With no residential or commercial structures in the area to draw traffic, the street seemed to be another set from that same science-fiction movie about a depopulated, post-apocalyptic world that Tommy had remembered in the supermarket. A rumble overhead was the sound of trucks on the freeway above, but because those vehicles could not be seen from here, it was easy to imagine that the source of the noise was colossal machinery of an alien nature engaged in the fulfilment of a meticulously planned holocaust.
Considering his overactive imagination, he probably should have tried writing a type of fiction more colourful than detective stories.
In the cargo hold was a cardboard carton full of smaller boxes of dog biscuits. “I went shopping this afternoon for Scootie,” she explained as she removed the packages of biscuits from the larger container.
“Your dog, huh?”
“Not just my dog. The dog. The essence of all dogginess. The coolest canine on the planet. No doubt in his last incarnation before Nirvana. That’s my Scootie.”
With the new tape measure, she got the accurate dimensions of the broken-out window, and then she used one of the razor blades to cut a rectangle of that precise size from the cardboard carton. She slid the panel of cardboard into one of the plastic garbage bags, folded the bag tightly around that insert, and sealed it with lengths of the waterproof plumbing tape. More tape secured the rectangle, inside and out, to the glassless window frame in the passenger’s door.
While Del made the rain shield, Tommy worked around her to purge the front seat of water and sparkling fragments of tempered glass. As he worked, he told her what had happened from the moment when the mini-kin had shorted-out the office lights until it had erupted from the burning Corvette.
“Bigger?” she asked. “How much bigger?”
“Almost double its original size. And different. The thing you saw clinging to the van window… that’s a hell of a lot weirder than it was when it first began to emerge from the doll.”
Not one vehicle drove through the underpass as they worked, and Tommy was increasingly concerned about their isolation. Repeatedly he glanced toward the open ends of the concrete shelter, where heavy rain continued to crash down by the ton weight, bracketing the dry space in which they had taken refuge. He expected to see the radiant-eyed demon—swollen to greater and stranger dimensions—approaching menacingly through the storm.
“So what do you think it is?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where does it come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does it want?”
“To kill me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“I know.”
“What do you do for a living, Tuong Tommy?”
He ignored the purposeful misstatement of his name and said, “I write detective stories.”
She laughed. “So how come, in this investigation, you can’t even find your own butt?”
“This is real life.”
“No, it’s not,” she said.
“What?”
With apparent seriousness, she said, “There’s no such thing.”
“No such thing as real life?”
“Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by ‘reality’ you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing.”
Having used two rolls of paper towels to clean the passenger’s seat and the leg space in front of it, heaping the last of them on the sodden little pile that he had created against the wall of the underpass, he said, “Are you a New Age type or something—channel spirits, heal yourself with crystals?”
“No. I merely said reality is perception.”
“Sounds New Age,” he said, returning to watch her finish her own task.
“Well it’s not. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.”
“Meanwhile,” he said, “I’ll wander aimlessly in the wilderness of my ignorance.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”
“Are you about finished here? I’m freezing.”
Del stepped back from the open passenger-side door, the roll of plumbing tape in one hand and the razor blade in the other, surveying her work. “It’ll keep the rain out well enough, I guess, but it’s not exactly the latest thing in aesthetically pleasing motor-vehicle accessories.”
In the poor light, Tommy couldn’t clearly see the elaborate Art Deco, jukebox-inspired mural on the van, but he could discern that a substantial portion of it had been scraped off the passenger side. “I’m really sorry about the paint job. It was spectacular. Must have cost a bundle.”