The other guard grunted, turning to Chandra. “And her?”
Chandra squirmed under his hungry eyes, tugging on her T-shirt. The shirt was intentionally too small, to show off her figure. This was a key part of their plan but, still, Ash’s cheeks burned as he caught a glimpse of her bare skin from the corner of his eye. He’d spent most of the afternoon pretending her body ended at her neck.
“You know what Mac says about touching the merchandise.” The first guard nodded, a hard jerk of his square jaw. “Let ’em past.”
Merchandise. Ash had never realized how many muscles there were in his face, how hard it was to focus on each of them at the same time, willing them to stay still when all they wanted to do was grimace at the ugliness of what had just been said.
Not a girl; not a human being.
Merchandise.
He didn’t think he’d ever hated anyone as much as he hated Mac at that moment. He didn’t know the man personally, but he’d heard of him. Unfortunately. Everyone in New Seattle had heard of Mac Murphy, owner of the city’s grimiest brothel. He was a toad of a human being, both in physical appearance, and in general effect on the world around him. Ash wished it were physically possible to squish him beneath his shoe. The world would be a better place if Mac Murphy were just green sludge on the sole of his boot.
There was a beat of silence, and then the second guard shuffled to the side, licking his lips. “Go on then, honey,” he said, eyes on Chandra.
“Move,” Ash murmured, voice low, nudging Chandra forward.
She stumbled, shoulders hunched up near her ears.
“Oh God,” she said, walking steadier now. She tried, again, to tug her T-shirt lower, as though she could make it grow several more inches through sheer force of will.
Ash tipped his head as they walked past the horrible men with guns. He was careful not to move too quickly and to keep his shoulders relaxed, like this was all normal. Something he did every day.
The green sky lit up. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Not an omen, Ash told himself.
Keep walking.
Mac’s brothel crouched at the end of the dock like an animal waiting to pounce on its prey. It used to be a motel, the kind of place with a flickering vacancy light, and rooms that could be rented by the hour. It’d been horrible even before the floods had made everything horrible; now, it was hell. Only the top two floors were still above the water, a thick carpet of black mold crawling up their dingy, yellow siding. There wasn’t glass in the windows, but Mac had covered some of them with cardboard and old blankets to keep what little warmth there was left inside the building. The rest of the windows yawned open, reminding Ash of broken teeth.
Mac himself sat in a moth-eaten chair inside the first motel room off the dock, feet kicked up on his makeshift desk, which was just a moldy piece of wood balanced over two stacks of cinder blocks. The door was propped open with a brick, and Mac had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was a squat man with a barrel chest, and his face really did have a toad-like quality: eyes too far apart; big, peeling chapped lips. Ash half expected his tongue to flick out of his mouth and snap up a nearby fly.
Mac chewed on his thick bottom lip, cigarette dangling. “You got business here, son?”
His eyes lingered on Chandra’s T-shirt, and Ash felt a flash of anger deep in his gut.
“Heard you paid for girls,” Ash said, working hard to keep his voice steady.
Chandra shifted her eyes to the floor, shoulders bunched up around her ears. She sniffled in a small, pitiful way, and Ash felt a flush of pride. He knew she was scared, but this, at least, was pure performance. In fact, it reminded him of a television show about the Wild West that she’d been watching the week before. This was why he’d asked Chandra to help him out with this little mission. Zora was a crap actress.
Mac leaned back in his chair, considering her. After a moment he said, “She ain’t much to look at.”
It took every bit of willpower Ash had not to knock the cigarette from Mac’s mouth right then and there.
He caught a scowl shaping Chandra’s lips and elbowed her. She quickly transformed it into the beginning of a sob. Hands balled at her mouth, silent tears.
Mac let his chair drop back down to all fours. “But there’s no accounting for taste around here. Some of my clients like ’em different. I could give you . . .” He paused, digging something out of his teeth with his thumbnail. Shrugging, he tried, “Fifty?”
Ash swallowed, barely hearing the price. He prepared himself to say the thing he’d come here to say. “Would you take it in trade?”
The words turned his stomach. People weren’t things to be traded. Or, they shouldn’t be. But here he was.
Mac’s eyes narrowed, and Ash felt the muscles in his shoulders pull tight. Did he recognize him? Before the mega-quake, Ash’s face had been in the news here and there. He looked different now. His hair was longer and shaggier. He hadn’t bothered shaving since Dorothy had disappeared, and he had a little scruff on his cheeks.
But, still, there were people around these parts who might remember the young pilot who was brought back from the past by a mad scientist. Ash had been counting on Mac not being one of those people. He didn’t look like the type to watch the news.
Mac’s eyes lingered on him a moment longer. “You ain’t one of my regulars?”
It sounded like a question, like Mac was trying to figure out where he recognized him from.
Ash tensed. “No, sir, I’m not,” he said. “But I’ve been by the Rusty Nail now and then.”
The Rusty Nail was a bar at the end of Aurora that Mac was known to frequent. Mac nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation.
Ash exhaled, relieved. “I heard you got a new girl. Real pretty. Brown hair.” I heard she bit the last guy who tried to touch her, Ash thought, but he didn’t say that part out loud.
It was the biting detail that had caught his attention. He’d been at some trash bar on the outskirts of town when the guy next to him had yanked back his sleeve, showing off two swollen, moon-shaped welts in the crook of his arm.
“Teeth,” he’d said, when he caught Ash looking. “Murphy’s new whore has a temper on her.”
Dorothy, Ash had thought. He could easily picture her biting any man who tried to touch her without her permission.
According to bite-mark guy, Mac’s new whore had shown up in a seedier part of the city about a month ago, lost and alone but pretty as a picture. She wouldn’t tell anyone her real name, but Mac was calling her Hope, and, Hey, wasn’t that ironic? Get it? Because she didn’t have any hope left. Followed by a hearty laugh.
Ash had supplied the bite-mark guy with drinks and bowls of peanuts until he was reasonably sure he’d gotten the whole story.
And then he’d taken him out behind the bar and beaten the living crap out of him.
Because really.
Now Mac’s face broke into a crooked smile that showed off several rotting teeth. “Oh, we got a new girl all right, but she’s worth a bit more than fifty.” A pause, like he was considering something. “I suppose I could let her go for twice that—and that’s me being generous, mind, what with you a new customer and all.”
Ash had been expecting this. He dug around in his coat, pausing when he found the slim envelope he’d tucked inside the lining.