“Llewellyn?” Jacob said. “Should I know that name?”
“Maybe. I think it’s me.”
“You remember something?”
“I don’t know.” The farther I got from the dream, the less certain I was that it meant anything.
“I think I like you as Dana.”
“Am I?”
“A memory doesn’t change who you are.” I felt his hand find mine and squeeze. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that knowing the answer to the questions that had plagued me my whole life would not change who I was.
But that was wrong.
I had defined a large chunk of myself around the fact that I didn’t know these things. If I uncovered that knowledge, whatever the truth might be, the knowing couldn’t help but change everything I was.
Instead of following up that line of thought, I changed the subject. “So you’re a history buff?”
“Hmm?”
“FDR’s Second Bill of Rights? The Spanish Flu? You’ve been a font of trivia—”
“The Spanish Flu wasn’t exactly trivia.”
I elbowed him. “You know what I mean.”
“I grew up with it,” he said. “My dad is a history professor at Kent State.”
“Really? You never mentioned that before.”
“Dana, we’ve never talked about anything personal.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. I figured out a long time ago that there was something there you didn’t want to deal with.”
I sat up. “You were right.”
He sat up next to me, reached out, and hugged my shoulders. I leaned into him. It was nice, resting my head against his shoulder. I reached up and squeezed his hand. This was something I had never had, never allowed myself.
I didn’t realize I was crying until Jacob reached over and brushed the tears from my cheek.
I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, and I felt hot, even in the chill night air. I bit my lip and hugged myself. I was too embarrassed and flustered to say anything coherent, and it made me feel even worse about how I had treated Jacob, shut him out pretty much since I’d met him. I wanted this, but I had no idea how to do it.
His hand was still touching my face, and he gently turned me to face him. I felt as if I was burning away inside, and I couldn’t form the words to explain myself. All I could come up with was, “I’m sorry.”
I felt so incredibly lame.
“I understand,” Jacob said. But I was pretty sure he didn’t have any idea.
He caressed my cheek and then, without any warning, he kissed me.
At least, to the self-obsessed, self-involved woman he held, it came without warning. I was too wrapped up in my own regrets and my own discomfort to pick up on what he was thinking, even though we had just slept next to each other.
I felt him hesitate, and I realized that when his lips touched mine, I had frozen like the little girl I had just dreamed about. I willed myself to move again, placing my arms around his shoulders, leaning into him as if I was falling. I let my lips move to feel his own, and I let my lips part and felt the tip of his tongue find the gap. My own tongue, with a mind of its own, darted out to caress his. At the touch, my skin flushed so hot I felt as if my clothes might catch fire.
He hugged me to him, and I fell forward, pressing against him with the entire length of my body. I wanted him, and it scared me.
I felt his arms embrace me, his hands caress me. My blouse pulled free from the waistband of my slacks, and his hand touched the naked skin on the small of my back. I shuddered. Then his fingers brushed the Mark, and everything inside me vibrated on the verge of snapping.
I raised my head from the kiss and said, gently, “Stop.”
“What’s the matter?” There was an edge of fear in his expression that silently asked if he had done something wrong. It made me want to cry.
I touched his face. I didn’t want to hurt him. That was the last thing I ever wanted.
“Dana?”
Damn it, I was crying again. I rolled off him and tried to compose myself. “It’s not you . . .” I realized what a trite cliché it was, and the words choked themselves off.
I heard him sit up, then he placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t apologize!” I snapped at him. “You’re fine. You’re wonderful. I’m the one who’s all fucked up.”
“Are you going to be—”
“I’m a virgin,” I told him.
“—all right? What?”
“I said, ‘I’m a virgin,’ Jacob.”
“Really?”
I turned around to look him in the face and said, “With what you know about me, that surprises you? You realize that was the first time I even kissed someone like that?”
“No, I didn’t.” He let his hand fall from my shoulder, and I had an urge to grab it and hold it in place. I still really wanted the contact, to be close to him. But I let it fall. To do anything else would be really unfair to him.
“It really isn’t anything about you. I’m just not ready for that. Not here.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I probably should buy you dinner first.”
I reached out and squeezed his hand. “Too much has happened. I just need to get my head together.” I let go. “I never really had a boyfriend before.”
“So I’m your boyfriend?”
I leaned forward and kissed him again, lightly on the lips. Then I told him, “If you can deal with all my baggage, then yeah, you are.”
TWENTY-FOUR
IT WASN’T UNTIL we got up to continue our road trip that I realized I had completely forgotten about Ivan. That gave me another reason to be glad I hadn’t gone any farther than I had with Jacob. If my first time had been interrupted by a third party, I could imagine being put off the idea for life.
It was worse because, when Ivan “directed” me with his Mark, it was as if he was touching me more intimately than Jacob had attempted. In some sense, my body felt as if I’d already lost my virginity to Ivan. That was something I was never going to let either of them know.
I took the Charger back out onto the broken road and pushed us all back in the direction of Ivan’s Empire. It was easier to do this time, the Chaos tugged at me like Jacob had, but the sensations were less raw. The Mark stroked me, egged on by Ivan, but it was less breathless, less jangling nerves.
Which meant that something else had to go wrong.
“Dana?” Jacob said.
“What?”
“Your gas light came on.”
I glanced down, and the Charger’s fuel gauge was on empty, and the fuel warning light was glowing at me. I cursed. I tried never to let the tank go below halfway.
Then again, I was on my third state without a fuel stop. What was I expecting? “Okay, we have to stop for gas.”
Like I had with the farmhouse, I tried to reach out into the Chaos around us to find something that felt like a gas station. As I did, I began to realize that my Charger, much as I loved it, was not the greatest vehicle for time travel. It would only be useful this side of the turn of the twentieth century. Even then it confined us to major roadways.
I began to appreciate Ivan’s steam-driven armor.
I steered the Charger, more with the Mark than the wheel, and let the gray twilight around us coalesce into a paved country road running between acres of farmland. The road signs said we were headed south on National Pike Road and Spoolsville was ten miles farther along. It was about midday, overcast, and, like the world we’d just left, I saw no sign of other traffic.
I saw the obvious destination, a large circular sign hung on a pole advertising Davis*Quality*Gasoline in a garish early twentieth century font that was reminiscent of a blue Coca Cola logo. I pulled into the lot in front of a little Tu
dor-style cottage that had a single blue-painted gas pump out front. At least that was what I thought it was, it was cylindrical, and had a hose hung up next to it, but it was topped by a giant cylindrical glass tank with graduated hash marks on it.
That looks real safe, I thought.
I honked the horn.
“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.
“This doesn’t look like a self-serve kind of place,” I said.
“Aren’t we a little out of place for a Depression-era gas station?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’d rather try explaining ourselves to the proprietor than surprise him by stealing his gas.”
“She’s being wise,” Ivan said.
I honked again. Nothing.
I’d been worried about swiping gas and being confronted by a shotgun-wielding proprietor. Now the emptiness was getting to me. There’d been no traffic on the road with us, and now there was no sign of life at Davis*Quality*Gasoline.
“More Spanish Flu?” I wondered aloud at the emptiness.
“Maybe it’s Sunday,” Jacob answered.
I chuckled and shut off the engine. The latter was probably—given the infinite possibilities the Chaos implied—a lot more likely. A one in seven chance, in fact. “Okay, why don’t you see if you can get that pump working, I’ll go inside and see if I can find anyone.”
“Okay,” Jacob said.
I glanced at the antique gas pump and added, “And be careful. I have a nineteen-gallon tank, and that thing probably doesn’t have an auto shutoff.” I closed the door and had to force myself to walk away from my car while Jacob got out to fuel it. I had the OCD urge to stand by and make sure he didn’t overflow the tank.
I was inordinately proud of myself for not turning around to check on him as I walked up to the little Tudor building. The door was glass, and looked in on a dark interior, so I guessed the Sunday hypothesis was right. I expected the door to be locked.
It wasn’t.
I pulled it open, and some little bells chimed above my head. The air inside seemed still, stale, and empty. All my cop instincts started telling me something was wrong. It was the feeling you got walking into a 7-Eleven right after some punk’s just shanked the cashier and run for it. I reached for my gun and realized that it was in the hands of some Shadow in an alternate universe somewhere.
I cursed under my breath and scanned the room.
“Is there anyone here?” I called out. The bells on the door had announced me, so there wasn’t a need for stealth.
No answer.
There wasn’t much here, just half-bare shelves with candy and cigarettes and automotive odds and ends. I noticed that, above the cigarettes, a small cardboard sign told me how many ration coupons I needed to purchase them.
Back by the counter, a heavy cash register that looked that it came from the prior century squatted like a pagan altar. On the back of the register a neat hand-lettered sign read, “US Currency Only.” The drawer hung open and empty.
It was a robbery.
I edged up on the counter, expecting to see the cashier crumpled in a bloody heap beneath the empty cash drawer. I leaned over to look, and nothing was behind the counter but an upturned stool and a newspaper dropped carelessly on the floor.
The paper blared a headline, “ARMISTICE TALKS FAIL.” The date was June 7th, 1919. I don’t know why, but the date on a random newspaper gave me more of a sense of dislocation than anything else I’d gone through since I started this road trip of the damned. Even driving along a post-Fascist Pennsylvania Turnpike complete with propaganda billboards didn’t hit me in the same way. Maybe because at the time I had been too exhausted for it to really sink in.
I was almost a century from home. More, if I took into account that the world I was in was not the same 1919 that history textbooks back home recorded. At the very least, I seem to remember the armistice talks for World War I succeeding.
I bent to look at the text under the headline. I had only just read half a sentence about “Southern forces massing for a new offensive,” when I heard buzzing outside. Over it, I heard Jacob’s voice. “What the hell?”
I ran back outside to see Jacob bent over the side of my Charger, dispensing amber liquid from the baroque glass dispenser. He faced across the street, toward a cornfield. Above the field buzzed a biplane, disconcertingly low.
Crop duster?
The plane aimed right at us. I saw a flash from the nose, and a streak of the parking lot exploded in dust and gravel. I’d seen enough war movies to jump aside before I realized what was happening. I didn’t hear the gunfire until the bullets tore apart the glass door and the façade of the little Tudor gas station.
“Shit!” Jacob yelled.
I yelled back, “I’m fine. Get in the car!”
I scrambled back to my feet. The biplane buzzed above the gas station so low that it seemed I could reach up and touch the landing gear. It banked around for another pass at us. I ran as it turned, and by the time I reached the driver’s side of the Charger, it had already looped around back toward the cornfield.
It passed in front of me, barely fifteen feet above the trees next to the gas station. I could see canvas pulled taut over the airframe. I could see the wicked black tubes of the machine guns on the nose. I could see a gray-clad pilot, head hidden under helmet and goggles. I saw three starless American flags stenciled on the side under the cockpit and I could almost read a name.
And, on the tail and wing I saw a circular emblem painted with the battle flag of the Confederacy.
A Confederate biplane?
I remembered the newspaper. “Southern forces massing for renewed offensive.”
I yanked the door open and slid into the driver’s seat. I started the engine before the door had closed. The plane had looped back around the cornfield for another strafing run.
Jacob must have seen the plane’s markings, because he yelled up at the approaching plane, “What the hell, Johnny Reb? We’re not a military target!”
I shifted into drive just as I started to hear the delayed hammer blows of the machine guns. I let off the brake and pushed the Mark as the car rolled forward. The driver’s side door slammed shut on a suddenly silent twilight. I smelled smoke and glanced back at the gas station twelve hours removed from the one we had just vacated.
This one had burned. Nothing remained of the little Tudor cottage except a pile of rubble and a few blackened timbers pointing upward, like spears giving the coup de grace to a charred corpse. In place of the gas pump was a crater in the asphalt that was less a sign of explosion, then the scene of some intense melting.
Ivan looked at the scene and said, “This is a military target.”
“What?” Jacob said.
“Logistics and resupply—any fuel depot in wartime is a legitimate target.”
I heard realization in Jacob’s voice. “Oh.”
I checked the rearview mirror and saw the gas cap still open. I shifted into park and got out to close it. I tuned out Jacob and Ivan as I stepped out. I’m no shrinking violet, but while they were doing some sort of male bonding about military tactics, I was starting to get the shakes from having someone try to kill me just because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Good lord, was this actually somewhere where the Civil War lasted another half-century? Or, maybe, the Confederacy wasn’t defeated. Maybe in this world the Civil War ended in a truce, or a stalemate, or maybe came to some sort of accommodation. The biplane might belong to renewed hostilities, someone wanting a rematch.
My hands shook when I placed the dangling gas cap back on and closed the door on it.
Was I standing in a world where there were still slaveholders around? It was a chilling thought, made more surreal by the thought that where I stood here in this version of 1919, I was closer to the Civil War than I had been to World War II when I
stood in my own world.
I heard thunder in the distance, and it dawned on me that the sky was still clear. It wasn’t thunder I heard. “War zone,” I whispered, “bad plan.”
I ran back and got in the driver’s seat and quickly drove us back into Chaos—which, by comparison, seemed a lot less threatening now.
TWENTY-FIVE
“OH, FUCK!” I shouted at the dash. My voice had a bit of breathy vibrato caused by the Mark caressing my insides raw as the gray twilight Chaos roiled outside the car. My frustration fought its way out through the layers of building tension and physical sensation as I allowed Ivan to guide me.
“What’s the matter?” Jacob’s voice had an edge of concern that sounded barely in check.
“The ‘check engine’ light,” I half gasped, half snapped in frustration.
“What? What does that mean?”
“That must have been leaded gas we filled up with.” You’re a guy, I thought, you should know this stuff.
“I thought they didn’t start using leaded gas until the 20s.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and the Civil War ended in 1865.”
“Point taken,” he said. “Are we going to break down?”
I sighed. “No. But it means I probably just fucked up the catalytic converter.”
“Oh, that’s all?” The relief in his voice pissed me off.
“That’s all? You know what it costs to replace one? Over a grand, damn it! I can’t afford this crap.”
“Dana, after the last day or so, does it seem that important?”
“It’s my car.” Even as I said it, I knew how crazy it sounded. But, well, it was my car. But it was looking less and less practical as a mode of travel between universes.
Ivan interrupted my automotive angst to tell us, “We’ve reached the Empire.”
* * *
—
I drove out of Chaos, and the Charger pounced onto a concrete highway like a captive cheetah finally being released back on the savanna. Six arrow-straight lanes worth of freedom, and I think I could hear the Hemi almost sigh in relief.
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