Duncan bit his lip. He dared not shift, though he was hard, pressed painfully against his breeches. Blood pounded through his crotch. He willed his hands to remain steady.
Her feet and legs were caked with mud, the hem of her gown black with the stuff, even though she held it off the ground. She was wet as a drowned kitten, but smiling and shining, moving a slow dance like she was born to this damp world—as innocent as the rain. Rain which gave life, and which flooded and drowned. This, he thought, was why men paid more for virgins.
The old unicorn was also aroused.
She had him then. She got to her knees, as she had done instinctively that first time, and offered him her cupped hands. With deliberate steps he came to her, lowered his head until his whiskers brushed her fingers, and licked her palms with a thick pink tongue.
Duncan loosed his arrow.
Pierced through the throat, the unicorn screamed. He reared, becoming a tower of a beast, as tall as some of the trees. Duncan jumped from his blind and shot again and again. One arrow hit his chest, another his shoulder, but still the beast kept to his feet. Duncan thought the monster would turn and run, and he would have to track him until he dropped. But the unicorn stayed, kicking and rearing, pawing over and over again the ground where Eleanor had been.
She’d ducked away, crouching at the edge of the clearing; Duncan saw enough to know she was safe. He got one more shot away before the unicorn charged him. He drew his sword and managed a slice at him as he passed. The edge nicked his chest, drawing a little blood, but the unicorn didn’t slow. He turned on his haunches, throwing a rain of mud behind him, and attacked. Neck arched, horn aimed, the unicorn ran at him. Duncan stumbled back and raised his sword to block.
He couldn’t hold his own against the sheer force of the beast’s movement. The unicorn pressed forward, his body a battering ram with his horn at the fore, and Duncan could only rush to escape, making token parries with his sword.
The unicorn got beside him and with a swipe of his head knocked Duncan over. He sprawled in the mud, and as he got to his knees the unicorn charged again, striking him as he turned away. The blow wrenched his shoulder and spun him around. Setting his will, he got to his feet and looked for the next attack—the unicorn was coming at him again, making a running start, ready to impale him on that prized, impossible horn.
He opened his hands—his sword was gone. He’d lost his bow as well.
He waited until the last moment to dodge, to keep the unicorn from swerving to stab him anyway, and again the beast’s bulk shoved him over. With the wind knocked out of him, he was slower to rise this time. He heard the thunder of hot breaths coming closer.
Eleanor screamed. “Here I am! It’s me you want!” She stood in the middle of the clearing, arms at her sides.
The unicorn stopped in a stride and turned to Eleanor, his betrayer. With a satisfied snort, he trotted at her, neck arced, horn ready.
“Eleanor, no,” Duncan would have said, if he’d had the breath for it.
She got to her knees—putting herself too low for the beast to stab her comfortably. He’d have had to bring his nose nearly to his chest. So he had to crush her with his hooves. Duncan stumbled in the mud, hoping to get to her in time.
The unicorn reared, preparing to bring all his weight and anger down on Eleanor.
In a heartbeat, she stepped underneath him and raised Duncan’s sword, which she’d hidden beside her.
She held it in place underneath his heart, and he came down on the point. For a split second he hung there, and it looked like she was holding him up with the sword. Blood rained down on her from the wound. Then he fell straight onto her, and they crumpled together.
Finally, too late, Duncan found his feet. The unicorn was dead. Its body lay on its side, a mound in the center of the clearing.
“Eleanor,” he panted with each breath. He approached its back, his heart pounding in his throat. Blood streamed from the body, filling in puddles and footprints. He saw no movement, heard no cries.
He went around the great unicorn’s head, twisted up from its neck, the horn half-buried in mud.
And there was Eleanor, streaked with blood and dirt, extricating herself from the unicorn’s bent legs.
“Eleanor!” He slid into the mud beside her and touched her hair, her shoulders, her arms. He helped her wipe the grime from her face. “Are you hurt? Are you well?”
“I got away. I’m only a little bruised. But you—” She did the same, pawing him all over for signs of injury. His twisted shoulder hurt to move, but he could move it. All his limbs worked. He could draw breath. He would live. They both sighed.
Smiling, she took his hands.
“No more unicorns, Duncan. If you want me, I’m yours. And if you won’t have me, I’ll leave and find someone who will.”
He swallowed her with kisses until she laughed. Then he took her, there in the rain and the mud, against the carcass of the unicorn.
Ghost Town
Jack C. Haldeman II
THE clapped-out pickup almost made it to the gas station. I had to get out and push it the last fifty yards. It had been making suspiciously fatal sounds for the last couple of days, and the trail of oil it was leaving in the dusty road was not reassuring.
That I was broke and hadn’t pulled a con in almost a week didn’t improve my frame of mind as I huffed and sweated the piece of junk off the road and onto the hard-packed dirt of the gas station lot. A man sitting in a rocker on the station’s porch watched me without moving to help. He was wearing faded jeans and a beat-up straw hat. His eyes showed no interest in me one way or another.
I leaned against the hood, catching my breath. What a dismal place to break down, stuck in the wilds of Arizona or maybe New Mexico. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was. It all looked the same to me: hot, dusty, and not a civilized thing in sight.
The town didn’t even rate a stop light. It was just a crossroads in the middle of a desert nowhere; one gas station with a whole lot of junked cars out back, a feed store, a place that looked like it was a combination grocery, restaurant, and bar. There were a few other buildings, but they were mostly boarded up and abandoned. The empty buildings didn’t look much better than the occupied ones. Everything in sight was tilted one way or another, with sagging roofs and collapsing porches.
A faint breeze lifted a loose corner on the tin roof of the gas station. It slapped sharply again and again, echoing out over the desert quiet, but the man on the porch didn’t seem to notice or care.
I walked over and climbed the warped wooden steps. There was a waist-high metal drink cooler at one end of the porch. I opened it, and the water was dark and cold, with large chunks of ice floating in it along with cans of soft drinks. I pulled out my handkerchief, soaked it in the ice- cold water, and wiped my face. Then I grabbed a can of Dr Pepper and cracked the top.
“Fifty cents,” said the man.
I turned to him, and he still wasn’t looking at me, just staring down the road that ran dusty and straight from here to forever without a turn. He might have been thirty, he might have been sixty. His face was as dry and parched as the land I’d been sputtering through for the last few days.
“In the can,” he said.
Next to the cooler, an old coffee can had been nailed to the wall. There were maybe ten quarters in the bottom. I added two more, leaving me roughly six dollars to my name, and went over, leaned against the porch railing directly in front of the man, and took two long pulls on the soda.
He had to look up at me, and he did. His eyes were deep blue, and he had the look of a man who shaved with a cheap razor. He didn’t say anything, just looked. I finished my drink. He still hadn’t said anything.
“Busted down,” I said. He didn’t reply.
“Quit on me,” I added.
He nodded, but otherwise didn’t move.
“Think you could take a look?” I asked.
“I suppose,” he said. When he got up, I wasn’t sure if it was h
im or the chair creaking. He walked slowly to the truck and popped the hood.
“This here is a dead truck,” he said. “Thrown a rod through the engine block, you did. Look right down here.”
I looked but I couldn’t tell anything. It was just engine pieces and oil. All I know about cars is how to scam people out of the titles, which key to put in the dash, and where the gas goes.
“Can you fix it?” I asked.
He snorted and shook his head. “Said it was dead. I did. And I mean what I say.”
Things looked bad, but the truck was no great loss. I’d only had it a couple of months. Conned it off a widow-woman someplace in West Texas. Got her name out of the local paper, and all it took was a fake smile and the old Bible switch. I kicked the tires.
“Let you have it for two thousand,” I said. “Don’t feel like messing with it anymore. I’m a busy man, and ain’t got time for automotive problems.”
“Not interested,” he said, slamming the hood.
“Fifteen hundred,” I said. “You could part it out for that, easy.”
He looked in the driver’s window. “Cheap AM radio,” he said. “No FM, no tape, no a/c. Give you ten dollars.”
“An even thousand,” I said. “Look at the tires.”
Twenty minutes later, as I pulled my duffel bag out of the back, he had the title to the truck, and I had fifty dollars.
“You look like a man of taste,” I lied. “A man like you ought to have a good watch. I’ve got my father’s Rolex in my bag. Give you a good price on it.”
He just snorted and went back to his chair on the porch. I crossed the street in search of a cold beer.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark bar, which was simply two large rooms, one a restaurant and the other a lounge of sorts, attached to the general store. I use the word lounge loosely, as it was mostly a collection of odd clutter, a few booths, two overstuffed sofas, a beat-up bar with mismatched stools along one end, and a distinct lack of illumination. Well, I’d been in a lot worse. I dropped my bag on the floor by the bar and took one of the stools.
A young man was playing rotation pool by himself, and two men and a woman were sitting in a booth, nursing glasses of draft beer. The shelves behind the bar were littered with junk. Odd rusted farming tools sat next to katchina dolls and masks covered with feathers. A polar bear carved out of ivory sat between a ceramic Buddha and what appeared to be an African tribal mask. Not exactly the kind of junk I’d expected in a nowhere place like this.
The barmaid came out of the kitchen in back, wiping her hands on a towel. She was tall and slender, with blue eyes, and dark hair that seemed to be going in a thousand directions all at once. A few braided strands fell to each side of her face, tightly encased within beads of stone and silver.
“Hi,” she said, with a friendly smile. “What can I get you?”
“Draft beer,” I said. “It’s dry out there.”
“Oh, you get used to it,” she said as she pulled the tap. “It’s not so bad. You just passing through?”
“Guess so,” I said. She was wearing a sleeveless tank top and a necklace with about a thousand little things hanging from it. Amid the general clutter, I could see a turquoise bear, an arrowhead, and a small silver unicorn. She drew the beer the way I like it, without much head, and as I set a five-dollar bill on the counter and took that first cold sip, she drew up a stool on the other side of the bar and sat down.
“Not much here to hold a person,” I said. “All I’ve seen for the last three or four days is dust, cactus, and mountains that seem to hang on the horizon and never get any nearer.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful country,” she said, fingering a small crystal of quartz that hung from her necklace. “And those mountains are sacred, you know; at least to some people.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” I said. “They just look like something that’s between me and where I want to be.”
“And what place would that be?” she asked, with a smile. “Where would a man like you be headed?”
“Someplace else,” I said, taking another hit of beer. “Where the action is.”
“There’s action here,” she said. “Though probably not what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said honestly, finishing my beer and waiting while she drew another. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not here.” Her bracelets flashed as she pulled the beer. She wore several. Some were silver and turquoise, one was a simple copper band, others were strings of beadwork.
She set my beer down and locked her blue eyes with mine. “My name’s Joline,” she said. “Most people call me Jo. What’s yours?”
“Mark Rogers,” I said automatically, for some reason giving her my real name, something I never do with passing strangers. Dumb move.
I was rattled by the slip, and looked away. A good con man doesn’t leave tracks like that.
“You seem to be a woman who appreciates fine jewelry, Jo,” I said. “I’ve got a nice Rolex watch that used to belong to my dad. He left it for me in his will, but I’ve got no use for something so fancy. I could give you a good price on it.”
I pulled one of the cheap imitations out of my duffel and set it between us. She gave me a hard look.
“It’d make a fine present for that special man in your life,” I said, giving her my best fake smile.
She picked the five-dollar bill up off the counter and made change for the two beers, pushing it toward me and leaning back.
“No special man,” she said, still looking hard. Then she cracked the slightest of smiles. “So, where’d you really get that watch, Mark?”
“Mexico,” I said. “Bought twenty of them off a man in Tijuana. He wanted fifteen bucks apiece. We haggled. I was going to go five, but we settled on five-fifty. He said the extra fifty cents was for his kids.”
“Did you believe him?” she asked. “About the kids?”
“Yes,” I said, blushing. For a man who’s pulled so many scams, you’d think I wouldn’t have been pulled in by such an obvious ploy. But there’d been something about him; I don’t know, but I did believe him. What a sucker!
She looked at me for a second, then turned and cracked the top on a tall can of beer. Handed it to me. “Let’s take a walk,” she said.
I reached to pick up my duffel bag. “You can leave that,” she said.
“I’ll carry it,” I said, slinging the strap over my shoulder. A man like me can’t be leaving sixteen imitation Rolex watches around where someone could steal his livelihood. I reached for my change on the bar.
“That’ll be safe,” she said firmly. I nodded and left it where it was.
“I’ll watch the till,” said the kid at the pool table as he sank the eleven ball. “I anticipate a real rush of customers,” he added with a laugh, taking aim on the twelve.
“Thanks, Mike,” Jo said. “This way.”
I followed her through the kitchen, heavy with the smell of chilis, fried meat, and freshly baked bread. She gave one pot a stir, tasted the spoon, and turned down the gas. The screen door slammed behind us, and I was looking at a scene straight out of the ’60s.
A wide dirt path, or maybe it had once been a narrow road, curved out from the back steps. It was heavily rutted and scarred. But what flashed me back were all the mismatched dwellings that lined the path.
I hadn’t seen such a mishmash of funked-out, burned-out architecture since Life magazine, or maybe it was People, ran a photo spread on hippie communes back when I was a kid. No two places looked alike. The only thing they had in common was that they were all deserted and all falling apart. That didn’t stop crazy Jo from waving at them as we walked down the path, her bracelets and—I now noticed—anklets, flashing in the late afternoon sun.
There were wrecked adobe houses and ruined log cabins. They sat beside disintegrating geodesic domes and caved-in sod huts that were nestled up next to rotting frame shanties and rusting travel trailers. A collapsed teepee
leaned against something unidentifiable, apparently a home of sorts once made out of mud and sticks. All the hollow windows stared at us like the eyes of blind men, and it gave me the creeps. Jo didn’t seem to mind, and she whistled and waved to them as she led me down the path, as though the empty windows were full of friends she was greeting. I was following a bedbug crazy woman, for sure.
At the end of the path was a small corral; hard-packed dirt with a few struggling weeds, surrounded by a collapsed fence of weathered junk lumber and dried tree limbs. Tumbleweeds were caught in the fence, and there was a pitiful swaybacked burro in the middle, pawing at the dirt and brushing flies off with its tail.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” Jo asked, sitting on a rock. “This is my favorite place in the world.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just shook my head. It looked like a dump to me.
“This place is magic,” she said. “There are legends surrounding this area that go back to the beginning of time. The Indians considered it sacred ground. The Spanish built a mission here. It’s a touchpoint to the spirit world. Can you feel it?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
She smiled, fingering the unicorn around her neck. “It takes time,” she said. “If the time is right, you will see. Your heart must be ready.”
I could see all right, but what I saw was a mangy animal, a lot of desert, and some barren mountains off in the distance.
“So tell me about your father,” she said. “The one that didn’t leave you that fake Rolex in his will.”
Which story to tell? I had several, all lies. In one, my father was a war hero. In another, he played baseball for the New York Yankees. Or he was a stock car driver, a successful surgeon, a missionary in Africa, it all depended on the situation.
“He died in prison,” I said, and couldn’t believe that the words were coming out of my mouth. “A riot or something. I was, I guess, about fifteen. He robbed gas stations, and sometimes liquor stores. I never got to see much of him. He was either traveling or in jail.”
The burro had come over, and she was petting the sorry beast.