14.
Brenna ran down the shaft, rung over rung, as fast as she could. Above her were the comforting footfalls of Ridge. Below her was Tomson, and below him Lantz. At the moment, she had one thought foremost in mind, and that was to escape the mudmen. She could hear their fluting sounds in the air, both inside the long shaft that trailed off into darkness below, and in the air outside. She could hear the chitter of their claws on the metal. "Hurry!" Ridge said above, and Brenna heard Lantz cry out below. An instant later, the world exploded in light as the panels of the shaft came apart. Light flooded in, and with it came the clawed grasping hands of the mudmen and their nightmare faces. She screamed as she smelled their mushroom smell, saw their round mouths with cobweb teeth, their slitted eyes with dull red retinas. She felt the cold wind of air from open rooms and shafts in the ship's nose area. She felt the rush of wind as mudmen crowded in for a meal on the four helplessly exposed humans.
In that same instant, the combined weight of humans and mudmen made the shaft collapse. Brenna clung to a steel rung as she felt Ridge's heavy body plummet past her. She slipped down several rungs. She ignored the bright red and yellow flashes of pain in her mind as she slammed into more rungs and as her ribs brushed against a body. She had no idea whose body. She tried to scream, but had no breath for it, as the ladder with her and Lantz on it tilted crazily and then fell into open space. She glimpsed the two men falling below her. They seemed to be falling into the mouth of some brass machine that swallowed them up. It was the last she saw of them because she and Lantz were falling backwards into a heap of slag. She looked up helplessly in slow motion as a dozen mudmen grasped hungrily after her with their claws. She saw their mouths grinding as if already chewing on her flesh. Then everything went black as the dusty coal and wet slag sucked her into it like a mass of quicksand.
Moments later, she lay on her stomach coughing. The world was a dark place flashing with mauve and olive drab lights. Her head throbbed and her lungs wanted to puke forth the dust in them. She raised herself up a few inches by pushing on the wet, foul-smelling slag with her palms. She was alive. But where?
She stirred, pulling herself into a half-seated, half-reclining position still leaning on her palms. She looked about and expected to be killed by the mudmen any second, but she could not smell them nor could she hear their fluting noises nor could she see any eyes glowing in the dark.
A large baseball thing lay in the slag nearby, and she shrieked. It was the head of a dead mudman. They came apart easily, and this one had not survived the tumble through a cubic acre of falling slag. The dust was still settling on its canvas-like skin and sleeping face. To be certain it was dead, she lifted a chunk of anthracite and slammed it down on the head. The head split like a bag of liquid and splashed green bile into the grainy black slag. She regretted having made the added mess, and pulled back.
She heard a feeble moan. "Is someone there?"
The moan again. "Lantz, is that you?"
"Brenna, help me out. I'm stuck here."
Brenna crawled on her hands and knees until she saw a glimmer of gray light. She felt a breath of air on her face, and smelled distant rain. She saw Lantz's pale neck and reddish hair protruding from a pool of dust and oily sand. "Hurry," Lantz said. "I'm sinking. This stuff is like quicksand."
Brenna flattened herself and crawled across the surface of the stuff until she grasped Lantz's hands in both of hers. She felt the gooey sand pulling at her torso as she flattened herself and pulled, and it seemed the sand was winning. The sand seemed to be sucking them both down. Nearby, she noticed a grill with several vertical metal bars. Desperately, she swung herself around until she could lock her ankles around the bars. She prayed no mudmen were on the other side to pull at her feet. "Hang on," she said gasping.
Lantz choked and sputtered. "I'm going down."
"I've got you."
"God..." Lantz was starting to suffocate as the weight pressed down all around her. Her hands were under the slag, pulling Brenna down. Brenna's hands disappeared under the wet heavy quickslag. Only Lantz's face was visible now. Lantz's eyes were wide with desperation and were starting to cloud over with fatigue and anoxia.
Brenna hooked her boots around the metal bars and flexed. Pressing her forearms down flat to distribute her weight better, she pulled her own body toward the bars using her feet. For a moment, nothing happened. Then she felt the sand yield a bit. Inch by inch, she pulled Lantz out, until both women were able to pull themselves up using their hands on the bars. "That was awful," Lantz said, brushing her red hair back with muddy looking hands.
"We're in some kind of shaft," Brenna said. She saw that the shaft had been filled in by a collapse of the slag, so there was no way to go back out the way they'd come. "I think we're buried under an acre of this stuff, and we're lucky that we slid into this drainage tunnel or whatever it is."
Lantz rattled the bars. Metal chattered and sounded as if it might yield. "No way but forward then."
Brenna sniffed. The air had a vinegary tang. She pointed to the dimly glowing red and white flowers of decay and fungus in the separating metal walls. "Watch out for that stuff--it will burn you."
"Too bad it doesn't burn the mudmen."
Brenna shook her head. "I think they're made from it, and other ugly stuff. Come on, stick with me. Let's get out of here." Together, they grasped the bars and shook them until the round grating of which the bars were part gave way. The grating fell forward onto slag, and the two women crawled forward in the gloom. "You hear that?" Lantz said, lying on her side.
Brenna stopped also and listened. "Water." She sniffed. "Smells fresh, like rain."
Lantz's face looked luminous in the dark. Her freckles almost seemed to glow. "Oh God. Sounds like mudmen paradise. Water, darkness, probably rats too."
They crawled forward, because there was nothing else they could do, except stay here and die. Brenna said: "I imagine they'd love eating rats. It would be like eating their own kind."
"I think I see light," Lantz said. She stopped again, resting on her elbows, and looked puzzled. She looked at her hands, which shone grayish-white. "Light. It's artificial daylight, made from bioluminescent bacteria."
The two women dug their way out through a last heap of slag and emerged in a part of the ship they had not imagined. They crawled out from a wide pipe in a trail of falling slag, and emerged one after the other on what looked like a concrete subway platform. A dangling sign read in large blue letters on white enamel: Largo.
Water dripped rain-like all around on the dark tracks, while bright biolume shown down from under the ancient green glass canopy overhanging the length of the platform. There wasn't a living soul in sight, but lights glowed with comforting strength and regularity. Several placards revealed pictures of attractive, smiling young men and women looking out with happy eyes. If it was advertising, it was enigmatic. Only the word Largo appeared again and again.
The platform amid the tracks was of piled stone, with moss growing around the edges of the individual stones. In a passenger shelter of rippled greenish glass stood two wooden benches whose slats had grown black and brittle with age, but otherwise the place looked as though a crowd of commuters might come running up the stairs any moment to greet a train, should one come rushing out of the tunnels at either end. Instead of a train, and instead of a buzzer or a whistle, they heard mudmen fluting in the tunnels. Brenna thought she glimpsed red dots of light in the tunnels.
Brenna and Lantz ran as fast as they could, across the wet slippery tracks. They clambered up the stone face onto the platform, ran across its chilly wet concrete squares, and down into a well-lit white tile tunnel. "Wish we still had our rifles," Brenna said.
"We'll make new weapons," Lantz said. "No way are we going back for the rifles."
They ran along the clean, well-lit underground. The tunnel was oval. Placards of advertisement for Largo lined the walls. Faces smiled on them as they hurried to escape the mudmen. In a motif of cobalt letters on white background, a tile sign read Exit. A blue arrow pointed in the direction they were running. They redoubled their pace, ran up a wide flight of stairs just like in a subway, emerged in a small but ornate station.
"Wow, look at this place," Lantz said as she walked into the center of the hall with her hands in her pockets. Brenna followed her across the lavishly marbled floor with its inlaid images of earth globes. There were six such circles: one looking down on the Arctic, one looking up at the Antarctic, one each looking at the Americas, Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region. A glance told Brenna the maps reflected Earth around the end of the 21st Century.
Over Lantz's head, about 40 feet up, was an expanse of glass panels, and beyond that lay the blackness of outer space. A luminous band of stars must be the Milky Way galaxy, Brenna thought. The glass panels were held in fine wooden frames that warmly covered the ceiling. A band of finely work oak several feet high ringed the transition from ceiling to walls. The oak was richly carved with gargoyles, gilded leaves, and jungle animals with glowing green glass eyes. The basilica structure had brownish-reddish marble walls dripping with creamy white inclusions, like clouds on taffy. Ornately beveled archways supported on Corinthian pillars led off in various directions, all of them devoid of humans. Still, everything looked clean and functional, if thoroughly dusty. They spotted a ticket counter with brass rails and frosted window, closed. They spotted men's and women's bathrooms behind black wrought-iron doors, locked. They saw windows all around containing advertisements that said Largo. Brenna frowned, savoring the name curiously.
"Look here," Lantz said striding through a long hallway with a curving ceiling of metal struts and fancy Art Nouveau stained glass. As she walked, lights turned on around her and turned off just as soon as she passed. "It knows I'm here."
"What knows?"
"Largo," Lantz said spreading her arms as if introducing Brenna to a friend. Lantz looked up and laughed. "Largo is the name of this place."
"How do you know that?" Brenna walked after her, amused.
Lantz tapped her forehead with one index finger. "It's all in my head. I was in a place like this once. It wasn't called Largo, and I don't remember the name."
Brenna shook her head. "The ship is messing with our minds. Maybe none of this is real."
Lantz stood with her arms akimbo. "Try falling down on your head. If it hurts, it means it's real."
"I'll take your word for it."
They walked through the train station, expecting hordes of passengers to come pouring through the gates on all sides any moment. Not a soul obliged. "Maybe it's a trap," Brenna said.
"Doesn't feel like a trap."
"Feel that?" Brenna felt a breeze on her forehead as they pushed through the swinging walnut doors, which had shiny brass fixtures on the inside and black iron hinges on the outside. "Smells like a rainy evening in Paris," Brenna said, pinching her collar up.
"Someplace smaller," Lantz said. "Brussels or Cleveland or Sapporo." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Brenna could hear the other's teeth chatter and said: "Are you finally getting cold? Want a coat?" Lantz nodded, and Brenna pointed to a clothing store across the street. "I have no money," Lantz said, but they both shrugged and ran skipping across the street. The running wasn't necessary, because the street was empty. It was, Brenna thought, a typical rainy boulevard outside a little train station in a prosperous little town anywhere in the civilized world of Old Earth. There were some smallish cars, but none moved. The cars sat parked at the curb on either side of the street, following the convention of the steering wheel on the left (as opposed to the Commonwealth and Japanese convention of the driver sitting on the right). This entire little world was detailed down to the least little item, Brenna thought. Still, somehow, it did not feel like Earth. Not exactly. "Something is different," she said carefully, not wanting to say wrong. Something was different, not wrong per se.
"It's a beautiful place," Lantz said as they hurried through the lightly dribbling rain. It was good to feel raindrops on one's forehead, Brenna thought as they ran across the opposite sidewalk and pulled open the heavy, stylish brushed-steel door of what billed itself in pink neon as the Largo Style Shoppe.
Inside, rock music boomed-no vocals, just suggestively throbbing instrumentals. The air was dry and clean. It smelled faintly of cloth and fabric glues. On flat tables they found bolt upon bolt of attractive cloths and fabrics. Cheery summer dresses hung on one carousel rack. Coats for rainy wear stretched twenty feet along a wall closet in all sizes from little girl to adult woman. One corner was filled with shoes, another with lingerie, another with umbrellas and winter coats and scarves. "A little for everybody," Brenna said as she fingered the fine materials and looked for price tags, but found none.
"Look at these hats," Lantz said. She pulled a plastic rain hat over her head with both hands and twirled around laughing. The hat was transparent, with a wide floppy brim, and covered with pastel dots.
"Here is a sweater for you," Brenna said holding up a heavy knit. It was dark blue and looked almost mannish. It had a thick collar and heavy knitted pillar forms running up and down the front and back. "Nice," Lantz said, holding it up in the white light. "Cool," she said, slipping into it. She shivered with pleasure. Brenna turned a word trick, saying: "Warm," and they both laughed.
"Have you been to the ladies' room lately?" Lantz asked.
Brenna shook her head. "No, why, do you have to go?"
"I think so." Lantz looked a trifle uncomfortable. "I almost don't know how."
"Oh, you'll figure it out," Brenna said. She spotted a sign in the back of the store with an icon suggesting the ladies' restroom. "Over there."
Lantz walked off in that direction, idly fingering coats and pants as she went. On one carousel was a display of loud, happy yellow teddy bears. On another it was a pile of stuffed rabbits with reddish glass eyes. She disappeared into the WC and Brenna eagerly sorted through a pile of leather coats looking for something in her size.
Lantz screamed, and Brenna went running. She wished now that they'd gone back for the rifles, if it had been at all possible to find them in the slag. As she ran toward the bathroom, Brenna reflected that all this seemed too good to be true. There must be a catch-like mudmen pouring out of the walls to eat them alive. But it wasn't mudmen that made Lantz scream. It was a puddle of blood on the tiled bathroom floor-her own. "I don't know what happened," she said. She held her hands to her mouth and leaned against the wall in shock. "I walked in thinking I'd go to the loo" (she pointed to a row of stalls) "and all of a sudden this gush came out. It's not a period or anything, Brenna. I'm bleeding inside."
"Do you feel faint?" Brenna felt the raw edges of insanity gnawing around her at that moment as never before, and pushed it all away. She clung to all that there was, which was what was here--nothing else. She put an arm around Lantz's waist to help her.
"Just tired."
"Do you hurt?"
Lantz pulled away from Brenna's embrace and shook her head thoughtfully. "No." She probed her midsection with her palms and reaffirmed: "No pain."
"What is going on?" Brenna said looking at the slick of oily red blood smeared on the floor like a spiral galaxy. Lantz had stepped in her own blood, and now she wiped her shoes on a handful of paper towels torn from a dispenser. "I wonder who maintains all this so neatly, this whole ship and all?" Lantz said.
Brenna wondered too. "Not mudmen, that's for sure. They're too dumb."
The answer presented a moment later as the two women explored this place called Largo. "I'm glad you have a warm sweater," Brenna said as they left the Largo Style Shoppe. They came back into night and rain. "I'm glad too," Lantz said. She wore the plastic hat with the yellow red and green dots on it, and held it by the brim with both hands. "Wow, this is like back on Earth."
Brenna sniffed the air. "Yes. I can smell green things. There must be a park nearby. Smell that kind of tangy rich stuff? That's soil."
"I know soil," Lantz said as if Brenna held her for a dummy. They jostled each other in the ribs. "Race you across the street," Brenna said.
"Wait," Lantz said. "Take a look."
They walked back to the Largo Style Shoppe and looked inside the window. It was dark inside, and the music no longer throbbed. Brenna tried the door but did not force it. "That's an airlock on the edge of the door," she said. She ran a fingertip up and down the sturdy flex material. "You know what? I'll bet the ship sucks all the air out and leaves a near vacuum. That's how things stay so fresh. The minute you go from one place to another, the lights go on and air rushes in. We're walking through a vacuum-sealed museum."
"Oh come on," Lantz said, but her disbelief seemed to fade as they walked along the sidewalk opposite the train station. From here, they could see that the station was pitch-dark inside. "You may be right."
"So figure this," Brenna said. "We look up and we keep see the stars, even through the clouds and the rain. Maybe it's a band of glass running around the ship. Maybe Largo is some sort of giant shopping mall that stretches around the ship under the glass. Maybe it was meant to be for all those people to live in...but they were eaten..." She held her hand over her mouth in horror at the thought.
Lantz did not find the idea amusing either. "I'm not too sure, Brenna. If people were meant to live here, to cruise here everyday, they wouldn't need those vacuum compartments. I think this area has another purpose. Don't ask me what."
Largo proved to be a ghost town in its own right. They wandered in and out of shops and taverns. In one bar, a mechanical bartender mixed drinks and did magical tricks for them while they laughed. He was a fancy brass imitation of a 19th Century saloon bartender. He had the kind of moveable jaw that ventriloquists' dummies had, but there was no ventriloquist to do tricks with him. Brenna leaned over the bar out of curiosity, and saw that he was just a set of leather bellows and articulated steel pistons from the waist down. Lantz laughed. "He mixes a mean margarita though." She walked over to a juke box and pressed buttons. There was no coin slot. The music just started pouring out-no vocals, just a rich, thick paste of rhythmic sound that wrapped pleasantly around them.
"These aren't real margaritas," Brenna said. "We'd be flat on the floor. These are goody-goody drinks with honey and oats and other health stuff in them. That stuff around the rim isn't salt but crystallized vitamin sprinkles."
"It's fun to pretend," Lantz said at her barstool. She sipped while twirling on the stool. "Too bad there aren't any nice-looking guys around."
"I sort of wish Ridge were here," Brenna said.
Lantz spoke around her straw, which was on her lips. "You like him, don't you?"
Brenna nodded. "I was attracted to him from the first moment I saw him. I felt terrible because I thought I was married to Ricardo and had children." She still felt a devouring sense of loss as if part of her soul had been sliced out with a gutting knife.
"I'm so sorry about that," Lantz said. "I was supposedly still single. Maybe because no guy wants to get near a redhead who pumps iron and shoots guns with the best of them."
"That's all a lot of hooey," Brenna said. "They made us from bits and pieces of other people's lives. Now it's up to us to live our own lives."
"That's sort of how life is anyway," Lantz said. "Nobody just pops into the world without a program running. Everyone has one of those player piano sheets written by their parents, their culture, the whole thing."
"Yes," Brenna said, "so now we just have to figure out how to live our lives. I wonder if we could somehow find Tomson and Ridge."
"We could try," Lantz said. She yawned, setting her drink aside. "Aren't you tired at all, Brenna?"
Brenna did feel a certain faraway bone-weariness. "Nothing serious yet. I'm getting there. They must have fed us a bunch of uppers, because I'm still raring to go. But I could close my eyes for a little while."
They walked down the rainy street together, looking into shop windows and noting that same phenomenon that everywhere they went, lights turned on as they approached and shut off as they passed. "That could get annoying," Brenna said after a while.
"The dark scares me a bit," Lantz said. "Say, do you suppose it ever gets to be daylight in here?"
Brenna said: "I imagine if we were orbiting a planet like Earth maybe. You know, a planet that's just bathed in sunshine. Reflected sunshine would light this place up like a million candles."
"I'd like that."
As they strolled along, the shape of Largo became apparent. The city formed a thin ring, maybe 100 feet thick, about a mile around the wider edge of the ship's nose. Imagine drawing a thin blue line around the thick part of a bullet, Brenna thought...the outer wall was either thick glass or, more likely, a reflective and conductive bluish material that gathered an image on the outer hull and transmitted it through the hull, recreating it in pixels on the inner hull surface-Largo's "sky." On either side of the street were shops and other buildings up to three or four stories high. Some reached almost to the hull. Brenna assumed that the band of real estate forming Largo was hemmed in on either side by steel decking and beyond that would be the more normal (though generally spectacular, except where ravaged by time and mudmen) ship's quarters. It still wasn't clear what the purpose of Largo was, if not to serve as a shopping mall and recreational area for the thousands who had been killed while in deep sleep.
"There is a hotel," Brenna pointed out. "Want to find a room and take a bath? Rest a while?"
Lantz rolled up her eyes. "That sounds divine. My God, yes."
They strolled up the ornate gray marble entrance of the Hotel Largo. The entrance was framed in honey-colored marble pillars with Ionic friezes top and bottom and then a little arch carved full of grapevines, cherubs, and wicked satyrs. As they pushed through the heavy double doors, they heard the customary rush of air filling the spaces ahead. Lights came on. They heard faint, very Continental violin music. The lobby was a high, domed affair with a wrought-iron mezzanine drowning in greenish light from more Art Nouveau stained glass. The air was at once light and cozy. Brenna expected to see men in spats and bowler hats, and women with parasols and hoopskirts, but the usual deathly stillness prevailed. "This could become dispiriting," Lantz said as they took a little brass-cage elevator up to the second floor. "Spooky, I mean."
They emerged on a floor carpeted with long Persian runners. The doorways were set back in little alcoves for a look of privacy to offset the closeness of everything here. Brenna jogged up and down the hall throwing doors open and admiring the variety of sumptuous furnishings. Lantz trailed a bit more tiredly, yawning from time to time. She looked pale and drawn. "Look, Brenna," she said pointing into a lavish marble room that contained a yellow-rimmed swimming pool done in green and blue floral tiles. Mirrors decorated the walls, and there were at least six alcoves, each containing its own hot tub. An atmosphere of vapor and camphor scented with lemon and oranges drifted through the air.
Brenna cautiously tested the waters all around and found them temperate. The two women stripped naked and plunged laughing into the large pool. There, Brenna swam laps while Lantz rested in the shallow end. Lantz held her face up to the light and her hands on the yellow tiles along the sides while her trim lower body floated lazily just under the surface. "How do you feel?" Brenna said as she emerged sputtering from a long trawl along the glowing blue bottom. The water was chlorinated and clean, and stung the eyes. It burned pleasantly in Brenna's nose but made her sneeze. Lantz nodded and kept her eyes closed. "I'm listening to the violin music," she said smiling with pleasure. Her freckles looked carroty and her skin as pale as eggshell paper. Brenna swam up and down a few more times. "I'm getting a little tired now too, Lantz. Want to try some of the hot tubs?"
"I'd like that, but I'm too lazy. I'll just float here a while."
"Okay, suit yourself!"
Brenna climbed out. Artificial gravity pulled the water off along the smooth planes of her body and made her feel heavy. She wondered if humans had not been meant to be aquatic animals somehow. Hooting and laughing, she ran in a circle around the pool and then jumped with big splash into a steaming hot tub. At first the heat stunned her. Then she settled back and let the jets of water under the surface massage the aching and abused muscles and bones of her body that had been through so much duress in the past day. "You should try this!" she called out. The floor around the hot tub was dark tile inset with lovely pink and chocolate stones. It slanted lightly inward and drained back all the water she'd splashed out during her jump. "I can't remember when I last ate," she said out loud, hearing her voice echo amid the olive walls with their curving paintings of nymphs and gods and other classical themes right out of a Bad-Nauheim or Mondorf-les-bains or Tivoli spa. "All we need now is young men in loincloths to bring us more of those fake health margaritas."
After a while, the warmth became more than she wanted to enjoy and she got out. She found a pile of fresh clean white frotte towels on a table in the alcove, and dried herself. The warm moist air kept her warm and comfortable. She knelt by the side of the hot tub and washed her filthy, torn jumpsuit. "I think we'll do some more shopping after you've rested," Brenna said. She wrung her uniform out and hung it over a chair to dry. In this climate it should take a while to dry down to a sort of warm damp condition, and then she'd find a warm spot in the hotel to finish drying it. Maybe while Lantz slept. "We should find the biggest beds in the hotel," she said cheerfully as she rounded the corner, coming back into the main hall with its yellow-framed pool.
"Lantz?" Brenna heard violin music and hurried to her friend's side.
Light poured down from the glass ceiling, an avalanche or chandelier of overly bright bioluminosity that was the lightest of light yellows like lemon ices. Shades of darker greenish light played in there along with streaks of red and blue and gray. The rich light poured down through hanging plants, palm fronds, slowly turning dark fan blades, little Victorian faux Bernini pillars of bronze holding up the mezzanine. The light gleamed off dark lavish surfaces-large brownish Han vases, polished tables, windows inset into the dark oak walls, Largo posters with beautiful smiling faces, and more. The light fell down on the aquamarine pool waters that stirred lightly with a chlorine foam over a bright pool bottom decorated with inlays of colored glass beads in the shape of a palm tree.
"Lantz!" Brenna exclaimed and ran to the pool, where she could hear the violin music more clearly than ever. Under cascades of piano music coming from the walls, the redheaded woman lay as Brenna had left her, in the pool with her arms on the yellow ledge. Her head was tilted back as if she were asleep, but her eyes were half open and glazed. Her mouth hung open as if she had taken one last shuddering breath before her heart stopped beating and her lungs stopped rising and falling. Brenna cried out "Oh no!" and ran to her side. Brenna splashed into the water beside Lantz and sought a pulse. Lantz's pale skin was already chilly, and her flesh had a rubbery feel to it. "My God no!" Brenna exclaimed tearfully and held her hands over her face. Stirred by the turbulence of Brenna's legs in the water, Lantz's body slipped gently into the water feet first, all the way to the bottom, and that was where she lay in an attitude of utterly peaceful repose with her arms lightly apart. Her hair came undone and floated like reddish seaweed.
Brenna stood frozen in shock at the pool's edge. The body lay in the water where it had slipped. Lantz's torso lay on the green glasses of the palm fronds.
Abruptly, Brenna ran into the hot tub alcove for her jumpsuit. It was still wet, so she ran back to the poolside and put Lantz's still-dirty clothes on. It didn't matter now. Anything to get away. Her pleasure here was spoiled by the terrible realization that if she did not find Ridge, she would be all alone here. Forever. And that was too terrifying a thought to bear. Sobbing, she ran down the rainy street in the empty night city. Feeling nearly hysterical, she banged on the opaque windows of those odd little cars parked at the curbs. They were empty. One or two lit up faintly, inviting her to get in, but what could they do other than run her around and around Largo?
Then she heard a man's voice. "Lantz? Brenna?"
Ridge?
Confused, she stopped and looked around. Then she realized it was Lantz's collar com. She cupped it in one palm, pulling it close to her chin. "Ridge? Where are you?"
"I'm standing in this train station, wondering where you are."
"Oh God," she said. "Ridge. Hold on, I'm running to you as fast as I can."
"Maybe you'd care to tango," he said in a dry voice, as if nothing were wrong. And maybe again for just a little while, nothing was wrong. Brenna ran down the sidewalk. She ignored the rain hitting her face. If only we can have a little time together, she thought. It's not much to ask. Not after we have had so little and lost so much.
Ridge stood waiting on the sidewalk outside the Largo train station. Brenna fled along the sidewalk and splashed through puddles as she flew toward him. Ridge spread his arms and hugged her tightly against his hard, strong frame.
|
