Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “’Turo,” he said, “feel around the refrigerator.”

  ’Turo took one step toward the refrigerator and stopped, swaying as the truck straightened in an eastbound lane.

  “The cold air is way over here,” he said.

  “Ramon!” called Vickery, “get us back north, fast!”

  “You don’t gotta tell me!” came the reply.

  The air in the little enclosed kitchen had begun making a popping sound.

  “Breathe shallow,” Vickery told Castine. “I’ve heard of this—spontaneous vacuum bubbles. Give you nosebleeds.”

  ’Turo grabbed a counter and Castine clutched Vickery’s arm as Ramon made another left turn and accelerated. The popping continued for another minute, as the truck rocked through a couple of intersections, and then ’Turo waved his hand in the air.

  “The cold air is back in the fridge, I think,” he said.

  Vickery gingerly extended his hand into the space over Castine’s seat, and then exhaled. “The heat’s back in the oven too.” And a few moments later the rattle of the metronome slowed, and then stopped. The truck sped on northward.

  “Amplified possibility field?” said Castine breathlessly, eyeing her seat.

  “And then some,” agreed Vickery. “I think the freeway current—” or the Labyrinth current, he added mentally, “—has become a big static charge.”

  “Can electricity do that?” asked Castine.

  “I don’t know. I think this stuff can.”

  She frowned. “What is there for it to arc to?”

  “You get your finger too close to a cat in dry weather,” said Vickery, “and a spark arcs to the cat. I think two worlds are getting too close together. Your old boss has made too many connections across the gap.”

  ’Turo was staring at him uncomprehendingly.

  Castine gave Vickery a look and sang a line from an old song about “our mountain greenery home.”

  “Soon,” he told her, “soon.”

  “Up to the Koreatown Galleria?” called Ramon from the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah,” said Vickery, “That should be well out of the current, and I’m not sure this lot of chili verde’s good for another day.”

  Castine had carefully resumed her seat. “That . . . happens sometimes? The crazy air, not the chili verde.”

  “It used to be pretty rare,” said Vickery. “Now maybe once a week.” He smiled uncertainly and shook his head. “Galvan says if a truck gets stuck in it, we have to throw out all the bananas and ceramics—she says they contain Thorium 40, and its half-life might get lethally shorter in a field like that.”

  “Vick,” said Ramon, “I called in the new location, and Galvan says we should just hang it up and drop you off at the car lot. They got a rush-order drive that needs an expert.”

  “Day like this, I’m not surprised,” said Vickery.

  “I’ll just wait in the truck,” said Castine. “She won’t want to see me.”

  “No, you should come in. If we’re going to get you a job with her, you two have to meet sometime.”

  “We still get paid for the full day, right?” called ’Turo.

  “Sure,” said Ramon.

  “I don’t want a job with her,” said Castine, staring at Vickery.

  He leaned down close to her and whispered, “You want to go to a bus station, buy a ticket? Ride a train for more than fifteen minutes? There were probably security cameras at Union Station yesterday. I’ll get us a vehicle, and get it camouflaged.”

  But he had to admit to himself that he was thinking of their conversation yesterday: Is the TUA likely to interrogate my wife again? Yes, probably.

  Can I just drive away from that? he asked himself. I can keep Ingrid safe, here, for now.

  Ten minutes later Ramon steered the taco truck up the driveway into the Eighth Street car lot and parked beside the Airstream trailer.

  “This . . . interview might take a while,” Vickery told Ramon, “and I’m not sure how it’ll work out, so don’t leave yet.”

  Ramon nodded, switched off the engine and opened the door. Cooler air blew in through the steamy cab. “I’m gonna hit the head,” he said. “I’ll leave the keys in case they gotta move it.”

  Vickery pushed open the truck’s back doors and stepped down to the sunlit pavement, then gave Castine his hand to brace herself on as she followed. He reached up and unhooked his leather jacket and put it on as ’Turo climbed down from the truck too, tugging at his sweaty shirt.

  Bald-headed Tom was standing in the open doorway of the trailer, and he glared at Castine and then raised his hand to stop Vickery.

  “I got nothing,” Tom said. “She says she’ll give you the details of this one in her office.” He nodded toward the building on the other side of the lot.

  Vickery turned around and led Castine away from the trailer. In the maintenance bay sat another Ford Taurus, this one simply white, with no decals, and a stranger in a gray sweatsuit half-sat on the hood, holding a small valise in both hands. Vickery kept walking, making sure Castine stayed beside him.

  “I doubt she wants to see her!” called Tom from behind him.

  Vickery just waved without looking back, and then pulled open the glass door of the office building.

  “Galvan’s office is down at the end here,” he said, leading the way along a hallway past the rest rooms. Framed pictures of sports cars and clowns were hung on the walls, and a pair of baby shoes dangled from a sprinkler in the flocked ceiling.

  “When do I get my gun back?” Castine whispered.

  “After we get back from this drive. Hush now.”

  He rapped on the metal door at the end of the hall and said, “Vickery,” and from a speaker on the wall came Galvan’s voice: “Get in here, Vick.”

  Vickery turned the knob and pulled the door open; he had only been in Galvan’s office a couple of times previously, but he remembered not to blunder into the little plastic model cars hung on strings from the ceiling. Galvan stood at the far end of the room behind the lectern she used for a desk, and she frowned when Castine followed Vickery in through the door.

  “Who’s your—” she began, then shook her head. “No. Not the girl that flew my car to Hell?”

  “The same,” said Castine, sighing and stepping forward. “Sorry. It was kind of an emergency.”

  “Another truly crazy one. And you came back, huh? Move forward, into the light.” When Castine had stepped closer to the lamp on a table by the wall, Galvan came out from behind the wooden lectern and peered closely at her, and at the bandage on her head. “I don’t suppose you brought my car back.”

  “I’m sorry, no. It kind of burned up.”

  “She’d like a job with you,” Vickery interjected.

  Galvan reached up and batted one of the model cars. “Well! You must have some interesting sort of driving skills to get it there, anyway, right? You want to try out as one of my drivers, probationary? I could have two salaries to dock for the loss of that car.”

  Castine hesitated, and Vickery said, “Yes, she would.”

  “There’s a guy out front,” Galvan said, “who needs a ride right now, and the current is a damn hurricane today.” She turned to Castine. “What’s your name?”

  “Betty Boop.”

  “Uh huh. Lucky I pay in cash, not with checks. You can go along, learn the routine—it ought to be a bumpier ride than usual, but you’ve seen worse.”

  Vickery took a firm hold of Castine’s elbow then, and nodded emphatically toward Galvan—for the little girl in overalls and straw hat had just stepped out from behind the lectern.

  “The three of us are alone here,” he said quickly, speaking to Castine more than to Galvan; and, having thus tried to warn Castine not to acknowledge the girl, he was at a loss for what to say next; “uh, so I can tell you that the current is in fact very bad today,” he finished lamely. “This fare can’t wait till tomorrow?”

  Castine nodded in what he took for acknowledgment—at least sh
e wasn’t looking toward the little girl—and Galvan cocked her head at Vickery.

  “What’s this,” she said, “nerves? In fearless Vickery? Are you worried about Miss Boop’s safety? The guy needs to travel today, and you’ll drive him. Both of you. Now.”

  Peripherally, Vickery saw the little girl stare at him and slowly shake her head from side to side. Then she stepped back behind the lectern, and he was sure that she had disappeared. He wondered if Galvan would have been able to see her, if she had turned around.

  “Okay,” he said, in as level a voice as he could manage, “we’re on our way. Come on, Betty.”

  As they stepped back out into the hall and Vickery closed the door, he put a finger to his lips. When they had got outside and were walking across the lot toward the maintenance bay where their fare waited by the white Taurus, he whispered, “Be ready to run back to the taco truck if I say ‘commence.’”

  Castine gave him a wide-eyed questioning glance, but nodded.

  The same bearded attendant as yesterday came striding up as they stepped into the shade, carrying his Etch-A-Sketch like a tray. “She can’t go,” he said, nodding toward Castine. “I got in all kinds of trouble yesterday, letting her.”

  “Galvan said she goes along,” said Vickery. “Go ask.”

  “Damn right I’ll go ask.” The attendant hurried away toward the office building, holding the Etch-A-Sketch level.

  Vickery glanced at the stranger leaning on the white Taurus, and nodded. The man looked away, still holding the valise in both hands. Castine rubbed her palms down the sides of her sweatshirt.

  Within a minute the attendant was hurrying back across the lot. “Okay,” he panted when he had stepped up beside Vickery, “yeah, she can go too. Here.”

  He held out the Etch-A-Sketch. The letters on the screen were a bit blurred now, but Vickery could read BIG BEAR AIRPORT; and his heart was pounding as he slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket and glanced around at the lot and the fence and the street beyond, not looking directly now at the man leaning against the white car.

  “Got it,” he told the attendant. “I’ll just move the taco truck out of the way first.” He took Castine’s arm and started back toward the truck.

  “It’s not in the way, Vick,” the attendant said from behind him, “I’ll have—”

  “I—gotta get my phone out of it anyway,” Vickery said, a little desperately.

  “Vick,” the man insisted, following, “I’ll get it, Galvan said you’re supposed to just—”

  “Commence!” Vickery said to Castine, and she sprinted for the passenger side of the taco truck.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vickery pulled the gun from his pocket and turned and fired two shots past the attendant into the grille of the Taurus; the man who’d been leaning against the car jumped clear, fumbling at his valise.

  Castine was in the truck, and had reached across and pushed open the driver’s side door, and Vickery ran to the truck and climbed in and started the engine. The dashboard metronome was rattling back and forth. He clanked the shift lever into reverse and backed the vehicle out into the street, then hopped down to the pavement and ran back to grab the end of the gate. Its wheels squeaked furiously as he dragged the gate fast across the driveway, and as he clicked the padlock shut he peered through the green netting wired to the chain link—the attendant had run away out of sight, and the man who was supposed to be Vickery’s fare had pulled a pistol out of the valise and was running this way.

  Back in the truck, Vickery gunned it in reverse along the right lane, facing hastily stopped traffic, then shifted to drive and drove it across the median line to force a merge into the eastbound lanes. He accelerated for a block, then turned right, into a narrower street lined with ivied fences and old apartment buildings. He drove down it too fast, honking the horn to keep any pedestrians on the sidewalk and discourage anyone from backing a car out. At the next street he turned left, driving at a legal speed now.

  “The metronome . . .” said Castine, nodding toward the jiggling, rattling thing.

  “That’s why they were going to send us out to Big Bear,” Vickery said, “far away from any freeway current. There’s an iPhone under the dash below the radio, back against the firewall. Pitch it.”

  Castine bent over, groping under the dashboard, and straightened up with the phone and threw it out the window. She hesitated for a moment, then pulled out her own phone and threw that out too.

  “You never know,” she said. The windshield was tinted, so she swung the visor to the window and flipped it down, blocking any view of her face from outside.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got to get on the freeway,” Vickery told her. “The 110, in fact. They’ll fan out and catch us if we stay on surface streets.”

  “Terrific.” Castine turned toward him. “Who was that little girl?”

  The truck swerved as Vickery jumped in surprise when a frail, high voice answered her from behind them.

  “It was me.”

  Vickery looked quickly over his shoulder and saw that the girl in overalls was standing right there in the kitchen doorway. Seeing her up close for the first time, he was struck by how narrow and pale her face was, making her green eyes seem very big. Her expression was anxious.

  After a moment of silence in which Vickery simply concentrated on staying in his lane, Castine exhaled and then asked, “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Sometimes I think I grew up in India, but my parents both died or something, and now I need to find my secret garden, with a wall around it, and a hidden door with a key a robin will show me. The flowers grow slowly there, and they don’t change into other things.”

  Castine nodded and threw a helpless glance at Vickery, then looked back at the girl. “Is your name,” she asked gently, “Mary Lennox?”

  “I pretend it is,” the girl whispered. “Where I am, things fall out of the people’s heads, and I pick them up before the lizards can. I found Mary Lennox.”

  Vickery was glad that Castine seemed to know what the girl was talking about. “You warned us,” he ventured, “about driving that man to Big Bear.”

  The girl nodded. “You know what would have happened.”

  The metronome’s frantic pace was slowing down, and the girl leaned forward, her ragged straw hat nearly touching Vickery’s face. “Where I am is the opposite of the garden. One’s dead and hard to get out of, the other’s alive but hard to get into.”

  And then she was gone.

  Castine slumped in her seat, and Vickery freed a hand from the steering wheel to brush damp hair back from his forehead.

  “What was all that?” he asked hoarsely.

  Castine was blinking. “A ghost, the ghost of a poor little girl! She’s pretending she’s the character in that book, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. An orphan named Mary Lennox, raised in India, who discovers a walled garden on a lonely British estate, and a robin shows her the hidden key and the doorway . . . Oh, I loved that book too, when I was a girl!”

  Vickery swung the truck into a right turn, knowing that there was a freeway onramp ahead.

  Castine was hugging herself and staring ahead. “I wonder who she was, behind the scavenged story.”

  “Well, God bless her, she’s saved me twice. Yesterday she stopped me from going back to Hipple’s place, and just now she saved us from being killed out in Big Bear by what must have been a TUA assassin. That guy with the valise, our would-be fare. I guess Galvan did decide to make a deal with the TUA after all, and cut Hipple out, as long as it was agreed that I—and you too, as it happened—got killed out where our ghosts wouldn’t end up in the current, retrievable.”

  “I can’t believe Terracotta would actually want to kill me,” said Castine. She touched the bandage on the side of her head. “Well, not where my ghost wouldn’t be retrievable, anyway. Maybe the assassin was supposed to kill us separately.” She shook her head. “So are we fleeing, finally? This is a
camouflaged vehicle.”

  “It looks like we are. Galvan’s not likely to report this truck as stolen, she doesn’t like involving the police in anything.” An onramp to the 110 North loomed ahead. The dashboard metronome had resumed its rapid clicking, but the mariachi music from the radios was still synchronized, and he took a deep breath and steered the truck into the onramp. “I just want to make one stop on our way out of LA.”

  “No, why? The gas tank’s full, you’ve still got money, and even if we throw out the chili verde there’s easily a couple days’ worth of food right here in the truck.” She waved ahead. “Let’s just go, follow the 10 straight east all the way to Florida.”

  Vickery had floored the gas pedal to get the truck up to merging speed; and when they were on the freeway and he had edged into a comfortable gap in the right-hand lane, he was careful to keep his speed steady and the wheels evenly spaced between the lane-markers, for the spot where he and Castine had exited the world yesterday was coming up.

  “I’ve got to go see Jack Hipple one more time,” he said, without looking away from his lane. “The treacherous bastard clearly sold me out. I’m sure there were TUA guys at his house yesterday, and he tried to get me to go there. But they won’t be there now, since Galvan has stepped up to be the one to sell me to them.” He nodded. “I’m going to make Hipple subsume a ghost, before we exit this picture.”

  “What, put it into one of these?” She waved at the rattling metronome.

  “Or into some other piece of organic stuff. Right. Lay it permanently to rest.”

  “The Secret Garden girl? Why? She—”

  “Not her.” He thought again of two hang-glider wings spiraling over Sylmar. “My wife.”

  “Oh God, Sebastian. For her sake, or for yours?”

  Vickery gripped the steering wheel tightly. “For hers, damn it! You don’t—what was it you said on Sunday, you didn’t use coercion when you interrogated her ghost, you didn’t use feedback?” He spared her a glance. “What’s feedback?”

  “Oh, they—shit. You know what it is. What they do is, they set up a microphone connected to a second speaker, and they turn up the radio volume, so the microphone picks up the ghost’s voice from the radio and from the second speaker. So you get a feedback sound-loop, that squeal. Ghosts—well, ghosts hate it, they—apparently when a ghost hears its own voice distorted to a screech, it feels as if it’s losing its identity. Its already depleted identity.”