Captives (4 page)

Walt shut his eyes, rubbing his forehead. "I don't give a shit about any of this. How do you even know the guitar was Willie Nelson's in the first place?"

"Because Mr. Nelson gave it to me." Dim lowered his eyes in reverence. "Post-mortem."

"You took his guitar. From his body. Holy shit, you slew Willie Nelson."

"I am not the slayer of Willie Nelson! I found it. In the house of one of his neighbors. Months after the world became quiet."

"If it was his neighbor's house, wouldn't you assume it was his neighbor's guitar?"

"You being you, I presume you have seen your share of the dead?"

"Sure. After a few days of decomposition, you can't tell whether they wore their genitals on the inside or the outside. Let alone their identity."

"Flesh rots, this is true." He gave Walt a significant look. "Hair, however…"

Walt drew back his head. "You found his braids."

"Attached to a skull, attached in turn to a body, whose last act was to cradle this beautiful guitar to its chest."

"And you stole the one thing he wanted to be with him at the end. How touching."

"
He
didn't need it anymore, did he?" Dim glared down at his knees. "Anyway, in using it, I intend to honor him. To continue the legacy of a man who spoke for so many."

"Whatever. Okay, so then your friend Liam stole it from you, right? And you haven't tried to get it back. Presumably because it's dangerous. What happens if I die in pursuit of this most holy object?"

"If you retrieve this for me, or make a valiant and honest effort to do so, I swear to do everything in my power to get your wife back for you."

"First, she's not my wife. Second, if you can't get your own guitar back, what are the chances you can rescue her from an armed gang?"

Dim held out his hands. "More than zero. That is far superior to the odds you currently possess, yes?"

"True enough." He moved his hand nearer his pocket. "Which raises the eternal question. Why don't I save myself the trouble and beat the answers out of you?"

"Because I have a relationship with these people. I may be able to bargain for her freedom. You would have no such connection to draw on."

"Who says I need help?"

The man sighed, noticed a crumb on his lapel, and brushed it off. "I am a professional liar, sir. If you beat me, I will sob, wail, and send you in the completely wrong direction. You will come back for me, I am sure. But I won't be here. By the time you find me, your woman will be gone forever."

"I'd tell you not to make me regret this, but I already do." Walt stood. "We're wasting time. Let's move."

Dim grinned and clapped. He had a bicycle in the garage and a bag at the ready. Afternoon sunlight gleamed from the windows of the silent houses. It was a pretty town, a mix of Victorian homes, early 1900s brickwork storefronts, and modern glass offices, but Walt had eyes for none of it. Too many miles ahead of them. They'd be lucky to hit the city by nightfall. They pedaled through a stretch of farms. The highway climbed into low mountains.

Walt swore as the grade increased. He switched gears. "If this guitar means that much to you, why haven't you gotten it back already?"

"Earlier, you called me a bard," Dim said. "It's an apt term, though we've adopted a new one. Like days of yore, Liam has decided to lend his services to a local chieftain. He is under their protection. Residents are very rarely allowed to leave the tower they have taken as their keep."

"Their
keep
? Should we turn around and get the battering ram?"

Dim eyed him soberly. "Getting in is
your
job, sir. There is a fence. Sentries. At night there are dogs. Very tricky, you see."

"Who runs the place?"

"An unlikely alliance of gangsters, Sharks fans, and gutterpunks known as the Forged Ones. The story of their assembly is quite epic in nature, but I haven't yet completed setting it to blank verse. What is important for our purposes is that they are extremely strict regarding their security. Visitors are not allowed inside the grounds without being vouched for by one of the clansmen. If the visitor misbehaves, the man who so vouchsafed may lose his privileges, his property, even his life."

"Never have I been happier to be a woods-shitting hermit," Walt muttered. "Rather than breaking into this fortified compound, why not wait for Liam to leave it, then jump him?"

"That may work," Dim said. "But it may not be that simple."

The road wove through the mountains and descended into a long, narrow valley patchworked with towns and farms. It was late afternoon and the air was beginning to cool. Walt figured they had another thirty or forty miles to go. Assuming no trouble, they'd make the city in another few hours, scout the tower that night, strike within the next day. He tried to keep his thoughts on the business ahead rather than on Carrie. Or on Dim, who Walt would happily strangle if he could guarantee the man's dying words included her location. Despite Dim's bravado about what a fine liar he was, Walt thought there were decent odds he could bash the truth out of the man.

That left a lot of uncertain ground, though. A lot of space for Carrie to be lost in. Maybe Walt had too readily agreed to a bad idea. But if the last few years had taught him anything, it was that it was better to get a move on and figure it out as you went than to stand on the shoulder of the road waiting for help to show up.

"Perhaps you'd like to tell me a story," Dim said, prompted by nothing.

"You've got to be kidding me."

"Why not? We have a long ride and nothing else to occupy us."

"Sure, how about the one where I took down the mothership? You'll never believe it, but I won it in a game of strip poker. Don't ask me why they agreed; they didn't even know what poker was. I thought it would be like driving a car, but it turns out it's significantly more difficult to operate a mile-wide ship. Crashed it in the ocean five minutes later. You should see my new insurance premiums."

"You are a ridiculous person. Anyway, I am not interested in that story."

"Of course not. It's only the most important achievement ever."

"One so important that everyone knows it already."

Walt glanced over. "They do?"

"Certainly. What they lack, however, is knowledge of your partner. Otto."

"God damn it. This is a sneaky trick."

"I don't take your meaning."

Walt laughed. "I think you do. I don't care what people say about me. But if I don't speak up for Otto, who else will?"

"You are more thoughtful than the stories made you," Dim said. "Then again, most people are."

Grudgingly, he told the story. How their wild goose hunt for the Bear Republic Rebels led them to Otto and the handful of others in the woods outside Santa Barbara. How they had come to the city to fight back—and had been squashed almost immediately. Which led to the schism. Which led, in turn, to his and Otto's master plan: take up the balloon, plant explosives on the ship, and tear it apart from the inside.

As he spoke, Dim took notes, balancing a pen and small pad of paper on his handlebars. "What kind of man was he?"

"Older. Vietnam vet. Suspicious of outsiders, but loyal as hell once he trusted you. Willing to do whatever it took. Bet you fifty bucks he voted for Bush—both of them—and that we'd have hated each other's guts if we'd met before the Panhandler. But he was a good guy. We were a fit."

"You sound as though you miss him."

Walt gazed at the hills lining both sides of the valley, green with spring rains. "I don't know if we knew each other long enough for that. But it felt like he would have gotten along better in this world than the old one. Sucks he had to miss it."

Dim nodded vaguely, wiping his brow with his tie. "We would be in a much different place without him. Thank you for telling me of him. And how about this not-wife of yours, this Carrie? How did she come into the picture?"

Walt eyed him sidelong. "When did this turn into a
Rolling Stone
profile?"

"You cannot blame me for wanting to know what kind of woman ends up with a man like you."

"Nine feet tall. Chews tin cans open with her teeth and spits the lids out as bullets." His nose was running from the wind and he wiped it on his sleeve. "I met her near here. More like she met me. She'd been on the run for three days. Didn't even know who was after her. Hadn't eaten in days. As soon as I got some food in her, she cleared her head, turned around, and took them down. That was when I knew."

"That you had no intention of marrying this woman."

Walt rolled his eyes. "If you knew what my other relationships have been like, you wouldn't blame me for being slow to strap on the labels. Anyway, who's going to marry us? A tree?" He gestured to all sides. "What's the point in pledging forever when shit like this happens?"

Dim gazed out on the fallow farms, the ragged houses. "To share it while it's here, I suppose."

"I didn't know I was traveling with a philosopher. Well, story time's over. Think about how you're going to get her back from the Mystery Assholes."

The man went silent. Walt picked up the pace, but his legs were getting wobbly, and they had to break for water and a snack. Walt wasn't sure he'd have the strength to keep going on, but when he thought of Carrie, he found he didn't have the strength to stop.

Dusk came, claiming the hills. At the top of a rise, they looked down on a mishmash of cities staking out the land between the mountains and the dark waters of the Pacific.

White offices stood beneath the night. Spanish churches and houses spangled the streets. Dim bled speed, glancing between the corridors of buildings. Isolated shouts carried on the damp, cold air, snatched up by a buffeting offshore wind. It had been months since Walt had been inside a proper city, and though he'd once been the type of New Yorker who only left Manhattan for Mets games and grudging trips home to Long Island, cities now struck him as perverse landscapes as alien as the pen he'd once stumbled into in the Southwest desert. There were way too many places for people to hide from you, look down on you, shoot at you. Meanwhile, they had few if any renewable resources, including little things like food and water. At this point, cities were essentially like the corpse of a sperm whale that's fallen to the bottom of the lightless ocean. The only people who stayed were the human equivalent of the abyssal crabs who feasted on fetid blubber.

"And there you are," Dim said softly.

He nodded down a side street, but the flickering lights had already caught Walt's eye. A white apartment tower spiked into the sky, set back from the curb. The lot had been fenced at the sidewalks by two layers of chain link topped by razor wire. Behind them, a man strolled past, lantern swinging in his hand, a muscled black dog at his side, its nails clicking on the pavement. He had hardly disappeared behind a wall when a woman appeared behind him, rifle on her shoulder, dreads piled on top of her head.

They circled the building, keeping from sight. Though it was ten at night and daylight was long gone, a number of residents remained on the grounds, seated on the front steps or gathering around trash can fires, dressed in jeans, army jackets, or fleeces. Dogs and sentries, too.

"These guys don't fuck around, do they?" Walt said once they'd withdrawn to the next street over. "Does the roof have a Bat Signal?"

"The struggle in this city lasted years," Dim said. "Those who made it learned the virtue of extremes."

"Does their security ever get less extreme?"

"Christmas Eve, I imagine."

"I don't suppose they've moved Christmas to March."

Dim smiled wryly. "That has not occurred to them. Fortunately, this is an area where we can employ Liam's pride against him. If he leaves the building, it won't be without the guitar."

"How are we going to get his schedule? Has he got his tour dates online?"

"Not exactly. But if you've got another hour in you, we can check the analog equivalent."

They returned to their bikes and Dim led the way down the road. He skirted a freeway and peeled toward a park. Torches flapped within the greenery. The wind carried laughter and voices, none of them sober. Manicured seven-foot hedges blocked view of the interior. Dim took a quick look around and stashed his bike behind a shrub. Pink and white roses bloomed from the trimmed walls.

Dim straightened his tie and entered a tunnel through the hedges. Though they couldn't see the revelers, their voices were so close Walt spent the walk glancing from side to side, disoriented, lost in disembodied chatter and the smell of the roses in the night.

Ahead, a woman's voice shot above the murmurs, the enunciation so crisp you could crumble it on a salad. "Welcome to the Garden, where the walls are made of flowers and the moonshine's almost as cheap as the words. Aren't you happy?"

She was answered with cheers. She laughed throatily, declared her name, ran through some practiced patter. Dim turned a corner, heading her way.

"Clear night tonight," she went on. "The stars, aren't they gorgeous? Sometimes they look so close you could pluck them out of the black. Whenever I try, all I'm left with is handfuls of air. I keep reaching, though. Because one day, I might come back with a light of my own." She paused, her words hanging in the marine air. "Until then, I let them inspire me in other ways. Tonight, I'm going to share one of the first stories that taught me to look up and dream. It goes a little something like this. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…"

Whoops rang out from the crowd. Walt jerked his head. "No way."

Dim paused at a four-way intersection. "It's not as confusing as it looks. This is one of my oldest haunts."

"I'm not worried about getting lost in a place where you can open a new door with a pair of pruning shears. I'm talking about the tom. I thought you guys told stories about the people you've met. Shit like that."

Dim frowned vaguely. "You can never go wrong with one of the classics."

He turned right, stepping over a man passed out on the chipped bark lining the path. At another intersection, he held out his hand and indicated Walt should wait. He crunched off through the bark. A man in a long jacket walked past Walt, giving him the single upward nod of the young and the cool. The woman continued to recite, complete with character voices and spot-on Jawa imitations. Walt wanted to hate it and her for having co-opted it, but odds were the dude who'd dreamed it up was just as dead as everyone else. It had moved beyond him, passed into the culture. Fat bastard ought to be humbled.