Apocalypse to Go (7 page)

“So much for the vegetable course.”

“What?” Ari was staring at the counter. “I saw the carton moving. And cabbage hanging in the air.” He turned to me with a look of sheer exasperation. “What?”

“A Chaos critter.” I said. “I told you about those. This one was eating the coleslaw, so I scared it off.”

“If these things can eat real food, why can’t everyone see them?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of the questions the Agency’s research staff is working on. I’ll tell you if they come up with a theory.”

Ari started to speak, then merely set his lips together with a sour twist. I threw the remains of the coleslaw into the garbage.

“I got you some artichoke hearts, too,” Ari said. “I suppose they qualify as a vegetable, anyway.”

“Barely, but thanks.”

Before Michael and Sophie left, Michael admitted to me that he’d started working on the map of gates.

“Sean’s helping me find them,” he said.

“He can find anything,” I said.

“But he can’t actually open them.”

A little sibling rivalry there, I thought. “Have you actually spotted other gates?”

“One, yeah, in a cemetery down in Colma, but it doesn’t go to Interchange. I dunno where.”

“Both of you be careful, will you?”

“You bet. Sean wants to talk to you. He’s uptight about when we get Dad back. I mean, he’s gay, and he remembers Dad being hella down on that.”

I said an unladylike word. I remembered it, too. It also occurred to me that the Dad I was remembering would be less than thrilled to find me living with a man I wasn’t married to. “I’ll call Sean. Let’s not worry about this stuff until we actually have Dad home again.”

“Yeah, it’s not a sure thing.” Michael paused for a gloomy interval. “I’ll call Father Keith tomorrow about Sophie.”

“Good. Ask him about a group called the Hounds of Heaven. I think she’ll find them interesting.”

B
Y THE TIME MICHAEL
and Sophie drove off, the time stream had washed away all traces of the thief and his temporary escape gate. I spent a few minutes trying to pick up traces of the energy but found none. The sidewalk was only a sidewalk with a little chip missing where the guy had thrown the blue-violet orb.

I went back upstairs and called Sean, but I only got his answering service. I left a message and clicked off. While I called, Ari paced up and down in the living room, but he stopped before he drove me crazy.

“I was thinking of going to the gym,” Ari said. “But I don’t like the idea of leaving you here alone. There’s not much chance that our would-be thief will come back right away, but one never knows.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I’m real glad you’re staying home.”

“All right. I can do a few sets of push-ups and the like here.” He sounded genuinely pleased at the prospect, a tone of voice that brought back grim memories of high school gym teachers.

“How many do you do?” I said.

“Three sets of fifty each. One hundred fifty for each exercise, that is. Sit-ups, push-ups, and the one whose English name I never can remember. You start standing, drop to a crouch, do a plank, then back to a squat and up.”

“No wonder you can’t remember the name. Your brain’s bruised from slapping against your skull a hundred fifty times.”

Ari set his hands on his hips and scowled at me, just like the gym teachers used to do. “It’s actually quite invigorating.”

“The very thought makes me feel faint. That’s what I used to do in gym class, faint. Constantly. It was real embarrassing.”

“You probably fainted because you were starving yourself.”

He had a point, not that I was going to admit it.

“Have fun,” I said. “I’m going to sit here and read my notebooks.”

“You could at least try a few—”

“No.” I may have snarled.

Ari gave me one last scowl, then stomped off to the bedroom to change into gym clothes. I put on a Lady Gaga CD loud enough to cover the sound of him repeatedly dropping to the floor.

Later that evening we had unexpected visitors. I was catching up on routine Agency business at my desktop, and Ari was watching a basketball game on TV, when the front doorbell rang. I started to go downstairs to open the door, but Ari stepped in front of me.

“I don’t feel any danger,” I said.

“I don’t care. Just wait.”

He picked up the new TV remote he’d acquired recently, a shiny black model, not the pizza-stained gray one I used to own. When the doorbell rang again, Ari clicked a couple of buttons. On the TV screen an image appeared of two men standing on the porch.

“It’s just Sean,” I said. “And Al. His boyfriend, y’know?”

“Oh,” Ari said. “I’ll go down and let them in.”

When he set the remote down, the basketball game reappeared onscreen. I followed as he strode to the head of the stairs, where we kept a waist-high metal filing cabinet. I’d been planning on putting flower arrangements on top to brighten up the space. Ari opened the top drawer and took out a pistol I’d never seen before, a
blue-gray thing that looked less lethal than the Beretta but lethal enough.

“Ari!” I snapped. “It’s my brother.”

“I know, but I’m taking no chances. Someone might be lurking behind them.”

I followed him down the stairs. When he opened the door with his left hand, Sean and Al both saw the gun in his right and put their hands up with a theatrical flourish.

“Er,” Al said, “if you’re busy or something, we could just leave. You don’t need to fire warning shots across our bow. Honest.”

“I just wanted to make sure it was really you.” Ari lowered the gun to point at the floor. “Next time, give us a ring before you drop by, will you?”

“You bet,” Sean said. “Can we put our hands down now?”

“Yes.” Ari cracked not a trace of a smile. “You’ve been vetted.”

We all trooped back upstairs, Ari first, for which I was grateful. I’d been afraid he’d herd us at gunpoint.

Al Wong and my brother Sean made a handsome couple, though Sean was so preternaturally beautiful, with his perfect features, wavy dark hair, and blue eyes, that Al tended to be ignored in the equation. In any other context people would have noticed him immediately, because he was as good-looking as any Hong Kong movie star. As it was, he got shoved into the background, which, luckily, he preferred to being on display. He tended to dress in flannel shirts and jeans, while Sean went for tailored slacks and beautifully cut shirts in fancy fabrics. That night Sean was wearing an emerald-green silk shirt with fawn slacks and a brown suede jacket cut like a sport coat. The color and sheen of the silk made his eyes glisten like sapphires.

“What brings you to our neck of the woods?” I said.

“The friends we were hanging with,” Sean said. “They live pretty close by. And so when I got your message, I thought we’d just see if you were home.” His voice shook as he continued. “Next time I’ll call ahead for sure. I know he’s a cop, but jeez!”

By the time we returned to the living room, Ari had put
the gun away. He flopped back down on the couch and turned on the TV sound. When Al noticed the basketball game, he shrugged out of his beaten-up canvas barn jacket, dropped it onto the floor, and flopped down next to Ari to watch.

“The Warriors,” Ari announced, “are losing badly.”

“They usually are,” Al said. “I wonder if Don Nelson will ever win that six hundredth game.”

Sean and I left them analyzing the team and went into the kitchen to talk. Sean took off his suede jacket and hung it over the back of his chair before he sat down.

“Mike told me you were worried,” I said.

“Yeah,” Sean said. “I used to get so damn scared when Dad would lecture us on how awful gays were. ‘Homos,’ he called us. I knew even then he was talking about me. Like, from the time I was maybe six I knew what I was. I was sure I was going direct to hell.” He forced out a smile. “Probably even before I died.”

“Well, Dad had a lot of strong opinions about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean he still does.”

Sean tilted his head to one side and blinked at me.

“We haven’t seen him in so long,” I continued, “that we tend to think of him as being exactly the way he was when he was arrested. But prison changes people and their opinions. Who knows what Dad’s like now?”

“Oh.” Sean considered this for several long moments. “I can see that, yeah. He’s had all these years away, and we won’t know what they’ve done to him till we get him home. Well, if we can get him home.”

“It’s going to be kind of a crap shoot.”

“I’ll just have to deal with it. If we do find him, we can’t leave him there.”

“Right. Besides, there’s Mom. They’ll have a lot of stuff to work through.”

“That’ll keep him busy!” His grin turned wicked. “Ari’s a lot like him. You’re involved with a guy who’s just like your father. How Freudian can you get?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. Sean displayed his survival sense by changing the subject.

“Mike must have told you I was helping him with that
map,” Sean said. “It’s taking both of us to do it, and it took us forever to find one gate. Now that we’ve got one, though, I know how they feel, or I should say, how I feel when I sense one. We can focus in on the vibes, which means we should be able to find the others faster, well, if there are any.”

“I don’t understand. You guys knew about the gate in Aunt Eileen’s house already.”

“That’s what Mike and I thought, that we could use that one to zero in on the others. We couldn’t. It’s different than the others. We know Dad made it, right? Well, someone else made the others. So the vibe’s different. Y’know?”

“No, actually, I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Okay.” Sean shot me a grin. “And because I’m helping, I was wondering if you could take me on as a stringer for the Agency.”

“What? You? Looking for gainful employment?”

“I know I’m a slacker.”

“Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.” I folded my hands piously. “Learn, my child, and grow wise.”

Sean stuck out his tongue at me. “Well, I deserved that,” he went on to say. “But will you? You’re the head of the bureau now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, and if you weren’t my brother, I could hire you tonight, but I don’t want to be accused of nepotism. I’ll ask my boss about it. They put Michael on stringer status, and my boss mentioned a while ago that they might be interested in recruiting more O’Gradys.”

“Thanks. It wouldn’t kill me to earn a little money now and then. Al’s birthday is coming up, and I don’t want to buy him a present with his own credit card.”

The guys left when the basketball game ended. Al had to get up in the morning to go to his government job. I locked up, then sat down next to Ari on the couch. He turned off the TV and looked at me.

“Ari, there’s something you need to think about,” I said. “You genuinely scared my poor brother when you were waving that gun around.”

“I never wave a gun around. That’s irresponsible.”

“Well, okay, sorry. Just seeing it scared him anyway. You
don’t know what he’s like when he gets into full panic mode. It could take hours to calm him down.”

“I needed to make sure that it was them and only them. After all, it’s my job to keep you safe.”

I don’t know what got into me, the Devil, maybe, but lines from
The Tempest
floated to the surface of my mind. “Ariel, thy charge exactly is perform’d, but—”

Ari growled. I don’t know what else to call it but a growl, and his face changed to a dangerous lack of expression. “I hate that sodding play,” he said, and he sounded on the edge of growling again. “And my sodding name, and that sodding playwright, too.”

I stood up and took a couple of steps sideways to get clear of the coffee table. He got up with the Qi of pure rage swirling around him like the tempest in question. I moved to put the coffee table between us.

“I’m sorry.” I made my voice as calm as I could. “Ari, I didn’t realize it would bother you so much.”

He took a deep breath, then another, and shoved his hands into his jeans’ pockets—to keep them safely confined, I figured, like they’d taught him in anger management class. For several minutes we stood on that knife’s edge. Finally, he sighed and forced out a thin smile.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said. “Every summer when I visited my mother in London, I was teased about my wretched name, and that sodding Shakespeare play always came into it. Airy spirit! Too delicate for—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and breathed deeply yet again. “Well, no need to go into all of that.”

“There’s not, no. You actually make me think of Ariel Sharon, not Shakespeare.”

That got me a genuine smile. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very flattering.”

“I’ll never mention the play again.”

“And I’ll try to stop making an ass of myself.” He frowned down at the floor. “I’m honestly surprised I reacted the way I did.”

I metaphorically bit my tongue to keep myself from bringing up
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. “It’s getting late,” I said instead. “We’re both kind of tired.”

“True.” He looked up, back to his usual controlled self. “Almost time for bed. I’m going to go take a shower, I think.”