Apocalypse to Go

by Katharine Kerr

  When I finished sending the message, I logged off and shut down the system to derail possible Chaos hackers. I swiveled around in my computer chair to see Ari standing nearby. He held out a plate topped with a slice of cold pizza.

  “You never ate lunch,” he said.

  The pizza stared at me with olive slices for eyes.

  “I didn’t want lunch, that’s why,” I said. “There’s an awful lot of calories on that plate.”

  “The doctor said you need to eat more.” Ari fixed me with a grim stare. “You need to join the gym and come with me when I work out. Then you won’t worry about a few sodding calories.”

  “I was raised to believe that ladies never sweat.”

  “Ladies, perhaps, but how does that apply to you?” He stepped back out of range before I could kick him. “Nola, you’ve got to eat more.”

  We locked stares. He won.

  While I ate the pizza, Ari paced back and forth by the window and talked on his cell phone in two different languages. The Hebrew I could recognize. I thought the other might be Turkish. I knew better than to ask questions, but when he finished, he volunteered some information.

  “According to a couple of highly placed people I have access to,” Ari told me, “Spare’s a legitimate member of my organization. I never mentioned deviant world levels, of course. Neither did they.”

  “But then, they wouldn’t even if they knew.”

  Although I checked a couple of times that afternoon, I never received an e-mail from the mysterious Mr. Spare14. I did a little more research online about Chaos magic but found nothing I didn’t already know. At one time I’d done some serious research into the subject. I’d organized the results in a notebook, and fortunately I remembered where the notebook was.

  Some years previously I’d cached some loose papers over at the house belonging to my Aunt Eileen and her husband, Jim Houlihan, when I’d moved out of town on Agency business. When I called her, she had no objections to my coming over to hunt.

  “Stay for dinner, dear,” Aunt Eileen said. “Tell Ari I’m making lamb stew with poppy-seed noodles to go under it.”

  “That will seal the deal, for sure. Thanks. We’ll be glad to.”

  Ari put on a proper shirt and his gray sport coat. I changed into a pair of trouser jeans and a red-and-white-print cotton blouse. Before we left, I placed a couple of Chaos wards on every door and the downstairs windows. When I finished, Ari activated the elaborate electronic security system that he and his buddy Itzak Stein had installed in the building and the garage out in back. Ari and I had leased the entire building in which we lived, two flats out in San Francisco’s fog belt, to ensure that any danger our jobs might bring would target only us, not an innocent neighbor. At the moment the bottom flat stood empty except for my father’s old desk, but I didn’t want anyone prowling around in it, empty or not.

  My Aunt Eileen and her family, which at that time included my younger brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Sophie, live in the sunbelt, that is, the southeast side of the city. The house stands in the Excelsior district, partway up the hill that’s topped with the blue water tower. It’s an odd misshapen house on a double lot, three stories at one end, two at the other, but only one in the middle section: a long living room that the front door divides in half.

  In one half of the living room, a pale orange brocade sectional sofa stands under a portrait of Father Keith O’Brien, my uncle on Aunt Eileen’s side of the family, in his Franciscan robes. I’ve never seen anyone sit there. The family clusters at the other end of the room, where there are shabby armchairs and recliners arranged near the TV, when, that is, we’re not in the kitchen.

  It was in the kitchen that we found Aunt Eileen that afternoon, sitting at the round maple table and reading the newspaper. She wore one of her usual retro outfits, a pair of leopard print capris and a pale blue cotton shirt with rolled sleeves. She had new pink fuzzy slippers with bunny faces, complete with long ears.

  A large pot of stew simmered on the stove. Wisps of herbed steam rose from the surface. Ari inhaled deeply and smiled. I sat down at the table a couple of chairs over from hers. Aunt Eileen folded the newspaper and laid it down.

  “Ari, dear,” she said, “you can take off that jacket. It’s awfully warm in here.”

  “That’s quite all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  “You really don’t have to hide your gun. I mean, honestly, we all know you’re a police officer.”

  I snickered. Ari winced, but he did take off his sport coat to reveal the Beretta in its shoulder holster.

  “He never leaves home without it,” I said.

  Ari shot me a scowl, then draped the jacket over a chair and sat down next to me.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I said.

  “Well, Jim’s at work,” Aunt Eileen said with a sigh. “There was more trouble with the L Taraval line, and so of course they called him in.”

  “That happens too much,” I said, “his boss taking his weekend, I mean.” My uncle worked for Muni, the San Francisco public transport system, which exists in a state of perpetual decay.

  “It’s the budget problems. Since he’s on salary, they don’t have to pay him for overtime.”

  “Makes sense, but very irritating.”

  She nodded her agreement. “Brian’s team is playing today. High school basketball’s over for the year, so now he’s on the baseball team. I don’t know about Michael and Sophie—upstairs probably, and I don’t really want to know what they’re doing. Let’s hope it’s schoolwork.”

  A lesson in human biology, maybe, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. Apparently Ari was thinking along the same lines.

  “You’ve been quite generous to both of them,” Ari said. “I can have a talk with him about proper manners when you’re living in someone else’s house.”

  “You’re a darling,” Aunt Eileen said. “It’s wonderful how he listens to you. Just make sure you knock before you open the door.”

  Ari left the kitchen by the back stairs that led to the bedrooms on the floor above. Aunt Eileen waited until he was well gone.

  “I hate to admit this,” she said, “but I’m beginning to think your mother was right about Michael.”

  “That he’s an out-of-control juvenile?”

  Eileen held out a hand parallel to the table and waggled it to indicate she could go either way. “At times he’s fine. At others, he’s really hard to handle,” she said. “Jim makes things worse, bellowing at him, usually after he’s downed a couple of glasses of whiskey. Jim has the whiskey, that is, not Michael. I’ve never seen Mike touch any kind of alcohol, which is just as well.”

  “Yeah, it sure is! What’s the problem? Too much lewd conduct with Sophie?”

  “No, it’s his schoolwork. He doesn’t do any, and here he’s got the chance at that scholarship for college. If he doesn’t get into college, the scholarship won’t do him a bit of good.”

  “I’ll have Ari press home a few salient points. There’s something about being lectured by a man packing a Beretta that should make Mike sit up and listen.”

  We shared a laugh, but I worried. When Michael was born, I was ten, and I thought he was the best doll in the world. Since my mother had seven children total to take care of, she was glad to let me play mommy with the new baby. Once my father disappeared a few years later, and she needed to work outside the home, I became Michael’s second mother. Since I was just a teenager, my parenting skills were minimal.

  “I think the real problem,” Aunt Eileen said, “is that Michael’s talents are blossoming. They always come in like teeth and make a person just as irritable as teething makes a baby. That’s why I’m trying to ignore his behavior with Sophie. It calms him down.”

  “As long as she doesn’t get pregnant.”

  “I got her to Planned Parenthood. She’s really glad to have the birth control.” Aunt Eileen paused for a sigh. “Just don’t mention that around Father Keith.”

&nb
sp; “Another thing to hide from him, huh? Like my own visits there.”

  Aunt Eileen rolled her eyes at the memory. When I turned sixteen, I started pouring out Qi like a lighthouse, and boys became the moths. I’d had no idea why they all started ignoring my awesomely beautiful younger sister to swarm around me instead. Not all of my would-be suitors were boys my own age, either—unfortunately. It was a period of my life that I did my best to forget.

  “I’m just glad Ari’s taken an interest in Mike…” She hesitated with a quick drum of her fingertips on the table. “And speaking of Ari, I’ve been wondering. I know he’s here to be your bodyguard. Does this mean that someone’s threatening you? I’d really hoped that when that awful man Johnson was killed, you’d be safe.”

  “Yeah, so did I. But I honestly think that this bodyguard business is just an excuse. I’m really not sure why he was attached to the Agency. It doesn’t seem to be the way Interpol usually operates.”

  “Jim’s been saying the same thing.”

  “He’s right. Of course, if the State Department asked for Ari, that would count for something, but no one will tell my boss if they did. I do know that somebody very high up in Ari’s chain of command wanted him here.” I shrugged. “Ari doesn’t know who.”

  She sighed with a shake of her head. “I do wish you’d get another job. Something safer, where people would tell you things if they were important.”

  I smiled as vaguely as I could. Eileen got up and poked viciously at the stew with a long wooden spoon.

  Michael and Ari came downstairs a few minutes later. Sophie, Mike informed me, was going to take a shower. Although Ari sat down at the table, Michael hovered near the doorway. He shoved his hands into his jeans’ pockets and put his back against the wall, mimicking the way that Ari often stood. He was a skinny kid, just about my height, 5’8”, though with long legs that promised more growth later. We look a lot alike, black hair, fine features including the slightly tilted Irish nose, but his eyes are blue whereas I have hazel eyes that tend toward green.

  “I need to find something in the upstairs storage rooms,” I said. “Mike, why not come with me? I’m going to need your help to move cartons around.”

  “Oh, okay.” He groaned the words rather than speaking them and peeled himself off the wall.

  Ari cleared his throat. Mike glanced at him, then turned to me. “I don’t mind helping,” he said.

  “Great!” I said. “Let’s go.”

  At the extreme north end of the Houlihan house is a stack of three small rooms where Uncle Jim’s mother, Nanny Houlihan, had lived before she passed away. Eileen had turned them into storage areas, though recently she’d cleared out the ground-floor room and stashed its contents elsewhere, because it housed the psychic gate to the deviant world level known as Interchange. Uncle Jim had padlocked the door into that room and hammered a couple of boards across it to keep it shut. We climbed the stairs up to the door of the second storage room. On the landing Michael paused and turned to look at me.

  “I’m real sorry about the bad grades,” he said.

  “So am I. If you want to go to college, you’d better bring them up in summer school.”

  “That’s what Ari said, too. He told me I was hella lucky to have a chance at college.” He reached for the doorknob. “School would be seriously better than going into the army like he did.”

  Michael opened the door and held it to let me go in first. Since an old venetian blind covered the room’s only window, I flipped on the overhead light. The antique steamer trunk in which I’d stored my college notebooks and other souvenirs sat against the farthest wall of the square room. Big storage cartons and a treadle sewing machine blocked the path. Michael began moving things out of the way, then stopped and turned toward the window. He frowned and seemed to be listening to a distant noise. I heard nothing.

  “What is it, bro?” I said.

  “This is totally whack,” he said. “I’m not sure—just let me—” He took a couple of steps toward the window, then stared at it. “There never was a gate here before.”

  “Is there now?”

  “Yeah. I can feel it, but it’s not on right. I mean, it’s sort of skewed or hanging weird, like a door that’s off one of its hinges.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “I’m thinking I could pull up that blind, and then we could see what’s over there.”

  Over on the other side of the trans-world gate, he meant. I ran an SM:D and felt nothing but the usual low hum of suffering inherent in earthly existence.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  It took us a couple of minutes to clear a path to the window. I stood at one side of it and Michael, at the other, where he could reach the pull cord to open the blind. As soon as he touched the cord, the blind made a clattering noise and melted away.

  Sunlight flooded my vision and made my eyes water. I could smell fresh air, scented with damp earth and manure. I blinked hard and squinted to look around me. We were standing right on the edge of a flat roof, looking down at a vegetable garden edged with mutant morning glory plants, ten feet high, some of them, supported on poles. We’d come through to Interchange.

  “Oh, shit!” Michael said. “I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?” I said.

  “That the house is different here. It’s only got one room at this end. Nola, step back, a big step, and then turn around. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I followed orders.

  I bumped into a pile of cardboard cartons. Dim electric light replaced the sunshine. I heard Michael whistle in relief, and I let out my breath in a sigh. We were back in the storage room at the Houlihan house.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Michael said. “That was hella stupid of me.”

  “Well, it’s not like you knew what was going to happen.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m having to learn how to world-walk on my own, and sometimes I seriously mess up. I wish Dad was here. It’s gross that he got busted like that.”

  “Yeah, I have to agree.”

  Michael scowled at the venetian blind. “It’s weird about this gate opening up. I helped Aunt Eileen carry some stuff up here just last week, and it wasn’t open then, the gate, I mean.”

  “Huh.” I considered the problem. “Well, I know even less about this stuff than you do, but let’s look at it logically. There’s a couple of possibilities. Dad opened the original gate downstairs a long time ago, but he’s in prison. So, maybe someone else opened this one.”

  “They did a fail job if they did.”

  “The second possibility is that it opened itself. Do you think gates can expand themselves? Sort of like a leak in a packed earth dam, where the water keeps washing away the dirt once the leak gets started. The hole gets bigger and bigger.”

  “Maybe.” Michael sounded doubtful. “But why now? Dad must have made that other gate what? Thirty-five years ago?”

  “About, yeah.”

  “And it never spread in all that time.”

  “That’s true. Maybe it’s spreading now because you’ve found your talents. You’re another world-walker in this house. Do you think the gate has some kind of property that would sense that?”

  “Maybe. I might be sending out, like, vibes, and I was using the gate downstairs hella often for a while. But—I dunno.”

  We looked at each other in utter confusion.

  “It might have something do with Dad,” I said. “In that letter he smuggled out, Dad mentioned being paroled. He also said he was thinking about us a whole lot. Maybe he’s out, and that had an effect on the gate. This whole process takes place on some deep level of your mind, after all.”

  Michael’s eyes got very wide. “If that’s true,” he said, “we could go get him.”

  “We could—if only we knew exactly where he is and how to reach the place. And of course I might not be right about the parole. I’m just guessing. For all we know he’s still in Moorwood Prison, whatever world that’s on. I’m willing
to bet it’s not on Interchange. That would be too convenient.”

  “Too dangerous, you mean, with all the rads.”

  “That, too, yeah. If he’s still in jail, we can’t even visit him. The authorities would want to know where we came from. You don’t want to end up in the cell next door for the same crime.”

  “Yeah, guess it would be the same, if I brought you along. Transporting someone across world borders. I keep forgetting it’s illegal. Well, it is there, anyway, wherever there is.”

  “Exactly.” It occurred to me that Austin Osman Spare14 had to know something about world-walking. “Now, look, I may be in a position to find out more about this situation. I don’t know yet if I can or not, but I’m going to try. Getting Dad home is high on my priority list these days.”

  “It would sure be easier to concentrate on stuff like school if I could, y’know, talk to him about world-walking.” Mike sounded sincere. “I just get seriously confused sometimes, trying to read my school stuff, and trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing with these gates.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Unfortunately, I also have Agency work to do here. I can’t go haring off across the worlds until I know what I’m doing and have the time to do it in. Understand?”

  “Yeah, I do. Y’know, there are other gates in San Francisco, like the one that over-there police squad used to take Dad away. I’ve been thinking about making a map.”

  When I did a scan around this idea, I felt only a distant and faint chance for danger. “The Agency could use something like that. They’ll pay you for it.”

  “Cool!”

  Michael glanced back at the window. “We better get the stuff you wanted and go back downstairs,” he said. “This room’s starting to give me the creeps.”

  When I opened the trunk, I had to rummage through a lot of notebooks as well as shoe boxes full of things friends had sent me, like Christmas and birthday cards, the kind of paper junk that somehow you never want to throw out even though there’s no reason to keep it. I did find the material about Chaos magic about halfway down the layers, as well as an old college notebook from a class on Jung’s psychological theories. On impulse I grabbed that, too, and we left.