The Flight of the Silvers (27 page)

“I was just thinking about that pawnbroker. The expression on his face when I got all pissy on him. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten that look from people, Zack. Complete strangers. My husband always said I made a strong first impression on people. It wasn’t a compliment.”

The cartoonist smirked sardonically. “That’s all right. I once had a woman slap me just thirty seconds after meeting me.”

Amanda laughed. “Yeah. I remember. Guess I made a strong first impression on you too.”

“Well, part of me.”

She wiped her eyes and brushed back her hair. She realized now that she’d have to dye it a different color.
God. I’m already thinking like a fugitive.

“Zack, why does that trash bread look so good to me?”

“Because we haven’t eaten all day. Come on.”

He rose to his feet and extended a hand. As he helped her up, she wrapped herself around him.

“Oh. Hey. Huggage.”

“Thankful huggage,” said Amanda. “I’m glad you were still with us when all this stuff happened. I’m glad you’re still with us now. You’re a good man, Zack. Sometimes, on rare occasions, you’re even funny.”

He grinned along to her surprisingly droll humor, his hands falling awkwardly on her back. As a jaded New Yorker from an aloof and broken family, he was severely unskilled in the art of physical contact. But there was something jarringly beautiful about this embrace. They were both the same height, with the same limber frame. Her warmth and symmetry were a little too nice to handle right now.

At the end of their hug, Amanda suffered a sudden flashback to Esis Pelletier. The madwoman had approached her in an alley much like this one, uttering words so bizarre and cryptic that Amanda quickly forgot them in the chaos that followed. Except now a tiny fragment came back to her, an angry warning to not entwine with something. Or someone.

She crumpled the thought into an angry little ball and buried it in the back of her mind, along with the policemen, the pawnbroker, and Derek’s harsh words. No more of that business. It was time to be strong again.

—

They returned to the park with nourishing goodies, their first meal on Earth that wasn’t provided by physicists. For a gratifying twenty minutes, the Silvers sat around the picnic table, devouring their bounty like a pack of wild predators.

Amanda returned David’s T-shirt after the meal. She watched with puzzlement as he sniffed the fabric. She wasn’t sure if he was checking for sweat stink, cooties, or something worse.

While the others waged a run on the nearby department store, Amanda stayed in the park with Theo. Their clothes were too bloody for close public mingling. Theo was in no condition to go shopping anyway. Once Amanda finished changing his bandage, she led him to the shade of the pine tree and ordered him to take a nap. Though he insisted he was fine, he quickly drifted away on a bed of grass.

Amanda rested against the tree, mindless in the wake of her meltdown. She occasionally heard Theo mumble in his sleep. He called out to a woman named Melissa, then mumbled something about a girl with two watches. Amanda hoped he was at least having a good dream.

An hour and a half later, the others came back with fresh supplies. New clothes for all. Better shoes for some. A map. A compass. Two flashlights. Six knapsacks to carry it all.

Amanda wasn’t encouraged by Zack’s crabby expression. “How much do we have left?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed defeatedly. “About a hundred and fifty.”

“What?”

“We bought the cheapest stuff they had. But even bargain basement clothes add up when there are six of us.”

“So what are we going to do about money?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You think you can write the Harry Potter books from memory?”

Amanda fought a grin. “No.”

“Twilight?”

“Zack . . .”

“I have some ideas. We can talk about it later. In the meantime, you may want to have a chat with your sister. Or Mia. Or both.”

“Why? What—”

Hannah dropped her bags on the picnic table, then brusquely walked away. Her face was grim. Her eyes were red from crying. Mia soon slapped her own purchases on the table and shuffled off in the other direction. She looked even worse.

When Amanda turned to Zack, he chucked his hands in hopeless quandary. He had no idea what happened between Hannah and Mia. Neither one of them was talking.

—

They’d split up four ways inside the Harvey Mark, with a plan to reassemble in an hour. Mia wandered the aisles in a moony daze, marveling at the daft embellishments to this otherwise familiar environment. A stock boy pushed giant boxes on a hovering aeric platform. A two-dimensional ghost woman hawked the benefits of a Harvey Mark purchase account. A young boy hobbled after his mother on legs of pure tempis.

More alarming were the fashions, a mix of 1950s and 1980s clothing styles, flavored with a twist of madness. Mia saw two teenage girls dressed in sleeveless turtlenecks with cleavage holes cut in the fabric. One wore a bob of orange-red hair that was teased to looked like flames. The other sported blond bangs that were long enough to obscure her eyes. Mia couldn’t tell if the girls were cookie-cutter trend slaves or bold fashion rebels. All she knew was that she’d never be anything more than an alien here.

Soon Mia and Hannah spotted each other in the women’s clothing section. Their overwhelmed expressions were identical, enough to evoke a mutually nervous giggle.

“This place is like Wal-Mart on acid,” Hannah said. “It’s freaking me out.”

Despite Mia’s resolve to think nicer of Hannah, she found herself squinting with reproach at the box of black hair dye in her handcart.
Your sister sold her wedding ring so we could eat and live, not touch up our roots.

It was actually Amanda who’d requested the product for herself. Though Mia had misjudged again, Hannah wasn’t entirely innocent this time. She’d convinced her sister to go black over blond just so she could use the leftover dye on her roots.

Peering into Mia’s cart, Hannah winced at the pair of dark, long-sleeved shirts she’d chosen for purchase.
Oh sweetie. You’re going to bake like a muffin in those things. Is it worth getting heatstroke just to look slimmer for David?

Loath as she was to jeopardize Mia’s fresh goodwill, Hannah plotted a course of delicate pestering. “Uh, hey, listen—”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Mia spun a quick circle, urgently scanning all shoppers within eyeshot. From her panicked expression, Hannah feared the girl was on the verge of a gastric catastrophe.

“Are you okay?”

“No. She couldn’t have picked a worse time. What the hell is she thinking?”

“What? Who are you—”

A bead of light suddenly appeared ten inches in front of Mia’s chest. Hannah took a step back.

“Whoa. Jesus. Is that . . . is that the thing your notes come from?”

“Yeah.”

Mia raised her handcart until it obscured the glowing breach. Hannah skittishly peeked inside.

“Wow. I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s like a tiny sun. How long before a note pops out?”

“It varies,” said Mia, increasingly tense. Something wasn’t right about this delivery.

“And does it usually—”

“Hannah, I can’t talk right now. I need to focus on this.”

“Okay,” she said, dejectedly. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Wincing with guilt, Mia bent her knees until she was eye level with the portal. She could see another Mia through the tiny circle, anxiously pacing the carpet of her Terra Vista suite. She was dressed in the same clothes Mia wore now, and radiated a sense of worry that was painfully easy to recognize. It was her just fourteen hours ago.

Mia’s skin blanched as she grasped the scope of her new problem. “Oh God. Oh my God.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“This is a past portal. I’m not receiving, I’m sending. I know exactly what I need to write but I don’t have the right pen. You need to find me a red pen, Hannah. It has to be ballpoint and it has to be red.”

“Uh, okay. Why—”

“I’ll explain the rest when you get back! I promise! Just please go! Hurry!”

Hannah rushed toward the school supplies, wondering just how scared she should be. She vaguely recalled David mentioning something about Mia’s newfound fear of paradoxes, the devastating consequences of changing the past. He didn’t seem to share her concern.

“I don’t believe it works the way she thinks it does,” he’d told Hannah. “I certainly can’t imagine that some minor inconsistency in her notes will somehow bring the universe to collapse. Then again, what do I know?”

David knew plenty, enough to alleviate Hannah’s fears. Still, after everything that happened to their world, she could understand why Mia would be deathly afraid to screw with time.

Hannah quickly returned with an assortment of red pens. Thin trails of sweat rolled down Mia’s temples.

“Oh thank God. I don’t know how much longer it’ll stay open.”

“I’m here. I have it.”

Hannah shielded the portal from all prying eyes while Mia tore a pen from its packaging. She ripped a careful swatch from the back of her journal and then double-checked the archive of her original message. She didn’t know why she bothered. The words had been laser-burned onto her psyche.

They hit you all at sunrise. Sleep with your shoes on. Get ready to run.

During the eighty-two long seconds of Hannah’s absence, Mia had considered all the things she wished she could write in place of that vague warning. With the right words, she could have ensured that the building was evacuated hours in advance. Nobody would have died.

Conversely, she pictured what would happen if the portal closed without any warning sent at all—a revised chain of events in which Rebel and his people killed everyone in their sleep. It was too terrible to think about. It was worse to think that it could still occur retroactively, just because Mia didn’t have the right pen.

Mia rolled up the note and deposited it into the breach. As the portal vanished silently into the ether, she wrapped Hannah in a delirious hug of relief.

“Oh God. Thank you so much. I’m sorry I made you go running like that. And I’m sorry if I was ever cold or mean to you. It’s just stupid jealousy. You’re so pretty and you have this amazing body. But I know you’re a good person too. And I promise from now on . . .”

She suddenly realized that Hannah wasn’t returning the embrace. Mia pulled back to find her white-faced with horror, stammering as if Mia had stabbed her.

“You knew.”

“What?”

“Your note. I saw it. You knew we were going to be attacked today and you didn’t say anything.”

Mia tensely shook her head. “No. Hannah. I didn’t know. I mean not for sure.”

“‘They hit you all at sunrise’? ‘Get ready to run’? What did you think it meant?”

“You don’t understand. I’ve gotten bad notes before. Conflicting notes. I wasn’t sure what was happening and I didn’t want to worry people without—”

“You didn’t want to
worry people
?”

In hindsight, it sounded pretty bad to Mia too. “Hannah, I’m so sorry.”

The actress didn’t care about Mia’s remorse. She didn’t care how this whole scene looked to the bystanders who were watching. Her mind was trapped six hours in the past, lost in battle with the Motorcycle Man.

“I went out jogging at sunrise,” she cried to Mia. “Do you think I would have done that if . . . do you know how close I came to dying?”

“I’m sorry!”

“Sorry doesn’t fix it, Mia! People died! Czerny died! Erin got cut in half, all because
you
didn’t want to worry people!”

The tears flowed wildly on both of them now. Hannah held up a trembling hand.

“I can’t even look at you.”

She retreated down the aisle, crashing into a fellow shopper as she brusquely turned the corner. Both their handcarts fell to the floor.

“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

“My fault,” the man assured her.

He wasn’t wrong. It took five rewinds for Evan Rander to stand in just the right place for a spilling collision. Now he shined a cordial grin as he stooped to gather Hannah’s belongings.

“Oh, you don’t have to—”

“No, no, no. I insist. What kind of gentleman would I be?”

Even in a better state of mind, Hannah wouldn’t have recognized him from their first encounter. Evan had swapped his ostentatious cowboy getup for a simple gray business suit. His hair had been respectfully parted to one side, and he wore soulful blue contact lenses behind rimless glasses. He was the humble good Samaritan now. He was Clark Kent.

Soon he presented Hannah with a refilled handcart. She sniffed and wiped her nose. “Thank you.”

“No worries. I sense you’re not having the best of days.”

“Yeah. That’s putting it mildly.”

“I saw you arguing with your sister back there. Listen, I have siblings myself. These things always blow over.”

Hannah rubbed her eyes. “She’s not my sister.”

“Oh.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I really need to go.”

“Of course. Of course. I understand. You take it easy now, all right?”

There was very little for Hannah to find creepy or suspicious about this incarnation of Evan. And yet as she made her brisk journey to the restroom, a dark voice in her head urged her to not look back. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was still standing at the scene of their accident. Still watching her. Still smiling.

—

David studied the map on the picnic table. The nearest cradle of civilization was ten miles to the north. Their abandoned van lay a scant eight miles to the southwest. It wouldn’t be long before the police search made its way to Ramona, if it hadn’t happened already.

“We can’t do ten more miles today,” Amanda insisted. “We can’t even do two miles. Look at us, David.”

Over the boy’s grumbling objections, the Silvers bought two rooms in a cheap motel off the main drag. The accommodations were pitiful compared to their suites in Terra Vista, but each room had two beds and each bed was soft. By three o’clock, they were all out cold.

Mia woke up four hours later, groggy and alone. Purple clouds peeked in through the curtain gaps. She could hear the shower running.