“But what would they pay in?” Joanna parked the Mustang in a weedy yard behind a boarded-up former gas station, whose price-boards listed Regular at 25¢ a gallon and Ethel at 29. The open door at the back of the little adobe building was surrounded by a dirty trail of torn mattresses and and filthy plastic bags. Whatever protects your bicycle, Antryg, you BETTER put it on my car… “I’m betting the Interdimensional Transport Company doesn’t move that much corn for free.”
“If it were me,” said Magus grimly, picking up the battery-bags, “I’d probably charge the enslavement of a couple of their shamans, if they don’t have some resource like gold or silver that can be used for magic.”
“Or, depending on how high their population is,” added Antryg, as he led the way toward the wire fence and the wilderness of tracks beyond, “they may simply set up a power-sink on-site to extend another branch-line to somewhere else from there. The food will keep the population dense enough – depending on how much the Company is willing to transport and distribute – to power the corridor—”
“And if some of them go insane every time a train comes through,” concluded Joanna, “that’s par for the course.”
“Par for the course?” Magus inquired, and the rest of the journey across the branching steel rails, and among the rusted cars on the sidings, that lay between them and the river, was spent in Antryg’s explanation of how golf was scored, a religious practice in which he had been indoctrinated by its devoutest believer Jim Hasselart, the manager of Enyart’s Bar.
Deathly silence lay over the river-bed, as Joanna produced wire-cutters from her backpack and Antryg snipped his way through. The gray overcast had thinned to bleary sunlight; the freeway glittered like a poisoned snake. Antryg walked toward the shallow depression of the weed-filled flood-channel itself, a pinwheel in one hand and the Magic 8-Ball in the other, his profile like a beaky stork’s as he turned his head here and there, listening. Joanna and the Magus followed, with the electromagnet, the batteries, and the lasso of wire and crystal. Somewhere far-off a police helicopter chattered. Distant sirens wailed. Joanna’s head began to ache again, as if somewhere within the wall of an old house, wiring had shorted and the wood begun to smolder.
“The corridor must set up a constant emanation of low-grade damage,” whispered Magus, as if fearful to break that terrible hush. “The waterfront folk spoke of it, even the ones who didn’t have nightmares or go mad and murder one another. Most of them said their children cried constantly—”
“No surprise,” returned Joanna. “I feel like bursting into tears myself. Where did he learn about all this?” she added, and nodded toward the angular form ahead of them, in his tattered green Army jacket and shabby jeans. “I mean, is trans-dimensional energy-corridors something they teach in Council Wizard School?”
“Not having been permitted to enter the Citadel courses,” replied Magus, a trifle bitterly, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t believe so. But one has to take Council vows, you know, in order to receive training – and of course your first vow is not to use whatever you learn, for any purpose whatsoever, no matter how good it seems to you. But then before he took his vows, Antryg was taught by Suraklin, who was probably the most powerful mage in the past thousand years… And if anyone would know how to suck the life-force out of people’s bodies to power up a stove to cook his dinner, Suraklin was the man for it. I’m astonished—”
“That’s far enough!” A man’s voice split the stillness like an ax. “Get your hands up or we shoot.”
Antryg turned in surprise; Joanna and Magus raised their hands at once. Men emerged from behind the concrete pillars of an old bridge, from the black mouths of the nearest storm-drains. Others were scrambling down the opposite concrete slope. Several carried automatic rifles – AK-47s, Joanna saw, as they came closer – the others – there were about ten in all – had Uzis. They were dressed in sharply-fitting polyester trousers and guayabera shirts, black hair sleekly combed. The man who seemed to be the leader held no gun, though when he came close Joanna saw that under his tailored leather blazer he wore a shoulder-holster. Flecks of gray showed in his trim jawline beard. Joanna and Magus retreated to Antryg’s side as they were surrounded, and the leader and the largest of his henchmen came to within a few feet of them before the bearded leader spoke again.
“You the man been sellin’ shit to my bravos down here in the river, asshole?”
The Uzi leveled at Antryg’s chest, but curiously, nobody mentioned Antryg’s sword. Joanna wondered if they saw it.
“Good Heavens, no,” responded Antryg mildly. “I haven’t an ounce of shit on me, neither do my friends, do you, Joanna? Magus? And you would be…?”
“I’m Villareal and I don’t like stupid jokes. I seen you and your bitch down here yesterday—”
“Ah, so that was you behind the pile of cars. I’m not terribly fond of stupid jokes myself. Have you seen us down here before yesterday? Yet your friends hiding down here in the storm-drains – illegals up from Mexico, I assume? – have been waking up in the night and killing one another for three weeks now.”
Villareal caught Antryg by a handful of his shirt, jerked him savagely back and forth. “How you know that, Four-Eyes?”
“It’s my business to know. Please handle that carefully,” he added, as one of the men – a boy barely growing his first fluff of mustache – jerked the canvas tote from Magus’s hands. “If it’s destroyed the problem is only going to get worse.”
“You tryin’ to threaten me?”
“Not at all.” Antryg regarded his captor with surprise in his wide, gray eyes. “But if we can avoid having everyone in the riverbed – and possibly for several miles around, if the emanations spread – go insane and start murdering one another at random with a few simple precautions, I’d rather do it that way. But you see, since the source of the problem is invisible, unless my friends and I take care of it this morning, eventually someone is going to inform the authorities and they’ll come down here and make a search, and you wouldn’t really want that, would you? They won’t find anything, of course, but when people start howling and seeing devils at regular intervals…”
Villareal shook him again. “What the fuck is goin’ on?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s what we’re here to ascertain. With your permission, of course.”
The gang-leader let him go with a shove, and stood irresolute. Magus, meanwhile, had been thoroughly frisked, and Joanna had her backpack pulled off her and gone through: “Nice laptop in here, Villa. Nuthin’ else but wires an’ tools an’ shit… What the fuck is this?” A stocky young man with a Fu Manchu mustache held up the wire-and-crystal lasso.
“Technically it’s a portable dimensional spiracle,” replied Antryg promptly. “When hooked to a power-source – please don’t pull the crystals out of it, they’re just quartz – it should breach the energy-barrier that separates a multi-sourced trans-dimensional enclave from the world into which it’s been introduced, hopefully without opening subsidiary portals… Generally the things that come through those aren’t anything you want to meet.”
“You fucken crazy, man.”
“You know, that’s exactly what my therapist says! But she does also say I’m perfectly harmless. Watch out with that bag, there’s another laptop in it…”
“Okay, my friend.” Villareal grinned evilly. “You go ahead an’ you just show us how you gonna make everythin’ okay down here an’ make all my coyotes quit screamin’ an’ tearin’ up their own faces with tin-can lids… an’ then maybe I let you go. Maybe I let your little girlfriend here go, too.”
Joanna stepped away from the hand that he reached to touch her hair.
The men made a circle around them, nudged each other, snickering, ready for a show.
“Joanna—”
Antryg held out his hand. Shaking a little, she took the canvas bag from the kid, and her backpack from Mr. Mustache. “Hey, those are good batteries,” protested one of the men when M
agus retrieved the tote that held them.
“We get ‘em back, Vato, don’t worry about it,” replied Villareal. “Soon as we see what Four-Eyes here’s gonna do.”
“He gonna make the Statue of Liberty disappear?” asked Mr. Mustache, and got a general laugh, as Joanna set up the electromagnet and spread the lasso in a five-foot circle on the ground.
“He gonna make you disappear, Torres, how about that?”
To Antryg, she whispered, “Can I go with you?” She knew what was going to happen, and the thought of being left with Villareal and his “bravos” if anything went wrong was more than she wanted to deal with.
“No.” He took one of the laptops, screwed in the long wires from port to port connecting them – a precaution in case the corridor itself interfered with computer function in some way – and plugged in the mass of wire, crystals, and smaller electromagnets that he’d rigged along the co-ax cable into the printer-port. “I’m sorry – I’m profoundly sorry – but I do have to insist this time. You’ll be far safer out here than you would be with me—”
“That does not make me feel any better!”
“It would if you knew what’s in there. If my laptop does work in there, it should register when the ports make connection with the activation-field on these rings Magus described. If not, I’ll—”
“What’s in there? Abominations? Things that fell in from the Void…”
“Those will be bad enough,” said Antryg quietly. “I think I’m going to meet the people who think it’s all right to suck the sanity out of human brains to source long-distance commodity shipments, and I suspect I won’t like them. I’m almost certain they won’t like me.”
“Hey, come on, Four-Eyes!” called out the mustachioed Torres, and someone else whistled.
“Yeah, kiss her an’ get to work!”
She whispered, “Just don’t disappear in there, all right?”
She saw his eyes shift, and realized that the possibility existed. That he’d known the possibility existed.
But he only leaned down quickly and brushed her lips with his, tucked the folded laptop under his arm, and shoved the handfuls of crystals and doorbell-magnets into the pockets of his jacket. Joanna stepped back, knelt beside the main electromagnet and opened the laptop, checked the program. Her hands shook. God, get me out of this safely…
“Now, whatever you do,” called Antryg to the watching ring of thugs, “don’t anyone step into the circle here.”
They all laughed, and Torres mimed terror. “Oooh, I’m scared!”
“What, the spell not gonna work if we do?” called out the kid. “Like in the movies?”
“Oh, it will,” said Antryg earnestly. “It’s just that you won’t like what happens next.” In the center of the palely-glittering lasso, he raised one crooked hand.
Joanna took a deep breath and hit Enter.
And Antryg disappeared.
There were, not surprisingly, shouts of shock and anger: “What the fuck!” “Chingado!” “Where’d he go, man?” The kid strode forward and Joanna yelled, “DON’T step in the circle—” and of course he did…
And vanished also.
“What the fuck—?” Villareal grabbed her by the shoulder, dragged her to her feet; Joanna tried to twist free before the electromagnet got kicked over or the computer stepped on.
“I told him not to step in the circle!” she yelled.
Magister Magus shoved him back. A half-dozen Uzis swung to cover him – which would have caught Villareal in the spray of bullets as well – and the gang-leader yelled, “You bring him back, bitch, or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what?” Joanna wrenched her arm free, dropped to her knees beside the laptop again, forced her attention back to the screen. “Kill me? That’ll bring him back.”
“Kill your friend here—”
She heard Magus squeak and guessed someone had pulled a knife, and forced herself not to look around. A shadow fell over her and a hand grabbed her arm again and she said, “DON’T! He’ll be in touch with me in a minute—” Please, God, let his laptop work in the corridor! “—if the connection isn’t broken…”
A scuffle behind her, and she risked a quick glance as Villareal strode toward the circle. The wires that connected laptop to laptop snaked across the dirty, pale concrete and over the crystals of the portable ring, and ended in its center. There was something – like the flicker of a migraine’s colorless fire – just at the end of them, making it impossible for the attention to focus on exactly what was there for more than an instant.
Villareal walked all around the circle. There was another man with him, whose face was an older version of the kid’s; this man yelled “Chico!” into the blandly empty ring, a note of frantic desperation in his voice. “Chico!” Other men were coming to join the little group in the riverbed, emerging from the storm-drains or from the little cluster of cardboard shacks under the bridge, like bundles of rags whose unwashed stink made Joanna gag. Some trotted; others ambled, like men with all the day before them and empty years behind. A few called out questions in Spanish, but three or four were brown-haired, blonde, or African-dark: bearded, ragged, and – as she saw as they came closer – nearly toothless. One short man in a much-decayed brown suit-coat said, “You step back from that girl, brother,” and, when some of the Uzi-wielding gang turned toward him, demanded, “What, you really gonna shoot them things off down here in the middle of the day in front of all these witnesses? You okay, honey?”
“I’m fine, but just keep them back from me,” said Joanna over her shoulder.
The man came close, crouched beside her; Magus had moved up on her other side.
“Where the hell’d your friend go, honey?” asked Brown Coat. His breath was a sewer. “I saw him disappear, from clear across the river. David Copperfield himself can’t pull a trick like that, not in the center of a circle. Wayne Barton,” he added, holding out his hand, nearly black with filth. “Master-sergeant USMC… retired.”
“Joanna Sheraton.” She took his hand, well aware that he might very well have saved her life and Antryg’s, too. “This is Magister Magus.” If I say he’s a wizard they’ll think it’s all a magic-trick… “We’re paranormal investigators.”
“You here about this nightmare shit that’s been goin’ on?”
Deeply relieved to finally have a corroborative witness, Joanna said, “Yeah.”
“It’s fucken drugs!” insisted Villareal. “These assholes been sellin’ some kind of weird shit—”
“That’s not what’s goin’ on, man.” Sergeant Barton turned his head to squint up at the gang. “I don’t know what the fuck is goin’ on, but it’s no drug I’ve ever seen. These the guys you’re bringing up from the Border?” He nodded in the direction of the gathering group of newcomers, men – and a couple of women – not dressed like the long-time homeless, who stood in a clump a few feet away.
“None of your goddam business,” retorted Villareal uncertainly, and at that moment the darkness of the laptop screen was lit with orange numbers. “What the hell do you know about it anyway?”
SUB-PORT 01 ACTIVATED.
SUB-PORT 02 ACTIVATED.
SUB-PORT 03 ACTIVATED.
Joanna whispered, “He got through. And the laptop works inside the corridor. He’s installing that thing—”
“What will it do?” Magus paused in his explanation to Villareal about what was going on, which Joanna hoped wasn’t making any sense.
“Theoretically,” said Joanna, “it’ll feed a randomizer virus into whatever system is keeping the corridor open—”
“I know about it because every three hours and forty-five minutes we get this… this sound, this feeling… Some of the guys get the shakes, or go into panic… The babies your wetbacks got with ‘em start to cry—”
“What – What?” Joanna jerked around from the screen. “Three hours and forty-five minutes?” And looked at her watch.
Oh, shit.
SUB-PORT 04 ACTIVATE
D.
SUB-PORT 05 ACTIVATED.
SUB-PORT 06 ACTIVATED.
SUB-PORT 07 ACTIVATED.
There were twenty sub-ports, calved off the coaxial cable wired into the laptop’s printer-port, enough, Joanna had calculated, to feed sufficiently different variants of the virus into whatever was the computer component of the corridor’s power-system. Even if something went wrong now, the fact that the laptop would work inside the corridor meant that she had a better chance of fixing it. With luck, Antryg would be able to use at least some of his abilities at magic inside the corridor as well, against whatever he might meet in there…
SUB-PORT 08 ACTIVATED.
“Yesterday Katerina over there tried to set fire to the shelter they’re all living in, with her little girl inside it,” went on Barton more quietly, with a nod toward a very scared-looking young woman standing at the back of the immigrant group. “I don’t know how well you know your people, Mr. Villa, but down here we’ve seen ‘em come and go and that little lady wouldn’t touch drugs if you held a gun on her. It was like she was sleep-walking, and the others don’t dare let her by herself now, for fear she’ll do herself a harm out of horror at what she almost did. Whatever’s goin’ on, it’s not drugs.”
Where’s sub-port 09?
“So what the fuck is it, smart guy?”
“Damned if I know, but if these folks have some kind of idea how to stop it—”
Joanna looked at her watch again. Five minutes since the last port went up. They’d left the house about twenty minutes after the pinwheels had gone off but Joanna hadn’t noted the exact time: Why would we? We had almost eight hours…
“I ain’t seen ‘em do nuthin’ but dick around with their computer—”
“And make two guys disappear into thin air!”
An hour to get down here and at least a half-hour yattering around with Villareal and his thugs, maybe more…
“One of ‘em was one of my bravos!”
“One of your bravos who was dumb enough to go do what somebody yelled at him not to! I may be a god-damn drunk, but I’m not stupid, and whatever it is, it’s on a line straight down the bed of the river from Seventh Street almost to Union Station, and whatever it is, it gets worse like a… like some crazy heartbeat, regularly, every three hours and forty-five minutes all along the line at once.”
Corridor (Windrose Chronicles) Page 3