Hormat touched his shoulder, again signed for silence, and led the way upstairs.
Two large men slept at the top of the stairs, one of them snoring. Hormat stepped over them both and led Mike down a hallway, into a room that looked like an unused guest bedroom, and out its window into darkness.
When his eyes had adjusted, Mike found himself standing outside a large home in a wealthy neighborhood, almost as thick with trees as parts of Dreamworld. The night air was cool on his arms. He guessed that it was sometime between midnight and six in the morning. Hormat got his attention, pointed past manicured shrubbery toward where Mike could tell the front door must lie, briefly made his hand into the shape of a gun, and held up two fingers. Mike understood: two more guards at the front door, still active.
Hormat crept away from the house, moving from shadow to shadow, and Mike followed him, trying not to make any noise. There were enough trees, bushes, and other foliage on the grounds that shortly he could no longer see the house when he glanced behind him, and there was just enough moonlight and starlight for him to see where he was putting his feet. It did not make him slow his pace. He had no idea how long Hormat’s knockout stuff lasted—all he knew was that he wanted as much distance between him and that house as possible.
Just as Mike was trying to frame his thanks, they reached the edge of the woods and came out onto a road, and what was waiting for them there seemed so incongruous that Mike couldn’t help laughing out loud. He had been subconsciously expecting some sort of futuristic vehicle, something out of a Hollywood movie, bristling with phallic weaponry and ready to leap into orbit on command.
Hormat’s ride was an ancient Honda with rust spots, bald tires, and a cracked windshield.
As Mike tried to suppress his laughter, Hormat looked first uncomprehending, and then annoyed. “We must work with local technology whenever possible,” he said.
“I know, I know,” Mike assured him. “It makes perfect sense. I just wasn’t expecting it. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Hormat unlocked the car and they both piled in. “This is actually good,” Mike said as the seat belt fastened itself. “If they wake up and chase us, they’ll blow right past. No way is Haines gonna believe he could’ve got taken by somebody who drives an old Honda.”
Hormat started the car and drove away.
Mike watched him drive. He seemed to know how, and was smart enough not to speed away from a crime scene. The seat and controls had been modified to accommodate a dwarf, with an accelerator/brake lever that resembled an antique gearshift sticking out from the steering column, just behind the wheel. Mike tried to catch Hormat’s eye, but Hormat would not take his own off the road, even though he could have afforded to at the speed they were traveling.
“Hormat?” Mike said finally.
“Yes?”
“I ought to wait to say this until I can look you in the eye…but I can’t. Thank you. Very much.”
“Welcome you are,” Hormat replied. His syntax told Mike as clearly as his tone of voice that thanking him had, for some reason, been a mistake. He pointed to the glove box with a finger so gnarly it looked like a condom full of walnuts. Inside, Mike found a bottle of water. For the first time he became aware of the foul taste in his mouth; he uncapped the bottle and drank deep. The water was indescribably delicious.
At first they drove winding residential streets, through a neighborhood better than any Mike had ever expected to live in, but then they came to a main drag, took a right, and followed that a few kilometers. Everything was closed for the night, even the gas stations. Hormat tried to set the cruise control, but did not seem surprised when it didn’t work. A genuine, authentic, piece-of-crap ’08 Honda.
Mike had a million questions, but found he was in no real hurry to ask them. For the moment it was enough to be heading away from Haines and Conway. He wasn’t at all sleepy, but he closed his eyes and let himself drift, conscious for a while only of the sensation of motion through space, and of the lingering dull aches in his pinky and ear.
C H A P T E R 15
TO BEAT THE BAND
Eventually they came to an entrance ramp for a highway whose name Mike didn’t recognize, and Hormat took that up onto a huge ten-laner. Even at this hour, there was a fair amount of traffic on it, but most of it whizzed by them in the controlled lanes to the left. The Honda had not been retrofitted, so they had to stay in the two autonomous lanes, restricted to a top speed of 110 kph.
At that Mike started thinking again, at least enough to become confused. As far as he knew, only a few states had computer-controlled roads in place so far. He hadn’t noticed the plates on the Honda in the dark. “Hormat?”
“Yes?”
“Where are we?”
He realized as he asked it that his question was indeterminate, but as he was trying to rephrase it, Hormat answered, “About eighty kilometers from Dreamworld.”
Mike was startled. From the moment he’d woken to find himself in Haines’s torture chamber, he had been assuming that he was on the opposite coast, somewhere near Thrillworld: that Conway had flown him there unconscious on a private jet or something. He’d certainly felt as if he’d been out for long enough to have been hauled across a continent. But if not—
“Then…this is still the same night I…I got caught?”
Hormat nodded.
Jesus. Annie might not even know he was gone yet. “But Haines told us he couldn’t fly out here until tomor…” He trailed off and slapped the dashboard in disgust at himself. “What a maroon! He was trying to fake us out. Shit, he did fake us out.” He had a horrid thought. “Jeeze, they didn’t get Annie, too, did they?”
“No,” Hormat said.
Mike released his breath. With relief came the realization that there was something odd about Hormat’s voice and manner. They were nearly as strained as they had been when Mike had insisted on thanking him. Mike glanced over his shoulder to study the sparse traffic behind them, saw nothing that looked or acted remotely like a pursuit vehicle—or a cop, for that matter. What was Hormat so uptight about? He studied the look on the dwarf’s face until he realized where he had seen it before.
In a mirror…
“You’re AWOL,” he blurted suddenly.
Hormat frowned. “I do not know that word.”
“Your people don’t know you’re doing this.”
Hormat took his hand off the accelerator involuntarily, then resumed speed, stone-faced. He said nothing.
“They don’t, do they?” Mike persisted. “You could get in trouble if they find out, right?”
A gnarly muscle swelled in Hormat’s jaw. He nodded.
“Jesus.” It took an almost physical effort not to say, “Thank you,” again.
Perhaps Hormat realized he wasn’t going to, after a few seconds, and appreciated it. Something made him unclench his jaw and unbend far enough to say, “Much worse than that could happen.” For the first time he took his eyes from the road and looked Mike square in the eye.
Mike met his gaze. “They won’t hear it from me.”
Hormat returned his eyes to the road.
Mike did the same. Time and white lines went by. Slowly he realized the landscape was beginning to look vaguely familiar. If he had it right, Dreamworld was over that way, just beyond that rise. With any luck, he might actually get back home to Annie’s place before she woke up! He saw himself preparing their breakfast, and nearly doubled over with a savage spasm of previously unsuspected hunger.
“Ill you are?” Hormat asked sharply.
“Starving,” Mike said, and took another long drink from the bottle of water. “God, I could eat the ass end out of a whale with a plastic spoon.”
It just slipped out, an expression Uncle Walter had used to annoy Mom, and for a moment Mike was afraid he had offended Hormat, too—
—and then the dwarf brayed with sudden laughter.
Mike was so relieved, and Hormat’s laugh was so intrinsically funny, that he couldn�
��t help breaking up himself. The contrast of his tenor laugh with Hormat’s baritone honk was even funnier, to both of them. Soon they were roaring together, laughing so hard that Hormat had to pull into the slow lane and steer with the elbow of his accelerator arm so he could have a hand free to wipe the tears away. It took them several tries to stop; one of them would almost manage it, and then the other would set him off again. It was Mike’s aching stomach muscles that finally forced him to quit, but he didn’t mind a bit; he felt great.
Still chuckling, Hormat wiped tears from his eyes and said, “I have nothing you can eat, Mike.”
Mike nodded. “No sweat. I’ll be home soon.” He glanced out the window. “Hey, what time is it?”
Hormat checked his finger. “A little after five o’clock.”
That was good. With luck, Mike would be able to sneak back into Dreamworld before morning shift change without being spotted. He knew at least three good ways to do so. Now, which would be best?—
He caught himself. If he was over the shock now and ready to start thinking again, he might as well do so intelligently. Getting back home would take care of itself—more important questions remained unanswered, and his window to ask them was closing fast. And as he tried to formulate them, several things that had been puzzling him below the conscious level suddenly started to make sense—or so it seemed.
He felt he’d formed a bond of sorts with Hormat; time to see how far it would stretch. Start slow. “Hormat?”
“Yes, Mike?”
“How did you rescue me? I mean, how did you manage to tail a pro like Conway all the way to Haines’s place? For that matter, how did you even know I was in trouble?”
The dwarf blushed, enough to see even in the poor light inside the car, but didn’t duck the question. “I, also, placed a tracer on you,” he admitted. “Just after we met, when you were taking us to meet Annie.”
Mike nodded. “Sure. I should have guessed. If Conway has the technology, so do you. Is yours still on me?”
Hormat shook his head. “We have left it behind us.” Something in his voice told Mike the answer was true but incomplete. “But you put one on Annie, too, when you shook hands with her. Right?”
Hormat’s silence was a tacit admission. Okay so far. Go for one of the big ones. “Hormat?”
“Yes, Mike.”
“Why did you rescue me?”
This silence conveyed no information Mike could read.
“I mean, I see why you had to go AWOL to do it. As far as your people know, me and Annie are as big a threat as Haines and Conway. They want to know why you’re here so they can use you to destroy Dreamworld somehow; we want to know why you’re here so we can be sure you won’t; and you guys don’t want to tell either side anything. I understand that, kind of. So it seems like as far as you guys are concerned, if we all kill each other off, that’s good news. What made you stick your neck out?” No answer. “In fact, why were you even monitoring me at one A.M., or whenever it was they snatched me?”
Hormat not only did not reply, he actually stuck his tongue a little way out and bit down on it as if to prevent himself from doing so. That was okay; Mike suspected he already knew the answer. He checked their surroundings and saw that they were getting close to Dreamworld. The window was nearly shut. Time to roll the dice and go for broke. “You want to tell me, don’t you?”
Hormat sucked his tongue back in and frowned so thunderously that for a moment Mike thought he was about to burst into tears.
“Your friends don’t want us to know…but you want to tell me why you’re here. Or ‘now,’ or whatever. You’ll be in big trouble if anybody ever finds out, but you want to tell me anyway. You came to do that, and you saw me get grabbed.”
The dwarf spoke through clenched teeth. “Read minds, do you?”
Annie had asked him something like that, once. She was not the first, either, but her comment had caused him to give it a little thought. “No,” he said. “It’s just…well, I see people do funny things, and I just think, well, why would I do that if I was them? Really, I think anybody could do it if they tried.”
Hormat made a hrrrmph sound.
Mike had no time for the subject. “Look, Hormat, you saved my life. You tell me, you don’t tell me, either way you’re my bud, okay? But if you’re gonna tell me, you better get to it. We’re gonna be back at Dreamworld in ten or fifteen minutes, and I want to get back Under before the sun comes up and makes everything harder.”
Hormat’s hands tightened on the wheel and accelerator until the knuckles whitened and ropy muscles stood out on his arms, but he said nothing.
At first Mike held his breath, but soon he had to quit that and just waited and hoped. After a while he got tired of both waiting and hoping and just watched the road, and some indeterminate time after that, they both knew that so much time had passed that Hormat would not be able to answer Mike’s question before they arrived. The window had closed.
Hormat spoke then, startling them both. “You are right.”
Mike waited, and thought about hoping again.
“I do want to tell you.”
He resumed hoping. Maybe the secret could be told in a few sentences.
“But I cannot. My decision to make, it is not.”
Mike went back to watching the road.
“The right I have not. Can you understand?”
If something bad’s after you guys, maybe Annie and me can help! Mike wanted to say, but the pain in his new friend’s voice made him bite his tongue. “Chill, Hormy. Like I said, you saved my life. You can’t tell me, you can’t.”
“Thank you,” Hormat said, and his arms and hands relaxed. But he kept frowning just as ferociously.
“But we’re gonna find out, you know. Me and Annie.”
Hormat turned his head, and Mike looked him in the eye. Hormat returned his own eyes to the road and nodded slowly. “Yes. I expect you will,” he said wearily.
They rode on in silence. Mike kept wanting to make conversation, but every neutral subject he thought of sounded idiotic in this context. It was hard enough to chat with any grown-up, much less a time-traveling dwarf. Eventually he quit trying and instead passed the kilometers trying to guess, or deduce, or intuit, just what the hell Hormat and his friends were doing here/now. He had no success at all.
A while later the turnoff for Dreamworld came into view in the distance, and Mike decided it was time to start planning his break-in. A faint rosy glow was apparent behind the hills to the east, but there was still plenty of darkness to work with, and Security would be at its most sleepy. The first thing to do was—
—Oh, SHIT—
“Oh, SHIT,” Mike said aloud.
“What is it?” Hormat cried, alarmed.
“My Command Band!” Mike blurted, pawing uselessly at his bare left wrist. “Oh shit, this is terrible. This is freakin’ awful! Hormy, those two assholes cut off my Command Band—it’s probably still back there—oh God, we gotta go back for it—”
“No,” Hormat said forcefully. “There is no time.”
“You don’t understand—I can’t get back inside without that Band.” This was the last straw for Mike. Too much had happened to him, and his nerves were shot; he began to blubber. “Hormat, what the hell am I gonna do? I’m screwed, I’m totally screwed—”
Hormat could not put a hand on Mike’s shoulder because he needed both hands to drive. Instead he touched his foot to Mike’s calf and rubbed it. “Can you not merely wait until the park opens, and—”
“I got no money,” Mike said, feeling his voice take on a sing-song whining quality and helpless to stop it, “I got no ID, I got no place to hide until Opening, if I did get in they’d lock a regular Dreamband on me and the only way I know to beat that takes props I haven’t got—Jesus, Haines and Conway can get in and Under faster than I can: I gave them the key! They’re probably on their way after us right now, or sending guys, they’ll nail me right in the parking lot waiting for the doors to open�
��” He buried his face in his hands and wept.
Hormat removed his foot from Mike’s leg and sighed. “Sit back,” he said.
Mike ignored him, giving way to hysteria.
“I said, sit back,” the dwarf repeated sharply.
Grudgingly, Mike straightened up, but kept sobbing.
Hormat braced his left arm against the steering wheel, re-checked his rearview mirror, and yanked back hard on the accelerator/brake lever.
Things happened too fast for Mike to register then. When he caught up with events again he was sitting with an air bag in his face, listening to the dopplering horns of cars and trucks whizzing past on the left, so shocked he had stopped crying and too shocked to speak.
They were on the shoulder—just on the shoulder, with their left front fender almost over the line into traffic. The Dreamworld turnoff was only a hundred meters or so ahead. Mike was unhurt, save that his hips and chest were sore where the belt had grabbed them, and his face stung where it had impacted the air bag. He tasted blood, realized he’d bitten his tongue. Some was trickling down his chin, but he couldn’t get his hands high enough to wipe it away.
Hormat retracted both air bags, switched off the SOS system, and turned to face him. He reached out and took Mike by the shoulders, and even in his daze Mike noticed how gently he did it. “Do I have your attention?” he asked.
Mike nodded dumbly.
Hormat held his eyes and spoke slowly, and with unmistakable sincerity. “You have a right to be hysterical. You have the right to despair.” He shook his ugly head from side to side. “You do not have the time right now.”
Mike took a deep, shuddery breath, wiped at his nose with his forearm, and nodded.
Hormat released his eyes and his shoulders, got him a tissue from a box between their seats, and restarted the stalled engine. “A right to be hysterical I have,” the dwarf muttered to himself, “and I also the time have not.”
“Hormy, what am I gonna do? I got about half an hour to get in there, and I don’t know how.”
Hormat shrugged. “Then it’s simple. I must get you in.”
The Free Lunch Page 18