deserters. I can’t blame you for being afraid of him, but I really think you ought to cut your losses and come quietly now. The fool mortal wrecked my boat; perhaps one of these has an automobile we can appropriate?”
Uncle Jacques shook his head, and the man said, “Too bad. We’ll just have to walk out then.”
“You don’t understand,” said Uncle Jacques, “I’m not surrendering to you. I’m giving you a message to deliver. If Budu won’t come to me, tell me where he is and I’ll go straight to him. Where is he, Arion?”
The man he called Arion grinned and shrugged. He said, “All right; you’ve caught me in a lie. The truth is, we don’t know where the old man’s got to. He’s dropped out of sight. Labienus has been holding the rebellion together. Wouldn’t you really rather surrender to him? He’s quite a bit more understanding. I’d even call him tolerant, compared to old Budu, who as you know never forgave doubters and weaklings…”
Then Uncle Jacques demanded to know how long this person called Budu had been missing, and when Arion hemmed and hawed he cut him off short with another question, which was: “He was gone before the war, wasn’t he?”
And Arion said, “Probably.”
Uncle Jacques showed his teeth and said, “I knew it. I knew he’d never have given that order! Who was that behind the wheel of the archduke’s car, Arion? Was that Labienus’s man? The epidemic, was that Labienus too?”
His voice was louder than thunder, making the walls rattle; Lanark and I had to clutch at our ears, it hurt so. Arion had stopped smiling at him. He said, like you’d order a dog, “Control yourself! Did you really think history could be changed? Labienus simply arranged it so that things fell out to our advantage. Isn’t that what the Company’s always done? And be glad he developed that virus! Can you imagine how badly the mortals would be faring right now, if those twenty-two million hadn’t died of influenza first? Think of all those extra mouths to be fed in the bread lines.”
Uncle Jacques said. “But innocents died,” and Arion just laughed scornfully and said:
“None of them are innocent.”
I swear, Uncle Jacques’s eyes were like two coals. He said, “My son died in that epidemic,” and Arion said:
“Your pet mortal died. They do die. Get over it. Look at you, hiding out here on the edge of nowhere! Labienus is willing to overlook your defection. He’ll offer you a much better deal than the Company might, I assure you. Unless you’d like to be deactivated? Is that what you’d prefer, to crawl back on your knees to all-merciful Zeus for oblivion?”
Uncle Jacques just told him to get out.
But Arion said, “Don’t be stupid! He knows where you are. What am I going to have to do before you’ll see reason?”
He looked at Lanark, who was just sitting there gaping, and then over at me. I wanted to dive behind the bar, but I knew the shotgun wouldn’t stop him. Uncle Jacques said, “You’re going to kill them anyway.”
Arion sighed. He said, “You chose to hide behind them, Lavalle. But you can save them unnecessary suffering, you see? I’m tired, I’m cold, we’ve got a long walk ahead of us and I want that mortal’s coat. Don’t make me wait any longer than I have to, or I’ll pull off his remaining arm. Let’s go, shall we?”
I guess that was when Uncle Jacques took his chance. I couldn’t see, because they were both suddenly moving so fast they were only blurs in the air, but things began to smash, and I threw myself down on the floor and just prayed to Jesus.
They don’t fight like us. You would think, being the creatures that they are, that they’d shoot lightning at each other, or fight with flaming swords, but it sounded more like a couple of animals snarling and struggling. Once when the fight got too close to me, I saw the wall panel next to my head just burst outward in splinters, and a second later there were four long gashes there, like a bear had clawed it. You can still see it, down near the floor, where we filled it in with wood putty later.
I don’t know how long it lasted. Suddenly it got a whole lot louder, as something crashed straight down through the ceiling and there was a new voice screaming, shrill as a banshee. Right after that there was a wet-sounding thud and then it was quiet.
You can bet I was cautious as I got up and peered over the bar. There was Uncle Jacques, sitting up supported by Aunty Irina kneeling beside him, and he had his hand up to his face and it looked like one of his eyes was gone. She was still snarling at Arion, who lay on the floor with his throat slashed open, and she had got a crowbar from somewhere and run it through his chest, too. There was blood everywhere.
Lanark was still where he’d been sitting, wide-eyed and white-faced. I heard footsteps above and looked up to see Miss Harlan peering down through the hole in the ceiling, and by the light of the kerosene lantern she was pretty pale too. God only knows what I looked like, but my hair had come half down and was full of dust and splinters.
I collected myself enough to say, “That’s one of those people you’re hiding from,” to Aunty Irina. She looked up, I guess startled at the sound of a human voice, and after a moment she said yes, it was.
I found a clean rag and brought it for Uncle Jacques, who pressed it to his eye and thanked me. He got unsteadily to his feet, and I saw his coat was about half ripped off his back, just hanging in ribbons. The skin underneath seemed to be healing, though. The edges of his cuts were running together like melting wax.
I said, “At least you got the bastard,” and Aunty Irina shook her head grimly. She said:
“He’s just in fugue,” and I looked at Arion and saw that the wound in his throat was already closing up. Aunty Irina made a disgusted noise. She drew a knife from her boot and cut his jugular again. It only bled a little this time, I guess because he didn’t have a lot of blood come back to flow yet.
I asked, “What happens now?” and Uncle Jacques said hoarsely:
“We’ll have to run again.” He looked around at the mess of the bar and added, “I’m sorry.”
Lanark began to cry then, that dry hacking men cry with, and I knew he’d been scared clean out of his mind. Aunty Irina went over to him and took his face in both her hands and kissed him, a deep kiss like they were lovers, and then she stared into his eyes and talked to him quietly. He began to blink and look confused.
Uncle Jacques meanwhile crouched with a groan and took Arion by the feet, starting to drag him backwards toward the door.
Aunty Irina turned quickly and said, “Leave that. You just sit and repair your eye.”
He said. “Okay,” and sat down, breathing pretty hard. They feel pain as much as we do, you see.
What happened was that we had to do it, me and Aunty Irina, and as we were dragging the body out through the lobby Miss Harlan came down with the lantern and helped us. Every so often as we took him up the road to the sawmill, he’d start moving a little, and we’d have to stop while Aunty Irina cut him again. The wind almost blew out the lantern and the rain soaked us through. Still, we got him up there at last.
We found a couple of old rusty saws in an office, and they didn’t work real well, but Aunty Irina showed us how to do it so he’d come apart in a couple of places. She explained how nothing could kill him, but the more damage we did, the longer it’d be before he could piece himself together to come after her and Uncle Jacques. So we did a lot to him. It was hard work, just three women there working by one kerosene lantern, and the rain coming through the roof the whole time in steady streams.
You don’t think women could do something like that? You don’t know the things we have to do, sometimes. And knowing the kind of creature he was made it easier.
Most of him we dropped down a pit, and used the old crane to send a couple of redwood logs after him, and I reckon they weighed a couple of tons apiece. I’m not telling you where we put the rest of him.
It might have been near dawn when we finished and came back, but it was still black as midnight, and the storm wasn’t letting up. There were two empty bottles on the bar and Lanark had passed out on the floor. Uncle Jacques had made himself an eyepatch. He said it’d be likely another day before he got his eye working again.
I offered to fix them some breakfast before they set out. They thanked me kindly but said they had better not. They gave us some careful instructions, me and Miss Harlan, about what to look out for and what to say to anybody else who came looking around. They told us some other stuff, too, like what that awful Hitler was going to do pretty soon and about International Business Machines stocks. Cut off from the world like we were, we couldn’t make a lot of use of it, but it was nice of them.
And they apologized. They said they’d only been trying to make the world a better place for people, and it had all gone wrong somehow.
I got one of Papa’s coats down for Uncle Jacques, and he shrugged out of the bloody torn one he had on. I
