Irregulars - lanyon Josh - Страница 88
- Предыдущая
- 88/116
- Следующая
“No. Mac passed five years back.” Gunther shook his head. “His diner’s a Starbucks now.”
For just a moment the shadows of Falk’s face deepened. Then he turned his attention back to Jason. “Why don’t you pick. You got a favorite spot?”
“I like the HRD Coffee Shop, just off Third and Tabor Alley,” Jason suggested. Despite what Falk had said about paying, he thought he should keep things in a range he could hope to afford. Maybe someday he’d eat somewhere as exotic and refined as Michael Mina, but right now he just wanted to escape to cheap, cheerful, and above all, familiar surroundings.
Falk gave him a nod. “All right then. Let’s go get some grub.”
Gunther and Falk escorted him out of the small room through a rather dull corridor of what looked like offices. When Jason kept his gaze straight ahead, he encountered only beige walls cement floor, and ordinary men and women dressed for business.
But occasionally, he glimpsed a flare of brilliant color or a strange, beastly countenance just over the frames of his glasses. And once, when he glanced up at the ceiling, the periphery of his vision filled with thousands of arcane symbols, blazing like stars against a fathomless darkness. Looking directly through his glasses, he saw only a yellow Casablanca ceiling fan wheeling in slow circles beneath a white plaster ceiling and banks of florescent lights.
Tellingly, he couldn’t hear a hint of traffic or the busy street life that usually filled the city.
“Where are we exactly?” Jason asked.
“San Francisco headquarters,” Gunther replied.
“Underground,” Falk added.
“You mean we’re in tunnels under the city?” Jason asked.
Falk just nodded.
Jason remembered fellow patients at St. Mary’s whispering about the vast system of tunnels supposedly lying below San Francisco, but he’d never really believed any of their stories. At the time the descriptions of secret subterranean bunkers and missile control rooms had struck him as paranoid delusions. Now, walking these immense corridors where the elongated silhouettes of black cats and red-eyed goblins slunk through his peripheral vision, it struck him that a secret military base was actually rather mundane—even a little unimaginative.
As they progressed, passersby laden with black folders and stacks of files greeted Gunther warmly but took in Falk’s presence with an odd uncertainty, as if he was someone they knew of but never imagined they’d meet, like Santa Claus or Jack the Ripper.
One pretty young woman admitted that she’d thought Half-Dead Henry had gone over to the other side, while a plump, bald man recalled his superior officer disappearing for a week while he supposedly attended Falk’s funeral.
“But that was back in the weird old days, you know, when all the monarchies were being overthrown and none of our agents would say what they were really doing out in the other realms.” The bald man stopped in front of a door marked Lower Incantations. “It must be nice to be back now that things have straightened up.”
“Sure,” Falk replied, but he didn’t linger on the subject or in the other man’s company. Instead he turned away. Gunther and Jason followed after him.
The gold plaques designating each door they passed offered Jason an almost surreal sense of the types of work that went on behind them—Sacrifice Licensing, Enchantment Residue Analysis, Transformation Vaults, NATO Irregular Affairs Division Payroll—but none proved to be their destination.
As they walked farther, he began to wonder if they were lost. And he almost asked, but then they turned a corner and came to a halt where the hallway abruptly ended in a wide expanse of gray concrete. The air smelled of the subway and someone had stenciled a mishmash of city transit routes, street maps, and timetables across the concrete wall in front of them. To the far left stood several steel bike racks where—among mountain bikes, ten speeds, and a few brooms—Jason’s battered green bicycle leaned at an expectant angle.
Aside from a few additional chips in the paint, his bike looked to be in good shape, which Jason found relieving. It had been his one reliable form of transportation since he was sixteen.
He gripped the handlebars and took a kind of comfort in the solid reality of them. Nothing strange or hidden here, just simple machinery laid bare. For just a moment he could pretend that the world was still the same as it had been yesterday.
When he looked up from the bike, he saw Falk take a piece of white chalk from one of his pockets and scrawl something on the cement wall. Beneath that he drew the tall rectangle and simple circle that a child might have used to depict a door and its knob.
A delighted smile lit Gunther’s handsome face.
“I’ve always wanted to see how they used to do this back in the day,” he commented to Jason, as if Jason could have any idea of what he really meant.
“The door’s the easy part, really. The trick is deciding whether you trust yourself enough to walk through it.” Falk dropped the chalk back into a pocket of his stained trench coat and glanced to Gunther. “Are you coming or staying?”
Gunther looked torn but then shook his head.
“I’ve still got paperwork and background files. Commander Carerra will skin me alive if I wander off on a hobo adventure just now. But I’ll catch up with you later. No doubt Carerra will have orders for me to deliver to you.”
“Sure.” Falk gave the response in an offhanded manner as if his attention was already far away. Then he spat into his own palm and smacked his hand against the chalk doorknob.
Jason felt the hair standing up on his arms and along the back of his neck.
Then Falk blew out a long slow breath.
It was hardly anything, and yet Jason’s stomach flipped as if he’d suddenly dropped twenty feet. For just an instant he thought he saw a white mist rising at the edges of his vision. Peering over the fames of his glasses, Jason saw Falk blaze to a silver brilliance. He looked radiant, almost beautiful, but far too bright to keep gazing at.
Jason shifted his attention to the concrete wall and realized that the outline of the door wasn’t just a line of chalk anymore. Bright white afternoon light poured in at its edges. A warm beam fell across Jason’s arm as he walked his bicycle closer.
Falk pushed door open and blinding sunlight poured into the dim hallway. Jason smelled frying onions and noticed the noise of street traffic rumbling over pedestrian conversations. A car alarm went off and then stopped.
Falk stepped out into the light and Jason blindly followed him out of the dark into the mundane squalor of Tabor Alley. When Jason glanced back he found nothing remained of the door but a few scratches in the graffiti tagged across the brick wall behind him.
Chapter Four
The HRD Coffee Shop was not a coffee shop, Henry noted, but more like a greasy spoon diner that had collided with an Asian taco truck back in the seventies and was still reeling with dark wood paneling and flecked Formica. The sweating cooks behind the grill served up pancakes, turkey dinners, fried rice, pork tacos, kimchi burritos, and Mongolian cheesesteaks to a throng of seedy customers.
As he and Jason worked their way to the counter, Henry noted that several burly cooks seemed to know Jason by sight and greeted him warmly. The Hispanic girl working the register offered him a sisterly grin and judged his new glasses to be “very smart”. Jason laughed at that, then after a moment of consideration, ordered a kimchi burrito.
“I love that there’s so much to choose from here,” Jason commented to Henry. “It’s like free will on a menu board.”
“Certainly more exotic than most coffee shops from my day,” Henry agreed. Still he chose to play it safe his first day back among the living and ordered the Mongolian cheesesteak.
- Предыдущая
- 88/116
- Следующая
