Spares (30 page)

I eventually seemed to find myself out of the exhaust and up a level, and from there I floundered my way into the service corridor and thus out toward my standard exit. The guys at the door bade me a cheery hello, but I couldn’t even see them by then. Everything was pressed in too hard, and everything was very black. I stumbled down cobbled streets which seemed to have turned into tunnels, aware that the world had shrunk because I could clearly see the curvature of the Earth, indeed had to walk carefully to avoid falling over because of it. Naturally, it was raining, and the clouds ahead were so full and dark it felt like early evening. The walls of the tunnel were punctuated at intervals by doors which periodically opened, releasing the sound of people eating and drinking in noodle bars. The sounds turned into little rabid noise creatures, which scuttled down the tunnel like mechanical rats. Then the door would shut again, leaving me in a world where sound had never existed except in the form of the light green spattering sound of falling rain.

I managed to distinguish Mal’s building from the un-differentiated mass around me, and hobbled up an infinite number of stairs, each about six feet tall. I got lost on one of them for a while, and then came to realize I was standing outside the door to Rat-face’s apartment, and that it was open. This struck me as curious, and I went inside, though I knew that a confrontation with another human being was the last thing I needed. Luckily, the problem didn’t arise, because Rat-face and his buddy had been murdered. Their faces had been rendered nearly unrecognizable by the application of something like a steam iron, and their internal organs were failing to live up to the first part of their name. It occurred to me that I might have done this in the last ten minutes, but the blood was dried and the smell was pretty unpleasant, so I decided that on balance I probably hadn’t.

By the time I made it to Mal’s I was feeling really, really bad. The second rush is the heavy one, and it knits up with every other such rush like a string of Christmas cards on a line. The sound of dead people talking was so loud and dark that I could barely see where I was going. I made it to the middle of Mal’s floor, got out my spike and another foil package, and chased the first dose with a little more. The idea is to round off the edges of the really bad stuff by coating it with some first rush; but it seldom works very well and is the slipperiest of all possible slopes. I slumped there for a while, surrounded by visions of blood and shit, then I checked out for a while.

When I heard someone at the door my eyes opened immediately, and it was only then I realized they’d been open all the time. I’d been very far away, inside somewhere distant and small and old, and my eyeballs were crispy from not blinking.

The door opened. A figure stood silhouetted against the dim light in the corridor. It took me a while to work out who it was. I wasn’t especially pleased.

“How the hell did you find me?” I slurred, my tongue clacking in my mouth like a stick against iron railings.

“Guys at the back entrance called Howie.” Vinaldi grinned. “Said, and I quote, ‘The big fucked-up guy is on the loose again.’ Howie reckoned this was the only place you could be, and he was right. Seen the mess downstairs?”

“It was Yhandim. I saw him with those guys a couple days ago.”

Vinaldi saw the opening, made the pitch. “He’s got the little girl and Nearly with him now.”

“I know,” I said. “This is not news to me.”

“Okay, well, you got to hurry. We let Ghuaji go, after Dath planted a tracker on him, and he’s just left New Richmond and is out in the Portal as we speak. An employee of mine has seen him get in a car, and he’s heading out into the wilds. He’s going home.” Vinaldi held a hand down to me. I didn’t take it.

“I’m still not going,” I said.

His voice was calm. “Yes, you are, Randall, and you know it. There’s a truck outside and I can see that I’m going to have to drive myself, which will be a first in about ten years, so get the fuck up and let’s get after him.”

“I don’t understand you,” I said, trying to climb to my feet. I still had no intention of going. I just wanted to give him a hard time on his own level. The walls moved alarmingly, and I almost didn’t go through with it. But once I was standing, going back down again seemed even harder. “Why don’t you sit tight in your fortress on one-eighty-five and let your men handle it? That’s what you pay them for. I tried to take you down, remember? Why are you hanging round giving me grief?”

“Atonement, Randall. You ever hear of the word?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it, and what does it have to do with you? You said yourself it’s their own stupid fault they got left in The Gap. Even if it wasn’t, everybody did bad things in there and it’s far too late to do anything about it now. You want to atone for something, atone for the drugs you sell that people like Shelley Latoya OD on, atone for the guys you’ve had whacked, and just leave me alone.”

By the time I finished I was shouting wildly. Vinaldi left a pause, and then spoke quietly and with finality.

“Come on, Jack,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”

I jerked my head to look up at him. Maybe it was the use of my first name, which appeared unconscious and unplanned, but what I saw in front of me was not Johnny Vinaldi, the gang lord and vicious thug who had half of New Richmond’s underworld in the palm of his hand. Instead, I saw just a man who was having to gear himself up to something he didn’t want to do. Something he was afraid of, possibly more so even than me. Someone who, for reasons of his own, was giving me an opportunity to be less of a waste of everybody’s time and patience.

I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide,
in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.

I leaned down unsteadily, picked up my drugs, and straightened again.

“Just understand one thing,” I told Vinaldi. “if you’re thinking of atoning to Yhandim, you’re taking the wrong guy along with you. When I find the man who’s got Nearly and Suej I’m going to tear his fucking head off.”

“That’s more like it,” Vinaldi said, slapping me on the back. “The old reasonableness we know and love.”

“Piss off,” I muttered. “Where’s this fucking truck?”

Four o’clock found us driving as fast as we dared through Covington Forge, through snow falling in flakes the size of small dogs. It was dark, the heating in Vinaldi’s truck didn’t work, and both of us were frozen. A bottle of Jack’s bought at a gas station in Waynesboro was trying its hardest to alleviate the season’s weather, but it was only a veneer at best. Vinaldi was pissed at me because he’d wanted an almond cappuccino. The gas station attendant and I had a good laugh about that. I guess it had been a while since Johnny’d had to deal with the real world.

The Matrix junction box at the town limits had burned out long ago and subsequently been used for target practice. Covington Forge was off the net, abandoned to the past and left to cannibalize itself. As Vinaldi steered through the deserted streets, I saw America itself as one big matrix: bright, dangerous cities crammed with sharp and needy people, interconnected by a spider’s web of highways and toll roads and bordered at the edges by the slow coasts peppered with perambulating old people. And in between, in the gaps, a sagging mass of flat line towns that hadn’t made it into the twenty-second century—alive and technically equal to everyone else, but actually breaking up, losing their
cohesion like skin on the face of someone who’s been very ill for a long time. The nose might still look sharp, the eyes bright, the cheekbones in place; but the flesh in between falls loosely between the peaks.

It wasn’t an especially profound observation, but then I was very cold. The buildings around us looked as if they agreed with me, and as if they were only too aware of their position in history. They looked pissed off, to be honest. The pavements were scarred, the walls bulged, the roofs a millimeter away from collapsing onto the fetid life within. It felt like we were driving over a corpse that was fermenting inside, but whose chest still rose and fell, and probably always would. It was great.

We’d thought maybe Ghuaji was meeting someone here, but as we followed his car from a distance it became clear that we were going straight through and out the other side. I was beginning to come down by then, though it still felt as if someone was slowly stirring my brains with a warm finger. Sounds were now distinguishable as such, and I believed that the majority of what I saw was real. For most of the afternoon what I’d seen had mainly consisted of a dark bulk of trees against mountainous hills, as we headed higher into the Appalachians. In the last of the afternoon light we’d piled up Interstate 64, through the glittering sprawl of Charlottesville and then higher into the beginnings of the Blue Ridge. After Waynesboro, Ghuaji had taken 81 Southbound, turning into Route 60 at Lexington, the roads getting smaller and smaller, away from what passes for civilization these days and into a murky area in between.

While Vinaldi drove in silence I’d busied myself by chain-smoking and watching the Positionex attached to the dashboard. This showed Ghuaji’s whereabouts as determined by a Global Positioning Satellite, mapped onto a layout of the local roads to within a couple of yards’ accuracy. Following him wasn’t going to be difficult. Working out what we had to do when we caught
up with him was, and that looked like it had to happen soon. Covington Forge is pretty much the end of the line.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Vinaldi muttered as we came out the other side of town into yet more countryside. “This is the land that time forgot. I can’t believe that at my time of life I’m driving down a road to nowhere, most particularly in this kind of weather.” His voice was steady, and betrayed to only a tiny degree the fact that irritation was not the only emotion he was currently struggling with.

“Christ knows,” I said, shivering suddenly in a whole body spasm. “From now on, there’s squat until you’re in West Virginia.”

Vinaldi grunted and stared out of the windshield with a kind of tense gloom, making no bones about the enmity he felt toward the gnarled trees and crags outside. Then I noticed that the readout on the Positionex indicated that Ghuaji had lessened his speed.

“Looks like he’s going to make a turn. Maybe we should get a little closer.”

“Got any more good advice?” Vinaldi muttered, his breath a cloud in front of his face, “like ‘Don’t run into the back of him’ or ‘Drink your coffee before it gets cold,’ not that we have any coffee because you bought whiskey instead, despite my very clear instructions?”

“There,” I said.

Vinaldi pulled the truck to a halt and peered out distractedly. I’d almost missed it. On the right side of the road, barely discernible in the snow and darkness, was a narrow road leading up into the hills.

“That’s not a proper road,” Vinaldi said in the snow-padded silence.

I looked at the map, and saw that he was right. Another hundred yards up the mountain on the left was an exit for 616. On the right there was nothing, and yet the car had clearly gone that way. The light on the Positionex showed it heading off up toward what used to be Douthat State Park.

I shrugged, and Vinaldi turned the wheel and took us onto the road, There was no sign at the top of it, and the surface was completely covered with snow except for the tracks left by Ghuaji’s vehicle. Trees pressed hard into either side, much closer and thicker than you would expect. Vinaldi stopped the truck again for a moment, peering eloquently out into the wilderness.

“You’re sure about this,” he said, dubiously.

“Johnny, I’m not sure of anything. But if we’re following Ghuaji then we have to follow him, and this is where he went.”

And so we set off, keeping to the middle of the road to avoid the branches which stretched halfway across. Using the Positionex, I tried to ensure that we kept a fixed distance between us and Ghuaji, and this meant driving a little more quickly than either of us would have liked—though still not exactly fast. Any quicker than thirty miles an hour sent the tires spinning and the truck sliding toward the side of the road. Any slower and the truck threatened to throw its hand in with gravity and slip back down the steep incline. Vinaldi had the headlights turned as low as possible, but I was still worried that sooner or later Ghuaji was going to spot them.

The slope began to level off about ten minutes later. The snow had slackened by then and through the slowly drifting flakes we could see a stretch of straight road in front of us. We also saw a smallish tree growing up out of the left-hand lane, oddly lit by the truck’s headlights. As we passed it, Vinaldi risked turning toward me.

“This is weird,” he said.

“Tell me about it.” I noticed something on the side of the road and leaned forward to squint through the windshield. An old shack, obviously unused in decades. And in front, the remains of what looked like gas pumps. As Vinaldi stared at it I fiddled with the map overlay panel on the Positionex, trying to get a more precise fix on where we were. The panel still refused to show the existence of a road along our path, even going back to the late 1990s.