dogs rummaging for food. Even sickly brown birds and plentiful pigeons sunned themselves on electric wires, singing their approval with the crystal blue sky in the background.
“Disgusting, diseased birds!” grunted Poe, pedaling erratically beneath them. She could have cared less about the brightness of the afternoon.
She swerved left-right-left, not because of road debris, but because of the crate the bicycle was pulling.
It was dancing to the tune of the young woman’s cursing.
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Maybe they sensed her frustration and helplessness, but hungry dogs circled closer to the old Schwinn, hoping to afford a nip or two of Poe’s flesh as punishment for wandering into their territory. Too bad for them. Their drooling faces collided with the steel-tipped combat boots that covered her legs almost to the knees beneath her army pants.
“That’s for even trying,” Poe said gratingly as she kicked at a hairless dog.
Cool didn’t always spell comfort, durability, or for that matter, maneuverability. Damn all Schwinns to hell! Why couldn’t I find a better bike?
Poe wiped her brow, cursing herself for wearing a lightweight pea coat and a thick bulletproof vest over her t-shirt. The coat might have been light, but it was still black, absorbing the wrath of the sun and making her sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.
There was no time to stop and take off the damn coat or deal with the fly-ridden dogs that still followed her tracks. She was half an hour late.
The designated place was on the south side of downtown, a truly depraved area full of hirsute palm trees in need of a shave from a generation of inattention. Rats made the California trademark their nest. Even the ficus and jacaranda trees left uncut loomed over the street, creating an arbor of drooping leaves and bark so thick that they blocked out most of the sun.
Back in the day, that part of the city housed warehouses filled with bleak, underpaid workers, smog-spewing industry, drug addicts, hookers, and alcoholics. They also sheltered the ballsiest giant rats ever to be found. Twenty or thirty of them had chased Poe during one of her searches years ago for an alternative home. The rodents changed her mind about 226
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living there for they were ten times the size of any regular city rat she had ever seen.
She didn’t exactly feel tingly and safe riding the worthless, heavy bike and its load to the center of rat hell. Her sore muscles were torturous as the sharp debris on the road prevented her from jetting out of there, and she still had about half a mile to go.
Then there was Sainvire’s naked body. She’d always thought it was bullshit for women in books and films to throw themselves at their lover’s mercy with no mind of their own beyond pleasure. To this, she muttered, “Still do. Sex is wonderful and exploding and all that, but after the last convulsion, life crashes to normal again. No big whoop. Sainvire would have a hell of a time convincing me to wear spiked heels and a cat outfit or to whack somebody for him.”
She conjured up her West L.A. home in her mind, ten minutes from the Santa Monica beach. “It’s time for me to go home. I’ve got Penny to think about.
Sainvire will never leave his people, especially after Sister Ann and Goss.”
Her concentration on the task at hand and the image of blue waves crashing on the beach paid off.
Only forty-eight minutes late. Two more hours until sundown. She parked the bicycle near 16th and Olive and waited for an escort to appear and direct her to the chosen warehouse.
But no one did. She only encountered a welcoming committee of hissing rats the size of armadillos, utterly unafraid of anyone, least of all her.
“Good ratties. Go on with your business and pay me no mind.”
A contingent seemed to be headed somewhere more satisfying than Poe’s meager flesh. Ordinarily she would have let out a sigh of relief, but not this time.
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“Something’s wrong,” Poe said quietly, her heart thumping.
Outnumbering her a thousand to one, the rats should have attacked. Poe readied her Kalashnikov assault rifle Sainvire had left for her. Smaller than its more famous counterpart, the AK-47, the rifle was outfitted with a PBS silent fire device and a BS-1
underbarrel grenade launcher.
She took a deep breath and followed the hustling rats that surpassed her thighs in size. “Thanks, Sister, for insisting I wear steel-tipped boots for special occasions.”
The stench of rotting meat, garbage, rat droppings,