Selection Event (12 page)

Martin glanced at Billy. He was picking pieces of grass off his coveralls and pressing his lips together, holding back a grin.

The only fresh vegetables were a few onions in one of the refrigerator bins, and they were getting a bit soft. Otherwise, the shelves were fully stocked with several kinds of canned meat, and twenty or thirty cans of soft drinks and two six-packs of beer. The freezer, on the other hand, was filled to capacity with frozen dinners of every variety. Martin was hungry enough that even greased and breaded paper-maché would taste like a gourmet delight.

The pantry didn't offer much. There were a few cans of peas and beans and some cheese spread. All of it was factory-prepared, all remnants of the old world. The only fresh food would be the soft onions.

Roaches, Martin thought. We're acting like roaches, eating the refuse of the old world. How long would it be before frozen foods would defrost and spoil and the remaining cans of food would swell with poisons? What would these people eat then?

Under yellow sodium lights, the men outside were revving the Land Rover even harder than before, sending thick clouds of half-burned fuel into the slanting rain. When they used all their gasoline and what remained was contaminated with water, what would they do? Where would they walk then?

He saw one of them speak to the others and gesture at the rain. They slammed the hood of the Land Rover, killed the engine, and went under the carport and lit up cigarettes. Still living in the old world, Martin thought. He opened the kitchen window to get some of the rotten-food smell out of the house but the wind blew in the stink of car exhaust.

While they opened frozen dinners, and separated the ingredients into different bowls, Martin asked Billy, “Why do you stay here? Why don't you and the others run away?”

Billy stopped and stared at Martin. “You d'not know?”

“No. Know what?”

“I must stay. All must stay.” Billy held out his arm, showing Martin the track marks inside his elbow. “Mr. Curtiz has medicine to protect us from disease. He give us a shot every night to keep us safe. If we d'not have medicine, we get sick.” Billy began chopping the onions on the cutting board. “I know because one day I d'not get medicine, I got very sick that day. Mr. Curtiz give me the shot, I got well, just like that.”

“I see.” Curtiz was more clever and depraved than Martin had given him credit for being. As long as everyone was an addict and Curtiz had what they needed, there was no need to guard or threaten them. He held their biochemistry hostage.

Martin was opening cans of peas when Curtiz came and stood in the doorway and watched them. He was smoking a plastic-tipped cigar, had his hair combed and was freshly shaved. Again he smelled of menthol, but he also brought with him a stale wet-straw odor. His white bush jacket was conspicuously clean, and from beneath its hem protruded a shiny black holster, one of things brought back from San Francisco.

Martin slid a platter of frozen chicken into the microwave. Billy dumped the large bowl of canned and frozen peas and diced onion into a pot of boiling water.

“We had fresh hippo steaks, believe it or not, a few weeks back,” Curtiz said. He smiled and exhaled a billow of smoke.

Remembering what Ryan had told him, Martin asked nonchalantly, “Is this the first woman survivor you've found?”

Curtiz took a slow deep drag from his cigar. “You don't see any others, do you?” he said easily.

“What are you going to do with her? There's something wrong with her, you know.”

“Dinner at eight-thirty, Martin.” He tapped his teeth. “And I make the executive decisions.”

“No problem there.”

They looked into each other's eyes a moment longer than Martin knew was safe.

“Independent creative thought, I appreciate,” Curtiz said. “Defiance, I do not. I detect an undercurrent of defiance, Marty. We could work together here. There's a lot in this for people like us. You may not realize how much of a chance I'm giving you. But it's your choice. Think about it.” He stood there and watched him. “There's only one good choice.”

Martin knew that, but it wasn't Curtiz' choice.

On the burners and in the microwave, the food bubbled and crackled. Its oily smell blended with Curtiz's aftershave and the car exhaust that still wafted through the window.

“I've been thinking about my choices,” Martin said. “I want to help out, but it would be easier, you know, if every order didn't have a death sentence behind it.”

“Whatever,” Curtiz said, disinterested. He turned and began walking away. “Think of it however you want. It's your choice.”

Indeed, Martin thought.

Chapter 19

 It grew dark as Isha loped along, making a wide circling search in the opposite direction. It drizzled off and on and then began to rain steadily, soaking her long hair and making it lie heavy and cold next to her skin.

The rain washed away most smells so that most of what she breathed in was only the sand-smell of concrete and the sharp chemical odor of asphalt.

She crossed canal bridges and smelled the still, algae-thickened water, and further yet, she passed near the hot steaming dung of a tall humpbacked animal that plodded serenely down the street in front of her. She ran up a walkway and waited in the shelter of someone's porch until the animal was gone. She shook herself several times to get the cold water away from her skin, but still she shivered and it was raining harder and there was no trace of the man she sought.

She loped further down the dark street, able to hear nothing now but the falling rain as it splattered on the asphalt around her, made dull plops on her matted hair and rattled on the metal tops and hoods of the cars parked in driveways. The rain ran into her eyes and blurred her vision, and all at once she was afraid.

Strange animals could be anywhere nearby, watching her, and she wouldn't know until it was too late. She stopped in the middle of the street, rain running out of her hair in streams. She could smell nothing but water, she could hear nothing but rain. She shivered.

She turned and ran back the direction she had come, remembering the troop of animals she had seen and the dog in the street that had been killed, practically torn out of its skin. She thought of the cat, her pet — it would be wandering through the house, alone, as she had been alone — yet she needed to find the man that had left her....

She ran up one street — suddenly knew it was the wrong street — backtracked, crossed a canal bridge that was utterly unfamiliar to her, backtracked again, and now saw nothing familiar at all, and stood panting in the middle of the street, quick billows of steam rolling out of her mouth, dripping wet, completely lost.

She caught her breath and when she began to shiver, she moved on, loping at a steady pace, letting her brain tell her where to turn.

Chapter 20

Everyone except the brown-skinned help was at dinner. Max had been brought out, still wearing his dirty white t-shirt, jeans, and red tennis shoes. In the pocket of his jeans, Martin saw the lump of his plastic Superman, and the boy kept his fingers on it, twisting it through the fabric of his pants as he was led to the table. Both nervous and curious, he sat next to Martin and stared at the silent woman with wide eyes. She had been led in and placed on Curtiz's right, with Ryan next to her.  

The woman was now dressed in a black leather miniskirt, a pink silk blouse opened to show her cleavage, and a yellow scarf which had been crookedly knotted around her neck. Beneath the scarf were several pearl and gold link necklaces, and her hair, still wet, was weirdly combed — straight in places, angularly combed in others, and sprinkled with glitter. Several clips had been stuck in at various places to hold it all together. But her face was blank, utterly devoid of expression, with purple smudges smeared over her eyes and very red lipstick coating her lips. She might have been a nice-looking woman
—
full lips and teak-colored eyes. Martin could imagine that if she ever smiled, her expression would be warm and friendly. But now there didn't seem to be anyone living inside her.

Stewart was back, sitting at the far end of the table, opposite Curtiz. He wore his perpetual half-witted grin, a huge expensive wristwatch on each wrist, a purple silk shirt, and had a pair of stereo phones hanging around his neck. Stewart's head wobbled loosely on his shoulders and he seemed to have trouble estimating the distance from his hand to his wine glass. He was probably drunk. He flung one hand in the direction of the woman.

“How'd I do on her, man? Don't she look great?”

“She looks fine,” Curtiz said, reaching over and touching her shoulder. She could have been made of latex. One of the combs loosened and slid out of her wet hair. Curtiz didn't seem to notice.

“I had to go to some of the other houses around here to get the jewelry,” Stewart said. “Don't she look fine? Can I have the next one we find? Mr. Curtiz?”

Curtiz ignored Stewart and gazed at the woman, a little smile on his lips.

Ryan ignored everything and was inattentive and jittery. He sat on his hands and his unfocused eyes pointed straight ahead at the blank wall behind the table. Curtiz was probably holding out on him till after dinner.

The five other men, all grim, unshaved, and wearing an assortment of ill-fitting sport shirts, sat along one side of the table. Martin noted the sweat beading on their foreheads and dark spots soaking out from their armpits. Curtiz was probably holding out on all of them.

Martin leaned down and whispered to Max, “Have you eaten today?”

The boy shook his head no.

“Well,” Curtiz said, both hands flat on the table next to his plate, “here we all are. The people of the new beginning. Considering what we've all been through in the last months, this is a happy moment for us, a momentous moment for us.”

Martin was torn between ridicule and sadness. Except for Stewart, who looked near passing out, only Curtiz was having a good time.

“I propose a toast to us,” Curtiz said, lifting his filled wine glass. “A toast to New America in the New Times.” He stood and held his glass high — an official toast.

After a pause, Ryan also stood, but he looked at his glass as though it contained a toxin.

Martin and the other men stood. By then Stewart figured out what was happening and grabbed his glass and got up. The woman did not move; Curtiz didn't seem to care.

“To us, pioneers of the New Times!” Curtiz announced, and then drank.

Martin sipped the wine — it was sickeningly sweet — and he noted that Ryan only touched the rim of the glass to his lips. Stewart emptied his glass in a swallow.

Curtiz sat and the others imitated. When the food began circulating, Curtiz put a few pieces on the silent woman's plate, but she showed no interest.

Martin passed each dish to Max, who took only the smallest amounts of each thing on his plate. Ryan and the other men put little on their plates, which they looked at uncomfortably.

Martin felt exceedingly grim. But, he thought, at the end of the world, what could he expect?

Through all this, the woman at Curtiz's side remained silent and could have been comatose, except that she sat up and had her eyes open which blinked every half minute.

Off and on, hesitantly, Max nibbled on a piece of chicken. He had been only picking at his food and Martin thought perhaps he was ill. He whispered to Max, “Do you feel all right?”  

The boy nodded.

“Try to eat more,” Martin whispered.

The boy nodded and lifted a forkful of mashed potatoes to his lips.

But at the other end of the table, Stewart crammed tremendous amounts of food into his mouth, chewing with his mouth open, and finishing off a plate of fried chicken and a plate of soft french fries.

Martin ate enough to take the edge off his hunger, and then the food began to taste like firmed-up mush with overtones of exhaust fumes.

While he listened to Curtiz's ramble, Martin toyed with his knife and fork and dribbled a little wine on his paper napkin and idly folded and unfolded it until it was a firm but mushy mass.

Halfway through the evening, Curtiz reached to the woman as he talked and slid his hand affectionately across her shoulder, under her hair, and rested it on the back of her neck. She made no response.

“Can I have the next woman, Mr. Curtiz? You never said,” Stewart whined through a mouth of half-chewed meat. “Mr. Curtiz?” Again, he was ignored.

Curtiz was motoring on about crops and harvests and the overflowing bounty that could be expected. Through the whole evening, Curtiz never acknowledged that Santa Miranda lived by a complex irrigation system that brought water from the Sierra Nevada mountains, a hundred miles away. He never mentioned that his plan for mechanical harvesting would require a huge amount of power — and from what? Gasoline? But whatever the case, there would be guns galore, observation stations on the tallest buildings, and armed scouts with signal flares on perpetual alert for outsiders. This part he had thought out in great detail.

“And Marty, I want to know what you think. I want your input here.” He ran a finger across his mustache. “What do you think was the greatest problem facing America — or the world — before it all went under?”