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Anna Huff needed a gun. She was now a very famous girl, if her push alerts and WorldGram following were any indication. Already the news had dubbed her the Preppy Psycho. Jason Kirsch was wounded but not dead. Lara Kirsch was nowhere to be found. Anna’s WorldGram comments were a toxic stew of death threats from Kirsch loyalists, spam, and vacuous cries of support from thirsty men and women alike. She couldn’t stop scrolling through all of them.
There was no telling if PortSys had figured out Anna’s latest port ID yet, but she didn’t want to be unarmed when they did. She was in Dewey Beach, Delaware, huddled behind a row of townhouses a mile from the water that, shockingly, did not yet have a brick-and-mortar wall surrounding them. Across Route 1, she saw the chilly reflection of a tiny lake and the eaves of shoreline McMansions towering high in the air over their respective barbed wire-topped walls. A seagull circled around the lake and made a throaty whistle.
Snitch.
Only one of the townhomes in Anna’s row appeared to be occupied, although when squatters took over a place, they usually kept the lights off anyway. The adrenaline and parched heat from Phoenix had worn off of her and the brutal cold was taking hold. She was more tired than she’d ever been. All she wanted was a bed and the chance to replay her night with Lara over and over and over again. She could still taste Lara’s lip gloss on her. She could have eaten a whole tube of it. She took a deep breath, smiled, then hugged herself. It feels good to be in love. Great, even. God it feels good to admit it. No shame in the feeling anymore.
Bryce Holton was still awake. Network Z showed him loitering around the railroad crossing in Rockville. Anna chose a pin just out of his range of eyesight: around the corner from an abandoned Army surplus store overlooking the tracks. When she ported to Maryland, she peeked around the corner and saw him handing a dimebag to a kid who couldn’t have been older than eleven. She picked up a piece of rebar lying next to a crumbled parking barrier and held it firm. Her hands were developing an affinity for hard weaponry.
Bryce’s preteen client ported out. That was Anna’s cue. She ran at Bryce with the iron bar and caught him right in the face as he turning around to see who was coming.
“Owwwwww!”
“Remember me?”
“No.”
“Yeah well, this is for Sarah.”
Anna smashed Bryce’s kneecap with the rebar and he let out another howl. This was the fourth man she’d beaten up today, and she was getting a taste for it. She grabbed his gun out of his waistband.
“Hey man, you can’t steal that!”
“Sorry not sorry,” Anna said. She was gone a second later.
Now she was in Cuernavaca, Mexico, her frigid toes and body gradually warming back up. She walked, without much of a plan, along a darkened and empty street until it opened up into a bustling thoroughfare. She sped past the Baby Rock discoteca and saw all manner of clubbing sleaze—American, European, nouveau riche Chinese—demanding that the bouncer check for their names on the guest list. She hid her face. She was famous for assaulting the prince of porting, and for being a girl who kissed another girl. She knew that few people would take kindly to the former and that certain people out in the free zones, no matter the country, wouldn’t take too kindly to the latter either.
PINE agents were so widely despised in Mexico that a gunfight immediately broke out any time they dared to port in, which is why Anna thought it was the best place to enjoy a temporary respite from law enforcement.
She guessed wrong. After three more blocks, she saw an American PINE agent port in ten yards from her and train his rifle on her.
“FREEZE!”
She did as she was told, but the PINE agent didn’t count on the plainclothes Federale who was waiting in another club line across the street. The Federale opened fire and the PINE troop dropped to the ground, blending in with the scattered refuse immediately.
Anna ported out of Cuernavaca and onto the wholesale floor of the resurrected Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, where she slithered between hordes of fishermen porting in from the East China Sea and restaurant buyers zipping in from all over the world to snatch up anything fresh from white plastic bins in front of the fish stands: boulders of priceless tuna loin, whole sea cucumbers, crab claws as long as table legs, spiky urchins cracked open to reveal the golden uni custard inside, and the rest of a revitalized marine life bounty. A pair of tourists watched in equal parts anticipation and horror as a fishmonger nailed a fresh horse mackerel to a plank and filleted it for them to eat while it was still alive. They posted a five-star review on WorldGram as they gulped the fish down.
Loading trucks speeding by came within a hair of clipping Anna’s ankles on every pass. She stole a towel from behind one fish stand and dried herself off as she snuck by another fishmonger running a mako shark carcass through a bandsaw. She walked at a half-crouch, looking like she was constipated, desperate to remain concealed among the churn of buyers and vendors and insufferable foodies blasting in to shoot port-bys of themselves eating a wriggling octopus tentacle. Near another booth, she caught a glimpse of her face on a tiny, standard-def television sitting on top of one of the coolers.
Shit.
She slipped behind another food stall and snagged a folded white apron off its steel shelving, cinching it around her waist, and around the dress that had made her look so fabulous just an hour earlier. Now was not the time to look fabulous. She opened up her phone and made an old school voice call to Bamert.
“Ahoy ahoy,” he said from the other end.
“They know my port ID.”
“I can remedy that for you in just a moment. Or, at least, Burton can.”
“I don’t have a moment.”
“Well then, you better make one.”
Two PINE agents ported in ten yards away. Anna ducked under a table selling contraband whale meat, then scurried behind a row of giant standalone refrigerators while market security screamed at the troops to go away. She took the gun out of her handbag and gripped it tight as the agents swept through the stalls, overturning storage bins and ignoring angry cries from the vendors. They spotted Anna fleeing behind the massive appliances and held up their rifles, but by then she had already ported to the abandoned passenger terminal of O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
All of the gates and old concession areas of O’Hare were shuttered, never to be reopened. This was strictly a cargo and military aviation hub now. She blew in next at a gate that opened to a jetway to nowhere. The lone vendor in the concourse was a Thai hawker selling fresh noodles to all of the refugees, immigrants, and homeless folk loitering about.
You need a different phone. Anna couldn’t keep porting with the one she had, but she still had to be able to port at a moment’s notice. She ran, gun in hand, over to a teenage girl sitting next to her sleeping mother on a gate area bench.
“Excuse me, do you like your phone?”
“Huh?” the girl asked.
“Never mind.” Anna grabbed the phone out of the girl’s hands and gave her the compromised phone as a forced tradeoff.
“Hey!”
“Sorry.”
A dozen PINE agents blew in but Anna had them beat once again, porting out with the girl’s phone—she didn’t have a passcode lock on it—before they could spot her and fire.
She was in the Laotian countryside now, just outside Luang Prabang, consigned to a path littered with signs warning of landmines in the surrounding fields. The constant toggling in and out of daylight was fucking with Anna’s equilibrium, like she had left her Eustachian tubes behind while teleporting all around. She could barely keep her balance as she hurried along the path.
The heat wasn’t helping. It deadened the air and rendered Anna’s drying job in Tokyo pointless. She could smell sweet incense permeating the countryside but couldn’t see where, exactly, the smell was coming from. Beat gunfire. A government mosquito control vehicle roared by, its loudspeakers blaring out directives in English to not go near any standing water because of an ongoing malaria epidemic. “GO TO THE HOSPITAL IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE SYMPTOMS,” they warned.
Anna called Bamert a second time.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Your port ID says your name is Marguerita Consuelos de Vallos. That’s a gorgeous name.”
“Can you help me yet?”
“We’re working on it, Marguerita. Just keep moving.”
“I wanna die.”
“No, you don’t. You want to live. Move.”
An American couple ported in. When they saw Anna walking along the path in her dress and apron, they double-checked their phones. She had to go again. She was about to zero in on a dead spot in Uganda when, without warning, she felt the shiver.
Someone, somewhere, had selected Anna’s pin for her. They chose the center of the 5 expressway in Los Angeles. The wormhole dumped Anna into the passing lane and she had to leap over to the shoulder to avoid a Mack truck whizzing by.
The entire freeway was a truck derby: moving trucks and oil tankers and garbage trucks and cement trucks and wobbly contractor pickups and container trucks that stretched the length of a hockey rink. Funding for street lights in LA was nonexistent, so the trucks barreled down the 5 illuminated only by their own menacing high beams. They drove as fast as possible, except when they were occasionally ramming into one another.
The shoulder was no safer. Another truck came at Anna from the wrong side of the rumble strip and she had to jump on top of a concrete divider that barely kept northbound and southbound traffic separated. She was teetering on the barrier; it was no wider than a balance beam. Mr. Willamy’s awful balance training was proving useful once more. She opened up PortMaps again but another hole had already opened up right next to her. She held perfectly still until the wormhole timed out and she was “safe” again, then pinned the row of townhouses in Dewey Beach.
But when she took a step, she found herself on another freeway, directly on top of a moving container truck.
She was not prepared for the wind. Actually, she wasn’t prepared for any aspect of her current predicament. Her handbag blew away. The seams in the trailer were digging into her belly as she lay flat against its top. The semi was going 100mph down a long stretch of dilapidated highway, nothing beside it except for filthy snowbanks and tall, thin fir trees that stuck straight out of the snow like hairs standing on end.
Anna saw rusted green exit signs for towns she couldn’t recognize: SABATTUS, GARDINER, AUGUSTA, SIDNEY, WATERVILLE. They all drew a blank. All she knew is that she was still in America, and that she was on the verge of freezing to death.
The wind hissed at her. The container truck hit a pothole and her PortPhone flew out of her other hand and landed three feet in front of her.
“OH NO!”
A few more bumps in the road made the phone dance around like it was enchanted. Anna tried to slither forward to grab the phone, but could feel the wind trying to peel her body off the truck and blow her away. She pressed her hands and body down into the roof because gravity and friction were all she had at her disposal to stay alive. The corrugated steel of the container was so cold that any exposed flesh stuck to it.
The truck hit one more big bump. Anna saw her phone hop up, twirl around in the moonlight for just a second, and then fall overboard. She didn’t see where it landed. On the ground? In the snow? Now Anna had absolutely nothing save for a pair of extraordinarily chafed thighs.
Every second on top of the container made the wind more cruel, like she was being dragged through a field of poisoned nettles. The truck swerved to avoid a pothole and took Anna right along with it, to the edge of the container and nearly off it. She was getting farther and farther away from the phone and without it she was stranded, lost to PortSys but also to the world entire. She may as well have been dead.
Maybe you should jump. After all, what the worst that could happen? Death? Death seemed okay. She had her moment of glory back in Phoenix, but it was clear that she was in way over her head now. Emilia and Jason were toying with her, seizing control of her body and sending it to new and rotten places. She was miles away from the stolen phone, far enough that walking back to it was no longer an option.
But Anna Huff had no other choice. She took a deep breath and prayed for a quick death: the kind where you’re already halfway up to the white light before you even know you’re bleeding. That was what she wanted if she couldn’t have life. If she couldn’t have Lara. She wasn’t even sad or angry about it at the moment. She had a plan for death and was intent on sticking to it.
Both lanes on the highway shifted over and the truck slowed to a relative crawl at 40mph, past a vacated road work site. She saw a frozen mound of dirt ahead, next to an abandoned excavator. It was her best chance for a soft landing. She rolled off.
Upon closer inspection—like say, hitting it at near terminal velocity—Anna noticed the dirt mound she was aiming for was not soil but rather a pile of hard gravel stones, along with a few razor sharp salt crystals thrown in for good measure. She may as well have jumped onto a mound of porcupines. No death. Not even close. Instead, she hit the top of the mound kidneys-first and rolled down the pile. She spilled onto a patch of dirty asphalt and now every part of her was red and raw: face, neck, back, arms. She was exposed like a shucked clam. God didn’t even do her the courtesy of knocking her unconscious. Instead, He had sealed her inside a great chamber of screaming pain. The depth and force of the pain took her breath away. In her mind, she heard a studio audience laughing at her plight.
Please, death. Please, work with us here.
Anna was in so much pain that she couldn’t even remember how much she hated everyone at the moment. That hate was vacuum-sealed and preserved for later. Her main motor functions had yet to boot back up. Blood was oozing out from under her body. She picked up her left arm and a flap of skin hung down from it like a sheet from a clothesline.
“Shit.”
Every subsequent discovery Anna made about her condition was worse than the last. Her feet were blue. The seams in the truck roof had torn open her belly. Her dress was torn and she mourned it more than her own lacerated skin. She tried to pick the dirt out of her exposed wounds but couldn’t get all of it. The cuts were deep and miserable. The rips in her skin had formed strange, glistening polygons. It was like looking at Sarah’s scalp after the bullet had done its gruesome handiwork.
Finally, she stood up and crossed the highway. Every step hurt. Every stray pebble and shard of glass found their way into the soles of her new shoes. It was an orchestra of pain inside Anna Huff, with the added degradation of watching each truck barrel down the road and rush past her without giving her a second thought. Most of these trucks were self-driving. They weren’t programmed to give a shit.
But then, by the grace of God, one of them stopped. A rickety pickup truck whizzed past Anna and abruptly pulled over. She saw the passenger door open and sprinted toward it, so bone cold that she didn’t care what kind of lunatic awaited her.
She was greeted by a Mexican woman in her fifties sitting in the driver’s seat. Her son, a chubby little thing, sat beside her.
“Señora?” the woman said.
“Lo siento,” Anna said. “Un accidente. Necesito mi PortFono.”
“Tienes un PortFono?”
“Sí.” She pointed down the highway. “Pero en la carretera. Allá.”
“Ven.”
There was nowhere to sit. The kid was only seven or eight years old but he was big enough to take up most of the passenger seat. The woman tapped her son, who looked extremely reluctant to help.
“Muevete!” she told him.
The boy scooched over in his seat, leaving room for a spare asscheek.
“Ven!” she told Anna again.
“Gracias.”
With that, Anna stepped up into the truck and squeezed next to the boy. The seatbelt wouldn’t fit around them both. She was bleeding on him. A lot.
This is definitely the worst moment of this boy’s life.
The boy reluctantly held out a piece of Trident for Anna. “Gum?”
“No, gracias.”
“Cierra la puerta,” the woman said. Anna closed the door and they got back on the freeway slowly, the bigger trucks swerving around them with pissy honks.
“Donde estamos?” Anna asked.
“En Maine.”
Oh! Maine! This all makes sense now, since there’s nothing around. Pretty much exactly how you pictured this state.
After two minutes, Anna saw a PINE agent lingering on the side of the road. She wrested the wheel from the mother and steered the truck directly into the troop. He flopped onto the hood, legs shattered, then fell off to the side as the mother screamed and hit the brakes.
Anna jumped out of the truck and ran over to the agent, who was still alive but blessedly unconscious. Nearby, she saw her phone resting in the snow, the screen still aglow. She grabbed it and went back to the driver and her son, who were now out of the truck and standing over the broken body of the PINE agent. Neither the mom nor the child had passport lanyards.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Anna told them. She was expecting the woman to start screaming bloody murder. Instead, she just shrugged.
“Que se joda,” she said. Fuck him.
Her little boy gave the soldier the bird—the kind of angry finger Anna preferred—and then the two of them walked back to their truck and drove away, leaving Anna bruised and bloody on the side of the frigid highway.
Another truck, with an American flag across its back windshield and two latex truck nutz hanging from its hitch, stopped. The driver got out with a shotgun.
“HEY!” he shouted.
But Anna was gone before he could pump his 12-gauge. She thought she was porting to Dewey Beach, but PortSys had other ideas. After she took a step and felt the shiver, she was two hundred feet in the air and losing altitude quickly.