Spires of Infinity (14 page)

Whilst studying to become the best damned lawyer on Earth, Gabriel had taken

drama classes to learn how to intone, narrate, and monologue properly, all skills that a lawyer needed honed as sharply as possible. He’d found that he actually had some talent for vocal storytelling. Painting pictures in a way most people never could, he was so good that his words alone could sway the opinions of a jury.

In telling the greatest saga in movie history, Gabriel had left out the prequels. As far as he was concerned it was a damn shame George Lucas never got around to making those. They were atrocities, raping his childhood in the name of the almighty dollar.

George Lucas had somehow forgotten how to tell a good story. Forgetting everything that was important, he’d focused more on making as much money as possible.

Shivering, Gabriel had a moment of epiphany. Was that the reason he’d been

headed to hell before the Northern Sage intervened? Had he lost sight of what he set out to do in becoming a lawyer, focusing only on money and the all-important, perfect score?

In the beginning it was about justice, and proving his father wrong. In the end it was fame, and money, his expensive clothes and car, and maintaining his perfect record at any cost. Shame washed over him as he realized how much he’d sold out.

With no more stories to tell, Gabriel found the silence oppressive and

uncomfortable. Glancing over at Sam, who was picking at something in her teeth with a dirty fingernail, he was genuinely curious about what sort of life could produce such a repulsive, yet attractive girl. He actually
wanted
to know someone else’s story, to get to know
her
. He was actually beginning to see her as a person, rather than a pair of breasts that existed for nothing more than his own personal pleasure, like every other woman that he’d ever met.

This realization came as something of a shock to Gabriel. He’d been such an

unrepentant, sociopathic sex fiend for so long, that this desire to connect with another person of the opposite gender was both alien and somewhat frightening. It was rather disturbing to find that he was beginning to care about someone that was not him, but still, his curiosity prevailed.

Nudging his Cathor toward Sam’s, Gabriel felt uncharacteristically nervous as he smiled at her.

“What’s up,” she asked, hawking a monster of a loogie onto the ground.

“I was just wondering,” Gabriel said. “What’s your story?”

Shrugging, Sam looked away. Awakened by the motion, Mister Mittens glared at

Gabriel, obviously blaming him for it.

“I don’t know any good stories like the ones you told.”

“I don’t mean like that. Tell me about yourself. I don’t know anything about you at all. Who are you? Where did you come from? What’s your story?”

“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Sam cracked a lewd grin, with a

pointed look at his crotch. “I don’t know anything about you either.”

“Fair enough,” Gabriel nodded.

“Yeah,” Sam shrugged, again disturbing Mister Mittens, who swatted at the back of her neck with his claws. “I guess there’s nothing better to do.”

Watching her expectantly, Gabriel cleared his throat when she made no indication of continuing the conversation.

“Oh, you want me to go first?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“Well. There’s not much to tell really. My mother was poor as dirt. She whored herself out when funds got tight, which is where I came from. Neither of us ever really knew who my father was. I guess I was as happy as any other child oblivious of her total poverty. I was always hungry, and my clothes always had holes in them, but I didn’t know any different.

“When it was time for my tenth birthday, my mother said she’d take me

somewhere special. I was so excited, because I’d never gotten a birthday present before.

I couldn’t sleep at all the night before. She took me to the market, but instead of buying me something special, she sold me.”

“What,” Gabriel blinked at her, wondering if he’d heard that right. “She
sold
you? Like a slave?”

“No,” Sam looked down at her hands on the pommel of her saddle. “Like a

whore. She sold me to a brothel.”

“What kind of a parent would actually
sell
her own daughter to a life like
that
,”

Gabriel cried, suddenly remembering his father. He had no doubt that bastard would have sold him for booze money if he thought he could get away with it.

“She was always poor,” Sam continued uncomfortably. “Things were harder on

her with a child to feed and clothe. Which would you choose, abject poverty and a child you never wanted or loved, or a pocket full of money that would keep you from having to whore yourself out for next month’s rent?”

“That’s no excuse. And stop defending her! What she did to you was horrible.”

“You think I’m defending her? I hate her. I always hated her. Looking back

now, I can tell she was only waiting for me to get old enough to sell me off. I ran into her last year, but she didn’t recognize me. I popped her a good one, but when I saw her crying on the ground, asking why, I realized how stupid my anger was. Anything I could ever do to her was a small thing compared to what she’s already done to herself. Some nasty whore’s disease was eating her up from the inside out, and I gave her all the money I had on me, telling her to go see a doctor, but she probably just spent it all on drugs the second I was outta her sight. She’s probably dead and buried in some unmarked grave by now, unremembered by anyone but me. She died alone, because she sold the only family she’d ever had.

“Anyway, I spent one night at the brothel, horrified at what they taught me I’d have to do to eventually buy my freedom. I didn’t know about sex back then, and the thought doing it with strange men frightened me, so I ran away and never looked back.

I’ve spent my life wandering from town to town, crap job to crap job, wondering if this is all there is to life. I mean, there has to be something better out there, right? I guess that’s why I want a baby so much. I’m trying to find something meaningful, like loving a child of my very own. And I kinda wanna prove that I can be a better mother than mine ever was.”

“That’s horrible,” Gabriel muttered, feeling deep pangs of sympathy. Such

emotions had been buried within him for so long, he’d almost forgotten he had them. “I shouldn’t have made you tell me about it.”

“I don’t want your pity,” Sam snapped. “Lookit me now! I’ve got a great job.

I’m an NVM. I’m gonna get my baby with a pure as can be father. I’ve never once taken money for sex just to pay the bills like my whoring mother! I’ve triumphed over every horrible thing that tried to drag me down. I won. So keep your damn pity!”

“Sorry, I—”

Before Gabriel could continue with his apology, Sam flicked her wrist, pulled

back her arm and threw. Something flashed before his eyes. Turning, he followed the progress of a heavy bladed throwing knife with long red streamer tied to a ring at the end of the handle. It slammed between the eyes of what might have been the offspring of a rat and a lizard that fell into a vat of toxic waste, exploded, and then was put back together the wrong way.

“Whoa!” Gabriel could
swear
that he’d felt that streamer brush him on the way past. “That, was a good shot.”

“Thank you,” Sam beamed. “You can tell me
your
story while dinner cooks.”

Grimacing, Gabriel eyed the hideous creature. With many deformities, and the

fact that it was bleeding an acid green color, it looked even less appetizing than Indian food.

“We’re going to
eat
that thing?”

Sam shrugged. “A little salt, a lot of pepper, and you won’t even taste the sulfur.”

“Sulfur! I’m no chemistry expert, but isn’t that poisonous?”

“Bah, it won’t kill you,” Sam cheerily dismounted and yanked her knife free of the mutant.

Sighing, Gabriel slid out of his saddle and hobbled the cathors so they could not wander far while unattended.

As Sam sliced open the belly of the mutant, the contents splattered onto Gabriel’s boots.

“Stand back,” she laughed. “Some of them are contents under pressure.”

Fixing a rather fake smile on his face, Gabriel nodded. “Thanks for the warning.”

Grumbling about the unfairness of the universe, Gabriel cleaned off his boots.

His poor mother was probably sick with grief over the news that her baby had taken the Greyhound bus straight to that fearful courtroom in the sky to be judged for his sins.

Despite all those childhood fantasies of being a hero on other worlds, he longed to return to the courtroom. He was always so alive while laying a case before the jury. He’d turned out to be quite the pussy, hadn’t he? His father had been right all along.

“So,” Sam said, setting up her small, oil-burning stove. Mister Mittens curled up beside her and resumed his napping. “What about your parents?”

“Ah, right,” Gabriel said, sitting. “My parents. My mother loved my father so much she never left him, even when he beat her bloody in a drunken rage at lest once a month. I hated him so much, and even when he was sober he hated me. He didn’t approve of anything that I liked, thought I was a pussy or queer, always said I didn’t have what it takes to be a real man.”

“Sounds familiar,” Sam muttered while she spitted chunks of green meat on sticks and roasted them over the small, but disproportionately hot flame from the stove, sprinkling on salt and a
ton
of pepper. “She never hit me, but my mother’s words hurt worse than any beating woulda.”

“He hit me too,” Gabriel continued. “After he beat my mother into submission, he'd turn on me. I was always going to school with cuts, black eyes, and even broken bones, too afraid of what he’d do to me if I asked my teachers for help.

“When I was twelve, he came home more wasted than usual. When my mother

tried to explain that we didn’t have the money for him to waste it on booze he beat her unconscious, but this time he didn’t stop. He just kept hitting her, and hitting her. Blood splattered on the wall and the furniture, but he wouldn’t stop. So I grabbed the biggest knife we had in the kitchen and I told him if he didn’t stop I’d kill him with it. He looked at me, then at my mom, and the blood on his hands, and he laughed. He told me I didn’t have what it takes, and he was right. I couldn’t do it. I dropped the knife, and he got up, and he left, and I never saw or heard from him again.

“After everything he’d done to us, she still
loved
that bastard! Of all the things he did to her,
that
is the one I can never forgive. I went to college to prove I was better than his worthless, uneducated, redneck hide, and I became a lawyer to make sure people like him never hurt people like us ever again.”

“College,” Sam asked. “You mean you went to University?”

“For eight years,” Gabriel nodded. “Four of general studies at a local college, then four more at an Ivy League law school.”

“Wow,” Sam said in awe. “You’ve had eight whole
years
of school? Then why are you so dumb?”

“That was just college,” Gabriel said. “I went to thirteen years of school before that as a kid.”

“You must have been
rich
to afford all that schooling,” Sam said. “My mother could only afford to send me to primary school for three years. I learned to read, and write, and do numbers, but not much else. I’m saving up lotsa money so that when it’s born, my baby can go to school a lot more than I did, and to University too.”

Sighing, Gabriel sat back, looking up at the impossible sky. His story had

dredged up a lot of horrible things from his childhood, and the voice of his father, ranting about him not being good enough, seemed louder than usual. He wished that voice would just go away and stop haunting him. He wished he could move past what his father had done to him all those years ago and move on with his life. Something about the retelling of the story was nagging at him, as though he’d knowingly lied, and felt guilty for it, but he’d told it all true.

“He really messed you up, didn’t he,” Sam asked.

“That he did,” Gabriel agreed, trying to ignore the none-too-appetizing scent

rising off the meat. “We’re
really
going to eat that?”

“I’ve known babies that cry less than you!”

“Hey,” Gabriel grumbled.

Standing, Sam plopped down on her knees beside him. Surprisingly, she hugged

him tightly. Her NVM enhanced body was feverishly hot, and the warmth radiated into him, taking some of the chill from his bones. Despite her unwashed smell, he found the embrace oddly comforting. Strange fantasies of a weirdly non-sexual nature began to wander through his thoughts. Living together in Chicago, having children, that sort of thing. He almost jerked away from her, startled. Normally his thoughts about women were how fast he could get their clothes off and have his way with them.

“You looked like you needed a hug,” Sam said to him. “Maybe if you’d just

accept your past as part of who you are, like I did, you wouldn’t hafta hide behind stupid stories like coming from a different world.”

“Why is that so hard for you to believe,” Gabriel cried as Sam returned to tending the meat.

“Because stuff like that doesn’t even happen in stories,” Sam asked with a dumb expression on her face.

“I’ll have you know that Doctor Who does it
all
the time!”

“Who?”

“Exactly! I died, and I ended up
here
. This must be Purgatory. Or this is all just a coma dream.”

Examining him closely, Sam gestured to the sky. “I don’t think anyone could

hallucinate that. Not when you’re from a world with a sky as boring as you describe.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been splattered by a bus before. Have you?”

“I don’t even know what a bus is. The Celestial Mother take me, are you on the rag or something today? You’re sure acting like it. Maybe I should start calling you Gabrielle.”