Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  “Can I pitch it into the ocean?” he asked hoarsely.

  “You have to,” said Angelica, nodding and not looking at the thing.

  Mavranos reached back over his shoulder and then snapped his hand forward, letting the pliers spring open at the last moment, as if he were casting a fishing fly. The little bloody metal fork spun away, glittering for a moment in the horizontal sunlight, and then disappeared behind a wave.

  Cochran looked back at the body of Scott Crane. A spatter of fresh red blood stood out on the dark beard, but the pale, lined face was as composed and noble as before, and he reminded himself that at the moment Crane was incapable of feeling pain.

  The two silver dollars were lying on the stones near Scott Crane’s bare feet. “Aren’t you gonna put the coins on his eyes?” Cochran asked.

  “No,” snapped Angelica. “They’re his fare over. We want him to come back.”

  Then why have them here at all? thought Cochran defensively. His raised arm was getting tired.

  Angelica crouched to pick up the myrtle branches and the gold cigarette lighter, and she opened the lighter’s lid and flicked the striker; the myrtle caught and burned with an almost invisible flame, though Cochran could smell the incense-like smoke.

  Angelica nodded to Plumtree.

  Plumtree faced the now-glittering gray water, and when she had lifted the glass she paused. “Not even Valorie?” she asked in a quiet voice, clearly not addressing any of the others present. “This is mine?”

  Standing to the side of her with his arm stiffly raised, Cochran could see wind-blown tears streaming back across her cheek.

  “Scott Crane!” she called strongly out toward the waves and the glowing fog. “I know you can fucking hear me! Come into me, into this body of your murderer!” And she tipped the glass up and drank it down in three convulsive swallows.

  With a drumming roar like the sound of a forest fire, sudden solid rain thrashed down onto the peninsula, flinging up a haze of splash-spray over the stones and blurring the surface of the sea. The sudden haze of flying water was lit by two rapid white flares of lightning, and the sudden hard crash of close thunder battered at the marble walls and rocked Cochran back on his heels.

  Plumtree’s hair was instantly soaked, and it flew out like snakes when she flung her head back and shouted out three syllables of harsh laughter.

  “Four-and-twenty blackbrides baked in a pie!” roared the voice of Omar Salvoy from her gaping mouth. “When the pie was opened, the brides began to sing! Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king!”

  Cochran had lost his footing, and he twisted as he fell so that his knees and elbows knocked against the wet stones.

  He could see the remains of Scott Crane, only a couple of feet in front of his face. It was a bare gray skull that now lolled above the collar of the shirt, and the already-wet fabric was collapsed against stark ribs and no abdomen at all, and the hands that spilled from the cuffs were long-fingered gray bone.

  Plumtree turned away from the sea, and even through the dimness and the retinal afterglare from the lightning Cochran could see the white of her bared teeth, and he knew this was Plumtree’s father, Omar Salvoy. He might have been looking straight at Cochran.

  “Mother!” Cochran yelled, and though he was only trying to induce the Follow-the-Queen effect in her, to his surprise the wail powerfully evoked his own dormant childhood fear of being heartbreakingly lost and monstrously found, and he was glad that the rain would hide the tears he felt springing from his eyes. For his self-respect more than from any particular hope of its efficacy, he shouted, “Janis’s mom!”

  Perhaps it had worked—at any rate the figure that was Plumtree was allowing itself to be hustled back up the stairs by Mavranos, and Angelica was now crouched on the other side of the dressed skeleton, hastily folding the stick-like arms and legs.

  Angelica looked up at him over the arch of the cloth-draped breastbone. “Get the Wild Turkey bottle!” she said.

  Cochran nodded, and crawled across the stones and snatched up the pint bottle in the moment before Pete Sullivan grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. Cochran had almost dropped the bottle in surprise—it was as hot as if scalding coffee had just been poured out of it, and he shoved it into the pocket of his windbreaker.

  Another flare of lightning lit the weathered stones through the thick haze of rain, and the instant bomb-blast of thunder fluttered the wet hair on the back of Cochran’s head.

  Things like beanbags were falling out of the sky and hitting the stones all around him—he squinted at a couple of them as Pete hurried him across the pavement, and he saw that they were dead seagulls. Over the roar of the rain battering the pavement he could hear bestial groans and howls shaking out of the mouths of the deeply moored pipes now.

  He and Pete followed Angelica up the slippery stone steps to the roadway mud, and after Angelica had unceremoniously dumped the armful of clothes and bones in through the open back window of Mavranos’s truck they all scrambled around to the side doors and piled in, kicking out old clothes and McDonald’s take-out hamburger wrappings.

  Cochran and Plumtree and Pete were all wedged uncomfortably in the back seat; but Cochran relaxed a little when he heard Plumtree muttering about Jesus. Apparently the Follow-the-Queen invocation had worked, and this was the personality of Plumtree’s mother.

  Mavranos had started the truck and levered it into gear before they had got the doors shut, and he clicked the headlights on as the truck rocked forward along the dirt path back toward the yacht-club parking lot. Tools and frying pans clanked in the truck bed, and Cochran wondered if Crane’s skeleton was being broken up back there.

  Then he leaned forward over the back of the front seat to peer ahead past the squeaking whips of the windshield wipers. Translucent human figures waved and grimaced out on the road in the yellow headlight glare, and stretched or sprang away to the sides as the massive bumper and grille bulled through them.

  Angelica was crouched in the front passenger seat with her carbine across her knees. “I see lights, ahead,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the rain and wind that were thrashing in through the broken window by her right elbow. “Don’t waste time focusing on these ghosts.”

  “Motorcycles,” said Mavranos, squinting through the streaming windshield. He took his right hand from the steering wheel long enough to draw the revolver from under his belt and lay it across his lap. “They’re on Yacht Road, turning into the parking lot.” He tromped on the accelerator, and the old truck bounced violently on its shocks, clanging the tools and pans in the back. “I’m gonna stop,” he called, “sudden, when we’re past the Granada. You all jump out and get into it—I’ll use this truck to clear a path through these guys.”

  “No, Arky—” Angelica began, but then the truck had slammed down over a curb and had passed the parked Granada, and was braking hard and slewing around to the right on the wet asphalt. Cochran was pressed against the back of the front seat, but he shoved the right-side door open while the truck was still rocking from side to side, its left side facing the oncoming glare of motorcycle headlights.

  He dragged Plumtree out onto the pavement after him, and he was fumbling in his pants pocket for the Granada’s keys. Pete had followed him out and had opened the truck’s front passenger door, but Angelica was arguing with Mavranos and wouldn’t get out.

  “I’ll shoot ahead while you drive,” she was yelling. “Pete, go get in the Ford! Arky, drive us out of here!”

  Over the stadium-roar of the rain Cochran heard several hard bangs, and the truck’s long right rear window became an opaque spiderweb in the moment before it fell out onto the asphalt in a million tiny pieces.

  He saw Mavranos lunge up and across the front seat, blocking Angelica from the gunfire; “Angelica,” Mavranos was yelling, “get down, get back to—”

  Five more fast bangs hammered at the truck, and Angelica tumbled backward out of the truck and sat down hard on the
puddled pavement. As Pete Sullivan ran toward her, Cochran spun away, toward the Granada. He frogmarched Plumtree around to the passenger side, opened the door, and shoved her into the back seat; then he ran around the front and got in behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Angelica was on her feet, and Pete was hurrying her to the passenger side of the Granada. They got in, and Cochran shifted the engine into low gear.

  “Don’t go!” Angelica was yelling in his ear as he stepped on the gas, “Drive into them, Arky’s been shot, we’ve got to get him—”

  “He’s driving,” Cochran told her. He took his eyes off the advancing pavement ahead for just long enough to give her a quick up-and-down glance, but he didn’t see any obvious blood on her rain-soaked jeans and blouse. Apparently she had not been hit.

  Ahead of them the truck had surged around and roared forward, and with an audible slam a motorcycle headlight beam whirled up across the dark sky as the truck rocked right over the fallen machine and rider; Cochran swerved his lower-slung car around the body and the spinning, broken motorcycle, and then he tromped on the accelerator to keep up with the racing truck as it sped out of the parking lot. Dead seagulls thumped under the tires.

  The motorcycles were behind them now, their headlights slashing the walls of rain as they turned around, and Angelica was lying across Pete’s lap to hold the carbine outside of the car, its black plastic stock wedged against the still-open passenger door.

  She pulled the trigger five times—the concussions of the shots were stunning physical blows inside the confined cab of the car, and the flashes of hard yellow muzzle-flare made it impossible to see anything more than the truck’s taillights in the dimness ahead, but the headlights behind didn’t seem to be gaining on them, so Cochran just bit his lip and hummed shrilly and kept squinting through the rain-blurred windshield.

  Over the ringing in his ears and the roaring of the engine, he became aware that Plumtree was shouting in a quacking voice in the back seat. “You can’t kill him with bullets,” he dimly heard her say. “Even when his Lever Blank acolytes threw him off a building in Soma, he didn’t die. He is the Anti-Christ.”

  “Oh hell,” he whispered. Who to call up, he thought—not Janis nor Cody, there’s no point in breaking the bad news to them yet. “Valorie!” he shouted.

  At least it shut her up. Angelica had pulled the door closed and folded the stock of her carbine, but now she had popped out the old magazine and rammed a new one in—hardball rounds, Cochran guessed—and had rolled down the window and was sitting on Pete’s knees with her head and shoulders, and the rifle, out the window.

  She fired six measured, presumably aimed shots—the explosions rang the car roof, but were much less assaulting than the previous five had been—and then she hiked herself back inside and rolled the window back up. Cochran glanced at the rear-view mirror and couldn’t see any headlights back there.

  “Arky’s shot,” Angelica said breathlessly. “He got shot in the head.”

  Cochran nodded at the truck ahead of them, which had just caught the tail end of a green light and turned left onto Marina Boulevard. “He’s driving fine.” Cochran sped up and honked his car horn to catch the yellow light and stay behind the truck; the tires squealed on the slick asphalt but didn’t lose traction.

  Angelica rubbed her fist on the steamy inside surface of the windshield and peered out through the glass. “I don’t see him, though—do you see his head at all, if he’s driving?”

  Cochran tried to see details of the truck in the moments when the windshield wipers had swept aside the blobs and streams of rain. “No,” he admitted finally, “but he might be sitting real low.” With the feedback-like ringing in his abused eardrums he had no idea how loud he might be talking.

  “But—” he went on shakily, in a louder voice. Hadn’t Pete or Angelica noticed? “But the truck is blue, now.”

  “It’s—?” Angelica stared expressionlessly at the boxy truck bobbing in the lane ahead of them. Even in the dim gray light, the truck’s color was unmistakably a dusty navy blue. “And it’s—that’s him, that’s the same truck, we haven’t taken our eyes off it.” She sat back between Pete and Cochran, looking all at once small and young behind the wet black metal of the gun in her arms. “The local Holy Week is over, that means—and nobody rose from the dead. We really did fail here today.”

  Plumtree wailed in the back seat, and for a moment Cochran thought the mother personality was still on; then she spoke, in the flat cadence of Valorie: “What would you have me be, an I be not a woman? Manhood is called foolery, when it stands against a falling fabric. And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gun-stones.”

  For a moment no one spoke; then, “I reckon Kootie was right,” said Pete. “I guess the receiver had to be somebody of the same sex.”

  Cochran’s right shoe sole squeaked back and forth between the brake and the gas pedal, and the engine roared and slacked, roared and slacked, as he swerved from one to another of the eastbound lanes to keep the speeding truck in sight ahead of them, and the word sex hung in the steamy air.

  CHAPTER 20

  The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.

  —Charles Dickens,

  A Tale of Two Cities

  THOUGH HE COULDN’T SEE her in the shadowy alley ahead of him, Kootie sensed that the woman in the hooded white raincoat had found the other mouth of this interminable unroofed passage, and was picking her way down the rain-slicked cobblestones toward him, patient as a shadow.

  Even if there had not been wooden crates full of cabbage heads and big green onions stacked against the ancient brick walls, the alley would have been too narrow for any car to drive down it; and the scalloped eaves of the pagoda-style roofs were four or five stories overhead, and Kootie was certain that even on clear days the sunlight had never at any season slanted all the way down to these wet paving stones, which had probably not been dry of rain water and vegetable juices and spit and strange liquors since the pavement was laid—and Kootie giddily thought that must have been before the 1906 earthquake.

  If that earthquake ever even happened, he thought, here.

  He was crouching in the deeper shadows under an iron stairway, and all he was doing was breathing deeply and listening to his own heartbeat, which for several minutes now had been alternating between scary rapid bursts and even scarier three-second dead stops. Like bad-reception images on a TV, every object he looked at seemed to have a faint twin half-overlapping it to one side, and he suspected that the rainbow-edged twins weren’t precisely identical to the actual objects; and the cold, oily air seemed to be shaking with big dialogues he couldn’t quite hear, like the faint voices you can catch on a turned-up stereo in the moments between tracks.

  He wasn’t at all sure he was still entirely in the real, San Francisco Chinatown.

  When he had first noticed the Chinese woman in the white hooded raincoat he had been standing out of the downpour under an awning in an alley called Street of Gamblers; and he had ducked through a touristy souvenir shop to evade her, hunching through aisles of woks and wisdom hats and plastic backscratchers, and when he had pushed through the far door and stepped out into the rain again, he had sprinted right across the narrow neon-puddled street, between the idling, halted traffic, into the dark slot of this alley. He hadn’t looked back, for when he had caught the woman’s eye in the Street of Gamblers she had for one hallucinatory moment seemed to be the globular black silhouette that had showed up on the motel TV screen this morning in the instant after Arky had poured beer into the set; and he had guessed that, whoever she was, she had assu
med a psychic posture that had made her compellingly identical to one of the wild archetypes.

  He had hurried down this alley—jogging past inexplicable open-air racks of whole barbecued ducks, under ornate balconies and indecipherable banners and clotheslines crazily hung with dripping squid, and stared at by ancient women smoking clay pipes in open doorways—and he had skidded to a panting halt here when it had finally occurred to him that no real alley in San Francisco could stretch this far without crossing a street.

  He hadn’t eaten anything since a few slices of delivery pizza late yesterday afternoon, and he had been wearing this now-wet flannel shirt for twenty-four hours. He was dizzy, and exhausted without being at all sleepy, and he knew by the aching fractures in his mind that something awful had happened this morning. Something besides industrial pollution and dead sparrows was coming down hard with this rain, and the cooked ducks and raw squids were, he thought, probably being exposed to it intentionally, for some eventual bad sacramental purpose.

  He jumped in surprise—and a moment later,

  “You caught me,” came a high, lilting voice from close by.

  He looked up to his left, and there she was, smiling down at him where he crouched under the stairs.

  He had been startled a moment before she had spoken. He was on bar-time again, experiencing events a moment before they actually happened. That meant that she, or somebody, was paying a magical sort of attention to him—but he had bleakly guessed that already.

  Her face under the white plastic hood was younger than he had thought, and the faint aura he saw off to one side of her was rainbow-colored now, and was clearly just a reiteration of her real shape.

  He noticed that her feet were bare on the wet stones, and that the long black hair that trailed across her chest between the lapels of her raincoat seemed to be clinging to bare skin, rather than to any clothing.