Selection Event (11 page)

While he was gone, Martin asked the woman her name. She sat with her knees up and her face hidden. She didn't answer. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

Again, nothing.

Ryan came back out without the gas can or the flares, got in the passenger seat and said, “Okay, downtown.”

“What did you do in there?”

“What I was told to do. Drive.”

Martin was wondering if Ryan was trying to set the city on fire. What kind of Curtiz logic was that? Was it time now to make a move on Ryan?

Martin drove.

On Montgomery Street, Ryan took two cans of gas and four flares into a high-rise office building and ten minutes later came out at a fast walk. Martin still hadn't got the woman to say a word. She just leaned against the wall of the van, a human lump shrouded in a blanket.

“Let's get the hell out of here fast,” Ryan said.

They barely got to the end of the block when the van was rocked by the explosion behind them. In the mirror Martin saw black flame-streaked smoke and glass blow across the street.

“Why's Curtiz doing this, Ryan? What's he thinking?”

“I guess what we don't get, he don't want nobody else to get.”

“That's idiot thinking.” Martin's gripped the steering wheel so hard his fingers had gone numb. He drove fast toward a Bay Bridge on-ramp. “Ryan, I thought, when I came up from underground and saw what had happened, I thought anybody that was left might see the world in a new way and decide it was time for people to be nice to each other. I really thought that.”

“He hates faggots too,” Ryan answered.

“I'm stunned.”

“I used to be a faggot, but I don't care anymore.”

As they drove back across the Bay Bridge, they could see behind them two columns of black smoke rising from the city and smearing across the dark sky. It began raining again before they got off the bridge.

After a half hour, the woman started moaning and was quiet only to take a breath for the next moan. Neither Martin nor Ryan spoke until they got back to Santa Miranda.

Chapter 17

Isha awakened again to familiar loneliness. She began her search for Martin on the first morning he was not there. She left the house and trotted down the street, constantly looking behind and around her, still wary of lurking cars that might suddenly come at her out of nowhere.

With her nose to the sidewalk, tracing along on the edges of the lawns, her brain recorded a map of odors. Dirt smells came up through the weedy lawns — dozens of dirt smells, musty, clayey, vegetable smells, some acidic, some with the traces of urine, some smelling strangely unnatural, and with the dirt smells were the smells of the weeds and grasses growing. Her brain registered and mapped their sequences in a way a human would have found precise and alien.

At one point during her circle, she smelled something freshly dead. The smell filled the air, blotting out everything else. She listened even more carefully now and moved cautiously, stopping, listening, and then moving a little farther on. It was a hot smell, the smell of blood and opened viscera.

Then she saw it, across the street from her — a dog, larger than herself, mauled and lying in its blood-soaked skin. Isha passed quietly by it and saw in the street another dog, also dead, also freshly killed. She looked behind her, around her, lowered her head, and hurried on as quietly as she could.

She caught the smell almost at the moment she heard their sound. Several of them. She crouched in the weeds of an overgrown yard and waited. Through the weeds, she saw them cross the street — animals such as she'd never seen or smelled before. There were many of them, some bigger than she was, some smaller, and a few of them carried their babies on their backs.

They walked like dogs, but they weren't dogs. Their front legs were like human arms, and they traveled together, like a human family, the large ones leading and scolding those that lagged behind. They smelled different from anything she had ever smelled and they frightened her.

After the last ones disappeared between two houses, Isha paused and then continued her circling search. She had got only to the next cross-street when she smelled something else dead, something smaller.

She looked around and saw a black cat, part of a black cat, in a smear of its dried blood on the driveway next to her. She thought she heard something, nosed the ground, and
did
hear something. It was a small noise in the weeds. A rat?  

Isha held her head high and stepped carefully into the weeds, keeping one forefoot raised.

Another noise of grass bending, a squeak— Then she saw its dark shape. It was a young cat, a month past its kittenhood, black, and without a tail. Its wide yellow eyes looked up into Isha's. Isha sniffed it tentatively and it mewed to her.

Isha raised her head and looked around. Nothing near. No humans near. She looked back at the cat. It sat staring up at her.

Isha sniffed the cat closely, pushing her nose against its side, and then she opened her mouth and carefully placed her jaws around it and lifted it up out of the weeds and started for home.

The cat rode quietly for a while, its body hanging out of the sides of Isha's mouth, but then it began to struggle and Isha had to stop and put it down. Isha took several steps farther, looked back to see if the cat was following — it was — and so she continued down the street. It trotted along behind her now like a small black shadow, its stub tail held straight up.

Often Isha would slow and breathe in the air and listen, searching for Martin's trace. Then she would continue on, turning periodically at intervals determined by some unconscious mechanism, always in the same direction, until her olfactory registers told her she had crossed her earlier path. Then she headed back to her home, the young cat following.

Once on her street, where everything was familiar, she held her nose higher, above her shoulders, and smelled for food, breathing in deeply through her nose and then letting the air puff out her mouth. She was hungry again. Food would be good now.

Past Jojo's house, just up from the corner, she caught the faint scent of dry food. She followed it around the side yard of the house, to a fence, which she leaped over, into the backyard. The young cat slid between the fence boards.

The house door stood open, and the smell came from there. Dry food, such as she remembered eating. But something else was in there. Something that made a rustling noise and had a strong smell that she had not noticed till now.

Now the strange hair-skin smell overwhelmed all other smells. Whatever-it-was made crunching, scrabbling noises, as though it was moving the food around on the floor.

Isha lowered her ears close to her head and peered around the corner. All noise stopped, and she saw a small round head with two wide eyes staring back at her. It screeched, leaped atop the counter and threw a handful of kibble at her. Isha flinched and crouched at the shrill howling, but the animal was much smaller than she, so she charged inside, snarling, showing her teeth and barking. The animal leaped from the counter to the kitchen table, slid across it, leaped again from its edge and vanished into the back of the house.

Isha did not pursue.

She found the chewed-open bag — still half full — picked up a corner with her teeth and started to leave the house. The manx stayed back, picking up bits of kibble and cracking them between its teeth.

Isha put down the bag of food, went over to the cat, picked it up between her jaws, and carried it out of the house. Then she went back for the food. The cat followed her dutifully back into the kitchen and began eating pieces of kibble from the floor.

Isha looked from the cat to the bag of food and back again, wanting to get both the cat and the bag out of the house. All at once, she knew. Along with the cat, she nipped up the food from the floor, every piece of it. Then, with the bag in her jaws, she went out the back door. The cat scrambled after her, delicately touching its nose to the bag, as Isha led it home.

In the late afternoon, after the two of them had repeatedly eaten their fill and the cat rested quietly, Isha again left the house, put her nose to the ground, and began another circling search, this time in the opposite direction, mapping the sequence of smells.

Chapter 18

It was around 7:00 PM when they pulled into the driveway, and from the thick overcast a light rain had begun to fall. Around the rambling house, Curtiz had his Hispanics and Asians clipping the shrubs and pulling weeds. Their clothes were dark from the rain.

The woman had stopped moaning when Martin had stopped the car, but she hadn't moved from her upright fetal position. When they pulled her out, her hair was stuck to her face and arms in jagged streaks.

“What's her name?” Curtiz asked.

“She hasn't talked,” Ryan said.

“Ah. I see. Silent type. And a good haul of weapons.” He picked up one of the automatic shotguns. “Very good. Very nice. We'll have to send you boys up to Sacramento and see if you can have some luck there.”

“I don't think Sacramento will burn as easily as San Francisco,” Martin said.

“Probably not,” Curtiz said, nonplussed. “Buildings not as close together.” He was looking at the woman again. “But all cities will burn, eventually.”

It occurred to Martin that he was probably right — they would burn from lightning, if nothing else, and no one would be around to put the fires out. Ash would fertilize the soil and weeds and trees would grow out of the foundations of every great building. Vines would one day twine through the hulks of melted mainframes.

“Martin, go inside and see what you can fix up for dinner.” Curtiz rubbed his hands together. He radiated good humor. Big guns and a mute woman had lifted his spirits. “We're having our first dinner party tonight. Dinner for ten. See if you can make it good.” He was the happiest Martin had seen him.

“I've never fixed dinner for more than two people.”

“I'll send in one of the rice-eaters to help you out,” he answered absently. He was still looking in at either the weapons or the woman, Martin wasn't sure, thoughtfully smoothing his thin mustache with one finger as he tapped his teeth together inside his closed mouth. “What are you waiting for?” he said without looking away from the inside of the van.

“I've had a long day. Can I see Max first?”

“No. He'll be at dinner. If you can get everything ready by eight-thirty.”

....

When Martin opened the kitchen door, he saw a chaos of dirty pans, dishes, wrappers, food boxes, and colorfully molding food. The air had a warm rotten smell. Outside the window, several of the men worked on one of the Land Rovers, racing the engine, holding it at high revs for a quarter of a minute and then backing slowly off. It was deafening. They had apparently taken the muffler off.

Since Curtiz had taken over the house as his command post, whoever had been in the kitchen had apparently never cleaned a dish or put anything away. Every available flat surface was littered with sour-smelling milk cartons, food-crusted can lids, wadded cellophane, empty cereal boxes, dirty silverware, bits of food, garbage.

From where Martin stood examining the disaster, he could see a china cabinet through the kitchen in the dining room, the former owner's special dishes still lined up in precise rows behind the glass doors.

One of the Asians walked in behind him. “Scuse,” he said, dipping his head. He was hardly five feet tall, probably mid-twenties, a few acne pockmarks in the angular hollows of his cheeks. His green coveralls were wet across the shoulders and his wet hair plastered flat on his head.

“My name's Martin.” He held out his hand.

“I am Billy," he said. After a moment's hesitation, he shook Martin's hand.

“We're supposed to fix dinner for ten people,” Martin said.

Billy looked past Martin into the kitchen and shrugged. “Kitchen is very nasty.”

Martin opened the door at the end of the kitchen that led into the garage and saw a wheelbarrow. “Bring that in, will you?”

“Wheelbarrow?”

“Yes, bring it in."

Billy shrugged again and wheeled it inside, parking it where Martin gestured, next to the counter. With his forearms Martin pushed everything into it. Dishes clattered and broke and splatted into the rot-softened leftovers.

The men outside the window revved the Land Rover loud enough to vibrate the dishes in the wheelbarrow and hide most of Martin's noise. Ryan appeared in the doorway with his hand on the butt of his pistol. “What in the hell is going on?” he shouted when the noise died down.

“I'm doing dishes,” Martin said. “There'll always be more dishes.”

Ryan stared at the heap in the wheelbarrow.

“It's a new world, Ryan, right? You just set fire to San Francisco. Why would you care about a few broken dishes?”

Ryan stood there, still looking uneasy. His eyes darted from place to place and he had a band of sweat just below his hairline.

“Must be getting close to that time,” Martin said. “Time for you to go see god.”

Ryan looked straight at him, uneasiness giving way to hostility. “I don't just
see
god.” He walked out.