A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  “What am I not…?” Then it hits him.

  Felix finds the parking break release and uses it–

  The powerful Bentley screeches as it lurches forward and accelerates toward the intersection and the back of the statue of blond Siobhán still standing at the corner watching the slowly cruising flying platforms that can be seen hovering over the street down the way.

  “SHITSHITSHIT!”

  Felix slams on the brakes and the Bentley hydroplanes through the intersection, narrowly missing two cars. Actually, he’s pretty sure a Prius gently kisses the edge of the rear bumper but luckily has little effect on the Bentley’s forward progress. He jerks the wheel right a bit too much to compensate, though, and the Bentley fishtails around, barely missing a car parked on Turk as the big, pink car slides to a stop now facing west and Siobhán’s all but frozen face peeking around the corner.

  Felix just sits with his foot jammed down on the brake pedal and hands locked in death grips around the steering wheel, breathing heavily as he tries to calm down. Okay, don’t do that again.

  When he’s recovered enough, he eases his foot off the brake and gently down onto the accelerator. He pulls up to the corner slow and deliberate and puts it in park. He gets out and walks up to Siobhán. He lets himself admire her odd, fake blond look for just a moment before gingerly uncovering the Warp on her chest. Felix presses the Warp button on and steps back before she can break his arm or something.

  Siobhán shudders into pace with Felix and pulls her hood down off her head as she whips her head toward him in a flurry of blurred goo.

  “Jesus! Don’t do that!” she scolds.

  “Relax, alright? Damn.”

  “Don’t tell me to relax, child.”

  “‘Whatever it takes,’ right? I got us a car.”

  Siobhán squints at the Bentley and says, “That? It looks like a Hello Kitty store exploded on it. You aren’t much for subtlety are you?”

  “It’s fast and we’re in a hurry,” Felix says as he turns and walks back to the open driver side door and gets in.

  “Felix, that thing’s atrocious. It’s basically the opposite of stealth. And who said we were in a hurry? We could show up in Sausalito tomorrow if these disguises hold up.”

  Felix glares at her from the driver’s seat and says, “Wahrheit said–”

  “If what your better-really-be-ex-girlfriend said is true, we’re all fucked anyway, Felix. Your ‘Var-height’ knows that.”

  “I’m also just a tad concerned about my aunt and uncle, whatever they may be. If we show up ‘tomorrow’ and they’re torn apart by those nightmare pork-fuckers, I’ll kill you myself!”

  Siobhán stares at him in disbelief then scrunches her face like she’s going to give Felix what for but there’s that damn look again like something in his expression that changes her mind. Instead, she walks around the front of the car and grumbles, “That I’d like to see.”

  She gets in, throws her bag in the back, settles her rear end into the bucket seat with a touch of exaggeration, and looks at Felix expectantly with her big fake eyes. He shuts his door without returning her gaze and puts the car back in drive. Felix starts off through the slow traffic, weaving and swerving quickly but carefully. Even chemically elevated and enhanced as he is, he has trouble hiding his anxiety about driving. He catches Siobhán noticing his white knuckle grip on the wheel.

  She asks, “You want me to–”

  “I’ve got this. It’s cool–” Felix winces as he thinks of Rudy and the anxiety of driving mixes with his pain over Rudy’s awful demise.

  “If anyone is… I don’t know, sped up like us right now, we stick out badly. I think you can synch these balls. Here…”

  She places her left hand onto Felix’s Warp and feels around while doing the same to hers. He drives with one white-knuckled hand while she fiddles. “Uh-huh… There.” There’s a little beep on both Warps and Felix feels his vibrate like a video game controller for a moment. Then she does the same thing to the Warp on the dashboard. “Alright, good shit.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I’ve never used these things myself, but you hear stuff. Met a girl in Junction who used to shtoop a guy that used this kinda stuff to rob banks. Artsy prick. Bad business, that. Not worth it. Especially if your supplier had shoddy workmanship. They’re not worth the punishment or side-effects. I will say that your friend is fucked already if he’s on the Guardian’s bad side.”

  Felix steers them north around the corner of Turk and Van Ness Avenue and almost directly under a porker flying platform hovering in place about thirty feet over the gently upward sloping street. The porker and front of the vehicle are facing north above them and it being that high makes it harder to see them down in the car if it tried, but one of the eye cameras on the body of the platform is rotating slowly towards them.

  Siobhán hits the Warp power button on her chest and Felix, herself, and the Bentley shudder back into normal speed. Felix hits the brakes but not as hard as last time. There’s a little slippage caused by the shifting friction of the two time streams, the rain, and the smart brake system being profoundly confused for a moment. It recovers with a fluttery screech and eases them to a stop behind the naturally slowing normal speed traffic.

  Felix tries his best to look casual as he scans above the street out the driver window. There’s a vague, dark fluttering like something staying in one place longer than other things in a time-lapse film clip, then it’s gone.

  “Anything?”

  Felix looks around above the street up and down Van Ness.

  “I… think… it’s gone.”

  She cringes some, looks around out her windows faux-casual and grumbles, “I hate this. I like things that fight fair; it’s easier to trick them.”

  Felix closes his eyes and breathes in and out slowly, concentrating on his body high and trying to forget that he’s terrified of driving and that there’s a fleet of horrible monsters flying around the city trying to find and hurt them.

  A honk from behind opens his eyes and he sees the line of cars ahead has already moved twenty feet on up the gentle slope of Van Ness.

  “Go, Felix,” Siobhán nudges, “and keep it cool. Not too fast, not too slow.”

  “Gotcha,” he replies as he accelerates and eases them into a medium pace up the slight hill. He tries to focus on just what he’s doing and ignore the cars changing lanes and zooming past every which way all around them.

  They both silently scan the streets and skies through the haze of green gas as he drives them up Van Ness. They see nothing strange besides bulbs, fliers, spiderflies, etc. and those barely seem strange at all to me now.

  32

  Felix breaks into a fresh sweat as they wait at a stoplight to turn left onto Lombard Street and continue on the 101 up to Golden Gate Bridge and the salvation it hopefully represents.

  The light turns green and they’re still alive and unmolested, so he does just that, then drives them to the end of Lombard where it becomes Richardson Avenue and up a short stretch to where it becomes Presidio Parkway.

  Siobhán shifts in her seat like she’s uneasy. Felix glances over and looks back at the road. She looks nervous in a way Felix hasn’t seen. He asks, “What’s wrong? I mean, besides the obvious.”

  “Okay, before we get up there, I need to know something.”

  “I’m pretty easy right now. Ask away,” he says, chuckling nervously like a kid in line for a rollercoaster he keeps having to watch tear by full of terrified, screaming riders.

  “Am I familiar to you?” Siobhán asks.

  Felix says, “Of course. I mean… what do you mean?”

  “When we met at that party, was I familiar?”

  “How could you be?”

  Siobhán starts, “Do you–” but cuts herself off.

  There’s a pause as Siobhán closes her eyes and seems to meditate, clenching her jaw repeatedly as well. She hums and wiggles her jaw around like she’s prepping for
a stage play or trying to relax from being in one.

  In an entirely unrestrained Irish accent Siobhán asks, “An chuimhin leat mé?”

  “What?”

  Felix is confused but not just because she’s opening the floodgates of some vulnerable place he’s only seen hints of. Her undisguised voice and foreign speech are vibrating through my mind like a memory I can’t have.

  “D’yeh remember me?”

  “I don’t understand,” Felix answers.

  “Is that you, Ciarán?”

  Felix is struck by this name said in this voice and it makes him profoundly uncomfortable. He concentrates on the road, steering them north up the highway and the stretch called Doyle Drive, the last curving section of road north out of the City, which is flanked by trees and brush with the Bridge as its terminus.

  “An chuimhin leat an meaisín, Ciarán?”

  “Don’t call me that. I don’t know what you’re getting at–”

  “Y’sure y’dohn remember? The name means nouthin’ to yeh?”

  Felix surprises himself by racking his brain to figure out if it does mean anything. He glances at Siobhán, who is now staring at him with her fake, candy-blue eyes. He’s glad he can’t see her even more eerie contact-covered eyes at the moment and looks back at the road.

  As the tree flanks thin out, a line of tollbooths for people heading south into the City stretches over the road just before the bridge begins. To the right of this is a roughly two-lane northbound bridge entrance. Felix stays in the furthest right lane.

  The Golden Gate Bridge looms over the choppy, swirling strait below, majestic and a bit ominous in the mist and heavy rain. There’s a large fog bank rolling into the bay above and below the bridge and the south bridge tower is intermittently obscured by it as it meets with low-lying cloud cover.

  Felix stammers, “I… I d-don’t know…”

  “Yeh have’teh. Y’canna leave me alone agehnn, a ghrá. Not now that O-eh johst have’yeh back. Tá tú uaim…”

  “Siobhán, I have no idea what… what you– Is that Grieves?”

  Siobhán joins Felix in staring out the front windshield at the figure standing with its back to them in the road about thirty feet ahead in the next lane over to their left. Dark coat, pants, and boots; check. Glowing, translucent, and Jello mold-like head and hands; check.

  The rain runs down Grieves’s head, clothes, and hands as he turns back toward them, mumbling already. Upon seeing the pink eyesore speeding toward him, Grieves’s eyes seem to get even bigger as his almost invisible, useless eyelids widen around them. His mumbling seems to become excited yelling and he takes a few steps over to stand in their lane. He waves his arms back and forth in the air like he’s still trying to get their attention.

  Grieves bends over by half as they pass quickly through him and in the short window of time he’s phasing through the Bentley’s interior he is able to ramble in an exaggerated whisper yell, “DDon’tgofurthuuuur-thersBad–”

  Felix’s eyes dart repeatedly from the cars and bridge ahead to Grieves in the rear view mirror waving his arms. Felix realizes that Grieves wasn’t waving to get their attention, but to warn them. Siobhán watches Grieves out the rear window. Grieves runs after them a few long strides then stops and descends into the road by the tollbooths.

  Felix notices vents flapping open in the surface of the bridge road, walkways, and towers and the glowing green gas comes out faster than usual. He says, “What now?”

  As Siobhán looks at Felix again, she falls back into the “American” accent which must be a subconscious or trained habit at this point and says, “What was that about–” but cuts herself off when something down the bridge grabs her attention. Felix looks at her then follows her gaze.

  A young woman stands on the east pedestrian walkway. She is stock-still and dressed for a funeral in the nineteen forties, black shoes, skirt, jacket, tilted topper hat, and lace net veil drenched and dripping from her lack of an umbrella. She seems to have something in each hand but he can’t see what the items are. That’s when Felix realizes there’s something very strange about her. He can’t really look directly at her face and once again he’s reminded of Wahrheit’s house. It’s there like a soft-focused, high contrast version of a face, but as they come around the curve toward her, Felix sees a subtle disturbance in what he can’t help but think of as the surface of a form-fitting moving projection. The un-woman raises her left hand to her waist level and its contents glows.

  Siobhán instinctively presses her linked Warp sphere and goes for the pistol against the small of her back with the other hand as it warms up.

  As the linked spheres synch roughly with the Warp the strange woman engaged, there is a bone-vibrating shudder and everything goes distorted and gooey for a flash. Then the flash subsides and Felix is faced with the fact that he is speeding them toward slow-moving walls of cars, trucks, and vans caught in the time sludge as they crawl across the bridge heading north and south. That distant part inside of Felix is able to joke, they should add this to the driver test.

  Something about the two Warps synergizing causes the strange woman projection to glitch and cut out. The figure is actually in a thick but form-fitting blue-black body suit with antennae sprouting equipment pouches on the upper arms and on her back between her shoulders. The head is encased in a sleek, contoured full helmet with a glowing, pale bluish-white tinged transparent faceplate which is a vertical oval starting below the wearer’s lower lip and bubbling out a bit over the forehead before curving back down and terminating near the top of the head.

  It’s Audrey. Her black hair is pulled back tight and glowing symbols dance across a kind of readout display glowing in the faceplate over and around her eyes. She stares coldly through the streaming data and pulsing diagrams at the car until she locks eyes with Felix.

  Audrey’s eyes initially convey something between “I knew it” and “how could you” before transforming into “you did this” as she raises her other hand. She shifts her glare onto Siobhán and her shark eyes pour out, pulling and melting and tearing her face apart in the helmet while she aims what looks like a Makarov pistol with a long suppressor attached to the end.

  Siobhán can only whisper, “Oh fuck y–” before the first shot goes cleanly through the windshield and through her neck, causing her curse to end in a loud gurgling moan. It makes a perfect 9.22mm hole in the glass without cracking out from it all, so Siobhán’s neck doesn’t stand a chance.

  “Silencer” would for once be far more accurate as a description for whatever the attachment on the end of the gun is. The pistol makes absolutely no sound and there’s no flare at the end of the muzzle either. The ejected cartridges are caught in a black velvet pouch, which pooches out on the side as they hit its interior but sags back down with each shot as they fall to the pouch bottom.

  After watching exactly three arterial pulses of blood quickly make their way out of Siobhán’s neck, Audrey fires three more shots in through the passenger window as Felix tries to maneuver them behind a large crawling moving van. The first two crack Siobhán’s head open with a sickening one-two pop, spraying blood, skull, and brain matter all over the pink zebra interior and Felix. He puts the van between them but the third shot comes through the entire van; then Siobhán’s right shoulder, upper torso, and left shoulder; and out into Felix’s right shoulder then comes out clean before exiting the Bentley and at that velocity, presumably cutting through the whole rest of the bridge and ending up somewhere out in the Pacific.

  “Hnnnnngh–Fuck–ghnn!” Felix blurts out through clenched teeth.

  He’s never been shot before but he’s not sure even that would have prepared him for this particular brand of getting shot. It feels like the cylindrical path the bullet cut through the back of his shoulder is still forcibly open to the air and sizzling and it burns like hell. He’s bleeding but not like it hit an artery. The weirder sensation is his muscle trying to clench around the cylindrical section that’s no longe
r there and the strange, searing pain makes him tear up.

  Through the pain, Felix turns his attention back to steering the Bentley as best he can. He nearly strikes a Ford Ranger as he steers them through staggered row of crawling vehicles but he squeaks by just barely.

  Felix sneaks a peek at the rear-view mirror in time to watch Audrey fire another shot from back on the walkway which goes through the cars he just maneuvered around, through the back of the Bentley, through Siobhán’s heart, and out through the side of the engine, catching the radiator on its way out to cut low into a minivan on the bridge ahead.

  The Bentley keeps going and fast but steam starts wafting back from the front where the bullet exited.

  Felix can’t bring himself to look at the mess that’s left of Siobhán in the seat next to him but, mercifully, her bucking and twitching is subsiding. To keep his mind from cracking any further for just a bit longer, he decides to forget she’s even there. It helps that the task of speeding between and around all these vehicles in the rain in fast-motion is taking most of his concentration. He can’t see Audrey in the mirror anymore but he’s not slowing down for anything.

  After avoiding a grouping of southbound cars as he steers between them and a northbound truck, he sees something dark moving downward in the upper fog bank ahead from behind the south bridge tower horizontal strut one down from the top. The fog clears for a moment and he sees a Porker flying platform descending from its ambush hiding spot in a controlled fall. It’s obscured as it drops past the next strut down and when it comes back into view, the thrusters and rotors are spinning back up. After dropping behind the lowest strut, the vehicle smoothly eases itself down to a floating stop about twenty feet above the bridge surface. The long, cylindrical tube that juts from the ball on the bottom of the flying platform shifts from its fixed position and smoothly aims toward the speeding Bentley.

  A blue light strobes form the Swiss clock eye cameras and Felix assumes it means for him to stop and go peacefully. Not feeling he has a choice, Felix decides to ignore it and steers his pink chariot so that a pack of crawling cars is between him and the menacing turret. The lights strobe red and it fires a beam of impossible black, cutting the cars he’s currently hiding behind in clean diagonal sections along the path of the beam, but seems to miss him intentionally like a warning shot. It’s like a foot diameter cylinder of subtraction, which cuts matter into nothing in its path. The cars and SUV come apart and collapse slowly toward the bridge road surface and he has to fight the urge to visualize what just happened to the people inside as he swerves around their diagonally bisected vehicles.