The Flight of the Silvers (4 page)

Hannah felt a strong vibration at the base of her hand. She gaped with insanity at her new silver bracelet. Mere seconds ago, it was a fat and dangly bauble, wide enough for a bicep. Now it rested snugly on the thinnest part of her wrist. Whereas once it appeared featureless, now it was split down the middle by a bright blue band of light.

She glanced up to discover the biggest adjustment of all. A curved plane of silky white light loomed all around her, closing two feet above her head. The outside world took on a yellow gossamer haze.

Hannah tried to relocate but ended up walking into the wall of her new surroundings. The light was warm, steel hard, and utterly immobile. She was stuck here, just a hair north of Commercial Street, in an eight-foot egg of light. That was enough to send her mind into blue-screen failure. She was in full rejection of the events onstage. Suspension of suspension of disbelief.

Nearby strangers caught sight of Hannah’s odd new enclosure. A befuddled young man rapped his knuckles against her light shell.

“What is this?” he asked, much louder than necessary. She could hear him just fine.

“I don’t know . . .”

“How are you doing this?”

“I’m not.”

“What’s happening?!”

Not this,
she thought.
This isn’t happening at all.

The Great Hannah Given: mental ward alumnus, habitual wrong person, and unreliable narrator. Ergo, no eggo. No crowd. No crash. No white-haired man.

Everyone froze as a thunderous noise seized the area—a great icy crackle, like a glacier breaking in half. Bystanders threw their frantic gazes left and right in search of the clamor until, one by one, they looked up. The eerie sound was coming from above. It was getting louder.

More screams from afar. More gunshots. As the crackling din grew to deafening levels, the sky above turned cold and bright.

A teary young redhead scratched at the wall of Hannah’s light cage. The actress could see lines of frost on the tip of the woman’s nose, though the air inside the enclosure was as warm as July.

“Please!” the stranger screeched. “Help me!”

“I can’t! I don’t know how!”

Suddenly the tallest buildings in the skyline began to splinter at the highest levels, as if they were being crushed from above. Metal curled. Stone cracked. Windows exploded. With a grinding howl, an ailing structure gave out at the middle, causing all floors above to topple and fall in one great piece. Hannah pressed her hands against the light as she watched the other buildings crumble. The sky wasn’t just getting brighter and louder. It was getting closer. The sky was coming down.

Shrieks and cries rose from every throat in the mob. There wasn’t an empty square inch around her egg now. More than a dozen people pounded at the wall, weeping and begging.

The skyline was gone. Now the great white sheet descended on the clockless clock tower, cracking the jagged neck of the structure and sending huge chunks of stone flying everywhere. One of them demolished a police car, along with everyone near it.

Hannah fell to the pavement—wincing, crying, desperately trying to shut out the horrible noises. In the final few seconds, the cruelest part of her mind forced her to open up and see the world one last time.

Everyone around her was at long last quiet. Frozen dead.

Then, with a shattering crunch that would haunt her for the rest of her life, the ceiling came down and smashed all the corpses into shards. It devoured the ground and just kept going.

The actress had no idea how long she existed there in the blank white void of existence, kneeling on a floating disc of concrete and sobbing at the nothingness all around her.

Soon the void swirled with smoky wisps of blue and the nothing became something. By the time Hannah’s eyes adjusted, the glow of her bracelet had faded and the eggshell of light was gone. Beneath her feet and her fallen handbag lay the same round patch of 13th Street, but it was now fused into concrete of a lighter color.

She craned her neck and saw blue sky and white clouds, the distant gleam of several tall buildings. She didn’t recognize a single one.

Her hands quaking wildly, Hannah smeared her eyes and sniffed the warm summer air. Her last few working neurons struggled to process her new state of existence but all they could tell her with any degree of confidence was that right now at this very moment, she was alive. And she was elsewhere.

TWO

It had been twenty-two years, three months, and seven days since Hannah Given last came screaming into a world. She’d emerged from her mother with little muss and zero fuss, the textbook model of a healthy childbirth. Growing up, she occasionally lorded that knowledge over her older sister, who’d formed a kneeling breach in the womb and had to be delivered by crash Caesarean. Hannah loved hurling that pebble, especially when Amanda was acting a little too cavalier in her role as the Impeccable One.

Unfortunately, there was nothing joyous or natural about Hannah’s second nativity. This time she popped into the world as a five-foot-five adult, clothed in a navy blue T-shirt and stretch jeans and saddled with a ninety-dollar hobo bag filled with clutter from the previous life. This time her arrival caused an electrical disturbance for a thousand feet in every direction. And this time, in a baffling circumstance she would lord over no one, she emerged from an egg.

She struggled to absorb the strange new environment. What was once a plane-wrecked intersection was now a clean and expansive parking lot, peppered with ficus trees and flanked on all sides by jarringly unfamiliar businesses—Peerless Spins, Sunshine Speedery, Jubel’s Juves & Shifters. Even more perplexing was the fact that every storefront was barricaded behind a smooth white wall of . . . something. At first glance, it looked like plastic. But the surface carried a faint shimmer, as if it were reflecting light from some nearby swimming pool. Protruding from the center of each barrier was a small placard that listed the store’s hours of operation, plus a digital clock that was currently as blank-faced as Hannah herself.

Only one store stood open for business: the sprawling SmartFeast that stretched across the north edge of the lot. Hannah could see people—calm, living people—bustling about inside.

She mindlessly moved toward the supermarket, staggering ten clumsy steps before a painful tremor overtook her. Her muscles burned with acid. Her extremities flared with hot needle stings, as if her limbs had all just woken up with a vengeance.

Hannah dropped to her knees between two parked sedans, then sobbed into her fists.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop. Please.”

A shrill and tiny voice in her head urged her to stay perfectly still. It assured her that she’d gone quite insane, and that a single wrong move could turn her into steam or glass or a flock of small birds. Her knees could grow mouths that sang “Eleanor Rigby.”

Four wretched minutes later, her panic and pain subsided enough for her to clamber back to her feet. She cleaned her face in a car’s side mirror, then continued shambling toward the SmartFeast.

Now she could see the casual mayhem inside. Throngs of impatient shoppers congealed at every checkout stand while cashiers dawdled helplessly. Another blackout. Or perhaps the same blackout. Hannah exhaled with relief when the lights flickered back to life.

Just outside the entrance, a slender teenage girl kept a lazy vigil behind a cloth-covered table. Hannah reeled at her strange blond hair—short on the sides but ridiculously long in the back and front. She reminded Hannah of a Shetland pony.

Both her table and her sleeveless black turtleneck were covered with buttons, each one containing a photo of an adorable dog or cat, plus a bold-faced call to action.
Stop Pet Extensions.

Hannah stared at the activist for a good long minute, trying to make sense out of her and her cause. Eventually the girl noticed Hannah. She studied the actress through a curtain of bangs, then took a long swig of bottled milk. It had a picture of a maniacally happy cow on the label. The brand name was Mommy Moo, and the drink was boastfully fortified with something called Casamine-4.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” said Hannah, in a parched rasp.

“You stretched?”

“Huh?”

“I’m asking if you’re okay,” the girl attested. “You look like you’re not.”

A bleak chuckle escaped Hannah’s lips. She felt light-headed and horrendously fragile, as if a stiff breeze could crack her to pieces.

“No, I’m not okay. I can’t even . . . Listen, my name is Hannah and I’d like to ask you something. I know how crazy this’ll sound, but I’m really screwed up right now and I’d appreciate a straight answer. Am I . . .”

She took another shaky glance around the lot, then sucked a jagged breath.

“Is this Canada?”

The question earned her five seconds of stony silence from the girl.

“Are you rubbing me?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you making some stupid joke at my expense?”

“No! I’m not! I’m really not, okay? If there’s any joke going on right now, it’s at
my
expense. I’m lost. I’m scared. I’m sick to my stomach. And I don’t recognize a single thing around me.”

The girl continued to eye her with doubt.

“I’m not ‘rubbing’ you,” Hannah insisted. “I’m not making a joke. Please. Just tell me where I am.”

At long last, the blonde brushed away her bangs. She had radiant green eyes, just like Amanda. Having grown up brown with envy, Hannah found the strength to wonder why the hell anyone would hide eyes that pretty.

“You’re in San Diego,” the girl informed her. “Downtown. Just a few blocks from the harbor.”

Hannah pressed a fist against her forehead, as if struggling to hold her brain in.

“Thank you.”

“You want me to call someone for you? A doctor? A friend?”

“No. I appreciate it, but I think I just need to . . . uh . . .” She felt distracted by all the girl’s weird buttons and stickers.
Pet extensions?

“I should just go.”

“Okay. Keep walking.”

Hannah cocked her head in fresh bafflement. Though the girl’s words were dismissive, she’d delivered them with cordial warmth, as if she were merely wishing Hannah a pleasant weekend.

The actress slung her bag over her shoulder and made her wavering escape from the lot. Five minutes after she turned a corner, the other stores began to open. The waxy white barricades popped out of existence one by one, like soap bubbles.

—

Hannah drifted down the quiet avenue, praying to stumble back into some familiar part of the city. Signs informed her that she was on West Earl Boulevard, a street that didn’t exist anywhere in her memory files. The area teemed with glassy office buildings, each one sporting a café or bistro at the ground level. One eatery brandished boastful signs about its “10× booths.”

Her attention was captured by a twelve-foot street advertisement, a morbid image of a sheet-draped corpse on a coroner’s slab. A thin female arm dangled out from under the covers, her dead hand clutching an unlabeled pill bottle. Grim black text flanked the bottom of the picture.

SHE CERTAINLY DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING.

PREDICTIVES: UNTESTED. UNLAWFUL. UNSAFE.

Under the tagline, a call to action urged citizens to contact the American Health Bureau at #99-17-18384.

Hannah stared at the poster for a long and restless minute before forcing herself onward. At the next corner, she mindlessly averted her gaze from the clear glass front of a newspaper box. She was overstocked on calamity at the moment. The last thing she needed was another dose of disruption in the form of a brain-busting headline. “Gelatinous Man Wins Congressional Nod,” or “Tentative Accord Reached Between Humans, Apes.”

A half block later, she suffered another pins-and-needles attack, forcing her to rest on a bus stop bench. She opened her handbag and was soothed by her familiar belongings—her wallet, her makeup, a Trader Joe’s granola bar, a recent issue of
Entertainment Weekly
. Most cherished of all was her little pink iPod, which looked as dead as her cell phone.

As she idly nibbled her granola bar, a blue-and-white city ambulance came to a halt on the opposite side of the street. The driver, a stocky young man in a royal blue jumpsuit, stepped out of the vehicle and stretched. Hannah wondered what would happen if she went up to him and explained her predicament. He’d probably take her straight to the municipal nuthouse, where overworked clinicians would feed her big words and little tablets until she realized that her whole life up to this point was just a schizoid dream.

A tinny voice beckoned the paramedic from his belt radio. He rushed back to his seat and started up the ambulance. The rooftop lights spun bright and red. The motor sounded more like a hair dryer to Hannah than a gas engine.

With a steamy hiss, the vehicle floated to second-story altitude. The wheels folded inward until the hubcaps faced the pavement. The engine emitted a final roar, and then the ambulance shot down West Earl Boulevard like a cruise missile. Leaves and litter fluttered in its wake.

Hannah sat frozen in dead-faced torpor. A piece of granola fell out of her hanging mouth.

Inside her head, a stadium full of little Hannahs erupted in riot. They screamed, they sobbed, they pounded the floor. Only one managed to stay in her seat. Amidst all the chaos, she looked up at the sky and calmly suggested that she find a quiet place to gather her wits.

Hannah collected her belongings with shaky hands, then continued in the direction she believed to be west. Soon her sage little helper offered new advice.
The next time you see a newspaper stand, try to stop and look. You don’t have to read the headline, sweetie. But you may want to check the date.

—

The marina was a short hop away, just as the pony-haired girl had said. Hannah had to walk two more blocks before she caught the blue water of the bay between buildings.

Soon she found her nesting spot: a long granite bench at the base of the pier. The view was remarkably similar to the one she remembered from her coveted reality, her
terra sana
. Beyond all the docks and bobbing white yachts lay the long green shore of Coronado. The sky was blue, the air was warm, and nothing soared through the sky but seagulls.

The actress folded her legs in a calming lotus pose while she drank in passing strangers—three joggers, two lovers, one mother. Hannah did a double take at the woman’s baby stroller, which was nothing but handlebar and chassis. Despite its missing parts, the carriage floated steadily along the walkway, as if rolling on invisible wheels.
That’s not right,
Hannah’s rational self insisted
. That is a crazy, sci-fi, future-world object, which makes no sense because
this is not the future.
A newspaper and a digital bank sign had both confirmed the accuracy of Hannah’s inner calendar. It was the same year, same month, same crazy Saturday as the one she woke up in.

A gangly young man entered Hannah’s field of vision. From his wavy brown hair, his Dustin Hoffman proboscis, and the unsure way he carried himself, she reflexively filed him under
Nerd, Jewish
. He wore an untucked black button-down over jeans and carried a large spiral-bound book. Unlike the other amblers on the concrete strand, he shined his anxious stare in all directions. Soon it found Hannah and stayed there. She was close enough to see that he was focusing on her middle bits. Scowling, she crossed her arms over her chest.
Go away, go away, go away.

Mercifully, he went away. Hannah returned to her thoughts.

Of all the dark and troubling aspects of the morning, the part she wanted to revisit the least involved the white-haired man who’d wrapped a bracelet around one wrist and a bruise around the other. Hannah knew it was crucial to revisit all the things he’d said, since he was the only one who seemed to know what was going on.

Tragically, the audio portion of her memory had been scrambled by trauma. His words hung in fragments, like poetry magnets.
Keep your head. Keep your head. This is the end. For them, not for you.
[Something something]
plans.
[Something something]
strings. Help will come.

What help?

The skinny man with the notebook came back into view, once again eyeing Hannah from a short distance. His awkward attention bounced between her face and her torso.

Hannah glared, she glowered, she gloomed in his direction, until she was made of nothing but red lights and stop signs. She broadcast her dismissal so strongly that he took a clumsy step back.

As he departed, Hannah could see that his notebook was actually a drawing pad. For a moment, she was afraid she’d misjudged him. Maybe he only wanted to sketch her, not screw her. Who cared? She had bigger concerns.

You’ll be joined with your sister soon enough.

That was it. Amanda. The white-haired man said that Amanda would be here, wherever “here” was. The thought made Hannah cautiously euphoric. Her sister was one of the most demanding and sanctimonious people Hannah had ever known, but she was also one of the sharpest. She could steam press this quandary into something a little more wearable.

But was Amanda really here? Did she pop up in an egg of light somewhere in Chula Vista? Or was it all just some—

“Excuse me . . .”

Hannah gasped and jumped in her seat. As soon as she saw the wavy-haired artist looming at the edge of her bench, her face flushed hot and red.

“Holy shit. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, no, no, no. You can’t be this dense.”

The artist tilted his head like a puzzled dog. “Uh, apparently so, because I’m not sure—”

“Do I look like I want to be bothered right now? Or sketched? Did you think I’d enjoy having some creepy guy stare at my breasts right now?”

“Wait, what?”

She pressed her palms together in a desperate plea. “I’m really sorry. I’m usually much nicer about it, but I’m on the verge of a complete meltdown and I need to be alone. So if you have even an ounce of goodness in you, I’m asking you to please, please, please just go away and don’t come back. We have nothing to talk about.”

His steely gray eyes grew wide with bewilderment, and suddenly Hannah felt the needle of judgment spin back toward her. From his current expression, she wouldn’t be surprised if he had already filed her under
Nut, Skittish
.

“I wasn’t . . .” He let out a shaky laugh. “Okay, this has taken a weird turn.”

“Oh my God. You’re still not going.”