Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [49]
“I ought’a kick her fucking ass.”
She’d tried to scramble out of his reach, scraped palms and the frantic heels of her Hush Puppy loafers slinging grit and dust, but there were legs like prison bars, legs that wouldn’t step aside to let her through, faces that stared down in shock and disgust and something hungry like delight.
“She’s not worth it, man,” Rick stammered, and Robin had hung on those words, terrified, praying silently that Tony would see the obvious truth in them, that she wasn’t worth it, wasn’t worth the energy it would take to realize the bottomless fury in his eyes.
He’d stood over her, a dangerous animal she’d never seen take off its mask, what big teeth you have, what big claws; big man, still holding his balls with one hand.
“Please, Tony,” she whimpered through the blood and snot and stinging salt tears, “I’m sorry. Please…”
“Fuck her, man,” Rick said, creeping, oily desperation. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“Yeah, whatever you say.” And then, to her, “But baby, you better know that your life is over. The goddamn niggers won’t even want you after I’m done talking.”
He drew his foot back, and she’d flinched, bracing herself for the hard rubber toe of his sneaker, but he’d struck the ground instead, and bits of the parking lot rained down in her hair, pelting her arms and face.
And lucky Amy Edwards had climbed into the candy-apple CRX in her place, and the ring of drunken teenagers had broken up and wandered away to other cars and other bottles, leaving her to the night and its consequences.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, and she was still sitting there, shivering and shielding her swelling nose with blood-smeared hands, trying to stop crying, when someone behind her had asked, “Are you gonna be okay?”
She’d turned around, and the pretty boy in the leopard coat had been there, and a girl with skin like milk and whiter dreadlocks haloed in the sodium-arc glare. The girl wasn’t wearing a coat, just a Hanes tank top, and her bare arms were covered with silver-blue webs, spiderwebs like casting nets from the backs of her broad hands to her shoulders.
“Do you need us to take you to the hospital?” the girl with the tattoos asked, the white girl, that beautiful ala-baster gorgon. And then another boy, not so pretty, something broken and wary in his lean face, had knelt beside her and wrapped a leather jacket around her.
“I think he broke her nose, Spyder,” the boy told the white gorgon, and she’d knelt, too, made Robin move her hands and frowned. There was a small and perfect cruciform scar between the gorgon’s eyes, softest rose against the snow, and it had almost seemed to glow when she leaned close to look at Robin’s nose.
“Yeah, I guess you do,” the gorgon said, and then they’d helped her stand and followed the pretty boy, haughty swish and fake fur, across the empty parking lot.
4.
Where the highway cut deep into Red Mountain, the weathered gash down through its Paleozoic bones, shale and chert and iron-ore ligaments, Robin switched her headlights on. The sun was gone, burned down to a molten sliver, orange-red streak in the western sky as she crested the mountain and started down into the wide valley below. The city twinkled and glittered in the fresh night, the uneven cluster of electric light and the garish ribbons of I-65 and I-20.
She’d been concentrating on nothing but the cherry-red taillights of the eighteen-wheeler in front of her, ignoring the oily flow of images that had begun to play behind her eyes, the memories past vivid that ate into her cool, her queen-bitch deceit, like nail polish remover through Styrofoam. She felt dim relief to see the city, to know that Spyder and Byron were so close now.
“Don’t let it freak you out,” Spyder would say, “they’re only flashbacks. They can’t hurt you.” But Robin knew better, knew that Spyder knew even better than her.
Outside, it was getting colder, but she had the window down, anyway; she hated to drive alone now, especially after dark, paced the Civic to keep up with the speeding patches of traffic. The heater