The Dream Widow (34 page)

“... babeee ...” said Badger with slurred speech.

     “The fetus will be perfectly fine. I told you that before––if you know anything about me, you know I don’t like to repeat myself. Whoops! Watch out for that drop-off.”

“ ... kill ... you ...”

“I’m sure you would, dear, if not for this gun pointed at your ‘babeee.’” He sighed. “If only your friends could have saved you. But all’s well that ends well as they say, and once we reach our destination I’m certain we can negotiate a different outcome.”

“ ... lost ...”

“Oh no, certainly not,” said Darius. “I know exactly where I’m going.”

They arrived at a narrow ladder that disappeared through a round hole in the ceiling. Large black letters spread across the wall nearby: “Maintenance Access––Surface.”

Darius holstered his revolver. He looped a section of rope under Badger’s arms and behind the back of her neck.

“Now follow me and be careful.”

He climbed the narrow ladder, one hand pulling Badger behind him. Her hands were still tied and so she climbed the rungs one at a time. Darius gave her support by pulling up on the rope beneath her arms.

He pushed on the hatch above his head and it opened with a squeal of metal. Cold air and the smell of frost poured inside.

Darius climbed out of the maintenance shaft and pulled Badger up to the frozen concrete of a roofless building. Crimson snow whirled in the beam of the headlight as Darius nudged Badger outside the ruins.

Tribal voices yelled and a half-dozen red lights bounced over the snow.

“It’s me, you idiots,” said Darius.

The Circle troopers lowered their guns.

“Sorry, sir,” said the nearest.

“What are you men doing out here?”

A tall soldier saluted. “We ran out once those monsters started eating people. But the doors slammed shut and we can’t budge any of them.”

“That’s fine,” said Darius. “All six of you follow me. There’s another way inside.”

The party trudged northeast through knee-deep, powdery snow to the rusted fence that shrouded the Tombs entrance. Snow-covered steps led down to a trench that ended at a massive reinforced door and keypad. Earth and rock had been shoveled away from the door, exposing a long box of snow-covered concrete.

“Now dear––what’s the code?”

“... never ... tell you ...”

Darius pressed the muzzle of the revolver into Badger’s side. “You’ll survive this, but what about the small one? Think about someone else for a change.”

Badger sniffed. “555 ... 222 ... 3437.”

Darius pushed her into the hands of a soldier and punched in the code. With a metallic grind, the door began to open, vibrating the earth beneath their feet.

“What a good memory,” said Darius. “I hope the child’s as clever as you are.”

EIGHTEEN

V
illagers clogged the lanes like blood cells in a web of capillaries and pushed irresistibly to a plaza at the heart of the monastery. The toasted garlic smell of fried tofu still hung in the air and mixed with curls of incense from slotted bronze spheres.

All the monks attended, even Parvati. She sat beneath a gold and crimson umbrella at the north corner, nodding and smiling to the monks packed in beside her. A sky-blue robe covered her black jacket and pants.

A staccato of wooden sticks began the main attraction: the chham. Twelve monks danced a methodical circle around the plaza as drums and cymbals crashed a simple rhythm. All were dressed in crimson-patterned jackets with wide strips of gold, red, green, and blue fabric hanging from their belts like a skirt. Each wore a different mask painted to represent a heavenly figure. Some masks were red with fierce white teeth and others were as black as a coal sculpture.

Wilson and Reed watched the ceremony from the edge of the crowd. Wilson wore a huge yellow cockscomb of a hat along with his crimson robes and mustard-colored jacket.

“I don’t understand,” he said through the din of cymbals and drums.

Reed chopped a hand at the dancers. “It’s symbolic. To bring luck and to drive away evil spirits, that’s the most basic meaning. On a higher level it’s the story of Lopon Rinpoche, the guru with powerful magicks who brought Buddhism to these mountains. The monk dancing now represents his power to transform into a tiger.”

“I’m sorry––I didn’t mean that. What I don’t understand is this month of meeting people and scraping data from memory fragments. Parvati said that was the only way to leave but it’s still impossibly strange to me.”

“I have only a simple understanding of the problem, but I think it is something like a game, like a children’s puzzle.”

“Maybe it is,” said Wilson. “I just don’t want to play anymore.”

Reed was quiet for a moment and watched the memorized steps of the costumed monks.

“When this is over, will you remember?”

“I’m not the problem,” said Wilson. “The entire point was to bring back your memory.”

Reed chuckled. “We have a pattern of misunderstanding each other.” He clapped Wilson on the shoulder. “I know that I am nothing, a corrupted memory fragment of someone’s walk through the streets. I’m less than an eyelash lost in a wheat field.”

“You’re not––”

“Who I am now or what I was before isn’t important. What is important is you. Promise me you will contemplate what’s happened here and won’t forget the people you’ve met, fake or not.”

“I promise.”

A stooping Chinese soldier in a fur cap and long coat squeezed through the crowd. Wilson felt nervousness rise in his throat until the soldier pushed the cap up and he saw Jack’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Jack. “They’re coming, that’s all.”

Wilson and Reed followed in his wake as Jack plowed a furrow through the tightly packed crowd of monks and villagers to an empty cobblestone lane.

Jack pointed to the far end. “Any moment now.”

“The last,” whispered Parvati’s voice in his ear. “The secret of freedom.”

Wilson turned and she was right behind him.

“More mumbo-jumbo,” said Jack. “Stop teasing the kid.”

A motley group turned a corner and approached over the rounded gray stones. All the people from Wilson’s past, but snapping with an uneven flicker.

His father, blonde-haired and without a beard. His mother, young and thin with long auburn hair. Badger in hunting leathers and black braids, her brown eyes snapping back and forth.

Wilson felt his skin prickle with goosebumps. All three seemed real, enough that he wanted to hug each one and ask how they were doing. He made the sign of the cross and bowed as the group approached.

With no sign of recognition, his mother and father nodded respectfully and brushed fingers across Wilson’s upturned palms.

Badger stood plank-solid in front of him, her head tilted back and eyes wide as if she’d just seen a ghost. Wilson blinked at her strange expression and held his hands out further.

Without warning Badger grabbed the front of Wilson’s robes and shook him like the last leaf on a branch. Spittle flew from her mouth as she screamed at him.

“Wake up, Will! Wake up!”

Wilson’s lemon-colored hat tumbled to the swept cobblestone and he tried to push her away. The crowd turned and the chham music stopped.

“What’s wrong with her!”

“Look, the girl’s gone mad.”

“She’s attacking the guru!”

Parvati and Jack tried to pull Badger away but her fingers gripped like talons. Wilson tried to concentrate on whispering the four lines of the strength-trick.

The cobblestone vibrated, bounced, and the buildings swayed back and forth. Stones fell onto the screaming crowd.

“It’s starting,” yelled Parvati. She pointed at Reed.

Blinding needles of light exploded from his midnight-blue robes. Reed floated into the air and changed to a diamond of sunlight. Wilson squeezed his eyes shut and looked away, but a red glare seeped through his eyelids.

A sound crackled the air like the falling limbs of an ancient tree. The worn stones beneath Wilson’s feet became still and the buildings settled onto their foundations. Reed and his light were gone, and left only the smell of lavender.

Badger grabbed Wilson around the waist with both arms.

“Now my turn,” said Wilson, still trying to push her away.

Parvati shook her head. “It’s too late.”

Fifty PLA troops in pea-soup uniforms with red patches flashed into being a half-meter above the empty street. Their boots crashed down like thunder and an officer screamed orders in a strange language. The first row knelt and pointed long rifles at Wilson. The second row aimed over the heads of the first.

Jack raised his hands. “Face it, Wilfred––we lost.”

NINETEEN

H
ands still tied behind her back, Badger kicked the table and made the cables stuck to Wilson’s body wave like branches in a hurricane. She bent down to his ear and screamed.

“Wake up, Will! Wake up!”

“There you are,” said Darius. He limped out of the stairwell with the pistol aimed at Badger. “I think you broke my foot. And how dare you fake the effects of my sedative. It’s for science, after all.”

Badger turned and touched Wilson’s cold hand with her fingers. The Circle soldiers clattered out of the stairwell hatch and pointed rifles at her. The two that were in shape, that is––the other three put their hands on knees and panted hard. Only five, like she expected. The one she’d knocked over the edge lay in a heap at the bottom of the deep stairwell.

Darius limped around the vast cavern with wide-eyed amazement and forgot all about his foot.

“By the seven sectors, what is this place?”

The sparkling light from Reed’s dome mixed with the red Circle headlamps and cast waves of purple on the walls of caskets.

“Utterly fascinating,” said Darius. “It appears to be a storage facility, but for what?”

The five soldiers aimed rifles at Badger from a respectable distance as Darius took his time inspecting the machinery in the cavern and the domes in the center of the smooth stone floor.

“Four of these glass chambers are dark,” he said. “One contains a naked man floating in blue liquid. What a mystery!”

He approached Wilson’s table and pursed his lips at the web of cables and monitoring boxes around the blanket-covered body. Wilson’s head lay on a pillow and someone had carefully brushed his dark brown hair. A wire connected the silver band on his forehead to a panel under Reed’s dome.

“A modern-day fairy tale,” said Darius with a smile. “I would call him sleeping beauty, but are you princess charming? I don’t think so, dear.”

“Touch him and I’ll kill you,” said Badger.

Darius sighed. “Give me another boring, clichéd phrase. How about ‘you’re all going to die here,’ ‘nobody leaves alive,’ or ‘over my dead body?’ It’s a shame, but I suppose a girl in your position doesn’t have time for a more creative response.”

The cavern boomed with a deafening gunshot and Darius instinctively ducked. In the shadows near the entrance to the medical room a Circle trooper struggled with someone briefly. He kicked a pistol across the floor and pulled the short figure into the light.

Badger’s eyes opened wide. “Mary?”

Wilson’s mother twisted in the grip of the big man. “Get off me!”

The soldier brought her to Darius beside Wilson’s bed.

“One more player upon the stage,” Darius said, and clicked his metal thumbs. “Who might you be, dear lady?”

“Don’t say a thing,” said Badger. She held Wilson’s hand tighter.

Darius clapped. “I love secrets! Now I really must know.”

“You’re as stupid as I thought you’d be,” said Mary. “I’m his mother.”

“Who––Wilson’s? This gets better and better. Mother, son, and baby––three generations under my thumb. A very sharp one, thanks to you.”

Mary stared at Badger with a horrified expression. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Of course she didn’t,” said Darius. “I’m capable of discovering simple things like pregnancy all by myself.” He turned to Badger. “Now what were we talking about? Oh yes, I wanted to know what this cavern is all about.”

Badger lifted her chin and spoke slowly. “This is the tomb of our ancestors. All of them came here with grand plans and high hopes. In the end all their machines and careful thinking failed. The brave people dreaming for a new life became rotten corpses trapped in a box. They believed in fairy tales and a future that never happened. If you want to be more than just a dead man in a scary story told over a campfire, you should leave now.”

Darius smiled and bowed from the waist. “That’s so much better. I should write it down.” He stuck out his tongue and licked his lips. “I have so many questions. Why is this single dome lighted when the others are dark? What happened to our dear friend Wilson on the table?”

Badger looked down at Wilson’s pale face.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

“Well, well,” said Darius.