Napier's Bones

by Derryl Murphy

  Jenna was staring at her arms, face pale. “I saw that movie,” she responded after a moment of trying to regain her composure. “They almost died.”

  “But they didn’t, and that, combined with its wonderful series of synchronicities is what makes this little bit of metal—” he waved his wrist in the air “—so damned valuable to us.” After saying this he finally noticed that Jenna wasn’t looking any better. “Here,” he said, opening his door and climbing out, “you scrunch on over and let me drive for awhile. I’ll explain as we go.”

  Jenna climbed over the bucket seats and tried to settle in, but her knee bumped against the glove compartment, which noisily popped open. Inside was a manila envelope which slid down onto Jenna’s lap, as if pulled along by an invisible wire. Numbers swarmed everywhere, but none of them appeared to be dangerous, and when Jenna delicately picked up the envelope with her fingertips they all faded away.

  “Jesus,” said Dom. He’d opened the driver’s side door but had stayed outside when the envelope appeared.

  “Open it,” suggested Billy. “The numbers that were here didn’t seem dangerous.” After a few seconds of dubious thought, Dom nodded in agreement.

  Jenna slowly peeled open the envelope, then shook the contents out onto her lap. Two U.S. passports. Carefully, Jenna picked one up and opened it, closed it again and handed it over to Dom, eyes wide open.

  Dom climbed into the car and leaned back before he opened the passport. He noted with some sort of distant interest that when he did look inside, he felt no surprise at what he saw. A picture of him, accompanied by the name Eric Wood; even his signature using that name. He turned to look at Jenna, saw the passport she was holding up, her own picture inside accompanied by the name Lisbeth Sorenson.

  “Someone else is in on all this,” said Dom finally.

  “Someone who wants to help us, I think,” replied Billy.

  “But why passports?” asked Jenna. Her voice was tight and quiet, but Dom could hear the quiver of fear there.

  Dom started the car. “First thing, we’re off to Canada.” He pulled out and headed for the highway.

  “Canada? What do you mean? Why Canada?” Her voice was even more panicked now.

  Billy put a hand on her shoulder. “Settle down, Jenna. Give Dom the time to explain things instead of getting so upset.”

  She closed her eyes, leaned her head back and took a series of deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” she finally said, voice barely above a whisper. “The passports coming out of nowhere, that picture of me I know was never taken, and I have trouble with blood at the best of times, and seeing those numbers crawl inside me like that just made it worse. It was like something out of a horror movie, bugs climbing inside you and making your skin bubble and crawl and flow through your blood and you can see it like you’re watching a Discovery Channel documentary and they’re little and even though you say they’re supposed to help, they—”

  “Whoa!” yelled Dom. “Jenna, your freaking out is freaking me out. Shut the fuck up a minute and let me explain what’s going on.”

  She turned to look at Dom, lip quivering but eyes set hard. “All right. Tell me, please.” Her voice was deathly quiet now.

  Dom took a deep breath, concentrating on the traffic for a minute. “Right,” he finally said. “First, the passports. They’re pretty obviously a gift from someone who knows what shape we’re in. I doubt that crossing the border is going to help us get away, but there are things I have squirreled away in Canada, things that can help us deal with our situation here. And since they’re closer than anything in the States, it makes sense to go that way. Although . . .” He scratched the bridge of his nose as he thought for a few seconds. “Don’t know if I like the idea of someone out there knowing that about me already.”

  Billy shrugged. “Too late to do anything about it now.”

  “Not so,” said Dom. “We could drive somewhere else, mess up their plans.”

  “We have the wire you just got us,” replied Billy. “Will it last long enough if we have to go further?”

  Dom pursed his lips. “Probably not. Shit. So Canada it is.”

  “What about the wire?” asked Jenna. “Why’d you have to poke me with it?”

  “Well, synchronicity is what makes our world go round,” said Dom. “Any time there’s a sequence of numbers that hold some sort of coincidence, artefacts connected with that coincidence can be of great aid to numerates. Mojo.”

  She nodded, staring straight ahead.

  “So Apollo 13 was loaded with mojo. The rocket blasted off on the 13th of the month, and it did so at 1313 hours. Coincidences like that create a rush of numbers that push their way in, forcing out the bland, everyday numbers that make up the fabric of life. When they do that, there’s a dynamic that’s created, one that numerates can use to their benefit.”

  “But I thought the number thirteen was supposed to be unlucky.”

  Dom shrugged. “I’m sure for some people it is. But how unlucky was it for Lovell, Swigert and Haise?”

  “Who?”

  “The astronauts on that ill-fated flight to the Moon,” answered Billy.

  “Oh.”

  “The three of them survived the disaster,” continued Dom. “There was no way they should have made it back, but they did, and the sheer genius that they used to figure their way out of such a mess just added to the mojo. Numbers would have been flying in all directions during the time they were trying to fix things and map their corrections, burrowing into the wires and panels and diodes and everything else on board that capsule. So it stands to reason that artefacts from on board should be even stronger than normal, what with the synchronicity of the numbers on liftoff and the addition of all those numbers that saved their lives.” They were finally leaving the city and heading north. Dom accelerated to a shade past the speed limit and then turned on the cruise control. “But all of the numbers were put to use to save the day, not to attack, not to take anything away from someone else, and not for personal gain, unless you count living to see another day as personal gain. And so the numbers in these wires,” he waved his hand again, “are burrowing into us in order to protect us from trouble coming from the outside. They survived the onslaught of an explosion in the vacuum of space, they’re going to help us survive the onslaught of this woman and her shadow who think they can get to us.”

  Jenna rubbed at her wrist. A quick glance over told Dom that the blood was gone and that the hole he had pricked in her skin couldn’t be seen. She leaned back and closed her eyes, and Dom turned his attention to the road ahead.

  8

  The ride was long but peaceful, and after a few hours Dom began to relax again. They stopped twice for gas, once more for another toilet break, and any food they ate was takeout, greasy burgers or day-old sandwiches in the car, Dom washing them down with Coke, looking for the caffeine to help keep him sharp. He kept Coltrane playing in the background, and after an attempt to talk more about numbers was rebuffed by Jenna—“Right now I don’t want to think about that stuff”—they made small talk, mostly about where they’d grown up, what school had been like, her job, and their favourite sports teams, hers being the Denver Broncos and Dom’s the Boston Red Sox, while Billy professed to not liking sports very much at all.

  It was summer, and the days were still long, so after about eight hours, when they finally pulled up to the border, the sun was still fairly high. Jenna had been driving since the last stop, and after she parked the car at the end of the fairly lengthy line of vehicles waiting to cross over, they got out and stretched for a few minutes, standing on the pavement and trying to enjoy the fresh air riding somewhere underneath the fumes from all the running engines. When the line moved again they traded places, Dom back in the driver’s seat, and this time they stayed in the car, inching forward every couple of minutes, the only scenery a few weathered buildings that mostly belonged to small-time customs brokers, and beyond those miles and miles of empty farmland on both sides of the border.


  After a little more than forty-five minutes, they were at the border station showing their new passports to the woman on duty. She entered information into her computer, asked a couple of perfunctory questions, then waved them through. As Dom pulled out he heard a distant, high-pitched squeal coming from behind, and he and Jenna turned their heads in time to see a sequence of numbers, rock-solid and built like a meteorite followed by a scorching-hot tail, plummet from the sky to the south and plough into the red Volvo three back from the truck now at the border station. The Volvo flipped violently into the air, its trunk buckled under the weight of the numbers’ punch, and landed on its side, but already the numbers had bounced to the next car, a white Taurus, crashing through its back windshield and rebounding up through the roof, scribing a path with a smaller angle to the silver pickup at the head of the line and smashing this time through the hood, pinning it to the road, its box and rear wheels raised a foot or more off the pavement. People everywhere were scrambling from their cars, and border guards from both the Canadian and American sides were running to the scene. Sirens were screaming somewhere in the distance. Dom pushed the accelerator pedal to the floor and at the same time watched through the rearview mirror as the numbers, now a compact ball with no tail, leapt up high into the sky, leaving the truck to drop its rear with a crash to the road. An RCMP cruiser whipped by them on the way to the border, lights flashing and siren dopplering, numbers from the sound shift splattering up against the windshield like bugs, briefly occluding his vision before fading away.

  “I thought you said we were protected!” yelled Jenna.

  “We were!” He shook his head and corrected himself. “We are. Maybe these new passports were too new, maybe that’s what signalled them. Looking for something never used before.”

  “More numbers,” said Billy, pointing to the sky ahead of them.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Two dark and ominous tornadoes were descending from a sunny, cloudless sky; as they watched, the twisters wound their way down and touched the ground, two fidgeting stains smearing across an otherwise perfect expanse, kicking up soil and garbage and rocks and all sorts of other detritus in their paths. Rather than wind and cloud, though, these tornadoes were comprised of immense quantities of numbers, patterns, strings and formulae. Both tornadoes danced and gyrated across a landscape of golden wheat, getting into position to catch Dom and Billy and Jenna as they drove through.

  “What do we do?” asked Jenna.

  “Here!” yelled Billy, taking the wheel from Dom’s control and turning right onto a paved secondary highway. For a second Dom tried to wrestle back control of the wheel, and the car swung across the lane into the path of an oncoming combine, but they managed to get their act together and the car back into the right lane. A sheepish Dom watched the farmer in the combine as he leaned out the window to give them the finger.

  “Give me more warning next time,” said Dom. He wiped sweat off his forehead and glared at himself in the mirror.

  “Sorry,” replied Billy. “But you were so busy looking at the numbers I didn’t think you’d seen the road.”

  Jenna leaned across the back seat and looked out the rear window. “They’re still following us!” Her voice was panicked.

  A sign flicked by, naming towns and distances. “I have an idea,” said Dom. “We get there in time, I think we can shake this freak one last time.” He gunned the engine and the car’s speed climbed to 100.

  “What if a cop catches you?” asked Jenna. “If we get stopped there’s no way we’ll beat those things.”

  Dom spit on his hand, leaned forward and smeared the saliva across the inside top of the windshield. “There’s enough numbers in there from what the wire put into my body that it should mess up any radar gun,” he replied. “If not . . .” He paused for a second, then shrugged. “Well, we’ll deal with it when it comes, I suppose.” He sounded calmer than he felt.

  “There’s another sign coming up,” said Billy. Dom slowed down enough to make sure he could read it; there was a diner just a couple minutes ahead. He smiled.

  “What?”

  He glanced over at Jenna, who was watching him now instead of the number tornadoes, even though she was still hanging over the back of the seat. “A plan,” he said. “Get out your driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, that new passport, and anything else that has a number on it.”

  The parking lot for the diner was dirt and gravel, and he spun up rocks and soil as he pulled into a parking spot between two large pickup trucks with roll bars and mud-caked sides. They dashed out of the car and ran for the doors, the tornadoes cutting swaths through wheat fields as they approached, their roar outside almost as overwhelming as the sound the search numbers had made down in Utah.

  Inside was a young girl working as a waitress, blonde hair, tight jeans and a white t-shirt, and two older men sitting in a booth, one wearing a John Deere hat, the other with his faded-brown cowboy hat dangling from the coat hook on the post beside him; both wore faded jeans, one in a checked shirt, and one in a striped shirt and boots. All three stared at Dom and Jenna as they ran in, but before the waitress could ask if they needed any help—and Dom could see the prospect of helping either one of them didn’t excite her too much, seeing how they both likely looked a little wild and freaky right then—Dom grabbed Jenna’s hand and dragged her over to the booth nearest the other side of the door. “Give me your ID,” he whispered, then ran and grabbed the salt containers from all the tables along that side of the door, twisted off the tops, and spilled their contents onto the striped plastic tablecloth.

  “Hey!” shouted the waitress. “You can’t do that!”

  Dom heard the two men get up from their table, their boots clopping on the floor as they approached to back the girl up. He pulled out his wallet and peeled off ten American twenty dollar bills, thrust them toward the girl. “This’ll pay for the mess and your time, okay?” Outside, the first number twister had just broken through the wheat field and was approaching the road. The sound of it was so deep Dom felt as if his heart was being squeezed by an angry, pulsating fist.

  The waitress took the money, peered at a couple of the bills, then shrugged and nodded. Both men turned back to their table, shaking their heads and commenting on the couple of “fucked-up Americans.” The waitress, though, just pocketed the money and kept watching. “Art project,” said Dom. His voice sounded high-pitched and frantic to his own ears. He hurriedly wiped the salt across the table, making sure it was spread out as evenly as possible. Then, after closing his eyes for one frantic second to envision the pattern he was looking for, he began to draw a line in the salt with his finger, connecting the entry point from the corner of the table closest to the door with a hole he rubbed into being in the very centre of the table, using a maze very much like Pictish rings he’d studied up on just a year ago. The job was fast and sloppy, accompanied by lots of mutterings of “Hurry” from both Jenna and, somewhat more sotto voce, Billy; he looked up to see that the first twister was now in the parking lot and the second was just beginning to cross the road, both of them breaking up and settling into smaller patterns, no less deadly because of the change in size.

  He did a couple of last-second corrections and grabbed all of Jenna’s ID from her hand, quickly smeared the numbers away and shook them off the cards and into the hole in the middle of the salt maze, did the same for his own ID, then grabbed Jenna by the hand and pulled her back to the counter. The waitress stepped back with them, and let out a loud shriek when the door to the diner banged open and the first numbers rushed in, fluttering and spinning madly around the ceiling, the bass roar changing almost instantly into a high-pitched drone, this time a plague of numerate locusts. Jenna ducked and tucked her head into Dom’s chest, and he put his arm around her, a natural reaction he was surprised to find he possessed—and it was him, not Billy—and the waitress walked quickly over to the booth where the two farmers still sat, obviously not sure why the d
oors had opened like that and why she was feeling so weirded out, but likely sure she wanted to be away from Dom and Jenna. Dom found himself briefly wondering if moments like this were what influenced stories about poltergeists and ghosts.

  With a pulsating scream, numbers from the second twister rushed into the diner, the interior now filled with a variety of black and wiry shapes and sizes, but so far the mojo Dom and Jenna were wearing on their wrists kept a safe bubble around them, and eventually the air began to clear and the numbers fell into Dom’s makeshift maze, all of them starting at the corner entrance, all of them aware, or as aware as directed numbers could be, that the specific strings of numbers they were targeting were somewhere in the centre of the maze, but all of them also reduced to having to count every single last grain of salt as they went by.

  “It’s working,” said Dom, and he hustled Jenna out the door and into the car. Within seconds, they were back on the road and speeding away from the diner.

  Aside from the arrhythmic thumping of the tires driving over asphalt patches in the highway, everything was silent for awhile. Jenna leaned across the back of her seat again to watch for anything following them, and Dom and Billy scanned the sky ahead, but eventually they decided they could relax. Jenna turned around and leaned forward, her head in her hands. “What exactly did you do that time?”

  “There are certain designs that attract numbers. The one I did was a kind of Pictish ring; when the numbers sense it, they have to get inside and follow it to the end. The salt is a little trick I picked up from one of my anonymous online pals. Until an absolute quantity of salt crystals has been settled on, it’s an unstable group.”

  “Unstable?”

  Dom shook his head. “I don’t pretend to understand, but I know part of the reason it works is because of the mathematical properties inherent in a crystal. This guy—at least, I assume it was a guy—compared it to some sort of quantum effect, said that the numbers coming after you have this insatiable need to know exactly how many crystals there are, and that until they do it can go either way for them. If the numbers go to the centre of the ring without doing the counting, then the ring collapses in on them, just kinda eats them. As for our ID, scraping the numbers off and shaking them into the centre of the ring means that they can’t track us that way anymore, because that’s what the search numbers were smelling. They had to go to the ring, because our numbers were hiding inside it, and no matter how strong these fuckers are, they can’t convince the numbers to avoid it and keep looking for us.”