THEY WERE STANDING on a fragrant pile of garbage in a junkyard outside some city, somewhere in the world. Standing side by side, they were once again dressed in the clothes they’d worn to what would become known to them as the Sacred Crevice.
Lorraine looked at Ronnie. “You still got your dick up in me, son,” she said with an accent common to his part of town.
“You think Claude is fuckin’ wit’ us?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke, Ronnie Bottoms?”
In the distance, beyond a high chain-metal fence, there were dirt roads and hovels, people moving around by foot, bicycle, and now and then by car.
“Smells like a dead man,” Ronnie said.
“And his sister,” Lorraine agreed.
“You know, Lore, it’s like since you came back to life, you aren’t exactly the same.”
“It’s me, Ronnie,” she said, “only now I almost understand what before I just wondered about.”
Ronnie was about to ask what it was that she nearly understood when a slight, bronze-skinned man and a feral-looking brown and yellow dog approached the mound of garbage upon which the star-crossed friends stood.
The man looked to have a fever. His yellowy eyes glistened with an oily light, and there was a machete gripped in his left hand. His skin shone in the morning sun, and his inch-long straight black hair stood out as if charged by atmospheric electricity. He only wore shapeless tan pants cinched by a hemp rope in lieu of a belt.
The mongrel at the man’s side was long-limbed with a distended belly. It had been an old dog, maybe even a dying dog, but now its hot eyes and greasy pelt were vibrating with vitality.
Both man and cur were grinning madly. Ronnie could see that they were about to attack.
“Who are you?” the street thug from New York asked the rabid pair.
The snarling dog cocked its head to the right as if to better hear the question already asked. The man’s grinning maw closed but was still filled with mirth.
“Nontee,” the man said, and then his companion yipped and howled. “Nontee of the eighty-sixth house of the last tribe of Ga. We are the second limb of a first orchard and I am the fruit of Lambor and Ty.”
“You a cousin to Inglo?”
The smiles vanished. Both man and dog—whom Ronnie thought were the same person in much the same way that Ma Lin and UTB-Claude were one with the Silver Box—found their master’s name distasteful coming from Ronnie’s lips. But still they held back.
“You cannot mention the name of God,” the man-half of Nontee said. “Just its utterance is greater than the worth of your life, your race, your species, your world.”
“We’re communists, Nontee,” Lorraine said with a smile. “We don’t believe in worth in any kind of hierarchical sense.”
Lorraine’s tone was arrogant and effectively cut off any attempt Ronnie was making at détente.
“Get ready to fight,” Ronnie whispered.
The dog leaped with extraordinary speed but Ronnie caught its back left paw before it could clench its slobbering jaws on Lorraine’s throat. Ronnie threw the mutt across a vast expanse of junk and litter, then ran after it, intent on the kill.
Meanwhile the bronze-skinned manifestation of Nontee ran forward, brandishing his knife at Lorraine. He swiped and swung, jabbed and made complex forms with the flashing blade, but Lorraine simply moved like the water she ran past that morning. Nontee’s gestures were slow compared to her speed. His rage was a balm to her sense of being.
“I will kill you!” the onetime garbage dweller cried.
“You will die,” Lorraine averred, and then she ducked under a swipe that would have severed anyone else. “… and I will also one day die. But you won’t kill me.”
Nontee screamed and Lorraine laughed as she darted about, avoiding the man-thing’s attempts to impale her.
In the meanwhile, Ronnie clenched one hand on the junkyard dog’s throat while the mongrel had its jaws clamped on his left forearm. There were pain and rage in Ronnie’s heart. He could feel the throat of the beast with its steel-band-like muscles and tendons trying to sever his bone. He could feel the poison of the saliva moving through his blood. Through all of this Ronnie felt sad for the mad creature that could imagine only devastation. He wondered if the atom of Inglo, Nontee, was drawn to this scrapyard because it so clearly reflected the state of his soul.
* * *
LORRAINE STEPPED ON a hidden cardboard box, lost her footing, and fell. Nontee, as the bronze junkman, cried out in victory, raised his pitted dark blade, and made ready to sever the limbs of his enemy. Once he’d succeeded, she’d be his pet worm that would mewl and crawl back to her mechanical master.
Lorraine could see this future in her enemy’s eyes; she was not afraid, however. Even if Ronnie died or was defeated; even if she was made into a human grub, she would never again be slave to fear. She was now a warrior, and no man was or would be her master.
Lorraine smiled then. She looked the zombie man in the eye and laughed. For a moment, the human manifestation of Nontee hesitated, wondering what trick his enemy hid from him. In that moment, Lorraine saw flying through the air the dog corpse of Nontee thrown with remarkable accuracy at his human half. Nontee the man turned to see the dead dog smash into his chest. Before he could right himself, Lorraine was up with his big knife in her hand. The bronze man’s head flew from his body as hot blood spouted over the laughing woman.
When Ronnie reached them, she had fallen to her knees. Nontee the headless man was also kneeling, leaning up against an old trunk that had been discarded and forgotten.
“You’re bleeding,” Lorraine said to Ronnie.
“A lot,” he agreed. “Must be the poison from the dog’s mouth. Makes me feel kind of light-headed.”
Ronnie stumbled and Lorraine rose to grab him.…
* * *
LORRAINE FELL AND Ronnie Bottoms found themselves sitting in the same sexual position as before. They were once again naked, in the midst of intercourse if not exactly fucking. The only vestige of their battle was the blood oozing down Ronnie’s left forearm from the dog bite and his chest from the dog claws.
They were gazing into one another’s eyes.
When Lorraine rose up and off his erection, they both felt a tearing sensation. Ronnie grunted and Lorraine actually cried out. Instantly weakened by the separation, Ronnie fell over on the table and tumbled to the ground. Lorraine staggered to his side and grasped his wound with both hands.
“What happened to Inglo’s emissary?” UTB-Claude asked, standing over them.
Ronnie’s mind was dulled from the pain and poison, and Lorraine concentrated on the wound, so neither one responded to the Silver Box’s clone.
“Did you kill him again?” the doppelgänger asked.
“How does it feel?” Lorraine asked Ronnie.
“It’s gettin’ a little bettah. How come you had to say that shit about communism?”
“They were just so smug, I wanted to rub their noses in it.”
“If we could’a kept ’em talkin’, we mighta been able to make somethin’ happen. We might’a could’a grabbed one of ’em.”
“I know. I knew what you were trying to do. Next time I’ll let you control the situation.”
“Did you kill him again?” UTB-Claude repeated.
“It wasn’t just one,” Ronnie said. “I mean it was just one mind, but he was in two bodies—a skinny little dude and a dog. When I asked him who he was, he said Nontee.”
UTB-Claude stood up straight, casting his gaze upward but obviously looking into himself. “Nontee. Descended from the tribe of Ga, the progeny of Lambor and Ty. He and his mate Nosta received a quadrant of a minor galaxy where there existed ninety-four intelligent life-forms. The suffering they caused, through me, would put to shame any perversion known, or even imaginable, in your species.”
“You not one of us, Claude?” Ronnie asked with a hint of a smile.
“Sometimes no.”
“We killed him … them,” Ronnie said. “It happened too fast. We were stronger ’cause you put us together, but he wants us bad. You could feel the hate pourin’ off’a him.”
UTB-Claude seemed to be released by the essence of the Silver Box that had dominated him since their return.
“You children did good,” he said. “The Silver Box could tell when Lorraine held on so hard to life and when Ronnie survived the process of rejuvenation that you were both special beings. Go home and lick your wounds. The war will continue tomorrow.”
“Hold up, Claude,” Ronnie said. “I thought you told us that it would take mont’s before he could come at us again.”
“He’s pressing the limits of revitalization,” the doppelgänger replied. “He’s afraid of us.”
“Where were we?” Lorraine asked.
“Here and there,” God’s puppet said with a sly smile on his lips.