Black Man / Thirteen

They worked each other out of the clothes piecemeal, stopping to kiss and touch until finally she lay back on the bedroll naked, brushed her own hands down her flanks, and opened her thighs for him. He shifted on elbows and hands, a little awkward with lack of custom, and then gasped as he slipped into her. The evening air was cool and breezy against his skin, and Carmen Ren was heated and wet inside. She smiled, shifted sideways lazily, did something with her muscles. He felt himself gripped along the length of his cock, a slippery, tugging intimacy, and then she pulled him down on top of her, lifted her thighs, and clamped them to his sides—they burned like branding in the cool—and he came, sudden and rushing unstoppable, jolting like there was current through him off some badly insulated cable.

He hung his head, stayed propped on his elbows.

“I’m sorry.”

She smiled up at him again, wiggled a little and tensed her muscles around his fading hardness. “Don’t be. You know how it makes me feel, seeing you lose control like that?”

“It’s just.” He could feel himself flushing. “Been a long time, you know.”

“Yeah, I guessed that. It doesn’t matter, Scott. We’ve got time. I like you inside me. We’ll go again when you’re ready.” Another twitch of that coiled muscle, and a sudden widening of her eyes. “Oh. In fact.”

He didn’t know if it was the way she talked, casual as she lay there under him, as if they were sitting in a breakfast diner together, or maybe just the fact that he had her here, the culmination of so many damp, hopeless daydreams when he went home from Ward BioSupply alone. Or maybe it was that word, handmaiden, drumming around in his head, still on his lips like the dark spice taste of her. He didn’t know, truth be told didn’t much care. He knew, because Janey had once told him, that he was uncommonly fast back in the saddle, but even for him this was something else. He felt himself hardening right there inside her, swelling against that thing she did with those muscles, and he knew this time it was going to be all right, was going to be a long, sweet ride.

Afterward, they lay in a tangle of limbs on the bedroll, backs to the peeling wall, partially draped with the sleeping bag and Ren’s jacket, gazing at the slice of evening sky just visible through the empty doorway that led outside. Scott thought the stars had never looked so bright and kind as they did tonight, not even back home. They seemed like sentinels, vibrating gently in the soft blue-black, wishing well. He told her that, and she chuckled deep in her chest.

“Postcoital astronomy,” she said.

“No,” he said, letting her have her joke, but firm despite it. “This is special, Carmen. We’re blessed tonight.”

She made a small, noncommittal noise and stretched a little.

“You know,” she told him, a little later. “It could be for a long time, this hiding. It’s going to be tough.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed a hand on the stubble of his cheek, mock roughly. “I imagine you’re used to tough, aren’t you.”

“Will RimSec come after us?”

“I don’t know.” Her tone was thoughtful. “There are people I’ve called to tidy up back at the dock. They’ll cover our traces, that’ll be a start. We have friends, Scott. More friends than you’d imagine.”

“And enemies,” he said.

“Yeah. Enemies, too.”

He twisted his head to look into her face.

“Tell me the truth, Carmen. Is this the End Times? When the world goes down in flames, and the beast rises from the ocean with the names of blasphemy written upon him? Is that who we’re up against? The beast?”

She hesitated. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t talked about that. But I do know this much: somewhere out there, there’s a dark man looking for him, and for us. This man is a servant of the darkness, and that’s who we have to guard against, Scott. Both of us, whatever happens, we’re servants of the light and we have to keep watch. The black man is coming. And when he comes, we have to be ready to fight, if necessary to the death. Are you ready for that?”

“Of course I am. I’ll do anything. But…”

She shifted, pushing herself up against the wall so she could look him in the eye. “But what?”

Scott looked up at the ceiling. “Can’t He do anything about this black man?”

“Not yet,” she said gently. “At least, that’s what he tells me. It isn’t time. He has other concerns, Scott, other work to do. It’s complicated, I know, I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but I know what’s been revealed to me, and all I can do is tell you the same. We have to have faith, Scott, that’s what he told me. That’s a Christian strength, isn’t it? Having faith, not questioning what’s revealed?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“And, yes, maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, but if we have faith, I think it will. We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part. There’s a reckoning in the wind, and, uh, a harrowing to come. Those who stand in its way will fall, those who follow in faith will be raised up.”

“Then, that means…” He squeezed her hand tightly. Blood thudded in him; he felt his groin stir faintly. “He has come in judgment. It is the time.”

And then, abruptly, he remembered the gaunt, hollow-eyed stare of the stranger, remembered how it felt to be fixed by those eyes at close range, and looking up at the ceiling again he no longer felt the warm pulse of longed-for vindication, the affirmation of all he’d struggled to believe and hold true. Instead, out of nowhere, he remembered those eyes, that stripped-to-the-bone face, and all he felt was cold, and afraid.

A reckoning in the wind.

CHAPTER 10

Fifty kilometers outside Van Horn, Interstate Highway 10 laid down a luminescent pale strip of gray in the desert night, stretching away toward low, horizon-hugging mountain ranges whose names the man calling himself Eddie Tanaka had never bothered to learn. Stars punctured the velvet blue-black above like knife points, sharp white contrast to the dull red glowing orbs of the autohaul rigs below as they hammered along through the darkness in both directions, following the highway with insectile machine focus. Rising drone, blastpast rush of dark noise and wind, drone collapsing back into the distance. Passing the garish LCLS lights of Tabitha’s with a detachment no human driver could have mustered.

Well, maybe a gleech, he allowed sourly. They don’t got much use for this kind of merchandise.

He glanced up at the brothel’s skyline billboard—the name in vampiric spidery red lettering the original Tabitha would never have agreed to if she hadn’t sold up and moved to the Rim as soon as she had the capital. Behind the spiky-thin lettering, as if caged in by it, female figures switched back and forth in full flesh-toned color, pixeled almost—but, legal requirements and all, not quite—up to human footage perfect.

Gleech wouldn’t be out here on the highway anyway. They don’t drive.

That you know of.

That Kenan knew of, and he fucking was one, smart guy.

Smart guy? Yeah, you’re some fucking smart guy, Max, out in the parking lot of Tabitha’s with whore’s snot on your jacket and not even a blow job to show for it. All your plans and schemes, your carve-out-a-new-life bullshit, look where you’re standing still. Snot on your clothes and no blow job. That’s how fucking smart you are, smart guy.

“Smart guy…”

He heard his own mutter, final echo off the abrupt, ti

Never can fucking leave it at just one shot, can you.

He’d dumped the synadrive into his eyes a couple of hours earlier, and the thing was, this was quality product, right out of his own stash, not the stepped-on shit he shifted to the kids in Van Horn and Kent on a Saturday night. So he fucking well knew he’d only need that single squirt—and initially that was what he settled for, just the one dropperload dribbled down onto the quivering surface of his left eye, what the kids called pirate dosage. But pirate shots always, fucking always, left him feeling weirdly unbalanced, and that was on a good night—which tonight wasn’t—and so as the synadrive came on, that feeling of fucked-up symmetry built and fucking built until it seemed like the whole right side of his body was just too slow and sleepy to bear, and so he gave in and tipped his head back one more time before he hit the road, and the fluid rolled down his right eyeball like tears.