That man was a con-spirat-or, a fucking Union soldier.

GET TO

GETTO

Slowly the hatred began to fade as he thought about how he’d fooled them. He’d been only thirty feet away from the soldiers, holding his cocked gun, crouching down in a bowl of dirt high on a ledge of rock above them. They’d eased into the grass and found the bag he’d carefully placed there. Shivering with fear he’d heard their alien voices, heard the wet snorting of the dogs, the rustle of grass.

Hrubek saw the letters again, GETO. They floated past, then vanished.

Hrubek recalled the colored lights on the police car starting to spin. A moment later the soldiers returned to the cars and the one who hated him most, the lean fucker in blue, the one with the limp, got into the truck with his dog. They sped off east.

Hrubek crouched down and put his cheek against the damp road. Then he stood up.

“Good night, ladies…”

It was coming back to him. GETO. He squinted down the highway, westward. He was seeing not the black strip of asphalt but rather the letters, which slowly stopped swirling and began to line up for him. Like good little soldier boys.

GETO 4

Hrubek’s mind was filling with thoughts, complicated thoughts, wonderful thoughts. He started walking. “I’m gonna see you cry…”

GETON 4

There!

There it was! He began trotting toward it. The letters were all falling into place.

GETON 47 M

The dogs were gone, the conspirators too. The fucker with the limp, Dr. Richard, the hospital, the orderlies… all of his enemies were behind him. He’d fooled them all!

Michael Hrubek searched his soul and found that his fear was under control and that his mission was as lucid as a perfect diamond. He paused and set one of the tiny animal skulls in a nest of grass at the base of the post, muttering a short prayer. He then walked past the green sign that said RIDGETON 47 MILES, turned off the road into the cover of brush and began to hurry due west.

On her parted lips he rubs the petal of a yellow rose.

His eyes are fixed on hers, two feet away, close enough for him to penetrate the orbit of her perfume, not so close each feels the heat radiating from the other’s body in this chill room. She reaches out for him but he motions curtly for her to stop. Her hands acquiesce but then rebelliously reach slowly to her own shoulders and dislodge the satin straps of her nightgown. They fall away and the cream-colored garment drops to her waist. His eyes stray to her breasts but he does not touch her and, as he again commands, she lowers her hands to her sides.

From the green-and-russet tangle of a rosebush, the reigning plant in the darkened greenhouse, he lifts away two more petals. These, pink. He holds them in his large, confident fingers, and lifts them to her eyes, which she closes slowly. She feels the petal skin brush over her lids and continue down her cheek. Again he makes a circuit of her mouth, both petals coursing slowly over her half-open lips.

She wets these lips and tells him playfully that he’s destroying one of her prize flowers. But he again shakes his head, insisting on silence. She leans toward him and nearly succeeds in planting a contracted nipple against his forearm but he sways back and their bodies don’t touch. A petal caresses her chin then slips from his fingers, spiraling to the slate greenhouse path on which they stand. He snatches another from the shivering bush. Still, her eyes are closed, her hands are at her sides. As he has insisted.

Now, he brushes her earlobes so gently she doesn’t at first feel the touch of the flower’s skin. He presses the valleys behind her ears and caresses the soft wisps of white-gold hair.

Now, her shoulders, muscled from carrying tubs of earth like that out of which these rosebushes grow.

Now, her throat. Her head tilts back and if she opened her eyes, she’d see a cluster of pale stars awash in the speckled glass. Now, he weakens and kisses her quickly, the petals disappearing from his spreading fingers, which grip her neck and pull her to him. Her breath, matching her desire, rushes inside her, pulling with it his own. She moves her head in a slow circle to increase the pressure of his touch. But he’s too fast for her and he dodges away. He stands back again, dropping the crushed petals and tugging more from the thorny stem beside them.

Her eyes still are closed and the anticipation grows unbearable as she awaits the next touch, which occurs on the lower part of her modest breasts, and she sets her teeth as her lips spread in what could be taken for a snarl but is rather evidence of will. The roses move slowly along the arcs of her breasts and she feels too the drag of several of his fingers, a much rougher feel yet equally provocative… Soft and rough. Fingernails, petal flesh. The heat of his touch, the cold of the greenhouse floor on her bare feet.

She feels pressure as slight as a breath. She’s astonished that such a large man is capable of such subtle motion. He kisses her again and the sensations from his lips and fingers fire through her.

But he won’t hurry. The pressure fades and vanishes and she opens her eyes with a plea for him not to stop. He again closes her eyes and she obeys, listening to a curious ripping sound. Then silence, as her neck and breasts are covered by two huge handsful of petals, which fall away from his hands and trickle to their feet.

He kisses each of her eyes and she takes this as the sign that he wants her to open them. They gaze at each other for a moment and she sees that, no, not all the petals have fallen. One remains. He holds it between them, a bright-red oval from a John Armstrong plant. He opens his mouth and places it on his tongue, like a priest dispensing host. She desperately works the nightgown over her hips and reaches for him, enveloping him in her arms, sliding her hands into the small of his back. He leans forward. Their tongues connect and as she pulls him down on top of her, they transfer the red petal back and forth until it disintegrates and they swallow the fragments as they swallow each other.

Lis Atcheson remained lost for a moment in this memory then opened her eyes and gazed out over the flowers in the greenhouse, listening to the pleasant hiss of spray from the watering system.

“Oh, Owen,” she whispered. “Owen…”

She set down her packed suitcase and strolled through the damp, fragrant room, then out the lath-house door to the flagstone patio. She looked out over the lake.

The black water lapped persistently.

Troubled, she noticed that the level of the lake had risen another several inches in the last twenty minutes. She glanced to her left, toward a low-lying portion of the property-the dip in the yard behind the garage, where Owen had stacked the extra bags. A creek trickled into the lake there and the marshy shoreline was obscured with rushes. She couldn’t see how well the barrier was holding but she didn’t particularly want to walk down the narrow, slippery path to find out. Owen was a meticulous-often fanatic-worker and she guessed that he’d built a solid levee. Her own engineering efforts, in the center of the yard, looked shoddy. The water was almost up to the level of the bags she’d dozed upon after she and Owen had made love; it was only eighteen inches beneath the top row.

She walked closer to the lake. Above her, no stars. She couldn’t even discern the underside of the clouds; the sky was flat and smooth, a gray-blue monotone, like the flesh of a shark. Were the clouds moving or not? Were they a hundred feet in the air, or ten thousand? She couldn’t tell.