Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I’m pretty sure you’re nearly done,” Athena said. “Then I’d just set up some barriers and head home. Hell, I’d do that now if I were you.”

  Gabriel recognized her tone. “Did you want to go home, Athena?”

  “I’m an old woman, Gabe. I’ve already been here for twelve hours.”

  She was old—seventy-something (he had never checked, mostly out of fear of Athena)—but she had more energy than all the rest of them combined.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been out here in the rain for six. You get to go when I do.”

  And then, like a coward, he shut the radio off.

  He was probably going to pay for that. Athena pretty much got her own way around the sheriff’s department. She’d worked as the dispatch longer than Gabriel had been alive. She had told him the story of his birth so many times that he had gotten sick of it. It had been a stormy night like this one, and at that time, Anchor Bay hadn’t had its own hospital. His father needed an escort to get him to the nearest hospital, which was in Whale Rock.

  In the end, the sheriff at the time had just driven the frightened family at high speeds across dangerous roads. Athena swore that was why Gabriel had come back from his wanderings. He was destined to be Seavy County’s sheriff from that moment on.

  Gabriel didn’t believe in destiny, although he wasn’t sure why. He seemed to believe in everything else. He just knew that, even on nights like this, he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

  So a few more cars had gone into the corridor. If they weren’t going home to Pelican Creek or some of those mountain hideaways deep in the corridor, the ones that scared even him, then they’d get to Mile Marker 3 in twenty minutes, assuming good road conditions.

  And that wasn’t a good assumption on this night. He had another hour, maybe more, before he could go home, light a fire, and thaw himself out.

  “News?” Zeke Chan, Gabriel’s main deputy, yelled from his position near the squad.

  Gabriel shook his head. The wind seemed to have come up, making the rain lash even harder.

  They were standing in an open space on a bit of an incline. They had to be away from the trees, just in case one of the larger gusts knocked down a limb.

  Gabriel was already worried enough about falling power lines. He kept trying to talk the power company into putting in underground cables, and they kept threatening to make the residents of Anchor Bay pay the costs.

  Gabriel knew it would take someone dying from a downed cable, electrocuted out here in the middle of nowhere, before the power companies took some initiative themselves.

  Zeke dashed across the road. The water was getting deep here too. The sheer volume of rain falling in the last few weeks guaranteed local flooding and landslides. The ground had been saturated at the beginning of October. This was the wettest fall that Gabriel remembered, and that included the famous fall of 1999. Usually, there were sun breaks and often days without rain, but not this time. When the weather had turned in September, the rains had come with a vengeance. It had felt like deepest, darkest winter.

  If this was fall, Gabriel didn’t want to see what winter would be like.

  Zeke reached him. The flashlight’s beam showed the waves Zeke had made in the puddles with his boots.

  Zeke’s rainslicker was yellow, just like Gabriel’s. They had bought yellow after a police officer from Seavy Village was killed stopping traffic on a night like this. He had been wearing the regulation green.

  Water dripped off the hood of Zeke’s slicker. His heart-shaped face looked red and chapped. He’d been here even longer than Gabriel. Zeke had been the first one to notice that the ditches on either side of the highway had converged to form Seavy County’s newest lake.

  “We haven’t seen anybody for half an hour or more,” Zeke said. “What say you we call this one? Set up a few barricades, let the motorists take their chances?”

  Gabriel would have loved nothing better, but that wasn’t his mandate. Someone had to stay here until the highway patrol showed up. Once they arrived, they took control of the area and decided how to protect the average citizen from the roadside hazard.

  “The highway patrol’s not going to get here tonight,” Zeke said, “and I’ll bet they’re not going to make it through the corridor anyway. If the roads here are falling away, imagine that sinking section around Mile Post 25. It’s got to be gone by now.”

  “I hope not,” Gabriel said. “It’s got a curve on either side. Only locals would know that it’s even there, and they always drive too fast.”

  Zeke sighed. He apparently knew Gabriel well enough to understand that little statement as a refusal to leave. “Well, at least one of us can go. I’m sure there’ll be another emergency elsewhere soon.”

  “Got a hot date?” Gabriel asked.

  “With my shower.” Zeke laughed.

  “Let’s give it another half an hour. Athena tells me a few cars left Joe’s Tavern a while ago.”

  “Storm watchers?”

  “Locals, I’m hoping.”

  Zeke shot him an exasperated look. They both knew that anyone driving through the corridor tonight was either a tourist or someone who couldn’t get away from his job, even for one bad night.

  The chance of those cars belonging to locals was pretty slim.

  “Crap.” Gabriel grabbed his radio and flicked it back on. He had meant to turn it on a few seconds after he’d spoken to Athena, so that when she called back in irritation, she couldn’t reach him. But he’d left it off a good ten minutes now.

  “What?” Zeke asked.

  “Accidentally shut the radio off.”

  Zeke grinned. “Accidentally my ass. Athena wanted to go home too, didn’t she?”

  Gabriel shrugged.

  “You should let her. That precipice she calls a driveway has got to be nasty in storms like this.”

  Gabriel hadn’t even thought of that. “She’s a big girl. If she needs to stay in town, she will.”

  “If there’s room at any of the inns.”

  “It’s the first of November,” Gabriel said. “The season was over long ago.”

  Although the tourist season had been changing lately, lasting longer and longer. With fewer people flying, and money tight, destination travel turned out to be somewhere close to home, like the coast, rather than Maui.

  Not that Gabriel wanted to be in Maui. He wasn’t fond of the islands.

  “The first of November,” Zeke said reflectively. “All Souls’ Day.”

  “All Saints’ Day.” Gabriel adjusted the bill of his very wet cap. He’d never given the day after Halloween much attention until he’d gone to France. There, in the Loire Valley, he had awakened on November 1 to the sound of church bells.

  Church bells, and sunshine, and closed restaurants. He had to wander the streets until he found an open boulangerie, where he bought a croissant, took a bottle of water from his room, and went down to the center of town. There was one of France’s more famous castles. He sat on the grounds, near the algae-covered moat, watching two teenage boys practice their juggling, with the bells still ringing, and felt as if he had gone to heaven.

  France was a long way from here.

  “Gabe?” Zeke said. “Lost you somewhere.”

  “All Saints’ Day. Just remembering a trip I took.”

  “Yeah, like which one? You’ve taken more trips than anyone I know.”

  Gabriel nodded, but didn’t share the memory. “I think you should check the east side of the highway. We’ve had two inches of rain since we’ve been out here, and I’m getting a bad feeling about this. I’m not sure we set up in the right place.”

  Zeke glanced over at Suzette Hackleberry, the other deputy. She was holding up the Stop/Slow sign. Usually she worked backup dispatch for Athena, but on nights like this, Gabriel needed more people on the road.

  “Okay to leave her?” Zeke asked.

  “She’ll be all right for a little while,” Gabriel said.

  Zeke nodd
ed. “If the road’s bad up ahead, what do I do?”

  “Radio the State Patrol and have them shut down 19 through the corridor,” Gabriel said.

  He remembered that happening when he was a boy, but he doubted it had happened since. There would be a lot of fuss, particularly from locals who worked on the other side of the Coastal Mountain range. With 19, 26, and 20 closed, they would only have 18 to make it over the mountains—and that was if that highway didn’t slide away either.

  Water slithered down his back, somehow finding its way in from the front of his rainslicker. The chill made him even colder.

  Zeke jogged off toward the trees and the darkness. The flashlight clutched in his right hand sent ripples of light along the soggy highway.

  Gabriel watched him go. Maybe Gabriel would have to contact Athena, have her insist the State Patrol guys show up sooner rather than later, and talk them into driving the corridor.

  Gabriel was a good driver, but he didn’t have the equipment the state guys did. He would rather they take the risks on the saturated roads.

  He couldn’t see Zeke anymore. Just the flashlight, making its odd reflections in the road.

  The light gave Gabriel the oddest sensation, an unease that made him as cold as the rain.

  Something was coming from that direction, something important blowing in with the storm.

  Then he tried to shake the feeling off. He wasn’t Cassandra Buckingham. He didn’t pretend to have precognitive powers.

  But the feeling wouldn’t shake.

  Something was coming. Something that would change not only him and his little town, but everything.

  Forever.

  Nine

  Highway 19. Van Duzer Corridor

  Oregon Coastal Mountain Range

  Rain slashed across the highway, pelting the car with thick, heavy drops. The clouds hid the moon. Trees, towering over the narrow two-lane highway, added to the blackness, their limbs waving and dancing in the wind.

  The Bug’s lights couldn’t penetrate that kind of darkness. All Lyssa could see were two beams of light, filled with water, illuminating a black surface without lines.

  The highway through the Coastal Mountain Range hadn’t changed at all. It was still treacherous and isolating, things that had attracted her as a teenager and frightened her now.

  Her back and shoulders ached. She’d been sitting in the same position for hours now. Her eyes burned from trying to see through the inky blackness.

  It had been a mistake to press forward. She should have stopped in Portland. But a hotel would have used the last of her cash, and her credit cards were maxed out. She had a precious cashier’s check in her wallet. Two thousand dollars, all the money she had left in the world.

  She should have left the funds in her Madison bank account and left that account open, but she hadn’t wanted to. She had had enough trouble with the press these last few months. She didn’t want them tracking her every move—and she didn’t trust the bank’s security systems enough to protect her.

  Not that it would be hard to find her in Anchor Bay. She had grown up here, after all. But that wasn’t something the Walters family knew, nor was it something that had ever shown up in the cursory bios done of her when she’d married Reginald. And fortunately, Buckingham, while not the most common last name, wasn’t that uncommon either.

  Emily was asleep in the backseat, oblivious to this treacherous drive. She had always been good at shutting out the world, but she had gotten better at it these last few months.

  Lyssa had hoped that this trip would interest Emily, that the sights of Western America, from the mountains to the raging rivers to the tacky tourist attractions like Wall Drug, would awaken some part of her, but Emily had barely seemed to notice. Most of the time she had read her books or listened to her CD player, head bobbing to sounds that Lyssa couldn’t hear.

  There hadn’t been a lot of mother-daughter bonding. There hadn’t even been much mother-daughter talk. And Lyssa was beginning to get worried about that.

  The road curved dangerously. Lyssa remembered this part of the highway. Suddenly the road hugged a cliff face, and on the passenger side, nothing protected the car from the sixty-foot drop to the river below. Lyssa used to dream about this curve, because as a teenager she would slide around it much too fast, always regretting the speed as she fought for control of whatever car she had been driving.

  But the road was different now. Someone had installed guardrails with little yellow reflectors that caught her headlights. The guardrails were dented—probably from teenagers who hadn’t been as lucky going around this curve as she had—and one entire section had fallen away.

  Lyssa slowed, remembering how hard it was to see anything coming from the west even in broad daylight. The muscles in her back spasmed. She was clutching the wheel so tight that her arms were rigid.

  She didn’t want to come back here. She didn’t want to see this little town with all of its memories and its oddities and its strange beliefs in itself. She had survived this place once; she wasn’t sure she could do it again.

  And she wasn’t sure it was the best for Emily. Maybe Lyssa should have packed them both up and gone somewhere very far away, where people didn’t care about the Walters family, someplace like England or Australia, someplace where they spoke English and watched American TV, but only reluctantly.

  She probably could have found money for that. Her grandmother Athena might have loaned it to her. The problem was that Lyssa wasn’t sure how to survive in a foreign country, even one where the language was, in theory at least, the same.

  And she still had to face all her legal troubles. Taking Emily out of the country would seem to most people like an admission of guilt. Leaving Madison seemed like one.

  But Lyssa couldn’t stay, for Emily’s sake. Reginald’s death had made the national news—a one-day curiosity about the loser Walters son, the one who hadn’t joined the family business and didn’t live like a multimillionaire, who had died under mysterious circumstances. After that, the national press had moved on to other stories, all of them apparently more compelling than that of a mentally unbalanced man dying in his own backyard.

  The regional press stayed on it, though, and it had become the nightly headline on local newscasts from Minneapolis to Chicago. Lyssa often came home from the university to find reporters camped on her yard. She changed her phone number three times, only to have the unlisted numbers “discovered” by the press. She couldn’t even have voice mail without someone hacking into it.

  And there was nothing to do with Emily. Sophia had had to quit when the press discovered that her visa had expired, and Inez couldn’t handle the pressure. Emily had gone to the university’s day care for one whole hour before the head of the day care had found Lyssa, complaining that Emily and her reporters were too disruptive.

  So Lyssa had kept Emily at her side, taking her from class to class, making the poor girl sit through office hours. Emily read more books than Lyssa had realized existed, working her way through every mainstream children’s classic that didn’t have magic in it.

  Emily had a newfound aversion to anything paranormal, including her formerly favorite television programs such as Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Emily wouldn’t say why; she would only tell her mother, in a tone that brooked no disagreement, to shut the television off.

  Then there was the investigation into Reginald’s death. Lyssa finally had to have the attorney she had hired for her divorce help her find a good criminal defense attorney. The detective on the scene, Volker, who had seemed so understanding, now had an idea that either Lyssa or Emily had killed Reginald. The fire was of mysterious origin, and the coroner believed that Reginald’s torso blew open, which started the fire. Somehow, the coroner said, he had swallowed something explosive, and it had killed him. Apparently no one believed in spontaneous human combustion anymore.

  They would believe even less in what had really happened. All Lyssa had been able to get out of her d
aughter was that Reginald had put Emily into the lake, fully clothed, and held her underwater. He was playing, Mom, Emily had said only once, and even she didn’t sound all that convinced. But she wouldn’t admit that he tried to drown her.

  That night, Lyssa had stayed awake thinking about the circumstances. She knew, somehow, that her daughter had taken a power from inside herself and turned it against Reginald, making him let her go. But Lyssa wasn’t sure what that power was or how it worked.

  For that, she was going to see her grandmother. Athena was an authority on all things magical in the world.

  Even if Lyssa and Emily went on to England or Australia or even Canada from here, they needed time in Anchor Bay. Lyssa needed to know what her daughter’s powers were, and how to control them.

  The rain seemed even heavier now, the drops pounding on the roof of the car like small fists. Lyssa had lowered her speed to twenty around the curves; it felt as if she were crawling. But her visibility was down to only a few feet. She needed to be able to stop.

  At this rate, she would never get into town.

  She rounded the last curve and hit the straight stretch that ran for four miles until it collided with U.S. Highway 101. Highway 101 covered the entire Oregon Coast, and was the main road in Anchor Bay.

  The forest continued for a few more yards, but once she was out of the mountains, she was out of the trees. She didn’t remember it that way; she remembered nearly two miles of forest before reaching town.

  Hair rose on the back of her neck. Even here, things had changed.

  As the Bug zoomed out of the trees, it passed a figure beside the road. Lyssa jerked in surprise. She hadn’t seen the person at all, even though the figure was wearing a yellow rainslicker and carrying a flashlight.

  The night was very dark. Very dark, and very dangerous.

  She hoped she didn’t get the person she’d passed even wetter.

  For a brief moment, she toyed with stopping to see if the person was all right, then ruled it out. Stopping for solitary people wasn’t a good idea, not even near small coastal towns, and it was a worse idea when she had her daughter and most of their possessions in the car.