Colt was heading roughly southeast, taking him away from his apartment, which was only a couple of blocks south of the campus. From Carter’s inquiries, little was known about Colt’s extracurricular activities. Wherever he was heading might very well turn out to be interesting, or at least illuminating.
They were now deep into suburbia. There were very few nonresidential buildings to be seen, and soon there were none, only streets of white houses weatherproofed to bear the rigors of the neighboring Atlantic. Carter checked his GPS and discovered that if Colt didn’t reach his destination soon, he’d be in the bay.
Then Colt swung south, and headed down a road leading onto a small peninsula. The road onto the isthmus was narrow, and Colt’s car was the only one going down it. While heavily treed, it would only take a glimpse for him to realize he was being followed. Carter fell back still farther, giving Colt plenty of lead. According to the GPS display, the peninsula was something around three hundred yards long with two rows of houses backing upon one another served by parallel roads that split from the access route as soon as it cleared the confining isthmus.
Carter considered his options. He could drive over there, but the chances of being spotted were good. If he walked over, however, that would seem suspicious in itself. He decided he would risk taking the car in, playing the role of a lost stranger who had made a wrong turn.
He took his car in slowly in case of meeting oncoming traffic. As the houses of the prim Providence street behind him vanished beyond the looming English and red oaks that lined the peninsula road, Carter felt a cold sense of isolation settle upon him. “Road” was an overstatement; his car shuddered its way along a rutted and ill-kept track. It had been surfaced once, but was now pitted, and Carter had to watch for potholes.
Any relief he felt at breaking out of the oppressive green tunnel was instantly quashed by the sight of what was, according to the map, Waite Road.
It certainly wasn’t much to look at; before him the road ran straight ahead along one row of houses, then arced to the right to form a shape that looked overall like an asymmetric tuning fork or the mirror image of an “h.” The houses were all of the same form, built in the 1930s by the look of them, and all were occupied and maintained. That said, they weren’t maintained with much emphasis on appearance. The roads Carter had navigated to reach there had been lined with houses that were clearly the owners’ pride and joys, or—at least—the product of stringent local laws and possibly residents’ associations.
Waite Road didn’t care, or at least the arm he could see, the row facing eastward toward the river, didn’t. The lawns were not overgrown, but looked more like they were kept in check by the grazing of goats rather than mowers. The paintwork was white, but patches of moss showed here and there under the eaves. About half the houses had cars in their drives, and all of them were pickups, none of them new. None of the houses had any swing sets or outdoor toys visible. None of the houses had any view of the bay, the east side of the road bearing a dense stand of trees. More oaks, Carter saw.
Carter had been in bad neighborhoods before, ones where being an unfamiliar face had gotten people shot in the past, but he had never been in one that felt so wrong before. Waite Road was an appendix to Providence, both in the sense of being something added that was not absolutely necessary, and as an organ whose function was obscure. The last thing he had expected in the city was a place that felt like a failed Deliverance theme park.
There was a rough track off to the left where a path worn by generations of vehicles turning had been given a patina of permanence with a grudging few sacks of gravel thrown onto the rutted earth. Carter drove by it and then backed down along the track as far as he dared, which at least served to make his car partially hidden by the oaks and not quite so obvious from the road itself. His initial plan had been to stay there until Colt came out again, but he quickly decided he would need to be more proactive if he wanted to find anything out. This second plan ran into problems when he felt a powerful reluctance to open the door and get out.
He wasn’t scared, he told himself, it was just that the place had put him on edge. It was idiotic, he knew. The citizens along Waite Road would just be normal folk, and it was only the strange isolation of the place that was working upon his nerves. Even so, it took a swift check of his Glock before he felt secure enough to step out of his vehicle.
Outside, he felt foolish. There was nothing odd about the place; it was just run-down. Probably some historical quirk of the city’s zoning laws meant this place was overlooked. Still, he thought as he broke out of the tree line on the bay side, it seemed odd that such prime Rhode Island real estate was being underused like that. The view across the water was excellent, though he could understand why the stand of trees was necessary as a windbreak.
He walked southward along the shoreline until he gauged he was about level with the farthermost house, and reentered the trees. He walked cautiously through the leaf mold and frail grass until he could get a good look at the house without being seen in turn. The plan was to make his way northward through the trees, examining each house in turn until he found Colt’s car, although as he hadn’t been able to see it from the neck of the road, he thought it must be down the other arm. This supposition was disproved immediately.
The farthest house on the bay-side arm of Waite Road was half as wide again as its neighbors, but that was the limit of its grandness. It was no mansion; only the same as the other houses around it, but more so. In fact, Carter wasn’t convinced it was a residence at all, or not purely so. There was a sense that it was some sort of communal building, a community center, in as much as one street bearing maybe a dozen houses can be a community.
And there was Colt’s red Mazda3, parked down the far side of the building. Of Colt himself there was no sign. Carter looked quickly around to make sure he was unobserved and, as there didn’t seem to be a soul anywhere around, took a few pictures of the house. The lower windows showed nothing but darkness within, whereas even the shutters were closed on the second floor. Carter guessed that, with some of the winds that blew in off the Atlantic, the shutters weren’t just there for show. Then again, he thought, none of the residents gave the impression they did anything for show, if their homes were any evidence.
He waited for half an hour, then an hour, but saw no activity whatsoever. Deciding he might be in for a long haul, he went back to his car to get some bottled water, an MRE heater, and a pouch of coffee. Maybe a ration pouch, too; he was just beginning to feel the absence of the meal he’d missed by responding to Xu’s phone call. The coffee wouldn’t taste much like coffee, but sometimes you just want something hot, and he’d drunk enough of the coffee pouches to have acquired the taste. With a small frisson of perverse pleasure, he remembered he had a cappuccino pouch in his map pocket.
He was still smiling at the thought of committing a crime against coffee connoisseurs the world over when he cleared the trees and saw that somebody had discovered his car.
A man was standing ten feet from it, his back to Carter. He wasn’t moving, just looking at the car like a man might stand motionless near a horse or a cow, for fear of spooking it. Carter was quiet on his feet, but the man heard his approach all the same and turned to face him.
He wasn’t very old, early to mid-twenties, Carter guessed, and he surely wasn’t very handsome. He stood about five feet ten, and must have been carrying around 240 pounds. He looked at Carter through heavy-lidded eyes with the attitude of a corpulent child.
“You shouldn’t park here,” he said. Then, belatedly, “This your car?”
Carter smiled a friendly smile, although battling banjos had suddenly appeared on his internal sound track. The man was wearing faded jeans, a pair of battered blue and white sneakers failing at the toe caps, and a lumberjack short-sleeved shirt over a gray tee.
“Yes. I got lost. I couldn’t see the through road. Could you tell me where I am, please?”
“This is Waite’s Bill,” said the m
an. His slow speech worked with the half-closed eyes to give the effect that he was sleepwalking. “This is private property.”
“I’m sorry,” said Carter. “I got lost. I didn’t realize I was trespassing.”
At least that explained the sudden change in civic ambience, he thought. Waite Road was essentially a gated community, water providing its fences and sheer antisocial weirdness acting as its gate. He wondered how anybody got on the housing list here. Then he wondered why anyone would want to get on the housing list in the first place.
The man had lost interest in him, but was looking out into the bay. A handsome motor yacht was passing by, heading out to sea.
“Nice yacht,” said Carter. “Okay for some, huh?”
He noticed the man look up a little; he hadn’t been looking at the yacht at all, but only the water.
“Don’t want a boat,” said the man. “I want to go swim.”
Carter frowned. It didn’t seem very warm out there, and the undertows would be fierce. “I’m not sure that’s such a good place to go swimming. Maybe the other side of the bill…?”
“I’m good at swimming,” said the man.
Carter doubted that, but said nothing. The man seemed tractable, though, so perhaps he could get some local background out of him. He walked over to stand by him, mapping out a conversational strategy to befriend him on the way. The guy was obviously very into swimming, so that would be his “in.” Fine.
He stood by the man, looked out over the dark waters of the Providence River as they wound out into the ocean, drew a breath to speak, and then everything went to shit.
Chapter 13
THE NAMELESS CITY
At some point, everyone suffers small physiological glitches. The human body is, after all, a complex entity, and tiny perturbations in its structure and chemistry can have notable, frightening effects. From a sudden-onset migraine to the random, racing heartbeats of atrial fibrillation, down to smaller effects such as a nervous tic or a brief period of blurred vision in one eye. The body usually compensates, and the troublesome effect passes.
For several long seconds, this is what Carter believed. His primary concern was that the changes in his perception meant that he could not safely drive until the small glitch in his metabolism passed. He would be glad when it did; a sour yellowness had settled upon his vision and it made him feel soul sick. It was like looking at the world in old photographs—not with the warmth of sepia, but damaged pictures found in an old box, a transparent cellophane-like layer separating from the image like an insect’s wing.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind, when he realized the underlying truth of it; he felt he was seeing the world through someone else’s perception. His own, but not him.
Carter’s sight blurred with double images, multiple images, and they were not the same. He was breathing heavily, becoming aware of the sound of his breath rasping in and out of his throat, the coldness in his lungs. What a shambolic scarecrow a human is. How full of paradox and obsolescence. Life quivered fitfully inside him, a flickering light in a stormy universe. He felt small and inconsequential. He felt the truth pressing in upon him, up from the ancient Earth beneath him, down from the still more ancient stars above, a pressure of reality that would crush him like a louse between fingernails.
He was vaguely aware that he had fallen to his knees, one hand on the cold grass of the riverside. He was too far from normal sensation to even feel panic at what he was experiencing. He was beyond fear, beyond wonder, beyond reason on a spectrum that tended into a darkness he could not fathom.
He knew he could no longer trust his perceptions, that he was suffering some sort of fit, some sort of fugue state. It didn’t matter how real the waves of motion beneath his fingers felt, as if the ground were nothing more than a thin sheet beneath which a billion, billion worms and roots writhed; it wasn’t real. It didn’t matter that he saw across the bay clumsily superimposed upon itself, again and again, juddering images of the built-up land he knew, along with banks of primal woodland that had never seen humans, and strange tall buildings constructed of some smooth, red-orange stone that glowed in the rays of a sun that was behind the clouds; it wasn’t real. He saw the water and the sky join in a flickering, jagged line and the line, a synthetic horizon, travel toward him emitting a crackling roar as all creation flexed in ontological agony.
It was real. As real as anything else. As real as anything had ever been.
Carter wanted it to stop, would do anything for it to stop. Nothing existed except for the torment of the moment. There was no past and no memories, there was no future and no hope. There was only the now, and the anguish of that thin slice of existence. He could bear it no longer. He had already suffered a second, or a minute, or a year, or forever, and it had to stop, and he knew where the stop switch was.
He fumbled for his pistol.
He felt the front sight tap against his incisors.
He worried momentarily about chipping the enamel, even though the frame was polymer, not steel.
He thought of Charlie Hammond’s S&W Model 5946.
He thought of Charlie Hammond.
* * *
He didn’t fire.
* * *
In Atlantic City, Bernie Hayesman looked at the plate of ribs, and he was not happy. He had asked for an omelet, a simple omelet to be sent up to his office, and they had sent ribs. He couldn’t understand it. He’d spoken to the chef personally. They’d discussed eggs, if briefly. There was no earthly way “omelet” could have been misconstrued as “ribs.” He looked at the plate of ribs, and the ribs looked back. Neither he nor they were overjoyed at the situation.
The runner who’d brought in the food was hanging around the door, looking nervous. Hayesman was generally considered a good guy, but woe betide anyone who screwed up, because then he would come down upon them like the wrath of Jove. The runner couldn’t see how he could be blamed for this particular screwup, but he was nevertheless wary of the possibility. “I could get it changed,” he said. “Should I ask them to do an omelet, boss?”
Hayesman waved a hand dismissively. “It’s cool. I’ll eat these. You can go.”
The runner left, and Hayesman was left alone with the ribs.
He ate them slowly and unwillingly. The last time he’d had them, he’d ended up eating most of them cold because of that asshole kid and his roulette “system.”
Then Rand and her team had come back after kicking the guy out, and they’d looked kind of freaked-out. Rand had kept herself on an even keel until she’d sent her people back on the floor. Then she’d sat down without permission. She was ex-services, and she never sat down in the presence of a superior without permission. She’d told Hayesman about the slots, and how she’d taken the ones that had hit near-as-dammit simultaneous jackpots out of service and called in the engineer. She said she didn’t expect him to find anything, but she was really keen for a rational explanation.
The engineer didn’t find anything. The slots showed no signs of having been interfered with in any way, and the probabilities set on the reels were absolutely in line with house rules.
“He figured out what the chances of all four machines jackpotting at the same time were,” she’d said. Hayesman had never seen the usually unflappable Rand so shaken. “That kid said some numbers when we threw him out. I can’t swear to it, but I think he said what the odds were. They were massive, boss. Astronomical.”
Hayesman had told her that it was nothing. Just a conjuring trick, just some dick trying to make himself look good. That she shouldn’t worry about it.
Hayesman worried about it. If the kid had been smarter about how he used whatever shtick he had come up with—and the thing with the slots had convinced him that there was some shtick—he could have taken the casino for a lot more than he had. He’d been so barefaced about it, though. Like he didn’t care.
Hayesman belched. Great. Now the ribs he hadn’t ordered and didn’t want were giving him gas.
He didn’t feel so good. He pushed the plate away from him. No more of those. He’d eaten enough. He felt his gut moil slowly within him like a languorous sea creature.
He didn’t like the thought of bringing in upper management on this. They’d want to know why he didn’t get the guy’s name at the time, and he had no good answer to that because, simply put, he’d underestimated him. He hadn’t taken the guy seriously and, by the time he pulled that Harry Potter shit with the slots, it was too late. Better late than never, though, and at least the Oceanic could earn some brownie points with the community by putting the shout-out on somebody who might break banks if he wasn’t spotted early enough.
Hayesman grimaced. That omelet was looking really good about now. He didn’t usually have an acid digestion, but he had a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the bathroom for the rare times it troubled him.
He made to stand, and sat down again immediately. Something was definitely wrong with his guts. Maybe flu. He really needed to get to the bathroom in case it was something violent. He’d had sudden-onset flu once in his life, and had not enjoyed the moment when he lost control of his bowels.
He didn’t dare move from his seat, however. The internal pressure in his bowels was becoming painful. He felt bloated, and … no, he could feel bloating, could feel his guts swelling inside him. This was bad, he could tell. Not just inconveniently bad. This was really, health-threateningly bad.
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