thick with dust. A series of steps, a giant’s stairway, had been cut into the skin of the hills to my right, the prelude to a bunch of new dream homes. There was so little anyone could want on the hillside that there was no fence: just the road’s oily, uneven edge, a yard or so of tangled puncherweeds posing as shoulder, and then the spiky, overgrown weed garden of the hills.
Six forty-seven, and I needed altitude.
Alice grumbled to a stop at the foot of the new building development, and I sprinted up the dirt track that had been gouged for the earthmoving equipment. As I clambered past the pads onto which the houses would be dropped, I seemed to move in the center of a bubble. Outside the bubble were the heat, the dust, the larger sounds and smells of the day; inside were the rattle of wind in brush beside me, the scuff of my running shoes, and the rasp of my breathing. For a moment, I floated above myself and looked down, seeing my laboring body as a machine that existed simply to get my head to the top of that hill.
My knees began to buckle long before I made it. I was even more fatigued than I’d realized, worn down to nub ends and scraped nerves by Wilton Hoxley. I did the last third of the incline at a sorry trot, which was just as well because I ran right into a chest wound.
At the moment of impact, I thought I’d been shot. I bounced back, flung like a slingshot, and a bright spot of pain in my chest announced itself in crimson through my T-shirt. Both the red and the pain spread as I stood there stupidly, staring down and waiting for my lungs to collapse. When they didn’t, when the sound of the shot didn’t follow, when a second bullet failed to tear into me, I looked up and saw a barbed-wire fence.
A fence, by implication, has something on the other side of it. The thought formed altogether too slowly in my brain as I pressed at the torn skin on my chest and tried to stanch the bleeding. The hill crested some twenty feet beyond the fence. I left a piece of my shirt waving gaily on one of the barbs, but except for that and a scratched knee, I got through intact. I was almost to the top of the hill when I heard the music.
Polyphonal, rhythmic, anachronistic, something with drums and tambours and sackbuts, it floated on the breeze that blew hot on my face as I topped the hill and looked down on a miniature out of an illuminated manuscript brought to life, a fifteenth-century fairyland set down mistakenly in some obscure corner of the Gobi Desert.
Turrets rose gracefully against the nicotine-colored sky. Pennons snapped in the wind, arches arched, flying buttresses flew. I counted three crenellated pasteboard castles, stone-solid from here, several smaller structures, and a warlord’s moated fortress. On a patch of green sward too healthy-looking at this time of year to be anything but Astroturf, mounted knights with lances gave each other the evil eye through upraised visors when their horses pawed the plastic. This had to be the place.
Revelers in costume pushed and shoved their way festively through the streets of a medieval town that huddled at the knees of the taller structures. People crowded against stages where jugglers made patterns of oranges in the air and mountebanks performed tumbling tricks and magicians did complicated things with geese and conical Merlin’s hats. A sudden burst of flame, seen out of the corner of my eye, popped my goose bumps to attention in defiance of the heat. I focused to see a burly man on one of the stages, stripped to a pair of uncomfortable-looking leather bloomers, lift a torch to his mouth and spew an arc of fire five feet long.
The fire reminded me that I was underdressed. I clambered back through the fence and scuffed my way back down the hill to fetch my suit of armor.
The flat little automatic that I’d reclaimed from the cops was in the glove compartment, and I took it out and put it, plus two spare clips, on top of the car. The clip in place was full, and the bullets were illegal hollow-points that made an entrance wound the size of a tenpenny nail and an exit wound the size of a cantaloupe.
The bucket full of water and towels had been wedged on the floor between the backseat and the backrest of the front seat. I drew out one of the sopping towels and wrung it out over my head, soaking my shirt and shorts, and then twisted the excess water out of the others and went to work.
First, two wet towels, one on top of the other, wrapped tightly around my torso from armpits to crotch and fastened to each other and to the T-shirt with the heaviest of the safety pins. Then one towel, wound diagonally, around each of my arms and legs and pinned to my shirt and shorts. I had to leave open areas over my knees and elbows to give me bending room, and it took a little time to get it right. By that time I was as wrapped in white as Claude Rains in the middle reels of The Invisible Man.
I dipped the extra-large sweatpants into the bucket, gave them a squeeze, and climbed in. The towels didn’t look all that bulky, given the size of the pants. The zippered sweatshirt, dripping wet, followed. Finally, I took one of the three plastic slickers from its little package, shook it out, and slipped into it. It had a sash instead of buttons, making it easier to get out of, and it reached almost all the way to my feet. If he sprayed me and threw a match, the fumes just above the surface of the plastic would ignite first, followed almost immediately by the plastic. I figured it would burn through in a couple of seconds, but at least it gave me one skin I could shed, and it would keep the gasoline from saturating cloth. I tucked the two spare slickers into the front of the wet sweatpants, tugged the drawstring on the pants tight to keep the spares in place, tied a simple one-tug bow in the sash on the coat I was wearing, slipped the flat automatic under the right wristband of the sweatshirt, and started up the hill. The two extra clips were in the shirt’s single pocket, hard to get to through the coat. I hoped that would be my biggest problem.
It was 7:09, and I was late.
Halfway up the dirt track, I realized I had added at least twenty pounds to my weight and invented the world’s first portable steam room. The slicker held the moisture in- which was one of the things it was supposed to do, prevent evaporation-and by the time I reached the fence, I was pouring sweat. The sun, which was finally on the verge of dropping behind the ridge of hills to the west, seated through the transparent plastic like a microwave through freezer wrap. When I’d thought this through, if my mental processes at the time could be so charitably described, I’d known I would be hot. I hadn’t known I’d be exhausted.
The fence poked a few holes in my armor and tested the limits of my flexibility, but I barely noticed. It was 7:11, and the Incinerator was nothing if not punctual.
There must have been five thousand people enjoying themselves in the hollow below me. As I worked my way down the dry brush of the hill at an angle, I saw that most of them were in contemporary clothing; the medieval motley was apparently reserved for employees and nostalgic party animals. An edge of shadow was moving across the bottom of the large bowl that held the Chivalry Faire, and historically incorrect colored lights were blinking on here and there. With the night would come the Master of the Revels, in his cap and bells and black rubber trench coat.
But where was he? It was almost quarter after, and nothing seemed to be amiss. I didn’t want to blunder into the crowd without having any idea where to find him, so I sat down next to a large, desiccated clump of sage and surveyed the scene.
The parking lot beyond the Faire, on the other side of the hollow, was already plunged into shadow. Between it and me were the main gates, through which people were still arriving, and the tall castles and ye quainte village. Studded here and there among the medieval set pieces, like walnuts in the crown jewels, were artifacts of the twentieth century: trailers that served as dressing rooms for the costumed help, Porta potties, ticket booth, a large catering truck, electrical generators. At the near periphery of the village was an area reserved for food booths, and on the far side was a concentration of carnival rides that had been gussied up with Arthurian trappings for the occasion. People squealed as they rode a small roller coaster painted to look like a dragon or whirled in cups that, for the moment, were supposed to be wine barrels. The largest of the rides was a haunted house bristling with cardboard turrets to turn it into a haunted castle, and the smallest was a six-foot pyramid made of rubber sheeting stretched over a padded metal frame, up which eight or ten very small children were trying to climb. As they bounced back down, their shrill squeals of laughter cut through the deeper noise of the crowd. Looking around, I suddenly saw children everywhere.
Above the Faire, the sloping hillsides that formed the hollow were packed with dry, explosive brush, the perfect fuel. My best guess was that Hoxley intended to crisp all five thousand revelers, children included.
A sharp smell overrode the acrid scent of the sage, and I recognized it as me. I tried to tell myself that it was just sweat, but any pack of dogs, smelling the fear on me, would have torn me to pieces, plastic and all.
Seven-eighteen.
Where was he!
Something was nagging at me, some detail I’d seen and had filed away in a part of my brain that had either shut down or gone to the end of the oxygen line so the areas needed to keep me alive could function without
