“We’d love to stay,” Cerise said, smiling at the slightly more enormous twin, Craig, who had taken a strong liking to her. He’d let her know he was “down a wife,” and he was stroking her damp hair with his big pale hand. Milo looked like he was working up his nerve to politely object to this. “But unfortunately we have obligations out there.”
Rev. Buckle wasn’t happy, but she said we were free to go as soon as we paid for our drinks. Nobody took money anymore, of course, but every last thing we offered them was refused. In fairness, we didn’t have much worth taking—shoelaces, matches, some breath mints. They agreed to take our life jackets for one round, but that left two still to pay for. Finally we offered our weapons. They sneered at my crossbow and poison arrows. They briefly considered taking Cerise’s shotguns, “for the kids,” but decided the kick would be too much for the little ones and anybody over age nine would be ashamed of such weapons. Milo’s derringer pistol took black powder and when that was discovered, it made him an instant laughing stock. “This guy—he’s too much,” the Rev. Buckle said, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Why don’t we keep him?” Elder Rolph said. Unfortunately for Milo, the idea caught on. A defector had absconded with the bulk of the community’s DVD collection and they were low on entertainment. They could spend the last days around the fire pit, listening to Milo recount every episode of Moonshine Ranch.
“Okay. Shake on it,” Cerise said, and she and Rev. Buckle sealed the deal.
“We can’t just leave Milo,” I said as I followed Cerise to the door. Milo watched Cerise walk up the aisle to the exit, like a bride in reverse, looking like his heart would break. “Cerise, it’s not right,” I said.
“We have no choice,” Cerise said. She was not a sentimental woman.
“Hold up! We ought to keep that one, too,” one of the Elders said, “the big one.” Cerise and I froze, but obviously they meant me. Cerise ran for the door and the Elders took me by the arms. I heard the report of a 19th century pistol and Rev. Buckle fell head first into her baptismal Jacuzzi, spurting blood. Milo dropped the gun. The derringer could get off only one shot every half hour or so, and it had burned his fingers.
“That one’s mine,” Parker Saenz said. She’d appeared on the altar platform—and where she’d appeared from I could not have said—and she was holding my crossbow, but casually, as if she had nothing to fear from the Elders. The sight of her moved me, as it always did. She was so tiny and beautiful and terrifying. “Hands off.”
“He killed Mama!” Elder Craig screamed.
“I have claimed him and I have written my claim in the Book of Counsel and sealed it with the sign of Seven Macaw,” Parker said, as if explaining something to an obtuse reservations agent or customer service rep.
Whatever it meant, it was air tight. Craig and Rolph conferred, and I could see by the look on their faces that they wanted to object, but there just wasn’t any easy comeback to it. The Rev. Buckle’s legs were still twitching and as I watched, the bubbling water turned slowly red.
“But we’ve got a blood debt on our hands now,” Elder Rolph said, letting go of my arm. The three of them began to argue in a language I didn’t catch a word of, but it was clear by their expressions that things were getting heated. Parker had put down my crossbow to free up her hands for making big emphatic gestures, and I took a few steps toward it. Nobody seemed to notice.
“Just remember this conversation the next time I ask you for a favor,” Rolph said.
“Oh, certainly,” Parker said. I fired a poisoned arrow into Rolph’s stomach. He was still doing a slo-mo stagger toward the carpet when I shot another at Craig. They fell almost in unison. The two big men convulsed on the church floor, spitting foam and tearing at their skin. I took a certain satisfaction in it, but Parker was staring at me as if she weren’t sure what to think.
I shrugged. Sorry.
“Don’t forget your arrows,” she said, after a minute.
I carefully pulled the arrows from the guts of Craig and Rolph and ran out of the church after Cerise and Milo.
* * *
“So that’s your church?” I said to Parker as we walked along the cracked-up highway toward the Don Cheevers. I wanted to clear the air. Nobody had said a word in a long time. Cerise kept looking over her shoulder for whoever might be coming after us. Milo stumbled along; he had just killed for the first time and he’d also been traded for beer by his married older girlfriend, and he was having trouble processing these two disparate but equally upsetting experiences. I had never killed before today either, not counting Cormac, but in the course of my professional life I’d often wanted to, and I was a little disturbed by how easily it came to me.
“Since I was a little girl,” Parker said, cheerfully. She smiled as if she were remembering pot luck suppers and youth group sing-alongs and other innocent pastimes.
“Okay,” I said, thinking of the two poisoned giants and their reverend mother. Nothing about her attitude indicated that she particularly minded what I’d done back there, even though she seemed to be on pretty cozy terms with the three corpses we’d left behind.
“Okay,” I said. We were all dealing with things in our own way.
* * *
“It’s right around here,” Cerise said. “It’s only like three blocks from the Panera.” We were standing in the middle of a field. “Hank!” she yelled.
I waited for a tree stump to flip up like a door on a hinge. Maybe Hank would pop out like a curious prairie dog and sniff the wind. But nothing happened. A flock of birds spiraled over us, dropping a few fresh ones at our feet.
“Who’s hungry?” Milo said. Everyone was. I started a fire and Milo scooped up an armload of freshly dead grackle.
“We will not eat of the flesh of birds,” Parker said.
Milo stood staring at Parker like she was a little nuts, which she clearly was. I’d been waiting for an opportunity to warn him about that. While Milo and Cerise had walked ahead, arguing between themselves, I’d asked where she was headed and how long she planned to stay with us, and I had not gotten a straight answer. “Till the great wheel of time breaks its spokes,” she said, with a lunatic, but very lovely, smile. That sounded pretty short-term, though, so I didn’t worry too much. We’d had many painful conversations about how “us” could never happen but that was all before, and it had been somewhat easier to stick to my guns when she wasn’t constantly draped around me like a poncho.
Now Milo looked from Cerise to me, waiting for somebody to back him up, to tell Parker we most certainly did eat of the flesh of birds, but nobody would meet his eyes. Cerise was a little afraid of Parker, and I was too busy being nonchalant. Parker was stroking my head the way one might a friendly house cat’s. This head-petting thing was just a little platonic affection between two friends; I was cool with it, or so I hope it seemed to everyone else.
Not getting any backup for his first reaction, Milo decided to play it differently. “I understand where you’re coming from. I was lacto-ovo before all this. But, you know, desperate times.” Milo began to impale the birds on sticks for roasting. “Plus, they’ll just go to waste.”
“None for me,” I said.
“None for you?” Milo said. Even Cerise, who had been studying the toes of her boots for the past quarter of an hour looked up. It was the first time I’d refused food of any sort since before I began my famine prep program, more than a year ago.
Cerise and Milo began to pluck the feathers from their birds. “You know what makes me sad?” Milo said, working a tough one out from the lower wing. The three of us stared at him. “When a friend gets into a new relationship and totally changes who he is. That makes me sad.”
This was unfair. It was possible, likely even, that certain aspects of my personality had shifted and changed as our world unraveled, but my relationship with Parker—if that’s what it was—was not the cause, but a symptom. No way would I be this fireside cozy with an admin if our governor were back in Austin wi
th his boots on his desk, running things. Only this afternoon Milo had shot a priestess in the head, but I didn’t blame Cerise for that. I blamed the times.
“I haven’t changed any more than is necessary,” I said. Despite what it looked like at the moment, my goals remained constant. I scooted away from Parker and looked Milo right in the eye. “Finding the last colony and reuniting with my family remains my top priority.”
“Then take a bird, my friend,” Milo said, passing me a stick. “I plucked it for you and everything.”
“Don’t,” Parker said. She was getting drowsy, and resting her head on my shoulder. I couldn’t fathom how her hair could smell so good in circumstances like these. It was unnatural.
“No thanks,” I said.
Milo shook his head and put his bird over the fire. There was smoke from the fire, certainly, and whether there was groundsmoke mingling in with it from some fissure we hadn’t noticed, nobody could have said. But as soon as the birds began to sizzle on their sticks, they also began to caw and flap their wings. Cerise dropped hers into the fire immediately, but Milo held on to the stick for a moment, watching as the bird craned its featherless head to peck his hands, before he let it go. There was an awkward silence as we watched the birds burn down into bone and ash. I had the feeling that words would soon be exchanged. Somehow, they blamed me for this.
Milo sat down on a rock near the fire and steepled his hands, looking up to the stars that burned through the ashy sky for strength. “Look, I’ll be the one to say it if nobody else will. Your girlfriend there? She’s a sorceress. Wake up and smell the coffee, Eric.”
Parker had fallen asleep with her head in my lap. “She’s not my girlfriend,” I whispered.
“But you admit she’s a sorceress,” Milo said.
“No way. She was an administrative assistant,” I said.
“Sure, maybe she was. We were all something else. I was an artisan baker and now I am a captain without a ship. But let me ask you this. How many times have we eaten bird?”
“Three times a day, from the get-go,” I admitted.
“And that has never happened before,” Cerise said.
“Maybe those were too fresh,” I said. “Let’s try again with some that have been in the dirt a little longer.”
“Wow,” Milo said. “Just wow. You read about relationships like this. But you of all people.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, me of all people, but I was pretty sure from the way she looked at me that Cerise would have liked to point a shotgun my direction and be rid of me, but for the alleged sorceress sleeping in my lap. Anyway, we skipped dinner that night.
* * *
In the morning Parker Saenz was gone, and I was back to being the third wheel.
“Oh, that’s rough. Ouch,” Milo said, when he found me sleeping with my face nuzzled against the bare dirt instead of Parker. “But I’m sure she’ll call.” Then he and Cerise laughed unpleasantly.
“You’ve got the wrong idea. It’s not like that between us,” I said, brushing dirt from my cheek. “She’s more of a spirit guide.”
“Sure. That’s what it looked like,” Milo said. He and Cerise were already walking in the direction of downtown, a bold move, because word on the peddler circuit was that the entire area was Bat Rodney’s territory. But the Panera Cerise had taken as her landmark yesterday had evidently been the wrong Panera. There was another one, just south of downtown, and that Panera was the one that was near the Cheevers.
* * *
We were sitting in the rubble filled lobby of the Crockett Hotel, drinking hot Big Reds and eating barbecue chips from a vending machine that remained miraculously uncrushed. Food was somewhat more plentiful here, but other goods were in short supply. A tavern keeper named Skinny Liz controlled the machine’s stock and we’d traded my brown wool dress socks for the drinks and news of any kind.
Liz had my socks tucked into her belt and I looked at them with regret. I was worried about blisters and about how it would look to wear oxfords with bare ankles, but Skinny Liz was a notch or two above the peddling class, and she only accepted luxury items, such as intimates and accessories.
Cerise had refused to hand over her bra, and Milo was in sandals, and the two of them stared at me so long that it began to get uncomfortable. In the end I felt obligated to peel off the socks and hand them over.
“You got some bad information. There never was a Panera this far south. And the Rodneys are not that big of a factor. Most of them were home schooled and they’re not all that comfortable outside the compound,” Liz said. We were speaking in hushed voiced because there were regular patrols around here.
“Hey, I was home schooled,” Milo said, “and I am very well adjusted.”
“The grownups are talking, sweetie,” Cerise said, putting her fingers over his lips.
“Where are you all from, anyway?” Skinny Liz said. You could tell at a glance we weren’t city folk. Most of the residents of the city center wore novelty Texas t-shirts, boots, and velvet sombreros, items scavenged from the remains of Market Square. Liz had on a tie-dyed t-shirt that said TEQUILA and she wore a midnight blue sombrero cinched tight under her chin. It sparkled with faux gems.
“We live in the old park, up by the northern lava wastes. You know, near the Captain Burger sign,” I said.
“Don’t think I know it. Who’s your leader?”
“Trip Edmonds,” I said.
“Oh, wow. Trip Edmonds, the farmer?” Liz had been a little condescending to us till now, as we were a bunch of dirty, rag-wearing bumpkins, but this impressed her.
“He’s no farmer,” I said. The idea of Trip Edmonds tilling the earth was comical, even back in the days when the earth cooperated in such enterprises. I had been somewhat fussy about my appearance, but Trip had had a punch card at Alamo Tan and a standing Thursday pedicure.
“Trip’s in product reclamation. We service the north/south footpath,” I said, with stupid pride, momentarily forgetting my termination.
“Yeah, so that’s the story, huh?” Liz said. “But he’s definitely a farmer. I see his crops heading to Alamo Plaza every few days. He supplies the new guy.”
“Supplies him with what?” I said. Nothing grew beneath the shadow of the Captain Burger sign but weeds and mesquite brush.
“Meat,” Liz said. “You never noticed?”
I was beginning to have doubts about Liz’s brain function. “Farmers grow stuff—did grow stuff. Corn, soy, what have you. Meat is supplied by ranchers.” I looked over at Milo and Cerise, hoping to be confirmed in this opinion, but the two of them looked stricken.
“The riders, stupid. Eric, what she’s telling us is that Trip is selling us to the riders,” Cerise said.
“That’s right,” Liz said, bobbing her sombrero in a nod. The look Trip had given Lisa at my termination proceedings came back to me now. It was a cold, appraising look. It was the kind of look I had many times given to a cellophane wrapped side of beef under the fluorescent lights of a grocery store, while I pushed my cart through the aisles and calming instrumental jazz leaked from the speakers. I began to scream, and Liz stuffed my socks in my mouth to silence me.
* * *
Liz believed that the Panera Cerise remembered had actually been a bagel franchise. It was no longer standing, but she agreed to walk us in the right direction. I wanted to go back for Lisa immediately but Cerise said it was suicide, and so she would have no problem shooting me if I even attempted to return before she and Milo were ready to go with me. My fellow residents had been on the point of killing me only a short time ago and it was unlikely absence had made their hearts grow fonder. Milo argued the situation required stealth and subtlety, not me rushing into camp and screaming unpalatable truths nobody would want to hear. “You go running back there now, and the most likely thing is Trip will hand you all over to the riders immediately. Let’s get Hank’s help on this. Be big enough to admit you need it, Eric,” Milo said.
“So who’s ru
nning things down here?” Cerise said.
“New guy. Real asshole,” Liz said.
“Anyone we’d know?” Milo said.
“Doubt it. He didn’t prep.”
The three of us stared at her. “He didn’t prep?” I said.
“Is he convulsing?” Liz asked, pointing at Milo.
“That’s just how he laughs,” I said. I didn’t see anything funny about it, but Milo was spitting Big Red from his canteen all over his beard.
“HE DIDN’T PREP!” Milo screamed. “And now he’s running the city!”
“Keep it down,” Liz said, scanning the empty street. “I need you to get him under control,” she said to Cerise.
“That’s enough,” Cerise said, and Milo pulled it together.
“I can’t believe this. Look at our group. There’s me.” My failure to rise to the top of the new order was self-evident, even to Liz, whom I’d just met, so I didn’t feel the need to elaborate. “Then there’s you two, with a boat in the middle of a city park.”
“Oh, that is dumb,” Liz said.
“The sea levels are rising as we sit here,” Milo said, getting defensive.
“Lorna and Doug?”
“Earthquake,” Cerise said. I ticked off the other members of the Alamo Preppers and Cerise filled me in on their fates: Martin, Jolene, the Urbans, Ted and Julio, the Espiñoza-Taylors, each and every one of them had been killed in the first week. It was as Cerise said, a piss-poor showing. “The only one maybe doing okay is Hank,” she concluded. “He should have been our president.”