The Vigilantes (The Superiors) (8 page)

“Never? Girrrl. I am so gonna teach you if we ever get outta here and have us a real place. Who cooked for you?”

“Well, I lived at a restaurant for a long time, and we didn’t have a place to cook. Our owners just brought us canned food and stuff. And then I lived at the Confinement, and there was a big kitchen where some people cooked, but I never did. I had garden duty.”

“But the cook should always know the garden. My goodness. I am going to love teaching you all kinds of things.”

Cali looked at Shelly and found herself smiling, a little shy. She’d never met anyone so nice. She couldn’t help but like him and trust him instantly. He seemed so open, like he’d never lived through anything, like he’d never been bitten or treated bad by a Superior, like he’d never had a reason to stop smiling.

“So, were you happy at your last place?” she asked.

“Happy? Hmm, yeah, I guess I was. It’s been my only place, though I’ve been rented out a few times for labor on other farms. But our master, he was just the best, you know? He never beat us or anything, and he let the girls keep the babies until they were four or five and they had another one before he sold the older ones. He was real good to us, even ones like me who weren’t much use. Except for renting out or being bit for a meal now and then. See, the other Superiors around mostly were farmers too, but the ones who weren’t might come feed on us sometimes. Master sold most of the males, of course, but, well, I think I was sort of a favorite.”

“Why?”

“You know. He liked to have me around for extra duties now and then, if you know what I mean.”

“Like what?” Cali asked.

“Girl, you are too innocent. Like you know. Visits in the night?”

“For feeding on?”

Shelly laughed. “You really are a laugh, sweetie. Yeah, my master liked to feed on me, for sure. But other stuff, too.”

“Ohhh,” Cali said slowly, feeling stupid. She shuddered and hugged herself. “Ugh. I mean, I’m sorry. Wasn’t it awful? How are you still so…I mean, you seem awfully nice and normal for having that happen to you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, girl. I didn’t mind at all. Like I said, we were all in love with our Master. He was good to us. And he got me things, even, sometimes.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like, you know. He let me wear Superior clothes,” Shelly whispered, leaning towards Cali. “I mean, when no other Superiors were around, of course,” he added. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper again. “Sometimes, he let me come in his house at night and we’d use his big bed. It was so…just…wow. And once, he even let me stay until morning.”

“Why would you want to?” Cali blurted out before she could stop herself.

“Girl, you never been in love, have you? You just wouldn’t understand,” Shelly said, waving a hand. “But I reckon he got tired of me now, since he sold me off. Not that I thought it would last or anything. I’m not stupid. Just a fool in love.” Shelly covered his heart and Cali laughed. She thought of the time Man with Soft Hair had let her sleep in his bed. The bed had felt so nice—when he wasn’t in it. He’d never done anything that made her too uncomfortable, and she’d been awfully glad of it. But she’d never in ten lifetimes think of loving a bloodsucker.

“Wow. Nothing like that has ever happened to me,” she said.

“You never been in love?”

“Not yet,” Cali said, looking at him from the corner of her eye.

“You ever had a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know.” She picked at a thread on her shift. “Not really.”

“Oh, yeah you have. Come on, tell me about him.”

“I don’t want to. He wasn’t my boyfriend, anyway.”

“Girl, it’s just getting light out. We got all day here, and who knows how many more days. What else is there to do? You best start talking.”

“Okay,”
Cali
said, laughing a little. He made it so easy. So she told him about the boy at the Confinement who had his eye on her at one time, and she told him about all her sisters and their babies and their boyfriends, her mother, all her half sisters and brothers she didn’t know, and about the Confinement.

Shelly told her about the sapien farm he’d lived on, his friends, about snow and trees and the four seasons, and about the jobs he’d been rented out for. They swapped stories about their homes and compared gardens, each describing the different plants that the other didn’t know and delighting in the ones they both knew. Shelly was right. They had nothing to do but talk. So they talked all that day, as they would talk for many more days in the time they lived together.
Cali
never knew she had so much to say.

Chapter 12

Byron cursed the snow. Here he’d almost made it to his destination, and he had to get held up by snow. Not only that, but his trailer wasn’t weather-proof, and the temperature had dropped to single digits, so he had to pay extra for an adjoining sapien-room off his own hotel room. It wasn’t too bad, except the smell of them started wafting into his room after a couple days.

He didn’t know what they did in there, but whatever it was, it sure as hell didn’t smell pleasant. The stink of them grew stronger and stronger until it seemed to penetrate the door and come through into his room. He even told them to bathe, but he didn’t stick around to supervise them. He was a Second Order Superior. He shouldn’t have to put up with such indignities.

After the third day, Byron requested another room with an adjoining sapien-room, and he found that one tolerable for two more days. He didn’t know when he’d get out of the damn hotel. The snow didn’t show signs of tapering off any time soon. He couldn’t imagine what kind of lunatic would want to live in this climate. Over the last century, he’d gotten quite content with his warm spot in the world. What fools did up here in the mountains, he couldn’t guess.

When he grew restless after a few days trapped inside, he called his wife.

“Miss me already?” she said, smiling into the phone in her licentious way.

“The second I pulled out,” he said.

She laughed. “Half a minute on the phone and already talking dirty.”

He smiled, letting her turn his comment into something sexual as she liked to do. Already, his mood lifted a little. Sometimes all he had to do was see her face to know that everything would turn out as it should, in his favor. After all, they had both survived a hundred years of war, and so had their two children. They had stayed married. They had both secured lucrative jobs. Marisol brought a light to his life, one that he didn’t think he could live without. He’d sink into despair without her smiling face, her lewd humor, her resolute love for their family. She brought constant good fortune to their lives and refused to let it go.

“How can a man help himself, when he’s looking at you,” Byron said when Marisol kept grinning at him in expectation of his comeback.

Now she laughed again. “I miss you, too, baby,” she said. “As soon as you
pulled out.
”

“How are the children?”

“Oh, you know. Paige is down with the flu and Parker’s been throwing up all night.” She grinned hugely. She could go on talking all night and never once get serious, never once tell anything resembling the truth. Still, in their human lives, the conversation would have made perfect sense. Now, it only seemed ridiculous. But sometimes, Byron needed exactly that, and Marisol always seemed to know when.

“Well. Have you called the doctor?” he asked.

“You know doctors,” Marisol said. “They just charge us a hundred anyas to tell me there’s nothing they can do, and then they prescribe something anyway, which we can’t afford.”

Byron stiffened. He hated talking about money when Marisol played her little game of being human again. She knew him so well, and yet she never seemed to pick up on how degrading he found it to have her remind him of their days of scraping together money to buy diapers, to pay for doctor visits, and the kids could forget field trips at school. It had been so long ago, but somehow Marisol seemed to remember it like yesterday. But even she slipped up sometimes—forgetting that as humans, they had called their money ‘dollars’ instead of ‘anyas.’ Still, unlike most Superiors, her memory of human times stayed as sharp as her memory of her Superior life, even after several hundred years. If not for her, Byron probably would have forgotten every bit of his human life—and with great relief.

“But I’m an Enforcer,” he reminded her, breaking the unspoken rules of her little game. “I can afford anything. Want to fly up here and visit me for a day? Bring the kids. We’ll have a field trip, a little picnic. I’ll teach them about the climate of hell.”

She lost her smile a little. “Oh, baby, are you okay? I was only teasing. Is it that bad up there?”

“Worse. I’m stuck in a goddamn hotel, nothing to do, and only an insane person would go outside. I think there’s some kind of blizzard going on. Even at night it’s light as a full moon.”

“Awww, I wish I could come,” she said. “You know, sometimes I miss snow.”

“I don’t see why you would. It’s positively awful.”

“I know, I just remember it from growing up. Wading through snow up to my waist, skiing over to the neighbor’s… Maybe I’ll come up and go skiing once you settle in.”

“Why not make it tonight? I’ll be busy once I get settled in and get the assignment.”

“I can’t,” she said with a sigh. “I have a big surgery tomorrow. I can’t miss it.”

“What time is it?” he asked, careful not to reveal anything over the communication, which was probably not monitored but could be randomly picked up by the government at any time. Of course Marisol had to use her doctor’s discretion.

“First thing in the evening,” she said, which he knew meant she had one of her First Order patients scheduled. Their celebrity made them avoid the spotlight, but if he’d been home, Marisol would have told him about the First Order Superior getting work done and what work she’d scheduled. But even Enforcers had to watch what they said over electronic communication. And Byron cared more about the reputation his wife had built for herself than about a First getting a nose job. He knew her discretion and artistry in reshaping people to look as they wanted kept her among the premier surgeons in the Funnel, maybe even in North America.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said. “Can I talk to one of the kids before I go?”

“Which one? You know you can’t pick one or they’ll get jealous.”

“Paige first, she’s more sensitive. Then let me say good day to Parker.”

“Bye then,” Marisol said, then licked the screen and laughed. He watched her wipe her saliva from the camera with a huge smile on her face. She loved doing disgusting things like that, probably knowing what her tongue looked like magnified onto the screen of his pod. At least he didn’t have the wall-screen on. A wall-sized tongue, even that of his beautiful wife, didn’t make for a pretty picture.

He spoke with first his daughter and then his son before retiring for the day in a considerably better mood than before the phone call. He would have liked to call them every night, but he didn’t want Marisol to think him desperate. Already he thought himself desperate, especially after almost a week in this infernal hotel with sap stench seeping into his room.

He checked on his saps as seldom as possible. Every time he opened the door, it let a little more of their reeking odor into his room. He paced and made phone calls, and grew more and more irritated with his situation. No one in his right mind would go out in this kind of weather. Surely no one would commit crimes except on the rare occasion when someone went crazy with boredom and snapped for lack of anything else to do. Local law enforcement could handle those cases. Byron hoped he hadn’t been sent on some kind of fool’s errand. When he made it to Princeton, he’d probably end up sitting around his house all winter doing nothing.

So why did they need more man-power? What kind of Enforcers lived up here, that they couldn’t handle the number of people who would venture out and wade through miles of waist-deep snow to commit crimes against their neighbors? Byron didn’t like it. He didn’t like the weather, and he didn’t like that he had begun to suspect there was more to the assignment than they’d told him at the outset. And he sure as hell didn’t like that he had to keep smelling that putrid odor coming from the next room. What could two humans possibly do that would smell that bad? He could only hope they’d started mating in there. Having a sapling to sell off every couple of years might provide a welcome side project in this sleepy little area. He could make a good profit off the two saps the government had given him. Technically he’d only rented the male for now, but he thought it would prove a wise investment.

A new sap every two or three years, a baby he could sell at three or four years old. They didn’t bring a lot of money at that age, but they didn’t cost much to feed, either. A good young breeder like his female sap cost a lot more than her babies would bring in, but after a while, he’d earn back everything he’d paid for her and more. Well, everything the government had paid on his behalf.

Her companion could be purchased for a good price, too—males were easier to come by and cheaper, since they didn’t have much use in increasing a herd of sapiens. Males made a better investment if someone just needed something to feed from or to work in the fields on farms, since any male could mate a single time with a female. The females had much more value. And if they produced a male child soon, maybe he’d keep it, breed it with the mother again to keep more of her delectable flavor in the offspring they produced. Of course he couldn’t do that too many times, or his saps would lose their fertility from inbreeding. He knew that in Confinements, the government introduced saps to new populations every few generations to cut the incidence of inbreeding and thus prevent inheritable genetic defects in the sapien population.