Napier's Bones (8 page)

Jenna rubbed at
her wrist. A quick glance over told Dom that the blood was gone and that the
hole he had pricked in her skin couldn’t be seen. She leaned back and closed
her eyes, and Dom turned his attention to the road ahead.

The ride was
long but peaceful, and after a few hours Dom began to relax again. They stopped
twice for gas, once more for another toilet break, and any food they ate was
takeout, greasy burgers or day-old sandwiches in the car, Dom washing them down
with Coke, looking for the caffeine to help keep him sharp. He kept Coltrane
playing in the background, and after an attempt to talk more about numbers was
rebuffed by Jenna—“Right now I don’t want to think about that stuff”—they made
small talk, mostly about where they’d grown up, what school had been like, her
job, and their favourite sports teams, hers being the Denver Broncos and Dom’s
the Boston Red Sox, while Billy professed to not liking sports very much at
all.

It was summer,
and the days were still long, so after about eight hours, when they finally
pulled up to the border, the sun was still fairly high. Jenna had been driving
since the last stop, and after she parked the car at the end of the fairly
lengthy line of vehicles waiting to cross over, they got out and stretched for
a few minutes, standing on the pavement and trying to enjoy the fresh air
riding somewhere underneath the fumes from all the running engines. When the
line moved again they traded places, Dom back in the driver’s seat, and this
time they stayed in the car, inching forward every couple of minutes, the only
scenery a few weathered buildings that mostly belonged to small-time customs
brokers, and beyond those miles and miles of empty farmland on both sides of
the border.

After a little
more than forty-five minutes, they were at the border station showing their new
passports to the woman on duty. She entered information into her computer,
asked a couple of perfunctory questions, then waved them through. As Dom pulled
out he heard a distant, high-pitched squeal coming from behind, and he and
Jenna turned their heads in time to see a sequence of numbers, rock-solid and
built like a meteorite followed by a scorching-hot tail, plummet from the sky
to the south and plough into the red Volvo three back from the truck now at the
border station. The Volvo flipped violently into the air, its trunk buckled
under the weight of the numbers’ punch, and landed on its side, but already the
numbers had bounced to the next car, a white Taurus, crashing through its back
windshield and rebounding up through the roof, scribing a path with a smaller
angle to the silver pickup at the head of the line and smashing this time
through the hood, pinning it to the road, its box and rear wheels raised a foot
or more off the pavement. People everywhere were scrambling from their cars,
and border guards from both the Canadian and American sides were running to the
scene. Sirens were screaming somewhere in the distance. Dom pushed the
accelerator pedal to the floor and at the same time watched through the
rearview mirror as the numbers, now a compact ball with no tail, leapt up high
into the sky, leaving the truck to drop its rear with a crash to the road. An
RCMP cruiser whipped by them on the way to the border, lights flashing and
siren dopplering, numbers from the sound shift splattering up against the
windshield like bugs, briefly occluding his vision before fading away.

“I thought you
said we were protected!” yelled Jenna.

“We were!” He
shook his head and corrected himself. “We are. Maybe these new passports were
too
new, maybe that’s what signalled them. Looking for something never used
before.”

“More numbers,”
said Billy, pointing to the sky ahead of them.

“Oh, shit.”

Two dark and
ominous tornadoes were descending from a sunny, cloudless sky; as they watched,
the twisters wound their way down and touched the ground, two fidgeting stains
smearing across an otherwise perfect expanse, kicking up soil and garbage and
rocks and all sorts of other detritus in their paths. Rather than wind and
cloud, though, these tornadoes were comprised of immense quantities of numbers,
patterns, strings and formulae. Both tornadoes danced and gyrated across a
landscape of golden wheat, getting into position to catch Dom and Billy and
Jenna as they drove through.

“What do we do?”
asked Jenna.

“Here!” yelled
Billy, taking the wheel from Dom’s control and turning right onto a paved
secondary highway. For a second Dom tried to wrestle back control of the wheel,
and the car swung across the lane into the path of an oncoming combine, but
they managed to get their act together and the car back into the right lane. A
sheepish Dom watched the farmer in the combine as he leaned out the window to
give them the finger.

“Give me more
warning next time,” said Dom. He wiped sweat off his forehead and glared at
himself in the mirror.

“Sorry,” replied
Billy. “But you were so busy looking at the numbers I didn’t think you’d seen
the road.”

Jenna leaned
across the back seat and looked out the rear window. “They’re still following
us!” Her voice was panicked.

A sign flicked
by, naming towns and distances. “I have an idea,” said Dom. “We get there in
time, I think we can shake this freak one last time.” He gunned the engine and
the car’s speed climbed to 100.

“What if a cop
catches you?” asked Jenna. “If we get stopped there’s no way we’ll beat those
things.”

Dom spit on his
hand, leaned forward and smeared the saliva across the inside top of the
windshield. “There’s enough numbers in there from what the wire put into my
body that it should mess up any radar gun,” he replied. “If not . . .” He paused
for a second, then shrugged. “Well, we’ll deal with it when it comes, I
suppose.” He sounded calmer than he felt.

“There’s another
sign coming up,” said Billy. Dom slowed down enough to make sure he could read
it; there was a diner just a couple minutes ahead. He smiled.

“What?”

He glanced over
at Jenna, who was watching him now instead of the number tornadoes, even though
she was still hanging over the back of the seat. “A plan,” he said. “Get out
your driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, that new
passport, and anything else that has a number on it.”

The parking lot
for the diner was dirt and gravel, and he spun up rocks and soil as he pulled
into a parking spot between two large pickup trucks with roll bars and
mud-caked sides. They dashed out of the car and ran for the doors, the
tornadoes cutting swaths through wheat fields as they approached, their roar
outside almost as overwhelming as the sound the search numbers had made down in
Utah.

Inside was a
young girl working as a waitress, blonde hair, tight jeans and a white t-shirt,
and two older men sitting in a booth, one wearing a John Deere hat, the other
with his faded-brown cowboy hat dangling from the coat hook on the post beside
him; both wore faded jeans, one in a checked shirt, and one in a striped shirt
and boots. All three stared at Dom and Jenna as they ran in, but before the
waitress could ask if they needed any help—and Dom could see the prospect of
helping either one of them didn’t excite her too much, seeing how they both
likely looked a little wild and freaky right then—Dom grabbed Jenna’s hand and
dragged her over to the booth nearest the other side of the door. “Give me your
ID,” he whispered, then ran and grabbed the salt containers from all the tables
along that side of the door, twisted off the tops, and spilled their contents
onto the striped plastic tablecloth.

“Hey!”
shouted the waitress. “You can’t do that!”

Dom heard the
two men get up from their table, their boots clopping on the floor as they
approached to back the girl up. He pulled out his wallet and peeled off ten
American twenty dollar bills, thrust them toward the girl. “This’ll pay for the
mess and your time, okay?” Outside, the first number twister had just broken
through the wheat field and was approaching the road. The sound of it was so
deep Dom felt as if his heart was being squeezed by an angry, pulsating fist.

The waitress
took the money, peered at a couple of the bills, then shrugged and nodded. Both
men turned back to their table, shaking their heads and commenting on the
couple of “fucked-up Americans.” The waitress, though, just pocketed the money
and kept watching. “Art project,” said Dom. His voice sounded high-pitched and
frantic to his own ears. He hurriedly wiped the salt across the table, making
sure it was spread out as evenly as possible. Then, after closing his eyes for
one frantic second to envision the pattern he was looking for, he began to draw
a line in the salt with his finger, connecting the entry point from the corner
of the table closest to the door with a hole he rubbed into being in the very
centre of the table, using a maze very much like Pictish rings he’d studied up
on just a year ago. The job was fast and sloppy, accompanied by lots of
mutterings of “Hurry” from both Jenna and, somewhat more sotto voce, Billy; he
looked up to see that the first twister was now in the parking lot and the
second was just beginning to cross the road, both of them breaking up and
settling into smaller patterns, no less deadly because of the change in size.

He did a couple
of last-second corrections and grabbed all of Jenna’s ID from her hand, quickly
smeared the numbers away and shook them off the cards and into the hole in the
middle of the salt maze, did the same for his own ID, then grabbed Jenna by the
hand and pulled her back to the counter. The waitress stepped back with them,
and let out a loud shriek when the door to the diner banged open and the first
numbers rushed in, fluttering and spinning madly around the ceiling, the bass
roar changing almost instantly into a high-pitched drone, this time a plague of
numerate locusts. Jenna ducked and tucked her head into Dom’s chest, and he put
his arm around her, a natural reaction he was surprised to find he
possessed—and it was him, not Billy—and the waitress walked quickly over to the
booth where the two farmers still sat, obviously not sure why the doors had
opened like that and why she was feeling so weirded out, but likely sure she
wanted to be away from Dom and Jenna. Dom found himself briefly wondering if
moments like this were what influenced stories about poltergeists and ghosts.

With
a pulsating scream, numbers from the second twister rushed into the diner, the
interior now filled with a variety of black and wiry shapes and sizes, but so
far the mojo Dom and Jenna were wearing on their wrists kept a safe bubble
around them, and eventually the air began to clear and the numbers fell into
Dom’s makeshift maze, all of them starting at the corner entrance, all of them
aware, or as aware as directed numbers could be, that the specific strings of
numbers they were targeting were somewhere in the centre of the maze, but all
of them also reduced to having to count every single last grain of salt as they
went by.

“It’s working,”
said Dom, and he hustled Jenna out the door and into the car. Within seconds,
they were back on the road and speeding away from the diner.

Aside from the
arrhythmic thumping of the tires driving over asphalt patches in the highway,
everything was silent for awhile. Jenna leaned across the back of her seat
again to watch for anything following them, and Dom and Billy scanned the sky
ahead, but eventually they decided they could relax. Jenna turned around and
leaned forward, her head in her hands. “What exactly did you do that time?”

“There are
certain designs that attract numbers. The one I did was a kind of Pictish ring;
when the numbers sense it, they have to get inside and follow it to the end.
The salt is a little trick I picked up from one of my anonymous online pals.
Until an absolute quantity of salt crystals has been settled on, it’s an
unstable group.”

“Unstable?”

Dom shook his
head. “I don’t pretend to understand, but I know part of the reason it works is
because of the mathematical properties inherent in a crystal. This guy—at
least, I assume it was a guy—compared it to some sort of quantum effect, said
that the numbers coming after you have this insatiable need to know exactly how
many crystals there are, and that until they do it can go either way for them.
If the numbers go to the centre of the ring without doing the counting, then
the ring collapses in on them, just kinda eats them. As for our ID, scraping
the numbers off and shaking them into the centre of the ring means that they
can’t track us that way anymore, because that’s what the search numbers were
smelling. They had to go to the ring, because our numbers were hiding inside
it, and no matter how strong these fuckers are, they can’t convince the numbers
to avoid it and keep looking for us.”

“Search numbers
always have a little bit of autonomy,” said Billy. “But they’re pretty
predictable, as well. If you have the time, there are several ways to set up
little traps for them, devices that will lock them in place long enough for you
to get away. But as we saw down in Utah, usually time isn’t on your side.”

“So where do we
go now?”

“North, to
Edmonton. Most folk in the States know about Calgary, so that’s likely where
she—they—will be watching, but there aren’t many who pay attention to anything
further north.”

Jenna rolled the
window down about an inch and leaned back, her head turned to the right. Dom
couldn’t tell if she had closed her eyes or was just watching the world go by,
so he kept quiet, surveyed the surrounding landscape, the fields of wheat
standing tall and still in the calm air. Off in the distance pump jacks worked
oil or gas up from deep underground, swaying back and forth like slow-bucking
broncs, and releasing ancient integers that hadn’t been seen since the time of
dinosaurs, the numbers briefly rustling back and forth in the air before
dropping back to the ground and trying to dig their way back to their zone of
fossilized comfort. Dom had tried to capture and use some of those numbers,
once, but their forms had been so severely altered by time and pressure that
they had been virtually unrecognizable to him, resulting in a minor backlash
that had given him a square inch patch of rough, pebbly skin on his right thigh
that had lasted for weeks and, despite copious amounts of ointment, had
remained itchy as hell for weeks more after it had disappeared.