Furthermore, the man with the handbell had the build of a man used to hard work. Broad shoulders with arms crammed with muscles and a trim waist meant that he wasn’t lean but all steely workhorse. His face was a series of angles and sharp edges that made him look like an exotic, older male model. It occurred to me that his was the face of a messiah, a thought that was paradoxically ironic.
His name was Theophilus. It was a biblical name that meant beloved of God, because he believed he was the beloved of God. He literally believed he was God’s main guy. He had swiped a handbell from a local church to be able to garner the attention of anyone still wandering about in the greater San Fran area. In fact, he sweated a little over the selection of a handbell with just the right tone for what he was trying to portray. Then away he walked into the streets of San Francisco to spread the word of God’s mercy.
Theophilus was going to save all the survivors, and Lulu was the first volunteer, er, victim, to step up. He wore sackcloth and insisted that I wear sackcloth, too. Once he figured out what I was, or rather what I wasn’t, I had to pay penance. Penance involved being on my knees and praying profusely. Penance included begging for forgiveness from God. Penance meant being embraced by Theophilus’s punishments.
One might think that I took exception to this kind of treatment, and one would be correct. I did take exception. Even before the change, Louise Ambrosia Bronson was never the kind of girl to take a load of crap from a man, or any other person for that matter. My father, the vice admiral, wouldn’t have put up with that. My mother, the socialite, was a huge believer in women’s rights, and although a distant mother, she was adamant about Louise being a girl with chutzpah. As desperate as I was in the period immediately after the change, it only took me approximately ten minutes (Since watches didn’t work any better than anything else, I didn’t know how many minutes it actually took, but I know for a certainty it wasn’t very long.) to understand that Theophilus was all full of crazy sauce right up to the brim.
His mad pottage ran over the top and poured all over the place. I tried to run, but stupid me was wearing some kicky high-heeled Giuseppe Zanotti sandals, which are not the kind designed for running. (Desperate ≠ ugly survivalist gear, at least it didn’t until later.) Plus Theophilus was a forward-thinking psycho; he had obtained FlexiCuffs for meeting girls during the apocalypse. He also had a little olive drab backpack jam-packed with all kinds of convenient goodies. These were items that he thought he’d need like duct tape, plastic gloves, ankle restraints, extra Bibles, and lots of Little Debbie’s Cosmic Brownies. Theo had a sweet tooth, enough said.
Theo also had a camouflage handkerchief and a bottle of chloroform, of which I’m pretty sure he didn’t acquire from a high-end department store. (Which begs the question of where does your average, everyday psychopath obtain some quality chloroform for the purpose of drugging all the post-apocalyptic babes he meets? Inquiring minds need to know.)
After I ran away from Theo in my strappy sandals from Bloomies (I didn’t trip either, and that’s a point I feel confident in making considering all those frequently stumbling scream queens from low-grade horror movies.) he easily caught up to me. He wrestled me down to the cement sidewalk and held me there while he dug in his backpack for the handkerchief and chloroform that he had readied. I bucked my entire body and kicked my legs at him, but years of Pilates and yoga hadn’t prepared me for 220 pounds of former longshoreman. Basically, all I really did was get scraped from head to toe on the remorseless pavement. He pressed the cloth to my mouth and nose for an extended period of time. I struggled a whole lot more. I screamed, too, but no one was listening, not even the dragon that had flown past earlier. My screams weren’t significant through the handkerchief, anyway.
Interesting side note: chloroform does not work like it does in the movies. After a couple minutes of Theo pressing it to my face, all I got was slightly nauseous at the chemical smell. He grunted, I assume with dissatisfaction at having fallen for the same Hollywood mythos as I did, flipped me over, and punched me in the side of the head. At least I only remember being hit once, maybe twice. There were a lot of bruises on my head as well as other places, so he could have hit thirty times for all I knew. I hope my face skinned his knuckles raw.
That was pretty much the end of that particular day.
Lulu’s Sordid Present
The Present - Colorado
I woke up to the excruciating pain of my leg being pierced by a stake. It had impaled my upper thigh, scraping past the bone, and poked through the front so that I could clearly see the pointy part. (I very, very briefly admired the fact that someone had spent a goodly amount of time sharpening it to a very fine tip.) After I’d fallen, the initial pain of being skewered had caused me to black out, but not for long, because I could see that I was still all by my lonesome. Fighting back the excruciating waves of agony, I looked up and saw no one peering down at me. I grabbed the end of the stake that was sticking through my leg and said a few more choice words. Above my area of confinement, the pinkish light of a Colorado sunset bloomed across the skies. One isolated star had appeared. Maybe it was even one of the planets.
“Son of a BLUEBERRY!” I yelled, thinking some other word altogether. Clora had pressed everyone in Sunshine to use non-swearwords around a very absorbent Delphine. There was even a swear jar in the main meeting room.
Taking a deep breath, I lifted my thigh up and immediately regretted it as black spots exploded at the corners of my eyes. As my head began to clear, I rested my cheek against the dirt wall, grateful for the support while I tried to gather myself to act. How I had avoided getting pierced by the other stakes, I didn’t know, but I was momentarily thankful.
“Hey! Buddy boy!” I yelled. “Come help me out! I’ll limp away! We’ll call it even! You can even have the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!” I lied because, no, he couldn’t. I’d give them to the turtle-spiders before I gave them to the guy who built stake-filled pits for fun and enjoyment. (The FB status had now been changed to: Fell in a pit with some stakes, and not a vampire to be found. Who knew? #Needstitchesnow)
“Who are you?” came his voice. He was closer now, out of the shadows where he couldn’t hide, trying to see what he had caught in his trap. “What are you doing here?”
“My name is Lulu,” I said. “I came to talk about your little, special place.”
“Lulu,” he repeated. It was a little like when Theophilus had said it in a disgusting, patronizing manner. Theo thought I had another name, a biblical name, and I had just needed some baptizing and a new cool name to make me all vestal-like. (Like it was that easy.)
“You know, we could shoot the breeze all evening,” I remarked as if I was discussing the weather or high tea, although even I could hear the notes of strain in my voice. I felt moisture dripping down my leg, and I knew it wasn’t sweat. I wasn’t a doctor, and I didn’t know if the stake had severed an artery or not. “However, you’re clearly the type who wants to be left alone in his tech bubble, and who am I to disrespect that? Maybe a sign warning people off or something of that ilk in the future? You give me a strip of fabric to tie this off after helping me out of the pit, and bygones can be bygones.” Then I’ll shove the stake up your…
“Lulu,” he said again. I think shock was setting in because it sounded even ickier. I wondered where the pixies were and why they weren’t flying to the rescue. Heck, I would even take the centaurs at this point. I shivered and looked up as a shadowed figure blocked out the light of the single star. “I knew a Lulu once,” he said slyly.
Oh, butterfly’s butt, I thought with earth-shattering realization. I knew the voice. I had heard it before. I had met this man before. I also knew about the turtle-spiders. His name was Tate. That was the one he’d given the Redwoods Group when he’d come in with another woman as camouflage. His hair had been dyed, and he’d worn colored contacts then. The new animals had formed the same connection with him that the firefly pixies had formed with Sophie. Then he’d me
taphorically stabbed them in their shell-covered backs right before Sophie sliced off his arm in order to save the child he’d kidnapped.
I reached for the KA-BAR, but my thigh was shrieking at me to stop moving, period. The turtle-spider things weren’t sightseeing; they’d likely followed Tate here. Apparently, they held a grudge longer than some people I knew.
“I should have seen it coming,” Tate said. He stepped to one side, and I could see his mussed, dirty blonde hair and his intensely blue eyes glaring at me. He hadn’t changed overly with the exception of the missing arm. “I can see when danger is coming,” he said in a banal manner. “It doesn’t work as well now that I’m in this place.” He looked up and outward, clearly staring out of the bubble at something I couldn’t see. “I can’t leave much anymore, but there’s food stores here and nearly limitless water. This place has five water reservoirs, you know.”
I would have given it another college try because I was kind of persistent that way, but I really didn’t think that Tate was going for any of my lines. He was going to kill me and leave me for whatever scavengers came around. The folks at Sunshine wouldn’t notice me missing for a week or two, and not even Landers would…
Dammit.
I gritted my teeth and pulled on my leg. The thigh slid about two inches up the stake and stopped. I nearly threw up. The stake was well and truly fixed in the cement. I was going to have to yank my own leg off it, or someone was going to have to saw the stake in two pieces. Or someone was going to have to saw me in two pieces, which was always a possibility with Tate. Zach and Kara, another close friend of Sophie’s, told stories about Tate’s cannibalism. (Food stores in Cheyenne Jr.? Gross.) I might very well be blonde barbeque on the hoof. “Don’t eat me,” I said. “I’m stringy, and all my bitchiness has probably made me sour.”
Tate chuckled. Talk about a really unpleasant, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard kind of noise. “All that fear in you has probably made the meat go bad,” he agreed.
“Seriously,” I said. “Come down here, and I’ll cut you. I don’t give a good golly gee whiz about what you did before. I’m not a judge and a jury and all I want is to go.” I touched the handle of the KA-BAR with my fingers. I was going to have to do this all by myself. I wiggled my thigh and felt it move another inch. Another five and I’d be off the stake. I’d use Mr. Stabby to carve handholds in the walls, and if I had to, I’d drag myself down the side of this mountain. The fruity-loopy Tate could go back in his hole and play Parcheesi with constipated trolls for all I cared. If some of the others from Sunshine wanted to come deal with his damage, then they could bring a frigging army and…
I knew what I sounded like in my head. I sounded like Louise. I shook her away.
“This doesn’t have to be like this,” I said, trying again.
Tate crouched at the side of the trap. He glanced outward again, obviously watching something outside the bubble. “Those little insects are mad as hell,” he remarked. “They can’t come in here, but they want to. Are those silver toothpicks?”
That was odd because the firefly pixies generally could go inside tech bubbles. Light had once let a little nugget escape about that. She’d said it was because they weren’t really “new” to the earth. They’d been here before the change, just as some of the others had.
“And the turtle-spiders?” I asked. “They ticked, too?”
“For a different reason,” he said. For a moment Tate almost sounded normal. Almost. His penetratingly blue eyes descended to me again. “I remember you. You had a thing for Sophie’s boyfriend. Didn’t land him, hmm?”
“I tried,” I said, wiggling my thigh again, then trying to stave off the blackness that threatened to engulf me. I got the leg up another inch, and I adjusted my body accordingly. “Wasn’t interested in blondes. His loss.” Not really. It was my loss for being such a stupid cow, but it had been the learning lesson I needed.
“You seem very different now,” Tate said conversationally.
“I could say it was all the self-help books, but I haven’t read a book in almost a month.” I tugged my leg again and wished I hadn’t eaten an hour before. “You’re changed yourself. Been taking your mood stabilizers on a regular basis? Maybe an antipsychotic drug, too?”
Tate considered me carefully. “You’re mouthy for someone who’s doing her best imitation of a shish kabob.”
“Don’t let that give you any ideas,” I snapped back. “Tomatoes and onions aren’t my best counterparts.”
“You’re a long way from California,” he said.
“We had to rethink things after the big fire,” I said. What was it with nutjobs and fires? Oh wait, I suppose it didn’t count that the formerly alive President hadn’t really intended to start a massive fire when he’d shot his superweapon; that had been happenstance.
Tate scratched the side of his head with his remaining hand. I gathered that the turtle-spiders were still angry with him and wouldn’t heal him. Or maybe that was something even magic couldn’t heal. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if he was still having a problem clapping, but I bit it back.
“You look for these places,” he said. He waved his hand in the direction of Cheyenne Jr. “That means there are more of them.” That was said in a manner that denoted his interest in the subject. He was absorbing the information to be used at his whim at a later time. “Not only that, but that they’re useful to you and your people.”
Mouth firmly shut, I grasped my upper thigh and gave it a big jerk. It came up about two more inches, but a black wave of unconsciousness broke across my head. It wasn’t long before my eyes fluttered open again because Tate was still crouched at the side of the trap staring down at me.
“Should I help you?” Tate asked. “Should I leave you in the pit? Would you actually get out by yourself? I guess that depends on how much blood you’ve lost. So should I do this…or should I do that?” He systematically pointed with one finger at his left side and then his right side as he said, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a girly by her toe. If she won’t talk, then let her go. Skidum, skidee, skidoo. But when you get the prize, your little bride will surely find out where you hide. So there’s the door and when I count four, then out goes you. Eeny, meeny, miny…moe.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, trying to shimmy my leg upward. It was funny how my mind thought about things that didn’t matter in the slightest at that moment. An image of Dracula impaling the bodies of his Turkish enemies popped into my head. The stories said that the son of the dragon had simply put them on the sharpened poles and let them languish until they’d died, leaving the bodies as a warning to others.
Tate touched the side of his face. “It means that it’s either Lulu’s luckiest day or her unluckiest day.”
He stood up and stared at me for what seemed like the longest time. Then he reached around the back of his jeans and pulled out a gun. He didn’t hesitate as he aimed and shot me.
And me? It wasn’t like I could have dived away from him and avoided the shot.
Chapter 5
Lulu’s Wretched Past Again
The Past – San Francisco
Theophilus renamed me Hasadiah, which was not with my express permission. He informed me that it meant one that God favors, but I felt less than favored. He, and I mean Theo, not God, kept me chained to a pew in a church. If I was fortunate, he let me have a bucket to use to urinate in. If I was less than fortunate, I had to make do with the floor. I got to wear sackcloth, and I had to pray a lot. If I didn’t wear the sackcloth and I didn’t pray, I got beaten. Theo was pretty good with his fists. When his fists got sore, he was pretty good with a belt. Once he used a hefty Bible on me, saving his fists for a rainy day. (It was an oversized King James Version that some pastor had hoarded in his office.) That sucker really put a whaling on me.
There were lessons I learned from Theo, who had once been a longshoreman. He corrected me in that he’d actually been a stevedore named Martin. I only called him Marty a single tim
e before he broke out a 2X4 wrapped with what he called a holy cloth. (There were lots of crosses and doves printed on it.) Number one was that if I kept my mouth shut until he wanted it open, I would get hit less often. Number two was that Theo knew how to chain a girl to a church pew in a way that meant one was staying there for the interim. Number three was that no one was going to rescue me.
It was Theo’s theorem that he had been one of the survivors so that he could save others. Specifically he wanted to save girls. I was on the top end of the age range of what he termed savable, but I squeezed past the line. Lucky me. So if I did everything Theo said, then I would be saved. When I talked smack, then I was going to hell.
And I thought everyone in the world simply vanishing was bad enough.
Theo would leave me in the church chained to the pew, which was fastened to the floor with bolts. He would walk out into the greater San Francisco area and ring his bell like a psychotic little Salvation Army worker except without the bucket. He knew there were others out there. It was just a matter of enticing them into the fold. If I had been with him, I would have screamed at them to run away, which was probably why Theo didn’t take me with him.
While I sat in the pew one morning wishing I had two tabs of oxycodone so that I could get past the pain of the most recent beating, it occurred to me to start marking days. (The three-section chain whip that he’d used on me was made from metal and leather and was called a plum flower. Theo had explained to me as he went along. I didn’t ask for a more specific explanation of why it was called that, but Theo was more than happy to illuminate that before he was a stevedore he had been a third officer on a merchant marine vessel. He’d visited many countries to include most countries on the Asian continent, which was where he’d obtained the whip. This was a lot more than I wanted to know about the thing that was cutting into the flesh on my back as he hit me with it, but it wasn’t like I could have stopped him.)
Forest of Dreams Page 4