'Well you're the lucky one. Mine was a bastard. What's that got to do with anything?'
'There was a girl in my community, who shunned all her brothers. No matter how respectfully and piously they treated her. From the oldest to the very youngest, she turned from them all. Hatred burned in her bosom for every man. Her father hanged himself in his own barn. This is unusual within our community. Later we discovered it was through guilt. His wife had died some years before and he had done his daughter a great… disservice.'
'Really?' said Linda. 'Well my father never did me that 'disservice'. Not physically anyway. Mentally that's another matter. See, when I was a little girl I was like the son he always wanted. The son my brother refused to be. It was my father who taught me to shoot so well. We used to go on long hunting trips together. Then I became a young woman and he couldn't help noticing. Nothing had changed for me, but it had for him. He didn't like spending nights alone in a cabin with me. Not out in the middle of nowhere. So suddenly he just freezes me out, doesn't want to know. Even sent me away to a private school. I mean how extreme is that?
'This all suited my mom fine, of course. All she did all day was hang out with her country club friends, getting drunk on Martinis and high on whatever pills her doctor prescribed. She hated not having a daughter she could dress up and parade around at her society functions. She hated that I liked my father more than her. She hated most things. Top of her list were common folk and my father. Didn't hate the money he made though.
'Anyway, I get good grades at this exclusive school, so I figure I deserve to party a little. Some of the other girls from my school used to hang out at this bar called Nabokov's. Named after an author who wrote this book called Lolita, you probably won't have heard of it, it's about an older guy who falls for this young girl. Anyway that was the whole point of the joint. It was basically a place where older guys with money could, you know, cruise younger girls, buy them expensive drinks and maybe take them home.' Linda looked up from her sights and glanced over at Anna. 'You're not following any of this are you?'
Anna's brow furrowed. 'I got a little lost when you mentioned bars of Nabokov. Is this a type of metal?'
'No,' said Linda taking a deep breath. 'A bar is a place where people meet to drink alcohol, to talk and maybe take someone back to their home.'
'To marry?'
'Not exactly. To do what married people do, but without the same level of commitment.'
'To fornicate.'
'Yes. If they get lucky. Anyway, I'm having fun doing this for a while, then who should I run into at this club but my own father. And I don't just run into him at the bar or the cloak room or nothing. No, I run into him in the ladies room. I open the door of the cubicle and there he is. Snorting coke and getting blown by a girl from my school, two years younger than me.' Anna was wearing that puzzled expression again. 'Listen, I don't need to go into it, but those are two very bad things okay?' Anna simply nodded and let Linda continue. 'The next day at school this girl comes looking for me and starts making out like she wants us to be friends. She tells me my father offered to put her up in her own flat and everything, saying he's already got three other women like that. So when I got home I confronted him with this.'
'How did he respond?'
'He went ballistic. He called me a whore and a junkie for hanging out in a bar like that. Can you believe the nerve of the guy, after what I caught him doing? So we have this big stand up row and he throws me out on my ass. Literally picks me and throws me out onto the lawn. Then he opens my bedroom window and starts throwing all of my things out. Clothes, CDs, make-up, books, all of them right there on the ground. And my mother, she just sits there and watches. Sipping her early morning Manhattan and popping pills, like nothing is happening.'
'So you had nowhere to live?'
'Nope,' said Linda. 'And then I found out who my friends were. None of my school friends would take me in, or the 'good families' I knew. I ended up in a YWCA hostel, with no income. Then I bump into a guy I knew from that bar I was telling you about. He buys me dinner and tells me I could be making good money just doing what I used to do for the fun of it. He gets me a couple of clients and before I know it I've got a swanky uptown apartment and the names of the most powerful men in the State in my address book. I got to travel the world executive class and basically had a ball.'
'Had a ball. That means you were happy, am I right?'
'More or less.'
'You enjoyed the things those men did to you? I am sorry to say I know a little about that myself. I find it hard to believe that it made you happy.'
'Yeah, well my situation was different. I had a choice about what I did. I wasn't chained to a wall. Besides there were worse things I could have done with my time.'
'There were?'
'Well yeah,' said Linda getting a little riled. 'As soon as people started dying in their millions I found that out. Turned out that while there wasn't a lot of demand for IT specialists or stock brokers anymore, people in my line of work could still get by. Only the rewards were a lot less and the risk was a lot greater.'
'Is that when you started killing people?'
'Only, as I've said before, to stay alive.'
Linda caught a movement down by Bertha. The door to one of her exterior storage compartments opened slightly and something fell out. It was long and black and it rolled under the van. It was Cortez. Damn it, he was a cunning bastard. She ought to have known that he and Greaves weren't just going to sit there and do nothing.
They must have dismantled one of the dividing walls and slipped into the outer storage compartment. Then jimmied the lock from the inside. If they'd done any permanent damage to Bertha she'd make them pay for it.
Linda could just make out Cortez commando crawling along the underside of the vehicle. He came out right by some trees, completely in shadow. There was no way the raiders could have seen him. He was taking the fight to them.
Close combat, in the dark, in dense woodland. Didn't matter how well the raiders knew the terrain, this was now Cortez's territory. Poor bastards didn't stand a chance.
'Mistress Linda,' said Anna. 'I have only known you a short while so forgive my impertinence, I don't claim to see into your soul but would you permit me to make an observation about you?'
'Go ahead. Knock yourself out. It'll help pass the time I guess.'
'I know you say you had a choice about your erm… career. Is that how you would have it?'
'That'll do.'
'And I know you say you only killed to stay alive, but I wonder if you would grant me the indulgence of offering another explanation?'
'You have such a quaint way of talking. But you don't have to keep pussy footing around, get to the point.'
'Alright, I think you fornicate with other men to win back your father's love. You went to this place Nab, err…'
'Nabokov's.'
'Yes, you went to Nabokov's to find men your father's age. To give to them what you couldn't give to your father. The very thing that you felt made him withdraw his love for you. Then when he banished you from his home, once again over the very same thing, you kept looking for his love from other men. You gave them what you felt had kept you from your father. However, they could not give you the love that your father withheld. It says in Corinthians 6:18: 'He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body'. You started to kill men out of anger at your father. You were angry that he stopped loving you and even angrier at what this had made you do to yourself.'
Linda put down her rifle and just stared at Anna. She looked away, nervous and self conscious. 'Pray forgive me Mistress Linda. I fear I have spoken out of turn. The circumstances are unusual and I forgot myself. You were being so kind and I…'
'No, no,' said Linda. 'That's okay, I'm not cross, I'm… well I'm flabbergasted. I mean I thought you were this retard. I'm not being rude or nothing, but all you did was whimper and pray all the time. Then suddenly it's like you just look right into my soul. You're a regular little Freudian aren't you?'
'Freudian. Is that like an Episcopalian?'
'Not exactly. But it's kinda like a religion to some people.'
A scream of intense pain stopped the conversation. It came from the woods around Bertha. Both Linda and Anna jumped. Several short bursts of gunfire followed. Linda scanned the woods through the rifle sights.
