“What are you gonna do with all that stuff?” The small propane torch made some sense: what they couldn’t cut or stab or shoot they might be able to burn. But the rest struck him as peculiarly useless.
“You will see. At least, I hope you will have the chance to see.”
Frank considered, trying to look past the present moment at something else. “You know, we sell a lot of hobby stuff in our stores.” He nodded at Burnfingers’s package. “Steven used that for a little while, then got bored. Funny it should be lying around. I wonder how much of what’s happened here lately is coincidence and how much of it something else. That Mouse—I get the feeling she can do a few tricks with the threads of reality herself.”
Everyone assembled in the front hall, loaded down with bags and suitcases. Flucca insisted on being first out the door. “If they aim for your heads, they’ll miss mine. Besides, I’m used to working with vegetables.” Alicia’s biggest cleaver dangled from his right hand as he turned.
Burnfingers stood ready to back him up as he flung the door wide and the little man dashed outside, weapon held high. He didn’t have to use it. The plants’ blind fury had burned itself out.
The front walkway was littered with debris. It looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. Branches and leaves were scattered everywhere, a fine carpet of brown-green, which was just beginning to decay. Only a few growths remained standing. All were broken and torn, ripped to pieces by their neighbors. A few of the smaller plants, which had been ignored in the greater carnage, reached weakly for the refugees, but their roots and leaves were too short to span the walkway pavement. Flucca and Frank cut them to bits anyway, glad of a chance to strike back at something.
Taking the suitcases and heavy bags from the women, Burnfingers tossed them through the motor home’s open door, then helped them inside. A shadow the size of a 727 passed overhead, but when Frank tilted back his head and shaded his eyes he saw nothing. He wasn’t disappointed. Whatever it had been might be coming back, and he was relieved when it was his turn to enter.
“Sure you feel well enough to drive?” Burnfingers asked him as Frank settled himself behind the wheel.
“You kiddin’? I’m looking forward to it.”
They took their seats and he headed for the gate, not bothering to close it behind them as they barreled through. Whether this was or wasn’t their own reality, he doubted they’d be coming back.
He slowed as they approached the first intersection. All the streets were carpeted with shredded vegetation. The remaining stripped growth stood motionless as the dead all around them, having spent their energy in that earlier hour of cannibalistic fury. Only a few of the taller trees that lined the streets jerked spasmodically. None reached for the motor home. Not another vehicle appeared as they sat idling behind the stop sign.
“Which way?” He looked back over his shoulder.
Mouse stood by a closet, eyes closed tight. Either she was thinking hard, or else inspecting something none of them could see. Then her eyes snapped open and she looked to her right.
“That way?” Frank sounded dubious. “That way’s down. Nothing there anymore except ocean.” Come to think of it, he reminded himself, there was nothing in any direction except ocean. He shrugged and pulled on the wheel, putting the motor home on the drive that wound like wire around the ragged edge of the Peninsula.
Soon the ocean came into view. Catalina was still gone and there were more waterspouts and whirlpools than before. Immense brown-red shapes the size of small ships battled in the raging water. Behind them, the sun was setting. Even it was different: a swollen, unhealthy-looking yellow globe. Frank was sure he could make out individual solar prominences flaring hellishly from the edge of the bloated disk. Was it an optical illusion or had it really grown? Would it go nova on this reality line while they were still driving in circles? He fancied he could see dark sunspots crawling across the nuclear surface, forced himself to turn back to the leaf-and branch-paved road.
The coast drive descended sharply toward a small suburb called Hollywood Riviera. Redondo Beach was the first major community up the coast.
Except Redondo Beach wasn’t there anymore. There was only the agitated green sea, which stretched as far north as the Hollywood Hills. A few taller structures still thrust their uppermost floors above the waves, now that the rate of subsidence seemed to have slowed. East and north, the towers of Wilshire Boulevard rose above the water like a line of violets. He applied the brake.
“What now?”
Mouse nodded calmly. “This is the right path. Continue.”
“But we can’t,” Alicia pointed out. “The road goes under the water.”
The other woman smiled at her. “Reality is what you make of it. Keep going, Frank. I’ll tell you when to stop or turn.”
So this was it, he told himself tiredly. They could turn back to the empty house in the devastated neighborhood and wait for the ballooning sun to fry them, or he could listen to Mouse. Tiny, elfin-faced, beautiful, enigmatic, irresistible Mouse. She’d followed as often as she’d led, these past crazy days. Now she was telling him to do the impossible.
But was it really so very much more radical than sticking one’s foot over the edge of the world, or driving blind on a highway that ran through ultimate void past a veil of stars? If there could be roads through nothing, why couldn’t there be roads through something? Water, for instance? Slowly his foot came off the brake.
“Frank …?”
He turned to his wife and smiled, surprised at his own indifference to what might happen next. “There’s nowhere else to go, sweetheart. Not here, not on this line. So we might as well go on.”
She looked at Mouse, who smiled reassuringly. Then she sat up straight in her seat, her hands gripping the armrests tightly. “Okay. I don’t know why, but okay.”
“There is only one other problem.” Burnfingers was staring straight ahead as Frank started down the slope, the motor home picking up speed as it headed for the water.
“What’s that?” Frank heard himself shout.
“I cannot swim.”
The motor home did not leak. Not even a little bit. Nor did it show signs of leaking as they plunged deeper and deeper into the resurgent sea. By law they should have come to a halt. At the very least, water should have seeped into the engine compartment and shut them down, or the air they continued to breathe should have made them too buoyant to cling to the increasingly rough seabed. Laws, however, no longer seemed to apply to them, natural ones least of all.
Mouse continued to give directions and Frank obeyed, too far beyond astonishment to object. He tried to pretend they were out for an afternoon drive on the San Diego Freeway, but it was hard to ignore the fish and other denizens of the deep who swam curiously up to the windshield and windows. Something was keeping the water out, and it wasn’t a pressure differential or airtight seals. It defied reason—which meant that in the context of the past several days it was perfectly logical.
“Just don’t open any windows.” Mouse’s eyes alternated between open and shut. Frank wasn’t inclined to ask why. “We are safe within a fragment of your reality, which you have carried about with you the way a diving spider carries its air supply. Now is the time for you to make use of it.”
“How long will it last?” Alicia asked softly, marveling at the increasingly dark landscape.
“Long enough.”
“It’d better, little singer.” For the first time since they’d made his acquaintance, the big Navajo was showing symptoms of fear.
They had a hard time driving through the kelp forest that clung to the narrow continental shelf. A pair of mutated things that looked like sharks with hands inspected them closely before swimming away. Frank wondered how their protective bubble of reality would respond to a direct attack. Would any assailants bounce off, or would they be able to penetrate?
As time passed and the air inside the motor home remained breathable, he found he was able to relax a little. They were so deep now that if their protection did collapse it would all be over in a few seconds. They rolled down an increasingly flat and featureless bottom until he came to a steep drop-off. He wasn’t even surprised to discover that the brakes still functioned.
“Keep going,” Mouse instructed him.
“What, over that?”
“It’s the way.” Her eyes were only half open, giving her a slightly sinister look.
Frank turned to his wife. They exchanged one more kiss. No need for words anymore. Not in a here and now that wasn’t.
He switched from brake to accelerator. As they went over the cliff he instinctively shifted into low. The slope was almost seventy degrees, but they didn’t fall. Somehow he kept control.
“Reality is sticky stuff,” Mouse told him with a sly smile.
Feeling almost jaunty, he switched on the headlights. The twin beams pierced the blackness for forty feet. Schools of small silvery fish swam into the lights, hung as if paralyzed for an instant before dashing away in fright.
Their descent seemed to continue forever. When the cliff did terminate, the end was abrupt and unexpected. The ground leveled off. A broad, flat plain stretched endlessly before them. It looked like mud and sand, but the motor home progressed across the uncertain surface without any trouble at all. Except for the small area lit by the headlights, it was pitch-black around them.
“Wow, did you guys see that?” Wendy was sitting by a big side window, staring out into the darkness.
“See what, dear?” her mother asked.
“Something big. It had teeth and fins and it looked like a neon sign!”
“Didn’t know we were that deep.” Frank spoke without turning. “You sure we’re goin’ the right way?”
“We are going the only way,” Mouse assured him.
