Life on the Preservation, US Edition (7 page)

“Brainstorm over dinner?”

“I think I’d like that.”

When the door closed behind Curtis, the Curator noted the panic current had become electric anticipation. He tried to withdraw from it, but already he was as much Charles Noble as he was Curator, and withdrawal was not a simple option.

He did not understand his new function.

CHAPTER FIVE

OAKDALE, WA., 2013

K
YLIE PULLED AT
her restraints. The twine cut into her wrists and ankles. She sucked air between clenched teeth. The blood was slippery. The twine was not cinched as tightly around her right wrist. She kept twisting her arm, deliberately using the rough twine to saw at her flesh, slicking it up with blood so she might squeeze free.

“Child, be still,” Father Jim said.

“Don’t
touch
me.”

He stood and moved into the candlelight. Father Jim seemed too big for the room. He looked crazy with his messed up comb-over and little knife. No, not a knife – a
scalpel
.

He was going to cut her.

He put the scalpel down and withdrew a small glass bottle from his pocket.

“This will numb you. That pagan dentist had it in his office. If it works on gums it will work down there, too.”

He unscrewed the cap and upended the bottle, saturating a cotton swab. He capped the bottle and replaced it in his pocket.

“You must lie still, Kylie.”

He put his hand on her knee and pushed it down. His hand was cold and dry. “Don’t be afraid. The blade is very sharp. At first I was going to use a razor, but then I found the scalpel, while I was looking for Novocain. The dentist provides. There was a reason, a plan, for what I did to him. There’s always a plan, Kylie. It’s a mistake to believe otherwise. If the path diverges, you follow the obvious signs. This is how God wants you made right, Kylie. He spoke to me by making me remember that
National Geographic
story about the Africans.”

Kylie wasn’t merely afraid – she was riding the flashing edge of hysterical panic. Using that panic, she pulled with almost superhuman strength, and her right hand, incredibly, came free. Father Jim immediately seized hold of it. She twisted and thrashed but his grip was unbreakable.

“Let her go,” Billy said.

Kylie stopped struggling. Father Jim did not let go but looked over his shoulder. Billy leaned against the door jamb. The blood seeping from the split lump on his forehead looked black as oil in the candlelight. For a moment no one moved. Then Father Jim released Kylie, grabbed up the scalpel, and turned on Billy.

“Drop it,” Billy said, raising the toy-looking gun, like Doc Holliday in one of Billy’s movies. Like Val Kilmer. The priest hesitated, then lunged. Billy fired. Father Jim threw himself to the left, his head snapping in the opposite direction. Kylie couldn’t tell if the bullet had struck him or not. Jim crashed his face into the door frame and went down, hitting the floor hard. The candle holder jumped on the bedside table, and the flame guttered. The acrid smell of gun smoke hung in the air.

“Guess he’s my huckleberry,” Billy said. The automatic slipped from his hand. He swayed dangerously and did a slow, graceful drop back into the hall.

“Billy?”

He didn’t respond. Kylie leaned as far forward as she could, which wasn’t very far at all. She could see Billy’s legs. The rest of him was out of sight. The lamp in the living room made a dull gleam on the hardwood floor between Billy’s feet and Father Jim. The priest, lying face down, was still alive, and breathing in a peculiar way, making wet huffing noises at irregular intervals.

Kylie went to work on the knot that bound her left wrist to the bedpost. This one was tighter than the right one had been, a pea-sized gnarl. She picked at it with her fingernail and thumb. She tried to get her teeth on it, but, maddeningly, couldn’t stretch her neck that far. Nor could she pick at it long without resting. Reaching up and across with her free arm put a strain on her back and shoulder. Beyond that, her abraded wrists and ankles stung like mad. Now with every movement the rough twine sawed into her bleeding skin. In her initial terror she had been oblivious to the pain. But not any more.

After half an hour of picking at the knot her back cramped and she had to stop. Frustrated, she began crying. She couldn’t help it. She lay back and let it all out, deep sobbing hopeless despair. When she was cried out she lay quiet and began to push the despair aside.

There was no point in despair, in giving up. The strained muscle in her back gradually relaxed. Kylie sat up and resumed working on the knot. On the porch the generator halted, probably out of fuel. The lamp in the living room winked out, taking the hardwood gleam with it.

Father Jim’s breaths were long and clotted-sounding. At times he seemed to
stop
breathing.

Kylie forced herself to remain calm. She concentrated on the knot,
staring
at it in the dim candlelight, prying with her fingernail. Patient, shutting out Father Jim, shutting out her fear about Billy. Gradually the knot began to yield to her efforts. She kept at it until it was loose enough to squeeze her left hand free. The skin was torn in a circlet around her wrist.

She sobbed with relief and immediately sat forward to work on the ankle restraints. In this position she could see more of the floor beyond the foot of the bed. Father Jim was still gripping the scalpel in his right hand. Kylie wanted it.

She clambered over the footboard and dropped, hands-first, to the floor, her ankles straining at the twine. Kylie held her breath and reached for the scalpel. Suddenly the priest clutched down on it, big veins standing out on the back of his hand.

Kylie snapped
her
hand away as if she’d stuck it into a flame. But Father Jim didn’t seem to be conscious. Again she reached out. Boldly, she pulled his fingers open and worked the scalpel free.

The surgical steel cut effortlessly through her ankle restraints. She dropped the blade, yanked on a pair of pants and jammed her feet into sneakers. With the candle she stepped into the hall, certain that Billy was dead. She set the candle on the floor and knelt beside him. The bump on his forehead was like a cracked egg, oozing fluid.
I loved Billy,
she thought. She touched his hair, petting him tenderly, kind of watching herself do it. After a while Billy’s eyes opened.

“Kylie,” he said.

She stopped petting him, startled. “Your poor head,” she said.

“Aspirin.”

“What?”

“In the bathroom. Aspirin – for my poor head.”

Kylie jumped up, found the aspirin and a bottle of water. The town had run out of real bottled water ages ago. This was rain water collected from catch basins. At first people feared drinking water that fell out of the poisoned sky. They blamed it for the their loss of sexual function and for the wasting illness that was slowly finishing off the stragglers left behind after The Judgment. But Father Jim had taken to blessing the town’s catch basins after every rainfall, transforming poison into safe Holy Water. Of course, everybody was still dying.

She helped Billy sit up. He dropped the first two aspirins she gave him. She placed the next ones directly on his tongue and helped him with the water bottle. Some of it dribbled into his beard but he managed to swallow the pills. To Kylie, those little white tablets seemed frighteningly inadequate.

“Can you stand?” she asked Billy.

“If you help me.”

She tried but she was a small person and Billy was not. He leaned heavily on her, and they staggered into the living room, colliding with furniture, kicking empty beer bottles over. It reminded her of other clumsy waltzes they’d performed when Billy was blind staggering drunk. She helped him make a semi-controlled crash onto the sofa. He groaned loudly and held his hand up to his forehead without actually touching it.“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. Unless you can pull a doctor out of your butt.”

“I don’t think I can.”

She covered him with a blanket. “Spinning,” Billy mumbled and then was quiet.

Father Jim was finally quiet, too. Billy had shot him in the head, so he
should
be quiet. Kylie took what remained of her candle and hunkered in the short hallway where Billy had fallen. She held the candle out and above her eye level, moving it side to side, searching for the dropped pistol. The priest resumed his clotted, wet snoring. Kylie tried to ignore it. Candlelight revealed the little automatic where it lay next to the priest. She reached for it. Even in
Kylie’s
hand it was small.

Before The Judgment, it had seemed to her Father Jim could do anything, overcome anything. He often told the story of his ‘wayward’ teenage years and how joining the Marines had saved him, matured him. He was scary-intelligent when he wanted to be, and he had gotten into officer’s training and eventually became a pilot. Later, he heard the Lord calling him to serve a higher organization, and he left the Marines. He could still fly airplanes, though. He could still give flying lessons. Jim owned a little red and white Cessna 150. It had only two seats and was so small Kylie laughed the first time she saw him fold his body into the cabin.

It was in that little airplane that Father Jim finally took advantage of all his years of grooming Kylie. She was thrilled the first time he took her flying. She hadn’t been in the least bit frightened. “It’s no harder than learning to drive a car,” he said. “I’ll teach you.” And that’s all it was for several lessons. She was good and hooked and wouldn’t have given up those lessons for anything, the first time Jim put his hand on her thigh. He had been touching her for a while, of course, though never in front of other people and never
there
. But it seemed he was always rubbing her back or taking her hand, or playing with her hair.

But that first time, in the airplane flying over the Kitsap Peninsula, that he settled his hand on her thigh – that was the true start. It was August and hot even at two thousand feet. Father Jim’s hand was firm. Kylie tried to keep her thighs tight together but she couldn’t really do that and work the rudder pedals. Jim kept giving her instructions about what to do with the airplane. “Make a left turn, Kylie. Watch your horizon. Pull back on the yoke a little to keep your nose up. And keep the little ball centered on that instrument. There you go.” His hand worked around to her inner thigh, where it remained for the rest of the lesson – just that far. A week later he made love to her on a cot in the airport office. No, ‘made love’ is what she told herself. The truth was, he
raped
her. And from then on whenever he called her his ‘little co-pilot’ that former term of endearment meant he
owned
her.

And now he was about to be dead with a bullet in his head.

It was too dark in the house. Kylie decided to re-start the generator, even if it
was
a waste of fuel. Billy stored the spare gas in five-gallon cans next to the side of the house. Using both hands, Kylie picked one up and lugged it to the porch. She poured a gallon of gas into the generator, spilling quite a bit in the process. Then she thumbed the START button and the generator kicked on immediately. It was lucky for her and Billy that Father Jim had convinced everybody that God wanted them to live without machines or booze, otherwise the town would have run out of both a long time ago.

She returned to the kitchen and closed the door behind her. In the dark she waited a minute, listening.

Something was different.

Kylie stepped out of the kitchen. The lamp was on, and Father Jim wasn’t dead. He was standing in front of the fireplace, looking at himself in the mirror above the mantel, carefully combing his stringy iron-gray hair with his fingers. He turned when Kylie came in. His nose was bent and his upper lip was crusted with blood. He must have broken the nose when he ran into the door frame. But worse than that, there was a black hole in his forehead about the diameter of a pencil, an inch or so above his left eye. A crooked line of blood ran from the hole to Jim’s eyebrow. The eye below the brow was so bloodshot it had no visible pupil. Either the bullet or the door frame had knocked him cold. “Have you seen my hat?” he said.

Kylie stared at him.

“Have you seen my
hat
?”

She noticed it on the floor under the roll top desk but didn’t say anything. She raised the baby automatic and pointed it at Jim.

“I thought I dropped my hat around here.”

“You better go away now,” Kylie said.

“I will if it’s not raining.”

“It’s not,” Kylie said.

He looked confused, his jaw hanging loose. Kylie said, “The door’s over there, behind you.”

Father Jim turned and shuffled to the door. Leaving the door open he walked out onto the dead lawn and halted, staring at the sky, at the dull glitter that was not stars. Father Jim called this phenomenon the Apocalypse Sky. Billy just said it was ‘some alien shit’.

“Go on!” Kylie said, but Father Jim didn’t move. She retrieved his hat and sailed it out to him like a saucer. It hit the back of his leg. He picked it up and placed it carefully on his head, covering the bullet hole.

“You’re not right yet,” he said.

Kylie slammed the door.

CHAPTER SIX

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

I
AN STOOD BARE
-chested in the kitchen, pouring hot water through a Melitta filter. He leaned over the rising steam and inhaled deeply. The aroma was wonderful. But that didn’t mean it was worth getting up at seven o’clock in the morning. He lifted the filter away and set it in the sink, added a splash of heavy cream to the cup.

He stepped into the living room – and stopped.

His stash of pill bottles stood arrayed on the bedside table, caps off. Sudden fear drew at him like a black tide.

Ian put his cup down, gathered the bottles in trembling hands, replaced the caps and put the bottles back in the bathroom medicine chest.