Skeletons (19 page)

I laid her down in the wagon, covered her, and made camp.

Our position was more exposed than I would have liked, but after scouting the trees to three sides of us and setting traps, I was sure I could guard the one open area in front.

The sun dropped down and a moon came up, bright and nearly full. I heard the sounds of crickets and wondered if they were real insects or the white ashy ones of this new world.

My eyes betrayed me. One moment I lay watching the rising moon; the next my ears were filled with the loud sound of one of my traps going off behind me. I snapped awake, seeing the moon high overhead now. I had slept for hours.

I had no idea which trap had gone off. I studied the three flanks behind me with my eyes, my ears. I heard, saw, nothing. I rose, begging myself to be silent, and checked the wagon.

Reesa
lay sleeping, her breath soft and even.

I backed into the clearing, crouched low, using nearby bushes for cover. Melting into a stand of them, I waited.

There was no sound until I heard a voice behind me. "You still don't know true invisibility, do you,
Kral
Kishkin
?"

I whirled to see Sasha, or rather his skeleton, standing boldly white in the moonlight.

"Where did you—"

"I hiked through the woods," Sasha said. He laughed. If I had closed my eyes, it would have seemed he was the same man I had talked to this morning. But now he was armed with a short blade, which he held out menacingly in front of him.

"I'd like my long knife back," he said. Again he laughed. "Handle first, please."

I drew his blade from my belt and showed him the blade side. "I'm afraid not, Sasha. I made an oath."

He feigned innocence. "To who?"

"To you, of course."

"I wasn't serious,
Kral
Kishkin
."

He advanced a step on me. I held my position, poised for a fight.

Suddenly he turned and began to walk toward the trees. "Come with me," he said, with a trace of his old sadness.

I stood my ground, and he stopped and turned.

"Follow me to a special place," he said. "We can settle our business out of sight of
Reesa
. Give me this one last wish."

He went into the trees, his bones suffused with moonlight.

Cautiously, I followed.

There was a path. Tensed, with the blade before me, I trailed Sasha for perhaps twenty meters. I kept him well in front of me. The trees opened up. The ground here was covered with a soft carpet of pine needles. Above, the moon shone down like a lantern. In the air was the faint hint of flowers, as I had smelled that night in the Valley of Blossoms.

"This was a sacred place," Sasha said. "It was a place where we came to pray to God.”

He waved his hand, and skeletons appeared all around me, coming out of the woods.

Sasha said coldly, "Take him."

I was besieged. I cut the first two that came at me, watching them fold to dust even as four others moved in. I was grabbed from behind. I slashed my blade back, catching that attacker, but two others held my arms and pinned me as the third remaining held my legs. I felt Sasha's knife knocked from my hand to fall to the ground. The three skeletons held me prone as Sasha approached.

He bent, picked up his knife. He examined it. In the moonlight I saw the ghost of his old features surrounding his bones.

"It was foolish of me," he said, "to ever give this to you. And foolish of me to think that I would not think differently after I had done this to myself." He bent his head back, showing me the long slash on his ghostly neck where he had cut his own throat. "I can only mourn the rest of my tribe who were not allowed to see the world as I do now."

"What do you see, Sasha?".

His eye sockets looked at me. "This," he said, running his hands down his skeleton, "is what God wanted. This is the world now. It is foolish to think any other way."

"Have you forgotten that you were human, Sasha?"

"I am human!" he said. "I am me. Only it is you who seem unnatural to me now,
Kral
Kishkin
. It is you who do not belong in this world. Tell him," he said to one of the skeletons holding my arms.

"Hello, Peter Sun."

The voice was that of the MIG pilot Sasha and the others had nursed after his crash, who had set off with Maria to live away from everything. The skeleton turned his face to me and I saw the outline of the pilot's features.

"It's true," Maria's voice said. I looked down and saw that the skeleton who held my legs was, indeed, Maria.

Sasha said, "I, and the four soldiers the army was kind enough to let me have, found their hiding spot, not far from here. It was a place where I knew Maria would go. A cozy little hut, too. But they no longer need it."

"No, we don't," Maria said.

"Hold him tightly," Sasha said. Then to me: "You will see everything differently soon,
Kral
Kishkin
."

He held his blade in front of him, poised for the strike.

A shot sounded.

The MIG pilot gasped, let me go, and dropped to dust. I jerked away from Sasha's knife thrust. A second shot split the night and Maria turned to powder. The third skeleton holding me tried to strike me, but I turned and knocked him down as another shot sounded. He fell to nothingness.

Sasha rushed at me.

I crouched, deflecting his blow, and he fell. He got up quickly.

A gunshot missed him. He slashed at me, just missing my arm, and suddenly he turned and ran into the woods.

Reesa
appeared out of the trees and sprinted past me.

"
Reesa
!" I shouted.

"I will get him," she said, her voice hard.

There followed a mad run through the woods. Both Sasha and
Reesa
knew this forest better than I. I heard them thrashing through the brush in front of me. I tried to keep up. Far ahead I saw a flash of white bones. A shot rang out. The movement through the woods continued. I heard Sasha curse. In a moment I had broken out into another area free of trees. Sasha had dropped his knife and faced
Reesa
, who held the rifle up, pointed at him.

Sasha advanced on her slowly, palms open. His voice was gentle. "
Reesa
, it is I—"

Reesa
fired.

Sasha froze, disintegrated to dust, fell to nothingness.

When she turned to me, I expected tears, expected her to drop the rifle and fall into my arms, weeping. Instead, she moved past me, her face set and hard. “There may be more. We'd better check."

We searched the woods around our camp; there was no one else.

Late in the night, with a hint of dawn coming to the east,
Reesa
lay in my arms. She was tense and angry. "
Reesa
, why are you mad?" I asked.

"I should have been watching you. I should not have been sleeping."

"
Reesa
—"

"No." She turned to me, anger flaring. "I have a sacred duty. I've let myself be overcome by foolishness.”

“By love."

Her hands balled into fists, and for a moment I thought she would hit me. "Yes, love. That is the foolishness. I've let myself believe that it can last."

I pulled her close to me. "Of course it can. We'll take care of each other."

"
No
." She pushed away from me. "Don't you understand? I'm here to take care of you, and then I'll be gone."

"But Sasha said—"

"Sasha only prolonged it! Didn't he tell you everything?"

"He said that you and I had a chance together this way— "

“He told you nothing. The text of the prophecy says the daughter of the highest will conceive the child of
Kral
Kishkin
, but that
Kral
Kishkin
will remake the world with a daughter of another tribe." Now there were tears in her eyes. "You will have another wife, Peter Sun, and you will have other children. But I and my whole tribe will be gone."

"I don't believe it. I won't let it happen."

"It will."

I held her to me, and let her cry until sleep took her. I put my hand on her belly, imagining that I could feel the tiny child, my child, move within. I loved
Reesa
more than life itself, more than all the world and all the living humans on it.

As the sun rose, blanketing the east with beautiful light, I vowed to it that I would not let the things
Reesa
said happen.

"I vow, on the earth and all the things that live on it," I said.

Next to me
Reesa
stirred in her sleep, and turned to nestle closer to me, and whispered in her dreams, "
Gone
."

I watched the new day dawn and the world come alive below our mountains, and looked up at the hard, unyielding peak we had to climb, and prayed.

What a trip! Hollywood!

How does that Vomits song go again?

She's such a bitch,

So loud and so rich

(HOLLY wood, HOLLY wood)

She's such a drag

Like a burned-out hag

(That's: HOLLY wood, HOLLY wood) (Chorus) But in the nighttime, I love her

That goes unsaid,

I'd make love to her—

If only I could put a bag Over her head! Yeah!

Then Brutus Johnson's guitar comes in—
brrrrrrrrng
brrrrrrng
, and the place goes wild, and ol' Shark, ol' Roger,
dat's
me, advance man, producer, and road manager, collects his check and goes home.

Love it, babe!

God, I hope those bastards are dead.

And Carl Peters, and the rest of them, because, baby, this is a whole new gig!

Ah, the Grateful Dead did know something, didn't they?

I do wish Rita, ol' Carl's secretary, was still around at this moment. I'm getting sick of looking at boneheads through the tinted glass of this Lincoln Town Car. She'd do all right in this Lincoln, ol' Rita would. She could cut the coke, and she knows how to use the zipper on these leather pants. We already know that, oh, yes we do.

Yeah!

But Christ, like any movie that runs too long, this is getting boring.

I mean, where the hell is the action tonight? All I've seen is boners marching and stumbling and shooting guns in the air. I took the old tour through the hills, as if I couldn't do it by heart with my eyes closed. Remember those days,
Rog
? Driving that damn tour bus, hair cut like a
Mousketeer
, smiling all the time, using that little hand mike to tell the
bluehairs
where we were: "Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is the home of Bob Hope! And just up the street . . ." When what I really wanted to do was scream at them to go home and die in their
Barcaloungers
, huffing out their last cracker-stale breaths in front of Bob Barker on the tube. Or I wanted at least to tell them the real story: "Ladies and gents—old farts, if I might be so bold—see that twenty-room sucker over there behind the iron fence? Well, it's got enough alarms on it to wake Fatty Arbuckle from the dead, and ol' Johnny's hardly ever there, anyway! And if you ever got near enough to ring the bell, chances are some three-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-wrestler would leave off
porking
the maid, appear behind you, and blow your head clean off your shoulders into your outstretched hands before your finger ever reached the button! See that TV camera over there? And there, and there and there? Well, you can wave now, because one of them is tracking your
schnoz
even as we ride by! I mean, these bastards have detectives to watch their detectives!" Ah, yes, the good old days.

And speaking of Fatty Arbuckle, I swear I saw the fat fart earlier this evening, walking down the Boulevard. Those had to be his big bones, and I could just make out the features. Seemed to be a lot of the old-timers, dead-timers, if you will, out for a stroll down memory lane tonight, and if I hadn't been so coked, I might have thought it scary to see Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton—who looked bad in bones, even worse than in life, believe me, I saw the poor old bastard a few times wandering around, waiting for a part to fall on his head—and Mary Pickford, walking silently up and down the Boulevard, passing
Grauman's
, ogling all the changes, maybe even crying bone tears. It was like some horrid silent movie. I even slowed down to watch two of these dead-timers—think it was John Wayne and Hank Fonda, but they didn't like each other much in real life anyway—duking it out right in the middle of the street, Wayne really
womping
on Fonda's head until the old trooper just dropped to white powder and blew away. The Duke just sauntered down the street, and believe me, people got out of his tracks. I almost ran him down—hell, I never liked him much in real life, bastard shoved me out of the way once to get at the bar at one of those cocktail things Roundabout's parent company, Boil Oil, was always having, and inviting everyone who wasn't tied down, or up, from the various entertainment divisions: Palmer Pictures, Vortex Video, Roundabout itself—but I let the old cowboy do his thing, thumbing my nose at him behind the dark glass as I drove by.