I stopped and listened. Not far away, and getting closer, was the sound of a car.
"Joshua!" I yelled, moving away from the ambulance. "We need to leave! Now!"
The side of the cube tore open. A dirty white Escort shot through the hole, swerving. It was heading directly towards me. I froze, which was probably not the smartest thing I could have done.
The driver of the Escort hit its brakes just in time to keep from squashing me like a bug. Then he turned off his engine, undid his seatbelt, and got out of the car. There was a small grinding sound as the automatic shoulder belt moved forward.
"Sorry about that," the driver said. "I didn"t expect anyone would be standing right in front of my car."
"What in f.u.c.k"s name are you doing here," I said.
"Getting my story," he said. "What"s your excuse?"
It was Van Doren, of course.
Chapter Eighteen.
"Joshua," I hollered. "We have to stop."
Joshua poked his head over the ledge and looked down. "It"s too late," he said. "We"re already off."
"Can we throw him out anyway?" I asked.
"Now, there"s a thought," Joshua said. "But the answer is no."
"Pity," I said.
"It"s the problem with being a civilized species," Joshua agreed. "No convenient falls from a great height."
"Hey," Van Doren said. "That dog is talking."
Joshua laughed. "You think that"s weird, wait about a half hour. It"s going to be a long night, pal." He stepped back out of sight.
Van Doren turned back to me. "What"s going on?"
"I"m interested in hearing what you think is going on," I said. "And as long as you"re talking, how you managed to follow us here."
"I got word that you were moving Mich.e.l.le today," Van Doren said. "I considered staking out the hospital, but I decided to stake you out instead. I figured that no matter where Mich.e.l.le was going, you"d have to go there, too, sooner or later. You weren"t in the office this morning, so I went to your house, where I saw your car. And waited. At about four, you and Miranda left your house in your car. What"s up with that, by the way?"
By this time Miranda had made it over to where we were. "None of your business, creep," she said.
"Sorry," Van Doren said, mildly. "Professional curiosity."
"I doubt the "professional" part," Miranda said.
"Yow. Feisty," Van Doren said.
"Tom," Miranda said. "Don"t worry about kicking him out of this thing. I"m going to rip his teeny little heart out myself."
"Works for me," I said.
Van Doren looked at us both uncertainly and then continued. "You two went to Lupo a.s.sociates from there, and then spent about an hour there before heading to Pomona Valley. A couple more hours pa.s.sed before you guys had the parade of ambulances."
"Why didn"t you fall for it?"
"Because I was following you," Van Doren said to me. "None of those people rushing out with stretchers looked like you. Or like her, for that matter. As it was, I just barely saw you when you did sneak out. That was a pretty tricky operation."
"Not tricky enough, obviously," Miranda said.
"Well, I"m more motivated than most," Van Doren said. "I followed your ambulance to that parking lot and then waited to see what you did next. A couple minutes later you guys got back on the freeway, and from there it was just a matter of not calling your attention to me. I"ve gotten a little better at that since the last time I tailed you, Tom."
"I still don"t see how you followed us out when we went on the dirt roads," I said. "There was no one else out there with us. I"d have seen your car."
"I followed you quite a ways back," Van Doren said. "And I killed my lights."
He pointed to his car. His parking lights and brake lights were shattered and broken. His headlights were fine, but then he could just turn those off.
"Nice," I admitted.
"Yeah, well, it"ll probably be the last time they let me use a company car, anyway," Van Doren said. "I just about wrecked it on these dirt roads. Between that and having this car towed from when you kidnapped me, Tom, they"re not going to give me the keys again."
"You"re breaking my heart," I said.
"That"s how I followed you here. As to where here is, and what"s going on, I have no clue. I a.s.sumed this building was some sort of weird clinic."
"Building?" Miranda said.
"Didn"t you feel the thump, Van Doren?" I said. "You didn"t see this thing before you got to it?"
"I felt a tremor, sure," Van Doren said, slightly confused. "So? This is southern California. We have tremors all the time. It didn"t feel like it was close by. And no, I didn"t see this place. It"s black. I saw your tail lights disappear and I just followed you in."
"It didn"t strike you as odd, the way you came in?" I said.
"I came in the same way you did," Van Doren said.
"Wow," Miranda said. "You"re just totally clueless, Van Doren."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Van Doren said.
"She doesn"t it mean it as an insult," I said. "She means it literally."
"I"m not following you," Van Doren said.
"Joshua," I called.
"Yo." He poked his head over again.
"I"d like to show our friend here exactly where we are," I said.
"No problem," Joshua said.
The cube disappeared. The Earth hovered below us, the moon off to one side.
Jim Van Doren screamed higher than I had ever heard a grown man scream before.
"I think we have some sedatives back in the ambulance," Miranda said, after we had Joshua re-tint the cube.
"Nah," I said. "He maintained bladder control. He"ll be fine."
Van Doren leaned on the side of his Escort. For some reason he had a death grip on his radio antenna. "Holy s.h.i.t," he said.
"I remember having that very same reaction once," I said.
"Are we really in s.p.a.ce?" he asked.
"Oh, yes," I said.
"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" Van Doren asked.
"Jim, remember that time in my car, when you asked me to tell you what I was up to?"
"Sort of," Van Doren said. "I"m not thinking too well at the moment."
"Try," I said. "It"ll help."
Van Doren closed his eyes to concentrate. "You told me that you were doing something with s.p.a.ce aliens," he said.
"Right," I said.
"I thought you were just being an a.s.shole," he said.
"Just goes to show," I said.
He pointed over to Joshua"s ledge. "And the dog is an alien."
"Mostly. It"s sort of a long story," I said.
Van Doren"s mind was working furiously now. "Is....," he began, looked towards the ambulance, and then back at Miranda and me. "Mich.e.l.le Beck"s an alien, isn"t she? Something"s happened to her and now you have to take her back to the mothership?"
Miranda giggled. Van Doren scowled. "I"m sorry," Miranda said. "I think the word "mothership" did it to me."
"Well?" he said, to me. "Is Mich.e.l.le Beck an alien?"
"No," I said. "At least, not yet."
"Not yet?" Van Doren said. "What does that mean? Are they going to a.s.similate her into their collective?"
Miranda burst out laughing.
"What?" Van Doren was shouting now.
It was a second before Miranda could catch herself. Then she gently touched Van Doren"s arm.
"Jim, you"ve got to stop watching so much science fiction," she said. "It"s making you talk funny."
"Ha ha ha," Van Doren said, peevishly, and pulled away. "Look, I"m just trying to figure out what"s going on."
I considered Van Doren for a moment, trying to decide what I was going to do with him. Joking aside, murdering him wasn"t an option. But he now knew more about the existence of the Yherajk than anyone outside of me, Miranda and Carl, and that could be dangerous to us. I was loyal to Carl and Joshua, and Miranda was loyal to me, but Van Doren wasn"t loyal to any of us. Certainly not to me. Quite the opposite, in fact, since he in the last few weeks he"d been doing his d.a.m.nedest to cut my career out from under me.
Well, I thought. Time to change all of that.
"Jim, why do you work for The Biz?" I asked.
"What?" he said. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"I"m just wondering," I said. "You make no bones that it"s a s.h.i.tty little magazine, and that you"re doing s.h.i.tty little jobs on it. But you"re still there. Why?"
"I don"t know if you"ve noticed this, but journalism is not exactly a rapidly expanding profession," Van Doren said. "Particularly in Los Angeles, where you basically have to put a gun to peoples" heads to make them read."
"You could always move," I said.
"What, and miss all this?"
"I"m serious," I said.
"So am I," Van Doren said. "Would you want to be an agent in Omaha, Tom?"
"No, but that"s not where my business is," I said.
"Well, neither is mine," Van Doren said. "I write about the entertainment world. Have to be here to do that. I"m writing for a magazine that"s near the a.s.s-end of that world, I admit that. But you have to start somewhere. Think of it as the journalism equivalent of working on a straight-to-video flick."
"Why write about entertainment?" I asked. "Really, who gives a s.h.i.t about it? It"s not really important. It"s not real news. You"re just wasting your time and talent, such as it is."
"Nice cheap shot," Van Doren said.
"I try," I said.
"And you"re wrong," Van Doren said. "It"s not a waste. You"re so stuck in the belly of the beast that you don"t notice it, but our entertainment is the single most successful export America has."
"Shucks," I said. "And all this time I thought our most successful export was democracy. Guess that was just another lie I learned in school. I hear evolution"s kind of a crock, too."