fifty of them-and she was alone.
Occasionally on those frequent rest breaks, Jerusha would use her wild card ability to restore the jungle growth along their trail in hopes that it would make them more difficult to follow. Hopefully, they weren’t being followed; hopefully, Rusty’s tactic would work and the Leopard Men would follow him instead.
It was the blind joker Waikili who made Jerusha wonder. He came up to her hours after they’d begun their march, tugging on her safari jacket. “They coming, Bibbi Jerusha,” he said to her in imperfect French, seeming almost to stare at her with the blank, dark skin of his face. “They coming after us.”
She could see the fear radiating out into the group at his words, all of them whispering to each other, a few breaking out into terrified wails and tears. “Shh…” she told them. “Cesar, tell them they must be quiet. Waikili, how can you know this?”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t have eyes, but I feel them here.” He tapped his forehead. “They find the camp. They following the steel man, but some of them follow us, too.”
“You’re just guessing, Waikili,” Jerusha said desperately. “You can’t know. It’s not possible.” Even as she said it, she worried that she was wrong, that the joker Waikili might have also been a hidden ace.
Waikili shook his head into her denial. “I know,” he repeated. “I am not wrong.”
Jerusha bit at her lower lip. They were all staring at her now. “All right,” she said. “If they’re following us, then we just need to move faster than they do. They won’t catch us. Come on, we’ve rested enough. Let’s go.”
The Santa Cruz Islands
Solomon Islands
“What’s that?” sprout asked.
They had come to a high point: a dinosaur-back hump of volcanic ash bedded on sandstone that showed through down by the beach. The island was forested and densely undergrown. Its nearest neighbor lay over sixty miles away and, key, it was uninhabited except for monkeys, tropical birds that were equally loud to ears and eyes, and a colony of wiry skittish goats. Nobody ever came here.
That was a vaguely cruciform mound grown over with tough native grass. Only the double-vaned tail betrayed its real nature. “A B-25 bomber, honey,” Tom said. The son of a successful, hard-charging Air Force general, his… predecessor… had been an avid warplane buff as a kid. And Tom had access to some of his memories, though not all. Especially the early ones.
“What’s that?” his daughter asked him.
My daughter, he thought, defying his tormentor of the night before. “A warplane for dropping bombs. They fought a lot of battles around here during World War II. This plane was probably based at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, a few hundred miles from here. Must’ve been shot down.”
He hadn’t come here just to give the lie to the old hippie’s reproach. Sending those kids after the aces who had smashed Nyunzu had given him a pang. They were aces themselves, sure, and some of them were scary as shit, but they were still kids.
He needed to hear Sprout’s voice, feel her hand in his, see the pure and innocent love in her clear blue eyes.
“Will they bomb us?”
He laughed and led her away. “I don’t think so, sweetie. They better not, or Daddy’ll teach ’em better!”
“Which Daddy?” she asked, her eyes huge and solemn beneath the sun hat Mrs. Clark insisted she wear.
It took him a moment to register the question. Then it hit him like a punch in the nuts. “What do you mean, honey? I’m your daddy.”
Mulishly she shook her head, making her ponytail flap from shoulder to shoulder of her blue-and-white sundress. “My real daddy. I miss him. Why can’t I see him?”
“I’m your real daddy. The only daddy you got.”
“I want my real daddy! You made him go away! You’re mean. Ow-you’re hurting me!”
From orbit the island was invisible amid the ocean’s endless blue. The Radical screamed. No one could hear. He launched a sunbeam at a random angle into the atmosphere, saw it flare briefly as air turned incandescent.
Feeling the prickle of capillaries bursting under the skin and a tickle in his eyeballs he flashed down, drew a deep breath, and back. Then west, against the Earth’s rotation, crossing the terminator into darkness.
Hanging above North Africa he found the pale green blotch of the Sudd. He flashed to twenty thousand feet, scanning the Earth like a hungry eagle.
He found a Caliphate Multiple Launch Rocket System battery isolated from its main force. Bad move. Like Judgment he appeared among them, spread screams and fire and death and left fireworks lighting the sky behind him.
He felt much better then.
Somewhere in the Jungle
Vietnam
Aliyah lay beside him in the bed, tracing Ellen’s fingers across his bare chest. They were both naked, apart from the earring. The sun was pressing in at the window. Her body was warm and soft and comforting, curled against him. Ellen’s right breast lay exposed by the folds of blanket, the nipple reacting to the cold now instead of their play. He popped a wasp free, sent it looping through the still air, and then back down onto his belly and into the flesh. Up, loop, back. Up, loop, back.
“What are you thinking?” Aliyah asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just grooving on the postcoital bliss.”
“Did you have a fight?”
“You mean ever in my life?”
“I mean since we were together last.”
“Ah,” Bugsy said. “Well, yes. On the plane, Nick and I had a little slap-fight. I talked it over with Ellen last night.”
It was the nice way to put it. Talked it over sounded so much better than had a knock-down, drag-out, emotional dramafest. And still, Ellen had woken up this morning, put in the earring, and Aliyah had come to bed. And they’d fucked. Which was part of the problem.
I don’t have a girlfriend, he’d said at the height of the argument. A girlfriend is someone you spend time with. Me? I have a sex toy that you take out of the closet when you want to pretend you’re with Nick.
He didn’t remember now exactly what Ellen had said back. Something about Bugsy thinking with his dick. But now this. Aliyah. Maybe he should have gotten up, gotten dressed, shown her the bug-and-bicycle sights of rural Vietnam. The impulse had been there, but then she’d put her hand on his cock, and there had been a bunch of other impulses instead.
Or maybe Ellen had just wanted some time to pretend she was with Nick. And who the hell was he to tell her that was a bad thing?
“You’re angry with her,” Aliyah said.
“Nah. I’m just tired. Long plane rides always fuck me up for a couple days. And…”
“Is it me?”
He shifted to look at her. Ellen’s face took on a softness when Aliyah was wearing it. He tried to remember whether she’d been that vulnerable when she was alive. He didn’t think so. Something about being dead must make a girl less secure about herself.
“It’s not you,” he said. “You’re great. You’ve just got some lousy roommates.”
The knock on the door was gentle. Aliyah pulled the blankets up just as Billy’s skinned head poked through. Bugsy could feel the tension in her body and remembered that she’d never met the joker. That had been Ellen.
“Sorry, man. We’re running a little late. We’ll be down in a minute,” Bugsy said.
“No trouble,” Billy said. “But if we’re going to get there before the curator gets pissed off, we’d better get it swinging.”
“Five minutes,” Bugsy said, and the corpse monkey withdrew. Bugsy’s fellow joker. Aliyah leaned forward and kissed him slow. “I know I have to go,” she said. “But listen. Whatever’s bothering you? Don’t let it get you down, okay?”
