End of the Century by Chris Roberson Page A

all of the cost herself, and then successfully guilted her mother into picking up the tab for the rest. Alice didn't know much Spanish, and all that she got out of the trip was a suspension for getting caught drinking by one of the trip sponsors, a case of turista that she couldn't shake for a week, and the passport that she later used to get into the UK.
    Alice had almost gotten lost on the subways in Mexico, neither her language nor her orienteering skills up to the task of deciphering the posted maps, but she figured she'd have an easier time of it in the London Underground, since a) the maps were in English, and b) the trains were full of people who could answer questions, if she got turned around.
    As it was, she managed to get completely mixed up. She'd meant to end up at Waterloo Station, right next to the London Eye, but managed to get onto the Bakerloo line at Piccadilly Circus heading the wrong way and found herself instead in Paddington, a mile or two away.
    Alice considered getting back on the train and heading back the other way, but that was another six bucks she really didn't have to spare, and according to the map in her Frommer's it didn't look like too far a walk, so she decided to hoof it instead and save the money.
    Everything around her seemed disappointingly… normal.
    When she'd traveled in Mexico, she'd never been able to forget for a second that she was in a foreign country—everyone was talking a different language, she had trouble reading all the signs, all of the brand names advertised on billboards and signs were strange.
    Here, though, it was easy to forget she wasn't just in another part of the United States. Everything was written in English—though with the occasional extra ‘u’ tossed in for extra colo u r—and the bus stops all carried ads for the same movies and TV shows she watched back home. The people she passed on the street spoke with accents but were speaking English. And coming from Austin, which was not only a big college town with lots of foreign students but the hub of enough technology and dot-com business that there were always people from all different countries to be found in the stores and restaurants, accents were nothing new to her. At the barbeque joint where Alice used to go with her mother and grandmother, there were even times it seemed they were the only native English speakers in the place, between the Chinese and Japanese and Hindi being spoken at the tables around them and the Spanish being spoken behind the counter. The accountant who kept the books for Alice's mother was Irish, and their neighbors were German on one side and Korean on the other. So it was hardly culture shock to run into new accents in another country. That the majority of them were speaking English just meant it was even more familiar.
    When Alice had been in Mexico, the punk rock white chick with the dyed-black hair and nose ring, Doc Martens and leather jacket, she'd gotten more than her fair share of stares. Here? Nobody gave her even a second glance.
    Of course, what would they all say if they knew? If they knew that she was on a mission from God?

    Technically speaking, Alice didn't know who she was on a mission for. She received visions, but for all she knew they could just as easily have come from the Queen of Faerie as from God, or space aliens, or another dimension, or a supercomputer at the end of time. All she knew for certain was that she was receiving visions, and that she had to do something about them.
    They were, however, visions. Not just voices, not just hallucinations. That was for crazy people. And Alice wasn't crazy. At least, she was relatively sure she wasn't.
    Her logic was that crazy people didn't know that they were crazy. They just woke up one day convinced that aliens from the Dog Star were communicating to them through the fillings in their back molars, or that the Virgin Mary appeared to them in their Pop Tarts, or that they were really the