Nowhere Man (Wine of the Gods Book 35)

by Pam Uphoff

  Nowhere Man

  Pam Uphoff

  Copyright © 2018 Pamela Uphoff

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN

  978-1-939746-36-8

  Cover Art by Gerd Altmann

  This is a work of fiction.

  All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Doesn’t look like a Space Alien

  Chapter Two

  Oh. Kay. Maybe he is.

  Chapter Three

  Party!

  Chapter Four

  A new job, and a quick promotion

  Chapter Five

  Attracting negative attention

  Chapter Six

  Showing off

  Chapter Seven

  On the Beach

  Chapter Eight

  Almost done

  Chapter Nine

  That’s a wrap

  Chapter Ten

  Nowhere

  Excerpt from an upcoming release

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Pam Uphoff

  Chapter One

  Doesn’t look like a Space Alien

  The big white Suburban careened out of nowhere, across three lanes of traffic. Lily hit the brakes and crowded the shoulder as far as she dared. The fender of the Suburban retreated from the inches-from-her-nose side pass, barely ticked her front fender as it crossed in front of her, got itself onto the shoulder and screeched to a halt. Lily made a more controlled stop, a few car lengths behind it.

  The rest of the traffic recovered from their various more successful attempts to avoid the SUV and kept going. Smart people. Maybe she ought to have as well. Technically she'd made contact with it, but it had been more sound effect than bump . . .

  She moved her Nissan further onto the shoulder and stopped about ten feet away from the Suburban. Braced her shoulders and got out. The Suburban was covered with minor dents and scratches, a few old enough to be showing rust. Lily walked to the driver's window.

  There was a man in the front seat – sort of sprawled. Not wearing a seat belt, he must have slid out from behind the wheel. Hairy; long pale blond hair, unkempt beard halfway down his chest. Somewhere between tanned and 'ethnic' in skin color.

  "Are you all right?"

  The man wiggled around, getting his butt back in the driver's seat, disentangling his right foot from a blanket. He rolled down the window with an old-fashioned hand crank. Cheap fleet vehicle.

  "Yeah, t'was, umm, kind of unexpected. T'speed, not to mention actually popping out on a road. Huh. How about you? I was a bit busy, but I think I would have noticed a serious crunchah, y'know?"

  His words were sort of accented, a bit fast. He cracked open the door and practically fell out of the big vehicle. "Sorry, no experience at reentries like that."

  Was he drunk? Stoned?

  He walked a bit unsteadily to her little Nissan, and bent over the front bumper, where they'd barely kissed metal. Well, plastic, in Lily's case.

  "That doesn't matter, we barely touched and, well, I messed up the bumper big time yesterday." The other corner of the bumper was pushed back, the metal supports under it all bent, the plastic scraped, gouged and torn a bit here and there. Lily looked down at it, resignedly. "I, umm, rear ended a neighbor yesterday. They put this new stop sign in my neighborhood, and I haven't gotten used to automatically stopping there." And neither has she, but she's not going to admit that she backed up into me. Hard.

  He rubbed his head as if it ached. "Oh yeah, doncha hate that?" He leaned over and rubbed the little roughed up spot their contact had left on the plastic.

  Lily stepped back to her car and grabbed her purse. Fished around and pulled out paper, found a blank half of a sheet and filled out her information on the upper part. "Can I get your name and driver's license number?" She moved around to where she could see the license of the SUV, then and stopped.

  The license plate quite definitely claimed to be valid until June 2245. Issued by the State of Jefferson. "Ha, ha. What's your real license?"

  He got still for a moment, then walked further around the car, trailing fingers over her car's injured bumper and fenders. He glanced at her license plate. "Oh, here in California, of course." He leaned over and stuck his hand way under the car, and pulled on something. She winced as something gave. Although he couldn't hardly make it any worse, could he? Then he straightened and ran his hands over the fender, crumpled behind the replacement headlight.

  Lily shifted to where she could see. It didn't seem as pushed back as it had been. . .

  With a protesting crump the fender popped outward. The man rubbed his fingers over the remaining folds and dents and they flattened out like putty. He backed away from it and gave it a critical look from a distance. "That's better. Dunno how well t'paint'll hold up." He leaned back down and started rubbing the largest tear in the plastic. “I hate doing plastic. Weird stuff, not rock or metal, isn’t really biological . . .”

  Lily shut her mouth and gulped. Looked out at the highway where, between cars, the sideways skid marks were quite clear. They started between lanes. Four tires, moving at about thirty degrees off the centerline of the car at high speed. The black tracks lightened as the driver – or perhaps the man in the passenger seat – grabbed the wheel and turned the car into the skid. He'd been going damned fast when he passed her. She sat down carefully on the now immaculate bumper and looked at her shaking hands. Looked at the man. What skin she could see under all the hair was darker than one would expect with the blonde hair. Not quite African dark, and the nose was rather high bridged, like an Iranian friend of hers. Blue eyes. He wasn't quite right. Lily cleared her throat carefully. "Reentry, you said? Like from outer space?"

  He sniffed. "Nah, nothing like that! Just parallel worlds. I'm from Earth, same as you, it's just, my Earth had a little different history."

  Lily cleared her throat again. This was either a good idea, or a monumentally bad one. "So, you probably don't have any local currency? Umm, would you take two hundred dollars to fix my neighbor's car? Umm, in a sort of sneaky fashion?"

  The hairy man blinked those blue eyes at her, then the corners crinkled into smile lines. "Only if it comes with an offer of a shower, laundry, and dinner."

  Chapter Two

  Oh. Kay. Maybe he is.

  "I'm Eldon Denison, by the way."

  The hairy man had cleaned up very . . . frighteningly? The curly blonde beard was now trimmed to about an inch long, the wavy blonde hair in a neat ponytail, contrasting with his dark skin. The strong bones of his face showed now, masculine to a high degree, symmetrical enough to not be ugly. But he was still tall, broad, muscular. Probably part Arab, maybe a little African. Or even oriental, the shape of those blue eyes. A stranger she'd let into the house. If her mother ever found out she was going to be dead meat. The Chesterfield's Mercedes was bad enough.

  She set the lasagna down in the middle of the table. Served the first hunk to Eldon, the second to herself.

  She sat and looked at him hopelessly. "This was such a bad idea. They're bound to have all sorts of alarms. And I expect you're an explorer, not a thief."

  "Err, well. Umm, my training is extensive. I'm sure I can deal with security measures." He looked around. "You must be awfully well paid. What do you do?"

  "I'm a college student. This is actually my parent's house. They're off on a cruise and didn't want the place empty. So I have to drive fifty klicks to classes every day."

  Eldon scratched his beard. "If the traffic I dropped into is any indication, they o
we you big time."

  "Well, it's only for another three days, then they'll be back" Oh, why don't I just give this huge hulking stranger all the information he needs to rob the house and ravish me, unmolested?

  "So, why don't we take a walk around, I can get a feel for the region and maybe you can point out these neighbors with the dented car?"

  "Okay. The neighborhood isn't really set up for walking, but we could take the bridle trails that wind through."

  "Oh, you have horses?"

  "Well, not me, but a lot of the neighbors do."

  He grinned. "As it happens, so do I."

  Pulling horses out of thin air convinced her all over again.

  Her parents' place was half of an acre tucked into an awkwardly shaped flat spot up a canyon. They'd bought the lot after the previous house had burned down in one of the brush fires that regularly swept these dry hills. The prior owners had had horses, and the little two stall shed had survived the fire. Eldon got something from his suburban, carried it to the back, and popped it like a soap bubble. A wagon, lots of leather straps that were probably harnesses, one saddle, four horses.

  "Blazer, Muffin, Banana and Star. Let's take Banana and Star." Eldon grabbed the blue roan with the blaze and the speckled brown roan with the white splashes on her belly, and locked them in the stalls.

  Banana was a golden chestnut pinto and Star a dark chocolate pinto. They weren't draft horses, but they were big and well muscled. Banana looked flashy in the dark leather and silver conchoed tack. Star got more rope tied to her rope halter for reins, and Eldon vaulted on bareback. Lily patted Banana, hiked up her jeans a bit and hauled herself aboard. It was a long way up, and the stirrups were adjusted for someone Eldon's size.

  He slid off and helped shorten them, then vaulted back onto Star. All this and athletic too. Lily hadn't ridden for years, and never regularly enough to be really good at it. But Banana walked quietly along looking around with alert, but not alarmed ears.

  "Looks like it burned, here." Eldon urged Star up beside her.

  "Yes, it's a real hazard of living in the hills up here. My parents built that house on the foundations of the previous one." She eyed him. "What is your world like? Are you way ahead of us, on your parallel world?"

  "Nah, not my home. See, what year is it here?"

  "2036."

  "Right, see, once worlds split apart, time goes differently for them. It's like their rate of time splits, too, so the more splits, the slower each world goes. Your world is in this . . . We call it a book, and all the almost parallel worlds are pages. And this is a big thick book, and almost all the Worlds are going really slow, in comparison to the worlds that split away before the book. So . . . there's this other Earth, going faster than you. They got into genetic engineering, and then when they saw what the engineered people could do, they just freaked out. Now, there were more splits. Sometimes the Engineered were just left alone, sometimes they were forcibly sterilized, sometimes killed, and on one Earth, they discovered dimensional travel, and they exiled all the engineered to a rather dangerous world. That Earth, the one that had dimensional travel and the world they sent to engineered to, have both had about fourteen hundred years pass. But that Earth had so many wars and shit that they aren't really advanced at all. I'm from the Exile world – we call it Comet Fall now. We sorta dropped back to early industrial, worked our way back up, got hit by a comet, started over at about medieval and worked our way back up again. But we've only made it to early industrial. Water wheels, small steam engines, and the weird stuff our engineered genes let us do. We call it magic."

  "Like pulling four horses out of thin air?"

  "Right. There's a perfectly good scientific explanation, involving eight dimensions. We ignore the science and just do it. Those few of us who can see in eight dimensions." He fell silent as both horse perked up their ears. A cavalcade of teenagers riding bareback rounded the curve, and Eldon shifted Star nearly off the trail to let them gallop by.

  "There's a little reservoir up at the top of the hill, they ride up to it and swim, even though they aren't supposed to."

  "Why not? It's not like they can get it any dirtier than birds pooping in it. Or do you not have ducks and geese here?"

  "We do. It just that the sides are steep; it was built to hold water for firefighting, not to be easy to get in and out of. They keep collapsing the sides as they go in and out."

  Eldon grinned. "Unless your kids are different from ours, you ought to just make a couple of easy in and out spots for them. Save frustration on both sides."

  Lily snorted. "It isn't safe." The trail crossed a street, and once behind the houses again, split. She led them further uphill.

  "So, what's a common name around here?"

  "Here? Umm, Smith, Jones, Garcia? My best friend in grade school was Cindy Brown. There were eight other Browns at the school, not a single one related to her. Err, am I going to regret asking why?"

  "Well, I'll need to get ID if I stick around here very long. Common names make a lot of things easier. How big of a town is this? According to that newspaper I read, it looks like it's what get called everything from SoCal to the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area, Orange County and things like that."

  "Oh, no. We're all broken up into little bitty towns. All packed together. This is Altadena. You're going to steal someone's identity?"

  "Someone dead, so don't worry about it."

  "Huh." She rode across a hill and pointed down. "See my house, with the red tile roof? And out back a steep slope, a hundred feet up to the next street? The big house in the middle of the block, with the driveway bricked in like a big compass? That's the Chesterfields. Their daughter-in-law is sponging off them, and I swear she . . . oh never mind. I don't believe she has whiplash, I think she just wants money."

  She watched carefully for the Chesterfield's. No one outside. It was one of the biggest houses in the canyon. "See the red car? That's the one. Oh, and there's Sindara walking out the back. I don't believe either the name or the hair color is original."

  Eldon snickered. "I see you two are good friends."

  "Well, her sister-in-law, Margo, and I are school chums. Were. She's gone and married an actor. Her mother thinks she's insane, especially since she's started taking acting lessons."

  "How many people live there?"

  "Just the parents, Harold, their son who is Sindara's husband, Sindara and their two kids. Oh, and a maid." She waited until Eldon had taken it all in, then sent Banana on her way with a squeeze.

  Back at the house, Eldon dug out buckets and watered, and then fed the four horses. "Why don't you do all the things you'd usually do on a lovely evening, and I'll slide uphill and take a look at the car, while it's sitting outside. I'll take my time, do it now if I can get to it, or wait and fix it tonight after everyone is asleep."

  ***

  With the light warped around him Eldon had the bumper in pristine condition in fifteen minutes. There was less damage than in Lily's car, but a sturdier framework to coax back into position. Nice car. Well built with what snobs would call elegance. Then he circled the house, stopping to eye the woman sunbathing in practically nothing. Umm. Yummy. Her hair was brick red, her figure sumptuous. He'd been alone for the last year, just eating occasionally as he slept and healed. But he knew better than to . . . hmm, that impulse had been easy to control. Good, the local collective subconscious wasn't trying to turn him into the God of Perversions or something. Excellent, in fact. Maybe he should stay here. He did bring out his hip flask and tip a bit of that wine into her lemonade. That would take care of her neck injury, if she had one. If one were technically minded, one would say the wine sustained Von Neumann nano-assemblers for manufacturing medical repair ribozymes. Most people just said “magic” and spared themselves the headache.

  He gave her figure one last invisible leer and headed inside, to scout out the territory, mostly out of plain old curiosity. But also in case they had paperwork stashed somewhere. As mansi
ons went, it was merely large. The whole place was immaculate. Only one maid? He hoped they appreciated her, obviously a paragon. Large palatial bedroom, with a huge bathroom, a small reading nook. Something dense. A safe set in the foundations. He grabbed a small bubble, and he could reach right through the thick metal and see what was inside. Papers mostly. Exactly what he needed. Birth certificates. One for a nineteen year old girl, another for a twenty-eight year old man. Born locally. Eldon grabbed books and felt the paper, ripped three pages out of the one closest in composition to the certificates. He melded them, pulled them out to the right size, moved the ink around to match the birth certificate forms and most of the information. He folded it carefully and pocketed it, replaced the real birth certificates and let his bubble go. There was much more house to explore. Down half a flight of stairs, two empty bedrooms, with a shared bath between. A turn of the hall, more steps down and two more bedrooms, these with signs of occupation by children. A boy and a girl, tenish? Across the hall, up two steps, and there was another over sized bedroom with a huge bathroom. Back down and turn the other direction to a nice comfortable TV room. Turn to the front of the house and find a more formal sort of sitting room, a fancy dining room. Beyond that a primo kitchen. Stone countertops of polished granite and two of everything, including sinks and ovens. There was another dining room, all chintzy and warm just off it, and stairs going down, first to the garage and then further to the wine cellar, and a tasting room that must be directly under the sunbather. Huh. He listened carefully, mentally, and could 'see' her up there, and two more people as well. He climbed back up, and found the maid through the other kitchen door, pulling clean sheets out of a drier. And forward of that, a cozy little office where a woman of fifty or so sat with her computer, filling out invitations.

  Hmm, not to a party here, but to some other address . . . he'd bet the movie star son-in-law. Why the mother-in-law was the one stuffing envelopes was less important than the fact that Lily was right there on the list and that if he got his name on there, he could see her again.