Apocalypse to Go (24 page)

Market Street, on the other hand—I’d never seen it in such bad shape, full of potholes and, oddly enough, creased by six pairs of streetcar tracks instead of the usual two. Pedestrians strolled along the sidewalks or dodged the occasional automobile as they jaywalked across the wide street. When I looked west toward Twin Peaks, I saw no radio tower on top of them, no houses, either. A glance east, and I saw the Ferry Building, painted a peeling beige. Boards covered half of the top-floor windows.

As we made our way across at Second Street, I realized that none of the buildings lining Market stood more than five stories high. Black with soot, they were all built in a crumbling Beaux Arts style, heavy with urns and statuary that would rain down like missiles in the next big quake. Possibility Images of this disaster flooded my mind. I kept looking up in sheer terror to reassure myself that yes, I was only receiving PIs.

About halfway across I stumbled over a set of streetcar tracks that ran on a strip of asphalt laid over bricks. Ari caught my arm and steadied me. I pulled free and stopped walking to fight against the noise buzzing and hissing inside my mind. The number of bees had shrunk to maybe half a million by then, but they still dominated my consciousness.

“Come along!” Ari said. “You’ve got to keep moving. We’re in the middle of the sodding street.”

Dimly through the noise in my brain I heard a clanging.

“Tram,” Ari snapped. “Walk!”

He yanked me by the arm and got me walking again, just as the yellow streetcar whizzed past behind us. I decided it was time to stop pretending bravery and raised a Shield Persona, an SH as the Agency calls this function. The hiss and buzz stopped, but deprived of my extra senses and talents, I felt staggering drunk. By the time we reached the
opposite sidewalk, I was panting for breath. Ari guided me to the cool stone wall of a building and let me lean against it to rest. Spare14 stood guard between the passing crowd and us.

“You need Qi,” Ari said. “Take what you can from me.” He leaned over me and kissed me.

I sopped up his energy like a wad of paper towels in the rain. He kissed me again and let me feed for a long minute. I forced myself to pull away. “I don’t want to drain you,” I whispered. “But thanks.”

Ari straightened up, started to speak, then turned around fast when a female voice beat him to it.

“You need to get her to a doctor, not into bed.”

I glanced around and saw a tall, square-shouldered white woman elbowing Spare14 to one side. She wore a long-sleeved black dress with a double set of buttons down the ruched front. Maroon piping emphasized every seam. A black scarf wrapped like a wimple around her head, but stray wisps of gray hair had escaped to cling to her cheeks. She set her hands on her hips and looked me over with cold dark eyes.

“I’ll be okay,” I mumbled.

“No, you won’t.” She turned on Ari. “Listen, you! I know what your kind is like. If this girl dies, what are you going to do for cash? You might think about that even if you don’t care about her.”

Ari opened his mouth, made a stammering noise, and shut it again. She snorted and turned back to me.

“What drug did he give you?” she said. “Glory seeds?”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t give me nothing.”

“Oh? Then what did you take on your own?”

I let my mouth hang open and stared at her.

“I beg your pardon!” Ari finally found his voice. “Just who might you be?”

“My name is Major Grace. You can ask about me over at the mission later. What counts now is getting this girl some help.”

Major grace for minor sins? I giggled over my mental nonsense. Spare14 was hovering behind her and making anguished faces. If he hadn’t been so burdened with the
leather jacket and the sports bag, he would have been waving his hands in sheer despair. I remembered that we had to keep moving, had to get to his office. Give her what she wants, O’Grady!

“Look, Major,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I’m coming down. Honest. It was something in the drink, y’know? The john gave it me. I don’t know what was in it. That was like at midnight. Long time ago now.” I laid a hand on Ari’s arm. “Don’t be so down on him. He’s all I got in the whole world.”

“Probably so,” Major Grace said. “More’s the pity.”

Ari snarled at her. Major Grace considered him with her head tipped a little one side. Her expression oozed contempt. Ari looked down at the ground.

“All right,” she said. “But I want to see you two over at the mission later. Let her sleep it off, then bring her. We’ll have a doctor on duty this afternoon. I persuaded him to come over a couple times a week. He donates his time. Won’t cost you a penny.”

Ari hesitated, looked up, then flashed her a grin. “Very well. And thanks.”

Major Grace allowed her scowl to disappear. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

She turned on the heel of her sensible black shoes and marched off. Ari let out his breath in a sigh of relief.

“Major?” Ari said to Spare14. “Well, she should be commanding an army unit.”

“She is,” Spare14 said. “That’s who runs the mission she referred to—this world’s version of the Salvation Army. They do what they can for anyone who comes to them.”

The idea that compassion existed even here in SanFran gave me courage. As an experiment I dropped the SH. Most of those virtual bees had flown off. The buzzing, hissing sensation from the presence of my fellow psychics had faded to the level of mild tinnitus—annoying, certainly, but not disabling. I began to feel the psychic “magnetic force lines,” to use a metaphor, of this new world. They tangled together in an odd pattern of knots and snarls, but at least I could sense them.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I can walk again.”

We left Market through an archway. Over the side street,
a curved structure built out of crumbling black wood hung between two stone pillars. I could just make out faded yellow letters that said “International Settlement.” I had trouble figuring out if we were on Kearny, Stockton, or some other street because over here everything looked different from the San Francisco I knew.

Instead of glass towers and marble facades, low buildings lined the street: nightclubs, cheap hotels, some stone, most red brick, a few stucco, interspersed with lunch counters, liquor stores, and tobacco shops. During the whole walk north I saw only a few dozen cars go by instead of the usual downtown traffic, and they were squat, ugly things pieced together from random parts. Instead of trucks, horse teams drew delivery wagons, though they double-parked just like at home. All the streets were paved with red brick, not asphalt.

Thanks to the low life expectancy here, everyone we saw looked under forty, most even younger. People hurried along the sidewalks—some well-dressed men in suits, some women in flowered dresses, fitted coats, and little hats. The rest were riffraff like us. A lot of people were smoking cigarettes; the stench made me cough whenever I got a faceful of smoke. On some of the corners we saw young boys selling penny newspapers, none thicker than a few printed sheets.

Finally, we turned onto a broad street that ran at a diagonal to the grid behind us. Columbus Avenue—that I recognized, because we might as well have walked into an Italian city, judging from the street and business signs and the talk of the passersby. I could smell sausage and garlicky sauces, dark-roast coffee and pastries, as we passed restaurants and markets. Distantly, church bells rang out—Saints Peter and Paul in Washington Square, I figured, where one of my cousins had been married in my world’s version of the church. I smiled at the memory and felt a trace of Qi recharge.

“Here we are,” Spare14 said.

His office sat above a nightclub in a garbage-strewn alley off Columbus, or I should say, above a business that once been a nightclub called The Purple Shallot. Boards
covered the big front window. The sign hung at an angle from a broken metal support.

“They didn’t pay up,” Spare14 said. “Late one night a small crowd of alleged drunks destroyed the interior.”

Spare14 took a ring of keys out of his slacks’ pocket and began to unlock a metal grate over a side door. I looked around. At the corner stood a bookstore, La Venezia rather than City Lights, but the name didn’t matter. I finally knew where I was. Overhead, the sky was turning gray with wisps of fog. The sweat on my face began to dry in the cool wind. Qi flowed to me, more energy than the change in temperature would account for. I felt a presence, looked up at the encroaching fog, and saw the familiar gray Fog Face, about three feet high, floating above the building.

“Javert!” I sent a silent message. “Thanks!”

The face nodded at me, smiled, and disappeared. He left behind another waft of Qi, which I channeled into my lungs to flush out the smell of that gross tobacco smoke. I climbed the stairs to Spare14’s rooms without any trouble.

Although Spare14 had referred to the place as his office, it turned out to be a small apartment. We walked into a front room with a tattered gray-and-green carpet, a sagging green couch shoved against the dirty white wall, and a pair of mismatched wooden chairs. Near a window stood a dark wood desk with a landline phone and a coffee mug full of pens sitting on its varnished top. I could see through an open door into a tiny kitchen done in cream-and-black tile.

“There’s a bathroom of sorts on the far side of that.” Spare14 pointed at the kitchen. “Do sit down, O’Grady. You look utterly exhausted.”

“I was,” I said. “I’m getting on top of things now.”

Ari set down the suitcase and helped me to the couch. I sank into the plush cushions and rested my head on the padded back. Ari bent over me and kissed my forehead.

“Try to rest,” he said.

“Okay. I kind of need to.”

Spare14 put the sports bag down next to the suitcase and draped Ari’s jacket over it. Ari knelt and opened the suitcase. He took out a small square gadget that looked something like an old-fashioned light meter.

“Going to check for bugs?” I said.

“Yes, why take chances? This Axeman fellow, who knows what sort of high-tech goods he can buy on the black market?”

I watched Ari run the detector around the baseboards. When he finished with those, he started on the window frames and the doorways. Spare14 sat down at his desk. He took out his key ring and unlocked one of the drawers. He reached in and pulled out his briefcase, the same one, I was willing to bet, that he carried in my home world. I had no idea how it had gotten into this desk on another world.

Ari finished scanning the room. He sat down next to me and put an arm around my shoulders.

“Think you can sleep?” he said. “Maybe you’ll dream about Sean or Mike.”

“Good idea. The conscious part of my mind’s a wreck, but the rest of it’s probably still functional.”

“The rest of—” Ari sighed and gazed upon me with extreme reproach. I knew he was thinking about insurance adjusting. He got up, drew the Beretta, then strode over to the window. He pulled one of the heavy gray curtains open just enough to allow him to peer out. I lay down on the couch with his bunched-up sweater for a pillow, let my breathing slow, and shut my eyes. Trance or sleep, it didn’t matter. I imaged my two brothers and let myself drift off into the warm dark.

The tinnitus turned into the soft splash of waves on sand. I was standing on a beach—somewhere, a long stretch of featureless sand, sea, and foggy sky. I turned and looked around me, but I saw no distinctive landmarks, just a rise of dunes topped with long strands of sea grass. In the far distance, to my right as I faced the sea, I could just make out what appeared to be a hill or enormous rock either in the water or looming over it. If the coast I stood on was the Pacific coast, and I assumed it was, then the bulge on the horizon lay to the north.

I started to walk toward whatever it was. Overhead, gulls gathered and cried, wheeling over the waves. The cries turned into human voices, and I woke.

Ari was standing by the door with Spare14 and a man I’d
never seen before, tall and on the portly side, with dark hair, receding at the temples, cut very short. He wore a pair of brown slacks, a white shirt, and a loosely cut tweed sport coat that hung open in a way I’d come to recognize. He was wearing a shoulder holster under that jacket.

When I sat up, the three men turned toward me. The third guy smiled briefly—very briefly. He had a full, round face with brown eyes behind brown-rimmed glasses.

“Agent Jan Hendriks,” Spare14 said. “He’s an expert on gang activity with links to psychic crime. We’re lucky to get him.”

“You flatter me,” Hendriks said to him, then nodded at me. “You must be our psychic, Miss O’Grady. How are you feeling?”

“Better, thanks,” I said. “I think I’m getting used to the aura field here.”

Both Hendriks and Spare14 nodded as sagely as if they’d understood me. Hendriks glanced at Spare14. “You told me in e-mail that Javert has a theory. Javert always has a theory. Wait!” He held up one hand flat. “Let me guess. Our perps are somewhere on the beach.”

“They are,” I said. “I’m just not sure where on the beach. I couldn’t see any clear landmarks.”

“She’s usually right,” Ari put in, “when she says these things.”

“What?” Hendriks said. “I take it you had some sort of vision.”

“I wouldn’t call it that. An objectified trance clue is more like it. Something links my missing brothers to the ocean.”

“If you’re right, this means I owe Javert a salmon.” Hendriks smiled, a little ruefully. “We have a long-standing bet, you see, about his theories. A large raw salmon, to be precise. I hope they’re in season.”

“I have no idea,” Spare14 said. “But I’m sure we can find some sort of large fish for sale down at the wharf.”

“I’ve seen Javert,” I said. “Or his projection, I mean. I need to get close enough to him to communicate.”

“Where is he?” Hendriks said.

“Aquatic Park.” Spare14 waved vaguely at the north-facing window. “Just down the hill. They’ve disguised his
travel tank as a milk wagon, or so Personnel told me earlier today, but I believe he’s out in open water.”

I considered my memory of his projected image. I felt, very distantly, an impression of his physical presence and realized that he’d made a link between us when he’d transferred Qi. “Not anymore,” I said, “the fishing fleet’s coming in. Too dangerous. If they spotted him—”