Rabbits(91)

Suddenly, three cars were coming straight for me.

I turned and started to run as fast as I could, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to avoid getting hit if at least one of them didn’t stop.

Just before those three cars were about to hit me or hit the brakes, a white van roared through the intersection and came to a screeching halt directly in front of them. The cars swerved out of the way like they were in a videogame, and I was left staring at the passenger-side panel door of a white van. The magnetic logo on the door read: GOLDEN SEAL CARPET CLEANING. That was the name of the company tied to the number Russell Milligan told us might belong to Hazel.

The side panel door slid open.

“Get in.”

I jumped inside and the man who’d spoken closed the sliding door behind me.

The van sped away from the intersection.



* * *



—

The interior was finished more like some kind of modern high-end camper than a carpet cleaning company’s equipment van. In fact, there was no equipment inside, just two small cream-and-teak Danish Modern sofas with a rectangular coffee table set between them.

The man who’d opened the door for me took a seat on the small sofa to my right. He had brown eyes and jet-black hair.

“I got your message,” he said, and motioned for me to take a seat across from him.

He spoke with a slight British accent and looked to be in his early forties. His ethnicity was hard to place, maybe Turkish or Italian. He was wearing a black suit, clearly tailored to fit his thin athletic frame.

“What message?” I asked.

“This one,” he said, and then pressed play on his phone. Suddenly my voice filled the car.

    My name is K. I’m here with my friend Chloe. We’d like to speak to you about…well, about a lot of things, but I suppose most pressing is the fact that Alan Scarpio told me something was wrong with the game, and that I needed to help him fix it before the next iteration began. Now Scarpio’s missing and we’re not sure where to turn. Please call me back.



“Hazel?” I asked.

The man just smiled.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m supposed to drop you off,” he said as he received a text alert on his phone.

“You’re supposed to drop me off?” I echoed.

He nodded.

“Where?”

“Please excuse me for just a moment,” he said as he started composing a message to somebody.

Was I actually taking a van ride with the legendary Rabbits player known as Hazel right now? Should I ask him about Alan Scarpio? I thought about it for a moment. No. Even though he may have just saved my life, I had no way of knowing who this guy really was.

Hazel or not, Chloe was going to be so pissed that she missed this.

As I was thinking about Chloe and how mad she was going to be, I noticed something for the first time.

There was nobody driving.

I’d never been inside a driverless car before, but the ride itself didn’t feel all that different. The way the steering wheel moved reminded me of an amusement park ride. I was fully prepared to be freaked out when I’d noticed nobody was driving, but actually, I found it oddly comforting.



* * *



—

A few minutes later, the van pulled over, and the mysterious man who may have been Hazel opened the side door and stepped outside.

“This is where I leave you,” he said.

“Where are we?”

“Seattle,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

He smiled.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said as he walked around the van and peeled off the magnetic sign that read GOLDEN SEAL CARPET CLEANING.

“Who sent you?” I asked.

“You called,” he said, and then he stepped into the driver’s seat, and guided the van away from the curb and out into traffic.

How did the call Chloe and I had placed to Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning almost two months earlier result in this guy and his driverless van coming to my rescue?

I took a look around. The van had dropped me off in the middle of the Fremont neighborhood, on Evanston Avenue, right in front of a coffee shop I used to frequent when Baron lived in the area.

Connected to the building that housed the coffee shop was something called The Fremont Rocket—a Cold War relic turned community totem that towered above the area. No actual rocket parts had been used to create the enormous work of art, but the bits of old airplane parts they’d used had been assembled in a perfect Art Deco interpretation of outer space, à la Barbarella or Flash Gordon.

As I stood looking up at the rocket, a red Volkswagen bug pulled up. Blasting from the windows of the vintage car was a song from the late 1980s by the band Def Leppard. I recognized the lyric “I can take you through the center of the dark” as it blared out of the bug’s powerful stereo.

The song was called “Rocket.”

Standing beneath a statue of a giant rocket listening to a song called “Rocket” would be an interesting coincidence on its own, but what if, at exactly the same time, a couple walked by—two women in their midforties, one wearing a light blue NASA T-shirt and the other an original 1988 Love and Rockets Sorted Tour jacket? At that point, you might take it as a sign—and if you were the kind of person who was obsessed with patterns and coincidences, you’d have to follow them to see where they were going.