by Daniel Price
—
The van was still a mile from the hospital when Constantin Czerny reached the end of his string. He turned his head to the window, thought of Beatrice, and then moved on.
Amanda rushed to the head of the stretcher and checked his pulse.
“No, no, no, no. Don’t do this.”
Hannah turned around and watched with dread as her sister began resuscitation measures. With each chest compression, little rivers of blood oozed from the edges of Czerny’s stomach bandage.
David watched with dark discomfort. “You seem to be aggravating his injury.”
“I don’t have a choice,” said Amanda. “If I don’t do this, he has no chance at all.”
“At the risk of upsetting you . . .”
Theo cut him off with a sharp, grim look. Don’t.
Amanda pinched Czerny’s nose and forced two breaths down his throat. She resumed compressions.
“Cardiac arrest is not the same as death,” she said. “If we can get him to a defibrillator in the next five minutes . . . Goddamn it, Zack! Why are you slowing down?”
Hannah followed Zack’s nervous line of sight. Two vehicles approached in single file from the opposite lane. They were both dark blue and sneaker shaped, as if some mad mechanic had slapped a minivan rump onto a sports car. Bright white letters on the hood and roof advertised the cruisers’ affiliation with the Terra Vista Police Department.
The actress looked to Zack. “What’s the problem? We didn’t do anything.”
He eyed her cynically. “We’re riding in a van that’s not even remotely ours, with a dying man in the back and a two-foot spatter of Erin’s blood on the driver’s side. We do not want their attention.”
The cruisers met the van. Zack fixed his gaze ahead with as much aloofness as he could muster. Once the police cars disappeared over the hill, Zack stomped the gas pedal. Hannah ran a shaky hand through her hair.
“God. I can’t take this.”
Amanda was on her fifth round of chest compressions when she noticed that the Silvers in the back were looking at her, not Czerny. Even Mia’s young face teemed with fatalism. Amanda wanted to scream at them. Did they think she was deluded? That she didn’t know death when she saw it? She was a cancer nurse. She knew.
“This doesn’t . . .” She shook her head at Czerny. “It doesn’t make sense. A person with his injuries usually goes through four stages of shock. They progress to tachycardia. Tachypnea. They don’t jump straight to . . .”
She looked at the blood on her hands. Her lips quivered. “He’s already cold. He shouldn’t be cold already.”
Suddenly Zack let out a chain of profanities, a machine-gun blast of foul exclamations that only a native New Yorker could properly achieve. For a moment, Amanda thought she was the target of his wrath. Then she noticed everyone aiming their hot attention past her, through the missing back doors.
The police cars had come back. They rapidly approached the van from behind, then lit their flashing colors.
FOURTEEN
As his limbs turned to stone and his fingers clenched like hooks around the steering wheel, Zack took an anxious trip down the many branching futures. He knew there were no good outcomes left. Just a tightrope path to the least catastrophic.
His heartbeat doubled as he stomped the gas pedal.
Hannah grabbed his sleeve. “Zack, what are you doing? They want us to stop!”
In lieu of spinning roof lights, the twin cruisers were covered with lumic panels. Every inch of the chassis now flashed red and blue. Once Zack accelerated, the sirens blared. A gruff voice boomed through the speakers.
“PULL OVER! NOW!”
Theo veered his wide gaze between the police cars and Zack. “I’m seriously questioning your plan right now.”
“Me too!” Mia yelled.
Zack spotted a sign for Highway V. He’d learned from his preparative map studies that all the interstates here had roman numerals. V stretched all the way north to Sacramento.
“Okay,” he said. “I’d like everyone to listen to me while I explain the shitty situation we’re in. We have no identity here. Whether we’re suspects or perps or just people of interest, those cops will ask us our names. They’ll look for us in their databases and they will not find us. Working under the correct assumption that we’re hiding something, they’ll hold us. Once they find out what happened to the original owners of this van, I imagine they’ll hold us a good long time.”
“But if we explain—”
“Explain what, Hannah? That we’re from a parallel Earth? That we popped into the world six weeks ago and have been staying at a hotel run by physicists until we were attacked by people with swords and guns?”
Zack rushed through a red light. A garbage truck and a commuter bus both screeched to a halt as the van cut between them.
“PULL OVER BEFORE SOMEONE GETS HURT!”
Mia shook her head. “But there are still people who can vouch for us . . .”
“Who, Quint’s people? Do you really think we’re safe with them after everything that happened?”
“Zack’s right,” said David. “We have to keep going.”
Theo gestured at the cracks and broken hinges. “I’m not arguing your reasons. I’m just saying we’ll never be able to outrun them in this thing. It’s falling apart.”
That was indeed a problem. In addition to the wisps of white smoke that snaked from the engine, a dashboard gauge casually informed Zack that the vehicle had enough power left for 25.2 miles. The last time Zack breathed, it was at 28.
Hannah turned in her seat, her hair blowing wildly from the wind of her missing door. “Look, they’re going to stop us one way or another. Let’s just tell them the truth. They’ll think we’re nuts, but we have proof. I mean the things we can do—”
“No.”
The objection came from behind her. Amanda had taken her own bleak trip through the future. She envisioned them all in a government lab, some antiseptic Guantánamo staffed by scientists even crueler than Quint. They’d probably hold them for six months in barren cells before making full use of their scalpels.
“No more authorities,” she said. “We keep going on our own.”
Hannah gaped at her. “What are you going to do? Blast them away with your tempis?”
“THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!”
Zack steered the van up the entry ramp and onto northbound Highway V. He was relieved to find traffic sparse on both the ground and aer level.
David threw a pensive glance at the police cruisers as they split into a side-by-side formation.
“I have a way,” he offered. “It’s not pretty, but I think it’ll work.”
“Will it hurt them?” Mia asked.
“Most likely. Yes.”
She swallowed her objections, even as her thoughts fell back on Krista Bloom. Mia wondered how many slippery-slope incidents it would take before she and her friends were apologizing to their own murder victims. I’m so sorry. There’s no other option. This’ll be quick. I promise.
Zack glanced at David in the rearview mirror. “Look, I trust you. Do whatever you can to stop them without hurting them.”
“Do everything you can to avoid hurting them,” Amanda stressed.
“You guys are insane!” Hannah shouted. “This is insane!”
David flashed a palm at her. “Your objections are noted. Now please be quiet, all of you. I need to concentrate.”
He leaned forward in his seat, squinting as he rummaged through a whirlwind montage of local history images. Seven seconds later, he returned to the present, with company in tow.
An eighteen-wheel truck materialized behind the police cars. The cab was deep black. Its liquid tank trailer was garnished with hazard signs. The cargo had been heptanoic acid, an organic compound used primarily for fruit soda flavoring.
It also had a vital role in the production of black market cigarettes. On Christmas Eve, an aspiring bootlegger hijacked the vehicle and absconded down the freeway at 120 miles an hour.
This had all happened eight years ago. To local eyes, it was happening again.
The Silvers watched in stupor as the ghost truck overtook the cruisers, forcing both drivers to swerve in opposite directions. One slid into the guardrail. The other veered across the median, into southbound lanes.
“No!”
Hannah covered her mouth as a delivery van smashed into its trunk. The cruiser spun a full 360 degrees before hitting the opposite guardrail. The motor died in a shower of smoke and sparks.
As quickly as it arrived, the phantom tanker disappeared. David scanned the view out the rear doors, then emitted a weak chuckle.
“Wow. That was . . . I’d never done anything like that before. That was intense.”
The Silvers all regarded David with varying shades of disquiet. He quickly turned somber.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect him to cross into opposing traffic. That wasn’t my intent.”
Amanda knew she wasn’t in a position to judge after what she did to the Motorcycle Man. And yet a wary voice in her head reminded her that she hadn’t chuckled afterward.
Theo peered out at the other police car, which had already recuperated from its guardrail scrape. “We still have one on our tail.”
Hannah jumped in her seat as a highway patrolman appeared outside her door. His motorcycle was a powerful-looking machine, as thick as a horse. The driver was covered from neck to foot in a blue rubber suit.
“Shit. We have two again.”
“Three,” Zack corrected. He had a motorcycle cop outside his window too.
“I think these guys are wearing speedsuits.”
The floating wires of Mia’s memory connected. She rushed to the grate. “The motorcycles are going to speed ahead!”
“What?”
The suits of both patrolmen suddenly lit up with a mesh of glowing blue lines. The cycles shot forward in a hot blur. They disappeared over the horizon.
“How’d you know they’d do that?” Theo asked.
“I got a note.” Mia flipped to the last active page of her journal. “It said the motorcycles will speed ahead to set up a tempic barrier on the highway. We won’t be able to get around it, but Zack will know how to get through it.”
“What?”
“That’s what it said.”
“I don’t know how to get through a tempic barrier!”
“I’m just telling you what it said!”
The highway once again descended to ground level, splitting the north and south arteries around a thick strand of trees. A sign on the right announced the next exit a mile away. Zack was sure the motorcycle cops would raise the barrier before that. And now he couldn’t turn around.
Amanda gasped as if someone touched her back with cold fingers. Mia held her arm. “What’s the matter?”
“Tempis.”
The Silvers looked behind them as a long white panel extended from each door of the cruiser. The vehicle slowed down, leaving yards of empty space behind the van.
“What are they doing?”
“Isolating us,” David said. “We’re about to be boxed in.”
Hannah saw the motorcycles up ahead. The patrolmen had disembarked to set up a pair of thick metal posts on opposite sides of the road. With a flip of a switch, the space between them filled with solid white energy. It stretched across the highway like a tennis net.
Caught between the tempis and the trees, Zack had no choice but to step on the brake. Hannah eyed him nervously. “What now?”
“I don’t know.”
“This was your idea! Think of something!”
Zack watched the police car come to a halt. Two tall men in uniform stepped out, guns drawn.
“David, ghost the doors.”
“What?”
“The doors. The windows. We need them back now.”
“Okay.”
The policemen stopped, perplexed, as the missing doors to the van reappeared like magic. Hannah ran a hand through the clouded window next to her. Nothing but painted air.
“Does this mean you have a new plan, Zack?”
Yes. “No. I’m just buying time.”
The motorcycle cops approached from the front. They pointed their pistols at Zack and Hannah.
“Turn off the engine and get out of the van! Now!”
Taking a cue from the Scottish Twins, Zack aged the windows until the glass turned clouded and cracked. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. If his friends hated his last idea, they’d truly despise this one.
“Theo, do you still have Rebel’s gun?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can’t do that!” Hannah yelled.
Zack raised his palms. “Calm down. I’m not going to fire it. I’m not even going to point it. I just need it for . . . veracity.”
“What are you talking about?”
He let out a feeble sigh. “Look, we’re obviously going back to the police station. There’s not much we can do about that. But if we coordinate our story, only one of us will be put in a holding cell. All you have to do is tell them I kidnapped you—”
“No!”
“No way!”
“It’s the only chance we have of escaping!” Zack insisted.
“For us,” Amanda shot back. “Not for you.”
“There has to be a way through the barrier!” Mia exclaimed. “Why would I write it to myself if it wasn’t true?”
Amanda winced in frustration. She could feel the tempic wall in her mind. She could even touch it, in ways she couldn’t explain. But as sure as she knew anything, she knew she couldn’t do more than make a few ripples in the surface.
Twenty feet from the passenger side, a policeman shouted through the ghosted window. “Turn off the engine and step outside with your hands up. It’s the only way you’re getting out of this in one piece.”
Theo lifted Rebel’s gun by the edge of the handle, then carefully placed it under his seat. “I hate to say it, but I think we’re out of options.”
“Let’s just do what they tell us,” Hannah said, her eyes welling with tears. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to see any of you die.”
“But what’ll they do to us?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know, sweetie, but is it any worse than getting shot to death?”
David shook his head in bother. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We just survived six murderous people who had talents like ours. They attacked us without warning and we still beat them. Now after all that, you’re looking to surrender to four mere coppers?”
“It’s not that simple,” Amanda said.
“Of course it is. They have weapons. So do we. We know theirs. They don’t know ours. If we work intelligently, we could disarm them before they even know what hit them.”
Once again, everyone leered at David in dark wonder. He was getting used to the look.
“That’s crazy,” Hannah griped. “You’re going to get us all killed.”
Theo nodded. “She’s right. We only got out of that building through dumb luck. We push it again and someone’s going to die.”
Mia bit her thumb in tense deliberation. She fell well on the side of the cautious majority, and yet she knew that without David’s reckless gallantry, she’d be a frozen corpse in the security room.
Zack kept his tense gaze fixed on the windshield. He could see hints of the tempic barrier through the clouds and cracks, an urgent puzzle that taunted him. If only Quint hadn’t been so damn stingy with his information.
His brow suddenly rose. His mouth fell open. “Oh. Wait a second.”
While David continued to arg
ue with Theo and the sisters, Zack turned around in his seat.
“Wait a second! Guys!”
He got their attention. Between his wide eyes and hanging jaw, his friends saw a glimmer of hope.
“I know how to get through it.”
—
Zack’s good news wasn’t good at all to the Great Sisters Given.
“No!” Amanda yelled. “Absolutely not!”
It took him just nineteen seconds to explain his idea. While he filled in the others, he removed the Salgados’ nightstick from the door holster and passed it to an incredulous Hannah.
“One of those two posts has the generator. It could be on the outside. It could be on the inside. In any case, you break it and the wall goes away.”
Two weeks ago, when Quint demonstrated a tempic barrier in action, Zack had noticed a thermos-size power pack on the frame. According to Quint, tempis didn’t run on electricity. It was fueled by something called solis. But power was power. Lack of power, in this case, was freedom.
There was, however, one significant drawback to the plan.
“You’re risking my sister’s life!” Amanda snapped.
“It is a risk,” Zack acknowledged. “I’d do it myself if I could. But Hannah’s the only one who can smash it. She’s the only one fast enough to get away.”
“It could work,” David said. “If she attacks from the woods, as Zack suggested, they won’t even notice her until the barrier’s down.”
Mia peeked out the ghosted window as stealthily as she could. “But the motorcycle cops are wearing speedsuits . . .”
“Yes, but they’re not wearing shifters,” Zack replied. “The shifters are in the bikes. They can’t speed on foot.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
He looked back to Amanda, suddenly sheepish. “I saw it on lumivision.”
“Oh my God . . .”
“I’m right about this. I’m telling you.”
“No. I’m not letting you do this. You’re not throwing my sister’s life away on some stupid—”
“I’ll do it.”
“—half-assed plan that doesn’t even make sense.”
“I’ll do it,” Hannah repeated, in a tiny voice. She held the nightstick with white-knuckled fear. Rubber and wood, against two metal posts and four men with guns.