Strange Highways (48 page)

I had three minutes to study my precious kisser in the mirror until the head-banger left. Then Bruno came out again, grimacing worse than ever.

“Listen,” I said, “suppose Stone was within twenty feet of me, back there in the offices while I was playing around with those paper decoys or whatever the hell they were. He could have tripped right out of this probability by now.”

“No,” Bruno said. “You’re a receiver, not a transmitter. He’ll have to locate someone with the reverse talent of yours before he can get out of this time line.”

“Are there others?”

“I detect two within the city,” Bruno said.

“We could just stake those two out and wait for him!”

“Hardly,” the bruin said. “He would just as soon settle down here and take over a world line for himself. That would give him a better base with which to strike out against the other continuums.”

“He has that kind of power?”

“I said he was dangerous.”

“Let’s move it,” I said, turning to the steel door from the adjacent warehouse basement.

“You’re marvelous,” Bruno said.

I turned and looked at him, trying to find sarcasm in that crazy face of his. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Marvelous? I’m marvelous? Listen, one guy doesn’t tell another guy he’s marvelous—especially not when the two of them are in a bathroom.”

“Why?”

“Never mind why,” I said, starting to burn.

“Anyway, I’m not a guy. I’m a bear.”

“You’re a guy bear, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

“So can it with this ‘marvelous’ crap.”

“All I meant was, in the space of a few short hours, you have accepted the existence of probability worlds, an intelligent bear, and an alien from another world. And you don’t seem shaken at all.”

I set him straight: “Yesterday, I got good and drunk. I spent six active hours in bed with a great blonde named Sylvia. I ate two steaks, half a dozen eggs, and piles of fried potatoes. I sweated out every drop of tension from the last job I took on. I’m a purged man. I can take anything tonight. Nobody has ever thrown anything at me that I can’t take, and it isn’t going to start with this. Besides, I have three thousand bucks at stake—to say nothing about a little thing called `pride.’ Now, let’s get the hell out of here.”

We went through the steel door and the wood door beyond it, into the basement of the abandoned warehouse.

4

WHEN WE GOT BACK ON THE STREET AGAIN, WE DISCOVERED THAT AN inch of snow had fallen since we’d gone into the warehouse and the storm had cranked up two notches. Hard snow whipped about us, pasted our clothes, stung our faces. I cursed but Bruno just accepted it and said nothing.

What seemed like a millennium later and some ten million miles from the metal bar where I had almost cornered Stone, using the color-changing disc as our guide, we found some of the shifty alien’s handiwork. Five teenage boys were lying in an alleyway, all with a white, gossamer fungus growing out of their mouths, eyes, nostrils—even their rectums, for all I knew.

“I was afraid of this,” Bruno said, genuine anguish in his voice.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said, bending to look more closely at the corpses. They weren’t pretty. “They’re thugs. Delinquents. Members of some street gang. They’d just as soon shoot your sister as eat a doughnut. It’s a new gang to me. See the cobra each one has tattooed on his hand? They probably tried to mug Graham and had the old proverbial tables turned on them. For once, Graham did something worthwhile. They won’t be snatching welfare money from old ladies and beating grandfathers up to steal pocket watches.”

“Just the same,” he said, “we have to dispose of the bodies. We can’t allow these to be found. There’ll be a lot of questions about what killed them, and this probability line is not yet ready to be taken into the world travel societies.”

“Why’s that?”

“Credit problems.”

“So … what do you propose?” I asked.

He took that strange pistol out of his pocket, changed the setting on the regulator dial on the butt, then ashed all the dead gang-bangers. He was right about the Disney .780 Death Hose—it was the mother of all ray guns.

As we stirred the gray residue around with our feet and let the wind blow it away, I didn’t feel so good. I kept reminding myself about the three thousand bucks. And Sylvia. And the taste of good Scotch. And how I would lose all those things if I once let my nerve crack. Because, see, once a private richard backs down, his career is finished. Either his career or his life.

After the snowplows had passed, we walked in the middle of the street where we didn’t have to fight the drifting snow. At first, the tracking disc was little more than amber, but it soon began to change to a brilliant orange. As redness crept in around its edges, our spirits rose again.

We eventually had to leave the street for the river park, where the untouched snow soaked my socks and trouser cuffs.

As the wafer in Bruno’s hand grew brighter red than it had been all evening, we topped a knoll and saw Graham Stone. He was at the end of a pier at the yacht basin. He scrambled onto the deck of a sleek boat, ran for the wheelhouse door, swung up the steps, and disappeared inside. The running lights popped on along the length of the boat, and the engines coughed and stuttered to life.

I ran down the hill, my pistol in my right hand, while I thrust my other arm forward to break any fall I might make on the slippery ground.

Behind me, Bruno was shouting something. I didn’t listen to it. He shouted it again, then started running after me. I could tell he was running, even without looking, for I could hear his big feet slamming the ground.

When I reached the end of the pier, Stone had reversed the boat and was taking it out into the dark river. As I ran the last few yards, I judged the distance to the deck of the receding craft at maybe twelve feet. I leaped, fell over the rail of the boat in a tangle of arms and legs, smacked the polished deck with my shoulder, and watched the pretty stars for a moment.

Behind me, I heard a bellow of frustration, then a huge splash.

Bruno hadn’t made it.

From where I lay, I could look up into the wheelhouse windows. Graham Stone stood up there, staring down at me—maybe the real creature or maybe just another of his shed skins. I pushed to my feet, shook those stars out of my head, and looked for my gun.

It was gone.

I glanced back toward the pier. There was no sign of Bruno.

And somewhere in the intervening stretch of dark water, my .38 lay in river muck, useless.

I didn’t feel so good. I wished that I had never left the Ace-Spot this morning, had never met Bruno. Then I shook off all the negative thoughts and started looking around for something I could use as a weapon.

If you start wishing things were different from what they are, the next step is depression, then inactivity, and finally vegetation. No matter what the state of the world, you have got to move. Move.

I found a length of pipe in a tool chest that was bolted to the deck against the far railing. I could cave in a skull very nicely if I put the proper swing behind it. I felt better.

Stone was still in the wheelhouse, still watching me. The blue eyes gleamed with the reflection of the ship lights. He seemed too confident as I walked along the deck to the steps. I swung inside, crouching low. I kept the pipe extended, and he didn’t even bother to turn and look at me.

I approached carefully, using mincing little steps because I hated to commit myself to more than a few inches at a time. I kept thinking of the five young thugs lying back there with the cobweb fungus growing out of their bodies.

When I was close enough, I swung the pipe in a short, vicious arc. It slammed into his head—and on down through his neck and chest and stomach and thighs.

Another snakeskin. The lousy simulacrum collapsed, seemed to dissolve, and was a little pile of wrinkled useless tissue at my feet. Damn him!

Or should I say
it?

When I looked through the bridge window, I could see that we were more than halfway across the river toward the West Shore district of the city. The boat was on automatic pilot. I couldn’t make anything of the controls, and though I worked them at random, safeguards must have kept anything from changing. More wary than I had been, I left the wheelhouse in search of Stone.

I found him by the toolbox where I had found the piece of pipe. He gripped the railing with both hands and stared longingly at the approaching shore where we would surely run aground.

I sneaked up behind him, and I let him have it. Hard.

It was another tissue-paper construction.

I wished I knew how the bastard made those things. It was a handy talent.

We were two thirds of the way to shore now, and if I didn’t find him soon, he might escape us again. And Bruno had explained that a few days in any one probability will dissipate the residual energy of cross-time travel-rendering the tracking disc useless.

Stone had to be below deck. I could see all of the planking above the waterline, and I knew the wheelhouse was empty. So I found the hatch and the stairs to the lower cabins. I went down like any good private richard learns to do—carefully.

In the galley was another simulacrum, which I heroically crumpled with my trusty pipe. I felt like an idiot, but I was not about to take it easy with one of them—and then discover that it was the real and deadly thing.

I found another paper demon in the first of the double-bunk sleeping quarters and dispatched him quickly. The second sleeping cabin was empty, containing neither a scarecrow Graham Stone nor the real one.

Which left the bathroom. The door was closed but not locked. I twisted the lever, yanked it open, and found him.

For a moment, I was disoriented. Before me was the real Graham Stone,
and
a false shell separating from him. It looked like I had double vision, with the two images overlapping slightly. Then he snarled and smashed the simulacrum away as it separated from him. On his hands, ugly brown bubbles of flesh rose up, burst free, and spun at me like biological missiles.

I stepped backward, swung the pipe, and broke open one of the spinning … seeds, spores, whatever the hell they were. Instantly, the end of the pipe was sheathed in writhing white fibers. The fungus spread inexorably down toward my hand, and I had to drop the pipe. The second bubble had struck the doorjamb; a colony of cobweb fungus wriggled along the wood and aluminum, anchoring itself, spreading outward in all directions.

“Hold it right there!” I said, pretending that I was tough.

His hands came up again. I could see the spores forming. The skin turned brown, bulged, leaped away from him.

One of them burst on the wall next to me and sent climbing white tendrils toward the ceiling and the floor. Cracks appeared in the fiberboard as the stuff ate its way into the core of the ship.

The second spore struck my sports-coat sleeve, exploded with a bubbling froth of white growth. Never before or since have I stripped off a coat that fast, not even when a delectable blonde was waiting for me and cooing sweet things; I nearly strangled myself in the damn thing, but I got rid of it. By the time the coat hit the floor, the albino fronds were trembling like the hairs on the back of my neck.

Stone stepped out of the bathroom into the companionway, raising those hands at me again, and I turned and ran like hell.

Once before, I said that a private detective is finished when his nerve cracks, that the first time he backs down is the point at which his career begins to terminate. Well, I stand by that. I wasn’t turning chicken. I was just using my head for once. Those who fight and run away—live to fight another day. So I ran. There are times when you know it isn’t sensible to take on a tank with a target pistol, because you’ll be standing there holding your target pistol and looking at the twelve-inch hole they just put in your gut.

Besides, this creepy Stone character wasn’t playing the same game I was. He didn’t know the rules. Even the crummiest two-bit punk will give you half a chance. He’ll use a rod or a knife or even a jar full of sulfuric acid. But nothing this tricky. Stone didn’t have any respect for tradition.

Topside, I ran—to the bow of the craft and checked the onrushing bank of the river. It seemed no more than two hundred feet away now. It was the most welcome sight of my life. On the rail next to me, a pod of fibrous death split and wrapped spidery tentacles around the iron, bored into the metal, and began to greedily devour it. I was struck with the notion that these pods were more virulent than those that had killed the gang-bangers in the alleyway.

I dove to the right, behind an exhaust housing. Cautiously, I peered over the top and saw Stone standing by the wheelhouse steps, his bright eyes flashing, his palms flattened in my direction.

The boat rushed closer to the shore.

But not fast enough to suit me.

Two pods spun over my head, landed on the deck behind, and ate down through the planking. Before long, the yacht was going to be honeycombed with the white tentacles, each as thin as a thread but as strong, surely, as a steel wire.

A whining sound arose, the sound of tortured metal. The deck of the boat shuddered, and we seemed almost to come to a stop. Then there was a jolt, and we sped forward again. The bottom had dragged over a shoreline rock formation, but we had not been grounded.

And then we were.

The boat hit the second reef, tore out its bottom, and settled into four feet of water, most of its bulk still high and dry.

I rolled back across the deck, grabbed the rail, heaved myself over the side. I struck shallow water and went under, striking my jaw on a hunk of smooth driftwood. My mouth sagged open, and I swallowed water.
So this is what it’s like to drown
, I thought. Then I closed my stupid kisser and struggled to the surface again. I broke water, flailed my arms, pushed up, and staggered toward that blessed beach, sputtering and coughing and trying not to pass out.

I may not have a number of qualities that modern society considers admirable—like refined tastes and finesse. But there’s one thing I do have, damn it. Grit.