The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (5 page)

“The last time I was fire-dancing, I thought about swinging my firepots faster and faster, like a sling, and then just letting them fly, flinging them up into a tree and letting them burn everything. That freaked me out, a little—I could
see
myself doing that.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“No. I guess you’re right. I didn’t.”

“So you’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Alice said. “Everybody thinks about weird shit, right? You’re only in trouble when you
do
something about it.”

“That’s the way it seems to me,” Marzi said.

“I’m glad I ran into you tonight.” Alice stood, then held out her hand for Marzi to shake. Alice’s hand was callused and firm—Marzi wondered, briefly, how it would feel to have those hands pass over her skin, touch her belly, her breasts. She wondered if Lindsay liked the feeling, if Alice touched her gently or roughly or both.

When Alice Belle gets me horny, I know it’s been too long,
Marzi thought. “I’ll see you around. Give Lindsay my love, if you see her before I do.”

“Sure thing,” Alice said. She walked toward the tree where she’d been standing when Marzi first saw her. She picked up something long and dark—a chain, with metal, spherical cages affixed to either end. Her firepots. She slung the chains over her shoulder, and waved good-bye.

Marzi waved back, then dropped the remains of her cigarette and ground it out under her heel.

Smoke Out

Beej hurried along the sidewalk on a street a few blocks from the heart of downtown Santa Cruz, past boutiques and small restaurants, most of them already closed for the night. Beej didn’t care about the stores, though—he wasn’t out shopping, he wasn’t hungry, and human habitations in general didn’t hold much interest for him lately. He hadn’t been home in days. He’d been living outside, sleeping in parks and alleys, getting closer to the god.

Beej carried a large black plastic garbage bag slung over his right shoulder. He’d spent most of the day gathering its contents: driftwood, pebbles, blue and green glass bottles with the labels meticu-lously picked off, the shiny circle of metal from the top of a tuna can, a sandal with duct tape mending a torn strap, hair swiped from the floor of the barber shop on Front Street, the skins of popped balloons, several flowers pulled up by the roots, and a tarnished brass cowbell rescued from the gutter. Beej inventoried the objects in his head, trying to decide if he’d left anything out, if there were any other elements essential for the ritual. It wasn’t like the movies, where people had magical books to consult, or where some wise shaman came along and told you what to do. Beej was operating from his inner resources, with no guidance other than what he could glean from his own mental tremors. He tried to
sense
the contents of the bag, their gestalt, and feel for gaps.

He found one.

Beej stopped, staring blankly at the concrete sidewalk before him. He couldn’t go to the altar yet, then—there was one offering still to acquire. Beej looked around, and saw what he needed right away: a potted palm near a wine shop. He whooped with delight, walked over to the plant, and set his bag down. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he scooped out a handful of soil from the pot and piled it neatly on the sidewalk. He unzipped his pants, took out his dick, and looked at the sky, humming a swing tune. After a while his bladder relaxed—he always had trouble pissing in public—and a stream of yellow urine poured out, soaking the soil. After a while, he switched to pissing in the potted plant, so as not to supersaturate the dirt on the sidewalk. He finished and zipped up, then knelt and scooped a double handful of dirt from the sidewalk. It was damp and thick, now, transformed into mud by the water from his body. He opened the plastic bag, dropped in the mud, and wiped his hands unself-consciously on his pants.

That took care of the mud, but he still needed fire. He walked a few blocks to the drugstore, going the long way to avoid the crowds on Pacific Avenue, wincing as he entered the well-lit parking lot. This was a night for shadows, not artificial lights. Beej went through the automatic doors into the store, and someone started yelling at him. “Hey! You can’t come in here!”

Beej looked up, startled. “Are you closed?”

The teenager, dressed in an ugly green vest with a name tag, hesitated. “No, we’re open. But . . . you can’t come in here to sleep, or just hang around. It’s only for customers.”

“I am a customer,” Beej said. “Why would I want to sleep here? It’s too bright.”

“Ah,” the kid said. “Sorry. I thought . . . sorry.” He nodded toward the plastic bag. “You have to, um, check your bag, though.”

Beej clutched the bag to his chest, the bottles and driftwood clanking. “You
will
watch it carefully?” he said. “It took me a long time to get it just right, and if anything happened . . .”

“Sure thing,” the kid said, backing off, stepping behind the protection of his cash register. “No worries.”

Beej handed over the bag reluctantly. As soon as the cashier took it from his hands, Beej raced for the back of the store. He snatched up a can of lighter fluid and a box of kitchen matches, then ran back to the register. After dumping his purchases on the counter, he reached across and snatched his bag back from the boy’s grasp. Everything was still there, still potency-in-waiting, and Beej breathed a long sigh.

“Your bag smells like pee,” the boy said.

“Still waters run deep,” Beej said, grinning, and nodded toward the lighter fluid and matches. The kid rang up the purchases and Beej grubbed around in the pocket of his leather jacket until he came up with a few coins and bills. The boy took the money, wrinkling his nose. Beej saw that he’d accidentally given the kid a wad of gum wrappers along with the money. Except it
wasn’t
an accident—it was all part of the god working through him. Beej was an instrument of the lord of wreckage now, and everywhere he went, chaos and detritus would follow.

The boy picked the wrappers out of his hand and threw them into the trash, then made Beej’s change. “Paper or plastic?” he asked.

Beej grinned. “I’ve got a bag, thanks.” He dropped the matches and the lighter fluid into his garbage bag, then left the store.

The moon was up and full, leering like an albino jack- o’lantern. Beej went the long way around Pacific again, and this time he walked all the way to the altar.

The altar was in a hole in an empty lot surrounded by a fence, with a clothing boutique on one side and a parking garage on the other. Once there had been a building on this lot, but that was before the 1989 earthquake. Loma Prieta. That was the last major quake to hit the area, and it had leveled much of Santa Cruz. The heart of town, as it stood now, bore little resemblance to the town’s layout before Loma Prieta. Beej hadn’t lived here then, he’d still been in Indiana, but he’d seen pictures of the old town, and the wreckage, at the Museum of Art and History. In typical California fashion, the residents had started rebuilding right after the disaster, reinventing the town. There was a time when Beej had respected that impulse to rebuild and re-create, had found it wonderful—humankind uniting in the face of adversity, taking back the world from the elements. But he knew better, now. His eyes had been opened.

Humans were stupid filthy persistent insects. The world slapped them with an earthquake, and they came back for more! The earthquake was a message from the god itself, and they disregarded it. How much clearer did the god have to be? What part of “I don’t want you here” didn’t they understand? They had pride sufficient to offend the god.

Next time, there would be no rebuilding. The destruction would be utter, the ground scoured of life, no stone left on a stone.

For the first time in his life, Beej felt in total harmony with nature. So
this
was what all those pagans at school were talking about! He’d thought it was airy-fairy shit, all about trees and fields and the moon, but it was really about the raw brute force of nature. Titanic earth forces. The ground itself making its will known, throwing off the parasites that lived and thrived on its surface.

For whatever reason, this empty lot hadn’t been rebuilt after the quake, despite its prime location adjacent to downtown. This patch of ground was unchanged since the day after the earthquake, except for the rubble that had been hauled away, and the fence, and the grass growing up inside. It still bore the mark of the god’s fury.

Beej squeezed in through a hole in the fence and stood on the edge of his temple, the altar of the earthquake. Whatever building had once stood here had had a basement, and there was still a large hole with partially broken concrete walls shoring up the earth. Tumbled chunks of concrete filled the pit, with bits of rebar sticking out. Beej skidded down the steep slope into the hole, his bag over his shoulder. Several of the concrete blocks had tumbled together and formed something like a table, with a flat block across the top. The first time Beej saw that, he knew it wasn’t coincidental, not just a random pile of wreckage—it was a sign. It was an altar.

Beej worked happily, the moon providing his light. He took out the contents of his bag and piled them on the altar, arranging them until the configuration pleased him, in much the same intuitive way he constructed collages. The last thing he took from the bag was a stack of comic books, tattered and well read, the whole run of Marzi’s comic,
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
. Beej wasn’t sure why the god wanted those, but he knew Marzi was tangled up in this somehow. He fanned out the comics on the altar stone, looking at their covers, remembering the stories—the rainmaker, the mud woman, the rattlesnake sphinx, Aaron Burr, and the box canyon. He’d never liked Westerns, but that wasn’t what Marzi’s comics were about. He hated to burn them, but consoled himself with the thought that these were only reading copies; he still had mint duplicates bagged at home.

Once the objects were arranged to his liking, he smeared mud on the stone, imagining for a moment it was actually blood. Then he sat cross-legged on the ground, closed his eyes, and waited for a revelation. The god’s communications were usually subtle: whisperings in the night, partial words written in dust, voices hidden in the creak of bedsprings. Granted, the emissary that came to him yesterday in Genius Loci had been pretty dramatic, skin like cracked rock, black hair woven with feathers, a scalping knife in its hand. When it touched his head, Beej had felt a shifting of the plates in his skull, and had understood immediately what the god was doing. It had reconfigured the bones in his head so that they exactly matched the earth’s continental plates. His skull was a geological map now. That delighted him—there must be a vast sympathetic magic there! Marzi had tried to help him, he realized, by rushing in with a knife and driving the emissary away. That had been a mistake, but how could she know? It must have looked awful to her, like Beej was being attacked. He thought of Marzi, perishing under a pile of rubble, and felt a twinge. Maybe there was a way . . . but no. Marzi would die with everyone else, unless by some miracle the earthquake god chose her to be an acolyte, too. Perhaps Beej could initiate her into the church of the earthquake . . .

Fire.

The word hit Beej’s brain like lightning. More than just the word—the
vision
. Flames dancing on the altar. Very well, he would make it so. He squirted lighter fluid over the trash and the comics, then struck a match and tossed it onto the altar. The fluid ignited silently, and the trash—symbolic, Beej knew, of all the wreckage that the earthquake god would create on Earth—began to burn. The smell was unpleasant, but that was part of the deal. Destruction wasn’t pretty.

The fire didn’t interest Beej much, and neither did the mud. They were side effects, he knew. The heaving of the earth would trigger mud slides, and fires would start when the gas lines broke. They would aid the destruction, but that was all they were: handmaidens. The earthquake itself was preeminent, the first cause. The earthquake was god.

Something appeared in the flames. Beej leaned forward, staring at the shape in the fire. It was the emissary from the coffee shop, the sand-colored Indian! The figure was small at first, a gray form in the flames, but it gradually grew to human size. It stepped off the altar and stood before Beej, holding a large bowie knife casually in its left hand, feet hovering just off the ground. “Beej,” it said, voice smoky and distant. Indeed, everything about the figure was vague and attenuated, its body now made of smoke, not solid sandstone-colored flesh as before. Was the earthquake god weakening?

“I’m too far from my epicenter,” the Indian said, and Beej realized with a thrill that this wasn’t an emissary at all, but the god itself. Indeed, why would a being so powerful have need of messengers? It could be anywhere, everywhere—wherever there were fault lines, the earthquake god held sway. “I’m trapped,” it said, “locked behind a door, and by
pushing
and
pushing
I’ve managed to open it a crack, enough to reach out to you this way. But I’m still trapped, Beej.” The god wavered, its face blurring. “You have to let me out. You will have assistance from other worshippers, acolytes of mud and fire. But you are my favorite. Remember. My chosen one.”

“Yes,” Beej said. “Yes, oh yes. Where are you trapped? What can I do?”

“I’ll show you,” the god said, and raised its knife.

Beej sat calmly as the god sliced into his scalp. There was not much pain—the knife was very sharp. The god touched the bones of Beej’s head and tugged, and the plates parted. The sensation sent a shiver through Beej’s body. It was better than orgasm. It was an earthquake in his flesh.

With the tip of the knife, the god began writing on the surface of Beej’s brain.

Knowledge filled him. He knew where the god was imprisoned. He knew about the artist, Garamond Ray, and how the god had been changed and trapped—and he knew what Marzi had done, what she was still doing. Beej whimpered as the god’s mind brushed against his own. Even at this distance, with the god only reaching through the crack in the door of his prison, Beej sensed its enormity, its inhumanity, its unrelenting purpose.

Its message conveyed, the god retreated, putting the bones in Beej’s head back together. A breeze blew in through the fence, swirling the god apart, wisping its transitory body into nothingness. Beej touched his head tenderly and found it unharmed. He smoothed down his hair, feeling grubby and human again.

The things on the altar were smoking lumps, blackened by fire, and Marzi’s comics were now ashes. Beej touched the warm altar stone for a moment, then trudged up out of the hole.

The sense of total understanding was fading, had begun to fade the moment the god stopped touching him, but Beej remembered enough. He knew what he had to do first.

He had to break into Genius Loci, and open a door.