Part 93 (2/2)

There was a garden hose curled on its peg behind one of the tan-faced houses huddled by the Texaco station, the upper side bleached yellow on green like the belly of a dead snake. Harrie wrenched it off the peg one-handed. The rubber was brittle from dry rot; she broke it twice trying to uncoil a section, but managed to get about seven feet clean. She pried the fill cap off the underground tank with a tire iron and yanked off her helmet and air filter to sniff, checking both dosimeters first.

It had, after all, been one of those days.

The gas smelled more or less like gasoline, though, and it tasted like f.u.c.king gasoline too, when she got a good mouthful of it from sucking it up her impromptu siphon. Not very good gasoline, maybe, but beggars and choosers. The siphon wouldn't work as a siphon because she couldn't get the top end lower than the bottom end, but she could suck fuel up into it and transfer it, hoseful by hoseful, into the Kawasaki's empty tank, the precious case leaning against her boot while she did.

Finally, she saw the dark gleam of fluid s.h.i.+mmer through the fill hole when she peered inside and tapped the side of the tank.

She closed the tank and spat and spat, wis.h.i.+ng she had water to wash the gasoline away. The lake glinted, mocking her, and she resolutely turned her back on it and picked up the case.

It was light in her hand. She paused with one hand on the flap of the saddlebag, weighing that gleaming silver object, staring past it at her boots. She sucked on her lower lip, tasted gas, and turned her head and spat again. ”A few more years of freedom, Connie,” she said, and stroked the metal with a black-gloved hand. ”You and me. I could drink the water. It wouldn't matter if that was bad gas I fed you. Nothing could go wrong.

The Kawasaki was silent. Its keys jangled in Harrie's hip pocket. She touched the throttle lightly, drew her hand back, laid the unopened case on the seat. ”What do you say, girl?”

Nothing, of course. It was quiescent, slumbering, a dreaming demon. She hadn't turned it on.

With both thumbs at once, Harrie flicked up the latches and opened the case.

It was cool inside, cool enough that she could feel the difference on her face when she bent over it. She kept the lid at half-mast, trying to block that cool air with her body so it wouldn't drift away. She tipped her head to see inside: blue foam threaded through with cooling elements, shaped to hold the contents without rattling. Papers in a plastic folder, and something in sealed culture plates, clear jelly daubed with ragged polka dots.

There was a sticky note tacked on the plastic folder. She reached into the cool case and flicked the sticky note out, bringing it into the light. Patch's handwriting. She blinked.

”Sacramento next, if these don't get there,” it said, thick black definite lines. ”Like Faustus, we all get one good chance to change our minds.” If you meet the Buddha on the road- ”I always thought there was more to that son of a b.i.t.c.h than met the eye,” she said, and closed the case, and stuffed the note into her pocket beside the pen. She jammed her helmet back on, double-checking the filter that had maybe started leaking a little around the edges in Tonopah, slung her leg over the Kawasaki's saddle, and closed the choke.

It gasped dry when she clutched and thumbed the start b.u.t.ton, shaking between her legs like an asthmatic pony. She gave it a little throttle, then eased up on it like easing up on a virgin lover. Coaxing, pleading under her breath. Gasoline fumes from her mouth made her eyes tear inside the helmet; the tears or something else washed the grit away. One cylinder hiccupped. A second one caught.

She eased the choke as the Kawasaki coughed and purred, s.h.i.+vering, ready to run.

Both dosimeters kicked hard as she rolled across the flat, open plain toward Fallon, a deadly oasis in its own right. Apparently Nick hadn't been satisfied with a leukaemia cl.u.s.ter and perchlorate and a.r.s.enic tainting the ground water; the trees Harrie saw as she rolled up on the startling green of the farming town weren't desert cottonwoods but towering giants of the European forest, and something grey and ma.s.sive, s.h.i.+mmering with lovely crawling blue Cherenkov radiation, gleamed behind them. The signs she pa.s.sed were in an alphabet she didn't understand, but she knew the name of this place.

A light rain was falling as she pa.s.sed through Chern.o.byl.

It drove down harder as she turned west on the 50, toward Reno and Sparks and a crack under the edge of the clouds that glowed a toxic, sallow colour with evening coming on. Her tires skittered on slick, greasy asphalt.

Where the cities should have been, stinking piles of garbage crouched against the yellowing evening sky, and nearly naked, starvation-slender people picked their way over slumped rubbish, calling the names of loved ones buried under the avalanche. Water sluiced down her helmet, soaked her saddle, plastered her leathers to her body. She wished she dared drink the rain. It didn't make her cool. It only made her wet.

She didn't turn her head to watch the wretched victims of the garbage slide. She was one hour out of Sacramento, and in Manila of fifty years ago.

Donner Pa.s.s was green and pleasant, sunset staining the sky ahead as red as meat. She was in plenty of time. It was all downhill from here.

Nick wasn't about to let her get away without a fight.

The big one had rerouted the Sacramento River too, and Harrie turned back at the edge because the bridge was down and the water was on fire. She motored away, a hundred meters, two hundred, until the heat of the burning river faded against her back. ”What's that?” she asked the slim man in the pinstriped suit who waited for her by the roadside.

”Cuyahoga River fire,” he said. ”1969. Count your blessings. It could have been Bhopal.”

”Blessings?” She spared him a sardonic smile, invisible behind her helmet. He tilted the brim of his hat with a grey-gloved finger. ”I suppose you could say that.

What is it really?”

”Phlegethon.”

She raised her visor and peeked over her shoulder, watching the river burn. Even here, it was hot enough that her sodden leathers steamed against her back. The back of her hand pressed her breast pocket. The paper from Patch's note crinkled; her Cross poked her in the t.i.t.

She looked at Nick, and Nick looked at her. ”So that's it.”

”That's all she wrote. It's too far to jump.”

”I can see that.”

”Give me the case and I'll let you go home. I'll give you the Kawasaki and I'll give you your freedom. We'll call it even.”

She eyed him, tension up her right leg, toe resting on the ground. The great purring bike s.h.i.+fted heavily between her legs, lithe as a cat, ready to turn and spit gravel from whirring tires. ”Too far to jump.”

”That's what I said.”

Too far to jump. Maybe. And maybe if she gave him what was in the case, and doomed Sacramento like Bhopal, like Chern.o.byl, like Las Vegas...Maybe she'd be d.a.m.ning herself even if he gave it back to her. And even if she wasn't, she wasn't sure she and the Kawasaki could live with that answer.

If he wanted to keep her, he had to let her make the jump, and she could save Sacramento. If he was willing to lose her, she might die on the way over, and Sacramento might die with her, but they would die free.

Either way, Nick lost. And that was good enough for her.

”Devil take the hindmost,” she said under her breath, and touched the throttle one more time.

The Leavings of the Wolf Dagmar was doomed to run. Feet in stiff new trail shoes flexing, hitting. The sharp ache of each stride in knees no longer accustomed to the pressure. Her body, too heavy on the downhills, femur jarring into hip socket, each hop down like a blow against her soles. Against her soul. Dagmar was doomed to run until her curse was lifted.

Oh, she thought of it as a curse, but it was just a wedding ring. She could have solved the problem with a pair of tin snips. Applied to the ring, not the finger, though there were days- Days, maybe even weeks, when she could have fielded enough selfloathing to resort to the latter. But no, she would not ruin that ring. It had a history: the half-carat transition-cut diamond was a transplant from her grandmother's engagement ring, reset in a filigree band carved by a jeweler friend who was as dead as Dagmar's marriage.

She wouldn't wear it again herself, if- when, she told herself patiently- when she could ever get it off. But she thought of saving it for a daughter she still might one day have-thirty wasn't so old. Anyway, it was a piece of history. A piece of art.

It was futile-and fascist-to destroy history out of hand, just because it had unpleasant a.s.sociations. But the ring wouldn't come off her finger intact until the forty pounds she'd put on over the course of her divorce came off, too.

So, in the mornings before the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday section of her undergrad animal behavior cla.s.s, she climbed out of her Toyota, rocking her feet in her stiff new minimalist running shoes-how the technology had changed, in the last ten years or so-and was made all the more aware of her current array of bulges and b.u.mps by the tightness of the sports bra and the way the shorts rode up when she stretched beside the car.

The university where Dagmar worked lay on a headland above the ocean, where cool breezes crossed it in every season. They dried the sweat on her face, the salt water soaking her T-s.h.i.+rt as she ran.

Painfully at first, in intervals more walking than jogging, shuffling to minimize the impact on her ankles and knees. She trotted slow circles around the library. But within a week, that wasn't enough. She extended her range through campus. Her shoes broke in, the stiff soles developing flex. She learned-relearned-to push off from her toes.

She invested in better running socks-cus.h.i.+ony wool, twenty bucks a pair.

She's a runner and a student; he's a poet and a singer. Each of them sees in the other something they're missing in themselves.

She sees his confidence, his creativity. He sees her studiousness, her devotion.

The story ends as it always does. They fall in love.

Of course there are signs that all is not right. Portents.

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