“Evan, we ought to go now.”
“Breakfast,” I said.
“I am not hungry. The sky is light, it is morning, and I think-”
“Hungry,” I said. “Eat first, then we’ll talk.”
“You said last night that it was dangerous to stay here.”
“It is. A person could get drunk around here.”
“Evan-”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Plum.”
“But you said-”
“Never mind what I said. What do I know?” She blinked at this. “Come on,” I went on. “I’ll cook us something and then we can get started.”
“Where?”
“There’s a kitchen in the far building.”
“I do not want to go.”
“Suit yourself.”
“What will we eat?”
“Oh, I’ll find something,” I said lightly. “With all those bodies out there-”
“Evan!”
She had turned green again. I assured her that I was joking and she looked up at me, glaring balefully. I left her there and went to the kitchen, or, more precisely, the cooking area in the far building. I stepped over bodies and parts of bodies without reacting to them at all. I don’t know whether this was a result of the alcohol or if I was simply becoming accustomed to their presence, as one learns not to notice the wallpaper in a rented room.
Sheena’s men had found the kitchen before me, and had done what they could to kill it. The food they hadn’t carried off was now decorating the walls and floors. A great many eggs and melons had been smashed almost beyond recognition. I ignored all this, whistled a happy approximation of a tune, and found a couple of eggs and a frying pan in which to scramble them. I couldn’t find any salt or pepper or milk or cooking oil or, indeed, anything but the eggs, and the result was nothing James Beard would have wanted to hear about, but then he wouldn’t have been too happy with anything we had eaten since leaving Griggstown. Neither, as far as that goes, were we. The eggs were better than starvation, I decided. The smaller boll weevil.
I dished them out on two presumably clean plates, scared up a pair of forks, and went off in search of Plum. She was where I’d left her but she wasn’t how I’d left her. Her eyes were glassy and she had a stupid grin on her face.
“Whee,” she said. “Shmells like eggs.”
“They’re eggs, all right. Hey-”
She ignored the fork, took a handful of egg, stuffed it into her mouth. “Ughhh,” she said.
“I’m sorry if you don’t-”
“Yummy,” she said. She scooped up another handful of egg and pushed it in my face. “Eat, eat,” she said. “Later we’ll talk.”
“You’ve been drinking,” I said.
“Jusht a little tashte.”
“You’ve been drinking alcohol.”
“I’ve been drinking alcohol,” she agreed owlishly. “Fourteen yearsh old and I’m depraved. Drinking alcohol and running around in the jungle-”
“How much did you have?”
“-and fucking. Theshe eggsh are terrible. Are you shtill drunk?”
“I think sho. Damn it to hell. I think so. They aren’t that bad.”
“Dry and no tashte. I shouldn’t have had that drink, I shupposhe. It’sh bad for both of ush to be drunk, ishn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
She put the plate down. “But I really feel great,” she said. “Niche and looshe and everything.”
“Alcohol has that effect sometimes.”
“It’sh really great.” She extended her arms, beaming. “I’ve got a really wonderful idea.”
“Oh?”
“Let’sh shcrew.”
“No.”
“No?”
I tried explaining it to her. I don’t suppose I did a very good job of it, being still half in the bag myself, but I tried to make her understand about my need for a well-ordered life, my plans to marry and settle down and acquire a power mower and a mortgage. What I said may or may not have made perfect sense, but in any case Plum couldn’t make head or tail out of it, a cliché which, now that I think about it, has particular relevance under the circumstances. Her reply was nonverbal; she took off her clothes and unbuttoned my shirt and rubbed up against me.
“And besides that,” I said, shifting verbal gears, “we don’t have the time. It’s not safe to stick around here, and we should have left a long time ago.”
“You’re right,” she said.
“I’m glad you realize that. So-”
“We should have left lasht night, and we should have left when the shun came up this morning, and we shouldn’t have shtopped to have breakfast, and you shouldn’t have gotten drunk lasht night, and I shouldn’t have gotten drunk this morning. But we did all thoshe things wrong, and we’re shtill here, and it would be fun to make love, and I have all my clothes off, and you have most of your clothes off, and, oh, Evan, put your hand right here for a minute-”
And what I thought, since the human mind is well-equipped for letting ego figure out reasons to give id its way, was that this could serve as a line of demarcation between the old and the new. A final fling with Plum now at the apex of our adventure, and then we could head back the way we came just as I headed back to the life of the new Evan Tanner, the upright suburban Evan Tanner. One final taste of Plum Pudding and tomorrow the diet would begin.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Evan?”
I sighed a long and lazy sigh and rolled over onto my side. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of morning – the wind in the tall grasses, the flies swarming in the other buildings.
“I think I am not drunk any longer.”
“Neither am I.”
“That was very nice, Evan. Does it always make one sober to make love?”
“Not always.”
“We should dress now.”
“We should.”
“We should leave at once.”
“Yes,” I said. I sat up. “We really should.” I reached for my clothes. “We wasted far too much time already. Not that it was exactly a waste, but we should have been out of here hours ago. Fortunately it hasn’t done any-”
“Any what?”
I didn’t say anything. “Evan? You stopped in the middle of a sentence.”
She was facing the opposite way, her back to the doorway of the building. She couldn’t see what I saw.
“Evan?”
“I was going to say harm, it hasn’t done any harm. But I think it has.”
“What?”
“Don’t turn around,” I said levelly. “Stay where you are, stay calm, don’t turn around-”
So of course she turned around.
And saw what I saw:
Three men, black as power, naked as truth, and tall enough for pro basketball. Three huge naked black men with polished bones through their septa and bone rings on their fingers. Three naked black giants with their genitals painted bloody red.
Looking our way, and grinning.
Chapter 8
The thing to do, I thought, was not panic. This thought didn’t do too much good. The thing to do when mountain climbing is not fall, and the thing to do when swimming is not sink, and the thing to do when menaced by three naked black giants is not panic. Sensational.
One of the giants pointed at me. “ Uganda,” he said, more or less. “Mobutu Kasavubu Casaba Curare Montego. Uhuru Godzilla Colorado. Antigua.”
I kept my eyes on the three of them and reached blindly to my left, where I had left my pants. I fumbled in the pocket and found the Swiss Army pocketknife.
“Matilda. Piranha Daktari Laconic Malaysia Tomorrow. Llewellyn Otsego Decatur.”
I opened the knife as surreptitiously as I could under the circumstances, which were not as conducive to that sort of thing as I might have wished. I got the can-opener blade first try. That wouldn’t do at all. Next shot, I got the blade you use for punching holes in belts, if you’ve either lost some weight or stolen a fat man’s belt. I decided it would do for punching holes in people as well, and that I didn’t have time to search for a more conventional weapon. Besides, the belt-hole maker was certainly more useful than, say, the nail file. Or the tweezers.