Lew swung onto the shoulder and hit the brakes, sliding on loose gravel. We came to a stop under the dark rectangle of an unlit billboard, the road walled on both sides by forest. Lew slapped on the dome light. “Give me the directions,” he said.
“These directions?” Lew hadn’t wanted me to print them out. We didn’t need any fucking MapQuest directions, he’d said. The Audi had GPS.
“Shut up and give me the fucking printouts.”
“It says the same thing it did the last twenty times I read it to you,”
I said. “Highway Twelve, then thirty-five point two miles to Branch Road, then—”
“There is no fucking Branch Road!”
“Maybe not on your little blue screen there—”
“Jesus Christ, would you shut the fuck up about the GPS?” For the past two hours our little yellow arrow had glided across a blank blue screen. The satellite connection still seemed to be working, but the DVD of map data had nothing to say about this patch of Appalachia. I said, “You spent what, fifty thousand dollars on this car? How much would it cost to get one of those that showed actual roads?”
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared out through the windshield. “Give—me—the fucking—”
“Take ’em.” I slapped the pages onto his lap, then got out and slammed the door behind me.
It was 1:30 a.m., forty degrees, and dark, no light but the fingernail moon slicing in and out of high, opaque clouds. I felt like I had the flu: nausea, headache, aching joints. My hands still burned in their bandages.
We’d left Gurnee just after 5 a.m., ahead of the morning rush, zipping down the skyway through the heart of Chicago and riding a cresting wave of traffic onto I-80, heading east into the rising sun. Lew barely slowed through the toll plaza; thanks to the I-Pass on the Audi’s dash, each toll automatically deducted from his credit card. The female voice of the Audi’s GPS prompted us before every turn. So twenty-first century. If I weren’t so nervous about being pulled over by the cops, I might have enjoyed it.
Ten miles past Gary, Indiana, we drove into a wall of lake-effect snow and lost WXRT just as the angels were coveting Elvis Costello’s red shoes. We emerged twenty minutes later to sun and sweet driving. Ohio had been colonized at forty-mile intervals by glass-and-concrete flying saucers—the nicest oases I’d ever seen. Spacious and clean, appointed with shiny restaurants, arcades, and gleaming restrooms that clairvoyantly flushed, rinsed, and blow dried—everything but wiped your ass. We assembled a multivendor breakfast of Burger King hashbrowns, Panera’s asiago bagels, and Starbucks venti lattés. Then while Lew revisited the auto-john, I stopped into the gift shop for ibuprofen and other medical supplies, and also picked up a newspaper. There was a short article on the Hyatt shooting.
“Did they catch the shooter?” Lew said.
“No arrests, no suspects, but they’re interviewing ‘persons of interest.’ ”
“It’s not too late to call the cops,” Lew said.
“No. No way.”
“Fine then,” Lew said, and handed me the keys. “You drive.”
“Really?”
The offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. As soon as he got in the passenger seat he set his beautiful silver laptop atop his lap and proceeded to daisy-chain himself to the car: cigarette lighter to laptop to cell phone to headset to ear.
“Smile,” he said, and took my picture with his phone. “I’m sending this to Amra.”
“You guys do this all the time?”
“Sure. We send each other pictures during the day. Or just IM. And e-mail, of course.”
“Lew?”
“Del?”
“What do you do when you two have sex, put on body suits and touch serial ports?”
“Nobody’s had sex through serial ports since 1987. We’re strictly FireWire, bro. My baby needs the bandwidth. Don’t you, baby?”
I hadn’t even realized Amra was on the line. I tried to ignore Lew while they talked, but it was impossible. There were several reallys?
and sudden glances at me that kept me on my toes.
“Okay,” Lew said, and pulled off the earphones and mike. “The cops called, but Amra thinks it was just routine, they were calling everybody who stayed in the hotel.”
“Do they know who did it yet?” I asked.
“It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ll check the online news in a sec. But here’s the weird thing. Did you call any of your friends and tell them that you were at our house last night?”
“What are you talking about? Of course not.”
“A guy stopped by this morning as Amra was getting ready for work. He said his name was Bertram Beech. This is the same guy who was calling Mom’s house, right?”
“He was at your house?”
“She said the guy creeped her out. Very intense, said he had to speak with you, said it was a matter of life or death.”
“No way.”
“Uh, way. What kind of head case says ‘a matter of life or death’?”
“The Bertram kind,” I said. “Did she tell him where I went?”
“Of course not. But listen, man, you can’t have him coming by the house again. Call him and tell him that it’s not cool.”
“All right, I’ll call him.” What could Bertram want? The phone calls were bad enough, but now he’d traveled all the way to Chicago, and somehow found Lew’s house. Well, that maybe wasn’t that difficult. I’d talked about my family with him in the hospital, and these days it wasn’t hard to find a phone number for almost anybody. I suddenly realized that I was coming up on the bumper of an RV, and switched over to the left lane.
“Who is this guy?” Lew said. “Somebody from Colorado?”
“I met him in the hospital.” I saw the eyebrow raise in my peripheral vision. “Yeah, that hospital. He believes that powerful telepaths are secretly in charge of the planet, and that they’re possessing people for their own entertainment.”
“Powerful telepaths . . . ,” Lew said.
“Slans,” I said.
Lew burst out laughing.
“You mean you didn’t know that Slan was nonfiction?” I said.
“Bertram belongs to an organization that believes that Van Vogt intentionally—”
“What did you say—Van Vaht? It’s Van Voh.”
“No it’s not. You’ve gotta pronounce the T at least.”
“What, Van Vote? Don’t be an idiot. I bet you still say Submareener.”
“My point—,” I said.
“And ‘Mag-net-o.’ ”
“—is that Bertram thinks Van Voggatuh used fiction to cloak the truth.”
“As opposed to, say, your friend P. K. Dick, and Whitley Strieber, and—”
“Streeber.”
“And L. Ron Hubbard, who just made up shit and said it was the truth.”
“Exactly.”
Lew nodded. “I find your ideas intriguing, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. What’s the name of this fine organization?”
“It gets better,” I said. “The Human League.”
“No way.”
“I’m not sure they realized the name was taken.”
“My God,” Lew said. “It’s the perfect cover for an elite fighting force—an eighties New Wave band! This is so Buckaroo Banzai.” He refolded his legs, no easy task in the Audi. “So this Bertram guy must have been thrilled to meet you, one of the pawns of the overlords. Did he explain why the masters of Earth would bother possessing an underemployed graphic artist and not, say, the national security advisor?”
“Oh yeah. He was convinced that my possession—well, all the showy possessions, like the Captain?—were for the entertainment of the other slans, kinda like theater for superhumans. The slans came to power in the forties, and they’re long-lived, and that’s why so many of the demons are so old-fashioned. They like their old radio shows and comic books—the Shadow, Captain America.”