Ghostlands

TWENTY-EIGHT

The sign on the building said MARRIED STUDENT HOUS-ING.

I’m neither, Colleen Brooks thought sardonically, and not likely to be anytime soon. But even so, she was grateful for the soft bed and running water.

And Doc there with her.

After their time with Larry Shango in the Insomnia Cafe, the afternoon found them in the quarters Jeff Arcott had assigned them, beyond the physics building and the student store, past the sculpture garden with its Rodins and Henry Moores and Degas ballerinas, to the utilitarian block of apartments where Melissa Wade led them and then-with a delicacy Colleen appreciated-quickly departed.

The two of them dropped their dusty packs just inside the front door and divested themselves of the crossbows, machetes, cutting blades and other miracles of lethality each favored (although Colleen always kept her big Eviscerator Three close by, while Doc retained the straight razor in his boot).

Colleen got the water in the shower running, waiting for it to heat. Doc was in the bedroom now; through the open bathroom door she could see him hiss with pain as he worked to remove his scuffed and sun-faded leather jacket.

She glided over to him, helped him off with it, hung it in the closet, where there were wooden hangers.

“I groan like an eighty-year-old man,” he commented.

“No, just like a forty-five-year-old with mileage.”

“I’d say, rather, the truck that dragged me has the mileage. I fear my odometer broke long ago.”

She smiled. She was down to his blue denim shirt now and worked undoing the buttons. But the blood from the numerous cuts he’d sustained in the lovely grunter vacation spot that evening had dried and adhered to the inside of the shirt.

She ushered him into the bathroom, foggy with steam from the showerhead. Wetting a wash towel she found hanging on the door, she bathed the wounds as she gently peeled away the fabric. His torso was olive dark, long and lean with muscle, and as ever she admired it for its efficiency and its strength.

But she pitied it, too, for its many scars, and saw the night’s work would add to them.

“Geez, Viktor,” she said, “you’re starting to look like a map of Bosnia.” (Not that she herself was without significant marks from any number of beings human or otherwise.)

“I have never been one for scrapbooks, so I carry my keepsakes here.” He pointed to a long gash running alongside the base of his lowest rib, by the abdomen. “Here is where you saved my life in Greenwich Village,” and another, higher, “here where you saved me in West Virginia, here in Illinois.” (He pronounced it in his thick accent “Ill-in-noy-is,” which oddly charmed her, though she couldn’t say why.)

“All these almost deaths,” he added, melancholy eyes smiling, “all these fates deferred. You swoop in like Lady Liberty-”

“Or Mother Russia?”

“Or an avenging angel, sword held high, and cheat finality at every turn. You challenge my pessimism, Boi Baba.”

And you challenge my despair, she thought, but did not say. All the losers she had been with, all the Rorys and Eddies and Jacks-not to mention the ones she’d blown off from the get-go, the pond scum even lower on the food chain, if possible, than the bottom-feeders she’d selected. All the guys more likely to be in a police lineup than at an awards dinner, whose only distinguishing feature was their cynicism, the only bar they set the one that held their beers and chasers.

Looking back over the long line of these specimens-like an evolutionary chart that never got much beyond Australopithecus-Colleen reflected that the only thing she could count on with them was that she couldn’t count on them…and that, whether they stayed or went, she knew she wouldn’t have much taken from her because she never gave them the keys to her heart.

Not so with her sad, competent, loving father, whose face she knew as well as her own, even after all these years. In dying he had left her, and torn away a piece of her that was precious and core.

That was when she had first learned that love was a wound, and without ever putting it in so many words, even to herself-especially to herself-had determined to lock her heart away from further harm.

And yet, she marveled, here she was all over again. With a man so admirable, so much finer than herself…and so dangerous to the self-protection she so prized.

Love was a wound, and an enduring, foolish risk…but then, hell, so was everything now.

She kissed the scars on Viktor’s chest, and on his rib cage and his arms, and drew him with her into the shower, then to the bed, where for a time it was sweetness and immediacy and flow, and neither of them thought of the future or of the past.

As day eased into night, she released herself into his keeping, and slept.

Later, when they were both awake, he held her in the darkness, skin touching skin.

“What was it like,” she asked softly, “there in the reactor?”

He was silent a time, thinking of Chernobyl, and then he said, “I never was in the reactor. I only saw those who were. They paid out their lives, knowing they were dead men already, keeping the hoses trained on the core, buying others time. I cannot conceive of such courage.”

And yet you have it, Viktor, she reflected, I’ve seen it so many times. How can you not know that? But then, she supposed, it was always most difficult to see one’s true self.

“Why do you ask this?” he said, and she could make out his eyes in the dark, studying her.

“Once, when we were talking about the Source, you said, ‘Into the reactor.’ I think we’ll be there soon….”

He held her tighter, and nodded. “Yes, I think so, too.”

“Funny, you know, I can’t wait…even though it’s gonna-”

He put a finger to her lips. “Shh…” No need to say it would assuredly kill them; they both knew.

Later still, she said, “I always figured I was kinda like a toaster. It shorts out, it’s done, it goes in the trash. It doesn’t move on to some higher plane.”

“Your resemblance to a toaster is somewhat remote.”

“Don’t be obtuse.” She fingered the cross on the chain around her neck, the gift Viktor had given her long months back, after he had saved her in the frigid waters en route to Chicago. It was the only thing she wore now, along with the dog tags, and the dragon scale he had returned to her. “Do you believe in an afterlife, Viktor?”

He pondered it. “I would like to, yes. But who can say? I’ll know when I get there…or I’ll never know.” He kissed her on the head. “Or perhaps I’ll merely be a toaster beside you on the shelf.”

That begged the question, but she didn’t press him further. Anyway, it wasn’t really the question she’d wanted to ask….

The one that spoke in her heart, that thrust like sheared metal off a car wreck, like the screams of a mother and daughter dying in the frigid waters of a swollen stream outside Kiev.

If there were an afterlife, who would you choose to be with?

Feeling his lean, scarred arms around her, lying back against his wounded self, Colleen Brooks felt haunted by a woman she had never known.