Wildcard (4 page)

His Spanish was rusty, but serviceable. He
brushed up on the plane ride. In Toahultaca, he managed to buy a
horse and supplies - water jugs, a tent, the usual things. He spent
a week talking to people, collecting pieces of the legend. A man,
raised by wolves and Indians, who lived alone in the desert. The
people were afraid of him, thought he was a demon or a spirit or
something different. They called him “il cabrenezo”, the cursed
wanderer. One after another, they pointed in the same direction,
into the hills.

He rode in for four days, just riding
around, looking, with no idea how to find LuvRay. He enjoyed it,
but it was wild and he slept with a pistol under his blanket. He
woke up, the fifth morning, saw a wolf looking at him from a few
feet away. He reached down slowly, pulled out the pistol. He fired
into the air. The wolf turned and ran away.

“Good,” said a voice behind him. “You wanted
not kill. I want you live.”

Sublime sat up quickly and turned. The man
had black hair and eyes and a lean face. He wore leather clothes,
like a modern Indian and sat on a rock, looking calmly at Sublime.
“Who you are?”

“RJ Sublime. Are you LuvRay Chose?”

“Shoze is name sound. Yes, I am. Why you are
here?”

“I’m looking for you.”

LuvRay nodded. “I thinked. I dreamed. What
is your want of me?”

“I want you to go to France, to find
somebody. Her name is Martha. I have passports, documents, money
and credit cards. A flight is booked, and train tickets.”

LuvRay didn’t answer. He just walked away.
Sublime spent two more days there, waiting. He looked, but knew he
wouldn’t find the man. He could only wait for LuvRay to contact
him. When he started a fire two nights later to cook, he decided to
leave the following morning. LuvRay had made up his mind
apparently. He wouldn’t go.

Sublime returned to the fire after taking a
piss; LuvRay was stirring the pot. He turned to Sublime, opened his
hand and dropped some things into the chili.

“I go, RJ Sublime, if you go me and meet
triatee dhan.”

“Who? What?”

“Not know word. Spareets from dry
earth?”

“Spirits? Of the desert?” He laughed. “Lord,
I do believe I’m in the wrong movie.”

Sublime walked over to his horse, took out
his Swiss Army knife and an onion. “Show me the way.” He looked at
the wrinkled nubs in the chili, stirred them in. “Peyote?” He cut
up the onion, dumped it in as well.

“No. Different. Only Indian know this. Make
vision.”

An hour after they ate the chili, RJ handed
LuvRay the bottle of Mescal he had bought in the last town. He was
feeling the onset of the cactus buds. LuvRay sipped a tiny amount,
handed it back.

“You bring me death.”

“What?” Sublime was looking at the stars and
they were looking back. “I don’t operate that way.”

“Triatee dhan show my death. They say now.
You bring on horse.”

Sublime sat up. “I don’t usually kill
people, LuvRay. Why would I kill you?”

“I no say you kill me.”

“All…all right. What did the ghosts show
you, then?”

“Only what I say. No more.” He looked at
Sublime. “When animal die, they no bury. They walk away, no think.
I seed many wolf die. Elders. All my wolf are died. Time I was cub.
All.”

“What about the wolf I saw tonight? What’s
his name?”

“She. No name. Wolf has no name. Only man
has name. Her pack chase away. Alone. I take her. Now I leave, send
her alone again. Soon, she die.”

“Why? She needs you for food?”

“Some. More is wolf die if alone. No pack,
no reason for live. Like this.”

As the buds and the Mescal combined, Sublime
gradually lost touch with reality. He started to float in space, to
lose track of everything. He saw faces, the cactus and plants began
to talk and move about, each movement a symbol of unnamable
fears.

“No,” said LuvRay. “No this way.”

LuvRay taught him. He needed to take the
intensity, bring it to his body, not get lost in mind. He needed to
open it outwards, not inwards. “Lay on back, speak for stars,
after, speak for ground and plants and animals. This good way
you.”

So he did. And the stars sang, in a language
out of the knowledge of man which he did not know, but understood.
The stars held him, hovering in an embrace beyond time, in a
wordless space where nothing needed to be true. Hours later, LuvRay
stood above him.

“Now you meet fire.”

LuvRay squatted and reached into the fire,
grabbed a burning ember and held it in his open palm, unharmed.
LuvRay smiled at him, handed him the ember. He dropped it, looked
at the blister on his palm, looked back at LuvRay. He stood and
began walking away, turned his head and motioned for Sublime to
follow him.

They walked into the desert. The fire
dwindled and disappeared. Sublime no longer knew how to get back to
the campsite. LuvRay cut limbs off a cactus, sliced it up and they
ate it. They walked more, LuvRay occasionally stopping, smelling
the wind in a blissful way. He bent down, picked a handful of earth
and crumbled it under RJ’s nose.

“Smell.” He almost smiled. “No place ever
have same smell.”

They came to a cave and sat inside.

“My home. No other man seed. You are first.”
LuvRay looked back out to the desert. “And last.”

A wolf walked up.

“Is that the same wolf?”

But LuvRay was gone. Afraid, he turned to
the wolf, who lowered its head onto its paws, staring at him. He
eased down, looking it in the eyes. They lay like that for a long
time, neither moving.

“Run.” Sublime jumped up. Had the wolf said
it? “Run. Run with me.”

So he ran. He found the freedom of the
desert, running with the animal. He ran in the bright night,
blessed by ghosts to fly over rocks and holes. The wolf loped at
his side, eager to fly with a new friend. The still, cool air took
them together, turning into a breeze as they moved, luring the
beast and the man to a communion before such things as wolves and
men found themselves apart.

His mind was pushed into a boundary past the
sky, buried deep in the cool earth. Nothing and no one owned them,
and they were nothing at all. Just animals in the wild, happy and
free. They ran, unencumbered by the pretension of humanity.

They stopped, rolled together, played
together. RJ stared into the beast’s eyes without thinking of time.
He understood something never before guessed at. He was satisfied
that it had no words. The pair ran some more. They arrived at the
campsite as the sun rose. LuvRay was not there.

The Sergeant looked down at his black
high-lacing boots. He loved them. Danner boots, the choice for
outdoor professionals. His philosophy was that durable, dependable,
waterproof footwear would get one through all sorts of troublesome
situations. A soldier can’t make the world conform to his plans and
schemes, but with the right boots he can kick the merde out of any
nasty surprises. And he was about to do that to one wolf and Indian
raised no nation wildman.

Not that the Sergeant had any particular
problem with Luvray Chose. Far from it. He respected and liked
Luvray, at least by reputation. He admired the man. Luvray seemed
happy when things got tough. He obviously liked sleeping in the
dirt and the cold. He was no stranger to battle, either.

The Sergeant was not going to fight Luvray
for personal reasons at all. In fact, he never did anything for
personal reasons. He just followed orders. He liked it. A woman
once asked why he was that way and he had no answer. “Probably my
years of training,” he replied. But that wasn’t it. The Sergeant
had been genetically encoded to derive deep satisfaction from
taking orders in an appropriate chain of command.

He was a tactician to the bone, able to
carry out any order below the level of ‘overtake that country’ or
‘formulate policy for such and such a situation.’ He would be lost
in diplomatic terrain and if the General had, as some sort of joke,
ordered him to go to a party and make friends or get a date, he
might have clarified parameters. “What sort of friends, SIR?” He
felt the urge to snap out the word “sir” if he didn’t comprehend
the orders he were given, as if the loudness of the word could
somehow rearrange the sentence into a more comprehensible
arrangement.

But these were orders that made sense,
orders that he liked. He had also been genetically encoded to enjoy
fighting, and to excel at it. His pain tolerance bested an
elephant’s. He was a laboratory of humanimal bioengineering
designed for a single purpose: to carry out with no question and no
concern the orders of his commander, in this case, the General,
also a bioengineered being.

They had been designed to work with each
other.

Although he had no troops per se, he had
issued many commands. He possessed an almost primal ability to
force others to obey his orders in violent or deep stress
situations. People instinctually knew that he would find the means
to carry the day, and simply did what he said feeling that was the
best way to get out alive. He could read people on the spot, seeing
the depth of their ability to take stress, and what they could
do.

He considered just dropping in front of
Luvray, saying ‘surprise’ and going at him, but the soldier in him
couldn’t sacrifice the combat initiative in such a stupid and
deliberate manner. Surprise, or definite initiative as he called
it, was a critical advantage and should never be sacrificed.

He had seen old films where a soldier would
yell “hey” or scream something unintelligible and then leap, an
idiot’s maneuver. As if someone would be more vulnerable after
being yelled at than if they suspected nothing at all. He had to
force himself to watch such stupidity when he wanted to line up
those fools masquerading as soldiers and give them a proper
asschewing from a Sergeant.

It was something he never actually did
because, technically, he had no soldiers under his command, but he
damn well knew how. He could chew a soldiers ass all the way off if
needed. It was part of being a Sergeant. And if one of his
theoretical men ever announced their presence before attacking, he
would. He would chew it off and shove it back up the hole. An
attacker should never give up the element of surprise. Just hit
someone. And running at them from the front? Hit them from behind.
But then he was a soldier, not a movie director and maybe it made
for more drama. He certainly didn’t plan for any drama in the
taking of LuvRay Chose. Still, LuvRay had a hell of a reputation, a
mythos, really, and he wanted a real fight with him.

Commitment, along with surprise, was another
critical factor. The Sergeant knew he would complete the mission.
Then when the A plan didn’t work, he found another way.

He knew LuvRay had keen senses, beyond the
ordinary. He would be difficult to surprise, and the Sergeant liked
the challenge. The plan: wait on a bench at the top of the train
platform, reading a newspaper. Then, when LuvRay walked past, hit
him with a neural stun device while walking toward him. Catch him
before he fell and act like a friend helping someone lightheaded to
their car.

He wasn’t sure why the General wanted the
capture. After all, LuvRay was working for them in some way. “I
wish to meet him,” was all the General had said.

No problem. He sat on the bench with his
paper, waiting for the wolf.

LuvRay looked out the window of the train as
it pulled into the station. This was a bad place for him. Too many
people. Any people was too many for him. Paris had far too many
people.

He looked at his shoes. They had hard soles.
He preferred soft soles, moccasins, or no shoes at all. But for
some reason he wore hiking shoes. Jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather
vest, all natural. LuvRay didn’t like synthetic fabrics. He
disliked spending too much time indoors, too. The plane ride over
had made him almost crazy.

The train stopped. He shouldered a small
pack. As he neared the end of the platform, he felt it, a not
rightness. He slipped low, moving behind the crowd by instinct. Saw
it. Newspaper. A man reading a newspaper. He broke into a loping
run the opposite way.

The Sergeant took off after him, stun tagger
in hand. It was a limited use weapon. He kicked off two shots. Both
hit the pack. Great instincts the man had. The next shot dropped
someone in the crowd. It was getting too messy. He had to change
tactics. He tossed the gun aside, moved to take him by hand.

He dodged between two people, and LuvRay’s
pack was flying at his face. He knocked it aside, but it cost him
close to a second. LuvRay’s feet could be seen, disappearing
between an old woman’s legs, under a bench sandwiched between two
kiosks. The Sergeant knew he couldn’t spare the time to go
around.

“Bougez vous,” he yelled at the people
LuvRay had gone under. He ran at the bench. It was backed to
another bench, where people leaned back, trying to stay away from
the man who had suddenly flown from underneath.

The Sergeant thumbed a tiny pellet from his
belt. He didn’t want to use tek. He wanted to go combat primitive,
perhaps out of respect for LuvRay. But it was creating too much
attention. He leapt, low, to place one foot on the back of both
benches, then to leverage that into maximum height, or change of
direction, depending on whether he could see LuvRay in the crowd or
not. He did, and opted for the change in direction toward
LuvRay.

He turned it into a dive, intending to land
on top of him with a strike to the temple. Severe disorientation if
successful, possibly unconsciousness. But it required total
commitment to the maneuver. He flipped the pellet, which struck
LuvRay on the left buttock and dispelled its charge. His sciatic
nerve flared into pain, visible by the jerking response. His left
leg should be without motive power.