She started to become delirious when we walked her into the emergency room. When the admission nurse saw her wound, they immediately took her back into the trauma room. Jacob managed to use his badge to get us back where we could keep an eye on her as they started the exam.
The three of us stood back by one wall as they placed her on a gurney. Whedon was saying, again and again, “It hurts . . .” One of the nurses drew a hypodermic of something as one of the orderlies held her shoulders down. The doctor told her that they were just going to make her a little sleepy so they could see what was going on.
The nurse rolled up her sleeve and injected something in her good arm. Once she did, the doctor and another nurse started cutting away the shirt around the wound. Whedon’s left sleeve fell to the ground by the doctor’s feet, the material spotted with black and flecks of blood.
The doctor’s face grew pale as he said, “Oh, God.”
I never before heard a doctor say those words in that tone of voice. I hoped I never would again. What I could see of Whedon’s arm through the crowd of emergency staff confirmed my worst imaginings. The threads of black hadn’t stopped their growth, and everywhere they grew, the skin had split open in a new wound filled with black. It had grown as far as her shoulder.
“Gangrene,” the doctor said, though I’m sure I heard a note of uncertainty in his voice. “Have them prep the OR for emergency surgery.”
Whedon groaned on the table. The doctor leaned over. “Relax, we’re going to have to remove the infected tissue.” Then he stood up and looked at one of the nurses. “She’s not fully sedated, give her another 5ccs of—”
He was interrupted by a crash as a stainless steel tray fell from a cart next to him, scattering instruments across the floor, including the hypodermic the nurse was using. One of the orderlies cursed, scrambling back, and a stand with an IV bag fell noisily onto another cart with heart monitoring equipment.
Jacob stepped forward. “What the hell?”
Everyone was backing away from the gurney, and Whedon was sitting upright, waving a scalpel. One of the orderlies cradled his arm, his scrubs splattered with his own blood.
Her hand shook as she pointed the scalpel at the doctor. “I need to go home now.” Her voice slurred, probably from the sedation. She wobbled a bit as she sat up, and the blouse she had worn fell off her left shoulder where the doctor had removed the sleeve and slit the material to the collar. It revealed a lacy satin bra that seemed so unlike the businesslike pain in the ass Whedon had been. It also revealed the perverse Mark that ate its spidery pattern into her arm, and up across her shoulder.
The doctor got points from me for sliding in front of the nurse and the wounded orderly to face Whedon. “Put that down,” he said, “You’re sick and not thinking clearly.”
Whedon slid off the edge of the gurney and stood, swaying back and forth. “I’m going home.”
Jacob cursed, and I saw his hand reaching for an empty shoulder holster. I held out an arm in front of him and stepped forward. “Jessica?”
The IV stand leaned up against one of the carts, still attached to Whedon’s scalpel-wielding arm. When she took an unsteady step forward, she pulled it crashing forward before the tube finally pulled free of the needle taped in her arm.
She squinted in my direction. “D-detective Rohan?”
I swallowed when I saw her eyes. I could see spreading patches of black, as if someone had put drops of India ink to bleed across the sclera. “Listen to the doctor.”
The doctor said, “You have a bad infection, and it’s spreading. We need to treat it before—”
“Bullshit!” She swiped with the scalpel so aggressively that the doctor stumbled back, almost knocking over the nurse behind him.
I took a couple of steps forward. It wasn’t close to ideal, but she was unsteady enough that I was pretty sure that I could get control of her arm before she managed to do me any real harm with the scalpel. I kept my hands low, spread, and open as I said, “We’re trying to help you.”
“You don’t even know what’s happening to me!” Her voice and her posture steadied, as if anger increased her lucidity. She pointed the scalpel at the doctor. “You’re not cutting my arm off.”
I felt the touch of a Shadow on my Mark.
I didn’t want to believe what was happening, and for a fraction of a second as I moved to grab her arm, I’d convinced myself that I was feeling the approach of another ambush.
As I moved, she took a step toward the doctor, and disappeared. At the same time I felt the cold hand of a Shadow slide across my Mark.
A cold, small, feminine hand.
“No, damn it!” I said to the air as I pushed my own Mark to follow her. The hospital room blurred as the more ephemeral contents disappeared. I caught a glimpse of her as our movements through Chaos were briefly in sync. I called out to her, “Jessica! Stop! You don’t know where you’re—”
Her visible presence was long gone before the sentence was finished. I ran through the slowly mutating corridors of the hospital, now only following the feeling of her Shadow hand on my Mark. I raced outside to a parking lot that was eerily empty as I ran through layers of potential worlds where only the surface of the asphalt and the lampposts held any congruency beneath a pulsing gray-blue sky that bore no sun, moon, or clouds.
I ran across the parking lot, moving deeper into Chaos from our temporary 1970s haven, and the lampposts dissolved into fog with the hospital, and the ground became unstable, mutable, fluid. I felt her, but she had run full-tilt into this Chaos, and her touch on my Mark was fading . . . faded . . .
Gone.
I could feel the wild motion of the Chaos around me, and I had instinctively run along the most stable route. Whedon hadn’t. Again I had the feeling of running across ice floes floating on a raging rapid. Problem was, while I was dancing on top of the ice, she dove straight into the water.
I stopped, and a world resolved from the fog around me.
I stood on a street of weed-shot brick between ranks of burnt-out Victorian housing. The cold here made my breath fog. A rusted-out Model T squatted tireless on the road in front of me. Through the weeds on one side of the road, I saw a flash of bone—the skull of some large animal staring at me.
Below the blood-red sky, the entire world was silent.
I tried to sense Jessica Whedon’s presence, but I felt nothing. Alone. Cold.
Too close, I heard a canine growl, then multiple ones. The weeds rustled around the overgrown road, and through the underbrush I saw flashes of black-silver fur, the glint of an eye, and the curl of a wolf’s muzzle.
Time to go.
Like my travel before, escaping the Shadows, it took me four times as long to return as it took me to leave. But I could return. It seemed that I had a sense of direction in Chaos that prevented me from losing myself.
What happened to her?
I don’t know why I should think that question. She was clearly joining the ranks of the Shadows. The Mark scarring her body ate into her skin like the other Shadows, and she been granted the same ability to move through worlds that I shared with the Shadows. . . .
But why didn’t she share the same homicidal tendencies that drove the ones chasing me and Ivan . . . or John Doe?
Maybe it’s progressive, like some sort of zombie dementia.
That couldn’t be quite right either. The Shadows that had stalked me and Ivan were homicidal, but they were also functional. They set elaborate ambushes, used firearms effectively, and had hijacked a semitrailer. They were far from mindless, more like an enraged mob than shambling hordes.
That wasn’t quite right either. The Shadows were far from being a directionless mob. They were focused quite tightly on a few definitive targets. If it was just a predatory mindset, sensing our Marks like a shark smelling blood in the water, they should have dispersed the first time we
escaped them, losing themselves back into the ocean of Chaos to hunt their next meal. I told Ivan that these things showing up now was no coincidence, and the more I thought, the less random it appeared.
To engineer the almost successful ambush at the airport, they had to track us, and somehow coordinate the convergence of two or three separate groups toward the exit by the airport. That’s not trivial for police to do with full radio communication and a helicopter.
Someone, somewhere, had to be coordinating their attack.
I don’t know why, but I had a strong and unfounded fear that I would return and neither Jacob nor Ivan would be there. However, as soon as I walked across the parking lot where my familiar blue Charger, coated in mud-spray, sat between a VW microbus and a lime-green Pinto, I saw Jacob and Ivan waiting for me, huddled by the emergency entrance.
Jacob saw me first and ran toward me. “Dana, are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Whedon—”
“She’s gone.”
The color drained from his face. “Dead?”
“No, just gone. I couldn’t follow her. She got lost in the Chaos.”
Ivan walked toward us, and Jacob edged away from him and lowered his voice. “Dana, what you do—what he does—it’s contagious?”
I sighed, and even though it was a perfectly reasonable concern, I felt no urge to rein in my irritation. “I’m not going to bite you, Jacob.”
Ivan stopped before me and said, bowing his head slightly, “My Lady, are you going to accompany me back to the Empire?”
“Hold on,” Jacob said. “What?”
Ivan ignored him, and his voice took on a grave tone. “I must return as soon as I can, with or without you.”
“I thought you couldn’t return empty-handed.”
“I’ll face severe discipline, yes. But I must report the activity by the Shadows, and what happened to your friend. I know of nothing that explains her transformation. She was just another of the Stationary before the attack, wasn’t she?”
“Stationary?”
He cursed something in Russian and clarified by looking askance at Jacob. “Like him.”
“Wait a moment here,” Jacob said.
“No,” I said. “She didn’t have the Mark.”
“I must report that Shadows exist so close to the Empire and can multiply their numbers. I’ve delayed returning too long already. Will you accompany me?”
Jacob looked at both of us. Then, before I could answer, he took my arm. “Can you give us a moment in private?”
I let him take me a few steps away from Ivan so he could whisper, “Are you seriously considering going back with that guy?”
“Yes.”
“The same guy you had handcuffed in your basement six hours ago?”
“Yes.”
“Do you trust him?”
“No.”
He sighed.
“What do you want from me, Jacob? You’ve seen what I’m dealing with. Ivan comes from a place where people deal with this as a matter of course. Not to mention the fact that if I don’t go with him, a mob of Shadows might follow me home.”
“They could be following him.”
“You think it’s a better idea I risk that, and lose what chance I have at learning about—”
“Indoor voice, Dana,” he whispered.
I realized my volume had been ratcheting up with my frustration. “Damn it, I don’t know what else to do.”
“I know.”
“I won’t strand you in the ’70s, though. We’ll swing back home so I can drop you off back where you belong.”
He touched my hand. “No.”
“What?” My voice started rising again.
“You aren’t going to leave me to wonder what happened to you. You go, I’ll go.”
“What? No. This isn’t your fight.”
“Partners, remember?”
“This isn’t a police investigation.”
“Way I see it. I’m keeping an eye on a suspect in an unsolved homicide.” He nodded back at Ivan.
I froze, unable to talk. The fact was I wanted him with me. I had aired all my dirty laundry in front of him, and he was still around. I did not want to let that go.
And I felt like a selfish bitch for not trying harder to talk him out of it.
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” I said, my token effort to give him one last out.
“And you do? You’re just going to follow this guy home and say, ‘Take me to your leader?’”
“Unless a better option presents itself.” I looked up at the dark sky. The air was chill, and my breath fogged a little. I felt very tired and hugged myself. I wanted to go home, put some old Metallica on full blast, and pretend that nothing existed beyond the walls of my house.
I turned around and walked up to Ivan. “How do we get there?”
TWENTY-ONE
THE LAST THING I wanted to do was use my Mark again, but I also did not want this opportunity to slip away, no matter how ragged I felt inside. I felt bone-tired, but it wasn’t really physical. According to the clock on the dash, it was only three in the afternoon, despite the setting of the sun here in 1970-something.
My fatigue was psychic and spiritual. I felt myself shaking, vibrating like a piano wire, and if anything so much as brushed against me, I felt an involuntary shudder. Every nerve felt overstimulated to the point I couldn’t really distinguish pleasure from pain, or from simply incidental contact.
I needed my bed . . . or a long soak in my bathtub with my eyes closed.
Instead, I drove slowly out of 1970s Cleveland while Ivan rode shotgun and explained what he wanted us to do.
According to Ivan, my car was necessary to return to the Empire in any reasonable time. It served the same purpose his armor had, pushing the occupant through worlds faster than anyone could walk. The weight might slow me down, but the speed at which it covered ground more than made up for it.
Ivan said that it was only due to his armor and the fact that his quarry had taken a “straight” route through Chaos to my world, that Ivan had been able to keep up with John Doe.
He believed that driven by a Prince—driven by me—my Charger could traverse the worlds between here and the Empire as quickly as it could cover the ground between here and where we were going. Perhaps faster.
“The ground between here—”
“We need to go to the North American capital, Washington.”
Of course, we did.
I looked at the clock again, and if it had been a normal drive he was talking about, it wouldn’t be horribly out of the question. Seven hours, give or take. I licked my lips and thought about the last few excursions into Chaos.
Could I do that again, for that long?
Muscles inside me shuddered with anticipation just thinking about it. I drove out of Cleveland and onto the freeway. I glanced at the gas gauge and sighed, “One side trip first.”
“What? Why?” Jacob asked.
“We can’t get to DC on a quarter tank.”
“Oh,” Jacob said. “Why don’t you stop here?”
I shook my head. “Leaded gas is not a good idea for the catalytic converter, and I don’t think the Sohio station there would take twenty-first century plastic.”
“You have a point there.”
I pushed the Charger back toward home, but only briefly. I did not want to return too close to the Shadows. Less than a half minute pushing with my Mark found us back in a familiar 1986. Jacob looked at the boxy cars with rectangular headlights and said, “I don’t think a station here will take your plastic either.”
I nodded. “But if memory serves, we’re in an era before all self-serve pumps were prepay.”
I pulled off of the interstate and filled the tank at a Shell stati
on. It was unleaded and not prepay. It was only 90 cents a gallon, but I still felt guilty for stealing the gas. I wondered why, since I’d done a hell of a lot of more legally questionable things as a cop. Up to now, I’d only been concerned about legal niceties in my “home” world.
I wondered if I was reacting against Ivan’s solipsism—as if, after hearing about universes appearing and disappearing throughout Chaos, I wanted them to be more real.
However I felt, I was committed once I started pumping. I had no way to pay at a 1986 gas station. Even my folding money would look fake in this decade.
The attendant ran out cursing when I drove away, but a nudge from the Mark and he and the Shell station were gone.
* * *
—
I needed a rest, and we were close to the Pennsylvania border before I felt prepared to try using my Mark again. When I told Ivan I was ready, he asked, “Can you follow my direction?”
I felt his hand on the small of my back, but it wasn’t his hand, and it wasn’t really my back that felt it. He looked at me, and I could tell he had no clue exactly how he was touching me.
Without the distraction of needing to flee for my life or the unpleasant touch of the Shadows groping me, I was fully aware of the sense of his Mark brushing me ever so lightly with a masculine touch that elicited goosebumps and little shivers on my skin.
I bit my lip and forced myself to stare at the road ahead of us. My knuckles cracked as I gripped the wheel.
“Yes,” I said. What I thought was: seven hours?
I steeled myself as I pushed forward with the Mark. Again, I opened up with everything I had in me, and the motion of the Charger seemed to pull me even farther, faster. Ivan’s touch came along with me, embracing me, guiding me, as I felt my Mark pulling me deep into a bottomless well inside myself.
Along with Ivan’s guiding touch stroking me, with my senses heightened to bursting, I could feel the world around me, as if it embraced me, too. I could sense the way worlds slid by, obeying their own motion through dimensions I could feel but couldn’t visualize.
I had the general sense of where Ivan pushed me, just as the geographic direction I needed to go was generally due southeast. But there was the immediate feel of Chaos sliding by me and the Charger, I no longer seemed to be stepping across the ice floating on the rapids, I was surfing the crashing water, submerged in the current, with infinite streams of probability washing across my skin in frighteningly intimate waves.
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