In front it’s just a small place. There’s a cabin here and there, tucked away under big dusty old trees, and you can hear the pigs grunting happily in the back as somebody is clanking a bucket on fence rails. There are dogs standing in the dust, wagging their tails gently, grinning, and looking entirely too smart for their own good. There’s a couple of children with snot dribbling down their upper lips. There’s a couple of crooked-looking people sitting in the shade of the porch. Some other folks with blocky heads and eyes that don’t track very well come out of the only open door, and stare at them.
Emma is stiff when she goes crawling down the footholds at their final parking spot. Her foot finally reaches downward into space, frustrated. She can’t find the ground with her sneaker toe and she doesn’t trust her leg to take the weight if she just drops, cold.
Then she feels Dance’s hands come up around her ribs, lift her down the last ridiculous few inches she couldn’t reach. He steadies her, feeling her wobble the first few steps, and then she’s got a grip on the cab door, and she nods. “Thanks,” she says, and he lets go, steps back. She blinks into the glare, pulling down her shirt.
She’s about to turn around when her hearing is split wide open by the giant’s voice of the Preacher. He says, echoing like a massive temple gong from somewhere inside the deeps in the back of her skull, “HAVE you been blessed with the Name of the Lord Jesus and HAVE you accepted HIS LOVE IN YOUR HEART?”
Emma feels a garbled noise come out of her mouth and she slumps forward into the door, gasping.
The Preacher’s voice grows louder. “HAVE you accepted the LORD Jesus AS Your PERSONAL Savior?’
She almost doesn’t feel it when Dance’s hands snap up around her ribs, slide up around her armpits, and cradle her back against him. “Easy,” he murmurs. “Give it a moment, let you get your legs working again–”
“HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD OF THE LORD?” the Preacher cries out, anguished and solemn and deafeningly crazy loud.
Emma gasps. “Why is he shouting like that–”
“Who?” Dance says, and it’s a whisper, a breeze brushing her ear, compared to the Preacher’s roaring into the middle of her skull.
“Preacher, he’s shouting, God, make him stop shouting–”
There’s other confused noises around her.
Drin’s voice barely registers.
Dance is saying something, and then there’s a tight wall of glittering Dance tail coiled around her head like a turban, about an inch away from her ears, and completely, heavily, draped tight against her collarbones and back. The ice pick in her brain is shut off.
She gasps, and feels the tip of it patting her shoulder, resting against her carotid artery anxiously, touching her face. She’s in a box made of Dance’s body. Dance’s head is in the dark box with her, too, breathing fast in the humid air, with the only light coming from the coil itself. It’s quiet in there, with only their own rapid panting. No Preacher voice.
“Oh God,” Emma moans, resting her forehead against Dance’s cheek. He kisses her gently.
“What was it?” he whispers.
“Preacher,” she gasps. “I came out of the truck cab and suddenly he was shouting in my head. Really shouting.”
“And not in a way that can get through me,” Dance murmurs.
Emma looks at him, blinking away tears of pain. “Thank God,” she gasps.
“If I open up, can you bear it long enough to tell them to get Preacher to shut up?”
“Why?” She says, feeling stupid and half-blind.
“Because there’s a gun trying to dig into my back,” Dance says quietly. “They think I might hurt you.”
“Oh God, Dance, open up and I’ll yell at them to cut it out,” Emma says.
“Right,” and then his coils are sliding apart, and Emma starts yelling and the icepick radio volume in her head is even more massively loud than before, but she’s yelling anyway.
“Shut it off! Shut off Preacher!” she screams, over and over.
Just as suddenly as it came, the racket in her head is gone. Shut off, and she’s just leaning silently into Dance, face turned down into his shoulder, tears running down her face from the pain.
“Easy, girlfriend,” he murmurs, hugging her, his hands spread on her back. “Just hang in there, it’ll ease up.”
“I see what you mean about it being so fucking bright out here,” Emma says, unwilling to turn her face up and squint into the silent glare.
“Sorry, ma’am,” says one voice, and then another. “Didn’t realize you had a mod that could pick up that band. We ast Preacher to turned up the volume to make sure the bugs couldn’t get in, and then we thought–we just thought–”
“You wasn’t,” Fozzi’s voice says at the others, disgusted. “Thinking, that is. While I appreciate your desire to keep all of Drin’s ladies safe, let’s not surprise ’em in the process. Don’t be pointing popguns, okay? It ain’t effective.”
“It’ll take down bugs,” says the man who doesn’t want to lower the gun. Emma can feel Dance’s body sway into her a little, not resisting when he’s poked in the back.
Fozzie says, “You know how that kinda thing annoys my old lady, and Dance here, he’s just a baby. He ain’t got any manners yet. Trust me, if it’s loaded for bugs, you’ll just piss him off enough to whang your head off like he was peeling grapes. You ain’t gonna take out a Black Ops Naga with a popgun like that.”
There’s a silence. Then scuffling of boots. “You didn’t say, Fozz, man.”
“You shoulda said,” somebody else in the curtain of tear-blurred glare says.
Dance shifts his weight slightly and draws in a deeper breath next to Emma’s body, relieved, as if the gun has come away from his back.
A woman’s purring whiskey voice says then, close behind them, “Oh yeah? And have you cowboys play at testing your draw? That’s be a fine way to treat a guest, force him to take your stupid lil popper and bend it around your thick heads.”
Drin’s voice says then, “That’d be a shame, looks like a perfectly good thirty-ought to me.”
“Gun’s only as good as the man carrying it, ain’t that the truth? Good to see you again, Drin, I’m flattered you trust this buncha of six-year-olds.” The whiskey voice stalks around them, speaking as she moves.
There’s more muttering.
The woman snorts. “Efrim, you better get that thing unloaded and put up in the gun safe before you shoot one of the kids, getting surprised by shit you ain’t never seen before. We got guests. Behave yourself.”
The man replies, “We got bug trace popping up here and there for two weeks all over the county–”
“–meaning I’m damn glad Drin showed up with the cavalry, and we ain’t got time for ape-troop crap,” the whiskey voice growls, and the anger in it is profoundly convincing. “And hey, wow, I dunno, looks to me like Dance’s manners are just fine. Then of course you got Emma riding him like he’s a goddamn pony. Damndest thing I ever seen. I wouldn’t piss off an old-time War Librarian, if I was you. Ever see guys who died on permanent shuffle round the prisons with their records lost? Ma’am, it’s pleasure to meet you, and I apologize for this pack of goons.”
Emma sticks out her hand, blindly, and feels something cool and dry grip her hand briefly, precisely, and let go.
The woman keeps moving. Emma has a blurry view of jeans and dusty cowboy boots worn white by the buckles, straps, and metal of riding spurs. The woman says, “Looks more like we’re a bunch of drooling trailer trash drunks with harelips and tinfoil on our heads, making a livin’ off stealin’ each other’s dirty underwear. I can smell you lot from a mile away. And you ain’t been testing your blood sugar while you was gone, have you, Fozz-man?”
“Jeeze,” Fozzie says, pained. There’s scuffling nosies, and boots scattering away at speed.
“Right,” the woman says. “Let’s see if we can make up for being rude and give Drin’s ladies some decent hospitality, off in the cool. I got lemonade squeezed for you.”
Fozzie sighs. “My old lady makes the best damn lemonade in the world.”
“Lemonade sounds…good,” Dance says then, and sounds surprised at himself.
Fozzie chuckles. “She’ll get you eating right,” he says.
The woman lifts a long plaid sleeve and snaps her fingers, and Dance’s head jerks a degree. “Man, when was the last time this child got some decent liver in him?” she says. “We’re gonna need some lobsters and some of them little bait-shiners to get him feeding again. Crawdads and maybe some shrimp, if you can get it real fresh. Sound good, Dance? I thought so. Gotta eat fresh when you’re one of them real old-time boys. Don’t you worry, folks, we’ll find Dance the right stuff. I mean, I been known to eat crickets dusted with bonemeal, when I got to, but it’s worse than K-Fry for what it does to my insides, dunno about you.”
Then Drin’s arm is around Emma’s shoulders, and he’s murmuring, “Need a minute? You need to lie down somewhere quiet?”
“Cool and quiet and lemonade,” Dance says.
Rather than move her aching head, Emma reaches out, fumbles at Drin’s shirt. “Yeah,” she says, and leans on both men and making her legs stagger along somehow or other. “Damn, it’s bright out here,” she says.
“Amen,” says Dance.
One of the man around them mutters, “Sounds like Fozz’s old lady was pissed off before we even got home!”
“Yeah,” says another. Emma blinks. It’s Billie Dean, still wearing the headphones. “Well, she worries about Fozz. You know I told him to use his kit and take his meds every night, just like I promised her I would, but he just keeps forgetting.”
“Well, if anybody can beat some sense into Fozz, it’s her,” says Bruce, as if this reassures him in an uncertain world. “Fozz’d forget to pay the bills if she wasn’t right there with everything laid out.”
Billie Dean looms over her then, and peers at her. “I hope Preacher didn’t hurt you too bad. He don’t mean to.”
Emma blinks up at him. “It wasn’t the radio? I mean, the cab speakers or something?”
“Oh no,” Billie Dean says. “Preacher can go right into your head, if you’re new around here. He got rules about pokin’ and pryin’ when he hears folks livin’ here, but newcomers, he checks ’em out pretty good. Most folks don’t even know he bin in their minds, unless they got bugbit. But I can hear him now when he gets loud, so can a few other folks. He’s just been getting stronger and stronger. He ramps it up when there’s bug trace going on. He purely can’t stand ’em. Says it makes him have unchristian thoughts. He didn’t mean to get so loud with you. You ought to be mostly okay now, he’s tuned you down to naught already. I can hear him on the other bands, where I bin hearing bug trace sometimes. Want I should tell him you’re okay? He starts weepin’ and crying about redemption when he knows he hurt somebody with mods like that. Breaks his heart.”
Emma blinks at him. Dizzily, she says, “You tell Preacher I’m gonna be fine, and I thank him for his help gettin’ us here safely. That’s hard work, testifying out loud like that, for that many hours.”
Billie Dean nods his head deeply enough for her blurry sight to see it. “I will do that, ma’am, thank you. That’s kind of you. See, Preacher is what you get if you take a — a Librarian and add this psych mod to ’em, and hurt ’em a lot until they find the Lord. I guess there’s a guy like Preacher who yells about Krisna a lot over in India.”