Alex felt rather restful and at peace with himself. He partially deafened, and his face hurt, and his lungs and his eyes hurt, and he could taste blood at the of his tongue. Scrambling through the roadside forest a mindless panic, basically-had left him striped with many nasty scratches and a couple of hefty, aching bruises, plus a thick coating of cedar gum and dirt.
But he had seen the F-6. It had been pretty much what he'd been led to expect. It was nice not to be disappointed about something in life. He felt he could put up with dying with a better grace now.
He chewed more bread. It wasn't good bread, but it was better than camp food. There was a gray squirrel running around on the forest floor. It was drinking out of the rain puddle in the roots of the fallen tree. Didn't seem upset in any way. Just another squirrel going about its job.
Vaguely, under the persistent whine of aural aftershock, Alex heard someone calling out. Calling his name. He sat up, put his foot in the smart rope, lowered himself down from the trunk to the ground, and swiftly coiled the rope around his shoulder.
He worked his way through the labyrinth of fallen trees back to the site of the wreck.
But whea he glJ~~j the rescuer, searching vaguely around the wreckage, Alex fled. He reached the fallen cedar again, cast his rope back up, and yanked himself quickly back into the tree.
"Over here," he called, standing on the trunk and waving. He couldn't call out too loudly. Shouting really hurt him inside.
Leo Mulcahey walked over, methodically working his way through the maze of fallen limbs. He wore a sturdy felt Stetson and a safari jacket.
He stopped in a small patch of knee-high undergrowth and looked up at Alex. "Enjoying yourself?" he said.
Alex touched his ears. "What's that, Leo? Come closer. I'm kind of deaf. Sorry."
Leo stepped closer to the leaning tree trunk and looked up again. "I might have known I'd find you much at your ease!"
"You don't have to shout now, that's fine. Where's Juanita?"
"I was going to ask you that, actually. Not that you care."
Alex narrowed his eyes. "I know that you took her away, so don't bullshit me. You wouldn't be stupid enough to hurt her, would you, Leo? Not unless you've really got it in for Jerry, as well as me."
"I have no quarrel with Jerry. Not any longer. That's all in the past now. In fact, I'm going to help Jerry. It's the last act I can commit that will really help my brother." He pulled a ceramic pistol out of his jacket pocket.
"Oh, that's really good," Alex scoffed. "You dumb spook bastard! I've had two tubercular hemorrhages in the past week, and you're coming out here to shoot me and leave me under this tree? You hopeless gringo moron, I just lived through the F-6, I don't need some pissant assassin like you! I can die perfectly well all by myself. Get lost before I lose my temper."
Leo, astonished, laughed. "That's very funny! Would you like to be shot up in that tree, where it might be painful, or would you like to come down here, where I can make it very efficient and quick?"
"Oh," said Alex, daintily, "I prefer being murdered in the most remote, impersonal, and clinical manner possible, thank you."
"Oh, with you and I, it's personal," Leo assured him. "You kept me from telling my brother good-bye, face-to-face. I dearly wanted to see my brother, because I had certain important personal business with him, and I might well have gotten past his entourage and seen him privately, but you interfered. And then, in the press of business, it became too late." Leo's brow darkened. "That's not sufficient reason to kill you, I suppose; but then, there's the money. Juanita has no money left; if you're dead, she gets yours, and Jerry gets hers. So your resources go to environmental science, instead of being squandered on the drug habits of some decrepit weakling. Killing you is genuinely helpful. It'll make the world a better place."
"That's wonderful, Leo," Alex said. "I feel so honored to assuage your delicate feelings in this way. I can only agree with your trenchant assessment of my moral and societal worth. May I point one thing out before you execute me? If the shoe were on the other foot, and I were about to execute you, I'd do it without the fucking lecture!"
Leo frowned.
"What's the matter, Leo? An old bulishit artist like you can't bear to let your condemned man have the last word for once?"
Leo raised the pistol. Behind his head, a thin black noose snaked up silently from the forest floor.
"Better kill me now, Leo! Shoot quick!"
Leo took careful aim.
"Too late!"
The smart rope hissed around his neck and yanked him backward. He flew off his feet, his neck snapping audibly. Then he leaped up from the forest floor like a puppet on a string as the serpentine coils of the smart rope hissed around the butt of a cedar branch. There was a fragrant stink of burned bark as the body was hauled aloft.
The hanged man swayed there, violently, dangling from the tree. And at length was still.
IT TOOK ALEX forty-seven hours to get from a smashed forest in Oklahoma to his father's penthouse in Houston. There was a lot of bureaucratic hassle around the federal disaster zone, but the Guard and the cops couldn't stop him from walking, and his luck changed when he got his hands on a motor bicycle. He didn't eat much. He scarcel~ slept. He had a fever. His lungs hurt very badly, and deat was near, death was very near now, not the romantic death this time, not the sweet, drug-addled, transcendent death. Just real death, just death of the cold, old-fashioned variety, death like his mother's death, an absence and a being still, forever. He didn't love death anymore. He didn't even like death anymore. Death was something he was going to have to get over with.
It wasn't easy to get into his father's part of town. The Houston cops had always been mean, tough cops, the kind of cops that had teeth like Dobermans, and heavy weather had not made them kinder. The Houston cops were kind to people like him, when people-like-him looked like people-like-him; but when people-like-him looked the way that he now, the Houston cops in 2031 were the kind of ho collared diseased vagrants off the street and did secret things to them far out in the bayous.
But Alex had his ways. He hadn't grown up in Houston r nothing, and he knew what it meant to have people owe him favors. He got to his father's building without so much as a change of clothes.
And then he had to work his way past his father's own worked his way into the building. He won his own way with the machine in the elevator. The human receptionist at the penthouse floor let him in; he knew the receptionist. And then he found himself waiting in the usual marble anteroom with the giant Aztec mandalas and the orangutan skulls and the Chinese lamps.
He sat there coughing and shivering on a velvet bench, in his filthy paper suit, with his hands on his knees and his head swimming. He waited patiently. It was always like this with his Papa. There were no alternatives, none. If he waited long enough, some gopher would show up and bring him coffee and sweet English biscuits.
After maybe ten minutes the bronze double doors opened at the far end of the anteroom, and in came one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. She was a nineteen-year-old violet-eyed gamine with a sweet little cap of black hair and a short skirt and patterned hose and high heels.
She took a few tentative steps across the inlaid marble floor and looked at him and simpered. "Are you him?" she said in Spanish.
"Sorry," Alex said, "I don't think I am."
She switched to English, her eyes widening. "Do you want... to go shopping?"
"Not right now, thank you."
"I could take you shopping. I know many nice places in LIStOfl.
"Maybe another time," said Alex, and sneezed vioShe looked at him with deep concern, and turned and left, and the doors closed behind her with a tomblike clunk.