Free Napier's Bones by Derryl Murphy Page B

the diner banged open and the first
numbers rushed in, fluttering and spinning madly around the ceiling, the bass
roar changing almost instantly into a high-pitched drone, this time a plague of
numerate locusts. Jenna ducked and tucked her head into Dom’s chest, and he put
his arm around her, a natural reaction he was surprised to find he
possessed—and it was him, not Billy—and the waitress walked quickly over to the
booth where the two farmers still sat, obviously not sure why the doors had
opened like that and why she was feeling so weirded out, but likely sure she
wanted to be away from Dom and Jenna. Dom found himself briefly wondering if
moments like this were what influenced stories about poltergeists and ghosts.
    With
a pulsating scream, numbers from the second twister rushed into the diner, the
interior now filled with a variety of black and wiry shapes and sizes, but so
far the mojo Dom and Jenna were wearing on their wrists kept a safe bubble
around them, and eventually the air began to clear and the numbers fell into
Dom’s makeshift maze, all of them starting at the corner entrance, all of them
aware, or as aware as directed numbers could be, that the specific strings of
numbers they were targeting were somewhere in the centre of the maze, but all
of them also reduced to having to count every single last grain of salt as they
went by.
    “It’s working,”
said Dom, and he hustled Jenna out the door and into the car. Within seconds,
they were back on the road and speeding away from the diner.
    Aside from the
arrhythmic thumping of the tires driving over asphalt patches in the highway,
everything was silent for awhile. Jenna leaned across the back of her seat
again to watch for anything following them, and Dom and Billy scanned the sky
ahead, but eventually they decided they could relax. Jenna turned around and
leaned forward, her head in her hands. “What exactly did you do that time?”
    “There are
certain designs that attract numbers. The one I did was a kind of Pictish ring;
when the numbers sense it, they have to get inside and follow it to the end.
The salt is a little trick I picked up from one of my anonymous online pals.
Until an absolute quantity of salt crystals has been settled on, it’s an
unstable group.”
    “Unstable?”
    Dom shook his
head. “I don’t pretend to understand, but I know part of the reason it works is
because of the mathematical properties inherent in a crystal. This guy—at
least, I assume it was a guy—compared it to some sort of quantum effect, said
that the numbers coming after you have this insatiable need to know exactly how
many crystals there are, and that until they do it can go either way for them.
If the numbers go to the centre of the ring without doing the counting, then
the ring collapses in on them, just kinda eats them. As for our ID, scraping
the numbers off and shaking them into the centre of the ring means that they
can’t track us that way anymore, because that’s what the search numbers were
smelling. They had to go to the ring, because our numbers were hiding inside
it, and no matter how strong these fuckers are, they can’t convince the numbers
to avoid it and keep looking for us.”
    “Search numbers
always have a little bit of autonomy,” said Billy. “But they’re pretty
predictable, as well. If you have the time, there are several ways to set up
little traps for them, devices that will lock them in place long enough for you
to get away. But as we saw down in Utah, usually time isn’t on your side.”
    “So where do we
go now?”
    “North, to
Edmonton. Most folk in the States know about Calgary, so that’s likely where
she—they—will be watching, but there aren’t many who pay attention to anything
further north.”
    Jenna rolled the
window down about an inch and leaned back, her head turned to the right. Dom
couldn’t tell if she had closed her eyes or was just watching the world go by,
so he kept quiet, surveyed the