“You aren’t supposed to be here,” a tiny yet indignant voice said.
Sylvia sat up to find that she was in a sandbox. A little girl with copper hair sat at the edge of the sandbox; her nose was red and dripped as if she had a cold. The little girl dabbed at her nose with a tissue and then sneezed. “Bless you.”
“Thanks.”
“Where am I?”
“My mommy’s house. But you’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be in your world.”
“My world?”
“Where you come from.” The little girl sneezed again. “You shouldn’t have left.”
“I couldn’t let that creep get away.”
“Mommy says you shouldn’t interfere with things you don’t understand.”
“Does she?”
“Yes. That’s why she grounds me if I bring people to the sandbox.” The little girl wiped at her nose. “But I didn’t mean to bring you here.” Tears sparkled in the girl’s blue eyes.
Sylvia tried to put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, but she backed away. “Hey now, don’t cry. I’ll get out of your hair before Mommy finds out, all right? Tell me how.”
“You sit in the center of the sandbox.”
“Makes sense,” Sylvia said. She tried to sound chipper so the little girl wouldn’t start to bawl. She slid back into the center of the sandbox and then waited. “Well, here I am.”
“I’m working on it.” The girl sneezed yet again. “When you get back, you have to be careful. Stay away from the city. Isis and Renee will hurt you just like the others.”
Sylvia wanted to ask who the girl meant, but she had already sunk through the sand. With a start she woke up and banged her head against something metal. She cursed at this and then felt a bandage on her forehead.
She realized she was inside a tractor-trailer. How had she gotten here? Maybe a trucker had found her at the factory. She thought of her weird dream and wondered if it was real. Then as she sat up, she felt the sand on the mattress.
What had the girl meant? Who the hell was Isis? As for Renee, did she mean Renee Kim, that obnoxious little girl? She shook her head and supposed she would find out as soon as she found Tim Cooper and beat some answers out of him.
She opened the door of the truck and climbed out to find two people huddled around a fire. One was obviously the driver, an old man with a thick mustache and a straw cowboy hat. The other was a young Asian woman who looked like Renee Kim’s older sister—only with normal black hair.
The Asian woman turned to her and smiled. “Hello, Sylvia. My name is Akako. This is Sam.”
“You can call me Old Coyote,” the driver said. He tipped his hat.
“How do you know my name?”
“Tim told us,” Akako said.
“Where is that bastard? Is he the one who knocked me out?”
“You knocked yourself out. You hit a rock when you landed.”
Sylvia looked past the two people at the fire to see a forest of pine trees around them. In the distance she saw a black sky without even any stars. “Where exactly did I land?”
“Well, why don’t you sit down and I’ll explain.” The woman who called herself Akako picked up a can of baked beans. “Would you like something to eat?”
“I’m fine.” Sylvia crept around to the other side of the fire and sat on a rock. “So, what’s going on here? Where’s Cooper?”
“Tim left to find our friend. That’s why he was in your world.”
“My world? Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“What?”
“Never mind. So this is the Twilight Zone?”
“A parallel universe. It’s pretty much the same as your own, except New Stockholm was founded by the Dutch, who called it Rampart, and then later the English took it over. They also use the old-fashioned measuring system. Miles instead of kilometers. It takes a little getting used to.”
“Right. I must have given myself a concussion.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. There are all sorts of parallel universes out there. Infinite, really. It’s all quantum mechanics.”
“I skipped that class at the academy.”
“The police academy?”
“How’d you know?”
“Tim mentioned it. And I visited your world a couple of years ago. You know your sister’s friend Renee?”
“The smart-mouthed punk with the funny-colored hair?”
“That’s her. I inhabited her body for a week a couple of years ago. You remember when Agnes was feeling sick and you had to take her home?”
“What about it?”
“That was the Agnes from this universe. Only here she’s a witch.”
“A witch? And what are you: a werewolf?”
“No. I’m from a different parallel universe. One where the Japanese colonized most of America.” Akako waved at the air. “It’s really difficult to explain.”
“And where’s Cooper from?”
“Here.”
“And he knew a woman named Sylvia here, didn’t he? One who looked like me?”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he told me. Bastard got drunk and tried slobbering all over me in a bar.”
“Well, ain’t it a small world?” Old Coyote said.
Akako’s face had darkened. She nodded to Sylvia. “The Sylvia Joubert of this world was Tim’s fiancée. She was a witch too, like Agnes.”
“Sure, and did she have green skin? Put kids into the oven of her gingerbread house?”
“No, she looked just like you.”
“That’s what that weasel said. I thought he was lying to get into my pants.”
“You’re welcome to stay here with us until Tim gets back.”
“Where’d he go?”
“To find a friend of ours.”
“In this Rampart City of yours?”
“Yes, but—”
Sylvia was already up and running through the forest. She didn’t know where exactly Rampart City was, but she had a good idea it would be in the same place as New Stockholm. She would find it and then she would find Tim Cooper and drag him back to her world and throw him in jail for what he’d done. Nobody made a fool of her like that.
Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She spun around and caught Akako in the chest with one hand. The young woman went down to the ground with a grunt of pain. “You can’t go there,” Akako said. “It’s too dangerous. If Isis—”
“I’m not worried about this Isis person. I can take care of myself.”
With that, Sylvia took off again into the night.
Chapter 18
Tim was grateful for the air filters he’d installed inside the helmet. The filters couldn’t completely eliminate the fetid sewer stench, but at least his eyes didn’t water. He just hoped it didn’t get any worse; if he threw up inside the helmet it would short out several key systems and leave him stranded.
To get into the sewers had been more difficult than he imagined. After he crossed through the barrier, he hopped through the trees into Sharonville. There were no cars around at that time of night, to give him the road to himself. To open a manhole cover wasn’t a problem with the augmented strength of the armor; the real problem was to fit through the opening.
It was clear he needed to widen the hole so he could fit. His first idea was simply to grab at the edges of the hole and pull as hard as he could. Despite the strength of the armor, to lift an entire section of pavement proved to be too much. Red warning lights flashed inside the helmet to indicate the hydraulic systems were about to give out.
He got lucky in that there was a Home Depot right down the road. The store was closed, which made it easier for him. He simply smashed through the front doors and then stomped along the main aisle until he found the heavy equipment to rent.
Tim had never used a jackhammer before, but didn’t find it too difficult. The problem was the noise, which while it didn’t bother him with the dampening equipment in the helmet, he
figured it might annoy anyone nearby. They in turn might call the police and he’d be forced to fight or flee long before he was ready.
He got lucky again in that he had chosen a commercial area of town and apparently everything was closed except for the gas station a block down the road. The crumbling pavement dropped down into the sewer to leave him with a hole wide enough that he could fit through it. Tim eased himself down into the sewage with the boosters.
The next problem was that since he had built the armor in New Stockholm, he didn’t have a map of the Rampart City metro area in his navigation display. He should have found a Best Buy to smash into and steal a GPS, though with Isis altering things, that might not be overly helpful either at the moment. At least the compass inside the helmet worked, so he could steer to the east, where he assumed he would eventually find Rampart City.
The suburban sewers, which had been built much later, smelled a little better but made for a tight squeeze. At some points Tim had to crouch down and creep forward in order to fit. This scuffed the armor’s red paint, but he managed to get through.
As he continued eastward, the pipes became wider, to the point where he could stand. The cracked cement of these pipes had rust stains, fungus, and scattered graffiti. The latter Tim studied for a moment; he wondered if Emma’s friend the Sewer Rat had made some of these. He remembered she had said he made sculptures of her—in Scarlet Knight guise and not—out of trash found around the sewers and dark alleys of the city. Tim didn’t see any of these as he continued his trek into the city.
Another change he noticed involved the rats. He had seen a few of these back in Sharonville, all of them less than a foot long. The farther he went, the number and size of the rats increased exponentially. At an intersection of pipelines, he saw a half-dozen rats; each measured at least three feet without the tail. More ominously, they swam towards him.
The rats exhibited far more coordination than he would have thought possible to encircle the armor. They shrieked and hissed—whether at him or each other he didn’t know—until one finally scratched at his leg. The rat’s claws couldn’t do anything more than chip a few flakes of red paint off the armor. The rat hissed and then tried to bite Tim’s leg with the same result.
Still the rats didn’t leave; more of them swarmed around him. He could easily clear them away with his armored legs and arms, but he didn’t want to kill these creatures. He could try to use the tranquilizer darts, but he wanted to keep as many of these as he could for when he had to get back to the surface.
By now the number of rats had multiplied to two-dozen, some even bigger than the first ones that had tried to attack him. To Tim’s amazement, they actually began to climb on top of each other to form a sort of rat ladder. A smaller rat, only two feet long, leaped onto his back to claw futilely at the armor. Tim shook it off as gently as he could, but the rats still weren’t deterred. More climbed on him to bite and claw at him.
He wouldn’t have much choice about what to do now. He’d have to kill them in order to clear a path. That would probably make things a tough go farther down the line, as he knew from Emma that the rats communicated with each other. Once they saw him as a threat, he’d have even more to deal with.
There came a sharp hiss and miraculously the rats jumped off of him. He was again amazed to watch them form two lines with precision that befitted a military regiment. Then he looked up to see their general approach.
Tim recognized the rat with the silver stripe down its back. He had seen this rat with Emma’s friend the Sewer Rat when they raided TriTech. He was the rat Emma had befriended; she gave him the name Pepe because of his skunk-like appearance.
Pepe swam up to him without fear. The rat’s long snout twitched as he sniffed at Tim’s left leg. Pepe looked up at him and squeaked in a way that sounded almost like a question. Emma could speak to the rats, as could her friend the Sewer Rat, but Tim could not. “I’m not her,” he said over the loudspeakers.
The rat squeaked at him again. Tim shook his head slightly. “I don’t understand you.” It became like an episode of Lassie then as Pepe turned and thrust his snout frantically towards the pipe to the left. “You want me to follow you?” Pepe nodded an affirmative, a gesture he had probably picked up from his human friends.
“Well, OK, lead on,” Tim said. The rat would probably lead him to a nice pile of garbage it had found. Or it might lead him to Emma. At this point it was about the only hope he had to find her.
***
In one of her letters to him in jail, Emma had written that Pepe was as smart as a human—and in some cases probably smarter. Tim saw this for himself as Pepe guided him through the sewers of Rampart City. The rat would check back periodically to make sure Tim followed him and motioned with his snout that they should keep moving.
When they came to other groups of rats, Pepe spoke for Tim. The other rats showed Pepe the same deference as the ones who had initially attacked Tim, probably because of Pepe’s friendship with Emma and the Sewer Rat. After they spoke with Pepe, the other rats would disappear; Tim wondered if they were spreading the word about his presence.
The greatest sign of Pepe’s intelligence came when it was time to leave the sewers. The rat made sure to find a pipe that opened into the harbor. This made sure that Tim wouldn’t need to repeat his impromptu road construction work in Sharonville. He squatted down so Pepe could jump on his shoulders and then dove out of the pipe. Before he could plunge into the water, he lit the boosters, to edge himself up to an embankment by the docks.
They had to double-back a bit from there and headed west. Tim used the boosters to get onto the rooftop of the nearest factory, a building similar to the one Renee’s father owned. Pepe clung to Tim’s back and used his claws to hook onto the gap between the helmet and breastplate. When he ran out of rooftop, Tim jumped back to the ground and crossed the street when he was sure no one would see him.
Once he’d made it through the industrial section of town, the buildings became closer together, which allowed him to hop from one rooftop to another. He hadn’t designed the suit to jump with a passenger, but Pepe’s weight was slight enough that it didn’t affect his balance much. With each jump the rat would shriek as if afraid Tim would splatter him on the rooftop. Once Tim landed, Pepe would thrust his snout in the direction Tim needed to go.
They entered the Trenches, the rundown neighborhood populated mostly by recent immigrants. Loud Mexican salsa music blared from some windows while arguments in Spanish came from others. Tim wondered if Emma might be one of those immigrants now, or if she might be here at all. Maybe Pepe was leading him into a trap; if Isis could warp the minds of humans it should be easy enough to do with a rat.
At one of the many dilapidated apartment buildings, Pepe indicated he should go down. Tim jumped onto the fire escape and flinched for a moment as the fire escape creaked beneath the suit’s weight. The fire escape held and he began to pound down the steps; he hoped no one spotted him.
Finally Pepe pointed to a fifth story window. The curtains were drawn and the window closed, but this was easy enough for Tim to fix. He smashed through the glass and hoped the sound didn’t alert any neighbors—or anyone in the apartment. Then he climbed inside.
He stood up inside an unoccupied bedroom. The bed was unmade and the room itself untidy, with clothes, CDs, and DVDs thrown everywhere. This couldn’t be Emma’s bedroom; she was much too neat for that. He had never actually seen her bedroom, but one look at her penmanship told him she wasn’t a slob, like whoever lived here. Really with the posters on the wall and the heavy metal T-shirts, this looked more like the bedroom of a teenager than a nearly thirty-year-old geologist. But maybe that’s what Emma was now, a sloppy teenager in the slums.
Pepe hopped off his shoulder to land on a dresser. The rat squeaked emphatically until Tim turned around to see what Pepe had found. He reached out with one hand to carefully pick up a doll. From the look of it, it wasn’t any ordinary doll. This one seemed to be patched t
ogether from several dolls. The orange hair and pale face on the doll made it clear in his mind who this represented.
Tim hadn’t seen one of the Sewer Rat’s sculptures, but this seemed to be designed in the same fashion. Then there was the way Pepe nuzzled the doll. Now Tim began to understand why Pepe had brought him here—he had picked up his master’s scent. But did that mean he was in the Sewer Rat’s bedroom?
The answer to this came a moment later when he heard a woman shout, “I told you to stay the fuck away from me!”
The light snapped on; Tim was blinded for a moment as his night vision equipment temporarily overloaded from the flash. Before his vision could clear, he heard the woman scream. He could hear her footsteps retreat from the room. He blindly limped after her.
His vision cleared enough that he could see her at the front door as she tried frantically to unlock it. Through the spots in his eyes he saw a fat woman with dark brown hair in a pink waitress’s uniform. Her nametag identified her as Becky. Emma’s friend Becky. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
Becky gave up on the door and slid down to the floor to curl up against the door. “Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t do anything wrong. It was her. It was all Emma’s fault.”
Tim lifted the helmet’s visor and then bent down. “Becky, it’s me. It’s Tim.”
“Who?”
“Tim Cooper. Don’t you remember?”
“Are you one of the Specials? I didn’t do anything. She’s the one you want.”
Tim thought better than to put a hand on Becky’s shoulder; it would probably scare her worse at this point. What did she mean by Specials? And what had Emma done? He supposed if he found that out, it would help him find Emma. He lowered the visor and then tried to make his voice sound as menacing as possible. “What did she do?”
“I don’t know. She said she attacked some guy at work.”
“Where’s she work?”
“At the Plaine Museum. Or she did. She got fired.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 160
