The Flight of the Silvers (30 page)

“I honestly don’t know how to help you,” he’d told Theo, as the young man thrashed and screamed in withdrawal pain. “If I were any good with people, I wouldn’t have become a scientist. The only argument I can make is a mathematical one. It seems you’re one-sixth of your world’s remaining population. You’re the living marker for a billion people. Given the numbers, I suppose it’d be especially tragic if you threw your life away now. It wouldn’t just be suicide. It’d be genocide.”

As the weeks passed, the two men grew into their roles as counselor and patient, improving in synch until Theo finally became clean. When Bill learned that Theo was leaving with Zack, he came to work on a Sunday just to hand off his phone number.

“Look, I think your departure’s premature, but you’re strong enough to make your own decisions. Just call me if you ever feel weak or tempted. I won’t tell Quint a thing.”

Now, forty-two hours later, Theo felt weak and Theo felt tempted, but he couldn’t call Bill Pollock because Bill Pollock was dead. Good people kept dying and yet Theo kept on living. The karmic balance of the universe was fatally broken.

He squeezed the money in his hand and took a teary-eyed glance at the Genie Mart. Whether it was suicide or genocide or something else entirely, the living marker for a billion people was ready to drink enough for all of them. He rose from the bench.

“Finally.”

Theo spun around in surprise. Twenty feet away, a ginger-haired man leaned against the swing set, casually examining his cuticles. He was dressed like Theo from head to toe—same jeans, same sneakers, same gray sweatshirt. It was a surreal and discomfiting vision, like staring at a true dark genie.

“Who the hell are you?”

Evan grinned. “You’ll figure it out in a minute.”

“How long have you been standing there?”

“As long as you’ve been sitting there. I saw you wrestling with your conscience and I wanted to see which way you’d go. Now, while I respect your decision to party like there’s no tomorrow, I’m afraid it was all for nothing. You can’t buy liquor. Not without one of these.”

Theo squinted as Evan flaunted a small blue photo ID. He held it up as he approached.

“They call it a wet card. You can apply for one when you turn eighteen. Just take a one-day class, a one-hour test, and then ta-da! License to drink. You have to be careful though. You get caught in a drunken misdemeanor, the card’s suspended. Get caught in a felony, the card’s revoked. And if you serve alcohol to someone without a wet card, even in your home, you’re in for some hefty fines, fella. The civil liquortarians shit a blue pickle when they heard about this plan. But when they saw what happened to cigarettes, they suddenly became a lot more flexible.”

Now he stood close enough for Theo to read the card, which featured Evan’s cheery photo next to a cryptic pseudonym.

“Gordon Freeman?”

“The card’s a fake,” Evan explained. “So’s the name. Zack would get the reference. He’s awesome that way.”

The pieces finally came together in Theo’s head. “You’re Evan Rander.”

“Ding ding ding! Told you you’d get it.” Evan laughed. “Oh, that Farisi and her spoilers.”

Theo tightened his grip on his book bag and took a hasty step back. “Listen—”

“Oh relax, guy. I’m not so bad. In fact, I come bearing gifts and valuable info. Just hang a bit. You won’t regret it.”

He hopped over the bench, then motioned for Theo to join him. After a few silent moments, Theo took a wary perch on the far end.

Evan shined a soft grin at the Farsight Professional Augury. “You know, folks here are nutty about the future. Obsessed with it. Corporations have their own augurs on staff. Politicians rely on them like pollsters. It’s still a bunch of crap. All cold readers and educated guessers, spouting flowery babble that could be twisted to mean anything. None of these people are gifted like our sweet little Mia. And she’s not gifted like you.”

He grabbed a bottle cap from the concrete and flicked it from his fingertips. Theo watched it sail toward a light post, knocking a fat moth out of the air.

“Once Mia makes it to New York,
if
she makes it to New York, she’ll get out of the note-passing business and find a better use for her portals. You’ll inherit the keys to the spoiler shop. You’ll be a lot better at it.”

“You talk like you can see the future yourself.”

Evan chuckled. “Me? Nah. I’m no augur. I’m just a guy who’s been around the block a few times.”

He flicked another bottle cap. Theo watched with grim fascination as it killed another moth.

“How do you know so much about us?”

“Well, T’eo me lad, it’s a wee bit complicated. I’m certainly familiar with
your
storied past. My goodness. Graduated high school at twelve. Got your undergrad degree at fifteen. The youngest person to ever enroll at Stanford Law and, subsequently, the youngest to drop out. When people ask why you quit, you insist that it wasn’t the course work. It wasn’t the pressure. ‘No,’ you say, with a wistful sigh, ‘I just got tired of being special.’”

Theo felt a cold lurch in his heart. He used to say that often, exactly the way Evan described.

“I also know what happened five years ago,” Evan added. “How you got that scar on your chest.”

He pantomimed a driver flailing at the wheel. His cartoonish screeching sounds ended with a spittle-flecked crash.

Theo brusquely stood up. “Go to hell.”

“Come on, man. How long you gonna keep punishing yourself for one little car accident? Folks have done worse. Hell, I know three people who destroyed a whole planet on purpose. They sleep just fine.”

“Thanks for the perspective,” Theo replied, while walking away. “Enjoy your night.”

A bottle cap sailed by his head, just a half inch from his cheek. Theo stopped.

“Is that some kind of stupid threat?”

“Nope. Just a stupid trick to get you to turn around and look at your gift.”

Theo turned around and watched Evan procure a sixty-ounce bottle of vodka from his knapsack.

“What do you want with me?”

Evan hunched his shoulders in a shrug. “Just passing the time, brother.”

“Maybe you should find a hobby.”

“Maybe I already have. Oh, hey, that reminds me. Has Hannah started flirting with you yet?”

Evan laughed at Theo’s dim expression. “Guess not. Well, she will, but don’t get a big head over it. You’re just her default choice. She knows by now that David isn’t biting and Zack’s got eyes for Sister Cherry Pious. She used to have a fourth option, but I removed it. Poor Hannah. Simply can’t exist without a man to wrap around her little finger. Are you going to take your present or not? I went to a lot of trouble here.”

Theo returned to the bench, examining the bottle from every angle. A frightening new voice in his thoughts suggested a darker use for it.
Hit him. Kill him. Kill him now. Trust me.

“Well, I hope you enjoy it,” Evan said. “You and I don’t cross paths very often. You’re usually busy with other stuff. So while I wouldn’t hang your photo in my locker, I can’t say I hate you. Mostly I just pity you.”

“Why? Because I’m a drunk?”

“No, because you’re special,” Evan replied. “You
are
special, Theo, even among us freaks. You’re only scratching the surface of your weirdness now. When you find out what you can truly do, man oh man, your life will change. Everyone will want a piece of you. Your friends. The Pelletiers. The U.S. government, eventually. And Peter Pendergen. He’ll be the worst of all.”

Evan laughed. “I love the way he says your name. He’s got an Irish brogue, so to him you’re not Theo Maranan, you’re
T’eo Maernin
. And he’ll say your name a lot. Oh yes. He’s got plans for you, my friend. To him, you’re Jesus, Neo, and Frodo rolled up in one tortilla. The minute you get to Brooklyn, he’ll set you on a great and impossible task. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying, and you’ll die knowing you failed. There’s your future, Mr. Self-Punishment.”

He leaned over and tapped the tattoo on Theo’s wrist.

“There’s your karma.”

While Theo reeled over all the new information, Evan stood up and let out a stretching groan.

“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 hoping 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.”

She rubbed her eyes. “It’s all right. Let’s just keep going.”

Eight minutes later, they reached the MerryBolt chargery, a facility that looked less like a gas station and more like a drive-in theater. The lot contained over two dozen generator spaces for cars. A large screen kept motorists distracted with commercials and cartoons.

Thankfully, the place included a mini-market that was stocked to the roof in ice-cold refreshments. After downing a full cherry vim, Hannah felt her inner gauges swing back into the green. She blithely locked arms with her companions, like Dorothy in Oz, as they proceeded down the road with their new bags of bounty. She considered talking about her breasts again, just for positive attention, then cursed herself for being so damn insecure.

A hundred yards from the chargery, David came to a sudden halt. He aimed a curious gaze up a long dirt hill.

“Huh.”

“What’s the matter?”

He broke from Hannah’s grasp. “Wait here. I want to check something.”

Theo shook his head. “Uh-uh. We’ve split up enough already.”

“Fine. Then come with me.”

“David, are you sure this is a good idea?” Hannah asked. “Mia really needs water.”

“I know what Mia needs. If this is what I think it is, she’ll benefit most of all.”

Hannah and Theo traded a dim expression as they followed David up the slope. Whatever the boy was looking at was invisible to them. All he would tell them, as he led the charge, was that something interesting came up this hill two days ago and never came down.

By the time they joined David at the crest, they could see exactly what he was talking about. The recent past had met up with the present. And quite a present it was.

The luxury van glistened in the sunlight, resting serenely near the edge of a cliff. Aside from the dirt and grass on the tires, the vehicle looked as pristine as a showroom special. Through the tinted windows lay six plush bucket seats. A metal emblem on the rear door heralded the van as a Royal Seeker. It was painted in shiny silver.

Hannah held her mystified gaze on the abandoned vehicle.

“Huh.”

—

Zack ambled back and forth in the leafy shade, clucking his tongue to a forcibly cheery tune. If pressed to name the song in his head, he could only peg it as a number from
The Little Mermaid
. The one the crab sings.

Soon he spotted the dry chagrin of Amanda and Mia and became smirkingly contrite.

“Sorry. That used to drive my girlfriend nuts too.”