Free Napier's Bones by Derryl Murphy Page A

with it when it comes, I
suppose.” He sounded calmer than he felt.
    “There’s another
sign coming up,” said Billy. Dom slowed down enough to make sure he could read
it; there was a diner just a couple minutes ahead. He smiled.
    “What?”
    He glanced over
at Jenna, who was watching him now instead of the number tornadoes, even though
she was still hanging over the back of the seat. “A plan,” he said. “Get out
your driver’s license, birth certificate, social security card, that new
passport, and anything else that has a number on it.”
    The parking lot
for the diner was dirt and gravel, and he spun up rocks and soil as he pulled
into a parking spot between two large pickup trucks with roll bars and
mud-caked sides. They dashed out of the car and ran for the doors, the
tornadoes cutting swaths through wheat fields as they approached, their roar
outside almost as overwhelming as the sound the search numbers had made down in
Utah.
    Inside was a
young girl working as a waitress, blonde hair, tight jeans and a white t-shirt,
and two older men sitting in a booth, one wearing a John Deere hat, the other
with his faded-brown cowboy hat dangling from the coat hook on the post beside
him; both wore faded jeans, one in a checked shirt, and one in a striped shirt
and boots. All three stared at Dom and Jenna as they ran in, but before the
waitress could ask if they needed any help—and Dom could see the prospect of
helping either one of them didn’t excite her too much, seeing how they both
likely looked a little wild and freaky right then—Dom grabbed Jenna’s hand and
dragged her over to the booth nearest the other side of the door. “Give me your
ID,” he whispered, then ran and grabbed the salt containers from all the tables
along that side of the door, twisted off the tops, and spilled their contents
onto the striped plastic tablecloth.
    “Hey!”
shouted the waitress. “You can’t do that!”
    Dom heard the
two men get up from their table, their boots clopping on the floor as they
approached to back the girl up. He pulled out his wallet and peeled off ten
American twenty dollar bills, thrust them toward the girl. “This’ll pay for the
mess and your time, okay?” Outside, the first number twister had just broken
through the wheat field and was approaching the road. The sound of it was so
deep Dom felt as if his heart was being squeezed by an angry, pulsating fist.
    The waitress
took the money, peered at a couple of the bills, then shrugged and nodded. Both
men turned back to their table, shaking their heads and commenting on the
couple of “fucked-up Americans.” The waitress, though, just pocketed the money
and kept watching. “Art project,” said Dom. His voice sounded high-pitched and
frantic to his own ears. He hurriedly wiped the salt across the table, making
sure it was spread out as evenly as possible. Then, after closing his eyes for
one frantic second to envision the pattern he was looking for, he began to draw
a line in the salt with his finger, connecting the entry point from the corner
of the table closest to the door with a hole he rubbed into being in the very
centre of the table, using a maze very much like Pictish rings he’d studied up
on just a year ago. The job was fast and sloppy, accompanied by lots of
mutterings of “Hurry” from both Jenna and, somewhat more sotto voce, Billy; he
looked up to see that the first twister was now in the parking lot and the
second was just beginning to cross the road, both of them breaking up and
settling into smaller patterns, no less deadly because of the change in size.
    He did a couple
of last-second corrections and grabbed all of Jenna’s ID from her hand, quickly
smeared the numbers away and shook them off the cards and into the hole in the
middle of the salt maze, did the same for his own ID, then grabbed Jenna by the
hand and pulled her back to the counter. The waitress stepped back with them,
and let out a loud shriek when the door to