by Tim Scott
It was a long shot, but it was a trick I had used before.
Normally I ended up in a bar someplace I had forgotten about, or a spot down in Big Sur I’d camped as a kid—although once I woke up in a motel in El Salvador, which was a bit of a surprise. But that’s what happens if you drink mojitos when you’re not used to them, I guess.
I dropped the bike onto the freeway and gunned it, swinging up my visor to feel the crisp, cold wind across my face and hoping the sheer brutal force of it would clear right through my head. Balloons thudded, like some boxer was giving them a working over, then, one by one, they were torn off and ripped out of sight down our slipstream. Why had someone put balloons on the bike? And what was written on that card I had picked up off the door? “Jonny and Mat, don’t be late for the party.” Were the two things connected?
My head reeled.
I was far enough into this thing to deserve some answers by now surely, I thought, rather than more confusion. I flicked the bike through the traffic, as we wound down the main street of Compilation, and I just wanted to get out of this zone because it always gave me a bad feeling—the same way I got a bad feeling from a room where the lighting was harsh and inhumane, or when I saw a dying vase of ignored flowers, or when I heard the fidgeting whine of a badly tuned-in radio. Some things are not meant to be.
Just as some things are meant to be. Like Mozart. Or the cheesecake they served at the Wham-Wham Bar. Or the dawn paddle out at Todos Santos.
I opened up the throttle, implicitly trusting that Teb really had masked our C-4 Charlies, and the road fell away, smearing into a blur as we whipped in and out of the toiling traffic. I was driven by an insatiable urge just to get the fuck out of here. A helicopter yawed around above us, skidding and sliding through the air like a drunkard on an ice rink.
The Well-Malls and Sniffer Alarm stores and Chair-Crazy warehouses, the bars and whorehouses and Kitchen Guerrilla shops bounded past as I let the bike go. Just let the big dog eat. The helicopter rolled past again in a wild flurry of blades, rocking like a ship on the sea as it banked, then finally settled high above the freeway, a hundred yards ahead. It could be anyone, I told myself. It could be anyone. But it was following the road now, and moving at our speed.
The rear door yawned open like a loose jaw, and I caught a glint of something shining in the bowels of the thing. Then, as the freeway curved gently around, the chopper banked and the sunlight flooded into the rear bay, and I saw the front wheels of the four bikes; the four figures and the familiar absence of four crash suits.
It was the Riders. Fuck it.
41
The bikes fell from the rear of the chopper like evening swallows searching for insects, as one after the other, engines fuming with white-blue smoke, they dropped in a heart-stopping, slow-motion arc that would surely smash them to pieces when they hit the tarmac.
Instead, when they struck the ground, the bikes all skipped back up into the air like tennis balls poured from a tin, bouncing out of time in great, jerky, bucking movements. Eventually they settled heavily onto the road and surged toward me through the scattering traffic, the wrong way down the freeway. My throat swelled, and the saliva in my mouth vanished as I wrenched the bike instantly off the freeway, thumping down a soft grassy bank and skidding uncomfortably onto a small gravel road in the back-water of Compilation, crashing through the gears until we ripped down the quiet lane. Here the shops were sleepy as hell, and the single-story wooden houses were shored up with neat metal crutches.
I whacked the heads-up display button on the bike, and a faint translucent green screen appeared obediently. I toggled gingerly through the menu, keeping an eye on the road, until I found the setting that activated the rear sensor, and the ghostly image slid up in front of me, blurred by the vibration of the bike.
I let my eyes adjust to what I was seeing, and eventually understood that the small shivery green dots were the Riders, hammering their way after us. My attention was wrenched back to the road in a crack of movement as I whipped the bike sideways to avoid someone ahead I had hardly seen.
I felt the shock inside settle back down through my veins like the sediment in a murky pond after the dive of a kingfisher.
Our sheer speed meant corners were appearing in wild bursts, charging up to meet us, and I leaned into them at such an angle that the world seemed to slide away. Up ahead, a wall of white lights marked the separation of the zones, but I had lost all sense of orientation and didn’t know where we were now.
The bike shook as I sent it through the jinking corners, then ripped into the next zone, scything through thick snow, which instantly clawed and choked the back wheel so it slewed wildly and began wagging from side to side like the tail of an excited dog.
It would have to be Christmas Single.
I fought with the sluggish, overheavy steering that felt like it had been drugged, and I screamed at myself not to hit the brakes too hard or I’d lose the thing for sure.
And all the while fresh flares of slush sprayed up in a brown-white fog.
The bike skewed again, knocked almost sideways by a drift of hard-packed snow, and we virtually careered into one of the huge smiling angels that were plastered up along that particular road, each with the name of some generous sponsor being blown from a trumpet. A sleigh appeared out of the snowy fog, pulled by four reindeer, and tramped past us while the smiling, unshaven Santa inanely grinned in our direction with an expression like he had just slept with his neighbor’s wife or something.
We screamed past advertising slogans saying: “Come and live the fairy tale!” And I just had time to think: “Come and live with a lot of sad deranged people who should know better,” would have been more accurate.
I gripped the handlebars as loosely as I could, absorbing the bumps and jolts and trying to convince myself I had some slippery sort of control over the bike now. We stumbled on much too slowly for my nerves, bumbling over the ruts and crunching over the mounds of artificial snow they spent so much pointless time and effort creating. I felt anger pour through my veins again, but one glance at the display screen found the Riders still on our tail, but closer now.
Much closer.
I threw the bike down a small side alley, not caring that it might not go anywhere. I had to do something, or we were just a couple of lame reindeer. The place was lit with white fairy lights that gave a gentle pale glow to the snow. We roared farther down this twisting alley, and the garish overenthusiasm of whoever did the decoration soon swamped everything. Fountains of lights erupted, adorning every conceivable cranny on every building, like a creeping, shining plague.
I took a sharp right, then a left, hoping the narrow streets would make it impossible for the Riders to keep up. My throat bulged with anxiety, and my heart pumped so hard I was sure I would soon run out of blood. At some stage, they would start shooting and I mustn’t be startled by it. Almost immediately, I felt a dull, solid whump across my face. I wiped snow away from my eyes and wondered if my adrenaline was masking some pain that would seep slowly through, gradually chilling my body. I felt another dull whump on my arm and, looking up, saw it was just playful kids laughing and chucking snowballs from the top of a flat roof many stories above. No doubt brimming with glee at their accuracy.
I cajoled the bike on, letting it snap over the bumps and wondering how the Riders had suddenly found me at Inconvenient. Maybe it was just a lucky guess, just like it had been at Teb’s place. I flicked left down a wider, tree-lined street where the snow was almost pristine, with only a couple of other tracks scratched over it, and knew I had to get away. It was suddenly obvious I had to get over to my house, whatever happened. I opened up the throttle, realizing it was all or nothing now—realizing there was no point getting caught lamely somehow trying to play safe.
The bike skewed and skidded. I took the next corner with my feet sliding across the ground to keep from bouncing through the shop windows, but the Riders were still gaining.
I dodged two mo
re sleighs, slewing over the sidewalk to get out of their way. One was pulled by men dressed as angels, and the other by excitable huskies, who barked and tugged as we screamed past, rolling the sleigh sideways out of control and scattering presents wrapped in glossy, bright paper all across the slushy road in a chorus of tiny sleigh bells.
I kicked up through the gears, leaving the chaos of the sleigh behind, and skated down the wide street, flanked with rough two-story log cabins, that sprawled their wide, rustic porches down onto the sidewalk. Ironic, I thought, as they blurred past, how they had hijacked the style of the gold rush and presented it as something magical and romantic, when speculator towns had been cold, harsh, and ferociously brutal. Humans had a habit of being careless with history like that, treating it as something bendy and pliable that could be reshaped into whatever was most amusing.
Gentle flakes of snow began falling, taking the edge still further off any kind of sense of reality, while the thumping bumps of the icy ruts threw us up against the walls of our crash suits like we were inside a lettuce shaker. Up ahead, I could see the road broaden into a wide square, so I eased the throttle, wondering whether to double back down one of the side streets, but it was clear from the screen that one of the Riders was too close behind me.
There was a gaudy fountain in the center gushing snow from the mouth of a huge, triumphant angel, and on the near side was a massive neoclassical building with wide steps and a gigantic white illuminated star outside the front door. I kicked the bike sideways around the fountain, trying to decide which might be the quickest way out of the zone, when I saw him.
My chest tightened like it was trussed up with piano wire and my stomach sank as though it was an old rag dropped in a bucket of water. Screaming smoothly out from the streets opposite came the shining, fuming, laid-back Rider.
I slewed away from him.
A second Rider swung out from another street, blocking my path, and I realized bleakly they had somehow got ahead and were bearing down on the square from different sides.
I hurled the bike around, spraying up a curtain of brown slush that fell lazily across the road. Then I gunned the bike back the way we had come, but as I accelerated I saw a third Rider wallowing wildly down the middle of the road toward us, like a wild horse that has been spooked by a fox.
I spun the bike again and scrabbled, catlike, up the first few steps of the large stone building, thinking that from up there, at least, I would hold the high ground. The front wheel of the last Rider’s bike nosed to a halt at the top, and as I looked, I saw him unsheathe a gigantic gun.
I twisted away instantly, veering back down toward the fountain, when I heard the blown-out, rasping howl of a shot, and felt the bike buck like a bear that had trodden on a hornet.
The ground lurched and swiveled, merging with confusing slices of sky. We scrambled through the dead air, then I felt the hard, back-shuddering, screeching crack as we hit the base of the fountain. The crash suits scraped across the hard, unforgiving stone, and we came to a raw, dull, aching halt that left a trail of eerie silence behind us. As everything settled, all I could hear was the slow slap-slapping of the thick slushy snow falling from the fountain above us.
Everything stayed like that for the next few seconds, as though time had moved on without us—as though the warm comfort of lying prostrate and snug in the crash suits on the felled bike might last for hours.
Then I saw the familiar boot of one of the Riders and realized he was looming over me. I released the crash suit and rolled over in the crunching snow, and found they were all there, silhouetted black against the large bright star that sat at the top of the steps I had tried to climb.
“You are a pain in the ass,” said one of them, prodding me with his gun. “If you’ve broken anything, we’ll kill you.”
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” I heard a Santa shouting from somewhere, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” And from where I was lying, I saw a young, fresh-faced man excitedly run over toward us. Whatever was going through his head, I could not possibly imagine. One of the Riders leveled a gun at him as he reached us.
“Ho fucking…oh!” he said, tailing off, and turned and fled.
“This place is weird, I’m telling you,” said one of the other Riders. “The whole population dresses as Santa Claus.”
“Get the Package,” the lead one said.
I opened my mouth, thinking I might as well get it over with there and then.
I couldn’t do what they wanted.
I didn’t even have the file anymore, because I had left it with Teb to see if he could make sense of it. Maybe there would be another chance to escape, maybe there would be more last-minute reprieves, but they would simply come after me again and I was tired of it all. I wanted to face the music now; I couldn’t make a Dream Virus and I couldn’t carry out their weird plan to assassinate God.
“Come on, Package! Come to Mummy,” said the one calling himself Death, leaning down, and I just caught sight of the round of ammunition in his teeth when a voice cut through the artificially chilled air.
“He’s mine.”
There was something assured and steady about the tone that made the Riders hesitate, when normally I sensed they would have turned and fired. Over their shoulder at the top of the steps, silhouetted by the giant white star, was the relaxed figure of a man—and I knew exactly who it was.
“Who the fuck are you?” said Death, waving his gun wildly about.
“I am an encyclopedia salesman,” said the man with the merest hint of a Belgian accent, still with his arms loosely folded.
“A what?”
“An encyclopedia salesman. And the Package, as you call him, is mine. You can go now.”
“We can go?” said the same Rider as though he had just been told his best friend had cooked and eaten his pet hamster. “We can go?” he repeated, more insanely, and I felt the safety valves breaking in his mind. His broken tone seemed to be laying the groundwork for some hugely violent act that was to follow.
“Yes,” said the Belgian, holding up a finger as one of the other Riders went for his gun. “Naughty. I have backup.” He smiled, and a thick swarm of faceless armed marksmen suddenly appeared on the roofs of all the surrounding buildings with such density even the Riders were taken aback. “They will kill you very quickly,” said the Belgian with a forced smile. “So, as I said, you can go.”
The Riders stared, amazed at this development, but the guns were there and they were real. They’d begun to walk self-consciously toward their bikes when one of them stopped.
“You’re an encyclopedia salesman, you say?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what I thought you said. We could do a deal if—”
The Belgian cut him off. “No deal,” he said, smiling. “Good-bye.”
The Riders strolled casually to their machines, drawing out the moment, perhaps feeling there was a good chance this bizarre man and his backup might disappear as quickly as they had arrived. This lasted until they fired up their bikes, when it all seemed to get too much for them, and they screamed off unnecessarily quickly into the distance, roaring out their frustration.
The Belgian stood, poised and relaxed, as they burned off. I stiffly heaved myself up off the snow, my clothes damp at the knees and elbows. I glanced around at the rooftops and took in the alarming number of guns that still seemed to be pointing directly at us.
“I don’t think running is a serious option,” Mat said.
“No, they might notice even if we just walk quickly,” I said, with a halfhearted attempt at a joke. The Belgian began tapping down the stone steps toward us in the ice-cold silence.
“They are all having Christmas dinner in the town hall!” he cried, opening his arms—explaining, I guessed, why there was no one about. “Turkey,” he went on, getting closer, “with all the trimmings.”
I looked at him. He was a much smaller man than I had imagined, with a rather too-neat, pristine appearance, as though he had a hairdresser lurking j
ust out of sight, ready to attend to him at any moment. His walk was crisp, but not manic, like a squirrel who’d eaten all the nuts he could ever want and had chilled out a bit. I suddenly got the idea he was the sort of person who was fastidious about not storing anything in his attic because he couldn’t stand the mess, but quite where that came from, when there were at least sixty guns pointing at me, I really don’t know. Caroline had made it clear he was an assassin, and this was not a good time to take any liberties even inside my own head.
“So,” he said, reaching us, then holding up a single thin sheet of paper, “I suggest you sign.” I smiled at him, and reached for the paper and pen without much hesitation. There really was no point arguing; he held all the aces. He probably held all the kings for that matter, and quite a few of the other cards as well. And really, if I’m going to be pedantic, he pretty much held the card table and probably all the air. I wasn’t going to get away with saying “Thanks but no thanks” to his encyclopedias this time; the stakes had gone up by infinity.
“Thank you,” he said, “you won’t be disappointed. Half a million drawings, one million color photographs, with detailed explanations of every conceivable subject in the world today. They are a valuable addition to the quality of your life. You will never be short of answers now.”
“Thank you,” I said, wondering if he knew how ironic that statement sounded.
“We know you have a minor problem with your Jab-Tab, but we are working on it and will deduct the money from you at the source.”
“Tell Caroline E I’ll see her again,” I said ignoring the stuff about the Jab-Tab and handing back the signed sheet, not knowing exactly why I had said it, but feeling it was worth saying anyway. He looked at me quizzically, like a teacher listening to a child who has just used the word “owl” instead of the word “pencil” by mistake in a question.
