Free Expiration Date by Tim Powers

Looking-Glass
. “It’s a fabulous monster!” he called back, quoting what the Unicorn had answered about Alice.
    Don’t I wish, he thought.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “I ca’n’t help it,” said Alice very meekly. “I’m growing.”
    “
You’ve no right to grow
here,”
said the Dormouse.
    —Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
    T HE van shook every time a car drove past it, but after carefully laying the plaster hands and the little bag with the dried thumb in it on the front seat, Sullivan climbed in the back and tossed the sheets and blanket and cushions off the unmade bed. The bed could be disassembled and partially telescoped to become a U-shaped booth with a little table in the middle, but when it was extended out like this, the boards under the booth-seat cushions could be lifted off, exposing a few cubic feet of unevident space. He hooked his finger through the hole in the forward board and levered it up out of its frame.
    Inside the booth-seat box lay a couple of square, limp-plastic rectangles connected by two foot-and-a-half-long ribbons, and a gray canvas fanny-pack containing his 45 semi-automatic Colt and a couple of spare magazines.
    He lifted out the fanny pack and helted it. He hadn’t shot the 45 since an afternoon of target practice in the desert outside Tucson with some of the other tramp electricians a couple of years ago, but he did remember cleaning it afterward, and buying a fresh box of hardball rounds and reloading all three magazines.
    The strung-together plastic rectangles were meant to be worn around the neck while traveling, with one rectangle lying on the chest and the other back between the shoulder blades—right now he had about six and a half thousand dollars in hundreds in the one, and his union papers in the other. Sullivan always thought of the pair as his “scapular,” because the linked flat wallets looked like one of those front-and-back medallions Catholics wear to keep from going to hell. He was always vaguely embarrassed to wear it.
    He glanced toward the front of the van, where the three pieces of Houdini’s “mask” lay on the passenger seat.
    What would he put away in the seat box, and what would he keep out?
    If he was going to drive straight back to Arizona and try to save his job at the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station, he would peel off a couple of hundred dollars to comfortably cover gas and food, and leave the rest of the cash hidden in the seat box here, along with the loaded gun, which was a felony to take across state borders;and the mask would be most effective where it was, out in the open. But if he was going to stay in Los Angeles for a while he’d have to allow for the possibility of being separated from, or even abandoning, the van—he’d want to have the cash and the gun
on
him, and the mask would have to be hidden from the sort of people who might get into the van and ransack it.
    Another car drove past on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and the van rocked on its shocks.
    Stay in Los Angeles?
he asked himself, startled even to have had the thought. Why would I do that?
She
works here, Loretta deLarava, and she probably still lives aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach and commutes right up through the middle of the whole city every day.
    I’d be crazy to do anything but leave the mask on the front seat and drive… anywhere. If I’m screwed with the Edison network I can still get electrician work, in Santa Fe or Kansas City or Memphis or any damn place. I could be a plain old handyman in any city in the whole country, doing low-profile electric, as well as cement work and drywall and carpentry and plumbing. An independent small-time contractor, getting paid under the table most of the time and fabricating expenses to show to the IRS on the jobs where I’d have to accept checks.
    And if I scoot out of here right now, I
might
not even be screwed with Edison.

    S UKIE ’ S NONSENSE Christmas carols were still droning in the back of his head,