Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

Oedipal issues didn’t interest Noel. What interested him was a magical amulet with an Egyptian connection.

He crossed the cracked marble foyer, out the doors and down the steps. Simoon sat slumped at one of the round concrete tables outside the studio cafeteria. Nothing exemplified the economic differences on a movie lot like these two restaurants. The one Noel had just left catered to the stars and the studio power brokers. The cafeteria fed everyone else. Noel laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and produced another handkerchief. She wiped her eyes. “Thanks. Sorry.”

“Not at all.” Noel pulled out his cigarette case. “Do you mind?” Simoon shook her head. He lit up.

“Turkish,” the girl said. “Uncle Osiris smokes them. I’ve never seen a white guy smoke one before.”

Noel tilted his hand and surveyed the cigarette. “My flat mate at Cambridge put me onto them.”

The girl stared back down at the cracked and weathered surface of the table. The Santa Ana wind whipped her dark hair around her face. A few strands caught on the lips of her generous mouth. She pulled them free and the motion lifted her bosom. She was short and stacked, and Noel felt a brief stirring in his trousers, but he knew the likely outcome, if he should disrobe.

Noel sat down next to her on the bench. “Would you tell me more about this amulet? You said it was magical, and I can’t help but be interested.” He gave her his most winning smile. “Call it professional curiosity.”

“I don’t know too much about it, but my mom called and started pushing me to tell John about it. It’s an achet , and Thoth gave it to Peregrine when she toured Egypt a million years ago. I guess she was pregnant, and the achet was supposed to be for her kid. But Peregrine never gave it to him. With everything that’s going on back in Egypt, my mom and Osiris and the other old folks were all twitching out about getting the necklace to John. Mom said to tell John that it gives the wearer the strength and power of Ra—blah, blah, blah. I thought it sounded just stupid, but Mom kept bugging me and bugging me, so I finally told him so she’d shut up about it and get off my back. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing here, and now I’ve pissed off Peregrine, and I’m just screwed.”

But Noel wasn’t really listening any longer. Ra. The sun god in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. John Fortune seemed to have an affinity for light and fire. And Peregrine’s house did burn down . His thoughts were spinning. Of course this might all just be the maundering of desperate jokers looking for a miracle, and I may be seeing connections where none exist .

Simoon stood up. “Well, I’m going to go back into the house. I think I’ve had as much fun as I can stand tonight.”

“Wait. You’re sure Bugsy and Lohengrin were with him?” Noel asked.

“Well, they’re missing, too.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cell number for any of them?”

He watched a series of complex emotions sweep across her face. She pulled out her phone. “I think I’ve got Bugsy’s. He kept calling me for a date.”

And obviously struck out , Noel thought as he copied the number into his palm.

“Okay, I’m out of here. Thanks for the handkerchief.” She offered it back to him.

“Keep it.”

Noel watched her walk away, admiring the sway of her hips. Sparks arced through the dark as he flung away the cigarette. He dialed the number she had given him. A youthful, sleep-blurred voice answered.

“’Lo?”

Noel cut the connection, and checked. His phone, courtesy of the Order, contained a GPS tracker similar to those used by 911 operators. Bugsy hadn’t disabled the GPS feature on his phone. He was in the Nevada desert.

Noel called and arranged for a car to be delivered to his hotel.

The night was dark, the ground was cold, and John Fortune had no idea where he was.

Lying on his back, he looked up at a black, star-spangled sky. He seemed to be in the bottom of a shallow gully, hemmed in by rough-hewn rocks and boulders, without a taco stand, road, car, or streetlight in sight. When he held his hands in front of his face, he could barely see his fingers. His chest felt funny, his throat raw. His body hurt all over, as if he’d just run back-to-back-to-back marathons. Even more distressingly, he was totally naked.

He lurched to his feet, wincing in sudden pain as small, sharp stones on the floor of the arroyo dug into the bottoms of his feet. “What happened to my clothes?” he asked aloud.

There came no answer.

He lurched in a circle, dizzy and coughing. He remembered…he remembered the skittering thing crawling under his skin, like a rat burrowing into his body. The fear that had enveloped him. There had been a man, clad in shining white, who’d tried to kill him with a sword… wallah! Fire had danced all around him, and smoke blinded his eyes. Maybe the fire had taken his clothes—but no, that idea was ridiculous. He had no burn marks on skin or flesh.

Finally he remembered—he had run, bursting out of the house into the night. The feeling of freedom had been exhilarating, intoxicating. He had run for hours. How many hours?

How many miles? He did not know. In the end he had collapsed, exhausted. Here .

Wherever here was.

Fortune shivered. He couldn’t just sit here all night. He had to get back to Los Angeles. He was starving. He’d never been so hungry. He needed food, bad. And clothes . He couldn’t sit around butt naked in the middle of nowhere and wait for help. Help of any kind was unlikely to find him. He’d have to seek it out.

And if that thing was still in him, he really needed medical attention.

He remembered that the thing had been scuttling toward his head. Hesitantly, he put his hands on his jaw, gingerly felt his cheeks, up around his ears and across his forehead—where he felt a lump. The thing that had climbed into his body was still in his head.

John Fortune freaked and ran. Or tried to.

He clawed his way up the side of the arroyo, sliding back down several times in a rain of gravel and sand. Once he dislodged a rock near the edge of the dirt bank that would have crushed him if it had landed on him, but somehow, miraculously, it missed when they both tumbled back to the gully’s floor.

Somehow, he dragged himself up out of the arroyo. He glanced around wildly, desperately looking for something, anything that might hold a hope of aid. He was in wild, undeveloped foothills that dropped down to a plain dotted by clumps of stunted evergreens. The ground was sparsely covered by small shrubby bushes, tufts of grass and cactus, which he discovered when he brushed too near one and scratched his left leg from calf to ankle. The sudden pain acted like a pitcher of cold water thrown in his face. He tried to breathe easier. Aided by the light cast by the rising moon, he spotted a dark ribbon of what could be a road, or at least a path or trail of some kind, free of the stones that were tearing up his bare feet.

He started toward it, cautiously but quickly, eager to find some human contact, someone who could tell him what had happened to him and assure him that he’d be all right. …

He was thirsty, and his hunger was so great that his stomach cramped like it did before his monthly blood came. The moon rising above the foothills was gigantic in the night sky. The jackals who laired in the wadis greeted it, howling. Fortune’s head throbbed in rhythm with their cries. The hunger was bad, but he was used to it. He had often gone without food, when that meant that his children could be fed. Not that his sacrifices had helped much in the long run. He had lost them all, one by one. Jamal burning with fever, clutched hopelessly to his breast, nothing to feed him but the salt tears dripping from his cheeks .