The Hero of Varay (6 page)

Joy and I went back inside and headed for the car-rental booths, but they were all swamped. We couldn’t get within ten yards of a counter. It was pointless to wait. There wouldn’t be a car left by the time we could get halfway through the lines.

“How are we going to get out of here?” Joy asked. She was starting to sound a little panicky herself.

I shook my head, but I was already pulling her along again. There was only one possibility left that I could think of, the El. If we could get aboard a train into the city, we could ride to within a mile of my condo, close enough to walk the rest of the way if we had to.

The elevated was apparently the last route anyone thought of. Possibly a lot of out-of-towners didn’t know that there was a line running from the airport to the Loop, or they just weren’t geared to thinking of that kind of transportation. There was still a crowd waiting, but not as large as the crowds trying to rent cars or flag down taxis that weren’t there. Joy and I were able to move far enough through this crowd to squeeze aboard the first train.

Squeeze
. There was scarcely room for everyone to inhale at the same time. Not even a world-class pickpocket could have operated in that car. Our ride into the city was long, uncomfortable, and more than a little terrifying. Each stop brought the risk of a riot as some people inside tried to get out and more people outside tried to cram in. The stops weren’t long enough for passengers to get off if they weren’t already near a door, and no one could move toward the doors until some of the passengers in front of them got off.

By the time we got near the Loop, Joy and I were able to get out. We just took the first opportunity that came up, even though we were still quite a distance from my place. We had to walk for a few blocks then, but conditions weren’t nearly as chaotic in the city as they were out at the airport. In fact, things may have been calmer in the streets than usual. There were people out on the sidewalk talking to neighbors and strangers, everyone wondering what was going on, but more people must have been inside, glued to their televisions and radios. Eventually, we were able to flag down a cabbie who was still working, though he had a boom box on the front seat next to him and it was blasting out the news. When we pulled up at the entrance to the apartment building, I gave the cabbie a fifty and told him to keep the change. He almost smiled.

There was no security guard on duty in the lobby, but I wasn’t about to call the building manager to complain about the lapse. Joy and I went right on through and had an elevator to ourselves. Still, the elevator seemed to move as slowly as if it had to stop at every floor between the lobby and thirty-eight.

Once we were in my apartment with the door locked behind us, I started to relax, just a little. In the apartment, no matter what happened, we were only a few steps away from safety. I dropped Joy’s suitcases in the foyer and we stood there, just clinging to each other at first.

“I’m scared,” Joy said, her voice muffled because she was talking half into my shirt.

“Me too, a little,” I conceded, “but we’ll be safe now.” I still needed a couple of minutes to calm down to only halfway panicked myself. Scared? You bet. Hero or not, I was damn scared. With any luck at all, my danger sense would give us enough time to escape through one of my magic doorways even if an H-bomb was about to go off overhead. The danger sense worked just as well in the real world as it did in the buffer zone. But the fear was still there.

“I’ll turn on the TV so we can find out what’s going on,” I said after I got myself more or less under control. “You see if you can get through to your parents on the telephone.” I figured that the phone lines would all be jammed, but if Joy didn’t try, she might be sorry later. I was starting to think properly again, and that relaxed me a little more.

“If you do get through, tell them that you’re safe and that I’ll make damn sure you stay safe.” I didn’t turn loose of Joy right away, though. “You might suggest that they put together whatever food and survival gear they can pack into their car and get ready to head out into the country if things get any worse.” If war did come, running to the country might not help, but it had to offer more hope than sitting around in a major metropolitan area waiting to be vaporized.

Despite
glasnost
and
perestroika
and the disintegration of Communism in Eastern Europe, there was still a chance for all hell to break loose. The remaining hardliners might seize the opportunity to try to reestablish themselves. I couldn’t forget how the optimism of that May in Beijing had turned to horror in Tiananmen Square, the bloodshed that Romania had gone through, or the continuing difficulties within the Soviet republics.

“Is that what we’re going to do?” Joy asked.

“Something like that.” I didn’t even smile. I was too tense for that. “We’ve got a safe bolt hole we can get to in a hurry.” How long the buffer zone would remain safe if our world fell into a stupid general war I couldn’t guess … but I didn’t expect to see mushroom clouds over Varay.

Joy went to the telephone while I turned on the televisions in the living room and master bedroom. There didn’t seem to be anything new on about the
Coral Lady
at the moment. In the bedroom, I spotted two six-foot swords lying on the bed.
Two
of them. I had forgotten the second sword, the one that Xayber’s son had used on me, and it had been a long time since I had heard the line that an abandoned elf sword would return to kill whoever abandoned it. That was why I started carrying the first one, Dragon’s Death. Now, it seemed, I had a second to worry about.

There was a sheet of Uncle Parthet’s three-by-five spiral notebook paper with the swords, but all it said was: “See you at Basil.”

Louisville!
I hoped that everyone there had hopped back to Varay at the first word of trouble.

“I can’t get through on the telephone,” Joy said when I rejoined her in the living room. “I can’t even get long distance. All I get is a busy signal when I dial the one.”

“Did you try the operator?”

“All lines are busy, please try again later.”

“Then we’ll just have to keep trying,” I said, giving her a quick kiss.

Joy nodded, too vaguely, then excused herself. As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I hurried through the dining room and hit the silver tracing on the door to the kitchen and stepped through to Mother’s house. I started shouting and running through the place, but there was no one there. When I spotted both cars in the garage, I figured that they had all scrammed back to Varay. I hoped so. I even got home to Chicago before Joy came out of the bathroom.

She went right to the telephone again and had no luck. She hung up and tried again. And again.

“Give it a few minutes,” I suggested. I went to her and led her back to the sofa. “It can’t help to keep dialing over and over. That may be what’s keeping the lines tied up, everybody trying over and over like that.”

She nodded. We sat on the sofa and watched the news on the television for a time. I held Joy close to me, but she hardly seemed aware of me. I could understand that. She was scared, really
scared
, for maybe the first time in her life. I was scared too, but fear was no stranger to me.

The TV networks were all staying exclusively with coverage of the terrorist attack and the reactions to it around the world—obviously. They didn’t have a lot of information from anywhere near the scene yet: some tape taken from helicopters before the Air Force chased them away, a long way from the scene of the explosion, and the first radio reports from on the ground in west Florida—not very close to the scene either. Mostly, the networks were reduced to covering press conferences and briefings in Washington and Tallahassee. No one held out even the slightest hope for any of the people who had been on the
Coral Lady
, but the lists of passengers and crew weren’t being made public until an effort could be made to contact all of the families. A large section of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge crossing Tampa Bay had disappeared, and the remaining sections were just so much twisted wreckage. No one had any idea how many people and vehicles might have been lost on the bridge. Afternoon traffic had been heavy, according to one traffic helicopter that managed to escape the blast and land safely after the explosion. The blast had sent the waters of Tampa Bay crashing up on shore, then sucked the water level down as water streamed in to fill the hole left in the sea by the nuclear explosion. A second tidal wave flowed ashore then, swamping boats and low-lying coastal areas, causing more as-yet-unknown casualties and damage.

At least the early diplomatic news was less terrifying. No one seemed ready to start throwing missiles around. Everyone was talking—saying “Not me” and generally condemning terrorism in general and the attack on the
Coral Lady
in particular. It wasn’t just the “man on the street” who was frightened by the possibilities. This time it was more than politics that got the various heads of state in front of the cameras and microphones.

The networks had to fill most of their time covering the reactions of people like the ones Joy and I had seen at the airport and on the elevated coming in from O’Hare. The same kind of crowd scenes had been played out in most of the major cities of the United States to one degree or another, and there were some reports of panic overseas as well. People had been hurt, trampled. At least three had been killed in separate incidents. The initial panic was slow in passing, but conditions were already improving—according to one network anchorman who was just beginning to get his own emotions under control.

Nearly a half hour passed before Joy decided to try calling her parents again. The network had gone to a rehash of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the problems following those. They even started talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only cities to suffer nuclear explosions previously. Joy only had to try twice to get through to St. Louis this time.

I busied myself checking to see if there was anything I wanted to take along to Varay. Sure, the immediate danger seemed less than it had just an hour before, but I wasn’t ready to accept even the remaining risk. I was going to get Joy somewhere safe. That still presented its own problems, but I couldn’t slough them off any longer.

The telephone conversation sounded like a disaster of its own. Joy was talking and sobbing at the same time. I don’t know if her parents could understand a word she was saying. I couldn’t understand some of them. But she did calm down a little before she finished. Her parents had to know that she was safe, and she knew that they were safe. Since there were still no dangerous alarms of additional explosions coming over the television, that had to be enough for the moment.

I handed Joy a box of tissues when she got off the telephone and she went through about half the box. Then she hugged me and put her head against my shoulder and I just held her until she was ready to talk.

“They’re okay,” she said.

I smiled. “Yeah, I could tell. You feeling better?”

She nodded. “We’re still not having much of a reunion, are we?”

“It’ll get better.” I took her back to the sofa and we sat down again. I wasn’t sure yet how to break the news about Varay to her, but I didn’t want to put it off any longer. I guess I hemmed and hawed around the fringes for several minutes before I really took the plunge.

“You remember that I said that I have a safe place for us to go?” I started. Joy nodded.

“I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you about this place since we started getting serious about each other.”

She got a mildly puzzled look on her face but didn’t say anything.

“I love you,” I said. There was a long silence between us then. Joy’s puzzled look got deeper. I started feeling frustrated. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

“I love you too,” Joy finally said, but she sounded hesitant, worried about where I was heading with the talk, I guess.

“The problem is, if I just tell you about this place you’ll think I’m crazy. And if I take you there without telling you a little about it first, you’ll think
you’re
crazy. Or maybe you’ll just get scared.”

“I’ve been scared since we heard about that bomb going off,” she said.

Good point. Let’s try again, I told myself.

“You know the story of
Alice in Wonderland?
She falls down a rabbit hole, then goes through a door into a crazy, magical world?”

“I saw it on TV last year. What in the world are you getting at?”

But I was running out of words. “I think it’s time to show you,” I said, getting up from the sofa. “Just remember
A lice in Wonderland.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going someplace safe. And we start in the bedroom.” I had hold of her hand and half-pulled her up from the sofa. Joy started giggling. I guess she was ready to write off all the strange talk as the start of a new sex game. That would do for the moment.

“You had me worried,” she said.

We detoured to pick up her bags. I carried them into the master bedroom and left them right by the door.

“Should I unpack anything first?” Joy asked.

“Not yet.” I pulled her to me and kissed her with all the fervor and passion I could muster, then broke the clinch.

“Just a second. I’ve got to get something before we go.”

Specifically, I had to get the two elf swords. I slipped the straps for the shoulder rigs in place and the blades clattered together. Joy’s eyes expanded.

“I told you that I ran into a guy with a six-foot sword,” I said, trying to make it sound light, like a joke. “The one with the ebony handle was his.”

“And the other one?” She wanted it spelled out.

“That’s mine.” I kept my eyes on Joy. Her smile had already evaporated. Now, fear started to crawl across her face again. It was time to hurry.

“You’d better carry one of your bags. That will make this a little faster.”

She nodded automatically and picked up the smaller suitcase, still looking at the hilts of the swords sticking up behind my shoulder. I used my rings to open the doorway into Castle Cayenne, then held it open with just my left hand. I used the right hand to urge Joy through the door. Her eyes went blank as soon as I opened the passage, but she didn’t resist. Then I pushed her other suitcase through with my foot and stepped through behind it.