Prometheus Road (22 page)

“Is the boy with you?”

“What boy?”

“Your nephew. Since you’re here, I assume you’ve been escorting him around the region.”

“Tom is in the wasteland. He doesn’t travel well.”

Tom crouched and took a step back into deeper shadow as the hum beneath the train got a little louder. He stroked Helix’s head, hoping the little dog would remain quiet under his arm.

“I see,” Hermes said doubtfully. “By the way, how did you get into this facility without my guards seeing you? Has your ability to disappear now been extended to your physical form, or are you just terribly clever?”

“I know things,” Magnus said with a shrug, taking another step back.

“I shall learn exactly what you know,” Hermes said as he casually stepped off the roof and dropped toward the floor in front of Magnus. “And then I’m going to kill you.”

A moment before Hermes reached the platform, Magnus threw himself into the nanoborg’s legs to knock him down.

Before Hermes could roll over and see Tom, the freight door slid closed, obscuring Tom’s view. He moved toward the small porthole in the door and got a brief glimpse of Hermes’ black-gloved fist slamming into Magnus’s face.

The train rapidly picked up speed. Tom staggered, trying to stay on his feet, and barely managed to set Helix safely down on the floor before he fell on his face. Tom and Helix slid along the ridged metal deck, inadvertently racing each other to the back wall of the freight bay. Tom managed to turn his body to hit the wall with his feet, but that was his last horizontal movement. The acceleration steadily increased, buckling his legs and squashing him against the rear wall. Gasping, he worked to straighten his legs and pry his arms out from beneath his back, finally ending up with his back flat against the bulkhead, staring into the rumbling freight bay lit only by the tunnel lights shooting past the porthole at high speed. He rolled his eyes to one side to confirm that Helix seemed okay. He heard a gasping wheeze from his own body as he tried to drag air into his compressed lungs.

The train continued to accelerate along with the pounding of Tom’s heart. His view of the room narrowed to a small circle. Then the circle turned black.

WHEN Tom became aware of his surroundings again, he saw a gray wall moving vertically past his body. In his peripheral vision, he saw only gray fog. He felt almost as if he were back in the bay, floating facedown in a gentle current, his face shielded by the breathing mask as he watched the underwater landscape drift past. The difference here was that the colors had drained away. As an experiment, he raised his head. He was in a river of gray silt, floating past muddy gray banks dotted with rocks, broken bottles, rusty cans, and dead fish with milky eyes staring up at a shroud of gray sky. Rats scuttled along the banks, hopping from corroded hunks of gray machinery to random piles of moldy bones. Even the air smelled gray, full of soot and light streamers of smoke that smelled less like burnt wood and more like the unfiltered smoke from crematorium furnaces. The wind moaned through twisted, leafless trees that reached for the sky as if searching for remembered sunlight. The bleak landscape reminded Tom of Stronghold, but this place had a different character.

“Creepy. Don’t like it,” said the gray toad perched on Tom’s right shoulder. Since it was talking, Tom assumed it was Helix in a new dream disguise.

“Are these the Dead Lands?”

“No. The Dead Lands are nearby, and they’re more cheerful. This is the Acheron, river of pain, flowing with tears to carry the souls of the dead to the lakes of Hades for judgment.”

Tom hesitated. Looking up and down the river, he noticed gray human bodies partially concealed by drifting gray shrouds as they floated on their backs down the river. Their faces were indistinct, and they had no hair on their heads to help differentiate them. “Am I a dead soul?”

“You’re a traveler along the Road. You have a power that the unguided souls do not, and that power allows you the freedom to ignore boundaries, to seek the light or the dark places along the Road as you choose.”

The gray bodies had slowed into a bobbing traffic jam on a narrow section of the river. Tom drifted inexorably toward the dead floaters. If he remained on the surface, he would be pinned against them by the floaters coming down the river from behind, and the thought bothered him more than he cared to admit. “How did I get here? I didn’t choose to come here.”

The toad looked at Tom with a wise expression. “It was an accident. You were knocked unconscious, and your energy body doesn’t have enough experience to bring you to a favorite memory place along the Road. The train to Las Vegas is mirrored here as the river of pain; its route intersects the course of the Acheron as the river winds its way around the world.”

Tom remembered to look at his hands to gain more control over his environment. The ash gray appearance of his skin disturbed him. “How do we get out of here?”

“You wake up, or you cross from the river to the Road. Either way will work. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to go about it.”

Tom tried to concentrate on lifting his body from the water. When that didn’t work, he tried to focus on the memory of the diamond river he’d seen earlier, but the river of pain remained, inexorably flowing toward infinity. He looked back at the oncoming corpses drifting toward him, then glimpsed a dull silver cord attached to his lower back that stretched back up the river just underneath the surface. The toad gave him an encouraging look, so Tom turned and grasped the silver cord.

TOM opened his eyes and immediately noticed that his face was grinding across the steel deck toward the front of the freight car. The train slowed with occasional jerks, as if brakes were being applied and released. Helix walked along beside him, calmly watching him slide. Tom’s chin bumped over a recessed latch in the floor.

“You could have said something,” Tom said, pressing his palms against the floor to lift his head and slow his slide.

Helix gave Tom his usual wide-eyed stare of innocence.

Tom wished he’d remembered to ask the dream toad if there was any news of Magnus. If Magnus survived the attack by Hermes, he would most likely be sent to the rehab facility in Las Vegas, where Tom might be able to find a way to rescue him. If Magnus escaped, they would rendezvous with Lebowski at the casino bar, assuming Tom could find it. He didn’t want to think about the other possibility—that Magnus might have been killed on the platform by Hermes—the old man was too clever for that.

For now, Tom had to figure out how to avoid being captured when he reached his destination. Magnus had said there would be another way off the train, but he had assumed he would be with Tom to show him the way. The train slowed some more, and he was able to stagger over to the porthole window to look outside. The train crept toward the station platform, and he saw a cluster of armed guards waiting. They would see him as soon as the freight doors opened.

Rubbing his sore chin, he remembered the latch in the floor. On his hands and knees in the dim light, he crawled back along his sliding path until he found it. With a grunt, he lifted it to see the rails beneath the train and a six-foot drop to a concrete trench. Helix looked at Tom and took two steps back as if he knew what was coming.

“It’s okay, boy. I’ll protect you,” Tom said, gently taking Helix’s collar so he couldn’t dart away. He tucked the little dog into his shirt and swung his legs into the hole. He edged out farther, feeling the wind on his legs as he tried to position himself so he’d avoid the rail during his fall. He took a deep breath, angled the trapdoor so it would shut after he went through, and pushed off.

His shoulder struck the rail on his way down, knocking him off center, but he landed on his feet and rolled sideways so he wouldn’t squash Helix. The impact prompted a grunt from Tom and a small yelp from Helix, but it didn’t do any serious harm to either of them. His shoulder hurt now, pulsing in time with the headache that had returned to remind him of his deadline, but at least he was off the train. He took Helix out of his shirt, scratched him on the chest to calm him down, then set him on the floor so they could both run down the trench past the platform. With a loud hum, the train came to a halt and Tom heard the doors to the freight cars sliding open. Shouts and footsteps of the guards covered any noise he was making in the trench, so they continued running until they reached a short staircase to a service door on the opposite side of the train from the platform. The door was unlocked. Tom tucked Helix under his arm and proceeded up a dusty black staircase through hot, musty air. After eight flights, he was sweating. After fifteen flights, he was panting. The big drum in his head pounded at a quick tempo to accentuate the steady thump of his footsteps.

The door at the top of the stairs was marked as a fire exit. Hoping he wouldn’t set off any alarms after he’d gone to all the trouble of sneaking out of the train station, he gently pushed against the bar, then shoved the sticky door open. No alarms went off, but the bright sunlight on the other side of the door nearly blinded him, and the air felt as if he were stepping into a blast furnace. Squinting, he lurched out into an alley. Both ends of the alley looked almost the same, opening onto streets where flashing colored lights vied with the sunlight for domination of the visual landscape.

He had arrived in Las Vegas.

Choosing one end of the alley at random, he stepped out onto a main street, and it took a moment for him to work out what he was seeing. At odds with the flashing colored lights of a massive casino sign, most of the buildings on the street had been reduced to gray rubble. Walls covered with bright decorations stopped abruptly in jagged lines of broken masonry where ceilings had once stood. Long rows of broken windows looked down on the street from the taller structures like hundreds of hollow eyes watching his movements. Piles of rubble blocked the wide sidewalks in many places. In contrast to all of this was a throng of people, mostly naked, their bodies painted in solid colors of blue, silver, gold, red, and yellow. Three blue men led the long parade, capering about like drunken monkeys, beckoning onlookers along the sidewalk to join the parade. Many of the yellow people carried brass instruments on which they played a bouncy, well-rehearsed tune. Tom didn’t know enough about music to be able to identify the tune or its style, but the happy faces in the crowd and in the parade implied that this was some sort of a celebration. A lean young woman with red hair that matched her body paint took Tom’s hand and tried to pull him into the street to join them.

“What are you celebrating?” Tom asked the woman in red. He had to shout to be heard above the music.

“Being human,” she replied with a laugh. She tugged on his arm.

He resisted, preferring to move among the spectators and keep his clothes on. The red woman shrugged and moved on, blowing him a kiss as she danced away. Studying her finely sculpted form, Tom wondered if he was missing something.

He shook his head, looking up the street where the parade was gradually making its way north. Working his way through the crowd, he noticed that some of the spectators didn’t seem quite real, then he decided that his pounding headache and lack of sleep were affecting his perceptions. It would be best to ignore his surroundings and look for The Golden Fleece. He appeared to be in the correct part of town to find that particular casino, but the noise, the crowds, the music, and the lights were a spectacle far beyond what he had ever seen in person, and the whole experience was daunting. Was the rest of the country like this?

It took him about half an hour of walking with the parade before he finally saw the enormous blinking yellow letters over a casino entrance that spelled out “The Golden Fleece.” Beneath the casino name, the image of a happy-looking lamb with a sparkling gold coat of wool danced back and forth, with its front legs high in the air holding gold coins. Tinted dark blue windows at street level obscured whatever activities might be hidden inside the casino, but the front doors beckoned to the flocks of gamblers passing by with cool breezes blowing through the open portals. Signs painted on the windows advertised loose slots, loose women, and loose dwarves, but the meaning of these phrases was unclear to Tom. Jostled by two blue women on their way to join the parade, Tom headed for the front door, but he never made it.

With a horrible crash of breaking glass, the large tinted window beside Tom exploded outward, expelling a large man in a gray cloak. He somersaulted through the air, then landed flat on his back in the street with a loud grunt. His face was covered by his hood and a gray cloth mask, leaving only his bloodshot eyes exposed to the sunlight. Tom seemed to be the only person who thought that the man’s sudden appearance was unusual; multicolored people in the parade casually stepped over him on their way past, and the spectators just ignored the gray man, plucking bits of broken glass from their clothes as if this sort of thing happened every day.

Concerned, Tom dropped to one knee and felt for a pulse at the man’s neck. Helix sniffed at the man’s head and growled until Tom shook his head at the dog.

“Newton,” the man whispered, staring up at the sky with glazed eyes. “Devil spawn.”

Tom assumed the man was delirious, but at least he was breathing. “Why did they throw you through the window?”

“Wouldn’t give in,” he said through gritted teeth. “Wouldn’t sing ‘Danke Schoen’ for the drunk clodhoppers in the front row.” He stopped to cough and take another breath. “I’m an artist, man. I play the music in my blood. Can’t stand Wayne Newton.”

Tom thought this might be some sort of a code phrase. “Can you tell me how to find Lebowski?”

The man stiffened and rolled his eyes toward Tom for the first time. “Who wants to know?”

“I’m Tom Eliot. I was sent here by Magnus Prufrock.”

The gray man quickly rolled on his side and clapped his hand over Tom’s mouth. “Quiet, boy! Do not say that name out loud!”

Helix growled and lunged toward the man’s wrist, but Tom blocked the dog with his arm. Tom nodded, and the gray man removed his hand from Tom’s mouth, rolling onto his back with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know any Lebowskis. Go away and leave my broken bones here in the street for the painted ladies to step on. Such is the life of a musical prophet.”

Tom frowned. “I think you’re Lebowski.”

“And I think you’re a troublemaker,” said the gray man. Then his eyes glazed over again, and he suddenly began to slap his forehead with his hands. “Oh! The thunder is speaking to me!”

Tom raised one eyebrow and looked up at the clear blue sky, which nearly blinded him with its brightness. “What thunder?”

The gray man’s voice changed, lowering in pitch as he turned his head to yell at Tom with a distant expression in his eyes. “The blind seer Tiresias has a message for you, mortal! Come closer to hear his words!”

Frowning, Tom bent closer to the gray man, ready to jump away if he made any sudden moves. “Yes?”

“There is a fly in the pie! The rats rustle in their sleeping chambers, thinking thoughts of former glory, preparing for their final attack on the world built of human ego! Yet all is not lost, for a son will be born to divert the ravening hordes, and the people shall call him Agamemnon!”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Tom said, taking a step back as he stood up, “I have to meet someone in this casino.” The gray man didn’t seem especially dangerous—just crazy. It was probably the intense dry heat boiling his brain.

Tom turned to leave, but the man rolled on his side to grab Tom’s ankle. “Help me up, man. I can lead you to Lebowski.” His voice had returned to normal.

Tom eyed him dubiously, then helped him stand up. The man wobbled a bit, and it occurred to Tom that he might be drunk. Whenever the man tipped his head forward, a pair of large and complex silver earrings, delicate spirals within spirals, swung free of his cowl.

“I’m not drunk,” he said, as if he were reading Tom’s mind. “I hear the music of the spheres, and that requires Muse, the drug of amplification. When I smoke Muse, it works with my DNA to create my own unique musical style, projected through my earrings for all to hear when I perform.”

Tom guided the staggering man toward the front door of the casino. He didn’t really understand about the musical drug, and he might have asked more about it under different circumstances, but he had a job to do. “Do you perform with Lebowski?”