“Lots of people are checking out of the hotel because of the hurricane,” Lucian said. “Some of my wetback girls have already tried to run off. I had to drag the little bitches back so don’t you try to vanish, either—I’m in a bad mood. Tomorrow we’ll probably get one last spike in business, and I don’t want my popular newbies to disappear on me.”
I was forcing myself not to stare at the spot on his jacket where the gun made a slight bulge. “What if the hurricane hits?”
“It won’t. That’s just the news trying to scare everyone. And I told the sheriff to keep an eye out for you, so I’ll know if you try to run off. We’ll be doing full business again, don’t you worry.”
His words closed in around me like iron bars and prison doors. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
Lucian nodded curtly. “So get the fuck out of here, and keep your phone turned on. I’ll call you when I need you.”
I changed in Room 8, grabbed my mug from the closet where I’d stashed it, and left. It was night out, and cooler than usual. A soft, salty breeze wafted in from the ocean. The streets were busy with cars—tourists already getting the hell out of town. I felt their urgency, wanted to run with them, run and run and run and then hide in a deep, dark pit, safe from the spiral misty monster.
Darkness had flooded the Pieria Nursing Home. It was quieter back there, and I picked my way through tall grass and chunks of ruined brick beneath a waning moon. Inside the dying building, I heard snores and mutters from dark corners, but a soft glow came from what I had started calling Our Room. Eryx and Irene were there. An old flashlight stood on end, pointing upward at the ceiling and giving a weird, spiritual feel to the room. It was a séance for people who hadn’t died yet.
“So how was work?” Irene asked wryly.
“I had a fucking great day.” I plunked down on the mattress, set my mug aside, and told them about how I called Guy Five’s wife. They laughed until tears came. I felt like a genius and my fear from the talk with Lucian faded. Then I told them about Hurricane Tyler.
“It’s going to be great!” I finished. “It’ll level the Haidou, and we’ll be safe here. I mean, the nursing home has a basement, right?”
“No,” Irene said. “You don’t hide in a basement during a hurricane. One good storm surge, and you’re sitting in a swimming pool. You hide behind the leeward side of a wall or something.”
“Leeward?”
“The side away from the wind. And it’s best if the wall is stone or brick.”
“Then it’s no problem.” I was practically rubbing my hands. “This whole place is brick, right? We’ll be safe, and Lucian will be fucked. He won’t even be able to blame us.”
“Are they going to make everyone evacuate?” Eryx asked.
I shrugged. “The TV didn’t say. That’d be even better—we could get out of here and go somewhere else, where Lucian and the sheriff can’t find us.”
“How would we get out?” Eryx said. “We don’t have a car.”
“Catch the bus again,” I said. “Or maybe hitchhike.”
“What about the others?” Irene said.
“Others?”
“Cerise and Henry and Ephram and Phillip and June. What about them? Ephram can barely get around. Some days Cerise can barely walk because of her arthritis. None of them have cars, and they don’t have money for the bus.”
“Yeah,” Eryx put in. “I mean, I don’t want to weather a storm here, but I feel bad about just leaving them behind.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Not that it’s our job to save them,” Eryx added. “I mean, if there’s a hurricane, what can we do about it except get ourselves the fuck out?”
I shifted on the mattress, feeling a little doubtful. “Right.”
“I’m kind of nervous about it.” Irene pulled her knees up. “Category Four is pretty powerful. You ever live through a hurricane?”
“No,” Eryx and I both said.
“I have. Last year. It was only a Category One. Still scary as hell.”
“I saw a tornado once,” Eryx said. “It was a mile away, but it scared the shit out of me. That was when my mom was still around, and I grabbed her hand so tight. We didn’t have a basement or anything to hide in, and she said we should stay outside because the trailer might fall on us.” He shut his eyes and rolled his head around. “God, I’m fucking tense.”
I was sitting between them, and I put my arms around both their shoulders. “We’ll be okay. I won’t let anything hurt you guys, I promise.”
Eryx smiled, and Irene laughed a little. I felt them both relax a little under my arms. Then Irene was kissing me. I kissed her back, then I kissed Eryx, and Eryx kissed Irene. Irene laughed a little.
“I feel drunk,” she said, “even though I haven’t had anything.”
“Let’s get drunker,” Eryx said, and they both kissed me again.
We melted into each other, and I was both hard and soft at the same time. The whole thing was weird—familiar as a slipper and new as flowers. My skin tingled as fingers slid under my shirt and into my shorts. I touched Eryx’s hardness and Irene’s softness. My mind expanded to encompass the whole universe and shrank down to center on my dick.
We didn’t have any condoms. Irene and Eryx were all, “Who cares? We could be dead next week,” but I pushed them into stuff that wouldn’t fuck us up later, and they went along with it, and I felt like that was my real first time. The Guys didn’t count. I was real and I was whole, if only for a little while.
It seemed to last forever, but it probably didn’t. Eryx and Irene fell asleep, but I lay awake, listening to lizards skitter on the walls and feeling the crack where the two mattresses came together beneath my back. Finally I went outside. The air slid over me, clinging like wet silk. Hurricane Tyler was already breathing on me.
My feet took me down to the beach. Damp clouds dragged over the sky, and the wind was rising. Wild waves taller than me chopped at the beach, and the air felt ionized, full of energy. Despite that, my earlier feeling of wholeness and peace was wearing off and Lucian and the Guys shoved themselves into my mind, trying to push Irene and Eryx out. So I spread my arms wide in welcome as a high wave rushed up the sand like a beaching blue whale. Screw the Guys. I had called on Hurricane Tyler to stomp the Haidou and all of Aquapura flat, and the monster had listened. I was glad. Fuck, I was exultant.
A shadow moved up the beach, the crunch of footsteps swallowed by the sound of angry water. I caught the smell of dirty tobacco smoke, and my exultation turned to ire. June was trudging toward me. What the fuck was she doing down here? I really didn’t want to talk to her.
I expected her to say something, but she ignored me and kept walking straight toward the ocean. She reached the shifting water line and kept going. A wave washed over her calves and wet her purple caftan to the knees. Her cigarette went out. I jumped after her and grabbed her bony arm. The water was blood warm and gritty with sand.
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “You can’t swim in this!”
June turned as if noticing me for the first time and laughed louder than a hyena. “Scared I’ll drown, Danny-boy? Big fucking deal. My life is ending. If not today, then tomorrow. Your hurricane will make sure of that.”
I dropped her arm. The sea swirled around my thighs. “My hurricane?”
“He’ll take hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives, thanks to you.”
“Me?” I backed up a step, feeling cold and hot at the same time. “It’s a hurricane. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Not really. Did I?”
She laughed again. “I told you to face your demons, Danny-boy, and you failed. Instead you called upon powers you don’t completely understand to destroy lives you haven’t even touched. How like a god.”
“You’re crazier than Daffy Duck on cocaine,” I said. “I’m not a god.”
“I just can’t get you to pay attention, can I? I suppose that’s why I have to do this.”
<
br /> “Do what?” I shouted as another waved shoved us both.
She ignored me. “You’re a bigger fool than I am, you know. It took a few zillion years, but I finally learned that my time is over. I’m already dead. But you—you stopped before your time even began. So watch and learn from someone who finally did what needs to be done. This is for you, Danny-boy.”
With that, she leaned in and kissed me on the mouth. I tasted salt water and smoke. Then she broke away and took three steps into the ocean. Before I could say or do a thing, a huge wave slammed into her. It bowled her over, knocking her arms and legs into a tangle of bony yarn, and then she was gone.
The little girl with the iron scissors led Ganymede down the long steps that led through the open-air auditorium and down to the bare stage far below.
“You’re poky slow,” said the girl. “Come on.”
Ganymede trotted down the stony steps, minding his balance, and eventually arrived on the stage itself, where he found the little girl already talking to two women, one middle-aged and one old. The old woman was spinning thread with a drop spindle, which looked kind of like a top, and the middle-aged woman held a cane with measuring marks on it.
“His name is Ganymede,” the girl was saying. “He’s very nice.”
“Yes, dear,” said the old woman. “We know.”
The middle-aged woman held a long bit of thread against her cane, measured it, and held it out to the little girl. “Cut here, sweetie.”
The girl took the iron scissors from her belt and snipped the plain gray line. Ganymede thought he heard a faint groan. The thread itself vanished. Already, the middle woman was measuring another piece, and the old woman kept on spinning, her expert fingers carefully twisting the strand.
Now that they were back at work, the three females seemed content to ignore Ganymede. Finally he bowed and said, “Ladies.”
“Lord,” said the old woman. All their voices echoed slightly in the empty auditorium. No birds flew through the sky overhead.
Ganymede felt himself falling into formal prince mode. “Might I ask your names, great ones?”
“I’m Atropos,” the little girl said, snipping another piece of thread. “The one with the cane is Lakhesis, and the spinner is Klotho.”
“Ask your questions,” Lakhesis said. Her hands never stopped moving over her measuring cane. “You’re cute and charming, love, but we’re busy here.”
“Uh … thank you,” Ganymede said. He glanced at Klotho, started to ask a question, changed his mind, and looked at Atropos instead. “You’re … younger than I thought you would be.”
“You mean I’m a lot older,” Klotho snorted. “Really, boy—who would you trust to get the strands right, a young child or an experienced spinster, eh? Cutting is a child’s job.”
Atropos lopped off another hunk of thread with a little smile at Ganymede. He smiled back. Lakhesis leaned toward him over her cane.
“Besides that, Atropos is too young to understand exactly what she’s doing,” she murmured. “It doesn’t bother her to end someone’s life-thread.”
Ganymede stared at the threads and the busy hands that moved them. Spin, measure, cut. Spin, measure, cut. Each thread a life, decided from beginning to end. Some were long, most were short. He wondered where they went when they vanished, and where his piece was right now. The whole thing creeped him out.
Lakhesis measured a thread, an extremely short one, and Atropos moved her scissors toward the indicated cutting spot, and Ganymede thought about a life cut so short. Suddenly he couldn’t stand it.
“Wait!” he said, and Atropos stopped, the terrible scissors held just above the thread. “Don’t. Please. Give more.”
Klotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos traded looks. “Very well,” Lakhesis said. She held out the thread to Ganymede. “You decide.”
“Me?” He paused. “Okay. Sure. I can do that.” Ganymede held the length. It felt heavy and light at the same time, an entire life resting gossamer across his palms. He moved his hand along it, and images from the life rushed through his mind. He saw a baby learning to crawl, and when he paused at a potential cutting spot, the baby caught an infection and died. He kept moving, watched the baby—a boy—learn to walk, talk, wrestle with his brothers, start herding sheep in mountain pastures. He paused, and the boy fell into a gorge, breaking his leg and dying of exposure before his anguished parents could find him. Screw that. Ganymede kept moving. Another shepherd found the boy. He reached adolescence, married a girl, fathered five children. Ganymede paused, and the boy—man—was ambushed by highwaymen while taking wool to market and killed. No way. Not with a wife and five kids at home. Ganymede kept moving. The man fled the robbers, grew older, watched his children marry and have kids of their own. He had a minor heart attack, but Ganymede kept moving and the man survived it, though he stayed sickly after that. Then he developed cancer in his stomach and headed for a slow, seriously painful death. That sucked, so Ganymede backed up to the heart attack.
“Here,” he said to Atropos, who had been cutting threads with amazing speed the entire time. How many thousands of lives had she ended while he screwed around with this single one? She reached out with her scissors and snipped. The thread vanished.
“Nice one, sweetie,” Lakhesis said. “He won the lottery.”
“You’re coming along well,” Klotho agreed.
Ganymede blinked at her. “What do you mean?”
“You act like more like a god every day,” Klotho said. Spin, spin, spin. Her fingers never stopped twisting strands. “Ignoring most, helping a few, damaging many.”
“Damaging?” Ganymede said, startled. “What do you mean by that? I’ve never hurt anyone.”
Klotho gave a dry laugh, and Lakhesis stared at him until he felt hot blood flow up his face. “No?” Lakhesis said. “Look in that golden goblet at your belt and tell me what you see.”
Shaken, Ganymede obeyed. In the circle of the cup he saw the ocean. It bubbled and boiled, and out of it rose a long, powerful body. It swam toward shoreside city with powerful S-strokes.
“No,” Ganymede whispered.
The sinuous monster attacked the town. It crushed buildings and devoured people whole. Then it slid back into the sea. Time passed, and the monster attacked again. More people died. The king talked to a priest and learned the monster would only stop if the king fed his daughter to it. Sadly, the king chained his daughter to a shoreside rock. The monster rose up out of the water, ready to bite the screaming princess in half. At the last moment, a graceful figure swooped down from the sky. A pair of madly-fluttering winged sandals let him fly, but the young man wasn’t Hermes. He was brown-haired and handsome, and a huge pouch hung from his belt. The guy zipped down in front of the sea monster and from the pouch he pulled a bloody severed head. It had snakes instead of hair. Ganymede stared in disgust and fascination. The monster looked at the head, and instantly turned to solid stone. It plunged into the water, vanishing forever. The young man carried the pretty princess back to shore, and the grateful king married her to the young man.
Atropos said, “The name of the monster that attacked the town is—”
“Ketos,” Ganymede finished. “Oh shit. I set her free in Tartarus. All those people.”
“The power of a god,” Lakhesis said. “But it’s not all bad, sweetie. Perseus and Andromeda—the hero and the princess—will rule the kingdom wisely and well. They’ll establish a long line of powerful kings.”
“Though one of the people that got eaten by the monster would have had a kid who would have figured out germ theory,” Klotho added. “Now we’ll have to wait a few thousand years for it instead.”
Ganymede felt too weak and shaken to ask what Klotho meant by any of that. A little flick of his power had killed hundreds of people and changed thousands of lives. The empty benches of the auditorium watched him with judgmental eyes.
“I have to go,” he muttered. “Sorry.”
“But you didn’t get what you came for,�
� Klotho said.
“You want to know how you can possibly kill Zeus even though you have no intention of hurting him,” Lakhesis added.
“And you want to know if we’ll change that as a favor to you,” Atropos finished.
It wasn’t until Atropos said it that Ganymede knew it. A little bit of hope started growing in his chest, and started to speak.
“No,” Klotho said gently. “We won’t.”
Ganymede staggered, as if they’d smacked him in the back of the head. “Why not?”
“Because some things shouldn’t be changed,” Lakhesis said. “Listen, dear, we know more about the past and future than anyone in the universe, but just because we know the future doesn’t mean you have no choice in it.”
“It doesn’t?” Ganymede’s head spun like Klotho’s spindle. “I don’t understand. You just said I have to kill … him. I won’t have a choice.”
“No,” Klotho said. “That’s not what we said. You’ll kill him all right. But you’ll choose to do it.” She handed another length of newly-spun thread to Lakhesis. “When the time comes, you’ll want to.”
Ganymede’s confusion switched over to anger. “No, I won’t!” he burst out. “I won’t! How the hell can you sit there and tell me what’s going to happen and then tell me I can make a choice about my future?”
“You’ll make a choice,” Lakhesis said. “We just know what it’s going to be.”
“And you’ll choose it in less than an hour,” Atropos added. Snip. Another thread disappeared.
“Fuck that!” he yelled. “I guess it might be possible that in ten or twenty thousand years I’d think about it, but in less than an hour? Screw you!”
The Fates didn’t say a word. They just continued their work, ignoring him. Ganymede’s anger and indignation grew. “You don’t know a damn thing!” he shouted. The world pulsed red around him, and he gripped Zeus’s goblet. “It’s my choice! I have a choice! How can the future be set if I have a choice?”
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