by Drew Magary
But when she took a step, she found herself on another freeway, directly on top of a moving container truck.
She was not prepared for the wind. Actually, she wasn’t prepared for any aspect of her current predicament. Her handbag blew away. The seams in the trailer were digging into her belly as she lay flat against its top. The semi was going 100mph down a long stretch of dilapidated highway, nothing beside it except for filthy snowbanks and tall, thin fir trees that stuck straight out of the snow like hairs standing on end.
Anna saw rusted green exit signs for towns she couldn’t recognize: SABATTUS, GARDINER, AUGUSTA, SIDNEY, WATERVILLE. They all drew a blank. All she knew is that she was still in America, and that she was on the verge of freezing to death.
The wind hissed at her. The container truck hit a pothole and her PortPhone flew out of her other hand and landed three feet in front of her.
“OH NO!”
A few more bumps in the road made the phone dance around like it was enchanted. Anna tried to slither forward to grab the phone, but could feel the wind trying to peel her body off the truck and blow her away. She pressed her hands and body down into the roof because gravity and friction were all she had at her disposal to stay alive. The corrugated steel of the container was so cold that any exposed flesh stuck to it.
The truck hit one more big bump. Anna saw her phone hop up, twirl around in the moonlight for just a second, and then fall overboard. She didn’t see where it landed. On the ground? In the snow? Now Anna had absolutely nothing save for a pair of extraordinarily chafed thighs.
Every second on top of the container made the wind more cruel, like she was being dragged through a field of poisoned nettles. The truck swerved to avoid a pothole and took Anna right along with it, to the edge of the container and nearly off it. She was getting farther and farther away from the phone and without it she was stranded, lost to PortSys but also to the world entire. She may as well have been dead.
Maybe you should jump. After all, what the worst that could happen? Death? Death seemed okay. She had her moment of glory back in Phoenix, but it was clear that she was in way over her head now. Emilia and Jason were toying with her, seizing control of her body and sending it to new and rotten places. She was miles away from the stolen phone, far enough that walking back to it was no longer an option.
But Anna Huff had no other choice. She took a deep breath and prayed for a quick death: the kind where you’re already halfway up to the white light before you even know you’re bleeding. That was what she wanted if she couldn’t have life. If she couldn’t have Lara. She wasn’t even sad or angry about it at the moment. She had a plan for death and was intent on sticking to it.
Both lanes on the highway shifted over and the truck slowed to a relative crawl at 40mph, past a vacated road work site. She saw a frozen mound of dirt ahead, next to an abandoned excavator. It was her best chance for a soft landing. She rolled off.
Upon closer inspection—like say, hitting it at near terminal velocity—Anna noticed the dirt mound she was aiming for was not soil but rather a pile of hard gravel stones, along with a few razor sharp salt crystals thrown in for good measure. She may as well have jumped onto a mound of porcupines. No death. Not even close. Instead, she hit the top of the mound kidneys-first and rolled down the pile. She spilled onto a patch of dirty asphalt and now every part of her was red and raw: face, neck, back, arms. She was exposed like a shucked clam. God didn’t even do her the courtesy of knocking her unconscious. Instead, He had sealed her inside a great chamber of screaming pain. The depth and force of the pain took her breath away. In her mind, she heard a studio audience laughing at her plight.
Please, death. Please, work with us here.
Anna was in so much pain that she couldn’t even remember how much she hated everyone at the moment. That hate was vacuum-sealed and preserved for later. Her main motor functions had yet to boot back up. Blood was oozing out from under her body. She picked up her left arm and a flap of skin hung down from it like a sheet from a clothesline.
“Shit.”
Every subsequent discovery Anna made about her condition was worse than the last. Her feet were blue. The seams in the truck roof had torn open her belly. Her dress was torn and she mourned it more than her own lacerated skin. She tried to pick the dirt out of her exposed wounds but couldn’t get all of it. The cuts were deep and miserable. The rips in her skin had formed strange, glistening polygons. It was like looking at Sarah’s scalp after the bullet had done its gruesome handiwork.
Finally, she stood up and crossed the highway. Every step hurt. Every stray pebble and shard of glass found their way into the soles of her new shoes. It was an orchestra of pain inside Anna Huff, with the added degradation of watching each truck barrel down the road and rush past her without giving her a second thought. Most of these trucks were self-driving. They weren’t programmed to give a shit.
But then, by the grace of God, one of them stopped. A rickety pickup truck whizzed past Anna and abruptly pulled over. She saw the passenger door open and sprinted toward it, so bone cold that she didn’t care what kind of lunatic awaited her.
She was greeted by a Mexican woman in her fifties sitting in the driver’s seat. Her son, a chubby little thing, sat beside her.
“Señora?” the woman said.
“Lo siento,” Anna said. “Un accidente. Necesito mi PortFono.”
“Tienes un PortFono?”
“Sí.” She pointed down the highway. “Pero en la carretera. Allá.”
“Ven.”
There was nowhere to sit. The kid was only seven or eight years old but he was big enough to take up most of the passenger seat. The woman tapped her son, who looked extremely reluctant to help.
“Muevete!” she told him.
The boy scooched over in his seat, leaving room for a spare asscheek.
“Ven!” she told Anna again.
“Gracias.”
With that, Anna stepped up into the truck and squeezed next to the boy. The seatbelt wouldn’t fit around them both. She was bleeding on him. A lot.
This is definitely the worst moment of this boy’s life.
The boy reluctantly held out a piece of Trident for Anna. “Gum?”
“No, gracias.”
“Cierra la puerta,” the woman said. Anna closed the door and they got back on the freeway slowly, the bigger trucks swerving around them with pissy honks.
“Donde estamos?” Anna asked.
“En Maine.”
Oh! Maine! This all makes sense now, since there’s nothing around. Pretty much exactly how you pictured this state.
After two minutes, Anna saw a PINE agent lingering on the side of the road. She wrested the wheel from the mother and steered the truck directly into the troop. He flopped onto the hood, legs shattered, then fell off to the side as the mother screamed and hit the brakes.
Anna jumped out of the truck and ran over to the agent, who was still alive but blessedly unconscious. Nearby, she saw her phone resting in the snow, the screen still aglow. She grabbed it and went back to the driver and her son, who were now out of the truck and standing over the broken body of the PINE agent. Neither the mom nor the child had passport lanyards.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Anna told them. She was expecting the woman to start screaming bloody murder. Instead, she just shrugged.
“Que se joda,” she said. Fuck him.
Her little boy gave the soldier the bird—the kind of angry finger Anna preferred—and then the two of them walked back to their truck and drove away, leaving Anna bruised and bloody on the side of the frigid highway.
Another truck, with an American flag across its back windshield and two latex truck nutz hanging from its hitch, stopped. The driver got out with a shotgun.
“HEY!” he shouted.
But Anna was gone before he could pump his 12-gauge. She thought she was porting to Dewey Beach, but PortSys had other ideas. After she took a step and felt the shiver, she was two h
undred feet in the air and losing altitude quickly.
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
She was falling among the raindrops, frantically reaching out to grab things that weren’t there. All she could see was black as the wind toyed with her. She couldn’t even hear herself screaming because that same wind was slicing through her eardrums. The stolen PortPhone was still clutched in her right hand, but the water would finish that off quickly.
You’re falling and you’re gonna die. That much was established. Seeing no light below, she assumed (prayed) that she was over water. So, for the second time in twenty-four hours, Anna Huff executed a flawless dive that Mister Willamy would never see. Gut in. Toes pointed. Arms extended and cleaving through the heavyweight air. The dive of her life and she hadn’t even gotten a chance to be in a sanctioned meet this season. 10.0.
She saw the whitecaps and let go of the phone just before hitting the surface. No more Dougie. Before the divorce, the Huffs had a real bulldog that Sarah and Anna doted on. A sweet dog with honest eyes. They would feed Dougie pepperoni and take him for rides in Rhonda even when they had nowhere to go. But Mr. Huff took Dougie with him when he abandoned them for good. That little bulldog cover was a talisman Anna kept close to remember Dougie by. Now it belonged to the Atlantic.
When Anna hit the water, the cold strangled her. Why won’t anyone just let you die? The frigid seawater gripped her battered body as viciously as Vick had. She went to inhale, but her diaphragm was gone. Massive swells pounded away at Anna and now she could feel the ocean pouring down her throat, spreading death through every corridor of her body.
Do the survival float. Anna had learned it way back in summer camp. You float face down in the water and conserve energy only by moving when you come up for breath. She had to do it for thirty minutes at camp and it was worse than anything Willamy had ever subjected her to. Still, this was the only decent option she had in her maritime arsenal at the moment.
She forgot how to do the survival float.
The salt water ate away at her wounds. The Atlantic was a giant jellyfish, slowly digesting Anna and making her part of its own crystalline body. She was sinking, the cold turning to numbness and rendering her motionless. Her sense of direction was gone in this endless expanse of sea; its surface could have been above her or below her and she wouldn’t have been able to tell. It wouldn’t be long now. She wasn’t gonna beat the ocean, it was clear. Who’d be dumb enough to think they could?
There wasn’t time to contemplate. The Atlantic, eternally busy, wouldn’t allow for it. Whatever memories Anna wanted to summon—of her mom, of Sarah, and of her beloved Lara—the Atlantic had no time for any of those. Everyone wants to go down swinging, but that isn’t how death works. You surrender. You succumb. Death wants your dignity before it takes the rest of you. You don’t get to ponder it like some valedictorian asshole.
The only bright side, if it could be called that, was that Anna’s death would get to be her own, lousy as it promised to be. This was now exclusively between her and oblivion. An intimate death. No one else could have it. Maybe the bad guys had finally defeated her. Maybe she would soon be encrusted with barnacles and left to rot along the seafloor. But that didn’t matter. All of those fuckers would be locked out of her tortured consciousness forever. She wouldn’t have to remember a thing about them, and they would never be able to touch her again.
Something grabbed Anna. She didn’t think much of it. She didn’t think anything. Whatever it was, it was likely to be bad: a trick of the water, a shark, the great sucking pull of a steamship, etc. Whatever. Let the ocean do what it does. Just go die in peace already.
She broke through the surface of the water, stunned to be taking in actual oxygen. Then she heard a distinctly Mancunian voice screaming at her.
“GET ON THE MAT, DICKHEAD!”
Anna looked up. There, floating on top of a portable Aerobed, she saw a wad of frizzy hair set against the vast darkness.
“Asmi?”
“GET ON!” Asmi tugged, but Anna was drained past reason. “Anna, you’re gonna die if you don’t get on!”
A wave hit the mattress and Anna slipped underneath. Asmi hung on but her grip was loosening in the gale. Lethal indifference had set in, and Anna was back to inhaling seawater before she felt a mighty mitt grab her other arm and pull her, with brute force, back to the surface. Before Anna could process anything, she was lying on top of the mattress and saw a tall, hirsute boy jump off of it. A great white shark—one bigger than a fisherman’s lies—leapt out of the water to snatch Bamert in midair, but ended up with only a mouthful of rain instead. He had disappeared into the wind as the makeshift raft careened dangerously into the swells.
Asmi reached into a plastic bag and handed Anna a PortPhone. “Hit PORT!”
“Urrrgggghle.”
“HIT IT!”
Anna did as she was told. She felt something, perhaps a foot, smash into her ribcage. There was no sensation as Anna rolled off the raft and through a wormhole—feeling a deeper chill than anything hypothermia could unleash upon her—landing face-down on a feather-soft bed of paspalum grass. She vomited up a gallon of seawater while staring out at a snarl of tangerine and lilac glowing on the horizon. A kinder wind carried the sunlight and pressed down gently on her frozen corpus. It felt like the touch of God.
KONA, HI
“Anna!”
Asmi was pressing on Anna’s abdomen to get the remaining seawater out of her digestive tract.
“Stop,” Anna groaned.
“There still might be water in your lungs, dickhead!”
“STOP.”
Asmi quit CPR and flipped Anna over onto her back. Above her was a marquee that read Kealakehe High School. They were on a football field, with WAVERIDERS painted in all-caps past one of the end zones. Beyond that were the tranquil waters of the Pacific, filling Anna’s soul with joy and relief, one ocean healing her soul almost as quickly as another had destroyed it.
She was a giant bruise, the whole of her skin awash in bluish and greenish splotches. Her insides were waterlogged. She’d never be dry again. Cut her open and she would have exploded like a beached orca. The grass, which looked so pretty at first, was now poking at her raw skin. She could feel her nerve endings come back online but knew that would only bring a new onslaught of radioactive pain.
“Stay right here,” Asmi told her.
“I was planning on that.”
Three port trips later, Asmi was drying Anna off, cleaning her wounds with iodine and mummifying her in gauze and surgical tape. Everything went from freezing to burning in an instant. Touch any intact part of her skin and it would rip.
“How did you find me?” she asked Asmi. “If they know we’re here, we’re dead.”
“They don’t. I’ll explain later, but for now, you need to rest.”
“Where’s Lara?” she asked Asmi.
“Just rest, darling.”
“Where is she?”
“We don’t know, but we’re working on it.” Asmi checked her phone. “Okay, it’s all ready for you.”
“What is?”
“Your bed. I have a pin ready for you.”
“Asmi, I can’t.” She had ported so many times already. Her body and spirit had been pulverized. There were pieces of her still left in Phoenix, and Cuba, and DC, and Cairo, and Tokyo, and Maine (in that case, literally). All that remained on the soft grass of Kealakehe High was a scrap of Anna Huff: the stray piece of a puzzle that would never be put back together again. If she ported one more goddamn time, there’d be nothing left of her.
“You can’t stay here,” Asmi said. “No one can see you.”
Anna began to cry. “I want my mom.”
“She’s okay. We know where she is and PortSys can’t get to her. But now you have to rest, dearie. Please.”
“Everyone just leave me alone.” You could have been dead and happy right now. Instead, this.
The sun was slowly dissolving behind the ocean. Soon, it wo
uld abandon her once more and the day would be over here. But what was a day now, anyway? What was time? Anna had pinballed all over the world in such a tight timeframe that she was beyond mere jet lag. She was Anna Huff, but she was also a collection of 37 trillion cells, give or take, that had been meticulously programmed by evolutionary forces to not live this way. Each cell had evolved to adhere to a regimen of nights and days that established the bedrock of her physiology. All of that had now been broken apart, tossed around like a bad salad. Her body was going schizo. Her heart thought it was her liver. Her lungs thought they were her brain. Her feet thought they were her hands. She was less a body than a faint radio signal, flickering in and out as it drifted through the atmosphere.
“Once more,” Asmi said. “One more port and then you can rest.”
“I’ve gone insane.”
“We all have. Be strong with it.” Asmi took Anna’s new phone and queued up the pin. “Hit PORT.”
Anna took the phone and looked at the location. “You have to be kidding me.”
“Okay it’s a touch amusing, I’ll grant you that. But I promised I wouldn’t laugh at your reaction.”
“I hate everyone. When this is all over, I’m just gonna watch TV.”
She hit PORT and rolled into the wormhole, again feeling an inner cold that went beyond anything the frosty grip of the Atlantic had to offer.
When she opened her eyes, she was in a small dark room, lying on a thin mattress. A male figure loomed over her menacingly. Fuck. Emilia and Jason ported you somewhere else again. She expected a butcher knife. She expected Jason Kirsch to use it this time.
It wasn’t until she heard the man speak that she realized she was dealing with an entirely different type of annoyance.
“Hey,” Burton whispered. “Where’s my air mattress?”