Last Call For Caviar (11 page)
Read Last Call For Caviar Online
Authors: Melissa Roen
Ah, Midsummer Night! I guess that’s when Puck shows up. A cloud sailed high overhead, casting his face for a moment into darkness. Then, Abdul kissed me once. Twice. And I melted into his arms.
.
Giovanni was pacing back and forth outside Buddha Bar when we returned from our moonlit stroll. He met us partway down the path. It seems there had been tension building between Slava’s bodyguards and the Sheik’s security personnel. Giovanni was just coming to look for us when we showed up. Abdul was needed inside to help defuse the situation from escalating into a brawl. Confirming what I had already sensed, Abdul was more than an engineer building cities in the sand. A brawl might play into Slava’s plans, but the Sheik had a cool head and was determined not to get drawn into a public confrontation.
“I’m sorry I have to leave you now. I wanted to make sure myself that you got safely home, but Sheik Sakr bin Zayed needs me inside. I’ve got to go. My driver, Bilal, will make sure you get home. Don’t worry. He’s ex-Emirati Army; I would only leave you in the best hands.”
Abdul kissed me lightly on the lips and then they were gone, hurrying into the club.
Bilal, stocky, taciturn and in his mid-forties, insisted on checking the perimeter of my property and my home for intruders, and made sure I set the alarm before he left.
I had left lights and music on and engaged the alarm before going out, but secretly I worried about coming home unarmed. It was a relief to have someone who was a security professional check all the doors and windows and any possible hiding places.
I’m not sure what time it was when I finally crawled in bed, my head a jumble from all the intrigue of the evening. I thought of Anjuli-Lucy and our meeting in the weeks ahead. I knew I would have to walk very softly in that encounter. I thought of Tasha, and all I felt was dread. I didn’t see how I could help her, enmeshed as she was with Slava and his entourage. Her eyes haunted me. I hadn’t mistaken the fear I saw when he touched her.
Then, I thought about Abdul and the taste of his lips when he kissed me. Just as I’d thought, delicious. With a smile, I drifted off to sleep.
I awoke later to the sound of someone calling my name. It came from the terrace just outside my shuttered bedroom door. I seemed to float as I crossed the room and hovered by the door. I listened, my hand on the latch, and heard my name once again sighing on the wind. I thought I could hear footsteps moving just on the other side of the door.
“Who is there?” I whispered, but somehow I felt no fear. There was silence for a beat, and then I heard, so softly I might have imagined it,
“Cherie. Open the door.”
And I knew. My hand fumbled at the latch on the shutter as I threw open the doors; the sheer drapes billowed gently inward on the breeze. I glided through them onto the terrace. The flagstones were cool under my bare feet.
I stepped into a world black and white. Starlight silvered the terrace, bleaching everything of color under its shining light. But the shadows were brushstrokes of indigo, impenetrable slashes deeper than the night.
There was no one there. Stillness lay over everything, a hush as though the night itself held its breath. I stood confused, feeling the breeze caress the nape of my neck. I felt a crawling sensation between my shoulders, as though something hidden watched me and waited beyond the light.
Long seconds passed as I stood frozen, my heart thudding in my chest. And then, I heard a faint scraping sound in the shadows, and I saw him standing as though carved in stone. His absolute stillness brought to mind a statue in the moment before stirring into life.
He took a few steps forward, passing from the shadows into the moonlight. The stars mantled his shoulders and lay like frost about his head. His dark hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, but the eyes and mouth were as I remembered in my dreams.
I felt his magnetism across the distance that separated us, and then, I felt his arms around me, my head against the broad expanse of his chest. I could feel his heartbeat. I smelled his scent, the taste of spice on his skin.
“I don’t understand… Am I dreaming? Are you really here?”
“Oui, ma cherie… I’m really here. I couldn’t stay away.” He silenced any further questions from me with his lips.
He picked me up in his arms and carried me inside. And then, I was lying naked on my bed, feeling as though I were drugged, unsure if this was a dream, as reality and desire merged. I felt the muscles on his back flex and move beneath my hands, the heat of his skin along the length of me burned, and the tangle of our limbs entwined. I felt his weight pressing me deeper and deeper into the softness of the bed, the arousing caress of his hands roaming over my body, and the kisses he trailed down my neck as he entered me. The soft sounds we breathed in rhythm, a slow dance in each other’s arms.
This couldn’t be a dream; his presence was so real. He’d come back for me. I was in his arms, feeling his love pour into me again. I was drowning in desire and let the tide pull me under.
I awoke alone in a shaft of sunlight burning across my bed. The door to the terrace was open, and the memory of the night before came flooding back in. I didn’t hear the shower running, nor could I smell coffee being brewed.
I couldn’t wait to see him in the daylight. He’d come back, my heart sang. I first went to look for him on the terrace. Then, I searched the house. I called his name, but birdsong and the waves dancing in the cove were my only reply. I went to the garage and then searched everywhere in the house and garden once again.
He was gone. There was no note left behind.
I sank down on my bed, the faint trace of his scent already fading in the heat. It had seemed so real, the taste and touch of him so solidly rooted in reality. I didn’t want to believe this interlude had been merely the creation of my dream mind. My lips felt swollen, my breasts were tender, and I felt a slight soreness between my thighs. These and the languid warmth spreading through my core—these were signs I couldn’t deny.
But why would Julian come to me in a night of passion, only to vanish without a word in the harsh light of day? It seemed last night’s reunion had been merely the product of too much to drink and starlight. Just a midsummer night’s erotic dream conjured up by my own desire and memory. I could feel the dream fade as I sat there.
Even more worrying, drunk on moonlight and caught up in the madness that I was really in Julian’s arms, I had slept through the night with my terrace door left wide open—exposed and vulnerable to anything else that could have been creeping about in the night.
But even as I got in the shower to wash away the traces of my folly, a part of me, a stubborn kernel, insisted that last night magic had enchanted me, and Julian had really been in my bed.
On Litha, the night of the summer solstice, when the membrane between worlds almost disappears, Julian felt my yearning and came to me. And like lovers, separated across time and space, we had met and coupled on the astral plane.
.
I’d been trying to get hold of Chaz since yesterday morning, ever since I heard the news of the giant quake that struck the Antelope Valley, about an hour from downtown L.A. The epicenter was located in Palmdale, smack dab on top of the San Andreas Fault that snaked most of the length of California, from the Salton Sea in the south, to just outside the Bay Area of San Francisco. I prayed she’d escaped the worst of it in Marin County, across the San Francisco Bay.
Online reports were calling it the most powerful earthquake ever to have hit California, possibly the largest ever known in our time. Some measurements put it at 9.8 on the Richter Scale. Other scientists claimed it was closer to 10. Shaking and powerful aftershocks, almost as strong as the initial tremor, were felt the whole length of the San Andreas fault line.
What couldn’t be disputed was the enormous and widespread devastation it had caused. It may not have rivaled the cinematic version from the movie
2012
—in which the earth splits open in yawning chasms miles deep and continental shelves slide whole into the sea—but Cali had been torn asunder.
The central part of the state, the agricultural heartland, was burning in countless places, from the mountains down to the Pacific Ocean. Under the searing drought, the crops that hadn’t been burned by the fires were withering from the parched conditions.
Even before this earthquake, delivery of food and goods to markets had been disrupted by the worldwide oil shortage, and the state’s economy had been derailed.
Three months before this earthquake struck, Charlotte had sent me an online article from the
L.A. Times
which painted a horrifying picture of the desperation and descent into anarchy which was already gripping Southern California. The reporter’s byline was Anton Rodriguez.
Shortages of all kinds have led to wide-scale hoarding
,
which has resulted in waves of riots in the greater Los Angeles area over the bare store shelves.
Yesterday, shoppers at a Costco depot in Encino battled with any weapon at hand, willing to kill for a bag of rice. The desperation is spreading, since so many businesses have folded and jobs lost. In some places, people are starving and wandering the land, scavenging for any sustenance they can find
.
Wild game has been hunted to extinction in the southern part of the state and any meat is now a potential meal. Domestic animas have to be closely guarded or they just disappear.
The whole food chain is being exhausted, and there are reports that now man has taken to hunting man. The weak, the aged, the infirm and the young are the most vulnerable targets of growing cannibalism.
False prophets have sprung up in the last year; but the most terrifying is a sect called the Blood Hand. Led by a former convict, John Slade, who has repented his past and been reborn as “a sword of the Lord’s vengeance.” He now calls himself Brother Slayer
.
Playing on the mounting fears of the anarchy and starvation sweeping the southland, Brother Slayer exploits the uncertainty of these harrowing times and the resentment of foreigners and immigrants—“the infidels or wicked,” as he calls those who haven’t been converted to his way of thinking or joined his movement. With fear and famine stalking the land, many have responded to his call and embraced his message. Not only those who see these strange days as a license to shed moral restraint—as easily as they remove their clothes—but those desperate and lost, broken souls in search of an answer, any answer, and a leader who will protect and feed them.
Mostly composed of young males with weak or nonexistent family or social ties, the members
of Blood Hand flout their aggression, dominance and territoriality. Under the cloak of doing the Lord’s work in advance of Judgement Day, the Brotherhood authorizes them to revel in an orgy of bloodletting and violence. For those who just want to pillage and rape, membership in the Blood Hand provides a convenient cover story.
To absolve his faithful of atrocities being committed, Brother Slayer quotes from the Bible, urging his followers down a bloody path toward salvation. Proclaiming the end of days is nigh, he preaches death to those who have sinned and brought down this punishment and promises a reward of glory and salvation to his followers, saying:
“The righteous will be glad when they are avenged, when they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.”
Signs of the Blood Hand are appearing around the megacity of Los Angeles, where society is splintering into tribes, and hostility towards strangers holds sway.
Schismatics from the Brotherhood have taken their license to reap and slaughter a step further, and are still more to be feared. They have taken as their motto:
“That thy foot be dipped in the blood of thine enemy and the tongue of your dog in the same.”
Preying on isolated communities, and hunting in packs with dobermans and hybrid mastiff-pit-bull mixes, these fiends have lost all humanity or restraint, perverting the Christian allegory of communion, the body and blood of the host and sacramental wine into a righteous justification for human blood-drinking and flesh-eating.
Not everyone in California has gone insane and joined a cult. Like everywhere else in America, people are armed and communities are banding together to fight back against the general anarchy and blood cults. But suspicion of strangers rules the day, and many have learned by painful experience to shoot first and ask questions later
.
It’s gotten to the point that a solitary traveler or anyone without community ties coming upon a town in the southern part of the state is tempting fate. Travelers won’t know what they will find: blood-drinkers welcoming them for dinner, or normally decent people deformed by their fears into vigilantes ready to shoot at the very hint of a threat.
Like elsewhere, the wealthy and powerful in their gated enclaves defended by private armies, are insulated and have a better chance to survive. They have armored convoys and personal bodyguards, private helicopters and jets to soar above the madness crawling below.
Just like the residents of Monaco, I thought uneasily. Resources and wealth protect them for now, but the tide is turning. The sheer numbers of displaced and desperate humanity fighting to survive will ultimately overwhelm their defenses.
The rest of California is becoming Balkanized. Whether towns, hamlets, communities or families and clans, with so little to go around, one has to take care of their own.
The article finished with,
The state government is barely functioning; most public services have been severely curtailed. Cities and towns are effectively on their own. Some residents try and maintain public order, hold onto shared values and community aid. Other places have succumbed, become outlaw towns where psychopath
s
prey on the weak and only the strongest—or most ruthless—survive.
One month after this article was published, Chaz informed me, Anton Rodriguez’s body was found in a trash-strewn alley in downtown Los Angeles, his throat cut and his body drained of blood, the symbol of the Blood Hand branded on his chest.
The earthquake would probably be seen by the false prophets as the hand of God smiting the wicked, and as a sign of the righteousness of their ravings.
Looking at the first photos that were making their way on to the web, it looked as though a giant’s hand had smitten the land.
At some point, the decision might be made to quarantine the state like was done with Japan. Then, troops would be called in to maintain the restricted zone, and people trapped behind the lines would be abandoned and left to deal with the aftermath of death and destruction on their own.
The wildfires burning in the central part of the state were actually a blessing in disguise for the northern part, since they created an impassable fire zone. For now, they kept the terror in the south from spreading north. It added one more layer of protection for Leah’s band across the border in Oregon.
I worried that I couldn’t get hold of Charlotte. I wanted to tell her where to find Leah. I knew Leah would take her in, and it wouldn’t be that far for Chaz from Marin County to Coos Bay.
I knew Leah was standing at the crossroads, and that danger from the south was rolling up the coast like a bad storm and would inevitably arrive. I also knew if anyone could survive, it’d be her. With her innate bossiness and organizational skills, I wouldn’t be surprised if Coos Bay had elected a new Sheriff. Leah was born to run countries, maybe even the universe. I’d vote for her in these times.
I sent both Chaz and Leah emails, tried their cell phones numerous times, but I got no reply from either. I maintained a vigil, reading the reports coming in and the first accounts from survivors. As the updates arrived, the situation grew bleaker by the hour; the death count kept being revised ever upward until the half-a-million mark was breached, and this was just the first few days. I shuddered to imagine what tomorrow would bring.
California had been my first home and the land of my birth. I remembered it as a golden land where summers seemed endless when I was young. I mourned her passing.
Cali was broken. God help them; no one else could.