Termination Shock

Then he carefully removed the magazine from the weapon, cycled the action once to eject the remaining round from the chamber, and threw it on the ground. He was sobbing.

In his emotional state it took him a moment to respond to her greeting. While waiting for him to settle down, she looked around and noticed that Amelia—now her acting security chief—had followed her all the way out here. She was still gripping her pistol with both hands, keeping it aimed at the ground, focusing her gaze primarily on the sobbing man but also glancing around from time to time for incoming swine, alligators, and knife-brandishing scavengers.

The queen looked over toward the pickup trucks. The woman who’d gotten out of the second truck was headed toward them, walking as briskly as she could manage given that she was of grandmotherly age and, like most Americans, overweight. “Amelia,” she said, “go and ask that woman if she can take Lennert and Johan to hospital. She is friendly.”

“How do you know that!?” Amelia demanded. Then, remembering her manners, added, “Uwe Majesteit.” Her parents had immigrated to Rotterdam from Suriname. She had grown up poor and tough, she had thrived in the military, and she was fastidious about manners and hierarchy.

“Don’t address me that way here.”

“What should I call you then, mevrouw?”

The question hung there as a new thought was occurring to the queen, which was that she and her team had just entered the country illegally.

Presumably there would be some face-saving way to patch it all up. But until the matter had been sorted out properly, it might be wisest if they did not go around advertising the fact that she was who she was. The tabloids would have a field day with this. They would never accept that the crash had been unavoidable. Instead they would make the queen out to be a foolish person, in over her head, unqualified.

And that was before they even sank their teeth into the question of why she was coming to Texas in the first place.

“Saskia.”

Amelia raised her eyebrows, but reluctantly obeyed the order, leaving “Saskia” alone with the sobbing boar-killer. She holstered her pistol at the small of her back and ran toward the woman from the pickup truck. Amelia covered ground fast.

About then the man finally pulled himself together and turned toward Saskia. He pulled his T-shirt up away from his flat belly and used it to wipe tears and sweat from his face. This made Saskia want to do likewise. She was suddenly conscious of how sweaty she had become in the short time she had been out of the plane. She wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup but she wondered how bad the damage would be if she were to make a similar gesture. Fenna could always fix it later, if she would only stop being such a baby about the plane crash.

The man turned his head to one side and stuck his tongue out in a way that reminded her of New Zealanders doing their haka dance. She wondered if he might be a Pacific Islander, at least in part.

Having got that out of the way, he turned toward her.

“Ma’am.”

“Thank you for helping my friend. We are going to get him to hospital. We will get your knife back to you.”

The man glanced past Saskia, took in the scene. “Mary’s fixing to help you. Gonna be fine. Y’all need anything else?”

It seemed a remarkably generous and open-ended offer from a man in such a condition. Saskia looked sharply at him to see whether he was being sarcastic. He would not meet her gaze, but his eyes strayed briefly toward the dead boar. “I got no purpose now,” he explained. “Gotta fix on something.”

“Well, for example, would you know how to get us out of here?” Saskia ventured. It might have been better if she had worked in some extra phrasing such as hypothetically or in principle, supposing we were to request it but this was how it came out. “We can pay you.”

“Cash?”

“If you prefer.”

“Where you want to get to?”

“Houston.”

“Is there some kinda legal situation I should know about?”

Saskia shrugged. “Maybe with immigration? But we can’t help it.” She now thought a little harder about the man’s question and understood what he was getting at. “Not drugs or anything like that, if that is what you were thinking.”

He hesitated, trying to get the story to add up. Not that he didn’t trust her. It was all just very odd. She could see this. Key information was lacking.

“I am the Queen of the Netherlands,” Saskia told him. “I am here on a secret mission to save my country.”

“Rufus. Most people address me as Red. My not-so-secret mission is now accomplished.” He glanced at the huge dead boar and repeated the strange gesture of sticking his tongue out.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Red.” They exchanged a sweaty handshake and began walking back toward the plane. She had to remind him not to leave his rifle on the ground. The gator-adorned pickup truck was moving toward Lennert, Amelia standing up in the back keeping an eye on the open-air hog and reptile butchery.