Three

Back to the future, the narrator and his abductor go for a pleasant drive through the canyon.

The car was unsafe at any speed. It seemed not to know this, or perhaps more accurately, seemed not to care. Streetlights, haloed with translucent moths, drew neon streaks past the car with blazing speed. There were no other cars on the boulevard. Every traffic light left a bleeding green bullet-hole in the night.

 

I looked to my dozens of nervous reflections in the starred faults in the window.  They were like a sunburst of ghosts, erupted from the epicenter of some past fracture and overlaid against the passing streetlights. Defensive stares pierced me from every one. They were uncomfortable. They wanted to go back.

 

The man in the other seat was visible in brief sweeps of light. Things changed with each pass. Sometimes the cigarette moved, or the misshapen wheel turned with a different hand, or the smirk on his face would tighten or loosen. My driver's only apparent constant, I presumed, was his focus.

 

He stared, viciously and resolutely, into that zone of darkness always ahead, the one that obstinately remained beyond the range of the single working headlight. The tires shuddered against the impeccably smooth road below. Each of the car's structural joints rattled in a chaotic rhythm unrelated to their course along the boulevard. And the agonized whine of the transmission shattered the sleep of this otherwise sleepy city. But it was his focus, I placated upon, that stared forever onward in its own halcyon power.

 

The car made a quick twist to the left, inertia pressing my face to the splintering window. We were heading towards the mountains, I saw, and the road was about to become a tortuous and gravelly ordeal, a trail for the Santa Monica ridge's volunteer fire department. I forgot all about Sammy.

 

I righted myself in the chair, leaned back and settled my eyes on the dirt road approaching in the foothills. I'd never been this far before. "Where are —"

 

"HOLY CRAP, HE SPEAKS!" my driver bellowed in astonishment. I jumped in my seat, snapping the seatbelt free from its holster and sending it whirling into the car wall.

 

"Dude!" Fake macho came out when I was terrified. But then I was laughing. I hadn't said anything for the whole trip. My driver had noticed, and that was the joke. "Dude," I repeated, calmer, "who are you?"

 

A hand sprung off the wheel, enunciated an arc through the air, and aimed solidly at me, palm down. It seized my own, before I had even fully protruded it, and clamped shut. "Yevgeniy Arkovin!" it declared. And then, for the first time, my driver looked away from the road. Eyes, colors indiscernible except for glints of reflected dashboard lights in each, projected something over me. Now it was I who was the prisoner of his focus, a cage in his car. "I'm Gene." He said it like it was obvious.

 

Gene turned back to the road, releasing me. I coughed. I hadn't breathed. "We're going to the old tower. Sammy left something up there from last time. Don't touch that." The sun visor above my seat had fallen open and spilt wads of crumpled receipts into my lap. The car jolted onward. I thought I saw the city lights as the car rounded a quick vantage point.

 

"What's the old tower? How did you know –?"

 

"Shut up." He paused. "Wait." He paused again. "Yes. What's your name?"

 

"Uh, Andrew. Case."

 

"Ok. Shut up, Andrew Case."

 

Any protest I would have made was instantly buried. Finally, the road had aligned itself with the crest of the mountain, and the full lights of the Santa Monica basin exploded into view on my side of the car. It was all the more awesome through a cracked window.

 

And suddenly, I saw our destination. A dilapidated communications tower, probably a cold war relic, perched on the next extrema of the mountainside.  It looked dead. Gene looked maniacal.

 

It took longer than I thought it would for the car to screech to a stop along the cliff. And as it approached, the immense height of the tower became more pronounced, arching somewhat with the winds at the top. The whole structure was mostly steel tube the diameter of a tree trunk, extruding from an abandoned control room squatted at the bottom. I looked closer, stepping from Gene's car and craning my neck. Rungs perforated the height of the tower, which must have been six stories, running up through a trapdoor to a crow's nest just before the top. Every few meters, a step dangled by one attachment, or was missing altogether.

 

"It's at the top," Gene said.