The Hammer of Eden

Now he was being ordered out by a beautiful naked girl who was flushed with anger or excitement or both. To add to his humiliation, he had a hard-on like a flagpole.

Am I losing my grip?

The thought disturbed him. He could always get people to do what he wanted, especially here at the commune. He was so taken aback that he almost obeyed her. He walked to the door without speaking.

Then he realized he could not give in. He might never regain dominance if he let her defeat him now. And he needed Melanie under his control. She was crucial to the plan. He would not be able to trigger another earthquake without her help. He could not let her assert her independence in this way. She was too important.

He turned in the doorway and looked at her, standing naked, hands on her hips. What did she want? She had been in control today, in Owens Valley, because of her expertise, and that had given her the courage for this display of bad temper. But in her heart she did not want to be independent — she would not be here if she did. She preferred to be told what to do by someone with power. That was why she had married her professor. Having left him, she had taken up with another authority figure, the leader of a commune. She had revolted tonight because she did not want to share Priest with another woman. She was probably scared Star would take him away from her. But the last thing she wanted was for Priest to walk away.

He closed the door.

He crossed the little room in three paces and stood in front of her. She was still flushed with anger and breathing hard. “Lie down,” he commanded.

She looked troubled, but she lay on the bed.

“Open your legs,” he said.

After a moment she obeyed.

He lay on her. As he entered her, she suddenly put her arms around him and held him hard. He moved fast inside her, deliberately rough. She lifted her legs around his waist. He felt her teeth on his shoulder, biting. It hurt, but he liked it. She opened her mouth, breathing hard. “Ah, fuck,” she said in a low, guttural voice. “Priest, you son of a bitch, I love you.”

* * *

When Priest woke up, he went to Star’s cabin.

She was lying on her side, eyes open, staring at the wall. When he sat on the bed beside her, she began to cry.

He kissed her tears. He was getting a hard-on. “Talk to me,” he murmured.

“Did you know that Flower puts Dusty to bed?”

He had not been expecting that. What did it matter? “I didn’t know,” he said.

“I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” He tried not to sound irritated. Yesterday we triggered an earthquake, and today you’re crying about the children? “It’s a hell of a lot better than stealing movie posters in Silver City.”

“But you have a new family,” she burst out.

“What the heck does that mean?”

“You, and Melanie, and Flower, and Dusty. You’re like a family. And there’s no place in it for me, I don’t fit.”

“Sure you do,” he said. “You’re the mother of my child, and you’re the woman I love. How could you not fit?”

“I felt so humiliated last night.”

He stroked her breasts through the cotton of her nightshirt. She covered his hand with her own and pressed his palm hard against her body.

“The group is our family,” he told her. “It’s always been that way. We don’t suffer with the hang-ups of the suburban mom-and-dad-and-two-kids unit.” He was repeating the teachings he had gotten from her years ago. “We’re one big family. We love the whole group, and everyone takes care of everyone else. This way, we don’t have to lie to each other, or to ourselves, about sex. You can get it on with Oaktree, or Song, and I’ll know you still care for me and our child.”

“But you know something, Priest — no one ever rejected you or me before now.”

There were no rules about who could have sex with whom, but of course no one was obliged to make love if they did not want to. However, now that he thought about it, Priest could not remember an occasion on which a woman had refused him. Obviously it had been the same for Star — until Melanie.

A feeling of panic crept over him. He had felt it several times in the last few weeks. It was the fear that the commune was collapsing, he was losing his grip, and everything he loved was in peril. It was like losing his balance, as if the floor started to move unpredictably and firm ground suddenly became shifting and unreliable, just as it had in Owens Valley yesterday. He fought to suppress his anxiety. He had to stay cool. Only he could keep everyone’s loyalty and hold it all together. He had to stay cool.

He lay on the bed beside her and stroked her hair. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “We scared the shit out of Governor Robson yesterday. He’ll do what we want, you’ll see.”

“Are you sure?”

He took both her breasts in his hands. He felt turned on. “Trust me,” he murmured. He pressed against her so that she could feel his erection.

“Make love to me, Priest,” she said.

He gave her his roguish grin. “How?”

She smiled back through her tears. “Any damn way you like.”

* * *

She went to sleep afterward. Lying beside her, Priest worried over the problem of accreditation until he thought of the solution. Then he got up.

He went to the kids’ bunkhouse and woke Flower. “I want you to go with me to San Francisco,” he said. “Get dressed.”

He made toast and orange juice for her in the deserted cookhouse. As she ate, he said: “You remember we talked about you being a writer? And you told me you’d like to work for a magazine?”

“Yes, Teen magazine,” she said.

“Right.”

“But you want me to write poetry so I can live here.”

“And I still do, but today you’re going to find out what it’s like to be a reporter.”

She looked happy. “Okay!”

“I’m taking you to an FBI press conference.”

“FBI?”

“This is the kind of thing you have to do if you’re a reporter.”

She wrinkled her nose in distaste. She had picked up her mother’s dislike of law enforcement people. “I never read about the FBI in Teen.”

“Well, Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t giving a press conference today, I checked.”

She grinned sheepishly. “Too bad.”

“But if you just ask the kinds of questions a reporter from Teen would think of, you’ll be fine.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “What’s the press conference about?”

“A group who claim they caused an earthquake. Now, I don’t want you to tell everyone about this. It has to be a secret, okay?”

“Okay.”

He would tell the Rice Eaters about it when he got back, he decided. “It’s all right to talk to Mom and Melanie about it, and Oaktree and Song and Aneth and Paul Beale, but no one else. That’s really important.”

“Gotcha.”

He knew he was taking a crazy risk. If things went wrong, he could lose everything. He might even be arrested in front of his daughter. This could end up being the worst day of her life. But mad risks had always been his style.

When he had proposed planting the grapevines, Star had pointed out that they held their land on a one-year