Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  And now she’s lost in the afterworld that horrible thing came out of. And I’m planning—or considering at least—going there and rescuing her.

  But she can’t expect that of me, he thought suddenly as he gunned through a yellow traffic signal at Van Ness. Nobody could. No, I don’t care what I told that crazy old man, I probably won’t do it—oh, I may steal a metronome and go to the storage facility, and even get in the Blazer and start the engine—but then I’ll surely reconsider, and face once and for all the fact, and it is a fact, that realistically there’s nothing I can do—and switch the engine off. I can walk right up to the edge of doing it, dutifully and obviously prepared, and then be stymied by the fact that it’s patently impossible.

  The thought let him relax a little. At Normandie he turned south, toward the Galvan kitchen commissary.

  He parked the bike under the same big old pepper tree where he had usually parked the Blazer, and he walked cautiously across the empty asphalt lot to the commissary door. Yesterday you walked up to that door with Ingrid, he though, and then suppressed the memory.

  At least nobody’s here except Galvan’s old uncle Primo.

  He pulled open the door and stepped inside, and as the door began to hiss closed behind him he heard a car entering the lot. He glanced back, and in the moment before the door shut he saw two cars rocking up the driveway. The lead one was Galvan’s powder-blue 1972 Cadillac.

  The door closed, with an echoing boom. Primo leaned out of his office, and the lights and air-conditioner came on. “Vick?” he said uncertainly. “I thought you—”

  Galvan won’t recognize the motorcycle, Vickery thought rapidly, but even if I snatch a metronome and dash out by the back door, Primo will surely tell Galvan that I was here a second earlier. And she’s evidently got guys with her.

  “I need to talk to Lady Galvan,” Vickery said, trying to put confidence into his voice. “If she’s not here I’ll wait in your office.”

  “Sure, Vick, she said she’d come by this afternoon. Or I can call her.”

  Vickery had reached the door of Primo’s office, and quickly sat down in one of the wicker chairs below the schedule chart. “Nah, I’ll wait,” he said.

  “Okay. You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” said Vickery, and he was slouched in the chair and holding a steaming cup when the door opened and Galvan and three men stepped into the commissary.

  “Hey, boss,” Primo called, “Sebastian Vickery’s here to see you.”

  Vickery could see Galvan through the open office doorway. The woman was a head shorter than any of the three men behind her, but she drew his attention by seeming to be more sharply drawn than them—her broad, tanned face and short-cropped black hair, and her blocky figure in cargo pants and a khaki jacket, and most of all her protuberant brown eyes, combined to inspire wariness even at the best of times.

  “Here?” she said, peering now in Vickery’s direction. “That saves trouble, I want to talk to him.” She strode past the ovens and refrigerators to the office doorway, followed by her three companions, no doubt cousins or siblings of hers, who were dressed in jeans and denim jackets. “Tio Primo, why don’t you take your lunch break.”

  Primo nodded and hurried out of the office, and Galvan imposed herself through the office door and took the other chair, while the three men moved in and stood beside her, expressionless, blocking any exit from the office. The closing of the parking lot door echoed in the big empty kitchen beyond.

  Galvan frowned and took a silver cigarette case from her shirt pocket, then looked up at Vickery. “Your girlfriend stole my best car,” she said. “And maybe she disabled the iPhone—anyway, the car isn’t showing up anywhere.”

  I daresay, thought Vickery. “You can take the cost of it out of my pay.” If somehow I still work for you, he thought.

  “You don’t say ‘I can get it back.’” observed Galvan.

  Vickery rocked his head. “Okay, if I get it back, you can take any repairs out of my pay.”

  “But you know it’s gone, don’t you.” Galvan opened the flat case and fingered up a cigarette. “My gypsies say they can’t hear anything from the other side now except some old-school poem and a woman talking to you.”

  “To me?” Vickery made his tone light. “What does she say?”

  “Well, it’s steady the same thing, but sometimes she calls you Sebastian or Vickery, and other times she calls you Herbert. She says, ‘Sebastian, friends we part.’ Or Herbert.”

  Vickery could feel his face heating up, and he took a sip of hot coffee to cover it. “Ghosts are weird,” he ventured.

  As if in response to the word ghosts, the kitchen now echoed to the rattle of the little metronomes starting up.

  Galvan was looking at the cigarette as she thoughtfully broke the filter off of it. “Well, that’s an odd thing. My gypsies say it’s not a ghost. They say this woman is alive, there.” She looked up at Vickery. “Is my car there?”

  “There? I don’t see how. The woman who took it has a fiancé in Baltimore, maybe she—”

  “Lying to me won’t make me feel more kindly toward you.” Galvan was looking down again, carefully cutting the cigarette paper from top to bottom with a thumbnail. “You took my iPad and went after her this morning, when the car was still trackable. You saw her disappear, didn’t you?”

  After a pause, Vickery exhaled. “Yes,” he said. “And yes, your car’s there.”

  “And my iPad?”

  “It got run over.”

  “So we add another two weeks to the ten years I deduct from your pay?” It was evidently a rhetorical question, for she went on, “Or do I take the money that an independent party offers me?”

  Vickery watched the three standing men out of the corner of his eye, and inhaled to expand his ribs and try to feel the alignment of the gun in his pocket. He wished it weren’t in his left pocket. The metronomes were still making a rattlesnake background noise out in the kitchen.

  He took another sip of coffee and then held the cup in his right hand. “What does the independent party want?” He was fairly sure that the independent party was Jack Hipple.

  “You. Tied up. He says he has a buyer.”

  “The buyer wants to kill me. They’ve tried a couple of times already. Which do you want to do, dock my pay or take this party’s money?”

  “Tom at the yard tells me you don’t work for me anymore, and this anonymous party will pay cash now. Is there some reason I’m not thinking of, that says I shouldn’t sell you to him?”

  “The, uh, buyer is a government agency.” Vickery lifted his left hand to rub it over his face, and he had to contain a tense laugh at the craziness of this gambit—Ingrid, my friend, he thought dizzily, maybe I’ll be seeing you soon after all. “The Transportation Utility Agency. I understand they’ve got offices in Westwood.”

  He let himself smile, a bit wildly. “There,” he went on, “now you can leapfrog right over your independent party and deal with his buyer direct!” He was peripherally watching the hands of the three men beside Galvan. “But if they don’t kill me first thing, they’re likely to interrogate me, and I’d have to tell them about how you dealt with that Chinese guy who tried to muscle in on your occult rackets two years ago, or what became of the city councilman who got too curious about the freeway nests. Not to mention a plain old car service that hasn’t paid taxes on its cash and barter income for years.”

  He was aware of a drop of sweat rolling down his chest under his shirt.

  Galvan cocked her head. “I think your point,” she said wonderingly, “is that I should just dispose of you.” She turned to look at her men.

  Vickery yanked the .45 out of his pocket just as the hands of at least two of them men darted into their jackets—but Vickery had instantly raised his gun and was pointing it at his own temple.

  “Don’t move,” he snapped, “or the loonie gets it!”

  They hesitated, wide-eyed, and he went on, “I should have ment
ioned that this Transportation Utility Agency monitors freeway ghost-chatter the way the NSA monitors phone traffic—the reason they want to kill me is that I heard something from a ghost that they didn’t want me to hear.”

  Galvan had dropped her cigarette and case, and was staring at Vickery in, for once, open astonishment. Finally she cleared her throat and said, “Oh?”

  “You hear those metronomes out there in the kitchen?” said Vickery, pressing the muzzle against his own temple. “We’re in the current. If I die here, that agency will surely summon my ghost, and interrogate me that way. And I promise you I won’t have anything to say except revelations of your crimes. I get the idea they could use some valid prosecutions lately.”

  For several seconds no one moved or spoke.

  Then Galvan sat back and clapped her hands onto her thighs. She grinned, and then began laughing. “Good, good!” she said. She turned to the three men and made lifting gestures, and they began laughing too, bewilderedly. Vickery managed a smile.

  Galvan’s laughter stopped. “I’ll tell the independent party—to go fuck himself,” she said, getting to her feet. She looked down at Vickery with a baffled smile. “Don’t move or the loonie gets it!” She shook her head. “You are one truly crazy hombre, Vick. I generally try not to kill truly crazy hombres. Go home. You owe me about forty thousand dollars. Oh, and a thousand for the iPad.”

  “And I want to take one of the metronomes.”

  One of Galvan’s men raised his eyebrows, but Galvan flapped a hand. “I don’t even know what those cost. Sure, take one. I think you still work for me.”

  “Thanks . . . boss.”

  Vickery slid the .45 into his right jacket pocket and walked carefully out of the office to the front door, stopping at a work-table to pick up one of the little twitching metronomes, half-anticipating at every step to be shot in the back; or in the leg, to facilitate transportation to some remote-from-freeways location for final execution. But he found himself out in the sunlight as the door closed behind him, and he forced himself not to hurry as he walked to his bike and started it up.

  As he rode away down Normandie, he found that he was still tense—he was jerking the clutch lever unevenly when he shifted gears, and had to remind himself to breathe deeply.

  Friends we part, he thought. She knows—to the extent that knowing anything may be possible in that place—that there’s no way I can reasonably be expected to rescue her.

  You are one crazy hombre, Vick. Yeah, Lady Galvan, crazy enough to point a loaded .45 at my own head, with my finger inside the trigger guard, but not crazy enough to jump into the place Ingrid voluntarily jumped into.

  Damn it—I can’t!

  But at the storage facility he punched his code into the keypad beside the gate, and when the gate obligingly slid open he rode to the little garage that was his rental unit, flipped down the kickstand, and got off the bike. The padlock didn’t refuse to open, and the segmented metal door rattled up on its track with mocking ease.

  He went in and started up the Blazer, and then slowly backed it out and shifted it into park; and he wheeled the bike in. He opened a box and reluctantly lifted out a half-pint bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon and crossed to another box to fetch a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

  He walked out of the dim cubicle into the sunlight and dropped the carton and bottle onto the passenger seat of the Blazer, then went back and pulled down the cubicle door.

  He paused to grin sourly at the padlock. I’ll either be back here shortly to put all this stuff back, he thought, or I’ll probably never be able to come back at all. Do I bother to lock it?

  You don’t have to decide quite yet, he told himself, and crouched and clicked the padlock shut. He straightened, took a deep breath, and walked to the idling Blazer, wondering where he might buy string and beads.

  CHAPTER TEN

  One cup to the dead already, Vickery thought dizzily, hurrah for the next that dies!

  In the dimness of the parking garage under the Bank of America tower on Third Street, he screwed the cap back onto the flat Jack Daniel’s bottle and sat back. He stared through the windshield at the exit sign on a far wall, and he had to keep snapping his gaze back to it, for his car seemed to be slowly rotating.

  The metronome he had set on the dashboard was clicking back and forth, but the little black radio he’d bought at a Walmart had begun playing Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and it was still synchronized with the car radio. He felt in the pocket of his leather jacket to make sure both of the newly beaded strings were still there.

  The last time he had been drunk had been in 2012, after he’d learned that his wife Amanda had killed herself, had parked on a freeway shoulder and put his .357 revolver in her mouth and pulled the trigger. She had hated all the times his Secret Service schedule took him away from her, but it wasn’t until he confessed that he had got a vasectomy three years before their wedding that she had started drinking seriously. Reversal surgery had apparently not helped. On the night she wrote a bitter and largely incoherent goodbye note and got in the car, he had been on duty in Boca Raton, where President Obama had been debating Mitt Romney.

  More lines from the old Bartholomew Dowling poem crept into his mind now:

  . . . When the brightest have gone before us,

  And the dullest are most behind—

  Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!

  ’Tis all we have left to prize:

  One cup to the dead already—

  Hurrah for the next that dies!

  The already overlapping vocals of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” from the two radios were suddenly doubled, and the guitar was a jangling cacophony. The metronome had begun furiously rattling back and forth.

  He dropped the bottle and made the sign of the cross with his right hand, then started the car and carefully backed out of the parking space, taking deep breaths.

  Remember what you were taught about taking action while concussed, he told himself, this is probably similar—your executive functions are dysfunctional, so your flexible thinking and concentration are impaired, and you’ll be bad at monitoring your own performance. Pay attention!

  At the Flower Street exit from the garage he discovered that a validation or credit card was required to lift the bar; there was a button on the kiosk that would summon an attendant, but he simply drove ahead onto the street, and the snapped-off bar spun away to the side. If it made any noise, he couldn’t hear it over the racket from the radios.

  He managed to make a smooth left turn onto Third Street, squinting in the abrupt sunlight and blinking sweat out of his eyes, and when the big green freeway sign loomed overhead he swerved into the lane that would take him onto the northbound side of the 110.

  A car honked behind him, possibly because he had unknowingly cut it off, but he gripped the wheel tightly and concentrated on staying in the middle of the lane that now bent away toward the freeway lanes.

  On the freeway itself now, in the far right lane he quickly judged that the cars in the next lane to the left were moving too fast and close to one another for him to veer across that lane—but he needed to deviate sharply from his own lane while the current was still strong.

  There was no shoulder he could drive on, just the half-lane marked with diagonal lines and then the retaining wall, but he swerved to the right, correcting when even over the radio noise he heard the passenger side abrading the wall. He was certainly generating his own field by moving much more slowly than the rest of the cars on the freeway—horns honked behind him and several drivers accelerated to pass him.

  He freed one hand from the wheel to reach down and switch off the engine and then switch it on again. He glanced at the rear-view mirror but saw no flashing red and blue lights yet.

  “Come on,” he whispered through clenched teeth, “Ingrid!—Amanda, Minotaur!—where are you?”

  The engine was running again but chugging unevenly now, and the yellow Service Engine Soon light was
glowing on the dashboard; desperately he fluttered the gas pedal to keep the car from stalling.

  Then the metronome thrashed to the floor and the wooden ball broke free of the pendulum and struck him on the cheek before ricocheting away into the back; and the whole car shook and the view through the windshield was obscured with a sudden dust cloud.

  The dust funneled away in front of him, the radios went abruptly silent, and in the next moment he saw an offramp ahead that stretched straight for at least a couple of hundred feet; and the shoulder on both sides of it was flat dirt.

  He swerved into it.

  And even though the lane didn’t shift in his view, he was weightless for a moment, and then the wheels slammed into pavement and the top of his head struck the headliner. He glimpsed a curved highway and flat desert, and then he was sprawled across the seat as the Blazer tipped over without a sound onto its right side.

  He had forgotten to fasten his seat-belt, and his head and right shoulder were jammed painfully against the passenger side door and his legs were folded above him. The Marlboro carton lay across his face. The car had apparently stopped, all momentum somehow lost.

  Grabbing a dangling seat-belt strap and then the steering wheel, he tugged himself up, and he was able to pull his legs down past the console—and then he was sprawled across the seat the other way, for the car was now upright on all four wheels. Had it actually tipped over at all?

  He hiked himself up on his elbows and looked out through the window.

  His attention was caught first by rapid motion in the curdled tan sky, twisting darker-brown shapes that seemed in one moment to be many-fingered hands, and in the next to be the eyes and snout of a vast, world-spanning beast; and in one corner of the sky a tornado appeared to be drawing distant dust motes up into it; but all these changing shapes seemed steady, not descending nearer, and he let his eyes drop to peer out at the landscape.

  At first he saw only a broad highway, with flat desert extending away beyond it to a remote row of oddly identical mountains on the horizon; then, as if a focus had been adjusted, he saw dozens, hundreds, of human figures in the distance, all rushing in one direction and then in the other, like bubbles in a rocking pot, and, like bubbles, individuals among them seemed to wink in and out of existence from moment to moment.