, setting the candles aflicker and sending the boxcap bouncing to the floor. "Look at me, Ángel!" he roared. "I am talking to you!"
"And I am listening, Brother Stone." Ángel's face radiated hurt astonishment.
Stone shook him. "You will not ignore me!" His fist grew ready.
"Of course not, Brother Stone. I made a mistake. I apologize." He spoke earnestly.
Stone searched the guileless face, then held his eyes closed a second. He listened to the echo in his head. "No more violence. Anywhere." Roughly he shoved Ángel back onto the chair and retrieved the boxcap from the floor. He threw it in the man's lap and paced the length of the table. For a moment he halted, distinctly aware of his tattoos applauding him. He cleared his mind, and ran a hand over his bald head.
"Ángel," he said evenly, grasping for calm, "this is all crazy. The 'Darmes have too many response options and too many reinforcements, and even if we succeeded and took our hostages, who says Highcrotch Magister Lutu would ever listen to our demands? Hell, we don't even agree on what we're demanding!"
"Sure we do." The voice came from below his knees. Stone looked down to see the shining face of Gabriel Girardon, and behind it the big physique pushing up through the trapdoor. Gabe went on, smoothly, "We agree that the bodies of habitantes -- like free citizens's bodies -- have to be guaranteed safety from involuntary medical experiments." He drew himself onto the edge of the opening and sat, looking for a drying cloth.
Stone threw him a shirt. "Gabe, I want out of the action. I just told Ángel."
"So I heard." Gabriel swiped his face, said something in French to a figure below, and in an easy motion spun himself out of the trapdoor to stand up. Runnels of water coursed down the leg of his raineralls, making a puddle on the floor. "Ángel," he said as he began stripping, "we can't budge now until we hear from all the wards. You want me to prod them?"
"No, Brother Gabriel. They will report in a timely fashion." Ángel straightened in his chair. He picked up a tiny flask of oil and saturated the rag again. "You've no optimism, Brother Stone," he said conversationally. "Don't you see how God is protecting us in our venture?"
Stone's head snapped toward him.
Ángel held his hands wide. "Did He not send the storm at precisely the moment we needed it? Does He not continue to protect us with the chaos of the rain? The foolish Femmedarmes don't suspect a thing. Or even if they do, let them come! All that needs to be done is being done right now. By the
time they get organized we will be model habitantes again, obeying orders." Ángel leaned forward, pointing to the ceiling. "Until our moment arrives!"
Stone folded his arms across his chest. He articulated each word carefully. "Ángel, your bloody revolt will only prove how violent we really are. It'll make the world stand up and cheer for the Protocols." "Right!" announced Eagle. "Yes!" sang Snake.
Ángel's voice was cloying. "We, judged as violent, Brother Stone? We are only fighting for our rights!"
Stone kept himself from advancing on the little man. "You don't give a rip-shit about the Testing or the Protocols, Ángel! This whole revolt is nothing but an excuse for you to play with your toys!" His arms were burning. He rubbed them.
"Hey, Baldy!" Girardon sealed the opening of his dry coveralls and laid his arm around Stone's neck. "I been thinking," he said. "You ought to tell Ángel the real reason you want out."
Deliberately, Ángel abandoned his uzi parts. Carefully he wiped excess oil from his hands. "Brother Gabriel," his silken voice said, "you and Brother Stone have been discussing this matter?"
Stone stopped Girardon's answer with an upraised hand. "I told Gabe about it this morning, Ángel. And now I'm telling you." He moved behind the empty chair. "Are you listening, Ángel?"
"Of course, Brother Stone." Ángel folded his hands in his lap, leaning back in his chair. "I will always listen to a comrade." Gabriel stood behind him.
Stone glanced at Gabriel, then braced himself on the chairback. "Then here's the real reason: I'm not going to help blow up this bailiwick, Ángel, because I don't want to be a part of that violence." He paused. "And I'm not going to have my head adjusted!" His arms were singing praises now, so loud he was sure the other men must hear them. He leaned forward urgently. "Nobody's going to be tested, Ángel! Nobody's going to have his head dinked with! We don't have to do this lunatic revolt! It is unnecessary!"
Ángel's eyes widened.
"So call it off, Ángel!" he shouted, "call it off!" Snake and Eagle sang Stone's refrain: "Call it off!"
"Stone!"
"Shut up, Gabe!" Gabe was crowding him, cutting off his space. Stone gestured him away.
Girardon ignored him. "Baldy, you don't understand these girls! They're not about to back off from the Testing! They want to know what causes people like us, what makes us tick!"
"Get out of my face, Gabe!" Stone swept by him, and escaped to sit on the trough by the wall. Inside his head he yelled, "Get him away from me, Tanya! Don't let me go after my buddy!" Elbows on his knees, he held onto his arms.
Gabe whirled toward Stone. "No, listen up! They're obsessed with us! We're what they talk about nonstop! You think they're going to quit now? Now, when they think they've got an answer to it all?" He bent over Stone, inches from his ear. "I guarantee you, they are going to mess with our heads!"
Stone stared at the floor and spoke to his tattoos. "One centimeter closer and I'll break his neck!" Snake was coiling and hissing, Eagle dangerously shaking his wings. Tanya's voice: "Careful, Baragiali, careful!" Stone pressed his arms tight against his legs, breathing hard. Aloud, he said evenly, "Shut up, Gabe."
Gabe leaned half a centimeter closer. "Baldy, you know what they want? They want to make us into zombies. Quiet, empty, docile men without two braincells to rub together!" Gabriel dropped to one knee by his friend, trying to look up into his face. "Man, we can't let them do that to us!" He shook Stone's shoulder. "You got to help us stop them! These cuntlickers want to take away our souls!"
Stone closed his eyes. Sweat dripped from his temple. With one last effort of restraint he spoke without looking at Gabriel. "Take your hand off me, Gabe."
Gabriel drew back, suddenly alert to the menace in Stone's voice.
Snake and Eagle released a small mutual sigh. Stone sighed with them.
"My brothers!" exclaimed Ángel into the silence. He surveyed the disassembled shotgun parts that Cuza had left on the table. "You neglect the truth." He stood and raised his hands over the gun parts. "They cannot take away our souls!" In a sequence of lightning moves, he set barrel to action, threw the mid-mounted locking bolt, keyed in the buttstock, and slid the sideplates into a fully-assembled weapon. In three more swift motions he broke the breech, slipped a shell toward the bore, and snapped the shotgun closed again. He arched his handiwork into an arm's length exhibit for their approval. "Our souls belong to God!"
"Ángel, lay off--" Gabriel began.
"And God will protect our venture!" Ángel hissed fiercely. He snapped the shotgun's breech open and closed again.
In that instant, a landscape shifted in Habitante Stone Baragiali. He found his deepest conviction, his purest rage, and the truest object of his loathing. They all mounted together into a single purpose. Stone felt his face widening into his best Crossover leer.
Slowly he began to get to his feet.
In the distance he heard Tanya's pained protest, Eagle and Snake warning, "No!" He sealed off the voices and turned to relish the bright-eyed countenance of Ángel Espartero.
"Hey!" Gabriel stepped briskly between the two men. "Hey!" he shouted louder, holding his flat hand up toward Ángel, then toward Stone. Stone bent his head and halted. From under his brow he looked patiently at his friend, humoring him, if only for the moment.
Ángel smiled at Gabriel. Carefully, he placed the gun on the table and made his gesture of release, his face a background of composure for his shining eyes.
Gabriel turned to Stone. "Stone," he said.
Stone watched Ángel.
"Stone!" Gabriel said again, moving toward him.
Even as he let Gabriel ease him back onto the trough, Stone kept his eyes riveted on Ángel.
"Come on, man, pull it together now," Gabe insisted. He tightened his arm around Stone's shoulder. Stone's eyes narrowed, still on Ángel.
"Brother Stone cannot pull it together," Ángel said calmly, lowering his hands to the table.
That voice cut through Stone's focus with a purifying asperity, laying open the vision of Ángel's slaughter of the Femmedarmes, that chilling laughter escalating with the splatter of soft flesh, the sting of fast blood. The words started low in his gut and rose by tiny increments until they exploded into slow pellets of rage. "Ángel, you fucker!" He shot to his feet and lunged toward the man beyond the table. Suddenly, he stopped and listened intently. His tattoos vibrated on his arms, singing the truth in his brain: "No, don't, Big Stone! He is our brother!"
Across the stream, Little Lucio Baragiali saw the other little boy in a funny African print hat running desperately down a long road after a disappearing figure and crying like his heart would break. The little boy fell, howled, and got up to run again, only to fall once more, this time lying in the dust, exhausted and sobbing. Lucio crossed over the stream, reaching out his hand to the child to help him up.
Ángel Espartero saw the big man's sudden stop and the subsequent softening of his features. When Stone extended his hand in peace, Ángel studied his face, holding Stone's eyes with his own. Then he picked up the shotgun and fired it point-blank into Stone's chest, rocking the closed little room with the sound and force of the explosion.
Stone's body hung motionless for an instant before it pivoted backwards. He fell against Gabriel, who had stood up to stop him.
During the instant of Stone's mid-air suspension, Gabriel covered his eyes, rubbed his ears, and shouted, "Ángel, you fucking fool!" Then he fell under Stone, heaving him to the side just before their two bodies hit the floor. "Stone! Stone, man!" His elbow dropped into the viscid cavern that had been Stone's chest. He pulled himself over the blood and sticky flesh toward his friend's face.
Remarkably, Habitante Baragiali still breathed.
Gabriel embraced the exploded chest and pushed his mouth toward Stone's ear. "Stone, man! I got you, I got you!"
The whisper was faint. "Gabe?"
"I'm right here, man, right here."
"They didn't leave us, Gabe," Stone panted lightly. "The animals
," he rasped. "They didn't leave us." He tried to move.
"Stay still, man, stay--"
"They're all right here, Gabe!" Stone's eyes were bright. He was smiling.
Gabe laid his head against Stone's shoulder, listening for the next breath.
Stone shuddered and was still.
Gabe held him tight. A huge pain began filling him up and flooding the room around him.
A dispassionate voice reached him from across the room. "He was a dangerous man, Brother Gabriel."
Gabe winced. In his gut the pain turned to fury. Carefully he draped cool wraps around the anger and pushed himself away from Stone's body. Bile washed over his tongue. He resisted spitting it full in Ángel's face.
With ritual calm, Gabriel folded Stone's arms over his body. On impulse he lifted the left sleeve, to look once more upon the woman entwined by the snake.
The white skin of Stone's forearm was smooth. And free of tattoos.
Girardon turned the arm over, shoved the sleeve higher. Quickly he pushed up Stone's other sleeve and beheld there no eagle, nothing at all. Just smooth, undecorated skin. Gabe closed his eyes tight and shook them open again. "Jesus!" he whispered, looking from one arm to the other.
He shivered, bunched his shoulders, and rotated his neck full circle, letting his eyes close and his head hang limp. After many moments, he wiped his face and peered at the figure beyond the table. Ángel cradled the shotgun and caressed its wooden stock.
Girardon's eyes narrowed. Deliberately, he made his fists open and fall casually by his sides. Then he made his face into a mask, and said evenly, "You didn't have to do that, Ángel."
"Think a moment, Brother Gabriel," Ángel responded. "What else could we have done? All our lives are at stake here."
Gabe stared at the little man before him.
Ángel waited politely for some reply.
Slowly, reluctantly, Giradon closed his eyes and nodded.
"Good," said Ángel. "Cuza will report that Habitante Baragiali never returned from sandbag transport at the levee. Until they can search, the 'Darmes will assume that, alas, the Great Dambovita River must have swallowed up Brother Stone." When Gabe did not answer, he continued, "You are right to mourn. We shall all mourn our brother."
The Kanshou (Earthkeep) Page 16