The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  Praise for Dave Hutchinson

  “The Europe sequence is some of my favourite fiction this century, and Europe in Winter is no exception. Mind-bending, smart, human, with espionage thrills wrapped up in a reality-altering Europe, all told with sparkling prose and wit that should, if there was literary justice, catch the attention of prize after prize. I love these books. I want more. Now.”

  Patrick Ness on Europe in Winter

  “As rich and as relevant as its predecessor. It’s funny, fantastical, readable and remarkable regardless of your prior experience of the series. Which just goes to show that, no matter how well you think you know something – or someone, or somewhere, or somewhen – there’s almost always more to the story.”

  Tor.com on Europe at Midnight

  “Europe in Autumn is one of the most sophisticated science fiction novels of the decade: a tour-de-force debut, pacey, startlingly prescient, and possessed of a lively wit. When approaching its follow-up, I felt both nervous and excited. Would Hutchinson be able to pull off the same magic a second time? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Europe at Midnight is pitch-perfect, bursting with the same charisma and intricate world-building as its predecessor.”

  LA Review of Books on Europe at Midnight

  “In a way, what is most striking about Europe at Midnight is not the hard edge of its politics, or even the casual brilliance of its science fictional reworking of the political thriller, but Hutchinson’s thrillingly assured control of his material. He writes wonderfully, his prose animated not just by a keen eye for character, but by a blackly witty sense of humor.”

  Locus Magazine on Europe at Midnight

  “Europe in Autumn is the work of a consummate storyteller and combines great characters, a cracking central idea, and a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Excellent.”

  Eric Brown on Europe in Autumn

  “This awesome concoction of sci-fi and spies – picture John le Carre meets Christopher Priest – is an early favourite of the year for me.”

  Tor.com on Europe in Autumn

  “The map of Europe has been redrawn, and its cartographers remain at work... the continent now exists as a patchwork of small nations and polities... for all that people want to carve out their own discrete realms, perhaps the greatest gift in Dave Hutchinson’s future Europe is the ability to cross borders.”

  Strange Horizons on Europe in Autumn

  “One of my best reads from the past year.”

  Huffington Post on Europe in Autumn

  “One of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.”

  Adam Roberts, The Guardian, on Europe in Autumn

  “With its understated stakes and imperturbable pace, its deliberate density and intellectual intensity... you have to work at it, but it’s worth it, not least because what Hutchinson has to say about the world today is now more imperative that ever.”

  Niall Alexander, Tor.com, on Europe in Winter

  “Hutchinson’s entire Europe-series are wonderful: not quite science fiction, not quite crime, not quite current realism, but some of all.”

  Benteh on the Fractured Europe Sequence

  First published 2019 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-229-6

  Copyright © 2019 Dave Hutchinson

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any Form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  The Town

  IT HAD BEEN raining for days, the remnants of a hurricane which had chewed bits out of the Louisiana coast before tracking east across the Gulf and killing almost a hundred people in Florida. It had come ashore as a Category Four, but by the time it left Florida behind and wandered up the East Coast it was weakening steadily. It had made necessary the evacuation of a couple of coastal towns in the Carolinas, but by the time it reached Boston it was just a mass of rain and wind and misery. Standing in front of the bank of mailboxes in the lobby, Alex could look out through the double front doors of the building and see the rain still sheeting down. It looked as if the sewers were backing up again; passing vehicles were bearing shallow bow waves ahead of them.

  It was a while since he’d been down here, but he couldn’t quite remember how long. Certainly not yesterday, and probably not the day before that. After that it all got a bit vague, a mush of daytime television and social media he couldn’t be bothered to engage with. He’d woken that morning with a distant sense that perhaps he should check the mailbox, if only as a reason to actually leave the apartment for a few minutes. What was quite remarkable was that he’d acted on the impulse instead of turning over and going back to sleep.

  “What-ho, Mr Dolan!” the building superintendent called in a completely wild stab at an English accent, crossing the lobby with a bag of tools. Alex waved back. He’d given up trying to tell the super he wasn’t English, partly because the man didn’t listen, but mostly because he didn’t want to hear what his version of a Scottish accent would sound like.

  Alex unlocked the mailbox for Apartment 402 and peered blearily at the wad of letters and junk mail and leaflets and magazines crammed inside. Maybe it had been more than a couple of days since he’d been down here. What to do with it all? Take it, or let it pile up a while longer? It wasn’t as if the mailman ever brought him anything that made the journey downstairs worthwhile.

  Leaving the box open, he walked over to the doors and stood looking out, hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. The street was almost empty of people, just a few hardy souls battling along under umbrellas. The owner of the mini-mart opposite was standing in his doorway, looking glum. He saw Alex and waved. Alex waved back. The owner put a hand out into the rain, then shrugged hugely. Alex nodded and shrugged back. Which was about all you could usefully say about the weather using sign language. Alex waved goodbye and went back to the mailbox. Ah, sod it. He grabbed the whole wad of post, stuffed it under his arm, and went back upstairs.

  In the kitchen, he dumped the post on the table, switched the kettle on, sat down, and sighed.

  He looked out through the window into the building’s airshaft. In the apartment directly opposite, a middle-aged bald man wearing only a pair of underpants was rearranging things in his fridge. From his body language, of which Alex could see far too much, it seemed to be a task which made him angry.

  The kettle boiled. He made himself a cup of tea, took it back to the table and sat down again. He felt as if the act of getting the mail actually out of the mailbox and into the apartment had all but exhausted whatever resolve he had ever had for doing anything about it.

  Bit by bit, he separated the junk from the legitimate mail on the table. Then he separated the letters from the obvious bills. Then he sat looking at the three piles. Three of the letters were identical. Same envelopes, same return address. Alex considered ignoring them—if he didn’t actually read any of them, they technically didn’t exist. Wasn’t that how it worked? He dithered over them, then in what amounted, for him, to a headlong rush, he slit them open with the butter knife and took the plunge.

 
The letters were from his agent. The first wanted to discuss the advance she had loaned him and asked why he wasn’t answering his phone or email. The second restated the first in rather more robust terms. The third thanked him for repaying the loan, asked him not to do it again, and suggested that at some point they might revisit the terms of their professional relationship.

  Alex read this letter a couple of times, trying to remember when—and how—he had paid his agent back. But there was nothing. It seemed unlikely; he had barely managed to make the previous month’s rent. Had he suddenly come into a large amount of money and subsequently suffered some kind of blackout? Was it a trap to make him call his agent and find out what the fuck was going on? The three letters covered a period of about a fortnight; the most recent was dated four days ago. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened during that time. Nothing had happened at all.

  In a spirit of experimentation, he picked up one of the bills and opened it. It contained a receipt from the building’s management company for the service charges on the apartment. It appeared he had suffered more than one blackout, because he couldn’t remember paying this one either. The original bill was still, as far as he knew, sitting in a drawer, waiting for him to find enough money to do something about it.

  He opened some more bills, and it was the same story with the electricity and water. A long-running and increasingly ill-tempered feud with the IRS had been settled. His credit cards had been zeroed. His accountant had—finally, it was noted—been paid.

  Alex looked out of the window again. In the apartment across the airshaft, the bald man was standing motionless, a carton of milk in one hand and what looked like a package of bacon in the other, staring into his fridge with all the concentration of someone watching a complex subtitled movie.

  The final envelope contained a letter and two printed airline tickets. It was a long time since Alex had seen a printed airline ticket. It was quite a while since he had seen an airline ticket of any kind. He read the letter. Then he read it again. He looked at the back in case there was a little note explaining the joke, but it was blank.

  He got up and went into the bedroom, took his phone off its charger, and dialled the number in the letter. It rang twice, then a man’s voice said, “Hi, Alex. Thanks for calling. You don’t mind if I call you Alex, do you? It makes a difference to some people. I’m Stan, by the way. I guess you got my letter.”

  “Who is this, and why have you sent me tickets to San Francisco?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah, well,” said Stan, in a tone which suggested it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. “I’d give you my attorney’s number but you wouldn’t believe it was her, so what I’m going to do is tell you her name and you can look her up and call her yourself and she’ll tell you this is on the level.” And he said a name which Alex recognised because it belonged to someone who had spent quite a lot of the previous year in the news as the defence attorney for a Silicon Valley figure accused of spying on behalf of the Russians. “Call her now and call me back when you’re done. I don’t know what you’ve been dicking about with, but we should have had this conversation last week.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the tickets are for tomorrow.” And he hung up.

  Alex stood there by the bed, phone in one hand, letter in the other. He looked at the phone, then at the letter, trying to work out what had just happened. Was this what a stroke felt like?

  He googled the name of Stan’s attorney. Then he googled the name of her firm. He thought for a moment, then dialled the number on the firm’s website. When the switchboard answered, he expected to be put on hold or simply told to go away, but he was put through immediately.

  “Mr Dolan,” said the attorney. “We were expecting your call several days ago.”

  “I’ve been away.” It didn’t do to tell a Manhattan lawyer that you’d stopped checking your mail because you couldn’t pay your bills.

  “Right,” she said in a voice which made him suspect she knew anyway. “You’ll have spoken with Mr Clayton.”

  “I spoke with someone claiming to be Mr Clayton.”

  “That will have been Mr Clayton, then.” Alex remembered that, in the face of what had seemed overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the Silicon Valley guy had been acquitted. “Okay. Well, you’ll be aware of his proposal.”

  “I am.” He wondered how much this call was costing Stan in billable hours.

  “You’re to meet Mr Clayton in San Francisco to discuss his proposal in person. For this Mr Clayton will pay you a per diem of two thousand dollars. This does not constitute a binding contract or a formal offer of employment. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “No.” He heard her sigh. “Yes.”

  She sighed again. “Okay. It’s been good speaking with you, Mr Dolan, and I wish you joy of your trip. The Bay Area’s lovely at this time of year.” And she hung up.

  Alex stood there with the phone in his hand. If this was someone’s idea of a joke, he considered, it was a pretty good one. He looked at the letter again. It was written in a clear, looping, slightly adolescent hand, a chatty, informal letter from the fifth richest man in the world, offering him work. The envelope was hand-addressed, too, and it had a stamp rather than the mark of an office franking machine.

  He went back into the kitchen and leafed through all the bills and outstanding debts that had suddenly blown away like leaves on an autumn breeze. There was, he realised, a part of him which had been praying for some sort of divine intervention. Now it had happened, he had no idea what to do next.

  He took a breath, went back through the call list on his phone, and hit redial.

  “So, you talked to my attorney,” said Stan.

  “She seems… feisty,” Alex told him.

  “Feisty is a good quality, in an attorney. I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

  “Did you pay my bills?”

  “Just as a gesture of goodwill.”

  Alex sighed. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me every day,” he said.

  “Christmas doesn’t happen every day,” said Stan. “I don’t hear anyone complaining about that.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to do that? Go through someone’s financial affairs like that?”

  “It’s just the same as doing a credit check on somebody,” Stan said defensively.

  “It’s not remotely the same as doing a credit check. You can’t just datamine someone’s life like that without even a hint of implied consent.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments, and then Stan said, “You know, this conversation’s not going entirely the way I thought it would.”

  “You thought I’d be so grateful to you for hauling me out of the fire that I’d jump on a plane without even thinking twice about it.”

  “Sure,” said Stan, as if it was absurd to think anything else.

  “This is a lot to process. You must appreciate that.”

  “You can always give the money back, if that’s what’s bothering you.” When Alex said nothing, he added, “No, I didn’t think so.” He sighed. “Look, Alex. Come out to the Coast for a couple of days and we’ll discuss it face to face, no obligations on either side. You get a couple of nice plane rides and a night in a really great hotel. I know this terrific dim sum place in Oakland, we could go there. And you go home with four thousand bucks, no matter what you decide. How can that be bad?”

  “I’ll call you back,” said Alex, and he hung up. He looked out of the window, but the bald man in the apartment opposite had gone. He’d left his refrigerator door wide open.

  THERE WAS A man standing in Arrivals at San Francisco International Airport holding a sign with DOLAN written on it in orange Sharpie.

  “Where’s the rest of you?” he asked when Alex walked up and identified himself.

  “This is all there is of me,” said Alex.

  The driver gave him a hard stare. “Are you the Dolan family?”

  “I’m one of
them,” Alex allowed.

  The driver narrowed his eyes. “The Dolan family of Pittsburgh? In town for a wedding?”

  “The Dolan family of Edinburgh. In town to meet the world’s fifth-richest man.”

  “You’re a Brit? You have a weird accent.”

  “I’m a Scot.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Well,” said Alex. “That is something of a bone of contention.”

  The driver was a very large man in a black suit that was ever so slightly too small for him. He grunted. “Rich folks don’t impress me,” he said.

  “We have that in common, at least.”

  He sighed. “Every frigging time I do a pickup here, some asshole comes up and tries to hijack the ride by pretending they’re the person I’m waiting for.”

  “Really?”

  “And it’s always rich folks. Poor folks don’t do that shit.”

  “Right.” This was obviously a subject on which the driver had been waiting for the opportunity to vent for some time.

  “I’ve had guys just walk up to me and snap their fingers for me to take them to the car. Not a word from them. Just snap their fingers.” He looked Alex in the eye. “And you can’t punch them. You can’t even use stern language on them. Just yes sir, Mr Rich Guy, no sir, Mr Rich Guy.” He seemed perfectly calm, serene almost, but Alex didn’t envy the Dolan family of Pittsburgh being stuck in a car with him.

  “I’m not rich,” Alex assured him. “I’m not even comfortably-off.”

  “Yeah,” the driver said, looking him up and down. “I can see that.”