Richard Paul Russo - Just Drive, She Said.pdf - Richard Paul Russo - margozap

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Just Drive, She Said

a short story by Richard Paul Russo

Night.

Ahead of us, the road ended at a washed-out bridge, but we were driving

for it at eighty-five miles an hour. Moonlight lit the barricades, the

ruins of the bridge dangling over muddy water below.

"Jesus!" I said, trying to look at her. She pressed the gun harder into my

temple.

"Just drive," she said.

I drove.

It wasn't even my car.

It was my sister's, an ugly-brown Mazda RX-7 that drove fast and smooth.

I'd borrowed it for a few days, and Friday night I drove to a nearby

liquor store to pick up some wine--something to get me through another

empty weekend.

I was inside for fifteen or twenty minutes. With three bottles of wine in

hand, I walked back to the car. I unlocked the door, opened it, and the

overhead light went on.

A woman sat in the passenger seat pointing a gun at me. She didn't move,

silent and intense, and I thought she was trying to decide whether or not

to shoot me.

"Get inside and close the door," she finally said.

I wasn't going to do anything stupid. I got in, closed the door, and the

light went off.

The woman took the wine from me with one hand, and with the other jabbed

the gun into my ribs.

"Start the engine," she said.

As I did, strange lights went on in the middle of the dash. The tape deck

was gone, replaced by a larger, glistening piece of electronics with

dozens of buttons, dials, and readouts. Amber and green lights flickered

across the thing, the displays showing figures that were probably letters

or numbers, though nothing I recognized.

"What the hell is that?" I asked.

"A probability wave console. Generator, tuner, and amplifier."

Jesus, hijacked by a lunatic.

She jabbed me again with the gun, and said, "Let's go."

"This isn't my car," I told her.

"You think I give a shit?"

No, guess not. "My sister's waiting for me," I said, without much hope.

"Want me to repeat what I just said?"

I shook my head. "Where to?"

"Just go right and drive a while," she said.

The gun was still in my ribs, so I did what she asked.

Her hair was short and dark, and she was wearing blue jeans, a gray

sweatshirt, and dark boots. Slim, but strong-looking. She didn't look

crazy, I thought, but then what did crazy look like?

As I drove along, she fiddled with the console, and a stream of figures

moved across the largest display. She glanced up, nodded toward a wrecked

Toyota ahead of us on the side of the road, and said, "That used to be my

car." We passed the wreck, and she returned her attention to the console.

A blue light began to blink frantically on the side of the console.

"Goddammit," the woman said. "How the hell did she find me so soon?" She

pushed another button and a small screen emerged from the top of the

console. A glowing map appeared on the screen, with two different blinking

lights a few inches apart.

"Turn right at the next corner," she said, "and hit the gas. Move this

crate."

I turned and accelerated. Traffic was light, but I still had to pay

attention to other cars.

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"Faster," the woman said.

"What about the police?" I asked. Which was a stupid question. I wanted

the police.

"Fuck 'em," she said. "Just move it."

So I stepped on the gas. I was weaving in and out of traffic now, getting

nervous. But whenever I started to slow down she jabbed the gun into my

ribs and said, "Keep moving."

She had me make a series of turns, wheels squealing with each one, then we

were on a long, open road with hardly any traffic. I was pretty sure the

river was ahead of us somewhere.

"Now floor it," she said. I hesitated, and she moved the gun from my ribs

to my head. "Floor it, goddamn you!"

I floored it.

Which was how, a few moments later, we were headed straight for barricades

and a ruined bridge at eighty-five miles an hour.

I should have hit the brakes. What was she going to do, shoot me? But I

kept my foot on the gas, the steering wheel straight.

The woman punched a few more buttons. Green lights flashed, bright

patterned circles. Just before we reached the barricades, she jammed a

switch on the front of the console.

Everything lurched sideways. At least, that's how it felt, lurched so hard

I felt sick. But we were still on the road, still moving straight ahead at

eighty-five. Except now the barricades were gone, and stretching out ahead

of us, spanning the river and glistening with bright lights, was a whole,

undamaged bridge.

We shot across it over the river, came down on the other side, and kept

going. I braked through a long, sweeping turn, barely keeping the car on

the road, then we were driving along the river road.

I couldn't see much in the dark. It wasn't a part of the city I knew well,

but I had been through it a few times, and something seemed out of place.

"Just keep going," the woman said. She was watching a display on the

console, a rolling series of figures that made me think of a time counter.

I drove along the river road, trying to figure out what seemed different,

but unable to pinpoint anything. About fifteen minutes after we'd crossed

the bridge, the console display stopped changing, and flashed a single

figure.

"All right," the woman said. "Bring the speed back up."

The gun was gone from my head, but I wasn't about to argue. I accelerated

until we were back up near eighty. The woman punched buttons, then again

jammed the big switch on the front of the console.

We lurched sideways without moving again, and this time I thought I was

really going to be sick. Everything in my vision began to tilt, and I had

a hell of a time keeping the car on the road. I hit the brakes and brought

the car to a stop, no longer caring what she would do to me.

I left the engine running, put my head on the steering wheel, and breathed

slowly, deeply, until the spinning stopped. I straightened and looked at

the woman. She now held the gun in her lap.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Sure," I said. "Terrific."

"We won't have to go so hard now," she said. "Just coast along at twenty,

twenty-five miles an hour."

"Does that mean I start driving again?"

She nodded.

I looked down at the gun in her lap, and nodded back. "Give me another

minute or two, will you?" I held up my hand, which was shaking. "I can't

drive like this."

"All right."

I sat there, trying to relax, trying to cut down the shakes. The street

was nearly deserted; only a few cars drove by, and there were no

pedestrians. The cars looked odd, but there wasn't enough light for me to

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figure out why. Then I leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked

at the front end of the Mazda. It was still an ugly brown, but the nose

had become more elongated, sharper. The retractable headlights were gone,

replaced by conventional stationary lights.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked.

"If it was daylight, you'd see even stranger things," she said.

Which made me look more closely at our surroundings. The nearby

streetlight was mounted on an unusually thick metal pole, and gave off a

sharp, emerald glow I'd never seen before. The lights in the buildings

were brighter, harsher than I would have expected.

"Let's go," the woman said.

I breathed deeply a few more times. Then I put the car into gear, let out

the clutch, and swung back onto the road.

We drove slowly, and I kept searching for changes in my surroundings, but

it was too dark to see much. The woman directed me through several turns,

then onto a freeway.

On the freeway there were differences I could identify. The overhead signs

were blue rather than green, lit from below by rose-tinted lights. And the

street and city names were completely unfamiliar--definitely not English.

I didn't think I could pronounce half of them.

"You going to tell me what the hell is happening here?"

"Just look for a motel," she said.

"And how am I supposed to recognize one?"

She smiled. "Spelled just the same here as where you're from. It's

practically a trans-universal word."

We drove on, and I wanted something to break the silence, to ground me.

"Will that thing play music?"

The woman just laughed and shook her head, and I wondered what was so

funny.

She was right, though, about a motel. From a mile away I saw a bright

glowing sign:

M O T E L

As we got closer, I could make out other words, but none of them made

sense. There were numbers as well, but there were too many digits, and a

strange hooked symbol instead of a dollar sign.

"Hope you can pay for this," I said. "My money's not going to be much good

here."

She smiled. "You'd be surprised."

I pulled off the freeway, drove into the motel parking lot, and the woman

pointed out the office at the end of the building. She made me go in with

her. At the desk, she talked to a crusty old man who wore a black helmet,

face covered by a smoky visor. What they spoke sounded like a mix of

foreign languages--a few words close to English, others like German, a few

like French.

The woman paid with large, brightly colored bills, and the man gave her a

narrow cylinder that hung by a chain from a plastic ball. We walked back

to the car in silence, then she directed me to drive around the back of

the building, where we parked in front of a tan door. The woman handed the

wine bottles to me, took two duffel bags out from behind the seats, then

made sure I locked the car. She inserted the cylinder into a narrow

opening where it hummed, then clicked; the door swung open, and we stepped

inside.

There was a table with two padded chairs, a television set, a radio, and a

double bed. The woman set the duffel bags on the floor, and I put the wine

bottles on the table; the labels had changed, and were now unreadable. I

looked at her.

"There's only one bed."

"We'll manage," she said. "Let's go get something to eat, I'm hungry."

We went to a coffee shop next to the motel, where the woman ordered for

both of us. I ended up with something that looked and tasted a lot like a

Denny's chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes.

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After we ate, the woman said she needed a drink. I figured I could use one

too, so we went to the attached lounge and sat at a table in the back

corner, empty tables all around us. She asked me what I liked to drink,

and I told her Scotch. She ordered from the waiter, and when my drink came

it did taste an awful lot like Scotch--cheap Scotch, but Scotch

nevertheless. The woman was drinking something clear over ice.

"A trans-universal," the woman said. "Alcohol, coffee, and tobacco. Hotels

and motels are close, along with guns and cars, but alcohol, coffee, and

tobacco are almost everywhere."

Right. We drank. One drink, two drinks. Then a third. I was feeling it. We

didn't talk, but we had another drink. I didn't know about her, but I was

getting smashed.

"What's your name?" I asked. Drunk, I was feeling reckless, and it seemed

like a reckless question.

"It would sound like garbage." She paused. "Call me Victoria." Another

pause. "What's your name?"

"Robert."

"Robert." She nodded. "Robert, do you have any idea what's been happening

to you?"

I shook my head.

"Of course not. Ever heard of parallel universes?"

"Sure. As an idea, not something that actually exists."

"They exist. We've been moving from one to another." She signaled for two

more drinks, then looked at me for a minute before going on. "The console

in the car? It generates probability waves that slip us from one universe

to another."

The drinks came, and she drank half of hers immediately. It was a crazy

idea, but how else had I come to this place? We sat for a while in

silence, drinking. Actually, I kind of liked the idea of traveling between

universes. It beat hell out of sitting alone in an empty apartment all

weekend.

"Wait a second," I said. "How the hell do you know how to speak from one

place to another? You can't know all these languages."

She shook her head. "I don't." She tapped at the base of her skull. "But

this does. Batch of microchips planted in my head." Then she stretched out

her arms. "Robert, I'm wired. I've got a built-in receiver running through

my whole body. Every time I shift universes, my body pulls in all the

radio and television signals, whatever's out there, and the batch in my

head does the rest. In ten or fifteen minutes, I've got enough of the

language to get by. That's how I picked up your slang. And each time I

shift places, I shift languages. Or I can lock onto one, like I have with

yours." She paused. "I like being able to talk to you."

I looked at her for a minute.

"Why? Why are you traveling between universes? And who the hell is after

you?"

She didn't answer. She returned my gaze for a while, stood, then said,

"Let's get back to the room."

Without thinking, I opened my wallet to leave a tip. My paper money had

changed from green to the brightly colored bills I'd seen Victoria use.

"Just like the car," Victoria said. "Anything that's not alive." She took

two small bills from my wallet, left them on the table.

I felt a lot drunker as we walked back to the motel. Or maybe it was just

overload. I felt I was moving through water. Or mud. It seemed like a long

trip across the parking lot, but we finally reached our room and went

inside.

I dropped into one of the chairs. Victoria sat on the bed with her back

against the wall. Someone in the room above us kept dropping things onto

the floor.

"When I first opened the car door and saw you," I said, "it looked like

you were trying to decide whether or not to shoot me."

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Victoria shook her head slightly and smiled. "I would never have shot

you."

"Maybe you shouldn't tell me that. Maybe I'll just take off."

"Yeah? Where the hell are you going to go?"

I shrugged.

"No," she said. "I was trying to decide whether or not to take you with

me."

"Why did you? Hostage?"

She shook her head again, the smile gone. "I've been lonely," she said. "I

just wanted the company."

I didn't say anything. She pushed up from the bed. "I'm going to take a

shower." She turned away from me and walked into the bathroom, closed the

door.

Find the gun, I thought. But only for a moment. I didn't really care where

the gun was, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. What I did

instead was undress and get into bed. I was beat, still half drunk, and I

needed the sleep.

But I couldn't sleep. I lay wide awake, waiting for her to return. It had

been a long time since I'd been involved with anyone, and that had been a

woman who spent all her time on speed of one kind or another; I'd begun to

feel like I was moving in slow motion whenever I was with her. Now I felt

as if I had been on speed most of the evening. I closed my eyes, but that

didn't help. I waited.

I opened my eyes to the covers being pulled away, and Victoria standing

over me, naked and wet from the shower. She was a completely normal woman,

whatever universe she'd come from.

She crawled across the bed on all fours, dripping onto my skin as she

leaned over me. She blew air across my belly, through the hair between my

legs. She moved down toward my thighs, and straddled me.

"I'm too drunk," I said.

She looked down at my crotch. "No you're not," she said.

"I'm too tired."

"No you're not."

"I don't even know what you are," I said.

"What do you think I am?" She moved forward, lifted slightly, then lowered

herself onto me, warm and moist. She smiled. "Just drive," she said.

I drove.

She wouldn't talk about where we were going, or why. I had the feeling she

didn't have any particular destination in mind, that she was just shifting

from one universe to another at random, trying to lose her pursuer. For a

few days, it seemed to work.

I got used to the changes. Or rather, to the idea of change. Each day we

made at least one shift, usually two. Once we made three, which was a

mistake--I got sick all over the front seat and nearly ran the car into a

concrete channel on the side of the road used by people on cable-powered

skateboards. After that, we shared the driving, and stuck to two shifts a

day.

Everything changed--the car, our clothes, money. Language changed,

occasionally becoming so close to English that I could understand it

again, but usually becoming completely unintelligible. And the world

around us changed.

Once we emerged into a domed city, buildings reaching to the dome itself

and through it, jutting into the open sky above. Another city was a maze

of narrow roadways with hundreds of footbridges above the streets,

connecting the stone buildings in a vast, chaotic network of bent and

twisted metal. And once we came out onto a cracked and potholed concrete

road in the middle of a dry, gutted wasteland, flat ruins for miles in all

directions, no signs at all of life. We shifted out of there as soon as we

could.

We spent several hours a day on the road. Sometimes we shifted at lower

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Richard Paul Russo - Just Drive, She Said.pdf

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