Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 16
Valdez meowed with pleasure from the rear of the truck.
Brie looked away from the flaming boat in time to see a landslide sweep across the road in the block ahead. Someone’s split-level ranch rode the moving earth like a drunken cowboy on a demon bronco.
From Big Red to the slide, brake lights flashed. Before blocked traffic locked her in, she backed up and headed down a side street. A block later, a huge sinkhole stopped her. A broken main gushed water from the hole. Brie could just make out the wrecked shape of a little white hatchback under the umbrella of spray. A man with a cell phone to his ear stood near the hole.
Brie pulled completely off the road onto a dirt lane. Valdez jumped into her lap and licked milk from his paws. “I hope everyone’s okay,” she said. As though he heard her, the man pointed at his phone and waved her off with a thumbs up.
“Sweet goddess, Valdez,” she said. “The whole city’s having troubles. We need to get our smiles out there.” Brie looked around. The dirt lane disappeared into the shadows of a blooming cherry orchard. She inhaled fragrant air and smiled. “I know this place. This is Ida Chapman’s orchard. I helped her pick during high school.” She laughed, put Big Red in gear, and headed for the equipment exit at the far side of the familiar maze of pink trees and dirt lanes. “Valdez,” she said, “Ida’s helping us deliver smiles. Tonight, we burn a candle for her.”
With a little bouncing and jostling and a few quick swerves, she and Valdez managed to reach the Leeman building. There, a crew of hard-faced street workers cordoned off her normal approach. She headed around the block to enter the lot from the other side.
****
Alan yelled, “More, dammit!”
Only static responded. He’d used all his adjustments. Brie’s number was rising fast. He checked the window.
To his horror, two uniformed EMTs ran from the building and jumped in their truck. Lights flashed. The siren wailed, and the truck was gone.
Alan checked his screen. When Brie’s number hit 99, he screamed, grabbed his keys, and sprinted for the door. He threw the bolt, ripped open the door and rammed into Morgan. “Look out!”
“Stop!” Morgan grabbed for him. “Doc, let her go! We’re part of this.”
Alan twisted away and ran down the stairs. Side cramped and short of breath, Alan hit the lot running. In spite of four hundred dollars worth of coffee, a small crowd waited for Brie’s truck. He shoved past them, glancing in the direction of their glassy stares. The red truck was heading for the lot entrance.
Alan ran to his car, jumped in, fired it up, and raced toward Brie’s spot. The crowd scattered. Alan skidded into the parking space.
Morgan stood at his front bumper, shaking his head, dreadlocks dusting back and forth across his shoulders.
In his rearview mirror, Alan saw the ridiculous red truck with a black nose slowing to enter the lot. He could see the ditzy smile on Brieanna’s oblivious face.
Morgan came around to the driver’s window. Alan rolled it down.
Morgan shook his head. “You better move, Doc.”
“I did it!” Alan said triumphantly. He held up his wrist to show Morgan his watch. “7:29! Q has enough data. It’s not precise, but an approximation is better than nothing.”
“I don’t know what-”
“Give it up, Rasta-boy! I win!”
“Win what?”
“I’m going back to Livermore!” Alan’s laugh was shrill and giddy. “I’m calling Marg, taking her to dinner, and flying to Kauai.” He reached for the phone on his dash.
It rang.
“Don’t answer it,” Morgan said.
Alan’s hand shook. He lifted the receiver.
A woman’s voice said, “Alan?”
“Marg?” He smiled and winked at Morgan. “I was about to call you.”
“I’ve been in an accident.”
His grip tightened on the phone. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m at the airport. I wanted to say goodbye.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A water main broke. I drove into a huge hole. I had the pictures of your lover. I didn’t have time to change. I was soaked. I was coming-”
“My what?”
“I didn’t understand until I met Brandon.”
“Who?”
“Brandon Wolfe, my EMT. He pulled me out of the car. He gave me his fire coat and a cup of coffee. His little sister makes the best coffee.”
“There was a fire?”
“I can’t help it. I love him. I suppose it’s like you and your bimbo. Anyway, fair is fair. We’re using your tickets. Got an earlier flight. We leave in a half hour.”
“You what?”
“It’s so romantic! He quit his job to go. He’s so spontaneous, so passionate. He just seems to move with the flow of things.” She paused. Wet sounds came from the phone. Then, breathless, she said, “It didn’t seem right to not say goodbye. No hard feelings, Alan. I really do hope you and your… your whatever, are happy.”
Alan’s vision darkened at the edges. The phone was cold in his hand. “Marg,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.”
“We tried, Alan. This is for the best. We’re both free. Aloha.” The line went dead.
Thirty minutes. He could make it. He dropped the phone, burned rubber in reverse, then floored it for the street. At 7:29 and thirty seconds, he passed a lumbering, red blur and raced away toward the airport.
****
At Big Red’s window, Morgan stroked Valdez’s neck while Brie steamed milk, her smiling, blue eyes twinkling with natural magic.
The steamer fell silent and she handed him his latte.
“Thanks,” he said.
She slipped her hair back over her shoulder then held up a chocolate-covered coffee bean. “Free for my favorite regular, Morgan. You always smile, and you never miss a day.”
“You’re a constant in my life too, Brie.” Suddenly shy, he asked, “Brie?”
“No bean?”
Morgan took a deep breath. The mingling scents of eucalyptus incense, coffee, and cherry blossoms braced him. “A friend’s playing banjo at a club downtown. I wondered-”
“Of course,” she said. “But I have to be home by ten. A lot depends on me getting up early.”
“Yeah, I know.” Morgan opened his mouth. Brie laughed and put the bean gently on his tongue.
Bob’s Yeti Problem
Lawrence Person
One morning Bob Krusden stepped outside his cabin to discover three yeti carcasses embedded in his front yard.
He was pretty sure they were yeti rather than bigfeet, as their pelts were a handsome silver-white rather than brown. Two of them were semi-naked, wearing only some sort of weird loincloth and bandoleer arrangement, while the third wore what seemed to be a dull brown uniform. All three were suffering from what Bob had learned to describe, during his three seasons writing for St. James Street, as “massi�
�ve blunt trauma.” Two were planted face down a good half-foot into the pine-needle covered loam outside his cabin, and the one in uniform seemed to have come down on top of the others. All three had broken limbs and were surrounded by copious quantities of dried blood.
Bob was, to say the least, surprised. Though it had been getting close to dusk, he was sure there had been no dead yeti in front of his cabin when he had come home from his afternoon hike the day before. From the looks of things, they had fallen from a great height sometime during the night without him waking. That didn’t surprise him. Trish, his ex-wife, had always said he could sleep through an air-raid siren. Certainly he had slept through her loading up their downstairs furniture and leaving divorce papers on the pillow.
When he had rented the cabin for the summer, he was pretty sure the real estate agent hadn’t mentioned any yeti, dead or otherwise. Moreover, the fact that yeti were generally thought of as mythological creatures, and ones native to the Himalayas rather than the Rockies, merely heightened the odd nature of the situation.
Bob wondered what to do. He had come up to Colorado to spend time cranking out screenplays far from Hollywood’s clamoring Babel, and had already finished two with a third in progress. Dealing with cyrptozoological remains wasn’t part of the plan.
He finally decided to head on into town. Ed might know if anything like this had happened before and who he should contact. Besides, he was out of cornflakes.
****
Bob pulled up in front of Ed’s General Store, Hunting Emporium and Internet Caf. Ed Ridley was a man of many talents, most of which involved avoiding real work. The general store portion of the business offered staples at only moderately usurious prices, while the hunting supply portion sold lures, bait, ropes, hand-warmers, ammo, etc. for a good three to five times what you would pay at your local sporting goods store. The Internet caf consisted of four Formica tables with old, battered iMacs hooked up to a landline upload and satellite download for a princely $10 an hour (one hour minimum), mostly for hunters who wanted to send E-mail or check their stocks. But these days Ed’s biggest cyberspace venture was swapping deer and elk leases online, leaving the store’s actual grunt work to his sullen teenage son, Mike, who was busy stocking cans of beans when Bob came in.
“Hi, Mike,” said Bob. “Nice day today.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Mike, not looking up.
Ed nodded at him from the counter as he passed, cradling his phone with his shoulder and typing into his laptop with the other. “Three for Saturday night? Yeah, I think I can arrange that,” he said.
Bob drifted around the shop, picking up a box of cornflakes, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a can of Folgers, and a four-pack of toilet paper. By the time he brought it up to the register, Ed was off the phone.
“That’ll do ya?” asked Ed, running a scanning wand over the items.
“Yeah. Say, Ed, you ever see any yeti up these parts?”
“Yeti?” he asked uncertainly.
“Yeah, you know, yeti, abominable snowmen, bigfoot…”
“Oh. Bigfoot! Yeah, we had ourselves a little bigfoot boom down in Silverton around 1977, 1978 or so, whenever they had that bigfoot on The Six Million Dollar Man. Since then I can’t really recall too many sightings. Most of our crazies see saucers or black helicopters these days.”
“Well, I don’t think I’m crazy, but this morning I found three dead yeti out in front of my cabin.”
Ed stopped scanning. “Yeti?”
“Yeah.”
“Three of ‘em?”
“Yeah.”
“Dead?”
“Oh, yeah. Looks like they had fallen a long way before smacking into the ground.”
Ed scratched his head, then finished bagging Bob’s groceries. “Can’t say as I ever heard about anyone finding any dead bigfoots around here.”
“Well, I think these are more yeti than bigfoot. They’ve got silver pelts.”
Ed nodded sagely, as though anyone knew what color yeti pelts were. “Well, I’d tell you call Sheriff Parker, but he’s in Pueblo getting his gallbladder out. That’ll be $18.46.”
Bob fished a twenty out of his wallet. As Ed was making change he had another thought. “Say, do you suppose yeti are an endangered species?”
“I would suppose so, since no one ever found a dead one before.”
“Well, maybe you better talk to the EPA then. I’ve got a card from one in Denver, a Melissa Speed. She handed ‘em out when she was poking around here about that spitting tree spider thing.” Ed tore off his receipt and wrote the phone number down on the back. “Here, you might give her a call and see what she thinks.”
Bob laid the groceries on the floorboard and fished his phone out of the Explorer’s glove compartment. He kept it there for the same reason he had erased the Internet software from his laptop: so he could actually get some work done. He deleted the waiting phone spam and dialed the number Ed had given him.
“EPA field office, Melissa Speed speaking.”
“Uh, Ms. Speed, I have a problem, and I’m not sure if you’re the right person to talk to.” He started outlining the situation.
“Yeti?” she interrupted. “This better not be a prank call! We can trace your phone number, you know!”
“No, it’s no prank! I’ve got three dead yetis in front of my cabin, and I don’t know what to do.”
After Ms. Speed warned him that she could have him in jail so fast it would make his head spin for filling a false report, she had finally agreed to drive down that afternoon.
As he drove back to the cabin, Bob felt a sense of relief that the whole incident was going to be resolved soon. It had occurred to him that he could have sold the story to the National Enquirer, but Bob hated the tabloids, having seen them lie about a few of his acting friends. He was also wary of any publicity for himself rather than his screenplays. Bob was short, overweight, balding and wore glasses, and knew he looked horrible on camera. The few times he had appeared on TV (right after his first, as thus far only, Oscar nomination), he was surprised at how unpleasantly nasal his voice sounded. When you came right down to it, he was a moderately shy person, and the idea of appearing on Dateline or the evening news filled him with a certain low-key terror.
However, his sense of relief was short-lived. When he got back to his cabin, he saw that there were now four dead yeti in his front yard.
****
Speed was a frumpy, overweight woman with frizzy brown hair and the deeply ingrained frown of the Permanently Disapproving.
“This better not be a wild goose chase, Mr. Krusden!” she warned, eyeing him suspiciously. “Where are these three yeti you talked about?”
“Uh, four, actually, and-”
&nbs
p; “Four? You told me there were three! Did you kill another one?”
“No, uh, I didn’t kill any of them. This one seems to have fallen from the sky like the rest.”
“Fallen from the sky? Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“And I dragged the bodies over here to the side of the cabin so I could get in without having to walk around them. Plus they were starting to smell.”
“Don’t you know what sort of-” Speed stopped, looking at the four dead yetis laid out by the side of Bob’s cabin, then slowly reached down to touch one of them. After a few minutes of pulling at their hair and opening their glazed eyes, she stood up.
“They are yeti, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was trying to tell you.”
“I need to take a Haldol,” she said.
****
It took Bob a few minutes to brew coffee, during which Speed raged into her phone at various other government functionaries, barking orders and making demands. When the coffee was ready, Bob handed her a mug.
“Thanks,” she said briskly, swallowing a pill and chasing it with the coffee. “Without my Haldol, I get unpleasant.” She went back to her phone. “No I don’t want him to call me tomorrow, I want him to call me right now!”
After another twenty minutes of haranguing other bureaucrats and pacing back and forth across his cabin floor, Speed finally rang off and put her phone away. “Well, that’s finally settled,” she said. “The FBI will be here to secure the scene in an hour or so.”