Emma Bull (36 page)

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"Uh-uh. Much more genteel. Same addi
ction, though. Things would have turned out pretty ba
d, except

that Ti
ck-Tick met me and took a liking to me, for Mab only knows what
reason. She put me on my feet

and kicked me in the butt, and here I am today."

For a miracle, she let me get away with the flippant version. With her fork she drew lines in the last of the sauce on her plate. "You can't just hang out. You can't just mooch, and panhandle, and suck all the…

the sustenance out of life. Bordertown is a scary place, an angry place, and sometimes you'll see it reach out and crush somebody. But for every one of those there's dozens of people…"

"I used to have a recurring dream, that I woke up and the city was gone, and all the people who lived in it were walking around in the big empty field that was left, trying to figure out where they were supposed to go now. And in the dream it was because we'd used the city up. Just used it up, like a loaf of bread, and there wasn't even a wrapper left."

I'd finished my dinner. It looked as if she'd finished as much of hers as she was going to. I hoped I hadn't really raised subjects that had killed her appetite.

"We should go," she said, dragging herself back from whatever abstraction she'd fallen into.

"This is embarrassing, but I don't have room for dessert."

"I told you, you get it to go, and eat it three weeks from now."

At the cash register, I went for my pocket, but she shook her head and informed me that it was on the city.

"Won't it disappear?" I asked.

"What?"

"The city. Like your dream."

"I think you've put enough in today that taking a little out isn't going to hurt. Don't you get expenses?"

So I let her pay the check, and we stepped out into the night. The temperature had dropped with the sunùhad dropped radically, in fact, as sometimes happens in summer. The hood of the Triumph was

pebbled with dew, and the sidewalk edges were dark with it. I could smell the moisture in the air,
it
was so thick.

"Look," Sunny said softly, and pointed to the tree-planted median strip down the middle of the street. A sheet of thin mist lay about six inches above the grass down the length of the block, broken by tree trunks and concrete benches and lines of shrubbery. "Ground fog. The parks are going to look like a Dracula movie." She tossed the waxed paper bag that contained half of a rolled pastry thing full of walnuts into the space behind the driver's seat, and swung her legs over the driver's side door.

"Do you ever open the doors on this car?" I asked.

"My God, they come up to my knees. Why should I?"

They were a little higher than that, but it was still a good point. I climbed over my side and buckled

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mysel
f in.' The seat was cold and damp from the dew.

"Where to?" she said, as the car growled to life.

I got my new mental fix. "Thataway."

"We're outta here."

I don't know why that style of leaving the curb is described as being like a bat out of hell. I've never seen a bat that could lay rubber.

We were a little under a dozen blocks away when sparks spat out from under the dashboard, once, twice.

"Oh, hell," said Sunny, "not the wiring harness again. It must be the damp. Can you see anything?"

There's not much space inside a Triumph Spitfire; the ideal position for looking under the dash is with the door open and your knees on the pavement. But by unfastening the safety harness and turning half around, I got my head upside down at the right level without actually having to put it in Sunny's lap.

The other thing about that car, and that vintage, is that it's a pretty straightforward machine. Everything built in the last few decades of the twentieth century has wiring like rainbow linguine under the dash, for the computerized fuel injection, the electronic ignition, all the power extras. Sunny's Spitfire had ignition, dash lights, and the headlight switch—not even a radio. So it wasn't hard to spot the taped-up bundle fastened to the underside of the dashboard with a wad of sticky stuff, and the gleam of fresh-cut wire ends.

I stayed exactly where I was, with my head upside down, and said, "It's a bomb."

I had the sick, empty feeling at the base of my spine that comes from being able to count the fillings in Death's molars. My face was twelve inches away from the thing, which would probably go off in a

second. Nobody would be able to identify me even if they could find my head.

Sunny's foot had come down on the brake and her right hand had gone for the ignition, in reflex. She stopped herself before she touched the key and slapped her hand back on the wheel. "Can you see the wire that's sparking?"

I cleared my throat. "Yeah."

"What color is it?"

"Red."

She sucked air in through her teeth. We were only doing about 30 mph now, so I could hear it. "Should have gone off when I started the car. Maybe it was the damp that screwed it up."

We were down by the river now. I could smell the sweet-sick odor of the water of the Big Bloody,

running red and strange out of the Elflands. The Triumph was still slowing down.

"Jump," said Sunny.

"What?"

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"Jump. If I go any slower, I'm afraid she'll stop."

"I'm not go—"

"God damn it, asshole,
get out of my car."

I think I must have vaulted clean over the door, because I don't remember touching it. I did remember to roll when I hit the pavement, and only scraped the palms of my hands and my elbows and my knees, a little.

There was a concrete slope, a ramp, down from the street and into the river. Maybe it had been a boat ramp once, before Faerie came back and the river ran red. Maybe it was the driveway to an underground garage, flooded by a change in the river's course. Whatever it was, Sunny was aiming the Spitfire down it. I understood now why she was afraid of letting the speed drop too low.

It was her turn to jump—wasn't it? I was chanting it in my head,
Jump, jump, jump
, like a crowd watching somebody on a building ledge. The Spitfire's engine revved, and the back bumper tilted up as the front end lunged down the slope.

She jumped and landed hard, harder than I had, and almost rolled off the edge of the ramp into the river.

But she was up in a flash, on her feet, and running toward me. The river was making gulping sounds over the car, as if it were chugging a pitcher of beer. Based on the way the Spitfire went down, I have no reason to believe that British-made convertibles float.

At first I thought nothing was going to happen. The only movement was Sunny, running, and the water swirling as it closed over the car. Then the surface of the river bulged up, shining; the ground heaved under me; Sunny sprawled on the pavement; there was the roaring, rushing sound of the explosion, and the racket of breaking glass. The river came down like a cloudburst all over us, stinking of madness and fish. A few of those came down, too, dead before they hit.

The quiet afterward might have been only in contrast to the noise, or I might have temporarily been a little deaf. I ran to Sunny, slipped on a dynamited fish, and sat down hard in the road next to her.

She pushed herself up on her arms and shook her head vigorously, and made a sound that I'd rather not try to spell. "You okay?" she asked, squinting up at me.

Reaction was setting in; some things in this world you can always count on. "Wonderful" I said.

She pulled herself upright, and sat cross-legged in the street, looking at the river.

"People are going to show up pretty soon," I suggested. "Maybe we should leave." Then I realized that I wasn't certain what cops do in cases like this. Maybe they were supposed to stick around when their car blew up and took out half the windows in the neighborhood.

"Do you know how many of those were left in the world?" Sunny said, still looking at the river.

I figured out that she meant the car. "More than there are now."

"It's not funny. I slaved over that car. I
loved
that car. Like
family
. When I find the bastard who did this, I swear—" I watched the way she closed her lips tight over the rest of the sentence and realized that this,

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too, w
as partly reaction. "Which way do we go now?"