Vacation (9 page)

No, this has to be Noh.

“Fuck you, bitch,” I whisper, but deep down, I’m glad she’s making the decision for me. Because I don’t want to know which way I’d choose to run.

“Dude!”

I turn my head, and here’s Odin beside me.

“Man, am I glad to see you,” he says. “I didn’t think Noh was gonna turn you around in time.”

A man in white leaps out from behind a nearby tree. He points his weapon at my face. “Hold it!”

I freeze.

“Man, thank god,” Odin says. “You’re one of Blackbeard’s guys.”

“Yeah?” the man says, pointing at Odin now. “So?”

“Listen, dude. You must be new here, because you guys already know me. I’m with the Garden.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? Maybe I should kill you and not take the chance.”

“I know for a fact that Blackbeard requires you bring all prisoners to him, so he can decide what to do with them.”

“True, but I could kill you anyway.”

“Your friends’d hear the gunfire and come check it out.”

“I could kill you with my bare hands.”

”We’d scream loud enough for them to hear.”

“I’d hide your bodies and say it must’ve been some animal screaming.”

“You think they’d really believe that?”

He sighs, and lowers his gun a little. “Probably not. Let’s go.”

The black helicopter lifts from the black ship and drops a shimmering sphere. Soon, a pulse shakes my body, as if the ship’s heart has exploded, and bloody flames squirt up from the vessel’s hull. The line of tanker trucks disappear into the forest on a path of broken stone.

“We have to find Aubrey,” I tell Odin again. “They got her.”

Odin glances at me with a funny look on his face. “Everything’s gonna be alright. I know this guy.”

The man in white motions at me with his gun. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” Odin says.

After the copter lands, a man hops out, in the same white uniform as all the other gun-wielding people around this place. He’s fat with a long white beard. Maybe this is Santa 364 days of the year.

“Prisoners,” our captor says, when the copter blades quiet down.

The bearded man, who must be Blackbeard, despite the contradiction, pats Odin on the shoulder. “Odin here’s an old friend of mine. Who’s this fellow?”

“My name’s Bernard,” I say.

“He’s Bernard,” Odin says. “He’s with me.”

“Good to hear it.” Blackbeard slaps my back, then turns to our once-captor. “Matek, you can stop pointing that thing at them now.”

“Oh.” Matek lowers the gun to his side. “Sorry.”

“Your people captured a friend of mine,” I say.

“Do you know what he’s trying to say?” Blackbeard says.

Odin shrugs. He looks in my eyes and says, “Let him go already, Noh. He’ll be fine. Plus, he’s freaking us all out.”

Something inside me changes. I don’t understand.

“Now man, what were you trying to say?” Odin says.

“We have to find Aubrey,” I say. “That’s not her real name. They captured her.”

Blackbeard scratches his beard. “Aside from you two, the only other detainees were the oil tanker workers, but we left them to their rafts.”

“She was taken on this beach just a few minutes ago by your men,” I say.

“I’ll ask around, but it seems unlikely,” Blackbeard says. “They know the consequences of keeping something like this from me.”

“Who is this girl, man?” Odin says.

“She saved me from Weis,” I say. “She has a wooden leg.”

“Weis’ daughter?” Odin and Blackbeard say together.

“Daughter?” I say.

“Those two are inseparable, man,” Odin says. “There’s no way she’d help you.”

“She did.”

“If this is true, then my men may be taking her back to Weis,” Blackbeard says. “They want the reward that’s undoubtedly coming to them.”

“You have to stop them,” I say. “Please.”

Blackbeard shakes his head. “Secrets don’t last long among the Meek, and Weis would find out eventually. He isn’t a cold man, but when it comes to his daughter, he wouldn’t hesitate killing me, even if it meant sacrificing his army to do it. I hope you don’t think me selfish, prizing my life above the woman you love, but you see my life is directly connected to the welfare of my country. I may be a pirate, but sometimes that’s the only hero a poor country can afford.”

I tell myself my fear of Blackbeard is the reason I don’t say, “I don’t love her.”

Because that’s not what I’m afraid of.

Part 12

The inside of the copter’s less thunderous than I expect. Which makes this is an awkward silence, instead of the natural variety.

Blackbeard rummages through a cooler beside the bolted sofa he’s sitting on. He pulls out a bottle and glasses. “Wine?”

Odin and I nod.

We’re drinking, and Blackbeard says, “I never did apologize for your eye.”

Odin waves him off. “Dude, that was my fault. I was trying to stab you.”

Blackbeard laughs. “Oh yes. I suppose that’s why I never apologized.” He takes another long sip of the dark red. “Does your friend know the story?”

“No,” Odin says. “He’s new.”

Blackbeard turns to me. “The first time I captured this fellow, I had no idea who he was. He said he was Garden, but my instincts told me he was Tic. My instincts you see have failed me on more than one occasion. I’ve been trying instead to rely on logic and reason, but it’s harder than it sounds.” He chortles into his cup.

“What’s a Tic?” I say. That’s the same word the old priest used referring to the men in black.

Blackbeard arches a white slug of an eyebrow. “When you said he was new, I didn’t know you meant new.”

“Yeah,” Odin says. “New new.”

Blackbeard places his glass on the bolted-down wood table in front of us. On a coaster. “TIC stands for Those In Charge,” he says. “These are people, like the oil tanker workers, who work for dominant countries with resources enough to sustain themselves, and then some. We, on the other hand, the Garden and Weis and me, are the Meek. It doesn’t stand for anything. It simply means our people and our countries are desperate, and we do what we have to do, in order to obtain what we need.” He booms in laughter again. “Don’t let the name fool you, son. Us Meek are strong and smart and sometimes organized as hell. Our only weakness is that we can’t affect the big picture. Although, if the Meek are going to inherit the Earth, the Garden will be the ones to do it. That’s why, even after Odin’s failed attempt to stab me, I refrained from executing him, for the off chance that he really was Garden. I’m glad I did.”

“Me too,” Odin says.

Blackbeard glances out the window. “I assume you want to keep the secret location of the Garden stronghold a secret, so we’ll drop you off at a random spot in this general vicinity. Good?”

“Yeah, good,” Odin says.

In a few minutes, we’ve landed, and Blackbeard waves goodbye. “I envy you,” he tells me. “If I had a chance to be born in another life, it would be with the Garden.”

The copter takes off, and before we start walking, Odin says, “I’m sorry I had to play dumb back there, man, but I couldn’t let Blackbeard know about our device.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“Um…maybe it’s better if Noh explains it to you. I don’t really understand it myself. Plus, that’s her thing. She likes all of us getting upset at her, so we don’t fight with each other so much. I hope she gets off on it. Otherwise it’s just sad.”

I have a feeling it’s just sad no matter what.

Instead of the wavy tunnels of the old Garden stronghold, here’s angulated carved stone. Small wooden boxes (which Odin informs me are holding dead animals) plug the shallow niches in the walls. And real coffins now encircle the coffin-like garden beds in the largest chamber. Pillars inscribed with human figures line the walls, but they don’t touch the ceiling. They look important but hold up nothing.

“Dude, I gotta go.” Odin says. “Oh, don’t go wandering. You could suffocate some places.” He leaves me by the coffins, and disappears into a dark hall.

I sit on one, and watch the people in the garden. Most are gathered around a miniature theater that stands in front of a coffin. Two marionettes wobble about, dancing or fighting or both, maybe. And I know it’s Laetitia behind the scenes, lying on the coffin, because her spikes peek out of the top of the theater. The audience laughs, and maybe I want to walk over there.

But Noh steps through a dark archway beside me. “Mr. Johnson, you’re back.” She bites at her fingernails. “Odin should’ve told me you arrived. I would’ve been here sooner.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

She takes a seat beside me, on the wide-eyed face of a man etched in stone. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. It wasn’t my intention to put you in any greater danger than that of all of us in the Garden.”

“I was the one who ran away.” Somehow, I want to defend her actions. Maybe because of what Odin said about her taking the blame for everything. Maybe because I lost Aubrey, and I want someone to like me.

“All new acquisitions run away after seeing the photos for the first time.” She squeezes her hands, as if grabbing at the album in her memories. “But ultimately, each one returns to us. You, however, were gone too long, so I checked up on you and found you with Weis. Once learning of his plot to invade, I knew we had to move. Luckily we had a secret exit from the caves he didn’t know about. That’s why we’re here.”

“Odin inferred that there’s something you need to tell me about the device. He wouldn’t say it himself.”

She bites at her bottom lip. “I suppose I must tell you. Secrets don’t last long in this place.”

Before she has time to say more, Odin rushes over. “Hey man,” he says to Noh. “Have you seen Pari?”

“Not since she went out,” she says.

“How long ago was that?”

“A few hours.”

“Shit.”

Alarms blast.

“Shit,” Odin says again.

Noh and Odin sprint through an archway, down a dark hall.

I follow.

Soon, I’m in a room littered with computer monitors and electronics. In the corner, there’s a helmet with wires snaking out the back. It has to be the monstrosity she used to enter my dreams and control my body. I could walk over and smash it. But I don’t.

Instead I face the screen that consumes both Odin and Noh, which shows a short young woman with braided hair and a gun to her head. The gun belongs to Weis.

“Let her go, asshole!” Odin trembles with fury, and this is a side of the boy I haven’t seen before.

“Hello, Weis,” Noh says.

“It’s good to hear your voice again again, Noh,” Weis says through the speaker. “Though these aren’t the best of circumstances, are they?”

“If you were following us here, why didn’t you simply attack us en route?” she says.

“Straight to business, I see,” he says and sighs. “The truth is, I wasn’t aware of your secret exit from the caves. It was by luck alone that one of my scouts happened upon your exodus and followed you here. I would’ve gladly looted you prior to your installation of the security door, but my men and I have been quite occupied saving certain junkie friends of ours from certain doom.”

I look away, though I don’t think he can see me.

“I must admit,” Noh says. “I’m more than a little perplexed by your chosen course of action here. What possible reason would you have to show yourself like this?”

“Think of it as a gift given out of respect,” Weis says. “You know that I’m fully capable of torturing this girl and retrieving the security code. But I’d rather not have to resort to that. Let me in peacefully and no one will be harmed.”

Noh rubs her forehead. “I am well aware of what you’re capable of, Weis, as you’re aware that I’m willing to sacrifice any number of lives to keep the Garden fully functional. You can’t honestly believe otherwise.”

“It could be that I have more faith in your humanity than you do.”

“You should have used the girl to obtain the code. Now, instead of making use of a sneak attack, you’ve given us opportunity to ready our weapons. Now, due to your lapse in judgment, people are going to die on both sides. This isn’t like you at all.”

Weis shrugs. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”

“No. There’s something wrong with you. Isn’t there?”

And a realization buzzes in my skull. “Where’s your daughter?” I say. It has to be her.

For a moment, Weis’ face loses its straight lines. “Amina was shot.”

It’s worse than I expected.

“Is she dead?” Noh says, so that I don’t have to.

Please, let her be alive.

“She’s in a coma,” Weis says, and his voice crackles. “The doctors have little faith that she’ll ever recover.”

Noh shakes her head, face low. “You truly believe that a bloody battle is going to make you feel better?”

“I’m giving you this opportunity out of the goodness of my heart!”

“If there were any goodness left in you, you would have tortured that girl and occupied us without bloodshed. What you’re doing is sick.”

Weis opens his mouth, but nothing seeps out. After a long silence, he says, “You’re right. But there’s no turning back, is there?”

“No way that I can conceive of. I’ll open the door in five minutes.”

“Right.”

Noh stares at him for a long while, not saying a word.

“Wait a second,” I say, and I have an idea, which I’d normally keep to myself, but I don’t want to die. “If Noh gives you a chance to speak to your daughter again, would you leave the Garden alone?”

“What do you mean by speak to her?” Weis says.

“I mean an actual conversation,” I say. “You can talk to each other.”

“How is that possible?”

I turn my gaze to Noh. “It is possible, isn’t it? You can make her eat whatever I ate. You can hook Weis up to the machine. Right?”

“There are two major problems with that scenario,” Noh says. “And in all likelihood numerous minor problems that, when added up, will exceed the magnitude of the major ones.”

“What problems?” I say.

“One,” she says. “Weis is never going to believe that we’re in possession of such a machine, unless he enters our stronghold and experiences the device firsthand. He won’t do this. He knows I will kill him the moment he steps through the threshold.”