11.
The tall black man leaned on the ornate handle of his saber as if it were a cane. His dark eyes had a mischievous glint to them, but they were deadly serious as they studied Eric and Tracy.
'You were on Rhino's ship,' he finally said. 'Crew members?'
'Prisoners,' Eric answered.
A few people in the crowd laughed skeptically.
The black man smiled. 'We've heard that one before, skipper. Care to try a different story?'
Eric didn't respond. His chest ached as if steel claws were shredding their way through skin and bone to grab at his heart. It was taking all of his energy just to maintain consciousness. A glance at Tracy indicated that she wasn't doing much better. But he could see a spark of defiance igniting in her.
'I don't care what you've heard before, pal,' Tracy said. 'We were paddling along on our canoe when they picked us up.'
'In your canoe, huh? Like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.'
'Christ,' she sighed in exasperation. 'If you used your head as much as your mouth, you'd realize that we couldn't be part of their crew. If we were, why would we have gotten off The Centurion in a leaky canoe?'' She shifted her hip to show him the wound. 'And why would Rhino have shot me?'
The man shrugged. 'You got scared when the fighting started. Or you thought the ship would go up in flames. You panicked. Rhino shot you as deserters.'
Eric chuckled. 'We certainly weren't afraid of the Home Run destroying anything but itself.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, first, you set the timer to blow much too soon. Second, the placement of the explosives was all wrong. You had them strung out along the hull instead of in one location. Also, had you built a funnel around them, you could have blown a hole clear through The Centurion and probably have sunk her.' Eric dismissed them with a disgusted wave of his hand. 'All you managed to do was destroy your own ship and get some of your own people killed.'
The man frowned. Behind him the crowd discussed Eric's statements in urgent whispers. When the man with the saber spoke again his voice crackled with anger. 'Unfortunately we didn't have your expertise. We were just doing our best.'
'Unfortunately,' Eric nodded.
'We managed to take a couple of them out,' a man in the crowd hollered. 'Killed one myself.' The crowd responded enthusiastically to this.
Before Eric could answer, a young man began elbowing his way through the crowd. Tears of grief and anger streaked his tanned face as he pointed an accusing finger at Eric.
'He killed Teddy,' he cried. 'I saw him shoot an arrow through him.'
'I saw him too,' a woman said, grabbing the young man by the shoulders. Eric recognized her as the older woman aboard the Home Run.
'What about that?' the black man asked. 'Is it true?'
'I did shoot somebody, I don't know who.'
'Whose side was he on? Ours or theirs?'
'I couldn't tell.'
The black man was incredulous. 'You couldn't tell, but you shot him anyway?'
'He shot him,' Tracy jumped in, 'because the man was burning alive, a human torch, for God's sake. All Eric tried to do was save him a few minutes of agony.'
The black man looked at the woman. 'Rachel?'
She nodded. 'That's the way it looked to me, Blackjack. I just wanted to hear it to be certain.'
Blackjack stared at Eric and Tracy, pinching absently at the whiskered skin under his chin. Finally he turned his back and started out the door. 'Bring them along,' he ordered.
'This might sound selfish,' Blackjack smiled, passing the canteen to Tracy, 'but the quakes are the best thing that could have happened to me.'
Tracy swigged the warm water, swallowing greedily. When she finished, she wiped the excess water from her chin with her palm and said, 'Care to explain?'
'Maybe.' Blackjack's smile widened, displaying more teeth. 'If you live.'
The three of them were sitting in the middle of a huge room the size of a warehouse that once had been the busy main floor of stockbrokers Finch, Levy, and Treemont. The overworked office staff had snidely referred to it as LAX Annex, calling the path that ran down the middle of the room between the rows of cubicles, The Runway. The Runway continued out of the main room down a corridor, passed the Xerox room, the Conference Room, the Executive Lounge, and finally halted at the private offices of Finch, Levy, and Treemont. Seven years ago Treemont had convinced his partners to take offices in this building because it was quakeproof. He'd been right; hardly any damage had been done to it from the shock of the quakes. However, Treemont, a short stubby man who'd only recently begun to battle his 'blossoming behind,' as his wife called it, by three-times-a-week workouts on Nautilus
equipment, had been trampled to death on The Runway after the second quake. Forty-three full-time employees, herded together with twelve part-timers and a Xerox repairwoman, had each contributed a footprint or two to the crushed body. Finch had tried to help his partner, but had been too late. The third partner, Levy, had actually been one of the first to stomp on Treemont in his own dash to the exit. Not that it mattered. None of the partners was alive by the end of the day.
The office had originally been designed to house fifty desks, each partitioned off to form semiprivate cubicles, each with its own telephone and video terminal plugged into the company's vast digital computer system. The interior designer had assured the partners that this setup would provide a sense of privacy yet still give the employees the feeling they were being watched. 'Guaranteed maximum efficiency,' the designer had winked.
The screens were all gone now, neatly stacked against the far wall as if the building's new residents thought they might someday come in handy again. Each little cubicle had a blanket or a flap of carpet hanging down to close it off from the rest and to form tiny apartments. The desks remained, serving triple duty as dressers, dining tables, and sometimes beds for the children. Behind a few partitions, Eric could see a lantern casting a silhouette on the sheet or blanket that was both door and wall. A few feet away, he saw the outline of a woman breast- feeding her hungry baby.
Despite the ventilation provided by the shattered glass, the room still was heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies and smoke from the lanterns. Eric didn't mind the odor, having endured far worse in 'Nam. Curiously, the smell of these bodies was different than those on The Centurion. Orientals claim they can barely stand the smell of Americans due to their heavy consumption of meat, compared with the lighter eastern diets of fish and vegetables. That lighter scent was what Eric smelled here, earthy but sweet. He realized for the first time how healthy and well fed they all looked, though he'd seen no animals. They must catch a hell of a lot of fish, he thought.
'Can you think of any reason why we should let you live?' Blackjack asked. The three of them were sitting in his cubicle. The ratty beach towel with CALIFORNIA: A STATE OF MIND printed in electric blue over a smiling surfer was flipped open so the two armed guards could watch Eric and Tracy closely. The woman held a spear, the man a compound bow. Blackjack casually continued, 'Any reason we shouldn't toss you back into the ocean, sans canoe?'
'I can't see any advantage to killing us,' Eric responded, just as casually.
'Christ,' Tracy said. 'Listen to you two. We're talking about killing, goddamn it. And you two sound as if you were discussing a garage sale.'
'She's right, of course,' Blackjack agreed. 'It is so uncivilized. But that doesn't change anything. As Walter Cronkite used to say, 'That's the way it is.' As far as I can see, you two are damaged goods.' He pointed at Tracy's nasty hip wound. 'In her condition, she wouldn't bring me much at an auction. And you, sport…' He nodded at Eric's chest. The blood had soaked through the bandages and blotted through his shirt. 'You aren't exactly fit.'
