As she reached the door, Ree heard a shout.
“Gorram frakking piece of go-se!”
If Ree hadn’t placed the voice by itself (which she did), the dense geek-speak cursing and the fact that there were more strange noises coming from an alleyway were enough to assure her that she was hearing the frantic customer from the afternoon.
Ree ducked around the corner and saw the man from earlier in the alley, holding a prop lightsaber and looking even worse for wear, if that were possible.
And then things got really weird.
Facing him was a twelve-foot-tall, green-gray-skinned beast with a bulbous nose and eyes so beady that they deserved their own craft fair. It was, for all Ree could tell, some kind of troll.
Except for the fact that trolls didn’t exist and sure as hell didn’t belong in the University District on a Thursday night when all she wanted to do was find someplace to drink in peace without running into one of her exes or any of the crazy customers from her job.
break (n—Archaic English)—a thing that cannot be bought by one Rhiannon Anna Maria Reyes.
Darren and Sandra both screamed when they saw the thing. The strange customer stepped forward, raising his lightsaber, which made the whirring hum of a high-end prop. Except that the glow was too good, too bright, for any of the sabers that Ree had ever seen. Ree kept a pretty close eye on the designs on the Web, to see if anything was cooler for practical use than her Force FX, but she hadn’t found anything yet.
And the plastic or glass or whatever on this one was way too thin to be practical—she couldn’t even see it through the glow.
And then the guy twitched forward with a quick kendo slice that cut off the troll’s hand.
What.
The.
Eff.
The troll’s bellow echoed through the alley, shaking dirt from the walls. The other side of the alley was a dead end into a building, so it wasn’t not like she could escape, except back into the bar.
Sandra and Darren screamed from behind her; then Ree heard the door slam shut.
Well, crap.
The troll took a lumbering step toward Ree, and she found her mind split in two. One part of her was so scared that she wanted to dig through the concrete to get away. But another part of her was strangely unimpressed, instead buzzing with excitement, saying, The troll from that crap movie was better-looking than this thing.
The logical part of her brain said to the suddenly fearless part, But, self, that thing was on TV, and this one wants to tear your liver out your nose. Run.
Before she could decide, the troll brought down its other massive hand toward her head.
Without thinking, Ree dove into a shoulder roll to the right of the beast’s blow. She composed a letter in her mind as she rolled.
Dear Dad,
Thank you for enrolling me in Taekwondo when I was five and not letting me quit until I had my black belt.
Love, your doting daughter
P.S. Trolls are real. I know, right? Crazy.
Ree rolled up to her feet, wondering how in the wild wild west she was going to joint-lock or jump-kick a twelve-foot-tall monster. Then the increasingly sane-seeming customer jumped forward and slashed again, his lightsaber cutting the troll’s legs off at the knees. The beast howled in pain as it collapsed to the ground. Ree scrambled back and jumped clear of the falling troll’s head, which crashed into the ground at her feet.
Over the troll’s body, she saw the man standing in a perfect Force Unleashed stance. He watched the troll, standing ready. After a moment, he relaxed and touched a button on the lightsaber.
The too-realistic blade blinked out in a moment with the requisite sound. Deactivated, it looked like an expensive prop hilt.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“The hell?” she answered, pointing at the maimed troll. It rolled over once, flailing for the man. Aaah! she thought, and shuffled away another couple of steps.
The bearded man jumped out of the beast’s reach, unfazed. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
Ree dusted the street off her legs. A few scrapes, nothing bad. “No, but ‘confused as hell’ would apply.”
“Understandable. You’ll want to step back a bit more.”
“Why?” she asked.
A second later, the dying troll popped like a burst balloon and gushed out into a puddle of viscous green-gray goop. Ree hopped back, but the wave of goop caught up to her, lapping over the sides of her boots.
She cursed absently, walking over to the man. “So who are you?”
“Call me Eastwood,” the man said.
Ree put her hands on her hips, thoroughly past “unamused” and approaching “HULK SMASH.”
“First name Clint?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.
“It’s a nickname.”
Taking another step toward Eastwood, Ree said, “I’d like to return to my earlier question: The hell?”
Eastwood gestured with his head to an open manhole in the street. “It was a troll, came out of the sewer.”
Ree gave him a skeptical look. There was no way something that big could fit through a manhole. Not to mention that she still hadn’t gotten a good explanation on the whole “trolls exist” fact.
Eastwood nodded. “You have questions, and I can provide answers. The fact that I’ve saved your life means you owe me the chance to explain, something I intend on doing.” He took another look around the alley. “Looks clear. Come with me now before the Doubt settles in.”
He pronounced Doubt with a capital letter, much the same way that her dad could say “Rhiannon Anna Maria Reyes, come here Now” when she was in trouble. Which happened a lot, between her childhood science experiments, Nerf war escalation, and the avant-garde haircuts she gave their golden retriever, Booster.
She said, “My friends are back there, so I’m not leaving. You can explain right here or I can call the cops.”
Eastwood harrumphed. “In less than five minutes, they won’t remember this happened at all. That’s what the Doubt does. But it won’t affect you. I can explain why I came into your store and why the troll was here, but we need to get out of this alley before something worse arrives.” He looked over his shoulder again, scanning the street.
Ree snorted. “Are you some kind of ghetto Kenobi? Come to teach me the ways of the Force so I can become a Jedi like my father?”
Eastwood flashed her a surprised look, then shook it off and pulled the lightsaber prop from his coat. “It’s what I had on hand.”
“Either you’re drunk or I am. Wait here,” she said, not waiting for him to respond. But only one of us just came out of a bar, Ree, she told herself. Bah.
Ree turned and opened the door again. Sandra and Darren weren’t in the stairwell, so she walked down the stairs to see them looking around the entranceway of the bar. Sandra looked up and said, “Oh! I thought you were still in the bathroom. Ready for pizza?”
Not to sound like a broken record, but the hell?
“What are you talking about? We were just outside, it was kind of memorable?”
Darren gave a wordless humph of bemusement. “That joke wasn’t that good, Ree. FOX is dumb for canceling Firefly, we get it.”
You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought. “The troll, remember?”
Two blank faces looked back up at her. They didn’t remember. Which meant Eastwood was either not totally crazy, or crazy but not entirely wrong. One way or another, it looked like the rabbit hole was inevitable. That or a padded room. Not a terribly appealing choice, really.
“Sure thing.” Ree scaled the stairs two at a time and returned to the alley to see Eastwood using a cartoon mop to soak up the troll goop.
Huh, she thought, her mind the model of erudition.
“So?” he asked.
“Not now. Gimme your cell number,” Ree said.
He laughed. “Just meet me outside Café Xombi at midnight, and we’ll go from there.”
“I have to work tomorrow. Gimme your cell and I’
ll call. My life isn’t so crappy that I’m going to fall over myself asking for the blue pill, okay?”
Eastwood smiled and produced a smartphone. He pressed one button, and a second later, her phone started ringing.
Ree looked down, and the phone showed [Blocked]. She held it up to check with Eastwood that it was, in fact, him calling, but he’d pulled a Batman, vanished without a trace.
Ree turned to the door of the bar but jumped back as it opened quickly, revealing Darren and Sandra with confused looks on their faces.
And Fanboy somehow has my cell phone number. Great.
Stalker has the lead over Kenobi, 4–1, but the pool is still open.
Chapter Three
As You Know, Bob
Shaking off the insanity of the alley, Ree accompanied Sandra and Darren to Turbo’s so they could all enjoy a glorious communion with the gods of pizza as incarnated in the basil pesto, tomato, Italian sausage, mozzarella, and feta pie. When they were done, Ree kissed Sandra goodbye and wandered down the street. Ever since the time Ree had gotten frustrated and shouted the couple’s scores through the bedroom wall in a Russian accent, Ree had taken to lagging behind and giving the two some privacy. And this time, it was a convenient excuse.
When they were gone, she called Eastwood. The phone rang three times.
“Here’s what you do,” he said.
Ree recoiled from the phone. “Hello to you, too.”
“Go south on Wilco ten blocks from Main, then turn left three times and knock on the first door on the right.”
“Give me an address. I’ll Google it.”
He scoffed. “No go, girlie. That’d do you less good than telling it to give you a walking route from Hokkaido to Beijing.”
Sighing, Ree said, “Whatever. Text me the directions.”
“If you really want the scoop, Ms. Digital Native, you’ll remember the frelling directions.”
“Are you always this much of an ass?” Ree asked.
“This is my nice side, mei-mei.”
“I’m not your sister.”
“Just follow the directions.”
And then he hung up. Ree stared at her phone, wrinkled her face in annoyance, and started walking.
She pulled her collar up as she crossed the street. If she were smart, she’d just go to a café and have some tea, then head home and pretend that the whole bullshit episode hadn’t happened. Sandra and Darren had apparently blacked out the sight of the troll, but Ree couldn’t help but see the damned thing every time she closed her eyes. She could still hear the pitch-perfect hum of the lightsaber as it cut through the monster’s knees, so she continued following the directions Captain Analog had spouted. There was something seriously screwed up in Pearson, and investigating it was way better than going home and wallowing in misery, though possibly just as bad for her mental well-being.
And that’s when she lost it, Doctor, Ree imagined Sandra saying as she looked down at a future Ree, locked in a padded room.
Wilco was mostly empty at 10 PM on a Thursday night. There were students here and there, a few homeless people, and the random unplaceable folks in clusters of ones and twos.
Making her way through the sporadic crowds, Ree reached Auburn, which was ten blocks south of Main. She’d left the U-District and entered a boring neighborhood filled with offices and apartments where rich kids from Cali and New England lived. This allowed them to attend U of P without ever having to deal with the inconvenience of seeing any parts of Pearson besides their classrooms and bars.
Ree walked a block, then turned left again, walked one more block, and turned left a third time. Why Eastwood couldn’t have just said “Go south nine blocks and then go in the first door on the right” was hard to say, but maybe he had a yen for folklore. Or was a jackass with a yen for folklore.
Remembering the rampant awesomeness of the lightsaber, she knocked on the door, hoping to get answers. She waited a few seconds, and then the door swung open with a reassuringly archetypal creak. The genre-loving part of her brain chuckled in approval as she stepped inside to see a stairwell going down.
Ree pressed the Record button on her voice memo app and started down the stairs. If nothing else, she’d be able to turn this into some kind of one-act.
“Eastwood of Eden”? No. “East by Eastwood”? Nah. “Tunnels and Trollops.” Yes. That’d do.
There was another door open at the bottom of the stairs, lit by one naked bulb flickering consistently enough that she wondered if it was Morse code.
The room beyond looked like a cross between the Science Fiction Museum and the dealer’s hall at Origins. Stacks climbed to the ceiling, forming narrow, dimly lit rows across the room. At the far side of the room, Eastwood stood in front of a desk piled high with books, yellowed paper, and a leaning tower of laptops. The far wall was covered by flat-panel TV screens.
Eastwood threw open his hands and said, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” His voice carried easily through the long room, the air still.
She snerked. “Morpheus, eh? Your coat needs to be bigger, and you need that awesome gap between your teeth.”
“Whatever. Just come in and close the door. We don’t want to be interrupted, and you may have been followed.”
“What, by fratboys?”
“If only,” Eastwood said. “I can deal with the Bromance crowd.”
Eastwood said the phrase with surprising seriousness. Curiouser and curiouser.
Ree made her way across the room, sneaking a look at the boxes and artifacts on the shelves. There were a lot of bound manuscripts, some old Betamax videos, DVDs, longboxes of comics, and costume pieces from TV shows and movies across the 20th century, among others. She stopped and looked at a piece that looked like Gort’s head from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
“Okay, I’m here. Lay some exposition on me, donor figure.”
“That’s Folklorist talk. Did you go to Berkeley?” Eastwood asked.
“Didn’t. Dated someone who did.” Ah, Berkeley, home of the best Folklore program south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, that had been a wild six weeks. Ree’s romantic history had several advantages, namely all the strange nonweapon proficiencies she’d picked up over the years from her partners. Do it right and you can get a general studies degree from dating widely, or an honorary doctorate if you stick with one person long enough. Ree hadn’t made it past the B.A. stage, though she’d learned more than a few handyman tricks from Jay.
Her stomach dropped at the thought of Jay, and she took a deep breath with her eyes closed, trying to push the feeling away.
When she opened her eyes, she looked up to Eastwood, who was waiting. He rolled a chair out in front of her. “Have a seat, this might take a while.”
“You have any popcorn?”
“That’s some impressive Snark Armor you have. I’d say +3 at least. Urban Outfitters?”
“ThinkGeek.” Ree considered and raised her hands. “Sorry. I’m here to listen, so talk.”
Eastwood picked up a mug from his desk, took a long sip, and started. “You’re a geek.”
“Yes . . .”
“You grew up watching sci-fi movies, reading fantasy novels, hiding under the covers after watching Alien. You probably played with lightsabers, maybe you had your cowboys fighting Picard and the spandex crew on the holodeck.”
“Close enough. But what does that have to do with the big pile of ugly back at Trollope’s?”
Eastwood waved to his stacks. “We tell these stories for a reason. They let us simultaneously remind ourselves of what’s out there while reassuring us that they’re not real. Humanity can’t quite manage to stop telling the tales of the monsters and beasts, gadgets and robots. We keep the warnings alive, even in ridiculous contexts: monsters that eat co-eds and aliens that kidnap nubile maidens to Mars.”
Ree sat forward. “Wait, are you saying these things are real because of the stories or despite them?”
“Good question,” Eastwood said.
&nb
sp; “You don’t know?”
Eastwood started to pace back and forth, talking with his hands but never making eye contact with Ree. “There are a range of opinions, most of them crappy and none conclusive. Some say we told stories to explain the shadows at the edge of the cave, and in the telling, they became real. Some say that the shadows at the edge of the cave were already alive and our stories made them whole, bound them to individual forms that could be known, and when they were known, they could be killed.”
“And what about this Doubt thing? Sandra and Darren don’t even remember stepping out into the alley.”
“The doing of some jackass a while back, during a massive throwdown in Europe during the Enlightenment. It was a virulent meme, spreading with humanism and rationality and all that rhetoric. The Technomancers wanted to be the alpha and omega of magic, so they tried a massive retcon, wanted to write the creatures out of existence.”
Eastwood swiped one hand through the air. “Sadly, like any good meme gone viral, it took on a life of its own. Instead of eliminating the beasts entirely, the Doubt just settled into our minds and let us MIB ourselves out of believing such things exist when we do run into them. When they realized what had gone wrong, the Technomancers got into the secret-police gig. As they spread around the world with the various empires, the Doubt went with them. It’s not fully settled in everywhere, and some people are immune, like with chickenpox or common sense.”
Ree took another deep breath, processing the backstory while delaying judgment on whether she believed it. “So maybe you’re telling the truth. Maybe you’re some whacko predator with a damn fine hologram generator. And maybe you had someone slip something in our beer. How do I know you’re for real?”
Eastwood nodded, walking around the corner into one of the stacks. Ree heard the sound of rummaging, and a minute later, he returned with a gray-white sphere. It looked for all the world like the training remote from A New Hope. Eastwood pushed a few buttons on the sphere, raised it to head level, and let go. The remote stayed in place, hovering and spinning slightly. Then Eastwood pulled the lightsaber prop out of his coat and handed it to Ree.
“You know what to do—elegant weapon, civilized age, all that good stuff.”
Geekomancy Page 3
