THE LAST THING I wanted to do was use my Mark again, but I also did not want this opportunity to slip away, no matter how ragged I felt inside. I felt bone-tired, but it wasn’t really physical. According to the clock on the dash, it was only three in the afternoon, despite the setting of the sun here in 1970-something.
My fatigue was psychic and spiritual. I felt myself shaking, vibrating like a piano wire, and if anything so much as brushed against me, I felt an involuntary shudder. Every nerve felt overstimulated to the point I couldn’t really distinguish pleasure from pain, or from simply incidental contact.
I needed my bed . . . or a long soak in my bathtub with my eyes closed.
Instead, I drove slowly out of 1970s Cleveland while Ivan rode shotgun and explained what he wanted us to do.
According to Ivan, my car was necessary to return to the Empire in any reasonable time. It served the same purpose his armor had, pushing the occupant through worlds faster than anyone could walk. The weight might slow me down, but the speed at which it covered ground more than made up for it.
Ivan said that it was only due to his armor and the fact that his quarry had taken a “straight” route through Chaos to my world, that Ivan had been able to keep up with John Doe.
He believed that driven by a Prince—driven by me—my Charger could traverse the worlds between here and the Empire as quickly as it could cover the ground between here and where we were going. Perhaps faster.
“The ground between here—”
“We need to go to the North American capital, Washington.”
Of course, we did.
I looked at the clock again, and if it had been a normal drive he was talking about, it wouldn’t be horribly out of the question. Seven hours, give or take. I licked my lips and thought about the last few excursions into Chaos.
Could I do that again, for that long?
Muscles inside me shuddered with anticipation just thinking about it. I drove out of Cleveland and onto the freeway. I glanced at the gas gauge and sighed, “One side trip first.”
“What? Why?” Jacob asked.
“We can’t get to DC on a quarter tank.”
“Oh,” Jacob said. “Why don’t you stop here?”
I shook my head. “Leaded gas is not a good idea for the catalytic converter, and I don’t think the Sohio station there would take twenty-first century plastic.”
“You have a point there.”
I pushed the Charger back toward home, but only briefly. I did not want to return too close to the Shadows. Less than a half minute pushing with my Mark found us back in a familiar 1986. Jacob looked at the boxy cars with rectangular headlights and said, “I don’t think a station here will take your plastic either.”
I nodded. “But if memory serves, we’re in an era before all self-serve pumps were prepay.”
I pulled off of the interstate and filled the tank at a Shell station. It was unleaded and not prepay. It was only 90 cents a gallon, but I still felt guilty for stealing the gas. I wondered why, since I’d done a hell of a lot of more legally questionable things as a cop. Up to now, I’d only been concerned about legal niceties in my “home” world.
I wondered if I was reacting against Ivan’s solipsism—as if, after hearing about universes appearing and disappearing throughout Chaos, I wanted them to be more real.
However I felt, I was committed once I started pumping. I had no way to pay at a 1986 gas station. Even my folding money would look fake in this decade.
The attendant ran out cursing when I drove away, but a nudge from the Mark and he and the Shell station were gone.
I needed a rest, and we were close to the Pennsylvania border before I felt prepared to try using my Mark again. When I told Ivan I was ready, he asked, “Can you follow my direction?”
I felt his hand on the small of my back, but it wasn’t his hand, and it wasn’t really my back that felt it. He looked at me, and I could tell he had no clue exactly how he was touching me.
Without the distraction of needing to flee for my life or the unpleasant touch of the Shadows groping me, I was fully aware of the sense of his Mark brushing me ever so lightly with a masculine touch that elicited goosebumps and little shivers on my skin.
I bit my lip and forced myself to stare at the road ahead of us. My knuckles cracked as I gripped the wheel.
“Yes,” I said. What I thought was: seven hours?
I steeled myself as I pushed forward with the Mark. Again, I opened up with everything I had in me, and the motion of the Charger seemed to pull me even farther, faster. Ivan’s touch came along with me, embracing me, guiding me, as I felt my Mark pulling me deep into a bottomless well inside myself.
Along with Ivan’s guiding touch stroking me, with my senses heightened to bursting, I could feel the world around me, as if it embraced me, too. I could sense the way worlds slid by, obeying their own motion through dimensions I could feel but couldn’t visualize.
I had the general sense of where Ivan pushed me, just as the geographic direction I needed to go was generally due southeast. But there was the immediate feel of Chaos sliding by me and the Charger, I no longer seemed to be stepping across the ice floating on the rapids, I was surfing the crashing water, submerged in the current, with infinite streams of probability washing across my skin in frighteningly intimate waves.
I had control though, like a surfer, I could sense and find paths through the shifting Chaos I could drive an 8-cylinder muscle car through. When I concentrated on sliding through the worlds where I wanted to go, I held onto the reality of a solid roadway under the Charger’s tires. Above us, the sky became a pulsing blue-gray twilight while everything fell away around us into the white mists of Chaos.
But the road remained solid, the one thread of reality knitting together all the worlds we passed through. My confidence rose. As I trembled inside, I gripped the wheel so tight I felt part of the car. I felt the hardness of the road as clearly as I felt Ivan’s touch on my Mark.
The speedometer hit ninety and stayed there.
The prolonged drive kept pushing me. Over time, the excitement evolved into discomfort, then began to blossom into pain.
I had never done this to myself—driven the Mark so hard, so long. As tightly as I held the wheel, I could feel muscles shuddering, and the Mark itself felt scoured raw, and while the surface of my skin felt like a raw open nerve, I couldn’t flinch away from the Mark’s touch. My breath came staccato through clenched teeth, and my eyes watered, and all I wanted was to let go.
If I didn’t, I was afraid I’d have no choice about it. “We have to stop.”
I let the indeterminate Chaos around the car collapse into something real and pulled the Charger to the side of a shady macadam country road. I held on until the car came to a complete stop, then I let all the internal barriers go, and everything that had built up crashed over me in an uncontrolled flood. I folded over the wheel and groaned, every muscle in my body shaking as it all hit me.
I was dimly aware of Jacob’s voice asking if I was all right.
Yeah, sure, I’m fine.
I trembled as if I had just suffered a seizure. I pushed myself up from the wheel and said, “I need a break.” I didn’t look at my passengers. I fumbled with the seatbelt, opened the door, and stepped out.
I had no idea where we were. The road was a tar-bound gravel slash through the woods on either side. The trees were full and green, the afternoon sun shining through the leaves. I walked out, about fifty feet into the trees, and my legs felt so weak that I had to lean against the trunks to keep from toppling over.
I stood in the middle of the trees and looked up, staring at the sky through the leaves. I felt empty, as if someone had drilled a hole in my life and drained away everything that made me me. I should have been feeling the loss of my old life, fear of the Shadows, some sort of excitement at finally learning something about my Mark. Instead, I was just very tired.
Jacob’s voice came from behind me. “Dana?”
I lowered my head and stared at the mulch under my feet.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I can’t do that for so long.”
“Does it hurt you?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ll be all right. I just need a break.”
“I can see that.”
I licked my lips. “I’m sorry for that display.”
“Don’t be.” We stood in silence for several moments when he added, “I don’t know exactly how this stuff works, but Ivan says we’re already close to the Empire here.”
I turned around. “What? How long was I driving?”
“An hour, give or take.”
I shook my head. “Even at the speed I was driving . . . It’s at least six hours to DC.”
Jacob shook his head. “I told you, I don’t really understand how this works, but apparently this . . .” He waved his hand as if he was having trouble with the word. “‘Universe?’” I could hear the quotes he put around the word. “He says it’s something like halfway or two thirds closer to the Empire. I think you impressed him.”
Made an impression, at least.
Jacob glanced back to the car. My Charger shone blue through the splatters of mud. At that moment I wouldn’t like anything better than to be back at my townhouse with a garden hose, some rags, and a Sunday afternoon with nothing more urgent to do than make it shine.
“Anyway,” Jacob said, “We can spend a few hours driving—normal driving—until we get closer to DC. If you’re not up to it, I could drive.”
“No one else is driving my car,” I told him as I walked back to my Charger.
AS onerous and exhausting as my explosive drive through the universes between the 1975 where we lost Whedon, and wherever here was, I actually found driving at a normal pace, without recourse to the Mark, relaxing. My body had finally run out of adrenaline, and now that there seemed no immediate threat to life, limb, or sanity, I felt as if every muscle in my body was slowly unconstricting.
The Charger’s Hemi purred even though I had almost literally driven it through hell. The tires crunched across the archaic country road at a more sedate thirty-five. I slowed, because now that the world was static around me, the road wove around, went up and down hills, and I didn’t want to drive any faster than I could see. I couldn’t imagine the levels of pissed I would reach if I’d driven my car into another universe only to hit a deer.
Beyond that, it was pretty country to drive through. I rolled down the windows to let in the fresh air and fished out my iPhone and put it on the cradle and hit shuffle. The first band to come on was Slipknot.
Ivan gave me a horrified look and said, “What is that?”
“Just some traveling music,” I told him. I think I was smiling for the first time today.
He muttered something in Russian, but I left the music on. The tortured vocals were a perfect match for my day. And it was my car, damn it.
We rolled by farms, and I saw pastures with horses or cows. In the distance I saw bearded men with broad hats, black pants, and light blue shirts tending the land. We’d passed the third farm, when I realized that I hadn’t seen any modern farm machinery at all.
I wondered if we were driving around some version of the nineteenth century. As we continued southeast, I passed three or four horse-drawn buggies that would have been familiar to anyone who’d passed through Amish country, though these were lacking the orange reflective triangles on the back. And, almost disastrously, they were driven by horses that seemed unfamiliar with automotive traffic. The first buggy we came to, despite my pulling over as far as I could, caused the horse to spook, roll eyes, and rear, and almost manage to spin around in its harness. Fortunately, the driver was able to gain control, whipping the animal and shouting German harsher than the Korn lyrics growling through my speaker system.
With the next two, I pulled over and stopped. And both times, my Charger received evil stares. I don’t know if they reacted to my vehicle, my clothing, the music leaking from the car, or just the fact that I was a woman driving two men around.
I couldn’t have been more out of place if I tried.
It was another hour before I saw any signs. I drove through miles of more farmland until I came to a T-intersection with two signs, one pointing right to East Palestine, the other pointing left toward Beaver Falls. The road was paved, rather than tar-bound gravel. Since I was pointed south, I took a left toward Beaver Falls.
Less than a mile down the blacktop I got the first real indication of how different this world was from my own. It was a large sign in black, yellow, and red. The text was bilingual in English and German. The English portion read: “Warning! You are leaving the Amish Zone!”
I slowed as I approached the sign until I came to a complete stop.
“Tell me that is not a swastika,” I muttered.
Neither Jacob nor Ivan obliged me.
Below the scare text on the sign was a little graphic emblem for some federal agency or other. It was circular and featured an eagle prominently in a seal a little too detailed to be contemporary but streamlined enough to be post Art Deco. The eagle bore a shield that was familiar enough in the federal iconography, at least the lower portion with the vertical stripes. The upper portion, though, instead of a collection of stars, bore a circular badge with the Nazi symbol on it.
I’d always seen the Department of the Interior as a relatively innocuous federal agency. But with that kind of seal, it took on some really ominous overtones.
“I guess World War II went a little differently here,” Jacob said.
“World War II?” Ivan said.
I looked at him and said, “World War II? Nazis? Hitler? Germany—”
Ivan just gave me a blank look.
“—and I guess you never had a World War I.” Not by that name, anyway.
Despite my reservations, I started the Charger again and began driving down the blacktop away from the Amish reservation. The small road fed into another road, and I finally saw other vehicle traffic. Until I merged, I could still pretend that I was driving in some remote corner of the Pennsylvania I knew.
Even with light traffic, I couldn’t pretend anymore. If anything, my Charger was more out of place along this stretch of highway than it had been in the midst of the Amish. The four-lane highway was the province of truck after truck, and all of them seemed to have been built in the forties at the latest. The diesel-belching cabs pulled trailers of every description—and not one trailer gave any hint of its contents. Like railroad cars, there were only logos for freight lines and cryptic serial numbers. I didn’t realize how much a part of the normal roadway landscape the ads on the side of semitrailers actually were, until they were gone.
Even though the trucks were all different makes and models, and the trailers were various colors, the fact that the sides were mostly blank gave everything an ominously uniform mechanistic feel.
At least the road was in decent shape, so I could make good time weaving past the trucks. The signage was strange looking, but it directed me toward the Pennsylvania Autobahn, where I got to safely open up the Hemi and make up the time I lost driving around the Amish.
Along the Autobahn were billboards showing images that wouldn’t have been out of place in any totalitarian state of the twentieth century. Idealized workers labored in the soil, or in the factory, or in the office. Slogans hovered over the heroic portraits, things like “The right to earn enough” and “The right to a decent home” and “The right to a good education,” and—disturbingly when I thought about it—each bore the legend beneath them: Out of Many, One: The National Progressive Party USA.
“So we lost the war?” I whispered as we passed one of the billboards where smiling white women happily tended a massive hunk of textile machinery that was busy weaving a recognizable American flag.
“I don’t think so,” Jacob said as we passed it.
“It looks like we lost.”
“Not the war,” Jacob said. “The Germans, for all their military buildup, couldn’t crack England, or push very far into Russia. There would be no way they could take the US by force—with an ocean in the way.”
“There are swastikas on our road signs.”
“By force,” Jacob said. “Before the war there were plenty of folks who thought the Fascists and the Nazis had good ideas how to handle the economy. Look at these signs—those aren’t Nazi slogans. They’re lifted from FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.”
Ivan shook his head. “These details do not matter.”
“It doesn’t matter that Nazis won?” I snapped.
“This is just one world that’s solidified out of boiling Chaos. It will vanish back into Chaos when we leave.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around that. “Hundreds of millions of people are under some totalitarian regime, and it doesn’t matter?”
“They’re Stationary,” Ivan said, as if that could explain his disinterest.
I wanted to believe that he just wasn’t aware of the particular evil Nazism was. He was from an Empire that grew out of the Napoleonic era, far removed from the genocidal impulses of the twentieth century.
But he Walked through worlds like this. That was his job. He was just as likely to have seen things worse than the history of my own universe.
I was about to argue that the people trapped in this world were just as important as the people in my world or in the Empire, when the sound of a siren cut through our conversation.