The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Page 10

  Now I didn’t even have a chance to back out. The train had gone right past that station without slowing. I just had to be ready to jump before the thing derailed.

  After about twenty minutes, she pulled up outside my apartment. “Do you need anything from your apartment before we go?” Vivian asked as we stepped out of her car and made her way into the building.

  “Maybe I should go get a plan, since you didn’t seem to bring one with you.”

  That felt sweet. I enjoyed the sense of smugness for a moment before she grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me up against the front door.

  “Hey…what…” I tried to shove her away, but she was surprisingly strong, and despite everything I was still hesitant to push her away by her chest.

  “Listen here,” she said, her voice low and spooky enough to convince me to do as she said. “This isn’t a joke. I don’t know what we’re going to find there, but it’s sure as hell not going to be nice. We’re going anyway, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to stop this thing before it starts. Whatever it takes, do you understand me?”

  I licked my lips, tore her hands from her shoulders, and pushed her backward. My eye was twitching, never a good sign. “What do you think I am, Vivian? I’m not your pet Tunneler, and I’m certainly not one of your uniforms you need to bully into doing their jobs. I’m sure as fuck not doing this because you’re telling me to. Not anymore.”

  “Then why are you here, Miles?” She planted her hands on her hips.

  “Because,” I said, “this is my goddamn city, understand? This is the city that raised me when my mother dropped dead and my father bailed. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it be burned to the ground by some asshole like Andrews or this doctor of yours. You think I don’t know what’s at stake? Then why don’t you fucking tell me what you’re hiding from me?”

  My face grew hot, but I forced myself to look her in the eyes anyway. To hell with her. If she didn’t want to deal with me, I’d leave her behind and go to Heaven myself. She needed me a hell of a lot more than I needed her.

  Vivian’s face was almost comical to watch. If her frown got any deeper I’d be able to swim in it. When she finally opened her mouth, I could almost feel the flames pouring out. “You want the truth? Fine. Doctor Dee sent a message to the gangs. Several messages. With bodies attached.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “In the last month we had a spate of gang murders. High-ranking gangsters, all of them, from every major gang in the city. Executed, all of them. Same method of killing: small caliber, right between the eyes.”

  “They’re gangsters. That’s what gangsters do.”

  She shook her head. “Listen, will you?” she snapped. “It’s not the murders that are important. They’d been left near their own gangs, and by the time we got to the scenes the bodies had already been tampered with. All apart from one over in the Silk Dragons’ territory. Killed the same as the others, bullet between the eyes. Except this woman still had a note pinned to her.”

  “Christ, haven’t they heard of phones?”

  “The note was typewritten. ‘Chroma is death. Fly to Heaven, or it will send you to Hell. Make your choice.’ It was signed by Doctor Dee.”

  “Sounds like your doctor has a knack for melodrama.” I stroked the corner of my mouth, my breath coming a bit calmer now. “Chroma is death? Not Doctor Dee?”

  “Until then we’d been operating under the assumption that Chroma was just going to be a revenue stream for Dee. But after that, we weren’t so sure.”

  I nodded, trying to puzzle it out. Calling your drug “death” wasn’t exactly a great way to win over a customer base. What was Dee up to?

  “There,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Now you know what I know. The notes were enough to scare the gangsters. Maybe we should be scared as well.”

  “You weren’t already? Jesus, lady, I’ve been shaking in my boots ever since you folks hauled me downtown.”

  Her scowl broke as quickly as it had come, and she smiled a little. It suited her. “We’re wasting time, we need to get moving. How long will it take us to get there?”

  I shrugged. “It varies from Tunnel to Tunnel, but usually around an hour.”

  She nodded and reached for the door handle, but I grabbed her arm.

  “One more thing,” I said. “Keep information from me again and I’ll strand you in the most fucked up part of Heaven I can find. Got it?”

  She grinned and gestured toward the door. “Shall we?”

  So much for the tough guy act. I’ll never understand women.

  The main basis for my Tunnel was a large iron ring fixed into the concrete floor with screws. The circle was seven feet across, large enough to fit someone lying inside. I had to pay my landlady a mint to keep it in the basement. It was separated from the long-broken heating system and water pipes by a pile of junk I had unceremoniously piled around it.

  The expression on Vivian’s face as I flicked on the single light bulb could best be described as dubious. She stared around at the water stains on the concrete walls and the webs in the corner that probably housed spiders bigger than your average household cat, her lips twisting and her nose screwed up.

  “You were expecting something fancy?” I asked. “Maybe some silk curtains and a serving girl to give you cocktails while you wait?”

  “No, but I wasn’t expecting to inhale fatal doses of mold spores. I thought this was supposed to be your business. You should take some pride in it.”

  I retrieved some sidewalk paint and a good-sized brush from an old wooden table beside the metal circle. The paint was supposed to be for kids, but it was a better medium than chalk for creating the Tunnel, and I could easily wash it away when I was done. “This isn’t the Bore. There isn’t much room in the budget for prettying the place up. Anyway, the types of people who hire the services of naughty men like me usually aren’t too picky.”

  I uncapped one of the paint tubes—green, this one was—and squirted some out onto an old kitchen tile I used as a palette. Vivian stood over me and watched me as I dipped my brush and began painting a large pentagon inside the circle, each corner touching a point on the ring.

  “What’s that for?” Vivian asked.

  “That’s our location. The territory of Suron. I’d pinpoint us better if we knew where we were going, but as it is I’ll just plonk us down next to the main city. That’s our best bet.”

  With the pentagon finished, I put away the green paint and got out the red. The colors didn’t really matter, but it made it easier to keep track of things. Since there were only two of us, it wouldn’t be too hard to make a specific Tunnel, thank God. Getting it wrong was a good way to experience what it felt like to be compressed to a singularity, but after trying to gauge a whole family of Vei and all their relationships, this would be child’s play.

  I put my own symbols in first, like I always do. They look like random squiggles and doodles—mostly because they are—but they’re a way of defining me. There’s a few that always remain more or less the same: representing my gender, who I was growing up, all that nonsense a shrink would talk to you about. Then came the more malleable bits, the bits that changed day-to-day. I put in my confusion, the aches from the beating Andrews’ boys had given me, my sleep deprivation.

  Vivian was quiet as she watched me. I had to put her in now, but first I had to decide what our connection was. I wouldn’t go so far as to call us friends. Workmates, maybe, as a rough approximation. I drew some lines out from my symbols to another section of the Tunnel, relying mostly on instinct to get it right, then sat back on my haunches and looked up at Vivian.

  “Were you born in Bluegate?”

  She stared at me for a moment, frowning, then glanced at the Tunnel. “Oh. No, a town called Danton. We came to Bluegate when I was a girl, five or six, I think.”

  “What brought you here?”

  She licked her lips. “My mother thought it’d be best for my sister
and I after my father left. Bluegate was still a city full of promise then, you know.” She shrugged.

  I nodded and started painting. It was a typical enough story. I could write a book on it. Bluegate: City of Broken Dreams and Other Clichés.

  I thought I caught a note of pain when she mentioned her sister. Dead, maybe. I didn’t need details so I wasn’t going to pry. I had enough of a picture of her early life to construct the Tunnel; digging further was just going to unleash emotions that we didn’t have time to deal with. I knew if it was me I’d prefer to leave the past where it belonged.

  I filled in the rest of the circle with my impressions of Vivian, and then it was done. It looked like the demented finger-painting of a three-year-old tripping on acid, but that was all right. It would do the job. After a while, you get a feel for these things, and I’d been at this a very long while.

  “You haven’t been to Heaven before, have you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t the sort of place you go on holiday. “You’ll have to leave your gun here. Cell phone too, watch, MP3 player, anything like that.”

  She looked at me suspiciously, but she slipped her jacket off and unbuckled her shoulder holster. “Why?”

  “Mainly because they’re a bit of a taboo in Heaven. But also, they can be dangerous if you get tempted to use them. Reality’s just too unstable there. Likely your cell phone would just malfunction and die, but the gun’s more likely to fire off still in its holster, or maybe just explode.”

  You couldn’t rely on things staying as they should be in Heaven. For some reason, it was only artificial things that were at real risk. A human—or Vei—body had a gazillion more moving parts than a gun, but while they were prone to change, it was never fatal.

  Vivian put her jacket back on and put her cell phone on the table next to her gun. “I don’t feel comfortable leaving it here.”

  I scratched at my stubble and shrugged. “Junkie. Can’t bear to let it out of your sight, can you?”

  I took the look she gave me as a no. I grinned, feeling strangely buoyed. There was a reason I’d made my job in Tunneling, and it wasn’t just because I was good at it. Truth is I enjoyed travelling to Heaven, recent events aside. For some reason, the madness of the place was freeing. There were no bars there, and nothing was fixed. It was a place of possibility.

  I put my own cell phone on the table as well, even though it had been so water-damaged it’d probably have a better chance of spontaneously fixing itself in Heaven. Habit, I guess. I removed my watch and patted myself down to make sure I didn’t have anything else that might be trouble. My nightstick was still sitting pretty inside my jacket. I didn’t even think about taking that out. Things had gotten dangerous, and I had no idea when I was going to need it.

  Other than that I just had my Pin Hole coins, which acted a little differently in Heaven. With luck I wouldn’t need them, but my luck and I weren’t on speaking terms, so I left them in my pocket as a precautionary measure. Safety first, that’s me.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. We got a bit of a walk ahead of us.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. I didn’t usually take people to Heaven; most of the time I brought them back to Earth. Vivian was clearly tough, but Heaven wasn’t exactly somewhere you could prepare yourself for. I couldn’t know how she’d react until she’d arrived. More than one human had lost it completely spending too long there.

  She seemed to be reading my mind. “Anything I should know before we go?”

  “Just…just stay close, and follow my lead. And don’t try to hold on to what you think things should be like, not if you don’t want to come back a wreck.”

  She met my eyes and nodded. All right, that was it then. Time to take a trip.

  I started humming, self-consciousness be damned, and let my mind slip into that special crazy state while I pulled the bottle of Kemia from my pocket and splashed it onto the concrete. Reality warped, a sensation of not-quite-rightness building just behind my eyes, and I could feel Heaven’s energy pushing against the circle.

  I continued to pour the Kemia until nearly half the bottle was gone. Somehow, it never washed away the painted symbols. Instead, they just seemed to slide around in place, warping and moving at the threshold of vision. Kind of like being drunk, I suppose.

  As the circle sucked on my energy, trying to tear open the hole, I became very aware of how little I’d eaten in the last day or so. I made a mental note to get some grub as soon as I got back, preferably before I passed out from low blood sugar.

  And then thought disappeared among a maelstrom of mental energy. The Tunnel pulsed once, twice, and I delivered a final blow to it, energy surging from me. The air hummed to match my own tune, and Vivian whispered something too quietly for me to hear.

  And then the Tunnel opened.

  The center of the circle seemed to sink into the ground, dragging the concrete with it. Within a couple of seconds the entire interior of the circle looked like a dark, deep well, descending to the center of the Earth, with a faint blue light glowing around the outside. It had taken more out of me than I’d expected. I glanced at Vivian, who was staring at the Tunnel like it had teeth.

  “Impressed?” I asked.

  “You wish. How do we…uh…?”

  “I’ll show you. Come here.” I stepped up to the edge of the Tunnel, the light reflecting off the mud on my shoes. Vivian came alongside me and peered into the hole. I could’ve sworn I saw her hands tremble before she shoved them into her jacket pockets.

  “Just relax,” I said, “and do as I do.”

  With one last glance around the basement, I stuck my leg out above the hole and let myself fall forward.

  I caught the sound of Vivian gasping before it became muffled. My stomach lurched as gravity shifted around me and I continued to fall forward, and then suddenly I was still again, upright inside a Tunnel lined with black. Ahead of me it seemed to stretch to infinity, an endless tube of darkness.

  I looked back to see Vivian staring at me, her eyes wide with shock. She was standing perpendicular to me, a disconcerting experience if you hadn’t seen it before. A film of clear fluid seemed to separate us, but I knew she’d feel nothing when she came through. If she didn’t chicken out, that was.

  “Come on,” I said. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

  My voice probably came through to her distorted, but by her scowl it looked like she’d got the message. She muttered something to herself, closed her eyes, and stepped into the Tunnel. She seemed to rotate in space for a moment, then she was standing upright next to me, trembling a little. Somehow, her face was remarkably calm.

  “Nice work,” I said. “Ready to rock and ruin?”

  She squinted and peered down the Tunnel. “God, why is it so dark in here?”

  “I can fix that. Hold up.”

  I closed my eyes and tweaked the nature of the Tunnel. The darkness retreated, and a pale white light that had no obvious source lit up the Tunnel walls.

  “Much better,” Vivian said, though she didn’t sound completely convinced. “Now we walk?”

  “Now we walk,” I confirmed.

  The Tunnel wasn’t really wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, so I took the lead. I realized I hadn’t asked Vivian if she was claustrophobic, but she seemed all right. That made things easier for me.

  “Is it possible we’re not alone in this Tunnel?” Vivian asked after a few minutes of walking.

  I shook my head. “The Tunnel takes us through some God-knows-where interdimensional places, but it’ll keep anything out.” I knocked on the wall of the Tunnel with my fist. It made a strange sound, somewhere between plastic and metal. “See? Solid as you like.”

  “And we won’t run into anyone else going to or from Heaven?”

  “Like Andrews’ boys? Nah. Each Tunnel is a discrete entity. Even if there were others going to Heaven right now, we’d never see them or know about it until
we got there.”

  “Good. That’s one distraction we can do without. If we get there before the gangsters, all the better.”

  It wasn’t impossible. Tunneling for two people was hell of a lot easier than doing it for dozens; the latter needed more detailed Tunnels and multiple trips, unless they had a whole bunch of Tunnelers. Getting there first was something to hope for, at least.

  The minutes stretched on as we continued to walk. I found myself thinking of Tania, of all people. Maybe she’d be doing this one day, ferrying cops back and forth. Nah, she wouldn’t be that dumb. She was a good kid, she’d know how to stay out of trouble. I didn’t have a clue how she stayed so clean in a city where you couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into a pimp or a drug dealer, but somehow she’d managed it.

  My stomach twisted a little when I remembered the promise I’d given her. I should have started teaching her months ago, when she first started nagging me. Instead I’d tried to blow town and palm her off on my friend. Desmond would do a damn sight better job than me, but a part of me felt like it was my responsibility.

  Listen to me, talking about being responsible. Hell, I was nearly a grown-up. Still, when this was all over, I’d do it. I’d teach her how to Tunnel. I might even enjoy it.

  “You got kids, Vivian?” I asked, almost without thinking.

  She made a noise, then said, “I hope that’s not how you usually proposition women.”

  My face burned. All right, I’d walked right into that. “Seriously, though.”

  “No time for children,” she said after a moment. “Besides, this isn’t the city to raise them.”

  “I turned out fine.”

  She snorted and muttered something to herself. It was probably best I didn’t catch it.

  “All right then,” I said, “so why’d you become a cop?”

  She made an “I dunno” noise at first. That was all I got out of her for a few seconds, but then she started speaking. “Stupidity and idealism, I guess. That got knocked out of me fairly hard when I hit the streets, though.”