Calculating Route
Michael Koryta and Jeffrey David Greene
The GPS was exactly the type of birthday present you could expect from David—cheap, thoughtless, and sans gift receipt.
Robin had gone overboard in her gratitude, because while the USS Relationship was sinking she still wanted to pretend they could carry on, or at least turn around, but even as she kissed him she thought, What yard sale is this thing from?
It didn’t have instructions, didn’t even have a box. Just the display unit and the power adapter that plugged into your cigarette lighter, the thing so obviously secondhand that it should have had someone else’s name written on it. In fact, she discovered when she turned it on, it as good as did have someone else’s name on it: the home address was already programmed in, and it wasn’t hers, and she couldn’t figure out how to change it. Lovely.
Hardly a splurge from David, then, but she didn’t need a splurge; all she needed was at least the imitation of compassion and caring. They’d been together five months, and anyone who’d been with Robin for five months should have known a few things about her, one being that she didn’t venture outside of her comfort zone much. Her daily routes—work, grocery store, gym, dog groomer, rinse and repeat—were well trod. The more thoughtful gift would have been a blindfold to make the trips challenging, not a GPS to keep her from getting lost driving the same damn roads she drove every day. With her birthday falling just ahead of Valentine’s Day, he had another chance, though. Maybe she’d get the blindfold next.
Even the name was generic: StreetDreams2000. No Garmin or Magellan or even TomTom, nothing anyone had ever heard of, and with a number affixed that made it seem dated, more than a decade behind the times.
She loathed it not because it was pointless but because it was a perfect symbol of their relationship, and it became an even more perfect symbol when she actually went so far as to hang the dumb thing up in her car just to please him. There was no point to pleasing him, she knew this, and yet here she was, still trying. Now that was a symbol, and not one she wanted to consider too deeply, though it was hard not to when it stared her in the face on every drive.
The idea was simply to have it visible, she had no intention of using it, but the device turned on every time she started the car. In this way, at least, it was ahead of other models she’d seen, because it didn’t even have to be plugged into the cigarette lighter to function. That fascinated her. Turn the key, and the screen came on, as if they were linked, but she’d never attached it to the car in any fashion beyond the suction cup that held the mount to the windshield. It should have no way of knowing that it was even inside of a vehicle, as far as she could tell, but, to be fair, Robin wasn’t a gadget girl, and she was used to marveling at things other people understood, like the way her iPhone would upload photographs to her computer without instruction. One of her friends had sighed with exasperation while trying to explain the concept of “cloud” file storage. Robin figured the StreetDream2000 must run on something similar.
Still, she didn’t need it on, and so if it had just shown her the map in silence while she drove, fine, she could deal, but instead the thing talked. A chipper British voice asked her over and over again if she’d like help finding her destination. Finally she told it yes, just to shut it up, and the voice activation was remarkable, much better than those customer service robots that made you wish you’d been born in the day of the rotary telephone. She gave the address of her insurance office just one time, and it was a tongue twister, so she was sure the device would never understand, but immediately the British voice came back with: “Calculating route to Twenty-Three Thirty-Two Coriander Courtyard, Marietta, Georgia.”
It took her a few miles to realize its flaw: the voice activation might have been top of the line, but once it was talking to her, she’d mindlessly followed the instructions, as if she was the robot, and made a left turn three miles ahead of where she needed to turn. She was swearing at the GPS, and at David, and considering a U-turn, when she realized she was on a one-way street. Nothing to do now but follow through.
The street kicked her out into a small subdivision that had sprung up in recent years where once there had simply been fields and For Sale signs. She’d never driven out to see the place, and once she got there she was curious, so she followed the GPS instructions through the winding streets, eyeing the look-alike brick homes, and suddenly found herself at a stop sign facing the back of the business park that included her company. She looked at the clock and said, “I’ll be damned.”
Robin knew exactly how long it took her to drive to the office, and, even if she’d caught nothing but green lights on the way, she was four minutes early. The shortcut through the neighborhood was a true time-saver. It might not sound like much, four minutes, but it felt like plenty. And if you did the math, that was eight minutes each day, and forty minutes per week, and two hours each month. Which meant it was exactly one day of free time added onto her life each year.
A day of your life back? She smiled at the StreetDreams2000. The gift that kept on giving, indeed.
THE MAGIC DIDN’T work everywhere, of course. The grocery store run was the same as always, and the gym, but on Saturday she saved six minutes on the trip to the dog groomer, twelve minutes round-trip. It was funny how you never considered a change in route once you’ve determined the best way. Or at least she didn’t. Maybe more creative types did. But once Robin locked on to something that worked, she didn’t change it up without a good reason. The neighborhood that was saving one day of her life each year in four-minute increments had been behind her office complex for years and she’d never even thought to consider the driving possibilities it offered. The idea of a computer telling you where to turn seemed like anti-independence, but it didn’t feel that way. Robin had always had an irrational fear of getting lost—perhaps one of the reasons she didn’t explore alternative routes—and the GPS gave her confidence to try. After it saved her thirty minutes at least cutting through Atlanta rush-hour traffic to meet David for dinner downtown on Monday night, she began to think that perhaps it had been a very thoughtful gift, after all. Maybe he recognized some shortcomings in her that he didn’t want to say out loud, and this was a gesture. It was an awful lot to assume about a used GPS, but, still, they had their best night together since the early weeks, and she couldn’t help but feel a connection to the gift.
She wanted to go home with him after dinner, in fact, wanted to have sex. No, check that—she wanted to fuck. And that wasn’t a word she liked hearing for lovemaking; even in the movies, it gave her an involuntary sour face. The word belonged as an insult, not tied up with romance. But on Monday night, it was exactly what she wanted, and it was exactly what they did, even though he was working the late shift, which meant he was tying his shoes at midnight when she was pouring an unprecedented third glass of wine, watching him get dressed while she lay still tangled in the sheets.
“You wanna just . . . stay here?” he asked. “I mean, you can.” He looked at her and then around the house with unease, as if she might take to prowling through the drawers and closets. She’d never been alone in his house before.
“No, I’ll go home,” she said. “It would be weird without you here. And lonely.”
The last part she never would have said, but she managed to not only get the words out, but to do so coquettishly, and somehow it led to one more round of sex and a spilled glass of wine and David running out the door already twenty minutes late for work while she stood barefoot on the sidewalk and laughed.
What a night. What an odd, wonderful night. It had taken on an amusing fog to her, the wine good-natured as it settled into her bloodstream, and she was sleepy, and for just a moment, one long lonely hesitation, she thought about staying. She could be asleep within minutes, and maybe this was just the sort of thing they needed.
In the end, though, she couldn’t do it. Got dressed and found her keys and left despite the alcohol buzz. It was no doubt a product of the buzz that she thought the GPS turned on before she turned the key in the ignition. She wasn’t used to being drunk, or anywhere in the neighborhood of drunk, but hand to God she felt she’d barely slammed the car door before the screen lit up. Maybe not, though. Surely not. As the engine warmed, the polite British voice asked for her destination, same as always, trustworthy, and she said, “Home” before remembering that it wasn’t programmed right for that.
“Taking you home,” the British voice said, and she corrected it.
“Thirty-Seven Thirty Collins Drive,” she said. “New destination. Thirty-Seven Thirty Collins Drive.”
“Calculating route.”
No bold ideas from the GPS this time, just out to the freeway, same as always. She was enjoying the haze of wine and sex and her mind was on David as the dark road rolled by, thinking that maybe she’d made a mistake, maybe they did work, maybe she should finally break down and suggest a trip out of town, to that place in the mountains, the one where—
“In 10.6 miles, take Exit 29E—Sandy Plains Road,” the GPS intoned.
“Yes, sir,” she murmured, and for the first time she really felt sad about her decision. Maybe she’d imagined the uneasiness on David’s face, maybe he wanted her to stay. God, could she get through one day of her life without so many maybes?
“Take exit ahead.”
Maybe, she thought as she exited the highway, the problem wasn’t him, or even them, but her. She was set in her ways, she knew this, and his gift of the GPS had proven that it wasn’t always a good thing. She’d benefited from some changes. And now, being set her in ways had her going home alone to an empty bed. No, it wasn’t always a good thing.
“In one mile, turn right onto Hiram Avenue.”
She wouldn’t have taken Hiram. She glanced at the map, trying to see how this was a good idea, but it was zoomed in tight. When she tried to adjust it, the British voice chastised her.
“We ask that you refrain from operating the GPS keypad while your vehicle is in motion. Thank you.”
Well, the hell with it, then. She’d take Hiram and see if this shortcut was as good as all the others.
What Hiram was—long and dark. What Hiram wasn’t—a shortcut, not that she could see. The pleasant wine fog was fading, and she was suddenly aware of how late it was and remembering all the reasons she didn’t like to be out alone at this hour. Robin hated being scared, and these situations were ripe for fear. Just when she was about to make a U-turn and return to the highway, the StreetDreams2000 interrupted her fear with a reassurance:
“In three-tenths of a mile, turn right onto Sterling Street.”
Progress. She knew Sterling Street, or at least knew one end of it. She imagined she had to be at the far opposite end now, but her internal navigation wasn’t great, so she trusted the GPS and turned right. The darkness ahead and lights in the rearview mirror made her second-guess this immediately, but the GPS voice told her “Continue to follow the road” and she figured the only thing you could do to make a bad shortcut worse was to deviate from the new plan.
She made a left turn on South Ballanger, and then another right, and she had the idea that the GPS was doing the same thing it had done to shave four minutes off her drive to work—cheat by cutting through residential neighborhoods. That relaxed her, as it was already a proven technique.
“Turn right onto Sampson’s Ferry Road.”
She’d been driving for twenty minutes now on a trip that should take no more than that, and she no longer recognized anything. Maybe it was time to give up on the genius of the StreetDreams and double back to Sterling Road. The only problem with that was that she was no longer certain how to double back. The route to get here had been convoluted. The iPhone had a GPS option but she didn’t like the idea of driving and using her phone, and she certainly didn’t want to pull over in this dark stretch of desolate road to play with her phone. It looked like she was driving down the streets of a neighborhood that hadn’t been built yet, the pavement fresh but the lots on either side empty. Not a streetlight in sight.
“In five hundred feet, bear left.”
Bear left? There was no place to go. The road dead-ended, and now she saw that it was exactly what she’d suspected—an unrealized residential development carved into what had once been farmland. Her headlights were shining on a large lot map and a sign that boasted DREAM HOMES STARTING AT $400,000, COMING NEXT YEAR!
They were still selling lots, but no construction had taken place. The sign looked old and dirty, too, and she wondered whether next year had really meant this year or even last year and the development plan collapsed beneath the real estate market and the economy. Regardless, she needed to figure her way back out of these winding roads.
She pulled onto the hard-packed dirt and gravel to turn around. Ahead of her a weathered, decrepit barn loomed against the night sky like a discarded set item from a B-movie horror flick, and the British voice said, “You have arrived at your destination. Welcome home.”
“This is not home,” she snapped as she put the car into reverse, and then she paused before pressing down on the accelerator, struck by a sudden, alarming realization: this had never been home for anyone. Even if the GPS was a secondhand gift, as she’d suspected, no one would have programmed an empty lot in an undeveloped neighborhood into it as their home address.
Something moved in the rearview mirror then. A ripple of shadow, and Robin screamed, a sound so loud and high and hysterical that she couldn’t believe it had come from her.
And all for nothing, too. Because the shadow was gone. She stared in the mirror and saw nothing but empty black fields, and ahead nothing but that weathered sign boasting of unbuilt dream homes, and she knew that it was time to get the hell out of here because she was starting to get scared, really scared, and Robin had led an overly cautious life for many years rooted in one simple principle: she hated to be scared.
Now the time had come to admit two things—she was scared to stay here, and, for a completely irrational reason, she was scared of the GPS. She didn’t like the way she blindly, dumbly trusted it, and four minutes saved going to and from work each day wouldn’t mean much if it led her down the wrong street sometime. An empty, dark street.
A street like this.
She put the car in park, grabbed the GPS, and—after one careful glance in the mirror and then out the window to her left, making sure that the moving shadow had indeed been her imagination, she stepped out of the vehicle, walked to the back of the car, and heaved the GPS as far as she could into the darkness. She got some distance on it, more than she’d expected—fear was fuel, evidently.
“I’ll find my own way from now on, thanks,” she said when it landed in the distant weeds, and then she turned back to her car for the last time in her life.
POLICE FOUND THE car in the same position the next day—door open, engine still running, though the low-fuel light was on by then. Robin’s body, what was left of it, lay some six feet away.
Her boyfriend told police he had no idea what she was doing in that empty maze of streets at midnight, so far from her home, and everyone they interviewed assured them that Robin was not one to take shortcuts or try new routes home. She’d been driven there, they insisted, kidnapped and forced into the abandoned area; there was absolutely no other explanation.
Motives were hard to come by. Her purse remained in the car, untouched. The only thing they could say was missing for sure was a GPS unit, but the boyfriend confessed that it couldn’t have been worth much, as he’d picked it up for $40 on the afternoon of her birthday, a panic gift because he’d forgotten that it was her birthday. If it had been a botched robbery attempt, they’d have been better off with the car or the purse.
For a time there was some hope that her final movements could be tracked using the GPS, and possibly the killer even located through it, if it was still on and putting out a signal. But David, the boyfriend, had no corresponding paperwork or serial numbers and couldn’t even recall the brand. It wasn’t one of the common names, he said. Just some generic rip-off. A pawnshop special.
Two weeks later, David having been cleared through witness accounts and autopsy time of death, the police had no suspects in the homicide.
AT FIRST RILEY didn’t even recognize it as a GPS.
It just looked like the corner of a black plastic rectangle that someone had wedged between a busty Power Girl action figure and a Cthulhu plushy doll on the toy rack in the back of the comic book shop.
Could be Star Trek memorabilia that somebody left behind, he thought with idle disinterest as he moved through the shelves. A replica phaser or something. He was too busy to investigate at the moment and figured it belonged to Carmen—Riley’s sole employee. Carmen was the weekend guy, and he was always messing up back orders and leaving Jolt Cola cans and other crap all over the place. Riley liked Carmen though, particularly because Carmen took most of his paycheck in store credit.
Only after a lunch of jalapeño-flavored ramen did Riley find time to give the imposter item a second look. This time he shoveled the Power Girl figure—in her glossy clamshell packaging—aside and reached for the suspicious black square.
Strangely, it wasn’t a toy, or a statuette, or anything else related to Star Trek, Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica.
It was a GPS.
Wonder who left this here? Riley thought, pushing the only visible button on the device. The GPS powered on and its screen flickered before showing a cartoony image of a moon with a human face gazing down at a long cobblestone street below.
The moon’s face smiled and winked, as if it was holding some secret knowledge, and a moment later the text scrolled by:
The StreetDreams2000.
Riley knew the onslaught of new-comic-release-day customers would be in any moment, demanding their comic books, so he headed back behind the counter and placed the device next to the register. As the afternoon regulars filed in to pick up their issue pulls, Riley questioned each one about the GPS, but no one seemed to know anything about it. He was pleased—for once—when Carmen finally pushed his way into the shop seeking out his pulls for the week.
“My comics in yet?” Carmen asked, flipping a long shank of greasy black hair out of his eyes. Just a few years ago, Carmen had been a bassist for a number of speed-metal bands, including FightZombies, an infamous group that went on to minor fame (sans Carmen) by touring various dives, barns, and house parties all the way from north Georgia to West Virginia.
“Yes,” Riley said, gathering up Carmen’s pulls and sliding them across the counter. Carmen’s selection of comics was rather eclectic: on top was his run-of-the-mill Marvel stuff, but underneath, carefully hidden inside a paper bag, were his hentai manga, Japanese comics that featured busty women having sex with large penis-shaped robots and tentacle beasts with hundreds of eyes. Riley never understood the fetish and rarely asked about it. “Here you go.”
Carmen nodded, thumped his fist flat on the counter, and turned to leave. “Thanks, chief.”
“Wait, before you go, I’ve got to ask you something.” Riley pulled the GPS from behind the counter and offered it to Carmen for inspection. “This yours? Or do you know if someone left it here over the weekend?”
Carmen squinted, and his eyes became ferrety slits. “Naw.” He shook his head slowly. “Definitely ain’t mine. Don’t think anybody left it here either.”
“Not even one of the guys from the Yu-Gi-Oh tournament?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.” Carmen leaned heavily on the glass counter—a habit that annoyed Riley to no end. All he needed was for Carmen to shatter the glass and impale himself upon the upraised sword of the Red Sonja statuette below—
“What did I tell you about leaning on the counter?”
“Sorry.” Carmen stepped back and leaned against a shelf of newly arrived comics instead. “It doesn’t look like a normal GPS to me.”
“You know anything about them?”
Carmen seemed to think about that, his eyes going wide as he scratched at a crusty brown stain on the Dr. Who T-shirt underneath his biker jacket. “I don’t know. I mean, I read about them in Consumer Reports—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. I was looking for a dashboard-mounted GPS for the van a while back. You know, for touring and whatnot. Read a bunch of reviews for TomTom and Magellan and shit.” Carmen pointed at the StreetDreams2000. “Never seen that one before. Must be some flea market brand.”
Riley glanced down at the sleek unit and its bright screensaver, which continued to flash the StreetDreams logo over a digitized background of plump clouds. “I don’t know. Seems like it’s pretty high quality to me.”
“Whatever.” Carmen shrugged and peeked into his paper bag, the one containing his X-rated import comics. For a fleeting moment one of the covers was visible and Riley saw a bright red nipple being tweaked by suction-cupped fingertips. Carmen interrupted Riley’s gaze with a question: “What are you going to do with it?”
“Keep it behind the desk and see if anyone asks for it, I guess.”
“Well, somebody obviously left the thing here; you don’t just accidentally carry that thing in from your car and drop it behind some comics. Nobody is coming back for it. Just keep the thing. Or better yet, sell it to a pawnshop.”
“I’m not selling it.”
“Give it someone special, then,” Carmen said. “Free gift. And with Valentine’s Day on the way.”
“Yeah, right.”
Riley didn’t have a girlfriend, but neither did Carmen, so why it bothered him so much, he couldn’t say. It just did.
“One of our best shopping weeks,” Carmen continued. “Every hopeless sad sack will come in here and blow money on comics because they sure as shit can’t blow it on roses or lingerie, am I right? Hell, it’s like Christmas in this business, it’s like—”
“Shut up,” Riley said. “Carmen, just shut the hell up.”
“Suit yourself,” Carmen said, indifferent to his anger, now staring blankly at the GPS again. “I would dump that thing, though. It’s almost like someone was trying to get rid of it.”
Riley finished up his evening close-out ritual by counting the till, boxing up a modest pile of old role-playing game books, and then pulling down the window shutters. Just before heading out for good, he stopped and looked at the StreetDreams2000, which was still flashing its hypnotic screensaver.
Incredible battery life that thing has, he thought.
He knew that the right thing to do would be to hold the GPS in the shop for a few days at least. See if a customer maybe came back in to reclaim it. Riley knew what it was like to lose something important and then feel that immense rush of calm when you recognized it was in the hands of a Good Samaritan all along. It was the righteous thing. A heroic thing. The kind of noble action that builds a customer base.
Still, he’d always wanted a GPS, but never truly felt the need to buy one. His life didn’t warrant such a device. He barely ever went anywhere that required directions, and everywhere important in his world was within a fifty-mile radius of his house. His stirring social life consisted of driving to and from his shop, visiting his mother in Norcross on the weekends, and maybe catching a LAN party with the guys over at the Strategist.
It wasn’t a new, adult monotony. The monotony of his youth had been similar—unless punctured by bullying or rejection. He’d always been the weirdo, and mostly that settled on his looks. In middle school, his peers had nicknamed him “Pug” because of his flat, sloping cranium, bulging eyes, and pert, upturned nose.
Things didn’t change much in high school, not until he fell deeper into his love of superheroes, Hammer Horror flicks, and Star Trek. Eventually he found friends—fellow geeks with equally interesting nicknames—and they spent every waking hour together in the camaraderie of shared fanboy obsessions. This allowed them to block out the rest of the social universe. Their geeky interests became a fortress of solitude, a self-governing civilization complete with its own lexicon, social cues, and inside jokes.
Everyone else moved on after high school, going on to Georgia Tech or schools out of state. Riley had never been a stellar student and so he didn’t follow his friends to college. The next year was hard. With his universe of fellow geeks moved on he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. The nearest comic book shop was twenty miles away, and it mostly catered to little kids playing Pokémon. He’d lost his friends, lost his wonderful cocoon made up of back issues of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and piles of twenty-sided dice.
Then he figured out a way to stay a fanboy forever: he looked at a map of comic book stores around Georgia and found an underserviced area. Then he scraped together enough family money to move to Winder and open Kingdom Comics. That was ten years ago.
At first it worked. Kingdom Comics made him feel vindicated.
I’m not Pug anymore, he would think. I’ve built my own world. I can live out the rest of my days surrounded by people just like me.
But now, as he edged toward thirty-two, he recognized the chief limitations of his chosen profession: money. Over the years he watched as his high school friends’ lives grew with new families and bigger houses. For Riley, every last dollar went to keeping Kingdom Comics alive. He felt like he didn’t even have enough money to take a girl on a date (if she would’ve gone in the first place), and his lack of funds certainly removed the possibility of any vacations, new cars, or pricey gadgets.
Riley gritted his teeth and snatched the StreetDreams2000 off the counter.
Fuck it, he thought. Maybe this one is for me.
THAT NIGHT, IN his ancient Nissan Sentra, he played with his new toy. The StreetDreams2000 was shedding LED light, illuminating the dangling, tentlike felt ceiling of Riley’s disheveled car. Usually the shabby interior would’ve bothered him. It was a visceral reminder of just one more thing in his life that was mediocre, imperfect, or just plain crappy. But for once, he didn’t care, because today he had the StreetDreams2000. He was staring intently down at the GPS, playing with the settings, changing its voice to that of a Finnish man with a deep baritone, then a throaty woman speaking Magyar, and finally he settled upon the voice of a pixielike British woman who sounded part secret agent, part phone sex worker.
The voice controls were remarkable. It seemed to pick up on every word you said, no matter how rushed they came, or what accent you used on them. One setting option said: LET ME GET TO KNOW YOU. Riley grinned at that. Getting to know a GPS? Whatever.
“Get to know me,” he said.
A moment later the British voice uttered back to him: “Hello, User1. What is your name?”
“Riley.”
“Good to meet you, Riley,” the StreetDreams2000 said. “What would you like to do today?”
He sat in silence for a moment, unsure of how to answer. It seemed like an odd question, he thought. Almost open-ended, at least from the tone.
“Are you asking for an address?”
“An address or a location of your desire.” The GPS seemed to pause for a moment, before adding—he swore with a slight flirtation: “If you can dream it, we can get you there.”
Riley grinned a bit and decided to play along. He had had a lot of fun messing around with a customer’s iPhone Siri, and the StreetDreams2000 seemed like yet another opportunity to mix it up with a feisty artificial intelligence.
“I’m hungry,” Riley said.
“Hungry for what, Riley?”
It was better than Siri. Better than anything of that kind. He decided to screw with it a bit more, see how much it really understood.
“The best fucking fish tacos in Georgia,” he said.
“The best fucking fish tacos in Georgia,” the StreetDreams2000 repeated, not missing a beat. “That would be Restaurante Del Mundo, 16778 Akers Boulevard, Atlanta. Would you like me to ready your directions?”
AFTER ROUGHLY AN hour of following the StreetDreams2000’s sweet, dulcet-toned commands, he found himself at Restaurante Del Mundo, a small pueblo-styled building out on I-20. When he went inside, the restaurant looked barely open: unfinished drywall, a few tables and chairs, a counter, and a register. Not even a posted menu. The grand opening was a few weeks away. How in the hell had the GPS determined this was the place for fish tacos?
The owners, a stocky husband and wife duo, stomped out from in back and seemed perplexed but genuinely glad to see Riley. He tried to leave, but they insisted that since he’d gone out of his way to find them, they’d cook for him. After a bit, they came back from the kitchen with a big plate of fish tacos. The food was unbelievable. The fish tasted fresh and lightly seasoned, and the tortillas were warm and soft without being overly doughy.
Yup, he thought, licking fresh pico de gallo from his fingers. These are the best fish tacos I’ve ever tasted.
After he’d finished what easily might have been the best meal of his entire life, the owners asked Riley how he’d found about them.
“Honestly?” Riley said, smiling crookedly and fidgeting with his napkin. The truth felt embarrassing. “My GPS brought me here.”
The owners seemed shocked. According to them, Restaurante Del Mundo hadn’t even officially opened yet and wasn’t in any phone book.
“We want to get a, what do you call it? MyFace page. And on the Google. But we have not yet.”
“Well,” Riley said, “maybe somebody is giving you a hand with that, and you just don’t know it.”
When he hopped back in the car, he grinned wryly at the GPS perched on his dashboard.
“So you’ve got magic powers, right?” he said. “How else would you know about this place?”
The GPS didn’t answer him. Instead, the screen flashed back to a current road map and that sexy voice chirped: “Next destination, please.”
“Take me to the best comic book shop in Georgia,” he said and then immediately regretted asking the question. He didn’t want to hear the truth—would rather hear a lie: that it was Kingdom Comics. But he knew that wasn’t the truth. He had worked incredibly hard on his store, kept it well stocked and solidly organized, but it wasn’t the best. He knew that. But part of him just wanted to feel like he’d really accomplished something.
Pug from high school might’ve gone out and started a mediocre comic shop, he always thought. But not me. I built something great.
The GPS was about to pass judgment on that, though, and Riley knew he shouldn’t have asked.
“The best comic book shop in Georgia,” the StreetDreams2000 said. “That would be Oxford Comics, 2855 Piedmont Road NE, Atlanta. Would you like me to ready your directions?”
“No. And Oxford Comics can kiss my ass.”
Silence lingered in the air, but then there was a faint whining sound, coming from somewhere unidentifiable. He wondered if maybe it was the GPS or perhaps just his worsening tinnitus from all that Pantera played in his youth.
Oxford fucking Comics, he thought. It wasn’t just that Kingdom Comics wasn’t the best—rather it was the fact that despite Riley’s best efforts it still wasn’t the best. He was a loser. Couldn’t succeed at anything. Couldn’t build a successful comic book shop. Couldn’t find a woman to love. Was still Pug, after all these years. Still the kid from countless confrontations with jocks in the hallway who pushed him up against lockers or spilled his backpack over, dumping his character sheets, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monstrous Compendiums all over the ground. “Fetch it, Pug!” they’d say, laughing and shoving him to the linoleum floor. “Fetch!”
Pug was a loser. Pug hadn’t achieved anything, hadn’t built something important with Kingdom Comics. Instead he’d forged a prison from which he could never escape—
“I’m not Pug anymore,” he said, aloud, feeling stupid as soon as the words hit the air.
“Pug is not a known address or location,” the StreetDreams2000 said. “Please repeat.”
He didn’t respond to the request. His temples were starting to hurt—aching from grinding his teeth. It grew uncomfortably quiet in the car again, but the StreetDreams2000 broke the silence with a single question: “Where would you like to go, Riley?”
“I don’t know. Okay?” He squeezed the faded steering wheel until his knuckles ached. “Stop fucking asking.”
“ ‘I don’t know’ is not a known address or location,” the StreetDreams2000 said. “Please repeat.”
“Stop fucking asking me!”
“ ‘Stop fucking asking me’ is not a known address or location,” it said, but this time the tone sounded different. Almost annoyed. “Please offer a valid destination request.”
“I don’t—whatever—” Riley sighed loudly, frustrated. “Just take me home.”
The GPS didn’t answer. Not immediately. Instead it seemed to pause, as if thinking, before saying softly: “If you can dream it, we can take you there.”
Riley’s eyes welled with tears, and he couldn’t even explain why. Maybe it was the way the StreetDreams2000 was talking now, as if this cold A.I. really cared about him and wanted to deliver him to the location of his dreams. Maybe it was because no voice so kind had reached him from a human face in years. Fuck years, hadn’t reached him from a human voice in his whole goddamn life. He was crying now, how pathetic was that, sobbing into his palms, the tears dripping between his fingertips.
“Take me home,” Riley said, before whispering: “Take me to someone who loves me.”
“Calculating your route, Riley. Calculating your route.”
THIRTY MINUTES LATER he was driving through a downpour, listening to bad wipers squeak across the windshield.
Need to get those replaced, he thought, brain still foggy with tears and emotion. They’re a driving hazard.
“In 10.6 miles, take Exit 29E—Sandy Plains Road.”
Part of him recognized how crazy this all felt. He was following the soft, cooing directions of a GPS that seemed able to magically find any location that he desired. Now it was taking him to someone who would love him? What in the hell was he following this thing for?
Because if it’s half as good as those tacos . . . he thought, and managed a laugh. What the fuck did it matter? He had a full tank of gas and, as usual, nobody was waiting on him.
The StreetDreams2000 clearly didn’t share his mirth. Her voice was hard now. All business: “In one mile, turn right onto Hiram Avenue.”
He was thankful that Hiram still looked like civilization to him, albeit a civilization wreathed in a thick Scottish fog. Riley leaned forward and squinted, trying desperately to see anything beyond his windshield. He couldn’t help but imagine misshapen creatures hiding in the shadows. One too many comic books. Or ten thousand too many.
“In three-tenths of a mile, turn right onto Sterling Street.”
He followed the orders and the fog gradually broke, and Riley was relieved to see a series of housing developments—the expensive kind that he’d never be able to buy into. But the next set of directions gradually took him deeper and deeper into territory devoid of streetlights or finished construction.
“Turn right onto Sampson’s Ferry Road.”
This next turn brought him over a hill and onto a gravel road that shook his Nissan’s ailing suspension. Riley gazed around and realized that he was deep in the middle of nowhere. Time to give up on the StreetDreams.
He was just about to turn around when the GPS barked another order at him:
“In five hundred feet, bear left.”
From what he could tell, the gravel path seemed to cut out here, stopping at the end of the field.
“Bear left,” the StreetDreams2000 said, its polite British voice suddenly sounding a bit petulant.
He paused, considering what to do next, and his headlights illuminated the empty fields and a sign promising dream homes to come.
That was it? The GPS thought this was funny? Riley wanted to find someone who loved him, and in answer the GPS took him to a place where nobody lived?
“You’re a prick,” he told the device.
“Riley, please bear left.” A pause, then, “Trust me, Riley. Bear left.”
To the left he saw a gravel track leading into the empty lots, mounds of dirt pushed to the side from back when they’d hoped to break ground on a neighborhood that had never come to life.
You can still turn around, he thought. There’s nothing here for you.
“Riley.” The StreetDreams2000’s voice sounded soft and forgiving again. “Riley. Bear left.”
He spun the wheel and his tires sputtered over the grass as he pulled onto the dirt road. The next stretch took him a few hundred feet, around one of those dirt mounds, toward sharp hills that were cradled with dense woods. There was an ancient barn practically clinging to the side of a steep hill; contorted tree limbs had grown through holes the walls, and the wooden branches cradled the building like wretched hands. Riley pumped the brakes and his car rolled to a stop, engine sputtering.
“Some GeekSquad programmer is going to pay for this shit,” he said. “Somebody thinks this is funny? I’m going to get my money back tomorrow.”
But of course he wasn’t. He had no receipt, nor even an idea of where the crazy GPS came from. Nobody to blame. So he’d go home and find someone to blame.
I wonder if some dickhead customer thought this was funny, and actually meant it for me, he considered for the first time. If they’re listening to me and laughing right now—I swear to God, if I find out someone has been listening to me sit in my car and cry, they are going to see a new version of me, a side they can’t even imagine. I will tear their arms right off their smartass bodies. . .
That required getting home, though. And how in the hell did he get home from here?
Maybe the GPS still would do that much for him. Maybe if he just put in the address, the obnoxious piece of shit on the dashboard would get him out of this downpour and back into his basement with some Chinese food on the way. Even if it was laughing at him.
“New destination,” he said, trying to make his voice hard, badass even, no more of the teary-eyed shit.
“You’ve arrived at your destination, Riley.”
“Like hell I have. Address. New address. New destination. Now.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Home! I want to go home!”
The StreetDreams2000 spoke again, the last words Riley ever heard: “You are home, Pug.”
DEPUTY DAVID WATTS had been in Harvest Moon Farms three times in his first five years with the sheriff’s department—once to break up a keg party, once at the report of someone setting off fireworks, and once following a drunk driver who’d turned into the hopeless swirl of circular lanes in an attempt to evade police, unaware that there was only one entrance and exit. The squad cars had parked there and waited for him to complete a high-speed series of turns, delighting himself by losing their lights, only to be hit with them again when he emerged back at the front. That had been some pretty funny shit.
Now Watts had been in the unfinished neighborhood twice in a month, both for homicide victims.
The place had never struck him as spooky before. Just sad. All those roads leading to nowhere and nothing. They had names and signs, they had parcels on file with the county, they had everything except a reason for existing. The developer had gone bankrupt at the start of the recession, and in this housing market, nobody was eager to absorb the project. It was too big, too expensive, and too pointless—houses were cheap in Atlanta right now, you could get into decent areas for a decent price, and the planned development was simply a poor location, an extra five minutes from anywhere you’d possibly want to be. Five minutes didn’t sound like much, but they added up over time.
Now, though, it was A Big Fucking Deal Crime Scene, and that meant, as it always did, that Deputy Watts was on the bench. He’d found the first body, and now they were up to two, and the fun thing about that was they’d put his boss on the bench, too. Chief Deputy Swanson, aka Fish Sticks, always so happy to take the glory, was a forgotten memory of the investigation now, and that pleased Watts to no end. The Georgia State Police and the FBI were both at the scene, the big-dick contest was swinging between them now, and Fish Sticks couldn’t do a damn thing about it but watch and pout. At least Watts had no delusions of grandeur; he was used to this shit and, frankly, preferred to be out of the spotlight, because the only time the spotlight found him, it tended to be when he’d fucked something up, like getting caught running his lights and siren just to go to Arby’s.
Today’s assignment, then, was right up his alley: wander around the neighborhood while the hotshots worked the scene, pretending to be on the search for evidence. As if there would be evidence a half mile away, hiding out in the weeds. Well, maybe there could be, but it was a safe bet that Watts wouldn’t recognize it if he saw it. The only place that looked halfway interesting was the creepy old barn, but of course the evidence techs had claimed that, and the local deputies were supposed to conduct a “field search of the perimeter.” Which meant, of course, that they were instructed to go wandering around aimlessly.
They sent him away from the main scene, out to search though they didn’t tell him what he was searching for. It had rained two nights in a row and the place was a mud bog. They’d moved a hell of a lot of earth out here without ever so much as digging a basement—mounds of dirt stood at the back of most of the lots, beaten down by rain and wind and time. It must have been hilly, once, and they’d cleared the hills in order to make each boring, flat yard look exactly alike. Didn’t want any neighborhood jealousy. Why do they get a hill next door?!
The place made great sense as a body dump—isolated, hidden, but close enough to the freeway to get out of town fast—but what was strange was the forensics experts kept insisting that the bodies hadn’t been dumped here. They hadn’t been dead on arrival, just dead after arrival. And there was no connection between the victims, one a prim-and-proper office girl, the other a comic book store owner. They’d never met, had no mutual acquaintances, and were so wildly far apart in profile that any theories were hard to come by. Not only that, neither of them had the slightest reason to drive through Harvest Moon Farms, which implied that they’d been coerced there, forced somehow. That had been the prevailing theory, but Watts had just heard that the forensics team was coming up empty—and emphatic—with that research. They were convinced that nobody else had been in the vehicles, that both the man and the woman had driven themselves to the dead end of their own volition.
It was, in Deputy Watts’s professional opinion, pretty weird shit.
He would have liked to hang around and listen to the big shots toss their theories about, because this story was getting good play in the newspapers, and pretending he was key to the investigation might get him laid if he talked loud enough in front of that bartender at Chili’s who always seemed to give him extra salsa, but instead they had thrown him out here on the search. It was a shitty way to kill a shift, plodding around the empty lots, poking through knee-high weeds and grass, searching for—what? He had no idea. All he found were old beer cans and weathered fast-food bags. And the plastic pipes, of course. Each parcel had been marked off with plastic PVC pipe, orange tape wrapped around it. More heavy duty than the traditional surveyor’s stakes, and that was good, someone had really been thinking, because nobody was breaking ground at Harvest Moon Farms.
He stopped at the far corner of the westernmost lot and took a piss and, while in midstream, decided to make it interesting. The empty pipes were there, after all, and why not test your aim? Watts wasn’t much good with his duty sidearm, but he was one hell of a piss shot.
SOMEONE WAS PISSING in Odie’s living room.
This was a new grievance.
All day long he’d watched the silent computer monitors that showed the activities at the murder scene, and all day long he’d seen that the idiots remained fixated on the wrong place: the barn, the barn, the barn—all the attention went to that pointless old barn, and not once had anyone so much as given a look at the plastic pipes. That was, of course, the point of a lot of tedious work. Odie had placed exactly 320 sawed-off pieces of pipe in the muddy lots of Harvest Moon Farms, each one emblazoned with orange surveyor’s tape, and of the 320, only 7 served an actual purpose, bringing air into the bunker. Now someone was taking a piss in one of them. Odie’s hand drifted to the Bushmaster AR-15 closest to him—one of sixty-three weapons (sixty-five if you counted the grenades) that he had with him in case the police ever reached the right destination.
No point, though. No need. Years ago, the government had no idea who they were pissing off when they fired Odie from his computer engineering job designing military-grade rescue beacons, similar to the kind that were sold to civilians for use on mountain-climbing expeditions and solo ocean crossings, the kind that would report exactly where you were and route emergency messages directly to a bunker in Texas that had been built to outlast anything up to and including a nuclear strike. Now, almost five years later, the government had no idea who they were pissing on, and Odie was hardly about to let his grand experiment fall apart in a burst of automatic gunfire directed at the cock of some moronic local cop.
He watched the yellow stream splatter down and then come to a jerking, halting end—prostate trouble?—and finally there was nothing left but a few slow drips on the concrete floor.
He looked at the puddle with distaste, sighed, and shook his head. In time maybe he’d find it funny, but right now it seemed pretty offensive.
It must be growing dark, because on the monitors he could see the evidence technicians setting up spotlights. Pointing the wrong way, of course. Behind them, the entrance to Odie’s bunker lay in shadows and beneath thirty feet of compacted soil.
He’d had fun watching them for a time, but it was growing old now, and he was anxious for new visitors. That was the real fun. Harvest Moon Farms was quickly growing a reputation as a body dump, but that wasn’t the truth at all. No corpse had ever been brought there and dumped. They’d all come home.
There were two thousand StreetDreams GPS units out there in the world, circulating at first from where he’d left them, eventually making their way through pawnshops and discount electronic stores and online auction sites.
His grand database with its monitoring scripts and sophisticated digital readout told him that nine hundred and ninety-seven units offered current potential. Many were sitting on car dashboards right now, shooting footage through fingernail-sized cameras, capturing audio through tiny microphones, and beaming it all back to Odie’s bunker by way of satellite.
He had built each StreetDreams2000 with his bare hands. Odie felt proud of every one of them too. They were his surrogates—sent out into the world to hunt and gather. Over hundreds of hours watching hundreds of potential visitors through his GPS units, he was enormously pleased with the response. Sure, some rejected the StreetDreams2000 right away. They either left it where they found it, sold it, or gave it away. Odie’s calculations had suggested that a large number would do exactly that. But many people kept the device—not knowing that Odie’s remote eyes and ears were on them the whole time.
Out of this blessed group, Odie could hope for only a small number of candidates to make it here. He was surprised, though, at how easily some would come. Some people apparently were happy to trust the directions that the StreetDreams2000 offered. Others needed more direct coaxing, though, so Odie would get involved remotely, speaking to them through the device, talking them home. Personal attention, after all, was among the most desired qualities in customer service. There was no navigational aid in the world that offered more personal attention than StreetDreams.
But he wanted more visitors. He wondered how many he might see before it was all over. Right now his computers showed four quality candidates—one was a couple driving from Florida back to Indiana, arguing the whole way, the man insisting that his wife trust the GPS commands and put away that damned road atlas; Odie thought they could be very intriguing, and he hoped the police were gone before any of them arrived. The police could slow things down, certainly. Put cars out on the road, keep surveillance at the end of Sterling Street, watch and wait.
All of this could have been avoided, of course, if he just hid the bodies, moved the cars, that sort of thing. He’d considered it briefly, but he saw no fun in that sort of game. There was nothing new about it, nothing fresh, nothing that people would remember after he was gone. Now a man sitting comfortably beneath the murder scenes the whole time, watching the dumb-ass cops scour the surface of the earth while the body count continued to climb thanks to the source directly below them? That was fresh. That was going to make Odie one of the immortals.
He had enough military-grade MREs (meals ready to eat) for a year and, with all this spring rain, more than enough freshwater filling the cistern to match it. He had his guns, and his computers, and his batteries, and his books. He was in no hurry to go anywhere. Why would he be?
Odie was home.
WHEN WATTS FINISHED with his piss, he zipped up and looked over his shoulder at the team working by the barn. None of them had so much as glanced his way. They didn’t give a damn what he was doing out here, as long as he wasn’t in their way. He could strip naked and sit in the grass and it would probably be four hours before anybody noticed.
“Taxpayer dollars at work,” he said, and laughed though it wasn’t funny. He was tired and he was bored and he had hours ahead of him in the cold rain.
He’d wandered about fifty feet before he saw some more junk in the weeds, this time a piece of scrap plastic instead of a fast-food bag. He walked over to it, as if there was some point in studying every bit of trash in the area, and then stopped and frowned. Not scrap plastic at all. It was an electronic gadget of some sort.
He knelt, moisture soaking the knee of his pants immediately, and picked it up and turned it over.
StreetDreams2000.
A GPS unit. Shit. This actually mattered. This actually might matter. The girl who’d been killed, her boyfriend had insisted that she’d been robbed of a GPS unit, and they’d never found the thing.
“Probably not the same one,” Watts said, but he wasn’t confident. It damn well might be the same one, and that meant he could go back to those assholes at the barn and show them that he was the only one out here who’d achieved anything, show them that . . .
“Shit,” he said, and stopped walking abruptly. He was holding the device in both hands, had turned it over to inspect it and then started carrying it along, held by all ten of his ungloved fingers. “You dumbass,” he whispered.
This was going to piss them off. He would hear holy hell about this, and even old Fish Sticks himself would get in the mix, because bitching at Watts remained within his jurisdiction, even if nothing else did. They’d all pile on him for tainting evidence, and, hell, he’d probably end up in the papers. Probably put a picture of him up, with some sort of headline announcing what a dumbass he was, and what if his girl at Chili’s saw that?
Drop it, then. Just drop it back down and pretend he’d done it right, go over to the barn and tell them he’d found something of possible evidentiary value. That was the term. He’d say it all casual and cool and they’d expect nothing until he led them over here and showed them what exactly it was. Nobody would need to know how stupid he’d been.
Until they ran the fingerprints. He was a dumbass squared now, his fix-it plan even worse than the first mistake.
What to do, then? Hide it again? Someone would find it eventually, and if they got a print off it and it came back to him, he’d not only be in trouble, he might be mistaken for a suspect.
That sent an uneasy chill down his spine. He’d been the first officer out here the day the woman was killed. They could look at him as a suspect.
He stared down at the device and pressed the power button, as if it would somehow provide him with an answer. The screen lit up and a moon winked at him. He powered it down immediately—for some crazy reason he didn’t like the way the moon had winked like that. Almost as if it knew he was in trouble.
“I need to get rid of this thing,” he muttered. That was the only option that didn’t end with him getting his ass reamed.
It was small enough to fit in his pocket. He walked back to his cruiser and opened the door and shoved it under the seat. When he got off shift, he’d smash it up and toss it in a Dumpster somewhere.
IT WAS THREE more hours in the rain before they let him go, and he intended to get rid of the GPS right away, but Chili’s was on his route home, and he swung in just to see if the cute bartender was there.
She was. Not only was she there, but she wanted to talk, and the bar was basically empty, just the two of them in conversation as the waiters came and went.
“Why so quiet tonight?” he said.
“Not many people want to sit at the bar at Chili’s on Valentine’s Day.”
“Shit, I didn’t even realize.”
She gave him a sad smile, and she looked even prettier because it was sad, somehow. “Not many people want to work at the bar, either. Everyone else has a date, right? Well, not me. No roses, no chocolates. Not even a card.” She gave a little laugh and said, “It’s a dumb holiday, anyway, but it would be nice to get something on it. From someone.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Watts said.
“Oh, yeah? So where’s my gift?” She was teasing him, obviously joking around, but still it was the closest to true flirtation he’d gotten from her, and it was then that he had his epiphany. He had a gift for her, and he could even be slick giving it to her. He could say something cool, by God, and slick, cool lines were scarce for Watts.
“I’ll go get it,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.
He jogged out in the rain and grabbed the GPS from his cruiser and carried it back in. She looked at it with one eyebrow raised.
“Um, not even wrapped. You seriously just pulled that thing off your dashboard and carried it in here and expected me to believe it was a gift?”
And here it was, the opportunity for the slick line, please, please, let it work.
“If it’s wrapped,” he said, “you can’t use it to find my place very well, can you?”
She smiled. Hesitantly, maybe, but she smiled, and then she reached out and took the GPS.
“You’re serious?”
“Of course. Will you come by?”
She was eyeing the GPS warily.
“If you don’t like it,” he said, “I can write out directions. Or just give you my number. Maybe it was a dumb idea. Sorry. Maybe—”
Backfired, he thought, reaching for the GPS now and feeling like an idiot, realizing all the ways in which this was wrong, but she pulled back from him.
“I love it,” she said. “That’s a sweet way to ask.”
Holy shit.
He’d scored. He sat back on his stool and hoped his grin wasn’t too goofy.
“I just might.” She pressed the power button with one red-polished fingernail, and the screen filled with its winking moon face. Now it didn’t seem hostile to Watts at all. It was a buddy to him, a lifeline. “That was a totally sweet way to give a girl a Valentine.”
“Welcome to the StreetDreams2000,” the device said in a British accent. “And Happy Valentine’s Day. Where would you like to go today?”
For a moment they were both frozen, and then she started to laugh, so he did, too.
“How did you program it to say that?”
“I’m slick like that,” Watts said, and he had a feeling he was going to be getting more than a little extra salsa tonight. Tonight was going his way. To think of the trouble he’d be in right now if he’d handed that thing over to the evidence techs, and instead, look at him now. It felt like there’d been someone watching over him today, and right now, whoever it was? He had to be smiling.
No question about that.