Redshift Part 26

"n.o.body ever called me ma'am before."

"The dirt has started to glow. Aren't you scared?"

"Leave me alone."

"We have to do something."

"What do you mean we, white man?"

He whispers, so she will pay attention. "Ticktickticktick. Time is running out. Together, we might make it."

"Stop that." Walleyed glare. "I'm working up to four hundred."

At her signal, he adds two ten-pound weights. "Come on, Roxy. You can't play like nothing's happening."

"How do you know my name?"

Diamond nose stud. Likes jewelry. Noted. "Roxy, Roxy. We need each other."

She is testing the weights. "Why would I do anything for you?

"Because you're in my power?"

"Not so's you'd notice." Rings, too. Note: Really likes jewelry.

She is focused on the lift to come. Great veins bulge. "Spot me?"

"Now?"

"Now."

"Fine," he says helpfully. Trevor pretends to spot her when what he is really spotting is the right vein. He drives the needle in. It's a wonderful drug. It paralyzes the mind but keeps the body mobile. How else would he get a woman this size out of the gym and into the back of the van he rented to take his gorilla in? She went from granite to pliant in seconds; he got past the desk by putting a gym bag over her head. Whispers, "What do you have to go home to anyway?

The world is ending." He feels only a little guilty.

It's scary out, but he isn't going to have to face it alone. Just having her in the back of the truck makes him feel better.That the sky is a bizarre new shade of violet is only slightly unnerving. Red fingers creep over the skyline-lava, surging out of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel? Naw, Trevor thinks, and drives on even though he hears a sizzle, as of fish frying in the drained harbor. In the back of the van his new gorilla alternately thrashes and dozes. Listen, it's not as if she has a life out there.

The house Trevor has fixed up for the captive gorilla looks just like all the others in that block: a brick Baltimore row house in a depressed neighborhood-white shutters, depressingly white front stoop with urban litter was.h.i.+ng up against it like trash in a flood. It's just what he wanted. A neighborhood where people like him don't come. End house, which means ingress from the alley, cellar door, which he needs to unload, no neighbors. He has backed the truck up to the cellar. He rolls her down the steps and into the lion cage he salvaged from a ruined circus. For a long time, she doesn't stir. Then she does. Howling, she hurls herself at the bars; her anger shakes the house. "What. What? What!"

Trevor hands her a c.o.ke. "Drink this. You'll feel better." At a safe distance, he extends tongs with his offering.

"Where are we?" She eyes the tongs. The object dangling from them glitters. "What are those?"

"Place I fixed for you. These are my mother's diamonds."

"You can't keep me locked up like this." She stops thras.h.i.+ng and says matter-of-factly, "Look at you, five seven. You can't keep me at all."

Couldn't keep Jane or the kids. He gulps. "I got you here."

"So what am I supposed to do, f.u.c.k you? Beat up on people?"

Then the weight of all the years that have been and the years that may never come staggers Trevor, and he cries, "You're supposed to help me."

"Help you what? Get women? Money? Food? If I kill whoever for you, will you let me go?"

Kill Jane? Never. Cult leader Adam? Maybe. Jake? He'd like that, but right now this is a holding action because he has no idea what is coming. "You never know what you need until you need it," Trevor says. The marvel is that he's come this far on instinct, and the rest? Wing it. "Too soon to tell what I need."

"This isn't the old Adam and Eve thing, I hope."

Hair in greased coils. That ma.s.sive skull, the corded body. Think Hercules carved in lard, but a woman. "I don't think so."

Roxy gauges her situation: the room, the cage-no bending those bars even if you do press four hundred. She settles on her pumped haunches. "I'll need equipment."

He thrusts the tongs into the cage, proffering. It's his late mother's diamond choker.

"Everything you need is on order."

Scowling, she fastens it around her bicep. "I've seen better." It is an uneasy accommodation, but it is an accommodation. From here on out it won't matter that Jane is gone or that the corporation has collapsed and the fabric of civilization is shredding. Just let them try to break in and take his money, food, vandalize his secret thoughts or steal the silver. n.o.body gets past Roxy. I have a gorilla, OK?"I miss you," Jane writes. "Adam is seeing somebody new." What do I care? I have a gorilla.

They get through the days, however. Nights are harder. In times like these television is interrupted, so there's no telling whether it's ten or eleven or closer to two A.M. The numbers on all your digital products are clicking backwards. Everything demagnetized while you weren't looking. You're on your own, the wind says. Alone, fust the way you were at the beginning. Not Trevor. He has his gorilla. Perhaps because of the riots and ma.s.s murders outside, she's quit trying to kill him. She gets into the captivity thing. Sits with him for public access TV but slouches downstairs to sleep in the cage. For protection, she says. Protection against him? Has he kidnapped a three-hundred-pound virgin? Hard to know. Athena has nothing on Roxy. Step aside, Amazon queen. Take a backseat, Wonder Woman. Now that she has his mother's opera-length pearls twined around her neck and now that his grandmother's diamond earrings hang like dollhouse chandeliers from her wide nostrils, she's in his power, right? He buys her clothes. He cooks wonderful meals for her out of the supermarket stockpile in the subcellar. Keeps her happy until he needs her.

Jane writes, Who needs you, anyway?

One day Roxy smiles. "Meat loaf. Again. My favorite."

In times like these, the silliest things make you feel better.

Still, there is the look he catches when Roxy doesn't know he's watching; the whites of her eyes gleam in the half light from the TV, and Trevor can't know. Is his gorilla fixing to die for him, or does she want to kill him?

How did it get so important to make her like him?

That's one motive for taking her outside. Trial run. Make her happy because in times like these, even a gorilla starts looking good to you.

The other? It's time to show her to the people. Trevor feels safer with Roxy thudding behind, regardless of her motives. Hard to know if it's a good or a bad thing that the streets are deserted. Every player wants an audience. Not clear if that's blood running in the gutters or the product of his hyped imagination. Roxy pads on, sniffing the air. "Talk about creepy. Hold up."

She spins him around.

"Stop that! Ow! Where are we going?"

"The gym," she says, dragging him. "They need me at the gym."

It is in ruins. Leached skeletons lie upturned in the ashes like the. rib cages of cattle in Death Valley. So much for Roxy's colleagues, those humongous guys.

"Too late." She grieves. "I came too late."

There is no talking about what happened. "It's OK," he tells her. "It is. n.o.body could have helped them." He isn't feeling too good himself. It's unnerving, watching your gorilla cry.

A sob rips her throat. "I shoulda been here for them."

He grips her hand. Mental note: Aunt Patricia's garnets, as soon as we get home. He is running out of jewelry. "You hadda be here for me. It's how we are now. Everything we care about is gone."

("Don't bother coming back," he wrote Jane last night. "Even if you want to.") "Yeah s.h.i.+t," Roxy says, leaving him to wonder if this excursion has been a mistake: thesound of her teeth, clipping off the words.

She is put to the test in the least likely place. At Trevor's front door. An ugly mob is ma.s.sing in the street.

Somebody he knows. "You," he says. (Jane wrote last night: "You might as well know, it isn't Adam I left you for. It's Jake I love.") "Jake, what are you doing here?"

Jake scowls. "Like you were trying to forget you ever had a brother?"

"What happened, did you lose the business?"

"Everybody is losing everything," Jake snarls. There is a c.h.i.n.k, c.h.i.n.k. Thirty guys stand at Jake's back, slapping chains against their leather-covered thighs.

Oh, s.h.i.+t. "You stole my idea," Trevor says. Just like everything else I ever had. "What do you want now?"

"Whatever you have left," Jake says. "Who's the b.i.t.c.h?"

At Trevor's back, Roxy bristles.

"No! You don't get Roxy!"

"If she wasn't the only one left, I wouldn't touch her with a stick." Behind Jake, his thirty guys drool and rumble with l.u.s.t. "But she is. C'mere, baby."

Roxy snaps Jake's neck and, like a terrier who never gets tired of killing rats, starts after the others. Twenty of the thirty guys head for safety- The last ten don't make it.

She rolls the twenty-ninth guy off of Trevor and gets him inside. He looks up into eyes that are neither white nor silver. "If you want my great-grandmother's emeralds, they're yours."

"Whatever," she says coldly, but-is her expression two degrees softer?

Emeralds. It's a cinch Jane won't want them. Interesting, when you get what you want it's never what you thought. What you really want is for your gorilla to like you.

The next challenge is mechanized. A savage inventor unleashes a new machine on Trevor's street. The thing cracks open houses and its master strips them of food and valuables. Some wit designed the robot monster to look like a combination of Rodan and G.o.dzilla.

Roxy gets hurt in the encounter, but she trashes the thing. Microchips land in her hair like glits. Bolts roll everywhere.

"If I had anything left to give, I'd give it to you," Trevor tells her, and she almost smiles. (He did, in fact, send his great-grandmother's diamond clip to Jane with a note: "Sorry about your bereavement.") "If it makes any difference at all, I'm in love with you."

"Whatever," Roxy says, and goes in her cage and locks the door against him.

Meanwhile, every clock has frozen. The white skies are shredded by nonstop lightning. It should be comforting to know that the streets are empty now, but it isn't. Stay in, cover your head, and wait for it to be over, right? Wrong. No matter how well prepared you are, sooner or later, things break down: generator, alternate fuel supply. Personal arrangements. Computer.

There is no mail coming in and no mailing out. Not anymore, so G.o.d only knows what Jane is up to or what will become of you. Even you, who overstocked, will run out of food.

Sooner or later.For the first time since Trevor brought her home, his captive gorilla speaks first. "We're running out of stuff." "I know."

"We gotta go out there."

"Would you do that for me?"

"d.a.m.n straight."

He shudders and falls in step behind her. There's nothing left in the gutted supermarkets, the empty houses. They follow ancient signs to a forgotten treasure trove: prehistoric fallout shelter. Things to eat, not anything you'd want to put in your mouth, but edible.

And coming out, they run into an ordinary guy. A lot like Trevor. Timid, can't make it alone.

Studying them, the stranger sizes up the situation. Their food, heaped in Trevor's ex-kid's wagon. "Swap you," the stranger says. Calls over his shoulder. "Come on out, baby."

Broken tiles s.h.i.+ckle down as a gorgeous woman emerges. Amazing, how she can look the way she does in times like these. Slim and elegant. Beautiful. She gives Trevor a sultry smile.

"Well?"

"A swap." Trevor asks cautiously, "As in, your girlfriend for my gorilla?"

Behind him, Roxy shudders.

The stranger cracks up laughing. "h.e.l.l, no-my girlfriend for that food you got!"

Beautiful. She is beautiful. Blindly, Trevor forgets that these aren't ordinary times. "Maybe we can work out a trade."

At his back Roxy snarls, but Trevor is too distracted to notice. The thing about bait is, it's got to look good to the fish you're after. Of course, the guy wasn't bona fide. In the end, he tries to stab Trevor, and Roxy has to kill both him and the woman, never mind that she was gorgeous.

Trevor tries to thank her, but his concentration is broken. He's hung up on the distance between what he should have had and what he has here. Then he sees Roxy's face. "I would never trade you off," he says. "You're irreplaceable."

"f.u.c.k you." Another minute, and she'll yank his ears off.

"Can you ever forgive me?" He waits for an answer, but Roxy is done talking to him.

After that, nothing happens. It happens for a long time. It is terrible, waiting to hear from Jane. Roxy is sulking and won't talk to him. Nothing comes, no e-mails, no postcards. The carrier pigeons have all died, and Trevor suspects that one of them has a message for him tied to its dead claw. He searches the bodies of the pigeons he can find, but their bones have been picked clean by the starving, and they are carrying only magazine subscriptions and credit card offers.

It is terrible, watching Roxy pine. She quits working out.

He tries to motivate her. "What if someone comes?"

She is wearing all his family jewelry at once. "Not my problem."

"Come on, Rox, we were put here for a purpose. We survived for a reason." He can't stop trying. "What do you think it is?""That's for me to know and you to find out," she says grimly. The diamond necklace slips off her scrawny arm and falls into the straw. She kicks it out of the cage.

He winces. "What do you want from me?"

But she won't talk to him.

Awful, this is awful, but when all else fails, Trevor, at least, is ready. Gorilla in place, food stockpiled. He's OK, but he's not so sure about the gorilla.

For a while, phenomena abound. It's only a matter of time before the Four Hors.e.m.e.n come charging out of the sky unless he looks up one morning and sees the four evangelists with their heads blazing in the morning fog. Right now nothing is happening. Boredom is worse than the plague or fires and floods-when there's a riot, at least you have stuff to do. He sits in the dark watching tapes because the last television station belched snow onto his TV screen and blinked out of existence.

Then nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening. Every day is like every other day, with no promise that whatever Sam Trevor has prepared for so carefully-he captured someone!-is actually coming. Still, it's not as if they can go outside and resume normal life. Whatever that was. For no reason you can point to, the city's in ruins.

In her cage, Roxy crashes on her bunk and turns her face to the wall. Trevor takes over the exercise equipment. Works out on the Universal gym. He is busy all the time now. Excited and scared. He bangs away on the weights, blowing air like an industrial vacuum cleaner.