Summer of Love, a Time Travel (26 page)

A
dog is barking.

Someone
throws a bottle. The glass smashes on the concrete, spraying shards on a woman
in a fringed dress. She screams.

“Get
off the street.
Now.
”

Chi
drags Ruby and Starbright back from the curb. They wrestle against the crowd,
until their backs press against the Psychedelic Shop.

A
girl in a long, black cape steps out of the crowd. She nudges next to Ruby, her
face and her hair hidden by a peaked hood.

Whistles
shriek. People scream. A cop smashes a man on the side of his head. The man
falls to his knees, blood staining his yellow hair.

“Police
brutality!” someone yells. “Get the cops! Get the cops!”

The
dog barks frantically.

A
woman screams, “Revolution! Revolution!”

Three
policemen charge through the wall of people toward Chi, Ruby, and Starbright,
swinging their clubs.

A
young man flees before the police, cringing and stumbling. The barking dog
leaps beside him. The young man’s got a leash wrapped around his hand. He
stumbles again, and the leash tangles around his ankles. The dog, a
black-and-white-sheepdog, snarls as a policeman batters the young man’s head
and shoulders with his club.

Now a
tall woman in rags steps out of the crowd. A ‘fro of writhing gray curls crowns
her head. A gray veil hangs over her face. The gray beggar presses herself
against the shopfront next to Starbright.

Chi
watches, eyes wide. What the hell is happening?

A
cop seizes the young man’s head in an armlock, while another smashes his billy
club across his kidneys. The young man drops the leash, and his dog leaps at
the second cop, protecting his master. A third cop raises his arms straight up
and slams his billy club on the dog’s head.

Chi
hears a
crack.

The
dog shrieks.

Starbright
screams.

The
policeman slams the club again. The dog drops to the sidewalk. The policeman
bashes the club across the dog’s face again and again, smashing the animal’s eyes
and skull. Blood pours through the dog’s fur.

A
woman screams, “Revolution! Revolution! Kill the cops! Kill the cops!”

The
dog-killer turns. He sprints after the screaming woman, swinging his club. She
runs, but the crowd blocks her. He aims for her face. “Kill the cops!” she
screams.
Crack.
The club connects with her jaw and teeth. The dog-killer
swings again.
Crack.
Blood streams from her mouth. She sobs. The
dog-killer jerks her arms behind her back and hustles her into a paddy wagon.

The
gray beggar turns toward Starbright. All Chi can see through the veil is two
burning eyes. But no, not burning. How can darkness burn? A darkness like the light
is being sucked into a vacuum. Darkness throbbing with a terrible force.

Starbright
clutches his arm, tears streaming. Suddenly she sees the girl in the black cape
standing next to Ruby.

“It’s
the girl with my face!” she screams.

The
black hood parts for an instant, and Chi glimpses her. Starbright? The same
girl—but not the same girl. Fragments of the girl’s face shift in dizzying
grimaces. The eyes burn like lit coals.

The
gray beggar groans, a sound like a rusty door hinge. With great effort, she
extends her swaddled arm before Chi and freezing cold bludgeons his chest. The
girl in the black cape brandishes a staff that writhes like a living thing. The
girl lifts the staff as if it weighs a thousand tons and struggles to swing it
toward Starbright.

For
a moment, Chi can’t move. The sheer force of the demons’ antimatter feels as if
he’s falling from a great height.

Ah,
but the antimatter is struggling, too!

The
three cops feverishly push the crowd back against the Psychedelic Shop. The dog-killer
is flushed and glittery-eyed. He charges toward the three of them.

Chi
yanks out his maser. He flicks to blue, runs the beam in front of the gray
beggar. A faint blue line like a crack in glass glows for an instant. The
beggar falls back. Chi flicks to green, bears the beam down. The tip of the
girl’s staff bows to the ground.

He
shouldn’t, but he flicks to yellow and aims at the dog-killer’s chest. The
dog-killer staggers back, as through tackled by an invisible halfback. The
chest of his uniform bursts into shreds. He roars with pain and rage.

The
crowd screams, “Revolution! Revolution! Kill the cops!”

The
dog-killer lurches to his feet. Two police charge at everyone in front of the
Psychedelic Shop.

“Go,
go, go!” Chi lunges, pulling Starbright and Ruby with him. He punches people
out of their way, loses his gaucho hat. They shove through the crowd, heading to
Clayton Street.

Suddenly,
in front of them, the girl in the black cape steps out of a telephone pole.
Fingers trailing, she extracts herself from the dark wood. Black sparks crackle
all around her.

The
gray beggar kneels beside a fire hydrant. She tugs at her rags, pulling them from
the hydrant’s metal rim. She turns her veiled face to and fro like a radar dish
seeking out a target. Seeking out them.

“Come
on, come on, come on!” Chi shouts.

They
run.

Blood
stains Chi’s boot.

9

Strawberry Fields
Forever

Ruby
stops dead in her tracks, seizing Chi by the elbow. He whirls back, dragging
Starbright with him.

“What
are you
doing?
” she shouts. “Where are you
going?
”

“Back
to the house,” he says, panting. He struggles with her, pulling her down the
sidewalk. “We’ve got to get inside!”

She
brakes her heels. “And let those women, those. . . .ghouls,
see
us? Find
out where we
live?
”

“They
won’t
see
us. They don’t
need
to see us.”

“You’re
crazy!”

“It
doesn’t matter, Ruby!”

“You
bet your ass it matters! We’ve got to scatter, throw them off our tracks!”

“Listen
to me!” The young dude is full of fire, flushed scarlet. She’s never seen him
so wound up, but somehow he isn’t panicked like she is. “The Prime Probability
has collapsed.” He glances all around him, at her, then long and hard at the
kid. “The timeline is preserved. Spacetime, conserved. But we need to get off
the street. If we’re not in any more danger, reality will remain stable. The
demons can’t come through from the Other Now until there’s a hole.”

This
makes no sense whatsoever. Still, she sees a demented logic to his words. “Are
you sure?”

Then
he does something so bizarre, he freaks her out almost as much as the ghouls.
What did he call them? The demons. He untangles his hand from Starbright’s,
raises his right fist to his lips, and whispers, “Katie.” For a horrifying
moment, she thinks he’s speaking into a microphone in his ring, contacting some
confederate hidden nearby. Like he’s a spy, a spy from the Man, come to
infiltrate the hip community just like she feared.

Then
he raises his left hand, cupping his palm behind the ring. A little field of
lavender light winks on. It isn’t a surface, like looking at a television
screen, but an object the size and shape of a pulp magazine made entirely of
light. The little field floats in midair!

He
whispers, “Katie, calc oh seven, oh nine, sixty-seven,” and tiny red numbers
and letters dance in the light. He catches her astonished look and pivots a
quarter-turn. Though the field of light seemed bigger than his hand, now she
can’t see it at all.

A
beat, and he says, “I’m sure.”

Ruby
hadn’t believed Chi’s street-corner lunacy about being from the future, but she
forgave him his wild imagination. She believes in imagination, the wilder, the
better. And now? Now she believes he’s from
some
where, and it isn’t a
hop and a skip down the road from Marin City.

“The
demons are gone,” he says. “Look around for yourself.”

She
looks around, and he’s right. Or at least they no longer crouch at the corner
of Clayton and Haight, those weird sisters, those hags of doom, spewing mortal
terror in their path. For that’s what she felt, standing next to the girl in
the black cape: arctic air and an intimation she was about to die. They’ve
vanished, sure as a C-note on a bad bet.

“You
in one piece, kid?’ she asks.

Starbright
nods. Her face is streaked with tears, but she’s no longer weeping. She is taut
with anger and urgency. Any trace of the darling daughter from the burbs is
gone for good. “They attacked us,” she says in a strangled voice. “They killed
an innocent living being.”

They.
She
doesn’t mean the demons.

“We’ve
got to get inside,” Chi insists. “Out of danger.”

Ruby
is shaking. She never shook before, not one time. Not when the fuzz stuck a
flashlight in her face in the doorway of her North Beach pad. Not when Roi went
on the yen. Not even when she witnessed Doc Clyde and his rose gardening fourteen
years ago.

Blood
on Haight Street, right in front of her eyes. How can anyone hold onto a New
Explanation when the street is choked with hate and garbage and blood? A dog beaten
to death while he’s out for a walk with his master in his own neighborhood.
It’s too much.

Before
she can figure out what to do, Leo Gorgon darts out of the alley beside 555
Clayton. He takes her by her shoulders. Dark circles shadow his eyes. “Ruby. You
were seen in front of the Psych Shop, man. The pigs.” He catches his breath,
exchanging a poisonous look with Chi. “The pigs are lookin’ for you.”

“We
didn’t do anything!” Starbright says.

“They’re
lookin’ for witnesses,” Gorgon says. “They’ll take you downtown, detain you all
night. Try to get a statement on record that’ll disqualify you later in court.
A cover-their-ass gig. You want to go to the cop shop, Starbright? How about
you, Beelzebub?”

“She
can’t go,” Chi says. “I would if I could, but I can’t, either.”

“Got
somethin’ to hide?” Gorgon says.

“Don’t
we all,” Chi spits back.

“I’ll
go,” Ruby says, though dread clenches her chest, making it hard to breathe.
She’s no hero. She’s done everything in her power to avoid run-ins with the
police, steered clear of politics and radical entanglements, not to mention
illegal substances. But she won’t stand for an atrocity like this, coming down
at her own doorstep. “I’ll call my lawyer at HALO, and I’ll go.”

“Don’t
do it, Ruby,” Gorgon says. “The cops don’t want a brutality rap. It’s bad
press. They mean business.” He hustles all three of them to the stoop of the
Mystic Eye. “Anyway, why should you? We’ve had enough of this harassment. The
Chief of Police has been on the people’s ass for goin’ on two years. Right?”

“That’s
right,” Ruby says.

“The
Summer of Love is gonna change all that. Ruby, everyone’s talkin’ on the
street. We’re gonna get a legal action committee together an’ go after the heat.
That mouthpiece over on Franklin Street says he wants the gig. Me an’ Cowboy
made the scene right after you left. We saw the blood, an’ we heard the story,
but the dog was gone. Everyone was freakin’ out, an’ nobody saw who took the
corpse. The dog’s owner got arrested for incitin’ to riot. They cuffed him an’ took
him away in a paddy wagon. So we want you fresh as the morning dew. Don’t
hassle with me on this one, Ruby. No statements to the Man until we get our act
together, all right?”

She
nods.

“Let’s
split town for the night. Even you, Bub.” Gorgon’s vicious look again, but Chi
nods. “People say they’re sweepin’ the streets for all of us. Pigs are claimin’
me an’ Cowboy set up that scene.”

“
Did
you set up that scene?” Ruby says.

“No
way,” he says. She meets Gorgon’s eyes and sees, for a rare moment, sorrow in
him. “That was some mighty bad theater.” For all his shucks and disingenuous
ways, she believes him. “Can you take three riders in that kraut car of yours?”
he says. “My truck’s got a flat.” Sure enough, Gorgon’s rickety flatbed, parked
down the block, tilts toward the curb.

“You
bet,” Ruby says. “I gassed her up this morning.”

“Let’s
get outta here.”

The
summer sun sinks into the treetops, one of those gusty amber twilights that
seems to take forever. The new moon buds into an arc as slim as a cat’s claw.
They walk cautiously through the shadowy alley back to the garage. Chi and
Gorgon pull the garage doors open.

“You
stay here,” Ruby tells the men. “Starbright, come with me. We’ll collect some
provisions and be right back.”

“Bring
me a pint of Jim Beam, if you’ve got it,” Gorgon calls to her.

She
and the kid go to the back gate, find it swinging open.

“Sweet
Isis,” Ruby groans. “
Now
what?”