There is a used bookstore in Virginia, I won’t say where for security reasons, the northern part if you really want to know, and this bookstore sells board games and dusty beanie babies and Pokémon energy cards and the comics Bone and Spawn and the Lumberjanes. It was a normal looking bookstore, lots of used books, only used books and things.
Meet Zebulon, 40, alone, addicted to finding hidden treasure. That’s why he loved this particular bookstore because occasionally you could find a hidden treasure, a signed first edition, a mint comic, an un-played 1970s Monopoly game.
One day, after sitting in the corner of this bookstore, an employee, the old man he’d always seen stroking a cat in a chair behind the counter, approached him and held out a book, “free,” he said. The cat, a calico, was by the old man’s side, curling around his leg. Zebulon looked at the cover, ran his fingers along the plain spine, the cover beige leather without an obvious title. “Read in car, not here.”
Zebulon sat in his Mazda and opened the book. It didn’t have any copyright pages, only a few blank yellowed sheets, one with the name Miranda. The old man was standing in the big salt-water poured bay window of his bookstore, staring out at Zeb. The first page had a simple arrow. A giant clip art arrow taking up the whole page. It was pointing diagonally out of the parking lot onto Sudley Avenue. “Bonkers,” said Zebulon to himself. He flipped to the next page, and they were all the same, the same arrow, in the same direction. He put the book on the passenger seat that was a yard sale of burger wrappers, empty french fry sleeves, Wizard magazines, newspapers, and receipts.
Zebulon pulled the Mazda to the edge of the parking lot. He looked over at the pages. Now there was a new arrow, a right-hand turn. He merged onto Sudley. This went on and on for 40 miles, out of the city and into the hills of the Piedmont, hunt country, although if anyone asks you don’t know where, this place is a secret. The pages had changed and changed with different clip art arrows, and Zebulon, in mesmerized astonishment, followed them all.
That is, he followed them all until they stopped. The pages went blank in a parking lot of a golf course, Cloud Shadow Pitch and Putt. If anyone asks, it wasn’t a golf course, but a place you couldn’t find twice. There were a group of men hovering around a golf cart, tipping up beer cans. Zeb got out of the car and took the book with him, holding it before him like an azimuth. The arrows appeared again and took him through the first few holes where a man yelled at him for cutting across the fairway. The book took him onto a cart path that ran along the famous river in these parts, a green river that was wide and clear that time of year, a beautiful river forgotten in the scrum of the golf course and surrounding buildings, a squat office building and a buzzing WalMart. The reason for the secrecy is not to protect Zebulon and the girl…well…it’s to protect the book.
Anyway, that’s where he found her, at the snack cart, a golf cart transformed into a mobile beer tender and hot dog stand. She was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the side of the cart flipping through a comic book.
“Miranda?” he said. She stood straight.
“Yes,” she said.
“This book brought me to you,” he said.
She flicked her ash and walked over to him. She held the book, and they both watched in wonder as the arrows changed directions and pointed back to Zebulon.
“The book had your name in it,” he said. She turned to the front cover.
“Zebulon,” she said, “is that you?” He nodded. “Wild,” she said. “You have a cool name. Wasn’t that in Wildstorm, a freaky general or something?” Zebulon knew the comic she was talking about but never made the connection.
“Miranda Zero from Global Frequency,” he said. She smiled and held up finger guns, smoke from her ciggy mimicking a smoking gun barrel.
