The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

by Chris Strange

CHAPTER FOUR

  I rode a 250cc Yamaha motorbike constructed sometime between the Ice Age and the Fall of Rome. Like all my things, it was dented and scratched almost beyond recognition, but it ran well, and it was damn fuel efficient.

  The rain was already hammering down when I rode out of my basement’s parking lot. The dark clouds reflected the city’s light back onto me. I revved the bike, wiped the rain of my helmet visor with the back of my hand, and peeled out onto the road.

  The address I had for Lance Peterson was in John Andrews’ territory to the north of the city, back past the police station. There was even less traffic now, but the increasingly heavy rain and wind made me take things carefully. It’d be a real fine thing if I screwed this up before I began because I hit an oil patch that was slick with rain and went tumbling onto the road. The bike would survive—it was a solid old thing—but I didn’t count myself that lucky, especially if some opportunistic criminals decided they liked the look of my shoes.

  Peterson’s neighborhood was full of run-down Chinese restaurants and squashed-together villas. I slowed, squinting through the rain and the darkness to find the right address. After a few minutes of weaving through the streets, I found it, a white villa with paint peeling from the weatherboard and a non-matching gaudy staircase leading up to the front door.

  I switched off my bike, put out the kickstand, and removed my helmet. The house was dark, like all the others. This wasn’t really a bad neighborhood, so people here were probably sleeping at this time of night instead of shooting up Ink or trawling the streets as the police department’s shiny new lackey. I put my hands in my pockets and hurried up the stairs to the shelter of the house’s veranda, despite already being thoroughly soaked on the ride there.

  As I tried to wipe the rain from my face, I pondered what to do now I was there. Detective Todd hadn’t exactly been specific about Peterson’s situation these days. Last time I saw him he was just a poor Vei kid trying to make a new life for himself in Bluegate. Vei immigrants tended to live in groups to make the rent easier to pay, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find eight or ten Vei living in this little villa, crammed in like kittens in a sack. It probably wouldn’t make a good impression on them if I kicked in the door and started demanding to speak to Peterson.

  So it was going to have to be the old-fashioned way: bang on the door until someone woke up and let me in. I straightened my tie, tucked in my shirt, and started hammering.

  I was at it for two minutes before a light finally flicked on behind the frosted glass of the front door. My hand had gone red and was starting to ache when the door slowly opened.

  It was a child. Damn, I hadn’t counted on that. She was a little Vei girl, wearing Earth-style pajamas and clutching a plastic doll to her chest. It was sometimes hard to judge ages of Vei children, but I’d guess she was about three or four.

  Vei were strange-looking people, if you hadn’t seen them before. I use the term “people” loosely, because as similar as they were to us in some ways, they were very different. From a distance they looked almost human; two arms, two legs, all the appendages you’d expect, but when you got up close it wasn’t hard to tell the difference. They were generally shorter and more slender than humans, with skin an almost impossible white. The most off-putting feature by far was the face.

  Their heads were round, almost spherical, and completely devoid of hair. They tended to have oversized eyes as well, though that varied from Vei to Vei.

  Their mouths were what really freak people out. Shark-like, I suppose you could call them. Two rows of pointed teeth on both jaws, no lips, and mouths that stretched all the way to the side of their face.

  The first human soldiers sent through the Bores to explore Heaven found the Vei equal parts disgusting and intriguing. It was less than twelve hours after the first team went through that the news stations were bursting with images of the Vei and their strange cities.

  But right now, this little girl could almost pass for human, if it wasn’t for her teeth. She squinted up at me, rubbing the sleep from her big eyes, and frowned. “Who are you?”

  I was never quite sure how to deal with kids, human or Vei. For the most part they resembled little drugged-up midgets, stumbling around the place shitting and puking. Usually I talked to them as if that’s what they were, enunciating my words slowly and carefully, until I sounded more stoned than them. This time, I tried treating her like I would a kitten I found in a box on my doorstep.

  “Hello, little one.” My voice sounded patronizing even to my ears. “What’s your name?”

  Her frown deepened, something that looked somewhat frightening on a person with teeth that could gut an elephant, even if she only came up to my thighs. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  I nodded sagely and hoped she didn’t start screaming. “I’m looking for someone. Lance Peterson. Is he your daddy?”

  “My father is dead,” she informed me matter-of-factly. “Lance is my uncle.”

  Christ, they bred Vei kids hard. “I need to speak to him. Is he here?”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “It’s important. Can you take me to him?” I tried smiling brightly to see if that improved my odds. Judging from my general state of exhaustion it only made me look more psychopathic, but hey, I was trying.

  To give the kid credit, she didn’t balk. She studied me for several moments in the same manner all women seem to have a knack for: somehow both appraising and dismissing at the same time. She was going to grow up to be yet another woman to be scared of.

  Finally, she gave me a curt nod and stepped back to let me in. I took a step inside, noticed the way she was staring pointedly at my feet, then wiped my feet on the doormat. A hard woman indeed.

  The inside of the house was all wooden paneling and knock-offs of abstract paintings. There were no trinkets from Heaven; most non-living objects brought to Earth degraded fairly quickly. Even Ink had a shelf life measured in weeks, and that was with all the extra precautions the dealers put into keeping it viable as long as possible.

  The girl led me through the hallway, pattering along in bare feet, and I could hear the soft sounds of breathing—something subtly non-human about it—coming from the rooms I passed. My barrage on the door didn’t appear to have woken anyone else. They must have had ears made of wood.

  Lance’s bedroom was at the end of the hallway, sharing walls with a bathroom and a linen closet. The girl stopped in front of it, still eyeing me with no small amount of suspicion, and pointed to the door. “I better not get in trouble for this.”

  “You won’t,” I assured her, trying my smile again. She didn’t look convinced, but she nodded and wandered back to her own room.

  I waited until she’d gone before I opened the door to Peterson’s room. Screw knocking. I was more than a little cranky, and a little sadistic part of me wanted someone else to suffer exhaustion like I was.

  I groped around on the wall and found a light switch. Peterson’s room was marginally bigger than my own. There were no windows, just a set of drawers, some neatly folded piles of clothes, and a single bed. Peterson was snuggled up in a thick pile of blankets, facing away from me. I could just hear him snoring through his slit-like nostrils over the rat-a-tat of rain on the roof. Turning on the light didn’t appear to have disturbed him at all.

  Right, that was it. If I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight, I wasn’t going to let this bastard get any either. I stomped across the room and took hold of Peterson’s shoulders. “Peterson, you lazy son of a bitch. Wake up!”

  His eyes snapped open and a little wordless scream escaped his throat. I clamped my hand over his mouth, ignoring the sharp points of his teeth for a moment. “Easy, easy damn it. I just want to talk.”

  He snatched my hand away from his mouth, but at least he’d stopped screaming. He scrambled up in his bed, pulling his covers up around himself, and fixed me with a look that was equal parts confused and angry. “Franco? What…?”

&nb
sp; I held up my hands and took a step back, already regretting my method of waking him. Probably not the smartest way to gain someone’s trust. “The little girl let me in.”

  “Is this a dream?” Unlike the girl he still had a hint of an accent, an odd way of pronouncing his i’s and r’s.

  “I didn’t think Vei dreamed.”

  “What in the names of the Eight are you doing in my house?”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. How the hell were you supposed to ask someone to turn on the nastiest gangster in the city? Maybe coming here on my own wasn’t one of my brightest ideas.

  I blamed tiredness. And police intimidation. I was usually much better prepared for things like this. It was a necessary part of being a Tunneler, at least one who wanted to survive.

  Peterson was still staring at me, so I said the first thing that came into my head. “So I hear you got a gig with Shirley O’Neil these days.”

  He frowned, looking even more fearsome than the girl had. “What of it?”

  “Great dame, that Shirley.”

  Peterson’s frown was rapidly turning into a scowl. He looked older than when I’d last seen him. He’d come to Earth so fresh and naive, and now here he was looking like he was about to pull a Glock on me.

  I switched from English to Vei, hoping it would score me some points. “Look, here’s the deal, Lance. I’m running down some leads, and I was wondering if the names Doctor Dee or Chroma meant anything to you.”

  His face became as still as if he’d been frozen in carbonite. He stared at me for several seconds before finally opening his mouth. “No. Not a thing.”

  In general, Vei are terrible liars. Peterson was the worst I’d seen. I almost smiled, but I thought it would spoil the mood. “You don’t have to be scared. I know people who can protect you.”

  “People? What people?”

  “The police are—”

  “The police? You’re working with the police?” His voice rose to a screech. “You brought the police here?”

  “It’s okay.” I held out my hands in what I hoped was a soothing motion, but he just backed away further into the corner of his bed. “They’re not here yet.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. In fact, that was probably the stupidest thing I could have possibly said. His screech turned into a wail, and he scrambled around, tossing the blankets off himself and babbling in Vei. “No, no, no. Dead, I’m dead, dead…” He began speaking too fast for me to understand. He threw the last blanket to the floor, and I realized he was naked.

  “Whoa, Jesus.” I held my hand up to block my vision and protect my delicate sensibilities. I was nowhere near drunk enough to see that. “Who are you afraid of, Lance? O’Neil? John Andrews?”

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he started grabbing clothes and assorted accessories and shoving them into a huge purple suitcase he pulled from under his bed.

  “Hell, just calm down,” I said. “Breathe, Lance. Breathe.” He ignored me, didn’t even look at me. I reached out to shake some sense into him. “For the love of God will you just—”

  A jolt of pain flew through my back, like someone had just kicked me square in the kidney. I tried to turn, but my body didn’t seem to be working. I heard a strangled screaming noise. It took me a moment to realize it was coming from me.

  The pain lanced through my muscles, and I knew I was going to fall. I couldn’t move any part of my body, and I was off balance. I toppled awkwardly, rotating as I fell. Peterson finally appeared to have noticed me; he was staring at me with his jaw dropping.

  I hit the ground hard, facing the door. The little girl was standing in the doorway. She was still wearing her pajamas, but she’d abandoned her doll in favor of something more exciting.

  The thing she held in her hands looked like a gun, but it was yellow, with two thin wires stretching across the room and burying themselves in my shoulder. The girl’s face was fixed in an expression of determination.

  I had just enough time to swear before something collided with the back of my head and everything went black.