Drought

by Graham Masterton

  Martin closed the cabin door and eased himself back on his bunk. It was hard, of course, but he had slept in much more uncomfortable places in Afghanistan, like the back of a Buffalo, or a trench so narrow that his arms had been pinned to his sides all night.

  ‘We are doing the right thing, getting out of the city like this?’ he asked Santos.

  ‘Are you asking me if I think that you are a coward, for running away?’

  ‘Not really. But maybe we should have stayed there and toughed it out, like everybody else.’

  ‘My people learned a very hard lesson, when your people came to steal our land. It may be brave to face up to adversity, but it is no disgrace to survive.’

  Martin turned over to face the wall. Every muscle in his body felt bruised, almost as badly as when he had been beaten by the Taliban. Even his brain felt bruised, as if he just couldn’t think any more. But he did think about Peta, standing in the moonlight looking at him. Had she been wondering if they could possibly start over, and live together again? Or was she simply resigned to the fact that he would never change?

  He slept for about two hours and then he was woken by a soft groaning sound. He opened his eyes and lifted his head a little. The moon must have gone down because the interior of the cabin was completely black. There was silence for a while and then the groaning sound was repeated. At first he thought the wind might have risen, because the cabin door was rattling, too.

  The next groan, however, was very much louder, and ended in a thick, phlegmy cough.

  ‘Santos?’ he asked.

  ‘I am sorry, Martin. I did not want to wake you.’

  Martin found his flashlight and switched it on. Santos was perched on the edge of his bunk. His shoulders were hunched like a vulture’s wings and his face was glossy with sweat.

  ‘So much pain,’ he said. ‘I never thought that such pain could exist.’

  ‘Do you want to take some more Tylenol?’

  He nodded. ‘I will have to. I left them in my truck.’

  ‘I’ll go get them for you. Where are they?’

  Santos shook his head. ‘I will get them myself, and maybe stay in the truck for the rest of the night. You have all of these people to look after. Your wife, your children, my grandchildren, too. You need all the sleep you can get.’

  With that, he stood up and wrapped his blanket around his shoulders. Martin stood up, too, and helped him out of the cabin, shining his flashlight across the clearing so that he could see where he was going. Santos reached his Suburban and laboriously climbed inside. Martin waited until he had closed the door and given him a salute, and then he went back to his bunk.

  Santos had been right. It was no disgrace to survive. But sometimes survival could be more than anybody could bear.

  After another twenty minutes or so he managed to sink back to sleep again. He dreamed that he was sitting in a bare room in Afghanistan, with a single high window covered by a cotton blind. There was a desk in the opposite corner of the room, and a black-bearded man in a black turban and salwar kameez was sitting at this desk, engrossed in writing.

  Martin could even hear his pen scratching. Scritchety-scritchety-scritch.

  Eventually the man set down his pen. He studied what he had written for a while, and then he stood up and came over to where Martin was sitting, holding up the sheet of paper in front of him. He held it much too close to his face, so that Martin found it hard to focus on it. He could see that it was covered in Pashto characters, although he couldn’t understand any of it. To him, Pashto writing had always looked like nothing more than a procession of black wriggling worms.

  ‘You know what this means?’ the man demanded.

  Martin’s mouth was so dry that he could hardly manage to say ‘No … I don’t have any idea … they just look like worms to me.’

  ‘This is because they are worms!’ the man snapped back at him. He gave the sheet of paper a violent shake and all of the wormlike writing dropped off it and fell on to Martin, squirming and convulsing. He had worms in his hair, worms down the back of his shirt, and worms all over his clothes.

  He twisted around and slapped at his sleeves, gasping in panic and disgust. Somebody, however, seized hold of his wrists to hold him down, and breathed hotly into his face. ‘Sshh, sshh! You’re having a nightmare, that’s all. Ssh!’

  He stopped struggling. Somebody was sitting on the bunk next to him, still gripping his wrists. It was still dark, but it must have been growing lighter outside because he could make out a silhouette. It was a woman, and he could smell a woman’s perfume, too, jasmine and musk. It was Saskia.

  ‘Are you OK now?’ she asked him. She sounded sympathetic, but also amused. ‘That must have been some scary dream you were having. It wasn’t about chalky werewolves, was it?’

  She released his wrists and he sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Rita’s not sick, is she?’

  ‘Rita’s fine, except she’s been snoring all night like a cow elephant on heat. I haven’t been able to sleep at all.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You can stay in here if you like. Santos didn’t feel too good so he’s gone to sleep in his truck.’

  Saskia looked across at the opposite side of the cabin, and then she said, ‘Great. Thank you.’

  Instead of going over to Santos’ bunk, however, she lifted Martin’s blanket and climbed in close beside him, putting her arm around him and crossing her left leg across his thighs. He had taken off his shirt and his chinos and was only wearing shorts, and he could feel that she had taken off her pants, too, and was dressed in nothing but her blouse.

  For a moment, he thought about telling her that this wasn’t what he had had in mind, but then she snuggled in even closer to him and pressed her breasts against his chest and she felt so warm and smelled so womanly that the words just wouldn’t come out.

  ‘Santos doesn’t trust me at all, does he?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think he trusts any white people. He doesn’t even trust me all that much, but he knows that I’ll take care of his family, mainly because it’s my job.’

  ‘How about you? Do you trust me?’

  ‘Do I need to? We’re both in the same boat, aren’t we, so trusting each other is kind of irrelevant. It’s a question of mutual self-preservation.’

  ‘I like that,’ she said, and spontaneously kissed him on the cheek. ‘It makes us sound like Adam and Eve. A man and a woman, running together from the wrath of God.’

  He turned his face toward her, and as he did so she kissed him again, on the lips this time. He kissed her back, and then she slipped her tongue into his mouth. They kissed again and again, with increasing passion, scarcely pausing for breath. When Martin pushed his tongue into her mouth, she teasingly bit it, and wouldn’t let it go. As she did so, she reached across and took hold of his penis through his cotton shorts. It was already half-stiff, and she needed only to rub it up and down three or four times before it was totally hard. In fact he felt that it had turned to bone.

  Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to pretend that they needed permission for what they were doing, or that they loved each other, or even that they liked each other. Saskia took hold of the waistband of Martin’s shorts and wrestled them down around his thighs. He lifted up his knees so that she could pull them off altogether and drop them on to the floor.

  She ran her hands all over his chest, feeling the five diagonal scars on his shoulder.

  ‘What are these?’ she asked him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did somebody hurt you? Who was it?’

  ‘War wounds. Afghanistan.’

  She took hold of his penis again and slowly massaged it, probing into the hole with her sharp, manicured thumbnail. ‘My battle-scarred soldier,’ she breathed, and bit his shoulder, too.

  He started to unbutton her blouse, and she sat up a little to make it easier for him, but the only time that she relinquished her hold on his penis was when he had to tug her arm out of her sleeve. W
hen he had managed to wrestle her blouse right off her, he reached behind her with his right hand and slid open the catch of her bra. Her breasts, now that they were bare, seemed very much bigger, and he could feel their weight and their warmth in the palm of his hand. Her nipples were tightly knurled, and he lifted up each breast so that he could suck them, and roll them with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  When he nipped one of her nipples with his teeth, however, she dug her fingernails into the shaft of his penis and said, ‘No, Martin! I do the biting.’

  With that, she dragged the blanket aside, and turned herself around to kneel astride him, facing away from him. He ran his hands down her long smooth back, and felt the wide flare of her hips, and then he reached around and cupped both of her breasts. Then she bent forward and took the head of his penis into her mouth, licking it and gently sucking it, but every now and then biting at it. Every bite hurt, but only for a split second.

  Martin was gripped by a tension that he had never experienced before. Usually, as he came close to ejaculating, he felt a pleasurable tightness gradually mounting between his legs. But what Saskia was doing to him made him feel as if his whole existence was building up toward a climax that would blow him apart like a bomb, body and soul.

  She bent over him even more, lifting her hips so that her open vulva was right in front of his face. He opened her lips even wider with his fingers, and she was so wet and slippery that he could have washed his face in her juices. He licked her, and slid his tongue inside her, and even though she had his penis deep in her mouth she let out a muffled moan.

  Now she began to bite him even more viciously, and the combination of pain and pleasure made him feel as if he were losing his sanity. It was that pain again, the same pain that he had endured as the Taliban whipped him with wire and beat him with canes, and yet for the first time since he had left the Marines, Saskia seemed to be making sense of that pain.

  He pulled the cheeks of her bottom even wider apart, so that he could poke the curled-up tip of his tongue into her anus. She flinched at first, and her anus tightened, but then he could feel her deliberately opening herself up to him. Next, very slowly, he slid his tongue down to her clitoris, teasing her at first with occasional flicks, but then licking it faster and faster, trying to arouse her as much as she was arousing him.

  She gave his penis one last lascivious suck, circling her tongue around it. But then she ran the tips of her teeth down the side of its shaft and sank her teeth into the skin of his scrotum, so hard that he gasped out ‘ahh!’. She didn’t let go, though. With her teeth clenched together, she stretched the skin upward as far as she could, and worried it from side to side. He couldn’t help it then. It was impossible to stop himself. He shot warm semen everywhere, all over her face and her hair and her hands, and his own thighs, too. His climax seemed to go on and on, and he felt blinded and deafened and lost to the world.

  Afterwards, she lay very close to him, still massaging his penis, and smearing his semen over his stomach until it dried.

  ‘You needed that, didn’t you?’ she told him. ‘I could tell that was what you needed from the very first moment I met you in your boss’s office.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And how could you tell that?’

  ‘I saw it in your eyes. I can always recognize people who have suffered pain. What most people don’t realize is that you need more of it. Your suffering defines you. It helps you to understand who you are.’

  ‘You’re a very interesting woman, Saskia Vane. I think I misjudged you, that day.’

  She lifted her head so that she could kiss him lightly on the lips. ‘Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. You don’t know anything about me. Quite possibly, you never will.’

  ‘Tell me about you and Governor Smiley.’

  Now she sat up and kissed him again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ve had enough time to recuperate. I want you to fuck me.’

  BOOK TWO

  Sins of Men

  ONE

  It was still dark when Bryan heard the doorbell chiming, again and again, and then somebody knocking at his door and shouting, ‘Bryan! Bryan!’

  Next to him, Marjorie stirred and snuffled and then said, ‘What’s all that noise?’

  Marjorie could usually sleep through anything, even a late-night barbecue next door, or the most catastrophic of thunderstorms, but the chiming and the knocking and the shouting were so persistent that even she had woken up.

  Bryan switched on his bedside lamp. ‘Sounds like Luis,’ he said. ‘What the hell does Luis want, at this hour?’ He frowned at his alarm-clock and saw that it was only three twenty-one in the morning.

  The knocking and the shouting continued. ‘Bryan! Bryan! You need to wake up! It’s happened to us now!’

  Bryan eased himself out of bed and went across to the chair by the window to pick up his maroon cotton robe. Marjorie said, ‘Whatever it is, Bry, take it with a pinch of salt. You know how excitable Luis can get.’

  Bryan lifted his hand in acknowledgement and then walked along the corridor to the front door. There was a frosted glass panel in the top of the door, and he could see Luis bobbing up and down behind it.

  He switched on the outside light, slid back the security chain and opened up. Luis was standing in the porch in a baggy blue tracksuit and slippers, his shock of black hair standing up on end as if he had suffered an electric shock. His eyes seemed to be bulging even more than they usually did.

  ‘They’ve done it to us now!’ he announced.

  ‘Done what, Luis? Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Of course I know what time it is! They must have done it sometime after midnight, because I was working late on my accounts and it was OK just before I went to bed.’

  Bryan sniffed. He could smell smoke in the air. From the city center, which was only three miles away, he could hear warbling sirens and the popping of what sounded like gunfire.

  ‘They’ve cut off our water!’ said Luis. ‘I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet and it flushed only once, and didn’t refill. I turned on the faucet and what did I get? Nada!’

  ‘Well, the water department said they might have to,’ Bryan reminded him. ‘They said they were going to do it by rotation. First one neighborhood, and then the next.’

  ‘That’s what they said, for sure! But you hear all that noise downtown? The rioting, it’s still going on! So I just call my cousin in Seccombe Lane and they still don’t have any water after three days now. There’s no rotation, Bryan! It’s all BS! They’re cutting us off permanent, one neighborhood after the other!’

  ‘You’d best come on in,’ said Bryan. ‘I need to make some phone calls.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ Luis told him, stepping into the hallway. ‘I can’t use my cell. There’s no signal. I tried Carla’s cell, too, and Roberto’s, but nothing. Just this noise like ssshhhhhhh! It’s like we’re being jammed.’

  Bryan led the way into the living room and switched on the lights. Even though the air conditioning was rattling, and it was the middle of the night, the room was still airless and uncomfortably warm. ‘Here, sit down,’ he told Luis, pointing to one of the heavy brown overstuffed armchairs. Then he picked up the phone and sat down himself.

  He punched out a number and it rang and rang for a long time before anybody answered.

  ‘Corben? It’s me, Bryan. Listen, I’m sorry to wake you, but Luis has just found out that the water department have cut off our supply.’

  He waited for a few moments, listening and nodding, but then he said, ‘No, Corben. I don’t believe they’re keeping their promise. They still haven’t restored the supplies to any of the Westside neighborhoods or any of the east side neighborhoods downtown.’

  He listened a little longer, first of all nodding and then shaking his head. ‘I don’t believe they’re keeping their promise, and that’s because they can’t keep it. They’ve run out of water, Corben, and it’s simple as that. I know that. I know. They’ve been misma
naging our water supplies for decades but it’s too late to worry about that now. My friend Walter Johnson said he drove past the Lake Perris Reservoir about a week ago and it almost looked like you could walk across it and you wouldn’t be any deeper than your knees.’

  Again he listened and nodded, and then he said, ‘I’m calling a committee meeting to see what we can do about this. It’s causing chaos downtown and we don’t want that happening here in Muscupiabe. I can hear gunfire and that could mean that people are being wounded or even killed. Yes. But who knows for sure? They had a report about protests on the TV news yesterday afternoon, but since then there’s been nothing, not a word. It’s like it’s not even happening. And all the cellphone networks are dead. Is yours dead? Well, try it. I think you’ll find that you don’t have a signal.

  ‘Corben – I’m the chairman of the Muscupiabe Neighborhood Association and I am the elected representative of the residents of Muscupiabe and as such I have a right to go the authorities and demand to know what’s going on.

  ‘Come around here at noon, say. I’m going to call around and get the rest of the committee together. OK. OK, good. I’ll see you then.’

  He put down the phone. Luis said, ‘What can you do, Bryan? What can any of us do?’

  Bryan stood up and as he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the red-brick fireplace. A balding overweight fifty-five-year-old realtor with bushy gray eyebrows and a fleshy nose and two double chins. He knew he didn’t look like much of a champion, but he had fought for seven years to improve the quality of life in his neighborhood, a triangle of residential homes between the intersection of three freeways – the Mojave Freeway, the Foothill Freeway and Route 259.

  Muscupiabe’s crime rate was still too high, but it was nearly twenty percent lower than neighborhoods like Roosevelt or Las Plazas; and Bryan had worked tirelessly to beautify Muscupiabe, too, with tree-planting and landscaping and fencing and lighting, and organizing teams of volunteers to fill in gopher holes and to clean off graffiti as soon as it appeared.