Horizons: A collection of science fiction short stories

by Nolan Edrik

  The thought of an explosive ticking away in his bag kicks Tyler’s brain into high speed. Instead of weaving through the maze of barely passable streets to the drop spot, he decides to take his chances with the fields behind the abandoned shops. He zips between two buildings and into an expanse of chest-high grass.

  The wheels lose their grip on the dirt as he accelerates. He may as well be riding on ice. Any sudden turn will send him skidding uncontrollably. Tyler notices a circular pattern in the grass ahead, probably a discarded tire, and begins leaning to the side 100 feet ahead of time. Even in such a gradual maneuver, the bike’s contact with the ground becomes tenuous.

  5:31:30

  He aims the bike toward the open bay of an old oil-change shop and shoots through the gap, across the street, through a transmission shop, and into another field. Again, he has to steer the cycle through the prairie like a battleship rather than a racing bike. Still, this method is faster than threading through the cracked side streets.

  After dodging a burnt-out car frame, a pile of rusted chain-link, and maneuvering through a dead pallet factory, Tyler hits Mellon Street and leans hard into the turn. The wheels grab the pavement like an old friend and pull him toward his destination.

  5:31:48.

  He cranks back the throttle and barrels over the ragged asphalt, standing on his pegs and absorbing the bounces like a racing jockey. The blue square in his visor blinks faster as he approaches his destination.

  1392 Mellon. 1394, 1396…

  5:31:50

  When the readout shows he’s at 1398 Mellon, he lets off the throttle and squeezes the brakes, sending the bike into a controlled skid. 1400 blinks in his visor, then 1402 right as he comes to a stop.

  The address is a vacant lot. No one’s there. 5:31:58. He drops the package on the ground and zips away, expecting to hear it detonate behind him. At the end of the block, he whips the bike back around and watches.

  The package rests silently on the pavement. Tyler waits a full minute and idles back across the street from the box. He looks at the addresses to the right and left, 1400 and 1404. The box is definitely in the right place.

  Tyler kicks down his bike’s stand and walks up to peer into the vacant lot. The spot is a giant hole with its edges squared off as if a building had once sat there but had been removed all the way down to the foundation. Tree roots dangle out into the empty space.

  “Dial HQ,” Tyler says into his helmet.

  Spencer picks up.

  “Ty, you get that package out to Mellon in time?”

  “I got here just under the wire, but on time. There’s no building though. Just a vacant lot. Is someone coming to pick this up?”

  “It’s a vacant lot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s strange. The invoice doesn’t mention anything about a pickup.”

  “Should I leave it here?”

  Spencer’s typing clatters through Tyler’s earpiece.

  “Hell no. Do not leave that thing lying around. The insurance policy on that box is worth more than you’ll make in a decade.”

  “What is it?”

  “No clue. The shipper listed it under the category of ‘other.’”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Wait there for ten or fifteen minutes and then take it back to your place if no one shows. We’ll try to reach the sender in the morning.”

  “Crap. OK.”

  Tyler pops off his helmet. The air smells of dust and burnt plastic. The sun is descending, the twilight glow transforming the vacant buildings’ decay from depressing to merely melancholy. Instead of the corpses of once-productive buildings, they begin to resemble ruins on a postcard.

  *

  Tyler stashes his bike behind a false wall in a supply closet at the back of his dad’s repair shop and hooks it up to charge. The service bays are empty, the lights extinguished. A sticky note hangs from the office door.

  “Nothing left for you to do. Take the night off.”

  Tyler feels a mix of relief and disappointment. Relief that he’s getting a night off for the first time in three weeks. Disappointment that business is slowing down even more. But what’s a 55-year-old mechanic supposed to do when cars are fixed by robots controlled by teenagers in Malaysia? At this rate, his dad will have to close the shop within a year.

  Tyler exits through the back door and climbs the fire escape to his apartment. The light flickers on when he enters, revealing the studio in its normal state of Spartan messiness. He closes and deadbolts the door behind him.

  He chucks his key fob onto the kitchenette’s square foot of counter space and plops onto his couch, the exhausted springs creaking under his weight. He sets his bag at his feet and removes the package.

  The box is a perfect cube, one foot long in each direction. Turning it over in his hands, he finds that it’s heavy but unevenly weighted, as if half of it is solid metal and the other half is empty. Each turn produces a gentle thump from something loose inside. The urge to shake the box grips him, but he remembers the massive insurance policy.

  Tyler pushes aside an empty Chinese-food container, sets the package on the living room table, and flips on the television. It’s a commercial for an in-car gym set, a compact steel frame strung with resistance cables so people can grab a workout during their commute. He falls asleep before the show returns.

  *

  The next morning, he wakes up to a game-show host quizzing contestants on how much a brand new lawn bot costs. An unreasonably excited middle-aged woman slams on her buzzer and shouts, “250 Dave! I’m going with 250!”

  As Tyler’s eyes focus on the host’s bleached teeth, he becomes aware that something isn’t quite right. His eyes snap back to his coffee table. It’s empty except for the Chinese-food container. The package is gone.

  He shoots up from the couch and runs to the door. It’s still deadbolted shut. The one window in his apartment, above his kitchen sink, is closed and intact as well.

  Could I have sleepwalked? Could I have misplaced it?

  He flies around his apartment, digging under couch cushions, throwing open cupboards, even at one point looking at the ceiling in case the laws of physics had suspended themselves and the package had flown up in the air, wedging itself into the plaster. His apartment is so small that the search ends quickly. There’s no avoiding the conclusion. The package is gone.

  *

  “How the hell does a package disappear from your house?” Spencer says.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Tyler shouts back into his helmet. He weaves his bike through the thicket of downtown traffic and steers into an alley where he can pick up speed. “I thought maybe you’d have a clue. Who brought this thing in? Did he look suspicious? Is this going to be a mess like that kingpin’s poodle all over again?”

  “The invoice says it was dropped off overnight, when Antonia was on. I’ll check with her and see if she knows anything. But she’s probably asleep right now.”

  “Fine. Let me know as soon as you hear from her.”

  “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

  “I’m heading to the delivery address right now. Maybe someone will be waiting or maybe there was a drop box or something I didn’t notice. If nothing else, if I see one of those Nativist goons hanging around, I’ll know how much shit I’m in.”

  “Well, figure it out quickly. We’ve got a pile of boxes backing up in here, and Gruber called in sick.”

  “Roger that.”

  The line clicks dead, and Tyler swerves out of the alley into traffic.

  *

  Tyler returns to the thicket of crumbling streets leading to last night’s drop spot. As he winds his way over the crumbling asphalt, he imagines a phalanx of beetle-black Zambrano sedans parked around the vacant lot, rifle tips peeking out of barely opened windows. Or a line of the Nativists’ modified classic American wheels, giant SUVs and low-slung ‘Vettes, their gas-powered guts torn out and replaced with
electric innards.

  Either way, Tyler decides to approach the spot at a steady clip in case he needs to get away from whoever’s waiting for him. He suddenly feels deep gratitude for all the speed modifications he and his dad had made to his bike. Sure, they’d stripped out some stability controls, and the bike didn’t have a twenty-hour operating time like the newer models, but sometimes there’s no replacement for flat-out speed.

  “Son, there will always be an advantage to whoever can get from Point A to Point B the fastest,” his dad had said. That was back when he was sober, when mom was around, before all the new cars hit the streets, before his business slowed to a trickle of hobbyists and illegal modifiers. He wants to call his dad, wise old bastard, to see what he makes of this situation, but it’s 9 a.m. and there’s no way he’s awake.

  Tyler turns onto Mellon and picks up speed. He has to do the jockey routine again, standing and letting his legs absorb the shocks from the crumbled asphalt. The street is clear of cars, but people could still be hiding among the buildings. His eyes flick around the walls, into the shadows, around the stacks of rusted car doors.

  There’s no sign of anyone waiting for him, but amid the rubble and decay, something new is sticking out. It’s a box. In front of the vacant lot at 1402 Mellon.

  Tyler focuses on it as he zips past. Even with his vision blurred by his speed, he’s sure of it. It’s the box from last night.

  What the hell? Did I leave it here last night? No, no, no. I clearly remember taking it home, sitting on my couch, and inspecting it. I’m not crazy.

  He stops at the end of the block and idles halfway back. Five feet away from the box are two pigeons pecking around for grubs in the dirt.

  Could this be some kind of joke? Or a trap? Who have I pissed off lately?

  Tyler picks up a rock and flings it at the box. The projectile bounces once and glances off the package, pushing it a half turn. The pigeons flap a foot into the air, then settle back down and resume grub-hunting.

  Not a bomb.

  Tyler racks his brain. The only reasonable explanation is that someone broke into his place last night, stole it, and brought it here. But why? If someone wants to mess with him, they could have done a lot worse when they were in his place while he was passed out.

  Could he have sleepwalked and sleepbiked it all the way out here? He checks his odometer. Not possible.

  Or could he have left it out here? As clear as his memory is of taking it home, between delivering packages during the day and working in the shop at night, he hasn’t been sleeping much. His mind has played worse tricks on him before.

  Tyler walks up to the package. Nothing looks different. It’s even sitting address-label upward like he’d placed it on his table.

  “You guys want this thing?” he says to the pigeons.

  *

  Tyler relays the story to Spencer, and they agree that the best idea is to open the package to see if helps them track down the sender. Even though it’s a break from protocol, Tyler is thrilled with any scenario that ends with him getting rid of this albatross. He’s now missed a whole evening and morning worth of deliveries because of it.

  Given the strange circumstances, Tyler takes a winding route back into the city, blows through a few red lights, and weaves past some crowded patches of traffic in case anyone is following him. Even if no one is following him, hauling ass in a crowded city is one of the few perks of the job. Zipping through the gauntlet simultaneously soothes and invigorates him.

  *

  Instead of going home again, he heads downtown to the Boso Bar. He turns down an alleyway, through the back entrance of a parking garage, and down into the service tunnels below. After a series of twists and turns, the tunnel opens up into a makeshift parking lot with loops of steel rebar driven into the walls where couriers can lock up their bikes.

  He looks at the other rigs stashed there. Hellman, Jax, Torino. All professionals. No one too interested in him or anything outside of their own delivery bags. Tyler climbs a two-story ladder and enters the bar through an empty rear storage room.

  The Boso Bar is dim, with most of the illumination provided by blacklights hung over fluorescent posters of antique Ninjas, Hayabusas, and outlandish creations made by old-time Japanese bike-mod enthusiasts.

  Stumps is behind the bar. Tyler orders a beer.

  “Want me to dose it with anything?” Stumps asks. “A little addy or some aza-octane? Something to sharpen you up?”

  “Nah, just a beer’s fine,” Tyler says. After a brisk ride on a crisp autumn day, his brain already is as sharp as it gets.

  Tyler takes his drink and retires to a horseshoe booth in the back, across from a blacklit poster. It’s one of those egg-headed, black-eyed aliens on a racing bike with an oversized fairing and raised handlebars.

  After a hearty gulp of beer and a deep breath, Tyler takes the box out of his bag and sets it on the table. He clicks on the headlamp he uses when working on his bike and flips out the blade on his penknife, resting the tip on the tape covering the box’s lengthwise seam. He reminds himself that breaching the box doesn’t make the insurance policy pay out. Only losing it or damaging it beyond repair does that. Still, he’s never opened a package he’d been meant to deliver, and he can’t shake the feeling that the package is booby-trapped and waiting to blow the second he opens it.

  Tyler takes another swig and punctures the tape. He slides the knife down the length of the package and counts to ten. Since there’s no hissing or sparking, he cuts open the other seams with two flips of the wrist.

  The box’s interior is lined with gel-filled film that’s squishy and cool to the touch. Plum-sized balloons filled with the same indigo ooze fill the inside like packing peanuts. Tyler removes the bubbles one-by-one, setting them in his bag so they won’t roll away.

  Buried in these balloons is a rectangular box the size of a toaster. One side is solid black metal covered in blinking lights. A waveform pulses across a small readout screen. The other end of the device is a clear, plastic-glass case holding a dead white rat with a tracking bracelet around its front left ankle. Or at least it looks dead. Tyler shakes the box. Yep, dead.

  Tyler turns the box over in his hands, the rat flopping from side to side with each movement. He can’t find any markings that indicate what this thing is, who had sent it, or where it’s headed.

  “The hell is that?” a voice says.

  Tyler looks up to see Jax standing at the end of his booth. He and Jax had worked for the same delivery company a few years back. Good guy. Trustworthy.

  “A headache in a box,” Tyler says.

  He explains the situation to Jax in broad terms: non-existent delivery address, anonymous sender, unnamed receiver. He skips over the part about it disappearing from his apartment. Jax stays standing at the end of the table, nodding and sipping his beer.

  “You ever seen anything like it?” Tyler asks.

  “Can’t say I have. And I have seen some weird shit. What’s that writing mean?”

  “What writing?”

  “Right here.” Jax motions Tyler over to look from his angle.

  Tyler slides out of the booth and into the pool of blacklight Jax is standing in. Jax points to the bottom of the device. In glowing UV ink are the words “EW – boson tunnel – G45.”

  “Oh, I get it now,” Tyler says and starts repacking the box. “Thanks Jax.”

  “Any time, man.”

  *

  EW – boson tunnel – G45

  Tyler has no clue what it means, but he doesn’t want to figure it out in Jax’s presence, in case the answer gets him into trouble. So he gathers his things and leaves the bar without even getting halfway through his beer. Once he’s back above ground, he pulls into an alley and uses his helmet computer to help his search.

  The entry for “boson tunnel” is filled with incomprehensible scientific terminology. G45 doesn’t bring up anything useful. EW could refer to thousands of things, from old publishing companies to
a line of light fixtures. Tyler toggles back to the boson tunnel article and tries to understand it, but still can’t hack his way through the thicket of jargon. So he flips down to the glossary at the end in hopes there’s a link to Boson Tunneling for Dummies, or anything that explains it normal English.

  No such luck. The glossary is loaded with obscure academic-journal articles by Finnish and Korean authors. Tyler’s eyes start to glaze over as he leafs through the list. Then a name jumps out at him. Ernie Windstrom. A professor at Detroit State. EW. Detroit.

  *

  Tyler sees the professor across the university quad, and he can’t help but laugh. For almost a day now, he’s been terrified by the thought that he’s toting around an explosive, or that whoever sent this package is hunting him down to get it back. And then it turns out that it’s the property of this geezer professor who probably hurts himself sneezing. The batty old coot probably just wrote the wrong address on the box.

  Windstrom is sitting at a picnic table piled high with paper books, scribbling with a pencil onto a paper pad. He’s drinking coffee out of a foam cup and chomping on a sandwich as he works, unaware of the mustard-slick lettuce that’s slipping out of the bread onto his lap.

  Tyler saunters across the lawn not caring how much he sticks out on campus with his tattoos and Kevlar-graphene suit. He’d gone to college. Studied to be an engineer, and as soon as he’d graduated, the industry went automatic. He wonders how many of these kids are going to hit the same wall he did, their entire vocations vanishing before the ink dries on their diplomas. How many of them will try to take his job hauling packages for drug lords and dotty academics? Doesn’t matter. He has that job locked down, even if it means he gets so little sleep that he misplaces packages and hallucinates that he’s brought them home.