Hope and Undead Elvis (7 page)

He took it. "Friends. You are an extraordinary young woman, Hope. I was told that when I was sent to find you."

Hope drew back her hand as if Gabe's had burned it. "You were told? You were sent? To find me? What do you mean?" Her heart started to pound as fear arose within it.

"Hope. Truly an apropos name,
señorita
. I was sent to find you to deliver you a message, because right now, in this time and place, you are the most important person in the world."

Chapter Seven

Hope and the Test

Hope blinked. "I'm what?"

"You're the most important person in the world. Or what's left of it, rather," said Gabe.

She laughed. "That's ridiculous. I'm nobody. Just another stripper." She bent to take another mouthful of the cool pond water.

"You're pregnant, Hope."

Hope choked on her water and coughed until she thought for sure she'd gag and vomit again.

Undead Elvis thumped her between her shoulder blades. "Put your arms over your head," he said. "That's what my momma always told me."

"That wasn't very funny, Gabe," said Hope, wheezing as she struggled to regain her breath. She discovered holding her arms up over her head really did help her recover quicker and she nodded to Undead Elvis in gratitude.

"It wasn't intended to be,
señorita
."

Hope glared at him. "I can't be pregnant. I'm still a virgin. I told you that." Her eyes narrowed. "Unless someone took advantage of me while I was sleeping."

"I wouldn't dream of such a thing," said Undead Elvis, "even if I had the ability to now that I'm a reanimated corpse. Huh. There's a good song in that somewhere. Pardon me while I work this out." He wandered along the pond's edge and hummed to himself.

"So what about you, Gabe? Did you just play modest with me before so you could get a little taste of Hope while I was sleeping?"

"No,
señorita
."

Hope looked him up and down, but could find no sign of any dishonesty. Something about Gabe made her want to believe whatever he said, even if it was ludicrous. Even if she was…

No, it was impossible.

Pregnant?

Ridiculous. He was having her on, playing a joke on her. "I don't like being made fun of."

"What would convince you?"

"I don't know."

"Not willing to just take it on faith?"

"Ha!" She'd seen far too much of the seedy underbelly of society working the strip clubs to have any faith in anything or anyone. "Any faith I might have had disappeared with the rest of the world."

Gabe sighed. "I see. I can't say I'm surprised. You picked up a pregnancy test from the Shepherds' luggage. Why not use it?"

Hope snorted. "You're not serious."

"I am. Either it will show you're pregnant, or it won't. If it does, will you believe me?"

"Fine. I'll pee on the stupid wand." She took one more defiant sip from the pool and then went off behind a tree out of view of Gabe and Undead Elvis.

"Can't believe I'm doing this," she muttered. "Pee on the wand. I'm not pregnant. He's just… just a crazy man." She rummaged through Mrs. Shepherd's purse until she found the white cardboard box. She tore it open and pulled out the plastic wand. In the past, when it mattered, she would have just let the plastic wrapper fall to the ground to be taken by the wind. Now, when it didn't matter, she put the crumpled wrapper back into the purse. It had been made by people, a remnant of the world gone by, and she didn't want to let it blow away.

She read the directions twice to make sure she understood what to do. Although she was still a little dehydrated, she managed to squeeze out a trickle of urine to bathe the end of the wand. Then she held it up and watched as her urine traveled up the fibrous material inside the stick and into the results window.

The little cottony tab inside it showed two blue lines, a positive result.

To be sure, she looked at it from various angles, but there was little use questioning it. The lines were solid, unyielding in their insistence that she was pregnant. Hope set the wand down and took a shaky breath. Maybe it was wrong, but somehow she didn't think so.

On numb legs, she returned to where Gabe sat at the pond's edge. "How did you know?"

"I was told,
señorita
."

"By whoever sent you to find me?"

"Yes."

"So who did that then? God? This whole virgin pregnancy thing is a God kind of thing, right?"

"If you like."

"I don't even believe in God. I never did."

"Does that matter? How else would you explain what happened to the world?"

Hope sat down and trailed her fingers in the pond water, watching the ripples spread outward in concentric circles. "I don't know. I figured it was some weird science thing, like a wormhole or something."

"No."

"Sometimes things happen that defy explanation, Li'l lady," said Undead Elvis. Hope hadn't noticed when he returned. "Like me being here, for example. I'm supposed to be dead, not up and about."

"You ever mess around much with computers?" asked Gabe.

"A little," said Hope.

"You know how after a computer's been running for awhile it starts to get buggy? Data gets corrupted. The hard drive fills up with meaningless file fragments?"

"I guess."

"When that happens, you have to clean things out and reboot the computer."

"Are you saying that's what happened here? The world got… got rebooted?"

"Not yet. This is when it's all locked up. Nothing's working right. Rules have been suspended. It requires a reboot, and that's where you come in."

"Me? Am I supposed to heal the world or something?"

"No." Gabe. "You misunderstand me. The world doesn't need healing. It was broken beyond repair. It must be started anew. The child you carry within you will be instrumental to that task."

"God, you mean I'm Mother Mary?"

"After a fashion."

"So what am I supposed to do?"

"You must carry and deliver the child safely, and raise him or her the best you can,
señorita
."

"I'd be a shitty mother in the best of circumstances. I smoke. I drink. I'm a goddamn stripper! And look at the world, Gabe. Until we found this place, I didn't even know where my next meal was going to come from."

"And yet, you made it here alive when so many others in the world didn't."

"I didn't ask for this!"

"No, but it was given to you, as was a protector to help see you to the journey's end."

"Uh-huh," said Undead Elvis with his trademark twang.

"But where am I supposed to go?"

"Graceland, Li'l lady."

"Why there?"

"It's a safe place to raise a child in this broken world," said Gabe.

"Safe from what? Those birds?"

Gabe lowered his voice. "There are things roaming the land far worse than the birds,
señorita
."

Hope leaned back to stare into the sky. "Of course there are. It can't be easy, right? I've got to be tested." Her temper arose again and she shouted into the sky, "Well, you know what? I reject you! I don't want to be a mother! Pick somebody else who believes in you and gives a shit about the world. It never did anything but shit all over me, so why should I do it any favors? Why should I do you any favors? If this is all your Creation, you fix it! Why use me? All I've got left is my life and now you're taking it away from me!" She bowed her head and dropped her voice to a whisper. "It's not fair."

Gabe knelt down beside her and took her hands. "It's not like that, Hope. You have a choice. You always have a choice. That's the greatest gift you've ever been given. The choice to live or die, to act or not to act. To believe or not to believe. The ability to choose is a wonderful thing that you shouldn't take for granted. I don't even have that ability."

"Why not? Because of your vows?"

Gabe smiled. "Yes,
señorita
."

The way he sat, with the sun just behind him, made the white bandana tied around his head gleam. The glow awakened something buried deep in Hope's primitive brain, some ancient racial memory of beings of light. "Gabe… Gabrial… Are you an angel?"

He smiled again. "I'm—"

A third eye appeared in the middle of his forehead. A moment later a loud crack assaulted Hope's ears. Gabe fell backward in seeming slow motion, his beatific smile frozen on his face.

Hope whirled to see a beady-eyed man in frayed black denim and a mohawk with a gun held out. "Ha, ha, ha!" he croaked through a mouth with neither teeth nor tongue. The man was going to shoot her; she could see it in his eyes. No… he aimed too low. He was going to shoot her baby.

Her
baby
!

The Shepherds' pistol was in her grasp then, even though she didn't remember pulling it from her purse. She squeezed the trigger the way Undead Elvis had shown her. The gun's thunderous report echoed across the pond and the kick felt like she'd been punched in the shoulder.

The man fell backward without a sound and when he hit the ground, he became a small, blood-sodden mass of black feathers. It was one of the birds that had so frightened Gabe earlier. Now, Hope understood why. "Make sure it's dead," she called to Undead Elvis, and ran to where Gabe lay with his knees folded under him and his face serene and staring up into the heavens.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. She touched his face. It was warm from the sunlight. She raised her own face as well. "I'm sorry!" she shouted. "You didn't have to do that! He was doing your work! He stuck to his vows. He did a good job." She cried some more. It felt better that she was crying over someone besides herself for a change. She'd liked Gabe. She'd have been happy to give up her virginity to him. She understood at last why he'd rejected her. Not out of dislike, but out of love—a love greater than she had ever known, or ever expected to. She envied him for that, and hoped he'd find a reward wherever his ultimate destination might be.

She reached down to shut his eyes, but Undead Elvis intercepted her wrist.

"No, Li'l lady. Let him look to Heaven forever. He delivered his message. He was a good soldier."

Hope nodded. "Goodbye, Gabe. I'm glad I met you, even briefly."

She gasped as light sparkled around Gabe's body. She squeezed her eyes shut against the glare and squeezed Undead Elvis's cold hand. When she opened them once more, Gabe was gone. Where his body had lain, a patch of white flowers shaped like tiny trumpets had sprouted. Their scent was sweet without being cloying, and reminded Hope of being a toddler and watching her mother taking laundry from the dryer.

Hope looked up at Undead Elvis, but saw only herself reflected in his sunglasses. "I think he must have done okay."

"I think so too, Li'l lady."

Hope rubbed a hand over her taut dancer's tummy. Soon, she knew it would become distended as the baby grew within her. Somehow, the idea didn't repulse her any longer.

She hoped she could live up to the expectations that had been set for her. She looked toward The Way, still parked where Gabe left it. "Those bird things found us here. I guess we can't stay here any longer."

"I don't guess so, Li'l lady."

"Pick as much fruit as you can carry," said Hope. "Let's go to Graceland."

Chapter Eight

Hope and The Way

They filled the back of The Way with as much fruit as they could pick. Hope exhorted Undead Elvis to hurry. She had a sense that something bad was approaching, and they needed to leave the desert oasis before it arrived to devour them.

Carrying water would be more difficult. Besides the gallon jug Gabe had carried in The Way, Hope found no other containers. She drank her fill, then topped off the jug. "I hope we find more."

"Let's hope, Hope," said Undead Elvis with a smile.

"Too much to hope for a car with air conditioning."

"It wouldn't be much good with that broken window, Li'l lady."

"True."

They looked at the pile of fruit in the bed of the car. It didn't seem like much at all. Hope wondered how long it would last. Then on the heels of that thought, she wondered how she would manage to eat enough of the right foods to grow a baby. She knew nothing about motherhood or pregnancy except that she'd planned to avoid it at all costs. So much for that.