Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
T hree weeks after the stings, Quiggs departed the hospital hunched inside one of three deep laundry bins delivering clean uniforms to the soldiers on Max’s barge.
Naturally, his bin had a rickety left wheel, banging his tailbone with each revolution.
Somewhere out there, Beau followed, keeping in the shadows, his eyes and ears alert for suspicious activity. Quiggs doubted anything would happen with the mist hanging over the city like a tattered veil an hour before dawn. At designated corners, soldiers slumped as if drunk against the walls of the closed pubs, waiting for the military patrol to cart them off. Nothing out of the ordinary to alert the assassin Quiggs was relocating.
Max concluded a group of extremists had planned the attacks with hired assassins tracking Quiggs for an opportunity. Until the guilty parties were caught, Max insisted his barge was the safest hiding place. Quiggs would be disguised as an ordinary soldier.
Max fed the heralds a story of Quiggs confined to the hospital another day before completing his recovery in an undisclosed apartment. The extremists would immediately search for clues to the location. Like baiting ferals, Max was giving them something to sniff by installing Cutty in a two-bedroom apartment in Port Paducah. If Max’s manservant wasn’t accompanying him on the barge, there was a damn good reason. They would assume he was caring for Quiggs. Instead of Quiggs, whoever broke into the apartment would find soldiers waiting inside.
Cutty had volunteered to bait the bastard. If hatched any earlier, the boilers would have stung his husband to death.
Inside the rickety bin, Quiggs heard the swish of brooms in front of the shops, the spray of hoses washing the streets of debris, the clack of garbage bins. Skilled cadets without rank were doomed to spend their adult lives performing these mundane jobs unless Quiggs invented new industries and the Triangle expanded its boundaries.
The early morning breeze carried the greasy smoke from hundreds of balconies where residents had fired up grills to cook at home instead of dining out. The attacks could be about money and displaced workers. As more people cooked at home, merchants lost income. His fueled grills had disrupted supply and demand for the dining halls. Jobs were rerouted. New businesses opened as old ones closed.
Water slapped the dock as he was wheeled toward the berth reserved for the commander’s barge. The barge was sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. It carried up to two hundred soldiers who rotated shifts with archers in watchtowers around the canal and with soldiers patrolling the borders and guarding the herders. The canal was thirty feet wide, its steady current powered by the lost engineering room. Six crewmen on each side used poles to shove away from the lip of the bank if the barge drifted too close. A pilot judged distances and barked orders where to pole.
There was a watchtower on the stern and one on the bow. Archers stood inside, scanning the vines for predators and yelling down where the vines infringed too close to the canal. Archers also watched ahead for flags on the mileposts. Blue signaled larger fins were nosing the banks near the herds or had shown aggression toward passing vessels. Red flags signaled possible feral activity. White signaled passenger pickup. Yellow signaled more goats needed nearby. The barge always hauled two flatboats of extra goats to drop off.
It had been this way for centuries, but Quiggs threatened their complacence.
The bin wheeled up the gangplank and to the rear where Max’s cabin was located. A soldier lifted him out, his hands on Quiggs’s waist no longer than necessary. Quiggs found himself at a green door with the sword and skull emblem of the commander’s rank. The deck around the cabin was barely enough for two men to walk abreast. Four steep steps took Quiggs down inside the cabin.
He remembered a tour of the cabin with his future classmates when he was seven. Max’s uncle was the commander then, clean-shaven, tall, and aloof, dedicated to exacting obedience to the rules. The cadets had gazed in awe at the red skulls on his cuffs.
Max’s count had eclipsed his uncle’s when he challenged for leadership a year after enlisting.
Young boys didn’t care about becoming commander and strutting around the barge in a stiff jacket and hat barking orders. Boys aspired to become master archers. Quiggs remembered volunteering first to climb a watchtower.
“You aren’t afraid,” Max’s uncle had asked him when he had descended.
“No, sir. I want to enlist and be an archer when I graduate.”
The commander had laughed and tweaked his piglet braid. “Not the destiny your family plans for you, young Quiggs.”
His family never planned for him to be a concubine hiding in the commander’s cabin either.
With the exception of replacing the bed to accommodate his size, Max had left the wood-paneled cabin unchanged. There was the same carved wooden table with four chairs, the heavy legs locked in sliding grooves in the planked floor. A footlocker, racks, shelves, and pegs held clothes and weapons. A panel of whistles on the back wall connected to various parts of the barge, the code telling soldiers what the commander wanted. Quiggs licked his lips, itching to try one.
A hot water reservoir on the right was used to fill the adjacent hipbath and the basin of a washstand. Common soldiers washed up at the water troughs on deck or waited to bathe in the cities’ bathhouses.
Rungs on the back wall led to the top hatch. Quiggs climbed up for a peek out, only to hear Beau’s warning hiss from the watchtower. Max had ordered Quiggs confined inside the cabin the next three days. He locked the hatch, then checked out the built-in bed occupying most of the left wall. The length accommodated Max’s height but was a snug width. Max swore his partners never slept with him, but from the deep fingerprints worn into the leather-padded footboard, he had entertained frequently.
A sliding drawer at the base of the bed contained borrowed military uniforms for Quiggs to wear. He held up a folded brown tee, thrilled to see Patrol on the back. No loose white concubine shirt open to his navel for him—he was a badass member of the Border Patrol! He spread the tee wide and sputtered at the full phrase: Bucket Patrol. The punishment for misdemeanors was cleaning toilet troughs. Hmmmph. Max’s little joke.
Neatly folded beside the uniforms was a long-sleeved ruffled white nightshirt and pairs of outrageous boxers with flaps in the crotch and seat. Stefan’s little joke.
Cutty left instructions on the table for using the piss hole, which was a small door on the floor near the steps.
Lift the door by its heavy metal ring.
Squat or piss in the basin.
Use supply of young vine leaves in basket to clean up.
Close the door.
Pull the lever to tip the basin.
Never pull the lever until after you have closed the door.
Fins can lunge several feet up and pull you down the chute by your ass or cock .
Quiggs clenched his buttocks as he reminded himself aloud. “Lift ring. Piss, squat. Close door. Pull lever. Got it.”
Feet tramped on the deck as soldiers returned to duty after a night in the city. Soft light trickled in from beneath the door and around the sides through the shutters over the two portholes, one by the bed, the other by the bath.
Water slapped against the sides of the barge gently rocking the room. Would he struggle with motion sickness during a storm?
He caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink. His hair was growing back, and despite Max’s reassurance, it did look like a coat of mold had sprouted on his melon head.
These were his first minutes of privacy without the worry of medics barging in to examine him or with Max hovering. One minute was all Quiggs needed for his first cleansing ejaculation. He lay on the bed, lowered his pants, and lifted the tee to his chin.
He plumped within a few strokes, then rubbed faster, intent on crossing the finish line. His blood warmed, and his balls drew up. Oh, yeah. Life sucked, but his dick worked. A tingling heat centered in his cock. His vision whited out, and his palm filled with spurt after spurt of cum.
Ugh. Dirty brown cum with yellow speckles and a barnyard smell. He cleaned up with the leaves and flushed them down the piss hole. He cracked open both port holes to air out the cabin, feeling as if he’d cheated on Max.
Soft pleased laughter drifted from the tower. He hadn’t fooled Beau.