Apricot brandy (26 page)

It wasn’t
him
though— that was the thing. It was something all
around
him. It was the quiet, partly, but it was also something the opposite of quiet. A sense of movement, that was it, a quiet, crackly, whispery movement— everywhere. It was freaky. He almost never smoked his crop, beyond checking up near harvest time on what he could charge for it. He preferred a glass of wine or beer now and then to dope, but this sense of movement, it was that creepy-tingly kind of thing you might get off a doob, kinda spooky.

Sal fired up the truck and took off. He trusted his impulses. If he felt the itch to harvest early, get his butt covered risk-wise, so be it. When you break the law, listen to your hunches. He would cut it, get it packaged, make some calls and truck down to the big city this very day. He and Cherry could do some serious week-ending down there.

It was too early to go inside the house. Dad and Maureen might be sprawled on the big couch in front of the plasma screen, the two of them snoring on Dad’s embarrassing fake zebra-skin upholstery, cocktail shakers and glasses everywhere. Sal went straight around to the back and into the yard.

There was certainly party-debris out here— pitchers, bottles, glasses on the patio table near the hot tub. But what was wrong with this picture? All the plantings around the yard, had they been this shaggy and overgrown yesterday? Maybe he just hadn’t noticed? No! Those trellised vines flanking the hot tub, densely shaggy, shoots thickly dangling into the water— he recalled Cherry very clearly in that tub yesterday: not a sprig of green in the water with her. And as he stood struggling to believe it— two or three feet of growth in one night— he had once more that sense of things stirring
almost
silently, that whispery sound of foliage, yet not a breath of breeze.

He approached the tub. That dense swirl of drowned vine-strands filling it, was it actually…
moving
? Yes. It flexed and twisted slightly, as an arm might do, reaching deeper, deeper, for something sought. Was that some fallen animal or bird he saw there,
snared
in the flexing weave of vines? It was something made of flesh and blood and was coming apart.

It was a face, half a face, one eye, Dad’s eye, attached like a little dark fruit to one strand of vine and a bit of cheek and jaw, like a ragged blossom. On another strand, like two parting petals just beginning to sink under the water’s surface, Dad’s lips, Dad’s lips stirring as they sank, whispering as they sank…
run… Sal… run
…

Just as Sal roared out of his father’s driveway, Helen Carver roared into the street, headed for her own. They jammed on their brakes, swung screeching through a matched half-spin, and sat staring stupefied at one another from their windows. They encountered their own amazed horror on one another’s faces. “What have you seen?” quavered Helen.

“I’ve seen that we gotta get outta here! Look, I got four-wheel drive and a full tank. Get in with me— I think the roads might be rough.”

All over Gravenstein, before the sun had half-cleared the hills, a new kind of growth was taking root in the earth. Jesse Rangle, the big-chinned rancher Karen had spoken to so enthusiastically in the 8-Ball, had gorged on juicy Fox fruit all night long and sun-up found him out behind his barn, enjoying one of his sheep. The ewe, a handsome Abyssinian, seemed not much troubled by the high hiking boots into which her back legs were inserted, their laces cross-tied to form loose shackles undisturbing to the animal, as she cropped lush grass, while Rangle grunted astern of her, lost in a dream of bliss. In his transport he was unobservant of how the ewe’s jaws had ceased to crop, though still grass entered them, and her throat still worked, still bulged and rippled as insurgent stalks thrust upward from the earth, crowding into the wooly barrel of the animal’s body.

As Jesse cocked his head back to yodel his joy, that joy changed timbre, for he suddenly experienced a different kind of linkage to his love. His own torso tremored and swelled with a rippling growth. From his gaping jaws emerged not a cry, but a shock of greenery and his eyes beheld, not the sky, but much deeper things.

Elsewhere in the valley, Roger Carver made his way out to his prize Black Angus in their feedlot behind the Maitland house. This was Roger’s customary morning practice, always involving some private gloating and pipe-dreams of ribbons won at the next Livestock Fair.

Roger moved a little stiffly in his robe and slippers, the back injury he’d suffered at Marty’s hands a bit inflamed by his night’s work. Marsha’s peach cobbler had been prepared with a very strict agenda of husbandly duty in mind. Her motive was dynastic rather than erotic— her father’s will had made offspring a condition of her inheritance of his assets.

He was astonished to find his prized herd up to their necks in a lush insurgence of new grass, grown impossibly tall from what was bare-trampled feedlot earth just the night before. The beasts gaped and gasped, their eyes glaring wildly. Alarmed, Roger rushed hobbling among them.

Vigorously he swatted and shooed to drive them out of this frightening greenery from nowhere. Swatted and shooed and shoved at them, till he noticed a furious itch engulfing his legs, an itch that grew suddenly piercing and became a branching, a binding, a threading of thrusting green coolth. His eyes too, then, stopped seeing the sky they glared at. Long he stood there, seeing instead what lay underfoot, seeing the wide realm of weevil and worm, of mole and nematode, the vast dark business of the underground.

Contos, the Day Captain, was mad as hell about being summoned to his post before sun-up, but he would never have dreamed of betraying even the slightest indication of his irritation to Marty Carver. Contos feared the Acting Chief Deputy right down to his bones. Three years ago, Contos happened to be just outside Karl Rabble’s office during the interview that led to that old cowboy’s retirement— had heard the kick that rebroke Rabble’s leg. He’d had the sense to grasp at once that a decisive shift of authority had occurred and from that moment had unfailingly presented Marty Carver with a perfectly impassive and obedient expression.

But now, just after sunrise, as the double street-doors of bullet-proof glass were flung open and Carver strode in, Contos let his jaw drop slightly— couldn’t help it.

This brought Marty towering near him, leaning close. “
What,
Contos?”

Too late to feign complete blindness. “You’re… you’re wet, sir.” That was the least of it. A torn sleeve showed what was surely the bulge of a broken bone in his forearm and the shredded tunic was covered in blood. There were sizable abrasions on his brow and a delicate measeling spread over his face like a freckling of little scabs, except that the color wasn’t quite right for scabs… .

Desperately Contos kept his gaze glued to Marty’s eyes, though these were not neutral facial territory either. An unhealthy tawny light glowed in Carver’s eyes, a golden-green shade Contos was sure had never been there before. “I’m wet, Contos, because we’re under attack and one of our enemies just tried to kill me. Gimme status. Everyone here?”

“We have both night and day shifts in the situation room, sir. Pearman, Karrick and Mellon haven’t responded.”

“Activity?”

“Just a drunk, sir. An old woman.”

“An old woman?”

“She threw a beer bottle at Spears’ cruiser as he was coming in. We put her in the tank.”

Carver was really scaring Contos now, very much in his face, golden eyes almost rabid. This close, Contos couldn’t help but register the oddity of Carver’s little scabs. They were almost green. “Description,” Carver hissed. His breath dispensed a smell… like a swamp.

“Five-two, skinny, maybe a hundred pounds, white hair, dark complexion, some kind of Native American or beaner.” In the silence that followed Carver’s face seemed to become a kind of demon mask, paralyzing Contos’ will. Voices of the men assembled in the situation room drifted out, a restiveness there, a cautious tone of doubt, complaint beginning to arise.

“Pop the gate. Go in there and shut them up and send me two officers with riot guns. You’ve put a killer in the drunk-tank, Contos.”

Moments later, two men with twelve-gauges at his back, Marty stood in the short-term lock-up wing. The tank was a free-standing cage with no hidden corners. It was empty, its gate hanging open.

Contos came in behind the trio and stood aghast. “Sir. I’ve been at the desk since we locked her in. No one’s— ” Marty reached out and gripped Contos’ throat so powerfully the man’s face turned purple. He stood gazing around him in perplexity and seemed scarcely to notice even when his officers pried his fingers from the gasping Contos’ throat and saved his life.

Why would the witch come
inside
here? Why wasn’t she taking the field with her damned spooks and fighting the dragons about to be born? Then, as if from under the ground he stood on, an answer came crawling up his spine.
She was after a bigger army
. Right now, all over this great valley, the newly dead were sinking into the earth. Did that sorcerous bitch dare—
dare
to go down here, straight down to Xibalba’s realm, and steal the dead as they came sinking under?

“You two. Get down to the garage, make sure she’s not hiding out down there, take a couple cruisers out to look for her. Contos, take two men out the entry and search that side of the building. Everyone else stays on post here. I’m going down to the basement— I want everyone standing by when I come back.”

If his announced destination surprised anyone, no one dared show it. Down through the morgue he went… through the utility plant… . If the witch had already gone underground, he could not pursue, but if she went there, surely she would die at the hand of the god himself!

In the shadowy corridor to the building’s old under-structure, Marty stood staring. The double steel door bulged outward. Its dropped chain and opened padlock showed how effortlessly it had been entered. Force had been exerted from
inside
, the doors were bent and buckled by a powerful impact that had jammed them in their steel frame. Marty put all his strength into a ramming assault with his shoulder. The doors were unyielding as stone. She’d burned the last bridge and gone down Beneath. Well, she’d merely sealed the door of her own tomb behind her.

“Chief Carver!” The voices of two men from the utility plant. Marty heard the note of crisis and ran back up the way he’d come. “Sir!” Webber, breathless, speaking first, he and Graves— two steady old vets whose wild-looking faces promised no good. “The main entry’s sealed— we can’t get out.”

“
What
? You can’t get
out
?”

“Not out of the garage either,” said Graves. “Both ways are blocked from outside! It’s— ” Graves’ voice failed. He looked to Webber for help. Webber blinked back at him, mouth moving helplessly at first. Then he faced his chief and licked his lips. “There’s like these big vines or trees growing up right outside the doors. Right up outta the concrete thick as your legs! Completely blocking all the doors!”

“All of them?” The garage exit had fire-house ports that could admit four or five vehicles abreast.

“It looks like they’re surrounding the whole building, sir!” Webber’s voice was cracking like a kid’s. “I mean they’re climbing up the windows, the skylights, you can
see
‘em growing! Right up outta the asphalt! I swear, I came
in
that garage not fifteen minutes ago!”

And new growth was climbing up Marty’s spine as well, threading cold and slippery through his very marrow. He knew that what was enveloping his police station was the rising displeasure of Jack Fox, of the god himself. Because that white-haired bitch had outmaneuvered Marty, had outwitted him before he even knew what was happening.

“Show me,” he told Webber and Graves, and followed them back up, expecting the worst.

Quetzal could smell the tart ghost of the cider kegs that had slept in this cool blackness five generations ago. Over near the farthest wall of the echosome space, she saw, just above the floor, a nimbus of green light staining the darkness. Within the faint light she could just make out the mouth of a pit with crumbled concrete lips. She hastened toward this fissure, her ghostly retinue weaving a close commotion of the air around her— hastened because she feared her legs would freeze with dread if she did not.

At the brink she looked down a contorted clay throat all furred with moss and fungi, the green pelt of Xibalba. No less than she feared
where
she must go now, she feared
how
she must go there. “Bind close to me,” she whispered to her troop of spirits. “We must flow like water and I in your midst. I am not purified by death, not hard and pure like you. My insignificant life will come apart down there unless you hold me close. My small being can be torn like smoke by wind. Bind close to me and keep me whole. Guide me where this leads us. My will— our will— fixed in
this
.”

She drew from her coat her long obsidian dagger. She pressed it once against her chest, and once against her forehead, and at the last held it before her, fixing her eyes upon it. Her gaze locked there, she began a slow side-to-side rocking of her shoulders, as one might do when shrugging off a heavy coat. Her knees buckled and her body slowly knelt, but as her head and shoulders and arms subsided, the knife remained aloft, two hands of faintest mist still holding it up before a face of faintest mist.

The fleshly Quetzal lay on the concrete curled on her side, a white-haired corpse in an old black coat. The ghostly currents coiled around her misty axis now, sheathing her right up to the wrists, only the knife left naked. They were a muscled snake of braided air poised upright on the green brink, its one black fang aloft, a tooth of stone. It swayed and danced on the brink till someone whispered
now
— and down it dove.

Quetzal was a little girl again, born and raised in La Ciudad de Basura, the vast trash dump, the metropolis of garbage, on the outskirts of Guatemala City. She was a wiry, wily little girl, darting nimbler than the ten-thousand rats that were her townsfolk in the mazes of made-from-trash shanties and shacks she called home. Every day she went off to work in the streets of Guatemala City, pretending to beg while picking pockets, a gleeful little thief so fleet that her speed was a species of invisibility.