Hope And Undead Elvis Part 23

"Tonight?"

"Now, if you will."

"I don't know..." The bravado Margaret had displayed earlier vanished as the woman seemed to sink into her wheelchair.

Hope reached out and squeezed her hand. "Margaret, listen. I said I'm leaving as soon as this storm clears up, and you can come with me."

"You mean... leave the Casino?"

"Yes. This place is poison to everyone in it. If it doesn't kill you all, the Righteous Flame will when they get here."

"The what?"

"The worst thing you can imagine. They're coming. They've been coming for months. Every time I get a little further ahead of them, then they catch up. I believe that if we make it to Graceland, we'll be safe from them there."

"And then what?"

Hope cradled her belly. "And then we fix the world."

Margaret shook her head. "Nothing can do that now."

"Not yet. Please, will you show me the Pit?"

"No, I can't. I'm too frightened."

"Then tell me where it is."

Margaret sighed. "All right. Turn right out of my room and go to the very end of the hall. There's a stairwell which leads down to the bas.e.m.e.nt where the kitchens, maintenance, and laundry rooms are. Go through there and you'll find a door labeled Backup Generator. The Pit is beyond there. After that, I can't help you."

"Are there people down there? Guards and stuff?"

"Probably. I don't know much more than I've told you."

Hope stood. She handed the receipt Margaret had typed up for her earlier back to the older woman. "Hold this for me. If anything... Just hold it for me, okay? And make sure Fidel gets fed if I'm not back in time to do it myself?"

"I will." Margaret sniffled. "Did you really mean it? I can go with you when you leave?"

"Of course."

"I'd like that. I always wanted to go to Graceland. Never got to."

Hope smiled. "I hear it's beautiful."

Margaret caught her hand and kissed it, then held it against her cheek for a moment. "Good luck, Hope. I'll see you very soon."

Hope left the room and waddled down the hall, following Margaret's directions. Her belly felt larger than ever, and she wondered how close she was to her due date. Due date was such an odd term, she realized. It implied that childbirth would follow the calendar, but with the world's end, calendars and even time itself had ceased to have any meaning for her.

Her baby would come when he was ready.

She found the stairs and sighed as she regarded the steps descending into darkness. "Least I'm getting my exercise," she said aloud to herself. Nevertheless, she took frequent rests and was careful to hold the rail at all times. So many stairs when she couldn't see her feet made her edgy. n.o.body else was on the staircase. She figured most everyone was either sleeping or gambling.

Just when she didn't think she could take it anymore, she found the bottom. She'd have sat and rested on the stairs if she thought she'd be able to stand back up afterward. Instead, she pressed on through a bas.e.m.e.nt lit only by sporadic candle stubs.

She came to the door Margaret had described. A man sat dozing in a chair, the front legs off the floor and back tipped against the wall. As Hope approached, she stepped on a steel plate on the floor that moved under her weight and made some suspended pans jangle together. The man's eyes opened and he raised a pistol Hope hadn't seen.

"You ain't supposed to be down here," he said. "Only folks who got no chips, and then they got to be brung."

Hope would have raised her hands, but she was too tired. "It's all right," she said. "Mr. Deuce sent me down here." She lowered her voice with an conspiratorial air. "To talk to the guy. The blue one."

The man's eyes widened. "Him?"

Hope felt an invigorating thrill of success course through her. She'd bluffed as well as any high-stakes poker player and the man had folded his hand. "Yeah. Is he still in the same place?"

"All the way in the back? Yeah he is," said the man. He glanced down at her belly. "You, um, are you gonna have a kid?"

Hope's smile turned genuine. "Yes." She rubbed her belly.

The man smiled back at her. "Good. The world needs kids in it. Now more'n ever. Hang on, lemme let you in." He took a key that was hanging inside his shirt and opened the door. It swung out to reveal a darkened corridor lit by a couple flickering candles. A stench of unwashed bodies mixed with vomit, urine, and acidic diarrhea to create a miasma that struck her almost like a physical blow. Hope gasped and covered her nose. "Yeah, it's kinda strong," said the man. "Hey, Chris? She's going to talk to that one guy. She's not here to work."

"Okay," said a disembodied voice. Other rhythmic noises punctuated the silence: the sound of footsteps on treadmills, the hiss of stationary bike sprockets, the sour exhalations of exhausted workers.

Hope shuffled through the oppressive hall. She could feel the eyes of those consigned to hard labor upon her as she walked, even though she could only see them as lumpy, misshapen shadows stinking of sweat and futility. A man who'd once been fat and now had his skin hanging off his shrinking frame vomited down his front. The yellowish bile soaked his shorts and ran down his legs as he staggered along a treadmill. His eyes were rolled back in his head, like a dead man who hadn't realized his life was already over.

The man called Chris sat at a desk, resting his feet upon it and paging through a coverless paperback by candlelight. His eyes glittered in the darkness like a crow's.

"Please," whispered a voice from one of the workers. "A chip. Anything. Save me."

Hope shuddered and hurried on to the end of the hall. She felt a terrible, pressing need to help these people, slaves to the Casino, but didn't know how. Someone behind her stumbled and fell off a treadmill, causing Chris to rise from his lazy vigilance. "G.o.ddammit, Himmel, you ain't been workin' even two hours yet. Get your lazy a.s.s back up." The sound of a booted foot hitting flesh drawn tight from starvation and fatigue shook Hope like a gunshot.

She reached the end of the hall and with a quaking hand she could barely see, pushed open the door.

There he was, in a pool of light from a cold fluorescent bulb. His jumpsuit, once pristine, was torn and stained, and his bluish flesh looked like it had begun to decay at last. His perfectly-coiffed hair hung around his lowered head like filthy rags as he trudged onward, never stopping as the treadmill turned a generator. A chain ran from one wrist to the treadmill handle, binding him without rest or reprieve. Hope gasped in surprise and horror. "Elvis!"

She heard a horrifying hiss behind her and spun to see a great black bird perched on a shelf with its wings spread wide.

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Hope and Shades Hope screamed as the bird flapped its wings and hissed at her again. It dove from its perch and flew toward her with its talons outstretched, seeking soft tissue to rend.

She fell backward against the door, unmindful of everything except protecting her baby. The bird squawked in surprise as its momentum was checked. Undead Elvis had flung out his free hand to snag the bird's leg. He swung it around hard into the wall. It exploded into a puff of black sand that scattered across the floor.

For a moment, Hope was frozen, her heart pounding and clutching at her belly. Then she was at Undead Elvis's side, her arms around him, openly weeping. "I missed you. I missed you so much."

"I missed you too, Li'l lady. I'm glad you found me."

Hope reached up to her head and removed the sungla.s.ses which had perched there for months. "I found these. They're yours, aren't they? I saved them for you." She handed them to him.

Undead Elvis smiled. "There they are." He put them on and a remarkable transformation came over him. His jumpsuit became whole and as shiny as when Hope had first met him. His skin repaired itself. His hair became perfect once more. "That's more like it. Uh-huh."

The door burst open, followed by Chris with the other guard, their guns drawn. "What the h.e.l.l is going on here?"

"Please, you have to let him go," said Hope.

"He ain't goin' nowhere," said the first guard. "He's a machine, that one."

"We checked," said Chris. "You ain't supposed to be down here at all, bun in the oven or not."

"No, you don't understand," cried Hope. "You have to let him go. He's supposed to come with me!" She grabbed the chain holding Undead Elvis to the treadmill and rattled it, as if doing so would release it.

"Knock it off, girl," said the other guard. "You best come with us."

"No! You have to free him!" Hope grasped Undead Elvis like he was a life preserver and she was drowning. She hadn't come so far, lived through so much, just to lose him again. "Please!"

"Take her to Shades," said Chris. "Don't bother The Deuce at this time of night."

"All right," said the other guard. They wrestled Hope away from Undead Elvis until she could do nothing but scream in miserable fury. They pulled her away, as rough as they dared to be with her burgeoning belly.

"I'll come back for you," screamed Hope. "I'll come back-oh!" A sudden, sharp pain tore through her abdomen, sending shockwaves to the ends of her figures and toes. She stopped fighting the men and instead clutched at them for support. As quickly as the pain had come on, it subsided, leaving her gasping for breath.

It was a contraction. It had to be. But it wasn't time yet for her baby to come. Her anguish and stress was carrying over to him, and if she didn't calm down, it would lead to the exact circ.u.mstance she wanted to avoid: having the baby under Mr. Duce's watchful eyes.

She gulped and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she said to the men. "I'll cooperate. Just please don't hurt him."

"Hurt him?" Chris laughed in an unkind way. "He ain't alive, far as we can tell. He ain't stopped walkin' that generator for months. We wouldn't have any power at all if not for him."

"We're takin' you to Shades," said the other man, as-yet-unnamed. "He runs things down here. He's The Deuce's man. He'll decide what to do with you."

"Might be a fine." Chris licked his lips. "Might get to take it outta your a.s.s."

The other guard shoved him. "Hey, be nice. She's gonna have a kid!"

Charlie was unmoved. "So?"

They came to a door with the words Shades Office hand-painted upon them, missing apostrophe and all. Charlie knocked. "Shades, man, you in there? We got us a troublemaker."

"Come in," said a masculine voice.

The other man opened the door into a small room with a large desk that was dominated by a huge ledger. Bare overhead bulbs cast the room in a dingy yellow.

The man behind the desk stabbed out his cigarette and stood up. The smell of his tobacco mixed with Old Spice wafted across the room and made Hope gasp in shock. Twenty years had put more lines in his face but the features hadn't changed, even with the leather-edged sungla.s.ses hiding his eyes.

Hope managed to say, "D-Daddy?" And then she burst into tears.

The man called Shades leaned on his desk for support, mouth open in surprise. "Hope? Is that you?"

Hope couldn't answer; she was bawling like she was five again.

"She was messing around with that one guy," said Chris. "Wanted us to let him go."

"Out," said Shades. "Now."

"But-"

"Get out of my office. This is my daughter, for G.o.d's sake."

Chris and the other man looked at each other, and then left.

Shades sat down. "Jesus. What are you doing here, Hope?"

Hope sniffled, her chest hitching as she tried to calm herself down. Her heart ached. He hadn't hugged her, or apologized, or even been the slightest bit joyful. What was wrong with him? "I was l-looking for someone." She felt her baby kick and it gave her strength.

"And you're pregnant? Does The Deuce know?"

"Yes. Daddy, aren't you going to say anything? I mean, I haven't seen you in forever."

"Forever's a long time, Li'l lady."

Hope gasped. She'd forgotten that was her father's pet name for her as a toddler. No wonder she loved when Undead Elvis used it. "You shouldn't be here. It's not safe for you. Or for your baby."

"Jesus, he's not just any baby, he's your grandson." Hope felt her temper rise. How dare he be like this? Why wasn't he down on his knees apologizing for his twenty-year absence? "Why did you go away? Why didn't you ever call, or write? Or even send me a G.o.dd.a.m.ned birthday card, Daddy?"

Shades bowed his head. "Because I'm weak. And I'm a bad person."

"No, don't say that!"

He looked up. Hope could see herself reflected in his sungla.s.ses. Why was he wearing them indoors, in a dimly-lit room? It made her uncomfortable. "I've done bad things, Li'l lady. I hurt people." He rummaged through his desk. "I still do. It's my job." He found what he had been seeking. He leaned back in his chair, tipped his head back, moved his sungla.s.ses aside, and dropped some fluid from a bottle into his eyes. Then he readjusted his gla.s.ses and sat up straight, regarding Hope as the droplets coursed down the lines in his cheeks.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "You do what you have to to survive. Even working for a man like The Deuce."

"He scares me."

"He scares me too."

"W-why do you wear those?" she asked.

"You know why The Deuce scares me? I'll tell you why. When I first came here, right after the world went to s.h.i.t, he put me in charge of getting his power system up and running. No big deal. I've been an electrician forever. Problem was we didn't have any way to run generators. I was joking when I said we ought to just use the G.o.dd.a.m.n treadmills and stationary bikes and have people do it, but he thought that was a brilliant idea. And he put me in charge of that. Long as the power was flowing, The Deuce was happy. And when he was happy, so was everyone else." Shades shuddered. "But one day I let him down. Had a short somewhere and I couldn't find it. I must have spent a day and a half on my feet trying to find the G.o.dd.a.m.n thing. Finally I couldn't hack it anymore and curled up to get some shut-eye. He found me and woke me up. Said he didn't appreciate me sleeping on the job. So he took a razor and made sure he couldn't ever catch me with my eyes shut again when I was supposed to be working."

A sick, crawling horror began to squirm its way up Hope's spine, like a spider ascending her vertebrae one at a time.