The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 42

Loud wet sneezing sounds from the aqueduct now. Chay motioned for her to come around to the front instead and she did.

Three elephants stood bathing themselves in the aqueduct. Two adults and a child. They lifted trunks from the sludgy water and curled them back over their heads and sprayed themselves, dark wet patches spreading in the wrinkled gray. She stared at them in no more wonder than she had when she'd first seen a unicorn. And no less. Both equally belonging to the world she knew, neither more preposterous than the other.

I've heard of these, she whispered to Chay. Are they smart like us? Smot, he said. But not like us.

She wanted to push on but Chay would have none of it. He opened one of the phrasebooks and deftly turned the pages and pointed at lines.

That doesn't look good.

You need to rest.

This needs to be mended.

Please lie down.

I would like to see some dresses.

She turned from the phrasebook to look up at him. You'd like to see some dresses?

He pointed at her shirt. Affy cloze. Burn big one la.s.s night, dis one no good now. Yeh?

We'll have to leave the freeway for that.

Sokay. Affy need res.

Would it do any good to argue?

They left the elephants to their bath.

It hurt to walk and he carried her. Across the southbound side, a short leap over the divider wall and across the northbound swath, then up what had been the northbound onramp from Los Feliz. They crossed the river above long concrete baffles in the sluggish water and she saw that half were clotted with acc.u.mulated trash and dead branches. A mushy sh.o.r.eline of rotted leaves. Ahead another iteration of decaying cars, broken sidewalks, overgrowth, dead greenery, stripped billboards, angled telephone poles, drooping power lines, broken storefronts, sagging structures. Fire had not touched this area but earthquake had. Fallen awnings and collapsed apartment buildings in what had been mixed residential off the main thoroughfare. A tree growing in the middle of the weedy street, radiating rootcracks giving it the look of something that had punched through suddenly from below. Up ahead a shop door banged in the wind as it had for nearly thirty years. A gaunt coyote stepped out from a doorway and stopped in the road looking at them with its tongue dangling. As if it had run a long way to be here in time see them. They walked on past curbed cars rusting beside parking meters sprouting from the gra.s.s. Torn flaps curled from a billboard up ahead. coming soon discernible in the ragged strips remaining. Car wash, service station, fast food, repair shop. A garbage truck. Wind and crickets and that banging door.

They found an RV on a concrete pad alongside a house beneath a tubeframe plastic-sheeted structure that had collapsed on top of it. They pulled the covering partway back as if turning down bedding. The RV weathered but in good shape. The door was locked and Avy pried it open with a prybar and went inside. Must and cobwebs, a brittle dry feel. As if some untenanted sarcophagus beneath the desert floor had been exhumed and opened to admit air and light withheld for centuries. Kitchen, dual sink, two popouts, draw curtains, recliner, sofabed, queensize bed. Pots and pans and utensils. Maps. No food. She could not imagine this thing moving on the roads she traveled.

She leaned out the door. Chay stood in the gra.s.sy driveway studying the ruined neighborhood.

Okay, I'll sleep here tonight. But we head downtown tomorrow. Got it?

Yeh.

She took the prybar with her and they scavenged the neighborhood but found nothing useful. A shrunken skeleton wrapped in thin stretched mottled leather sagging on an 80d nail driven into a front door. One side of the head bashed in down to the zygomatic arch. Eyesockets ever regarding the wooden shingle hanging from its k.n.o.bbed neck, the faded word looter scribbled on it with a Sharpie. It did not look like the remains of a human being at all but like some kind of scarecrow patched together out of the hides of other animals and it hung there telling all the story it had left to tell.

They went back to the boulevard and started in on the stores. There were signs that people had lived in some but not in many years. More coyote and racc.o.o.n prints than shoeprints traced out in the dust and filled in again, outlines softened. Rat droppings everywhere and a few dark shops become pigeon roosts.

Chay took a ten-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch copper pipe from a plumbing supply. In a small dark room in back of a Mexican grocery Avy found a stand of lockers. Nothing in the unlocked ones and padlocks on the other two. She ran the prybar through the hasps and twisted and the lockers' metal tabs gave way after being wrenched back and forth a few times. Sneakers far too large for her, desiccated antiperspirants, a large tee shirt and an extra large sweatshirt. She flapped the shirts and stirred up dust that made her sneeze. She rolled them up and put them in her backpack left on the register conveyor belt and picked up the backpack by a strap and left the store through its smashed-in window.

Chay could not fit inside the RV so Avy sat on the tailgate of a junkfilled Toyota shortbed beside the all but invisible curb near the house, dangling her sneakers and kicking at weeds as Chay removed his first aid kit from his pannier and opened it. She took a deep breath and started to take off her shirt but blood had seeped through the bandages and stuck to it and she stopped and poured water on it and rubbed the fabric and then slowly peeled the shirt off and threw it into the truck bed. She looked down at the gauze strips. Russet blotches like some kind of mold. She felt behind her and pulled at the curling ends of surgical tape banding her. The odd sensation as her skin lifted up and the tape peeled from her. Dried blood cemented the gauze to her skin. She poured more water and rubbed gently and paid no attention to the pale red flowing down her belly to darken the waistband of her shorts. Then she pulled at the taped gauze strips and they sloughed off redbellied and dripping like interrupted leeches. The sudden air cold against the puckered cuts. A wisp of cotton stuck to one crusting edge and made a faint ripping sound as she pulled it free.

Most of the wounds were superficial cuts that would scab and itch and heal. The left claw had found more purchase in her right breast and cut deep. The wound was wet and felt hot to the touch, and the skin on either side was plumcolored and swollen. Her father had taught her about germs but she didn't understand it completely and wasn't sure she believed what she did. But she knew to bathe the wound with alcohol and keep it clean and covered.

She looked up. Chay stood before her with the bottle of Stoli and an unused shop rag taken from a plastic bag.

Yeah, okay, she said.

He poured vodka on the folded rag and bent to her. She looked at his alien face and clutched the edge of the tailgate and did not make a sound throughout. He set the vodka bottle down and re-dressed her wounds as before. It occurred to her as he worked that she had inflicted just this kind of injury and much worse among his kind without restraint or remorse and yet here she bore such wounds and he treated them. She shook her head. The symmetry of it too perfect. You would be a fool not to learn what lesson this is trying to teach you.

She wiped herself dry and put on her new sweatshirt and bunched the sleeves and rolled the wrists. Thanks, she said. She slid off the tailgate and eyed the bottle as he repacked his kit.

Are you gonna make another spear tonight?

Spear yeh.

Not gonna hunt?

He retrieved a phrasebook and quickly guided her through several pages. Thank you, but I am not hungry now.

I will rest now.

Tomorrow will be another beautiful day.

She gave him back the phrasebook and grinned. Every bit as beautiful as today I'm sure, she said.

They did not light a fire but sat outside on the concrete pad before the RV. She had found a webbed folding chair and she sat spooning cold cheese tortellini from an MRE pouch and watching Chay organize tools on a sheet spread out before him, the nearer edge weighted down by the length of copper pipe. He picked up a hacksaw and cut two feet off the length at a sharp angle without a vice or any kind of clamp apart from his hand. He sawed a wedge into this angle cut to make two points one above the other like a gaping shark and then began to sharpen the whole of that end with rattail and barrel files.

Avy asked him the words for file and for copper and for saw. Then she asked if he would let her have the bottle of Stoli. He stopped filing and looked at her.

Affy need fuh wounds?

She tapped her forehead. For wounds. Definitely.

He turned the copper pipe before him and then set it down. He got out his bait box and handed her the Stoli pint. The bottle a third full. She thanked him and did not open it but set it aside.

Chay ran a long thumb along a tapering edge and took a file to the edge again.

Avy nodded at the forming spear. The spear's alive, right? You breathe life into it.

Breeve yeh.

But you throw em away and make new ones like they're waterbottles.

Yeh. Easy make.

But how can it be both? I mean, it's either a piece of pipe and you throw it away like it's nothing or it's alive and you take care of it and hate to see it get broken.

He patted his flat chest. Liff from heeyah, yeh? Breeve inta here. He patted the shaping weapon. Chay liff. Chay liff in heeyah. Yeh?

You put part of your life into the spear. Oh-that's why you play em, yeh? You're breathing life into them.

Yeh. Affy unnastan good yeh. Be like Chay peepah soon.

Did you just make a joke?

Choke yeh.

She laughed and then put a hand to her chest. Then she picked up the Stoli bottle and opened it and drank. It tasted as bad as it had the first time. She drank again.

He filed and tested edges and filed more. He put his lipless mouth to the blunt end and blew and the copper weapon thrummed. He puffed and the weapon tooted. He brought his mouth away and looked at it and patted it. Then he laid it on the sheet and opened up his paint box. Identical to his first aid box but for the color. He withdrew several yellow-labeled pint cans. 1 Shot lettering enamel. Brushes. A small flatbladed screwdriver. A pair of wooden chopsticks in a finegrained wooden slide-lid case patterned with darker woods. A particolored rag. A fitness magazine with half the pages torn out.

He pried off a can lid with the screwdriver and began stirring with a chopstick. He tore a page from the magazine and folded it and poured a circle of white paint on it and dipped his brush there and picked up the spear with the point near his face.

Avy took one more swallow from the Stoli bottle and recapped it and set it down near Chay. Then she picked up her bowie and her food wrappers and went down the street and threw the wrappers in a car and stood looking at it. Drunk and unaccountably disquieted.

When she got back Chay held up the spear for her to see the eyes he'd painted just before the main point taper.

That so it can see where it's going?

He nodded. See? he said. Affy unnastan.

Something woke her in the night. She lay listening and heard nothing that did not fit the night. She sat up and put a hand to her chest and felt the bandages and breathed a moment. The pale squares of shaded windows. The large soft bed. Sheets and a bedspread and pillows. Walls and roof. Comfortable and warm and so mistrusted by her.

She drew down the sheets and their rustle seemed loud. She eased out of bed and into her shoes. Socks already on. She picked up the bowie from where it leaned against the nightstand. The houselike vehicle creaking as she went to the door and opened it.

Chay was waiting there and he nodded at the moonlit road where wolves were nosing in the bed of the Toyota truck. They were northern gray wolves come down from the nearby hills to hunt and they had smelled her blood and vodka-soaked shirt from half a mile away. Their numbers flourished and their species no longer fragmented. These were quiet and curious and not at all tentative. They did not even look at Chay who stood armed ten yards from them. There were three of them and one picked up the shirt in its mouth and shook it from side to side as if breaking the neck of a rat and let it go to drape the side of the truck bed and another wolf picked it up and stood there holding it while the other two sniffed at it. One of them backed away and lifted a leg and p.i.s.sed against the truck.

Avy stepped out into the night. The wolves stilled instantly and their fur went flat and they stood looking at her from the small and junkfilled bed of the truck. She stepped away from the RV and lowered her bowie to the ground and stood up without it. Chay looked at her but said nothing nor made move to stop her.

The gaunt wolves bathed in moonlight watched the girl approach. The leader's head lowered close to his paws. They smelled the blood on her. The same as on the shirt they'd found. She held her empty hands out wide and came on. The leader bristled but gave no other warning or motion.

She stopped in the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s growing from the broken sidewalk. Not two yards from them wild and innate as they had been since before there were men to fear them or fires by which to tell stories of their prowess real or fanciful and their muzzles filled with the smell of her own blood. Yet not crazed. The night air cool and all around ensilvered by the moon's pale monochrome above the overhanging trees.

One of them gave a small yip and the leader turned and jumped from the tailgate like some kind of flowing liquid. The soft sure tap of its pads. It stood looking at her with ears high and muzzle raised and nape fur smoothing. The other two watching from the truck. Then it moved toward her in a kind of crouch as if easing under some low barrier. Avy turned to meet the soft approach. Held out an outspread hand and made no other motion. The wolf went still and stayed crouched low but not as if to pounce. The muzzle coming up to sniff. And then it batted her palm wetly and turned away and the others flowed from the truck to join it and trot away surefooted along the withering neighborhood and into their replevined world.

The girl watched them go and then looked at her palm. That cold wet touch a brand now in her heart. She looked up from her hand. The tatters of night sky visible through the overarching trees washed of stars by the full moon light. The moon that so recently had bound her to its cycle. The moon whose light had called her up from sleep.

On The Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.

Joe R. Lansdale.

1.

After a month's chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita's. It wasn't that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn't worried. He'd killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn't concern him.

The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire-one mean mama-three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad att.i.tude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, f.u.c.ked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofab.i.t.c.h, it also proved he had bad taste.

Wayne stepped out of his '57Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some sh.e.l.ls out of there. He already had a .38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita's it was best to have plenty of backup.

Wayne put a handful of shotgun sh.e.l.ls in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA'S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.

He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.

He spotted Calhoun's stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and ma.s.saging her rubbery a.s.s with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl's handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little t.i.ts pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shin, faded and left a patch of wetness.

For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun's sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacteria that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man's wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: "d.a.m.n, that's tough about ole Betty Sue, but she's dead as hoot-owl s.h.i.t and ain't gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she's just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I'll just toss her cold a.s.s in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire roll, haul her across the border to sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonics for dancing.

"It's a sad thing to sell one of your own, but s.h.i.t, them's the breaks. I'll just stay out of the tonics until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won't go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead t.i.ts and end up going sentimental and dewy-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal."

This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.

The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn't grab, ran screws through their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn't bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.

Bar owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, staffed music, and men paid five dollars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which, muzzled and handless, they could not do.

If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and at some business. Didn't have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just f.u.c.k and hike.

As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn't keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a man's d.i.c.k, the customers were happy as flies on s.h.i.t.

Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred-fifty-pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.

But, there wasn't anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.

Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn't worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand full of a little .38.

Wayne clubbed Calhoun's arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun's hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.

Calhoun wasn't outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pulled a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl's armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.

Wayne shot the dead girl's left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun's knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.

Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.

The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a full nelson on him.

Wayne kicked back on the bouncer's shin and raked his boot down the man's instep and stomped his foot. The bouncer let go. Wayne turned and kicked him in the b.a.l.l.s and hit him across the face with the shotgun.

The bouncer went down and didn't even look like he wanted up.

Wayne couldn't help but note he liked the music that was playing. When he turned he had someone to dance with.

Calhoun.

Calhoun charged him, hit Wayne in the belly with his head, knocked him over the bouncer. They tumbled to the floor and the shotgun went out of Wayne's hands and sc.r.a.ped across the floor and hit the crawling girl in the head. She didn't even notice, just kept snaking in circles, dragging her blasted leg behind her like a skin she was trying to shed.