Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY:

They Know Me

“Goddammit,” Plowman burst out, “you didn’t use the corncob pipe and the metronome! You move and I’ll blow your head off,” he added to one of the Sensitive Assignment Specialists.

“For God’s sake,” said Yoneda without taking her eyes off Finehouse. With her free hand she was fumbling in one of the pockets of her khaki jacket.

“I think you can release us now,” called Finehouse. “I’m prepared to describe these three days in the best possible light in my report, if you’ll all drop your weapons, cut us free, and get in the van. Several people here need medical attention. I see that you’re bleeding, Mr. Vickery.”

Castine inhaled through clenched teeth when she looked at the right leg of Vickery’s jeans. He looked down and saw that the fabric around the right front pocket was blotted with blood.

“Get your shirt and jacket off,” she said, and then helped him tug them off. She crouched to look at the wound. “You’re lucky,” she said. She straightened and looked over at Finehouse. “You’ve got first aid kits?”

“In the van. Get him in there and we’ll bandage him.”

“I got it,” said Galvan, trudging back to her Cadillac. She opened the door and groped under the seat, then closed the door and tossed a white plastic box to Castine.

Castine quickly tore open a package and smeared antibiotic ointment on a gauze pad, then stuck it on the gash in Vickery’s side and wrapped an elastic bandage tightly around his torso to hold it firmly in place and put pressure on the wound.

Vickery put his shirt and jacket back on, carefully. “Better,” he told Castine, “thanks.” He pressed his palm hard against his bloody shirt over the wound, gritting his teeth but hoping to slow the bleeding.

Galvan leaned against her car. “No spacemen after all?” She seemed geuinely crestfallen. “Shit. Arturo can drive my Dodge back.” She peered across the level sand at the car. “What the hell happened to my antenna?”

“We went under a low bridge.” Vickery clenched his free hand in a fist and scowled at the empty sky. Maybe Notchett was all wrong, he thought. Maybe the aliens are just bubbles in the sky and grotesque animations of litter and sea water, and pose no threat. And maybe when they withdrew just now they withdrew for good. Hell, maybe the Earth isn’t flat.

But he remembered the intense freeze and the column of not-snow over the bed of the L.A. River on Sunday night, and the undeniable fluctuations in gravity he and Castine had experienced on the bank; and the glowing thing that had descended into the sea last night, and the moments when the Ouranos had been weightless. And he remembered an image Castine had thought of when she comprehended the aliens’ imminent kick-off from the scanty dimensions of the Earth—a burned-out flashbulb.

He glanced toward the zip-tie-bound captives and saw that Yoneda was pointing Finehouse’s gun in their direction with one hand and pressing her old broken flip-phone to her ear with the other. She appeared to be listening, and after a few seconds began to speak into it, but was clearly interrupted. She listened again, and made a brief reply.

She snapped it shut and the cover fell off. As she stuffed it back into her pocket she met Vickery’s eye and said, “Try everything.”

Vickery nodded and took a cautious deep breath, then walked past the canvas to the Dodge and opened the door. Leaning in carefully, he set the emergency brake and snapped the pendulum off the dashboard metronome. “Boss,” he called over his shoulder, “you got duct tape?”

Finehouse spoke up. “You want to gag me? Are you afraid of Agents Yoneda and Castine hearing what I have to say? You, Mister GRU—I can offer you immunity and a new identity.”

Tacitus gave him a wan smile. “And thus does the warmth of feeling turn ice in the grasp of death!”

Vickery recognized the quotation from Bartholomew Dowling, and exhaled one syllable of a reluctant laugh; Yoneda knew it too, for she added the last two lines of the stanza, “A cup to the dead already, hurrah for the next that dies!”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Galvan. “Yeah, I got duct tape. Spacemen after all?”

“We need it,” Vickery said. “Pierce, chock the Dodge’s front tires and jack up the rear end.”

“I got a floor jack too,” said Galvan, “better’n what’s in the Dodge.” She tossed the keys to Arturo. “Both in the trunk. Andele!”

Vickery kept anxiously watching the road south, but the only vehicles raising dust along its visible length were cars leaving the area. Santiago wedged rocks against the Dodge’s front wheels, and when Arturo came puffing back, Plowman slid Galvan’s floor jack under the Dodge’s back end and pumped the handle enough to lift the rear tires several inches above the sand.

Arturo handed Vickery the roll of duct tape, and Vickery crouched beside the Dodge’s left back wheel, wincing as fabric dragged across the gash in his ribs. He took the old corncob pipe out of his shirt pocket and held it against the car’s quarter-panel; then with his teeth he tore off a foot-long length of the silvery tape and laid it over the pipe, with several inches pressed to the panel on either side. He used another stip of tape to firmly attach the metronome to the sidewall of the tire.

He straightened, slowly, breathing deeply to stave off dizziness, and walked back to the canvas spread out on the old pavement. “Castine, Tacitus,” he called, “once more into the breach.”

Both of them hurried to their previous positions, and Vickery took Castine’s left hand while she clasped Tacitus’s with her right.

“Pierce,” called Vickery, “lean in there and start the car.”

“About time,” came Plowman’s reply, followed by the growl of the Dodge’s engine. “Quick,” Plowman added, speaking more loudly as he shifted it into gear, “your doohickey is likely to fly off the wheel.”

Vickery looked from Tacitus to Castine. “Again,” he said.

He stared across the plain at the towering stone, and his recent thoughts of the aliens and their perspective made it possible for him to see even this stark natural monument as just a feature on a small, limited world adrift in an infinite incomprehensible void.

In moments all he saw was a meaningless collage, shades of blue and tan—but this time he looked only partway past them, in what he thought of as underpainting. The sky became bronze and the sand glowed with the indescribable color of infrared radiation, but he could also see the shadowy form of Castine standing next to him in real time. The roar of the Dodge’s engine was only half muted.

He looked down at the canvas, and it was a double-exposure: black lines on white, and glowing lines on a dimmer background. The canvas had been moved slightly since they’d first laid it out, and he had to shift to the side a few inches to get the two images exactly lined up.

Castine’s hand tightened painfully in his. He kept his double-exposure gaze on the overlapped lines, and after a few seconds the glowing lines and the sepia world flickered away, leaving only the black lines on the white canvas in bright sunlight. The Dodge’s engine was fully loud again.

Castine sagged, and he let go of her hand to slide his arm around her waist and take some of her weight, ignoring the pain in his side. He could feel that she was shaking. With his free hand he cuffed sudden sweat from his eyes and squinted up at the deep blue sky—and it was still empty. The edges of the canvas fluttered in the wind.

“It didn’t work—again,” said Tacitus.

Castine straightened up, stepping away from Vickery, and she pushed her hair back from her face with both hands. Her voice was hoarse as she said, “Oh yes it did.” She turned to Vickery. “You did your . . . underpainting. I could see it.”

Vickery looked up again and again saw nothing, then glanced toward the Cadillac and the ONI vehicles. Finehouse and his men were staring in his direction; looking the other way, he saw Plowman standing next to the open door of the Dodge. Galvan, having apparently concluded that Vickery’s second attempt had failed too, had walked across to the immobilized Dodge and was standing beside Plowman and peering in through the open driver’s side door. Santiago had looked sharply at Castine when she had spoken, and was now staring warily into the sky; a medallion on a string dangled from his right fist.

Vickery followed the boy’s gaze—and in that moment the sky erupted in darting silvery shapes far overhead; their eerie silence emphasized the hiss of the wind and the low roar of the car engine.

Someone in the group by the SUV screamed, and when Vickery spared them a sideways glance he saw that one side of the cluster of ONI personnel had sagged because the bearded man had fallen to his knees. A moment later the boxes on the sand by the van burst open and half a dozen chromed spheres flew up out of them.

Vickery watched them as they whirled away into the sky. The alien shapes far beyond them were darting at incalculable speeds from horizon to horizon, instantly changing course at acute angles, and the chrome balls were yanked back and forth on a smaller scale as if attempting to mimic them.

Castine was gripping his hand again. She whispered, “Almost . . .”

A change in the pitch of the Dodge’s engine caught Vickery’s attention—Santiago had kicked away the stones blocking the car’s front tires and lowered the jack, and now he was in the driver’s seat. Vickery saw him hang the medallion on the rear-view mirror. The sound of the engine changed as it was shifted into gear.

The car began to roll forward, directly toward the old pavement on which the canvas was spread, and Vickery leaped out of its way, pulling Castine with him and knocking Tacitus off his feet.

Plowman sprinted after the car and pulled the driver’s side door open. Running to keep up with the car, he reached in, grabbed Santiago’s arm and hauled the boy right out from behind the wheel, and as Santiago tumbled to the sand, Plowman leaped over him and slid into the driver’s seat. Vickery could now see the head of another man sitting beside Plowman, and he believed he recognized him.

The car rolled right up onto the cross-shape of cracked cement and stopped when the left rear wheel was resting on the canvas; and Plowman must have stood hard on the brake, for when he hit the gas pedal the car only lurched im place while the rear wheels spun furiously. In a moment the canvas was sucked up under the car and disappeared, no doubt wrapped around the axle and the shock absorber, and acrid smoke billowed out around the wheels and flew away on the wind. Galvan was hurrying toward the car, waving angrily.

The roar of the engine must have been too loud for Plowman to hear even a shout, and certainly it was too late to save the canvas, but Vickery started forward, yelling, “What the hell are you—!”

But Castine caught his arm. “Wait,” she said into his ear. “The pendulum and the pipe—and the symbol is always flat, in their view, even when—”

The ground under Vickery’s feet jumped sideways and he fell to the sand on his left hip, with Castine tumbling down on top of him. Shadows were moving across the shifting ground, and when he looked up through a sudden cloud of dust he saw something like twisted scaffolding at least momentarily unsupported in the air; the bearded man’s chrome spheres were rapidly circling it counter-clockwise. Vickery rolled over to cover Castine, but the grotesque structure didn’t fall.

The ground was still shaking, but Vickery rolled back off of Castine and sat up, grimacing and coughing. The tangled shape in the sky, the same color as the desert sand, hovered in the air at a height of perhaps a hundred feet, and only because he had spent hours last night tracing its lines in chalk and paint was he able to recognize Plowman’s negation symbol—viewed from below.

Far above it, the quicksilver fliers were now circling in the same direction as the closer chrome balls—mimicking them? Being drawn down toward the symbol?

A moment later the sky was empty of everything except the hovering negation symbol, and after a few more seconds it dissolved in wind-blown dust. Vickery’s ears popped, as if he were suddenly at a higher altitude, and Castine gripped her head and moaned, rocking on the still-gyrating ground.

The Dodge’s engine was allowed to subside to a normal pitch and it began to move forward off the cement slab—but it roared again as the slab dropped out from under the back end; the car was gunning steeply uphill in the moments before the doors and Plowman’s grimacing profile and the hood and the front wheels slid backward and disappeared into a newly opened sinkhole.

A geyser of dust erupted from the widening hole, and instead of dispersing on the wind it coalesced into a thrashing, angular shape, and with huge hands at the ends of skeletal arms it pulled itself out across the shaking sand. Its elongated head swung blindly back and forth, its shovel fingers dug trenches in the sand, and its mouth opened so wide that its lower jaw fell off and disintegrated; another jaw was extruded in its place, and also stretched so far open that it fell off and broke apart. A windy whistling issued from the open throat.

Vickery got to his feet and pulled Castine up, and they hopped and slid across the rocking ground away from the creature. But there were other patches of the desert floor sagging and breaking up to fall away into new holes, and other deformed creatures made of clumped sand flailing their huge hands in the wind. And the wind was very hot, and parchingly dry.

Through the flying clouds of sand Vickery saw several of the groping, misshapen forms, and to the extent that the things were able to move, they were crawling toward himself and Castine.

“Get,” Castine gasped, “away—they know me.”

Vickery remembered the sea-water apparition on the deck of the Ouranos last night, and the ghosts at the cemetery and along the Fairfax Avenue sidewalk.

He didn’t try to answer in the hot, whistling wind, but took her hand and pulled her along in the direction of the three remaining vehicles.

The alien ghost-figures were moaning now, the bell-like tones echoing one another. One long clotted-sand arm swung heavily toward them through the dust clouds, and Castine hooked a heel behind Vickery’s ankle and punched him in the chest, and they both sprawled on the sand as the limb swept past over them.

Vickery’s shoulder was pressed against the shifting ground, but a moment later it wasn’t pressing against anything, and a cold wind from below him fluttered his hair; Castine was half on top of him, her chest against his face, and the two of them were tipping into a new hole that had broken open at his back.

Vickery convulsed forward and rolled over, and then he and Castine were digging frantically with toes and hands to push themselves back from the edge—and in the few seconds before they had got clear of the hole they were both able to see very far down.

Below them, at such a distance that clouds obscured sections of their view, a vast white ring encircled a worldwide ocean, with distorted but recognizable continents clustered around a white central patch. In the light from some unseen sun, glassy needles could be seen standing up vertically from hundreds or thousand of points, most thickly along three straight lines—skirting the west coast of North America, crossing eastern North America through the north pole to east Asia, and stretching from southern England across Europe and the Caspian Sea to India. The lines were parallel.

Even as he and Castine had glimpsed them, the needles had broken apart and were gone.

When the two of them had scrambled on their hands and knees away from the crumbling edge of the hole, the earth was still rocking violently, and Vickery gripped Castine’s arm to keep her from trying to stand. He couldn’t see any of the grotesque creatures through the blowing dust, but a rough white block as big as a car impacted the sand a dozen yards away, and flying chips of it hit his face; he picked up a fragment and realized that it was ice.

Through his palms flat on the swaying ground, Vickery felt jarring impacts that must have been other ice-boulders crashing to the ground, for shards of ice were flying in all directions in the dust cloud that made it impossible to see more than a few yards.

He took a deep breath of the hot air, leaned toward Castine and yelled, “Can’t sit still.”

She nodded, and they got to their feet and began plodding forward. Vickery stumbled against a line of cracked cement, and he recognized the old pavement on which they had spread the canvas. He caught Castine’s arm to keep her away from the hole Plowman had fallen into—but there was no hole now. The old cement slab lay there intact, and the ground around it showed no signs of having broken. Plowman and the Dodge had fallen through a hole that to all appearances had never been.

The impacts of more giant blocks of ice were jolting the ground, and Vickery and Castine hurried at a hopping lope away from the slab. Through the churning turbulence of wind-blown sand he soon saw the outlines of the SUV and, more dimly, the van, and he took Castine’s arm and led her that way.

Finehouse and his men had at some point cut themselves free of the zip-tie restraints, and two of them were lifting a third man onto a stretcher. When Vickery and Castine blundered up and leaned against the SUV’s hood, Finehouse stepped close to them to be heard.

“Get in now,” he said harshly, “we’re leaving.”

Vickery saw that Yoneda was among them, leading the oddly-bearded man, who was clutching a crumpled chrome sphere. The ground shook again, and Vickery could see the enormous chunk of ice that had just fallen and broken into tumbling, barrel-size pieces. It could have crushed either of these vehicles, and the hot wind carried the jarring crash of two more blocks hitting the earth somewhere nearby.

“Let’s not,” said Castine into Vickery’s ear.

The shape of another car nosed into view beyond the van. A door opened and a figure stood up on the driver’s side, and above the wind Galvan’s voice shouted, “Vick! Come on!”

Vickery remembered the .380 in his pocket and pulled it out. It was sticky with blood from his side, but he held it steady, pointed at the ground.

“We’re going with Galvan,” he told Finehouse.

“Rayette,” called Castine, “come with us. We can show you how.” The wind tossed her hair across her eyes, and she held it back with one hand.

Vickery couldn’t make out Yoneda’s face, but he saw her shake her head. “What we did worked,” she called back. “I’m willing to do the next scene.” After a pause, she added, “You come with us. It’s the real world, rough or smooth.”

“Vick!” came Galvan’s yell. “Last call!”

Vickery pushed away from the SUV’s hood. He heard several booms of what must have been ice boulders striking the ground not far away, and his rib stung, and he was tense and breathless with the urge to run to Galvan’s car before she drove it away.

But Castine had a decision to make.

After no more than two seconds she took his arm and told Yoneda, “The real world and I never did get along.”

And then the two of them were hurrying toward Galvan’s Cadillac. Galvan got back in, and Vickery saw that Tacitus was in the passenger seat and Arturo and Carlos occupied the back seat. He looked around for Santiago and couldn’t see him in the murky turbulence; then he heard the yapping motorcycle engine start up and saw the boy riding away, standing up on the footpegs as the bike bounced over the still-shaking ground.

Castine had been looking that way too, and now turned to nod at Vickery, and at an impatient snarl from Galvan she hurriedly opened the passenger-side door and slid in beside Tacitus, while Vickery opened the back door and pushed Arturo far enough across the seat for him to crowd in. He was pulling the door closed as Galvan clicked the big Cadillac into reverse and backed around to face south, and then she was accelerating toward the road.

The dust cloud abated within a few hundred feet, and on the road ahead Vickery could see the piercing blue and red lights of police cars approaching. He didn’t see Santiago.

“This could be awkward,” said Castine, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “A gunshot wound, residue on our hands . . .”

“I think you two should have gone with Mr. Finehouse,” was Tacitus’s mournful observation.

Galvan barked a sharp phrase in Spanish to Arturo and Carlos, then slowed the big Cadillac to about ten miles per hour. She was squinting through the windshield at the approaching lights.

“I can stop ’em when they get within a few hundred feet,” she said thoughtfully. She reached out and unsnapped a hinged plastic disk on the dashboard, exposing two recessed buttons. “And tracing the the license plate on this thing will dead-end at the secretary of state’s office in Wyoming. But I don’t like dashcams and body cams.”

Castine leaned back against the headrest. “I think I can get you a . . . a partly obscuring entourage,” she said, “if you slow down to walking pace.”

“Whatever you’re talking about,” said Galvan, “do it.”

Castine rolled down her window. The sage-and-stone scented breeze was hot, but not as hot as the churning dust cloud behind them had been.

The police cars were close now, three of them, two in front driving abreast to block the dirt road. “About now, I think,” Galvan said. She pushed one of the exposed dashboard buttons. “The resistor takes fifty seconds to charge.”

“What have you got?” asked Tacitus.

“There’s a big-ass EMP generator in the trunk,” Galvan said, “looks like a giant spool of wire, and a resistor and a couple of capacitors like bazookas hooked up to it.” She nodded—with, Vickery thought, wary confidence. “Electromagnetic pulse. It’ll fry the microprocessors in their cars when we get a bit closer. This car’s old enough so it’s got no computer stuff, but if any of you have cell phones, they’re toast.”

Tacitus frowned and looked from Galvan at his left to Castine on his right, as if estimating his ability to clamber out of the car. “You’ve used it before?”

“Well I paid enough for it,” Gavan said. She glanced at Castine. “Invite!” she said.

“Slow down.” Castine leaned her head out into the breeze, and just because he was sitting directly behind her Vickery heard her whisper, “Will you come?”

Galvan said, “Fire!” and pushed the second button. Vickery heard a muted whine from behind his seat. Arturo caught his eye and shrugged.

The light bars on the roofs of the police cars went out, and the cars slowed to a stop fifty feet in front of the Cadillac; and then, out in the bright sunlight, there were people standing between the police cars and the Cadillac, and standing on the sand among the tumbleweeds on either side of the dirt track.

The figures in the conjured crowd, men, women and children, were dressed in every possible variety—T-shirts and shorts, business suits, worn denim, pajamas, while a few were simply naked—and the arrangement shifted, so that the appearance of a man might be in a business suit at one moment, and in swimming trunks in the next, and nudity was a state that flickered among them. They were all smiling and waving at Galvan’s car—specifically, Vickery saw, at Castine. She shook her head, then sighed and waved back at them.

Beyond the ghosts, out among the sparse weeds, wavering images of trucks and cars appeared and moved across the landscape for a few seconds before disappearing. Vickery glimpsed Santiago riding his bike through them.

The Cadillac was idling forward at less than five miles an hour, and Galvan steered to the right, off the track and out onto the looser sand. The ghosts bowed and moved back to clear her way as tumbleweeds scraped under the front bumper.

Vickery looked back. The ghosts who had been on the other side of the road were crossing it now, spinning and floating like a drift of balloons, their insubstantial feet sometimes not touching the dirt at all though still going through the motions of walking. Half a dozen police officers were out of their cars, but they were shouting at one another; several were pointing at the phantom vehicles and the ectoplasmic figures moving past, while the others gestured toward Galvan’s car. Beside Vickery, Carlos’s face was turned to the left toward the police, but Arturo gaped around at the crowd of ghosts.

Galvan had passed the three police cars and rolled back onto the road. Several of the officers got back into their cars, but two others started running after the Cadillac.

Galvan accelerated to fifteen miles an hour, and the pursuing officers fall back. The ghosts had followed the Cadillac for a few yards, still waving and smiling, then one by one had vanished, whisking up brief whirls of sand.

The police cars remained motionless where they had stopped. Their light bars had not come back on. Santiago, still standing up on the bike’s footpegs, was pacing the Cadillac now, a hundred feet away among the weeds.

Galvan peered at the rear-view mirror. “Hah! Worth every penny.” She glanced at Castine and said, “Thanks. Their report is gonna be a crazy mess, and I think what they mainly got with their body cams is views of each other.”

Vickery shifted around on the seat to look back, and in the sandstorm beyond the police cars he saw a last giant hand lift into the air and then burst into dust.

“Their report is going to get a whole lot crazier,” he muttered.

“How did you do that?” Galvan asked Castine; and when Castine gave her a blank frown, she added, “Call all those ghosts? Ghosts aren’t supposed to be able to even see this car.”

“Ella es la reina de los fantasmas,” muttered Arturo.

“They can see me,” Castine said, watching the passenger-side mirror. “I was in a ghost, I shared its identity,last night, out on the ocean. It wasn’t human, but it was sentient and dead—and I was too, in it. So I guess ghosts are specially aware of me . . . and I find I’m aware of them.” She gave a shaky sigh that was almost a laugh. “Like I’m an honorary ghost myself, now.”

Ella es la reina de los fantasmas, thought Vickery. She is the queen of the ghosts.

“Oh.” Galvan seemed momentarily disconcerted. “Well—yeah, thanks.” For several seconds she drove on in silence. Then she said, “This is far enough.” She was stepping on the brake now, and when the car slowed to a stop she shifted the engine into park. She climbed out, then leaned back in and waved toward the glove compartment. “Bag of jack rocks in there,” she said to Castine. “Haul it out and give me half of ’em.”

Vickery leaned forward to look over Castine’s shoulder, and saw her pull from the glove compartment a big plastic bag full of angular twists of black steel. She tore the bag open and shook half the contents into Galvan’s cupped hands, and Vickery saw that each of the things was four hollow spikes welded together to point in different directions.

“Scatter ’em thick across the road,” Galvan told Castine, who nodded and opened her door to get out. Galvan looked at Vickery and grinned as she held out one of the objects. “Hollow, see? Even stop self-sealing tires.” She straighted and yelled across the hood, “Behind us, imbecil!”

Out by the front bumper, Castine nodded and picked up the few of the things she had already thrown; she hurried to the rear of the car and scattered them back there.

Vickery got out of the car and limped around to the back, nervously keeping well clear of the trunk and its EMP generator, and he helped kick sand over the spidery iron stars that Galvan and Castine had by now scattered liberally across the road, noting that the things always sat with one spike pointed upward.

In the Secret Service, he recalled, they had called them caltrops, and government limousines had been equipped with “run flat” tires that had support rings inside, so they could still function even if they ran over the things. He hoped Finehouse’s vehicles didn’t have that kind of tires.

He heard the 125-cc engine shift gears, and looked up. Santiago was riding this way now across the weeds and the humped sand, and when the boy got to the road he stopped his bike beside the Cadillac’s back bumper, well away from the spikes.

His lean brown face behind sunglasses was expressionless, and when he spoke his voice was tight. “Mr. Plowman is dead, you saw.” He looked from Castine to Vickery. “Did it work? Is the big winter stopped?”

“Yes,” said Castine. She looked warily back toward the police cars, then went on quickly, “I felt it. The things in the sky saw the negation symbol—comprehended it, internalized it!—when Sebastian projected it in the past and the present, overlapped. The views were too widely separated in time for the things to miss, to step over.”

Vickery too looked back along the road, but the police cars were still stationary and the officers were clustered around them. “We should get going.”

But Castine went on, as if she had to get it out. “I felt them die today—I felt them fall right through the state of being ghosts this time, into—into fossilization.” She shook her head and exhaled. “As inert as that corncob pipe.”

“Mr. Plowman did it,” Santiago insisted, “with that pipe and the piece from the clicker, and my medallion. Putting those right on top of the lines, spinning.”

Castine nodded. “And he’s the one who found the lines in the first place. He and his friend carried them right down into the aliens’ view of our world.”

“His friend?” asked Vickery.

“You didn’t see the ghost in the car beside him? It was Frankie Notchett.”

“He carried my Dodge away too,” said Galvan, walking up. “Back in the car now, quick.”

Vickery turned to speak to Santiago, but the boy had tapped the bike into gear and twisted the throttle, and all Vickery saw was his receding back and the bike’s bobbing tail-light.

Galvan was already in the car, gunning the engine, and Vickery and Castine hurriedly climbed in. Galvan stepped on the gas, and the car surged forward, faster now.

In the front seat, Castine had bowed her head, and Vickery couldn’t see her. He raised his arm to reach over the seat and touch her shoulder, but his arm, his whole body, was trembling with delayed reaction. He didn’t look at Arturo or Carlos, but just clasped his hands tightly in his lap.

After another couple of miles Galvan was driving on a paved road, and soon they were passing the lonely white dome of the building known as the Integratron, which according to Plowman had been built without nails or screws by the same man who had started the UFO conventions around Giant Rock. The building was supposedly a focus for time-travel and anti-gravity, but Plowman had said he’d spent four days in the dome in the ‘70s, and it had been as bogus as the man’s story of touring an alien space ship.

Vickery looked away from it to peer past Galvan’s shoulder at the road ahead. Your negation symbol worked, though, old friend, he thought; that pattern of lines you completed by laboriously tracing it on the floor of the parking garage at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. And in spite of your age and reluctance, in the end you didn’t just hand the job over to us—you braved the cultists at the Zeta Reticuli Chess Club to check their celestial seismograph, and you piloted Notchett’s boat out to face the perils of a dying alien, and finally you took the negating symbol right into their—and your!—flat Earth. Rest in peace, in it. And I hope you’re with Becky again, somehow, for the first time since her tenth birthday party.

“I think we’re clear,” said Galvan, glancing at the rear-view mirror and then to the sides at the desert and the occasional distant house that they passed. “Those cops’ radios are cooked, and any that see us now got no reason to stop us.”

Upholstery creaked as her passengers relaxed, and Castine inhaled and lifted her head. Galvan caught Vickery’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “I saw those things with the big hands,” she said, “and the ice blocks falling, and the holes in the ground that closed up again.” Her tone was determinedly matter-of-fact, but Vickery caught a quaver of concealed awe in her voice. “Did you save the world again?”

Vickery sat back and emptied his lungs in a long sigh. He took a deep breath and said, “We all did. Yes.”

Galvan nodded and lifted one hand from the steering wheel to wipe her face. “I’ll—” she began; for a couple of moments she didn’t speak, then went on, “I’ll write off the Dodge, and the gas. Yeah. That guy drove it into a hole, and so the bamboo antenna and the fingerbones would have been lost anyway. But none of this gets you out of paying that hundred a month.”

“Woudn’t have presumed,” Vickery said.

“What a mess, eh?” Galvan stretched, straightening her short arms against the steering wheel. “I’m gonna find a storage place in Landers and hide this car till I can set up a new out-of-state limited liability company to register it—and now find a pay phone and call the yard for a ride back. We can drop you all somewhere.”

“I might stay in Landers,” said Tacitus. “It seems an appropriately remote place in which to . . . begin life anew.”

“I’ll hold that painting for you,” Vickery told him, “in case we ever meet again.”

Tacitus’ss mouth opened in a soundless, mirthless laugh.

Vickery’s hand was steady enough now to tap Castine on the shoulder. “How seriously are they likely to come after us?”

Castine shifted in her seat to look back at him. “Oh—I don’t know. We tied up some government agents and held guns on them . . . they might make an issue of that. Heh. Did we do anything else? Major?” When Vickery rocked one hand in the air, she went on, “It might be a good idea for us to retrieve your truck and then hide out at your studio for a while.” She looked out the window at the endless desert. “And I’ve got to get in touch with Plowman’s daughter.”

Galvan turned south on Old Woman Springs Road, and Vickery recalled that it led south to the Twentynine Palms Highway, which after fifteen long miles would at last deliver them to the westbound onramp of Old Man 10.


Back | Next
Framed