American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,233

expected. Maybe Weringer was wrong.”

There is a long pause. “I don’t know. Maybe we were all wrong. Maybe She will know.”

Mona uses one of the hand lenses to look around the corner. She sees two men before one of the lab doors, sitting on the concrete floor cross-legged like children. She wonders what to do before remembering the extreme incompetence of her last captor. The bitch in the blue suit, she decides, must have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for help, but that makes sense—the older and smarter ones would have been too dangerous to approach.

She feels her pockets, and finds a spent round casing from the fight in the canyon the night before. She weighs it carefully, then throws it across the hallway entrance where it tinkles loudly as it rolls away.

“What was that?” asks one man.

Mona shrinks up against the wall. She hears footsteps growing louder. The two men emerge from the hallway entrance, and sure enough they turn immediately in the direction of the sound: they don’t even think to check the other end of the hallway.

So the one on the left is incredibly surprised when Mona stabs him in the back of the leg, just behind his knee, and the other is too stunned to even look at her before she brings the butt of the Glock down, cracking him on the side of his head.

Both of them collapse. “My leg,” says the stabbed one, with an air of wonderment. “What’s happened to my leg?”

There were people in those bodies, once, thinks Mona. I wonder where they went…

Still, she can’t risk these two causing any more trouble, and she doesn’t want either of them hopping into another poor soul’s body. So she stoops down and stabs them in the knees, just next to the kneecaps, severing the iliotibial band.

“My other leg!” cries the stabbed one. “Oh, my other leg!”

“Shut up,” says Mona softly. “There are worse ways to incapacitate you. You want me to try one?”

He doesn’t answer. Mona wonders if he even knows what the word incapacitate means.

Forget it. She leaves them both behind and heads for the door they were guarding.

Mona eases the door open just slightly. The room is the typical Coburn lab (excepting the lens chamber, of course): bare, concrete, wreathed in stains and shadows from equipment long gone. Mrs. Benjamin sits in a heap in the corner, and in the center stands the woman in the blue suit. The two seem to be in the middle of a discussion.

The woman in the panama hat is saying, “—d you know I’ve been farther than you, big sister?”

“Oh?” says Mrs. Benjamin. She looks quite weak, and not very interested.

“You were trapped here in Wink like all the others. But I went to its very limits. When I died, I turned to lightning, and rode the curves of the skies above us… and I’ve been to the fringes. I went there all the time. Maybe past them, just a bit. You can’t claim the same, can you?”

Mrs. Benjamin does not answer.

“No. I even went to that Roadhouse of theirs. That’s where I met them. The natives who helped me. Everyone here thought it was outside the limits. And no one ever tried, because you were lazy, and afraid. But I did. I went there. Imagine how silly it is: a bunch of men, drunk and drugged and stupid, bringing down our five eldest family members. Do you want to find out how?” She reaches down again, and lifts up something: a small, lacquered box.

“I wanted to kill First,” says the woman. “But I wasn’t sure what it would take. So on the last trip, I sent them to get two totems. Just in case. So convenient to have a spare on hand now, isn’t it? I had to go back to their Roadhouse just this morning to get it. You’ve caused me a lot of traveling, Sister.”

“Totems?” asks Mrs. Benjamin, confused.

“Oh, you don’t know? No, you wouldn’t. Listen—do you remember the stories we used to tell one another about the wildling?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks up a little, but does not answer.

“Yes, you do. About the real first, the first child Mother ever had. But it displeased Her, and She abandoned it. But we always used to tell one another that it was following us, following everything we did, trying to catch up.” The woman opens up the box. “Well. It did, Sister. It came with us to Wink.”

Inside is, as Mona expected, a