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Theda knew she’d been made. It was plain the moment four days earlier when she’d first noticed the guy across the street scoping out her little card table psychic fair. He tried to look casual, as though he wasn’t watching her, but she knew better. There was something off about him. Men like him–heck, anyone like him–just didn’t spend time leisurely taking in the sights of the degenerate side of the city unless they were out for blood or money.
Not after the god had come and left it all in ruin, at least.
Faith and good had left with the god, leaving nothing in His wake but a wasteland that needed to shake its way back to equilibrium.
The man across the street picked the one place to stand where the bricks held their ground and stayed flat and patterned from the way they’d been laid. Most now heaved up in places, tripping filthy vagrants and respectable survivors alike, not that the two of those things could be separated, anymore, either. The mere notion of filth and respectability matched as poorly as the sidewalk stones.
The guy was older than she was, probably late-twenties. Longish hair the color of charcoal. He was tall although he seemed to be doing his best to disguise it. The way he slouched into himself with one boot braced against the wall as though he belonged there told Theda he damn well didn’t. He was too groomed, too… well, too damned clean to belong hereabouts.
A bounty hunter, no doubt.
Today, like each day before, he arrived an hour after she did, kicked aside bits of the rubble to find a place to settle in, one foot propped against the graffiti of a building strangely untouched by the warfare that had left almost everything around her in ruins.
“You don’t fool me,” she whispered and the john at her feet who was even then struggling to stand after his encounter with her gift, made a sound like he didn’t understand what she was talking about.
“Not you, old man,” she said to him and peered beneath her lashes again at the man across the street.
She jabbed her elbow in the direction of the stranger.
“I meant him.”
She heaved at the old gent’s arm, trying and failing to help him find a doddering stand.
“He’s not a regular,” she said. “He’s not even from this side.”
Her client didn’t seem to care. He was too engrossed in trying to keep his legs beneath him. She sighed. It wouldn’t matter to him anyway. He wasn’t breaking the law. At least, he didn’t know he was. But if the bounty hunter figured out the things she did for each john, then a world of hurt was about to open up for her.
And she hadn’t survived the apocalypse only to die for giving a john his jollies.
Even in the shaded late afternoon light, even beneath the shadows of leafy treetops stretching leggy, malnourished branches to heaven, she could tell the stranger was trying to work out what she was doing behind that rickety card table of hers. Trying to figure out if she was peddling something that would make nabbing her worth his time.
And that was where his deliberate show of presence came in, she was sure. He was daring her to move on, give him reason to think she was fidgety about what she was doing–show any sign that she was doing something illegal.
It was ridiculous what a gal had to do to survive out here, ridiculous that she had to make her work look salacious. It didn’t matter if she sold her ass out her in broad daylight. Didn’t matter if she stole from an old lady, stabbed a kid. Nothing like that mattered. She’d never get picked up for any of it.
But to show any sign of belief in religion or anything akin to divinity and you were smacked into jail.
If only that was all she was doing.
She peered down at the old bloke, wanting to find some compassion, but feeling none.
Compassion was a thing she couldn’t afford nowadays. It could get a gal like her killed.
“You good, old man?” she asked him.
He batted a hand in front of his face before nodding uncertainly.
He wasn’t Okay. Not by a long shot and she knew it. She could tell by the way he was still weaving on his feet, the way he couldn’t focus on his hands. His eyes looked clouded over with confusion.
She couldn’t say she blamed the old guy for passing out. His vision had been filled with crusade massacres and horrific, terrifyingly bloody battles. Still, she couldn’t afford the lolly-gagging. Not with that mercenary watching so keenly.
“Come on,” she said to the john, slapping his cheek in the hopes of rousing him. “You got your ride; now get the hell out of here.”
The ride had shown him exactly what a prick he’d been in his last life. The old codger had rightfully earned a grisly death if she cared a damn to tell him so. She didn’t. She just let him ride her visions because she did care about two other things: godspit and money. In exactly that order.
Like the hookers who came and went around her, sometimes flashing splinters of smiles at her, sometimes trying to run her off, Theda had settled into her chisel-colored survival instinct the way any good magician from Old Earth might have. Except she plied her trade from a card table with a bowed-in middle and joints rusted nearly clean through.
And the trick she turned was different. Very different.
She did so with the same sense of resolve as the prostitutes, though. Except maybe that analogy of prostitution wasn’t even right. Maybe she was more like the fortunetellers of old Earth: like Nostradamus or those famed kids from Fatima. Or, like a ghost whisperer in some archaic, entertainment-based television series.
Except, all those descriptions failed to nail her trade down just right because no one in his right mind in this new world would admit to believing anything remotely divine was left behind.
In the end, she concerned herself with getting paid–just like any professional woman of trade.
“Good thing I got your cash up front, old man,” she said and yanked at his elbows. He kept stumbling back onto one knee.
“I can’t,” he stuttered. “…I mean, it was all so—”
“Real?” she said with a note of sympathy and hated the feeling of sadness that crept over her. “Yeah. I know.”
He stumbled again and fell flat against the bricks of the sidewalk. He held onto the crumbling leg of her card table and she winced, thinking he was going to break it. It had taken her ages to find the thing, dilapidated though it was.
“Shit, man,” she said. “You’re going to be all right. Just get the hell up.”
She darted a look across the street. The mercenary had moved subtly, leaning forward just a bit. He’d no doubt seen the exchange of money, watched as the codger had fallen, was watching still as she rapped the gent’s cheeks in a vain attempt to rouse him.
“Get the hell up before you get me arrested.” She pulled at him again and he found his feet.
Arrested was a euphemism, of course. Crime was the least of the atrocities and so had lost its meaning. There was hedonism. And hopelessness. Those things they had aplenty.
“You said you’d help me escape,” he complained.
She glared at him. “Did you get a ride out of this fucking shithole?”
He sobbed and caught it with his teeth, biting down on the sound the way old dentures caught on a cracked lip. He nodded.
“Then stop belly aching. You got what you paid for.”
She had no patience for the johns. Most of them had a decent place to live still. The holocaust, the apocalypse, the rapture as the chosen might have called it, left Theda sleeping in a cove of broken slate and cement by night and peering at the bustling afternoon street from a derelict card table day upon day, calling to people as they passed by, in order to earn a living:
“Hey,” she’d coax. “Want a magic beyond any? I can do it for you. Give you some escape.”
Magic. A foolish thing to ply when men wanted sex and debauchery; she figured that out quickly enough. She had to change her come-on in the early days, but that was fine; Theda was a smart gal.
“I can give you a ride you’ll never forget,” she’d say, and that one would get them. A chance for some filthy old fart to roll over on a girl in her twenties. Old fools.
She learned early to target the old men; the younger ones weren’t so inclined to pay for sex, not when they could take it for free. A girl didn’t find fresh-faced young men like her first trick anymore; they’d all become too jaded.
That first trick she’d offered to do for half a ten, so long as he had the right paperwork. Like this old codger here, she knew he imagined an experience entirely different than what he got. And just like this gent, she’d gripped that young man’s hand tightly as she’d drawn out her pin and stuck him deftly in the thumb. Just like her dear old mom had taught her.
A bubble of blood had risen on the pad of his skin and she fought the urge to smear it between her thumb and forefinger before she’d slipped the digit into her mouth.
She had concentrated very hard, as hard as she’d ever done when she and her mother worked together in the last days, before they knew it was the last days. She drew hard on the flesh, pulling in even more of his fluid as she focused.
She got shifts of colors for a few seconds, then the unnerving sound of gunfire, the acrid stink of gas and mouldy earth. She presumed he felt the burning that came with the stink she caught wind of. Mustard gas, something whispered to her psyche. So, the poor young fellow had been in the First World War during his last life. Had died as a soldier, retching in his trench, along with a dozen other men.
She wasn’t sure how much he’d understood about the vision, but she did know he got all of it—all of her johns did. Every detail, every nuance of sound, each smell, and sight. He was there because she was there. And because she was there she knew things about him that he wouldn’t want anyone to know–least of all himself.
Poor soul had flattened right out on the remnants of sidewalk—just like this old fool now– and she’d had to rummage through his pockets for her pay before chasing him off.
The old gent in the here and now, was still swaying on his feet enough that he stumbled and went to one knee again. She knelt down next to him.
“I said get the fuck out of here,” she said, but there was no sting of rebuke in her voice. She just didn’t have it in her after what she’d shown him.
She watched him amble down the street, swaggering sideways as though he was drunk. It was often this way with the reincarnated. When their lives got telecast to them in living, breathing, reeking color, they felt the shame again as though they were fresh. Except, most of them didn’t quite understand that it was their own soul memories they were experiencing. They imagined it was a reaction to a vision she had somehow pressed into their consciousness, a roller coaster ride of hallucination.
They weren’t really sure how she did it, or even if it was something she actually did to them. They just knew they lived something thrilling and terrifying in those moments and it was worth the price of admission. A short bit of exhilaration in a life filled with agony and despair.
Because there was no goodness left in in New Earth, not since the god had come, no real joy in living. So, whether a little trick of the light, a trick of the hand, a trick of some sort of hallucination, it didn’t matter. It was a pretty trick she turned, indeed.
No one cared about such trivial things as morals, ethics, even the old-fashioned notion of sin. It was back to the primeval concerns of eat, sleep, forage, fornicate, and if all that was taken care of, you moved it up a notch. Steal, kill, use, and assault. Same things really, just on another playing level, like some kind of warped Dante’s inferno high on a gob of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Now, not quite eight months after the war, she actually made enough money every day to buy a stale egg sandwich from the survivor’s station, one that, fortunately, came with a smear of godspit taped to the bottom of the cellophane wrapper.
The coffee she got free, left on the back step in a thermos by the manager of the station, Ami. A good man for a dealer, even if he was a bit intense.
She wished she could say she was grateful for his kindness; instead, the only thing she was grateful for was the sandwich and the smear of bliss-inducing drug that he taped to the bottom because she wasn’t grateful for much these days. The god had changed all that.
Only the physical touched her now. Gone were the days when she cared about anything. The sun was just something that baked her arms to a toast-colored brown. The rain made her card table even more dilapidated. Most times she didn’t even feel sorry for the prostitutes who set up shop with a bruise or two on display.
These last four days were the first time in nearly eight months that she felt anything except the anxiety of getting her next fix; and she paid attention to that nervous energy. She’d be a fool not to.
All because of that unflinching stare from across the way. She couldn’t face another day of it. She’d lingered too long already under his scrutiny. She’d need to find another spot to peddle her wares.
She eyed him again and wondered what he thought of her particular brand of shenanigans. Had he noticed the way the john gripped her hand as though she were a tether keeping him from falling off a very steep cliff before he toddled off, still reeling from his vision.
Would he infer something spiritual about what he saw–because lawlessness, hedonism, and debauchery were all very fine and good in this new world, but religion of any sort most definitely was not.
And what was definitely not welcome in New Earth brought death.
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