Authors: Wayne Wightman
“Three. A man, a woman, and another person I couldn't identify. They're coming to the house and I really don't like that.”
Jack looked her over. “You're not afraid, though.”
“Afraid? Of course not. They can be dealt with.”
They stepped around a flat rock on which two scorpions sunned themselves.
“Help me share your confidence.”
“They're just pathetic human beings who are going to try to take what they want. It's worked for them before, so they'll try it again. We'll fix them a nice meal and send them on their way.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“They're not clean and they'll be in the house. But no, you shouldn't worry. After all, I am the queen predator in this valley of the shadow of death.”
“I just hope you don't wake up some morning and decide I'm for dinner.”
Natalie stopped and stared at him, stricken. Her shoulders slumped and she slowly shook her head no. Her hair, the blackest hair even in the brilliant light, fell over her face.
“I'm sorry — I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” He wrapped his arms around her.
In the moments he held her, they both heard distant barking. She composed herself instantly and stepped back to scan the distance. Jack pointed. They guessed eight dogs.
“We should just hold still. They don't see that well.”
“Have they ever attacked travelers or went after your hutches?”
“They do go after travelers, depending on how hungry they are. They seem to have got over their undue respect for humans. They came up to the house once.”
“And then?”
She almost laughed. “I sent them away.” She took his hand.
The dogs picked up their barking, as though they had found something.
Jack could see that they had stopped coursing and were trotting back and forth, active in one place. The barking turned to three or four of them howling. Even in the brightest daylight, it was eerie.
“What are they doing?”
“Who knows. Let's go back,” she said.
Jack checked behind them several times. The howling grew fainter with distance, but it did not stop.
....
Natalie put a stack of three plates on the counter and slid a large covered dish next to them. Next to these, she fanned out three cloth napkins.
“Cloth?” Jack said.
She nodded. She was busy.
He felt like he was just along for the ride, but with Natalie in the room, competence packed the air. He looked out the front window for the twentieth time. No one.
“They're almost here,” she said quietly.
“Very soon?”
“Almost now.”
“Besides being alert, anything else I should do?”
“Be pleasant.”
“I can be pleasant. Is it going to be hard to be pleasant?”
“It might be.” She turned and had him in her arms before he knew it. “Be your normal beloved pleasant self.”
“And everything will be all right.”
“It will. You have my bones on it.”
A fist banged on the front door and rattled the locked knob at the same time. “Anyone in there? Hey! Any one—!”
Natalie opened the door with an understated flourish and a smile. Today, she had chosen to stun the strangers with white — white pants and a white man's shirt — which made her black hair blacker. “Yes?” she said politely, as though it were fifty years ago.
The three of them gaped in silence.
The man in front, the one who had shouted at the door, late twenties, wore a melange of clothing and a dirty brown cowboy hat. His face and body language did not indicate intelligence.
“Whoa! Look here, civilized people!” He came inside; Natalie moved out of the way.
Behind him followed a younger woman, in her twenties, in boots, gangly, in a shirt and pants, but wearing a very old and ragged cocktail dress over them.
The third person to pass into the house was of indeterminate sex, taller and bigger than either of the others, and probably around thirty, wearing a desert cap with a neck flap. This person purposefully scanned the room upon entering and gave Jack a second look.
“Please come in,” Natalie said, closing the door.
The man circled the area with his arms out. “Waaooo! A kitchen! Waaooo! A fireplace! I bet you guys got beds! Like the old days! I see heaven! I see heaven!”
“My name is Natalie.” She held out her hand.
The man shook with her, but he was looking at Jack.
“Howdy do.”
“My name's Jack.” He offered his hand and the man shook it, squeezing very hard.
“Good to meet you.”
“Which way are you going? California?” Jack asked. He looked at the other two, but they were preoccupied by staring at Natalie.
“This is quite a, quite a place. No broken windows. And it's really clean. Waaooo! Do I smell dinner cooking? I feel like I fell into a shit hole and it was filled up with dollar bills.”
“Do you?” Natalie asked.
“I
do
, I
do
. I went off the highway to take a crap and saw your windmill. I bet not one person in a hundred ever sees this place.”
“How long have you been on the road,” Jack asked pleasantly.
“Hey,” the man said to the scrawny blond, “you remember that place in Kansas City? Waaooo! They had a butt-load of food. Gasoline, a generator,
lights!
But it wasn't as clean as this.”
“It was dirty,” the blond said.
“I said that.”
“Thank you for the compliment,” Natalie said, the brightest white, next the the three people in dusty rags. “I've fixed some lunch for you.”
The three visitors focused their attention on her.
“Food?” the man said. “You're offering us
food
?”
“I'm giving you food,” Natalie said. “Roasted rabbit, a few vegetables.” She turned to the counter, uncovered the platter with the rabbit, and spread out the three plates beside the cloth napkins.
The three of them converged on the rabbit and without a word, picked it apart with their fingers till it was stripped to bones. They didn't eat like savages, but they ate like intent hungry people, determined that nothing edible should remain. They ate from the sauce pans with the serving spoons, handing the pans from one to the other after a few bites.
Jack and Natalie stood aside and watched till the visitors finished feeding.
After wiping their hands on their clothes, they found the napkins and dabbed their mouths with them.
“Man! What a feed!” He was followed by the blond to the sofa, where they both fell back on it. The other person, the biggest one in the room, stood aside, observed, and said nothing.
Jack sat on the hearth. Natalie stood near him. “Where are you headed?” Jack asked.
“Who says we're headed anywhere?”
“Well,” Jack said, “if you weren't headed anywhere, were you just standing around?”
“Ha ha. Maybe we was going east.”
“Maybe you was,” Jack said.
“Do you have anything to trade?” Natalie asked.
The man did a giggle and slid his hand between the blond's thighs. “Only our good looks.”
The blond ignored everyone and went slack, as though her bones had gone soft. She tilted her head back and let her mouth fall open.
“She your girlfriend?” the man asked Jack, nodding at Natalie.
“Yes. Is she your girlfriend?”
“I found her back a ways. You can use her if you want. I trained her. Your woman idden near as bony as mine.”
“I eat well,” Natalie said. Jack saw that her eyelids hooded her eyes.
“I bet you do. She eat good?” he asked Jack. “Yuk yuk.”
“You have a brother named Hewitt?”
“What the fuck kinda question is that?”
“Just trying to be pleasant. Someone I met on the road.”
“Well, you just make me tired. We want to turn in. Where do we sleep?”
“You can't sleep here,” Natalie said.
“Say what?”
The blond's eyes snapped open; she seemed to have bones again, but now no one moved.
“I'm sorry,” Natalie said. “I thought you were asking where you could sleep in my house. You're not sleeping in my house. Did I misunderstand?”
The blond looked at the man with big eyes. “We could sleep here?” She was incredulous.
“Shut up,” he said to her. He looked up at Natalie, his face a rigid sneer. “Lemme get this. We been travelin' for months, sleepin' in dirt, and now, you with this house, you tell us, 'Not in my house.' Put us out like dogs? Like trash?” He was standing up now, waving his arms. “You know what it's like out there — people kill you for a blanket, and you got all this and you tell us to go sleep in the dirt again?” He was outraged. To Jack he said, “You stand there and let the skinny bitch talk for you? She wear your balls around the house?”
“You should sleep warmer with the meal you just had,” Jack said pleasantly.
“Really? Really! You think I'm gonna sleep warm? You're right, nutless, I'm gonna sleep warm because I'm going to sleep
in
here,
in
your bed,
in
your woman.” He came nearer Jack. “And my filthy part's gonna sleep at her body temperature.”
The big person seized Natalie from behind, a thick arm around her neck and a pen knife poised next to Natalie's right eye.
“I can-not-be-
lieve
, how easy this is! Damn it! Are we that good?”
The blond woman on the sofa whipped her head back and forth, keening, “Can't you just stop shoving and stabbing people, why do we always—”
The man had taken a step back and gave her a swift kick in the calf. “Shut up or I'll sell you to the Leks for meat.” He went toward Natalie. In a surprisingly swift move, he had taken the other person's knife with one hand and swung Natalie around in a hammer lock. He pressed the point against her sternum. A small red spot seeped into her white shirt, yet Natalie showed no alarm.
At the same time, the blond woman began yammering again. “Look, see, you could do it to her and Jack could do me and Who's-it could do whoever, and we'd all get along, see? We could all get a—”
Their friend took three long steps across the room, grabbed the blond woman by the front of her ratty clothes and slammed her against the wall hard enough that they heard a picture fall in another room.
After a moment of silence, the blond slid to the floor.
“Well, now. It's partner assignment time. I get this one, and you, dude, you get that one.”
The big person grinned at Jack. The teeth were so gray they could have been painted. The person pulled on black gloves with metal-tipped knuckles. From a cargo pocket, one gloved hand pulled out a collapsible baton.
The red spot on Natalie's chest had started to elongate. The man said, “Even I don't know if that's a man or a woman, maybe you find out, but from what I
do
know, you'll look at tomorrow with a totally different point of view.”
“Can't we, can't we just be quiet for a change?” the blond whimpered from the floor.
“We are, honey. We are. Everything's been settled. It's the misunderstandings in human relationships that cause all the trouble in the world, and I just eliminated those pesky misunderstandings. See? All figured out and settled.”
When Jack turned his focus from the metal-tipped gloves and baton back to Natalie, she was looking at him — then she glanced at the finger bones on the table near him, within easy reach.
“It's gonna be so much fun learning to be friends, doin' you up and down, topside and back, whichever way I can make you bend.” To Jack he confided, “Your young lady is very calm, considering, but maybe she's feeling a little hint—” (He pushed into her.) “—of what a big surprise she's got coming.” He licked her hair over her ear. “As for you, I don't think you're going to have any fond memories.” He yukked at that. “Of anything.”
When the big person moved toward Jack, he dodged sideways, snatched up the finger bones and slung them in an arc at the three intruders.
The three of them froze in position, as though they had been netted, except for their eyes, which went huge and wide and darted between Jack and Natalie.
Natalie picked the knife from the man's hand with her thumb and forefinger. Then she stepped away, turned, and examined him, a specimen.
“What happened?” Jack said. “What did I do?”
“You saved our lives, I'd say. As I knew you would.” Natalie carefully gathered up her bones.
As the three captives struggled, their arms and legs were pulled more tightly to their bodies. They squirmed and mewled on the floor, ending up in fetal positions.
“I thought they'd only work for you.”
Jack had gone over to her and opened her blouse to see her wound.
“It's nothing. Maybe what I do is rubbing off on you. Probably ruined the blouse.” She rebuttoned it.
“What do we do with them now? If we turn them loose, they could come back.”
“Even if they don't come back, we can be sure the next people they meet, or the next, they'll do to them what they were going to do to us.” Natalie squatted down in front of the man and spoke into his face. “We fed you, we didn't poke you with sticks or step on you, and in return you were going to use us for your fun until we died. For your fun.”
The man tried to shake his head; he made desperate noises but couldn't open his mouth.
“Animals kill for food. You were going to kill us on a full stomach.” Natalie gazed impassively at him. Then in an almost serpentine movement, she craned her head down till her face was inches from his. “You lose,” she whispered.
The man shivered with exertion, trying to force his way out of what held him. All three of them whimpered in long high-pitched squeaks.
Natalie picked up the baton and dropped it into her pocket.
“I don't want to hear you anymore. You ate with your hands, none of you said 'Thank you' for what you ate, and then you promised to rape your hostess.”
Jack heard something different in her voice.
“Natalie....”
Icily, she said to Jack, “Don't ever ask me to do something that might cause you harm. I'm not going to risk your safety or let these... humans... give the highway near me such a bad reputation that I'll end up going hungry. To think, these people came into my house—”
Faster than Jack could think, Natalie had the baton out, extended, and brought it down in a slashing blow on the man's jaw. The man's lips had been sealed by whatever the bones had done, but blood squirted then sprayed out his nose. His jaw had a different shape.