The Last Adventure of Constance Verity (15 page)

She studied Tia suspiciously.

“Oh, come on,” said Tia. “You can't suspect me. We've been friends since we were seven. Seven-year-olds are not secret agents.”

Connie didn't reply. It was most likely paranoia on her part, but it was hard to take anything for granted. The ridiculous and absurd were commonplace, and the only thing that grounded her was the ordinary. She needed ordinary things to make sense of this world. Otherwise, it was a place of infinite, sinister possibilities.

“It's okay,” said Tia. “We can work this out.”

Exhaustion overtook Connie. She flopped on the bed and
closed her eyes. “All this time, I thought I'd been living a life half-fantastic, half-ordinary. Turns out the ratio is a hell of a lot lower.”

Tia put a hand on Connie's shoulder. “Remember that Fourth of July when all the dead presidents rose from their graves?”

Connie nodded. “Chester A. Arthur was a real son of a bitch to put down.”

“I'm sure. After that, you came over to my place, covered in dirt and undead goop because we'd made plans for a movie night.”

Connie smiled. “Yeah. Movie night. I remember that.”

“We cleaned you up, had ice cream, watched
Sleepless in Seattle
. It was fun, right?”

“I left a goop stain on your sofa,” said Connie.

“And I never got it out,” added Tia with a grin. “That was real. Just two friends, hanging out.”

Connie sat up. “Was it? Or was the pizza delivery boy an agent of a sinister cabal?” She scanned the list of names. She didn't recognize most of them. That only made it worse. They were strangers, passing through her life with secret purpose.

She hadn't suspected a thing.

“Master detective, my ass. It's all bullshit. Everything. Everything.” Connie scowled at the universe. “Every-fucking-thing. The world I live in. The world they made me a part of.”

“You didn't have a choice. The caretaker spell—”

“The spell is bullshit,” said Connie. “It sets the stage, but it
was the people around me who took away my choice. I'm not up against some magical compulsion. It's people who screwed around with my life. The spell was just one of the tools they used. They flipped the switch to make me play along, and when they needed me to not play along, they flipped another switch. And I went with it because they never gave me any other choice.”

“Then how do you know that's still not happening now?”

Connie scrolled through the data.

“I don't.”

M
elpomene, Kansas, had a regional airport with a runway, a handful of hangars, and little else. From above, the town didn't look like much, and after they got off the plane, it looked like even less.

“God, I hate Kansas,” said Connie as their plane landed.

“So, you've had some negative experiences here,” said Tia. “It's not all bad.”

But it always was. To most people, Kansas was a perfectly pleasant place, perhaps with a reputation for being flat and dull.

For Connie, it was full of memories. None of those memories were good. There was something about her curse and the state. Every time Connie set foot in it, she ended up getting involved in something fantastic and overwhelming. This wasn't unusual. She found the fantastic and unusual as a matter of course. She'd discovered a secret civilization of roaches living in the walls of an old apartment, and unearthed the philosopher's stone once while burying a family pet.

But it was in Kansas that Connie had the weird stuff happen to her. It was in Kansas that every little town had a terrible secret. It was in Kansas where the Sunken City of the Chaos Gods lurked, buried beneath Wichita. It was in Kansas that Hitler's brain had nearly begun yet another World War Three. (She'd averted so many world wars, she'd lost count.) Kansas, where Connie had almost been eaten by cannibal cyborgs. Kansas, where her informal experience revealed that one in every ten people was part of a cult intent on destroying the universe because . . . well, who the hell knew why?

It was Kansas where the heart of the conspiracy to control her life was based.

“Fucking Kansas,” she mumbled.

“We came here expecting trouble,” said Tia.

That only made it worse. This state was the closest thing to Connie's kryptonite. Her closest brushes with death had been there. Her most unpleasant adventures had started or ended in Kansas. She was certain when her luck finally ran out, when death finally caught up with her, it would be there.

They grabbed their baggage. Connie scanned the crowds.

“See anything dangerous?” asked Tia.

“No, just some lizard men over there.” Connie nodded to a gathering of tourists in loud pastel shirts. “Oh, and I think that car is actually a shapeshifting robot.”

“All perfectly ordinary, then,” said Tia.

Connie grunted.

“I can't believe the great Constance Verity is frightened of this place,” said Thelma from Connie's pocket.

“If you were smart, you'd be afraid too,” said Connie. “I've been to the Death Worlds of Barkataru, and next to this state, they're positively quaint. At least there, they come at you with their swords drawn and an honest shriek. This is where evil comes to lurk, and lurking evil is the worst kind.”

“If you're expecting it, how lurky can it be?”

They didn't understand. They couldn't. While Tia had been along for many of Connie's adventures, she hadn't faced the worst this state had to offer. They'd see. Soon enough.

Connie's plan was to spend as little time there as necessary and not a minute more. She wouldn't die there. They checked into a cheap motel near the airport, but she had no intention of sleeping there. It was just a place to store their luggage. With luck, they'd be on a plane and on their way to anywhere else within a few hours.

They took a cab to the Melpomene Apple Pie Factory, where they camped out across the street in a café. Connie surveyed the building from the window while sipping her coffee.

“Doesn't look very dangerous to me,” said Tia. “They don't even have a fence up.”

“That only makes it worse,” replied Connie.

“So, what's the plan?” asked Tia.

“You wait here,” said Connie. “I'm going in.”

“You can't leave me behind again. I get that you couldn't sneak into Area 51 dragging me along, but if you're just going to walk in—”

“You need to listen to me on this,” said Connie. “Things have never been as dangerous as they are right now.”

“But there's a big, friendly pie painted on the side of the building.”

“Where you see a friendly pie, I only see a grim portent, staring back at me with a malignant grin and soulless, empty eyes.”

“But it's saying,
FREE PIE WITH EVERY TOUR
.”

“Bait for the trap.”

“But it kind of looks like a gingerbread house, and its stripy smokestacks make the whole block smell like cinnamon.”

“I can't smell anything,” said Thelma. “Being a ghost sucks.”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” said Connie without feigning an ounce of sympathy. “I'm telling you that places like this are never good news, as far as I'm concerned. We already know it's at the center of a conspiracy. I can't be watching out for you while I'm in there.”

“So, don't watch out for me. I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself,” said Tia.

“I don't have time to fight with you about this,” said Connie. “So, I drugged your coffee.”

“You slipped me a mickey?” Tia yawned. “Oh, you did not fucking do that to me.” She tried to wave her finger at Connie, but the limb stayed flat on the table. “I can't believe you fuckin' . . .” Her voice trailed off, and Connie caught Tia's head and lowered it to rest on the table.

“That's not a very nice thing to do,” said Thelma.

“It's Kansas,” replied Connie. “I can't afford to be nice.”

“She's going to be pissed when she wakes up.”

“I can live with that.” Connie stuffed Thelma in Tia's pocket. “Tell her I'm sorry if she wakes up before I get back.”

“Wait? I'm not going either? We had a deal. You agreed to take me with you.”

“Kansas,” said Connie by way of explanation. She clicked Thelma quiet before walking out of the shop and across the street.

Stepping into the Melpomene Apple Pie Factory made Connie's blood run cold. They gave tours every half hour, and she was right on time to catch one starting. She joined a group of tourists, all of whom were way more interested in industrial pie production than could be considered healthy.

The tour guides, Tony and Tina, were a matching set of smiling faces wrapped in cheerfully bright colors. They could've been brother and sister. Not in appearance but in mannerisms. They laughed at each other's jokes and completed each other's sentences with faux spontaneity. It was like watching a pair of synchronized robots at work. For a moment, Connie thought they might actually be robots, but that was too obvious. They were just two people doing a job they were very familiar with.

The tour ran through a series of exhibits presenting the history of the apple pie, but it was a cursory lesson at best. They were taken to rooms with pictures of pies and offered the most superficial descriptions of pie and what it represented for America, summarized by an illustration of the Statue of Liberty
and Lady Justice enjoying a slice together in front of a flag.

It was a whole lot of nothing, and twenty minutes into it, Connie raised her hand.

“I'm terribly sorry,” said Tony. “We don't take questions.”

“Where do you make the pies?” asked Connie anyway. “I'd like to see that.”

Tina smiled, more as a reflex than anything else. “We aren't allowed to show you the factory floor itself. Insurance reasons.”

“Why? Did someone get mutilated by a pie-slicing machine? Fall into a batter mixer?”

Tony kept his smile. “Nothing of the sort. We take safety very seriously here.”

“You don't make pies here, do you?” asked Connie.

The guides glanced at each other, conferring telepathically perhaps.

“A Melpomene apple pie is a multistep process and a closely guarded secret,” said Tony. Or Tina. Either one, really. They were increasingly hard to tell apart.

“It's apples and pie,” said Connie. “How secret can it be?”

They continued to smile. “Please, no questions,” they said in unison.

Connie mimed zipping her mouth closed.

“Now, if you'll follow us, we'll show you the original pie plates where genuine Melpomene apple pies have won various awards for outstanding achievements in the field of baked goods.”

Connie trailed behind the group. Her outburst had the
intended effect of making her an annoyance. She had some expertise in the art of shadows. There were master mystics who could render themselves unseen by will alone. She wasn't nearly that good. She had to get someone really irritated with her first. Once they decided they wanted nothing to do with her, it was relatively easy to tap into that and disappear. She'd never mastered the technique, but for most situations, mastery wasn't required. When she focused intensely enough, she could virtually disappear for a few seconds. Long enough to slip through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
that wasn't locked.

“Hey, you're not supposed to be back here,” said a woman in a blue business suit.

Connie jammed two fingers into the woman's chest. The woman gasped and fell unconscious into Connie's arms. The Sleeping Grace had been developed by Tibetan monks to cure insomnia, but it had other uses. She carried the worker into a nearby closet. There was always a nearby closet.

She studied the woman. This was a problem. In the old days, lairs were staffed by nameless, interchangeable staff, usually stuffed into colored jumpsuits to denote rank and job. If she was lucky, there would be a hard hat or gas mask. Something to hide the face. All you had to do for those lairs was steal the uniform off the right minion, and the rest was gravy.

Times had changed, and most secret societies figured out that stripping their staff of identity might make things more ominous, but it also made infiltration a lot easier. Loyalty was also a problem when henchmen were continually reminded how
replaceable they were. Nobody gave a shit about Technician 1234. Not even Technician 1234. Everybody noticed if Jenny from Human Resources went missing.

The other possibility was that Connie had made a terrible mistake and infiltrated an apple pie factory. This wouldn't be the first time she'd made that kind of mistake. She'd once assumed her own parents had been replaced by imposters, because they'd been acting suspicious. It was their own fault for trying to throw her a surprise birthday party, and they'd forgiven her for the black eyes. She had been only twelve at the time.

Her judgment was better now, but mistakes happened. She'd ruined a great first date by accusing the suave man across the table of being the notorious international assassin the Hyena. She'd been right, but he hadn't been out to assassinate anyone that night. Just enjoy a nice dinner. She'd tried apologizing, but he'd never returned her calls.

There was the ordinary and extraordinary, and in her life, there was the occasional gray area. Now that area seemed grayer than ever.

She'd come this far and saw no reason to turn back now other than to avoid embarrassment. She left the woman slumbering in the closet and walked down the hallway like she belonged here. In her experience, you could get away with almost anything if you didn't act like you were doing anything wrong.

She passed several coworkers. She nodded and smiled at
them as if everything was perfectly normal. They smiled and nodded back.

The forbidden areas of the Melpomene Apple Pie Factory were decidedly unsinister, but Connie refused to accept that. It would be just like Kansas to screw with her like this. She didn't make up her mind until she had toured the entire place. She checked every opened door (and a few locked ones) and found nothing more suspicious than the outdated '70s furniture in the break room. She was about to give up when she caught a snippet of conversation as she passed an office.