“Got a kiss for me?” Doug asked.
She gave him one, on the cheek, and she smelled the scent that was not her own.
“Rainy out,” Doug said as he unknotted his tie. “Traffic’s pretty bad.”
Laura closed her eyes, listening to Doug move around the bedroom. The closet opened and closed. The toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink. Brushing his teeth. Gargling, good old Scope. When would he realize about the tickets? she wondered. Or maybe he was past caring?
Her hands met over the bulge of her belly. Her fingers laced together and locked.
She slept, this time mercifully without dreams.
In her womb, David was still. Doug placed his hand against Laura’s stomach, feeling the baby’s heat, and then he sat on the side of the bed looking at his hand and remembering where it had been. Bastard, he told himself. Stupid, selfish bastard. He felt swollen with lies, bloated with them, and how he could look into Laura’s face he didn’t know. But he was a survivor and he had a silver tongue, and he would do what he had to do in a world where you took what you could get when you could get it.
He had a bad taste in his mouth. He left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator and got out a carton of orange juice. He poured himself a glassful, and he was nearing the bottom of the glass when he saw the two ticket stubs next to the telephone. It hit him like a punch between the eyes: he’d forgotten to throw them away since he’d taken Cheryl to see a Tom Cruise movie across town a few nights ago. He almost choked on the orange juice, almost bit through the glass. The ticket stubs. There they were. Right there. From his pants pocket. The ones he’d taken off. Oh, great! Laura had found them. Damn it to hell, what was she doing going through his pockets? A man had a right to privacy! Hold on, don’t lose it. Just hold on. He picked up the stubs, remembering when he’d pocketed them. Right after that, Cheryl had guided him to the snack bar for kingsize Cokes and Milk Duds. His eyes ticked back and forth from the telephone to the ticket stubs; he didn’t like what he was thinking, but why were the stubs next to the telephone? He felt heat working in his face, and he started to throw the stubs into a trash can but stopped his hand. No, no; leave them where they were. Exactly where they were. Finish your juice. Go to bed. Think about it, and come up with a story. Right, right. A story. Client in town, wanted to see a movie. Uh-huh. Selling limited partnerships in movie companies, and a client wanted to check out a movie. Sure.
Laura wasn’t dumb, that was for certain. He would have to work on the story. If she asked. If she didn’t…he wouldn’t volunteer anything.
Doug returned the ticket stubs to where they’d been. He drank down the rest of his orange juice; it was very bitter toward the end. Then he started back into the bedroom, where his wife lay sleeping and his son was curled up in her belly waiting to be born. Before he got there, he thought of something Freud had said, that nobody ever truly forgets anything. He set the alarm clock for an early hour, lay in the dark for a while listening to Laura breathe and wondering how he’d gotten here from the moment they had exchanged vows and rings, and finally sleep took him.
Seven miles could be the distance between worlds. It was that far—that close—to the apartment where Mary Terror slept with her new baby cradled against her. She made a soft, moaning noise, and her hand drifted down and pressed against her scars. The baby stared out at the world through painted eyes, his body giving off no warmth.
Rain fell on the roofs of the just and unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.
II
UNKNOWN SOLDIER
1
Bad Karma
THE SUN WAS SHINING, and mary terror was in the woods.
She ran on cramping legs through the wilderness, the breath pluming from her mouth in the chilly air, her body giving up moisture into the gray sweatsuit she wore. It had been a long time since she had run, and her legs weren’t used to the effort. It angered her that she’d let herself get so out of shape; it was a weakness of the mind, a failure of willpower. As she ran through the sun-dappled Georgia forest about three miles from her apartment, she held the Colt .38 in her right hand, her index finger curled around the trigger guard. Sweat was on her face, her lungs beginning to labor though she’d barely gone a third of a mile at an easy pace. The ravines and hillocks were rough on her knees, but she was in training and she gritted her teeth and took the pain like an old lover.
It was just before two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, four days after she’d found the message in the Rolling Stone. Her pickup truck was parked at the end of an old logging road; she knew these woods, and often came here to practice her shooting. It had come upon her to run, to work up a sweat and make the hinges of her lungs wheeze, because the road to the weeping lady lay ahead. She knew the dangers of that road, knew that she was vulnerable out on the open byways of the Mindfuck State, where pigs of every description cruised for a killing. To reach her destination, she would have to be tough and smart, and she’d lived too long as Ginger Coles in a redneck cocoon for the preparations to be easy. Her body wanted to rest, but she pushed herself onward. As she went up a hill she caught sight of the highway to Atlanta in the distance, the sunlight sparking off the glass and metal of speeding cars; then she was going down again, through a pine tree thicket where shadows carpeted the earth, the breath burning in her lungs and her face full of heat. Faster! she urged herself. Faster! Her legs remembered the thrill of speed at a high school track meet, when she’d strained past the other runners toward the tape. Faster! Faster! She ran along the bottom of a wooded ravine, pushing herself to go all out, and that was when her left foot hit a snag and she went down on her belly in the dead leaves and kudzu. The wind whooshed out of her and her chin scraped along the ground, and she lay there puffing and listening to a squirrel chatter angrily in a nearby tree.
“Shit,” Mary said. She sat up, rubbed her chin, found scraped skin but no blood. When she tried to stand, her legs didn’t want to. She sat there for a moment, breathing hard, dark motes spinning before her eyes in the cold, slanting sunlight. Falls were part of the training, she knew. Falls were cosmic teachers. That’s what Lord Jack used to say. When you knew how to fall, you truly knew how to stand. She lay on the ground, catching her breath and remembering the commando training. The Storm Front’s headquarters had been hidden in woods like these, only you could smell the sea in the eastern winds. Lord Jack had been a hard taskmaster: sometimes he awakened them with whispers at four o’clock in the morning, other times with gunshots at midnight. Then he would run the soldiers through the obstacle course, keeping time with a stopwatch and shouting a melange of encouragement and threats. Mary recalled the wargames, when two teams hunted each other in the woods armed with pistols that fired paint pellets. Sometimes the hunt was one-against-one, and those were the trials she’d enjoyed the most; she had never been tagged in all the dozens of hunts Lord Jack had put her into. She had enjoyed turning back on her adversary, coming around in a silent, stalking circle, and delivering the blow that finished the game. No one had ever beaten her at the hunt. No one.
Mary forced herself up. The pain in her bones reminded her that she was no longer a young firebrand, but low coals burned longer. She began running again, with long, steady strides. Her thighs and calves were aching, but she closed her mind to the pain. Make friends with agony, Lord Jack had said. Embrace it, kiss it, stroke it. Love the pain, and you win the game. She ran with the pistol held at her side, and she saw a squirrel dart from the brush and scramble toward an oak tree to her right. She stopped, skidding in a flurry of leaves, slowing the squirrel down into strobelike motions with the force of her concentration. The squirrel was going up the treetrunk, now leaping for a higher branch.
Mary lifted the pistol in a two-handed grip, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the shot and the explosion of the squirrel’s head were almost simultaneous. The body fell into the l
eaves, writhed for a few seconds, and lay still.
She ran on, the sweet tang of gunpowder in her nostrils and the pistol warm in her hand.
Her eyes searched the shadowed woods. Pig on the left! she thought, and she checked her progress and whirled in a crouch with her gun ready, aiming at a scraggly pine. She ran again, over a hillock and down. Pig on the right! She threw herself to the ground, raising dust, and as she slid on her stomach she took aim at another tree and fired a shot that clipped a top branch and sent a bluejay shrieking into the sky. Then up again—quick, quick!—and onward, her tennis shoes gouging the ground. Another squirrel, drowsing in the sun, came to life and fled across her path; she tracked it, heading toward a group of pines. It was a fast one, desperate with fear. She fired at it as it clambered up a treetrunk, missed by a few inches to the left, but hit the squirrel in the spine with the second bullet. She heard it squeak as she passed on, a signature of blood across the treebark.
Pig to the right! She crouched again, taking aim at an imaginary enemy. Off in the forest, crows called to each other. She smelled woodsmoke as she ran again, and she figured houses must be near. She entered a tangle of thicket, the sweat trickling down the back of her neck and dead leaves snagged in her hair. As she fought through the growth, battering it aside with her forearms, she thought of Jack urging her on with his stopwatch and whistle. He had written the message from the underground; of that she had no doubt. He was calling the Storm Fronters together again, after all these years. Calling for her, his true love. There had to be a purpose behind his summons. The Mindfuck State was still full of pigs, and all the Revolution had done was make them meaner. If the Storm Front could rise up again, with Lord Jack holding its red banner, she would be the happiest woman on earth. She had been born to fight the pigs, to grind them down under her boots and blow their shitty brains out. That was her life; that was reality. When she got back to Lord Jack and the Storm Front was on the move again, the pigs would tremble at the name of Mary Terror.
She burst through the foliage, her face raked by thorns. Pig to the left! she thought, and she dove for the ground. She hit the clayey dirt on her shoulder, rolled through weeds, and contorted her body to the left, lifting the pistol to take aim at—
A boy.
He was standing maybe fifteen yards away, in a splash of sunlight. He wore bluejeans with patched knees and a camouflage-print windbreaker, and on his head was a dark blue woolen cap. His eyes were large and round, and in his arms he held a small, boy-sized rifle.
Mary Terror lay where she was, the gun aimed in the boy’s direction. Time stretched, breaking only when the boy opened his mouth.
“You okay, lady?”
“I fell,” she said, trying to assemble her wits.
“Yeah, I saw. You okay?”
Mary glanced around. Was the boy alone? No one else in sight. She said, “Who you out here with?”
“Just me. My house is over that way.” He motioned with a turning of his head, but the boy’s home was about a half-mile away, over a hill and out of sight.
Mary stood up. She saw the boy’s eyes fix on the revolver in her hand. He was about nine or ten, she decided; his face was ruddy, the cheeks chill-burned. The rifle he held was a .22, and it had a small telescopic sight. “I’m all right,” she told him. Again her gaze searched the woods. Birds sang, cars droned on the distant highway, and Mary Terror was alone with the boy. “I tripped,” she said. “Stupid, huh?”
“You ’bout scared the life outta me, comin’ through there and all.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” She lifted her head slightly and sniffed the woodsmoke. Maybe a fire in the hearth at the kid’s house, she thought.
“What’re you doin’ out here? Kinda far from the road.” He kept his rifle pointed at the ground. The first thing his father had told him: never point a gun at a person unless you’re gonna use it.
“Just hiking.” She saw him look at the pistol again. “Target shooting, too.”
“I heard some shots. That was you, I reckon.”
“That was me.”
“I’m squirrel-huntin’,” the boy said, and he offered a gap-toothed grin. “I got me this here new rifle for my birthday. See?”
She had never run into anyone out here before. She didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. A boy alone with a squirrel rifle. She didn’t like it. “How come no one’s with you?” she asked.
“My daddy had to go in to work. He said if I was careful I could come on out by myself, but I wasn’t to go too far from the house.”
Her mouth was dry. She was still breathing hard, but the sweat was drying on her face. She didn’t like this; she could imagine this boy going home and saying to his parents I saw a woman in the woods today. She had a pistol and she said she was out hikin’. She was a big, tall woman, and I can draw you a picture of what she looked like.
“Is your daddy a policeman?” Mary asked.
“No, ma’am. He builds houses.”
She asked if you were a policeman, Daddy, she could imagine the boy saying. I can remember what she looked like. Wonder why she asked if you were a policeman, Daddy?
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Cory Peterson. My birthday was yesterday. See, I got this rifle.”
“I see.” She watched the boy’s gaze tick to her .38 once more. How come she had a pistol, Daddy? How come she was out there in the woods by herself and she don’t even live around here? “Cory,” she said. She smiled at him. The sun was warm out here, but the shadows still trapped winter. “My name is Mary,” she told him, and just that quick she decided it had to be done.
“Pleased to meet ya. Well, I guess I’d best be gettin’ on now. I said I wouldn’t be gone too long.”
“Cory?” she said. He hesitated. “Can I have a closer look at your rifle?”
“Yes ma’am.” He began walking toward her, his boots crunching on dead leaves.
She watched him approach. Her heart was beating hard, but she was calm. The boy might decide to follow her if she let him go; he might follow her all the way to her truck, and he might remember her license number. He might be a lot smarter than he looked, and his father might know someone who was a policeman. She was going to be leaving soon, after she’d gotten everything prepared, and she would worry about this boy if she didn’t tie up the loose ends. Daddy, I saw this woman in the woods and she had a pistol and her name was Mary. No, no; that could screw up everything.
When Cory got to her, Mary reached out and grasped the rifle’s barrel. “Can I hold it?” she asked, and he nodded and gave it up. The rifle hardly had any weight at all, but she was interested in the telescopic sight. Having it might save her some money if she ever bought a long-range rifle. “Real nice,” she said. She kept her smile on, no trace of frost or tension around the edges. “Hey, you know what?”
“What?”
“I saw a place where a lot of squirrels are. Back that way.” She nodded toward the thicket she’d broken through. “It isn’t too far, if you want to see it,”
“I don’t know.” Cory looked back in the direction of his house, then up into her face again. “I figger I’d better be gettin’ on home.”
“Really, it’s not far. Won’t take but just a few minutes to show you.” She was thinking of the ravine where dead leaves and kudzu covered the bottom.
“Naw. Thanks anyway. Can I have my rifle back now, please?”
“Going to make it hard on me, huh?” she asked, and she felt her smile slip.
“Ma’am?” The boy blinked, his dark brown eyes puzzled.
“I don’t mind,” Mary said. She lifted her Colt and placed the barrel squarely in the middle of Cory Peterson’s forehead.
He gasped.
She pulled the trigger, and with the crack of the shot the boy’s head was flung backward. His mouth was open, showing little silver fillings in his teeth. His body went back, following the shock to his neck. He stumbled backward a few steps, the hole in the cent
er of his forehead running crimson and his brains scattered on the ground behind him. His eyelids fluttered, and his face looked to Mary as if the boy were about to sneeze. He made a strangled little squeak, squirrellike, and then he fell on his back amid the detritus of winter. His legs trembled a few times, as if he were trying to stand up again. He died with his eyes and mouth open and the sun on his face. Mary stood over him until his lungs had stopped hitching. There was no use trying to drag the body away to hide it. She swept her gaze back and forth through the woods, her senses questing for sound and movement. The gunshot had scared the birds away, and the only noises were her heartbeat and blood trickling in the leaves. Satisfied that no one else was anywhere around, she turned away from the corpse and pushed back through the thicket again. Once clear of it, she began running in the direction she’d come, the .38 in one hand and the boy-sized rifle clenched in the other.
Her sweat turned cold. What she had just done fell upon her, and it made her stagger. But she regained her balance, her mouth grim-lipped and her eyes fixed toward the distant horizon. It had been his bad karma to cross her path, she thought. It had not been her fault that the boy was there; it was just karma, that’s all. The boy was a minor piece of a larger picture, and that was what she had to focus on. His daddy might have wondered why a woman was stalking in the woods with a pistol on a Sunday afternoon. His daddy might have known a pig, or even a federal pig. One telephone call could start the pig machinery, and she’d hidden too long and been too smart to allow that to happen. The boy had to be laid low. Period.
A little whirlpool of anger had opened within her. Damn it! she raged. Shit! Why had that damned boy been there? It was a test, she thought. A karmic test. You fall down, and you stand up again. You keep going no matter what. She wished it were springtime, and that there were flowers in the woods. If there were flowers in the woods, she would’ve put one in the dead boy’s hand.