“You’re sure the settings are correct?” I asked.
Guillermo gave me a solemn nod.
“All right then,” I said. Adopting a brave smile for all three of my audience, I took an unceremonious step through the ring, sticking my right foot through the opening first and watching it disappear from view. It was unnerving, the sight making me want to jerk back and restore my body to wholeness again. But I didn’t give in to the impulse, instead ducking my shoulders and head through the opening and completing the leap in a quick motion.
I can tell you I was more than a little relieved to find myself whole.
The room was dark, and when I clicked on the flashlight, I saw that I was in the room Perdida had captured with Guillermo’s camera. Scanning the room quickly, I saw a desk and chair, a filing cabinet, and a book shelf. There was no clutter on the desktop, and the shelf was empty, leading me to surmise that the office was currently unoccupied.
What kind of place is this? I wondered. In this world, Chavez Ravine must be a very different sort of space, as the modern office looked like nothing I would have expected to find in any of the little houses in Guillermo’s neighborhood.
Behind me was an oval of light, which was how the gateway from the crossover machine looked on this side of things. In our planning meetings, Guillermo and I had decided that he should leave the gateway open for five minutes after I went through to give me a chance to get back quickly if I needed it. After that, he would open it once an hour—at five minutes to the hour and leave it open until five minutes past. This way, I’d have a clear window of opportunity that I could plan my return around, and at the same time we minimized the possibility that someone from this world might see the opening and start some unwanted exploring.
I stood there silently and listened for signs of life anywhere around me. There was nothing, though. Whatever this office was part of, there seemed to be no people here no. I surmised that I might be standing in a business that was closed for the night. Whether that was true or not, the lack of any apparent menace told me I wouldn’t need to come running back to the portal in the next few minutes, so I waited in the office until the portal closed. Then I went to the door and shut off the flashlight.
Opening the door as silently as I could, I looked out into the hallway. Dark and empty. So far, so good. I turned on the light again and took a better look. The hallway looked sterile—either new and also unused or else located in a building like a hospital or some other institution where cleanliness was king. Doorways to what I assumed were other offices lined the hall on the left and right, but I could see no names on doors, only numbers. Turning, I checked and saw that I had come out of the office labeled 4-6W. This didn’t make a lot of sense, but I told myself it wasn’t my world. Who was I to judge?
I moved quickly along the hallway, a little nervous about the clicking of my heels on the tile floor but also eager to get out of this screwy building and into someplace that made sense, or that gave me some answers. It was a little hard to keep my bearings, but I guessed that I was now walking in the vicinity of what would have been Guillermo’s front yard.
A blandly ordinary door was at the end of the hallway, and I turned the knob, grateful to find it had no locking mechanism. Clicking off the flashlight again, I pulled the door inward, saw more darkness on the other side, and—after poking my head and shoulders through—turned on the light once more. Another hallway. I was going to have to be careful coming back not to get lost in the maze.
Unless I’d gotten turned around, the area to the right of me would be the equivalent of the location of Guillermo’s workshop, which meant that was where Elsa had entered this world. A little nervous that she might still be there, waiting for me to open a portal and come after her, I chose that direction anyway. There were no doors opening onto this hallway, and at the end was another door with an opaque window in its upper half.
Knowing my light would be at least dimly visible to anyone on the other side of the door, I killed the beam, walking along blindly with one hand on the wall for guidance. When my hand reached the corner, I pocketed the flashlight and grabbed the roll of silver dollars, holding it in my right hand while I fumbled for the doorknob with my left. Holding the coins in a tight fist to give my punch a little more power should I need it, I turned the knob and listened.
Silence.
I opened the door.
More silence.
There was a smell, though. Fresh paint.
Taking a deep breath, I switched on the flashlight again and saw that I was now in a locker room. Two long backless benches stretched ahead of me and on either wall was a row of full-length lockers. All were closed. Passing the flashlight’s beam over these, I saw that there were no names on the lockers.
There was no door at the end of the locker room—just an opening wide enough for three men. And beyond that was open space. The night sky was above me, a full moon off to my left, the direction I assumed was east. Turning a full circle in the light of the moon, I was able to get a pretty good view of Chavez Ravine.
It had been transformed. All the houses appeared to be gone, and the sides of the ravine were now terraced. In the moonlight, I saw what looked like horizontal bars where the terraces began, and when I shone the flashlight on these I saw that the bars were a railing, beyond which were rows and rows of seats. The whole ravine appeared to have been covered with concrete. At first, I thought I might be standing in a newly constructed—or not yet completed—baseball stadium, but when I took a few steps away from the terraced hillside, I noticed that the ground didn’t give like grass or dirt.
I stooped and ran my hand along the ground.
More cement.
All of Chavez Ravine had been covered over, and all the Chavezium with it.
I smiled at this, knowing that Elsa didn’t stand a chance of running amok in this world with the technological ideas she’d stolen from Guillermo and Klaus Lang. She could do nothing without the power source that the fools in this world had so recently buried. True, she might be able to create mischief if she found other like-minded mad scientists, but my greatest fears were at least mostly allayed.
For a moment, I thought about going back into the office to wait out the return of the gateway. While it was true that I hadn’t yet found out much about this world, I had at least found a detail that was literally concrete. That could be enough for now. I could spend the rest of the evening strategizing with Guillermo and then maybe come back again tomorrow night to start looking for Elsa.
But then I heard a noise, a voice from far across the stadium.
“Hey!” came a man’s shout. “Hey you! Hold it right there!”
No matter what the world was like, I knew that those were the words of the police, or at the least some kind of authority figure. And I wanted nothing to do with authority figures of any kind right now. So, I ran.
Clicking off the flashlight, I bolted across the concrete space of the stadium floor. In the moonlight, I could see that the area ahead of me was open, not terraced. In my world, this was the entrance to Chavez Ravine, and I was glad to see that the stadium’s architects had opted to leave that portion open rather than build a circular venue. Instead, it was more of a horseshoe, and thankfully the cop or night watchman or whatever he was had spotted me when he was at the bottom of the shoe and I was about at the middle.
The voice had seemed high up, too, and I pictured an older guy, maybe a retired cop, making his money by prowling around the grounds and maybe even taking the occasional nap in one of the offices, now chasing after me, the most exciting part of his night. Try as he might, there was no way he’d get me, not with the head start I had. I hoped he wasn’t armed, but with my flashlight off, I knew I didn’t make a very good target as I ran for what should have been the opening of the ravine.
I wasn’t counting on the construction fence, though, and almost ran into it before I realized it was there. It was about six feet high, easy enough to get over. I was still carrying
the flashlight, though, and had to stick it in my pocket before reaching up to grip the chain links.
And that was when I heard my pursuer. He sounded awfully close.
Expecting to see an old man in uniform chasing after me, maybe overweight, I was shocked to see the night watchman coming at me not on foot but on a little device that hovered a foot above the ground. It was a flat board, maybe two feet across, and it had a handle like you’d see on a kid’s scooter that the guard used to control the board. The guard wasn’t old either, or overweight. About my age, he was bearing down on me fast, going twice the speed I could have run at. If it hadn’t been for the fence, I’d have been out in the darkness beyond the stadium by now, but with the fence stopping me I knew there was a good chance he’d be on me in seconds.
I leapt for the fence, climbing as fast and as far as I could, and when I got to the top I didn’t bother taking my time to swing over carefully and start climbing down. If I had, he would have gotten me. As it was, I still felt his hand touch my shoe as I flung myself over the top and let myself fall to the ground on the other side.
There’d been no shortage of farm fences to hop, climb, or scramble over during the war, and I’d learned the art of tucking and rolling in basic training. Doing such a maneuver on the unforgiving surface of an asphalt parking lot was not something I was used to, but I’d had hard landings before. And, as fueled by adrenaline as I was, I expect I could have broken a collar bone in the fall and still gotten up to run away without feeling a thing until later.
As it was, I didn’t do much damage, managing to roll away from the fence and then get to my feet in a quick, fluid motion. I ran, ignoring the guard’s shouts that I should stop. He could have gotten off his hover scooter and climbed after me. And he could have found whatever gate there was in the fence, unlocked it and then continued the pursuit. But he did neither.
By the time I reached the other side of the empty parking lot that should have been where the first homes in the ravine were, I looked back to see the guard impotently doing the equivalent of pacing along his side of the fence, hovering along for fifty yards or so, peering into the darkness, and then hovering back to the point where he’d lost me. I couldn’t be sure, but I assumed his jurisdiction—and his duty—ended with the fence line.
Before I left the whole scene entirely behind me, I noticed a large sign on the fence about another twenty feet from where the guard ended his circuit. In big letters, it read, “Future Home of the Los Angeles Blasters” and underneath that “America’s Premiere Rocketball Team.” The words “Blasters” and “Rocketball” were printed in a way that made them look like they were comets—large letters at the heads of the words trailing down to smaller letters at the ends. The printing conveyed the feeling of rapid movement.
What the hell is rocketball? I wondered as I trotted through the dark, knowing that this world’s equivalent of Sunset Boulevard should be just a little farther ahead of me. And, as I went, I couldn’t help imagining all of that Chavezium, lost to this world’s scientists, possibly forever.
Chapter Six
From what I could tell, the night watchman hadn’t called the police on me. Even so, I wanted to put some distance between the stadium and me. I needed a way to kill an hour or two, knowing that in another world Guillermo, Carmelita, and Osvaldo were going to be filled with hope every time they turned on the machine again and then filled with uncertainty when they had to shut it off ten minutes later.
There was nothing for it, I knew. That guard had to be given a chance to settle down before I tried to get back inside.
So, I walked along Sunset Boulevard in the direction of Echo Park, not sure if either of those names applied in this world but taking some comfort in their being laid out in the same fashion as I was used to seeing.
I hadn’t been on the sidewalk for more than a minute before a car passed me. Only, it wasn’t a car. Like the night watchman’s hoverboard, this vehicle had no wheels, and it skated along about a foot of the ground making a loud hum as it went.
Electric? I wondered.
Maybe this world’s scientists had found a power source to rival Chavezium without needing to dig up the ravine. It was a question I wasn’t likely to find an answer to unless one fell in my lap, I knew. The surest way of marking myself as an outsider of the most extreme nature would have been to ask a passing pedestrian how those vehicles worked. It would have been as outlandish as someone in Guillermo’s world asking about the principles of internal combustion as a Meteor drove past.
Another vehicle was coming along the street toward me, and I got a better look at this one on approach. Low and sleek, it had dark windows that hid the occupants and a bar of lights on the nose rather than the two headlights I was used to. If it had doors, I couldn’t see them, and I had to wonder if the roof popped open to let people in and out. Strange as it looked, the car seemed luxurious, but maybe that was just the sleek design appealing to my prejudices. In the world I knew, the sleeker the body, the more expensive the car. Maybe it wasn’t that way here.
About a half a mile along the road, I saw a sign for a diner up ahead. This was a relief, not just that this world had diners but also that it would give me a place to hide out for a little while before heading back to the construction site. The prospect of hiding in the shadows for a couple hours was not appealing to me.
Outside the diner, I saw another familiar sight—a phone booth. On impulse, I ducked inside but found no directory. The phone itself looked nothing like a phone. It was just a sleek metal tube, shiny, with holes at either end. A small chain held it to a little metal counter—a theft deterrent, I suspected. There was no dial to speak of, but there was an array of buttons, each with a number on it, and one larger red button that I assumed stood in for a cradle. A black box was mounted beneath the metal counter, and I saw a slot in its front about the size of a nickel. This told me that, aside from the phone’s odd design, it was about the same as any other phone I’d ever had experience with.
When I pushed the red button, I was rewarded with the distant sound of a dial tone coming from one of the phone’s ends. I assumed this was the receiving end, so I put it to my ear and heard the tone more clearly now.
Having gotten lucky in my guesses so far, I pushed the button marked “0” and hoped it would get me an operator.
The sound of ringing brought a smile to my face, and then I heard a woman’s voice saying “Operator. How can I help you?”
“Hello, operator,” I said. “I’m looking for the number for a Guillermo Garcia, probably in the Los Angeles city lim—”
“Are you goddamn kidding me?” the operator barked.
I held the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment, realizing that my luck had just run out.
“No, ma’am,” I offered when I put the phone back to my ear. “I’m not kidding. I need the number for Guillermo Gar—”
“Go to hell, pal,” the operator returned. “Yank someone’s else’s package, why don’t you?”
And she hung up.
I simply stared at the phone for several seconds, pondering whether I should try again or not, and then I set it down on its little shelf, deciding I shouldn’t tempt fate. In a world where telephone operators got belligerent over simple requests, who knew what the penalty might be for a second offence?
Fortunately, when I got inside the diner, I found that it looked about as I expected a diner to look—booths with padded seats upholstered in red material and a long counter with stools running its length. There was a cash register at this end of the counter and a gum chewing waitress in an orange uniform on the other side who was pouring coffee for one of the patrons. I could hear music but not from a jukebox. It sounded like there was a radio playing in the kitchen, the sound coming from an opening in the wall behind the counter where the cooks slid the finished plates through for the waitresses to take to the tables. I couldn’t hear the radio well enough to try picking out the song, but I doubted I’d have been able
to, even if it had been playing on the counter for all to hear. In a world where so much was already different from the one I called home, I figured the music wouldn’t be anything familiar to me.
I headed for the counter and took a seat about halfway down, four seats away from the one occupied by the only other patron at the bar. Glancing around, I saw there were a few other customers there—two tables with lone newspaper readers each nursing a cup of coffee and in the farthest corner a young couple sharing an ice cream soda: two straws and two sets of eyes staring deeply into each other.
The waitress who’d been pouring coffee dropped a menu in front of me on her way to deliver the cup to the patron at the end of the bar. “Right back,” she said around her gum.
I glanced at the prices, glad to see they looked in line with what I’d expect in the world I’d just left and that nothing else seemed out of the ordinary about the language or the offerings.
When she came back, I asked for a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee. She gave me a disappointed look, her shift probably being a little shy of big spenders. I felt a little bad about that, but what could I do? If she knew she was actually serving a customer from a parallel world, that might have been tip enough, but there was no way I could let her know a thing like that.
She walked away to get my order ready, and as she did I noticed that the song on the radio had ended and the jockey was giving a line of chatter over the air. There was something in the way he talked that struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place it since I still couldn’t hear that well—not able to pick out individual words but rather just the tone and cadence.
Moments later, I had pie and coffee in front of me, a big slice and a steaming cup. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the plate and cup were placed before me, but now I was pleased that the waitress hadn’t skimped despite the scantiness of my order. This, of course, was balanced by a little more guilt over the fact that my money was almost certainly no good here.
The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4) Page 6