APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (65 page)

             
Arlington’s own ship flew a jolly roger from its radio antenna and had the hand painted words ‘Nita Marie’ carefully scribed on its stern. He had commissioned Tony Pena to use his ample artistic abilities else it would have looked like a first grader’s finger painting.

Arlington
had initially been wary of how he would be perceived being with Juanita because of her size, but she had a heart twice the size of a normal person and she helped keep him sharp; not to mention that he really liked her breasts, real or not. She in turn didn’t mind his masses of horribly drawn tattoos or his back woods way of speaking. It was his good heart that had drawn her to stay with him; that and, Laptu.

             
When not on their ship they also called Easter Island home. The new inhabitants here never looked down on the odd couple for their difference in size. Here, she wasn’t a midget. Here she wasn’t Juanita the circus freak, rather she was Juanita the woman, Juanita the warrior, Juanita the wife of Arlington, Juanita the savior from the silver ship. No one considered her less because her arms and legs were short or because her fingers were sort of stubby. Instead, they regarded her with respect and love and appreciation. No one saw Arlington as an alcoholic conspiracy nut, no one called him Yarlington or Yar for short, although he was sometimes called the Pirate, but never in a derogatory way. When they referred to him as that it wasn’t in hushed voices behind his back and followed by laughter. Now when they called him the Pirate it was in an almost romantic way, like he was some sort of super hero. To Juanita he was, but she would never tell him that. She liked him humble; and that humility was possibly his most attractive trait.

             
She liked sailing in their ship, just the two of them. They planned to sail all over the world and she had already seen so many sights that she would never have gotten to see if this apocalypse had never happened.

             
Life was good. She supposed that was why the dead hated them so much. The dead had once had that hope and it had been stolen from them. She stood beside Arlington watching the sunset and put her arm around his hip. She felt his calloused hand gently smoothing her long dark brown hair. She thanked God for all she had.

             
Hope. It was such a small word. People had a tendency to underestimate the worth of something by its size. 

             
She looked up to her man and found that she was smiling. She liked looking at him.

             
“Hey Pirate.”

             
He looked down and smiled. With the back of his hand he smoothed her cheek. “Hey mini-Salma,”

             
“I was thinking about Acapulco. What do you think about that?”

             
“Well, you know I have a weakness for senoritas...at least for one of them, anyway,” he said amending his first statement.

             
“You’d better say that,” she said mock angrily, although she really could look irate when she wanted to.

             
“Trust me; I don’t want you to go Luche Libre on my ass.”

             
“Damn right, you don’t.” 

             
“Why Acapulco?” he asked.

             
“I thought it would be a nice place to celebrate,” she said, looking back toward the waves that were topped with pink from the dying sun.

             
“Celebrate?”

             
“Yeah,” she said still looking at the sea. A smile crept onto her face. “We are going to have a real Mini Salma.”

             
She waited. It sometimes took him a minute to process and her smile grew wider with the anticipation. She wasn’t disappointed. He dropped to his knees, grabbing her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Do you mean…a baby?”

             
She put her hands on the sides of her husband’s face and kissed him softly. She leaned her head back and got a far-away look in her eyes as she looked up at the rose colored sky. “I like the name Hope.”

             
“What if it’s a boy?” he asked.

             
“It won’t be. Call it providence, I just know. It will be a girl and we will call her Hope.”

             
Arlington was quiet for a moment letting his mind sample the word. He nodded approvingly. “Hope is good.”

             
“Nothing better,” she said.

              From the beach Mia stopped watching the children at play, and looked at the sunset. It looked to her like a mortal wound as it bled its promises dry upon the horizon; the rotting remnants of day in shades of red. The flesh of the sky would bruise, then darken and finally fade into forgetfulness as night swathed the dead beneath its shroud. But eventually, that which was dead would rise again, resurrected by the funeral pyre of dawn. Everything repeats in its cycle, its b’ak’tuns, its circle…like Ouroboros, the dragon who seemed so human in his greed.

The faded idea that this epiphany was occurring on Easter Island, named for the most famous of all resurrections, was not lost on Mia and she thought of her husband, how cold he must be lying in the dirt of a king that had led him to his death, how cold those stones must be that rested upon his withered chest. She wondered if he too, might rise again and seek vengeance upon the Nephilim. Would Mickey need her? Could they once again stand shoulder to shoulder? Could her love resurrect his heart? In these dying days, she thought that anything, no matter how unlikely, must be possible.

Mia shuddered as these thoughts echoed in her mind.

All you have to do is believe…
whispered a voice, luxuriant and soft. She looked around her and saw no one.

Just believe…

She did. She had to; she had promised Mickey, hadn’t she?

Believe…
said the voice,
Believe…your love and your faith are all that I need to bring him to you…

She could do that, it wasn’t too much to ask. Such a little thing; just believe. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Mickey…” she whispered.

Her heart grew dark with shadows distant, as it sometimes did; her eyes dilated in her momentary catatonia, her face became slack and void of expression as her baby cooed from its shaded bassinet.

             
“I see you,” she said in a voice that seemed as if there were two in a haunting harmony. “I see you well…”

             
                                              
Chapter 80 - Epilogue 4

              From the depths of the Caribbean the Leviathan opened its predatory eyes. Its breath roiling the water around it, steam rose from the deep and broke the surface of the water as it belched its sulphuric breath. The eater of Islands felt hunger pains stab through its stomach as it uncoiled its colossal scaled lengths and swam through the darkness like a serpent as it began its search for food.