The Urban Fantasy Anthology (52 page)

At first she did not understand what she had seen and stood there waiting still to meet it. She heard loud trumpeting and wondered what other animal had come to join the fray and then knew what animal it was. The clan’s calls changed from whoops to frenzied highpitched laughter and she stumbled forward past the bodies still warm at her feet, holding herself up with left hand braced against the rough and flaking wall. She readied the knife and leaned forward to look out the window and past the rock-killed body still kicking at the doorpanel as if caught in some primal dream of hunting. As perhaps it was. She sank to her knees with the breath still not coming. The window a yard away and beyond reach. She put a hand to her chest and realized some of the blood on her was hers. The hysterical cries intensified and she heard several thuds and then something in her gut unclenched and she drew a great long wheezing breath and fell backward into the van. Head pillowed upon the first of her slain predators.

Of course Chay had a first aid kit. Injuries among his kind were no different in nature or in treatment than injuries among her own.

He found her gear and moved her half a mile down the road and set her on a car roof where he could see her while he scouted the vicinity. He found a plastic gascan on a jeep with an inch of gas still in it and he used it and her mag bar to set a convertible ablaze by way of campfire and worklight. He set her upwind of it on her foam sleeping pad on the trunk of a car. She watched with odd dissociation as he bent to her and cut her shredded flannel hoodie from collar to hem with her Gerber knife. The fabric soaked through with her blood and her assailants’ blood and already stiffening. He laid aside the parted halves and cocked his head and studied her. She looked scourged by a thin switch. Two narrow sets of three cuts each and many scratches ran from the inner swell of each small breast and between her ribs, down to midstomach. If she’d held the hyena two inches lower he’d have gutted her sure.

I never let anyone get this far with me, she said.

Don unnastan.

Nothing. Sorry. She turned her head and wondered if she would be sick. Her forehead felt hot. What’s your word for ouch?

Chay opened a waterbottle and soaked a handtowel and started washing blood off her chest but pulled his hand back when she hissed.

Little softer please?

Yeh.

He swabbed more gently and then pulled back out of his own shadow and studied her wounds by firelight. Deepset eyes enshadowed and unreadable.

She leaned her head up to look even though it hurt.

It didn’t feel that bad when it happened, she said.

Not tok, hokay?

Okay. Sorry. She let her head fall back. A shooting star segmented by his silhouette. The menagerie calls in the thick-growth hills subdued but still there. What’s your word for sorry?

Don haff one. Affy quiet now.

He bent to the plastic tackle box repurposed as his first aid kit and came up with a glass pint flask of Stolichnaya half-f. He opened it and held her up with one hand across her shoulder blades and she felt the cuts bleeding again. He put the bottle in her hand. Drink, he said. One, two drink, yeh? He made two comical gunk-gunk swallows.

She sipped and then immediately coughed and tried to sit up and regretted that because it hurt like hell. Jesus effin, she said.

Affy drink.

Yeah yeah, okay. She pinched her nose and drank and took a breath and shivered and drank again. Oh man. People do this for fun?

Not jus yooman.

He set out gauze rolls and number four gauze pads in plastic packets and surgical tape and shortbladed scissors. He touched the bruise beneath her ribs already turning ugly and he cocked his head.

I hit myself with my fucking knife, she said. She laughed. You should see the other guy.

Affy cold?

Naw. Affy fine, dude.

He made sure her bowie knife was out of her reach and then he pointed to her right. She turned her head to look and he upended the bottle of Stoli on her wounds. Her yell would have put out a campfire. The surrounding nightsounds stopped altogether. She bucked and he held her down and then wiped away the bloody vodka with a new clean rag and then he dabbed the wounds and let them dry. He taped the edges of the gauze pads and aligned them on the open cuts and pressed down gently and then lifted her to wrap her chest in bands of gauze. He taped that off and stood looking down at her. She was breathing hard but made no other sound. He lowered her back down. The arboreal racket seeped back into the night.

He looked through her backpack and found her tee shirt but no other. He eased her up again and removed the cut and bloodsoaked flannel hoodie smelling of vodka and made her raise her arms and tried to put the tee shirt over them but had never done such a thing and could not sort it out. She leaned her weight back against his outspread hand and put the shirt on herself and he laid her back down. She asked if she could have another swallow and he gave her the bottle. She swigged and held it out to him. He capped it and put it away.

Make beddah?

Fuck no. Make not give a shit.

He draped her sleeping bag across her. The burning car already guttering. The night windy but not cool.

I’m sorry about your spear.

The centaur shrugged. Jus piece a pipe, yeh? Make anudduh one t’morrah.

She squinted. I’m goddamned if I understand you.

Sokay. Affy res now.

Okay.

The centaur cleaned her bowie knife and oiled his sharpening stone with a small metal bottle of 3-in-One oil and sharpened the knife, pushing the angled edge across the stone in sure deft strokes, one just like the other. He wiped the blade again and cleaned the slurry from the stone and put the stone away. He held the blade up and turned it before him. A big knife even in his own big hand. He returned it to its sheath and set it beside the girl. She was breathing evenly. He watched her a moment and then turned away.

I’m looking for my mom and dad, she said.

Affy leef dem?

She did not reply and he began repacking his first aid kit.

I think they left me, she said. I think I mighta seen em die.

He shut the plastic tacklebox and returned it to his pannier and began sorting this night’s finds on his Shroud of Turin beach towel.

I need to find out. Alive or dead I need to know.

Know is beddah yeh.

Yeah.

Chay hep find. Now Affy res. Drink wadder too. Don be sick t’morrah.

Okey dokey.

He finished up his sorting and threw away half of it and threw out some of his previous kit to replace with the new and repacked the panniers and set them aside. He opened a bottled water and squeezed it into his gaping mouth.

I think you killed em, she said. Your people I mean. I think I saw it.

He threw the bloodsoaked handtowels and her shredded flannel and the waterbottle on the carfire. The fabrics flared pale blue and haloed and then began to smoke and pop as the waterbottle blackened and shriveled like some prehistoric insect carapace.

Only fair I guess. God knows I killed my share. Maybe someone’s kid saw me, huh.

He looked at her. She lay on her back with her eyes closed. The sheathed bowie alongside. The waning firelight upon her.

Mebbe, he said.

That Avy’s dead now though. I guess thass good but it don’t feel good.

She let out a long breath.

Don’t understand why you don’t wanna kill me like all the others do.

The centaur watched her breathing lengthen and he took up his watch and said no more. After he was sure she was asleep he opened up the two English phrasebooks she had given him and began to read them in the waning light.

Trumpeting awoke her and her first thought was that Chay had made another musical javelin and was trying it out. She sat up and then hissed between her teeth and put her hand to her chest and felt the bandages beneath her shirt. She remembered all of it at once and could not believe she was not dead.

She braced a hand behind her and glared back at the day and shaded her eyes. The morning well advanced. Chay stood in the back of the stakebed truck with forelegs on the cab and looked down at something off the freeway.

She pulled out the neck of her shirt and looked down at herself. She let go the collar and lay back and thought about throwing up. Hell with that. She stood and staggered backward and leaned against the car she’d slept beside. She breathed deep and waited for the pinprick blackness to subside. Let’s try that again. She straightened from the car and stood a moment and then took an experimental step. It didn’t kill her so she took another one. She retrieved her bowie from beside the sleeping bag and took off her belt and put it on again with the knife at her hip. She walked around the charred remains of the convertible. Chay was watching her now but did not move to help her. She nodded at him and he beckoned her on. When she got to the stakebed he pointed off at whatever he was looking at and she started to climb up but when she put a hand on the open tailgate and lifted her leg she felt her cuts grow tight in their bandages.

Loud wet sneezing sounds from the aqueduct now. Chay motioned for her to come around to the front instead and she did.

Three elephants stood bathing themselves in the aqueduct. Two adults and a child. They lifted trunks from the sludgy water and curled them back over their heads and sprayed themselves, dark wet patches spreading in the wrinkled gray. She stared at them in no more wonder than she had when she’d first seen a unicorn. And no less. Both equally belonging to the world she knew, neither more preposterous than the other.

I’ve heard of these, she whispered to Chay. Are they smart like us? Smot, he said. But not like us.

She wanted to push on but Chay would have none of it. He opened one of the phrasebooks and deftly turned the pages and pointed at lines.

That doesn’t look good.

You need to rest.

This needs to be mended.

Please lie down.

I would like to see some dresses.

She turned from the phrasebook to look up at him. You’d like to see some dresses?

He pointed at her shirt. Affy cloze. Burn big one lass night, dis one no good now. Yeh?

We’ll have to leave the freeway for that.

Sokay. Affy need res.

Would it do any good to argue?

They left the elephants to their bath.

It hurt to walk and he carried her. Across the southbound side, a short leap over the divider wall and across the northbound swath, then up what had been the northbound onramp from Los Feliz. They crossed the river above long concrete baffles in the sluggish water and she saw that half were clotted with accumulated trash and dead branches. A mushy shoreline of rotted leaves. Ahead another iteration of decaying cars, broken sidewalks, overgrowth, dead greenery, stripped billboards, angled telephone poles, drooping power lines, broken storefronts, sagging structures. Fire had not touched this area but earthquake had. Fallen awnings and collapsed apartment buildings in what had been mixed residential off the main thoroughfare. A tree growing in the middle of the weedy street, radiating rootcracks giving it the look of something that had punched through suddenly from below. Up ahead a shop door banged in the wind as it had for nearly thirty years. A gaunt coyote stepped out from a doorway and stopped in the road looking at them with its tongue dangling. As if it had run a long way to be here in time see them. They walked on past curbed cars rusting beside parking meters sprouting from the grass. Torn flaps curled from a billboard up ahead. coming soon discernible in the ragged strips remaining. Car wash, service station, fast food, repair shop. A garbage truck. Wind and crickets and that banging door.

They found an RV on a concrete pad alongside a house beneath a tubeframe plastic-sheeted structure that had collapsed on top of it. They pulled the covering partway back as if turning down bedding. The RV weathered but in good shape. The door was locked and Avy pried it open with a prybar and went inside. Must and cobwebs, a brittle dry feel. As if some untenanted sarcophagus beneath the desert floor had been exhumed and opened to admit air and light withheld for centuries. Kitchen, dual sink, two popouts, draw curtains, recliner, sofabed, queensize bed. Pots and pans and utensils. Maps. No food. She could not imagine this thing moving on the roads she traveled.

She leaned out the door. Chay stood in the grassy driveway studying the ruined neighborhood.

Okay, I’ll sleep here tonight. But we head downtown tomorrow. Got it?

Yeh.

She took the prybar with her and they scavenged the neighborhood but found nothing useful. A shrunken skeleton wrapped in thin stretched mottled leather sagging on an 80d nail driven into a front door. One side of the head bashed in down to the zygomatic arch. Eyesockets ever regarding the wooden shingle hanging from its knobbed neck, the faded word looter scribbled on it with a Sharpie. It did not look like the remains of a human being at all but like some kind of scarecrow patched together out of the hides of other animals and it hung there telling all the story it had left to tell.

They went back to the boulevard and started in on the stores. There were signs that people had lived in some but not in many years. More coyote and raccoon prints than shoeprints traced out in the dust and filled in again, outlines softened. Rat droppings everywhere and a few dark shops become pigeon roosts.

Chay took a ten-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch copper pipe from a plumbing supply. In a small dark room in back of a Mexican grocery Avy found a stand of lockers. Nothing in the unlocked ones and padlocks on the other two. She ran the prybar through the hasps and twisted and the lockers’ metal tabs gave way after being wrenched back and forth a few times. Sneakers far too large for her, desiccated antiperspirants, a large tee shirt and an extra large sweatshirt. She flapped the shirts and stirred up dust that made her sneeze. She rolled them up and put them in her backpack left on the register conveyor belt and picked up the backpack by a strap and left the store through its smashed-in window.

Chay could not fit inside the RV so Avy sat on the tailgate of a junkfilled Toyota shortbed beside the all but invisible curb near the house, dangling her sneakers and kicking at weeds as Chay removed his first aid kit from his pannier and opened it. She took a deep breath and started to take off her shirt but blood had seeped through the bandages and stuck to it and she stopped and poured water on it and rubbed the fabric and then slowly peeled the shirt off and threw it into the truck bed. She looked down at the gauze strips. Russet blotches like some kind of mold. She felt behind her and pulled at the curling ends of surgical tape banding her. The odd sensation as her skin lifted up and the tape peeled from her. Dried blood cemented the gauze to her skin. She poured more water and rubbed gently and paid no attention to the pale red flowing down her belly to darken the waistband of her shorts. Then she pulled at the taped gauze strips and they sloughed off redbellied and dripping like interrupted leeches. The sudden air cold against the puckered cuts. A wisp of cotton stuck to one crusting edge and made a faint ripping sound as she pulled it free.