The Graveyard Game (34 page)

Joseph let go of his arm and doubled over, as though he was going to be physically ill.
You fool. How could you have been so stupid as to tell Nennius—of all people—about what we’ve been doing all these years?

I didn’t! It happened by chance. We ran into each other on a cruise, and he told me the story to pass the time
.

Then he knew about you, Lewis. The Company finally noticed your prying into old secrets, and they sent him after you. He set a trap, and we’ve walked right into it. Mendoza’s not here, and neither is Edward. We’ve got to get the hell out before the security techs come for us
. Joseph straightened up and looked around, preparing to run for his life; but it was too late.

“We have weapons,” a drippy little voice informed them.

Both turned. There, instead of the phalanx of security techs they expected, stood three small pale men, dressed in what appeared to be golfing ensembles. They did indeed have weapons, and the weapons were trained on Lewis.

“You don’t do anything smart, this time,” said the foremost of the men. “We wait here until the others come for us. Then we take you home.”

Joseph, they’re only after me
, transmitted Lewis, deadly calm.
You can get away
.

“For Christ’s sake!” snarled Joseph, and winked out, to reappear between Lewis and the pale men. “Go, Lewis! Look, you stupid little—ow!”

Lewis, who had obediently winked out and reappeared thirty yards away, heard Joseph’s howl of pain. He saw the pale men firing again, and watched in horror as Joseph fell.

Then he was beside Joseph, caught hold of him, and they were away, this time getting as far as the next canyon before Lewis lost momentum. When they stopped, Joseph tottered a moment and fell again. He struggled to pull himself up but seemed unable to use his left arm and leg.

Lewis crouched over him.
My God, I’ve killed us both
.

Joseph struggled, making croaking noises. His face was terrifying: the left side slack, the left eye turned up sightless and white. The right eye rolled wildly as he strained to see over Lewis’s shoulder. Lewis followed his stare to behold three little globes of light floating over the ridge, coming after them.

Betrayed
, said Joseph.
Company told them, deal. Find you. Company let them take
— He went into a seizure.

Lewis, supporting his head, looked across the canyon in quiet despair. The lights came closer.
Can you see, Joseph? Can you hear me?

Uh
.

I’ll lead them away from you. I’ll go as far as I can. They might
forget there were two of us. Try to crawl to cover. If you can make it to morning, most of your systems ought to reset, and you can get away. I am so very sorry about this, Joseph
.

Lewis
.

But Lewis had winked out, and at the head of the canyon Joseph heard a shout and saw a waving figure, dark against the skyline.

“Here I am! Up here, you wretched imbeciles!” yelled Lewis, and dashed over the top out of sight. The three lights froze and then moved after him with uncanny speed, drifting above the brush like balloons. Joseph was left in darkness. He tried to keep from passing out from the pain, which was unlike anything he’d experienced in his twenty-odd thousand years.

After a moment he was able to coordinate his right arm and leg sufficiently to drag himself backward, half upright in the deeper gloom of an ironwood thicket. Panting, he tried to run a self-diagnostic. As he did so, he heard a distant crashing, a faint shout from Lewis, something Joseph couldn’t make out.

There was another light on the ridge across from him.

Right eye widening, Joseph crouched back into the shadows. Someone whined in the darkness beside him. But there was no one beside him. On the opposite ridge a lot of lights now moved fast, all in a line, like ants following ants, following Lewis, up and over the ridge. A torchlight procession. The Hollywood Bowl performance of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. When was that, 1938? Max Reinhardt’s stupendous, colossal extravaganza. Fairies in the trees with lights. Shine, little glowworm. Joseph went with Lewis, had drinks afterward in the bar at Musso and Frank’s, Lewis in his tuxedo elegant and so funny critiquing the show over his martini, acting out the worst moments, Joseph laughing and laughing—

A flare of light in his face, a tremendous vibration. He was flat on his back looking up at the biggest damn full moon he’d ever seen. But the moon didn’t notice him, it rose majestically and drifted up over the ridge, following all the little horrible lights. It dipped out of sight on the other side, but he could still see the glow through the trees.

As he was levering himself upright again, with unbelievable effort, he heard far off a long, wavering cry of agony.

Lewis!

He toppled and fell, going into another seizure. When it subsided, he grappled frantically at roots, stones, anything to pull himself along, anything to go in the opposite direction from the monstrous light, scuttling like a crab, blindly going faster and faster, and gravity was helping him now, because he was rolling, tumbling, oh
shit
he’d forgot about the cliffs—

Roaring air for a moment, and then a deafening crash as he hit the water. Darkness and deathly cold. Smashed like a bug. But he wouldn’t drown, would he? He was immortal.

He was floating face up when the full moon reappeared, drifting over the top of the cliff. He gasped and flailed, but once again it took no notice of him. It rotated, and he saw it was a beautiful craft really, a glowing drop. It hesitated a moment before moving out to sea, picking up speed as it went but still zigging and wobbling unsteadily, as though piloted by idiots.

He watched it leave. It had no need to come back: it had caught what it had been hunting for so long.

M
AN? BOAT?
Dead? Not dead?

Joseph was instantly awake, his eye narrowed. He waited until he felt the prodding beak again, nudging his painful ribs.

Not-man? Dead?

Alive!
He grappled with his right arm and clung, sinking his teeth into its dorsal fin for good measure as the dolphin screamed and darted under, trying frantically to throw him off. He hung on, through a long icy bubbly ride.

Ow ow!
Not-man, off! Not-man, off!

Hear me
.

Okay!

Seek boat. You swim me to boat. In boat, I stop bite, you go
.

Okay
, the dolphin agreed sullenly, and they rose slowly to the surface. The dolphin cast about for a ship, located one, and swam for it awkwardly, still giving a stealthy flip now and then in hopes of dislodging Joseph, who gripped it like grim death.

Not soon enough for either of them, the animal closed with its object, a small craft cutting through the darkness under power. It was towing a dinghy.

Baby boat
, Joseph indicated. The dolphin swam to the dinghy. Joseph lunged and got his leg over the side, then his arm. He rolled
gasping into the bottom of the dinghy, as the dolphin called him dirty names and swam away.

He looked up at the stars. Late, look how far they’d wheeled across the sky. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, the sky was pale, the stars had disappeared. Gray air, stale smells, and suddenly a very large tanker was taking up most of the view. He lurched up on his right elbow. The left side of his body was still dead.

Important things to do right now:

1. Reactivate signal killer.

2. Get out of dinghy before you are noticed.

Joseph groped for his left hand, pulled it into his lap, twisted the bezel on the ring, and felt a comforting little jolt. He writhed around and took his bearings.

He was traveling into San Pedro Harbor courtesy the good ship
Bobbi Jo
, which seemed to be making for a berth near the old Ports o’ Call sector. He made a tentative attempt to access a map; he got one! Los Angeles County. In the last moments before the
Bobbi Jo
docked, he scanned the map, made a plan, and rolled over the side into murky water.

Ten minutes later, he was crouched shivering under a boat dock, snarling at the crabs who advanced, intrigued by his condition. Finally he killed a few of them and cracked them open, and sucked the meat out of the pieces of shell.

He stayed there all day, unnoticed by anyone. By nightfall his left leg responded to commands somewhat, though he was still blind and deaf on the left side and unable to use his left arm at all. In the afternoon he reactivated the signal killer.

When the evening grew late and quiet, he crawled out and up to the marina. Filthy, unshaven, staggering, he looked like any of the other zombies who roamed the night. He quickly found the paths they used, the alleyways and ugly places where they passed freely, invisible to others. Before morning he found his way to the city wall. He waited
near an access port and watched. At dawn a convoy of transports lined up to exit. He shambled to the last one, swung himself up on its loading step, and hung on for dear life. He didn’t worry about being seen. Nobody cared about people going
out
to Los Angeles; it was only the incoming transports that were searched for refugees.

He clung like a limpet as the transport picked up speed, following the route of what used to be the old Harbor Freeway. As it drew near a certain overpass in Compton, he launched himself and fell, rolling and tumbling down the embankment, to come to rest against an ancient chain-link fence in a nest of blown paper and trash. The rest of the world collected its garbage to run fusion plants: not Los Angeles.

He lay there bleeding, running a self-diagnostic. Contusions, minor cuts, no more.

Growling at no one in particular, he dragged himself upright and stumbled along the verge, until he was able to find an offramp. He seemed to have sustained a scalp wound, and now the blood was running down into his good eye. Blinking, he made his way into Watts and shambled down Avalon Boulevard, looking through the ruins for an address.

Nobody bothered him.

The mission was easy to spot. It was the only intact building for blocks, had once been a big rambling private house, and there was a line of people stretching out the door onto the front porch. They looked at him, appalled, except the young man in some kind of monastic habit who was addressing them, handing each one a form to fill out. Joseph wiped the blood from his eye and read the sign mounted above the porch:
THE COMPASSIONATES OF ALLAH
. He lurched forward and began to crawl up the stairs.

Somebody finally thought to nudge the brother and tell him there was a white guy getting into line. The young man snapped, “No whites treated here—” Then he saw Joseph and stopped, gulping. Joseph fixed him with his good eye, which the blood was obscuring again, and tried to form words. He couldn’t, quite.

An elderly lady groped in her pocket for a handful of gray paper napkins and held them out to Joseph timidly. He accepted them and wiped his bleeding face. She told the young brother she thought Joseph might be Mexican. He leaned forward and told Joseph, in Spanish, that this was a blacks-only immunization center. Joseph just stared at him, breathing harshly.

“Maybe Filipino?” somebody else suggested.

Joseph raised his hand and made a writing gesture in midair.

The people in the line conferred briefly among themselves and decided that maybe the brother had better take the stranger inside before he died on the porch. Thoroughly unnerved, the young man went to the door and opened it, pointing inside. Why was Joseph moving so slowly? Blood loss. Internal hemorrhaging. Estimate fugue state in four minutes fourteen seconds, if self-repair not initiated prior to that time.

Inside was a waiting room. The young man held open a door marked
EMERGENCY CARE
for Joseph, waving at him to go in, but Joseph spotted the one marked
ADMINISTRATOR
and pushed that instead, and went through.

A thin-featured black man in old-fashioned reading glasses was going over forms at a desk. He glanced up in irritation at being interrupted, and his eyes widened at the sight of Joseph. Limping just ahead of the young man, who had run after him, Joseph grabbed a grease pencil from a jar on the desk and got its cap off. On the back of a form he wrote, with infinite care, the word
Suleyman
.

The Administrator looked at him sharply.

That was the last clear impression Joseph had for a while.

He was on a cot in a locked room. Mortals had carried him there. There were compresses on his wounds. It was day. He moved convulsively, twisted the bezel of the ring. Still safe.

It was night. He had a blanket now. Bandages too. The ring, again. Still safe.

Still night, but there were mortals moving around him, cutting away his torn and filthy clothing, washing him, bandaging him again, exclaiming over his bruises. Black men, all in the same monastic robes. They were talking to him, trying to get him upright, into white cotton pajamas. They put shoes on his feet. They pushed his arms through the sleeves of a long coat. Then, thank God, they let him lie down again.

Somebody was feeding him broth. Did he think he could manage with a straw? He tried. He managed, mostly, and somebody wiped away what had run from the slack corner of his mouth. He thought they would let him sleep then, but here were more of them, back with a stretcher. They moved him onto the stretcher and took him out into the night air. It was foul and cold. Old petroleum sump nearby. He was riding in an ambulance—when did that happen? An ambulance but no siren. He remembered the ring again.

They told him to be quiet, that they had to wait for the gate patrolman who knew them.

A shipyard? He had the sudden awful feeling that he was still crouched under the dock, eating crabs, and had only dreamed he made it this far. No, they were explaining that he had no papers, but Suleyman had arranged passage anyway. It was just getting light as he was carried on board the ship, big square freight barge, unlovely thing. Down to a tiny dark closet of a room. The fusion drive boomed steadily somewhere close. They all went away and left him, except the man in the reading glasses. Darkness. The ship was moving out. He could sleep now.