The quetzal who’d caused the mess had escaped, and without losing so much as a single drop of blood. Or whatever its bodily fluid was called.
A waste of skin.
That’s what that little cretin of a girl called him. Clod-brain. Dortmund Short Mind. And now, she, too, was gone.
He looked up through swollen eyes. He still sat in the chair at the table, his butt aching, back knotted and stiff.
Yvette Dushane remained at her post at the window. Shig stood just outside the front door, Talina’s rifle awkwardly clutched in his hands, watching in vain for Kylee.
The kid had run off with the quetzals? How utterly insane was that?
He looked up as Shig stepped into the room, took two tries to rack the rifle, and finally managed to secure it. “No sign of Kylee.”
“What the hell?” Yvette vented an exasperated sigh. “Not in any permutation of possibilities would I ever have anticipated that the kid would have reacted like that. It’s nuts. She chose them over us.”
“She places you with the ones who murdered her quetzal,” Shig reminded.
“Never seen anything like it,” Yvette said, refusing to relinquish the window. “She went charging out there, flailing with her hands, yelling, ‘Run!’ and then raced right through the middle of them. I thought one of them would snap her up, crunch her, and gulp her down. But no, they go trotting off toward the drainage in her wake. Following along like a bunch of clap-trapping oversized dogs.”
“If she’s still alive,” Dortmund rasped to himself.
“I’d bet you a two-hundred SDR gold piece she’s a pile of quetzal crap as we speak.” Yvette’s eyes thinned.
“How’s Trish?” Shig asked.
“Not good. Fevered last time I checked. Leg’s swelling, and the wound’s weeping blood and pus.” Yvette spared a glance for the young woman sleeping fitfully on the couch. “I gave her another dose of the pain drugs and antibiotics. Tried the radio again about a half hour ago. No response from Raya. Hell, the hospital could be smoking rubble for all we know.”
“Have faith,” Shig told her with a weary smile. “And Talina?”
“Still out.”
“Not exactly the relaxing refuge we had hoped for, is it?” Shig asked, stepping over to the microwave to punch the button on the last cup of vegetable soup. “Tal’s in a coma, Trish is shot, and Kylee’s run off with the quetzals to who knows what fate?”
“And no telling what the toilet-sucking quetzals have in store for us.” Yvette stepped away from the window long enough to place her hand on Trish’s brow. “She’s too hot.”
“Not much we can do,” Shig told her in an uncommonly placid voice. “I’m going back to try and feed Talina the last of this soup.”
Dortmund had dropped his head back into his hands, letting the agony of the position in the chair be his penance. He was barely aware when Yvette stopped before him, saying, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You going to sit there torturing yourself?”
He looked up, wincing at the stiffness in his back. “I shot a woman.”
“Yeah, you did.” Yvette’s expression showed no give. “Now, get up off your ass and make us a meal out of whatever’s left of the food.”
“I just want to die.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“This is all Radcek’s fault. This whole unmentionable disaster of a planet. I’ve been made into the very thing I’ve despised all of my life. And as soon as I take matters in hand to fix them, to save something for science, I end up shooting an innocent woman? How did this happen to me?”
He blinked, realization settling like a lead weight. “It’s the quetzal molecules. It must be. That’s what’s changed me.”
“You ask me,” Yvette said disdainfully, “you’re figuring out what it means to be remarkably book-smart and extraordinarily world-stupid. But that’s not my problem for the moment. Get up and make us supper.”
“I can’t.”
He started, wide-eyed, at the snick-snack of the rifle’s bolt being cycled. Yvette had the gruesome thing pointed at his knee cap.
“What are you doing?” he shrieked, toppling the chair backward as he jerked to his feet.
“There, see,” Yvette told him grimly. “You can get your sorry ass out that chair.” With the rifle, she gestured. “Now, get over to the kitchen there and cook.”
“But I—”
“I can blow your foot off. Give you a little taste of what you did to Trish. You see, I’ve always liked Trish. Known her since she was a girl. And, yeah, accidents happen. Doesn’t mean I don’t carry a grudge when they happen because of gross incompetence.”
Dortmund stumbled over to the kitchen counter. “You wouldn’t really shoot me, would you?”
“Professor, I’ll tell you this once: You wouldn’t be the first person I’ve blown a hole in. The difference this time is that I’ll feel good about doing it.”
Shit, she meant it.
Dortmund tried to get his heart to settle back in his chest. He kept fumbling with things, struggling to get lids off, pouring contents into the big kettle. Wondering what the hell he was making.
From the couch, Trish moaned, tried to shift, and kicked with her good right leg. In a weak voice, she said, “So sorry, Tal. Couldn’t see you suffer . . . and Cap wanted me to do it. Could see it in his eyes . . .”
“Hey, easy there,” Yvette said, retreating to the couch and bending over the wounded woman. “Trish, you’ve got to relax. You’re hurt. We need you to rest.”
Dortmund licked his dry lips, trying to concentrate on what he was cooking. Not that they had a whole lot left. Some sugar peas, green beans, odds and ends from the garden. Barely enough to go around even with just the three of them. Trish sure wasn’t eating, and soup was the only thing anyone had managed to get into Talina.
Which was a problem. Another of many.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Yvette inject more of the painkiller into Trish. What happened when that ran out? How long could a gunshot wound be left untreated? Dortmund wasn’t any sort of medical man, but Trish looked way too sweaty, pale, and drawn to be any kind of stable. And the way that leg was swelling was just plain ugly.
He stirred his “stew” together and put it on the heat.
Tomorrow, before they could eat breakfast, someone was going to have to make a journey down to the garden.
Go to the garden?
To what fate? A really mad Kylee was out there with at least three quetzals. And one of them—if the kid could be believed—was a rogue that would have killed and eaten Trish that very morning.
Dortmund clamped his eyes closed. He couldn’t count on Shig for protection. The man was just as fumble-fingered as Dortmund when he held a rifle. A scholar of comparative religion? Get real. Shig admitted that he’d rarely shot a gun, and the only times he had, it had been point blank. Point blank? What the hell did that imply?
Kylee made no secret that she had a score to settle with Yvette, so sending the woman would be like waving a red flag and asking for an attack. Dortmund going would be just as disastrous. Time and time again he’d proven he could not tell a quetzal from a sucking shrub.
“So, which one of us is going to try and make the trip?”
Whoever did, the odds were that they weren’t coming back.
Dear God, we’re going to starve to death here.
73
Xibalba had miserable leaden skies. Talina stared up at the sullen air and wondered what was wrong with her. The duality of her spiritual essence—what the Maya called ch’ulel—seemed to tear her apart as she stood alone in the Copan ballcourt. The Maya believed that the soul was composed of two conflicting entities, one wise, peaceful, and orderly, the other chaotic and violent. They had a word for that in Yukatec: pixom.
Is that why I am stuck here? Because I’m at war with myself?
Part of her nature was to protect, the other to destroy. A woman in eternal conflict.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she screamed up at the dirty sky. And then, in a pique of anger, she stomped on the stones beneath her feet. The ballcourt floor drummed with the impact. She listened, amazed as the reverberations ran through the fitted ashlars and faded into the distance.
She felt the stirring. Knew instinctively that she’d awakened the Lords of Death from their repose beneath the ballcourt.
She saw the figure when he emerged into the ballcourt. For a single striking instant he looked like the ancient Maya depictions of the first lord of Xibalba: One Death.
An instant later the death god’s appearance shifted, lengthened, and morphed into a blinding white quetzal. But something about it wasn’t quite right. Talina raised a hand against the glare, squinted, and saw that the quetzal’s head was nothing more than a gruesome wedge-shaped skull. The creature’s joints were skeletal, and the flesh along its body hung in rotten strips: One Death as he would look in the guise of a quetzal? Or a quetzal in the guise of One Death? Which would it be? Or was it both at once?
The quetzal opened its spectral jaws, the serrations that served as fangs looked cracked and broken. “Called me from the dead, did you?”
“Demon?”
“We are one and many. You killed me in the canyon. Then again in your house. But we waited. It was Whitey who finally figured out how to bring you down. Would have managed to kill you.”
“Whitey?”
Movement from behind caused her to turn. Rocket, blazing in crimson, yellow, and black, trotted up to her side. “Whitey wanted to drive you mad. Turn you against your own kind through molecular manipulation. It’s one of the more subtle ways quetzals fight,” Rocket said softly, his tail flicking back and forth. “He couldn’t have known until after he tasted you that day. You have too many other quetzal molecules from too many other lineages running in your blood. So you’re a little of all of us. Our TriNA went into your reconstruction of the pot.”
She cocked her head, right hand on her pistol. “So that meeting with Whitey outside Port Authority? It was a trick? Like, to sabotage my brain?”
“Wasn’t a complete failure.” The death quetzal snapped its skeletal jaws shut. Then added, “You’re here. Locked away. Half mad, but it’s better than nothing. They’re on their own back there in the town. In your terms, it’s war. Got to bring it to an end.”
“Some of us are still learning,” Rocket told her. “A few of us like humans.”
Talina clamped her eyes shut, a slew of disparate thoughts rattling around inside her head: quetzal visions, quetzal thoughts. All struggling with her own soul and personality.
What was Talina Perez, and what was quetzal TriNA?
When she opened her eyes, it was to see the death quetzal, its shape merging into Whitey, Demon, the quetzal that had tried to kill her in her house. The same lineage. One displaced by Port Authority. How many of them had died at the hands of humans, all the way back to Donovan himself?
“Yes, you begin to understand,” the death quetzal told her.
“Sometimes, when the hatred goes too deep,” she told it, “there’s only one way to end it.”
She pulled her pistol, shot once, twice, three times. Seeing no effect, she lined the sights on the bony skull and triggered the pistol. The thing remained unscathed, a quetzal-shaped One Death.
This is only a dream.
Rocket told her, “You are the pot. You did the shaping, the fixing, the changing. You understand that, don’t you? Whatever it is that you are, you are the vessel that holds us all.”
“Me?”
Rocket flashed orange patterns of agreement. “Whitey and Demon, Flash, Diamond, Leaper, the Briggs and the Rork quetzals, all of their molecules are changing, seeking, building pathways in your brain.”
“No wonder I’m dreaming I’m in Xibalba, that dead quetzals and skulls can talk. I’m insane.” Talina allowed herself one last shot before reholstering her pistol. Of course she couldn’t kill the death quetzal. The thing’s TriNA lurked inside of her.
Made her wonder what the psychiatric professionals on Transluna would make of her. Probably write up a whole new category for the DSM-12.
“We win,” the death quetzal told her. “Allison’s baby? Gerry Hmong? Moshe Levitz? All the others we’ve tasted and tried to learn? You were the key who finally showed us the way to prevail. And we will, if it takes a thousand years.”
They might at that; quetzals calculated based on an entirely different comprehension of time.
Talina took a deep breath, enjoyed a caustic laugh at her expense. Then she glanced at Rocket. “But that’s only one lineage.”
The little quetzal stared up from the ballcourt floor, his three eyes gleaming. “You begin to understand.”
“Talina?”
She glanced up. There, atop the brooding temple above the ballcourt, sat an owl—one of the messengers of Xibalba. Like the owl who had led the pregnant Blood Moon from the underworld into the world of light. They were the guides, capable of traveling between the worlds.
“Talina? Do you hear me?” The owl’s voice sounded disembodied.
She felt something, faint, a distant touch on her face.
“Follow the voice,” Rocket said. “It will lead you back.”
She glanced over her shoulder, could see her mother’s kitchen. She took one longing step back toward it. Hesitated. She could smell the cooking tamales, the recado rojo, and chili-spiced cacao.
“Talina? It’s important. We need your help.”
She turned her attention back to the owl. Knew that voice. Someone familiar. A warm and loving friend.
She took one last look at the death quetzal, watched its form blend into the traditional image of One Death. It continued to watch with spectral eyes, calling, “You can’t rid yourself of me. No matter how long it takes, I will drag you down.”
“You got it half right,” she told the apparition as she turned, leaped to the slanting wall, and climbed the ballcourt’s incline to the high temple. “You’re trapped in here with me, but I’ll screw vacuum before I let you drag me down.”
She climbed with a greater sense of freedom. Above her, the owl took to wing, flying ever higher. Yes, she knew that voice: Shig.
She might awaken crazy as a rabid bat with all these quetzals inside her, but at her core, she had the pot. Carefully reconstructed. In one piece again.
Overhead, the owl flew, straight up, and into the light.
The light flared, almost blinded her.
Coming to, she lay on her back. Uncomfortable as hell.
Talina blinked, realized her bladder was full; she was desperately thirsty and hungry enough to eat a crest. Raw.
It took a moment to find her focus. She lay supine on a bed. The face swimming above hers sharpened into concerned brown eyes, a pug nose, and round cheeks.
“Shig?” she whispered hoarsely.
“Good to have you back. We’re in somewhat of a mess. But I must say, what on Earth did you do to your eyes?”
74
Trish thought she could take pain. She’d been hurt before. Nothing compared to what she now suffered. Agony burned through her thigh, into her hips, and paralyzed her lower body.
It just fucking wouldn’t stop. Somewhere life, happiness, and joy had slipped away to become this absolutely endless misery and suffering. Time had slowed to a near standstill. The suffering consumed everything.
If she could, she would have crawled out of her skin. Left herself just bared muscle and stinging nerve, and sighed as the faint stirrings of air blew cool across her wet and bleeding meat.
Another of the agonizing waves rolled up her leg, left her gasping.
She tried to flee. Tried to slip away into the dimness of memory. Recalled her childhood: Mother telling her that Daddy was dead. But that it would be all right. That they’d make it.
How they’d decorated the dome on the one-year anniversary of Daddy’s death. Filled it with pictures of when he was alive.
Idly, Trish wondered where those pictures had gone.
Where anything but pain had gone.
She’d been twelve. Saw again the look on Talina’s face as the young security officer in her natty new uniform said, “Trish, I’m so sorry. It’s not fair. But your mother isn’t coming back.”
Trish had stood with Talina at the funeral where Mother’s corpse was enclosed in a wrapping. Tal had told her that no one wanted young Trish to see what the skewer had done to Mom’s body.
She’d never been able to really say good-bye.
She could see the red dirt being shoveled in on top of Mother’s body, so clear it could have been yesterday.
Won’t be long. Red dirt, just like that, will be shoveled on top of me.
“You’re going to hang in there, kid,” Talina’s voice came echoing down. Was that from above? Or from the deep past? Things were so blurry—and just plain hurt too much to care about.
“Tal?”
“Yeah, Trish. Hey, I’m right here.”
The heat burned even hotter in Trish’s body. She tried to swallow down her hot throat. “So thirsty.”
She felt a cup being placed to her lips, drank. Felt the soothing wonder of cool liquid as it hit her stomach.
“You’re going to be okay,” Talina told her.
Trish blinked, fought through the fog of pain, and fixed on Talina’s face. The woman was smiling, looking worried.
“Tal? You all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You gonna forgive me?”
“For what?”
Trish swallowed hard. So tough to admit. “He scared me. Knew he was going to kill me. I backed down. I just . . . I couldn’t find the courage. Let him take it all. Failed you.”
“What’s she talking about?” Talina asked.
Pariah Page 43