Napier's Bones (6 page)

“Right. All
three of us. Let’s find us a Denny’s.”

Both had a large
breakfast, although where Dom consumed several cups of black coffee, Jenna got
by with only orange juice. “I don’t belong to the church anymore,” she said,
when he asked her about this, “but sometimes I think parts of it still belong
to me.”

When they were
finished, and after two trips to the toilet for each of them, Dom settled the
bill and they walked out into the day, thin high clouds beginning to slide in
and blank out the blue sky and sun. “Where to now?” asked Jenna, as they
climbed back into the car.

Dom checked his
watch. “A mailbox about five blocks away from here, and then the bank. Here’s
hoping that my trail there had better cover than the one to the library.”

At the mailbox
he told Jenna to wait in the car and ran across the street, waving his fingers
in the air and watching where the numbers fell. It had been a long time since
he’d been here, and he was hoping to hell that things were still in place.
Happily, the numbers eventually and casually drifted in a small cloud over to
the box, which shook violently for several seconds after they covered it. Dom
opened the little door, pulled out an envelope and ran back to the car, the
numbers behind him falling to the sidewalk and slipping in between the cracks
or drifting down the gutter towards the sewer.

“What’s that?”

Dom ripped open
the envelope and shook out a small key, which he pocketed, a passport, and a
Montana driver’s license with his picture and the name
Eric Wood
on
it. “ID.”

Jenna made a
face. “Now how did you do
that
?”

He tucked the
license into his wallet and the passport into a pocket and then shrugged. “Not
hard, really. I have stuff like this seeded all around the continent, in places
I’ve already been or else in places where I have a friend willing to do the
mail drop.” He held out the envelope and let Jenna take it. “See how it only
has a one-cent stamp? I pilfered a few hundred of those from the home of a
mildly numerate fat guy.”

“A what?”

“A fat guy.
Shoulda seen him, he was fucking huge. When he died he weighed 733 pounds, and
they had to cut a hole in the wall of his apartment building to get his body
out and into a truck, since a hearse wasn’t big enough. Had to use a crane to
get him down, too.”

Jenna shook her
head. “What does him being so large have to do with anything?”

“I find myself
rather curious as well,” said Billy.

Dom grinned. He
realized he rather liked telling tales like this, after so many years of
keeping to himself. “His name was Randall Morgenstern, and he lived in upstate
New York. The best I could figure out, when whatever part of his mind that does
the job realized his numeracy, he’d been gaining so much weight already that it
just kept pushing him up until it found a nice prime number where his weight
could hover. He was actually pretty happy with that, the last couple of years
he was alive; he couldn’t lose any weight, but he could eat as much as he
wanted and not gain any, also.”

“The stamps,
Dom,” pleaded Jenna. “Please tell us what this has to do with the stamps.”

“Oh. Yeah.
Randall, I met him when I was in New York for the 9/11 attacks, and I decided
even I couldn’t stomach picking through the detritus like a ghoul, looking for
all the mojo that rained down out of the sky that day.” Jenna looked stricken
at this, and Dom reached out and put a hand on her arm. “You asked to get into
this. I could tell you stories that would
really
raise the hairs on
the back of your neck, but I won’t. At least not right now. In the meantime, I
should finish, right?”

She nodded.

“Anyhow, it took
two days, but once I managed to get out of the city I drove north, and while on
the road I spotted numbers on the horizon. Not really strong, but weird enough
to get my attention. I followed them and they led me to Randall’s place. And
then they faded away. I think that the events around then had flipped a switch
somewhere in Randall’s brain; he was panicked enough about the terrorist
attacks and about his own life right then that he subconsciously cast out
numbers as a call for help, and I happened to be the numerate in the right
place and the right time, probably the only one not paying attention to the
attacks.”

Dom started up
the car and pulled out. “Need to get to the bank,” he explained, before
continuing. “Randall lived on the second floor, and the doors just popped open
for me as I approached, both the front entrance and then the one to his
apartment. I didn’t have to do anything with my own numbers.” He signalled left
and, instead of racing to beat a light just turning yellow, waved his fingers
and mumbled a string of numbers instead. The light reverted to green. “When I
walked into his apartment, Randall had no idea who the hell I was, and I didn’t
know squat about him, either. But neither one of us was terribly surprised,
either.”

“He was
expecting you,” said Jenna.

“He was
expecting someone,” replied Billy. “Dom just happened to be that someone.”

Dom nodded his
head. “Right. He was lying there in bed, enormous, like a fucking hippo,
covered with a sheet. His TV was blaring away, a cable news channel, talking
heads alternating with pictures of the towers collapsing over and over and over
again, and beside him, on a small wooden chair, was a full and rather smelly
bedpan.”

“Ew.” Jenna
wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting.”

“Tell me about
it.” Dom pulled out into oncoming traffic to pass an especially slow driver,
dipped back into his lane just in time to avoid a dump truck that was about to
swerve out of the way. “It’s funny,” continued Dom, “but I didn’t even pay
attention to those things. Didn’t even know they were there until after I’d
left. Then the pictures of everything in the apartment dropped into my brain
like a slide popping into a projector and shining on the screen.”

“Why not?” asked
Billy.

“Because when I
walked into that apartment I almost collapsed. My knees just about buckled, I
could barely lift my feet to walk or my hands to lift my suddenly weighty hair
out of my eyes. Hell, I could barely catch a breath. Turns out old Randall’s
weight thing was being passed on to everything in his localized area. He
couldn’t control his own numbers, but they sure could control him, and his own
little world. Any visitors to his apartment felt the sudden weight gain, but
also all of his crap. It was all fucking heavy, from the bedpan that could
probably only be lifted with a forklift—”

“To the stamps
sitting in a drawer somewhere,” finished Jenna.

“Well, not in a
drawer. Sitting on the kitchen table. But yeah, that’s right. Heavy as shit.
And probably worse at that time because he was so freaked out.”

“So you stole them?
Is this how you get all of your mojo?”

Dom rolled his
eyes. “Let me finish the story, Jenna. Think of this as one of your lessons.”

She nodded, lips
pursed.

“So Randall
looked me in the eye, the end of the fucking world playing and replaying on his
TV, and he asks me, ‘Am I going to be all right?’ His voice was high and whiny
like a scared little kid. I pause for a second, then realize what it is he’s
asking, and I nod and say, ‘Yeah, you’re going to be fine.’ He stares at me for
a couple of seconds more, looks back to the news, and then this huge blast of
sequences comes storming out of his chest and hits me full on, an immense
gigantic pressure wave that combines with the extra weight in the room to
finally knock me to the floor, like I imagine it feels being caught in the
blowback of some huge explosion. I’m lying there gasping for breath, side of my
face pressed into the floor, and it’s all I can do to pull myself back up onto
my knees.”

“What happened?”
asked Jenna.

“Heart attack.
He got his reassurance and then he died. All of the numbers he’d accumulated in
his short and bizarre life were rushing out of his body, out of pores and
orifices and combining over the bed in this huge vortex, some of them bleeding
off and adding even more weight to everything in the apartment—me included—and
the rest pounding through the ceiling above and snaking off into the
atmosphere, looking to fall I don’t know where. I staggered over to the door,
still on my knees, got the door open and rolled out into the hallway, where my
weight returned to normal. Once out there that picture of the apartment wormed
its way into my memory, and I remembered seeing the stamps sitting on the
table; since they had numbers right on them they were the only things in there
I could immediately picture how to use, so I decided to grab them. I worked up
some numbers that kept the weight from affecting me too much and crawled back
in, grabbed them, then left the building and called an ambulance from a phone
down the street. Then I went and got a burger and sat in the car and watched
the cops and firefighters and paramedics do their little dance, trying to get
big Randall’s body out of his apartment. It was probably tougher since I’m
betting the events from the other day had taken a lot of them down to New York
City. Later on I put the stamps on envelopes, sealing in some numbers I’d woven
into the thread of the envelopes so that not only would they sink to the bottom
of the mailboxes and stay there, they’d be invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking
for them. Instant emergency ID in eighty-three cities across the continent.”

“Then why even
bother with stamps?” asked Jenna. “If you can make stuff go invisible with a
few simple numbers, then why not just do it all without having to rob a dead
fat guy of eighty-three cents worth of stamps? Even more curious, why not just
create these driver’s licenses and passports as you need them?”

“I’ll answer
that if I might,” replied Billy. Dom nodded his head. “There is an
interconnectedness to the numerate world, Jenna, and while Dom likely
could
do what you asked, it would shine like a spotlight at a Hollywood movie
premiere; any envelopes he left behind with nothing but his own numbers would
be a beacon that would attract every other numerate from hundreds of miles
around. Then they get their hands on stuff that he’s created and it’s suddenly
powerful mojo for them, sometimes mojo that can be used against him. Also,
using your own numbers takes a lot out of you. Anytime you can find numbers
that have been created by someone else, on purpose or, more often, via
happenstance, you use them. The personal cost is almost nil, and if the
benefits aren’t immediate, I think we’ve seen today that there might come a
time when they are felt.”

“It’s sorta the
same reason I don’t just go to Vegas and try to make an easy buck,” continued
Dom. “The place is crawling with numbers, but it’s also crawling with numerates
who don’t know any better, and the casinos wised up to that long ago and hired
pretty strong numerates of their own. If I went there wanting to use any of
those numbers, it would be way more effort than it was worth, with every
two-bit hick who thinks he has a lick of number sense crawling around looking
for the angles and guys I don’t want to tangle with watching for the slightest
sign that I’m using the numbers to my advantage. And, I’ve heard rumours they
don’t just escort numerates to the edge of town, but that sometimes numerates
are known to disappear.”

“They
kill
them?”

Dom tilted his
head as he rounded another corner. “Dunno. With that much money involved, maybe
so. All I know is, I’m not interested in finding out.”

Traffic was
still light, and they arrived fifteen minutes before the bank was to open. Dom
drove around the block twice, looking for signs and numbers, anything to tell
him that they were being watched or hunted. Nothing showed itself, though, so
he parked on the street and they got out. He gave the car’s license plates
another swipe with his hand, smearing the numbers enough to keep any long-distance
snooping from getting a fix on them, in case the bank was now being watched.
“Why didn’t you do that at the Denny’s?” asked Jenna.

“Because I
wouldn’t have stored any mojo there,” said Dom. “If this gal’s still looking
for us, and it seems pretty obvious she is, it’s gotta be taking a lot out of
her to do it from such a distance and to so many places. But she’ll naturally
think that banks are smart places to be looking, so even if my numbers work
better here than they did at the library, I’m still not going to take chances
right now.”

They sat on the
hood of the car and watched the workers in the bank go about their business
behind locked doors, counting down the minutes until opening time. “So why do
you think the numbers will work better here than they did at the library?”

“I can answer
that one,” said Billy. “Or rather, I think I can make a good guess.”

“Go ahead,”
replied Dom.

“The human
factor,” said the shadow. “Here at the bank, all anyone knows is that Dom has a
box, likely not under his own name. At the university, I gathered that the
librarian he was dealing with not only knew who he was, but had dealt with him
in the past. Correct?”

Dom nodded his
head. “Sy’s an old friend of mine. Absolutely no numerate abilities at all,
which is the best type of friend. You know they’re never gonna try to step on
you on the way to get something, and you’re never second-guessing yourself,
wondering when you’re gonna try the same on them. He’d sent me a message a
couple of months ago telling me that the library had acquired some new
manuscripts in special collections, and I was hopeful they would have something
for me to use. No good if I’m expected, though. They think I’m a book thief.”

“Another good
lesson to learn,” said Billy. “A librarian, especially one who works in special
collections in a reputable university, can be an excellent friend to have.”