“Start bargaining,” Kleat said, moving to flank the pit.
It was beginning. Molly wanted to freeze them all, make them as still as carvings.
Doc wasn’t fooled.
“He wants to know how you got Vin’s machete,” Duncan said. “He wants to know where their brother is.”
So pulled himself from the pit. The mud made sucking noises. He was armed with a shovel.
“Tell them.” Kleat was smiling, all innocence. “We sent him to get help.”
So barked at them.
“They say he never came down.”
“Then he must have gotten lost. He’s on his way.” Kleat held up his money. Water sluiced off the bright steel blade.
Duncan frowned. He spoke with the brothers.
“I told them we should start searching for him. The ruins are moving around. A stone might have fallen on him. There are animals, too. And the typhoon will get much worse, I think. We don’t want to be inside here tonight.”
“Good,” Kleat said, smiling. “We’re on their side. Keep talking.”
Duncan knelt to draw in the mud with a twig. Maps, always maps with him. Doc sat on his heels to add his own lines to the diagram. So looked over their shoulders. Molly stepped closer.
No one noticed Kleat until the door slammed shut up ahead. He gunned the engine, and with a wild glance back through his broken glasses, he took off. The Land Cruiser shot a rooster tail of leaves into the air and bucked forward over roots and tipped paving stones.
He was leaving them.
Molly was surprised by her surprise. Of course he was leaving them. He was Kleat.
The brothers gave a shout. Duncan, too. A waste of breath.
Molly watched it unfold. Duncan waved his arms in the air. The two Khmers raced around to the truck and grabbed their rifles. Duncan yelled at them not to fire. They cut loose anyway and gave chase.
34.
From behind, Molly couldn’t tell one mud figure from the other. One let off a long burst that emptied his banana clip, and he changed to a fresh one without missing a step. She ran after them.
Picking up speed, Kleat reached the green mineral causeway that ran between the ancient reservoirs. He veered to miss the remains of a
The brothers ran on. The faster one sprinted ahead, not bothering to shoot, maybe gambling that Kleat would clip a statue or that one of his brother’s bullets might puncture a tire. Molly continued after them. She didn’t want to see Kleat punished, but she didn’t want him to escape either. She just wanted to see.
She had reached halfway across the long causeway. The mouth of the gateway appeared in front of them, like the eye of a needle. Through there it would be blue sky, or almost.
One brother fired. The other chased.
The Land Cruiser suddenly lifted up on an orange blossom.
That was the first antitank mine detonating the fuel tank.
A heavy boom echoed across the water. From Molly’s distance, the Land Cruiser seemed to be launching into space. It spiraled forward through the plume of fuel and smoke.
The truck started to land on one side, then jumped again, thrown by the second mine. It flipped onto its roof, still moving, and the screech of metal rippled back to her in stereo along the tops of both ponds.
Flames shot up. Smoke spilled like ink.
The reserve fuel tank went off. The fireball created a temporary sun in the rainfall. It even cast an artificial rainbow.
An arm appeared from one window. Somehow Kleat had survived the explosions. He was trying to drag himself from the burning car.
The sight of him struggling to escape renewed the brothers’ fury. Molly thought of the turtle in their fire last night. They would have no mercy.
She was sure the wreck had quit sliding. But then it moved again. From her distance, it looked like translucent animals rushing up from the water and bunching around the fiery vehicle. It was the rain in her eyes, she thought.
The Land Cruiser shifted. It hit a third mine. What was left of it flipped off the road.
The water was deeper than she’d guessed. The flaming ball of metal didn’t float and go under in a lather of bubbles. It vanished. The man-made lake swallowed the man-made sun in a single bite.
Molly came to a standstill.
Kleat was gone.
Plastered in mud, the two brothers howled and fired their rifles into the water, cheated of their enemy.
She wasn’t sure what obligation she had to Kleat. He had left them to die. Let the prehistoric fishes have him. But someone needed to witness what was left. Someone had to say a few words over the water.
Grimly, she started forward.
In the space of an instant, she felt a hand wrap around her left ankle, rooting her foot in place. She felt its fingers squeeze.
Even as she glanced down, the image of a fist disappeared. There was the echo of a sensation, a physical resonance. Then it was as if it had never been.
She lifted her foot. A piece of green waterweed led over the road’s rim, limp and flat. Her imagination was in overdrive. She had invented the hand to halt herself.
She peered over the edge to see if a wave had flung up the weed. The wreck might have caused a ripple or runoff from the city. But the water was flat and dimpled by rain. And occupied.
Something was in there. Molly moved her head to one side.
It was the other ACAV. It had sunk to the bottom and was lodged in mud. Weeds floated up from the machine-gun barrels. A goldfish the size of a carp swam from one hatch. Another peered up at her from the depths of the second hatch. She leaned out over the water, angling for a better view. Their eyes weren’t spaced like the eyes of a fish. They were almost human.
“Molly!”
She pulled back from the water. Duncan was standing at the forest’s edge. The machete hung from one hand. The pacifist had armed himself.
“Come back,” he said.
“Kleat’s gone,” she announced. She heard her unnatural calm. “And I found something in the water.”
“Molly, before they start back. Their blood will be up. We have to hide.”
She glanced down the road at the brothers. They were prowling from side to side, searching for any trace of their vehicle or Kleat. “But we didn’t do anything. Kleat betrayed us all, you and me, too.”
“They’ll figure that out eventually. But it will be better if we’re not around when they return. Come back. We’ll take some food and spend the night in the ruins. We’ll go find Vin. That will satisfy them. It will all work out.”
That sounded sensible. Good old Duncan. She turned.
There was a fourth detonation out on the road.
Molly looked in time to see a man flying from the road, like a puppet getting jerked from the stage. There was no ceremony to it, barely a bang.
Abruptly he stopped, in midair.
She thought that it was an illusion, that time had stopped. The arc of his flight would continue in the next moment, it had to.
Then she saw the tree branch quivering. He’d been impaled on its tip. There he hung, like an ornament. Less than that, like a bit of trash caught in the trees.
