The Last Hour of Gann (104 page)

“Damn it!” she shouted, smacking her fist against his shoulder even as her thighs parted. “I asked you what you wanted, I asked you, and you said it wasn’t sex!”

“It wasn’t,” he grunted, bracing himself on one arm so that he could sweep his belt off and let his cock extrude in an immediate and
insistent rush. “It was marriage. The sex would just be sex without it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the sex,” he added, now struggling with the loin-plate, which had caught in his straining breeches. “If you’re worried that you don’t please me, you can be easy, Soft-Skin. Your body was made to pleasure mine.”

“What a huge relief,” said Amber in a curiously flat voice, each word carved and set separate from the others.

She really had been worried. He paused to stroke his snout along her throat again, then resumed the battle with his loin-plate and won. “I will burn with you, my wife. And you will burn with me.”

“You’re driving me crazy,” she said, arching her hips to help him tug her breeches down. “You know we’re not really married.”

He stopped. It wasn’t easy. His man’s shaft pulsed in his fist where he gripped it for the guidance it needed to find its way inside her in this bizarre position, but he was the master of his clay and he ignored its urgings. “I didn’t mark that,” he said, a bit breathlessly, but with admirable self-control. “What did you say?”

She looked up at him, her brows furrowed, and bit at her lower lip with her small, blunt teeth. She was also breathless and flushed
as well, and she looked down the hills and valleys of her body at the cock in his fist with an expression that was at once profoundly annoyed and entirely defeated.

“We’ll fight about it later,” she promised, reaching between them to take what he offered
and guide him home.

A true master of his clay would have firmly removed himself and thrashed this out. Human speech did not change from one tone to another; he knew what she’d said and he knew he should not allow it to lie spoken.

But her body took him in, hot and wet and gently squeezing at the whole of his length in ways miraculous to feel, and he was no Sheulek then, only a man willing to trade every future argument in all the world just to stay right here right now. So he let it go, and whatever twinge of conscience he may have felt in that release was swiftly forgotten in the pursuit of the one that eventually followed. It was not his proudest moment, but he would just have to pray about that. Later.

7

M
aybe it was true. Maybe they really were married. Amber had never actually befriended a married couple and didn’t have much personal experience with the married lifestyle, but Meoraq certainly seemed to fit the stereotype, even though he’d never been to the movies. He grunted when she talked to him, insisted he knew where they were going even after admitting he’d never been here before, coddled her unnecessarily when he decided her poor little girl-body couldn’t keep up, and then ignored her on the one occasion she asked to stop.

She asked for two reasons. First, the rain that had been drumming down on their heads for the better part of three days had undergone a series of disturbing changes in a short stretch of time. This morning, although drizzly, the wind had been relatively warm; next, it had stopped raining for maybe an hour, but gone very dark and very cold; about an hour ago, the sky had taken on a vaguely grainy appearance, almost like she was seeing an old movie, and it had started raining again, the drops like nails falling, not on her head, but straight into her face. Since then, it had been getting darker almost by the minute, even though she knew they had hours to go before nightfall. The lightning, which to be fair had never really stopped, picked up in frequency and intensity, until it began to feel like they were filming that grainy old movie in front of a huge crowd of paparazzi. And now there was thunder—not the low rolls and grumbles that had been following them for days from the distance, but the kind that she could feel shivering in her bones.

The second reason, the selling point as it were, was that quite unexpectedly, they were presented with a place to go. The hill they’d been climbing hadn’t been the latest in a series of suspiciously regular, short, steep hills. It was just a hill, like any of a number of hills that had been growing the closer they came to the mountains. It wasn’t particularly steep, but it was very slick and muddy, thanks to days of rain and the wind blowing directly in her eyes. The rocks that jutted out of its thorny, mud-slick sides weren’t the squarish chunks of eroded walls that had fallen in and been covered over; they were obviously just rocks. There had been, in short, no clues whatsoever that this was waiting on the other side.

They didn’t look like ruins. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings at all more than a few stories tall, just a few metal towers like antennae around the perimeter, and they were still standing. The roads were all flat—no overpasses pancaked to the ground—and they were all extremely well-lit.
It didn’t appear to be the protruding tip of an overgrown metropolis, but something small and complete, built to fill exactly the place it occupied. From here, so far away, any damage that time and neglect had invariably caused was hidden. The rain gave the illusion of movement to the lights that burned in every building and along every street. The wind could have easily been the sound of all the traffic Amber couldn’t see. And looking at it, Amber suddenly understood how people could believe in Scott’s starship. Looking at it, even Amber had a moment, however dim and fleeting, when she wondered if one of their old ships might really be able to fly after all.

Of course, she didn’t say that. All she said was, “Let’s
go down there and look around until this blows over, what do you say?” and he said, “No.”

And wasn’t that what marriage was all about? Communication and compromise. Jerk.

“Hey,” she said, and then had to shout it because of the wind and the fact that he was still walking. “Hey!”

She knew he heard her because his spines flattened, but he kept going.

“Hey!” That wasn’t working. Amber gave in and ran after him. “Can we please stop?”

“No,” said Meoraq.

The sky grew noticeably darker.

“Nicci and the others might be down there!”

“They aren’t.”

“You don’t know that!”
She grabbed at his pack, since she knew he’d just shake her off his sleeve, with far more success than she’d expected. He skidded, arms flailing, but quickly recovered his balance and before Amber could think to let go of his pack, he’d shrugged out of it and swung around. Lightning snapped across the sky, throwing her shadow in stark relief over his chest.

“Woman!” he bellowed. “Don’t paw at me!”

“Then d
on’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

He snatched his pack out of her hands and glared right back at her. “This is not a discussion. We
do not stop until I give that order!”

“So what I want doesn’t matter?”

“Not in this instance.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Don’t whine at me. Start walking.”

Amber had often heard it said that after a while, married people achieved such a state of togetherness that they could finish one another’s sentences. Apparently, there was an intermediary step in which one could see how the sentence was supposed to go without actually finding it necessary to fill in the blanks.

“I haven’t asked for a damn thing in—”

“That doesn’t buy my assent for—”

“Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t—”

“God Himself commands—”

“I said a
good
reason, not more of your Bible-thumping bullshit! Why can’t you just admit—”

“Why can’t you?!”

They stopped as if by some prearranged signal to allow thunder to smash overhead and roll away behind them.

“You don’t want to go down there because you don’t want to find them,” Amber said at the end of it. She was shouting, she supposed, but only because the storm made it impossible to be heard any other way. The thunder was still rolling, no louder but no softer, like a distant train that just kept roaring by.

His eyes narrowed, sparking white with reflected lightning. “You don’t want to look for them down there,” he countered, also shouting. “You just want to hide from a little winter storm!”

“
Little winter storm? Look at that!” She pointed back the way they’d come, and because she was pointing, she looked that way too.

The last time she’d seen it, the storm had
stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, all churning wind and the flashpop of lightning, black as a solid wall above the barest stripe of sky that could be seen beneath it. Now it was a lot closer and Amber saw for the first time thin tendrils of black, dangling down from the storm above and groping at the ground below if it were pulling itself along in some lurching, predatory fashion.

Thin tendrils…dozens and dozens of them…

A wall of tornados, as far as the eye could see.

“Oh my God,” she said, except she might have only mouthed it. She couldn’t hear herself speak, couldn’t hear anything at all but the sudden pounding of her heart and the howling of the storm. Her pointing arm dropped slowly; her other arm came up like a counterweight to clutch at her throat, which had tightened painfully. All at once, she couldn’t catch her breath. “Oh my God,” she said again and she heard it this time, just barely. “Meoraq, look at that!”

He looked, but his annoyed expression never changed.

“We have to get
inside!” she said (not shouting, not yet, or if she was, it was just because the wind and rain were so loud. She wasn’t panicking. Amber Bierce had never had one moment of panic in her whole life). “Right now!”

“Not here.”

“We’re going to die!”

He rolled his eyes, then took her arm and pointed to a rocky outcropping in the middle of the empty plains, so far distant that she could see nothing beyond its general shape and some shadows around its base that might be crevasses or maybe only dark brush. “Do you see the caves? We’ll weather down there.”

“We’ll never reach it! There’s shelter right here! Damn it, Meoraq, we have to get out of this
now
!”

As if God Himself agreed, lightning slammed into the ground not half a mile away—which still seemed like a long ways off, until it was lightning hitting there—shattering the skeletal finger of a lone tree down to the ground. The storm-monster in the sky picked up its splinters, tasting them as it
scoured the earth and tossing away the bits it didn’t like.

Meoraq looked at that, too, but his expression hadn’t changed. “There is no shelter here,” he told her
, raising his voice to a bellow in order to be heard, and turned around.

Amber stood with her mouth hanging dumbly open and the rain sluicing in, watching him walk away. Then she looked at the storm and the storm looked back at her.
Never mind how that sounded, even in the privacy of her head, it looked and it
saw
. It hovered for a moment, drawing up all of its little grasping fingers, seeing her, seeing
Amber
alone and helpless, and then it opened the roaring funnel of its mouth and came right for her.

She panicked and ran.

Her boots skidded in the wet grass; twice, she tripped over juts of stone and went tumbling, but she was always up again at the end of it and if there was pain, she didn’t feel it. When something snagged at the back of her tunic, she tore it off without stopping, and ran half-naked in the bruising rain until she hit the wall that surrounded the ruins. The towers that were arranged at points around it lit up all kinds of yellow when she climbed over, but nothing shot her down. As soon as she fell into the street—the flat, solid street—she was off and running again.

She didn’t think about where she was going. The dumb animal directing her flight kept her going past this building or that one, dismissing them without explaining its reasons.
Notsafe
was the closest she came to a real thought. Those three long structures so much like airplane hangars, open at both ends and filled with half-glimpsed hunks of machinery,
notsafe
. That tall, three-story building with the windows all around it, mostly broken into jagged-glass smiles,
notsafe
. Those rows of solid-looking boxes at the other end of the ruins, they were all right, but the all the empty streets and slowing fences standing between her and them,
notsafe
.

But she had to go somewhere. She had to go somewhere or die here in the empty street. Amber staggered to a halt, gasping for breath and spitting out rainwater, but behind her eyelids, the world suddenly lit up red.
Through the storm’s roar, she heard a popping sound, followed by an almighty crash of thunder that sent her screaming forward again. There was a light ahead of her, burning calmly above a door, and in the split-second before she crashed up against it in a panicked attempt to beat it down, the door just opened.

She hurtled over the top of the bot standing in the doorway, hit the polished floor boobs-first and went spinning wild across the room until she crashed into an extremely solid object.