The Last Hour of Gann (106 page)

“What
really happened?” Amber asked again, wrenching her gaze away to Meoraq. “What
was
the Fall? What the hell did God
do
to you people?”

“I don’
t know,” he said again. But, with an air that suggested he was humoring her, he came to the console (nudging the rag-doll mummy aside with his foot), and examined each of the sputtering monitors in turn. “The Ancients used our letters, but made many senseless words. Something to do with safety,” he read. “And with locks. Report to your…I do not know that word. Your abbot, I suppose. Doors will unlock…I do not know those words. It is a warning, clearly,” he said, straightening. “The exact nature of the threat eludes me. I don’t know what they used to do here.”

“We call it b
iological warfare,” Amber said, looking past him at the cells.

“Eh? I don’t mark you
.”

“They made weapons. V
ery small ones.” And it got out. Fear flared, but died away. Judging by the corpses, death may not have been immediate, but the bloodlust that had led to murder had been. If the germs were still alive and kicking, surely Meoraq would be raping her to death at the moment.

She eyed him warily.

He noticed and his head cocked. He was definitely annoyed, but certainly not consumed with murderous rage. He wasn’t even annoyed enough to tell her there was nothing worth looking at in this room.

And
yet she kept staring, curiously frozen, not just in her body, but her mind also. Because there was something about him, something obvious. Like lyrics to a song she’d heard a hundred times and couldn’t quite sing along with; like getting the right word on the tip of her tongue, but no further; like those detective shows where the clues were right in front of her, but she never the saw the end coming until the TV-cop put it all together for her.

God’s w
rath. She’d asked him what the Fall was and he’d called it God’s wrath, when the trees had bled red in the springtime because of all the blood soaked into the ground. War covered the world, he said, like skin covers a man.

She looked at the bodies on the floor again, the heap of them locked in dried-out death, and tried to imagine how it must have been, not just here in this room with the people you’d worked with for yea
rs, but everywhere. She could imagine the sound—alarms blaring, fire roaring, and everyone screaming—because she’d heard it once before, as she’d stumbled out of the wreck of the
Pioneer
, but even that was just one ship, just a few thousand people. This had been everywhere, everyone.

Meoraq’s head was creeping over a little deeper into that pissed-off angle. She was still staring at him. Something was still wrong, but all she could think when she tried to figure
it out was those two words: everywhere, everyone.

It had gone on for years, he’d said. The war and the blight and the storms—
years
—until the Prophet came and started tossing Bibles around. Heck, if you wanted to look at it that way, the storms hadn’t even ended yet. It wasn’t always as bad as it was tonight, but the wind was always blowing and the sun was never more than a shiny smudge behind the clouds on even the best of days. In fact, if you really wanted to be bitchy, you could argue that the land still looked pretty damn blighted. Nothing but grass and thorns and the toe-catching rocks, which were themselves mostly the eroded rubble of collapsed buildings.

Because
they fell. All of them. All over the world. And nothing was left except ruins like these, like the little patches of trees that you could sometimes find out in the wasteland of the plains. The cities fell, and whether it was the dust of their falling or the ashes from all the funeral fires, the wind buried them and the grass covered them up, and it was starting to grow up again, starting to, but not really, because—

Amber felt it start in her stomach, of all places, like a menstrual cramp more than anything else, or even like an orgasm, if an orgasm could be cold and awful.

—because nothing could start over until whatever happened first had ended—

She felt it crawling up her spine in prickles, catching the breath in her lungs and biting her nipples into painful points.

—and nothing had ended yet.

She
stared at Meoraq, caught and held in the terrible grip of a moment no larger than a pinpoint, a silence with three words like a billion voices screaming together:
He’s still sick.

Impossible. Viruses didn’t live that long, did they? It hadn’t just been years, but hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, and the whole planet couldn’t still be sick!

But…

She thought of Meoraq and the way his eyes glazed over whenever those yellow stripes started showing up on his throat, that hot/dead sta
re he got, and how his hand had a way of drifting down to tug at his belt. She thought of that story he’d told the night she’d gotten bit, how his father had single-handedly slaughtered over a hundred well-armed men and then not answered the door for a day or two. How he’d just left…just left. And all the women and children that the bad guys had tied up to take away with them, he’d left them too, left them butchered behind him, and maybe it really had been the raiders who did it like Meoraq said, but maybe—

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Just…in general.”

“In my flesh, you mean?” He looked at the nearest withered corpse and rolled his eyes. “Well,” he said, enunciating in that testy way he had. “I feel very well.”

“Are you mad?”

He lost the irritated angle of his head almost at once, averting his eyes and scratching at the side of his snout. “I’m not angry, Soft-Skin. I only wish that you would understand that these ruins are meant as reminders of God’s wrath, not as shelter.”

“
That isn’t what I meant. You don’t want to…I don’t know…shove me into a wall and have scary sex with me, do you?”

H
e leaned back and just looked at her for a moment, then twitched his spines cautiously forward. “Is that a request?”

“No, I just…”
Her gaze strayed down to a dead man’s blood-stained dick, still half-sunk into that poor woman’s side. “Should we do something for them?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Let them lie.”

“How can this not bother you?”

He looked down at the mummies tangled around the console, then around at the cells. “
Their punishment is well-earned and it is not for you or I to end it.”

“Can we
at least go to another room?”

“This is the lowest level.
Safest.”

“Yeah, and if God wants us, he’ll have us even if we’re ten miles underground.
I believe you now. Please, Meoraq. I don’t want to stay here.”

He
sighed, but led her back through the maze of corridors to the stairwell and up. He didn’t bother opening the doors on any other landing—marks in the dust indicated he had already done so once, so his unwillingness to do so now probably meant more bodies on the other side—and instead took her back up to the lobby on the ground floor. The storm was still roaring around them, but after the scene below ground, it was almost welcome.

“Define scary,”
Meoraq said suddenly, watching her pace a small circle around the room.

“What?”

“As you seem to think it will frighten you to be leaned against the wall for sex, would you prefer to lie down?”

She stared at him and finally heard a short, humorless laugh puff out of her.
“You don’t mean it.”

His spines flicked.
“I find it curious that you always manage to sound so certain about the things
I
mean.”

“
You can’t actually
want
sex after seeing all that.”

“They have been dead for ages,” he pointed out.
“How long would you deem a respectful time of mourning for them?”

“Would it mean anything to you at all if I said I wasn’t in the mood?”

“It might. Would it be true?”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times.
It seemed a straightforward enough answer. Baffled by her inability to give it some voice, Amber turned and paced away.

When she turned back, he was right behind her.

“You are an aggravating woman,” he told her, his hand slipping around to the small of her back. “You make me feel things there are no words for. You make me want to do things I do not know how to do. You also make me very angry. How fortunate that these are the times I most desire you.”

Cold fingers clenched in her stomach.
She tried to back up out of his grip, but he flexed his hand once and brought her hard against him. Smiling. He was smiling. She tried to feel better about that…but the basement was full of bodies. She backed up again.

This time, he let her go, exposing his teeth in a playful grimace that suggested he was not much put off by the idea of chasing her down. For the moment, however, he just watched her retreat and pace around the room.
“You want to be my woman. Do not pretend otherwise. I make you feel safe.”

She had no idea what she was going to say until her mouth opened and she heard it shiver out: “Nothing makes me feel safe anymore.”

“Lies.” He caught her by the belt and unfastened it. She didn’t stop him. “I am your shelter, and never more than when I do this.” He shucked her out of her breeches in two tugs, picked her up in the same movement, carried her two steps forward as he pulled her thighs around him, and shoved her hard into the wall. She gasped at the impact, but she bucked into him anyway. He nodded once, as if accepting an accolade. “Never more than when I do this,” he said again, loosening his loin-plate just enough to let his cock free. It pushed up between them, a brand against her belly for only a moment before he pulled it away and thrust it inside her.

Climax was immediate
, unwanted, eruptive. Amber shook, digging her fingernails into his shoulders even as she tried to hide her face against his chest, but he wasn’t through making his point. He kept his hands kneading at her thighs, his hips scarcely moving at all, so that their joining was little more than the crush of his weight against her chest, the throb of his pulse in her womb.

“Look at me,” he commanded, scraping his
scales lightly against her shoulder where his mark scarred her. “No, not so. Put your hands upon me. I am with you. Show me that you see me.”

Her hands rose, trembling, to cup his strange face b
etween them. She looked at him and saw him looking back at her. Just Meoraq, who could be a scary son of a bitch when he wanted to be, but who, for the moment, just wanted to be with her. He was fine. Amber felt herself smile a little, relieved right to the edge of stupid, girly tears.

He showed his teeth, approximating a smile for her, pleased.
“Are you frightened?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Not even here.” Thunder crashed; he did not flinch. “Not even now. You are for me, Soft-Skin, and I am with you. Let go to me, my wife. Let go.”

Amber dropped her brow to his shoulder, sobbed once, and did.

8

I
t was the last great storm of the season and even before he had pried the door open and seen the world for himself, Meoraq knew that winter had come. The previous day’s rain was still wet on the ground, but his breath misted in the air and when he looked beyond the ruins to the mountains, he saw a fine dusting of fresh snow on their tips.

“Oh wow.”

Amber crept out behind him, her soft hand catching at his. He squeezed absently, then released her and started walking, stepping over the remains of a metal tower, twisted together with a few trees and dropped here. Most of the ruins were gone, crushed into a single substance and spread over the streets like jelly over bread. Their shelter alone stood whole, although parts of several others protruded from the wreckage here and there. On the windward side of the remaining walls, debris sloped up like snowdrifts—omens of the weather to come.

“Why didn’t this place break apart too?” Amber asked in a small, shaky voice.

“Because we were in it.” He glanced behind him, only to see her still standing in the doorway. He sighed and reached out his hand. “We have never left His sight, Soft-Skin. We walk there still.”

She didn’t move.

“The under-levels are filled with dead people,” he reminded her.

She eased out half a step.

“And now the doors are broken open and they’re going to get wet.”

Her whole face puckered and she finished her approach in a clumsy leap. “I’m not scared of dead people!” she snapped, clutching at the back of his belt.

“I never said you were.”

“You implied it.”

“I did.”

They didn’t talk until they were out of the ruins, unless one counted Amber’s
harried expletives as speech whenever her footing slipped on the loose rubble, but it was a comfortable quiet, comfortable cursing. Once back in the relative stability of the open plains, he had to stop and let her look back, which she seemed perfectly content to do all day. His pointed sighs had no effect on her. In the end, he just started walking and let her decide whether or not to follow. Of course she did, if not quietly. He could hear her back there, muttering in ways that suggested she wanted him to hear at least some of the unladylike things she said, but she didn’t let go of his belt. His Amber, fearless once more in the morning light.