“BEAT THAT, CHUMPS,” said Nails, slamming down an ace. The tattered remnants of his earlobes wobbled obscenely.
“Pass,” muttered Sarah, sitting cross-legged to his left. An ursine biker with flaming skulls tattooed on each elbow shrugged off his turn with a grumble and a twitch of his red-brown beard. That left only Derek to play or concede. He pondered his cards with phony indecision, baiting Nails with a speckle of hope, and laid down the two of diamonds. He swept the pot without waiting for Nails to top him, and laid down a trio of fours. A smug smile glimmered on his lips as he scanned his opponents.
“Anyone?”
As expected, the trio responded with sullen silence. He followed up his play with a more prosaic pair of eights, ignored their ripostes of nines, jacks, and queens, slammed down a joker and held up his now empty hands, twiddling his fingers tauntingly.
“Another term for El Presidente. The will of the people triumphs again.”
Nails pounced on the vacuum left by Derek’s victory, playing a pair of otherwise unplayable threes. Derek’s sally had sapped the players of their upper pairs, leaving Sarah to toss down two sixes and the biker—Derek thought his name might be Stanley—to growl out another pass. Nails popped down a two and finished with a six.
“Vice Presidente!” he cried, and raised his palm for a high five, which Derek ignored. Sarah played an ace, ten, and six to empty her hand, leaving the biker clutching the remnants of his defeat. He threw the cards down in disgust and stalked off. Derek watched him go, wondering to himself if he shouldn’t make a bit more of an effort to be civil. These three were the only members of Luka’s pack currently willing to sit down with him. Now it appeared that number had shrunk to two. His survivor’s instinct should be crying out for allies, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Sarah gathered up the cards and gave them a brisk overhand shuffle. Derek waved her off before she had a chance to deal out the next hand. “I’m with whats-his-face on this one. Time to retire undefeated.”
Sarah snorted. “You were asshole three times, vice asshole another two.”
“Undefeated in recent memory, then.”
“C’mon, Matchbook,” said Nails. “We can switch to crazy eights.”
“You two enjoy.” Derek stood up, wiped dry pine needles from the seat of his pants, and left the cramped hollow they’d designated their games parlor. He took out his phone to check the time, remembered the battery was long dead, and took a ballpark estimate from the position of the sun instead. He pegged it at a little before noon, sighed. The minutes oozed by like ketchup from a glass bottle. Tonight, at least, was the night. Luka would either make good on his promise or prove the whole thing a crock. Doubtless he could cook up some story to keep some of his lackeys in thrall for another month, but Derek wouldn’t be among them. He’d spent the last days squirreling away a cache of canned goods and dried fruit beneath the cavernous roots of an oak tree, and had acquired enough to last him, by his estimation, three days—five if he stretched it. A far cry from a woodsman, he’d nevertheless familiarized himself enough with the forest to know north from south, and three days of solid walking should get him within kissing distance of civilization. From there he had money to buy a ride to the nearest Coach Canada junction, or the Governor to steal a ride if the townsfolk were less than accommodating.
Luka paced a crescent-shaped ridge of limestone thrusting from the clearing’s topsoil, hands clasped behind his back. His mouth grew thinner and more pinched with each passing hour. The stink of his impatience drove everyone to the fringes of the clearing, leaving the center his and his alone. The pack’s view of him mutated as his spirits darkened, swelling from reverence to a kind of superstitious dread. Even the forest people seemed wary of him. Motes—shed of his nylon bindings and instead attached to a tree by a length of chain—was the only person, apart from Derek, who dared to enter Luka’s inner radius. The anger or bitterness he’d first exhibited was gone, but so too, it seemed, was his fear.
Derek gave the pack leader a wide berth. He was no sycophant, but he knew better than to poke a bear when its blood was up, and Luka’s veins were a few PSI short of blowing a gasket. “Majka” was still nowhere to be found. Derek failed to grasp her role, but he took it by Luka’s relentless pacing to be an important one. And if the full moon was her deadline, she was cutting it awfully close.
The land sloped down at the southern edge of the clearing, descending into clutches of cedar and fir and pine, between which packmates and forest people eked out accommodations—always like with like. The two groups barely commingled, lacking a common language or even a general grasp of the nature of the other’s existence. The forest people lay on beds of bare earth, or skinned rabbits speared by deftly-fired arrows; the packmates scratched solemnly at bug bites or strung spare shirt awnings ineptly from branches or sprayed lighter fluid into dying fires. Derek dodged both camps and wound along a rocky cleft towards the pebbled shore of a stream. He scooped a handful of water into his mouth, sweet and sharply cold. Trees formed a natural palisade on all sides, breached only by random embrasures through which flew arrows of sunlight. At the far side of the glen sat the Asian kid, his arms and legs bound with handcuffs and twines of nylon rope, respectively, the cuffs further padlocked to a birch tree by ten feet of rusty chain. Derek hunkered down next to him.
“Hey there, slick. How’s it hangin’?”
The kid made no reply. His wrists were red and chafed. He never said much, and spent a lot of the time crying, but somehow Derek found his company oddly satisfying. Perhaps the kid’s predicament made Derek’s situation seem that much more desirable—at least no one had put him in shackles.
“It must get pretty boring, eh, just sitting here watching the stream. Well, I gotta tell you, I’ve been all over this damn forest and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot you’re missing. The rail shots and blow jobs are conspicuously absent, you could say. I mean, you could always ask around with them forest people, but I’m guessing they wouldn’t be all that accommodating.”
The kid’s head snapped up. His voice creaked out gravelly and hoarse.
“Look, if you let me go, I swear I’ll tell everyone I ran away, had like a nervous breakdown or something. I won’t say anything about you or any of these people, I promise.”
“Of course you won’t. Who the fuck would believe you? I mean, you’d probably peg me in a lineup if you ever got the chance—”
“I wouldn’t!”
Derek touched a finger to the kid’s lips, silencing him. “You would, and you’d love it. Don’t shit a shitter, kid. I’d do the same thing, I was you. Point is, you could say me and Luka kidnapped you, some sort of half-baked ransom plan maybe, but the rest of it? Dragging you up north to meet half the fucking cast of Lord of the Rings? Please. If it were just that, maybe I would let you go.” In truth, Derek would under no circumstances let someone in the kid’s situation leave his sight alive, but why let facts ruin a good bit of rhetoric? “But the boss man, he’s got some big plans a-brewing, and as I understand it you feature in ‘em pretty prominently.”
The kid rubbed the line of abraded skin circling his wrists. He hid his face from Derek, but the liquid warble of his voice betrayed his tears. “That doesn’t make any sense. I’m nothing to the guy. He only knows I even exist because I was in the apartment when he showed up.”
“What can I say? Wrong place, wrong time, friend. I’ve been there.”
“But Motes was the guy he was after, and he’s got him now. What could he want with me?”
Derek polished his fingernails on the lapel of his shirt. “The guy said something about a ritual later tonight, after dark. Some sort of religious ceremony. And a feast. I’m guessing you’re an important part of that.”
“Like . . . like a guest of honor?”
Derek’s smile was merciless, vulpine. “More like the main course.” He patted the boy on the head and left him to shit himself in peace. He felt several pounds lighter, as if he’d just hired a porter to take a burdensome piece of luggage off his hands.
The gulley was easier to descend than ascend, lined as it was with a dermis of loose stones and powdery gravel. Hot wires of exertion crisscrossed his thighs as he huffed his way back to higher ground. The pockets of idlers had disappeared from the trees, drawn inward to a chattering cluster ringing the limestone clearing. Derek muscled his way into the center—taking care to shoulder only packmates and not the more formidably-armed and mercurially-countenanced forest folk—where Luka stood in a posture of unchecked rapture, arms drawn rigidly down and out, fingers splayed, chest thrust forward. He dropped to his knees before a phalanx of aged forest people, hands resting solemnly on the handles of their weapons. They parted in a fluid ripple, revealing the slow but stately totter of a woman aged beyond possible reckoning. She stood compact but unbent, her movements slow in a manner that seemed to Derek wizened and graceful, rather than infirm. Her skin, deeply lined, looked less like leather than the pitted granite of a statue dredged from the silt-sheathed ruins of some sunken kingdom. She touched two fingers to Luka’s forehead and spoke briefly in a language Derek couldn’t understand.
Majka, it seemed, had finally arrived.