by Tanya Huff
“It’s a prime holding.” Jack paused at the edge of the parking lot and Charlie moved up beside him. “There he is.”
Toque holding his hair in place, hands shoved deep into the pockets of an oversized trench coat, Dan shuffled along the graveled path that led to Fort Calgary.
“He knows you,” Charlie began, and stopped when a plain black sedan drove into the lot and parked as close to Dan as possible. The man and woman who got out might as well have had police stamped on their foreheads. Carefully looking at nothing in particular, Charlie whistled an eavesdropping charm at them.
“What does the FBI want with this guy anyway?” the driver asked, circling around to join his partner.
She twitched her collar into place. “Why would I know if you don’t?”
He shrugged. “You might have heard something.”
“If I knew more, I’d have told you while we were driving over here to pick up the crazy person who’s going to stink up the backseat of our car.”
“He’s not going to go quietly either. There’s going to be yelling and he’ll piss himself and then there’ll be more yelling. We should wait until that school group gets in their bus and goes; I don’t want to traumatize the kids.”
“Is Dan an American?” Charlie asked Jack as both cops smiled and nodded at the gaggle of preteens leaving the Fort. The kids collectively rolled their eyes.
“Don’t know.” Jack glared across the parking lot. “You think they’re after him because he was going on about the world ending?”
“I think it’s more likely YouTube dredged Dan’s past and something nasty floated up.”
“If he’s like Auntie Catherine . . .”
“If he was female, clean, and significantly less hairy,” Charlie muttered.
“If he sees the future, like Auntie Catherine,” Jack specified, “he could have escaped the American government. One of their experiments where they’re trying to make super soldiers with psionic powers.”
“One of?”
“And before you say it’s all comic books,” he continued ignoring her question, “why does it keep coming up? Books, movies, comics, TV . . . You know what they say where I come from?” He folded his arms. “Where there’s smoke, there’s lunch.”
“You know what they say where I come from? Don’t be a dumbass. Unless the question is who’s dumbing down the electorate, government conspiracy is never the answer.” Charlie frowned as the kids began piling into the bus, the arguments over seating arrangements needing no amplification. “You distract the police. I’ll take Dan into the Wood and out again across the river by the zoo. That should be close enough, he won’t freak out too badly. You meet me there.”
Jack grabbed the gig bag as she stepped forward, rocking her back on her heels. “Why distract them? Why can’t you just tell the cops to go away? It’s not like they could refuse.”
“Removing choice is a slippery slope, Jack.”
“Tell that to the aunties.”
“You first.” Hypocrite she might be, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to give the aunties that kind of an opening. As the bus pulled out onto 9th and merged with traffic, she shoved him toward the parking lot. “Distract.”
“Fine.”
Flames shot out of the garbage can farthest from Dan. The smoke smelled like pot.
The pot smell was a nice touch, Charlie acknowledged racing across the crushed gravel, humming “You Don’t See Me” as she ran.
Between the smoke and the yelling for backup and the digging for the fire extinguisher buried under dry cleaning in the trunk, neither cop noticed as Charlie hooked Dan under the arms and dragged him toward the trees at the edge of the path.
He yelled, “Depress handle!”
It had been a long time since Dan or his clothing had been in contact with soap and water. Grateful for the cold, but still breathing as shallowly as possible, Charlie hit an A and wrapped it around Dan.
Dan yelled, “Damn kids!”
They stumbled between two sycamores and into the Wood. Dan stiffened, then relaxed in Charlie’s grip. She heard him draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly. A moment later they were in the copse of trees next to the zoo’s south parking lot.
“Six pounds of oranges!” Dan’s volume was impressive and, while the sound of sirens approaching from across the river meant the police were still busy, attracting their attention would be a bad idea.
She grabbed his wrist as he twisted out of her hold. Dug in her heels as he tried to get away. He was stronger than he looked.
“Four sixty-nine a dozen? Who the hell can afford that?”
“Dan, be quiet.”
Yellowed whites showing all the way around his eyes, he flailed his free hand in the general direction of the zoo. “I don’t want to hurt him!”
“Then don’t!” Hand poised to go over Dan’s mouth, Charlie let it drop as Jack stepped out of a familiar pillar of flame. “Jack, tell him to be quiet.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“Second verse, same as the first. Choice. Slippery slope. Also, he’s broken.” She could hear the pieces rattling around in his voice. “I’m afraid that if I tell him to stop, there’s no guarantee I can get him to start again.”
“Why even have power if you never use it?” Jack muttered, crossing to take Dan’s face in his hands. “Come on, dude, you know me. Calm down.”
“I didn’t get his name!”
“Whose name?”
“Still two hundred short!”
“Dan.”
“Polycarbonate!”
“Okay.” Jack stepped back, rubbing his palms on his thighs. “I’ve never seen him this bad. You might as well let him go, Charlie. He’s too fried to tell us anything.”
“If we let him go . . .” Charlie jerked her head toward the river. The sirens had gone quiet, the fire dealt with. It wouldn’t take long for the police to find him. They clearly had a fairly good idea of his natural habitat.
“Fucking elephant shit!”
Jack coughed out a small cloud of smoke and shifted upwind. “So we stash him somewhere until he’s chilled.”
No longer fighting to get free, Dan maintained a constant pull against her grip, tendons corded under her fingers. He’d been cranked tighter than Auntie Jane’s sphincter since she’d grabbed him.
Wait . . .
“While we were crossing through the Wood, he relaxed.”
“You were in there for like five seconds,” Jack pointed out. “How’s that time to relax?”
“I’ve shifted plenty of drunks, I know limp. I’ll bring him out in the park, wait for us there.” Maintaining her grip on Dan’s wrists, Charlie charged toward him. Eyes wide enough she could see the bloodshot, yellowish whites all the way around, he stumbled backward, mumbling about being late. “Tell David we’re coming.”
Kicking up faded cedar mulch, they crashed between junipers in a parody of a two-step and out into the Wood where sunlight spilled through a canopy of birch and ash and alder, drawing lines of gold from sky to earth. There were no paths through the underbrush. No birds. No insects.
Dan froze, drew in a deep breath, and closed his eyes. “So quiet,” he said after a moment.
Allie’s song, Jack’s song, her mother, her sisters, the aunties . . . Charlie thought she even heard Gary’s bouzouki taking the lead on “The Mist Covered Mountain.” When Dan opened his eyes and tugged against her hold, she let him go. He couldn’t get anywhere without her, and she was curious about what he’d do.
Hands out to either side, he walked slowly forward, placing each duct-tape-wrapped rubber boot carefully on the leaf litter, grimy fingertips lightly caressing bark and leaves. “My head is empty.” He spun around suddenly and fixed Charlie with a remarkably sane stare. “I can’t hear you.”
“I’m not talking.”
“No. I can hear you here.” Fingers tapped his ears. “But not here.” Tapped his forehead. “You’re not in my head. No one is in my head but me. I’m all alone.”
“And you’re usually . . .”
“Not. Not alone. Not ever alone.”
“You’re not usually alone in your head.” That was the sort of statement that needed considering. Charlie listened to the staccato, neo-punk rhythms of her younger sisters for a moment, then let them fade. “You hear what people think?”
“Think. Think. Think. All the damned time. People never stop thinking. So noisy. So shattered. Think. Think. Think.” His mouth was open, his eyes wide, his chest heaving. He spun around in a circle, first to the right. Then to the left.
“It’s okay. Calm down.” Here in the Wood it was harder to keep it a suggestion. Charlie did the best she could.
Dan stared out from inside a mismatched collection of twitches and visibly forced himself to calm. He closed his eyes. Nodded. Opened his eyes. “I think I should sit.”
“Not a bad idea.” Charlie held out her hand. He glanced down at it, then up at her, eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Your choice,” she told him, “but you’ll find it easier to move if we’re in contact.” The dirt and callus on his hand made it feel more as though it were covered in bark than skin. It felt almost familiar, almost like Uncle Edward’s hand near the end, thirty odd years on hooves having left its mark. Resolutely not thinking about the likely composition of Dan’s dirt, Charlie led him through the Wood to where memory placed a tree that would serve as a bench.
The fallen tree was exactly where she remembered it. Exactly how she remembered first seeing it fifteen years before. The Wood untouched by time, the tree untouched by rot. They could stay here as long as Dan needed, the only time brought in with them.
Dan clutched his chest as he collapsed down onto the log, and Charlie gave him a moment to catch his breath. She’d taken family as well as Jack’s Uncle Ryan through the Wood, but that had always been on a direct path in and out; walking within the Wood was an entirely different matter and she had no idea how far Dan thought they’d traveled.
He concentrated on breathing for a moment; then, when he sounded less like he was sucking air through a hookah, he unbuttoned his trench coat with shaking fingers. Then the coat below that. As the top two layers folded back like stained flower petals, he reached into the next layer—Charlie thought it might be a pinstriped suit jacket—and pulled out a plastic water bottle. Given the color of the liquid half filling it, she really hoped it wasn’t water.
Dan unscrewed the blue plastic cap and titled the bottle toward her. “Drink?”
“Thanks, but no.”
Outlined in dirt, his Adam’s apple rose and fell and rose and fell and rose and fell again. Half the liquid was gone when he lowered the bottle. “Smoother than I remembered.”
“So.” Charlie shrugged out of the gig bag. “You’re a telepath.”
“No.” Still clutching the bottle in one hand, Dan reached up under his toque with the other for a good scratch. “I just hear shit.”
Well, that answered Auntie Catherine’s question. He knew because he heard shit.
Human mutations happened all the time, although they were usually less comic book and more in need of minor surgery.
New question. Who had he heard this particular shit from? Who else knew about the asteroid? Of course there was always a chance he’d heard Auntie Catherine’s thoughts. Which meant nothing good in a whole different way. Eavesdropping on the aunties had destroyed stronger men than Dan.
When she asked, Dan stared at her like she was crazy. “How the fuck should I know?”
“You can’t identify the voice in your head?”
“Voice? I wish I had a fucking voice in my head.” His laugh bordered on hysterics. “I have two-legged radio stations playing in my head 24/7, and I can’t shut them the fuck off.”
“Was it a woman?”
“Was what a woman?”
“The voice that said the sky was falling.”
“No women. No men. Just thoughts.” Dan stared at the ground between his feet with such intensity, Charlie leaned forward to see what he was staring at, but all she could see was grass. And a stick. “Thoughts have no gender. No pink. No blue. But I can tell you that the sky fell in English. It wasn’t French or Spanish or any of the First Nations languages. It wasn’t in Chinese. Or Japanese. Or Hindu. Or Portuguese. Or Farsi. Or Ukrainian. Or Gaelic. Or Italian. Or . . .”
“I believe you.” Charlie had no idea how many languages there were in the world. Nor did she want to find out. “You heard the thought in English. That doesn’t really narrow it down.” As neither the grass nor the stick seemed to have any answers, she straightened and tried to come up with a question that would actually get them somewhere. “You hear thoughts from all over the world?”
“North America. Melting pot. Mosaic. North part of Mexico. Siberia once or twice. Sometimes I can pull in Brazil.” He shrugged inside the cocoon of his clothing. “Depends on the weather; needs the right cloud cover, atmospheric conditions, ducks.”
“Ducks?”
“They tell you geese’ll do. But they’re wrong.”
“Okay.” She frowned. “So if you were shouting things you heard, and you hear in all these other languages, why do you only shout in English?”
“Because I don’t speak French or Spanish or any of the First Nations languages, or Chinese or Japanese or Hindu or . . .”
Charlie raised a hand and cut him off. “Got it. So when you heard about the asteroid . . .”
“About the sky falling.”
“. . . what exactly did you hear?”
The look he shot her had actual substance. “The sky is falling.”
“Those exact words?”
“How the hell should I know. Too many thoughts. Needle in a haystack. Haystack of fucking needles.” He took another drink.
“Were there other thoughts around it?”
“Do you ever listen, girl? Too. Many. Thoughts.”
“I need you to remember them.” Given a little more to work with, Charlie was certain she could tell if he’d overhead Auntie Catherine.
“I need to stop hearing shit. We don’t always get what we need, do we?”
There was that slippery slope again, but Charlie didn’t see as she had much choice right now. “Dan, you have to remember.”
“You have black eyes. Not punched black, that’s purple. Really black. Inside.”
“I know.” The breeze had stilled, but leaves on the surrounding trees continued to whisper. “Remember the thoughts you heard around the same time you heard about the sky falling.”
“. . . can’t tell people the sky is falling, millions will die in the panic. . . . damn dog on the bed again. . . . said it was cancer. . . . don’t find a solution in six months, millions will die in the panic anyway. . . . You lying, cheating, bastard! . . . looks more like an Argentinian than a Brazilian. . . . take natural disasters for a thousand, Alex.”
Millions will die in the panic was so specific a phrase, the two thoughts had to be connected. “That’s a wrap, Dan. Thank you.”
Dan shrugged, tipped his head back, and poured the liquid remaining in the bottle down his throat.
Too bad. She could use a drink.
He hadn’t overheard Auntie Catherine. Someone else knew. And that someone thought they had six months to find a solution or millions would die in the panic. Overwrought much? Would the asteroid be visible to NASA in six months? Would they have to publish the news because they were government funded? Who’d already seen it and how? Had the government seen it and was that why they were pulling Dan in, before people started listening to him?
Too many questions. Not enough answers.
“Damn it, Jim, I’m a musician not an astrophysicist.”
“Dan.”
“What?”
“Dan, my name is Dan.” He sighed and slumped forward, elbows on his thighs. “First time in a shitload of time I tried to do something about what I heard. All anyone did was laugh. Started calling me Doomsday Dan. Assholes.”
“I’m not laughing.”
He turned his head and stared at her through narrowed eyes. “No, you’re not.”
“I have an auntie who sees the future. She saw the same piece of the sky falling.”
Dan snorted. It was slightly less damp than his snort on camera. “And I’m the crazy one.”
“You’re sitting in a Wood that doesn’t exist.” Charlie’s gesture took in the trees and the . . . well, trees. The landscape was all variation on a theme. “That didn’t cue you in that something unusual was up?”
“This is real?”
“It is.”
“Damn. I thought it was another hallucination. Like the big yellow dragon.”
“He’s gold. Golden. And he’s real, too.”
“The gray lady in the river?”
“Real.”
“The raccoon in the hockey sweater?”
“That one’s on you.”
“So, what’re you going to do about it, now you know?”
“Nothing.”
He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “How do you figure?”
“If there was an asteroid heading for impact in the next year or two, and it was big enough to do a lot of damage, it’d be all over the news by now. There’s hundreds of telescopes looking for that sort of thing.” Seriously, was she the only one who ever watched Daily Planet? “Since it isn’t, there’s lots of time for NASA to deal with it.”
“No.” Even confined by the hat, his hair slapped against his shoulders as Dan shook his head. “The voice said six months. Then we’re all going to die.”
“They didn’t say we’re all going to die.”
“Millions.”
“Dan,” she tried for soothing rather than impatient. “That doesn’t mean we don’t have years to stop it. The person you overheard saw the asteroid, somehow, and overreacted.”
“How do you know?”