Shift: A Novel (27 page)

For a moment he thought he’d been mistaken. It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. This girl was so calm, so inviting. A pale violet dress rolled over the curves of her body from her neck to the tops of her knees, cinched in at the waist to accentuate the swell of hips and bosom. She offered him her profile for a moment, then turned slowly, giving him the rest of the view.

The last time he’d seen her face, it had been twisted in anguish, the hair wild, the skin flushed. Now it was serenely composed, a rich dark amber that sucked up the light and radiated it back with a coppery glow. A hint of green shadow framed her eyes, and her lips had been painted plum. In twenty-five years, BC had never seen a girl in anything other than red lipstick, or at any rate never noticed a girl in anything other than red lipstick. He found himself biting his own lips, wishing they were hers.

If she recognized him, she gave no sign.

“Good evening, Miss—”

“Nancy,” she said quickly, then walked to him, laid her arms delicately on his shoulders, turned her face to his. Her mouth was so close that BC could feel the heat coming off her lips. He was about to kiss
her—for appearances’ sake, of course—when she spoke in a voice as cold as ice.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

BC pulled her closer, felt the tenseness of her muscles beneath the softness of her dress. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here.”

Naz ran her cheek softly against the side of his face. “You stupid boy,” she hissed into his ear. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Thirty hours after he escaped from Melchior and Keller’s San
Francisco lab, Chandler woke up in the stolen Imperial in the middle of the Utah Salt Flats. He had been out for eighteen hours—eighteen hours and twenty-two minutes—the knowledge of which was almost as disturbing as the time itself. But, just as on the morning he woke up in Cambridge after sleeping for five days, he felt refreshed rather than disoriented. Unsettled, sure, but not hungry or stiff. He didn’t even have to take a leak. His cheeks and chin were virtually as smooth as they were the last time he’d shaved—eighteen days ago. His hair hadn’t grown, his fingernails seemed freshly trimmed, even his damn underarms smelled dewily fresh. It was as if he’d stepped out of time itself.

A car went by then, slowing as it passed the shouldered Imperial before speeding away on the empty road. With a start, Chandler realized that if the CIA was looking for him, it would probably check the most direct routes between San Francisco and DC. He started the car and at the first opportunity veered south. He ditched the Imperial in Salt Lake City for a Nash, then swapped that for a battered 1950 Bel Air north of Flagstaff, where he finally worked up the courage to turn east. A white Chrysler followed him for the entire 250 miles between Holbrook, Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Chandler had to keep reminding himself that there was literally nowhere for the Chrysler to turn in the vast stretch of empty desert. Still, it took all his will not to veer south again. By that point he realized it wasn’t the CIA he was running from as much as it was himself—from this new version of himself, unchanged on the outside yet completely different under the skin. The only thing that kept him going east, that kept him from driving into Mexico, or into the Gulf of Mexico for that matter, was the thought of Naz. Whatever his ultimate fate, he had to see her one more time. Had to make sure she was safe. And the only way he was going to do that, he knew, was if he took stock of his new abilities. Found out
exactly what he could do, and how best to use that power to get Naz away from Melchior.

The Bel Air was running on vapors by the time he pulled into a Phillips 66 in the middle of Texas pastureland. While the pump was ticking he washed the windshield and checked the oil and water, but as he worked he stared absently out at the empty horizon. Fallow fields surrounded the station on all four sides, green-brown grass covering the land from horizon to horizon like a planet-sized bedspread. The only interruption in the emptiness was the station and the two blacktop roads that crisscrossed in front of it, but there must’ve been a town nearby, because the east-west road sported a fairly steady trickle of traffic. This was as good a place as any, he told himself as he replaced the nozzle in the pump. He had to do it sometime.

He sauntered into the office, smiled at the gas jockey, a small Mexican-looking fellow. Chandler waited till the man was finished counting change for one of the other cars; then:

“Do you have any NoDoz? Or Vivarin?”

“Long drive ahead-a ya?” The gas jockey pulled out a half-empty box of caffeine pills and, when Chandler scooped up four packages, let out a sharp whistle. “Real long drive.”

“Gotta get there in a hurry,” Chandler said. “I’ve been dawdling.”

“Caffeine’ll speed
you
up. Not much’s gonna help that ol’ jalopy out there. That’ll be three seventy, including gas.”

Chandler pulled a wrinkled single from his front pocket, and even as he flattened it on the counter he let his mind relax. Because it was like that now—not working to get into someone else’s mind, but relaxing, to lower the barriers that kept other people out. In the past four days he’d come to realize that the fundamental root of his power was present even when there was no drug in his system, that he could even conjure tiny illusions if all he was doing was augmenting an object that was already there. Like, say, the addition of a couple of zeroes to a one-dollar bill.

“Criminy, mister. Ain’t-cha got nothing smaller? You’re gonna clean me out.”

“Sorry.” Chandler didn’t meet the man’s eyes (he’d done that to a gas jockey in Utah and the man had had the disconcerting experience of
seeing his own face on Chandler’s body). Little flashes flickered in and out of his mind: a fat boss with a greasy merkin of fake hair pasted to his bald pate, a pregnant wife with ankles swollen to the size of milk bottles, a couple of Spanish words:
lechuga, miércoles
. He kept his breathing steady as the gas jockey pulled three twenties from the till, two tens, two fives, four singles, a couple of dollars in silver. He was about to count out the thirty cents in pennies when Chandler told him to keep it. He shoved the money in his pocket—his billfold already bulged with more than three hundred dollars—then headed back out into the Texas sun. As he climbed into the Bel Air he looked around again. Not a house or building in sight. Just the pastures and the two lonely roads and the trickle of cars. He drove about a quarter mile south until he reached a small field that seemed to serve as a used-car lot, then stopped the car.

For a long time he just sat there, gripping the wheel as though it were the bar of a roller coaster and if he let go he would go flying into space. Then, abruptly, he reached for the vial he’d taken from Keller’s lab. He’d dipped into it sparingly over the past six days. Among other things, he’d noticed that using more than a few drops seemed to burn up all the energy in his body, and one time, after he’d spilled a dollop of the clear liquid on his palm and licked it up, he’d tripped for just under three hours, then slept for more than twenty. He thought he might be able to counteract the latter effect with a jolt of something—Benzedrine, cocaine, or just a lot of caffeine. Hence the NoDoz.

He took the caffeine pills first. A whole package, washed down three at a time with half a bottle of flat Coca-Cola. After a few minutes he felt a little jittery, but that could’ve just been nerves. After a quarter of an hour he started to twitch. His breath came fast and hollow, his chest felt tight.

He looked down at the vial in his shaking hand. He’d caught glimpses of it in Keller’s mind, knew it contained about ten thousand doses of acid. It was still more than half-full.

He took a deep breath.

“Down the hatch,” he muttered aloud, and tossed back the contents of the vial like a shot of whiskey.

He closed his eyes, as best he could anyway. There was so much caffeine
coursing through his bloodstream that his eyelids were spasming, and he could feel his heart pounding against his ribs.

It happened fast now. Less than five minutes after he swallowed the acid he was hallucinating behind his closed eyes, and less than five minutes after that he’d moved past the hallucination stage as his body did the extra thing it did, turned the acid into some new chemical that in turn turned his brain into a giant radio antenna.

When he opened his eyes, there was the by-now familiar scrim, faint objects—today it was mostly ribbons of color, vivid but translucent—wafting over the real world, but if he concentrated on something—say, the modernist wedge of the gas station in the rearview mirror—it emerged in sharp relief. There were faint whispers, too, so real that he even turned and looked in the backseat until he realized they were coming from the minds of the people back at the station.
Hurry it up, buddy
, he heard someone think, and he decided to take the suggestion to heart.

He got out of the car and walked down the center of the road like a gunslinger in an old Western, getting ready to push through the swinging doors of a saloon and shoot the place up.
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ …

The gas jockey was back outside, moving slowly but efficiently between the vehicles. Joe Gonzalez, Chandler learned now, the information absorbed as effortlessy as sight and sound. That was the gas jockey’s name.

There were four cars in the station. Chandler could see five, possibly six shadows in the cars. But if he ignored the evidence of his eyes, he could tell that the four vehicles held seven occupants—there was a baby in the backseat of the Chrysler driven by Mae Watson and her spinster sister Emily. The baby’s dreams were little flickering flashes of color, and it was these Chandler let out first. Orange and yellow lights began to pulse across the empty fields.

“Fireflies,” Dan Karnovsky, sitting alone in the Buick behind Mae and Emily, mused to himself. “Nice tits,” he added when Mae leaned out of the car to tell Joe Gonzalez to check the air pressure in the tires.

But Chandler didn’t just want to pull images from other people’s minds. He wanted to see if he could make something himself. It was
hard to isolate. Between the hallucinations and the bits and pieces of other minds, his own thoughts were hard to find.

Concentrate, Chandler!

Mae turned to her sister.

“Did you say something, sis?” About my breasts, she added, but silently.

“Huh?” Emily said, but Mae didn’t hear her.

Neither did Chandler.

Push
, he said to himself, and screwed his eyes shut.
Push!

In the Watsons’ Chrysler, Baby Leo woke up crying.

Joe Gonzalez, pulling the nozzle from Jared Steinke’s Dodge, stopped dead in his tracks. Fortunately, the handle he was holding was closed, and only a few drops of gasoline spilled on the stained concrete. But Joe didn’t see them because he was staring at the sky.

“Dios mío.”

A flash of light was tearing a hole in the air above the crosshairs of the intersection. Silent, smokeless flames belched skyward, but instead of dissipating into the atmosphere they remained tightly knitted together like bolts of lightning emanating from a single dense thunder-head. In a moment the figure had taken shape. The legs, the arms, the head. The open eyes and mouth. He wasn’t a boy now. Not anymore. He was a warrior. A messenger from God. A roiling, fiery seraph more than a hundred feet high.

A Ford on the highway veered sharply to the left and bucked through the shallow drainage ditch and through a barbed-wire fence.

Chandler opened his eyes, looked at the figure in the sky with as much disbelief as the eight people in the gas station (and Wally O’Shea, the driver of the Ford, which had skidded to a stop in the middle of a fallow pasture). First Millbrook, then San Francisco, now Texas. It was as if the seraph was following him, as if he was trying to tell him something.

“Who
are
you?” he demanded, even as the figure turned to look at him, its mouth open, silent, desolate, yet mocking at the same time. “Go away!” Chandler screamed. He waved his hands at the flaming figure. “Leave me alone!”

But the figure lingered on, the flames of its body so bright they cast shadows for what seemed like miles in every direction. An arm
lifted from its side, raised up, pointed. As if to make sure there was no mistake, it reached out and out and out till it was inches away from Chandler’s face. Though it was easy to see the finger as some kind of accusation, Chandler saw it more as a summons, a selection: a heavenly version of Uncle Sam’s “I Want You.”

“No!” he screamed at the warrior. “I refuse! I do not accept this responsibility!” He swatted at the finger like a cornered kitten swiping at a rabid Saint Bernard. “Go away!”

And just like that, the warrior disappeared. No flash, no flicker, no poof. It was simply gone, leaving Chandler alone at the edge of the parking lot with eight pairs of terrified eyes staring at him. For a moment there were only the screams of Mae’s baby, and then Joe Gonzalez coughed.

“¿Señor? ¿Eres el diablo?”

Naz led BC in a slow two-step around the sitting room. She’d
put a record on the turntable, and quiet jazz wafted from hidden speakers, but her fingernails bit into BC’s shoulders like an eagle’s talons, as though she wanted to rip him apart.

“Don’t you understand?” she hissed into his chest. “That man will kill him.”

“His name is Melchior,” BC whispered into the dark waves of Naz’s hair, “and I don’t think he will. Chandler’s too special.”

“I’ve thought this through,” Naz insisted. “The only way he can get Chandler to obey him is if he threatens me. But if I escape—if Chandler finds out I’ve escaped—he’ll refuse to do what Melchior tells him to. And then Melchior will kill him.”

“But how would Chandler find out you got away? Melchior would never tell him.”

“Trust me. Chandler will find out.”

Naz’s tone discouraged further questioning, but BC knew what she was referring to. The reason he was here. The reason Chandler had been taken in the first place. Orpheus.