Apocalypse to Go

  “Jeez! And I thought I had problems!” He started to laugh, coughed, coughed harder, and grabbed a napkin from the table. He hid what he spat up, but I could guess that it was blood.

  The growths, I assumed, were also putting down roots into his throat. I slid a glass of water across the table. José grabbed it and drank.

  “That’s better,” he said. “So our little Sophie’s a werewolf? I guess it goes to show. You think you know someone, and here you don’t know shit.” He grinned. “Don’t look so sad, Nola. I’m glad I’m checking out of here. Why do you think we call old people lifers? This place is worse than any jail I ever heard of.”

  “I never put that together, about the lifers, I mean. But, crud! Your eye—it must hurt.”

  “When it gets too bad, we’ll have a little good-bye party, and then Orlando will solve the problem for me.” José pointed a finger at his head. “Bam.” He picked up the glass again and had another drink of water.

  I managed—barely—to keep from crying. This guy had saved my brother’s life once and was going to help us do so again, but I could do nothing for him. When I’d first signed up with the Agency, they’d warned me that I was going to face more misery than I could fix. They’d been right.

  “Anyway,” José went on, “I owe you an apology. We did a lousy job of protecting Brother Mike and Brother Sean, didn’t we? Shit, I shoulda known Storm Blue was up to something before they moved in. We shoulda gone with the guys when they walked down to the gate. Figured it was safe. Done it a hundred times. Ya know how that goes.”

  “I do, yeah, and I don’t blame you for anything.”

  “Thanks.” He meant it sincerely. “So, what do you need the BGs to do?”

  “Spread rumors,” I said. “Let the grapevine tell Chief Hafner that someone wants his job. Mention that Storm Blue’s getting the money together to take the job. By the way, how much can the Axeman charge for a trip out of here?”

  “Two thousand a head.”

  I thought back to the currency section of the TWIXT file. You could buy a three-piece tailored suit downtown for fifty. Steak dinner, two or three bucks, depending on the ambience.

  “That’s plenty of bribe money, all right,” I said.

  “And guns, yeah.” José paused and turned slightly in his seat, as if he were getting comfortable, but I noticed that he turned his good eye toward a nearby table. He leaned forward and murmured. “You know, there might be a couple people in here now who are straining their eardrums. Don’t look. You’ll spook them.”

  “Okay.” I spoke a little louder. “Did you know that there’s a renegade Maculate in Storm Blue?”

  “A Spottie?” José grinned and mimicked my increased volume. “Now that’s interesting! I can sell that piece of news.”

  “Can we all guess what happened to Nuala? I wonder what the Chief would think if he knew.”

  José laughed, a burst of black humor that ended in a coughing fit. I risked a quick glance around and saw a woman in a tight black dress watching us. She looked away fast when she caught me looking at her. José wiped his lips on the napkin in a bloody smear and looked contrite.

  “You and Mike gotta be related to her somehow,” he said. “Shit! Sorry if I was heartless.”

  I realized that while he knew about world levels, he’d missed the concept of doppelgänger. “It’s okay,” I said. “A distant cousin, that’s all. But that’s why I’m wearing all this makeup. I don’t want anyone drawing the wrong conclusion.”

  The others returned, balancing laden trays. Although José and I both picked at the food, the other men chowed down with a vengeance, even my father. Prison food, I supposed, had been meager and lousy. The barman appeared and brought two pitchers of beer and glasses all round to the table. I noticed that Ari and I were the only ones not drinking. Dad caught my glance and grinned.

  “I never did get to drink that six-pack,” he said. “The one I went to the market for that night.”

  The night when he’d been arrested, he meant.

  “I don’t know what happened to that,” I said. “But Uncle Jim bought your truck. It’s up on blocks in storage somewhere. He was sure you’d want it when you got back.”

  For a moment I thought he’d weep. Instead, he saluted me with the glass and had a long swallow of beer.

  With the food we received a flood of useful information about Storm Blue and the way that the police chief worked in general. The BGs were a small gang, hustling for whatever they could scrounge, but their very position near the bottom of the hierarchy meant they heard everything worth knowing. Since they presented no threat to the top gangs, no one bothered to watch their mouths around them.

  “How many men are there in Storm Blue?” Ari said at one point. “You mentioned the twenty captains.”

  “Each captain, maybe ten guys under him?” José waved his fork vaguely in the air. “But not all of those are gonna be in town at once. Some are mules, and some of them are gonna be out in the valley picking up shipments to bring in. Some are runners and diggers.”

  “And girls,” Little Sam put in. “Some of those guys are girls. Working the streets, ya know.”

  “Right. Not all of the guys have guns, either.” José paused for a bite of his pot roast. “Maybe fifty gunners.” He glanced at Orlando. “Sound about right?”

  Orlando nodded his agreement and continued sopping up gravy with a chunk of bread. My stomach clenched. Facing fifty armed men was better than facing two hundred, but still the odds were hopeless.

  “Diggers?” Ari said.

  “Guys who go through the old dumps, looking for good stuff. Car parts, pieces of radios.” José shrugged. “They don’t find much anymore. Most of the real loot got found a long time ago, but I guess down in the ruins of L.A. you can still pull up some good shit if you don’t mind the rads.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “Now look, when the shit hits the fan, we wanna be there,” José went on. “I can give you five guys plus me.”

  “Not you,” Ari said. “With vision in only one eye you won’t be able to see clearly enough. You’ll be nothing but a target.”

  “Yeah,” Little Sam put in. “You tell him!”

  “Maybe I’d rather go fast than just sit around and wait.” José shrugged one shoulder.

  “I can understand that.” Ari’s voice hinted at sympathy. “But if we can do this at all, we’re going to need to work with the cops. You and the BGs don’t need to be around for them to notice.”

  “That’s true,” Orlando said. “But Mike’s a BG, and that means some of us gotta be there.”

  “I can understand the feeling, but if the cops move in on BG territory, it won’t do Mike or you any good.”

  “He’s got a point,” José said. “I worked too damn hard building us up to let us get torn down in one raid. Listen to the Jamaican! He’s thinking.”

  “Okay, okay,” Orlando said. “You’re still the boss.”

  “Damn right.” José picked up one of the pitchers and refilled his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

  Dad, Ari, and I returned to Spare14’s office in a somber mood. When we walked in, Spare14 was talking on his landline while Jan sat on the couch with a stack of newssheets in his lap. Spare14 hung up and turned around his chair.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Fifty gunners,” Ari said. “At least. Without help from the police, there’s little we can do.”

  “Just so.” Spare14 sounded exhausted. “Unless we can get a Tac Squad from headquarters. I doubt if the liaison captain will agree to a large-scale operation. It would require too much forbidden technology, and even then, the risk to TWIXT agents would be considerable.”

  “Very high, yes,” Jan put in. “Not that we wouldn’t run that risk to rescue kidnap victims—if we had a decent chance at success.”

  “It’s too easy for a rescue to go wrong.” Ari glanced my way in explanation. “Killing the hostages as well as the rescuers.”

  “Yea
h, I understand that.”

  “What we need to do, then,” Spare14 said, “is to assemble more information before we make our case to Hafner. The question is whether he’ll work closely with a team from the CBI. Us, I mean.”

  “Hafner’s own men would be running a considerable risk, too,” Jan said, “if they join us in the Playland part of the operation.”

  “What about Playland?” I held up the book I’d found. “This’ll show us what it was like back in the 1920s. What’s it like now? Back in San Francisco it’s gone.”

  Back on my home world, a real estate developer, a man nicknamed “the Golden Rat” had razed Playland-on-the-Beach and built condominiums in its place. Here on Interchange, or so Spare14 told us, the amusement park had shut down one ride or concession at a time until nothing remained but crumbling ruins behind a rusting fence.

  “No one would ever have suspected that the Axeman has a hideout there,” Jan put in. “A dismal sort of place, and I gather it’s swarming with vermin.”

  “Maybe including some of the two-legged kind,” I said.

  “Nola,” Ari said, “must you keep repeating lines from bad films?”

  I ignored the question with as regal an air as I could manage.

  “We don’t have the men and body armor to shoot our way through a rubble field,” Ari continued.

  “Exactly,” Jan said. “If we can find the precise location of the hostages, the odds of freeing them improve, and our odds of surviving the operation do as well.”

  “And that,” I said, “is where Javert and I come in. If we can find the entrance—”

  “Entrances.” Dad laid a hand on my arm to interrupt me. “They won’t be keeping important hostages in some place that lacks a back door. We’d best make sure we’ve stopped up all the holes before we set the dogs on the rats.”

  The others nodded sagely. I realized that someone had come into the room behind me and turned around to see a man with antlers growing out of his head. Distantly, I heard hounds baying.

  “Actaeon!” I said. “Run for your life!”

  He gave me a sad smile and disappeared.

  I was sitting on the floor, propped up in my father’s arms. He was kneeling behind me, and Ari was kneeling in front of me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I was just getting a reminder that I’d forgotten Diana. The goddess, you know, that I saw in the drugstore.”

  I heard Jan giggle, and Spare14 sigh. Ari got up, then leaned down and offered me a hand. Between them, he and Dad got me on my feet and over to the couch. I sat down next to Jan.

  “What’s all this?” Dad said. “I saw the name Diana on your list, but I didn’t realize it came from a vision.”

  Even though he hadn’t seen me in thirteen years, he still understood me.

  “I saw an image of the goddess, yeah. She told me to seek her, but she didn’t say why.” I brought up the memory image and extruded it, pale white like marble, just like St. Maurice.

  Dad considered it for a long minute or two. “I wonder if she meant the Diana statue up in old Sutro’s gardens. On the big hill up above Playland, that was, if I’m remembering it rightly.”

  “An interesting location, that,” Ari said.

  Dad smiled. I banished the MI.

  “But we’d best not go up there just yet,” Spare14 said. “I don’t want to tip our hand. Perhaps Javert and O’Grady can find some information on that as well. Er, Nola, I mean. We have two O’Gradys now.”

  “Two O’Gradys and a squid,” I said, “and that’s almost as good as an army.”

  CHAPTER 16

  IN SANFRAN THE SUNSET DISTRICT turned out to be a long stretch of sand dunes, sea grass, and scrub brush except for the areas bordering streetcar lines. The city had already finished the Twin Peaks tunnel before the worlds split and the disaster occurred on the newly-born Terra Three, but no one had had the capital to build up the district. With the low population, there hadn’t been much need for tract housing, anyway. The city had put in four streetcar lines, among them an L Taraval line, the one that gave my Uncle Jim so much trouble back home. Here the L ran out to a small version of the San Francisco Zoo. Davis and Javert had chosen their hiding place near its terminus, right by the beach, a safe distance away from the ruins of Playland.

  I spent the afternoon studying the Playland book, because we waited till after dark to go join them. When the time came, Spare14 split our group up, because, or so he told us, a group of five people traveling together at night would have aroused suspicions. He and Jan took the streetcar. Ari and I went with my father. Dad had spent some time studying the paper map of the city. He’d refreshed his memory about certain “overlaps and access points,” as he called them. We gave Spare14 and Hendriks a head start, then started walking northwest along Broadway.

  “The theory of fast walking’s quite complicated,” Dad told us. “I never had a chance to study it properly, you see, thanks to being so involved with the IRA. But I do know the rudiments of the practice.”

  I abruptly realized that we were no longer on Broadway. Somehow or other we’d crossed half the city and were heading straight west up Laurel Hill. A few small cottages dotted the slopes rather than massed apartment buildings. No 1950s glass-and-steel office complex loomed at the top. Instead, a low stone wall and trees crowned the hill.

  “We’ll just nip into the cemetery here,” Dad said. “See the marble arch?”

  The arch in question glimmered in the light of a streetlamp. Two weeping angels lurked in the shadows to either side, so realistically sculpted that it took me a moment to realize that they were marble, not IOIs. Dad led us through to the sound of lions roaring. We were walking down Sloat past the Zoo, miles away from Laurel Hill. Ari muttered something in Hebrew.

  “Ah, the Lord’s original tongue!” Dad said.

  “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” I said. “And showing off.”

  Dad laughed and slipped an arm around my shoulders to hug me. “Right you are. It’s been a long time since I could walk so freely.”

  “How did they keep in you in prison? Did you have to wear that lousy collar the whole time?”

  “No, or I would’ve been stark mad by now.” The laughter died in his voice. “They built the H Block right beside a power station, a huge thing, and the cables ran right overhead. Pylons all round to carry the power lines, too.” He shook his head. “Invisible chains, is what they were.”

  “Supra-magnetic fields.”

  “Just that. They had half a regiment guarding the damned station, too, in case the IRA tried to bring it down.” He shrugged. “Ah, well, that’s behind me now. But I’ll tell you something, my darling, and this is why I’m showing off, as you put it. When you younger kids were all small, I looked forward to the days when you’d start developing your talents. I thought I’d be there to help you and take you through the process, like growing a splendid garden. Never happened, did it? But at least I can show you what I know.”

  I choked back sudden tears. “Yeah, but Mike still needs you. Real bad.”

  Dad hugged me again and let me go. “Then it’s a good thing I’m here.”

  During this conversation, Ari had been walking just a step or two behind us, listening, I supposed, but also keeping watch. I felt his SPP as poised and ready for danger.

  “Let’s stop for a moment,” Ari said. “The street’s ending.”

  About half a block away Sloat petered out into a streetlight and a scruffy lawn, a strip maybe ten yards wide. Behind that a slope rose, thick with trees and underbrush, and dark. I glanced up and saw a quarter moon riding the edge of incoming fog, a light soon to be dimmed.

  “Can you get a fix on Javert?” Ari said. “I’m not keen on blundering around in the dark. What if someone else is waiting for us?”

  I ran two careful scans. “I don’t feel any danger in there,” I said, “except for a couple of skunks. We don’t want to upset them, though.”

  When I ran an SM:P for Javert, I felt t
he touch of his mind and a waft of Qi from above. Over us, hovering maybe twenty feet off the ground, Javert’s Fog Face projection formed.

  HERE! FOLLOW!

  I pointed it out to the two guys, but neither of them could see it. I’d expected that of Ari, but I was surprised about Dad. I was also, I admitted to myself, pleased to find that I had a talent he lacked.

  Okay, I said to Javert. Lead on!

  He took us to a narrow dirt path that skirted the skunks’ territory at a safe distance. After a couple of hundred yards I saw something white glimmering ahead, the milk wagon. Davis slid out of the cab and hailed us. In my world the truck would have stood right beside the Great Highway in a very public parking lot where hang gliders and surfers came to practice their sports. On Interchange, Davis had parked on a dirt road in the middle of unclaimed land, near-wilderness.

  “Where’s Spare14?” Davis said.

  “Coming with Hendriks on the streetcar,” Ari said. “He wanted to stop at the liaison captain’s station for some reason.”

  I GO. BRING. Javert in his Fog Face suit drifted off again, heading back toward the Zoo.

  When Jan and Spare14 arrived, some twenty minutes later, they brought the reason for their stopover with them: sandwiches and a supply of currency for Davis, and a large raw salmon for Javert, tidily wrapped in white butcher paper.

  “She ordered one from the local fishmonger for me,” Jan said. “Very kind of her.”

  Davis stowed the huge salmon in the cab. “The inspector won’t want to eat that in the tank, I reckon. It’s kind of a messy job, the way he eats. But he’ll want a good swim later, anyway.”

  YES! Javert confirmed it. LATER.

  First, however, we needed to do our psychic reconnaissance. Like mine, Javert’s talents worked best on an empty stomach.

  We all went down to the beach. Davis drove with Spare14 in the passenger seat and Jan on the running board, clinging to the cab with one arm through the open window. Dad took Ari and me with him on a fast walk. On the beach pale surf gleamed in the moonlight. I could see the ocean moving and swelling, a dark mass that stretched out to a silver horizon.