River of Blue Fire (61 page)

Renie didn't know how smart he was—she thought he was a fool, just like all children did about their fathers. But he would be down to see Stephen in Durban and back before she even knew he was gone. And what did she care, anyway? It wasn't like she was standing around waiting for him. Renie had left him behind, just like her mother and her brother had done. They all expected him to sit around waiting. Like he didn't have a life of his own.

He squinted up the empty hillside road, then down the other direction, as though closer inspection might reveal a bus that he had somehow missed.

The light was almost entirely gone. Joseph had been stamping so long and so hard that he couldn't decide any more which was worse, the cold in his toes or the ache in his feet from thumping them on the road. Only two cars and one truck had gone by, and although all had looked at the man by the side of the high mountain road with surprise, none of them had even slowed. His breath was beginning to show now, a chalky haze that hung before his face for a moment each time before the wind snatched it away.

He was just beginning to think about making a bed for himself somewhere in the brush, out of the chilly downdrafts, when a small truck appeared around the bend of the hill above him, headlamps surprisingly bright against the twilight. Without thinking, Joseph turned in the middle of the road and began waving his arms. For a moment it seemed the driver had not seen him in time—Long Joseph had a flashing vision of his body left broken and unnoticed in the bushes like a dead township dog—but then the lights veered toward the shoulder and the truck stopped, spurting gravel from beneath its wheels. The driver, a stocky white man in a shiny jacket, jumped out.

“What the hell do you think you're playing at, you crazy bastard?”

Joseph flinched at the Afrikaaner accent, but he was too cold to be choosy. “Need a ride.”

The driver peered at him, then looked around, clearly wondering if Long Joseph might have confederates waiting to spring out and hijack his truck, or perhaps do something worse. “Ya? Where's your car?”

Long Joseph had a moment of sheer panic as he realized he'd invented no story to explain being here on this lonely mountain road. That government place—he was supposed to keep it secret, wasn't he?

The driver, worried by his silence, took a step back toward his truck. “How did you get here, then?”

An incident from Joseph's youth came back suddenly, like a blessing sent special-delivery from God. “Fellow was giving me a ride,” he told the driver. “But we have a big fight. Argument, I mean, He threw me out the car.”

“Ya?” The driver was still suspicious. “What were you arguing about?”

“I told him that rugby football was rubbish.”

The other man laughed suddenly, a big deep chortle. “Goddamn! Well, I think you're full of
kak
too, but that's no reason to leave someone out to freeze to death. Get in. You aren't an escaped murderer, then?”

Long Joseph hurried toward the car, blowing on his hands. “No. But I almost kill my brother-in-law once when he wreck my car.” It had actually been Joseph who had wrecked his sister's husband's car to start the fight, but it sounded better this way.

“You're all right, then, fellow. I almost killed mine, once, too. I still may do it.”

The driver's name was Antonin Haaksbergen, and although he was undeniably an Afrikaaner bastard and therefore by Sulaweyo's Law already proved vicious and untrustworthy and a bigot, Long Joseph was forced to admit that he was not completely without redeeming features. For one thing, his small truck had a very good heater. For another thing, he didn't ask too many questions. But perhaps the most persuasive evidence came almost immediately, as they rounded the bend and left Joseph's hitchhiking spot behind.

“You want a drink, fellow?”

It was as though someone had opened a curtain and allowed sunshine to flood into a long-darkened room. “You have some wine?”

“You're not half-picky, are you? No, but if you're very nice to me, I might let you have a rid illy.”

Joseph frowned, suddenly suspicious, wondering if he had exchanged the looming threat of one girly-man for another. “Rid illy?”

Haaksbergen reached into a compartment behind the seat and produced a can of Red Elephant beer. He handed it over to Joseph and took out one for himself, which he opened and placed in the holder on the dashboard. “I've been good all trip, and now I've got company, so I'm entitled, eh!”

Joseph nodded, the can already raised, the cool liquid running down his throat like rain onto parched desert hills.

“You like my truck?” Haaksbergen inquired, taking a sip of his beer. “It's nice, ya? The engine's a hydrogen-burner—quite good, and cheap to run, but I suppose if one of those little gimmicks fell out or something it would all blow up and take us with it. Still, that's life, eh . . . ?

“Good God, fellow, are you done with that already?”

The rest of the journey passed in a glorious, warm, liquid slide. The lights of the towns, more numerous near the bottom of the mountains, floated past the windows like tropical fish. By the time they had reached Howick, Long Joseph and Antonin (“my mother was Italian—what can you do?”) were pretty much best friends. Even Haaksbergen's occasional remarks about “you blacks” or “your people,” or his quiet disgruntlement at Joseph drinking most of the beer, seemed part of the frank exchanges of newfound brotherhood. Deposited in front of the railway station, the late-night crowd eddying around him,, Long Joseph waved a cheerful good-bye as the truck hummed away up the main road.

A slightly muddled thumbing-through of his cash resources made it clear he would never make it to Durban by train, and in any case he had no urge at the moment to go anywhere. He found a bench inside the station, curled up, and fell into a sleep where even the dreams were bleared, as though seen through deep water.

He was rousted firmly but without too much unpleasantness by a private security guard a little before dawn, and when he could not produce a ticket, was herded out onto the street with the rest of the multiracial assortment of dossers and transients. He spent a part of his ready cash on a squeeze-bottle of Mountain Rose from a 24-hour liquor store, in part to kill the deeply unfamiliar feeling of having drunk too much beer the night before, in part to help him think.

The thinking ended in a nap on a park bench. When he woke, the morning sun was climbing overhead and the world had become unpleasantly bright. He sat for a moment, watching people who never looked back at him as they walked past, and rubbing at the sticky ooze which had somehow collected on his chin, then decided he had better get moving. No telling when Renie might come out of that thing and go barking mad if he was still gone.

He returned to the caged kiosk that jutted from the side of the liquor store like a machine gun turret, and passed some bills through the slot in return for another bottle of Mountain Rose, which left him with only enough money to take the bus a few kilometers—far too small a distance to be any help. He had a few swallows of wine, then with magnificent self-control closed the pressure seal, slid the bottle into his pocket, and walked with immense care back to the highway.

His third and last ride of the day was on the back of a produce truck. Squeezed between towers of wrapped and crated greenhouse fruits, he saw Durban rise before him, a cluster of oblongs dominating the Natal coastline. Now his busfare was enough to get him wherever he might decide to go. He toyed with the idea of returning to the shelter where he and Renie had lived and finding some of his cronies, Walter or whoever else might be around, and taking them with him to the hospital, but Renie had made it clear that the shelter was no longer safe, and the last thing Long Joseph wanted to do was get in trouble and have Renie able to tell him later that he was just as stupid an old man as she had suspected he was.

The idea that the trouble might be the sort which he wouldn't survive long enough to be shouted at by his daughter only occurred to him later.

He had walked back and forth between the bus stop and the front entrance of the Durban Outskirt Medical Facility perhaps a dozen times in two hours. It was only when he had actually reached the hospital that he remembered Renie saying there was some kind of quarantine, and indeed, no matter how long he watched the building, no one seemed to be going in and out except doctors and nurses. There were even guards at the door, private security men in padded black firefight suits, the kind of muscle that even the craziest drunk didn't bother to mess with. And even though his opinionated child might think he was a drunk, Long Joseph knew that he wasn't crazy.

He had swallowed down perhaps half the wine, but the rest was still sloshing in the bottle in his pocket, testament to his good sense and powers of restraint. There were other people on the street in front of the hospital this evening, too, so he knew that he wasn't being suspicious. But beyond that, he had reached a sort of blank wall in his own head, a big hard something that kept him from doing anything else. How could he see his son if there was a quarantine? And if he couldn't see him, then what? Go back, and face that womanish Jeremiah and admit it had all been a mistake? Or worse, go back and find Renie up and asking questions, and not even be able to give her news of her brother?

He wandered from the bus stop toward the small cluster of trees that stood on a knoll a few yards down from the medical facility's front door. He leaned against one of them and slapped his hand gently against the squeeze-bottle while he waited for an idea to come. The wall in his head remained firm, as heavy and unyielding as the helmeted men by the entrance. One of them turned in his direction for a moment, the face shield blank as an insect's eye, and Long Joseph stepped back into the trees.

That would be all he needed, wouldn't it? Have one of those weight-lifting Boer bastards notice him and decide to teach the
kaffir
a lesson. All the laws in the world couldn't stop one of those private thugs before he broke your bones—that was what was wrong with the country.

He had just found a safer spot, deep in the tree shadows, when a hand clamped on his mouth. Something hard pressed into his back, nestling against the knobs of his spine.

The voice was a harsh whisper. “Don't make a noise.”

Long Joseph's eyes bulged, and he stared at the security guards, wishing now they could see him, but he was too far away, hidden in the dark. The hard thing prodded him again.

“There's a car behind you. We are going to turn around and walk toward it, and you are going to get into it, and if you do anything stupid I'm going to blow your insides all over the sidewalk.”

His knees weak, Long Joseph Sulaweyo was spun around so that he faced out the far side of the stand of trees. A dark sedan waited at the curb, obscured from the medical facility by the copse, its door open, the interior dark as a grave pit.

“I'm taking my hand off your mouth,” the voice said. “But if you even breathe loud, you are dead.”

He still could not see his captor, only a dark shape standing just behind his shoulder. He thought wildly of all the things he might do, all the netflick heroisms he had ever seen, kicking guns out of villains' hands, immobilizing an attacker with a kung fu jab; he even thought for a moment of screaming and running, praying that the first shot would miss. But he knew he would do none of those things. The pressure on his spine was like the nose of some cold, ancient creature, sniffing for the kill. He was its prey, and it had caught him. A man couldn't outrun Death, could he?

The car door was before him. He let himself be bent double and shoved inside. Someone pulled a sack over his head.

My children don't deserve no stupid man like me for a father
, he thought as the car jerked into motion. A second later, anger dissolved into terror. He suddenly felt very sure he would be sick, would strangle himself in the sack on his own vomit.
God damn, look at this foolishness
! he mourned.
My poor children! I have killed them both
.

R
ENIE stood up slowly, fighting an urge to be sick again. When she had thrown up in the insect world, nothing had come out, and thus it might have been interesting or even instructive to consider why the Kansas simulation had provided her with a clear stream of liquid to vomit. Renie, however, did not particularly want to think about regurgitation at all. As it was, the memory of what had made her sick in the first place, those poor mutilated creatures, was still nauseatingly strong.

“What is the problem with this place?” she moaned, wiping her chin. “Are these people completely crazy? Jesus Mercy, and I thought the Yellow Room was bad! Are they all some kind of lunatic sadists?”

Azador restarted the engine and the tugboat began chugging down the river once more. “They were only Puppets.”

“You
would
say that!” Only the overwhelming feeling of weakness and despair prevented her from starting another argument.

“I understand what Renie means.” !Xabbu was standing upright on the boat's rail, his balance impressive even on the gentle river current. “Are there really so many . . . what is that word, Renie? So many sadistic people that are the masters of this place?”

“They are rich bastards,” Azador said. “They do what they like.”

“It's hard to believe some of this . . .
ugliness
.” Renie had taken a few deep breaths, and was beginning to feel normal again. “Who would want to live with it? Who would want to do it? I mean, the person behind Scarecrow might have been a bastard, but he didn't seem
that
bad. But I suppose if it was all just a game to him . . .”

“Scarecrow had nothing to do with that,” Azador said flatly. “He lost his hold on this place long ago. What you saw, those puppets torn up and sewed back together like dolls, that was done by the Twins.”