Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  “We’ll be there to help,” Harmony said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Bloomington, Illinois, was a relief, an actual city after countless miles of cornfields. Factories and warehouses were the first vertical things Nessa and Marie had seen in hours, if they didn’t count the turbine fields dotting the flat horizon. Marie made a turn down an industrial corridor and they ended up stuck in gridlock, wedged into a row of semis outside a sprawling redbrick processing plant where the air smelled like beer and peanuts.

  Carolyn Saunders wasn’t a city person. To find her, they had to get off the highway and take a tangle of back roads to the farthest edge of the city limits. The metropolis ended up a crumb in the rearview mirror, swallowed by farmland. Her address was a lonely, ramshackle ranch house with ginger lace curtains and a rusted-out Toyota pickup in the pebbled driveway. Her neighbors were fields of wheat and barley, rippling in a warm springtime breeze. Marie pulled up behind the pickup, the Eldorado’s wheels grinding on the loose gravel, and turned off the ignition.

  The engine rattled once and fell silent. No sound now but the whisper of the wind through the fields and the distant cry of birdsong.

  “How do you want to do this?” Marie asked.

  “Honesty is the best policy,” Nessa said. “Or so they say. We’ll ask her where she gets her ideas. Then we’ll tell her where we get ours.”

  “What if she thinks we’re just a couple of crazy fans?”

  Nessa glanced to the back seat, where her book of spells sat nestled inside the suitcase.

  “I think I can manage a small demonstration to the contrary,” she said.

  They walked to the front door side by side. Marie hesitated, and Nessa gave her a nod.

  “You’re her number-one fan,” Nessa said, her tone lightly teasing. “Go ahead.”

  Marie knocked on the door.

  No response. She knocked again, more firmly this time.

  “Her truck’s here,” Marie said. “I assume that’s hers.”

  Nessa stepped onto the overgrown lawn, weeds brushing her ankles, and peered into the living-room window. She peeked through a gap in the lace curtains and her tiny smile vanished.

  “Get it open,” she said.

  Marie tried the handle. The cheap lock rattled against the old wooden frame, but it didn’t budge. She took three steps back, rushed in, and threw her shoulder into the door. Wood splintered, the knob cracking out of place as the door blasted open.

  Someone had taken a knife to the vintage sofa in Carolyn’s kitschy living room, tearing stuffing out by the fistfuls and scattering it across the rustic floorboards. A bookcase lay toppled, photographs torn from their frames, a woven rug coated in a sheen of broken glass.

  “Hold up,” Marie told Nessa. Nessa waited outside while Marie ran to the car, pulling open the back door and unzipping their suitcase.

  She came back with a gun.

  Marie held the pistol in a tight grip, barrel aimed low, and cleared the house room by room. The ravaged living room, then the kitchen, where the pantry had been torn open and anything bigger than a canister of oatmeal had been dumped out on the yellowed linoleum. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink next to an empty bottle of scotch.

  Through an open archway, Carolyn’s office looked like a crime scene. Her desk drawers had been yanked out and upended one by one, the floor littered with scraps of paper, notes, crumpled and yellowed receipts, a whirlwind of pens and paper clips. Her bulky old monitor sat out on the desktop, with a tangle of disconnected cables beneath; a square of naked floorboard marked the spot where her computer used to sit.

  In the cramped, dusty bedroom, windows sealed behind drawn paper shutters, her double mattress had gotten the same treatment as the sofa: gutted like a serial killer’s victim and its innards pulled out. Marie checked the closets, the bathroom, anywhere Carolyn could be hiding. Or anywhere they could have hidden her body. She wasn’t sure if she was worried or relieved when she came up empty. She sniffed the air, hunting for the telltale stench of decomposition. All she picked up was the faint scent of potpourri and old cedar.

  “Unless she went out for a walk at the luckiest possible moment,” Marie said, glancing out the living-room window at the truck in the driveway, “they—whoever ‘they’ is—took her.”

  “And possibly something she had, something she was hiding.” Nessa’s toe nudged a yellow clump of sofa stuffing. “Looks like she wasn’t in a cooperative mood.”

  “This…this isn’t our fault, is it?”

  “What? Why?” Nessa pushed her glasses up on her nose and peered at Marie. “Why on earth would you think that?”

  Marie let the curtain glide shut across the window, trapping the sunlight under a cloak of gauze.

  “Oh, I don’t know, we’re just being chased by demonic bounty hunters is all.”

  “Who are after us,” Nessa said. “No. Even if they knew where we were going, and if they could beat us here, there’s no reason for them to abduct Carolyn and leave. They’d either lay an ambush for us or leave a way to contact them and arrange a trade. Neither fact is in evidence. The logical conclusion is that your dear author has her own problems, which decided to rear their head at the most inconvenient moment possible. And we are now officially bereft of clues. I’m starting to think we should focus on killing Alton instead.”

  “That won’t free us from this curse. And from what that hunter said, even killing him won’t stop the contract. They’ll just keep coming at us until we’re dead.”

  “No,” Nessa said, “but it would be immensely satisfying.”

  Marie couldn’t argue that. She needed some fresh air. The cramped house, the wreckage all felt like it was closing in on her. She stepped outside and took a slow walk around the property, her footing careful in the overgrown grass. Nothing to see, nothing but faded clapboard siding and an old stone well out back, capped and padlocked down.

  Her senses tingled. Cop intuition, like she felt when she was tossing a dealer’s stash house. There was something here, something she wasn’t grasping just yet. Something nobody was meant to find.

  “Find anything?” Nessa asked, strolling out to join her.

  “I thought maybe this well could be hiding something, but…” Marie trailed off. She turned her back on it. “No. It’s the house.”

  “There’s no crawl space and no room for a basement stair. I checked. No attic, either, by the looks of it.”

  Marie studied the windows. The closest one looked in on Carolyn’s office, with a view of her ransacked desk. She held out a hand, sweeping it slow across the span of water-stained siding, like a photographer preparing for a panoramic shot.

  “Nessa,” she said, “I think Carolyn worked a little magic trick of her own.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because judging by the length of this wall, her office is bigger on the outside than it is on the inside.”

  Nineteen

  They scurried back inside the house. Marie paced Carolyn’s office, counting her footsteps, judging the distance. She wasn’t wrong. It was bigger on the outside.

  “The back wall,” Nessa suggested.

  Marie pressed her fingers to the grainy wood paneling. She crouched low and felt her way along each plank, her cropped nails slipping into each groove, giving experimental tugs and pushes.

  The wood split with a pop of air and groaned free. Nessa rushed over to help her. They lifted a door-sized chunk of wall away, exposing the space beyond, just a little bigger than a closet. A string dangled from a bare overhead bulb and Marie gave it a tug, casting stark white light across Carolyn’s chamber of secrets.

  Sheets of glued cork coated the interior walls of her hiding space. Thumbtacks in a rainbow of colors pinned up a flurry of newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and photographs, like something out of a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Marie half-expected to see articles about 9/11 and the deep state on display; instead, Carolyn’s collected evidence was incalculably weirder
and far more scattershot.

  FBI Raids Enclave Casino was connected to a twenty-year-old article titled Ausar Biomedical Under Investigation: Birth Defects Linked to Viridithol Trials by a length of blue twine. An article about a cartel massacre in a Mexican village south of Monterrey bore scarlet ink in the margins: Eden tendril here. Xerxes mercenaries, using deniable cover? Marie gazed from clipping to clipping, trying to follow Carolyn’s tangled threads of thought.

  “Marie,” Nessa said.

  She pointed at the biggest item on the left-hand wall, a map of the globe annotated with more pushpins. A color-coded note on the edge of the map gave an attribution for each pin and a list of names. The first one, The Scribe, linked to a green pin centered on Bloomington.

  “We aren’t alone,” Nessa said. “There are more of us. Thirteen names in all.”

  The Drifter, The Enemy, The Thief, The Salesman…Marie followed the list down to the final entry.

  The Witch and her Knight: IN PLAY. Carolyn had adorned the names with a blue dot and a blue-headed pin pressed into the heart of Manhattan.

  “Less than half of these names are marked ‘in play,’” Marie said, tracing the list with her fingertip. “Not sure if that means she hasn’t found them, or if they’re already…you know.”

  “But she knew about us. And she knew where we were. And she did nothing to warn us.” Nessa’s mouth curled in a dour frown. “I know she’s your favorite author, but I’m inclined to express my displeasure when we catch up with her.”

  “Do we know that? Somebody sent you that scrying mirror, not to mention writing a whole book of spells just for you. We’ve got an ally out there, somewhere. They just don’t want to show their face.”

  “Hmph. Maybe.” Nessa folded her arms. “All the same, now that we know she has the answers we need, she will be more forthcoming. I’ll get the truth out of her with a pair of pliers if I have to.”

  “Nessa.”

  “Only if I have to. Keep reading. There’s got to be something in all this mess that’ll tell us who took her.”

  They each took one wall, working back-to-back in the stifling, airless alcove. Marie picked a clipping at random, slid along a colored bit of twine to the next, and kept following the spiderweb. Carolyn had annotated most of the articles, and a pattern began to form.

  “Nessa, you spotting any mention of a man named Carlo?”

  Nessa read aloud from a margin. “‘Carlo says President Clinton assassinated on live TV. U.S. in lockdown, martial law declared.’ That…did not happen here.”

  “She made contact. Carolyn found a way to reach across worlds, talk to someone on another Earth.” Marie paused. “Wait. Which Clinton, Bill or Hillary?”

  Nessa paused, hunting through the clippings. “Neither. Apparently…Janelle Clinton? But what were they trying to accomplish here? Looks like Carolyn and her otherworldly pen pal were working on a project, passing information and news back and forth, but I don’t see the end goal.”

  Marie gazed at a fact sheet in dense six-point type, some kind of breakdown of a sight rail for a rifle. Military spec. Carolyn had scribbled a few lines on the back of the page: Talon Worldwide = Talon Armaments Group, just a couple of decades behind in tech. If our worlds are evolving that closely, will TW eventually develop Valkyrie armor or something close? Carlo’s putting himself in too much danger, posing as a grease monkey. Has to be a way I can help.

  Marie slipped into a memory. Not one of hers. Not from this life.

  When Savannah Cross had captured her, forcing her designer drug into Marie’s veins on the tip of a titanium needle, she’d fallen into a kaleidoscope of visions. Echoes of her past lives, blooming as vivid and real as her memories of yesterday. Now she was back there again, striding with thudding mechanical footfalls through an abyss of darkness and flame.

  Neon-green lines and targeting reticules flashed across her visor. All around her, women in black chitinous armor, half angel and half roach, braced bulbous rifles and laid waste to an urban street. Gouts of fire lashed across rooftops and blasted out windows as the air flooded with panicked screams.

  She remembered the sense of dark pride welling up in her chest. My Valkyries, she thought.

  “Marie?”

  Marie blinked, jarred from the vision. She pinned the sheet back on the wall of cork. Nessa turned, their shoulders brushing, and showed her a sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip.

  “Long before we lost Carolyn, she lost Carlo. Whatever they were using to communicate just stopped working. She was hunting for an alternative, making notes on places where reality seemed thin around the edges and she might be able to open another channel to him.”

  “But when? Last week? Last year?” Marie waved a hand, taking in the walls. “She’s been at this for a long time.”

  “Looks like she lost contact with Carlo four or five years ago, but she hasn’t given up. Some of these articles are fresher than the rest, and this one’s from March. The Ghost Babies of Pyramid Lake. Urban legends about some lake in Nevada where a string of divers went missing.”

  She handed Marie half of the sheaf. Marie leafed through the papers, stopping on another recent piece.

  “Here’s one about a haunted post office in Nebraska,” Marie said. “And another about a dead shopping mall in Des Moines. This one’s weird.”

  Nessa arched an eyebrow. “Look where we’re standing. ‘Weird’ is a subjective concept.”

  “No, that’s what I mean. There’s nothing strange about it—no disappearances, no murders, no urban legends. It’s just a mall, the Coastland Galleria, rusting away in the middle of nowhere and going out of business. But Carolyn has a lot of material on it.”

  “Coastland? It’s in Iowa.”

  “Artistic license, I guess.” Marie flipped a page. “Looks like Carolyn wanted to take a road trip, but not alone. She mentions looking for help, but not who or where.”

  “I might have an idea,” Nessa said.

  The last two pages of the sheaf were notes scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper. Carolyn’s handwriting was sloppy, slurred like a drunkard’s voice. A printout showed a chunk of downtown Chicago streets, fixed to the last page with a couple of staples and annotated in a rainbow of highlighter ink.

  Third time looking was the charm, she wrote. Bast Club appeared when the streets changed overnight, not long after the Great Fire of 1871. Not sure if al-Farsi is original owner. Occult underground only, need to be a known quantity or have someone vouch for you. Told them I was a friend of Daniel’s, they let me right in. Suckers.

  A second note, scribbled beneath with a different-colored pen, read: Screw these pretentious goth pinheads sideways with a frozen trout. Their whiskey is bottom-shelf swill, too. Eighteen dollars for an Old Fashioned, kiss my ass. So much for my plan. Fuck. Now I can’t go back. Or can I? Technically didn’t say I was banned.

  “I don’t want to cast aspersions on your favorite writer,” Nessa said lightly, “but I think she was drunk when she wrote a lot of this.”

  “Honestly, I’m kinda hoping she was drunk when she wrote that. Is that the last note?”

  Nessa looked to the wall. “Most of these aren’t dated, best I can guess by is the dates on the clippings themselves, but it seems pretty recent.”

  “So she’s planning an expedition to Coastland mall to try and make contact with Carlo, but she doesn’t want to go alone, for reasons she didn’t bother sharing.” Marie pursed her lips and took a mental walk through the timeline. “She thought she might find help in Chicago, at this ‘Bast Club.’ She took two trips, but something went wrong the second time and she got herself booted out.”

  “And she wanted to go back for another try,” Nessa said. “Whatever happened here—whatever happened to her here—interrupted her plans.”

  Marie stepped out of the secret alcove. She walked across the office and cracked a window, inviting the warm farmland breeze to cut through the house’s stifling stillness. Being cooped up in the
airless closet had left beads of sweat pooling on her back. Her blouse clung to her skin.

  “She stepped on somebody’s toes at that club,” Marie said. “Maybe they decided to step on hers. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Nessa leaned back against the wood paneling next to the concealed doorway, arms crossed as her eyes rolled to the heavens.

  “That we’re going to try and sneak into an exclusive nightclub for the—how did she put it—‘occult underground,’ in hopes of finding out who Carolyn crossed, and then follow them to our abducted author without being captured ourselves?”

  “Bingo,” Marie said.

  “You realize, of course, that if these people have any grasp of the real occult as opposed to being harmless poseurs, the creatures hunting us might also be there?”

  “If you think it’s too dangerous—”

  “Didn’t say that.” Nessa flashed a smile, a hint of challenge gleaming in her eyes. “Sounds like a kick and a half. Richard never wanted to go clubbing with me. And he hated it when I dressed in black.”

  “Chicago is two, maybe two and a half hours from here. We can be there by dark.”

  Nessa unfurled her arm and offered Marie her open hand. An invitation to the dance.

  “We haven’t started to get dark yet,” she replied.

  Twenty

  Nothing was sadder, Calypso often thought, than a demon who didn’t keep up with the modern age. He didn’t consider himself a computer whiz—that’s what the boys in the IT department were for, bless their human hearts—but he knew how to work a web browser. And now, sitting in his office down the hall from Senator Roth, ignoring his second call of the hour, he didn’t like what he saw.

  Gas Leak at LeVeque Tower, Floor Evacuated. You had to read between the lines when it came to this sort of thing. Like the tourist who hedged and said he “wasn’t allowed to talk about it” before evading the rest of the interviewer’s questions. Or the early-morning photograph of black SUVs surrounding the corner outside the hotel’s lobby, which a spokesman for the Columbus PD tried to pass off as “emergency response vehicles.”