Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  He hiked himself forward and stood up in what he now thought of as the duck-and-squid-basting rain; and he opened his mouth to say something, but she spoke first:

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  Kootie thought about that. “Shelter, I guess,” he said. “Food, rest.” He glanced fearfully up and down the alley, clenching his fists against another burst of rapid heartbeat. “Real streets,” he added breathlessly.

  “Go to this place,” she told him, pulling a folded sheet of white paper out of the raincoat pocket and handing it to him. Her fingertips were as cold as the rain.

  Then she had hurried past him and away, and the wings of her raincoat spread out wide in the rainy wind, so that she was a white triangle receding away with eerie speed between the close, dark walls.

  Kootie unfolded the piece of paper, trying to shield it from the rain with one shaky hand. It was a poorly photocopied line drawing of a scowling Chinaman with tiny smudged images of ships and animals all over his shirt and trousers. In the bottom margin of the paper, ballpoint-ink numbers were arranged unevenly:

  60

  31 10, 78 53:

  49 80, 86/100 90 91.

  —12

  Kootie looked after the vanished woman. He understood this code, but he wondered how she had known that he would. It was the Cuban charada china, a lottery and rebus system that had been brought to Havana by Chinese contract laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally of thirty-six characters, it had been expanded during the twentieth century to include a hundred symbols.

  This reproduction of the famous drawing was so poorly copied that not even the little images on the chino’s clothing, much less the tiny numbers beside each one, could be made out—but Kootie’s foster-mother Angelica had done so much divination work with the antique system that Kootie effortlessly remembered what picture or pictures each number traditionally referred to.

  Now he tried to read the indicated images as a message, a letter to him, and after a few moments he had mentally arranged them into phrases, filling in gaps with words that seemed probable:

  (On this day of) dark sun Deer Big Fish, Bishop of (Thomas Edison’s) electric light:

  (Look for a, you’ll find a) drunk physician (or physician for drunks), (at the) hotel (or convent) (where you saw the) big mirror and the old man, (by the) gemstone tortoise.

  —Saintly woman (or prostitute)

  How long, Kootie wondered, was she following me? Right around sunrise, when the dead sparrows fell out of the sky with the sour rain, I did see an old man propping up a big gilt-framed mirror against a brick wall and staring at me in the reflection. I think he was in front of a Chinese restaurant, though, not a hotel or a convent—though in fact this was right next to a shop called … Jade Galore, with a big jade tortoise in the display window. It had been near the Street of Gamblers … Washington and Stockton.

  Even as he wondered how he might find his way back to the normal San Francisco streets, he heard the rippling throb of car tires on wet pavement; and when he stepped forward and looked to his left, he saw the muted colors of cars moving past across the alley from left to right. A real street!—ask and ye shall receive, he told himself.

  He thought about the old man he’d seen with the mirror … and about the woman in the white raincoat.

  Saintly woman (or prostitute).

  Angelica would see danger in this invitation, spiritual peril even more than physical peril. Not everybody that uses magic is bad, she had told him more than once over the past two years, but it’s always bad for them—even if you’re masked and working for the good of others or in self-defense, it coarsens and blunts your soul.

  Kootie was trudging toward the cross-street ahead, not taking his eyes off the vision of the passing cars, but he was very aware of the paper crumpled in his hand. Angelica would expect him to run away from whatever it was that this letter offered—run to a Catholic church, or to the police, even; ideally, of course, she would expect him to run to her and Pete, if he could find them.

  But he knew what his psychically concussed symptoms this morning meant. As Mavranos had pointed out, Kootie was a member of Scott Crane’s magical army now—and he knew, in his guts and his spine and the primitive base of his brain, that their army had within the last hour suffered the equivalent of a nuclear strike.

  All he could sense with his stunned powers was injury and absence. The attempt to restore Scott Crane to life had palpably failed. Mavranos and Plumtree and Cochran were very likely dead.

  Kootie’s thoughts just exploded away into chaos whenever he tried to think about his foster-parents. He couldn’t believe that Pete and Angelica were dead, but he knew too that his individual capacity for belief wouldn’t affect whatever was. His natural parents had been tortured to death only a little more than two years ago; and now the fugitive couple who had taken him in, and had loved him and cared for him and been loved by him, might very well be dead too.

  He could only postpone that thought, for now.

  For now, Kootie was alone and conspicuous in a hostile, awakened city.

  49 80, he thought. 12.

  He had emerged at last from the dimness of the alley—his sneakers were scuffing on the wet cement of the street sidewalk now, and the passing cars were so obviously real that he could see the momentarily clear tread-prints of their tires on the puddled asphalt as they rolled past, and so close that he could see faces behind the rain-beaded window glass. This street was Stockton. Washington should be the next street down to his left.

  He shoved the crumpled paper into his jeans pocket. His legs were shaky, and he had to actually glance down at his belt to make sure he had not buckled it in a Möbius twist—he had not—but he sighed and began shuffling south, toward Washington Street.

  The blue truck hadn’t been stopping for red lights as it led the Granada on a swerving, skidding chase through the dawn streets of the Richmond district. The truck had braked for cross-traffic, but then gunned through the rainy intersections as soon as a gap between oncoming cars appeared, as if the red lights were just yield signs. Cochran had been hard-pressed to keep the vehicle in sight through the slapping windshield wipers, and even so he had had to run a couple of red lights himself, cursing and sweating as he did it. He had told Angelica to stash her gun under the seat in case they were pulled over by a cop.

  On the long westbound stretch of Geary Street, Cochran had briefly been able to pull up in the left lane alongside the racing blue truck, and Pete had hiked himself up nearly to a standing position in the Granada’s passenger seat, with his head and shoulders out the window; and when he had slumped back down in the seat and looked across Angelica at Cochran, his rain-wet face was pale.

  “He’s lying across the seat,” Pete had said flatly. “Face down, with blood on the seat by his head.”

  Cochran had hissed angrily as the truck had edged ahead again. Both vehicles had at times reached speeds of at least fifty, probably sixty—at green lights flying right across the stepped intersections and clanking the abused shock absorbers on the downhill slopes—and he’d been glad these Chinese restaurants and secondhand clothing shops weren’t open yet, and that traffic was sparse. “So who’s driving?” he’d demanded.

  “Nobody is,” Pete had said. “The truck is.”

  “I don’t mean to be—” Cochran had begun. “Damn it, do you mean the truck is driving? Driving itself?”

  “That’s what he means,” Angelica had told him, chewing her knuckles. “If he’d stop—if it would stop—at a red light, Pete could get out and get behind the truck’s steering wheel.”

  “No chance of that, it looks like,” Cochran had said grimly. “Maybe the thing’ll run out of gas.”

  Now the truck and the car were on the Great Highway, headed south along the western coast under the lightening gray sky, having screeched through the twisting promontory lanes of Point Lobos Avenue and gunned past the Sutro Bath ruins and the Cliff House Restaurant.

 
Last week we saw Crane’s naked ghost on the seaside rocks down there, Cochran had thought as he had leaned the speeding car around that bend of the highway. Today we’re chasing a runaway truck with Crane’s skeleton dumped in the back of it, and the Kootie kid is gone and Mavranos is probably dead. The king’s army has been pruned back right down to the dirt.

  The open lanes of the Great Highway stretched straight ahead, with the slate-colored sea to the right and the massive greenery of Golden Gate Park and the stumpy tower of an old windmill rolling past to the left beyond the northbound lanes. Ahead of the Granada the truck was barreling along, staying in its lane.

  Pete Sullivan was sweating. “Pull up right behind him,” he told Cochran, “and kill the wipers. We left the back window of the truck’s tailgate open, see?”

  Cochran switched off the windshield wipers and carefully edged up behind the truck, watching its close bumper rock nearer by inches as the two engines roared on and the lane markers whipped past under the wheels. The raised horizontal window at the back of the truck bobbed on its struts.

  “Hope he don’t brake,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, “or—”

  “What the hell are you going to do, Pete?” interrupted Angelica. “You can’t!”

  “I can’t,” said Pete Sullivan, flexing his hands and staring at the close back of the truck through the rain-stippled windshield, “but I bet Houdini can.” He glanced at Angelica. “Arky might be dying in there.”

  “Or dead,” she told him shrilly, “and you might be dying right on this highway! Under the wheels of this very car I’m driving in! Pete, you can’t. You may have Houdini’s hands, but you haven’t got his … the rest of his body!” Out of the corner of his eye Cochran saw her pat Pete’s knee, as if the subject were closed. “We’ll wait for the truck to run out of gas.” To Cochran she said, “Hey, back off, you’re gonna run right up his tailpipe. And turn the wipers back on.”

  The seat jerked hard then as Plumtree grabbed it from behind, and Cochran lifted his foot away from the gas pedal to keep from being jolted into accidentally ramming the truck. Plumtree seemed to be trying to climb over the seat—and then she was clawing at the open passenger-side window as if she intended to climb right out of the speeding car.

  “Take these rats thither,” she was saying loudly, “to gnaw their garners. Worshipful mutineers, Valorie puts well forth; pray, follow.”

  Pete Sullivan pried her wet hands loose from the window frame. “I’ll go,” he said, speaking distinctly into her blank face. “I will go. You stay.” He pushed her backward against evident resistance until she was again sitting stiffly in the back seat.

  In the rear-view mirror Cochran saw her lean back in the seat, watching Pete steadily.

  “Catch up,” Pete told Cochran as he turned around in the front seat and again peered out through the rain-blurred windshield. “Get closer. Angie, what you can do is say a prayer to … Ogun, right?” He was panting, almost laughing. “Isn’t he the orisha of iron—Detroit iron, I hope!—and the guy who takes people who die in traffic accidents? Tell him to hold off, here.”

  Angelica held up the hand she’d been chewing on, and Cochran saw blood on her knuckles. “I’ve been,” she said. “There’s iron in blood. But—Kootie needs you! I need you, goddammit!”

  Pete rocked his head toward the back seat. “Imagine the scene in here if I don’t. Anyway it’s gonna work.”

  Angelica was nodding, and biting her knuckle again. She took her bloody hand away from her face long enough to say, “I can see you’re going to do it. If you die—listen to me!—if you die here I will not forgive you.”

  Pete dragged his knees up until he was crouching on the seat. “I’m not gonna die.” He threw a bright glance at Cochran and said, “Watch me, and the truck. Compensate.”

  Cochran was dizzy with the realization that there was no way out of this. “Get it over with,” he said tightly, gripping the wheel and gently fluttering the gas pedal to keep the car’s bumper close to the truck’s. He didn’t dare glance away from the truck’s horribly close back window to look at the speedometer, but the lane markers were hurtling past and he knew the two vehicles must be doing sixty miles per hour.

  Pete hiked himself up to sit on the windowsill, with his whole upper body out of the car, out in the battering rain; then he raised his left knee outside and braced the sole of his shoe against the doorpost. He leaned forward against the headwind, and peripherally through the windshield Cochran saw his right hand grip the base of the radio antenna; then Cochran was aware of the fingertips of Pete’s left hand pressed against the top edge of the windshield glass.

  “Fucking lunatic,” Cochran whispered absently. The steering wheel and the gas pedal seemed to be living extensions of himself, aching with muscular tension, and he felt that he was using the car to reach out and hold the speeding truck.

  And he was balanced in the driver’s seat, ready for it, when Pete jackknifed forward and slammed prone against the outside of the windshield; Cochran just raised his head to be able to see over the blur of Pete’s shoulder against the glass, and the speeding car didn’t wobble in the lane.

  Angelica was muttering syllables in which Cochran heard the name Ogun several times; and in one corner of his mind he realized that the words droning in his own head were the Lord’s Prayer.

  Outside the glass, Pete’s hands were braced out to the sides and in front of him as he slowly drew in his feet and edged forward across the car’s hood on his knees. His weight was on his fingertips, and it seemed to be his hands that were maintaining his balance.

  Houdini’s hands, Cochran thought.

  Now the fingers of Pete’s right hand were curled over the front edge of the car hood, and the left hand slowly lifted in the rushing headwind … and beckoned.

  Cochran increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal by an infinitesimal degree; and he felt a nevertheless solid clang shake the car as its bumper touched the truck’s.

  And in that instant Pete’s hands had both lifted away from the hood, and his legs had straightened as he lunged forward in a dive.

  Angelica exhaled sharply, and Cochran could only guess at the control it had taken for her to make no greater sound.

  But now Pete’s shoes were clearly visible kicking in dark gap under the raised back window of the truck. He had gone into the truck rather than under the car’s wheels.

  Cochran was shouting with hysterical laughter as he snatched his foot off the gas pedal and trod on the brake, and Angelica was laughing too, though the sudden deceleration had thrown her against the dashboard.

  “He must have landed right on Crane’s skeleton!” Cochran yelled delightedly.

  “He’ll come up wearing the skull like a hat!” agreed Angelica.

  “A skullcap!” crowed Cochran, and then he and Angelica were both laughing so hard that he had to slow down still more to keep from weaving in the lane.

  “A kamikaze yarmulke,” choked Angelica. “Catch up, catch up, you don’t want to lose ’em now. And turn the windshield wipers back on.”

  Cochran’s hands were shaking on the wheel now, and the tires thumped over the lane markers as the car drifted back and forth. When he switched the windshield wipers back on, he could see the dim silhouette of Pete Sullivan inside the truck, clambering over the seats.

  When Pete seemed to have got up to the driver’s seat the truck wobbled visibly and then backfired like a cannon-shot, with two flashes of bright yellow flame at the exhaust pipes by the back wheels.

  Then Cochran saw Pete Sullivan’s hand wave out of the driver’s-side window, and the truck swayed smoothly back and forth in a clearly deliberate S-pattern.

  Angelica exhaled. “He’s got control,” she said softly. “He’ll be pulling over real quick.”

  “Not here,” said Cochran, “there’s no shoulder.” He let himself finally take his eyes off the truck and look around at the landscape. The gray surf still streaked the sea beyond the fence to the right
, but at some point they had passed the green forest wall of Golden Gate Park, and now it was low pastel-colored apartment buildings and bungalows that fretted the gray sky to the left. “He’ll want to turn inland to find some place we can park,” he said, and he clicked his left-turn indicator to give Pete the idea.

  Pete steered the blue truck in a careful left turn onto Sloat Boulevard, and then drove slowly through half a dozen residential blocks of old white-stucco houses to the parking lot at the South Sunset Playground. There were no other cars in the lot as Cochran swung the Granada into the parking space next to the truck, and Angelica was out of the car before he had even come to a full stop. When Cochran turned off the ignition and got out, she was already standing at the opened passenger-side door of the truck. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up in the east, and the mirror lenses of Angelica’s sunglasses flashed as she leaned into the truck cab over Mavranos.

  “Can you push against Pete’s hands with your feet?” she was saying to Mavranos. “Both feet? Good! Open your eyes, Arky, I want to check your pupils.” She looked up toward Pete, who was still behind the wheel of the truck. “We’ll need to get him to a hospital, stat. He’s conscious, with no bleeding from the ears or nostrils, and this isn’t a bullet wound, but … he was knocked out, it is a concussion.”

  She doesn’t want to say possible subdural hematoma, thought Cochran nervously. Mavranos is probably in shock, and doesn’t need to hear that there might be blood leaking inside his skull, lethally pressing against the brain.

  Plumtree had climbed out of the back of the car now, and she was leaning on the front fender, blinking around at the lawns and swing sets and the two vehicles. “Did it work?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Not a bullet wound?” said Cochran, reluctant to answer Plumtree. He could see that the truck’s windshield was starred with cracks radiating from a hole low down on the passenger side. “What is it then?”

  Angelica turned her mirror lenses toward him, then held out a fragment of polished white stone. “A bullet hit this statue he had on his dashboard—some kind of Buddha—and part of it hit him, to judge by the fragments in his scalp. A glancing blow to the back of the head, above the occipital region.” She turned back to Mavranos, whose head Cochran could just see on the truck seat. “Arky,” she said. “Open your eyes for me.”