The Visible Man and Other Stories (3 page)

At least there didn’t seem to be anybody around, Rowan thought, and then grimaced at his own fatigue-engendered stupidity. There could be a crowd within ten feet of him, or a posse armed to the teeth, and he’d never know it until the first shot went home. He started walking slowly along a sidewalk, heading for the crossroads he could see on the other side of the housing development. This seemed to be a fairly new complex. The lawns were still smears of ugly red clay, surrounded by hopeful little string fences that were somehow supposed to keep birds from eating the newly-planted grass seeds, and there had not yet been time for the basements to fill up with marshwater or the paint to peel off in the bitter sea wind. Maybe most people had gone to work, leaving only a few housepersons here and there, and maybe they would stay inside. His foot struck something.

“Hey!” said a voice, at the level of his elbow.

Rowan froze.

“Hey, mister,” the voice said, reproachfully, “you knocked over all my soldiers.”

A child. Rowan forced himself to think. “I’m sorry, son,” he said.

“The whole army!”

“I didn’t see you,” Rowan said, truthfully, “I’m sorry I messed up your army.”

Suspicious silence from the boy.

“I wasn’t thinking about where I was going,” Rowan said. That got a
huhn
sound out of the boy, who didn’t sound entirely mollified. The boy must have stood up then, as some of the toy soldiers he’d been touching became visible for Rowan, varicolored plastic figures lying askew on the sidewalk. Rowan hesitated, and then asked, “Which one of those roads leads to Hamilton?”

“That one.”

Wonderful. “The paved one?” Rowan asked cannily, and when the boy didn’t answer he pointed and said, “That one there?”

“Uh-huh,” the boy said. The tone of puzzled suspicion was back in the child’s voice. There was something odd about this grownup. The boy didn’t respond when Rowan thanked him, but from the little scraping noises Rowan heard he guessed that the boy had sat down and begun to move his soldiers about again. The child had lost interest in Rowan. There was something odd about all grownups, and Rowan wasn’t unusual enough to provoke more than a mild passing wonderment.

Rowan started off again. “You stepped on my fort!” the child wailed instantly. Ignoring him, Rowan kept walking. He maintained a brisk pace, keeping close to the curb and hoping that anyone coming up the sidewalk in the opposite direction would have room to pass him without contact. In this fashion, he managed to make it through the development without further incident, and onto the road that led, hopefully, to Hamilton. Surely a search party would be out after him by now; if he didn’t find a town to lose himself in, he’d be finished. There were no sidewalks here, and no traffic on this one-lane back road, and if he kept to the center of it the chances of colliding with someone out for a stroll were remote. He walked as fast as he could without actually breaking into a suspicion-provoking run.

When the housing development was hidden by a curve, he increased his pace to a fast trot. He could be jogging, couldn’t he? And besides, there was no help for it: his time was running out. The road began to climb, winding among small rolling hillocks, and the forest closed down on either side. Once a dog came down from some house set back in the trees, and yapped after him for a few hundred yards, but didn’t attack. About ten minutes after the dog gave up the chase, he came upon another house, this one set back from the road and climbing partway up a low hillside. There was a bicycle lying next to the road on the wide front lawn. Someone might be watching from the house, but Rowan decided that he’d have to take that chance. He walked casually over to the bicycle, set it upright in the road, mounted it, and rode unhurriedly away until the house was out of sight. Then he began to pump.

The bicycle was too small for him, but not small enough to make the proposition impossible. It wobbled some, but he sent it whizzing along as fast as he was physically able to peddle. It rattled and creaked in protest, but it held together. Somehow he also managed to keep the thing upright and stay on top of it. The bicycle wasn’t a racer, but Rowan was a powerful man, and more important, a desperate man, and he got it up to a pretty respectable clip. He could cover twice the ground now that he could on foot, and he felt a thrill of real hope. Rowan peddled through the hills for a while, and then the country began to level out. Here the road intersected a somewhat larger secondary road, two lanes instead of one.

Guessing at the direction of Hamilton, he turned onto the larger road. It was flat and straight, and Rowan made even better time. Dust boiled up from the pavement as he passed, and hung in the still air behind him in long wavering lines. Thank God for the guideways, Rowan thought—traffic was light even on the larger manual roads. He only encountered one car, going in the opposite direction, its steering wheel apparently turning by itself. He had to caution himself not to stare at it as it passed. Then he was alone on the road again, with only the squeak and rattle of the bicycle for company. After a while, houses began to appear more frequently by the side of the road, and there were cross-streets every so often, with overhead traffic lights at the intersections. He was barreling across one such intersection at full tilt when he crashed into something unseen but very solid.

The impact hurled Rowan from the bicycle head over heels. He hit the street, rolled, skidded along on his side and jarred to a stop against the curb. By the time he understood what was happening, he was resting on his elbows in the road and staring up at the sky, dazed and shaken. He was badly scraped along his arms and legs, and bits of gravel had been embedded under his skin by the force of the fall. Rubber-legged, he got up. There was a groan of pain from the unseen something he’d hit, and then it said a pithy word. A man, then. Some pedestrian had been crossing the road and he’d smashed into him. The bicycle was shoved clatteringly aside, and Rowan assumed that the man was getting to his feet.

“What are you, blind?” the man raged. “You sorry son-of-a-bitch!”

“I’m sorry, but you stepped right out—”

“You had plenty of room! You had miles of room!” The voice wavered slightly as it climbed in register: an elderly man, then. “What’s a’matter, you ain’t got eyes in your head? You could’ve turned! I swear I’ll sue you, you hear that? Knock me down, almost break my back—”

“Don’t frazzle off, old friend,” Rowan said nastily. Soft-talk wouldn’t work. He had to be truculent and menacing or he’d be arguing with this guy for hours. Play it like a young tough, a weep maybe. “It was just an accident, right? You scan that? Only an accident. So don’t give me the rest of this fargo, because I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’ve got a mind to have you run in, you son-of-a-bitch.”

“Shove it. You know, you could get hurt a lot worse, jobbie.”

There had been an edge in Rowan’s voice—the man sputtered, but remained silent. Rowan swaggered over to the bicycle, feeling self-conscious but playing it up. The bicycle didn’t seem to be significantly damaged, although the frame was a little bent and the handlebars had been knocked out of alignment. He twisted them back into true, climbed onto the bicycle and shoved off. When Rowan was a safe distance away, the man shouted after him, “Goddamn idiot! I hope somebody cuts your balls off!”

Wobbling more than before, Rowan peddled down the road. He had to think of something else soon. He was entering the outskirts of a town, and the chances of hitting another invisible pedestrian increased with every revolution of the bicycle wheels. And now he thought he could hear the thin keening of sirens high in the sky behind him, an eerie sound that might have been made by demons of the upper air. They were coming after him, and he was much too conspicuous bicycling down this traffic-free road. Just as he was about to ditch the bicycle, he topped a rise and came upon a truck waiting on a red light at an intersection, one of the moderate-sized vans still used for hauling freight between small cities not serviced by guideways. Rowan’s eyes narrowed in instant calculation. Carefully, he coasted to a stop squarely behind the truck, where he would be out of range of the driver’s mirror. He dismounted, picked up the bicycle and threw it into a tangle of high weeds and bushes by the roadside. Then, as the light changed and the truck started to accelerate, he leaped up and grabbed the edge of the latched tailgate.

The truck’s van was protected only by a hanging tarpaulin. Rowan brushed it back, pulled himself over the tailgate and tumbled inside. He landed on something with hard edges, squirmed aside, and came to rest on the vibrating metal floor. They continued to gather speed, gears growling—evidently the driver had not seen him come aboard. Rowan sank back on his haunches, and then stretched out as well as he could among the sealed boxes and crates, pillowing his head with his arms. He had never been so tired. The hard metal floor felt as soft as thistledown. He felt himself sinking into it, sinking down luxuriantly. Grimly, he forced his eyelids wide again and made a great effort to stay awake. He had been given an opportunity to think things through without the pressure of split-second decisions; he should be trying to formulate long-range plans, plot out a plan of action instead of just running aimlessly away. But his brain had turned to ash, and he could not think. Besides, where was there to go? Who was there who could help him? His friends were all back in Newburyport, and that old life seemed even more distanced and inconsequential than it had this morning, his old acquaintances only hazy figures from an almost-forgotten dream. Dream-men, phantasms, they could not help him. The floor was spinning, slowly and restfully. He knew it was a terrible mistake to doze, but he could no longer fight it. He fell asleep.

He was awakened by a harsh, frightening sound: the rattle and clank of the tailgate being unlatched.

Rowan pulled himself up out of evil, smothering dreams. When his eyes unblurred, he saw only a rectangular green thing with glowing edges, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the tarpaulin, with light leaking in around the sides. At first, he didn’t realize that the truck had stopped. Then he heard the tailgate
thump
as it was swung down. He sat up, terrified and floundering, still only half-understanding where he was. The tarpaulin was yanked aside. Blinking around the sudden influx of light, Rowan was astonished to see that no one was there. Then he remembered, in an intense, sickening flash, and had to adjust himself to it all over again, as he would have to every morning for whatever remained of his life.

“You floorsucker!” a voice said.

Before Rowan could move, he was seized by hard invisible hands, hauled from the truck—getting a brief dizzy glimpse of concrete, a high metal ceiling, arc lights—and set on his feet. The hands released him.

“I—” Rowan started to say. His vision exploded into shooting white sparks, pain lanced through his head. He reeled back against the truck and almost fell. His mouth filled with blood.

“Whatta y’think y’doin?” the voice said, harsh with rage. “You scupping thief!”

Pain had jolted Rowan fully awake. Instantly, he lashed out with his fist, aiming at the spot from which the voice had seemed to emanate. He missed completely, his arm scything the air, and took a hard punch to the stomach from his unseen adversary. It knocked the wind out of him and drove him back against the edge of the lowered tailgate. It was hopeless, he realized through a wave of nausea. He couldn’t win.

The next blow laid Rowan’s cheek open and threw him sideways to the concrete floor. He went along with the fall, augmented it, and rolled over twice very quickly. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran.

Someone shouted hoarsely behind him. Rowan kept running, heading for the far side of what was apparently an underground garage. Halfway across, he slammed into something solid but yielding; another invisible person. There was a gasp of surprise and pain, and the clatter of dropped tools. Probably he’d bowled the man over. Rowan himself staggered and nearly fell, but recovered his balance and kept on. He was sprinting with his head down now, dodging and weaving like a broken-field runner. More shouts behind him. Invisible hands clutched at him for a moment, but he broke free. A door seemed to spring up in front of him. He clawed it open and sprang through.

He found himself in a long, fluorescent corridor, the cold white light coming evenly from ceiling, walls and floor. He sprinted away to the left, followed the corridor to a fork, picked a branch at random and kept running. Then another fork, and another corridor. He found a door marked
Employees Only
, went down a small service stairway, through another network of corridors, and down another stairway to the bottom.

The corridor he emerged into this time was dingier than the others, faded tile and green-painted stone, lit by hanging overhead bulbs. There was a smell of damp in the air, and the stone walls sweated like toads. Rowan paused to rest, gasping and leaning against the doorframe. When his breathing evened enough to let him hear again, he listened for sounds of pursuit. Nothing. He’d lost them. And this was a basement corridor, few people would be traveling it. And now, he knew where he was. Even in flight, he had had time to recognize the trademark insignia embossed into the walls of the upper corridors—he was in one of the big shopping plaza complexes near Danvers. But how was he going to get out of here? There were sure to be thousands of people about in the complex; as soon as he came up out of the deserted basement corridors he would inevitably run into some of them. The faded denim pants and blue work-shirt he wore were not damning in themselves, but would certainly be a giveaway to anyone actively searching for an escaped prisoner. Somehow, he had to get a change of clothes.

Rowan started walking again, cautiously threading his way through a warren of basement corridors that seemed endless. Occasionally there were doors set in either wall, always locked and bolted. Storerooms, probably. From behind a few of the locked doors came the solemn, deep-throated chuffing of massive machinery, or, more rarely, a vibrant unwavering hum. Eventually, he passed into what seemed to be an older section of the complex. Here huge ceramic-covered pipes ran along the ceiling close overhead, the floor was rutted, and there were patches of mold on the walls. Some of the overhead lights were broken, and Rowan walked on through semi-darkness until he came to a door marked
Maintenance
at the junction of two shabby corridors. From behind this door came an unmistakable sound: someone snoring.