Krokodil Tears

Dr Proctor rolled away, and lay face up, staring at the sun.

'Me? I'm your Jesse, Hawk.'

'No, you have enacted the prophecy of the Moon and the Crocodile. You can be named Jesse no more.'

'So, I'll take a new name, like one of those ghetto kids trying to be a Russian musickie.'

Hawk was afraid of this new Jesse, but he fought his fear.

'I shall call myself…'

There was no cloud in the sky now.

'…Krokodil.'

PART FIVE: KROKODIL

I

Joaquin Salazar took off his straw hat and rubbed his sweaty forehead with an oily rag, squinting in the noonday sun. Hawk-That-Settles checked the cartons Joaquin had brought out to Santa de Nogueira in his battered pick-up. Canned goods, mostly, and twenty five-litre plastic containers of guaranteed pure-ish water.

'Will she sit up there all day?' Joaquin asked, peering up at the figure squatting on the roof of the chapel.

'Maybe,' Hawk shrugged. 'Help me get the water inside before it boils in this heat.'

'Sure thing, Senor.'

Hawk picked up two containers, and humped them into the main hall of the monastery.

The hollow man was inside, just sitting at the table, carving intricate statuettes of cartoon characters with a pocketshiv.

'Ottokar,' Hawk said. 'Give us a hand.'

Dr Proctor looked up, smiled and went out to help Joaquin without saying a word.

Sometimes, Hawk felt he was sharing Santa de Nogueira with a pair of voiceless robots. Krokodil sat on the roof all day and all night, looking to the horizon. Dr Proctor made his carvings. And Hawk-That-Settles looked after the pair of them.

When the water was safely stowed in the perpetually shaded depths of the building, and Joaquin was loaded up with last month's empties, the Mexican deliveryman drove off. He was obviously uncomfortable around the monsters, and wouldn't even consider Hawk's offer of tequila.

Hawk was drinking more now. It was the boredom. That was what had nudged Two-Dogs-Dying towards the bottle on the Reservation. Hawk couldn't get enough tequila brought out to Santa de Nogueira to keep him as drunk as his father had usually been, but he rationed his supply carefully and usually managed to keep the fug in his brain and the fire on his tongue.

Hawk watched Joaquin go. He couldn't remember whether Krokodil or Dr Proctor had spoken at all this month. Joaquin was probably the only person he ever had a conversation with these days. And Indians were supposed to be iron-willed men of few words and many deeds.

The pick-up zig-zagged across the desert, keeping to the rocky patches and away from the treacherous sands. On his first trip out, Joaquin had brought his sons and taken away Dr Proctor's sandcat and all its contents. That had been enough to cover six months provisions. The Salazar family were probably the highest-charging grocery service in the world, Hawk suspected. Last month, Joaquin had announced that the funds generated by the sandcat were at an end, and Hawk had had to hand over the DeLorean Agency tank Krokodil had been driving when they first met. He had negotiated nine months worth of food and water in return for a machine that, with all its inbuilt weapons systems, should pick up twenty or thirty million dollars when smuggled down into Mexico and sold to some would-be generalissimo. When the nine months were up, Hawk didn't know what he would do. By then, he hoped Krokodil would have decided the time had come to return to the world and they could rob a few yakuza filling stations for a grubstake. If not, he would have to fashion a bow and arrows and go out for desert game. He had eaten a catrat or two in his time, but had no wish to revert to the diet. Also, he was a terrible shot.

Joaquin bounced over the horizon, and his sputtering engine noise faded out. Santa de Nogueira was as still and silent as the depths of the sea. This had all been under the sea once. You could still find seashells out under the sand, and the fossil remnants of marine creatures. That had been before the Americas rose out of the water. Hawk had heard that the continent was going down again. Most of the South-East was under a foot of rancid saltwater, and there was a tidal barrage wall around New York City. Eventually, the waters would rush back in a deluge, and swamp everything. After a million years, the tide would come back in. In one of the newsfaxes Joaquin packed his beets in, Hawk read that scientists were rediscovering species long thought extinct. Back in the '20s, they had found the coelacanth, but now there were shoals of trilobites in the Florida Keys. It was as if evolution were throwing itself into reverse gear, as the planet readapted itself for a new prehistory.

He turned away from the gates, and walked back to the hall. Dr Proctor was slumped against one of the interior walls, taking one of his siestas, a makeshift coolie hat of threaded newsfax over his head. He had lost some of his bulk, and tanned like a Mexican. In his torn white pyjamas, he could easily slip over the Rio Grande wall and get lost down amid the latino millions, evading forever the vast, country-wide manhunt that was still searching for him. He hadn't killed anybody since last year, so many of the authorities were listing him as 'presumed dead.' Krokodil could have killed him at any time, but had never bothered with it. Sometimes, Hawk wondered just how harmless Dr Ottokar Proctor had become since his defeat. He was like a bright four-year-old, mainly keeping to himself but genuinely eager to please. Hawk supposed he was cured, but it was a cure he himself wouldn't have been happy to take. Remembering their guest's earlier career, Hawk occasionally considered slitting his throat just in case. But he didn't. He was an Indian, and he couldn't get rid of all the old ways. The insane were touched by the Great Spirits, and thus sacred.

Krokodil had changed too. Since her elevation to the Sixth Level of Spirituality, the former Jessamyn Bonney had had very little to do with the world. She drank her water and ate her beans, and she stared at the sun and the moon like a ship's look-out waiting for a sail to appear in the blue distance. Otherwise, she just sat while her clothes rotted on her back and her hair grew down to her ankles. She didn't come to his cot in the night any more, having outgrown love when she progressed beyond all other human concerns. Five times in the first four montils after Jesse's transformation, Hawk-That-Settles had left the monsters to their own devices for a few days and walked to Firecreek, the nearest collection of three huts and a gas station that called itself a town, where he traded catrat pelts for tequila, smacksynth and a night with a half-Mex, half-white girl who called herself the Hot Enchilada. But each time he had been more concerned with what Krokodil and Dr Proctor might get up to in his absence. When Krokodil's sail appeared, he knew he had to be there.

His father had come to him in a dream, half his head hanging loose, and told him that he was the last of his line, and that he must stay with the moon woman until the end of her evolutionary cycle. When she surpassed the Seventh Level, he would be allowed to go free and return to the Reservation to bury Two-Dogs with honour. Oh, incidentally, his father added, I'm dead now.

Still, sometimes he wondered whether the Hot Enchilada couldn't be persuaded to move out to Santa de Nogueira for the while.

Dr Proctor had stopped calling him 'Tonto,' but that was who he was beginning to feel like as he cooked, washed up and housekept for Krokodil. He had been her teacher when they first met, and now he was her domestic slave, never told anything but expected to be at the ready when Kemo Sabe decided it was time to ride off on Silver and rout the rustlers.

It was not yet one in the afternoon. Hawk looked, as he did hundreds of times every day, through the window at Krokodil's perch. She was so unmoving, she might as well have been a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Her hair was growing around her like a luxurious tent.

He opened up a carton with his fingernail, and pulled out a bottle. His last one had been empty a week