Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  “ ‘I don’t know’ is not a known address or location,” the StreetDreams2000 said. “Please repeat.”

  “Stop fucking asking me!”

  “ ‘Stop fucking asking me’ is not a known address or location,” it said, but this time the tone sounded different. Almost annoyed. “Please offer a valid destination request.”

  “I don’t—whatever—” Riley sighed loudly, frustrated. “Just take me home.”

  The GPS didn’t answer. Not immediately. Instead it seemed to pause, as if thinking, before saying softly: “If you can dream it, we can take you there.”

  Riley’s eyes welled with tears, and he couldn’t even explain why. Maybe it was the way the StreetDreams2000 was talking now, as if this cold A.I. really cared about him and wanted to deliver him to the location of his dreams. Maybe it was because no voice so kind had reached him from a human face in years. Fuck years, hadn’t reached him from a human voice in his whole goddamn life. He was crying now, how pathetic was that, sobbing into his palms, the tears dripping between his fingertips.

  “Take me home,” Riley said, before whispering: “Take me to someone who loves me.”

  “Calculating your route, Riley. Calculating your route.”

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER he was driving through a downpour, listening to bad wipers squeak across the windshield.

  Need to get those replaced, he thought, brain still foggy with tears and emotion. They’re a driving hazard.

  “In 10.6 miles, take Exit 29E—Sandy Plains Road.”

  Part of him recognized how crazy this all felt. He was following the soft, cooing directions of a GPS that seemed able to magically find any location that he desired. Now it was taking him to someone who would love him? What in the hell was he following this thing for?

  Because if it’s half as good as those tacos . . . he thought, and managed a laugh. What the fuck did it matter? He had a full tank of gas and, as usual, nobody was waiting on him.

  The StreetDreams2000 clearly didn’t share his mirth. Her voice was hard now. All business: “In one mile, turn right onto Hiram Avenue.”

  He was thankful that Hiram still looked like civilization to him, albeit a civilization wreathed in a thick Scottish fog. Riley leaned forward and squinted, trying desperately to see anything beyond his windshield. He couldn’t help but imagine misshapen creatures hiding in the shadows. One too many comic books. Or ten thousand too many.

  “In three-tenths of a mile, turn right onto Sterling Street.”

  He followed the orders and the fog gradually broke, and Riley was relieved to see a series of housing developments—the expensive kind that he’d never be able to buy into. But the next set of directions gradually took him deeper and deeper into territory devoid of streetlights or finished construction.

  “Turn right onto Sampson’s Ferry Road.”

  This next turn brought him over a hill and onto a gravel road that shook his Nissan’s ailing suspension. Riley gazed around and realized that he was deep in the middle of nowhere. Time to give up on the StreetDreams.

  He was just about to turn around when the GPS barked another order at him:

  “In five hundred feet, bear left.”

  From what he could tell, the gravel path seemed to cut out here, stopping at the end of the field.

  “Bear left,” the StreetDreams2000 said, its polite British voice suddenly sounding a bit petulant.

  He paused, considering what to do next, and his headlights illuminated the empty fields and a sign promising dream homes to come.

  That was it? The GPS thought this was funny? Riley wanted to find someone who loved him, and in answer the GPS took him to a place where nobody lived?

  “You’re a prick,” he told the device.

  “Riley, please bear left.” A pause, then, “Trust me, Riley. Bear left.”

  To the left he saw a gravel track leading into the empty lots, mounds of dirt pushed to the side from back when they’d hoped to break ground on a neighborhood that had never come to life.

  You can still turn around, he thought. There’s nothing here for you.

  “Riley.” The StreetDreams2000’s voice sounded soft and forgiving again. “Riley. Bear left.”

  He spun the wheel and his tires sputtered over the grass as he pulled onto the dirt road. The next stretch took him a few hundred feet, around one of those dirt mounds, toward sharp hills that were cradled with dense woods. There was an ancient barn practically clinging to the side of a steep hill; contorted tree limbs had grown through holes the walls, and the wooden branches cradled the building like wretched hands. Riley pumped the brakes and his car rolled to a stop, engine sputtering.

  “Some GeekSquad programmer is going to pay for this shit,” he said. “Somebody thinks this is funny? I’m going to get my money back tomorrow.”

  But of course he wasn’t. He had no receipt, nor even an idea of where the crazy GPS came from. Nobody to blame. So he’d go home and find someone to blame.

  I wonder if some dickhead customer thought this was funny, and actually meant it for me, he considered for the first time. If they’re listening to me and laughing right now—I swear to God, if I find out someone has been listening to me sit in my car and cry, they are going to see a new version of me, a side they can’t even imagine. I will tear their arms right off their smartass bodies. . .

  That required getting home, though. And how in the hell did he get home from here?

  Maybe the GPS still would do that much for him. Maybe if he just put in the address, the obnoxious piece of shit on the dashboard would get him out of this downpour and back into his basement with some Chinese food on the way. Even if it was laughing at him.

  “New destination,” he said, trying to make his voice hard, badass even, no more of the teary-eyed shit.

  “You’ve arrived at your destination, Riley.”

  “Like hell I have. Address. New address. New destination. Now.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “Home! I want to go home!”

  The StreetDreams2000 spoke again, the last words Riley ever heard: “You are home, Pug.”

  DEPUTY DAVID WATTS had been in Harvest Moon Farms three times in his first five years with the sheriff’s department—once to break up a keg party, once at the report of someone setting off fireworks, and once following a drunk driver who’d turned into the hopeless swirl of circular lanes in an attempt to evade police, unaware that there was only one entrance and exit. The squad cars had parked there and waited for him to complete a high-speed series of turns, delighting himself by losing their lights, only to be hit with them again when he emerged back at the front. That had been some pretty funny shit.

  Now Watts had been in the unfinished neighborhood twice in a month, both for homicide victims.

  The place had never struck him as spooky before. Just sad. All those roads leading to nowhere and nothing. They had names and signs, they had parcels on file with the county, they had everything except a reason for existing. The developer had gone bankrupt at the start of the recession, and in this housing market, nobody was eager to absorb the project. It was too big, too expensive, and too pointless—houses were cheap in Atlanta right now, you could get into decent areas for a decent price, and the planned development was simply a poor location, an extra five minutes from anywhere you’d possibly want to be. Five minutes didn’t sound like much, but they added up over time.

  Now, though, it was A Big Fucking Deal Crime Scene, and that meant, as it always did, that Deputy Watts was on the bench. He’d found the first body, and now they were up to two, and the fun thing about that was they’d put his boss on the bench, too. Chief Deputy Swanson, aka Fish Sticks, always so happy to take the glory, was a forgotten memory of the investigation now, and that pleased Watts to no end. The Georgia State Police and the FBI were both at the scene, the big-dick contest was swinging between them now, and Fish Sticks couldn’t do a damn thing about it but watch and pout. At least Watts had no delusions of gran
deur; he was used to this shit and, frankly, preferred to be out of the spotlight, because the only time the spotlight found him, it tended to be when he’d fucked something up, like getting caught running his lights and siren just to go to Arby’s.

  Today’s assignment, then, was right up his alley: wander around the neighborhood while the hotshots worked the scene, pretending to be on the search for evidence. As if there would be evidence a half mile away, hiding out in the weeds. Well, maybe there could be, but it was a safe bet that Watts wouldn’t recognize it if he saw it. The only place that looked halfway interesting was the creepy old barn, but of course the evidence techs had claimed that, and the local deputies were supposed to conduct a “field search of the perimeter.” Which meant, of course, that they were instructed to go wandering around aimlessly.

  They sent him away from the main scene, out to search though they didn’t tell him what he was searching for. It had rained two nights in a row and the place was a mud bog. They’d moved a hell of a lot of earth out here without ever so much as digging a basement—mounds of dirt stood at the back of most of the lots, beaten down by rain and wind and time. It must have been hilly, once, and they’d cleared the hills in order to make each boring, flat yard look exactly alike. Didn’t want any neighborhood jealousy. Why do they get a hill next door?!

  The place made great sense as a body dump—isolated, hidden, but close enough to the freeway to get out of town fast—but what was strange was the forensics experts kept insisting that the bodies hadn’t been dumped here. They hadn’t been dead on arrival, just dead after arrival. And there was no connection between the victims, one a prim-and-proper office girl, the other a comic book store owner. They’d never met, had no mutual acquaintances, and were so wildly far apart in profile that any theories were hard to come by. Not only that, neither of them had the slightest reason to drive through Harvest Moon Farms, which implied that they’d been coerced there, forced somehow. That had been the prevailing theory, but Watts had just heard that the forensics team was coming up empty—and emphatic—with that research. They were convinced that nobody else had been in the vehicles, that both the man and the woman had driven themselves to the dead end of their own volition.

  It was, in Deputy Watts’s professional opinion, pretty weird shit.

  He would have liked to hang around and listen to the big shots toss their theories about, because this story was getting good play in the newspapers, and pretending he was key to the investigation might get him laid if he talked loud enough in front of that bartender at Chili’s who always seemed to give him extra salsa, but instead they had thrown him out here on the search. It was a shitty way to kill a shift, plodding around the empty lots, poking through knee-high weeds and grass, searching for—what? He had no idea. All he found were old beer cans and weathered fast-food bags. And the plastic pipes, of course. Each parcel had been marked off with plastic PVC pipe, orange tape wrapped around it. More heavy duty than the traditional surveyor’s stakes, and that was good, someone had really been thinking, because nobody was breaking ground at Harvest Moon Farms.

  He stopped at the far corner of the westernmost lot and took a piss and, while in midstream, decided to make it interesting. The empty pipes were there, after all, and why not test your aim? Watts wasn’t much good with his duty sidearm, but he was one hell of a piss shot.

  SOMEONE WAS PISSING in Odie’s living room.

  This was a new grievance.

  All day long he’d watched the silent computer monitors that showed the activities at the murder scene, and all day long he’d seen that the idiots remained fixated on the wrong place: the barn, the barn, the barn—all the attention went to that pointless old barn, and not once had anyone so much as given a look at the plastic pipes. That was, of course, the point of a lot of tedious work. Odie had placed exactly 320 sawed-off pieces of pipe in the muddy lots of Harvest Moon Farms, each one emblazoned with orange surveyor’s tape, and of the 320, only 7 served an actual purpose, bringing air into the bunker. Now someone was taking a piss in one of them. Odie’s hand drifted to the Bushmaster AR-15 closest to him—one of sixty-three weapons (sixty-five if you counted the grenades) that he had with him in case the police ever reached the right destination.

  No point, though. No need. Years ago, the government had no idea who they were pissing off when they fired Odie from his computer engineering job designing military-grade rescue beacons, similar to the kind that were sold to civilians for use on mountain-climbing expeditions and solo ocean crossings, the kind that would report exactly where you were and route emergency messages directly to a bunker in Texas that had been built to outlast anything up to and including a nuclear strike. Now, almost five years later, the government had no idea who they were pissing on, and Odie was hardly about to let his grand experiment fall apart in a burst of automatic gunfire directed at the cock of some moronic local cop.

  He watched the yellow stream splatter down and then come to a jerking, halting end—prostate trouble?—and finally there was nothing left but a few slow drips on the concrete floor.

  He looked at the puddle with distaste, sighed, and shook his head. In time maybe he’d find it funny, but right now it seemed pretty offensive.

  It must be growing dark, because on the monitors he could see the evidence technicians setting up spotlights. Pointing the wrong way, of course. Behind them, the entrance to Odie’s bunker lay in shadows and beneath thirty feet of compacted soil.

  He’d had fun watching them for a time, but it was growing old now, and he was anxious for new visitors. That was the real fun. Harvest Moon Farms was quickly growing a reputation as a body dump, but that wasn’t the truth at all. No corpse had ever been brought there and dumped. They’d all come home.

  There were two thousand StreetDreams GPS units out there in the world, circulating at first from where he’d left them, eventually making their way through pawnshops and discount electronic stores and online auction sites.

  His grand database with its monitoring scripts and sophisticated digital readout told him that nine hundred and ninety-seven units offered current potential. Many were sitting on car dashboards right now, shooting footage through fingernail-sized cameras, capturing audio through tiny microphones, and beaming it all back to Odie’s bunker by way of satellite.

  He had built each StreetDreams2000 with his bare hands. Odie felt proud of every one of them too. They were his surrogates—sent out into the world to hunt and gather. Over hundreds of hours watching hundreds of potential visitors through his GPS units, he was enormously pleased with the response. Sure, some rejected the StreetDreams2000 right away. They either left it where they found it, sold it, or gave it away. Odie’s calculations had suggested that a large number would do exactly that. But many people kept the device—not knowing that Odie’s remote eyes and ears were on them the whole time.

  Out of this blessed group, Odie could hope for only a small number of candidates to make it here. He was surprised, though, at how easily some would come. Some people apparently were happy to trust the directions that the StreetDreams2000 offered. Others needed more direct coaxing, though, so Odie would get involved remotely, speaking to them through the device, talking them home. Personal attention, after all, was among the most desired qualities in customer service. There was no navigational aid in the world that offered more personal attention than StreetDreams.

  But he wanted more visitors. He wondered how many he might see before it was all over. Right now his computers showed four quality candidates—one was a couple driving from Florida back to Indiana, arguing the whole way, the man insisting that his wife trust the GPS commands and put away that damned road atlas; Odie thought they could be very intriguing, and he hoped the police were gone before any of them arrived. The police could slow things down, certainly. Put cars out on the road, keep surveillance at the end of Sterling Street, watch and wait.

  All of this could have been avoided, of course, if he just hid the bodies, moved the cars, tha
t sort of thing. He’d considered it briefly, but he saw no fun in that sort of game. There was nothing new about it, nothing fresh, nothing that people would remember after he was gone. Now a man sitting comfortably beneath the murder scenes the whole time, watching the dumb-ass cops scour the surface of the earth while the body count continued to climb thanks to the source directly below them? That was fresh. That was going to make Odie one of the immortals.

  He had enough military-grade MREs (meals ready to eat) for a year and, with all this spring rain, more than enough freshwater filling the cistern to match it. He had his guns, and his computers, and his batteries, and his books. He was in no hurry to go anywhere. Why would he be?

  Odie was home.

  WHEN WATTS FINISHED with his piss, he zipped up and looked over his shoulder at the team working by the barn. None of them had so much as glanced his way. They didn’t give a damn what he was doing out here, as long as he wasn’t in their way. He could strip naked and sit in the grass and it would probably be four hours before anybody noticed.

  “Taxpayer dollars at work,” he said, and laughed though it wasn’t funny. He was tired and he was bored and he had hours ahead of him in the cold rain.

  He’d wandered about fifty feet before he saw some more junk in the weeds, this time a piece of scrap plastic instead of a fast-food bag. He walked over to it, as if there was some point in studying every bit of trash in the area, and then stopped and frowned. Not scrap plastic at all. It was an electronic gadget of some sort.

  He knelt, moisture soaking the knee of his pants immediately, and picked it up and turned it over.

  StreetDreams2000.

  A GPS unit. Shit. This actually mattered. This actually might matter. The girl who’d been killed, her boyfriend had insisted that she’d been robbed of a GPS unit, and they’d never found the thing.

  “Probably not the same one,” Watts said, but he wasn’t confident. It damn well might be the same one, and that meant he could go back to those assholes at the barn and show them that he was the only one out here who’d achieved anything, show them that . . .