“WHAT ARE YOU doing?” Ivan asked.
I hadn’t even realized that I was in the process of pulling over until he said something. Reflex, I guess. However, something in his tone irritated me. “That’s a cop,” I said. “I’m pulling over like a good little citizen.”
“You can push the car—”
I cut him off. “When I’m ready, Ivan. I’ve had enough of jumping into your Chaos without any preparation.”
“Is this a good idea?” Jacob asked. “We don’t know anything about this place.”
I pulled the Charger to a stop beneath a billboard that showed heroic portraits from the branches of the military—though the Air Force seemed conspicuously absent. Below the soldier, sailor, and marine were smaller, more human-sized portraits of a policeman, a fireman, and a doctor. “Security abroad. Security at home,” went the motto on this billboard.
Jacob, I already know too much about this place.
The police car behind us was black and white, with a dome light on top the size of a bowling ball. It looked like a Ford from the 1950s, though it was a 50s where automotive design had sanded off all the frills and unnecessary details. The side panels were smooth metal, and any little flourishes or chrome accents were gone, until it was little more than a functional brick.
It made sense in a police car, but after seeing all those trucks, I thought that the design I saw probably went beyond just police cars.
The police car pulled up behind me, giant flasher going, and the driver got out. He started walking slowly up toward us on the driver’s side. The uniform he wore resembled a paramilitary outfit from South Africa circa 1965 more than it did the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol circa 1950-something. All of it black. Black fabric, black leather, shiny black boots, black sunglasses clipped to his breast pocket, and matte black grip for a machine pistol sticking out of the holster on his hip.
Ivan turned and started at the approaching cop and started muttering unpleasant Russian.
I flexed my hands on the wheel. The engine still purred as I watched the officer walk up behind the Charger. He was giving my car the once-over, I could see the kind of combination of confusion and wariness that you never want to see on the face of someone with a gun. His hand went to his holster.
Great.
“Dana,” Jacob said.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
The cop straightened up and started to walk up along the driver’s side. I eased my foot off the brake and allowed the Charger to roll quietly forward at idle speed. As the cop jumped back, drawing his weapon, I gave a small push with my Mark, and he vanished. It was a short jolt, a less than gentle friction against a part of myself already rubbed raw.
I rolled to a stop again, under a nighttime sky of stars and a full moon. The highway still sprawled empty alongside us, but I noticed the billboard was gone.
Also gone was the tension I’d felt rising in the car. I could hear Jacob exhale slowly, as if he’d been holding his breath.
I looked over at Ivan and said, “I pulled over because I didn’t want to do that at 70 miles per hour. I’m still feeling the effort from before.”
“Apologies, my Lady.”
“Yeah,” I said, “accepted.”
I pulled out onto the road again.
THE universe hopping had completely destroyed my sense of time. I felt as if I had been awake for days. I checked my watch, and it was only about fourteen hours since I had woken up this morning. Less than a day since Jacob had stormed into my apartment and everything started disintegrating around me.
The Mark throbbed on my back, a raw pulse reminding me that I had never used it so hard, or for so long.
I’d even lost track of how long I’d been driving. It had been long enough. “We need to stop,” I said, “I need some sleep.”
Jacob yawned. “You want me to spot you at the wheel?”
“Still trying to drive my car, huh?”
“No,” Ivan said.
I looked at him and said, “That’s presumptuous. This is my car.”
“And you need to drive in the event we must avoid some danger.”
Yeah—
“I guess you have a point,” Jacob said. “I guess you can’t drive it like she does, can you?”
It was a not so subtle dig against Ivan, and from his expression, Ivan felt it. Whatever deference he gave me due to status, he was still someone who resented being outperformed by a woman.
This was not going to go well.
“We are all going to stop and get some rest. I think we’ve put more than enough distance between us and the Shadows.”
Ivan frowned. “We will not be safe until we’re back in the Empire.”
“And I’m not chancing putting my car in a ditch.”
“So,” Jacob asked, “you’re going to start looking for a Day’s Inn?”
Yeah, there was that. I could pull the Charger over somewhere, but as much as I loved my car, I wasn’t up to sleeping in it. Also, where I was driving now was only a few steps removed from the Fascist police state we’d been pulled over in. Not the place to just randomly find a place to crash for the night.
Nighttime Pennsylvania slid by us, dark and somewhat ominous.
I was going to need to push the Mark again, at least a little. The realization made me wince inside. I still felt as if I had ravaged myself.
But we needed a safe place to hole up for at least eight hours.
I pushed the Charger into Chaos again. As the universe boiled apart around me, I felt a twinge quite aside from the effort of using my Mark. As a billboard for the National Progressive Party USA swirled away into an inconstant pattern of light and shadow that might have been a billboard, or a lamppost, or a tree, or a road sign, I couldn’t help thinking about the cop I had left by the side of the road.
Did he boil away like the sign as Ivan suggested? Did he just cease to exist? Did his whole history, birth, awkward adolescence, service in the military in a bizarro version of World War II, his stint in the police academy, marriage, birth of his kids—did all of that just disappear along with billions of other unique individuals just because I was no longer focused on them?
I couldn’t think like that; it was madness. If Ivan truly believed that’s what happened, he almost had to believe that those people, those billions, were meaningless. Stationary. I couldn’t accept that idea. It meant that Mom and Dad—even Jacob—were just some meaningless side effect of the Mark. Ivan was wrong because he had to be.
The bouncing of the Charger’s suspension brought my attention back to the Chaos surrounding us. I struggled to get my grip back around the roadway. Jacob or Ivan had become alarmed and had started talking excitedly. I ignored them to focus on the trembling breathless effort of the Mark pushing against me, against the car.
I couldn’t keep this up.
I tried to grope around the seething randomness, feeling for something concrete, like the road beneath us. I tried to pull us toward somewhere safe, where we could rest. When I touched something within the swirling twilight, I pushed the Charger out of Chaos and into another world of blazing noontime light and broken asphalt.
I let the car roll to a stop and gasped with the effort. A painful spasm slammed into me, and I was surprised it didn’t leave me bleeding.
No more of this, I thought. No more.
I looked up from the wheel and looked down the road. The road itself was gravel and ill-maintained, with crumbling shoulders, massive potholes holding brown pools of water, and weeds invading from the edges. Tall grasses waved in the wind on either side of us, and beyond the tops I could make out the roofline of a barn to our left.
I started the car rolling again, slowly on the broken roadway. We passed a battered sign half-fallen into the weeds by the roadside. Through the sun-faded paint and rust I could make out “State Line 15 Miles.”
“If my sense of direction holds,” I told my passengers. “We’re almost at the Maryland border.”
“Dana?” Jacob sounded worried.
“What?”
“You don’t sound well. Are you okay?”
You’re kidding, right? I sucked in a breath and put on a brave front, more for Ivan than Jacob. I think if it’d just been Jacob with me, I might have let my guard slip. A little. But, instead, I pasted on a smile, said, “Everything’s fine,” and gritted my teeth. I tried to ignore the throbbing from parts of me that really never should throb.
Wherever we were, it looked abandoned, which was fine with me. I followed the broken road until I saw the remains of a decaying split-rail fence being reclaimed by the tall weeds at the side of the road. I kept my eyes open until I pulled up to the wreckage of a gate. The driveway was close to invisible from the overgrowth, but it was there. I pulled to a stop in front of it and looked back at the other two. “Help me move the gate,” I told them.
They were a set of wooden gates that had gone gray and warped. The two halves had been chained shut at one time, but while the chain had fused to itself, the gate to the left had so weakened that pulling on the chain caused a section of wood to disintegrate. That gate was more rotted than its twin, but it also had sunk in and buried itself in the ground, making it immobile.
We worked on the other side, spending nearly twenty minutes forcing it open. In the end, the hinges refused to give, but the post—weakened with dry rot—decided to snap free at the base, sending all of us into a ditch by the side of what had once been a broad gravel driveway.
I checked the ground for foreign objects, picking up a few long nails and tossing them aside. I pulled the Charger up, through the gate, and then about another ten feet into the weeds. Then I jumped out and locked it up.
“What?” both Jacob and Ivan began to say.
“I want it off the road.” I waved ahead, along the overgrown gravel drive. “And since I can’t see the driveway, I’m not driving it any farther than this. I’m not getting us stranded with a flat tire.”
“Now what?” Jacob asked.
“Should be a farmhouse up this driveway, and given the state of the property, I think it’s unoccupied.” I turned to find my way along the long, overgrown gravel driveway, I trusted the guys to follow me. More accurately, I was so burned out that I was preoccupied with finding a place to rest a while. If there was no immediate danger, they both could lie down in the weeds for all I cared.
The drive was covered with waist-high grass, which still separated it from the old pastures where the growth had reached chest-level. It had obviously been years since anything had grazed here. I walked up a hill and when I crested it, I could see the remains of the farm over the weeds.
I saw acres that were still recognizable as long-abandoned cornfields, I could see stalks poking up out of weeds, still following hints of the original field’s geometry. Closer, nestled in the weeds at the edge of the field, I saw the skeletal hulk of an ancient tractor listing toward the corn as if it had unfinished business.
The barn stood, sun-bleached and swaybacked, between the cornfield and the farmhouse. Parts of the walls had fallen away so that, in places, I saw the sun shining all the way through it.
The house seemed much more solidly built. Sun had blasted the old Victorian building until all the colors had turned variants of bone gray, and some of the gingerbread trim and about half the shingles had fallen away. But the walls were straight, and most of the windows still reflected a glassy stare at me.
I had asked my Mark for a safe place to rest, without any people. I wondered if I could really trust that.
Lord, what choice do I have?
I was too tired to try and push through to find someplace less haunted-housey. I walked down through the weeds toward the empty house. I heard Ivan and Jacob following behind me. Jacob wondered aloud what happened to the place.
I shrugged. I didn’t much care, even if it was kind of eerie. It was even more so when I thought that the main road had seemed just as abandoned. It didn’t much matter; whatever happened to this place had happened a long time ago.
I got an idea how long ago when I tripped over a wood plank shoved in the ground. It brought me up short and looked down at it. The wood was weathered, untreated gray, and carved in the face were the words: Abigail Miller, b. 1910 d. 1919.
I stared and found my mind returning to my mother. I bit my lip and knelt down to straighten the grave marker. As I did, Jacob said, “There’re more.”
There were more. Seven markers for the Miller family, ages ranging from infant to just seventy years old. From the dates carved in the boards, three generations had all died between 1918 and 1919. I touched Abigail’s marker, from the dates, Abigail had lived at least long enough to see her grandmother and two of her siblings go.
Good lord, what would that be like? I’d just buried my mom, and I still hurt from how my dad died—I couldn’t imagine watching an entire family wiped out in such a short time. I couldn’t imagine being the one left to dig the graves.
“Flu,” Jacob said.
I looked up and asked, “What?”
“The Spanish Flu hit around then, the end of World War I.”
I turned back to the house and shuddered. “Is it safe, then?”
“It looks like it’s been a decade or two,” Jacob said.
I nodded, only half convinced. I wondered how often people like me and Ivan, travelers with a Mark, spread a disease to a population that had never been exposed to it? How many times had a population been devastated by some virus that had come out of nowhere?
I straightened up and looked back over the abandoned farm. The tractor was the only sign of the twentieth century here, and I realized its skeletal appearance was less decay than it was obsolete design. I also now noticed the absence of any telephone poles or wires, nor was there any sign there had ever been exterior lighting on house or barn.
The jet lag and general disorientation hit me full force. Not only did I know that this place had a much different history than the world I was familiar with, I had no real idea where in that history we stood. Back on the freeway, I felt as if we’d been in some version of the fifties after a very different World War II. Where we stood now? I didn’t know other than 1919, the latest year on the grave markers, had come and gone. I had no idea how long ago, though. Ten years? Twenty? Thirty?
“Dana?”
Jacob’s voice shocked me awake. I had closed my eyes and had been nodding off while I was standing there. I glanced up at the hard blue sky and said, “Let’s find a place to rest.”