“Why, what is this?” cried the baron. “This must be the young man the Brotherhood of Moloch was raving about.”
Myron, God bless him, lacks the ability to blend in anywhere except a trauma ward.
“You were supposed to speak at a conference, no? Where are you going now? Speak up, young man. You look so startled, your mouth is like my blood, for it is
a positive O.
” He laughed hysterically.
“Nowhere,” Myron said.
“We really should go, your lordship,” I said, doling the honorific out as a lagniappe to flatter him, but refusing to go so far as to give it a capital letter. Perhaps, therefore, it was not good enough for him, and he kept talking.
“You’re heading west, aren’t you? You must be, for you have come from the Michigan states. And you are dressed so warmly. It must not be to the Southwest you are going, for it is warm there.”
Myron hummed nervously.
“San Francisco, perhaps? But no, your eyes betray you; it is not San Francisco. Seattle? Portland? Ah, Portland! Arthur, you should tell your charge not to be so obvious. His mouth does not twitch, perhaps due to nerve damage, but in his eyes, his naked desire for Portland is so evident.”
“Fine,” I said, “you got us, you’re a caution, Baron. Now come on, kid, let’s get started. It’s a long drive.”
The baron said, as we left, “Gang aft eagle.” He was laughing uproariously again.
“What does that mean?” Myron asked as we locked ourselves in our room.
I was packing up the typewriter. “It means the best laid plans don’t always work out. Also, he’s an idiot.” I was so distracted as we headed for the car that I accidentally paid the hotel bill.
Myron couldn’t make a journey without imagining himself a Jules Verne character, so he was distracted with all of that, but me, I was worried. It was a straight shot along I-80 W from Chicago through Grand Island to Sacramento, and it wouldn’t take much skill with a map and a ruler to extrapolate our actual destination. On the other hand, veering north was out of the question: the baron was already on his ham radio telling everyone we were aiming for Portland. But veering south was also out of the question, as any fool who knew that we knew the baron knew we were supposed to head north would assume we would head south in reaction. Probably the smartest thing to do would be to turn back, but I didn’t want to run into the Everblums again. Just to be safe, first chance I had I stopped at a post office and mailed all my notes to my Boston PO box.
Myron apologized for giving away his secret, but I told him not to worry about it. He was just too honest, was all.
I went fast—everyone goes fast on this highway, there’s nothing to slow down for—and I would have gone faster except the Bug was pretty old. We hit Salt Lake City at nightfall, and I kept on driving. It was dawn, an hour outside of Reno, when a bat came down and buzzed the windshield. I knew what such auspices augured, so I pulled over. The bat wheeled around and landed next to the car and became a scrawny, naked, middle-aged man with a face like a leather mask. I rolled down the window. It was Allambee.
“I’ve got a message from Angel, mate. It’s about the car,” Allambee said. He always started any dialogue with a
mate
or two, to remind you he was Australian.
“Tell him if it was a gift, I thank him for it; and if it was a loaner, I’m not done with it yet,” I said.
“He wants it back. I don’t think he’s cranky, mate, he just wants it back. He said to drive it to Campanile, and he’ll meet you there, probably tomorrow.”
“Where’s Campanile again?” I asked, although I knew perfectly well. It was a few miles north, past the reservoir, along a road we’d already passed—just where Allambee said it was. “He’ll be there tomorrow, then?” I asked. “No need for me to go right away?”
“Nah, mate. You might catch some drama if you go on, though. There’s a whole fleet of bullymen up ahead.”
“What’s a bullyman?” Myron asked. Allambee ignored him.
“He means there’re a lot of cops up ahead,” I explained. “Maybe I’ll go right to Campanile now. I don’t know where the registration for this heap is, and I wouldn’t want anything to get impounded,” I said, “before I can deliver the car in Campanile.”
Allambee just shrugged. “No worries,” he said. “Mate.” And then he was flying away.
“Are the cops after us?” Myron asked when he was gone.
“It’s plausible,” I said. I’d cut a few corners in my life.
“And is this guy really going to meet you in Campanile?”
“It’s plausible,” I said.
“So you think it’s safe?”
“No, I think it’s a trap, but it’s a plausible one.”
“I think it’s a trap, too,” Myron said. “He never even looked at me. Everyone always looks at me.”
Before,
he didn’t add, looking away.
I was testing the wind with my hand, and it was blowing strong, maybe even strong enough to cover our tracks behind us. “I think it’s a trap,” I said, “because I always think it’s a trap. But here’s the plan. We’ll go off the road and drive across the desert, along the reservoir spillway. This has the advantage of being the most direct route to Campanile, in case there’s a bat watching us start off. I doubt if he’ll follow us far, though, he must be tired out from flying around all night looking for us. After we get to the reservoir, we drive the car right in. Then we spend the next three or four days underwater, breathing through this cardboard tube, until the whole thing gets called off. Then we walk to Campanile and get something to eat. It’s the last place they’d expect us to be.”
“There’s only one tube,” Myron said.
I gunned the engine. “We’ll take turns,” I said. I realize what I was proposing sounded crazy, but I’d gotten out of many a scrape before by simply waiting someplace extremely uncomfortable, like a refrigerator or the bottom of an outhouse, until everyone else got bored with looking. The worse the place was, the less likely anyone would think you could spend any time, let alone the month I spent under the outhouse, there. “Anyway, it’s not like we can actually drown.”
This was my plan, and it turned out to be a terrible one. Driving across the desert I had to roll up all the windows, because the wind was kicking dust and sand into the car, and with the windows up—there was no air conditioning—the car became unbearably stifling.
“Is that the reservoir?” Myron asked, looking out his window. “There’s no water in it.”
“That’s just some kind of secondary reservoir. If the first one fills up, they can send the runoff down the spillway, and it fills up this one. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of water when we get there.”
“I was hoping it would be dry,” pouted Myron, but I ignored him. I eased over now to drive along the edge of the spillway, along the concrete lip where our tracks were hardest to see in the thin spray of shifting sand. We were only a couple hundred yards from the reservoir and our aquatic adventure, and the ground was sloping upward gently, when suddenly my nose twitched, and something behind a bush up ahead, in the shadow of the bush, something that I had thought was a rock, turned out to be a man hiding under a gray duster. He threw the duster off and took a step and turned into an enormous bison, which charged forward. I stepped on the gas, but the car, the car was not so fast, and its wheels were still spinning for traction in the dusting of sand when two thousand pounds of bison crashed inexorably into the side of the car, right behind my seat. We skidded sideways over the steep edge of the spillway, which was, of course, dry, so our tumble down was very painful. I dragged myself painfully and a little bloodily out the shattered driver’s side window of the upside-down car, reached in for my duffle bag, and then helped Myron crawl across and avoid the glass. He was still holding his duffle bag, its cloth handle gripped tightly and probably unconsciously in one hand.
The spillway was festooned with foot-high concrete cones sticking up from the ground. As I understand it, water coming into the spillway from the reservoir would hit the cones, which was supposed to dissipate the kinetic energy of the flood. The spillway was only fifteen feet deep, but the car, after flipping over, had landed on the field of concrete cones, and they had punched right through the roof, battering the two of us. Myron had gotten it worse; he was bleeding rather badly from his head and wasn’t making much sense.
“Kid, we’ve got to get going,” I said. I pulled him over to the far side of the spillway, his duffle bag dragging behind him, to where there was a metal ladder in a shallow recess. But when I grabbed the lowest rung the whole ladder came free and fell over backwards, breaking apart into three pieces on the ground. The trap was a good one. I looked around quickly: there were other ladders every fifty feet or so, but they were probably also rigged. As a binturong I could climb the walls, of course—binturongs can climb anything red pandas can climb, and red pandas can climb anything—but there was no way to bring Myron with me. Our only hope, I figured, was to head toward the reservoir and climb the stepped embankment to the release gate; we should be able to clamber out from there. It was when I turned in that direction that I saw her. Ten feet away. The rising sun was striking her left side, casting deep shadows across half her face. She was wearing a white cotton dress, and even at the bottom of the spillway there was enough wind to billow it out and blow her short hair back and forth in her face. It was Mignon Emanuel.
“Myron,” I whispered, suddenly thinking of something I wished I had thought of days ago. “This tube hasn’t left your sight since you got it, right? No one could have pulled a switcheroo on us, right?”
But Myron was too dazed to say anything coherent. He kept babbling and making horrible groaning sounds. Then Mignon Emanuel spoke.
“Myron. Arthur,” she said, with a nod for each.
It was disconcerting, even after hearing what Myron had told me about her abilities, to be in the presence of a therianthrope and feel nothing, no comforting or warning tingle. It was like she wasn’t there at all. “Angel’s expecting us,” I told her, just in case that would do some good.
At Mignon Emanuel’s side was a purse, and she reached in and removed a furry severed head.
“Is that a dog?” Myron asked at last, shaking his head.
“It’s a coyote,” I said. “It’s Angel Sanchez.”
“Angel Sanchez is a coyote?” Myron asked. Like I said, he’d hurt his head and wasn’t thinking straight.
“Is the lion here?” I asked. I admit I was terrified.
“No. Benson has left his employ and is assisting me now.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Lynch was the one I was really worried about.
“I would first like to say that I’m sorry all this was necessary,” Mignon Emanuel said. “I hope you understand that I bear you no personal animosity, Arthur.”
“Bear?” Myron said, suddenly remembering where he was. “Watch out, she can turn into a bear.” The blood was flowing so freely from his head that it completely covered one eye. It got into his mouth as he talked, and he had to spit it out.
“I know,” I said.
“And, Myron, I do apologize that it has come to this.”
“Are you going to kill us?” Myron asked.
“What? Why, of course not, Myron. I’m here to help you, just as I always have been. I make no claims to altruism, although I am personally fond of you. You understand that I am in need of you, just as I flatter myself that you are in need of me.” She took a step forward.
“You killed Spenser!” Myron shouted at her.
“Spenser and I had a feud of long standing. That had little to do with you, Myron. There are things you don’t know about
Alces alces,
the moose. You would not blame me if you knew all I knew.”
“He’s the only person I’ve met in the last six months who didn’t just lie to me all the time!” Myron was crying now. He was so upset that he forgot to add what he had clearly meant to, which was
except for Arthur
or
present company excluded.
“Myron, I only lied to you for your own good. I need you to help me to bring an end to all this violence. We spoke before of unifying our people. We can unify them under your banner. Even if we know you’re not the chosen one, no one else knows that.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t all of you leave me alone?”
Up ahead I could see someone naked, probably Benson, standing up at the reservoir. Doubtless, if anything went wrong here, he could open the floodgates and fill the spillway with a wall of water. Anyone in the path of the flood would be pulped. It wouldn’t kill us, of course, but it would be easy for Benson to follow the spillway down to the second reservoir and fish the bodies out to finish us off. A thirty-pound binturong stands little chance against a bear, but Benson’s hand on the trigger made sure even any mismatched combat that took place wouldn’t be a fair fight.
Mignon Emanuel, meanwhile, said, “You’re too special to be left alone.” She took another step forward and held out her hand, bending forward at the waist. “Your friend Arthur can leave, no harm will come to him.”
Myron was sniffling beside me. I liked the sound of some of this, but just to be safe, I had reached into my duffle bag. Assuming no one had pulled a switcheroo—assuming the maneuver I had practiced years ago I was still proficient at—I had pried off the cap at one end of the tube, and I could feel the wadded-up tinfoil inside.
“I’m not the only one who needs you, Myron,” Mignon Emanuel said. “Don’t let us all down.”
“I don’t believe you anymore,” Myron screamed, and punched her in the face.
For a moment we all stood frozen. It was not a very good punch—Myron would never have strong arms, and he didn’t really know what he was doing—but he did catch Mignon Emanuel completely by surprise. Finally, very slowly and deliberately, Mignon Emanuel said, “No one in a thousand years has struck me with impunity. I hope you will take it as a token of my esteem that I am willing to forget this has happened.”
“I hate you,” Myron screamed, and punched her again, more confidently this time, and right in the nose, from which descended a trickle of red.
Mignon Emanuel’s face darkened into something truly terrifying. Rearing up, she roared, “If you have drawn blood, the binturong will die.”