by Gary Gibson
* * *
They continued on to the village Nat had mentioned. By then night had come, and Dutch almost drove straight through it before she realised the few scattered shells of buildings strung along the roadside in fact constituted a settlement.
She pulled over, but kept the engine idling. Her vision remained clear, with no shapes crowding the edges of her vision. She was filled with the kind of euphoria she imagined history’s great explorers must have felt.
Beside her, Nat studied a notebook he’d pulled out of his driving suit by the light of a torch. Dutch glanced at the notebook and observed tight lines of spidery handwriting.
He looked up. ‘There should be a general store straight ahead of here.’
Dutch took the brake off and coaxed the Coupé a little further along the narrow, bumpy road. Seeing more than a few metres without headlights was near to impossible, but no way was she risking turning them on.
‘Here,’ said Nat, his voice taut.
They pulled over and got out. The store appeared to be little more than a tin shack, its shelves still piled high with ageing canned goods.
Nat studied the notebook again.
‘What is that?’ Dutch asked.
‘This? It belonged to that scientist they recovered.’ He switched the torch off. ‘The RV should be around the next corner.’
Dutch followed him around past the store to a row of small, pitiful-looking houses that weren’t much more than shacks themselves. Thin saplings pushed through the windows, their roofs green with moss. He led her further, down a narrow, muddy lane that led to an empty lot occupied by a couple of rusted cars and an articulated RV of much more recent design.
A ladder beneath a door set into the side of the RV led up and inside its darkened interior. Dutch stood back as Nat ascended the steps, flicked on his torch, and stepped inside.
He reappeared within moments, one hand clamped over his face. He made his way over to the edge of the lot and retched into the grass.
‘What did you see?’
He wiped his mouth and coughed. ‘There’s a body. The smell’s pretty bad.’
She stepped towards him. ‘Give me your torch.’
He passed it over and Dutch pulled a bandana out of her jeans, wrapping it tight over her mouth and nose before taking her turn to look inside the truck. She saw workbenches and scientific equipment, and a body sprawled on the floor. If she kept her breathing even and shallow and didn’t breathe through her nose, she could just about bear the stink of putrefaction. Even so, she pulled off her bandana and sucked down a deep lungful of jasmine-scented air the moment she stepped out into open air.
‘That’s one dead in the truck apart from the one who died after they rescued him,’ she said. ‘How many others were in the expedition?’
‘Four.’
So there’d been six to start with. ‘Elektron seemed to think they’d all passed through the Rift. Looks like some of them didn’t make it that far after all.’
Nat groaned. ‘I don’t know why you even let him talk.’
She heard a rustling in the trees and glanced up. A pair of tiny eyes looked down at her and blinked, and then their owner shot off along a branch. Nothing more than a squirrel, but any normal animal was a rarity on Teijouan these days. That, even more than the car’s d-meter, convinced her they were safe.
What was it Elektron had told her? That the Rift was a crossroads, with a million different roads. She remembered talking to some scientist at a pre-race event in Hong Kong, years before. He’d told her there was more than one reality, an infinite number of universes each just a tiny bit different from the next, all stacked up one on top of another in some complicated way she couldn’t make sense of. And Elektron himself had been a scientist long before his mind fractured.
Maybe there was even a world out there where her father hadn’t died too young of a premature heart attack. A world where she hadn’t had to fight her way through a succession of orphanages.
She went to sit on the hood of a derelict car and wished she had a cigarette, even though she’d given up years before.
‘I need to keep looking and see what I can find,’ said Nat, nodding at the bandana she held in one hand. ‘Mind if I borrow that?’
* * *
She listened to him clatter around inside the truck for a while, then wandered back over to the grocery store, searching around until she found several cartons of cigarettes tucked away in a dry place. She pulled a carton open and lit a cigarette from a plastic lighter she found in a drawer, then got back inside the Coupé, steering it next to the RV. Nat ducked his head out and gave her an appreciative nod, then tossed down a fat refuse bag that landed next to one wheel. Dutch got out and took a look inside the bag: he’d stuffed it full of hundreds more of the superconductor rods.
‘Looks like you got what you were looking for,’ she said, perching on the hood of the Coupé while she finished her cigarette.
‘I guess.’ He went back inside, mouth and nose still covered by Dutch’s bandana, and re-emerged with an armful of document folders. He dumped them on the hood next to Dutch. One fell open, pages of printed equations and dense handwriting flapping in a breeze.
‘So what now?’ she asked, sliding back off the hood.
Nat sorted through the folders and spread one open on the hood. ‘There’s another map here, showing the exact route to where they found these rods.’
‘You want to steal more?’
His face stiffened at the comment. ‘As many as the Coupé can carry.’ He tapped the page with a fingernail. ‘But it’s right up next to the Rift—we’d be closer to it than anyone ever thought possible.’
Dutch couldn’t make up her mind whether the idea excited or terrified her. Maybe both, she decided. ‘How far?’
‘Five, six kilometres.’
‘Sure thing,’ she said, taking a last, shaky draw on her cigarette.
He nodded. ‘We’ll find a place for the night and set out at dawn.’
Dutch ground the cigarette under one boot. ‘I wonder where the others are by now.’
‘Who? The other contestants?’
‘Nothing wrong with wondering.’ They’d be holing up for the night round about now. As soon as the sun rose they’d take the road south. The terrain from that point on was smooth and level all the way to the finishing line. Sometimes the last leg turned into a straight contest of speed, with few if any Kaiju encounters.
‘Forget about the race,’ he growled.
‘We still need to cross the finishing line eventually,’ she reminded him.
‘We’ll come in last,’ he said, loading the folders into the boot.
I’ve never come last, thought Dutch. But then again, she’d never come first either. ‘Why even bother with the subterfuge any more?’ she asked. ‘It’s not like Strugatsky doesn’t know you stole his map. He’ll know we took the shortcut—’
‘We stick to the plan, Dutch.’
‘Sure,’ she said, not looking at him. She nodded across the road. ‘There’s another hotel over there looks like it’s still intact. We can hole up there.’
‘I’m serious,’ he said, gazing at her with a fixed expression. ‘This is not about winning a race.’
‘I know,’ she said irritably. ‘I won’t bring it up again.’
He stood there unmoving for several more moments, eyes still fixed on her, then popped the hood and pulled a solenoid loose before holding it up where she could see it.
Her mouth fell open, and she laughed. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I know you don’t trust me,’ he said, grinding the words out, ‘and I understand why. But that doesn’t mean I have to trust you either.’ He pushed the solenoid into a pocket. ‘This keeps us on the same page.’
* * *
Broken glass covered the floor of the hotel lobby, the walls decorated with posters of waving palm trees and advertisements for a local waterfall that had once been a tourist attraction. A corpse lay curled up behind
the reception desk, its bones gleaming in what little moonlight found its way inside.
A number of the rooms, upon investigation, proved to be in decent enough condition, and in a few cases still retained their window-glass. Dutch found one with a double-bed that she could almost imagine had been made up in the last few hours. She tested it with her bodyweight. It creaked a little, but neither did it collapse into dust and splinters.
She sprawled back and listened to Nat moving around in the room next door, then lit another cigarette before heading back down. She’d seen a sign for a bar tucked out of sight behind the reception. To her delight, she discovered an unopened bottle of whisky.
She nodded to the corpse behind the reception desk on her way back upstairs and told it to put the whisky on her tab.
Back in her room she kicked off her boots and sipped the whisky until a warm glow worked its way inside her. Nat had fallen silent next door. She thought about her long years in prison, and then she thought some more, and then she capped the whisky before heading through to Nat’s room.
Nat lay sprawled and snoring on the bed in the next room. The window-glass had survived intact, but had been badly starred. He’d pulled ragged, half-rotted curtains closed and stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers.
He’d discarded his jacket over the back of a chair. Dutch made a fast search through his pockets but to her frustration couldn’t find the solenoid. She stared at Nat’s supine form for a moment longer, then turned towards the door.
A floorboard creaked. She looked back at Nat to see his eyes were open.
He sat up, blinking and regarding her with wary caution. ‘Dutch? What is it?’
Hi Nat, she imagined herself saying. I was just searching through your stuff because I trust you even less than you think I do. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re going to try and kill me, and I’d rather get the hell out of here before you get the chance.
‘You looking for the solenoid?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she lied.
‘Then what?’
Dutch thought hard for a moment, then stepped closer, pulling her T-shirt up and over her head before dropping it on the chair where Nat’s jacket hung. Her jeans followed, and then she climbed onto the bed, straddling him.
‘This means nothing,’ she said, looking down at him.
He looked up at her in silence, then brought his hands up to rest on her hips before giving her a single small nod.
‘Just so we’ve got that clear,’ she said, reaching for the clasp of her bra.
Endless Highway
Dutch woke shortly after dawn to the sound of someone screaming.
She stumbled upright and saw that Nat was gone from the room. She stepped over to the window, pushing aside a curtain and peering through the starred glass. The dawn sky looked like a painted backdrop, the streets below a hastily constructed set. Nat stood in the road in front of the hotel, looking past the scientist’s RV.
She heard the same voice cry out again, full of anguish and terror, from somewhere on the other side of the RV. Nat ran past the vehicle and out of sight.
Dutch got dressed fast and threw herself down the steps and outside. She came to a halt in the middle of the street and looked around, hearing nothing but the wind.
‘Nat!’
No response.
Leave him here, she told herself. He’d left the map in the car. She could take it and drive away without him. Wu would have to believe her when she said he died in the jaws of a Kaiju.
But then, she thought, grinding her teeth together until they hurt, he still had the solenoid. Without that, the Coupé wasn’t going anywhere.
She ran over to the Coupé and grabbed a .375 hunting rifle out of the back. She tried hard to ignore the rush of fear down her spine like a flood of frozen diamonds as she loaded the rifle.
She found a narrow alley past the lot, with high walls on either side. At its far end, at the foot of a path that wound deeper into the forest slopes, crouched none other than Jack Burton. He had one hand pressed tightly over an open wound in his chest, his eyes pleading when he looked at her.
Dutch lifted the rifle and shot him straight between the eyes. She’d tried to brace herself, but the recoil still sent her stumbling backwards. A .375 was enough to take out an elephant.
She landed on her rump. Burton had vanished, replaced by another shapeshifter-Kaiju. Blood streamed from a wound where one of its eyes had been. It started to crawl towards her, the smell of its breath like a charnel house in hell.
Nat jumped down from the right-hand wall and ran towards her. He got her back upright, and then they both ran around the corner to the Coupé. Dutch pushed the hood open, and Nat hurriedly replaced the solenoid before joining her inside the car.
Dutch had barely got the engine running when Anna Dubayev came stumbling around the corner towards the rear of the Coupé, hands reaching towards them as if in supplication.
Dutch laughed out loud and reversed the Coupé straight into her. The mirage faded, and the injured Kaiju screamed its rage as they drove away at speed.
She still hadn’t stopped laughing by the time they left the village behind them. Nat glared at her, his face streaked with sweat and blood.
‘I hope to Christ it’s not me you’re laughing at,’ he said.
‘It would take forever to explain,’ she gasped. ‘Now tell me what the hell you think you were doing, taking a stupid chance like that.’
His face reddened. ‘It made me think one of the other scientists had come back from the Rift.’
She chuckled. ‘Idiot.’
He looked out the window. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
They headed towards the column of light over the next hill, and Dutch decided she had to kill Nat before he had a chance to kill her first.
But first, she needed the answers to some questions.
* * *
By now, they were almost at the island’s centre, and halfway to the East Coast. The light from the Rift grew stronger as they steered through jungle-strewn roads. The road ascended a mountainous slope through a series of steep switchbacks, and Dutch pulled over at the sight of a metal handcart abandoned on the road dead ahead. A body lay next to it, wearing a torn jumpsuit much like the one in the RV had been wearing.
Nat got out and looked around. Dozens of grey rods lay scattered all around the handcart, and thousands more on the surrounding slopes. Dutch caught sight of a shattered wreck half-buried in the trees that looked like a flying saucer, but of course couldn’t possibly be.
She left Nat to gather up more of the rods and walked a little further up the road. This close, the Rift was so bright it hurt to look at it. She kept walking until she could look down into a shallow bowl of land where the road dipped back down.
The Rift took the form of a column of blazing, shifting light that rose from the floor of the valley, as if someone had captured the Northern Lights and put them on display where few might ever find them. What looked like the ruins of a hospital sat in the valley’s centre, barely visible amidst the penetrating brilliance.
A secret facility, Elektron had said. She was starting to think he hadn’t been lying at all. She discerned shapes in the shifting patterns of light and shadow that seemed to be on the verge of resolving into…something.
The light shimmered, coalesced, and then did in fact become something.
She heard Nat walk up beside her, and she reached inside her jacket, feeling the contours of the pistol she’d put there before getting out of the car. ‘What do you see?’ she asked, nodding at the light.
He made a dismissive sound. ‘I don’t know. Coloured lights or something.’
She turned to stare at him. ‘You must see something?’
He gave her a strange look. ‘Now you’re talking like Elektron. Maybe the d-field is frying your brain.’
He didn’t ask what she saw, but if he had, she’d have told him she saw a road, long and straight and reaching towards a distant horizon, superimpos
ed over the valley like a double exposure. The more she looked, the more solid the road became, and the less real the valley.
Somehow, Dutch knew in the centre of her soul that the road had an objective existence, and that somewhere beyond that long stretch of virgin tarmac a whole new world lay waiting for her, the same way it had been waiting for the scientists who disappeared—and the same way it would have been waiting for Elektron, if he’d managed to get this far.
If Elektron knew about this, then surely others would before long. What would happen once word got out about the Rift’s true nature? Maybe it had always been waiting for people like her, the misfits and freaks who came to Teijouan for the Devil’s Run because there were so few places left in the world where they could fit in. Most of them had been reduced to picked-clean piles of bones along Teijouan’s deserted highways, but more would come—many more.
She noticed a set of stone steps cut into the hillside below the road, leading down to the hospital complex. She moved towards them.
Nat grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
She laughed. ‘Are you serious? Is a bunch of weird fireworks really all you see?’
‘It’s the d-field,’ he said. ‘It’s making you see things that aren’t there. You still need to get me back to the finishing line.’
‘I wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘Like hell you weren’t. I’ve seen you drive enough to know I’ve got a far better chance of making it back home with you behind the wheel.’
He was only partly wrong, she realised: she had been ready to go down there and find out where the road she’d seen in her vision led to. But there were still things she had to do first.
She turned to face him. ‘So are we really just going to sit around and wait long enough for the others to drive over the finishing line before we cross it?’
‘Yes.’
She laughed. ‘Like fuck we are.’
His hands formed into fists. ‘Dutch, I’m warning you. Do what I tell you, or I’ll…’
‘You’ll what?’ She locked her gaze with his. ‘Kill me?’