Part 26 (2/2)

(”Don't bother coming back,” he wrote Jane last night. ”Even if you want to.”) ”Yeah s.h.i.+t,” Roxy says, leaving him to wonder if this excursion has been a mistake: thesound of her teeth, clipping off the words.

She is put to the test in the least likely place. At Trevor's front door. An ugly mob is ma.s.sing in the street.

Somebody he knows. ”You,” he says. (Jane wrote last night: ”You might as well know, it isn't Adam I left you for. It's Jake I love.”) ”Jake, what are you doing here?”

Jake scowls. ”Like you were trying to forget you ever had a brother?”

”What happened, did you lose the business?”

”Everybody is losing everything,” Jake snarls. There is a c.h.i.n.k, c.h.i.n.k. Thirty guys stand at Jake's back, slapping chains against their leather-covered thighs.

Oh, s.h.i.+t. ”You stole my idea,” Trevor says. Just like everything else I ever had. ”What do you want now?”

”Whatever you have left,” Jake says. ”Who's the b.i.t.c.h?”

At Trevor's back, Roxy bristles.

”No! You don't get Roxy!”

”If she wasn't the only one left, I wouldn't touch her with a stick.” Behind Jake, his thirty guys drool and rumble with l.u.s.t. ”But she is. C'mere, baby.”

Roxy snaps Jake's neck and, like a terrier who never gets tired of killing rats, starts after the others. Twenty of the thirty guys head for safety- The last ten don't make it.

She rolls the twenty-ninth guy off of Trevor and gets him inside. He looks up into eyes that are neither white nor silver. ”If you want my great-grandmother's emeralds, they're yours.”

”Whatever,” she says coldly, but-is her expression two degrees softer?

Emeralds. It's a cinch Jane won't want them. Interesting, when you get what you want it's never what you thought. What you really want is for your gorilla to like you.

The next challenge is mechanized. A savage inventor unleashes a new machine on Trevor's street. The thing cracks open houses and its master strips them of food and valuables. Some wit designed the robot monster to look like a combination of Rodan and G.o.dzilla.

Roxy gets hurt in the encounter, but she trashes the thing. Microchips land in her hair like glits. Bolts roll everywhere.

”If I had anything left to give, I'd give it to you,” Trevor tells her, and she almost smiles. (He did, in fact, send his great-grandmother's diamond clip to Jane with a note: ”Sorry about your bereavement.”) ”If it makes any difference at all, I'm in love with you.”

”Whatever,” Roxy says, and goes in her cage and locks the door against him.

Meanwhile, every clock has frozen. The white skies are shredded by nonstop lightning. It should be comforting to know that the streets are empty now, but it isn't. Stay in, cover your head, and wait for it to be over, right? Wrong. No matter how well prepared you are, sooner or later, things break down: generator, alternate fuel supply. Personal arrangements. Computer.

There is no mail coming in and no mailing out. Not anymore, so G.o.d only knows what Jane is up to or what will become of you. Even you, who overstocked, will run out of food.

Sooner or later.For the first time since Trevor brought her home, his captive gorilla speaks first. ”We're running out of stuff.” ”I know.”

”We gotta go out there.”

”Would you do that for me?”

”d.a.m.n straight.”

He shudders and falls in step behind her. There's nothing left in the gutted supermarkets, the empty houses. They follow ancient signs to a forgotten treasure trove: prehistoric fallout shelter. Things to eat, not anything you'd want to put in your mouth, but edible.

And coming out, they run into an ordinary guy. A lot like Trevor. Timid, can't make it alone.

Studying them, the stranger sizes up the situation. Their food, heaped in Trevor's ex-kid's wagon. ”Swap you,” the stranger says. Calls over his shoulder. ”Come on out, baby.”

Broken tiles s.h.i.+ckle down as a gorgeous woman emerges. Amazing, how she can look the way she does in times like these. Slim and elegant. Beautiful. She gives Trevor a sultry smile.

”Well?”

”A swap.” Trevor asks cautiously, ”As in, your girlfriend for my gorilla?”

Behind him, Roxy shudders.

The stranger cracks up laughing. ”h.e.l.l, no-my girlfriend for that food you got!”

Beautiful. She is beautiful. Blindly, Trevor forgets that these aren't ordinary times. ”Maybe we can work out a trade.”

At his back Roxy snarls, but Trevor is too distracted to notice. The thing about bait is, it's got to look good to the fish you're after. Of course, the guy wasn't bona fide. In the end, he tries to stab Trevor, and Roxy has to kill both him and the woman, never mind that she was gorgeous.

Trevor tries to thank her, but his concentration is broken. He's hung up on the distance between what he should have had and what he has here. Then he sees Roxy's face. ”I would never trade you off,” he says. ”You're irreplaceable.”

”f.u.c.k you.” Another minute, and she'll yank his ears off.

”Can you ever forgive me?” He waits for an answer, but Roxy is done talking to him.

After that, nothing happens. It happens for a long time. It is terrible, waiting to hear from Jane. Roxy is sulking and won't talk to him. Nothing comes, no e-mails, no postcards. The carrier pigeons have all died, and Trevor suspects that one of them has a message for him tied to its dead claw. He searches the bodies of the pigeons he can find, but their bones have been picked clean by the starving, and they are carrying only magazine subscriptions and credit card offers.

It is terrible, watching Roxy pine. She quits working out.

He tries to motivate her. ”What if someone comes?”

She is wearing all his family jewelry at once. ”Not my problem.”

”Come on, Rox, we were put here for a purpose. We survived for a reason.” He can't stop trying. ”What do you think it is?””That's for me to know and you to find out,” she says grimly. The diamond necklace slips off her scrawny arm and falls into the straw. She kicks it out of the cage.

He winces. ”What do you want from me?”

But she won't talk to him.

Awful, this is awful, but when all else fails, Trevor, at least, is ready. Gorilla in place, food stockpiled. He's OK, but he's not so sure about the gorilla.

For a while, phenomena abound. It's only a matter of time before the Four Hors.e.m.e.n come charging out of the sky unless he looks up one morning and sees the four evangelists with their heads blazing in the morning fog. Right now nothing is happening. Boredom is worse than the plague or fires and floods-when there's a riot, at least you have stuff to do. He sits in the dark watching tapes because the last television station belched snow onto his TV screen and blinked out of existence.

Then nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening. Every day is like every other day, with no promise that whatever Sam Trevor has prepared for so carefully-he captured someone!-is actually coming. Still, it's not as if they can go outside and resume normal life. Whatever that was. For no reason you can point to, the city's in ruins.

In her cage, Roxy crashes on her bunk and turns her face to the wall. Trevor takes over the exercise equipment. Works out on the Universal gym. He is busy all the time now. Excited and scared. He bangs away on the weights, blowing air like an industrial vacuum cleaner.

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