Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead Page B

chin and lips. All of a sudden she didn’t want any more ice cream. She had never eaten anything so rich. In her world there wasn’t anything so rich. Her stomach felt queasy.
    “I have to go,” she said.
    She stood up, so did he.
    “Hey, you know the thing is, what you said about not having tools? What I mean is, I have tools. I mean I fix things. It’s not a big deal, but I’m good and I like doing it. I can fix all kinds of things, you know? Palm Pilots, cellphones, laptop. Whatever.”
    Kylie waved the locator. “You don’t even know what this is .”
    “I don’t have to know what it is to make it go again.”
    Hesitantly, she handed him the locator. While he was turning it in his fingers, she spotted the Tourist. He was wearing a puffy black coat and a watch cap, and he was walking directly toward her, expressionless, his left hand out of sight inside his pocket. He wasn’t a human being.
    Toby noticed her changed expression and followed her gaze.
    “You know that guy?”
    Kylie ran. She didn’t look back to see if the Tourist was running after her. She cut through the people crowding the sidewalk, her heart slamming. It was a minute before she realized she’d left the locator with Toby. That almost made her stop, but it was too late. Let him keep the damn thing.
    She ran hard. The Old Men had chosen her for this mission because of her youth and vitality (so many were sickly and weak), but after a while she had to stop and catch her breath. She looked around. The vista of blue water was dazzling. The city was awesome, madly perfect, phantasmagoric, better than the movies. The Old Men called it an abomination. Kylie didn’t care what they said. She was here for her mother, who was dying and who grieved for the trapped souls.
    Kylie turned slowly around, and here came two more Tourists.
    No, three.
    Three from three different directions, one of them crossing the street, halting traffic. Stalking toward her with no pretense of human expression, as obvious to her among the authentic populace as cockroaches in a scatter of white rice.
    Kylie girded herself. Before she could move, a car drew up directly in front of her, a funny round car painted canary yellow. The driver threw the passenger door open, and there was the man again, Toby.
    “Get in!”
    She ducked into the car, which somehow reminded her of the scutter, and it accelerated away. A Tourist who had scrabbled for the door handle spun back and fell. Kylie leaned over the seat. The Tourist got up, the other two standing beside him, not helping. Then Toby cranked the car into a turn that threw her against the door. They were climbing a steep hill, and Toby seemed to be doing too many things at once, working the clutch, the steering wheel and radio, scanning through stations until he lighted upon something loud and incomprehensible that made him smile and nod his head.
    “You better put on your seatbelt,” he said. “They’ll ticket you for that shit, believe it or not.”
    Kylie buckled her belt.
    “Thanks,” she said. “You came out of nowhere.”
    “Anything can happen. Who were those guys?”
    “Tourists.”
    “Okay. Hey, you know what?”
    “What?”
    He took his hand off the shifter and pulled Kylie’s locator out of his inside jacket pocket.
    “I bet you I can fix this gizmo.”
    “Would you bet your soul on it?”
    “Why not?” He grinned.
    He stopped at his apartment to pick up his tools, and Kylie waited in the car. There was a clock on the dashboard. 11:45 a.m. She set the timer on her wrist chronometer.
    Twelve hours and change.
    They sat in a coffee bar in Belltown. More incomprehensible music thumped from box speakers bracketed near the ceiling. Paintings by some local artist decorated the walls, violent slashes of color, faces of dogs and men and women drowning, mouths gaping.
    Kylie kept an eye open for Tourists.
    Toby hunched over her locator, a jeweler’s kit unrolled next to his espresso. He had the back off the device