Drought (24 page)

She ran her hands all over his chest, feeling the five diagonal scars on his shoulder.

‘What are these?' she asked him.

‘Nothing.'

‘Did somebody hurt you? Who was it?'

‘War wounds. Afghanistan.'

She took hold of his penis again and slowly massaged it, probing into the hole with her sharp, manicured thumbnail. ‘My battle-scarred soldier,' she breathed, and bit his shoulder, too.

He started to unbutton her blouse, and she sat up a little to make it easier for him, but the only time that she relinquished her hold on his penis was when he had to tug her arm out of her sleeve. When he had managed to wrestle her blouse right off her, he reached behind her with his right hand and slid open the catch of her bra. Her breasts, now that they were bare, seemed very much bigger, and he could feel their weight and their warmth in the palm of his hand. Her nipples were tightly knurled, and he lifted up each breast so that he could suck them, and roll them with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

When he nipped one of her nipples with his teeth, however, she dug her fingernails into the shaft of his penis and said, ‘
No
, Martin! I do the biting.'

With that, she dragged the blanket aside, and turned herself around to kneel astride him, facing away from him. He ran his hands down her long smooth back, and felt the wide flare of her hips, and then he reached around and cupped both of her breasts. Then she bent forward and took the head of his penis into her mouth, licking it and gently sucking it, but every now and then biting at it. Every bite hurt, but only for a split second.

Martin was gripped by a tension that he had never experienced before. Usually, as he came close to ejaculating, he felt a pleasurable tightness gradually mounting between his legs. But what Saskia was doing to him made him feel as if his whole existence was building up toward a climax that would blow him apart like a bomb, body and soul.

She bent over him even more, lifting her hips so that her open vulva was right in front of his face. He opened her lips even wider with his fingers, and she was so wet and slippery that he could have washed his face in her juices. He licked her, and slid his tongue inside her, and even though she had his penis deep in her mouth she let out a muffled moan.

Now she began to bite him even more viciously, and the combination of pain and pleasure made him feel as if he were losing his sanity. It was that pain again, the same pain that he had endured as the Taliban whipped him with wire and beat him with canes, and yet for the first time since he had left the Marines, Saskia seemed to be making sense of that pain.

He pulled the cheeks of her bottom even wider apart, so that he could poke the curled-up tip of his tongue into her anus. She flinched at first, and her anus tightened, but then he could feel her deliberately opening herself up to him. Next, very slowly, he slid his tongue down to her clitoris, teasing her at first with occasional flicks, but then licking it faster and faster, trying to arouse her as much as she was arousing him.

She gave his penis one last lascivious suck, circling her tongue around it. But then she ran the tips of her teeth down the side of its shaft and sank her teeth into the skin of his scrotum, so hard that he gasped out ‘
ahh
!'. She didn't let go, though. With her teeth clenched together, she stretched the skin upward as far as she could, and worried it from side to side. He couldn't help it then. It was impossible to stop himself. He shot warm semen everywhere, all over her face and her hair and her hands, and his own thighs, too. His climax seemed to go on and on, and he felt blinded and deafened and lost to the world.

Afterwards, she lay very close to him, still massaging his penis, and smearing his semen over his stomach until it dried.

‘You needed that, didn't you?' she told him. ‘I could tell that was what you needed from the very first moment I met you in your boss's office.'

‘Oh, yes? And how could you tell that?'

‘I saw it in your eyes. I can always recognize people who have suffered pain. What most people don't realize is that you need more of it. Your suffering defines you. It helps you to understand who you are.'

‘You're a very interesting woman, Saskia Vane. I think I misjudged you, that day.'

She lifted her head so that she could kiss him lightly on the lips. ‘Maybe you did and maybe you didn't. You don't know anything about me. Quite possibly, you never will.'

‘Tell me about you and Governor Smiley.'

Now she sat up and kissed him again. ‘No,' she said. ‘You've had enough time to recuperate. I want you to fuck me.'

I
t was still dark when Bryan heard the doorbell chiming, again and again, and then somebody knocking at his door and shouting, ‘Bryan! Bryan!'

Next to him, Marjorie stirred and snuffled and then said, ‘What's all that noise?'

Marjorie could usually sleep through anything, even a late-night barbecue next door, or the most catastrophic of thunderstorms, but the chiming and the knocking and the shouting were so persistent that even she had woken up.

Bryan switched on his bedside lamp. ‘Sounds like Luis,' he said. ‘What the hell does Luis want, at this hour?' He frowned at his alarm-clock and saw that it was only three twenty-one in the morning.

The knocking and the shouting continued. ‘Bryan! Bryan! You need to wake up! It's happened to
us
now!'

Bryan eased himself out of bed and went across to the chair by the window to pick up his maroon cotton robe. Marjorie said, ‘Whatever it is, Bry, take it with a pinch of salt. You know how excitable Luis can get.'

Bryan lifted his hand in acknowledgement and then walked along the corridor to the front door. There was a frosted glass panel in the top of the door, and he could see Luis bobbing up and down behind it.

He switched on the outside light, slid back the security chain and opened up. Luis was standing in the porch in a baggy blue tracksuit and slippers, his shock of black hair standing up on end as if he had suffered an electric shock. His eyes seemed to be bulging even more than they usually did.

‘They've done it to
us
now!' he announced.

‘Done what, Luis? Do you know what time it is?'

‘Of course I know what time it is! They must have done it sometime after midnight, because I was working late on my accounts and it was OK just before I went to bed.'

Bryan sniffed. He could smell smoke in the air. From the city center, which was only three miles away, he could hear warbling sirens and the popping of what sounded like gunfire.

‘They've cut off our water!' said Luis. ‘I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet and it flushed only once, and didn't refill. I turned on the faucet and what did I get?
Nada
!'

‘Well, the water department said they might have to,' Bryan reminded him. ‘They said they were going to do it by rotation. First one neighborhood, and then the next.'

‘That's what they said, for sure! But you hear all that noise downtown? The rioting, it's still going on! So I just call my cousin in Seccombe Lane and they
still
don't have any water after three days now. There's no rotation, Bryan! It's all BS! They're cutting us off permanent, one neighborhood after the other!'

‘You'd best come on in,' said Bryan. ‘I need to make some phone calls.'

‘That's another thing,' Luis told him, stepping into the hallway. ‘I can't use my cell. There's no signal. I tried Carla's cell, too, and Roberto's, but nothing. Just this noise like
ssshhhhhhh
! It's like we're being jammed.'

Bryan led the way into the living room and switched on the lights. Even though the air conditioning was rattling, and it was the middle of the night, the room was still airless and uncomfortably warm. ‘Here, sit down,' he told Luis, pointing to one of the heavy brown overstuffed armchairs. Then he picked up the phone and sat down himself.

He punched out a number and it rang and rang for a long time before anybody answered.

‘Corben? It's me, Bryan. Listen, I'm sorry to wake you, but Luis has just found out that the water department have cut off our supply.'

He waited for a few moments, listening and nodding, but then he said, ‘No, Corben. I don't believe they're keeping their promise. They still haven't restored the supplies to any of the Westside neighborhoods or any of the east side neighborhoods downtown.'

He listened a little longer, first of all nodding and then shaking his head. ‘I don't believe they're keeping their promise, and that's because they
can't
keep it. They've run out of water, Corben, and it's simple as that. I know that. I know. They've been mismanaging our water supplies for decades but it's too late to worry about that now. My friend Walter Johnson said he drove past the Lake Perris Reservoir about a week ago and it almost looked like you could walk across it and you wouldn't be any deeper than your knees.'

Again he listened and nodded, and then he said, ‘I'm calling a committee meeting to see what we can do about this. It's causing chaos downtown and we don't want that happening here in Muscupiabe. I can hear gunfire and that could mean that people are being wounded or even killed. Yes. But who knows for sure? They had a report about protests on the TV news yesterday afternoon, but since then there's been nothing, not a word. It's like it's not even happening. And all the cellphone networks are dead. Is yours dead? Well, try it. I think you'll find that you don't have a signal.

‘Corben – I'm the chairman of the Muscupiabe Neighborhood Association and I am the elected representative of the residents of Muscupiabe and as such I have a right to go the authorities and demand to know what's going on.

‘Come around here at noon, say. I'm going to call around and get the rest of the committee together. OK. OK, good. I'll see you then.'

He put down the phone. Luis said, ‘What can you do, Bryan? What can
any
of us do?'

Bryan stood up and as he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the red-brick fireplace. A balding overweight fifty-five-year-old realtor with bushy gray eyebrows and a fleshy nose and two double chins. He knew he didn't look like much of a champion, but he had fought for seven years to improve the quality of life in his neighborhood, a triangle of residential homes between the intersection of three freeways – the Mojave Freeway, the Foothill Freeway and Route 259.

Muscupiabe's crime rate was still too high, but it was nearly twenty percent lower than neighborhoods like Roosevelt or Las Plazas; and Bryan had worked tirelessly to beautify Muscupiabe, too, with tree-planting and landscaping and fencing and lighting, and organizing teams of volunteers to fill in gopher holes and to clean off graffiti as soon as it appeared.

‘We're not going to riot, Luis. Not here in Muscupiabe. When you riot, you only end up destroying your own neighborhood. But we're not taking this lying down, neither. No, sir.'

Marjorie appeared in the living room doorway with her hair in curlers. ‘Would you men care for some coffee?' she asked.

Bryan said, ‘Yes, I'd love some.' But then, ‘No … On second thought, I think we need to conserve all of the water we can.'

A
s dawn began to lighten the streets downtown, Lieutenant Henry Brodie pushed open the door of police headquarters and came briskly down the steps on to North D Street, accompanied by Sergeant Hector Perez Gonzalez and closely followed by seven officers in full riot gear.

The warm morning air still smelled acrid, although Lieutenant Brodie had been told that most of the serious fires had now been brought under control by the fire department or had simply burned themselves out.

He could see that smoke was still drifting from City Hall, three blocks further south, and that even thicker smoke was rising from the Vanir Tower, over on G Street. The roadway was littered with broken glass and lumps of concrete and overturned trash cans, and every vehicle in the parking lot opposite police headquarters had been burned to a blackened shell. There were even two burned-out squad cars blocking the West Seventh Street intersection, and halfway down the next block, a police van was lying on its side, with all of its windows smashed.

‘We lost control of this, Sergeant,' said Lieutenant Brodie. ‘That was inexcusable.' He was a tall, clear-eyed, gray-haired man with a squarish, chiseled face, and rather large ears. If he hadn't always looked so sour about the state of the world around him he might have been quite handsome. As it was, men found him intimidating and women thought that he was humorless and cold, even his wife Sylvia.

‘We just didn't have the manpower, sir,' said Sergeant Gonzalez. ‘Even with all of those security guards to back us up, there was no way that we could cope with so many protestors in so many different locations, not all at once.'

‘That's because we got the psychology all wrong, right from the get-go.'

‘Sir – these people had no water. They
still
have no water.'

‘I know that, Sergeant. And I'm sure that this probably started off as a perfectly legitimate demonstration. Most of these civil disturbances do. But it never takes long before a criminal element joins in, and uses them as a cover for violence and looting and criminal damage. This has happened so many times before and we
still
haven't learned the lesson, have we? It's Watts, all over again. Monkeys in the zoo.'

They heard sirens in the distance, and more crackling sounds that could have been automatic gunfire.

‘Do you know what our worst mistake was?' said Lieutenant Brodie. ‘We felt sorry for them. Instead of allowing them to demonstrate, we should have dispersed them immediately, and collared anybody who wouldn't go.'