The door to the motel room opened and Emory prepared herself to fight yet again as Brutus stepped in and stood looking at her. He wore his long blond hair in a golden braid and kept his beard trimmed closer to his face than the rest of the gang, but he was every bit as grubby and smelly. He was tall and muscular, with blue, mean-looking eyes, like the archetypal Viking.
“Bad news,” he said.
She sat looking at him, hating him intensely. Often, she had considered throwing herself off the balcony, but had so far been unable to bring herself to take that final fall.
“There’s nothing left but dog food,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to eat man meat with the rest of us.”
“I’ll starve, thanks.”
“You’ll fucking eat or I’ll blowtorch your tits.”
He tossed a can of Alpo onto the bed, and she sat looking at it, thinking that the time had finally come to consider the balcony in a very serious way. It would be much easier to do if she were drunk, however.
“Is there any booze left?” she asked. “I’ll need something to take the fucking taste out of my mouth.”
He grunted and left the room.
She opened the can with her can opener and scooped half of the nasty smelling dog food into the toilet, using the bucket of water to flush it down and getting back into the bed, sticking her spoon into the can and setting it beside her on the blanket. She had fought as hard and as long as she could and hated to give up, but there was nothing ahead now but more and ever greater misery.
Brutus came back into the room with a pair of leg shackles in his hand, and she sprang from the bed like a frog from a hot pan, beating him easily to the sliding door, but he was on her before she could get it open, knocking her to the floor with his great, hairy forearm. She scrabbled to her feet and tried for the hallway, but he caught her collar and swung her around, slamming her hard against the wall, knocking her senseless.
He took hold of her ankle and dragged her across the room, where he used his booted foot to smash apart the heating unit, exposing the radiator pipe. Emory came to as he was shackling her to the pipe and kicked him in the face, knocking him over backward, but it was too late. She was caught fast to the radiator.
Brutus stood back up and wiped the blood from the corner of his eye, looking at it on his fingers. “This is the second time you’ve made me bleed.”
“Wait till next time!” she said acidly.
He stood on her free leg and began to unlace her boot.
Emory hammered away at him with her fists, but he ignored her as he finished stealing her boots and stepped away, tossing them into the hall.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” she swore. “You fucking piece of shit! You fucking biker trash motherfucker! Nothing but a bunch of fucking white trash biker fucks! Eating fucking people! You fucking animals!”
He took the blankets from the bed and tossed them over her. “Didn’t have to be like this. All you had to do was go along.”
“Fuck you!” she said from under the blanket. “I’m a fucking soldier! You’re nothing but a goddamn animal!”
Another Mongol came into the room, a winter parka worn over his colors. His name was Gig.
“Something you might find interesting,” Gig said, noticing Emory’s shape beneath the blanket. “We found the green Jeep… on the east side of town.”
“What’s the plate number?” Brutus demanded.
“OA 5599,” Gig said. “It’s him. I’ve got some men watching the house now. All the curtains are shut, but there’s tracks in the dust outside the back door. A dead body under the deck.”
Brutus had never gotten a good look at the man who killed his brother, but he would soon be pissing on his dead body. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. “Be dark soon. We’ll hit him after it gets late.”
“You’re all animals!” Emory said, still hidden beneath the blankets.
Brutus booted her in the head, not real hard but hard enough to hurt. “Get a house mouse in here to keep an eye on this bitch. I don’t want her offing herself.”
Thirty
The basement was cold, but Marty and Susan spent most of their time cuddled together beneath lots of blankets, so it wasn’t unpleasant. The only time the cold was a genuine bother was when they had to come out from the under the covers to go to the bathroom or to wash up. They usually kept a supply of food by the bed along with the camp stove, so they could keep warm while preparing their meals.
Their time together since the asteroid strike had been good, and they had made love many, many times over the past few months, more times than Marty had in all the rest of his life. By the sixth week Susan was pretty sure she had conceived, but she chose not tell Marty about it. The end was drawing near, and knowing that she was pregnant with his child would only make his job more difficult when the time came.
The food had begun to run low after the first couple of months, and she went to sleep each night hoping never to awaken again, but each morning she awoke to find him there in bed wrapped tightly around her. She did love him, though not in a passionate kind of way, and their lovemaking had been a wonderful way to pass the days and nights. Each Friday night they had even been able to watch a DVD on Marty’s laptop until the battery finally went completely dead.
Then one disappointing morning Susan awoke to find that Marty had left the house during the night, to scavenge around the neighborhood by flashlight in search of food and supplies, and in doing so managed to scare up enough food to get them through another week. It had been difficult for her to do, but she feigned happiness. She felt terrible because she knew how badly he wanted there to be a future for them, and she knew he was perfectly willing to live with her there in that basement for the rest of their lives if that was what it took.
“You do understand,” she had gently said the week before, “that there has to be an end to this, right?”
“I do,” he answered heavily. “But will you let me fight for us?”
“Of course,” she said, touching his pained face in the candlelight. “So long as you’ll keep your promise to me.”
“I will,” he said, actually meaning it, for by then he had seen things on his numerous forays into the neighborhood, sights that chilled him to his core. Partially butchered corpses, heads stuck on fence posts, and entire families gathered together in bedrooms, dead of murder-suicides. Soon he would be forced to venture too far from the house at night to risk leaving her alone and undefended.
The light had faded outside the glass block windows, and Marty got up to cover them so they could light a candle without the risk of the light showing outside. The nights were pitch-black now, and the slightest hint of light seemed visible for miles and miles, though distance was extremely hard to judge in that kind of darkness. He slipped in beneath the blankets and wrapped himself around her, placing his hand flat on her belly where he knew that his child lived.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“I haven’t told you about the time I went to Yosemite with my scout troop yet. Would you like to hear about it?”
“Absolutely,” she said, lacing her fingers through his on top of her belly and rolling to her side to face away from him, now realizing that he knew she was with child.
As she listened to him telling her of his trip to Yosemite, tears began to pour from her eyes, for she had sensed a change in him, a change in his tone of voice as he told the story, almost as if he were telling it to a little girl whom he loved very much, and she knew that he had chosen tonight.