Hummingbird Salamander(80)

Then it was like he didn’t know what to ask me. Before something clicked. A flushed quality to his face, as if he’d taken drugs.

“You’re not easy to kill.”

“You almost did.”

“Yeah, well, it’s something I’m good at.”

“I have no quarrel with the truth of that.”

Langer smiled. “What are you? Out of an old book?”

“Some days.”

“Rope-a-dope, huh? Well, I’m no dope.”

A fire ate at Langer from long before the warehouse. A kind of disease had taken him, but he was still alive and walking among us. That’s what I decided the longer we shouted at each other.

I was still figuring out what to reply when he shouted across the void again.

“Why did she give you things?” Instead of giving them to me. Genuine. A genuine hurt behind it. “Why’d she take the time? Why’d she bother with you?”

I hated Langer on principle. But I also hated him for presuming to make me small in Silvina’s estimation. Even as I tried to do the same to him. How had she ever loved this?

“What about you? What did you give Silvina? Biotoxins? People who wouldn’t think twice about—”

“Shut the fuck up! You don’t know! You have no idea.”

Then he began to kind of argue with himself. And that’s how I knew he’d been having a lot of conversations with me in his head. And this other Jane didn’t understand … anything.

“The truth is, the only way we save ourselves is to get to the end faster. Silvina knew that. Somewhere, what she set in motion knows that. And no one—no one!—has the right to stop that.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think Silvina believed in that.” Didn’t know that’s how I deep down felt until I said it.

Langer considered that, nodded, came back at me from another direction.

“You got a voice in your head, too? One you can’t shake?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Sometimes.”

“He calls you ‘Lucky Jill,’ you know.”

Unexpected/expected, but I was too busy watching his hands to give him the satisfaction of reacting.

“Who? What’s his name? His real name?”

“The madman who wants to destroy Silvina.” So, no real name forthcoming.

“She’s dead. Somebody already destroyed her.”

He considered that in a way I found unsettling. Like Silvina was a giant stone statue in the wilderness.

Then he said, “He’s killed almost everyone I know. Or ever cared about. Destroyed it all. Even the things we created.”

We created. I chewed on that. “Maybe everyone you ever knew was a fucking asshole.”

The gun fluttered briefly upward, then pointed down again. He couldn’t know what was in my pocket. The hard, cool shape that gave me confidence.

“You want Silvina to succeed,” he said. “So why couldn’t you just step away, go away, leave it alone? I only need you dead because you won’t stop.”

“Is that what ‘Jack’ says? That I want Silvina to succeed?”

He laughed, bitter. “He’s a ghost of the old world. Doesn’t understand the new world. The one that’s coming.”

“Who does he work for?”

“Doesn’t matter. Works for himself now, and he wants every part of Silvina gone.”

Did Jack want that? Or did Jack just want to mess with Langer’s head? And how had he gotten into Langer’s head so thoroughly?

“Maybe he just hates you, Langer. Maybe he thought Silvina had already killed some people.”

“A lot of people need killing. Ask him—ask him about what he did to us. That week on the beach. Have him tell you about that.”

The way his face crumpled at his own words, I knew he meant him and Silvina, not what Hellmouth had done to his men.

“What week on the beach?” The most ludicrous, sentimental thing. But it still tore at him.

“We were going to change the world. But he broke his word.”

The way Langer said it made me jealous in some formless way. Langer radiating such emotion about Silvina and Hellmouth. Like in trying to glean Silvina from Hellmouth I was opening myself up to more disappointment.

“So why go after Roger Simpson and not Jack? Kind of a failure, isn’t it?” Wanting to drive in a knife.

“Vilcapampa’s evil. Jack’s a phantom. No one knows how to get to him.” All in good time.

“That’s not an answer.”

“You’d have liked to talk to Roger again, wouldn’t you? Good old Roger. Family protector. Him, Ronnie—that’d be rich. What they might tell you.”

It struck me Langer had gone rogue, too. It struck me that he was supremely unreliable. That it didn’t really matter what I said to him or he said to me.

Apparently, Langer’d had the same thought, because he raised the rifle. A tough shot in the rain, but he might catch me in the spray.

“Anyway, it ends here. Take your hand out of your pocket. Put the gun down.”

“It’s not a gun,” I whispered. “It’s a message from Silvina.”

I saw the look on his face as I pushed the button on the device. Saw him understand I didn’t much like my neighbor. And I realized he could read lips.