Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (29 page)

Somewhere off in the distance, Bridget was shouting, but Orville couldn’t make out the words. She hadn’t gone this far away from him before—she said it started to hurt and made her mind go fuzzy if she got more than a dozen yards away—which meant she was probably doing something she thought was worth the pain.

“You’re going to take me out of here,” the mugger said, very reasonably, and then gnawed on his thumbnail. His fingernails were ragged, bitten beyond the quick, his fingers bleeding in places and scabbed in others. “I been out here for a long time, days, weeks, sometimes I think forever, sometimes I think I was
raised
by bears, you know? But I’m not all the way gone yet, I can get back, you can take me. You put me here, you can get me out, and if you don’t, I’ll . . . I’ll eat your
heart
.” The man gnawed at his fingernail again, and this time blood trickled, and ran into his beard.

When he said he would eat Orville’s heart, Orville did not think he was speaking figuratively.

“Of course,” Orville said. In truth, he felt horribly guilty about this man’s circumstances. He was a mugger, yes, he’d swaggered and threatened Orville like a thousand bullies before him, but he’d been lost in the briarpatch, and it was driving him insane. That was Orville’s fault. He’d sent the man here.

“I killed people before,” the man said. “Shot them, and even cut up that one woman, I did, you know I did, but it was nothing like this, nothing as terrible as this. The shit I’ve seen over here, it’d make your hair turn white.” He reached for another water bottle, and Orville stared at him. Hadn’t there been something on the news, about a rash of muggings near Lake Merritt, one of them fatal, another involving a rape? Something about a pair of muggers who liked to lie in wait . . .

“That was you?” Orville said. “You were the ones who got that woman coming home from work, dragged her into her own house and . . . and did those things? And her boyfriend found her?”

“I don’t know who the fuck
found
her.” The man chewed off another lid. “I just know how we
left
her.”

Any sympathy Orville had felt melted away. Muggers driven to theft by poverty, desperation, even drug addiction, they might be excused, but this man and his friend had terrorized a community, and Orville didn’t owe him anything. Bullies were one thing. Murderers were another. Orville had a deep understanding now, about the preciousness of life. While the mugger sucked at the water bottle, Orville reached carefully behind him and felt the brass ball of the walking stick. If he whipped the stick around fast enough . . .

“BEAR!” Bridget shouted. The mugger didn’t hear her, of course, and if he noticed Orville flinch, be probably assumed it was because of his threats. Bridget came running, pursued by a bear, a great brown grizzly loping after her with its head low. Its fur was damp and matted, sticking up in little curlicues and corkscrews of darker hair, and it made a strange low whuffing sound as it ran.

The mugger must have heard it too, because he turned his head, then leapt to his feet and staggered backward. “No!” he shouted. “Not you, no, not you, I’m
out
, I’m getting
out
, I won’t be that way again!”

Orville sat, shocked into stillness. The bear was chasing Bridget, who was running straight at the mugger. The bear could see Bridget. Orville pulled the walking stick into his lap.

The mugger started running, veering off at an angle, and Bridget pursued him, with the happy effect of leading the bear
away
from Orville. The mugger was weeping and shouting as he ran.

Then Bridget fell to her knees, gasping, hugging herself, and shivering. She’d gone as far away from Orville as she could stand, and the bear loped toward her. Bridget crouched, protecting her head. The bear was upon her in moments, reaching out with a great paw to swipe at her—

—and though Bridget flinched, the paw didn’t seem to hit her. It passed close to her, but she didn’t go flying, didn’t scream, didn’t bleed. The bear grumbled and swiped again, with the same effect, and Bridget stopped huddling. She stood up, wincing as she moved, and stepped aside. The bear sniffed at her, shook its great head, and then seemed to catch sight of the mugger for the first time, and set off in pursuit of him. The mugger, who by now had put some good distance between them, looked back over his shoulder, staggered, and fell—probably tripped on a rock, Orville thought. The bear bounded after him, running like an exuberant puppy, and Orville approached Bridget.

“Shit,” she said. “Funny how I forgot I was a
ghost
for a minute. You can get used to anything.” Her cheeks were flushed red, as if from exertion, and Orville thought that was strange, since she didn’t have blood vessels.

“Wait,” Bridget said. “What . . . what’s happening?” She pointed to the place where the mugger had fallen. The bear wasn’t attacking him; it was merely sniffing around on the ground, occasionally pawing at the dirt, while the mugger . . .The mugger was growing. Changing. He was forty or fifty yards away, just a shape on the ground, but he was visibly changing shape, his crouched form on the ground turning darker, swelling in all directions.

“He’s becoming a bear,” Bridget said. “Shit. He must have gotten scratched, or bitten . . . Orville, we have to go.”

“He’s becoming a bear? I don’t understand. What—”

Where the mugger had been, a bear stood now, with darker fur than the bear Bridget had lured over to save Orville. They bumped their heads together, as if in greeting, and then both turned to face Bridget and Orville.

The mugger was a bear, which was far worse than him being a mugger. So much for Bridget’s plan.

“Run!” Bridget said, and tore off in the direction of their original goal, the passageway to a different part of the briarpatch. Orville came after her, knowing the bears were pursuing, knowing things were far more strange and dangerous here than he’d realized. The mugger they’d shoved into this world had been changed by it, and become some kind of shape-shifting lunatic. Orville ran past the scattered contents of his pack, the shining shotgun left lying in the dirt, and it was ten steps later before he realized he should have tried to grab the gun—but being chased by a bear was a pretty big distraction. At least he still had the walking stick in hand. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than bare hands. Bridget paused by the shadow of a great rock, beckoning him frantically, and Orville put on an extra push of speed, the way he’d run in Junior High when a particularly dangerous bunch of bullies was after him, though he’d never truly believed any of
them
would kill him. He ran into the shadow by the rock, a shadow that was also a door, and darkness engulfed him.

1

“So, Echo,” Arturo said. “Have you always been a psycho carjackin’ liar?”

“People don’t usually talk to me like that when I have a knife,” Echo said.

Arturo shrugged and twisted the wheel to veer around the ruins of a pagoda in the middle of the wide slate avenue the Wendigo was bombing down. Not that the Wendigo couldn’t steer itself, if necessary, but Arturo liked to feel like he was involved, and the Wendigo went along with that. “So stab me to death. Then you’ll be stuck in a car in the middle of the briarpatch.”

“Or maybe I’ll just save up my stabbiness until you’ve taken me where I need to go, and then let it all out in one long rush.”

Arturo shrugged again. “Whatever the Wendigo wills, honey. I’m just curious. You’re the one who told me the story, I’m just doing a, what do you call it, follow-up question.”

“I get bored on road trips. When the radio gave out, I had to talk about
something
. That doesn’t give you the right to quiz me. I just need you to take me to Ismael, so I can teach him not to fuck with me.”

“I’m thinkin’ that’s a good lesson.” Arturo braced himself as the road ahead turned into washed-out ruts deep enough to challenge even the Wendigo’s supernatural suspension. He bounced and jostled in his seat, and Echo bounced around too, gripping the door handle with one hand. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and Arturo figured, if all else failed, he could jam the brake pedal to the floor and send her flying headfirst into the windshield. He hadn’t tried it, though, because if the Wendigo wanted to get rid of Echo it would have, and Arturo had been putting his trust in the Wendigo for years now. Somehow, he believed, this would help him find Marjorie.

“It’s just, not to be rude or nothin’, but I’m wonderin’, have you had any professional help? I mean, is this an off-your-meds type situation?? The pathological lyin’, the attempted murder, that stuff isn’t so great.”

“I’m not a pathological liar,” Echo said, which almost made Arturo laugh, because what else would such a person say? “I’m a strategic liar,” she went on. “Mostly. I tell lies when it furthers my purpose, or when it’s funny. It’s not like I can’t help myself. I’m hardly compulsive. As for trying to kill people, it’s only
Ismael
, and he doesn’t die. Not that I’d mind killing other people. But, really, I think most people have murder in their hearts, don’t you?”

Marjorie did
, Arturo thought,
Probably. But the only one she murdered was herself
. But that wasn’t something he could say to
this
one. “A lot of people have some dark stuff in them, it’s true. But part of bein’ a good person is keepin’ that stuff under control.”

“Most people lie to themselves,” Echo said. “I’ve had a couple of therapists. One of them, the one I went to see when I was fifteen, I fucked him, and after that, he was so scared I’d tell my parents that he said I was totally well-adjusted, and everything they were worried about was just a phase. The other one, the one I had to see because of the court order, he eventually told me he liked paying homeless people to beat each other up and have sex with each other and shit. I got along with that guy pretty good. We understood each other. I do keep stuff under control, Arturo. If I didn’t, I’d be dead or in jail.”

“So you weren’t beat as a child or raised in poverty or nothin’ like that, then?” Arturo said. The rutted road abruptly vanished, and they were riding along smooth asphalt, a nice normal country road lined by fields overgrown with kudzu, but instead of yellow or white lines drawn down the middle of the road, the lines were electric blue. “Because that stuff, it’s not an excuse, but it’s at least an explanation.”

“I don’t need excuses. I take responsibility for myself. And I don’t need
explanations
. I’m a self-made woman. I am what I want to be. I have
fun
.”

“You’re havin’ fun now?” Arturo asked.

Echo rapped her knuckles against the passenger window, staring out at the green passing by. “Well,” she said after a moment. “Right now I’m mostly pissed off. But if I don’t teach Ismael a lesson, it’ll weigh on my mind, and I won’t be able to have as much fun again in the future. So I have to see this through.”

“So you don’t have, like, a purpose? Some goal for yourself?” Arturo was thinking of the note he’d found in the Wendigo, all those years ago—
A man needs a purpose like a car needs a driver
. The Wendigo had saved Arturo’s life. He wondered if maybe it would be possible to save Echo’s life, or, at least, her soul.

“I could die any time. My purpose is staying alive and keeping myself occupied. That’s it.”

“There’s somethin’ to be said for livin’ in the moment, I guess. But sometimes it’s gotta be hard to get up in the mornin’.”

Echo snorted. “I’ve got good brain chemistry, Arturo. I like my life.”

“You don’t ever feel bad? You don’t feel remorse for the things you’ve done? What’s that word for the kind of crazy where you don’t think anybody but you is real?”

“Sociopathic. But believe me, I know other people are real. It wouldn’t be
nearly
as much fun fucking with them if they weren’t.”

“I guess I’m not cut out for this psychology stuff,” Arturo said. “Because it seems to me like you’re just plain messed up.”

“Everybody’s messed up, Artie. You drive around in a car from another world, for whatever fucked-up reason. You’re messed up too. I just don’t lie to myself. Anybody else in the world, yeah, absolutely, but never myself.”

“I think you’d feel better, if you had a purpose,” Arturo said, knowing it was the best sort of outreach he could provide, knowing it wasn’t nearly enough for someone like this.

“Maybe so. Right now my purpose is ripping Ismael a new one, and I feel pretty good about that.”

The Wendigo transitioned again, in that seamless way it had, and rattled calamitously over a wide plain scattered with rocks and boulders, under a flat grey sky.

The bumpy ride dislodged the pile of paper rising in the back seat, and a few glossy pages from lingerie catalogues—normally kind of a nice present for Arturo, but not much good to him now—came cascading down into the front seat. Echo brushed them off onto the floor and said, “What’s with all the paper in here, anyway?”

“I’m not sure. The Wendigo provides. I don’t question it, and I wouldn’t get an answer if I did. Most of it seems like junk, but sometimes useful stuff turns up.” He was thinking of the fragments of Darrin’s imaginary journal, though how “useful” those had been he wasn’t sure, since they’d mostly led him to hanging around too long and getting carjacked.

“So if you throw it out, more just appears?”

“That’s the way it goes.”

“The paper fills up the whole backseat?”

“Front seat, too. And the glove compartment.”

“What about the trunk?”

“The trunk doesn’t open,” Arturo lied.

Echo reached out and twisted the little silver plastic knob on the glove compartment. That was where money showed up, usually—Arturo figured the Wendigo was smart enough not to leave money lying around on the seats in plain view of passersby—and he hoped that, if Echo ripped him off, the Wendigo would replenish his supply. The car was like an absent-minded parent doling out irregular allowances, though Arturo had never really suffered during the dry spells when no money was forthcoming. There was always something to eat—if only because of freebie restaurant coupons the Wendigo coughed up—and he could sleep in the car.