The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I had forgotten that moment until yesterday.

  * * *

  On the morning after she had tied me up, Kelly Dahl shot the shit out of my Jeep.

  I had waited until sunrise to find my way back to Boulder. The night was too dark, the woods were too dense, and my head hurt too much to try to drive down the mountain in the dark. Besides, I had thought at the time with a wry smile, I might drive into a mine shaft.

  In the morning my head still hurt and the woods were still thick—not even a sign of a Jeep trail or how Kelly had got my vehicle this far back—but at least I could see to drive. The Jeep itself had multiple abrasions and contusions, a dented fender, flaking paint, and a long gouge on the right door, but these were all old wounds; there was no sign of tumbling down a three-hundred-foot mine shaft. The keys were in the ignition. My billfold was still in my hip pocket. The camping gear was still in the back of the Jeep. Kelly Dahl might be as crazy as a loon, but she was no thief.

  It had taken me about an hour to drive up to the mine shaft the previous evening; it took me almost three hours to get back to Boulder. I was way the hell beyond Sugarloaf Mountain and Gold Hill, northeast of Jamestown almost to the Peak of Peak Highway. I had no idea why Kelly Dahl would drag me that far … unless the entire mine shaft experience was an hallucination and she had found me elsewhere. Which made no sense. I put the puzzle out of my mind until I could get home, take a shower, have some aspirin and three fingers of scotch, and generally start the day.

  I should have known things were screwed up long before I got to Boulder. The paved road in Left Hand Canyon, once I crept out of the woods and got onto it headed east, seemed wrong. I realize now that I was driving on patched concrete rather than asphalt. The Greenbriar Restaurant sitting at the exit of Left Hand Canyon where the road meets Highway 36 seemed weird. Looking back, I realize that the parking lot was smaller, the entrance and door painted a different color, and there was a large cottonwood where the flower garden had been for years. Small things on the short ride south to Boulder—the shoulder of Highway 36 was too narrow, the Beechcraft plant along the foothills side of the road looked spruced up and open for business despite the fact that it had been empty for a decade. Nursing my headache, mulling over Kelly Dahl and my screwed-up suicide, I noticed none of this.

  There was no traffic. Not a single car or van or cyclist—unusual since those spandex fanatics on bikes are zooming along the Foothills Highway every pleasant day of the year. But nothing this morning. The strangeness of that did not really strike me until I was on North Broadway in Boulder.

  No cars moving. Scores were parked by the curb, but none were moving. Nor cyclists hogging the lane. Nor pedestrians walking against the light. I was almost to the Pearl Street walking mall before I realized how empty the town was.

  Jesus Christ, I remember thinking, maybe there’s been a nuclear war … everyone’s evacuated. Then I remembered that the cold war was over and that the Boulder City Council had—a few years earlier and for no reason known to humankind—voted unanimously to ignore civil defense evacuation plans in case of a wartime emergency. The Boulder City Council was into that sort of thing—like declaring Boulder a Nuclear Free Zone, which meant, I guess, that no more aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons would be tying up there again soon. It seemed probable that there hadn’t been a mass evacuation even if the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant six miles away had melted down—a core of Boulder’s politically correct citizenry would protest the advancing radiation rather than evacuate.

  Then where is everybody? I had the open Jeep slowed to a crawl by the time I came down the hill to Pearl Street and the walking mall there.

  The walking mall was gone: no trees, no landscaped hills, no tasteful brick walkways, no flower beds, no panhandlers, no Freddy’s hot dog stand, no skateboarders, no street musicians, no drug dealers, no benches or kiosks or phone booths … all gone.

  The mall was gone, but Pearl Street itself remained, looking as it had before it was covered with bricks and flower beds and street musicians. I turned left onto it and drove slowly down the empty boulevard, noticing the drugstores and clothing stores and inexpensive restaurants lining the sidewalks where upscale boutiques, gift stores, and Häagen-Dazs parlors should have been. This looked like Pearl Street had looked when I had come to Boulder in the early seventies—just another western town’s street with rents that real retailers could afford.

  I realized that it was the Pearl Street of the early seventies. I drove past Fred’s Steakhouse, where Maria and I used to have the occasional Friday steak dinner when we’d saved enough money. Fred had thrown in the towel and surrendered to the mall boutique rental prices … when?… at least fifteen years ago. And there was the old Art Cinema, showing Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. It hadn’t been a real movie theater for a decade. I could not remember when Cries and Whispers had been released, but I seem to recall seeing it with Maria before we moved to Boulder after my discharge in ’69.

  I won’t list all the rest of the anomalies—the old cars at the curb, the antiquated street signs, the antiwar graffiti on the walls and stop signs—just as I did not try to list them that day. I drove as quickly as I could to my apartment on Thirtieth Street, barely noting as I did so that Crossroads Mall at the end of Canyon Boulevard simply was there but drastically smaller than I remembered.

  My apartment building was not there at all.

  For a while I just stood up in my Jeep, staring at the fields and trees and old garages where my apartment complex should be, and resisting the urge to scream or shout. It was not so much that my apartment was gone, or my clothes, or my few mementos of the life I had already left behind—some snapshots of Maria that I never look at, old softball trophies, my 1984 Teacher of the Year finalist plaque—it was just that my bottles of scotch were gone.

  Then I realized how silly that response was, drove to the first liquor store I could find—an old mom-and-pop place on Twenty-eighth where a new minimall had been the day before—walked in the open door, shouted, was not surprised when no one answered, liberated three bottles of Johnnie Walker, left a heap of bills on the counter—I might be crazy, but I was no thief—and then went out to the empty parking lot to have a drink and think things over.

  I have to say that there was very little denial. Somehow things had changed. I did not seriously consider the possibility that I was dead or that this was like that “lost year” on the Dallas TV show some years ago and that I would wake up with Maria in the shower, Allan playing in the living room, my teaching job secure, and my life back together. No, this was real—both my shitty life and this strange … place. It was Boulder, all right, but Boulder as it had been about two and a half decades earlier. I was shocked at how small and provincial the place seemed.

  And empty. Some large raptors circled over the Flatirons, but the city was dead still. Not even the sound of distant traffic or jet aircraft disturbed the summer air. I realized, in its absence, how much of an expected background that sound is for a city dweller such as myself.

  I did not know if this was some half-assed sort of random confusion of the space-time continuum, some malfunction of the chronosynclastic infundibulum, but I suspected not. I suspected that it all had something to do with Kelly Dahl. That’s about as far as my speculations had gone by the time I had finished the first half of the first bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was an old pay phone on the side of the liquor store twenty paces away. Even the goddamn phone was different—the side of the half booth read Bell Telephone rather than U.S. West or one of its rivals and the old Bell logo was embossed in the metal there. It made me strangely nostalgic.

  I let the thing ring twelve times before setting the bottle on the hood of the Jeep and walking slowly over to it. Maybe it would be God, explaining that I was dead but I’d only qualified for limbo, that neither heaven nor hell wanted me.

  “Hello?” My voice may have sounded a little funny. It did t
o me.

  “Hi, Mr. Jakes.” It was Kelly Dahl, of course. I hadn’t really expected God.

  “What’s going on, kid?”

  “Lots of neat stuff,” came the soft, high voice. “You ready to play yet?”

  I glanced over at the bottle and wished I’d brought it with me. “Play?”

  “You’re not hunting for me.”

  I set the receiver down, walked back to the Jeep, took a drink, and walked slowly back to the phone. “You still there, kiddo?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to play. I don’t want to hunt for you or kill you or do anything else to you or with you. Comprende?”

  “Qui.” This was another game I suddenly remembered from sixth grade with this kid. We would begin sentences in one language, shift to another, and end in a third. I never asked her where an eleven-year-old had learned the basics of half a dozen or more languages.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m leaving now. You take care of yourself, kid. And stay the fuck away from me. Ciao.” I slammed the receiver down and watched it warily for at least two minutes. It did not ring again.

  I secured the second bottle on the floorboards so it wouldn’t break and drove north on Twenty-eighth until I got to the Diagonal—the four-lane highway that runs northeast to Longmont and then continues on up the string of towns along the Front Range. The first thing I noticed was that the Boulder section of the Diagonal was two-lane … when had they widened it? The eighties sometime … and the second thing I noticed was that it ended only a quarter of a mile or so outside of town. To the northeast there was nothing: not just no highway, but no farmhouses, no farm fields, no Celestial Seasonings plant, no IBM plant, no railroad tracks—not even the structures that had been there in the early seventies. What was there was a giant crack in the earth, a fissure at least twenty feet deep and thirty feet wide. It looked as if an earthquake had left this cleft separating the highway and Boulder from the high prairie of sagebrush and low grass beyond. The fissure stretched to the northwest and southeast as far as I could see and there was no question of getting the Jeep across it without hours of work.

  “Sehr gut,” I said aloud. “Score one for the kid.” I swung the Jeep around and drove back to Twenty-eighth Street, noticing that the shorter route of the Foothills Highway had not yet been built, and drove south across town to take Highway 36 into Denver.

  The fissure began where the highway ended. The cleft seemed to run all the way to the Flatirons to the west.

  “Great,” I said to the hot sky. “I get the picture. Only I don’t think I want to stay. Thanks anyway.”

  My Jeep is old and ugly, but it’s useful. A few years ago I had an electric winch installed on the front with two hundred feet of cable wrapped around its drum. I powered it up, took the drum brake off, secured the cable around a solid bridge stanchion about thirty feet from the edge of the fissure, set it again, and prepared to back the Jeep down the fifty-degree embankment. I didn’t know if I could climb the opposite slope even in four-wheel-low, but I figured I’d think of something when I got down there. If worse came to worst, I’d come back, find a bulldozer somewhere, and grade my own way out of this trap. Anything was preferable to playing Kelly Dahl’s game by Kelly Dahl’s rules.

  I’d just gotten the rear wheels over the brink and was edging over with just the cable keeping me from falling when the first shot rang out. It shattered my windshield, sending the right-side windshield wiper flying into the air in two pieces. For a second I froze. Don’t let anyone tell you that old combat reflexes last forever.

  The second shot smashed the Jeep’s right headlight and exited through the fender. I don’t know what the third shot hit, because old reflexes finally reasserted themselves and I was out of the Jeep and scrambling for cover along the steep cliffside by then, my face in the dust, my fingers clawing for a hold. She fired seven times—I never doubted that it was Kelly Dahl—and each bullet created some mischief, taking off my rearview mirror, puncturing two tires, and even smashing the last two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red where I’d left them cushioned beneath the seat, wrapped in my shirt. I have to believe that last was a lucky shot.

  I waited the better part of an hour before crawling out of the cleft, looking at the distant buildings for any sign of the crazy woman with the rifle, winching the Jeep out on its two flat tires, and cursing over the smashed bottles. I changed the right front with the spare I had and limped into town, thinking that I’d head for the tire place on Pearl—if that was there yet. Instead, I saw another Jeep parked in a lot near Twenty-eighth and Arapaho and I just pulled in beside it, took one of its new, knobby tires, decided that my spare was in bad shape and the rear tires looked shitty with these new ones on front, and ended up changing all four tires. I suppose I could have just hot-wired the new Jeep and have been done with it without all that sweat and cursing under the blazing July sun, but I didn’t. I’m sentimental.

  In the early afternoon I drove to the old Gart Brothers sporting goods store and chose the Remington with the twenty-power scope, the .38 handgun, the Ka-bar knife of the sort that had been prized in Vietnam, and enough ammunition for the two guns to fight a small war. Then I drove to the old army surplus store on Pearl and Fourteenth and stocked up on boots, socks, a camouflage hunting vest, backpacking rations, a new Coleman gas stove, extra binoculars, better rain gear than I had in the old pack, lots of nylon line, a new sleeping bag, two compasses, a nifty hunting cap that probably made me look like a real asshole, and even more ammunition for the Remington. I did not leave any money on the counter when I left. I had the feeling that the proprietor was not coming back and doubted if I would be either.

  I drove back to the mom-and-pop liquor store on Twenty-eighth, but the shelves were empty. The hundreds of bottles that had been there three hours before were simply gone. The same was true of the four other liquor stores I tried.

  “You bitch,” I said to the empty street.

  A phone rang in an old glass booth across a parking lot. It kept ringing as I removed the .38 police special from its case, opened the yellow box, and slowly loaded the cylinder. It stopped ringing on my third shot when I hit the phone box dead center.

  A pay phone across the street rang.

  “Listen you little bitch,” I said as soon as I picked it up, “I’ll play your game if you’ll leave me something to drink.”

  This time I did expect God to be on the other end.

  “You find me and stop me, and you’ll have all the booze you want, Mr. Jakes,” came Kelly Dahl’s voice.

  “Everything will be the way it was?” I was looking around as I spoke, half expecting to see her down the street in another phone booth.

  “Yep,” said Kelly Dahl. “You can even go back up in the hills and drive into a mine shaft, and I won’t interfere the next time.”

  “So I actually drove into it? Did I die? Are you my punishment?”

  “Mu,” said Kelly Dahl. “Remember the two other Eco-Week field trips?”

  I thought a minute. “The water filtration plant and Trail Ridge Road.”

  “Very good,” said Kelly Dahl. “You can find me at the higher of those two.”

  “Do the roads continue to the west…,” I began. I was talking to a dial tone.

  III. Palimpsest

  On the day I surprised Kelly Dahl near the mountain town of Ward, she almost killed me. I had set an ambush, remembering my training from the good old Vietnam years, waiting patiently where the Left Hand Canyon road wound up to the Peak to Peak Highway. There were only three ways to get up to the Continental Divide along this stretch of the Front Range, and I knew Kelly would take the shortest.

  There had been a chain saw in the old firehouse in Ward. The town itself was empty, of course, but even before Kelly Dahl kidnapped me to this place there were never more than one hundred people in Ward—hippies left over from the sixties mostly. The old mining town had been turned into a scrap heap of abandoned vehicles, half-built houses, woodpiles, junk
heaps, and geodesic outhouses. I set the ambush on the switchback above the town, cutting down two ponderosa pines to block the road. Then I waited in the aspen grove.

  Kelly Dahl’s Bronco came up the road late that afternoon. She stopped, got out of the truck, looked at the fallen trees, and then looked over at me as I stepped around a tree and began walking toward her. I had left the Remington behind. The .38 was tucked in my waistband under my jacket; the Ka-bar knife remained in its sheath.

  “Kelly,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

  That was when she reached back into the Bronco, came out with a powerful bow made of some dark composite material, notched an arrow before I could speak again, and let fly. It was a hunting arrow—steel-tipped, barbed for maximum damage—and it passed under my left arm, tearing my jacket, ripping flesh on the inside of my arm and above my rib cage, and embedding itself in the aspen centimeters behind me.

  I was pinned there for an instant, a bug pinned on a collecting tray, and could only stare as Kelly Dahl notched another arrow. I had no doubt that this one would find its target in my sternum. Before she could release the second arrow, I fumbled in my belt, came out with the .38, and fired blindly, wildly, seeing her duck behind the Bronco as I tore myself free from the tattered remnants of my jacket and leaped behind the fallen log.