Down These Strange Streets

of murder.

“Maybe.”

“My first platoon sergeant used to say, some days you eat the croc and some days the croc eats you.”

“Yeah.” He smiled grimly. “The bitch left the kid to face the music. Let’s go find her and play a few bars.”

NO MYSTERY, NO MIRACLE by Melinda M. Snodgrass

The problem with opening a crack in the world is that you never know what’s going to crawl through it. Which can be dangerous if it’s your job to close that crack back up again . . .

A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for multiple television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation (for which she was also a story editor for several years). She was a writer/ producer on Profiler. She has written a number of popular science fiction novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Cards series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include Circuit, Circuit Breaker, Final Circuit, The Edge of Reason, Runespear (with Victor Milán), High Stakes, Santa Fe, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Ruin, the sequel to The Edge of Reason. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel Double Solitaire and the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Very Large Array. She lives in New Mexico.

THE RACKET OF THE WHEELS OVER THE TRACKS WAS HYPNOTIC. MOONLIGHT trickled through the slats of the boxcar, and, inside, a kerosene lantern lit the faces of the men reclining on their bindles. The warm golden light gave the illusion of health to sallow, stubbled skin. The lantern’s presence would have raised the ire and the fists of any passing bull, but fortunately none of the railroad police had checked the train at the past two stations. Cross leaned against the back of the car and listened to the basso drone of male voices, and watched the magic that sang in their blood coruscate around them.

He had left New York City three months ago, looking for the origin point of a mysterious hobo symbol. Usually such symbols were simple affairs—a code that hobos left for other ’bos to guide them as they crissed and crossed a desperate country. An empty circle meant there was nothing for you here. A triangle with two lines thrust out like arms, and four smaller lines like fingers meant that a man with a gun lived there. A cat meant a kind old lady, and a cross meant if you listened to some religious talk you’d get a free meal. This one had a cross, but it also had a serpent. The head of the snake nestled in the angle between the upright and the cross’s arms; its mouth was open, showing fangs, and there was something about the eyes that Cross found eerily familiar and disturbing.

His boss, owner of Unique Investigations, suspected that it marked the place of an incursion from another universe, and after loading up the money belt with cash, Conoscenza had sent Cross out to find it. Cross had spent weeks in hobo jungles, walking the roads, riding the rails, talking with hobos and being attacked, but he thought he saw an end to the journey. What the old man had told him in St. Louis sounded promising.

The old man had seen the mark in Buford Fork, a small town near Tulsa, Oklahoma. They would be coming up on it soon, and Cross would jump and go in search of the tear in reality and the creature that had made it. It was a warm June night, but still Cross shivered and pulled his suit jacket closer around him. He had come up against one of his own kind in West Virginia and it had shattered him. He’d lost days piecing himself back together, and he was still fragile as hell. He sensed that he could shatter at any moment, so he feared the coming confrontation.

Cross unlimbered his hip flask and gulped down a mouthful of brandy. Prohibition added to the woes of a desperate country, but Conoscenza had it smuggled in from Canada, and it was quality. After it was gone, Cross would have to find a speakeasy and buy whatever crap they were selling. Unlike a human, Cross wouldn’t go blind from bad bootleg.

“It wasn’t my fault.” The adenoidal tones of Ed Bloom came drifting back to Cross. “My management principles were fine . . . no, better than fine, they were great. But the owner couldn’t see that, and he closed the store. The employees had no cause to blame me.”

It was the nineteenth time Bloom had told this story since Cross had jumped aboard the side-door Pullman back in St. Louis. It made Cross wish he’d dipped into his supply of cash and bought a seat in a passenger car, but after what had happened in West Virginia, he feared to try. If he were to splinter in a freight car among a gang of hobos, no one would listen to them. No authority figure would heed a wild story from lost and forgotten men about a man who had shattered into hundreds of slivers of multicolored light and flown away in all directions. But if it happened in front of respectable citizens—no, he couldn’t risk it.

The train slowed. Cross gathered up his bindle, stuffed his fedora into the pocket of his suit coat, moved to the door, and slid it open a few feet. The spikes at the ends of the railroad ties flashed like a code. The train slowed again, the wheels giving a metallic squeal, and Cross jumped. He lost his footing but managed to get his shoulder down to take the brunt of the fall. The cinders next to the track crackled and sent up the smell of coal soot. Regaining his feet, Cross walked away.

* * *

NIGHT HAD FLUNG ITSELF OVER THE SMALL OKLAHOMA TOWN OF BUFORD Fork in a way that reminded Cross of a vast maw snapping shut. It also reminded him why he hated rural towns. He loved the glow of big cities, with electricity to hold the darkness at bay. He looked longingly at the glow of Tulsa on the horizon, but turned his back and continued down the main drag of Buford Fork. Up ahead he saw an oasis of public lighting, four gas lamps that lit the front of City Hall.

Across the street was a diner, but it was closed up tight, probably because there wasn’t enough custom to make it worth the effort of opening. A handwritten menu in the window touted chicken fried steak with cream gravy and hush puppies. Cross realized the flesh he wore was hungry. He pressed a hand against his belly and felt the bulge of the money belt. Did he continue to play the hobo or offer some homeowner money for food?

He passed a movie theater. Ironically, the marquee read City Lights, Starring Charlie Chaplin. There was a Ford Model A truck, the black cab coated with dust, parked out front. The whitewall tires were like the flash of a smile in the dark. There were two ancient Model Ts, and several bicycles leaned up against the wall. Cross considered going inside. He liked movies, but there was no ticket seller in the kiosk.

He moved on and saw the black silhouette of a cross against the sky. It perched incongruously on the roof of a house. A mission, then. He walked up to the gate in the faded white picket fence. A hand-lettered sign read The Blood of the Lamb Mission. Shadows near the bottom of the gate’s upright caught his attention. He bent, flicked on his lighter, and froze. The old man in St. Louis had been right. The symbol he’d been following across the depression-wracked country was carved deep into the wood. The drawing had been disturbing; the original was terrifying.

Now he regretted that he had been flippant in Conoscenza’s Harlem office. The big man had skated the drawing across the polished surface of the desk. Cross had studied the cross and the snake, met the dark gaze of the man who offered him a chance for oblivion, and asked, “I’m guessing this doesn’t mean there’s a doctor in the