She hums tonelessly above him, breaking into an occasional hoarse laugh.
He works backward from her to either end of the beam and finds it, the thick rope that is nearly invisible in the shadows. The light cannot find the upper end at all. Loping to it, he gives a tug and it holds. It took her weight, he tells himself. Securing the flash in his jacket, he yanks harder and still it holds. Hand over hand he goes up, tentatively at first until he trusts the rope and then with a powerful quickness.
Watching, she shrieks with witchy laughter and urges him on. Halfway up, something plummets in his peripheral vision and he freezes. Not her, falling—something lighter that lands with a little thump. Something else flutters by. If it’s a bat they’ve somehow disturbed, it’s too woozy to fly for shit. He wants to use his light to make sure she’s okay but he needs both hands to stay on the rope.
“Deanie!” he shouts.
She snickers. Her light clicks on and he sees her standing on the beam. She’s holding the flash in one hand like it was Lady Liberty’s torch and she’s taken off her coat and shirts. It was clothing that fell past him.
“Shit,” he mutters, closing his eyes.
He sees her still, her partial nudity as blinding as a burst of light in his eyes, the afterimage painful on his retinas. The rope creaks with his weight as he hangs there. It hurts his hands. He has to go up or down; he can’t stay where he is.
“Deanie, what’d you do that for?”
She doesn’t answer.
He opens his eyes and she’s crouched on the beam, eyes shut tight, toking deep, oblivious to the fact she’s balancing on a shit-greasy beam thirty feet above the ground. With her gypsy headrag, her rings and chains, her bare torso is somehow natural. She looks as if she might have flown up there, maybe on the back of some fallen angel, for some demonic purpose—lay the devil’s eggs up there maybe.
“If I go back down, will you come down on your own?”
She shakes her head. “You come up, take a hit of this shit, then I’ll come down. Go first, if you want.”
“Why don’t I just go call the cops and let them bring you down?”
She giggles. “Oh Samgod, you don’t want to do that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She comes to her feet and then to her toes. “Guess.” She raises her arms and the trail of her flashlight beam is like a strobe, showing him briefly the lift of her breasts, the tufts in her armpits. “I wish I could fly.”
Sam moves then, climbing the rope as if he were being timed by a nasty drill sergeant. He passes the beam and then lets himself down onto it. As soon as he steps on it, the Mutant retreats a few paces.
“Don’t move,” he says. “Please.”
The beam seems solid but he stands still a moment, waiting for the sound of cracking. Below him it’s totally dark. Taking out his flashlight, he turns it an oblique angle to her so as not to suddenly blind her. Or see her bare breasts too directly. It’s just as disturbing when the light finds her from the side. He doesn’t point it downward. He doesn’t want to see how far up he is.
“I’m not chasing you. Come to me.”
She saunters toward him, holding her arms out a little from her sides. Her nipples are rigid little bumps. Hastily he raises his eyes to her face. His cock is thickening—as much a weird reaction to the adrenaline rush of his terror of heights as it is from the sight of her trembling little peaks. Her eyes are as dark and depthless as the void below them. Just beyond his reach, she stops and takes a long hit from the roach. The tang of the smoke makes his nose itch and he is afraid he’s going to sneeze.
“Hurry up,” Sam urges her, “it’s frigging cold and I’m scared shitless up here. Gimme the goddamn roach and let’s get off this goddamn thing.”
“Don’t grab me,” she warns.
He nods. He has no intention of unbalancing them with stupid heroics.
“Put your arm around me,” she instructs, “slow.”
He encircles her waist so they are side by side, hip to hip.
She raises the roach to his lips. “Come on, now, it’ll feel good.”
For a fraction of a second, the damp paper touches his lip and then he spits it off forcefully. It disappears into darkness. Crying out, she leans after it but he has her firmly by the waist. They sway on the beam. She clings to him tightly in terror and he holds on for them both. After the echo of her cry, he hears his own violent heartbeat in the silence. Her face crushed against his ribs, she hears it too. She sniggers.
It takes him a couple of tries to be able to speak. “Come on, you’re scared too.”
She moves his hand up to her breast. “Wanna check?”
He snatches his hand away. “Cut it out.”
She slides by him to the rope, giggling at the feel of his hard-on against her hipbone. He listens to every inch of her descent. When her high-tops thump the floor, he closes his eyes in relief. Then he takes his guts in his hands and starts down after her.
10
Every creak of the rope is discrete in his ears, as he strains for the sound of strands snapping. By the time he drops off it onto solid ground, he is praying under his breath—automatically, without conviction, just begging any god that might be out
