Coils

Chapter 7

I got into the first of a line of cabs waiting outside the terminal, and I told the driver to take me into town. I half-expected to hear sirens at any moment, and I sat tensely much of the way in, staring out of the window, at other cars, at trees, at buildings, at signs along the road. The sun was working its way into the west, but there was still plenty of daylight remaining. I had to get out of town, had to put a lot of distance between me and this part of the country in a hurry, had to find a place to hole up, think this thing through, formulate a plan. Couldn’t think now, though; something could happen at any minute. Had to keep my wits handy. I was certain that this cab ride would eventually be traced, which was why I was heading into town. I hoped to confuse the trail.

I had her drop me on a busy, random, downtown corner. I walked until I came to a bus stop. I stood there watching people and pigeons. I got into the first bus that came along and rode it for a long while in a roughly northwesterly direction. When it took a turn to the south I got off at the next stop and began walking again, to the north and the west.

I rode two more buses and walked a lot before I reached a suburban area. Then I tried sticking out my thumb to passing motorists. I had a feeling of having done it before, years earlier, back when I was in school. Yes, I’d wanted to go home for the semester break my first year, and I didn’t want to spend the money. I remembered that it had gotten pretty cold and windy between rides. Smile a little. That sometimes seems to help…

…A number of required general courses and my Computer Science major requirement. I’d done pretty well. It had been a bit lonely at first, but I’d a few friends now—like Sammy, who used to call me “Mumbles”—and I was anxious to get home and talk about everything. Mumbles? I hadn’t thought of that nickname in years. Sammy was in my Comp. Sci. section, a little dark-eyed guy with a warped sense of humor. I’d had a habit of muttering when I was working with computers. Actually, I used to talk to them—give them names and all. He never knew that. He just heard me at it and started calling me Mumbles. We became pretty good friends as time went on. I wondered where he was now? Be nice to call him someday and see whether he remembers me…

Actually, I hadn’t started talking to the machines in college. It went back to my parents’ business when I was much younger. I used to play games with the computers. I started talking to them then, I guess. Outside of that one experience when I was about seven, though, I hadn’t gotten much in the way of personal responses from them. But I’d always had a feeling that if I tried hard enough—

A car slowed down. An older man in a lightweight business suit pulled over.

“How far you going?” he asked.

“Pittsburgh, actually,” I said.

“Well, I’m just going home to Norristown,” he said, “but I can drop you at the Turnpike, if you like.”

“Great.”

I got in.

He didn’t seem to be looking for conversation, so I leaned back and tried to continue my reverie. It had been broken, though, and nothing new seemed willing to surface. All right. I no longer felt as harried as I had in the cab. Maybe I could think a little more clearly now about my present situation. Then I might be able to initiate some action of my own instead of merely running, reacting.

Barbeau was definitely out to kill me now. No doubt about that. And Matthews was still working for him, as was the rest of the group…

The group… It was somehow the key. It had once included me, as much as I hated to think of it now. It also included Willy Boy, and Marie Melstrand. Cora? No, she’d never been involved. I really had met her for the first time on her Florida vacation. And Ann Strong? Very much so. There had been the four of us. Yes. Four of us with something in common…

We all had odd mental powers. I talked with machines, I possessed a form of human-to-computer telepathy. I could read their programs at a distance. Marie? Marie’s power was a force she could exert upon things. PK, they used to call it. While she could wreck a computer, she was incapable of reading it the way I could. Ann? Ann was a human-to-human telepath. She couldn’t read computers either, but she could both receive and transmit information, from and to other people—up to and including real-seeming visual impressions. And Willy Boy…? A kind of PK, I suppose, but not quite. His was a subtle form of physiological manipulation, working with matter and energy inside living systems exclusively.

How good were they? What were their limits? Another memory came through… Marie took great pride in her cooking, and she was good. I recalled that she’d had us all over for dinner on several occasions. Rather than fool with padded gloves or pot-holders, she had once, while seated at the table, levitated a huge tureen of steaming soup out in the kitchen, causing it to drift eerily into the dining room and settle to a perfect landing before us. I’d seen her spill a drink and freeze the droplets in midair, then cause them all to drift back into the glass without moistening anything nearby. The maximum mass she could affect…? Once, on a bet, she had raised Ann several feet above the floor and held her there for half a minute, but she was panting and sweating before the time was up, and she let her down kind of hard…

Old Willy Boy… The nearer you were to him the faster he could affect you. Sudden death within ten feet, a little slower out to twenty—thirty or forty feet caused him a lot more work, slowed him considerably. I’d say fifty feet was his absolute maximum, but that it might take him a quarter of an hour to get results at that range—strangely, the approximate radius of the larger tents he used to work in. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I must now be one of the few people to have felt both his healing and his destroying touch. I recalled the morning after that drinking session at his place. I had sacked out on the sofa, and I awoke when I heard him moving around, cursing. My head was splitting. I got up and walked to his bathroom. He was in there gulping aspirins. He grinned at me. “You don’t look too good, boy,” he’d said. I told him to save a couple for me. “What for?” he answered, reaching out and tousling my hair. “Heal! Heal, you sinner!” I’d felt a sudden rush of blood to my head, my temples had throbbed for a moment and then all of the pain was gone. I felt fine. “I’m okay,” I said, surprised at my undeserved recovery. “Praise the Lord!” he replied, taking a final aspirin. “Why don’t you do it for yourself?” I said then. He’d shaken his head. “I can’t work it on me. My little cross in this vale of tears.” And that was all I knew about Willy Boy’s power.

Ann… Her ability did not seem to fall off with distance. She could have been sitting in a motel room down in the Keys causing me to see that serpent as we were landing in Philadelphia. Her weaknesses were at some other level, and I couldn’t recall them. She did have a thing about flowers, though. Reading their primitive life emanations somehow soothed her. She returned to them whenever she was troubled. They were so prominent in her mental life that they often colored—or perfumed, I suppose—her transmissions. And it seemed that she could also make you not see something that was indeed present.

The four of us, then—a team, a set of tools for Barbeau. We were the reason that Angra had outdistanced all the competition some years ago. I could steal data from anyone’s computer. And if it wasn’t there, Ann could pluck it from the minds that held it Marie could ruin experiments, cause accidents, set back anyone’s research project. And if some particular individual were really troublesome, a certain Southern gentleman might pass him on the street, sit near him in a theatre, eat at the same restaurant…

But could I be sure of the extent of everyone’s abilities now? Back at the airport lounge, Marie had made a comment about getting better at what she did. Had everyone’s powers continued to develop, to improve with the passage of time? An intangible. Impossible for me to estimate. Best to assume that they had. Give Matthews a few more feet, maybe, intensify Ann’s hallucinations, assume Marie can lift a bit more, hold it a little longer. I never knew her range. Greater than Willy Boy’s, nothing like Ann’s. That was all.

What about Barbeau himself? Had he some special power beyond simple ruthlessness and a keen intellect? I didn’t know. If he did, he either kept it well-hidden or I was missing that memory.

And where was Cora? What had they done with her? I doubted they would have harmed her. Dead, she would have been worthless to them as a hold over me. I hadn’t seemed too tractable to Barbeau. Maybe there had been a signal from Ann to the effect that she had scanned me and that I was now useless to him. So he had not even bothered to offer a trade: Cora, for my coming back. On the other hand, he had known I was coming. He would take me back if I were willing, and he was ready to dispose of me if I were not. And just in case, just in case I got away, he wanted Cora for insurance. That seemed to make some kind of sense. I was certain that he had her alive, somewhere very safe.

The car began to slow. I peered ahead. It was getting on into evening now, and a bit harder to see… Traffic jam. An accident, maybe. I saw parked police cars.

No. It was a roadblock, near a little strip of parkland which filled the bulge between this and another highway. My stomach tightened. They were stopping everyone, letting them through slowly, one by one. Checking IDs, obviously.

Despite continuing civil libertarian protests, everyone had a Social Registration Card these days. They’d come in in the late ’80s, providing one number for everything—Draft Registration, Social Security, Driver’s License, voting, what have you. I could see now that, up ahead, the police were just looking at these cards and feeding the numbers through a little unit they carried.

I had known that an alarm would go out for me. But I had not expected anything this fast, this efficient. It was interesting, though, that they were after a number rather than a face. Perhaps Barbeau had not wanted just anyone to know which man he wanted so badly. Perhaps the police computer was merely set to identify my number. Perhaps it had been furnished mine and a list of phonies, so that they would not easily be able to ascertain my true identity. Yes, that seemed the way Barbeau would go about it.

I wondered, as we drew even nearer to the block—Should I simply tell the police my story, now that there were police available?

My more cynical self, which had been slow in making its comeback, sneered at the thought. At best, they would take me to be confused, upset… At worst—I did not know how many grains of truth there had been in Barbeau’s version of the past—uncomfortably many, according to my own returning memory. Was I really guilty of some crime or crimes of such scope that it had necessitated my being retired with a new identity? Somehow, I did not doubt that The Boss would have a better chance of making charges stick against me than I would against him.

My driver, who kept shaking his head, finally pulled up to the roadblock in his turn.

“Let me see your ID, please. Your passenger’s, too,” the nearest cop said.

He produced his own from an inside wallet, while I fished for mine.

“What’s the matter, officer?” he asked.

The policeman shook his head.

“Fugitive,” he said.

“Dangerous?”

The cop looked at him and glanced at the second car, upon the hood of which was perched an officer holding a shotgun, and he smiled.

The driver passed him my SR card. Almost without thinking, I coiled into the small unit he wore slung like an accordian and keyed with less musical effect. It was one of the older units, I saw. With the newer ones you could just push the card into a slot for a direct read.

He punched my number, but a slightly different signal went out. In the broadcast version a pair of the digits had been transposed. An All Clear light came on upon the face of the box. He handed back the cards.

“Go on,” he said, turning toward the next car.

We pulled away. The driver sighed. He had his headlights on now, as did the other vehicles.

It seemed only moments later that I heard a cry from behind us, followed by the shotgun’s boom. A sound like hail came from all over the place.

“What the hell,” the driver said, stepping on the gas rather than the brake.

But I had already begun to suspect. Someone, somewhere back at home base, must have been watching a printout or display screen. The machine cleared it, but to a human observer a pair of transposed digits still came awfully close to what they wanted. The possibility of operator error must have occurred to him and he had radioed out to have them halt us again. The fact that they were this trigger-happy made me wonder what they had been told and what their instructions must have been. I did not want to stay around to ask them personally. So…

“Stop!” I cried. They’ll shoot again!”

He finally hit the brake and we began to slow. I glanced back.

No time to wait for him to come to a complete stop. I needed every bit of the lead we had.

I opened the door and jumped out. I hit that grassy central strip, collapsed and rolled. I didn’t look back as I recovered my feet. I ran for the woods, cutting to my left and then to my right as soon as I entered them. I heard gunshots far to the rear, but they had the sound of pistols.

The ground took an abrupt turn upward and I stumbled to mount it. The sounds of traffic came from above. I did not know what road it was, but it did not matter. I was heading for it now. It was dark, there were lots of trees between me and the police and the shouting had stopped. If I could just get out and get across the highway… It was almost too much to hope that I might be able to flag a ride. I was vaguely aware of blood on my hand and my face, and I was certain that my trousers were torn…

… They must have been told that I was armed and dangerous, maybe even a cop-killer, to come on shooting that way. I kept expecting to hear them behind me again at any moment…

Up ahead of me, pieces of the blackness moved, came together. Suddenly, they shot upward, towering, swaying, acquiring illumination as from strong moonlight. It was a bear! An enormous grizzly—I’d seen them in zoos—reared up on its hind legs, facing me! It—

Oh, no. Not again, Ann. Not here. Not that way. Not with a grizzly bear on the outskirts of Philadelphia. You should have tried a cop with a shotgun if you’d wanted to stop me. I’d have shit my pants and wouldn’t have smelled your flowers. Better luck next time.

I headed straight toward it. I bit my lip and closed my eyes as I passed through, but I did pass through. When I opened them-again I saw the lights of traffic through a final screen of trees. Not just a little traffic, though. It was heavy, a veritable river. There was no way I could get across it without being hit.

But I thought I heard voices in the woods below now. Not too damn much choice.

I burst out of the wooded strip onto the shoulder of the highway, waving my arms at everything in the nearest lane, wondering what sort of impression I made—bloody, dirty and ragged—there in their headlights.

… Smile a little. That sometimes seems to help…

I came to a halt and just kept waving. Definitely now, I could hear the sounds of my pursuers, working their way through the woods, yelling to each other…

A truck screeched to a halt before me. I could hardly believe it, but I was not about to question the driver’s judgment. Behind it, an entire lane of vehicles was coming to a halt. I ran for it, pulled open the door and jumped in. I slammed it behind me and collapsed in the passenger seat. Immediately, the engine roared and we were moving. I felt like the Count of Monte Cristo, Willie Sutton and the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo—lucky and free. For the moment, anyhow. At least, I wouldn’t be shot for a while and I was moving, away.

“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe it looks funny, but I’ll explain it as soon as I get my breath back. You’re a real life-saver.”

I breathed a couple of deep ones and waited. The engine had settled down to a steady, smooth purring. We were moving along at a very good clip, the countryside flashing by in a long, curving blur. I turned my head.

The driver’s seat was as empty as a pawnbroker’s heart.

I took a deep breath. There wasn’t the faintest trace of daffodils, narcissi, Lilies or any other plant’s sexual organs, just the slightly stale, dusty smell of an area long enclosed.

I exhaled. What the hell.

“Thanks,” I repeated, anyway.