The Flight of the Silvers

by Daniel Price

  “Well, it’s been fun chatting, T’eo, but it’s way past my bedtime. So I bid . . .” He suddenly slapped his forehead. “Oh crap! I totally forgot the whole reason I came here. Jesus.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Deps,” Evan said, while checking his watch. “They’re hitting your motel in fifty-two minutes. Your friends are going bye-bye unless you get them out now.”

  Theo shook his head. “Bullshit . . .”

  “Come on. You already sort of knew they were coming, just like you sort of knew that Rebel’s people were coming. You gotta start listening to that inner voice, man.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Theo could hear the panicked chatter in his head right now. Run run run from the people with guns. People with guns. People with guns and badges.

  “Why would you warn me? What do you get out of helping us?”

  Evan walked backward down the street, flashing a droll smile.

  “What can I say? I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. But I do have a hobby. And if you guys got arrested then, gosh, I’d have to learn macrame. Who wants that?”

  He turned around and kept ambling. “Oh, and tell Booberella to check her damn pockets already. I can’t do everything for her.”

  As he watched Evan leave, Theo suddenly felt the weight of Rebel’s handgun in his knapsack. A cool voice in his head, neither devil nor angel, calmly demanded that he use the weapon to end Evan right now. It insisted that it would be an act of mercy, a one-time chance to prevent future tears, future misery, the future deaths of some very good people.

  You’ll look back on this night, the voice told him. You’ll wish you had done it. And so will Hannah.

  —

  The night clerk at the Aurora Motel nearly dropped her soup when two young police officers entered the lobby. She was a forty-year-old bachelorette, and was highly unused to encountering quality men at her wretched job. When they asked her if any multiple room purchases had been made with cash today, she didn’t hesitate to look through the registry. Yes, indeed. Rooms 115 and 116 were purchased with cash at 2:56 p.m., about six hours before my shift began. This isn’t my career. I’m actually a . . . Oh, what’s this? She looked at the photos of six young people, only one of whom looked familiar. Yes, sir. I did see a fellow of Oriental persuasion pass by my window earlier. I’m pretty sure it was him. He seemed to be in an awful hurry, both times.

  At 3:41 A.M., a cadre of policemen and Deps assembled outside the motel. On Cahill’s signal, they made a simultaneous seige of the two rooms.

  Both of them were empty.

  Five minutes later, Cahill found Melissa sitting at the desk in Room 116. He dropped an empty box of hair dye in front of her.

  “Found it in the bin. Guess the redhead’s not a redhead anymore. Nice of her to let us know.”

  Melissa shook her head in bother. “Amateurs. They’re all amateurs at this.”

  “You seem disappointed.”

  “It makes no sense. If they’re such amateurs, how did they know we were coming?”

  “They didn’t. They just got a lucky head start.”

  Melissa slid the stationery pad across the desk. The top page was graced with Theo’s sloppy handwriting.

  We didn’t kill the physicists.

  Slack-jawed, Cahill sat down on the bed. “Well, screw me.”

  Melissa launched her dark gaze out the window. Cahill was retiring soon. If these outlaws had an honest-to-God augur among them, then she was the one who was screwed.

  —

  Winded and sweaty, the Silvers perched atop a dark hill and looked back. Beyond the tempic gates of the impound lot, they could see the reflected glow of emergency lights from the motel.

  Hannah looked to Theo in flushed confusion. “You going to tell us how you knew?”

  He’d come pounding on their doors twelve minutes ago, their own Paul Revere. He was both relieved and disturbed to see that the British had actually come.

  “It’s complicated. I’ll explain once we start moving again.”

  Zack narrowed his eyes at the distant lights. He took no comfort at all from their close getaway. The Deps shouldn’t have found them this quickly.

  He shined a flashlight on his compass, and then at the trees. “We need to go north, which means we’ll have to cut through the woods. I hope nobody has dark-forest issues. We have two flashlights. It shouldn’t be bad.”

  “I can make more light if we need it,” David offered.

  “Third rule,” Mia sternly reminded him. “No public weirdness.”

  He raised his palms. “When you’re right, Miafarisi, you’re right.”

  Amanda slung her knapsack over her shoulder. “We should get going.”

  As they moved toward the woods, Theo furtively pushed the stolen cash into Zack’s palm.

  “Sorry.”

  Zack patted his back with tense distraction. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Theo checked on David, anticipating a far less charitable response. To his surprise, the boy merely eyed him through a quizzical leer.

  “You’re just not what?” he asked Theo.

  “What?”

  David removed Zack’s pen sketch from his pocket and pointed to the incomplete scribble that Theo left in the corner. I’m sorry, guys. I’m just not

  “Oh.” Theo scratched his neck in contemplation. “I don’t know how I was going to finish that.”

  “Well, I suppose you have time to figure out what you are and aren’t.”

  Though David had said the words amicably, they still didn’t sit well with Theo. He’d spent the last five years in a liquid state, living without a single care for the future. Now suddenly he found himself insanely concerned with events to come. He was concerned about Evan, concerned about New York, and now very concerned about Peter Pendergen.

  He straightened his book bag and followed the others into the woods. By the time they emerged, the sun had come up and the Silvers were five miles closer to Brooklyn.

  TWENTY

  They marched north, through a seemingly endless terrain of dirt roads and grassy hills. Yesterday’s clouds had all but vanished. Now the late-summer sun raged away at their skin, repeatedly forcing them to take shade under sprawling oaks.

  When they traveled, they plodded forth in a drowsy trance. It was only while resting that thin reeds of chatter sprang up between them. Virtually all the conversation came from Amanda and the men. Mia had fallen into a bleak silence. Amanda didn’t like her flushed color or the way she occasionally staggered on the grass. Mia had to assure her twice that she was fine. Just quiet.

  Everyone knew why Hannah wasn’t talking.

  It was at their first oak tree respite, four hours ago, that Theo relayed a message from Evan Rander.

  “He said check your pockets. I have no idea why. Just . . . be careful.”

  At first Hannah couldn’t find anything in her shorts but the silver half-dollar Zack had given her. She opened her knapsack and fished through the jeans she’d purchased yesterday. Tucked away in the back pocket was the driver’s license of a handsome thirty-year-old man. After a few seconds of tense perusal, she passed it to the others. Zack was the first to speak his name.

  “Ernesto Curado. Huh.”

  “You don’t know the guy?” David asked Hannah.

  She didn’t, but she was sure she recognized Ernesto from her hallucinatory vision yesterday, the muscular man who’d held another Hannah so closely from behind. Her ghostly double had called him Jury.

  Amanda studied the license with fidgety unease. “It doesn’t make sense. How did Evan get this in your pocket?”

  “He did it yesterday when I bumped into him at the department store. He put all my stuff back in the handcart. Guess this was why.”

  “But what was he hop
ing to accomplish? I mean if he was trying to upset you, why use the driver’s license of a man you never met?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hannah, with distant bother.

  Zack returned the license to her. “Well, whoever he is, he’s from the unified state of California. He’s one of us.”

  “Was one of us,” David corrected, with enough detachment to make Hannah want to scream.

  Theo frowned at him. “You don’t know he’s dead.”

  “I think the message is a pretty clear indicator.”

  Evan had placed a small and ominous sticky note on the back of the card. You would have liked him.

  Hannah obsessively studied the license for the next two miles, until all his information was chisel-etched into memory—his height (six-foot-two), his weight (205 pounds), his hair (black), his eyes (brown). She knew his address on 13th Street, not far from where the 747 had crashed. She knew he was an organ donor and that he shared a birthday with her mother.

  She also knew that Jury Curado was dead. There was no maybe about it. He survived the end of the world, but he didn’t survive Evan Rander.

  At noon, the Silvers rose from their fifth shady rest stop. Hannah watched jadedly as Amanda once again enlisted Zack to help her to her feet, a surprisingly dainty move for a woman who was normally self-reliant to a fault. The actress had caught enough lingering stares from Zack to know, even if he didn’t, that he harbored some attraction for Amanda. It wasn’t until her sister’s second outreached hand that Hannah realized the door swung both ways.

  Great, the actress seethed. She gets a funny love interest. I get a deranged stalker.

  Theo walked alongside her on the unpaved road. She glowered at his tender concern. “My sister send you to check on me?”

  “I’m checking on my own,” he insisted. “I feel bad. I should have waited until we were settled before—”

  “Settled? When are we ever getting settled? We can’t go a day without someone jumping us.”

  “Things will get better.”

  “Is that a premonition or just a platitude?”

  Theo wasn’t sure. Ever since he stepped out of the woods, he’d carried an odd surplus of optimism, more than he knew how to handle. His body beamed with giddy anticipation, as if there was a recliner and an ice-cold lemonade waiting for him on the other side of the plains.

  “Hannah, I’m really sorry I threw that Evan stuff on you. I should have waited.”

  “I’m mad at you for the opposite reason.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re holding out on me. I know he talked about me, but you’re not telling me what he said.”

  In relaying his tale of last night’s discussion, Theo had censored Evan’s uncharitable mentions of Hannah. He was stunned she’d sensed the omissions. The woman could be jarringly perceptive.

  “I didn’t think it was worth sharing,” he said.

  “Well, it’s about me, so why don’t you let me decide?”

  “It’s about both of us, actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  As Theo formulated his reply, Amanda and David both shouted in alarm. Now the others followed their gaze to the middle of the road, at the still and crumpled form of Mia Farisi.

  —

  She’d blacked out once before. Last year, at the end of a school assembly, Mia felt the auditorium spin into a vortex of bright lights. Before she knew what was happening, her eyelids fluttered and she toppled back into her classmates.

  It was her own damn fault. Her latest weight tantrum had thrown her into a six-day regimen of cabbage soup and rice cakes. She never expected her crash diet to become literal.

  Her oldest brother picked her up from school. Though Bobby Farisi was six-foot-four and built like a fortress, his baby sister had a way of turning him to porcelain. After a half mile of stony silence, he fell into blubbering tears.

  “You pull any stupid shit like that again, I swear to God I’ll kill you. Don’t ever scare me like that!”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Amanda. “Just drink.”

  She woke up in the shade, with her head in Amanda’s lap and a bottle pressed against her lips. Her head pounded. Her skin throbbed as if she were one continuous bruise. Mia took a sip of warm water and then scanned her surroundings. She could only see Amanda and Zack.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” said Amanda. “You’re overheated. A body can only take so much.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “They went to get water. They’ll be back soon.”

  “Water from where?”

  David had spotted the green bolt logo of a vehicle charging station behind a line of distant trees. None of the others could see it, even after following his pointed finger. The boy had thrown Zack a lordly grin. “And you mock my love for carrots.”

  Zack wasn’t feeling very humorous at the moment. He paced the grass with furious distraction.

  “You should have told us you weren’t feeling well. We would have rested more.”

  “I didn’t want to slow us down,” Mia said.

  “You think there’s a speed trophy waiting for us in Brooklyn? Our only reward is getting there alive. So you tell us next time. You pull this martyr crap again, I’ll tape you in a box and mail you to Peter.”

  Amanda squinted at him. “Ease up. She doesn’t need a lecture now.”

  On the contrary, Zack’s wrath was like water for Mia’s soul. Though the cartoonist could probably fit inside one of her brother’s arms, he carried the same masculine vulnerability, the same caring passion. It was scary how much she loved him right now.

  Zack let out a self-defusing sigh, then sat down with the others. “I don’t like splitting up like this. Not without cell phones.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Amanda assured him. “They know the way back.”

  At least the men do, she thought. Her sister had the directional skills of a leaking balloon.

  Once Amanda caught Zack’s gaze, she motioned to Mia’s free hand. He took it in his grip. Though he offered her a weak smile, he had to suppress his other new concern. If things were this tough in the grasslands, they didn’t have a prayer of making it through the desert.

  —

  Hannah’s calves burned with fury as she climbed the steep ridge. Her only comfort was the malevolent twinge of glee she drew from Theo’s matching strain. She’d forcibly volunteered him for the water-gathering mission, the Jack to her Jill. Though the task hardly required three people, David insisted on coming along. The boy barely broke a sweat.

  “You could have left your backpack with the others,” he told Hannah.

  “It’s okay. It balances the weight up front. Not that you ever noticed these.”

  David eyed her with perplexed indignity. “I noticed. I just never said anything. Was I supposed to?”

  “No, but you’re a teenage boy. I should have caught you looking by now.”

  He jerked a tired shrug. “I don’t get the fascination with large breasts. I won’t say it’s a purely American fetish, but it does seem to be rampant in this culture and era. I admit I’m intrigued by the unique disparity between you and your sister. From what I can see, she barely has a chest at all.”

  Hannah slapped Theo’s shoulder. “See? David knows how to get on my good side.”

  “If I acknowledge your superior endowments, will you stop being mad at me?”

  “Just tell me what Evan said!”

  “He said you’d flirt with me soon!”

  Hannah stopped at the top of the hill and stared at Theo in puzzlement. “That’s it?”

  “That’s the bulk of it. Yes.”

  “Jesus, that’s nothing. I flirt with people all the time. I flirt with David.”

 
The boy nodded. “It’s true. She does.”

  “Theo, why did you think that would bother me?”

  He flicked a tense hand. “I don’t know. He said you’d flirt with me by default, that you can’t exist without a man to wrap around your finger, which I thought was pretty unkind.”

  “It’s also kind of true,” Hannah admitted. Throughout her adult life, the actress had rarely gone a week without some fling, tryst, or other quasi-romantic dalliance. She gravitated toward partners who were meek enough to put her on a pedestal, a handy way to control the terms of the relationship. She wasn’t proud of it, but she was aware enough to recognize the pattern. The real mystery was how Evan knew it.

  “There was one other thing,” Theo cautioned. “He told me you used to have a fourth option, but he removed it.”

  Now Hannah was bothered. For the twentieth time, she procured Jury’s license from her pocket. Evan’s teasing note still burned fresh in her mind. You would have liked him.

  “I don’t understand. How could he say I had the option if I never got a chance to meet him?”

  “He must have his own temporal talents,” David mused, as if merely discussing the weather. “We know from Mia that it’s perfectly possible to tamper with the past. Maybe Evan can do the same. Maybe we exist in a branching chronology that he created, an alternate-alternate timeline where Ernesto Curado never became part of the group.”

  Hannah trembled as she tried to wrap her mind around the implications—a human being removed not just from life but from the memories of everyone who knew him. She couldn’t think of a crueler thing to do to a person, and yet Evan clearly took joy in his feat. Worse, he was determined to fill in the blanks for Hannah, to make sure she knew exactly what she lost.

  David continued to ponder the idea. “Actually, given how much Evan knows about us, I’m starting to think he used to be part of our group as well. Maybe he’d been with us from the beginning, until he decided to change that. What I can’t figure out though—”

  “David . . .”

  “—is how his own memories would be preserved.”

  “David, stop.”

  At Theo’s words, the boy glanced up at Hannah’s pained face. He flinched with remorse. “Sorry. I was channeling my father again. I could be wrong about all of this. I probably am.”