Final Hour (Novella) (7 page)

Instead, Undine says, “I forgive you.”

“Liar.”

She pretends sadness and compassion with conviction. “You're sick, Little Bear.”

That is a nickname from their childhood, given to her by this deceitful sibling. The name
Ursula
is from the Latin
ursa,
meaning
she-bear.

“It's not your fault, Little Bear. You're very sick.”

Little Bear raises the pistol.

She points it at her hateful sister's face.

Undine does not flinch or even blink.

“Am I very sick?” Little Bear asks.

“Yes, love. You are. You really are.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Little Bear asks.

“There's nothing I can do. Not now.”

“There's one thing,” says Little Bear, tightening her finger on the trigger.

Bob the dog could see and hear and feel and taste, of course, but most of his extensive knowledge of the world came to him courtesy of his fine nose, which had twenty muscles more than the pathetic four-muscle human nose, and which provided him with a sense of smell many thousands of times greater than Pogo's. By that one sense, he took in more data than all five human senses combined.

No sooner had Bob crossed the threshold into the abandoned factory than he caught a scent that interested him, perhaps one he recognized, possibly that of the bold woman who, in the supermarket parking lot, had earlier displaced him from the front seat of Makani's Chevy and in the process damaged his pride. He padded to the north end of building, nose to the floor, following a trail of spoor undetectable by his two companions.

Pogo was impressed by the silence with which Bob set out upon the search. He seemed to have a cat's ability to retract his claws, so that they did not click on the concrete, though this was not a trick that a dog should be able to perform. In spite of the physical exertion and excitement, Bob didn't pant, either, or express his opinion of the quarry by vocalizing—with growl and grumble—as he closed on her.

They came to a door. Beyond the door were steps descending.

Below lay a maze of corridors and rooms.

Voices ahead.

Undine does not once fix her eyes upon the fearsome bore of the pistol, from the darkness of which her death will issue in a spurt of flame.

She meets Little Bear's eyes and does not look away, as if her last best hope might be to mesmerize her executioner.

Little Bear says, “Tell me the one thing you'll do for your big sister, the one thing in addition to forgiving me.”

Although physically damaged, Undine remains mentally sharp. She knows what Little Bear is daring her to say.

“Tell me what you told me four days ago, the lie that almost got you killed then. End your agony and tell me.”

“It's not a lie.”

“So tell me.”

Undine hesitates. “I forgive you…I'll pray for you.”

“Liar. Neither you nor I, nor anyone in this freakin' family, has ever prayed for anyone or ever will.”

At such close range, she intends to blow off Undine's hateful face, but the dog leaps upon her back, knocking her to the floor.

The pistol discharged, and the bullet ricocheted through the room, drawing no blood, clanging off one of the metal shades that directed the light of the ceiling-mounted lamps toward the floor, shattering a distant fluorescent tube.

Bob bounded off Ursula as she scrambled on hands and knees toward the gun that, knocked from her hand, clattered across the concrete.

Makani moved fast and kicked the pistol farther from the woman's reach.

When the blonde looked up, her expression was demented in a most peculiar way, so that she appeared almost to be a child again, furious that her dignity had been assaulted and that she had been denied something she wanted, as if she had never been denied before.

Makani pressed the firing mechanism on the canister of pepper spray, and the one-second stream spattered Ursula's eyes, her nose, eliciting from her a shriek of pain and fury.

When in an instant her pupils contracted, when at once her vision blurred, when the cold fluorescent light became a blinding whiteness, when she could not draw a breath that didn't burn, Ursula should have collapsed in defeat, but she did not. Her rage was that of a wounded boar, her energy demonic, and she scrambled toward the pistol with an uncanny instinct for its location.

Makani dropped upon the crazed woman, pinning her against the floor, reading in her a desire to
kill, kill, kill.
She seized a fistful of thick golden hair, twisted it ruthlessly. Into Ursula's screams of outrage, Makani shouted,
“Be still, damn you!”
Cursing, spitting, the blonde tried to heave her off, thrashed and squirmed.

Riding the widow of Proctor Norquist as if taking on a storm wave, Makani amazed herself as she pushed the woman's face to the floor and twisted the fistful of hair again, twisted and pulled with brutal intent, with the consequence that her adversary's power to resist quickly diminished. From her earliest days on Oahu, she had been a tomboy; until this moment, however, she hadn't known that, confronted by a wild and evil hellcat, she could play a game of tough cop with some authority.

The brave dog leaped, Makani followed through as if she'd taken down a thousand nasty perps before, and Pogo stood astonished for a moment, feeling as if he were a useless goob, one of those gutless ducks, one of those wish-was surfers who floated in the lineup with everyone else but never rose on his board to ride a wave.

He saw the gun fly out of Ursula's grasp. He saw light winking off the little key as it arced onto the dirty mattress, and saw the starving sister break into tears at the sight of it.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she exclaimed, snatching up the key with hands shaking so badly that she kept dropping it.

Pogo bent down, seized Ursula by one arm, and held her cruelly tight, giving Makani a chance to climb off the woman. The blonde wheezed and coughed, choked on the air that she so urgently inhaled. Even secondhand, he found the super-hot pepper fumes distressing. She probably felt as if she were suffocating, though she wasn't. Every effect of pepper spray was temporary; there would be no permanent damage from it.

Together, he and Makani dragged her to her feet and forced her onto the chair beside the picnic cooler. “You make so much as half of one wrong move,” Pogo warned her, “and I'll empty this entire canister in your face. You hear me?” When Ursula only wheezed and blew her nose into her hand, he said again,
“You hear me?”
She said she did, she heard him. In a voice cracked and raw with hot-pepper fumes, she choked out a series of expletives that defined him as one part of the human anatomy after another, both male and female; she showed no gender prejudice in her choice of words.

When Makani turned away from Ursula to retrieve the pistol, the imprisoned but now freed twin sister had already plucked the weapon from the floor and stood with it in a two-hand grip. Although weak and shaky, Undine proved to be an excellent shot, at least at that close range, when she pumped two rounds into Ursula's perfect chest, killing her instantly.

Undine never imagined she could be this happy.

She is famished, starving,
aching
for food, but she is no less ecstatic because of her hunger.

Tolstoy once said,
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

He was right, if by “happy families” he meant families in which all the members are dead but for one.

They are all dead now: Mother, Father, and the greedy bitch-slut-pig sister.

Undine has wanted them all dead since she was ten. She has a secret stash of drawings and paintings that depict them mutilated and dead in many grotesque positions and conditions.

Twenty years of drawing them dead, wanting them dead. Patience pays off.

She might call this a miracle if she believed in miracles, but she doesn't believe in anything except herself. And money.

The sexy but perhaps stupid white boy and his sexy but mongrel girlfriend look down in shocked disbelief at Ursula's drilled body, which has slid off the blood-spattered chair and onto the floor.

“Who the hell are you?” Undine asks.

Staring at the corpse, they seem to have forgotten who they are.

“Are you friends of that thieving pig?”

“Does it appear like we were friends?” the boy asks.

“I don't know what it appears like. What're you doing here?”

The boy looks at the girl. The girl looks at the boy.

“We were just following her,” the boy says at last.

“Why?”

The girl shrugs. “Why not?”

They are both staring at the corpse again, still stunned.

“So you were up to some kind of no good,” Undine says.

The boy says, “It was just something to do.”

“Following her was just something to do?”

“Yeah.”

Maybe for the moment it doesn't matter who they are.

A slight vertigo afflicts Undine. She wills herself to be steady. She is two twins in one now. She has the strength of two.

“I need your help,” she says.

They turn their full attention to her, bewildered but beginning to recognize the consequences of this event.

The girl lost her pepper spray in the tussle with Ursula.

The boy still has a little canister. Undine tells him to drop it, he hesitates, she thrusts the pistol toward him, and he drops the pepper spray on the floor.

The black Labrador is slinking quietly to Undine's right, no doubt with heroic intentions.

“I'll shoot your dog dead if you don't control him.”

“Here, Bob,” the girl says. “Here,
now.
”

Reluctantly, the dog returns to her and sits at her side.

Undine says, “What kind of name is Bob for a dog? Why not Blackie or Midnight or Ebony?”

“Bob suits him best,” the girl says.

“Bob is a stupid name for a dog,” Undine insists. She is, after all, a poet. She knows a thing or two about names and words and the way they resonate. “What's
your
name?”

“Makani.”

“Is that a name? What kind of name is that?”

“Hawaiian.”

“
Hawaiian.
Jeez. Everyone wants to be exotic these days.”

When asked, the boy says his name is Pogo, and Undine says that would be a better name for the dog, and then for half a minute or so, none of them seems to know what to say next.

Undine breaks the silence. “I'm too weak to do what needs to be done all by myself. Help me, and I'll make you rich.”

The two look at each other, making whatever feeble calculations pass for their thinking.

Their names are so improbable that Undine has already forgotten them and remembers only Bob.

A little vertigo again. Less than before. She has the strength of two. She steadies her world.

A line from Shakespeare reminds her of the stakes:
Some o' their plants are ill-rooted already; the least wind i' the world will blow them down.

Undine is not only a poet who knows a lot of Shakespeare; she is also deeply rooted, safe from all winds.

The girl says, “How rich will you make us?”

“A million dollars each. In cash.”

“You have that kind of money?” the boy asks.

“I will. The fat bitch finagled our egg-sucking, shit-for-brains father into leaving it all to her, with just an allowance for me.”

“She wasn't fat,” the boy says.

“She's fat compared to me right now, the jealous little whore.”

The girl says, “If you only get an allowance…”

“I went to see her in that tasteless mansion with its thousand tons of garish furniture, supposedly to do a little dickering for an increase in my allowance, the two of us over dinner. But I didn't go there to dicker. That was bullshit. I went there to kill the vicious leech.”

“But obviously you didn't kill her then. Why didn't you kill her?” the pretty boy asks, proving her suspicion that he is a moron.

“Obviously,” Undine says, “the selfish sack of pus had a plan of her own.”

“Starving you to death,” the girl says.

“Your children will surely be geniuses,” Undine declares scornfully.

She needs these two and shouldn't be cross with them, but she loathes stupidity.

She is swaying on her feet, and her arms are shaking, and the boy sees this. “That gun is heavy.”

“It won't be as heavy if I put two bullets in your head. I may look shaky, but don't think you can screw with me.”

Undine feels as if she's tilting. Or the room is tilting. She tells herself that neither is the case.

The girl says, “He isn't going to screw with anyone who can make us rich. Chill, Pogo.”

Undine says, “My plan was to kill her, chop her up, put the pieces through an industrial Cuisinart, take the sludge far out into the desert, pour it out for the snakes and bugs and rats to eat, then take her identity.”

“Become Ursula,” the boy says.

“You
are
lightning-quick on the uptake. But now I'll need to lie low for a few weeks, gain some weight, get my looks back, before I can pass for that disgusting parasite.”

“So what do you need us to do?” the girl wonders.

Indicating the corpse, Undine says, “Chop, Cuisinart, dispose of the sludge.”

“All that for just a million?”

“A million each,” Undine reminds them. “Two million total, for just a few hours of manual labor.”

They stand there, thinking about it.

“What the hell is there to think about?” Undine demands.

“How do we know you won't kill us after we do it?” the girl asks.

The girl is stupid. Undine will not kill them until weeks from now, when she is restored.

Undine says, “Kill you? Are you crazy paranoid? If I killed you, I'd have to chop, Cuisinart, and dispose of you two,
and I don't have the strength for it, Bob
!”

The girl regards her with what might be pity when she says, “Bob is the dog.”

“The dog is Bob,” the boy agrees.

Bob is the dog, the dog is Bob:
Something about those lines, spoken one after the other, affects Undine negatively, summons the vertigo that she has repressed, no doubt because she is a poet and therefore highly sensitive to the way that words resonate with one another, to subtle rhythms that ordinary people are not capable of appreciating. She tilts, tilts, and the room turns.
Bob is the dog, the dog is Bob, Bob is the dog is the dog is Bob, Bob-Bob-Bob, Bob is the dog.

Although the girl has spoken no command, the dog bolts, Bob bolts, Bob the dog bolts. Bolts into the slowly revolving room. Not toward Undine. Away from her. Which is confusing as she tilts. She'd shoot him if he leaped at her. Now boy and girl are between her and Bob the dog, the dog is Bob is the dog, as the floor undulates. If she shoots, she might hit them. She needs boy and girl. Desperately, she needs them as, with the power of twins in one body, she commands the room to be still. The dog barks in alarm—or is it the girl?—barks
Pogo, no!
as the boy drops to the undulant floor and bounces up again with something in his hand, bounces up like a leaping Bob,
pepper spray
in hand, and Undine fires twice just as the stinging, blinding, suffocating stream defines a
Z
by splashing from eye to eye, slanting across nose, from one corner of mouth to the other. Bob dog did a circle, Bob dog behind her, teeth in her slacks, Bob dog pulling, Undine tilting. The blur of a boy as the world goes white, the boy at her like a dog on two legs, Bob dog behind, boy dog in front and grappling for the gun, girl barking
Pogo, Pogo!
Undine smells his blood. His hands slick with blood, so he can't tear the gun away from her. Kill him. Trigger it. The sound is huge, the pain huge, and everything is wrong. The white pain is brighter than the white blindness of pepper spray. Gun is gone. Vertigo. Going round, going down. Going, going…How happy she is with all of them dead. Father, Mother, Ursula dead, dead. How happy, but how brief has been her happiness, how brief, how—