“What’s your name?” he asked the woman.
“Does it matter?”
“Sure.”
He wrapped her in a blanket. She was small and shivering, her hair long and straight, dishwater blonde. She had a nice face, blue eyes, girl-next-door pretty but despondent as hell. Something in her had been yanked out and crushed.
“Maria,” she said.
“Slaughter.”
She did not look at him. She looked at the floor. She did not speak, he soon realized, unless she was spoken to. She acted like some of the weaklings he remembered from prison. The bitch-boys and punks that the hardtimers used as girlfriends. She was like them: trained, silent, obedient. Not a shred of defiance in her.
“Were you a camp woman?”
She looked up at him. “I was a whore to be used.”
Jesus. Thoroughly broken.
“I suppose that’s what you want,” she said, lifting her shirt and exposing two pert breasts that were grimy and sullied by purple bruises.
He pulled her shirt back down. “I got other things on my mind right now.”
“You’re not going to rape me?” she said.
“Honey, I never raped anyone in my life,” he told her. “It was always given to me, I never had to take it.”
He felt a foolish, almost boyish and immature need to brag of his sexual conquests to her. The club runs and parties back in the old days. All the women who’d show up. Not just biker babes but hot college girls and attractive housewives looking for a ride on the wild side, looking to escape the dull confines of their ordered lily-white worlds, attracted by bad boys as women of all stripes were always attracted by bad boys. But what was the point in telling her that stuff? It would have been silly. Like a thirteen-year old kid bragging in the locker room about the handjob Betty Sue had given him in her parent’s garage. Puerile.
“You don’t have to take it, I’ll give it to you.”
“I don’t want it.”
She looked dejected. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”
“Got nothing to do with it. Right now it’s about surviving.”
She was silent for a time but he could feel her warming up to him, intrigued that he had no interest in her body. “I thought bikers always raped women.”
He laughed. “That’s what citizens always want everyone to think.” He shrugged. “Some of us do. But so do some citizens. People are people and animals are animals.”
She seemed to think about that for a time as if the idea of something like that had never occurred to her. “You killed those two people.”
“They would have killed me,” he explained. “Those two were more than happy to watch me die in the cage.”
“Yes, they were.” She stared at the rusting tin walls, pulled the blanket tighter around her. “I didn’t think anyone would ever kill Maggot. You don’t know how many people he killed and ate in there.”
“I can guess. But you can’t blame him for that. He wasn’t responsible for what he was. You give a starving dog a juicy bone and he’ll bite it. And I just bet they kept him hungry.” He shook his head. “The real monsters were outside the cage. The ones who got all hot and bothered to watch me die an ugly death.”
Slaughter was amazed by his own enlightenment. Had those Zen experiences of late changed him in some way, transformed him? He wondered if it wasn’t true. Ever since the trip on the peyote express he had been thinking differently, seeing things clearer. He had to watch that. Compassion and wisdom even were grand things, but enlightened men tended to become martyrs and he couldn’t have that. He had to keep his edge. He had to find his brothers. He had to lead them at the fortress so he could snatch the bio and set his brother free, get old Red Eye out of the hot seat.
They listened to the rain coming down as the candle burned low. It was a nice sound. He pulled the blanket up tighter and realized he was getting too comfortable. He couldn’t afford to sleep right now.
“Why did you want to stay out there?” he asked her.
Maria looked at him, then looked away. “I wanted the worms to get me.”
“Why?”
Now she did not look away. “Do you know what life has been like for me?”
He nodded. “Still…rising back up as a dead thing isn’t much of a plan.”
“It sounded okay to me.”
The rain kept falling and they could hear it sluicing in rivers and creeks, expanding into ponds and muddy bogs that would become lakes in time. Thunder boomed off and on. Water dripped from the roof.
“Listen,” Maria said.
Slaughter did. He heard nothing at first and then:
Maria was shivering. “I hate worms. I hate all worms.”
“And you were going to give yourself to them?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
The sound of the worms falling seemed to go on interminably and Slaughter was thankful for the candle. Being in the dark and not being able to see them if they breached the shack would have brought him a little too close to out-and-out madness.
But another fell, and another.
Tearing a strip off the blanket, he stood on the chair and wadded the material into the hole so no more could get in. When it was tight and impenetrable, he jumped down and smashed the intruders. They were only about an inch long, immature as all the worms that fell were, but fat and soft. Repulsive.
He sat back down and Maria clung to him. She was shivering. He pulled her tight against him and she molded right into his body, but she did not stop shaking.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“No, no I’m not.”
An hour later, the rain had stopped.
No more worms.
That part of the downfall only lasted ten or fifteen minutes and then it was pure rain again. When they stepped outside, it was still daylight. A grainy uneven daylight, but daylight all the same. The sky was pink streaked by red and scudded with indigo clouds, but it was clear, no storms on the horizon. The landscape looked like Flanders in 1915 during the height of the Great War: a great bubbling swamp of mud with corpses trapped in it, hands and limbs and sightless staring faces rising from the muck. Slaughter saw at least a dozen dead, but figured there were probably many more sunken beneath the mire.
Tomorrow night they would rise up.
“It’ll be dark before long,” Maria said. “We better find a place to hide.”
He looked at her. “The wormboys?”
“There’s other things out here,” was all she would say.
They saw a few stragglers dragging themselves through the mud, but no armed bands of Ratbags. They were either dead or scattered or lying low. And that was okay. Slaughter had already checked the load on his weapon and he had no more than ten or twelve rounds at best.
They were down in the lowest part of the compound, he saw. Almost a bowl hemmed in by rising hills. He figured none of it was natural. The Army or whoever built this place had landscaped it to resemble a battlefield of
