The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  Satisfied, Denis got out of her car. He opened all the doors, and the hatchback, too; let the animals and the elements in, let them destroy any evidence there might be of Jane’s death in the back seat. He noticed the remains of their picnic, still on the ground—some trash, the butcher knife, the half-eaten loaf of bread—and picked them up. He tossed them into the back of Jane’s car, too. Standing with his arms crossed, Denis surveyed the scene. The car would be found eventually, but Denis was confident that its presence wouldn’t be connected to him. This was the best he could do, for now. Mud-Jane was the more significant problem in his life at the moment. She had a tendency to draw attention to herself, after all. And what would he tell her about her car? She’d expected him to take it back to her apartment. He’d just tell her he’d left it there, and when she found it missing, let her assume it had been stolen, or hauled away as a presumed derelict, or something.

  He went to his own car, still parked among the trees from his earlier trip here. He drove home, parked, and sat in the car for a while, going over the night’s events in his mind, as if he were running his tongue over the gap left by a missing tooth. Facing Mud-Jane again was the last thing he wanted to do, but waiting wouldn’t make it any easier. He got out of the car.

  “Jane?” he called when he entered the apartment. “Are you here?”

  She wasn’t in the living room; there was just a smear of mud on the couch. He checked the bathroom and the bedroom, too, but she wasn’t in the apartment. Where had she gone? And why? Would she try to break into the coffee shop again? Maybe she’d just stepped out to get some air, and would come back soon. How far could she go, without a car? He was too tired even to worry properly.

  Denis kicked off his muddy boots. He had to get those cleaned soon. He went into the kitchen and washed his hands thoroughly, even scrubbing under the nails. Then he went into the living room and turned over the couch cushions that Jane had dirtied. That was only a temporary fix, of course—hiding dirt did not eliminate it, as Denis well knew—but it would do for the moment.

  He was just about to wearily search the kitchen for a much-needed bagel when he was startled by a sharp knock at the door. Denis opened the door wide and made himself smile. “Hello, Officer,” he said.

  At 5:30 in the morning, Marzi finally got home, exhausted from talking to the cops, and from talking to Hendrix, who’d been none too pleased to be rousted out of bed before dawn. He was annoyed that Marzi had been in the café after hours, but quieted down when she pointed out that if she hadn’t been there Beej and the others would have been able to break in quite easily. Granted, there was the alarm, but Marzi had kept them from getting inside at all, and Lindsay’s call to the police had brought faster results than the alarm would have.

  Beej had been charged with vandalism for cutting the phone lines. If he didn’t plead guilty, Marzi would probably be called to testify against him. Marzi found it more likely that Beej would try to tell the judge about his attempts to liberate the earthquake god, which would lead to a series of very necessary psychiatric appointments for Beej. He was clearly two screws short of a hinge these days, and could use professional help. The police were going to question Jane and Denis as well. All in all, talking to the cops had been a less painful experience than Marzi had expected, but she was still exhausted. It had been a night of death and madness, and Marzi was looking forward to sleeping the day away.

  She stripped, splashed water on her face from the sink, and dumped double handfuls of it through her greasy, smoky hair. Not for the first time, she was thankful that she’d cut it so short; it was easier to keep clean, and that was one less thing she had to worry about. The doctors had told her to streamline her life as much as possible, to reduce sources of anxiety, and the first thing she’d done when she got out of the hospital was cut her hair down to a couple of inches, which now tended to stick up wildly from her head. Lindsay had helped her dye it pink that autumn, but the color had long since faded, leaving her hair the color of straw. She crawled onto her futon and pulled the sheet over her body. For the first time in what felt like forever she relaxed, tension bleeding from her body, muscles loosening. She was home, in bed, alone, safe.

  She closed her eyes.

  Marzi soared above Santa Cruz, looking down at the curve of the bay, boat sails the color of butterfly wings dotting the water, sea lions basking on a rock. Every roof was as familiar as the lines on her own palm. There was Genius Loci, there Logos, there Bookshop Santa Cruz, there the Saturn Café, and the sluggish, mud-colored river, which she and Lindsay always called “the raging San Lorenzo,” bisecting the town, the west side her home, the east side home to countless taquerias, the old Rio Theater, the Seabright Brewery. Marzi could see it all, the hidden parks, the tangle of rusting shopping carts by the river, the old Victorian houses—and she could sense the people moving through the city like blood through the limbs of a sleeping god.

  This is what it’s like when a city has an out-of-body experience, she thought, no longer moving, now hanging there, cloudlike.

  As if the thought were a cue, the city beneath her began to die. The river dried up, revealing river-bottom mud the color of shit. The roofs fell in, exposing rafters and support beams that reminded her of broken ribs. The streets cracked, potholes appearing like open sores. Dust and sand rushed in to choke the streets, burying the smaller houses entirely, and blowing sand scoured the paint from remaining structures, taking everything down to bare wood and metal. After a few seconds, the scene below looked like something from the Mojave, but even in that desert there was life, growing things, and animals, however well hidden. What Santa Cruz had become was . . . desolation. And not just Santa Cruz—the neighboring communities, too. Capitola, Scotts Valley, Boulder Creek, Aptos. The redwoods in the hills were charred by fire, blackened pillars sticking up at odd angles from still-steaming heaps of mud. If Marzi could have flown higher—she couldn’t seem to control her own movements—she felt she would have seen even more destruction. The coast road collapsing into the ocean. The mountains leaping up and falling down in the passing ripple of an earthquake. Wildfires destroying Oakland. San Francisco and Los Angeles falling into the sea, reclaimed by something older than life, reclaimed by the way of the world before there was life on Earth.

  Marzi began to cry. She knew, somehow, that this was her fault. Not her fault because she rode in gas-powered vehicles or sometimes forgot to recycle her plastic containers, not the general culpability for the environment that rested on the shoulders of the developed world, but her fault directly. She could have stopped this. She could have done something.

  A gust of wind spun Marzi in the sky, turning her toward the bay again. Without willing it, she began to drift lower and closer to the water, toward the tangle of hotels and liquor stores and one-way streets on the beachfront. Toward the boardwalk, with its two roller coasters, bumper cars, Tilt-A-Whirls . . . and the building closest to the water, Neptune’s Kingdom, the arcade where Marzi and Lindsay sometimes went to play air hockey. Neptune’s Kingdom had somehow survived the doom that came to Santa Cruz, its pennants tattered but still flapping, its sign broken and lying on the sidewalk, but the structure still intact.

  Marzi knew the Kingdom wasn’t empty. Something lived there. Something . . . denned there. Marzi drifted lower, until the Kingdom filled her entire field of view. Something moved inside with an enormous dry rustle, as if a nest of old bones and newspapers were shifting beneath a mammoth weight. Could this be it, then? The home of the Outlaw, the thing that had killed Daniel?

  No. The voice was unmistakably feminine, husky, smoke-and-whiskey roughened. Marzi seemed to hear it inside her head. The rustling came again. No, I am not your enemy.

  The Outlaw could come in many guises, she knew. He could make his voice feminine, of course. He could pretend—

  The voice laughed, a deep, genuine chuckle with no guile in it. That convinced Marzi. The Outlaw could laugh, but it always rang false or cruel, because he didn’t rea
lly understand laughter, except the laughter of mockery, the laughter of joy at causing pain. This was a true laugh, but that didn’t make Marzi feel much better, because now there was an unknown quantity, a new being, something she didn’t understand and couldn’t account for.

  I am not your enemy, the voice said. Nor am I, exactly, your friend. But I am an interested party. If you would prevent this desolation, Marzipan, you must be willing to make sacrifices. You must be willing to open some doors, and close others.

  “Why me?” Marzi shouted, not really expecting an answer.

  To her surprise, the voice responded immediately, with dry irony. Because you have a responsibility as an artist, Marzipan, it said, and then chuckled again.

  Another wind picked up Marzi and spun her away from the Kingdom. Do not look for me here, the voice said, its volume fading. I live in a different palace in the West. Look for me there, in the West beyond the West.

  If it said more, Marzi didn’t hear. She spun higher into the sky, and it was no longer the peaceful drifting of a cloud but something faster and more terrifying, something like free fall with no parachute, in reverse.

  Black dots appeared in the distant sky, over the water, and as they approached, Marzi recognized them. They were giant vultures. Diseased, scabby, starving, dropping feathers as they came, but still enormous, their yellow beaks opening hungrily, their eyes flat and black and desperate.

  This land was so dead that even the scavengers and carrion-eaters were dying.

  Then the vultures were upon her, beaks opening for her flesh, no longer caring if their prey was still alive and kicking, transformed into predators by their privation, and as they took their first bites, she woke.

  Marzi sat up in bed, the sheet stuck to her sweaty body, her heart pounding as if she’d just run flat-out for a mile. She looked around the room, vaguely surprised that there weren’t piles of sand in the corners, that the walls were intact, that the whole coast hadn’t been bludgeoned by earthquake and razed by fire and buried in mud and choked in sand.

  She got up, pulled on clothes, and stumbled to the kitchen. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so thirsty. The inside of her mouth felt as rough as an iguana’s back. She poured a glass of water, guzzled it down, poured another, and drank it more slowly. The clock on the microwave read 12:17. She’d slept enough, but she was exhausted, as if she’d been running in her sleep the entire time.

  Her answering machine blinked at her insistently, a stuttering red light. She distantly recalled hearing it ring earlier, but she’d just buried her head in the pillow and slept on. Marzi pressed the button, the machine beeped, and Beej’s voice spoke through a hiss of static: “Um, Marzi, hi, it’s Beej. At the police station. This is my one phone call and you’re it and I hate to bother you, but could you bail me out? I’m good for it, I’ll pay you back, you know, or else the system will collapse and money won’t matter anymore but . . . anyway. I’ll be here.” A long, long pause. “Guess you’re sleeping. Sweet dreams.”

  Marzi listened to the rest of the tape, but it was just a couple of hang-ups. She imagined Beej, holding a greasy black phone to his ear, staring bug-eyed into the middle distance, knowing he didn’t have any better friend than Marzi. It was so sad and crazy she almost wanted to call the police, just to have them tell Beej she couldn’t bail him out. But he’d figure it out when she didn’t come. He probably wouldn’t even hold it against her; that wasn’t his way. He’d just be a little hurt, a little bewildered. Maybe Beej would be able to get some psychiatric help now. Hell, it had done wonders for Marzi, hadn’t it?

  She brushed her teeth and took a shower, the hot water making her feel more human, less like something crumpled and thrown on the floor. She needed coffee, rather desperately, and then she’d be altogether okay again. She walked to the front door, took a deep breath, and seized the doorknob. Before, when she had trouble with doors, it had always been an unreasoning fear, born from the fact that she didn’t know what was behind the door, that it could be anything. But this time, she knew what she feared. Streets full of sand, the smoke of wildfires, buildings cracked by earthquakes.

  Marzi opened the door, and sunlight streamed in over her. Birds chirped. Some punks on skateboards glided by on the sidewalk, looking bored.

  Marzi let out a ragged breath. “Good morning, world,” she said, and went out.

  Gun Wise

  * * *

  Marzi ambled up to Genius Loci for coffee, and to look for Lindsay or Jonathan, but neither of them was around; just Hendrix, leaning on the bar and scowling. When she said hello, he just grunted. He was still pissed about that mess the night before, she figured. His glare had probably driven Jonathan away. “So,” she said. “What’d the cops say?”

  He shrugged tectonically, his dreadlocks swaying across his pale round face. “We’re pressing charges against Beej, the little shit, since he pretty much confessed to the vandalism. We didn’t bother with the other two, though.”

  Marzi frowned. “Denis and Jane? You just let them walk?”

  “The cops talked to Denis this morning, and he said he and his girlfriend were taking a late stroll when they saw Beej fucking around with something on the side of Genius Loci. He said they saw you inside, and came up the steps to tell you about it, but that you wouldn’t let them in.”

  “That is not how it happened!” Marzi said.

  “You said they were beating on the glass and yelling. Denis says they were beating on the glass and yelling. The cops don’t see a discrepancy there.”

  “It’s bullshit. I don’t know what they wanted, but they were crazed. Jane was, at least. And you heard about what Jane did yesterday, jumping on me, and—”

  “I believe you. Look,” Hendrix said, and beckoned her around the counter. Marzi came, curious, and Hendrix pointed to the wall just beneath the phone.

  A blurry picture of Denis hung there, alongside a crisper one of Beej, both taken in Genius Loci. A hand-scrawled note above them read “Banned for Life.”

  Marzi whistled, impressed. This was unusually decisive action for Hendrix. He and Denis were even sort of friends. But Hendrix was loyal to the café; Marzi knew that. Denis and Beej shouldn’t have fucked with Genius Loci.

  “Wow, Hendrix. They’re regulars, too.”

  He snorted. “Beej buys one tea bag and gets free refills on hot water all fucking day, and Denis never tips. I’m not sorry to see them go. You saw all the mud Denis tromped in here a few days ago, and Beej freaked out and started screaming in the Cloud Room . . . nah, good riddance. They’re a fucking disturbance.”

  “There’s no picture of Jane here,” Marzi said.

  “I don’t even know if she’s ever been in here, and I certainly don’t have a photo of her, Marzi, but I’ll tell everybody not to serve a mud-covered crazy woman, okay?” He stomped back to the counter to serve a customer.

  Once he’d finished, Marzi said, “Hey, thanks for doing this, Hendrix. It’s good of you not to give me shit.”

  “Jonathan lives upstairs, and you’re a manager, and Lindsay’s here more than I am, so what do I care if you hang out after hours? You’ve got a key for a reason.” He softened. “Besides, like you said last night, if you hadn’t been here, who knows what Beej and company would have done?” He shook his head. “This fucking place. I used to love this job, but now people are trying to break in, and I’m hearing shit . . .”

  “Hearing shit? Like what?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. It’s just weird echos or something, probably, but I keep hearing, like, voices when I’m in the kitchen lately. They sound close by but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I’m probably just getting old and going deaf and fixing to die.”

  “Nah, you’ll live forever,” Marzi said, and clapped him on the shoulder, feeling more friendly toward him than she had in a long time.

  Marzi went out into the sun and walked along Ash Street. An aging hippie street vendor grinned at her, showing brown gapped teeth, and
gestured to his stained blanket and the wares spread there: old engine parts, loose tarot cards, mason jars full of seashells and marbles, a leather rose, and a lone plastic scorpion, unevenly painted red.

  “Cheap wonders,” he said. “And I know just the thing for you.” He rooted around in a leather satchel while Marzi stood, uncertain. She would’ve just walked on, but he seemed nice enough, maybe a little loopy in the head, but no harm there.

  “There’s probably better business on Pacific Avenue,” she said, thinking of the kids who sold beaded necklaces and hemp bracelets there, the airbrush artists, the Famous Legendary Street Poet who sat on an upside-down bucket and intently read slim volumes of Beat poetry between recitations.

  “One can throw oneself into the crowd,” he said sagely, “or one can choose one’s customers. I prefer the back ways of things. Ah, here it is.” From deep in the bag, he drew forth—

  —a gun. Marzi gasped and stepped back, thinking he wasn’t harmless, he was a nutcase, and now she was a goner—

  But he held the gun out to her, butt first. “This is a genu-ine antique,” he said, nodding. “They don’t even make caps for it anymore, though I have a full package, yes I do, two hundred shots.”

  “It’s a cap gun,” she said, relief flowing into her limbs like water, and she took it from his hands. The gun was lightweight, but the barrel was made of actual metal, even if the grip was made of some Bakelite-era protoplastic.