Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists,” came the old man’s voice out of Kootie’s mouth. “I will go right through that sand and leave you way behind.”

  The smoky shred that was deLarava’s ghost now swung toward Elizalde, and the voice was like wasps rustling in a papery nest: “You have no mask.”

  The bloody fabric of the sweatshirt over Elizalde’s breasts flattened, as if an unseen hand had pressed there, and then a spotty handprint in Sullivan’s blood appeared on the sweatshirt shoulder, and smeared. Elizalde cocked her head as if listening to a faint voice in her ear, and then said, almost wonderingly, “Yes, of course.”

  Sullivan felt the bourbon-breath blow out of his mouth again. “This one is my family, too,” the voice said softly.

  Then Elizalde’s shoulder twitched as if shoved.

  —And out of Sullivan’s mouth Sukie’s ghost-voice added, “A.O.P., kids.”

  As quick as an image in a twitched mirror, deLarava’s ghost folded itself around past Kootie and stood between the three of them and the roofed causeway off the ship. “No one passes,” it whispered.

  Kootie looked back at Sullivan fearfully; and in spite of his own sick-making pain, Sullivan noticed that the boy’s curly black hair needed washing and combing, and he noticed the dark circles under the haunted brown eyes; and he vowed to himself, and to the ghosts of his father and sister, that he would make things better.

  “There’s no one there, Kootie,” he said. “Watch.” He stepped forward, away from Elizalde’s arm, and faintly felt the protesting outrage as deLarava’s fretful substance parted before him like cobwebs and blew away on the strengthening sea breeze.

  Kootie and Elizalde hurried after him. Kootie looked up at Elizalde with a strangely lost look, and he waved the roll of gaffer’s tape he had snatched off the deck. He held it gingerly, as if he didn’t want to get any more of the glue on his fingers than he could help. “When we get to the stairs,” he said, “I figured you could tape Pete’s arm with this.”

  Elizalde looked startled. “Of course. That’s a good idea … Edison?”

  “No,” said Kootie, trotting along now between the two grown-ups. “Me.”

  Halfway across the elevated walkway, Sullivan paused and began unbuttoning his shirt. “One last stop,” he said hoarsely.

  He fished out the front-side wallet of his scapular and pried free of the torn plastic sleeve the brass portrait-plaque that he had taken off of his father’s gravestone yesterday evening. deLarava’s bullet, a .22 or .25, had deeply dented the center of the metal plate, and the engraved portrait of his smiling father was almost totally smashed away.

  Sullivan rubbed his own chest gingerly, wondering if the blocked gunshot had nevertheless cracked his breastbone; and he held the brass plate between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  “Goodbye, Dad,” he said softly. “I’ll see you again, after a while—in some better place, God willing.”

  The piece of brass was warm in his hand. He hefted it and looked down at the shadowed water between the dock and the ship.

  “I’ll take that,” said a whisper from behind Kootie.

  Sullivan whipped his head around in exhausted alarm, but it was the ghost of Edison who had spoken, a smoky silhouette hardly visible out here in the breezy sunlight; the hand the old ghost was extending was so insubstantial that Sullivan doubted it could hold the brass plate, but when he held the plate out and let go of it, Edison supported it.

  “I’ll take him, and go, at last,” Edison said faintly. “I hope it may be very beautiful over there.” Sullivan thought the ghost smiled. “On the way,” it whispered, “your father and I can talk about the …” and then Sullivan couldn’t tell whether the last word was silence or silents.

  Kootie wanted to say goodbye to Edison, but was shy to see the ghost standing out away from himself, tall and broad in spite of being nearly transparent.

  But the ghost bent over him, and Kootie felt a faint pressure on his shoulder for a moment.

  In his head he faintly heard, “Thank you, son. You’ve made me proud. Find bright days, and good work, and laughter.”

  Then the Edison ghost stepped right through the railing and, still holding Peter Sullivan’s piece of brass, began to shrink in the air, as if he were rapidly receding into the distance; the image stayed in the center of Kootie’s vision no matter which direction he looked in—down at his feet, toward the buildings and cranes on the shore, or up at the mounting white decks and towering red funnels of the ship—so he turned to the walkway rail and gripped it and stared at the glittering blue water of the harbor until the image had quite shrunk away to nothing there.

  And at last he stepped back, and took Peter Sullivan’s hand in his left hand and Angelica Elizalde’s in his right, and the three of them walked together to the stairs that would lead them down to the parking lot and away, to whatever eventual rest, and shelter, and food, and life these two people would be able to give him.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Fault Lines Trilogy

  PROLOGUE

  THE DOLOROUS STROKE

  LAS VEGAS—A small earthquake rattled Boulder City on New Year’s morning, and workers at the nearby Hoover Dam reported feeling the shock.

  —Associated Press,

  January 2, 1995

  CHAPTER 1

  PANDARUS: … she came and puts me her white hand to his cloven chin—

  CRESSIDA: Juno have mercy; how came it cloven?

  —William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida

  A PAY TELEPHONE WAS ringing in the corridor by the restrooms, but the young woman who had started to get up out of the padded orange-vinyl booth just blinked around in evident puzzlement and sat down again, tugging her denim jacket more tightly around her narrow shoulders.

  From over by the pickup counter her waiter glanced at her curiously. She was sitting against the eastern windows, but though the sky was already a chilly deep blue outside, the yellow glow of the interior overhead lighting was still relatively bright enough to highlight the planes of her face under the disordered straw-blond hair. The waiter thought she looked nervous, and he wondered why she had reflexively assumed that a pay-phone call might be for her.

  The counter seats were empty where the half-dozen customers who lived in town usually sat chugging coffee at this hour—but the locals could sleep in on this New Year’s Day, and they’d be right back here tomorrow at dawn. This morning the customers were mostly grumpy families who wanted to sit in the booths—holiday-season vacationers, drawn in off of the San Diego Freeway lanes by the spotlit billboards beyond the Batiquitos Lagoon to the north or the San Elijo Lagoon to the south.

  The woman sitting in the dawn-side booth was almost certainly a waitress somewhere—when he had taken her order she had spoken quickly, specified all the side-order options without being asked, and she had sat where she wouldn’t be able to see into the kitchen. And she was hungry, too—she had ordered scrambled eggs and poached eggs, along with bacon and cottage fries, and coffee and orange juice and V-8.

  … And now she had set something on fire at her table.

  The waiter clanked her plates back down on the counter and hurried across the carpet toward her booth, but he quickly saw that the smoking paperback book on the table was just smoldering and not actually flaming, and even before he got to the table the woman had flipped open the book and splashed water from her water glass onto the … cigarette butt! … that had ignited the pages.

  The pay telephone was still ringing, but the overhead lights had gone dim for a moment, and a waitress back by the electronic cash register was cussing under her breath and slapping the side of the machine, and nobody else had happened to notice the briefly burning book; and the blond woman, who was now folding the soggy thing closed again, had gone red in the face and was smiling up at him in embarrassed apology—she couldn’t be thirty years old yet—and so he just smiled cautiously back at her.

  �
�Yesterday you’d have been legal,” he said sympathetically; then, seeing that she was confused, he added, “Seven hours ago there’d have been ashtrays on the table, you wouldn’t have had to hide it.”

  She nodded, pushing the book away across the tabletop and frowning as though she’d never seen the object until it had started smoldering in front of her. “That’s right,” she said to him sternly. “No smoking in restaurants at all in California now, as of midnight last night.” She looked past him now, with a forgiving, we’ll-say-no-more-about-it air. “Where are your public telephones?”

  “Uh …” He waved in the direction of the ringing telephone. “Where you hear. But your breakfast is coming right up, if you want to wait.”

  She was hitching awkwardly forward out of the booth and levering herself up onto her feet. “All I ordered was coffee.” The waiter watched as she walked away toward the telephone. Her left leg swung stiff, not bending, and he was uneasily sure that the dark, wet spot on the thigh of her jeans must be fresh blood.

  She picked up the telephone receiver in mid-ring.

  “Hello?” Again the restaurant’s lights dimmed for a moment, and the woman’s face hardened. In a harsher, flatter voice than she’d used before, she said, “Do I know you, Susan? Sure, I’ll tell him. Now, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I’ve got a call to make here, don’t I?”

  She hung up and dug a handful of litter out of a jacket pocket and dumped it onto the shelf below the telephone; from among these matchbooks and dry-wall screws and slips of paper and bits of broken green stucco she selected a quarter, thumbed it into the slot, and then punched in a local number.

  After ten seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, “Hi,” she said, still speaking in her rough new voice. “Is this the Flying Nun?” She laughed. “Gotcha, huh? Listen, Susan says to tell you she still loves you. Oh, and what I called about—I’m going to assume the Flamingo, you know what I mean?” She listened patiently, and with her free hand picked up one of the fragments of green-painted stucco. “Potent pieces of it … persist in percolating in the … what, pasture? Can you spell alliteration? What I’m trying to say, sonny boy, is that even though they did tear it down, I’ve got a chunk of it, and your ass is grass. Don’t waste time chasing the long stories on the front page this morning—skip right to the funny papers.”

  After hanging up, she smacked her lips and frowned as if she’d eaten something rancid, then stepped across to the ladies’ room door and pushed it open.

  She dug a little bottle of Listerine out of another jacket pocket as she crossed the tile floor to the sink, and by the time she was standing in front of the mirror she had opened the bottle and taken a swig; she swished it around in her mouth, looking down at the chrome faucets rather than into the mirror, and she spat out the mouthwash with a grimace.

  She re-capped the bottle and hurried back to her table.

  Already the sky had brightened enough outside the window to cast dim shadows from the steaming plates and glasses that now sat on her table, and as she slid carefully into the booth she frowned at the elaborate breakfast. From her open purse she lifted a waitress’s order pad and another, larger bottle of the mouthwash, and for the next half hour, as she ate, she flipped through the pages of the pad, frowning over the inked notes that filled nearly every leaf, and paused frequently to swallow a mouthful of Listerine. She held her fork in her left hand to eat the scrambled eggs, but switched it to her right to eat the poached eggs. The cash register on the other side of the room kept on spontaneously going into its cash-out cycle, to the frustration of the cashier.

  When the first ray of sunlight from over the distant Vallecito Mountains touched a pastel painting on the far wall of the restaurant, the blond woman lifted her right hand and made a fist in the new daylight; then she packed up her order pad and mouthwash bottle, got up out of the booth, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table next to the soggy, blackened old paperback copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  The waiter was Catholic, so he caught what she was muttering as she hurried past him: “In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.” Then she had pushed open the glass front door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight.

  Through the glass he watched her hobble out to a little white Toyota in the dawn-streaked parking lot; then he sighed and told a busboy to bring along a towel and a spray bottle of bleach to that booth, because there was probably blood on the seat. “The booth where Miss Chock Full o’ Nuts was sitting,” he told the busboy.

  She drove west on Leucadia Boulevard, past old bungalows set back under pines and fig trees away from the new, high pavement, and then crossed a set of railroad tracks; the street descended sharply, and she made a right turn onto a wide street with big old eucalyptus trees separating the north and south bound lanes; after driving past a few blocks of dark surfboard shops and vintage clothing stores she turned left, up into one of the narrow lanes that climbed the bluff beyond which lay the sea. Fences and closed garage doors batted back the rattle of her car’s engine.

  A long fieldstone wall with pepper trees overhanging it hid a property on the seaward side of Neptune Avenue. At the entrance of the private driveway, by a burly pine tree that was strung with flowering orange black-eyed Susans, the woman pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and switched off the engine. The dawn street was empty except for a couple of dew-frosted cars parked tilted alongside the road, and silent—no birds sang, and the surf beyond the bluff was just a slow subsonic pulse.

  Her face was set in a hard grin as she got out of the car, and when she had straightened up on the gravel she began unbuckling the belt on her jeans; and she kept whispering, “Just in the leg, that’s all, settle down, girl! Just in the leg as a warning, and anyway he stabbed himself in the leg already one time, just to have something to talk to some lady about—and he shot himself in the foot before that, with this here very spear. No big deal to him, I swear.” She unzipped her jeans and pulled and tugged them down to her ankles, exposing white panties with SUNDAY embroidered in red on the front, and exposing also a two-foot-long green-painted trident that was duct-taped to her knee and thigh.

  It was a short aluminum speargun spear, with three barbless tips at the trident end and three diagonal grooves notched into the pencil-diameter shaft. The tan skin of her thigh was smeared red around several shallow cuts where the points were pressed against her, and it was with a harsh exhalation of relief that she peeled off the tape and lifted the spear away. Gripping it with her elbow against her ribs, she wrapped one length of the tape back around her thigh, covering the cuts, and then she pulled her pants back up and re-buckled her belt.

  She stuck the spear upright through the gravel into the loam underneath, and then leaned into the car and hoisted out of the back seat a Makita power screwdriver and a yard-square piece of white-painted plywood with black plastic letters glued onto it. She fished two screws out of her pocket and, with an abrupt shrill blasting of the Makita’s motor, screwed the sign to the trunk of the pine tree.

  The sign read:

  REST IN PEACE

  “THE LITTLE LAME MONARCH”

  LATE OF LEUCADIA;

  PREVIOUSLY OF SAN DIEGO, SONOMA, LAS VEGAS

  AND REMOTER PARTS.

  For a moment she just stood there on the dew-damp gravel, with the Makita in her hand still harshly stitching the dawn air with its shrill buzz, and she stared at the sign with a look of blank incomprehension. Then her fingers relaxed and the machine crunched to the gravel, quiet at last.

  She plodded over to the upright spear, plucked it free, and strode around the pine tree and down the unpaved private driveway, away from the street.

  Fifteen minutes later and two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, an earthquake shook the deep-rooted expanse of Hoover Dam, forty-five million pounds of reinforcing steel and four million cubic yards of concrete that stood braced across Black Canyon against the south end of Lake Mead as it had stood for
sixty years; morning-shift engineers in the powerhouse wings below the dam thought that some vast vehicle was traversing the highway at the top, or that one of the gigantic turbines had broken under the weight of water surging down through the penstocks buried inside the Arizona-side mountain. Vacationers aboard houseboats on the lake were shaken awake in their bunks, and in the nearby city of Boulder more than two hundred people called the police in a panic.

  Dawn-patrol prostitutes and crack dealers on Hollywood Boulevard reeled and grabbed for walls or parking meters as the sidewalk pavement, already sagging lower than normal because of shoddy tunneling being done for the Metro Rail line, abruptly dropped another inch and a half.

  Just across the highway from Colma, the gray little cemetery town on the San Mateo Peninsula to which all the evicted burial plots of neighboring San Francisco had been relocated, a pregnant woman wrapped in a bedsheet and screaming nonsense verses in French ran out into the lanes of the 280 Highway.

  Along Ocean Beach on the west coast of San Francisco a sudden offshore gale was chopping up the surf, blowing the swells at chaotic angles and wrecking the long clean lines of the waves. The couple of surfers out past the surf line who had been riding the terrifying winter waves gave up and began struggling to paddle back in to shore, and the ill-at-ease men who had been clustering around the vans and pickup trucks in the Sloat Boulevard parking lot cheered up and assured each other that they had stayed out of the water just because it had been obvious that the weather was going to change this way.

  Similar abrupt gales split and uprooted trees as far north as Eureka and as far south as San Diego, all on that same morning.

  And in a bedroom in a run-down old apartment building in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, a fourteen-year-old boy was jolted awake—out of a dream of a woman running madly through rows of grapevines and clutching in her hand an ivy-wrapped staff that somehow had a bloody pinecone stuck on the end of it.