The Flight of the Silvers (10 page)

Theo shook his head at himself. “God. You must think I’m an idiot.”

“I don’t. Really. When I first got here, I thought this was Canada.”

After scanning her for ridicule and finding none, Theo leaned his head back and laughed. His face twitched briefly, like he was shaking off a fly.

“I’d been riding all night from San Francisco,” he told her. “So I was already at diminished capacity when I met the guy. I’ll also admit that I wasn’t entirely sober.”

“Theo . . .”

“My point is that I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Theo, did this guy have white hair?”

He stared ahead serenely. At this point, he’d lost all capacity for surprise.

“Yeah. I guess you met him too.”

The van pulled to a stop along the curb. Hannah looked out the window. They were still downtown, in a decidedly less ritzy area than the one she’d arrived in.

“We’ll be back,” said Martin. “We got two signals, so you’ll be in good company soon.”

The Salgados disappeared down an alley, between a dilapidated post office and a grungy diner. Hannah and Theo fell into an awkward silence. Suddenly the actress felt an eerie chill on the back of her neck, as if someone was watching her. She turned around and scanned the street. No one.

Soon Theo’s head dipped and his eyelids fluttered erratically. Hannah left him to his twitchy nap.

“Azral,” she muttered, in a vacant daze. It was strange to learn the name of the white-haired man after all this time. He was no angel. As sure as Hannah knew she was alive, she knew he was no force of goodness.

Four minutes after leaving, the Salgados returned without company.

“What happened?” Hannah asked. “I thought we were getting more people.”

Martin hurriedly texted his daughter. “False alarm.”

Hannah could practically feel his tension. His son looked downright disturbed. She opted not to inquire further. She’d had enough agitation for one ride.

The vehicle started up again. Soon Hannah drifted off into uneasy thoughts. A floundering actress, a droll cartoonist, and a law school dropout who got plastered at bus stops.
Why us, Azral? What could you possibly want from—

“He’s right,” Theo murmured.

Hannah looked at him again. His eyes were still closed. She couldn’t tell if he was addressing her or merely talking in his sleep.

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“Zack. He’s right. It’s not enough money to get to Brooklyn.”

She sat forward. “Wait, what?”

A few drops of blood trickled onto his sweatshirt. Then a few more. Then his nose became a faucet. It didn’t take a nurse to see that something very wrong was happening inside Theo Maranan.

—

While the first two floors of the Pelletier building had been converted to office space, the top flight stayed true to its hotel origins. Thirty suites remained fully furnished with beds, chairs, and dressers. Only the locks and lumivisions had been removed, by order of the new owner, Dr. Sterling Quint.

Amanda emerged from her shower to discover that one of the physicists had taken her clothes for study. All she owned now were her gold cross necklace and diamond wedding ring. She was willing to let science have the ring, if science asked.

She fastened her robe and crossed the hall into Hannah’s suite, listening to the running shower through the bathroom door. She pushed it open a crack.

“Hannah? You okay?”

Amanda could see her silhouette through the gauzy white curtain, the buxom shape that Derek had ogled fourteen hours ago. Hannah leaned against the tile in somber repose. The mood-lifters were wearing off, turning her thoughts to stucco.

“I’ll be out soon,” she said in a dismal voice.

“There’s no hurry, Hannah. I just wanted to check on you.”

“What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The quiet girl in the lobby.”

“Mia.”

“Yeah. Mia. She didn’t look very happy.”

“She just lost her whole family.”

“That’s what I figured,” Hannah said. “It’s got to hurt a little. I mean to see that we didn’t.”

Amanda sat on the edge of the sink and closed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“You know Mom’s dead, right?”

The spider-leg tingles came back to Amanda’s right arm. Her fingers twitched uncontrollably. “Hannah . . .”

“This wasn’t just San Diego. It was everywhere. A kid with a radio said so. The whole goddamn world.”

Amanda could hear her sister’s choking sobs over the water. “Hannah, you’re coming down off a very strong drug . . .”

“No, I’m coming down off everything! I’m crying about our mother! How come you’re not?”

A powerful chill seized Amanda’s hand. She pulled back her sleeve and gasped at the mad new blight on her arm. Her skin was covered in tiny white dots from her fingertips to her bracelet. The beads looked as hard and shiny as plastic, but they moved with a life all their own. Amanda watched with frozen horror as three flea-size spots shimmied up her thumb.

Oblivious to the crisis, Hannah rested her head against the wall. “I didn’t . . . Look, I don’t know what I’m saying right now, okay? Don’t listen to me.”

Amanda shook her hand with hummingbird zeal until the dots disappeared. She searched every inch of her skin for remnants.

“Amanda?”

She threw her saucer gaze at the shower curtain. “W-what?”

“I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’m not . . .” She flashed back to her alley encounter with Esis, the strange white tendril that had burst from her hand.
What did she do? What did she do to me?

Amanda jumped to her feet. “I should . . . I should check on the kids.”

“Let me know if you find out anything about Theo.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask.”

“He said he was a blight.”

Amanda stopped at the door. “What?”

“Theo. He made himself out to be some god-awful person, but he didn’t seem so bad.”

Hannah smeared hot water against her eyes. “I don’t want him to die.”

Amanda kept staring at her flushed pink arm, lost in dark imaginings. God only knew what the scientists would do if they found out about her white affliction. They’d probably have her vivisected by sundown.

“He’ll be okay,” the widow said, without remotely meaning it. “We’re all going to be okay.”

—

Amanda returned to the game parlor, her arm still tingling from her outbreak. She noticed David and Mia keeping a curious vigil at the window.

“What’s going on?”

Mia turned to her. “Erin’s back. She found another one of us.”

“Looks healthier than the last guy,” David added. “Though he doesn’t seem pleased.”

Before Amanda could peek for herself, the procession moved inside. Loud voices echoed from the lobby.

“—not until you tell me what the hell’s going on! I mean, why so cryptic? Are they paying you to generate suspense? Because trust me, I’m all stocked up.”

David smirked at his companions. “He’s certainly spirited.”

Mia noticed Amanda’s tense expression. “Are you okay?”

She forced a thin and shaky smile, even as her thoughts churned with hot new worries. She’d held Mia’s hand earlier. What if she infected her? What if they both had the alien blight now?

Amanda studied Mia’s fingers as casually as she could. “I’m okay. How . . . how are you feeling?”

“Numb,” the girl replied. “Tired. I’m happy for you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your sister.”

“Oh.” Amanda blinked in confusion, then reeled with guilt. “Yeah. I still can’t believe she’s alive.”

“Are you two close?”

“Uh, well—”

The argument in the lobby got louder, closer. Now they could hear Beatrice’s chipmunk voice.

“Sir, if you would just give me your name . . .”

“My name is Up Yours until I get some answers. What is this place? Who are you working for? What the hell do you want with me?”

“Sterling Quint will answer everything—”

“Sterling Quint? Sounds like a Bond villain. I’m not appeased. But if you can get him here and talking in five minutes, I’ll become a lot nicer.”

The group appeared in the doorway. Between Beatrice and Erin stood a lanky young man with wavy brown hair. His rumpled black oxford was torn at the left shoulder. He clutched a spiral-bound pad against his chest. A sketchbook.

Zack examined the three refugees in bathrobes, then chucked a hand in hopeless dither.

“Okay. Now I’m at a spa.”

—

Czerny stopped at the end of the second-floor hallway. He squeezed a drop of clear liquid into each eye and shot a blast of eucalyptus spray up his nostrils. After several blinks and sniffs, he was finally ready. He knocked on the door to the Primary Executive’s office, and then once again stepped into Rat Heaven.

Scattered among the Persian rugs and sculptures stood ten huge glass aquariums, each filled with scampering mice of the brown and white varieties. Despite the apartheid arrangement, both breeds enjoyed a life of murine opulence, filled with fresh mulch and lettuce, frequent mating opportunities, and the greatest luxury of all: time. As physicists, the Pelletier Group experimented with math, not mammals. None of these creatures would see the business end of a scalpel. Not for a few generations, anyway. Their caretaker was breeding a special strain for his wife, a university neurobiologist. Czerny could tell from the devoted pampering that these creatures were more than a pet project to Sterling Quint. They were pets.

A fat white mouse roamed free on his great mahogany desk. Quint stroked her back as she chomped a piece of radicchio.

“I’m not encouraged by the blood on your shirt.”

Czerny breathed through a scented tissue. “I’m afraid the Oriental has fallen into coma, sir.”

Quint scowled in pique. “Idiots.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Salgados. They should have smelled the alcohol on him. They had no business drugging him in the first place.”

“As it stands, I agree. Shall I dismiss them?”

Quint pondered the matter a moment, then slowly shook his head. “No. The last thing we need are disgruntled ex-contractors spilling our secrets. Raise their wages, but give them less responsibility. Have them guard the property or something.”

“Of course, sir. Clever thinking.”

It had been remarked by people crueler than Czerny that Sterling Quint kept mice to make himself feel larger. A quirk from his father’s genes had left him with achondroplasia, which stopped his growth at four-foot-five. While he struggled with his stature as a child, he’d made peace with it in his adult years. Now, at the distinguished age of fifty-five, he took comfort in the fact that “little” languished at the bottom of his list of pertinent adjectives.

“That doesn’t solve the problem of our unfortunate guest,” said Czerny. “I fear his condition exceeds my expertise.”

“Maranan won’t die,” Quint assured him. “I have a specialist coming tonight.”

Czerny knew better than to press his boss for details, or to inquire how he knew the Filipino’s name. He glanced at the three-by-three bank of monitors on the wall. Seven of the screens showed empty rooms. He saw Amanda, Zack, and the teenagers on one. On another, he caught Hannah running a towel over her wet, naked skin.

Blushing, he forced his gaze back onto Quint. “Uh, I suppose you already know that our sixth guest has arrived.”

“Sixth and last,” Quint responded. “That’s all of them.”

This was news to Czerny, especially since there had been nine signals from the start. One led to a corpse. He was eager to learn what Quint knew about the other two.

“Okay. I’ll inform the team. I take it you’ll be introducing yourself soon?”

“Yes. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Czerny sniffed his tissue again. “Excellent. I’ll let you prepare.”

“Constantin . . .”

He turned around at the door. Quint leaned back in his leather chair, shining flawless white teeth.

“It’s okay to smile. This is exciting stuff.”

Czerny laughed. “You have a gift for understatement, sir.”

Alone again, Quint held the free-roaming mouse and petted her with euphoria. There were six new people in his building today, six people who didn’t exist on this world yesterday. As far as science was concerned, this was a game changer. A game
winner
. Now all he had to do was follow the wisdom that Azral had texted him twenty minutes ago.

Keep them safe. Keep them content.

Quint wasn’t worried. It was easy to keep them safe when no one else knew they existed. Keeping them content was harder, given their state of mind. It was also less important. When these six people lost their world, they lost their options. In the end, they had nowhere else to go.

EIGHT

Zack Trillinger had earned enough screaming condemnation in his life to know that his wisecracks weren’t always appreciated. His mother had called it a “cheek problem.” He couldn’t help himself. Serious people brought out the Bugs Bunny in him, and no amount of blowback could get him to temper his snark. On a day like today, when taxis flew through the air and actresses moved at the speed of missiles, it seemed especially important to embrace the scathing absurdity of the universe, no matter who it bothered.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t prepared for the wrath of Amanda Given, a woman who was uptight even on good days, and who was still reeling from the white-specked lunacy on her skin. It took only twenty-nine seconds of mutual acquaintance for her hand problem to meet his cheek problem. She slapped him hard enough to turn his whole body.

“You shut your mouth,” she hissed, her voice wavering between fury and tears. “I don’t need that from you. You hear me?”

Shell-shocked, Zack held his red and stinging face. “Okay.”

“I don’t need that.”

“I understand.”

“Not today.”

“I know,” he said. “It was a bad joke. It was in poor taste. I’m sorry.”

The moment Erin and Beatrice left him alone with his three fellow refugees, Zack had finally revealed his name. He’d introduced himself to them one by one, signing each handshake with an appropriately stupid gag, a half witticism. Upon hearing David’s accent, he said. “G’day, mate.” To Mia, he proposed that OMGWTF?! should be their new default greeting.

With Amanda, his first impulse was to offer some wordplay bouquet about how she looked pretty intense and intensely pretty, but then bashfully nixed the idea. The moment he spotted her golden cross necklace, his comedy writers jumped to plan B.

“Where’s your messiah now?” he’d brayed, in a passable Edward G. Robinson impression.

Before either of them knew what was happening, her right hand sprung like a cobra and struck him. Amanda didn’t need to see the gaping horror on Mia’s face to know that she’d overreacted. Worse, she realized she might have infected Zack with whatever disease she now carried.

David rose from his chair and raised his palms in nervous diplomacy. “Okay, look, we’re all in a state of disarray right now . . .”

“South California,” Zack uttered.

“What?”

Zack resumed his stance in the doorway, hugging his sketchbook with vacant anguish. “We’re in the state of South California. It split in 1940 when the population got too big for Senate representation. They cut the line right below San Jose. I learned this downtown, in a bookstore called Scribbles.”

When Erin Salgado had traced the final signal to Zack, he’d been standing in the reference section, eliciting curious stares from his fellow browsers. It was odd enough to see a grown man gawk in stupor at the pages of a children’s atlas, but this man wore a gaping tear on his left shoulder and a woman’s handbag on his right. Both the bag and the tear were the personal effects of one Hannah Given.

“Zack!”

The shout came from the hallway. Zack turned around just in time to feel wet hair, soft flesh, and terry cloth pressed against him.

He awkwardly returned Hannah’s hug. “Hey, there you are. Speedy McLeave-a-Guy. You know, I’m used to women running away from me, but not at ninety miles an hour.”

She pulled away from him. “What are you talking about?”

Amanda blinked at them in bafflement. “Wait. How do you two know each other?”

“This is the guy I was telling you about. We met at the marina.” Hannah turned back to Zack. “What do you mean ninety miles an hour?”

“You don’t remember what happened?”

“I remember everything going all blue and super-slow.”

“No, you went all red and super-fast. You buzzed around the bench like a hornet on crack, talking so quickly I couldn’t understand you. You ripped my sleeve, then ran away. And I don’t mean Benny Hill speed. I mean you were a freaking blur.” He eyed her sling. “What happened? Did you break your arm?”

“No.” Hannah shook her head, dumbfounded. “That can’t be right. That’s not possible.”

“Yeah, that was the consensus at the marina.”

David matched Hannah’s befuddled look. “Forgive me, Zack, but even after everything that’s happened today, I have a hard time accepting what you’re saying.”

Zack shut the parlor door, then addressed the others in a furtive half whisper.

“I don’t want to upset anyone more than I already have, but I think there’s more than one kind of weirdness going on here. Beyond the flying cars and new state lines, I think something might be . . . different with us. Hannah’s not the only one doing strange stuff. Look.”

He opened his drawing pad, flipping through a series of crisp white pages. “Last night, I only had three blank sheets left in this thing. Now I have eight. My last five drawings disappeared like I never did them. And then there’s this one . . .”

He turned to a rough sketch of a nerdy couple, the two lead characters of his comic strip.

“This used to be finished. Now it’s not. I lost about a half hour of pencil work. That’s the kind of glitch that happens on computers, not paper.”

“What makes you think you caused it?” David asked.

“Because I watched it happen,” Zack said, with a delirious chuckle. “The drawing changed right in front of my eyes.”

Hannah shook her head in turmoil. Amanda nervously tugged her sleeve over her hand. “Look, I don’t think this is the best time to—”

“I’m hearing voices,” David blurted. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I didn’t mean to cut you off. I just had to get that out. Since this morning, I’ve been sporadically hearing people that I can’t see. People talking to each other, laughing, whatever. I only hope it’s related to this phenomenon you’re discussing, because otherwise I’ve lost my mind.”

“You’re not crazy,” Hannah assured him. “At least not more than the rest of us.”

Zack studied Mia’s dark and busy expression. “Got your own weirdness to share?”

She looked up at him. “Me?”

“Yeah. You’re a quiet one, but I noticed you got even quieter when we started talking about this. Is it something you can tell us?”

For a man who’d just been slapped, Zack was awfully perceptive. Mia had been thinking about her own incident—the glowing tube with the candles and the note, a special delivery that somehow managed to find her eight feet underground. She didn’t know how to bring it up without sounding insane.

“Not really.”

Zack eyed her skeptically. “You sure?”

“Leave her alone,” Amanda growled. “She’s been through enough.”

“We’ve all been through enough. But we’re all old enough and smart enough to speak for ourselves.”

Mia nodded at Amanda. “It’s all right.”

“It’s
not
all right. We’re still traumatized. Still grieving over the people we lost. The last thing we need right now is to fill our heads with supernatural nonsense.”

Zack peered down at Amanda’s crucifix and swallowed his next slap-worthy zinger. “Look, I’m just trying to make sense of this.”

“And I’m telling you it’s too soon to try.”

“Too soon for
you
.”

“Too soon for all of us!”

Zack chuckled darkly. “Really? How interesting that you already know me better than I know myself. Is this a new psychic power or just an old trick you learned at Judgment Camp?”

As Amanda stood up, Hannah took a reflexive step back. Over the course of her life, she’d seen every dark facet of her older sister. Shoutmanda, Nagmanda, Reprimanda. Hannah knew, as both a summoner and a witness, that few things were less desirable than a visit from Madmanda.

“You unbelievable piece of shit. Are you such a sociopath that you need to mock people just hours after they’ve lost everything? Is that how you were raised?”

Now it was Zack’s turn to step back. His wide eyes froze on Amanda’s hand. “Uh . . .”

“I don’t judge! I don’t preach! I don’t condemn the people who don’t share my faith!”

Hannah leaned forward, blanching at the bewildering new change in her sister. “Amanda . . .”

“What I
do
condemn are people who disrespect my beliefs, especially when I’ve done nothing to provoke you but wear a tiny little symbol!”

“Amanda!”

She spun toward Hannah. “What?”

“Your hand!”

The widow peered down at her fingers and got a fresh new look at her weirdness.

The blight had returned in full force, coating her right arm in a sleek and shiny whiteness. Though the substance looked like plastic, it fit her as snugly as nylon.

David and Mia jumped up from their chairs. Hannah covered her gaping mouth.

“What the hell is that?!”

Bug-eyed, gasping, Amanda dropped to the recliner. The glistening sheath felt cool on her skin, like milk fresh out of the fridge. She could feel every bump and fold of the armrest as if she were still bare-handed.

“I don’t know. I don’t—”

The sisters both screamed as Amanda’s long white glove erupted in rocky protrusions. Her silver bracelet creaked in strain, then snapped into pieces.

By the time the jagged fragments fell to the floor, Amanda’s arm looked like it was covered in rock candy. The crags rose and fell in erratic rhythms, an ever-shifting terrain.

David looked to the door. “Uh, maybe I should get one of the—”

“No!” Zack and Amanda yelled in synch. “Just watch the hall,” Zack said. “If someone comes by, keep them out.”

Amanda flinched at Mia’s approach. “No, stay back! I don’t want to hurt you.”

Zack inched toward her, fingers extended. “Look, you just need to calm down.”

“Calm down?”

Mia nodded tensely. “He’s right. This whole thing started when he got you angry.” She moved behind Amanda’s chair and stroked her shoulders. “You’re going to be okay. Just breathe, Amanda. Breathe.”

Hannah cringed with guilt as she watched Mia soothe her sister.
I should be doing that. Why didn’t I think to do that?

David peeked through a crack in the door. “Someone’s coming.”

A four-inch spike erupted from the back of Amanda’s hand. Her other arm erupted in a rash of tiny white dots. Zack jumped back.

“Jesus. All right. It’s definitely stress related. If you just relax—”

“How do you expect me to relax right now?!”

“It’s Dr. Czerny,” David announced. “And an extremely well-dressed midget.”

Amanda squinted her eyes shut.
Oh God. Please. Please . . .

“Hannah, maybe you should run distraction,” Zack said.

“What should I say?”

“Anything. I don’t know. You’re the actress. Improvise.”

Amanda forced her mind into calming memories—the nature hikes she took with her father, her honeymoon cabin on the French Riviera, all the young patients who cried happy tears when they learned they were in remission.

Soon the milky crags and dots began to melt away. Mia squeezed her shoulder. “It’s working. You’re doing it.”

Amanda opened her eyes and peered down, just as the last of the whiteness retracted into her skin.

“They’re almost here . . .” David cautioned.

“It’s all right,” said Mia. “It’s gone.”

Zack wasn’t relieved. He scooped up the remnants of Amanda’s bracelet, then threw a quick glance around the room.

“Look, I don’t know who these people are, but I don’t trust them. Until we learn more, we need to keep this to ourselves. We’ll talk about the big weirdness. We won’t talk about the other stuff. Agreed?”

Hannah, David, and Mia accepted his premise with shaky nods. Amanda had the least trouble with Zack’s proposal. On this matter, she couldn’t have agreed with him more.

Two hazy shapes appeared in the smoky glass. David opened the door to Czerny and a diminutive companion. They studied their five skittish guests with leery caution.

“Is everything all right in here?” Czerny asked. “We heard noises.”

Zack hurried across the room to greet him. “The strangest thing just happened, actually. Amanda bumped her arm against the pool table and her bracelet broke apart.”

Czerny furrowed his brow at the warped silver fragments in Zack’s hand. “Huh. That is strange.” He looked to Amanda. “Are you all right?”

“She’ll be fine. I’m Zack, by the way. You Sterling Quint?”

“That would be me,” said the other man, in a stately baritone.

The guests all took a moment to study him. He was indeed a little person, as David implied, but he carried himself with the regal airs of a maharaja. He wore a lavish three-piece suit with a red silk ascot, and his feathered gray coif was flawless to a hair. Zack figured his jeweled rings alone could fund a man’s food, clothing, and shelter habit for nearly a year.

“So you’re the answer man.”

Quint nodded. “As it stands.”

“Good,” Zack replied, with an anxious breath. “Because as it stands, we have questions.”

—

The conference room was a perfect oval of hardwood and gray marble. In lieu of overhead lightbulbs, the entire ceiling glowed with milky iridescence. Mia noticed a pair of multitiered switches on the wall—one to control the ceiling’s brightness, the other to change its color.

Quint sat at the head of a long oak table, shining a sunny smile at each guest as Czerny introduced them. For five people who’d made such a remarkable journey, none of them seemed particularly remarkable themselves.
Why them, Azral?
Of all the souls to sweep across existence, why these?

“Thank you for being patient with us,” Czerny began. “I know we haven’t revealed a lot—”

Hannah waved a shaky palm. “Wait. Hold it. Sorry.”

Mia’s eyes narrowed to frigid slits. She didn’t want to dislike anyone, especially on a day like today, but from the moment Hannah stumbled into the lobby with her tight clothes and ditzy airs, she struck a sour chord. She was every living Barbie doll who’d broken her brothers’ hearts, every gum-chewing mallrat who’d mocked Mia mercilessly.

“Before we get to the big stuff, I just want to know how Theo’s doing.”

Czerny had to wait for Quint’s nod of approval before answering Hannah’s question.

“Fortunately, he’s okay. Still unconscious, but stable. We expect he’ll pull through just fine.”