Apocalypse to Go (16 page)

“Are you going to drift off again?”

“I hope not. I feel light-headed and kind of weird, like my body’s a helium balloon.” I raised my arms over my head, then let them fall back to my sides. For a moment I lost track of my hands. The skin on my back felt icy cold.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ari said.

“Well, there’s sex.”

He stared. Perhaps I’d been a bit abrupt.

“I feel like I’m not really back in my body yet,” I said. “If you made love to me, it would help.”

He continued to stare.

“Well, you asked,” I said with a snarl. “Is this any worse than you wanting sex to get back to sleep?”

“No. Sorry. It just seemed like rather an abrupt change of subject.”

He smiled. I laughed, but my face seemed to belong to someone else.

“We could do something special,” I went on. “I don’t suppose you have any classified information I need to wheedle out of you.”

Ari shrugged and stood up. “I could invent some,” he said. “It’s almost dawn in Damascus, anyway. I’ll go shut the laptop down.”

“Okay.” I found myself wondering how it would feel to sink my nails into his shoulders. I could lick the blood as it flowed. “Uh, darling, while you’re at it, why don’t you get those handcuffs?”

His smile deepened to a grin. “Very well,” he said. “You liked that, did you?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s for your own good. Why take a chance on my self-control? Once we get started, I might not have any.”

“Oh? Are you telling me that making love to you tonight could be dangerous?”

“Yeah, I am. So if you don’t want to—”

“Quite the opposite, actually.” His Qi level spiked along with his grin. “I’ll just go get the handcuffs.”

I should have known.

While I changed into the black thigh-high stockings, I concentrated on the details of my current reality: the solid wood floor under my feet, the cool air on my body as I stripped off my sweaty clothes, the mesh of the stockings and the pinch of the garters on my skin, the pool of lamplight in our familiar room. I’d made a good start on regaining body consciousness by the time Ari came in.

He tossed the pair of steel cuffs onto my pillow, then caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. At the touch of his mouth on mine, the leopard woman archetype sank farther into the depths of my mind. He picked me up and carried me to the bed, then sat down next to me and kissed me again. I felt my body respond—my body, not someone else’s. My humanity came back stronger with every kiss and caress he gave me.

The vision, the voices, the Chaos attacks—everything disappeared as my world shrank down to Ari’s lovemaking. If I was his sleeping pill, I realized that night, he was my drug of choice.

B
Y MORNING THE DRUG HAD
worn off, but the city of the leopard women had faded from an emotional threat to a detailed memory. I lay in bed and thought about the woman who’d spoken to me. I wondered about the weight of her jewelry. I’d seen no one else in the marketplace wearing those silver chains, so possibly they marked some kind of status in her society. At the least they probably meant she was wealthy. Be that as it may, she’d made it clear that she disliked me. The feeling had become mutual.

Ari insisted on feeding me, though I drew the line at his favorite breakfast: a peanut butter and chopped pickle sandwich. Instead, he set a plate in front of me with one overcooked fried egg and a couple of pieces of cold, greasy, British toast. When he spread jam on them, I was too depressed to argue.

“It would be Sunday,” I said. “I won’t hear from anyone in the Agency till tomorrow. About the apparitions, I mean.”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t do any more research on your own.” Ari rubbed the side of his neck. “I’ll admit that being bitten was a new sensation, but there are limits.”

“Oh, come on! I didn’t even break the skin.”

“This time. That’s what I mean about limits.”

I smiled and forced myself to start eating the egg.

While we were cleaning up after breakfast, my sister Kathleen called. Our mutual friend, Mira Rosen, had finally delivered her baby the night before.

“It’s a boy, just like she thought,” Kathleen said. “Ten pounds, two ounces.”

“Oh, God!” I said. “No wonder she got so big!”

Ari looked at me with a raised eyebrow. When I clicked off, I relayed the news and explained my remark.

“I remember her from that party,” Ari said. “The therapist.”

“That’s right, yeah. You’ve got a good memory for people.”

“It’s part of my job.” Ari paused to shut the dishwasher door. “Do you want children someday?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because our jobs are too dangerous. Some philosopher guy said that having children means giving hostages to Fortune. If we had kids, they could end up being just plain hostages. I’d be worried sick about them all the time.”

“True.” Ari pounced. “But you’re thinking in terms of having my children. If
we
had kids, you said. You’re beginning to come round.”

I snarled; he grinned.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Why do you think I’m going to break down and agree to marry you?”

“Because you’re too intelligent not to. Obviously, I’m the perfect man for you. You must see that. So why not marry me?”

“I never knew that arrogance was part of perfection.”

“I didn’t say I was perfect. I said I was the perfect man for you. There’s rather a difference.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me, Mr. Perfection, do you want kids?”

“No, for the same reason you don’t. See? We even agree on that.”

I stomped into the living room and sat down at my computer desk. I had my Gnostic research to distract me from both the leopard women and Ari’s obsession with marriage, but Ari followed me.

“I’m going to go downstairs and do my exercises,” he said. “Are you sure you won’t—”

“Very sure.”

“We’ve got some rope in the trunk of the car. Did you jump rope when you were a girl? You might find it enjoyable—”

“No, nyet, nein.”

Ari sighed and set exasperated hands on his hips.

“My beloved darling,” I said, “I’m sick and tired of you leaning on me like this. I’m an adult. I don’t have to go back to gym class. Please just drop it.”

“Well, for the love of God, I’ve got to do something for you.” He spoke quietly, but the words ached with frustration. “I can’t get at those spotted bitches or that sodding priest, either, the one who keeps bothering you.”

I sat there stunned. Ari turned and started to walk away.

“Wait!” I got up and hurried after him. “I’m sorry. I misread that totally. I thought it was just—well—controlling behavior.”

He considered this with a complete lack of expression. When I put my hands flat on his chest, he forced out a twisted smile.

“Do you know what’s wrong with you?” he said. “You don’t know how to trust someone.”

“Say what? I’m trusting you with my life, aren’t I?”

“Are you? Physically, yes. You know perfectly well that if someone tried to harm you, I’d stop them or die trying. That’s not what I mean.”

“Let me guess. I bet this is leading up to, if I really trusted you, I’d marry you and give you my whole life.”

“Exactly.” His smile turned genuine. “You do see it, then.”

“Oh, go do your damned push-ups!”

He muttered a laugh and left the room. I snarled at his retreating back.

Around noon LaDonna and Itzak appeared at our front door, a perfect distraction. Itzak carried in a couple of steel tackle boxes containing, he said, not fishing gear but tools, materials, and diagnostic devices. For hours that afternoon the three of them did various elaborate and arcane things
to and with electronics, while I sat in an armchair in the living room and read books the old-fashioned way: by sunlight. One project I did understand. Itzak put a lock on the gun drawer in the file cabinet at the head of the stairs. He installed a digital gadget keyed to Ari’s fingerprints.

“No one else can grab the gun and turn it on Ari, huh?” I said. “Not unless they had a blowtorch or chisel or some such thing.”

“Before they got it open that way,” Itzak said with a sunny smile, “Ari would have killed them. I could put your print on the pad, too. It’ll take multiple IDs.”

“No, thanks. I have my own weapons access points.”

“I’m so glad you and Ari found each other. You’d both be hell for anyone else.”

I had to laugh at that, mostly because it was true.

“Ari’s insisting on putting detectors on the roof,” Itzak continued. “Pray for us.”

He squared his shoulders like a soldier going to battle and stalked off toward the back of the flat. I heard him speak to LaDonna as he passed her in the hall. She strode into the living room and flopped down on the couch.

“I am not going up on the roof with those two idiots,” she announced.

“You strike me as a wise and sensible person.” I closed my book. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, anyway. Do you know if Seymour ever looked at the vision I sent him? I’m kind of wondering what he made of it.”

“He’s on vacation as far as I know.”

“Vacation? Since when do we get vacations?”

“When you work in the home office, you do. Maybe you should transfer over.”

“DC’s not my kind of town.” I shuddered at the very thought. “Do you know when Seymour’s coming back?”

“Soon, I think. But you could try his assistant. I-C’s his handle. He’s been trying to find an astrophysicist we can trust to look over your data.”

“Astrophysicist?”

“Look, I’m no physicist, just a math head. I do understand parallel world theoretics, but that’s because it’s been my hobby since high school. I won my first science fair with
a project on the subject.” She smiled at the memory. “Anyway, thanks to your brother, it’s part of my job now. But that’s my limit. Mr. Spock the all-knowing scientist only exists on TV.”

“That’s true. I guess you don’t have a tricorder.”

She laughed, and I grinned.

“I did read over your report on that vision,” LaDonna went on. “Seriously horrible, but all I can say is the multicolored spray must have been some kind of radiation from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. And you knew that already, I bet.”

“Yeah, even I could figure that much out.”

I was going to continue our discussion, but from overhead came footsteps and the sound of hammering. We both looked up as if we could see through the ceiling. The thumping continued, punctuated now and then by muffled voices.

“I’m not having any premonitions of impending deaths.” I spoke quite loudly.

“Good.” LaDonna spoke the same way. “I was about to ask.”

When my landline phone rang, I answered it. Mr. Singh, the realtor, said hello.

“Let me guess,” I said, bellowing. “The neighbors want to know what Ari’s doing on the roof.”

“That is precisely it,” Mr. Singh bellowed in return. “They are worried because he appears to be wearing a firearm on his chest.”

“That’s called a shoulder holster. He’s not going to shoot anything. He’s just fixing our security system.”

“Ah.” Mr. Singh paused and sighed. “Very well. I shall tell them.”

We hung up. Eventually the noises stopped, and the members of my private Geek Patrol returned to the living room. Itzak sat next to LaDonna on the couch, and Ari took the other armchair.

“All right,” Itzak said. “Someone’s directing an odd kind of energy at these flats. That much I know.”

“You don’t have any idea what it is?” I said.

“No, but it doesn’t much matter. I’ve identified the multiple
frequencies they’re using, so I can block them, and that’ll work for now. I’ve set it up in the system records as Q—Ari’s suggestion, Q for query, because we don’t know what it is. LaDonna told me earlier that your employer’s research arm will take the problem from there. The real question is who’s sending it and why, but I’ve been told I shouldn’t ask that.”

“That’s right.” I softened the words with a smile. “Don’t ask it. Forget you ever knew about it, even.”

“It’s probably Ari’s fault, whatever it is.”

“Always,” Ari said. “My enemies are everywhere.”

We all laughed, even Ari.

“How long will you be staying in town?” I asked LaDonna.

“I have to go back tomorrow,” she said. “Tzaki took the day off, and he’s driving me to the airport. He’ll see me off.”

“Reluctantly,” Itzak said. “But I’ve been promised that I’ll get e-mail.”

“About Fred’s old job, of course,” LaDonna said.

They shared a smile. The smile and the way she’d used his nickname gave LaDonna away. She had a little more than recruitment on her mind, but then, so did Itzak. How often does one hypergeek find another, after all, that magic someone who can actually understand what they’re talking about? Race and religion present big problems for normal people, but hypergeeks know one another when they meet, and that kind of love conquers—well, not all, but an awful lot.

As they were leaving, I had a chance at a private word with LaDonna while Ari and Itzak were teasing each other about some incident in their shared past.

“Thanks for the help,” I said, “and e-mail me if I-C tells you anything interesting.”