Feeling the Way, CH 08 (Patreon)

It snowed as I left Toronto. 

If not for the meeting with the MacDonald Elder, I’d have found a hotel and a club and partied. Some of the clubs in Toronto have great reviews. But I got the sense he wanted me out of his city and I didn’t have the protection an Elder got. My family was feared, but accidents happened; common sense and me are on better terms than the rest of my family.

The forecast showed the snow would hang around, but the roads were clear. I figured I’d drive as far as I could and park. The projective algorithm said London was a likely option, with Windsor being snowed in by the time I’d reach it.

I relaxed once I crossed out of the Milton sector, which marked the end of Toronto, but immediately went back on my guard on noticing the sporty car passing me, with the heavy duty winter tires.

Albert’s gift gives us greater than average eyesight, and a knack for noticing details, like the difference between these tires and regular winter tires, the three centimeter traction spikes in the thread, which were ripping the wheel well, on top of ensuring this car wouldn’t skid out of control. Only people planning on doing some seriously risky winter driving put those on, and they didn’t put them on a forty thousand dollar car not designed for them. Those were for people who wanted serious speed.

Put the two together and the result meant trouble, especially when you added two other cars like this one catching up to us. I glanced at the driver, a bulldog, not a squirrel, but it meant little. The grin he gave me added to the trouble equation.

Time to make use of magic and precision engineering.

I set the breaks on, hard.

I have three years working at Royal Security, which Arnold runs. As part of that, the 2064 Nascar champion, Isabel Caglar taught me, and everyone else working there, aggressive driving. For those of you who don’t know, before she won her first championship, she was a stunt driver of the ‘Dead End Drive’ franchise. If you’ve seen any the of DED movies, you know the kind of move I can pull.

‘But Wyatt,’ I can hear you say, ‘you’re on a bike, not a car.’

That’s where Adam’s gift comes into play. My dad’s a driver. His magic puts even Miss Caglar to shame, but he isn’t what you’d call a good teacher, hence why Arnold doesn’t let him teach the men at Royal. But I have one of the highest ratio of his gift among my family and since I am not a fan of cars, I learned I can do something I call translation. I can take stuff I learned in a car and with some practice apply it to another kind of vehicle, like a bike. What it mainly means is that I didn’t have to relearn how to do stunt driving on my bike.

So as my bike went from one-ten down to fifty, engineering kept the wheels from locking up, magic kept me from skidding out of control, unlike the the car behind me who slammed on their break and turned to try to avoid me, skidding into a spin in spite of the spiked wheels. My back wheel went in the air, came down on it’s hood as it spun, bounced and back on the road. I speed up.

One of the following cars got caught in the ensuing accident. I winced, knowing I’d hurt people, but they were faceless, so easier to set aside for the time being. The other car hopped the shoulder, sending snow, rock and probably some of the pavement in the air behind it, but kept control as it bypassed the crashing cars. The car that had been next to me slowed at a more reasonable speed, letting me catch up to it.

I glanced at the map on my visor; my route was clear all the way to London. “Show me all road conditions, Overhead view,” I told it. “Centered on me, Zoom to a radius of five kilometer.”

The next exit was for route 33. It showed plenty of slow traffic, but at intersections, which meant stop lights. Those would impede me as much as them. The next exit was for highway 24, which moved smoothly. “Extend radius to ten kilometer.” Red appeared on a ramp. Highway 8 was at a standstill all the way to the first exits. I smiled and sped up.

This is why I drive a bike.

The car couldn’t get up to speed fast enough, so ended up behind me, but they were catching up as I weaved around the cars doing closer to the speed limit. My two pursuers were good drivers, barely slowing down.

This is where I wish our magic was more like that of the Children of Merlin, with their fireballs and what have you, or the Ten Knives, with their pre-written spells they can just pull out and activate. We have some of that, Society members have powers, and some can fling fire, or lightning, or a storm, in one case, and we do have the ability to write long-term magic, which is what lets my bike do some of what it does. But because of the ingredients, it can’t just be on papers that I can pull out and power. The direct phrases, that’s what we call our written magic, the stuff that has impressive effect needs to be written on the spot, and that’s not something I can do while driving, even if I have three pens ready to use.

The stopped cars heading on the ramp became visible and I moved right one lane. GPS programs with road conditions and speed had one problem they’ve had for as long as they existed. They don’t tell you how many of the lanes are slow when there’s more than one of them. It just says, ‘it’s slow’. The exit had two lanes and only the far right one was stopped. The left lane slowed, but still moved.

I was going to have to work with that.

I got in between both lanes without slowing, Just to put distances between me and — one car got on the left shoulder as it splits from the highway barely slowing.

I forgot about the winter tire spikes. The second had to slow, but followed the first car. I was still gaining, but a third lane got added at the merge and that one was clear. My options are limited here. I slid in front of a car, avoiding looking at who was in it and braked. They honked and braked too, not hard enough to lose control, but the one behind them slid onto the shoulder, clipping the back of the first pursuer, but not taking them out. They did end up blocking the second car, so that was a win and no one got hurt.

I got in the left lane at the merge just ahead of my pursuer and poured on the speed. One-ten, one-twenty, one twenty-five KPH. He was still with me. The coming exit told me I was in Kitchener, with both that and Waterloo ahead of me. Never heard of either city.

That’s for later. First, I needed to get rid of this car. The next exits went to city streets, which I didn’t want to do, not with him on my ass. The ramp after this one looked more promising. Highway 7 heading North, 8’s ramps looked like it went west, with this road merging with King street, perfect.

I sped up to one-thirty and wove around cars until I was in the right lane to get on 7. He did the same, picking up speed to catch up. I let him, accelerating a little only once he was ten meters behind me. I kept an eye on the car in my mirror and one on the coming split. The coming ramp wasn’t that tight, but what I had planned was going to stress the magic on the bike.

The split arrived, with the crash barrels three meters after. I raised a hand, flip him the finger and veered left into a car. It honked madly, but I was more focused on keeping control, and then slamming my own brakes as the cars ahead of me slowed to sixty to take their ramp. No way I could slow this fast, so I veered left again. Fortunately, that lane wasn’t busy and I could calmly slow to seventy, then fifty as I approached the light.

I could grab the next left and drive to the next ramp, get back on the 8 and stay on secondary highways until Iwas further west. I could get to London that way, and from there I could pick the 401 or the 402. The wise plan was to get to the border as quickly as I could and the safety of the United States.

But that was basically what they’d expect me to do. 

Fuck wisdom.

I drove through the light when it turned green. “Local search, gay club.” Three results came back.

Club Chroma has the most stars, so I was going to start with that one.

* * * * *

For a place to stay, my options were a Marriott, a Walper Hotel, and a Crown plaza. I was staying out of the Marriott. Chances were no Lewistons were working at this one; there were too many Marriott in the world, let alone the US, but my family and them have had a few run-ins because my dads sided with the Hertz during their dispute. All it took was one rat in that hotel being a Lewiston, and my stay would become a headache.

The Walper felt older from their site, so I pick it, parked my bike and get a room. It also had the advantage of being a fifteen-minute walk from Club Chroma. I had dinner, showered, then headed to the club.

Chroma is spread wide instead of high. The entry fee covered my first drink, which I made a Manhattan. The music was the usual fare, with the bass louder than it needed; but over all, at a reasonable level. It was early, so between dances I chatted with the guys. They ranged from late teens to early fifties in appearance—medical technology’s such it’s getting tough to know older guys’ age; and considering my dads look my like they could be my older brothers, my sense of how old men are is skewed.

From one of the older gentlemen I found out Chroma used to be a social center for the gay community, back in the early years of the century, until the mid-forties, when government support dried out. They had to expand and turned it into a club in the evening. It still did double duties, but now they reached out to any at-risk community.

The guy was a good dancer, if a little old style.

Things picked up by eight, and I spent my time on the dance floor, with stops for rehydration, bathroom, and the occasional fun. I’m never averse to on-the-spot fun.

I ended up bringing collie twins back to my room. Unlike what movies want you to think, twins who have sex together are not a common thing, so when I came across not only a pair of them but that they were fun to talk with, I didn’t let them go. Leon was a geek, knew everything about comic books, science fiction movies, and TV. John was a nerd, working in information infrastructure, which is fancy talk for building and maintaining computers. They kept sniping at each other about which one of them was the worse. Reminded me of home a bit, but without the aggression. These two did it lovingly.

One thing they did have in common was a fascination with magic. They read everything about it, even visited the Detroit Thinker shrine once, although they were underwhelmed. I got that. Thinker magic isn’t the most impressive unless you’re the cerebral type. So I gave them a demonstration.

I didn’t use one of the pens. I took my ink at the source, wrote each a phrase on their palm and then we had a twelve-hour marathon session, they even asked to be influenced when they worked out I was an Orr.

Yeah, my family’s mentioned in those books on magic. Quite a few times, too. We haven’t always been on the ‘right side’ of things.

* * * * *

After a few hours of sleep, I left the twins in the bed to visit Kitchener. I was going to give MacDonald’s men a few days to get tired of looking for me and take advantage of the warm late February day to relax and do the tourist thing. I went to the Ken Seiling Museum and got more historical information about the Waterloo region than I even have on SFM. These people are serious about their history, with a recreated village that included a mix of live actors to speak with and interactive holographic projection explaining how life was like back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I couldn’t imagine living in those conditions. 

I walked through the University of Waterloo, which was a sprawling complex. I don’t have university-level education. My dads insisted we went to school, so we’d have a sense of what ‘normal people’ were like. That had varying levels of success. Wolfgang had to be taken out after his third fight, where he hospitalized another bully. His nannies couldn’t stick around close enough during class to keep him out of trouble, not that I think they’d have stopped him. The bullies he targeted all went after girls.

Wade stuck it through to university, where he studied business administration with a specialization in the education system. He also played football. He loves the game and his ability made him a master of it. He never admitted to doing it, but the Spartans haven’t lost one championship since his first year there— the San Jose ones, not Michigan— so we’re pretty sure he spread his gift among the players ever since. The ratio of Spartan graduates in the NFL is way out of proportion. He’s lucky the Government isn’t interested in regulating magic use within schools. Wade passed on the NFL to take over the education system in California.

I dropped out after high school. School was rough for me, all those people, all those emotions. I had more than one breakdown there, enough I considered quitting, but my Orr pride wouldn’t let me. My family already considered me weak and defective, I wasn’t going to prove it. 

I did find one of my cooping system there. Hang out with the people having the most fun. Parties are great because no one’s busy feeling. I got away with it because of how easily I learn stuff thanks to Wade’s gift.

After that, I walked through the downtown area, since it was close by, and to get my head out of my past.

It definitely accomplished that.