The Broken Universe (26 page)

If a busybody like Herbert didn’t suspect a thing, then Prime was safe to assume no one had. He returned to the bedroom, rummaging through the closet. He thought he’d found something when he found a box on the upper shelf of the closet, but it turned out to be only a bundle of old bills and a hundred dollars in cash. The bottom drawer of the dresser yielded another gun and a box of bullets. Prime let them be. He didn’t want to be in possession of the gun of a missing person, even though the gun could have been unregistered. No, he was tired of police scrutiny.

The bedroom revealed nothing of Corrundrum’s true nature. But there had to be something. Corrundrum would have kept notes, information, details of his life among the natives of universe 7533.

Prime spied an air vent. He found a chair and unscrewed the fasteners of the vent with his pocketknife. Nothing but dust awaited him. The other vents and ducts contained nothing. He tapped all the walls, looking for hollow areas. He lifted all the pictures on the walls. There appeared to be no extra space unaccounted for in the unit. Nothing.

Prime simmered. He couldn’t come back. He had one chance at this. After he’d visited the apartment once, he didn’t dare be seen there again. Especially with Jerry Herbert’s watchful eyes on the neighborhood.

He scanned the apartment again. He didn’t want to start tearing open cushions or ripping out walls. He’d prefer his visit remain undetectable. Though Herbert knew he was here.

Herbert … What had he said of Corrundrum? Always ready to go. With a ready bag. Where?

Prime looked at the hooks on the wall in the kitchen. House keys were in Prime’s pocket, but there was a key ring for a car. Corrundrum had a car. Prime had known that.

Prime exited the front door and stared at the long row of garages. Which was his? Prime turned, saw Herbert looking at him from behind his shades. He motioned at the old man.

A moment later, Herbert appeared on his doorstep.

“Yeah?”

“Kent wanted me to check his car, turn the battery,” Prime said. “But he didn’t tell me which garage was his.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Herbert said, nodding, glad to be needed. “Right next to mine. Number forty-five, right there.” He pointed at one of the garages.

“Thanks.”

A streetlight cast blue light on the lock, but there were only three keys on the ring he’d lifted from Corrundrum. The lock turned with the first key and he pulled up the garage door. Inside was the car Corrundrum had driven when he’d found him in Toledo. Prime unlocked the car door and popped the trunk.

Inside was a duffel bag.

Prime unzipped it, but the contents remained in shadow in the faint light of the streetlamp. It looked like clothes, another gun, money in a wad.

“Is it starting?” Mr. Herbert called from his doorway across the parking lot.

“Uh,” Prime said. Shit. He couldn’t walk out of the garage with the duffel if he hadn’t walked in with it. “Yeah, maybe dead battery.”

“It’s been four months. He should have asked me to start it.”

Prime pulled the duffel from the trunk and threw it into the backseat. The dome light came on weakly. Where was his flashlight? He’d left it in the apartment, damn it.

He pocketed the cash. Tossing the clothing to the floor of the car, he dug into the bag. The gun landed with a thud.

“I got cables,” Mr. Herbert yelled. “I can give you a jump.”

Prime’s hand found a book—a dog-eared notebook.

He pulled it out, opened it, and flipped through the pages. Line after line of symbols and characters that weren’t the Latin alphabet. The numbers were, however, Arabic. Sequences of four and five digits. Universe labels?

He tucked the notebook in the small of his back.

There was nothing else in the duffel.

He zipped it up, shut the car door, and reached up to close the garage.

“Yeah, you let a battery sit for that long, you’re asking for trouble.” Herbert stood right there, his robe flapping over his knobby knees. He had a ring of keys in his hands.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Did it turn over?”

“Uh, no.”

“Let me get my car and we’ll try to jump it,” Herbert said. “We’ll have to push it out of the garage to get it close enough. Just have the two-meter cables.”

“No, I’ll just call AS,” Prime said.

“AS?”

“Auto Service,” Prime said.

“What’s that? Like Three As?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s like that,” Prime said quickly. Too many subtle differences were there to trip him up. He turned the lock on the door. “I’ll have ’em come by in the morning. No need for you to bother, Mr. Herbert.”

“No bother, but okay,” he said. “Have the professionals come on out, I guess.”

“Thanks, bye now.”

Prime walked back to Corrundrum’s apartment. He didn’t want Herbert to see which car was his.

He took one more look around the apartment for any sign of his invasion. There was his flashlight. Some burglar he was. Prime peered out the window. Herbert’s door was still open. Prime took the notebook out and opened it to the first page.

The strange characters filled the page. Numbers were at the top of the page. 7533. The universe code. Corrundrum knew where he was. The date was also clear. The first entry of this journal was dated fifteen years earlier. Fifteen years Corrundrum had been trapped here.

Prime suddenly remembered more of Corrundrum’s story. He had tried to escape this universe. By traveling to the Serpent Mound. The book on his shelf made sense. He said there was a beacon there, whatever that meant, but there’d been an ambush of some sort. “A band of paths had the beacon area under surveillance,” he’d said. Paths?

But what Corrundrum had said that interested him the most was the idea of Prime artifacts. Corrundrum had had a hunch that Prime had a couple in his possession, that the device itself, broken though it was, was one as well. Corrundrum’s reaction to seeing the device, his description of the transfer devices he had used and Oscar’s and Thomas’s reaction. The device was something different, something special. So were the artifacts they’d collected from Billy Walder.

Prime opened the curtain a centimeter and checked for Herbert one more time. The man’s apartment door was shut. Prime turned off all the lights in Corrundrum’s apartment then locked the door behind him. He saw no one as he sauntered across the parking lot.

He wasn’t sure what he had in the notebook, but he had something. There was treasure—of all sorts—in the multiverse and now he had a clue of where to look.

CHAPTER
21

John stood on the campus of the University of Toledo in Universe 7539, recognizing a place he had never visited and faces that did not know him. 7539 had no John Rayburn or Casey Nicholson. Nor was there a Grace or Henry. But there was a woman here, at least one, and a little girl, who weren’t born here. The question at hand was, how would he find them?

“What do you remember now?” Casey asked. “Does being here help the memories?”

They stood on the footpath near the river. This is where he had transferred them. The woman had been shot by food looters, and the girl had broken her leg when she’d fallen down the slope to the frozen river. All for two cans of noodle soup.

“I think it was here,” he said. “I’m just not sure.”

He shut his eyes. He’d transferred the mother and daughter from 7538 to get here, huddled in the snow with the two. From winter to fall. From death to happy-go-lucky campus. Covered in blood, he’d asked someone to call the police, but the person had pointed him toward the emergency box.

He opened his eyes. There was the box. He’d called, waited for the ambulance, then run off to the field house to shower and rinse the blood from his clothes.

So he’d been about ten meters to the east of where Casey and he now stood. He walked toward the spot, weaving through the throng of students.

“Here,” he said to Casey. “We were right here.”

Casey looked down as if there would be a clue after two years. “Here?”

“Yeah.” He’d left Kylie and her mother there. Kylie! That was the little girl’s name. He couldn’t recall the last name, however. Smith? No, not that common. “I remember the little girl’s name.”

“That’s good. Do we search the papers with that? You know the date, right?”

“The date was October twenty-ninth,” John said. Five days after Prime had tricked him out of his life.

“That should narrow it down,” Casey said. “If we know the name and the date, we can find more. There had to have been stories written.”

“Yeah, there had to have been,” John agreed. A wounded body, a child with a broken leg. On an otherwise bucolic college campus. Yeah, there had to be news stories written.

“Come on,” Casey said, grabbing John’s arm. The journalism college had a building on the main quad. It published the University of Toledo newspaper—
The Dagger.
The main room had three microfiche readers and an archive of past issues.

“It’s called
The Knife
in this universe,” Casey said. “Huh.”

Casey sat down at one of the readers, while John thumbed through the cabinet of fiche. He found the year and then the day when he had passed through this universe two years prior. He hadn’t been here long. Just long enough to call the police and wash his clothes out.

The fiche was heavy in his fingers and felt as if it might rip. The top story was on the student council race.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Should we try the next day?” Casey asked.

“Oh, right,” John said with a laugh. “What was I thinking?”

He pulled the fiche for the next publication date, two days later.

“Here it is,” he said. The top story was about the shooting and attack on campus. It
had
been a shooting on campus, just not this exact one. John scanned the article, with Casey over his shoulder.

“Her name is Melissa Saraft,” Casey said.

“Yeah, Saraft, that’s the name. Melissa and Kylie Saraft.” John wrote the name down so he wouldn’t forget it.

“They’re looking for an unidentified witness who was seen fleeing the incident,” Casey said.

“That would be me,” John said. “They didn’t find me.”

“Let’s assume after two years they’ve given up the search.”

“Taken to General Methodist,” Casey said.

The next edition of the paper was the Monday following. John had already reached 7650 by then and was staying with the Rayburns, working as a farmhand. There was no new information in the follow-up story, nor the scathing editorials on campus safety.

“Nothing,” John said. “I doubt
The University of Toledo Knife
is the place to look for more information.”

Casey looked at the student sitting behind the desk in the reference room. “Maybe he knows what happened to the woman and her daughter.”

“He looks like a freshman,” John said.

“Let’s ask anyway.”

Casey walked over to the desk and asked the student, “Do you remember that shooting from two years ago? The one where the woman was shot and the little girl had a broken leg?”

The student rubbed his chin. “In October, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I remember the story,” he said. “She was shot, but it wasn’t a serious wound. But there was something else.” He tapped his chin. “I’m trying to remember. Hmmm. Ah, yes. She had psychological conditions. No family, no support system. There was a follow-up story, by Joe Cursky at
The Barker,
but that’s all I can remember.”

“Thanks,” Casey said. They left and sat on the steps overlooking the quad.

“It freaks me out when I see someone I know and they have no inkling who I am,” Casey said, as they watched the college students lounge or walk on the grass of the quad. Casey pointed. “She was in my dorm freshman year. He’s in my psychology class. Tried to ask me out.”

“You’d think he would remember that,” John said.

“You’d think.”

“Psychological conditions,” John said. “What do you think that means?”

“If you were shot and ripped from your universe, you might have some problems too.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Oh, hush. You had to do it. For her sake.”

“I know,” John said. “What now?”

“I think we need to talk to Joe Cursky. And we should check the white pages at the main library while we’re here,” Casey said.

“Right.”

The university library only had white pages for Lucas County, and there was no Saraft listed at all. But there was a number for Joseph Cursky and one for the news office at
The Toledo Barker
newspaper.

From the pay phone at the student union they called the news office. It was only a little after noon on a weekday.

“Barker News, how may I redirect your call?” a voice said.

“Joe Cursky, please,” John said.

“Mr. Cursky is on assignment. Would you like to leave a message?”

“No, thanks.”

“Do you think he’s at home?” Casey asked.

“What does ‘on assignment’ mean?” John asked. He dialed the number they had for Cursky.

“Yeah?”

“Joe Cursky?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Joe Cursky the reporter for
The Barker
?”

“Yeah, who the hell is this?”

“I’m looking for Melissa Saraft.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“She was shot on the University of Toledo campus two years ago. Her little girl broke her leg,” John said.

There was a pause. “Yeah, she had some problems. I remember. Thought she was abducted by aliens or from some other universe. Something crazy.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Anything would help us.”

Cursky sighed. “Yeah, right. Who are you?”

“We’re friends of hers, we’ve been trying to reach her.”

“She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any family. Total blank slate. Figured she was on the run from the mob or something. Made her crazy. I remember now. She made up a weird story about nuclear war. She was in a hospital for a while. I talked to her a couple times.”

“Any idea where she is now?”

“So you can take her back to whatever she ran away from? No way, bud.”

“I helped her get away the first time,” John said.