City Come A-Walkin' by Gibson William Shirley John

Author:Gibson, William, Shirley, John
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
Published: 2014-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

FIGH-uhv!

Quickly. He borrowed Bill’s car and drove maniacally through the rain, with wild indifference to the slickness of the streets.

The rain came two minutes after he’d set out from his apartment. He’d been drenched when he woke his dazed and rumpled assistant manager and simply demanded the car keys. Bill had been too tired to question.

Cole shifted uncomfortably on the vinyl seat, his rump wet, his shirt sticking to his back. The heater in the Chevy Swift was chugging away, the windows were closed, and the rainwater on his clothing was beginning to steam up, making the interior of the car a hothouse. He could smell his wet hair and old cigarette ashes from the ashtray. There was a rotten taste of cigar residue on his tongue. His headache had receded, replaced by a malicious burning in his stomach.

The streets glimmered uniformly wet, vitreously black, something membranous and organic in their sheen.

The tired two-door sedan, its dented hood occasionally jumping on the hanger-wire that held its broken clasp closed, grumbled up onto the freeway on-ramp. He shunted here and there, eyes on the electronic guidance panels that lit up on the dash as soon as he entered the freeway. The traffic guidance systems weren’t installed in the city itself yet, and fewer than half the cars on the road were adapted, so its use was optional. Cole was groggy from lack of sleep; his eyes aching, he elected to use the guidance system to get him into Oakland. He switched on the unit and leaned back, let the steering wheel drive itself. It was still hard for him to get used to, watching the wheel moving without his touch, the brake pedal pressing itself down as it compensated for a car slowing just ahead....

The Swift rattled onto the bridge. In the windy wet morning the sea opening out from the Bay Bridge was a vastness of ruffled jade, seeming too ancient and all-encompassing to be shackled by the bridge-span; the sea waiting for the inevitable earthquake and its last laugh at the artifices of civilization.

Cole looked over his shoulder. Through a veil of fog the city rose in pearly towers, which in this mysterious perspective seemed the peaked ramparts of an exotic foreign city. Cole’s heart ached when he made out the fang of the Pyramid Building, remembering a man spasming his life away on the floor.

Looking ahead at the approaching clutter of Berkeley and Oakland, Cole leaned back. He let his hand rest on the butt of the pistol in his coat pocket. “And do what?” he asked himself. “Going to threaten to shoot them all? But who could I have brought to help? Maybe the Oakland police... but no, I’d have to explain... still, if it’s the only way to get her out...”

The car’s engine coughed once, as if to say Stop talking to yourself, Cole, it’s embarrassing me.

“No one else to talk to,” Cole said.

Talking to yourself is a bad habit, the car said in rumbles and whirs, so talk to me instead.

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