Terri Windling - [Bordertown 02] - Borderland Read online

  Victorian-style tearoom, with red wallpaper in a different, brighter floral pattern. Scooter and Roxanne had thrown out most of the dining tables—they were still stacked in the parking lot out back—and Scooter had stocked it with guitars. He used it as a studio, or just as a place to be alone and think.

  What Scooter and Roxanne did in their spare time— aside from arguing and making love—was read. Currently Scooter was working his way through John D. MacDonald and Ngaio Marsh; Roxanne was reacquaint-ing herself with Ed McBain and was giving Elmore Leonard a try.

  It was only six months ago that Scooter and Roxanne had decided to fix up the place and move in. Thinking about it, he couldn’t quite pin down a time when they had decided—silently, but mutually—that they liked each other well enough to set up house together. But here they were.

  Scooter partially dismounted from his bike and coasted the last twenty yards toward the back entrance, standing with his left shoe—a black high-topped, canvas, basketball shoe with white laces—on one crenellated pedal. The right shoe—same as the left, but white with black laces—hung down, toes pointed low. The bike made a ratchety sound as it coasted. Scooter squeezed the right handbrake, leaned the Schwinn against the beige-painted rear wall, and removed the key ring from his back pocket. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching him—he never saw anyone, and probably never would, even if someone were looking to see if the place was occupied, but Scooter couldn’t break himself of the habit. He’d been living too long now with a better-safe-than-sorry philosophy.

  With one key he unlocked the Kryptonite lock that secured the wrought-iron framework of burglar bars caging the door. He removed the lock, hooked it back in the hole, and shoved open the bars. With another key he unlocked the door, then opened it.

  It was dark inside.

  He brought in the bike and leaned it against the dry-wall beside the handpress. He left the back door open. In the dim light he groped between two paper bins on the lower level of the L of shelves occupying one corner of the former stockroom, now mostly Roxanne’s workroom. His fingers brushed a small box resting atop another small box; it toppled over at his touch. He grabbed the second box. The raggedly bitten nail of his index finger scraped across the narrow, flinted side; he flinched in one quick spasm as a shudder ran down his spine.

  Scooter slid open the box and pulled out a match. Only two boxes left, he thought. Have to remember to get more matches. He scraped it against the side and it flared. The smoke of ignition blew toward him and he breathed in a sulfur-tinged lungful. He set the box atop the printer, cupped the now-free hand near the match, and coughed. The glass and brass hurricane lamp on the middle shelf of the L glinted as he approached. He removed the thick-waisted glass chimney and lit the wick hurriedly; he could feel the heat in the tip of index finger and thumb by the time it caught.

  Matches were in short supply everywhere.

  The lamp brightened the room; Scooter twisted the slim brass rod that lowered the wick and the guttering light steadied. He replaced the chimney and wrung his hand a few times.

  He went to the back door and bolted it shut.

  When he turned back to the lamp, he saw a note held to the shelving above it with a plastic magnetic holder shaped like a banana. Scooter picked up the lamp and read:

  Gone to Galleria to trade for matches & stuff. Back sunset.

  R.

  Scooter snorted. She was always a move or two ahead of him.

  He looked up at the magnetic memo holder and shut his eyes, trying to remember the taste. It had been . . . heavy, heavy, yet paradoxically elusive if you tried to pin it down. You ate them with peanut butter on white bread, and with ice cream. . . .

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the lamp. Better not to think about shit like that.

  He carried the lamp and the box of matches into the main room. The old Doors tune, forgotten miles ago, had returned. He hummed it as he went about lighting lamps.

  It had been years since he had eaten a banana.

  He had just settled down onto the air mattress—with its anachronestic television pillow, a scented-oil lamp turned up bright on the low table that was his night-stand, and a used copy of Cinnamon Skin for company—when Roxanne returned.

  At her knock Scooter set the book facedown, got up, and went into her workroom. He unbolted the door and there she was, all long brown hair and large blue eyes of her.

  With a triumphant look she held up a brown paper bag.

  “Batteries for my amp?” he asked hopefully.

  She shook her head. “Presents, though.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to beware of Greeks bearing gifts?” He opened the door wider and she brushed past him. He removed the Kryptonite lock (which he had forgotten about and left dangling for anyone to shut or take) and glanced around. Nothing but the few cars and the wild hedge across the garbage-strewn street. He shut the door and bolted it again.

  “I’m not Greek,” countered Roxanne as he turned to her. “Besides, it’s ‘beware of Greeks giving bears.’ ”

  He grinned and stepped forward. They hugged. He smelled the sweat at her neck, the soft aroma of her hair, faintly floral. “I was starting to get worried,” he said into her ear. His chin brushed the quail-feather hanging at her earlobe. He kissed.

  “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  He moved back enough to look down at her face. “Doesn’t stop me from worrying.”

  She smiled, lifted up, kissed him. The paper bag crumpled with her tightening grip. “It’s nice that you worry.” She turned and headed into the “living” room, where the books and their bed were. “Somebody did follow me for a while, though,” she tossed over her shoulder as he followed her in.

  “Roxanne!”

  She sat at the foot of the air mattress, set the bag atop her crossed ankles. “Only a couple of blocks. I lost him. It.” She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “I wish you’d take the gun when you go out.” He sat awkwardly on the air mattress. He’d never get used to it; it was like stepping into a canoe.

  “I’m safer without it. Somebody’d hurt me just to take the gun, if they knew I had it.” She opened the bag, peered in, and put in a hand. “Besides,” she said, fumbling—the light was too dim for her to see inside the bag—“we’ve only got the six bullets.”

  “Five,” he said.

  She looked up sharply.

  He shook his head. “No, no. We lost one somewhere.”

  She tossed her hair back and shrugged with one shoulder simultaneously. “I’ll see if I can get more. Meantime . . .” Her hand emerged from the bag.

  He leaned forward. “Matches?”

  She nodded. “Lucifer matches.”

  “What, you trade with the devil for ’em?” He slid the nightstand closer, moving the lamp between them so he could see better.

  “Old Victorian term,” she said. “They also call them whiteheads. You can light them against just about anything; they don’t need a flint.”

  “I—” he began, then grinned. His dark eyes caught the lamplight; the silver scimitar in his right ear caught the flame and reflected it as something other than gold. “Hey, can I light one against a boot? Or with my thumbnail?”

  She laughed. “Here, macho man.” She tossed him the box. “Two boxes.” Her hand disappeared again into the sack, rustled within, and reappeared.

  “Razors!” He grabbed them from her. Gillette Trac I Is. His old Schick had become about as effective as a butter knife.

  “I still couldn’t find a straight razor,” she said. “I asked.”

  He waved away her apology. “What else?” he asked.

  “Well.” She opened the bag wider, upended it. Things spilled out onto the comforter atop the air mattress. She picked up two small boxes. “Typewriter ribbons for me.” A bulky bundle in a twist-tied, white plastic bag; “Three ears of corn.”

  “Who’s growing corn?”

  She shrugged. There were other things, sundry i
tems they needed; she announced them as she held them up and set them aside, finishing with: “A loaf of Mrs. Hernandez’s bread and—”

  He dove for the final, foil-wrapped item before she could mention it. “Chocolate!” He started to unwrap it, stopped, looked at her watching him, and set it on the nightstand. “Dessert,” he said. “Who the hell’s making chocolate? How much you have to trade for all this?” “Not a lot. Mrs. Hernandez’s baby is sick, and I traded her a bottle of ampicillin for bread and corn. She doesn’t trust the street drugs. Said she knew someone who was killed by bad morphine. She obviously got the corn from somewhere else.”

  He frowned. “Bread and corn?”

  “She owes me a fresh loaf every day for the rest of the week. Couple more ears of corn, too. I trust her. She’s a good woman.”

  He leaned back, eyeing the chunk of chocolate. “Shame about the baby,” he said. “She know about the pills?” Roxanne nodded.

  During the panic following the Change, Roxanne, though she did not understand why things were going wrong, could still see that things might not change back for a while—if at all. The city was closed off from certain commodities; the airports were closed and shipping was now more hazardous than most people cared to try and overcome. The valley didn’t grow crops well; the soil needed too much chemical aid. Roxanne knew that she would need trade goods before long, and that certain things then taken for granted would become valuable as their supply was depleted and not replaced.

  One afternoon she took a wheelbarrow from a hardware store that a few other people were busily looting, and trekked from pharmacy to pharmacy. Nothing was open by now, not with the power out, the police forces dissolving into anarchy, and the evidence of impossible things in and beyond the hills—what came to be called the Borderlands. Roxanne had to break into the first drugstore, a Rexall pharmacy. She threw a brick through the front window, wincing as glass shattered, then stepped through after it settled, pulling her wheelbarrow behind her. She half expected someone to yell for her to stop, or to hear the wail of a siren, but there was nothing.

  From the back of the Rexall she had taken birth-control pills of varying estrogen levels, penicillin and ampicillin in tablet form, insulin pills, vitamins, bottles of morphine, syringes with fresh needles in sterile packets, methedrine, Seconal, Valium, nitroglycerine tablets, first-aid kits, “D” batteries, and tampons. She filled her wheelbarrow, dumped the contents in the ground-floor apartment she was living in at the time, and set out again. She looted three more drugstores and kept her booty locked in three large trunks taken from Sears. She didn’t start trading them until demand started to grow on the streets as supplies dwindled from the steadily depleted grocery and drugstores. When “basement brewers” began synthesizing their own heroin, morphine, penicillin, barbiturates, amphetamines, and tranquilizers, she grew worried, but the worry soon passed. Half the drugs now available on the streets were ineffective; another ten percent was toxic, and the remaining forty percent was still not a significant enough figure for Roxanne to worry about—times were violent, hospitals were now small clinics working with a bare minimum of equipment, and lots of people needed what she had to offer. The batteries had been the first thing she ran out of. Tampons were next, but she kept a large reserve for herself. Necessary drugs became her trade goods for the next four years.

  Roxanne found her drugs becoming less valuable as they got further away from the expiration dates printed on their labels. She could always fudge that, of course, especially when selling pills piecemeal, but her conscience wouldn’t allow it. All too often lives depended on her wares, and sometimes hers depended on them being effective. She knew that if a drug had a printed shelf life of two years, it had been tested at four years; the FDA had halved such figures as a safety margin, allowing for more rapid decay of some brand, or for less than ideal storage conditions. She got a pharmacopoeia from a pristine Crown Books and started telling her customers that X percent of the drugs they bought might be ineffective. It lowered the value slightly, though it caused people to buy in slightly greater quantity, yet she was respected for her honesty. People bought from her before they would buy from a stranger.

  Word spread about Roxanne the Walking Pharmacy. Sometimes she was followed home.

  She took to carrying a knife. Soon after, she traded a healthy batch of penicillin and Seconal for a snubnosed .38 and two boxes of bullets. Ammunition, easy enough to manufacture by anyone who cared to learn how, had begun to surface again.

  She kicked herself for not having thought to hoard coffee.

  Cigarettes she hadn’t bothered with—she didn’t smoke, didn’t like to be around people who smoked, knew that tobacco would go stale within a few months anyway, doubted that anyone would be able to grow it in this climate, and was happy to see it gone.

  Marijuana, of course, had largely taken its place.

  Scooter was one of the few people Roxanne knew who didn’t smoke pot. Ironic, considering Scooter’s past.

  They’d met a year ago, when he had been scouting the trader’s heaven of the Galleria for painkillers. He had followed the grapevine to her, and he asked for her help. A friend of his, a middle-aged man named Dennis Feische, had ditched his bike on one of the mountain roads, and gravel had chewed up his thigh.

  . They’d gotten rubbing alcohol and washed the leg thoroughly, but apparently bits of gravel had remained in the wound and the leg had become infected. Dennis was hurting, Scooter told her, and he just wanted a good painkiller and maybe an antibiotic.

  Roxanne did not think of herself as a practicing physician, empowered to diagnose and prescribe. She was not Florence Nightingale. She supplied a product, a necessary product, and asked a fair price for it. But there was something in Scooter’s face, something at once desperate and forlorn, that made her ask him to take her to his friend.

  Scooter took her to the Holiday Inn lobby where he and twenty other ex-headbanger rock-and-rollers had crashed. In a dim room lit by a single wax candle Roxanne was confronted with a dying man half out of his head with fever. He ranted incoherently. He had no color. He wore a shirt and no pants. He had soiled the mattress on the floor beneath him. His right leg was mottled black and dark purple from knee to groin. The room smelled of rotten pork. She gagged and fought for control.

  “Can you do anything for him?” Scooter asked.

  She tried not to look at the gangrenous leg. “I—I’ll try. Leave me alone with him, okay ”

  Scooter and his buddies had left her alone, and she sat up half the night in the stinking room with the man, whose raving grew weaker by the hour. She quickly determined that amputation was impossible even if she could get him to a clinic; the gangrene had spread past the upper thigh. There was nowhere to cut after that. She pressed her fingers into the flesh of the other leg. White prints remained behind when she took her hand away. The other leg was going.

  Dennis Feische was going to die, and slowly.

  Sometime after midnight—she guessed; there was no clock and her wind-up watch was at home—she made a decision. She opened her knapsack and took out an ampule of morphine, a syringe, and a sterile needle.

  Scooter had cried for days. Dennis had been his friend. Roxanne comforted him, brought him back home, fed him, cleaned him up, cut his hair (trimmed it, rather; he wouldn’t let her cut it shorter than shoulder length), got him new jeans, new T-shirts, and new underwear from the more-or-less intact Surprise Store on Derrida, held him at night when he missed his friend, made love to him, and eventually fell in love with him.

  He didn’t move in with her then, and she wasn’t quite sure she wanted him to. These days it took a long time to win her trust. Scooter went back to the Holiday Inn with every intention of rejoining his buddies. One look around told him otherwise. They were all lying around the lobby, looking for all the world as if they hadn’t moved since he’d left. Bare mattresses covered half the floor. Trash covered the other half. From the entranceway he could smell the bathroom around the corne
r. The toilet wouldn’t flush anymore.

  “Scooter, man,” said someone from a threadbare couch along one wall. “How you doin’?”

  Scooter looked away from a man in his midtwenties and a girl in her early teens having sex on a dirty mattress in the corner. The man grunted with his thrusts;

  the girl made little hissing noises with her rapid inhalations.

  Scooter shook his head. He started to ask what had been done with Dennis, then decided he didn’t want to know. “Fuck this shit,” he said, and next day he had squatted a place of his own.

  Months later Scooter described to Roxanne how the place had changed after he left it. She frowned and looked at him curiously. “It doesn’t sound,” she had said, “like it changed at all.”

  And that was when Scooter realized that he was in love with her.

  After Roxanne put away her day’s finds, they blew out all the hurricane lamps but the one beside the air mattress and took off each other’s clothes.

  “Did you miss me today?” he asked as they embraced.

  “Did you go somewhere?” she rejoined blithely.

  They fell, laughing, onto the air mattress.

  “Let’s see,” said Roxanne, “if we can pop this thing.”

  They didn’t—again.

  Roxanne lay next to him, curiously childlike, her head nestled in the hollow of his right shoulder, the soft of her hair falling across her face and onto his chest, tickling when he shifted. Her right hand rested on his ribs; her right leg, bent at the knee, crossed inner thigh atop his thighs, crossed calf over his shins.