Cottonwood (39 page)

Sanford, chirring. His hand, the prickly underside like the legs of centipedes, rubbing back and forth slowly between her breasts. The cool, curved plates of his head pressing on her skin. His breath, like a wet bellows in her ear. His palps, vibrating and nudging softly at her neck. Sanford.

The acid in her guts became a slow, sour ache and then, as suddenly as with her ribs, just the ghost of one. She sagged into gravity’s pull, sweaty and exhausted, feeling only a dim, painless tugging as Samaritan cut her sutures out, but she was too tired to feel anything else.

“Thank you,” Sanford said quietly, stroking her hair.

“Blow me.” Samaritan came to the head of the table, shoved Sanford roughly aside and bent over her, clicking as he examined her. “I think I got the worst of it,” he said at last, prodding her. He hesitated, made a fist and pressed down hard directly over her liver.

“Ow,” Sarah muttered, but it was a pale thing, no worse than a day-old bruise.

“Stop squalling, you big baby.” He pulled her up, yanked her blouse shut and tied it over her midriff in a few curt pulls. He started to say something, then stopped and peered closely at her face. “Oh piss on me,” he snapped.

“What’s wrong?” she asked dully.

Without answering, he touched her cheekbone, the one Piotr had kicked and cracked the day he’d come to burn Baccus’s house and then kicked again the day he’d come to kill her in her kitchen. It didn’t hurt. Samaritan’s palps ground. “Went all through your bones, I guess. Fuck. Sarah, look at me.”

He’d never used her name before. She obeyed, too tired anymore to even think.

He punched her.

Not hard, not really. Her head rocked back, but didn’t fly off, and stars burst behind her eyes, but didn’t fade to black. Certainly, he didn’t crack her cheekbone again. She clapped her hand to her face, eyes swimming with reflexive tears, and saw Sanford lunge across the table’s foot in an angry blur.

“Stop and think,” Samaritan said crossly. “How’s it going to look when she goes out fewer colors than when she came in? Fresh bruises will hide the fact that the old ones are gone, so lay off me. I smell the piss already. You can stop spraying.”

“
Zhu’kwe
!” Sanford spat, a word her translator would not attempt. He lifted her down from the table and steadied her as she looked at the smooth and only slightly smudged flesh of her stomach. “For two chits, I’d—”

Samaritan held up the empty cylinder.

Sanford was quiet. Tense and fuming, but quiet.

“Go on, then.” Samaritan tossed the device and Sanford caught it. “I don’t know what you’re doing with this shit, but I get the feeling it’s better off with you than me. Get out and don’t forget my new door. Oh, and caseworker…?”

She looked back, her hand still held in Sanford’s even though she had her balance back now.

Samaritan handed over her paz and closed one eye in a wink. “Nice tits.”

“You prick,” she said shakily, snatching up her case from his floor.

“And anytime you want to see it, just come on by.” He waggled his fingers, found an unopened beer on his shelf and dropped heavily into a chair in his shabby trailer to drink it, laughing at her retreat.

To be able to walk without the burning in her lungs or the leaden ache in her gut, heavenly. It had seemed to take hours to come halfway up this road; the last length to Sanford’s house blew by in seconds. And once inside, in the stuffy shade she’d so been craving, she let the door close and impulsively threw her arms around his hard, inhospitable body, hugging him just like he was T’aki.

She startled him, plainly. It occurred to her only then that she’d never seen adult yang’ti hugging, only a parent with a child and then only rarely. Flustered, she let go, but his arms came up to trap her in a thorny, belated answering embrace. He stared at her, antennae twitching tensely, his body perfectly still, silent.

“Sarah!” T’aki came bouncing from the back room around their legs, his toy ship in one hand and the other clutching and tugging at her clothes. “You came! You came! You’re better!” And threw himself against her knee just as exuberantly as she’d thrown herself on Sanford.

“Thanks for coming to see me in the hospital, jellybean,” she said, reaching to pat his hard little head. She looked at Sanford, who was still holding her. “You have no idea what that meant to me. I know it couldn’t have been easy to arrange.”

He chirred, a soft thread of sound passing through his ragged breath. That was all.

“Thank you,” she said.

His hands flexed just slightly on her back.

She could feel her lips beginning to twitch into a smile. “You can let go now.”

He did, but slowly.

“I’m sorry about Fagin,” T’aki said, still wrapped around her knee.

“Oh honey, so am I.” She bent and picked him up, letting his palps tickle at her shoulder as she rocked him. “It was a bad thing…but it’s over now.”

“Is it.” Sanford moved the chair and opened the hidden hatch. He dropped down into his secret room and came up again with his special device. He set it on the table next to the empty cylinder Samaritan had given him and switched on his work light. “What will you do now?”

“Keep out of trouble and pretend to be hurt.” She touched her belly, smiling, then her cheek, and winced.

T’aki touched her cheek too, chirring, then hugged her neck uncomfortably tight.

“You would be safer to leave us for a time,” Sanford said, his back to her, already setting out his tools.

“Maybe.” She sat down, found T’aki’s side-seams and lightly rubbed the soft skin there. “But maybe not. I have to at least pretend it doesn’t bother me to work here, don’t I? And I’ll risk it. I like seeing you. It’s all there is to like in this place.”

“With luck and this—” Sanford rested his hand briefly on his code-bank. “—you will not have to suffer this place much longer. Either of us.” He picked up a long, thin tool like a dentist’s pick and slipped it into a groove on the side of the cylinder, then paused and glanced at Sarah. “Take T’aki to the Heaps, please. I need to work without distraction.”

T’aki, affronted, blew through his palps but then immediately began pulling Sarah toward the door, excitedly chanting, “Heaps! Heaps! Heaps!”

“Just for a few hours,” Sanford said. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” Sarah straightened her mangled blouse as much as possible and picked up her briefcase, taking T’aki by the hand. “It’s my job. At least until you get that thing fixed and we can get the hell out of here.”

“Hell is a vulgar word,” T’aki chirped, his legs tucked up so he could swing at the end of her arm.

“You’re right and I’m very sorry. Let’s go, jellybean.”

He raced out the door ahead of her and Sarah followed, moving slowly and trying to remember exactly how the pain had bent her back when she’d felt it—minutes, just
minutes
ago—but when she reached back to close the door, Sanford’s hand slipped into hers. She raised her eyes and he was there, looking back at her. Several times, he seemed about to speak, but the little clicks and scraping sounds he made came to nothing.

“I missed you too,” said Sarah.

He thought about that, then released her hand and let her close the door. T’aki was waiting about a hundred feet away, jumping through the obstacle course of some client’s tire- and appliance-strewn yard. Sarah headed that way, touching her hand briefly to the cracked glass of Sanford’s window. He tapped it in return and off she went to the Heaps, humming under her breath and thinking how funny it was, that bad days could turn into good ones so fast.

* * *

Or how quickly it could all go bad again. That was a whole lot less funny, however. As Sarah waited out her third hour at the impound lot in the hopes of someday getting her van back, she had plenty of time to think about what was funny and what wasn’t. Just the fact that she was here at all, for instance. Not on Earth or in life or anything existential, but here in this pea-soup-colored waiting room, on this plastic chair, staring hopelessly at the now-serving number on the wall above the surly gentleman at the service desk. She was here because her van had been towed after she’d abandoned it at the hospital. Apparently, the hospital’s attitude was that near-death was not a good enough reason to leave your vehicle on the curb in front of the Emergency Room, which was understandable if a bit assish. What was less understandable and a lot more assish was the attitude here: making a person who had been in critical condition mere days ago wait for three hours to get her van back.

And they knew who she was. On her initial approach to the so-called service desk, the gentleman on duty had scanned her paz into their system, glanced once at the screen, and said, “So you’re the bug-lady.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the lady got beat up by a bug.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Sarah Fowler? IBI?”

“Yes.”

He picked up a somewhat mangled section of newspaper and tossed it down on the desk in front of her. “Says here you got beat up by a bug.”

Her picture was in the paper. Sarah Fowler was front-page news in
The Wheaton Morning Clarion
. It wasn’t the picture from her employee’s badge or her driver’s license or even her high school yearbook. In fact, if it weren’t for the caption with her name in it, she wouldn’t have recognized herself. She was unconscious in a hospital bed, a mess of tubes and wires, bruises and bandages.
IBI social worker released after brutal bug attack
, said the tagline.

“Those sons of bitches,” Sarah heard herself say in a remarkably mild, marveling tone.

The service guy gave her language a disapproving grunt and took his paper back. Then he handed her a scrip with a misleadingly small number printed on it and told her to sit down and wait. Sarah went, but she was already typing her name into her paz’s search engine and by the time she dropped, disbelieving, into this hard, uncomfortable chair, she was reading.

Three hours. Dozens of articles, not just from Kansas papers, but from all over the whole damn world, although it was the
Clarion
she kept coming back to. It should have been obvious that something about the incident had been in the news, especially after Kate’s call, but this? The doctors, the cops, and of course IBI themselves—all agreed no human could have created her injuries, which were recounted in gruesome detail over and over. The
Clarion
went on to warn that the bug or bugs responsible should be considered to be at large somewhere in the surrounding community. Anyone who saw a bug should under no circumstances approach it, but should call IBI or the police immediately, and until the situation was resolved, parents were strongly urged to keep pets and small children under close watch.

This admonition reassured the locals exactly as much as it was intended to and the editorial forums were dominated from that point on by the good citizens of Wheaton demanding action that ranged from public protests to orchestrated harassment of IBI employees to the extermination of every last bug and every last bug-lover.

When they finally called her number, Sarah almost didn’t hear it. It took the service desk guy shouting, “Hey, bug-lady!” to get her attention (to get everyone’s attention, really). She paid her fine, collected her van, and drove home with her thoughts swooping through such violent circles that they gave her a headache.

The last thing she wanted to do in that state of mind was talk to someone, but less than a minute after swiping her passcard through Cottonwood’s front gate, Sarah’s paz chirped. The number was unfamiliar, but identified itself as IBI Admin, so she really couldn’t just ignore it.

“I’m driving,” was her hello. “Is this important?”

The picture cleared enough to show her floor supervisor, Beech or Birch, she still didn’t know. He was grinning. Not just smiling—and he’d done little enough of that in the few months she’d known him—but grinning. “We’d like you to come in, Miss Fowler.”

“To the office?” Sarah asked stupidly.

His grin widened. “Yes.”

“Tonight?”

“Right now.”

“Mr…” Sheesh, who
was
this man? “I’ve just spent three hours at the impound lot and I’m in a lot of pain. I just don’t think I can drive anymore tonight.”

Mr. Tree-of-some-sort immediately sobered up. “Of course not, Miss Fowler, so sorry. Just go on home.”

Her relief at this easy escape lasted only until she got home and found a white IBI van waiting in her driveway and a man in a flak vest leaning up against it. He laughed when she asked him if she was being arrested, but he also made it clear that she was coming with him. She could grab an aspirin first if she wanted one, but he had his orders and he was taking her in.

Sarah got in the van and sat quietly as he drove through Cottonwood’s pleasant residential neighborhood and right past the Social Services building where she worked.

“Do you know what this is about?” Sarah asked. Her voice did not shake, but her hands hurt a little from the effort of not clutching each other too tightly.

“Nope. Just that the big dog wants you.”

“Mr. Birch? Or Beech? The guy that sounds like Elmer Fudd?”

The driver shot her a puzzled glance as he navigated his way across a largely empty parking lot to the administrations building. “I’m talking about van Meyer, lady. I don’t know who you’re talking about. What the hell kind of name is Elmer Fudd?”

Van Meyer. She tried to dredge up some surprise and couldn’t. If anyone was going to bring her in after working hours on her first day back, it would have to be van Meyer.

But it was her floor supervisor waiting by the door when the driver let her out. He was still grinning. The effect was even creepier when not framed by her paz’s chipped screen.

“No offense, sir,” said Sarah, as he escorted her onto an elevator, “but there better not be a surprise party when we get out of this thing.”

“Even better,” he promised.

He took her to the basement, one level lower than the monorail station. It took way too long, the way elevators in hospitals and courthouses always seem to do. She entertained herself by imagining the doors opening on van Meyer, maybe in a grungy concrete hallway with a naked lightbulb burning behind him, and that would be the last anyone heard of her. Ridiculous. Van Meyer was evil, all right, but he was the sort of evil who wore a suit, not the kind that dragged young women off to be tortured in secret, underground dungeons.