“Yeah. Them.”
“Oh,” said Gwen. “Sorry about that.”
Shit. I mean, the guy was probably nicely disposed to us since we’d helped to free him and were giving him a ride, but the fewer people who knew we had anything to do with that, the better. I gave her an exasperated look.
She shrugged.
“Sorry for what?” said Steven. A second later, he said, “Oh… oh! That was you guys?”
He sounded alarmed.
“No,” I said. “It was not ‘us guys.’ It was someone we were with against our will.” Not true, but a decent way to play it I suppose.
“Dan Thurman? You mean you guys were with him when all that happened?”
“Do you know him?”
He didn’t answer.
“Yes, we know him,” I finally said.
Still nothing from the back.
I turned around in my seat. Steven looked like he was trying to decide if he should jump out of the car.
“Hey,” I said. “We know him, but we’re not fans. Got it?”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Look. I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. Things started snapping into place. If Dan had been lying about Guster–and it was obvious now that he had–how much else had he been lying about? I didn’t I think I could trust anything he’d told me at all, and acting with bad information was even worse than acting with no information at all. We had to bootstrap our knowledgebase somehow, and this clod in the back of the car was as good a place to start as any.
I figured that I would try to level with him as best as I could.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the thing. I think that Dan tricked me into helping him kill Stoneface, Carol Dee and Guster Grieshelgen. I didn’t actually kill any of them, but me being there sure helped. I know a little bit about magic, a little bit about the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory, and a little bit about monsters. But that’s it.
“There’s a bunch of stuff I don’t know. I don’t know why Dan wanted those people dead. I don’t know why he got me to help him. The people that got killed–I don’t even know what kind of people they are. Were they good? Where they bad?”
“Uh,” said Steven. “That’s a lot of questions.” At least he looked like he wasn’t going to take a header out of the car at 70 mph, which was, incidentally, as fast as Gwen’s car seemed to able to go with three fully grown adults in it.
“Let’s take them one a time then,” I said. “Will that work?”
Steven nodded.
“Why do you have a talking dog?” he said.
I thought I was asking the questions.
“I don’t,” I said. “A talking dog has me.”
Steven patted Babd’s shoulders. She draped over the front edge of the seat, bored.
“Tell me what you know about Dan.”
Steven scratched his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s pretty bad. Like, kind of a crazy guy. No one really likes to deal with him ‘cause you can’t count on him. He flakes out or just does whatever he wants. He messes with people’s heads for fun. Has some nice cars. His girlfriend is nuts.”
“Brigit?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said and visibly shuddered. “She’s pretty. I came up to her at a party one time…”
His eyes went distant, and his hand pawed at a wide scar that ran from his left ear down to the hollow of his throat. I had a flash image of Brigit laying her hand along a neck, then opening the flesh with a word and closing it back up after a moment of pain and terror. Just to be cruel and horrible. I thought back on the year that I’d known her and realized that I hadn’t seen her ever express any kind of sympathetic emotional response whatsoever. Not even fake it.
“Did she do that to you?” I said.
He nodded.
“The guys that had us, there were more of them with Guster before he died. What’s the deal with them?”
“The Guard. Kind of like the police, I guess,” said Steven.
Well, shit.
“But not really,” he said. “There’s only a couple of them.”
“Only a couple?” I said. “There were four in that room with us.”
“Yeah. A couple. Like ten.”
A couple.
“Okay,” I said. That kind of made sense. Praecants were rare, like ten-ish thousand in the world. If they were evenly distributed in the human population, you’d end up with something like 400 or so in the United States. Let’s say that there would be immigration, etc. because Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Maybe we double the number and get close to a thousand in the U.S. Would they congregate in cities or spread out? I could make a good case either way.
A place like Pittsburgh would be an attractor for various reasons, not all of them good. I’d guess that the concentration of Praecants in Pittsburgh would be higher than the average for an urban area.
So let’s put the speculative standing population of Praecants in Pittsburgh in the 50-100 area with a lot more coming and going as their business dictated. That standing population would want some kind of organization, even if they were all a bunch of wackadoos. The heavy hitters would rise to the top and probably get as many other competent Praecants as possible to sign up.
The crew we’d encountered in the park though, they hadn’t been professionals. Well, maybe two or three. But thinking back through the haze, most of them were probably just regular-ish people. I mean, Praecants, yeah. But run-of-the-mill. That’s why so many of them bolted.
I was having a hunch.
“Steven, is the Congress of the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory a team of super-organized magical badasses, or just a bunch of Praecants who ended up getting lucky in Pittsburgh?”
He laughed.
“They’re not badasses,” he said. “A couple of the Guard are dicks. And Guster and his buddies were powerful. They were pretty chill though.”
“Why do you think Dan would want them dead?”
“Probably just didn’t like them,” he said.
I think it was more than that. But the fact that Steven thought that was sufficient reason for Dan to kill a bunch of people was illuminating.
“So Dan has a reputation, huh?”
“Hell yeah.”
“If he’s so nasty,” I said, “why didn’t anyone do anything about him?”
“Um, they did. He got arrested a couple times, and the last time he escaped. They couldn’t catch him, but they kept trying.”
And Dan finally got tired of it and decided to take them all out with my help.
I felt sick.
“So,” I said, “now you know why they had me. Why did they pick you up?”
“I already said. They thought I maybe had something to do with it, too.”
“Right. But why did they think you had something to do with Stoneface and Carol Dee?”
“I dunno,” he said, and he was a terrible liar.
Clearly, the only reason they would have arrested him–or whatever they called it–was if they thought it was something he was likely to have done. Maybe based on past behaviors.
That was disconcerting. Threats from Babd notwithstanding, if Steven was the kind of person who was inclined to do something nasty, he could probably do a lot of damage in the back of the car at seventy miles per hour.
I pulled out my phone and messaged Gwen.
where’s fox? this guy make me nervous.
A second later, her phone vibrated, and she glanced at it.
She gave me a look like “Really?”
Is there a silent look that means “You can’t be too careful”? I wished that there was.
I checked Maps, and there was an exit coming for a little town called Portersville, right by Moraine State Park.
“Your Dad’s cabin is at Moraine, right?” I said. “Isn’t that the next exit?”
Gwen stared straight ahead for a moment.
“Yes,” she finally said. “It is. Been awhile since I’ve been there. Will you nav?”
“Hey, Lincoln,” she said. “My brush is in my messenger bag down by your feet. Will you grab it for me?”
“Sure.”
I reached into the bag and felt what I had expected–Fox. Good.
“Hmmm,” I said. “I don’t think it’s in there.”
“Oh, it must be in the back.”
“I can get it for you!” said Steven.
“No, that’s okay,” said Gwen. “I’ll snag it when we get there.”
I wasn’t super thrilled about what I was about to do. It wasn’t horrible or anything. It just seemed… mean. I felt like there was a better option or even several better options, but I couldn’t see them. They belonged to the Lincolns in the other universes where I wasn’t concussed and more than a little bit messed up.
So I’d do something that was not the best right now to avoid having to possibly do something even worse later.
Steven didn’t seem to be a bad person. A little slow, yes. But the fact is that the magical constabulary–the Guard as he called them–had thought that he was the kind of person who could be involved in multiple murders wasn’t great. And he’d clearly lied about why they had him. That meant that I didn’t want him in the car with us. I’d already exercised enough bad judgment when it came to who to hang out with to last me a lifetime.
I mean, really we’d done him a huge favor, and that favor was probably a mistake. We should have left him there. But we felt bad for him, had made the wrong call and then compounded it by letting him leave town with us. These were not well thought-out decisions.
I needed to start getting better under pressure.
Maybe that time was now.
What was I planning to do?
I was thinking that we could take the exit, head toward the park, and I could nav us down one of the various back roads that were trees on all sides. We’d find a spot with a pull-over and limited visibility and get out under the pretense that we were “there.” Then, I’d basically force Steven at gunpoint to start walking into the woods. Maybe have Babd follow him to make sure he was far enough in. Then have her run back, and we’d take off.
Not the nicest thing to do to him, but he’d be better off than if we’d left him with the Guard. Of course, he was a Praecant, so even if he wasn’t the swiftest boat in the race, I was sure he could fend for himself.
What could go wrong?
Well, he could freak and attack us. That would be really bad. Not too likely, but it was definitely possible.
He could simply refuse to go, in which case–what? What would I do? Shoot him? As liberally as I’d dosed out the kinetic force during combat, it was really dangerous. Potential broken bones. Possible concussions. You hit someone wrong, they hit the ground hard and whack their head on a rock and they’re dead. It’s not to be done lightly, unless you’re in real fear for your safety, which I had been a number of times recently.
But not right now. He made me nervous enough to not want him in the car with us, but not nervous enough that I wanted to risk permanently incapacitating someone.
So maybe this plan wasn’t the greatest. Too much potential for Bad Things.
Be better, Lincoln.
Question: Why did we have to threaten or confront him?
Answer: We didn’t.
All of the bad outcomes for us stemmed from the results of the confrontation part. If we could just skip that…
I felt back inside Gwen’s bag and found her wallet. I pulled out a couple of bills, $30. I’d pay her back.
“Hey,” I said, “before we hit the cabin, I want to stop for a couple of things, okay?”
“Uh, sure,” said Gwen.
There was a convenience store in the other direction from the state park.
“Exit’s right here,” I said. “Take it and hang a left.”
She did.
I navigated us about two miles west, then north on a little two lane road. Ahead was a place that looked like a combination gas station, convenience store and diner.
Gwen pulled up to the gas pumps.
I got out and took the money with me.
“Steven,” I said. “I’m going to grab some food. Why don’t you come in and get something? I’m buying.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
We walked into the store. A bored woman in her late fifties sat on a tall stool behind the counter.
I handed Steven the thirty dollars.
“Order me two hot dogs with chili and relish, will you? Get something for yourself too. I’ll be right back–I forgot my phone.”
I walked out. Halfway to the car, I glanced back, and Steven was talking to the woman, pointing to some nachos and a sorry looking soft pretzel.
I got in the car.
“Go,” I said.
“For real?”
“Go! Back the way we came.”
She fired up the Mazda and pulled away. From what I could see, Steven was still occupied inside.
What would happen to him? Well, he’d probably figure it out soon enough and call a friend. Or use the money to grab a bus back to the city if he didn’t have a friend. Or maybe he could teleport, although seriously I doubted it. Could any Praecant teleport? I realized that I had no idea.
“I gave him thirty bucks,” I said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You already did,” she said. “When I was getting the stuff from your house, I grabbed some cash and credit cards too.”
“Oh,” I said. “Just help yourself, then.”
“I did.”
She got us back on the highway, heading north.
“I kind of feel bad for him,” she said.
“Steven?”
“Duh,” she said. “Who else would I be talking about? Dan?”
“Good point.”
“He seemed harmless.”
“Maybe I’m getting paranoid,” I said. “Besides, he’ll be fine.”
“He just… I feel bad for him on a number of levels.”
Okay. I did not share this sentiment.
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the back seat. Babd. “If he decides to exact vengeance upon you, you will wish that you had killed him.”
“What?” I said.
“Or at least executed your original plan to abandon him in the forest, which almost certainly would have ended in a confrontation and his death.”
“You’re sure of that?” I said.
“It was likely,” said Babd. I looked in the back seat, and for a moment there was a horrible incongruity. I saw a little dog, probably Chihuahua more than anything else, but at the same time I saw something that should not have fit in the car. It shouldn’t have fit in an ocean liner or in the Grand Canyon for that matter. I felt a swimming in my head, like the mismatch between the moving and perceived not-moving that generates motion sickness.
The weight of that presence bore down on me in a flash, and I simultaneously wanted to worship it and to launch myself from the car to escape it.
And then it was gone.
“Ah,” said Babd. “I am too much here.”
It took me a second to collect my thoughts.
“No no,” I said. “You’re right. That would have gone badly. And I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“It would have been easier in the future,” said Babd.
“What?” I said. “You mean that Steven does something down the line that will cause problems?”
“No,” said Babd. “I mean that it will be easier for you to kill in the future if you have already done so now.”
“Listen!” I said, and the little dog flinched. Was that Babd or just residual canine reflex? “I’m not killing anyone. I figured that out a couple of days ago. It’s not happening.”
“You will need…” said Babd, and her voice trailed off. The dog paced left and right several times in the back seat as we sped north. “You will require clarity at some point and best it were not clouded with doubt.”
“What are you sayi
ng?”
“Impressions,” said Babd. “Colors and roars… overlapping layers suggest... what is to come without mould or irons…”
“Can you see the future?”
“Future is only a concept… but probabilities can be seen and evaluated… take care.”
Take care.
“Woah,” said Gwen. “It’s a little heavy in here.”
It was.
“Look,” I said, “everything’s going to be fine. We’ll head to your dad’s place and figure out what to do next. We’ll get some takeout. If monsters show up, I’ll make holes in them.”
“I like this plan,” said Gwen.
“Can we play fetch?” said Babd. “It is enjoyable to progress rapidly in pursuit of inanimate rods.”
Gwen laughed.
“Yes,” she said. “We can play fetch.”
“All right then,” I said. “Let’s move it.”
Erie was about an hour and a half away. It would be dark by the time we got there.
“I am moving it,” said Gwen.
“Really?” I said. “Can you give it a little more gas? Because there’s an old man with a walker behind us asking if we need a push.”
She flipped me the bird.
“I am inspired,” said Babd.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“I am inspired with an idea that will gain us information. I shall return.”
“Um, okay,” said Gwen.
I looked in the back seat, and something changed in Babd’s eyes. She was gone.
The little dog began to panic. It tried to scramble up to the nearest window but lost its footing and fell off the seat. It began to howl.
“Oh, it’s scared!” said Gwen.
The dog didn’t look good.
“I think it’s more than scared,” I said.
I was right.
I’m not sure if the dog barfed or shat first, but within five seconds it was all over, and Gwen’s car smelled amazing.
Chapter 12
“What’s going on?” said Gwen. “Did she-”
“Yeah,” I said. “Both.” I was starting to think that at least the dog hadn’t peed, when it peed. “All three.”
“Great.”
Gwen started slowing down and pulling the car onto the shoulder of the highway.
“Um, can we afford to do this?” I said. “We need to be making time.”
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 18
