Ishtar Read online

  The nuns go back about their business, ignoring the men as if they were rocks or goats, blessed as they are with short attention spans.

  “You think they’re pretty?” asks Anna, her voice laced with artificial innocence. “You think those girls are sweet?”

  “Girls is girls.” Rocco shrugs. “Looks like plenty to go around.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  Rocco smiles, squinting from the sunlight in his eyes. “That old man in the tower’s no threat.”

  “You got that right,” says Anna. “Gengis hasn’t killed a man in years. But those girls have skull power on their side. You are only three. Sure you want to mess with odds like that?”

  He’s not listening. Men never listen.

  When the nuns have gone, the three lay back, sated, clutching at their groaning stomachs. Anna asks a few distracting questions in her best clinician’s voice. Obvious questions. One thing about Armageddon, it cuts through all the need for small talk.

  “So where the Hell have you come from?”

  Rocco looks at her slyly, weighing her up. Calculating how much he can score in exchange for information. “You run this place all by yourself?”

  Anna doesn’t answer.

  When they realise silence isn’t going to get them anything, the men start speaking of a realm below where the light is weak and feeble. Of cold cement inset with crumbling cracks. Of a man who is part demon-lord, part major.

  “What’s his name?” asks Anna, suddenly interested.

  “He goes by many...Master, Daddy, Jesus...”

  The three men joke between themselves, private signals she can’t understand. Not the funny kind of jokes — none of them are laughing.

  “He was God and we were his lieutenants.”

  “Yeah,” says Skunk, and they’re silent after that.

  Eventually, the men want to know when she’s going to let them out. She needs to put some thought into that one, so she climbs back up the watchtower to see what Sirius has to say about it. Her Dog Star confidante, invisible now, in the sunlight, but shining every night to give her comfort.

  Anna watches storm clouds boil along the far horizon. If there’s any sign of movement, bells will peal. She’s not worried. You don’t survive this long out here by chance. Lately though, she’s been seeing ghosts. Nothing strange in that — the desert claims them all in its good time. But these are not her phantoms. She didn’t summon them; deprivation didn’t drag them screaming from her psyche. These windborne apparitions linger like imprints, remnants of better places, better days. She’s sure they’re real in their own way, and that it’s the prescience of storms that brings them on.

  ****

  How long has it been since she bathed or changed her clothes? She probably stinks, and it shames her to acknowledge she only cares because three men have come. There’s a splinter in her palm from when she bashed the bull to death. Radioactive dust, she reminds herself.

  She kicks her ragged threads into a corner, empties a pitcher into a large tin basin, stands in it and soaps. The liquid is soon rust-coloured. Old blood, she thinks. Old ways.

  Anna dresses before her mirror, puts on jewellery. Every piece she owns. A sapphire pendant to match his eyes. Earrings. Forty bangles of the finest Mexican silver.

  The clinic endures, which is more than can be said for the city of her birth. She’s hazy about those details, too. Where she’s lived, the places she spent her youth. She must have had a childhood, yet she can’t remember one. Not a single warm and fuzzy moment.

  Truckstop’s provenance, too, is dim and distant. It once sported a pretentious name, some kind of exclusive resort. Deluxe cosmetic tourism. She smiles at the resonance of elegant ladies reclining on crisp, white linen sheets awaiting surgeons to tailor vaginas to match their lips. In the future, nothing is white and bony shoulders are nothing to be proud of.

  The nuns like anything smooth and shiny. Crap that glitters. Cellophane or gold, they see no difference. Lately, they’ve taken to drawing Anna’s sign, the eight-point star, which is set above the clinic archway. The dumb fucks think it’s holy. Anna knows it’s just some corporation logo from before, but she claimed it as her own the day she saw how much it mattered.

  The nuns consider her some kind of angel. She’s not even a qualified doctor, but hasn’t the heart to admit it. She managed to get her head around insemination tech, that’s all. Knows how to hold core temperatures steady, knock them out and bring them back alive. Doctor Kamali chose her for her steady hand. Everyone was drunk back then, still living out of cans. The cans ran out long before the booze and hope.

  Kamali checked out with the last of the morphine. Couldn’t bear the shame of bringing babies into being. What’s the fucking point? she screamed, even when sleeping — especially when sleeping. But there had been a point back then, and Anna took it.

  The nuns collate their scriptures from a myriad of ancient sources: celebrity cookbooks, women’s magazines. That glossy paper made it right through Armageddon, barely blackened by the pyres of burning Bibles. Doctor Kamali rolled cigarettes from the pages of Revelation, her faith commensurate with her dwindling tobacco stash. When she died, they made a nest of her old library, plugging cracks in the brickwork with paper pulp.

  The only thing that shits Anna more than women is men. Men brought about the end, but they didn’t stick around to see it through. Their busted war machinery still litters the landscape, churning dust till the batteries expire. But the men themselves? Where did they go? Anna never did work that one out. To war, she guessed, but which war? How many were there? Was anyone victorious?

  Anna had been powerful once — that much she could be sure of. Real power, not this pitiful masquerade. And she’d loved him — Thomas — whoever he might have been. The man with the lion tattoo.

  ****

  She’s lingering at her own reflection when commotion snaps her back into the moment. Ugly laughter. Sound carried swiftly through dead air. “Daisy!”

  The nuns have deceived her with feigned disinterest. What had she been thinking? As if they wouldn’t want three men for themselves.

  Anna hurries down the stairs, sandals slapping hard on weathered slate. “Idiots,” she spits. “Never should have...too hard to protect.”

  By the time she makes it to the front, the waiting room’s surrounded. Nuns occupy every spare inch of balcony, packing in tightly, craning their glass-shaved heads for a better view through the office window’s bars. She pushes through the dirty linen mass of them, glad of her own broad shoulders and impatience.

  Inside, Rocco has Daisy backed against a wall. Her sheet is torn. The girl bunches ripped fabric against her breast, eyelids lowered demurely in submission.

  Rocco’s laughter resonates. A deep thing, assured and utterly revolting.

  “Step away quickly and you won’t get hurt,” says Anna calmly.

  “I’m thinking that one’s fine just where she is.”

  “I’m not talking to Daisy,” says Anna. “Step away, Rocco, while you still have a chance.”

  He’s not listening and neither are his friends. The other two hang back. Silence bloats to fill the space, stifling and oppressive. Beyond the window, placid faces gawp.

  “What you’ve got here is paradise,” says Rocco, picking at flecks of grit between his teeth. “A whole town made of nought but little girls.”

  “Different from the girls you’ve known,” warns Anna.

  “Thing is,” says Rocco, “we ain’t known so many.”

  “Are there no women in your bunker?”

  Skunk’s face cracks into a smile. “There’s women. Old and skank and butt ugly as all fuck. Which is what he keeps ’em for, natch.”

  “Incentives,” cuts in Jimenez. “Rewards sometimes. If you’re really lucky.”

  “Ain’t been so lucky in a long time,” says Skunk.

  Jimenez’s features cloud. That scar on his chest looks anything but lucky.

  Seems like it
should be Rocco’s turn to speak, but his eyes are fixed on Daisy.

  “Been dreaming all about her,” he whispers.

  There’s no point warning him to be careful what he dreams of. Rocco is long gone, his mind his weakest aspect. He’s fixed on little Daisy with such beady calculation. One move and he’ll be on top of her. The other two will do whatever Rocco does. Dogs will always follow bigger dogs.

  All three shift their gaze around to Anna. Seeing her as if for the very first time. Most likely true. Yesterday the men had been half-crazed with thirst, half-blind with sun and terror and exhaustion. Anna feels the pressure of their eyes, senses the spell of her authority evaporate.

  It’s Daisy who makes the next move, as Anna knew she would. She smiles, performs a little pirouette, takes Rocco by the hand, her prayer wheel of human ivory abandoned on the floor.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” says Anna.

  Rocco tips an imaginary hat, allows the girl to lead him to the door. The mass of nuns part to let them through.

  Still Jimenez and Skunk pause, weighing up their options. Long enough for Anna to make a move of her own. She steps up to block their way with her body. Holds her palm up like an old time traffic cop.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Why are you here?” she asks them bluntly. “What have you come looking for?”

  “Home,” says Jimenez.

  “Yeah,” says Skunk.

  “Home,” Jimenez says again, like he feels the need to reinforce it.

  “Nothing grows here,” Anna says, stepping closer. “Even ghosts can’t permanently imprint.”

  Jimenez shrugs. “Those girls don’t look like ghosts.” It’s then that he sees it. He gestures at Anna’s eight-point star tattoo, visible since she changed from shirt to singlet.

  Skunk has seen it too and is clearly shaken. Both of them stare, wide-eyed. They’ve forgotten all about Rocco and lovely Daisy.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Why — what does it mean to you?” She angles her arm so they can get a better look.

  Jimenez swallows dryly. All she sees is terror in its purest form.

  “Venus,” mumbles Skunk in a low whisper.

  “The star?”

  “The lady.”

  A look from Jimenez confirms he’s said too much. The men have lost their derring-do, dumbstruck by a symbol.

  “There’s a lady in the bunker?” Anna thinks she’ll have to starve the data from them, or beat it, maybe. Whichever way is quicker. “It’s just a star,” she says and they both cringe.

  A piercing shriek from outside sets her teeth on edge. The anguished cry is barely human, gender indeterminate. The nuns take it as their cue to leave, padding softly across the faded linoleum floor.

  “I warned him,” says Anna. “I warned you all.”

  Taking advantage of their confusion, she steps back, slamming the door in both their faces.

  The trapped men hammer on the sturdy wood with balled fists, yelling out obscenities. Anna’s prepared to be a little patient. It’s not the first time her clinic has served as a jail. Eventually their arms will tire and they’ll try their luck with the barred window.

  Somewhere across the sun-baked sand, cruel laughter resonates. The men are hammering so hard that at first they don’t make sense of what they’re hearing. Rocco screaming, a symphony of pain.

  “Tell me more of Venus and the star,” Anna shouts through the door, but the men are far too filled with rage to hear her. Their hammering continues, as does Rocco’s agony. The latter eventually overpowers the former.

  “There’s nothing that can be done to save him,” Anna cautions. “I can’t stop the things those sisters do.”

  Eventually the pounding stops.

  “What are they doing to him?” calls Jimenez, his voice unsteady.

  “Practising their religion. Performing it. Those girls aren’t much in need of practice.”

  “Which religion?”

  “The one that suits their mood. Forget about it. Your friend is dead. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Another scream and the hammering starts up again.

  “Whatever,” she says, wandering back around to the kitchen to get a drink.

  When she returns in half an hour, the men have fallen silent.

  “Tell me about the Major,” she says, lowering herself to sit cross-legged on the porch.

  Occasional screams of torment still echo across the landscape.

  “I’m sorry,” says Anna. “Really I am.” Then she asks again about the Major. “Does he wear a mark like mine?”

  Jimenez and Skunk aren’t talking. Both are far too horrified for words.

  “But he’s an ordinary man?” she asks them. “Like you?”

  No answer. Not so ordinary then. They don’t trust her. They’re never going to trust her. They think Rocco’s misfortune is her fault. She keeps on at them with questions, but the screaming doesn’t stop. The men clam up, concentration shot to Hell.

  She leaves them be. She’ll come back and let them out tomorrow. There’s a trail of red leading to the ossuary façade, but she ignores it. Such details have long ceased to be her business.

  She walks the camp perimeter, binoculars dangling, useless, half-hoping to spot another bull. This time she’s up for target practice. Blowing the damn thing’s head off would improve her mood. But there’s nothing past the line of passive, waiting mothers. Nothing but endless sand and sunlight.

  Let the storms come and boil away tomorrow. At least that way she won’t have to care.

  ****

  Just past sunrise, the two men still stand defiant. The resonance of Rocco’s screams hangs about them like an all-enveloping fog. She’s brought a jug of water and two enamel mugs. Holds them high so they can see them through the bars.

  “Where the fuck is Rocco?” asks Jimenez through the window.

  “Describe the Major and maybe I’ll let you out. Take you to him too, if you behave yourselves.”

  She takes their silence as a yes, pours, then passes each man a mug. They snatch them and quaff gratefully, gulping without spilling anything.

  She holds the jug ready in anticipation. “The Major,” she reminds them with a waning smile.

  “White guy. Maybe forty. Maybe fifty.”

  “Blond hair, bright blue eyes. Tattoo.”

  They stare at her eight-point star while they’re talking, still mesmerised by its apparent significance.

  “Like this?” she asks, baring her bicep for closer inspection.

  Jimenez shakes his head. “Nothing holy, Ma’am. He’s got a lion.”

  A lion.

  She almost drops the jug. “What kind of lion?”

  “Big.”

  “Where?”

  “On his back.”

  “Holding a flag in its paw?”

  They don’t answer quickly enough, so she screams: “Is the fucking thing holding a pennant?”

  Skunk nods almost imperceptibly.

  It’s holding a fucking pennant. She stands there, jug gripped tightly, her mind elsewhere. The lion changes everything.

  ****

  Questions chitter through her brain like locusts. Why did she never search for Thomas below the earth? Bewitched by a glamour, the sleight-of-hand of solid rock. Rock can be blasted. Caves can be created. She pictures swarms of men tunnelling through honeycomb like ants, each new chamber comforting and womb-like.

  When she’s ready, she goes to speak with Sirius. It’s not his time yet, but she always knows he’s there.

  The would-be mothers watch from beneath their ratty awnings. Some days it’s their silence that bothers her the most. They think she should be planting babies in her clinic. Making half an effort to save the future from the past. But she can’t think straight since the men walked into camp. She hates the way they’ve turned things upside down.

  “There’s something I’m forgetting,” she tells her Dog Star friend. “Some big secret I’m supposed to kn
ow.”

  The threat of storms has abated. One less problem she has to care about. A lick of breeze against her neck, teasing of coolness yet to come. Perhaps she should kill the men? Put them out of their misery. Forget the shiny illusions they have to offer. The women, too, the queue of hopeful mothers. She could end their suffering so cleanly.

  She hears the splintering of wood, comprehends its great significance, yet cannot bring herself to care. The lion lives. He lives. He lives, over and over and over in her mind. That lion tattoo is the sign she’s been waiting for, a thousand tiny candles flickering in her head. The message from Thomas, a purpose after all these wasted years. Truckstop wasn’t the end but the beginning! The kick-off point for a glorious new season.

  The skin beneath her own tattoo tingles — the dove on her back, not the eight-point star on her arm. She recalls a Hong Kong backstreet. Crowded, the stink of fish. The lion and the dove. They’d been inked together, side by side as the smoke-choked night filled with stars. Rockets, too. Brilliant fireworks as they kissed beneath the needle’s burning repetition.

  That was the night they felt no pain. No, the pain would come later, tiresome decades of it, or had it been longer? Who could say? Who bothers counting years when time itself is at a standstill? Only those crazy nuns with their great skull abacus and the ivory hourglass and the blanched bronze sundial, its symbols as worn and faded as history itself.

  The nuns. She snaps herself back into the moment, hurries to the makeshift prison to find a splintered door. The stupid men have kicked the damn thing down. Back out on the sand, the nuns are circling poor Skunk and Jimenez like jackals, sniffing their stink, ever vigilant, ever hopeful.

  “Where’s Rocco?” spits Jimenez, defiant, despite the terror in his eyes.