Oh Father, where have you taken the stars?
A flawless, featureless sky above, faded dying red embers of the fire the only illumination of an expanse like black velvet, the air was frigid; he was warm.
He slept beside her, eyes twitching beneath closed eyelids in a dream she hoped was not at all like the nightmare within which they lived. She moved to get closer to him, rested her face on his chest, her hand playing with his chest hair, fingers combing though dark brown curls. She looked up, kissed his sweet sleeping mouth, tasted herself on his lips. She listened for, found his heartbeat. The silence of the dead world intensified every sound: each heartbeat a thunderclap, each inhalation and exhalation a grating windstorm.
They had made love like forces of nature, like storm fronts colliding. They shifted as one entity between dimensions of heaven. In Simon, she had found what she had sought for eternities.
In his sleep he turned, draped his arm over her back, instinctively pulled her closer to him. She smiled, more content than she had been in… Ever.
She let sleep wash over her, knowing that tomorrow they would start the journey to Diablo. There was a long, cold road ahead of them, but together, she thought they could walk forever and never tire. She drifted off to sleep with a smile on her face and Simon in her thoughts.
“What’ll it be, Ms. Jennings?”
“Oh, I don’t drink.” She folded her hands on the bar.
West frowned, pulling a dusty bottle of something brown and alcoholic from the dusty shelf of a dusty bar on the dusty main street of a dusty dead town. “Well, that’s a shame. You’ll have to start.” He unscrewed the top of the bottle, took a small pull, and painfully swallowed the amber liquid. He coughed, eyes squinted, eyebrows arched at the awful, wonderful taste, covering his mouth with the back of his right hand as his left hand gingerly placed the cover back on the bottle and put the bottle back on the shelf. “Or maybe not.”
She smiled a sad smile of silver and terrible metal lace. “My mother was an alcoholic. They did a pretty good job of covering that one up. The Kennedy tradition.”
West turned from the wall of bottles. “I’m sorry. I had no idea—”
“Don’t worry about it. No one knew. But feel free to have a drink; don’t abstain just for my sake.”
West sat down on a stool behind the bar facing Patra. He adjusted the wick of an ancient oil lantern they had found in an antiques store on the main street of town. It illuminated the bar with murky, somehow foul light. They had no reason to be here, but somehow it felt so right. This was one of the few remaining buildings of Diablo, and as such, it was one of the first last ties to humanity that they had seen in days. The force of the shattering spire had flattened almost everything in its path. Fortunately, Diablo was located on the other side of the mountain, so it had been somewhat sheltered from the blast. The bar was a sturdy concrete block building. No frills, but sturdy. And still here. So they sat in an abandoned bar in an abandoned town in an abandoned world. Anywhere was better than beneath the mountain in that alien vessel.
“Oh, what the hell.” West reached behind him, took down a bottle of Remy-Martin champagne cognac. “Classy stuff for a beer-town like Diablo.” With some resignation he saw a tap behind the bar for the beer of his youth, Killian’s Irish Red. How tragic that electricity had rendered the kegs of beer below the bar useless flat piss-water weeks ago. He pulled a dusty glass from under the top of the bar, wiped it off with his rough drab sleeve. He filled the glass partway with the syrupy amber liquid. He reached under the bar again and pulled out an unexpected surprise for Patra: a warm glass bottle of Pepsi. There was a case of the drink underneath the bar, looking strangely out of place.
He swirled the cognac around the inside of the glass, admired its color. He held it up before Patra, who had opened her Pepsi. “Here’s to…” West frowned, not really knowing what to toast to anymore.
“Here’s to fellow travelers.” Patra smiled widely, her glimmering eyes searching West for approval. He smiled in return. “To fellow travelers.” The clink of glass and the sweet fire of cognac filled the cool evening air.
West sighed, content for the moment, leaned back on his stool. “What this place needs is a mean old bartender with a shotgun behind the bar, some crazy leather-clad Hell’s Angels playing pool, and a jukebox that only plays country unless you want to get yourself beaten with a pool cue in the parking lot.” He squinted, leaned over and reached for something out of Patra’s line of sight. Patra was not surprised when he pulled a sawed-off shotgun from underneath the bar. West laughed, eyebrows raised, placed it back. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad. Where’s the Kenny Rogers albums?”
Patra grinned, took another drink from the Pepsi bottle, swallowed slowly. “This really is pretty bad stuff. Must have been sitting here forever.”
“Not much call for soda pop in a working man’s town.” Patra noted how the cognac glass rested gently in West’s upturned palm, stem nestled between middle and ring fingers. Very civilized. “Trust me on that one.”
“Where are they? The miners, the soldiers, anyone?”
West sipped slowly, contemplative. He cleared his throat and looked into his glass. “Well, I’d suspect that they’re in places very much like the place you were.”
“The tower? All those ships—”
“I saw hundreds of those vessels dropping off human payloads at that one tower. I doubt it was the only one. The planet’s probably covered with them.”
“What are they for?”
“You know as much as I do, if not more. As far as I can tell, the humans are gathered in those towers, where the light changes them into—,” West looked over Patra’s silver body, “—metal. Some kind of liquid metal that becomes part of the ship. That metal came out of the walls and turned into more of those black things. I saw them come out of the walls. The vessel must use the human body as an energy source to create the… monsters. Aliens. Whatever the hell they are.” He looked out at nothing, beyond Patra to the darkness in the far corners of the room. He took a slow sip of his drink, blinked and roused himself from his reverie.
Patra pushed her drink away, wrung her hands in her lap. “I would’ve become one of those monsters if you hadn’t saved me. I would’ve melted into the walls of that tower and turned into one of those monsters.” Her voice had gotten considerably quieter, as if she were talking only to herself. “What am I now?”
West reached out, took her cold metal-laced hand. “You’re safe, Patra. You aren’t one of those things. You’re alive, you’re human, you’re—”
“Am I?” She looked up into West’s eyes with a gaze like a machine. Her voice, her eyes… West did not know what she was. He just knew that she needed someone to hold her hand, no matter how inhuman it felt.
“You are to me.” He tightened his hold on her hand, and they sat in the dead bar for a while longer, listening to the sound of nothing and feeling the endless cold of the night.
An inhalation. A pause. An exhalation.
He felt her breath on the small of his neck. Her eyelashes, closed, were small brushes on his cheek. Her eyes danced to the music of an unknown dream as she slept. He held her tightly, and she moved in her sleep instinctively to get closer to him in the cool night air. He watched her, the wordless beauty of sleep, the carefree face of an angel. His lips explored the landscape of her face, and found themselves lightly pressed to her forehead. The scar of her eye was obscured in the night. Her shallow breathing both warmed him and gave rise to a stippled field of gooseflesh on his forearms. He pulled the blanket over them, locking out the night and holding in the warmth their bodies radiated together.
In the darkness, the veiled moonlight bathed him. The intimate scent of woman, the magical feel of her pressed against him in the night. He had completed his cartographic mission of exploring every inch of her face and he had moved on to more remote climes. He stared into her closed eyes. She moved in her sleep and he rolled onto his back. She followed, Simon feeling the sweep of her cold-erect nipples, until chest to chest they lay, naked bodies entwining, her head nestling snugly into the hollow beneath his chin. Her hair was the intoxicating and improbable scent of lilacs, and he inhaled deeply, letting a chill go through him. It was getting colder, but they basked in each other’s warmth in the dead night air. He was more content than he’d been in…
So, so long.
He did not know what the next few days would bring. It was obvious that the planet was dying, growing colder each day. The sunshine was impossibly dim; the sky above them had begun to re-grow the hideous silver black violet web. They had to get off this dead planet. They had to get to Diablo.
Oh Maggie, do you know what you do to me?
He kissed her in the night and let sleep take him under its suffocating black wings.
“Do you dance?”
