The Dead Town

Chapter 22

In the KBOW parking lot, after Sammy Chakrabarty coaxed Mason out of the overturned Sequoia, and as they and Burt returned to the station, Deucalion asked Ralph Nettles which of the other vehicles belonged to him.

Still unsettled by the tattooed giant’s magical disappearance from the engineer’s nest and by the way he had almost effortlessly overturned Mason’s Toyota SUV, Ralph hesitated before indicating a three-year-old black Cadillac Escalade.

“We’ll go to your place and get the guns and ammunition you mentioned,” Deucalion said. “Give me the key.”

Producing the key, Ralph hesitated to surrender it. “Uh, well, it’s my car, so I should drive.”

“You can’t drive like I do,” the giant said. “You saw how I took one step from your room back there and into this parking lot? I had no need to walk it, no need to use doors. I can drive the same way. I understand the structure of reality, truths of quantum mechanics that even physicists don’t understand.”

“Good for you,” Ralph said. “But I love that Escalade. It’s my big-wheeled baby.”

Deucalion took the keys from his hand. Having seen how the giant killed four of those things called replicants, Ralph decided against an argument.

The snow came down hard, obscuring everything like static in a lousy TV image. In fact, Ralph half felt as if he had stepped out of reality into some television fantasy program in which all the laws of nature that he knew well as an engineer were laws that Deucalion — and perhaps others — could break with impunity. He liked stability, continuity, things that were true in all times and all places, but he figured he’d better brace himself for turbulence.

He got in the front passenger seat of the Escalade as Deucalion climbed behind the wheel. Ralph wasn’t a small man, but he felt like a child next to his driver, whose head touched the ceiling of the SUV.

Starting the engine, Deucalion said, “Your place — is it a house or an apartment?”

“House.” Ralph told him the address.

Deucalion said, “Yes, I know where it is. Earlier I memorized a map of the town laid out in fractional seconds of latitude and longitude.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” Ralph said.

Light pulsed through the giant’s eyes, and Ralph decided to look away from them.

As Deucalion popped the brake and put the Cadillac in drive, he said, “Do you live alone?”

“My wife died eight years ago. She was perfection. I’m not a big enough fool to think it can happen twice.”

Deucalion began a wide U-turn in the parking lot. “You never know. Miracles do happen.”

During the turn, for an instant, there was no falling snow and every source of brightness in the storm clicked off — the parking-lot lamps, station lights, headlights — and the night was more deeply dark than any night had ever been. Then snow again. And lights. But though they should have swung around toward the exit to the street, they had turned directly into Ralph’s driveway, five long blocks from KBOW.