Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  The other problem was my back-seat cargo. It was a lot more precious—and a lot more vulnerable—than the Praesidium operatives now chasing us down. I couldn’t dare be as reckless as Rogers.

  I also didn’t know where we were. All throughout Jenny’s conversation, I had been making arbitrary turns, winding through the east end of Richmond at random—almost like I was trying to implement my free will strategy from earlier.

  That had seemed like a fine idea when I thought getting lost was my goal. Now it struck me as another liability.

  Jenny had twisted around in her seat again.

  “Is it them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But who else could it be?”

  I was barreling down an avenue that had two lanes going in each direction. It was a thirty-five-miles-per-hour zone, and I had accelerated to at least sixty. I swerved around a white sedan that was clogging the left lane, then weaved back to avoid running into the back of a pickup that was puttering along in the right.

  From behind me, the headlights easily matched my moves and were still gaining on us. They were probably now fifty yards off.

  The streetlights had all been green so far, but the one up ahead was turning yellow. I pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, making it through the intersection just as the light turned red, then looked behind me.

  The vehicle blatantly ran the red, earning an angry honk from a car that had been waiting there. Any thought that this was just some traveler in a hurry now seemed unlikely.

  This was the Praesidium. It had to be.

  As if to confirm my suspicion, Jenny’s phone rang again. She ignored it. She was still focused behind us. The headlights were now thirty yards away. I could now see they were attached to a Ford Econoline.

  I passed another car. So did the Econoline, whose engine was revving hot, hard, and angry.

  Then I heard this popping noise.

  Gunshots. Two of them.

  I risked a glance in the rearview mirror and saw someone leaning out the passenger-side window, holding on with one hand, firing with the other.

  “Why are they doing that?” I asked. “Rogers needs you to stay alive, doesn’t he? I thought it was only me he wanted dead.”

  “They’re probably aiming for our tires,” Jenny said.

  “And then what? He’s going to kidnap you and force you into cooperating? How would that work, exactly? The Praesidium’s prophet-in-training working under duress?”

  More gunfire.

  “No idea,” Jenny said. “Rogers keeps acting like he’s going to talk me into this, given enough time. Maybe he knows if he has you and the girls I’ll do whatever he wants? I don’t get it entirely myself. He just keeps hammering that the Praesidium is now my home. It’s like as long as he possesses me, that’s enough.”

  I started zigzagging. Not enough to cost us too much speed, I hoped, but enough to make us a more difficult target. Between that and our speed—we were both traveling near seventy—I couldn’t imagine the shooter would be able to take any kind of decent aim.

  Up ahead, there were now two cars, traveling at roughly the same (slow) rate of speed, one in each lane. The avenue had a double yellow line down the middle, but there was nothing coming the other way—at least not until the next block—so I veered into the oncoming lane for a heart-stopping second or two to make the pass.

  “Nice move,” Jenny said. “He’s caught . . . no, now he’s around them.”

  We had slightly widened the gap behind us. Still, this didn’t feel sustainable. We were going to hit something, or come up on something we couldn’t get around, or run out of road.

  Another series of loud pops.

  “This isn’t working,” I said. “Do you actually know where we are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there a highway anywhere around here? Maybe we could outrun them once we got on some open road?”

  “Not really. There’s 295, but that’s—look out!”

  We were coming up on a red light. Two cars were entering the intersection perpendicular to us. I had no choice but to jam the brakes and let them pass. Then I had to make sure nothing else was coming.

  The Econoline took advantage, roaring up to within a few feet of our bumper. I thought maybe it was going to ram us; then I saw a hole in the oncoming traffic that we could just fit through.

  I stomped on the gas and threaded the needle between two cars, both of which slammed on their brakes, horns blaring.

  The van clipped one of them with its front bumper, sending the car into a spin. The van continued more or less straight. It had lost some momentum, but its driver seemed undaunted. And although we had gained back a twenty-yard lead, it didn’t feel like it was going to last.

  Then Jenny said, “There’s a train coming.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  As far as I could tell, there was no train anywhere. I didn’t see any tracks. I couldn’t even hear one.

  “No, not yet. But there will be,” Jenny said, with utter certainty. “Just do exactly as I say. Go right. Right!”

  We were very nearly to the next intersection—and still traveling about seventy—when she made the order. I braked hard and tugged the wheel right, suddenly thankful for whatever technology it was that made the Range Rover unlikely to roll over. Our tires squealed, but we made the turn.

  So did the van, whose driver had used that extra twenty yards to his advantage, being able to see where we were headed.

  This new street had just one lane going in our direction and parked cars on both sides, all of which struck me as potentially disastrous. There was just less room for everything. The van, which was again making up ground, would be able to push us into something, or pull even with us and sideswipe us into one of the parked cars, or use some other looming impingement to box us in.

  I zoomed down one block, blowing through a stop sign. Midway down the next block, Jenny said, “Turn left here.”

  Without really looking to see what else might be coming—and, again, without stopping—I followed her directions.

  And I was glad I did. We had left whatever neighborhood we were in. This road was wider, with no parked cars, and it was lined with industrial buildings. I felt like I had more room to maneuver. The van wouldn’t be able to pin us in here.

  Still, our pursuers were again right behind us, no more than ten feet off our bumper.

  Then I heard it.

  The train.

  The one Jenny had predicted.

  It let out three long blasts of its horn. The sound was coming from somewhere to my right. I still couldn’t see it, or—

  And then, four blocks down, I glimpsed the train tracks. There were lights flashing. The gates were dropping.

  “Gun it,” Jenny said.

  I pressed down the accelerator. It was a straight shot from where we were to the tracks.

  “You want us to, what, take out the gates?”

  “Yes. You have to listen to me. Faster.”

  “I’m already flooring it,” I yelled.

  From the back seat, Parker started crying.

  We had slowed to perhaps twenty-five to make the turn, but the speedometer needle was now sweeping rapidly to the right. Forty. Fifty-five. Seventy-five. The van was matching our speed, its headlights still filling my rearview mirror.

  The gates had now fully dropped. The train let out three more horn blasts. I couldn’t yet see the engine, but the sound was definitely close.

  “Jenny, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  “Just keep going. Trust me.”

  She said this with fierce determination, like it was her gift talking.

  I was doing ninety. Three of the four blocks had already melted away. I didn’t need to look in the rearview mirror to know the van was still on top of us. It might as well have been in the back seat.

  Then, to my right, I saw the lights of the train. It was not moving terribly fast. But it also wasn’t stopping either. We were tracking toward t
he same place at the same moment—the same place in space-time, as Einstein would say. There was no way we’d survive the collision at this speed.

  “We’re not going to make it!” I screamed.

  “Drive faster!” she screamed back.

  Both girls were now crying.

  In my peripheral vision, I could see this look on Jenny’s face that was almost maniacal. I honestly didn’t know why I listened to her. Maybe it was her certainty. Maybe it was my newly developing belief in her ability. Maybe it was just conditioning after thirteen years of being with someone who was stronger willed than me.

  Whatever it was, I kept hurtling toward that train.

  Its prow was now visible. We were on a direct path toward it. Did Jenny have a death wish? Was this how she wanted us to go? Family suicide by train?

  The engineer must have seen me coming, because the train’s horn blasted again. The space being illuminated by my headlights was all train. We were going to be crushed.

  And then Jenny grabbed the steering wheel and yelled, “Brake hard!”

  My foot went to the brake. She tugged down on the wheel so sharply she practically broke my wrist.

  For a moment we turned toward the right. I could feel the antilock brakes engage. We went sideways into a skid.

  It seemed to last forever. Our tires were getting no traction, just leaving rubber on the road surface and smoke behind them. We were drifting inexorably toward the train. Except instead of hitting it straight on, where maybe the bulk of our motor and our airbags would save us, we were going to sideswipe it.

  I was dimly aware I was screaming. From the back seat, the girls’ little voices added to the din.

  Only Jenny was quiet.

  The train loomed closer, ever closer, growing so large in my vision it was all I could see. My side of the car was going to strike first. It would be like a Matchbox car slamming into a tank. They would probably find small pieces of everything—the Range Rover, my family—for miles.

  We had maybe six feet to spare when the tires bit the road, giving us a violent jolt. We rocked hard to the left, the suspension taking on the full brunt of the force, and I thought we might pitch over, the Range Rover’s antiroll capabilities be damned.

  Somehow, the vehicle stayed upright, bouncing off the railroad crossing gate. We were now pointed at a ninety-degree angle from the direction we had just been traveling. I was still nowhere near in control of the thing. We were going to hit something. It just might not be as unforgiving as the train.

  We plunged off the asphalt. But as I braced myself for a collision, the steering wheel still not responding to my command, I finally saw the method to Jenny’s madness: there was a gravel road that paralleled the train tracks. We were now traveling down it, quite safely.

  Miraculously, we were going to emerge from this without a scratch.

  The same could not be said for the Econoline, which didn’t have nearly the braking or turning capacity of the Range Rover, yet had still tried to make the same semi-impossible maneuver.

  And failed.

  Badly.

  I didn’t watch the impact. I was too focused on trying to steady the bucking Range Rover.

  What I heard made me glad I hadn’t seen it. It was the gruesome crunch of metallic objects meeting, one far less yielding than the other.

  CHAPTER 42

  JENNY

  It took some time before Jenny stopped shaking.

  All the while, she kept replaying the train incident in her head. And praying to whatever god might be listening for forgiveness.

  The thought—about where the train was going to be, about how they would be able to use it to escape—had been another one of those ideas that seemed to appear out of nowhere. What it hadn’t included were the catastrophic implications for the van.

  Was the gift always this ruthless? Was it actually Praesidium-like in its moral calculations, factoring that a family of four was inherently more worthy of survival than a van full of henchmen? Or was it simply that she would be able to see certain things but always be somewhat blind to the full picture?

  It was like when she’d seen the woman with the orange hair, lurking outside CMR headquarters. Jenny had recognized instantly there was something—call it danger—surrounding the woman. Yet at no point had Jenny realized the woman was less than two days away from being gunned down. The specifics were absent.

  Then again, when Rogers had said the word Martinique, she’d had a much clearer vision of the consequences. Was it just because she was getting better at recognizing the sensation? Or was it that the victim, her husband, was someone so close to her, whereas the victims in the other cases were strangers?

  She still felt so new at this. So essentially clueless. It was like being given some fabulous new next-generation device—but no instruction manual.

  Surely, it hadn’t helped that she had been so resistant to the mere idea of the gift. When Rogers had first approached her two months ago, she’d assumed he was a scam artist. Even after he proved otherwise—DeGange perfectly predicted a deadly volcanic eruption in Alaska—she was still mostly interested in making him go away.

  As such, she hadn’t ever really quizzed him in greater detail about how, exactly, the gift worked. He had explained the basics, that she would feel the ripples from death—and the opposite of death, a life being saved—more strongly than anything else. But they had never really gotten around to talking about the more subtle aspects of the currents that were flowing by her all the time.

  Maybe it didn’t matter, because he didn’t know.

  Maybe only DeGange himself would be able to explain that.

  And, at least according to the rules Rogers had explained, she wouldn’t be able to meet DeGange until she was a full-fledged, oath-taking member of the Praesidium.

  That was never going to happen. Which made the gift like so many other things in her life, whether it was playing the college-admissions game or acing the LSATs: she would just have to figure it out on her own.

  They were now rolling through the countryside, closing in on Seb and Deb’s. Jenny had convinced Nate that was the only safe place to go. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that she’d convinced him as that he didn’t have any other ideas.

  After that, she had called to let her parents know they were coming. Deb, the light sleeper who answered the phone, had quickly turned matters over to Seb, who’d absorbed the details in typically analytical, unemotional fashion.

  Otherwise, there had been no conversation in the car. The girls had both fallen back to sleep—after the excitement and the yelling—and the grown-ups hadn’t wanted to wake them.

  The stars were bright and in their billions. The moon was nowhere around. And there wasn’t a streetlight within twenty miles to pollute the sky or spoil the show.

  Under nearly any other circumstance, she would have found comfort in the soft luminosity of light that had started its journey toward Earth millions of years earlier, before she, her cares—or her species, for that matter—had even existed.

  But Jenny was in no condition to savor the beauty of Surry County. She kept checking Richmond.com for news about what had happened, fearing the worst. And finally, when they were about five miles from her parents’ place, the site posted a story about a fatal accident involving a vehicle and a freight train.

  The police had not yet identified the victims, so the biggest question in Jenny’s mind was still unanswered.

  Had Rogers been in the van?

  Or was he coordinating the operation from somewhere else?

  To a certain extent, Jenny couldn’t decide whether it even mattered. A man with DeGange’s wealth could hire an unending supply of disposable bodies. The Praesidium could just reload and come after her again, couldn’t it?

  But how soon would the onslaught come? And in what form?

  They were about three miles from the farm when Jenny started talking softly.

  “I’ve been thinking about Candy Bresnahan,” she said.
/>
  “Oh yeah?” Nate said, his eyes on the road ahead as he drove.

  “Before she almost shot me, she said, ‘This has to end.’ But before that, she said something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘I’m tired.’”

  “Huh,” Nate said. “And you think that means something?”

  “Maybe. The more I run it through my head, I don’t think she was talking about me. You don’t get tired because of something related to a stranger you’ve never met. You get tired because of your own stuff. I think she was referring to her personal situation.”

  “Talk me through it.”

  “Vanslow DeGange is an old man. Rogers says he’s in good health, but he still won’t live forever and everyone in the Praesidium understands this. Unless they find someone with the gift, how do they stay in business? As I understand it, they had been looking for a replacement for years. They just hadn’t found one. And then I came along.”

  “Yeah, how did they find you, anyway?”

  “Well, for starters, the way the gift apparently works is that proximity does matter. Just like all of us, DeGange is more aware of things that are closer to him, whether it’s closer spatially or closer in time. He’s more likely to have thoughts regarding those things. So let’s assume for a moment that if Candy was in White Stone, Virginia, DeGange was too. At least some of the time.”

  “Sure.”

  “Richmond isn’t that far away. He apparently became aware of me having this gift some time ago. He just didn’t know who I was. But I was on his radar screen, as it were. And then, slowly, as he approached the moment we’re in right now and the time beyond it, he started being able to see more and more of this tall woman, not only having the gift but doing the work of the Praesidium. And they eventually figured out that person was me.”

  “Really,” Nate said like he didn’t believe it. “So after all this, you’re going to work for the Praesidium?”

  “Supposedly.”

  Nate was quiet for a moment. “I don’t mean to be selfish about it, but if that’s true, it kinda sucks to be me.”