Marc Zicree - Angelfire

The tent flap flew back and light flooded in, bringing Cal with it. He must’ve been hovering right outside to make that quick an entrance.

“Are you all right?”

“No, dammit! I’m not all right. My legs are cramping!”

He had no trouble with the stupid zipper. A moment later he was massaging my bunched muscles. I gritted my teeth until the knots loosened.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded. “Thanks. How long did I sleep?”

“About eighteen hours, off and on. Mostly on.”

“ Eighteen hours! You’re kidding!” Hell, that was embarrassing. “Why didn’t you wake me? We don’t have time-”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Relax. You don’t owe anyone an apology. How do you feel now? Ready to get back up on that horse?”

That horse. I caught a sudden chill. “Big T?”

“Is fine. Enid took very good care of him after the dunking. All your clothes are dry and relatively clean, so you don’t have to wear men’s unmentionables anymore. Everything smells of wood smoke, but I figured you wouldn’t mind that.”

He smiled and flicked a stray strand of hair off my cheek, and I relived all those moments when our eyes met and there was a fire in the hold. I relived the kiss. I’d wanted him to kiss me. What’d they call that-irony?

I realized I was just sitting there staring at him, when he glanced away, made a nervous gesture, and brushed his hands on his jeans as if touching me had given him cooties, or maybe something else.

“Well, gosh,” I said, “time’s a-wastin’. I’d better get moving.”

“If you’re ready to. There’s hot water for washing up. We rigged sort of an ersatz bathroom on the other side of the wall. You’re probably hungry.”

I was ravenous. “How much food did we lose?” I tried not to think about the mare.

“Fortunately, not a lot. You were right about splitting up the supplies.”

“Well, hell, Cal,” I said, grinning and slapping his leg. “That’s why you pay me the big bucks.”

He gave me a weird look. “I’ll have to ask Doc if euphoria is a side effect of nearly drowning. What did you have, a near-death experience or something?”

I pulled back inside myself just a little to check. “Or something,” I said.

He hesitated, watching my face, and I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me again. He didn’t. He just moved some more stray hair off my cheek, then slid out through the tent flap.

I took a deep breath and prepared to emerge from my cocoon.

You take certain things for granted. Like walking. After making my way to the “bathroom,” I vowed I would never take that particular activity for granted again. Bathing was an adventure, too, but like they say: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I figured a little more cold wasn’t likely to do me in, especially if I confined it to one six-inch-square patch of skin at a time. Still, it was a relief to finally be dry and fully dressed.

The others were carefully repacking our supplies. Except for Doc. He was sitting on a crumbling bit of masonry sipping chocolate from our hoard of dry goods when I arrived at the campfire. I sat down kitty-corner to him on a rolled-up sleeping bag and poured myself a cup of watery brown liquid. It was hot and sweet-heavenly combination.

“I guess I’m not a better man than you, after all,” I told him, tearing open a packet of jerky. “You didn’t sleep for eighteen hours.”

He glanced at me over the rim of his cup, steam veiling one eye, a lock of thick, dark hair hiding the other. Silver ran through it. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that before. Maybe it hadn’t been there until yesterday.

“I was not pinned in a freezing river by a thousand-pound animal,” he told me.

“No, you were just standing up to your ass in the freezing river trying to rescue the woman pinned under the thousand-pound animal.”

He shrugged.

“What, no Russian proverb to cover the occasion?”

He tilted his head, contemplating the steam rising from his cup. “Ah, well, there’s probably some saying about old oxen that would apply.”

I raised a brow. “Old oxen?”

“The old ox can still plow a straight furrow. Old oxen yet may have stiff horns-that sort of thing.”

I burst out laughing. “Viktor, that’s obscene !”

He blushed violently, while across the campsite the others paused in their packing to stare at us. “I did not mean-”

“Just teasing, okay?” I reached over and touched his hand. It was warm from the steaming cup. I had a flash of vivid recall about the warmth of his hands-and about my loose lips. Embarrassed, I pulled away. “You’ll have to tell me some more ‘old’ proverbs as we go along. They’re a hoot.” I drained the last of my chocolate, pocketed what was left of the jerky, stood and walked toward the picket line, wobbling only a little.

“There is no fool like an old fool,” he murmured behind me.

I pretended not to have heard him.

We found Cal’s missing suburbia, or what was left of it. It existed as a patchwork quilt of live and dead zones. Bands of holocaust gray striped with neighborhoods that seemed almost untouched except for the abandoned cars and overgrown yards. In some places the yards had become miniature farms filled with rows of dried cornstalks and makeshift garbage bag tents that protected unseen vegetables from frost.

We saw gangs and neighborhood watch groups. There was even a little old guy out raking leaves, while a woman who was probably his wife sat watch on the front porch with a plate of cookies and a baseball bat.

There were wild plants everywhere-weird-looking shit, some of it-growing up between the cracks in the asphalt, spiraling up light posts and over mailboxes. Nothing like Enid’s glass trees, though. We steered clear of it.

We steered clear of people as well. It wasn’t hard. Even folks who acted as if they might be interested in us got uninterested when they saw how heavily armed we were. Then there were the ones who were flat-out scared of Magritte. At one point a couple of priests scurried across our path, waving crosses at us. They barricaded themselves in a church. Magritte laughed, but it was a harsh sound with no fun in it.

Things got more and more grim-looking as we drew closer to Chicago proper. The streets were littered with glass and useless junk, useful junk having been snapped up in a spasm of looting that must’ve looked a lot like the one that wracked Manhattan. A regular greed orgy. The sidewalks sparkled as if they were carpeted in diamonds-sort of a twisted El Dorado. The air was thick and almost chewy with smoke.

If there were people here, they weren’t showing themselves, but every once in a while you could hear them. A child laughing, a woman crying, people yelling at the top of their lungs.

What struck me most was that there was no gunfire. Imagine that-it took an epic disaster, but the streets of Chicago were quiet. It’s damn hard to commit mass destruction without guns. Guns can be used anonymously and without fear on the part of the shooter. Knives and clubs, on the other hand, are a little more particular and a lot more intimate.

I said something of that nature to Doc as we made our way carefully south through a place called Park Ridge. He raised an eyebrow and said, “ Popalsya, kotorieh kusalsya . The biter, bit. Intimacy breeds vulnerability.”

I hate conversations that operate on more than one level at a time. I turned and gave him a long, hard look. “Message?”

He seemed startled. “None that I am aware of. Except, what you were saying-in hand-to-hand combat, one does not have the advantage of distance.” He smiled again, eyes warming. “Ah, you thought I was lecturing you, yes?”