by Daniel Price
“Hannah, you can’t!”
“If there’s a choice besides dying and getting arrested, I’ll take it,” she said. “I don’t want us getting separated. I don’t want to end up in some government facility or wherever they put people like us. I just want to live in a nice apartment and do musical theater. I’m sick of all the weirdness.”
Theo looked to the semblant rear doors. Gloved fingers briefly popped through the surface, testing the nonmaterial before hastily retreating. His mind fell into a jackhammer refrain. Tear gas tear gas tear gas tear gas . . .
“Tear gas,” he said. “They know the back door’s fake and they’re going to throw in tear gas.”
“What?”
“How do you know?”
“I think I just overheard it.”
He didn’t, but he was right all the same.
“We have about a minute before—”
The van was suddenly filled with a blast of heat, accelerated air molecules spreading in all directions. The Silvers winced. By the time they opened their eyes, Hannah was gone.
—
She ran into the woods at 155 miles an hour. Pebbles flew like buckshot from beneath her sneakers. The air around her was icy cold and her vision had turned almost uniformly blue. There was a fresh new ringing in her ears that, when she focused on it, sounded a little bit like music.
The actress slipped between the trees, then surveyed the road from a hidden distance. In her accelerated vision, the tempic barrier swirled with smoky gray wisps. She studied the thick metal posts of the blockade. She wasn’t sure she could break them, even at top speed.
“God, Zack. What were you think—”
“Quit squirming!”
Hannah scanned the area in a startled twirl. The words had come through a woman’s harsh whisper, but there was no one else around. She shouldn’t have been able to hear anyone in her shifted state.
She figured her nerves were playing tricks on her, with good reason. The motorcycle cops had caught her blurry dash to the trees and were now beginning a slow turn in her direction. Hannah watched their speedsuits in breathless anticipation. They didn’t light up. Oh thank God. At least Zack got that part ri—
“I mean it, Jury! Quit moving! I don’t want to rift you!”
Hannah glanced to her left and now saw a young, dark-haired couple hiding behind a nearby tree. The man was olive skinned, muscular, and exquisitely handsome. He wore a black T-shirt over jeans and grasped his companion tightly from behind. Though the woman’s face was obscured, she was built and dressed like Hannah. Her shoulder-length hair was even beginning to show its brown roots, just like Hannah’s.
The pair kept an anxious vigil on an empty patch of highway, twenty yards north of the tempic barrier. Despite their edgy posture, Hannah saw the tender way the man and woman touched each other. They were clearly intimate.
Before Hannah could speak, the brunette brushed her hair behind her ear. Now Hannah had a clear view of her face. Her face. Her own side profile, as seen in countless photos.
With a high scream, Hannah fell out of velocity and toppled to the dirt. The illusive couple disappeared in a blink. Hannah reeled in mad perplexity. She couldn’t shift. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t stop looking at the empty space where her ghostly self and lover once stood.
—
Four seconds after her sister left the van, Amanda heard her fragmented shriek from the woods. Her mind stammered in panic. Something, something, something went—
“Wrong. Something went wrong. She’s in trouble.”
Zack launched a nervous stare through the clouded glass. “She just left. Give her time.”
“No. This was a bad idea, Zack. You’re going to get her killed.”
Theo flinched in worry as Amanda moved in front of a clear window. “You shouldn’t stand there.”
David nodded. “He’s right. Please sit down.”
Amanda ignored them. Her green eyes bulged as the highway patrolmen proceeded, guns drawn, to the edge of the woods.
“No. No. No no no no . . .”
Mia kept her wary gaze on Amanda. She had one warning left from her future self, the worst one by far. Now all the alarms in her head were ringing.
“Amanda . . .”
With frantic eyes, Amanda looked to the intangible rear doors. Mia slid down the seat, speaking in a low and maternal tone. “Amanda, you can’t go out there . . .”
“She’s my sister.”
“You promised me you’d stay in the van.”
“They’re going to shoot her.”
“They’ll shoot you! If you leave this van right now, they will shoot you and you will die! It already happened! I got the note!”
The men eyed Mia with fresh apprehension. This was news to them.
“I really think you should listen to her,” Zack implored Amanda.
“Please! Please listen to me!”
Amanda’s shallow breaths slowed down to gulps. “Okay. Okay.”
Mia closed her eyes and exhaled. Thank God.
“I’m sorry, Mia . . .”
“It’s all right. You listened. It’s not—”
“I’m sorry.”
Amanda turned to the window. “I’M COMING OUT! DON’T SHOOT!”
“No!”
With a final look of remorse, Amanda brushed past Mia. She hurried through the ghosted doors, out into the open air.
“Amanda!”
In another string of time, another elsewhile, Amanda might have burst through the illusory hatch without a hint of announcement. Her sudden emergence might have startled a policeman into firing a fatal shot. But Mia’s warning prompted Amanda to issue one of her own. With five shouted words, she eased the pressure on the policemen’s triggers just enough to exit the van unharmed.
The cruiser cops raised their guns at her. Amanda kept her bloody fingers pointed at the ground.
“Show me your hands!” a cop shouted.
Amanda eyed them with savage defiance. “Call your other men back here.”
“Show me your goddamn hands!”
“You call your other men back here right now!”
Blood rushed to Mia’s face. She scrambled to the exit, only to be caught by her shirtsleeve.
“Let me go!”
“No,” said Theo, grimacing in pain. “No more bad ideas.”
It was Theo’s bad idea to grab her with his wounded arm. She broke free and sprinted toward the doors. David rushed after her.
“Mia, don’t!”
It never occurred to Mia that she already saved Amanda’s life, or that she was making the very same mistake she helped Amanda avoid. The moment she burst through the ghosted doors without warning, the policemen aimed their pistols at her head.
One of them fired.
Mia Farisi never considered herself a lucky girl, any more than she considered herself tall or svelte. And yet there were a few scattered nights on this world when she marveled at the miraculous circumstances behind her continued existence. She’d been spared from apocalypse by mysterious forces, saved from asphyxiation with the help of a future self. And then just twelve minutes ago, she was rescued from death by a brave and beautiful boy who, for reasons she’d love to hear one day, preferred a world with her in it.
She was lucky, never more so than now.
The bullet flew past Mia’s face, brushing her cheek with warm air before passing through the van and piercing a hole in the windshield.
The moment the shot rang out, Amanda stopped thinking about her sister. Her skin turned hot. Her mind went blank.
She showed the policemen her hands.
The tempis exploded from both palms, launching up the highway in two jagged cones. In the half-second journey between Amanda and her targets, a giant white hand had bloomed at the end of eac
h projectile. They grabbed the policemen like rag dolls, pinning them down to the concrete. Amanda could feel every button on their shirts, each newly broken rib in their chests. She idly began counting the fractures as if she were merely having a strange dream.
“Amanda, stop!”
The tempic arms vanished at the sound of David’s voice. Amanda cast a stunned gaze at the cops, then David, then her own twitching palms.
“What . . . what did I . . . ?”
“Come on!”
David seized Mia and Amanda by the wrists, pulling them back inside. Zack hit the gas pedal. The van traveled a hundred feet before the fog of Mia’s shock cleared away.
“Wait. What happened to the barrier?”
“It’s down,” said Zack. “Hannah did it.”
Amanda looked through the grate, at the empty passenger seat.
“Where is she?”
—
Hannah heard the loud standoff between the cruiser cops and Amanda. Even in her muddled state, she could tell her sister had once again become Madmanda—unyielding, unforgiving, impervious to fear or reason.
When the gunshot was fired, Hannah finally broke her paralysis. She jumped to her feet and scanned the area. Amanda was still standing, thank God, but the cruiser cops weren’t. The sight of her sister’s giant tempic arms was enough to rattle the two motorcycle patrolmen. They retreated from the edge of the woods and raised their pistols at Amanda.
“NO!”
Hannah shifted back into high speed and rushed toward them, thumping the barrel of each gun with her nightstick. As the weapons fell to the earth in a slow-motion twirl, Hannah noticed the twisted bouquet of broken fingers she’d left behind on each patrolman. Their faces were already beginning to contort in pain.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!” she yelled, hopelessly incoherent.
She ran to the tempic barrier, smacking the metal post with her baton. The reverberation shot all the way up her arm, rattling her bones. The barrier seemed no worse for the wear.
“Damn it! Come on!”
Hannah ran to the other post and noticed a metal protrusion on the outer edge. It was the size of a salt shaker, and sported three tiny green lights. Maybe Zack was right after all.
“Come on. Please.”
She struck the protrusion. The barrier flickered for a moment, then recovered.
“COME ON!”
A final desperate swing, and the generator exploded in a ball of sparks. The nightstick broke in half. Hannah de-shifted and clutched her throbbing hand, then scanned the results of her last strike.
The tempis was gone.
Zack didn’t waste a breath hitting the gas pedal. Hannah watched the clouds disappear from the driver’s-side window as the van screeched past her. Zack caught her gaze and pointed straight ahead. Hannah threw her arms out, flummoxed.
“Wait. What does that mean? Where are you going?”
The vehicle moved on without her, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by the others.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Zack threw a quick glance back at Amanda. “We need to get off the highway before those other cops get back on their motorcycles. It’s the only chance we have.”
“You left her back there!”
“She’ll catch up.”
“Not if she’s hurt!”
“She’s not hurt. I saw her.”
“Zack, turn around and get her! Now!”
“Listen to me. Your sister can run at over a hundred miles an hour. This van can’t even crack fifty. She’ll catch up. Trust me.”
“After all your stupid decisions, I don’t trust you at all!”
“You’re criticizing me for stupid decisions? What you just did—”
“Zack, I’m telling you for the last time . . .”
A small hand grabbed Amanda’s shoulder, turning her around. She barely had time to process Mia before the girl slapped her across the cheek. Heavy tears ran down her face.
“You didn’t listen! You didn’t listen to me and you almost got killed!”
Stunned and hurt, Amanda took a step back. “Mia . . .”
“Don’t you ever do that again! You listen to me!”
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t lose anyone else!”
“Mia . . .”
“I can’t lose anyone else!”
Amanda pulled her into her arms, holding her tight with aching grief. The two of them had met right here, in the back of this very van. Six weeks had never felt like such an eternity to Amanda. Time never felt so broken.
Theo scanned the empty road behind them, then turned grim. “Zack . . .”
For the twentieth time in the last ten seconds, Zack checked the rearview mirror. The exit was approaching fast, and Hannah wasn’t. His stomach seared with acid.
“She’ll catch up,” he uttered. “She knows what she’s doing.”
Amanda took a deep wet sniff over Mia’s head. “Zack, I’m begging you . . .”
She didn’t have to. He slowed to a stop at the off-ramp. He hated making mistakes, even on small things. This was not a small thing.
“All right. I’m turning around.”
A dark blur crossed the windshield. Another blast of heat filled the front of the van. By the time Zack turned to look, Hannah glared at him from the passenger seat.
“Go!”
With a hot breath, Zack stomped the pedal. The van hugged the winding exit from Highway V, then disappeared into the tree-lined suburbs of South California.
FIFTEEN
Quint didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. At every stop on his morning commute, he examined the dark new bags under his eyes, the jaundiced hue of his skin. He’d spent a long and sleepless weekend devising a scheme to kill Zack Trillinger, for reasons he convinced himself were absolutely vital to science.
By the time he reached the garage, at 7:25, he’d smothered the last of his doubts. This could work. This would work. The plan would go off without a hitch and everything would be okay again.
At 7:26, the universe sharply corrected him.
Quint’s knees buckled with strain as he eyed the bloodbath in the lobby—four dead strangers in multiple pieces, plus a frozen body that Quint could only guess was once a Salgado. He sidestepped the blood on the landing, only to find another spatter on the wall of the second floor hallway.
Having spotted Czerny’s car in the garage, Quint unlocked the door to his office and found Beatrice Caudell splayed dead on the rug. Her small blue eyes were bloodshot and frozen open in shock.
Quint held the wall for support and staggered down the hall. His office was the last room in the building to contain life—ninety-eight rodents, plus two surprise visitors he only loosely deemed to be human.
“Hello, Sterling.”
Azral sat on the edge of Quint’s desk, his face a calm and genial mask. Esis stood among the mouse cages, petting the fur of a small white youngling. Quint noticed that all the other rodents were engaged in rampant copulation. The madwoman had redistributed his creatures, mixing browns with whites, males with females. Five years of meticulous breeding, ruined.
“What in God’s name happened here?”
“The facility was attacked,” Azral informed him.
“Attacked? By who? Who are those people downstairs?”
“Brown mice,” said Esis, with a look of wry mischief.
Though Azral smirked with humor, the joke flew several feet over Quint’s head. He wanted to wring both their necks.
“They’re natives like yourself,” Azral told him. “Though a more unique strain.”
“I don’t understand. How could this have happened?”
“How indeed?” Esis asked, with a pointed glare at Azral. He sighed with soft contrition.
“The
error is mine. I underestimated these people, despite the warnings of my ever-wise mother.”
Esis crossed her arms in a showy pout. Quint studied her in daft surprise. The woman looked ten years younger than the man who called her Mother.
“Where’s everyone else? What happened to the subjects?”
“The Silvers are alive,” said Azral. “But they won’t be returning. The plan has changed.”
“Changed how?”
“That’s no longer your concern. Though I hold you blameless in this latest trouble, I’m afraid this is the end of your involvement in our project.”
Dumbfounded, Quint studied Azral in the vain hope that this was just another peculiar gag.
“No. You can’t cut me loose after all this time, without any explanation.”
“You’ll find I can indeed do such a thing.”
“You owe me answers, goddamn it! One of my employees is dead!”
“All of your employees are dead,” Esis casually informed him.
The nausea came back full force. Quint leaned against a bookshelf. “What? Why?”
“A necessary evil,” Azral sighed. “I seek to prevent future complications. If it’s any comfort, none of your people suffered much. Most of them died in their sleep.”
Quint took no comfort in that at all. “Then why . . . why am I . . . ?”
“I wanted to thank you for all your hard work, Sterling. You did everything I asked of you. And aside from that early issue with Maranan, you handled your tasks superbly. Know that we’ll always value your contribution.”
Quint’s eyes darted back and forth in busy thought. “Look . . . look, why don’t we compromise, okay? Just give me the girl. Give me Farisi and we’ll go our separate ways.”
“Sterling . . .”
“You said she was expendable!”
“To us,” Azral said. “Not to them. The Silvers will be traveling now. They’ll need her unique insight.”
“But—”
“Furthermore, you misunderstand your situation. I said I wanted to thank you. I never said you were spared.”
The walls of Quint’s mind suddenly constricted into a narrow tunnel, as a million floating concerns melted away to just one. White-faced, he fumbled the knot of his tie until it came loose. He knew that pleading for his life would be futile, like begging the mercy of a great white shark or a snowy avalanche.