The Flight of the Silvers (5 page)

“I’m going! I’m leaving right now! Jesus.”

“Thank you!”

“For the record, I wasn’t going to hit on you. Or sketch you. I don’t do life drawings.”

“Fine! Whatever!”

“And I wasn’t staring at your breasts, all right? I mean I see them now and they’re very nice. Congrats. But prior to this, I was actually looking at your arm.”

“I don’t care!”

“Obviously not. Sorry to have bugged you. Enjoy your meltdown.”

“Wait. What about my arm?”

With a frustrated scowl, he raised his right fist at eye level, as if he was declaring solidarity with the Socialist Youth Front. Hannah shook her head at him.

“I still don’t get it . . .”

“Wow. Okay. And you called me dense. Look at my wrist.”

She looked at his wrist. And now she saw it. The bracelet. The bangle. The same silver oddity she wore. Her mouth formed an O as perfect as their shared adornment.

“Well, look at that,” the man huffed. “I guess we do have something to talk about.”

THREE

The cartoonist joined Hannah on the bench, clutching his sketchbook against his chest as if he’d float away without it. At some point in the last half hour, the twelve-dollar pad had become an item of incalculable value. Each drawing was an anchor of stability, a snapshot reminder of the sane and rational existence that currently eluded him.

He was less sentimental about his other possessions. When Hannah asked his name, he surrendered the fat yellow lanyard that dangled around his neck. He didn’t care if she lost his Comic-Con pass. He was fairly sure the convention was over.

She held the badge with fumbling fingers. “Zack Trillinger.”

“Yup.”

“Creator of
Meldweld
.”

“That’s me.”

“What’s
Meldweld
? A comic book?”

“Comic strip.”

“Wow. How many newspapers?”

“None. It’s a web comic. I self-publish online.”

“Oh. Do you make a living from it?”

Zack kept his tense eyes locked on a woman’s floating baby stroller. Hannah was darkly relieved to see the same confounded look that had no doubt become a permanent fixture on her face.

“I make some income off of ad revenue and donations. For the rest of it, I freelance.”

“As what?”

“Commercial illustrator.”

“Oh. That’s not bad.”

“I hate it,” he retorted. “By the way, I’m sorry I got pissy with you before. If you had a morning like mine, then you have every right to be freaked out by everything.”

Hannah nearly cried with bittersweet emotions. Sharing her ordeal made her feel half as crazy as she did five minutes ago, which made the current nightmare twice as real.

“Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m sorry I went all psycho on you.”

“No worries,” he said, and then chuckled at his own choice of words. Hannah was too rattled to follow the humor.

“I’m an actress,” she offered after an uncomfortable silence.

“Really? Like for a living?”

“No. I wish. During the day, I work as a traffic coordinator at a medical advertising agency. I run between the creatives and the executives and try to keep them all on schedule while they yell at each other through me.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

“Not really.”

“No, I mean it’s interesting that we both keep talking about this stuff in the present tense.”

Hannah felt a cold squeeze around her heart. Zack was obviously five steps ahead of her on the road to acceptance. She didn’t enjoy the dog-leash tug.

He nervously rotated the silver-colored band on his wrist. Despite its airy weight, the bracelet seemed undentable, unscuffable. He couldn’t find the hint of a seam.

“The money’s blue here,” Zack announced after another silence.

“What?”

“I found a coffee stand while I was stumbling around. I tried to pay with one of my tens and the vendor stared at me like I was nuts. So I’m kicked out of line and I see the next guy pay with a shiny blue twenty. It had Theodore Roosevelt on it.”

Hannah took another swig of her bottled water. She noticed small patches of ash on Zack’s neck and a few more on his shirt and jeans.

“Where do you live?” she asked him.

“Brooklyn. I was supposed to fly back tomorrow morning.”

“Oh. Wow. You have family there?”

“I do. At least I
did
. I can’t imagine they’re . . .”

He stroked his chin with trembling fingers, fixing his glassy stare at faraway shores.

“Did you notice that all the license plates here say South California? You guys usually refer to it as Southern California, am I right?”

Hannah sighed. “You are right.”

“I also noticed that the cars are more rounded. Bubbly. Not like they were in the 1950s but—”

“I saw a flying ambulance,” she blurted.

“I saw a flying taxi,” he replied with an uneasy smirk. “I was building up to that.”

“Zack, what the hell’s going on?”

In addition to acceptance, Hannah’s new friend was five steps ahead on the road to understanding. From the moment Zack ruled out the Rip van Winkle scenario—thanks to a discarded, date-stamped lottery ticket—the wheels in his mind kept spinning back to the words
alternate
and
parallel
. He wasn’t ready to verbalize his hypothesis.

“I don’t know,” he said, his knees bouncing with anxious energy. “Until I saw you and your bracelet, I was pretty sure I’d lost my mind.”

“Do you have a history of mental illness?”

Zack eyed her with furrowed perplexity. “Are you suggesting that I’m hallucinating all this? Because I think that’d be bad news for you.”

“No. I only asked because I do have a history. I’ve been hospitalized.”

“For what? Schizophrenia?”

“No. Just . . . emotional stuff.”

“Well, that’s a far cry from seeing flying ambulances.”

“Look, I’m just going by that thing. I forget what it’s called. Where the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

“Occam’s razor.”

“Yeah, Occam’s razor. And right now the simplest explanation is that we’re both having some kind of psychotic breakdown. It’s either that or . . .” She pointed to the latest floating baby stroller to pass their bench. “What do you think’s more likely?”

Zack pursed his lips, exhaling in frustrated sputters. “Denial.”

“Who, you or me?”

“You.”

“What, you think I
want
to be crazy?”

“I think it beats the alternative,” he said. “I’d love to wake up in a rubber room right now. Because that would mean that nobody really died and everything has a chance of going back to normal. Unfortunately, I’ve never done well with rosy scenarios. After twenty-eight years of Jewish conditioning, I’ve come to believe the darkest explanation is usually the right one. Call it Menachem’s razor.”

Hannah scowled at him. “How can you even joke right now?”

The cartoonist jerked a listless shrug. “Just how I cope.”

“If you’re so convinced this is real, Zack, then help me. Tell me what’s happening.”

“I don’t know!”

“At least tell me how you got your bracelet.”

From the edgy look on his face, Hannah realized she was the one tugging the dog leash now. She also realized that Zack wasn’t as nerdy as he first seemed. Up close, she could sense a thin layer of hardness behind his boyish features, the same uptight strength her sister always carried. Hannah would have killed for some of that now.

“It was pretty insane where I was,” he attested.

“So a white-haired guy didn’t come to talk to you.”

“Someone did, but he didn’t say much. I couldn’t tell if he had white hair.”

“You’d remember him if you saw him.”

“I barely remember my own name after everything that happened. It was . . .”

“Insane,” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he said, with a grim expression. “Word of the day.”

—

The opening crowd at Comic-Con had been only half the size of Friday’s, thanks to all the fresh electrical mayhem. By 10
A.M.,
the exhibition hall once again bustled with thousands.

Zack manned his rented table in Artist’s Alley, the back-corner mini-bazaar where professionals hawked their works. He’d surpassed his wildest expectations the day before: six sales and ten handshakes from gushing fans of
Meldweld
. One of his admirers, a statuesque Goth with spiderweb tattoos on her arms, scrawled her hotel information in Zack’s sketchbook. He’d made a note to pin it up on his corkboard when he got home, as collateral against future ego losses.

Ultimately he’d spent Friday night alone in his hotel, text-messaging into the wee hours with his ex-girlfriend Libby. When she mocked him for passing up the chance to bang his first groupie, Zack merely shrugged and chalked it up to arachnophobia. But by 3
A.M.
, he’d come around to Libby’s way of thinking, as usual. Another non-experience for the King of Missed Opportunities.

The next morning, Zack yawned and doodled from behind his table as the local crowd ignored him. Everyone seemed glaringly tense now, hopelessly thrown by their faltering technology.

Halfway through his latest bored doodle, the convention hall plummeted into darkness.

Zack shot to his feet as countless conventioneers squawked in blind worry. Dozens, then hundreds of cigarette lighters pierced tiny pinholes in the darkness. Though Zack was relieved to learn that he hadn’t gone blind, the preponderance of flames created a new concern. He looked to the artist next to him, a portly man with a Fu Manchu mustache who waved his Zippo like a torch.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Zack cautioned.

“What the hell do you want me to do?”

“There are posters, banners, all sorts of flammable—”

“I just wanna get out of here in one piece. You want the same, then shut up and follow me.”

Reluctantly, Zack grabbed his sketchbook and followed. He knew it wasn’t entirely wise to trail the guy with the open flame, but then Zack feared that things were about to get very bad here, very soon.

A hundred yards away, a new crescendo of screams arose as a publisher’s booth became engulfed in fire. Two shrieking exhibitors emerged from inside, both sporting a fresh coat of flames. They crashed into a neighboring stall, setting it ablaze.

Panic seized the hall as the fire spread. Every exit was visible now, and every route became choked by throngs of squealing evacuees. Zack joined the thinnest clog and was quickly shoved aside like a coatrack. He huddled into a protective crouch against a folding wall, away from the flames and mobs.
Wait it out,
his inner strategist demanded.
Better late than trampled.

Soon someone sat down beside him, a tall and slender man in a black T-shirt and slacks. Tucked beneath his New York Yankees cap was a smooth white mask made of some oddly reflective plastic. Zack could spy only a hint of the stranger’s face through the eyeholes. He had fair skin, sandy brows, and the scariest blue eyes Zack had ever seen. They glistened in the firelight, dancing with wild amusement despite
the suffering of thousands.

Before the cartoonist could indulge his flight reflex, the stranger grabbed his arm. Zack couldn’t hear the clacking sound in the din, nor did he register the cool silver bracelet as it sealed around his wrist. All he could process were those ferocious eyes. They weren’t just amused, they were contemptuous. Mocking.

The man muttered something brief and incomprehensible before jumping to his feet. He waved his hand in a brusque loop. A puddle of radiant white liquid appeared by his shoes, as round as a manhole and as bright as a glowstick. Zack watched, bug-eyed, as the man plunged feet first into the pool’s hidden depths. He disappeared beneath the rippling surface. The portal shrank away to concrete.

For Rose Trillinger’s second son, this was the end of reason. The end of acceptance. Screaming, Zack rushed to join the stragglers in a fevered dash for the exit. He’d made it all the way to the doors when his new bracelet vibrated and he became sealed inside an egg-shaped prison of light. Within moments—

Hannah cut him off with a tense wave of the hand. “It’s all right. I . . . know the rest.”

Zack was all too happy to stop. From the moment the sky came down on the convention center, he’d retreated to his own private cineplex. He watched himself from the front row, confident that the hero would survive and all would be explained by the end of Act I. It wasn’t until he encountered Hannah that the fourth wall crumbled and he fell into the messy reality of his predicament.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Zack said. “I don’t know why we were singled out for bracelets. If your guy was as scary as mine, then . . . I don’t know. I don’t think they’re in a hurry to bring us into the loop.” He darkly eyed his silver band. “So to speak.”

Hannah sucked a sharp breath as she suffered her third and worst attack of hot needle stings. She huddled forward on the bench, wincing. “So what did . . . what did this guy say when he gave you your bracelet?”

Zack jerked a nervous shrug. “It didn’t make any sense. I don’t even know if I heard it right.”

“What was it?”

“He said, ‘Any other weekend, you’d be one of the Golds.’”

Hannah eyed him in dim bewilderment. “One of the Golds.”

“Yeah.”

“That makes no sense.”

“No kidding.”

“Jesus, Zack. What are we going to do?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t rightly know. I guess sticking together is the first step, if you can tolerate my company a little while longer. We’re going to need cash, or whatever passes for—”

The world fell abruptly silent as Hannah flinched in agony. Her skin stung like she was covered in firecrackers. Her heart rate doubled. Her vision took on a deep blue shade.

She pressed her palms to her face. “Oh God. I think I need a doctor.”

Oddly, Zack didn’t reply. She caught him staring ahead at the ocean, perfectly still and expressionless. He didn’t even blink.

“Zack, did you hear me? I feel like I’m dying!”

She jerked his sleeve, tearing a three-inch hole in the shoulder seam. The fabric felt tough somehow, like Zack had over-starched it. And he still didn’t acknowledge her.

Hannah struggled to her feet and moved directly in front of him. “Zack! Snap out of it! Please! I need you!”

Now his head tilted upward with all the speed of a sunrise, his eyes blooming wide in bother. A small voice in Hannah’s head insisted that she’d seen all this before as a child—the slowness, the blue haze, the odd taste of burning ash.

“What . . . who’s doing this?”

She frantically scanned the area. All over the marina, people moved at an absurdly lethargic pace, as if they all colluded on a silly pantomime. A middle-aged jogger creaked through a bounding stride. An Irish setter charged after a tennis ball with slow-motion pomp. A trio of seagulls spun in the air like a nursery mobile.

“WHO’S DOING THIS?”

Hannah turned back to Zack, who now watched her in rigid horror. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bubble. Maybe he could explain it. Except . . . except . . .

Except there was no bubble this time, no white-haired man with his finger on the clock. It was just Hannah and the world moving at two different speeds.