Blood Ocean (21 page)

Kaja had come by earlier in the morning. He’d brought clean shorts and had returned the hand and feet grips that marked him as a Pali Boy.

“You’re Pali,” he said. “You’ve more than proven yourself. I’m proud of you. Your father would have been proud of you.”

“But I let them take me.”

“You fought them and were overpowered. Look at Akamu. He was older and stronger than you and they got him. What’s important is that you survived it.”

Kavika then asked about Donnie Wu and discovered that his Uncle’s body had been recovered. The Water Dogs had counted more than a hundred and thirty injuries before they’d recycled him.

“They’re cannibals, you know,” he said grimly.

Kavika stared. “What—who?”

“The People of the Sun. Mr. Pak, the Korean we were talking with and who gave us the false lead, he chewed a piece of Spike away.” Even as Kavika said it, he felt bile creep into this throat.

It had taken some convincing, but finally Kaja left to send some of the Pali Boys to check and see. Although the People of the Sun forbade transit, they could still get close.

Kavika changed into clean shorts and went to the hold. His mother and sister weren’t there. For a moment he felt a tinge of worry, until Ms. Kwan, his mother’s neighbor in the hold, mentioned that they’d moved her up top.

Kaja had indeed moved her. His mother cried when she saw him. He told her that he’d been hurt, but didn’t tell her about the monkey-backing. After all, she still held out hope that his sister could be healed; Kavika didn’t have the heart to break it to her that the blood rapes and monkey-backing were nothing more than bullshit designed to keep white men alive who should be dead.

He stayed with them for an hour before he felt the pull to leave. Spike had been lurking in the back of his mind since he’d come to his senses. What had happened to her after they’d been attacked by the Boxers on bungees? The Water Dogs hadn’t heard from her, and neither had Kaja or the Pali Boys. Which left Lopez-Larou. He was told that she’d been instrumental in helping him escape, but she hadn’t hung around once he’d been safely delivered to the Russian. He needed to find her, to talk to her.

When he left, he headed towards the far side of the city. He tested his arms and legs, but didn’t trust them to carry him through the sky, so he walked. He didn’t particularly like it, but he had no choice. For the first few boat lengths, Pali Boys descended to greet him, welcoming him back to the fold, asking him how he was. He returned the camaraderie, offering embarrassed smiles when they asked why he was walking. They understood; they were just giving him a hard time. It felt good to be teased by them. They were like brothers, and that sort of abuse was always backed by love.

Then he was left alone, walking across the decks of the mad city. It began to drizzle, covering everything in a slick sheen. He stared into the glittering drops, opened his mouth and laughed.

Pele, it was good to be alive.

By the time he reached the ships belonging to
Los Tiburones
, there was a spring in his step. He felt better than he had in an age. A fat Mexican wearing a wife beater and clutching a machete stopped him and asked Kavika his business, and he told him. The guard disappeared for a few moments, then came back and let Kavika pass, with directions on where to find Lopez-Larou.

She saw him first. By the time he registered that it was her, she was running at him. She launched herself the last few feet, her arms entangled his neck and they almost went down. They stayed upright more through her strength than his.

“I was wondering if you were going to come by and see me!” She beamed at him.

Kavika grinned. “They told me what you did. They said you punched one of the women watching over me in the face.”

She let go of him. “I did much worse than that. Did you see the ship?”

He shook his head.

She looked positively excited as she said, “The bombs the Vitamin Vs planted went off and damaged the ship worse than anyone could have anticipated. It’s threatening to sink. They got Corpers with special hoses and foam trying to keep it afloat. Something about the structural integrity of the city, or some such bullshit.”

His mouth dropped open.

“We should get us a bottle of rice wine and go watch it.”

He shook his head. “We should, but I need to find Spike. You haven’t seen her, have you?”

She stopped smiling and got serious. “Not at all. You weren’t hoping I had, were you?” His face fell. “Oh, hell.”

Kavika turned around and stared out at the sea of masts and antennae.

“I saw her nailed to the wall. They’d beaten her, hurt her, bit her. I was hoping that maybe someone had found her.” A tear leaked from the corner of his eye.

“I want to find her, too. I was hoping you knew something. That maybe we could go together. Kavika, do you think she’s still alive? Where’d you see her last?”

“She was hurt—bad. The People of the Sun used her to set a trap.”

“The Koreans? Don’t you know that they’re... Oh, crap. You didn’t know.”

“I know. They’re fucking cannibals.”

“You don’t think that they’d...” She trailed off.

“I don’t know. But Pele help them if they did.” He punched his palm. “I can’t just assume she’s dead.”

“You have to see for yourself.”

“Yeah.” He paused. “We need reinforcements if we’re going there,” Kavika said as he rubbed his arm muscles. “I’m not as strong as I should be. I don’t want to hold you back.”

“Nonsense. Let me send out people to check and see if they can determine where she is. I have sources that can go anywhere on the city. If she’s still here, they’ll find her.”

“And if they don’t?”

She looked away. “Then she’s probably dead.”

“And it might be a good thing,” he said, looking pained.

“It just might.”

She took him to her place. He sat and stared at all the odd equipment while she pressed pills into hands and spoke to various runners in rapid-fire Spanish. Sometime during these exchanges, he leaned back and fell asleep.

He didn’t wake until it was dark. At first he didn’t know where he was; he sat up and looked around, but nothing looked familiar. There were lots of pillows across the floor, and the walls were covered with shelves, each filled with an assortment of containers.

A sound drew him. He saw a dim orange glow, then a curl of smoke. As his eyes adjusted, the room came more into focus. Behind the glow were a set of eyes, regarding him in a cool manner.

“You sleep deeply, Pali Boy.”

At the sound of Lopez-Larou’s voice, it all came back to him. He was in what the Pali Boys referred to as the Shark Tank, the home of
Los Tiburones
. More specifically, he was in Lopez-Larou’s container.

He wiped his eyes and stretched. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“You’ve been through a lot.” The orange glow flared with a sizzle and a pop, and then faded again. “Want some?”

“What is it?”

“A little something to calm you.”

Kavika shook his head. “I’m calm enough.”

“Suit yourself.” They sat for awhile, and then she said, “You talk to your father a lot when you sleep.”

Kavika didn’t know how to answer that. He polled his mind and remembered scraps of a dream where he and his father were sailing across the sea in a small dingy. “What’d I say?”

“It’s not so much what you said, it’s how you said it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You sounded... well, you sounded like a child.”

Kavika smiled with embarrassment. “That’s funny, because in my dreams I’m always a child.”

The orange glow, a sizzle, a pop. “What happened to him?”

“Died. He was diving the line and didn’t make it.”

“You mean the anchor line? That line?”

Kavika nodded.

“You guys are
crazy
,” she said, drawing the last word out. “Is there anything you won’t do?

“Lots.” And after a moment, “But I can’t think of anything right now.”

“How old were you?”

“Nine.”

“Ahh. My dad died when I was young, too.”

“Was he important?” Realizing how stupid that sounded, he hastened to add, “I mean, did a lot of people count on him?”

“I knew what you meant.”

Somehow he could tell she was smiling.

“He ran the drugs from Sonora all the way south to Mexico City and east to the Sea of Cortez.”

“Is that a big area?” he asked.

He watched her regard him for a moment, then she laughed softly. “Big enough to hold more than a million people.”

Kavika thought about that number. It seemed astronomical, but he had no frame of reference. “Is that a lot?”

“More than a thousand times the amount of people in the city.”

Kavika tried to imagine a thousand Kajas or a thousand Donnie Wus and couldn’t make it work. “It sounds like he was important.” She nodded and puffed again. “My own dad wasn’t anything special before the plague, before the Cull.”

“What’d he do?”

“He ran tours to the
Arizona
. That was a sunken ship in Honolulu Harbor. He once told me that that ship meant more to him than almost anything else in the world.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“It went down in World War II in a place called Pearl Harbor. Do you know what that is?” Seeing her nod, he continued. “It was sunk by the Japanese, who’d surprised everyone by attacking. One thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven men went down into the sea, and none came back. He said that the ship weeps for them. Oil from the hold still seeps up to the surface of the water, even after fifty years.”

“Nice story, Pali Boy, but what does that have to do with it being your father’s favorite place in the world? I mean, it’s a sunken ship, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not sure. He never told me, you know?” After a moment, “But sometimes I think that he thought of the
Arizona
like our world.”

“And all the people gone from our world, do they weep too?”

“My mother told me once that we weren’t really in the ocean. She said this was a sea of tears, and we were all that’s left.”

“Your parents were both romantics.”

“What does that mean?”

“That they saw the world for what it could be, or maybe should be, instead of what it really is.”

“And what is that?” he asked, rankling a little at her comment. “Not that I really think the ocean is made of tears.”

“Easy, Pali Boy.” She made the glow one more time, then snuffed it into a bowl. After a moment of arranging her clothes, she stood and came over to sit beside him. “You take things too seriously, you know?” She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him slightly so she could massage the knots out of his neck and shoulders. “What the world really is, is a place where only a stubborn few are left to live. What the world really is, is a place where the dreams of generations were squashed by an invisible disease. What the world really is, is a place where a boy like you can get blood raped and monkey-backed and still survive because people love you. It’s a place still run by white men who don’t know when it’s time to just lay down and fucking die.”

Kavika closed his eyes as she massaged his neck. He enjoyed the silence for awhile. Finally he asked, “What happened to your father?”

“He was shot in the back.”

His eyes widened. “Do you know who did it?”

“Paco Braun.”

He jerked his head back. “
What
?”

“He runs most of the drugs now in the city. I spoke to him this morning.”

Kavika took one of her hands and turned towards her. Their eyes met. They were less than a foot apart. “How can you talk to him? Doesn’t it make you angry?”

She shook her head. “My father was a bastard. Both of them.”

“You had two fathers?” He shook his head in confusion.

“One that made me strong. One that made me smart.”

“Which one did Paco Braun kill?”

“He killed the one who made me smart. I killed the other one myself.”

“Who is the one that made you strong? The one you killed?”

“He was my real father. He left me in the desert when I was five just to see if God wanted to take me. I was out there for a day and a half before he came back and got me. He acted surprised to see me still alive. But no hugs, no kisses. He just told me to get in the back of our truck and he took me home.”

“Really?”

“I never knew my mother,” she said, her dull eyes staring at the light coming through the skylight. “Some said he killed her for having me, because I wasn’t a boy. Others said that she ran away because he raped her and she couldn’t stand for him to touch her. Or that she killed herself.”

“Did he never do anything at all for you?”

“He called me Lupita—Little Wolf—and he made me strong.”

He stroked her hair. She smelled sweet with a strange musk. “He made you strong so you’d survive. For as big a bastard as he was, he gave that to you.”

She buried her face in his shoulder. He felt her tears; a trickle at first, then faster until it was like a summer rain. “Then when he tried to touch me I found a way to kill him. I became the wolf. That’s when La Jolla found me.”

“My father was a bastard for dying,” Kavika offered. “But that’s the only thing about him I could ever fault him with. I told you he was a tour guide, right? That’s someone who shows other people things that have gone on before or what others have done. After the Cull, he never really stopped. When the Great Lash-up began, he was the one who got all the Hawaiians together. He taught them the old ways. He lifted them up from the decks, not all of them, but a few. He did this to remind them that they’d once been warriors. He did this to give them hope.”

“Hope for what?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

“Hope that we’d all somehow survive, because as long as we were defying death every day, then we’d be afraid of nothing when the time came.”

“Your father was smart. That sounds like a good plan.”

“Except I used to be afraid.”

“And you aren’t now?”

“I was afraid of what would happen to my family if I died. I was afraid of what everyone would say.”

“And now?” she asked again.

“Now I know it doesn’t matter. I was monkey-backed and blood raped and I’m here to talk about it. Nothing happened to my family while I was down. Nothing anyone can say to me can equal what that monkey took from me. There’s nothing anyone can do to me anymore.”