Extinction Point: The End

One

The noise from the street was deafening. Shouting and singing blended with the occasional burst of raucous laughter, which in turn combined with the happy squeals of drunken women. The whoop of a police car’s siren clamored to overcome the combined voices of thousands of inebriated revelers. Instead, it became a counterpoint to the melody of yelling and singing rising from the mass of dancing bodies as the squad car slowly pushed its way through their midst.

Jim Baston, his eyes red and tired, tried to concentrate on the paragraph he was writing, but the blare of the rowdy crowd below his window was just too distracting.

“Save tonight’s work and forward a copy to the house’s inbox, please,” he said quietly.

“Yes Jim.” The female voice of the computer’s AI was soft and comforting. “I’ve done as you requested Jim,” the AI said a second later. “Is there anything else you would like?”

“No thank you. You can shut down. I won’t need you for the rest of the night.”

“Very well. Oh! And Jim…”

“Yes?”

“Happy New Year.”

“You too,” he whispered.

For the past ten years, he had been coming to this same hotel. Same room, every time. On first name terms with the owners (a pleasant couple from North Carolina), he didn’t even have to tell them his name when he called two months ahead to confirm his arrival. His reservation for the following year penciled in each time he ended his stay.

This was the quiet part of the city, too; he could only imagine what it would be like in the more popular areas. He felt like throwing open the windows and screaming at the crowd to shut the hell up! Couldn’t they see he was trying to work? Didn’t they know how important this book was to him?

Of course, who could blame them? It was, after all, New Year’s Eve, and if he had even half a life he would be out there too, welcoming in the New Year in as much of a drunken stupor as the rest of the city.

Instead, he stood, stretched his aching arms — careful to avoid the ceiling fan that twirled almost noiselessly overhead — and walked stiffly to the window, pulled up the blinds, pushed open the French doors and stepped out onto his balcony.

The noise that had been a grumbling rumble now became a cacophony, bolstered in part by Jazz and Salsa bands scattered throughout the city. The sound swelled up like a wave over the balcony, washing over him. From his third story vantage point, Jim looked out over a significant part of the city, its incandescent glow helping the full moon to fight back the darkness. Far off to the south a thick roll of thunderheads, black and roiling, threatened a damp end to the year. But Jim didn’t think a sudden soaking was going to do anything to squash the spirits of the thousands of revelers walking the streets this night.

Resting a shoulder against the doorjamb, he pulled an already opened soft pack of Marlboro’s from his shirt pocket. Tapping out one of the remaining cigarettes, Jim lit it with an antique Zippo, sheltering the fragile flame from the light breeze gusting over the rooftops with a cupped hand.

He took a long drag, held the smoke in his lungs for a few moments before exhaling it into the cool evening air in one long, slow breath. He was trying to give the things up, weaning himself off them by using them as a reward. When he completed five pages of the book, he got to have a smoke. Of course, he had been using the same excuse for the last ten years or so — didn’t look like his technique was working too well.

At twenty dollars a pack, it was amazing that anybody could still afford to smoke the damn things. Countries and presidents, ideologies and industry; they all came and went, but cigarettes outlived the lot of them. Jim wasn’t sure whether that was a testament to the resilience of people’s freedom of choice or just to the obscene amount of money that tobacco companies still threw into their marketing and advertising campaigns.

He hadn’t completed his five-page quota today; it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part, and he’d be damned if he was going to take a ride on the guilt-trip-express just because he fell down this once.

Its New Year’s Eve for God’s sake, he reminded himself.

Glancing at his wristwatch, he realized it was almost 10 pm. Still another two hours left until the ball would be falling in Times Square.

He could have chosen a hotel closer to the festivities; instead, he booked himself into his usual room in the small family run place on Royal Street, just a block or so away from the Old Ursuline Convent. If he was quick he could change into some fresh clothes and head for one of the bars that littered Bourbon Street. Jim didn’t want to see in the coming year stuck in a room on his own.

He would take a wander down Bourbon Street and see the sights; have a few drinks and maybe he would even treat himself to a cigar.

That’s what he loved about this city, you could amble through the streets drinking a glass of wine and smoking a big fat stogy if you wanted, and no one would look at you sideways. If he tried doing that in LA, he would have half-a-dozen unemployed actors — between jobs, they would be quick to correct — yelling in his face how much harm he was doing to himself, how he was depleting the ozone, blah-blah-blah. He’d heard the same arguments for the last half-a-century. Even good sense can start to stink if your nose gets rubbed in it for long enough, he thought.

Jim laughed at himself, a quiet half-mocking snort. A cigarette, the promise of booze and a cigar, damn he was living dangerously these days.

What the hell! Why should he care? He was sixty years old, after all. A couple of smokes and a few drinks weren’t going to shorten his life by more than a couple of minutes. He deserved a break. He had thrown himself into the latest book with more gusto than usual. It had consumed him for the past four months and it had also taken a toll on him, both physical and mental. A few hours away from it would do him good, give him a chance to clear his mind and reset his imagination.

Jim Baston had never once encountered writer’s-block during his career as a writer. Twelve books, all of them in the top ten of all the right bestseller lists. The books had flowed from him. He had written them on the fly, straight from his imagination to the computer. The completed novel invariably needed little in the way of editing; such was the clarity with which he was able to visualize the story and its characters in his mind.

But this one was different.

It was a work of non-fiction, his autobiography of sorts. Facing his past was hard and painful. So many mistakes locked away, hidden in the darkness of his previous life. And, as he released each memory out of its mental holding-cell, carefully removing the psychic padlock that had kept them safely locked away, he was forced to confront them in all their horrible glory.

As he watched the thunderheads moving closer to the city, he realized how weary he was. It was a weariness that started deep in the marrow of his bones, radiating out through every sinew, along every vein and nerve ending; resonating in every atom of his body.

Exhausted, he thought. Tired of getting up in the morning alone, of drowning himself in his work, of the only calls he ever received being from his editor. He was tired, he realized, of life. He was exhausted by the weight of his past. One night of rest would be a good thing. He could rejoin the human race for a little while.

Flicking the dog-end of the cigarette onto the concrete of the balcony, he extinguished it with his foot, turned and walked back into the room. A shiver ran through him, it was cool out there.

Jim grabbed his overcoat from the hanger behind the door, threw it on, picked up his wallet and keys from the side table, and headed out the door that would take him to the streets of New Orleans.

Two

Byron Portia slipped his silver-gray Peterbilt Hydro-Con into gear, rumbled out from the truck stop off I-15 and headed towards the interstate onramp.

In his late fifties, Byron was a man who just seemed to slip past the view of most people. If he had walked into a restaurant and blown away a couple of the patrons, the survivors would have been hard-pressed to remember any distinguishing feature. ‘Nondescript’ was the word most people would use to describe him, if they had to.

Of course, they would be completely wrong.

His unremarkable appearance was a carefully cultivated part of his persona. He did not want people to remember him. The mop of graying hair, usually hidden beneath a Met’s baseball cap, changed color at his whim with the use of an off-the-shelf hair dye. He didn’t favor wigs — too much chance they could fall off in a struggle. The paunch jutting out over his belted Levi’s was sufficient to suggest a lazy, relaxed, lifestyle, of nights in front of the TV and a diet of Coors and fast food. His naturally frost-blue eyes were occasionally altered with the use of disposable tinted contact lenses, and he was always quick to cultivate a beard or mustache, interchanging as he saw fit. Underneath the baggy, blue flannelled shirt, he was a tightly muscled man. He worked out regularly using the dumbbells he kept in the back of his big-rig, putting in three hours a day most days.

Strong as an ox, as his dear departed mom had often said.

He was meticulous about one other thing: maintaining his mask.

It did not matter how careful he was with all of his physical disguises, if you didn’t take into account your mask then you were screwed. He had learned that little lesson early on in his career. No matter how well he manipulated his appearance as non-threatening, however shy he acted, how big-brotherly or fatherly he appeared, if he could not control his unconscious thoughts he would betray himself.

That bitch in Las Vegas had proved that to him.

The big-rig thundered up the onramp. The interstate filter light showed green, so he slipped the gear stick up a notch and gently eased his foot down on the accelerator, pushing the speedometer up towards sixty. He did this on instinct, his subconscious running through the routine of controlling the rig. His conscious mind… elsewhere.

Byron could have activated the rig’s artificial intelligence system and had it drive the vehicle but he was a man who liked to remain in control of every situation. In all the years that he owned the truck, not once had he switched the AI on.

Instead, he allowed his mind to drift, running through memories almost a quarter century old.

Vegas Baby! What happens here, stays here. That’s what the old ads had extolled. That whore of a city, built by the mob and run for years by a mayor who had represented more killers and triggermen than he could probably remember. It was in this place that his calling had almost ended before it started.

He had picked her up not far off the Strip. There were plenty of nondescript saloons and cantinas scattered throughout Vegas that would cater to the lonely trucker back then. Besides, it was always safer to pick them up in a bar rather than straight off the street; much less chance of them being an undercover vice cop that way.

Sitting at the bar nursing a rapidly warming Bud — he didn’t enjoy beer, so he only occasionally took a sip from the longneck — she had sauntered up to him, taking the vacant barstool next to his.

She was all tits and make-up. She wore a short sequined dress that shimmered and glittered when she moved, cut just low enough to show off her implants. It rustled like a windblown tree when she sat down. Peroxide-blond hair framed a face pretty enough for her age… and her profession.

“Hi,” she had said her voice husky from too many cigarettes, “been in town long?”

He had just shaken his head and smiled at her.

She pulled a cigarette from her clutch bag and he lit it for her with an envelope of matches from the bar. She made sure she leaned low into him so he could see the full package. Why do they always smoke, he had thought to himself.

“My name’s Jenna,” she said between puffs and extended her hand. He took it and shook it gently, returning her smile. Her skin was warm and clammy to the touch. It sent a thrill of revulsion through him.

“Anthony,” said Byron, “Tony to my friends.” He was careful always to use an assumed name.

“Well, Tony,” — another Goddamn smile- “do you need a date?”

Then his mistake. For a second he saw what he was going to do her, its exquisiteness playing through his mind like a movie. The shock of her realization when he showed her the knife — ‘the tools of the trade’ as he preferred to call them — the skittering look of confused terror on her face as she felt the steel slip between her ribs and pierce her heart, the muted gush of blood that would be accompanied by his own gush of liquid as he ended her dreadful, sinful, life.

It was all he had been able to do not to explode right there, so vivid were the images and so intense the need to fulfill God’s will. The anticipation brought cold perspiration to his brow as he unconsciously wiped his greasy, sweaty, palms on his trousers.

His mask had slipped and the whore must have sensed the change in him, because her coy expression quickly disintegrated into a look of puzzlement, then a half-realization of just what she was sitting next to, of how close she was to death. It was subconscious but it was there.

“I… I need to go freshen up,” she stuttered her coquettish demeanor transformed now to that of a cornered alley cat. He could almost see the hair standing up on the back of her neck.

Confusion backlit her eyes as she pushed away from the bar and started to head towards the ladies-room. He grasped her by her forearm, gently but firm enough that she would have to struggle to break his hold. That’s when the full realization had hit her, and she pulled her arm out of his grasp.

“Why don’t I come with you,” he said suggestively.

“Stay away from me, you weirdo,” she had spat back flecks of spittle landing against his face. “Stay away.” Her face contorted by fear, not by rage, by fear. She backed away, and then disappeared into the gloom of the bar. Byron stood up, trying to look as much like a disgruntled boyfriend as he could.

“Women,” he said with an exaggerated sigh to the bartender, as if this single word could sum up the full complexity and confusion that was the fairer sex. He slapped down a five-dollar tip on the bar and made his way slowly out of the dive.

He was lucky that night, watched over by the one who had set him the task, who had taught him this, his most valuable lesson. But for weeks after leaving Las Vegas, he expected to be pulled over every time he saw a highway patrol officer or a Deputy, and he had been afraid. That was a first for him.

He did not understand what had happened that night, and spent hours going over the scenes in his head, looking at himself through her eyes, analyzing the situation. It had come to him eventually, a simple realization; on some lower level, she had detected his intentions. During that moment of indiscretion as he had teased himself with the pleasure to come, he emanated some kind of psychic energy that she had picked up on: his aura is how he thought of it.

Since then he was careful always to wear his psychic-mask when hunting. Slipping it on when he stepped out of his cab, not letting any part of the real Byron Portia ooze out of the cracks. Byron thought of it as locking himself away in a little room inside his head. Like one of those rooms on the old cop shows with one-way glass where he could look out and see them, but all that the person in the room would see was a reflection of themselves staring back at them.

It had worked. No more whores causing commotions in bars. Simple and efficient.

And so, here he was years later, heading south on I-15 towards Los Angeles. Still undiscovered. Protected. With much work behind him but far more still to come.

It was New Years Eve and there would be an awful lot of people out celebrating. That was just fine by him. He could lose himself easily in a crowd, walking among those he had been given the task of watching over. Watching for those that he hunted. And tonight he felt the pull, the need, the powerful imperative that flowed through his blood when the calling was upon him.

His truck hurtled along the highway, surrounded on either side by desert and the sun a liquid ball shimmering on the far horizon. He was just a couple of hours outside of LA, if everything remained copasetic he would find somewhere near Burbank airport and park up for the night, with enough time to clean himself up and go see-what-he-could-see.

Tonight he would hunt.

Three

Monsignor Jacob Pike pushed the great oaken doors into place, drew the two huge metal bolts, fastened the locks, and sealed off the outside world from Saint Bartholomew’s Church for the night.

With the final lock securely in place, the priest’s face seemed to lose all strength, dragged as though by some sudden pulse of gravity towards the cold slab floor, leaving in its wake a hollow shell of the man he had imitated for the past twelve hours.

Through sheer force of will he had managed to preserve his façade of normalcy; it was the least he could do for his audience, he supposed. To maintain the pretense he was what he claimed to be, this final selfless act of a lost soul.

His face now drawn and haggard, his viridian green eyes dull and jejune, Monsignor Pike took one painful step after the next, making his way along the aisle between the rows of lemon-oiled pews, the fragrance of incense still clinging to the air. He shuffled towards the chancel, the echo of each footfall his only escort through the now empty church.

Not bothering to genuflect as he reached the communion table, he paused instead to stand at the head of the aisle, his eyes drifting upwards, before settling finally on the life-sized crucifix that was the centerpiece of the sanctuary area.

During the day, the natural light of the huge stained-glass window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling nearly fifty feet above, would light this emblem of Christianity. The window reproduced the fourteen Stations of the Cross, images that symbolized scenes of suffering in each of the successive stages of Christ’s passion. A design created to instill a sense of awe in all who entered the church, to humble the proud and spark joy in the hearts of the downtrodden.

The colorful mosaic of painted glass lent an otherworldly etherealness to the church, sunshine pouring like wine through the beautifully colored scenes, but at night, without the sun’s illumination, the window was black and lifeless.

Soulless.

The aged priest understood the dichotomy.

To compensate for the loss of light; once the sun set, hidden blue and red spotlights sparked into life, tastefully highlighting the effigy of the suffering Christ hanging from the cross, his face a mask of suffering. The sculptor had captured perfectly Christ’s torment; a vicious crown of thorns digging into his head, a spear wound in his side bleeding water and blood down over his hip. His agony was so obvious; his suffering so profound, that no one looking upon the scene could fail to be moved by the enormity of this God-man’s sacrifice.

That was not what the Monsignor saw.

He saw an icon of deception, a promise to the human race that would never be fulfilled, could never be fulfilled. An empty vessel of a lie as hollow and dead as the very tomb that the crucified man was finally laid to rest in.

As empty as he now felt.

Like a cancer, his own despair had eaten through him, coring him out like termites devouring the foundation of his spiritual house, until finally, with nothing left to support it his belief had collapsed in on itself. And, for the past three years, Monsignor Jacob Pike had been faithless.

He no longer believed in the wonder, the resurrection or any of the underpinning principles that had drawn him to the Church and a life of service to God. He performed his daily duties out of habit rather than devotion. He was unworthy, he knew, to be a leader of his flock.

How could he be expected to lead when he was so lost himself?

He had so very many questions, and not one of them could he find an answer to within the pages of the book of books.

That first morning, he awakened with a feeling of disquiet and unrest in the pit of his stomach. Stumbling through the morning prayers and service, he found himself distracted and unsure of himself, something that he had never experienced before in his forty-two years as a priest.

For a while, he thought he may be sick. And in a way, he supposed he was sick, but it was a malady of the soul, not of the flesh. It would have been so much easier to deal with a life-threatening illness; instead, he was facing a much harsher future.

The feeling of disquiet only grew stronger with each passing day until, finally, today; he realized that he was empty of all feeling for the Church, for the religion… and for life.

He had prayed every day for guidance. Beseeching the Lord God Almighty to show him the way back to the path of enlightenment, to help him find his way home, to guide him back to divinity. Every day he awaited an answer, and every day he drifted further away from his religion when no answer came.

Finally, he had stopped trying, too tired and too old to continue to bother. The Church had priests trained to help those like him but he knew that would have involved him stepping down from his position within the parish, surrendering his flock to another. The embarrassment would be too much for him. Besides, he had battled his inner demons for too long and now he was tired. No, now he was exhausted and entirely depleted.

Standing under the stone arch of the doorway that would take him from the transept to the vestry, he paused and looked back into the cavernous interior of Saint Bartholomew’s, his fingers hovering over the bank of switches that controlled the multiple sets of lights within the church. Forty-five years of his life spent in service to God in churches around the country, the last twelve years here at Saint Bartholomew’s.

Looking out across the rows of pews that, until minutes earlier had seated hundreds of parishioners, the priest waited — hoped for — a flicker of some low smoldering spark of belief that might remain, hidden away deep in his heart, a final chance at redemption, a sign that he was not forgotten.

Instead, a bitter draft skulked through the doorway on frosty feet, sweeping any hope of salvation with it as it blew over him.

With a final sigh of resignation, the priest turned off the overhead globe lights and then flicked the remaining switches, extinguishing the rows of footpath lights and the spotlights beneath the crucifix, plunging the church into darkness.

A row of dove-gray filing cabinets lined one wainscoted panel-wall of the vestry. The metal cabinets contained the parish records for the last sixty-five years, all meticulously recorded by Monsignor Pike and his predecessors. A history of the priests and people who had lived, loved, and died in the parish. A rack of three simple shelves above the cabinets held various administrative supplies; reams of paper, pens and pencils, file folders and tabs, all needed for the day to day running of the church.

An ancient oak armoire, the original veneer long eroded, its dark wood scuffed and scraped through years of use, stood against the opposite wall. The squat simple dole cupboard next to it originally contained bread and other supplies that the priests would have distributed to the poor and needy of the parish, but the needy far outstripped the capacity of this simple wooden cupboard. Now it held a few blankets and a pillow for when the monsignor felt the need to spend the night.

Monsignor Pike removed his chasuble and vestment, folded them neatly one on top of the other before placing them on the second shelf of the armoire. Stepping out of his cassock, he draped it over a metal coat hanger and hung it on a hook next to the door. He pulled on a pair of black loose fitting Lee jeans, slid his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, buttoned it and then pushed his clerical collar into place. A mirror fixed to the back of the vestry door allowed him to check his dress, he straightened his collar with stiff, arthritic, fingers. Tufts of gray hair had puffed up when he pulled off his cassock and now protruded from his liver spotted pate.

“You look ridiculous,” he said to his reflection as he removed the plastic comb from his shirt pocket and combed his rebellious hair back into place.

In the center of the room, he placed the chair from his study. Plastic, with a high back and lined with comfortable foam and covered in a stain-resistant cloth that had faded over the years to a dull purple instead of its original red. He had written many sermons in this chair, he thought as he ran his hand slowly over the ridge of its back. Each of its four supporting legs had a caster fixed to it, allowing the chair to roll easily.

Kneeling slowly, his knees popping in complaint, he pushed in each of the four thumb shaped plastic locks that locked the chairs casters in place and stopped it from moving.

Satisfied the chair would not move, he raised one foot up onto its seat and again tested its stability before cautiously heaving the rest of his sixty-eight year old body up. He was no longer as spry as he once was, he reminded himself, so he kept a firm grip of the armrests with both hands. The chair wobbled a little, not designed to take so much awkwardly positioned weight, and he instinctively threw out one of his arms to steady himself, while he held grimly to the other armrest, catching his balance before he toppled over.

Sure that his balance would not betray him, the priest raised himself gradually to a precarious standing position.

Earlier that morning, he had secured a length of strong hemp rope to one of the ceiling’s beams, fashioning a noose at the unsecured end. He slipped his head into it and tightened the hangman’s knot until it sat snugly against the bones of the nape of his neck before reaching a hand up to give a final tug on the rope. Satisfied it remained securely fastened to the heavy timber beam running the length of the room, he dropped his hands to his sides.

“God forgive me,” he said, kicked the chair from beneath his feet and jerked spastically at the end of the rope for over a minute until blackness finally claimed him.

Four

There was a certain gaudiness to Bourbon Street at this time of year that, while it repulsed him with its cheapness on one level, was also a strange attractor drawing Jim Baston towards it, like a priest to a potential convert.

Sitting at a street-side table of an out-of-the-way café, he waited for a waiter to fetch his drink. It was a kitschy little theme-café, with fake lampposts and piped accordion music, attempting — in vain, Jim noted — to recreate the ambience of a Parisian street cafe. But it was the only place he could find that had any space left for him to sit; all of the other restaurants and clubs were filled to brimming, and he was averse to elbowing himself through a heaving body of youngsters just for the sake of some company.

The waiter, a tall teenager with a stubbly goatee and dressed in a long white bib and apron, brought his drink; whisky and soda… on the rocks.

“May I get you anything more, Monsieur?” the teenager asked with a half-decent French accent. Jim shook his head and told the kid thanks, but this would be fine for now.

Spiraled black bars of wrought iron set firmly in a red brick base and similar surround separated the sidewalk from the table area that Jim now sat at. Perhaps that was why the cafe was less popular? People liked to be able to walk — or stagger — freely between bars in this town. Jim was glad of the space, he could sit unobserved with a clear view of the street and watch the world and its inhabitants wander by undisturbed thanks to the cage like bars.

From the breast pocket of his jacket, Jim pulled the cigar he had bought earlier at a small tobacco vendor he’d come across as he strolled along Bourbon Street. A hand rolled Churchill maduro; Cuban, clothed in a clear plastic wrapper that crackled as he rolled the cigar between his fingers. Cuban cigars had become widely available in the United States, the trade embargo finally lifted after Castro’s eventual death back in 2013. The owner of the cigar store had been kind enough to give the cigar a cut and supplied him with a complimentary book of matches, the shops logo and address printed in colorful relief on its cover.

Flipping the cover open, he tore a match from the book

and struck it against the safety bar on the backside. The match flared, casting shadows on the plastic-ivy lined bistro walls, the sulfurous smell of the match’s ignition filled Jim’s nostrils and he felt his mouth begin to salivate in expectation.

Tearing away the plastic wrapper, he placed the cigar between his lips, twisting it close to the flame of the match while taking quick deep puffs to ensure the cigar lit evenly. When he was certain the tobacco was lit, he took a long draw from the maduro and allowed the smoke to fill his mouth, exciting his senses.

He shook the match to extinction.

A billowing stream of blue-gray smoke drifted above his head as he exhaled slowly.

There were only two kinds of people in this world, Jim thought; Cigar-people and non-cigar people. It was one of those smells and tastes that you either acquired immediately or just never developed a liking for. He had never met anybody who had ever said that they didn’t mind cigar smoke or that they thought cigars were okay. Invariably, on asking if his company would mind if he lit a cigar they either enthusiastically allowed him while basking in the aromatic smoke themselves or, conversely, gave a shudder of horror beyond comprehension at the very thought of being in its presence.

Strange to say, that he had always found women more accepting of cigars than men. Perhaps it was a subconscious homophobic reaction to putting something so phallic in their mouths that turned certain men off.

At a nod from Jim, the waiter brought him another drink. Jim handed the kid his empty glass, took one more long pull off the cigar and settled in to watch the old year die.

In the moments leading up to midnight it seemed to Jim that the city had found a voice as thousands counted down the final seconds together at the top of their lungs.

Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, it exclaimed, Five, Four, Three, Two, One.

Fireworks erupted into the night sky, exploding in great flourishes of color, glorious in their beautifully short life.

Raising his half-full glass to the light show high above the city, he spoke quietly to the night air; “Happy New Year, Lark,” before downing his drink in one swift swig and setting the empty glass on the table.

Jim arrived back at his room just after 1 am, his head buzzing pleasantly from the three drinks and the cigar, the taste of which still lingered agreeably on his palate and in his nostrils. He dropped his raincoat over the back of a chair still dry, the threatening storm never having materialized.

Standing at the window, he looked out over the city. The city was silent now.

“Jim! You have a call from your agent in Los Angeles.”

The sudden sound of his computer’s AI voice made him jump. He was half-tempted not to take the call. He knew that Archie would be disappointed with his lack of progress but he also knew that if he did not take his agent’s call he would be pestering him until he got what he wanted.

“Put it on speaker,” he said.

There was a faint click and then the voice of Archibald Krogh filled the room.

“Hey Jim! Happy New Year.”

His voice sounded nasal, he probably had a cold.

“Happy New Year to you to Archie. Don’t you have better things to do than harass your clients in the middle of the night?”

His remark was met with a chuckle that deteriorated into a coughing fit. “Good God,” Krogh said finally, “

I swear this Flu is gonna’ kill me one of these days… So tell me, how’s the book coming along?”

Jim was not comfortable lying but he decided that for the sake of both his own sanity and his over stressed agent’s health he would make the exception this time.

“It’s doing just…”

Everything changed.

Five

At 1.30 a.m., the laboratory was finally prepped and ready.

The transmitter sat on a plain wooden table in the center of the laboratory. About the size of two paperbacks stacked one on top of the other, it was not what style magazines would call ‘sexy’ in its design. Encased in dimpled black impact-plastic, it looked clunky and utilitarian. No sleek curves or shaded coloring, no logos or trendy advertising motifs; just a solid black box with a connector for a microphone on its fascia. Next to that; a plug for a VR-keyboard, and from the rear of the box a two-inch thick red high-voltage lead that snaked across the floor to a large transformer sitting in a locked cage in one corner of the lab.

A young woman wearing a white lab coat, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail that stretched down to the middle of her back, approached the table; a portable microphone in her left hand and its corresponding floor stand in her right. She placed both items on the table next to the box, careful not to jostle the delicate piece of equipment.

“Doctor Lorentz would you like me to connect the microphone now?” she asked.

Dr. Mitchell Lorentz looked up from his VR-Comp and regarded the girl over his pince-nez glasses.

“Yes, please do Doctor Drake. The sooner we get this over and done with the sooner we can get on our way, yes?” He smiled warmly at his assistant before turning back to his VR-comp.

Lorentz was a distinguished looking man. At seventy, he still had a full head of hair, sparingly peppered here-and-there with the odd brush stroke of gray that he insisted on keeping slicked back across his pate. Although he liked to dress casually, he always gave the impression he would have felt just at ease in a business suit or a tuxedo rather than the khaki slacks and polo shirt he wore beneath his ubiquitous white lab overcoat. A full mouth that was quick to grin and rarely frowned complemented his lean face and long Romanic nose.

Well known around the lab for being a stickler for his daily exercise, the professor would routinely break off a meeting if it interrupted his lunchtime workout regimen. Fit and lean, he was still a good-looking man for his age, his broad shoulders and toned arms often allowing him to be mistaken for a decade less than his actual age.

There was no Mrs. Lorentz. When asked why he had never married, he would reply in his most charming voice ‘Not married? Have you not met my wife?’ while indicating the lab with a sweeping hand.

Those close to him, of which there were few, knew that he was too dedicated to his work to inflict his obsessive pursuits and eccentric time-tables on a wife. Not that there had been a lack of interest on the opposite sexes part, but it became quickly apparent to any woman who entered his life that work was his first and only true love.

He had started out as a research assistant almost fifty years earlier, working for JPL out of California after graduating summa-cum-laude at Cal-Tech with a degree in Advanced Applied and Theoretical Physics. Part of the original NASA team that formulated the design of the first manned mission to Mars he had left the agency after the disastrous loss of the ship and its four man crew in 2017.

Despite the failure of the Mars project he quickly advanced, thanks in part to his capability as a project-manager but in no small way to his work on theoretical particles. Within ten years, he had gone on to head-up the research department at TachDyne Research Industries where he had received his first of two Nobel prizes for Science.

In 2030, just a few years after leaving TachDyne to open his own research lab in Pasadena, he had received his second Nobel prize for his company’s work on superluminal propagation, proving finally the existence of that long disputed particle; the Tachyon. Long thought to be the equivalent of a scientific Snipe hunt, Lorentz proved its existence beyond a doubt when he simultaneously disproved the paradox of Gödel’s time-travel in a rotating-Universe theory and proved the veracity of the reinterpretation principle, a theorem now known as the Lorentz Effect.

A few months after receiving the second Nobel, he sold his company to Aberdeen Enterprises and used the profits (which were considerable) to create a small start-up in Reno where he returned to his first love: hands on physics.

Dr. Lorentz spoke into a lapel mike attached to his lab-coat. “Edward, are you about ready?”

Lorentz voice was calm and level, and it amazed Drake. Here they were on the verge of an experiment that would revolutionize the communications industry and the Professor showed no signs of excitement at the prospect. She had worked with him for long enough to understand, she believed, why that was. He was one of those men who enjoyed the chase, the existence of the puzzle rather than its solving. It gave little gratification to him to know that he had potentially succeeded in his goal. She found that odd, alien even in this results driven world where she had spent her last few years.

Three rooms further down the corridor from the room that held the transmitter box, a similar box sat in a similar room. Instead of the connectors for the VR-Comp and microphone, this box had only one for an ancient Bose speaker that was resting on the table next to it, connected by a length of twisted speaker-wire.

A young man, his eyes owlishly amplified by his thick glasses, sat with the lid of the receiver resting next to him on the table. A soldering iron in hand, he was deep in the wiring of the machine, his shoulders hunched tightly as he maneuvered carefully through its electronic guts. A thin plume of gray smoke rose into the air as he secured a new component in place and the acrid smell of hot solder floated through the air.

“Just finishing up, Doc,” he said in a basso-profundo voice that belied his wiry body. “Give me about five more minutes and we’ll be ready to roll.”

Back in his room, Dr. Lorentz pulled up a second virtual-display on the VR-comp and using his index finger to highlight and capture the data on the first display, pulled a duplicate across to the second screen that seemed to hang in the air a few feet in front of his face. Thanks to the holo-projectors located strategically around the room, no matter where Lorentz or any of his staff moved, the display screen of the VR-comp would follow them, always at the optimal position and angle for reading. As Lorentz walked around the room, the screens became transparent to allow him unhindered vision, coalescing once again back into visibility when he stopped moving.

Data was collected through the myriad sensors scattered throughout the room, or if manual entry or adjustment was required then by voice or hand; alleviating the need for physical keyboards. The main CPU that drove the system was located in its own room elsewhere within the laboratory complex.

“Alright,” came Edward’s voice over the com-link,” just running the diagnostics… and… couple more seconds… okay, everything’s kosher here Doc.”

“Thank you Edward.” Professor Lorentz pressed an icon outlined in red on the floating display in front of him and ‘RECORDING’ began to flash at the top of the VR screen.

“Okay team, we are up and running. Everybody stand by, please,” he said.

The computer now began churning through an automated program, displaying each step and its result onscreen. Although everybody on the project was receiving the same feed, and the VR-Comp was recording everything in real time, Lorentz still read each step aloud as the computer progressed — old habits died hard, at his age.

“Phase 1 Diagnostics: Complete.” And: “Phase 2: Diagnostics: complete. System Diagnosis: Optimal.”

The transformer in the corner of the room began to power-up, emitting a low whine that rattled the protective bars of its cage like a monkey testing the security of its enclosure. The whine slowly grew in pitch until it passed out of the range of human hearing, leaving behind a low thrum that reverberated through the walls and across the floor of the lab.

Then: “Power: Engaged.” The old scientist’s screen flashed a message in bold green letters:

And a few lines underneath that, outlined by a flashing red border, a single icon glowed beckoningly. ENGAGE? it blinked.

He regarded the screen for a few moments longer, savoring the moment before finally turning to look directly at the black box on its table and his associate professor standing expectantly next to it, holding the microphone in her hand.

“Alright, fire her up,” he whispered and pressed the engage icon.

Everything changed.

Six

Rebecca Lacey woke up screaming. Her fingers twisted into claws that grasped at the cloth of her sodden, sweat soaked tee-shirt, bunching handfuls of the material until the shirt was pulled far enough up to expose the lean paleness of her damp belly. Her breath exploded in short, ragged, panting gasps as tears spilled over her scarlet cheeks and beads of perspiration dribbled over her naked arms and legs.

She heard her words as if from a distance, more pleading than spoken. “Oh… God! Oh… God.” A mantra of horror repeated over and over as her heart rattled behind her ribs, a terrified animal trying to escape its cage.

The dream — it felt so real — started out so wonderfully. She was somewhere beautiful. The half-remembered sensation of running her hands through long grass. Warmth. A wonderful light that permeated all things. And clouds. The scent of something so… she could not remember, there was no word to describe the wonderful fragrance.

And then it was all gone, ripped away from her in an instant and replaced by a horror so profound that her very breath froze in her lungs.

The knife.

She could still see it glinting in the light of the naked bulb that hung from the bare stucco ceiling of her apartment, the glass lampshade shattered on the floor where her head had smashed it into a hundred pieces.

The stranger had twisted the knife back and forth, back and forth, letting it glint and scintillate across her eyes, his face inches from her own, and his breath hot against her cheek.

She felt the frigid keenness of the blade as he traced its point from her forehead over the ridge of her nose and across her lips, sliding it down the curve of her throat until it reached her breastbone.

An everlasting pause and then:

Snick.

He had sliced away one of the buttons of her blouse.

A moan of terror had escaped her lips.

Snick. There was the next.

“Oh please, no. God. No,” she whispered.

He had worked his way through all of the buttons, his breathing becoming more and more rapid, and then, Oh dear God, and then he had… he…

Rebecca threw herself over the side of the bed and heaved a steady stream of vomit that spread in a rank pool across the carpet and splashed against her ghost-white skin.

She kept throwing-up until there was nothing left, just dry heaves that forced the breath from her until she thought she would choke to death. And, when finally that was over she started screaming. A shrill horrified ululation that escaped from deep down within her soul shattering the calm of the room before petering off to a low sobbing howl of pain and fear.

The door to her bedroom burst open. Between her wracking sobs of terror, she managed to lift her head towards the two people who now stood in the doorway and mumble through chapped, vomit caked, lips, “Mom… Dad… he killed me. He killed me.”

In the doorway, Mr. and Mrs. Lacey stood in their nightclothes and as the early morning sun shone through the bedroom window, framing them in a beam of dust-mote filled light, Jim Lacey, his eyes agog, fell to his knees and began to weep like a baby at the sight of his child. Sarah Lacey, her hair disheveled and tumbled, crossed the space between the door and her daughter in two quick bounds. Then she gently took Rebecca in her arms and held her until Becky could hardly breathe, all the while keening in her daughter’s ear, “You’re alive, praise Jesus. You’re alive.”

Seven

“…fine.”

Jim Baston blinked at the sudden change of lighting.

His skin tingled as though a light coat of static electricity played across it. There was an odd leaden fluttering sensation in his stomach and he felt as though he had come to a sudden abrupt stop after a long fall.

He breathed in. Leather, like expensive new shoes; the smell filled his nostrils.

The young store assistant stared back at him across the counter top. She looked to be about to speak, her rouged lips opened… and then closed again as a cloud of confusion passed across her face. Her brow knitted above brown eyes, the pupils of which had suddenly and fully dilated. The left side of her mouth lifted while the right side dipped down, her head tilted towards her right shoulder as though she was suddenly deep in concentration.

“I… I,” she stammered as the cloud of confusion turned rapidly into a storm of bewilderment that billowed and rolled with her expression.

“I’m terribly sorry but I… what were you saying?” A momentary pause in which he could have answered but did not, his own confusion freezing his tongue, arresting any possibility of a reply from him as his mind furiously tried to understand what was going on. The silence between the two strangers stretched out before she asked in a timid, apologetic, frightened voice, “Where am I?”

Auburn hair whipped back and forth across her face as she glanced frantically left and then right; panic now superseding confusion. Her cheeks flushed red as blood rushed to her head and Jim could see her breathing rate increase rapidly.

He regarded the confused woman standing across from him for a long second. His own head now cocked questioningly to one side. He was sure that he had a similar look of confusion on his face because he had no idea on God’s good green earth where he was or why he was here. He could not even remember how he got here. Panic began to claw its way out of its hiding place in the pit of his stomach, crawling on taloned fingers towards his throat.

The last thing he could remember was answering the phone to his agent. He had been talking to him just a second ago — the phone had been in his hand. It was New Year’s Eve. He had been out, had a couple of drinks and made it home sometime after midnight; exactly what time he couldn’t recall. A cold shiver of fear ran down his spine as a single thought filled his mind: Alzheimer’s. They could fix it nowadays of course but they had to catch it early enough to stop any damage. Once memories were lost to the disease, that was it, they were gone forever and if this was an episode of the disease, then how far had it progressed?

It had been four years since Jim had been to his doctor and he mentally kicked himself for not keeping those yearly appointments for his checkups. He swung around and took in his surroundings. He recognized nothing. This was not the comfortable bedroom he had been standing in seemingly only an instant before. Instead, he found himself next to a glass counter-top, on the other side of which stood the woman who looked as confused as he felt; three rows of display racks ran through a store that was lined top to bottom with expensive looking leather luggage; bags, women’s purses and crocodile skin briefcases. A rotating display unit off to his left was full of men’s wallets and a sign fixed to the top of the stand proclaimed finest calf leather in an elegant hand.

Behind the glass counter that separated them, the young store assistant had started speaking again, calling out as if to a lost child or dog, “Steven? Alison?”

A disturbing edge of panic creeping into her voice each time she called out the names.

How the hell did I get here, he thought to himself. Where am I?

“Do you think I could use your phone?” he asked but the girl did not even register his question, her gaze sweeping over him like a searchlight and moving on having found nothing of interest.

“Steven? Alison?” The panic in her voice now pronounced.

“It’s just that I don’t seem to remember where I am. It’s just a local call,” he said. He was disturbed to hear a note of desperation in his own voice.

“Alison? Oh, my God.” The young woman’s voice now so alarmingly tremulous he could barely understand what she was saying.

Something was not right. Jim could see three other customers in the store, all of them a lot younger than him but as he regarded each of them in turn, he could see that same strange look of confusion reflected back from each of their bewildered faces. They looked as though they had all just walked into a room and then forgotten why they were there or what they had come to do; as though they had left something undone that should have been otherwise.

A large glass window filled one wall, through it he could see a white marble-effect walkway that ran parallel to the store. Across the walkway, he could make out two other shops: a Gap clothes store and a Pretzel-Time. Reflective aluminum safety rails ran down the center of the walkway, guarding an open space that, presumably he guessed, dropped down to at least another level below the one he was on.

Several people had gathered outside the store window, milling aimlessly. Jim watched them looking around in that same bewildered manner. One of them — a young woman who until seconds ago had been revolving in slow circles as she gazed up at the ceiling somewhere outside of Jim’s vision — seemed oblivious to the baby stroller that her left hand rested upon, it’s plastic hood concertinaed back into the closed position. As the young mother completed one more slow turn the clutch bag slung loosely over her shoulder clipped the handle of the stroller and sent it rolling noiselessly away from her. Noticing it for the first time, she took two quick steps after it, taking hold of the handles with her outstretched hands she brought the errant pram to a halt before stepping around to the front of it. Kneeling almost reverently before it, Jim was sure he could see tears beginning to flow down her face; her jaw seemed to be vibrating. Reaching out, her hands disappeared inside the buggy, when they returned into his view she held a baby no more than six months old. Her mouth began moving but he could not hear what she was saying. Whatever it was, she was repeating the words again and again. A smile of utter joy lit her face as she stared at the child she now held cradled to her breast.

Jim’s confusion deepened as two balding middle aged men who had been walking hand-in-hand now turned and faced the other, regarding each other as though they had not seen the other in years before throwing their arms around the others neck and falling to their knees together locked in their embrace.

A teenage boy sprinted up to the store window. He stopped for a second in front of it and placed his forehead against the glass. Using his hands to shade the glare from the store’s reflected light, he gaped at the people inside, a look of frantic desperation on his face as his eyes darted from one face to the next. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he sprinted off out of sight leaving only a grease stain where his forehead had contacted the glass.

A keening began from a woman who sat crossed legged on the industrial carpeted floor an aisle or so away from him. Her low moaning voice set a beat to the under-swell of fear Jim could feel seeping into the air.

“What is going on here,” a large man in a business suit demanded, in a loud pompous voice.

The store assistant, still calling forlornly for Steven and Alison, ran past him towards the exit at the far end of the shop.

Jim followed her.

He pushed through the double glass doors of the store and stepped out into the mall. A tsunami of sound struck him as a wave of anguished voices washed over him, soaking him in its confusion. Here and there, intermingled with the dissonant buzz of voices Jim could occasionally make out an ecstatic cry of laughter or the rapid chatter of happiness. It floated through the confusion, emotional flotsam riding on a sea of panic. All of this playing to a background score of Muzak that wafted down from speakers set high up in the latticework of white metal braces holding the glass ceiling of the mall in-place overhead.

The noise amplified as it bounced from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall until finally turning into a mind numbing cacophony that forced Jim to make his way across to the aluminum safety barriers that prevented shoppers from falling through the open space to the floor below, his already assaulted mind unable to handle the sudden extra input.

He took a deep breath and leaned on the horizontal grab bar like a nauseous passenger gazing sickly over the side of a storm-rocked liner. He could see he was on the top floor of a shopping mall, three stories up. The floors beneath were just as packed with people too, all as equally disoriented as those on his.

A thought struck him: Maybe this was a terrorist attack. He remembered back in the late nineties of the last century, some Japanese religious cult had begun gassing people on the Japanese underground, and then in 2019, that home-grown terrorist group, what the hell was their name? Radical America, Freedom America? Whoever they were, they had managed to dump a ton of genetically modified respiratory Syncytial virus into the water supply of some mid-western town and killed all those people. Maybe that’s what was going on here, a terrorist group had loosed a chemical agent in the mall and that was why everybody was acting so harebrained.

But, he reasoned, there hadn’t been any real terrorist threat in the world for the last fifteen years or more.

Who the hell was there left in the world with a grudge?

There was a subtle change in the air that drew his attention away from thoughts of terrorist attack. Like the smell of ozone just before a thunderstorm, Jim could sense a change in the feeling of the crowd. Fear had replaced panic and that now was mutating into terror. Looking up from the bar he was leaning against he saw a wave of horrified faces and bodies flooding towards him.

He was transfixed: hypnotized by the crowd surging towards him. His eyes flickered from face to face, each one as pale as an avalanche as they rushed towards him. The novelist in him observed with a detached, professional attitude, taking note of everything from the look of panic in their eyes, to the way the front row of oncoming people seemed to ebb and flow with those behind.

The large pompous man from the luggage store had left just after Jim and was making his way in the opposite direction, pushing anybody who stood in his way aside. Seeing the oncoming crowd, he tried to turn and get out of their way but the mob swept over him as if he did not exist, trampling him underfoot. Others, faster than the unfortunate executive, dove for cover in shop doors or were caught up and pulled along too. Those not so lucky ended up knocked aside or smashed through the plate glass storefronts.

For a brief moment, he thought about jumping over the safety banister, holding himself there while the mob ran past but he doubted his arms would hold him long enough and his hands were too damp with perspiration for him not to expect to instantly lose his grip and fall the three stories to the ground below. No! He would take his chances with the mob, thank you very much.

Turning, Jim began to run in the opposite direction to the oncoming mob, hoping to get his legs up to some kind of competitive speed to match that of the mob behind him. To his utter surprise, he found that he was sprinting like a teenager. His legs ate up the ground; his arms were pistons pumping the air, his heart thumped in his chest and the blood pumped through veins unclogged by age.

He chanced a brief look back over his shoulder; he had a lead of five feet or so. If he could just make it to the stairs or the escalator before the horde, he would be okay.

Assuming there is an exit this way, of course.

Facing front again he was just in time to see the bewildered woman standing directly in front of him.

In her eighties, wispy gray hair hanging in greasy gray clots around a face that had probably been remarkable in her younger days. Plastic surgery had stretched and pulled the skin until it now looked so parchment thin it would tear and split if she should chance a smile. She wore a skin-tight cat suit that accentuated her overly large breasts; the silicone implants ensuring that even in this late stage of her life her boobs still stoically resisted the effects of gravity.

“We don’t care about you, only about Michael,” she shouted incoherently as he collided headlong with her and sent both of them sprawling onto the cold floor.

Jim careened on his back across the highly polished tiles and felt the air slammed from his lungs as he collided with something solid and unyielding.

The old woman was on her hands and knees, her lank hair hiding her face until she raised her head on a wrinkled stalk of a neck. Her face distorted into a mask of anger as she stared across the walkway at him, her eyes flashing an anger that he could not fathom. Her lips moved but he could hear nothing over the cacophony of voices and the thunder of approaching feet, as she spat what he was sure were some choice expletives at him.

Behind her, the crowd bore down.

Fear must have shown in his eyes because she twisted just in time to face the onrush of bodies as they smashed into her. A man in the front row, pushed along by the hundreds behind him, saw her, tried to leap over her scuttling body but mistimed and jumped too late. His foot caught the back of her head and sent him sprawling on his face. Those behind had no time to react. They stumbled and lurched, tripping over her and the sprawled man, grabbing at others as they went down, the old woman and the fallen man disappeared instantly beneath them.

It was a train wreck; bodies flew everywhere as the onrushing mass stumbled and fell and screamed and cried out in pain, surprise and anger.

Jim used the dampening of the mob’s momentum to gauge his plight and looked quickly around; whipping his head from side to side, he hurriedly assessed his situation.

He had landed near a molded plastic bench. Fixed to the safety barrier of the mall, it allowed three or four people to sit in modest comfort on the curved impact plastic seat. There was a gap between the underside of the seat and the floor, no more than eighteen inches. If he could just squeeze into that gap, he might stand a chance of getting out of this alive. Hardly thinking, he pulled himself hand over hand on his belly and slipped between the floor and the base of the seat. A moccasin clad foot smashed down on his left hand before he could pull it under the shelter. He screamed a curse and whipped his stinging hand to his chest, scooting himself further under the overhang of plastic until he felt the upright support bars of the security fence pressing into his back.

The crowd thundered by, the floor shuddering with their passing. Jim felt the rolling vibration reverberate through his bones, forcing his teeth into an involuntary chatter. The fact that he was terrified did not help either.

A body crashed to the ground, smashing into the walkway with the sickeningly abbreviated sound of a melon dropped from a great height onto a metal spike. The bloody face of a teenage boy, his eyes lifeless and blank, faced Jim. The poor kid’s body jerked and spasmed as countless feet stomped over him, pounding him into the walkway. Jim’s eyes met the boy’s; unable to turn away from the horror, he knew he would never forget the look of terminal shock embossed on that young face.

Time passed.

Finally, the river of feet slowed, became a trickle and eventually dried up completely. The dead boy, crushed and broken, gazed lifelessly at Jim, one shattered arm stretched out across the floor towards him as if pointing to Jim’s hiding place, his mouth hung open and a trail of blood leaked from his split and broken lips, his staring eyes accusatory: why did you live? Why you old man?

The sobbing lament of a woman broke Jim’s trance and he slid his cramped and aching body out from under his plastic sanctuary, careful to avoid touching the dead kid and trying not to slip on the pool of congealing blood that spread like a crimson lake against the stark white background of the floor.

It was the young mother he had seen through the window of the luggage store when he had first awakened to this strange, terrifying, world. She sat cross-legged in the recessed entranceway of a clothes shop holding her baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, to her chest, rocking back and forth. The baby stroller lay twisted and broken further down the walkway.

The low keening of a nursery rhyme floated across the now deafeningly silent mall.

“…Mama’s go’na buy you a mocking bird,” she sang, as Jim began walking towards her. “And if that mocking bird don’t sing, Mamma’s go’na buy you a—” She stopped singing as she saw Jim approaching.

“Are you okay, Miss?” he asked, as he approached.

The young woman scooted further back into the doorway, away from him, her face suddenly fearful.

Jim lifted his hands, palm out, to head height. “It’s okay,” he said gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. Are you okay? Is your baby alright?”

Her back connected with the unyielding door of the clothes store, from inside the store Jim heard the tinkle of bells vibrate faintly. Unable to push herself back any further she instead rounded on Jim; her eyes flashed a mixture of fear and anger. “Stay away from me,” she yelled her voice a high-pitched squeal.

“It’s okay. I just want to help you. I’m not going to —”

“STAY AWAY FROM ME YOU BASTARD!” she screamed. The fear in her voice so overwhelmingly palpable Jim felt as though he had been physically hit.

“I just —” he tried to continue.

The woman dissolved into tears, pulling the child even closer to her chest.

Jim backed up, “I’m sorry,” he said. The woman, her attention already refocused on the bundle in her arms, resumed her lullaby. There was nothing more he could do for the poor woman, he would just have to leave her here and hope that the paramedics would look after her when they arrived. If they arrived, he corrected himself before turning and moving reluctantly in the direction he hoped he would find the exit out of this insanity.

There were half-a-dozen dead bodies strewn across the mall walkways, their trampled forms lay smashed and crushed, broken limbs jutting at odd angles.

All was still.

Broken glass from shattered storefronts lay scattered all over, crunching under Jim’s shoes as he picked his way through the desolation.

More bodies lay in a disheveled heap around the top of the escalator’s gunmetal-gray stairway, and a second, broken and blood-spattered mass had formed at the bottom.

They looked like carelessly cast-aside dolls, discarded by some hateful child. He paid particular attention to avoid looking directly at the unfortunate souls as he stepped over their motionless pale bodies to ride the escalator down to the lower level. He leaped cautiously over the bodies piled at the bottom of the escalator like so many dry autumn leaves.

On the ground floor, near the escalator, he found a large illuminated visitors map of the mall. A fat red arrow labeled ‘You Are Here’ indicated Jim’s location, and he traced the route from it to the nearest exit with his index finger before turning and heading in the direction the map indicated.

The sky, a perfect cerulean blue, stretched off into the distance as Jim Baston pushed open the glass exit doors of the mall and stepped out into the fresh air. He stood for a few moments, bent at the waist his hands braced against his knees, sucking in a lungful of warm air. The heat of the day was astonishing after the air-conditioned environment of the mall, it radiated up from the concrete sidewalk in waves, and within seconds of leaving the building, beads of sweat began to pop on his forehead.

A scattering of lifeless birds lay dotted over the road that separated the sidewalk from the mall car park. Glancing up at the huge structure he had just exited Jim thought he could make out bloody splotches where the birds had collided with the polarized glass fascia of the building.

This is all wrong, he thought, raising himself to an upright position and shading his eyes with his hand from the intense glare of the sun. The sky was too blue, the air far too warm.

Wherever ‘here’ is, it sure as hell isn’t New Orleans. Not even Louisiana by the looks of it.

Blocking the road off to his right, three cars had smashed headlong into each other. Steam or smoke rose from two of the ruined vehicles and Jim could just make out the body of a driver still slumped against the wheel of one of the cars, barely visible through the hissing fog that rose from his vehicles broken engine.

Every atom of his body screamed at him to leave, run away; get the Hell out of here! But he couldn’t leave the driver to die. At the very least, he had to check that he or she wasn’t just unconscious.

This is madness. Sheer madness, he thought as he began walking cautiously over to the crashed vehicles.

Two of the cars were empty, their occupants having fled the scene. The third, an unrecognizable compact, was sandwiched between the other vehicles and had sustained the most serious damage. The driver, an elderly woman with blue rinsed hair, was slumped against the wheel of her car. Her jaw hung limply open, a thick clot of congealed blood filled her mouth. Jim assumed that her severed tongue probably lay somewhere at her feet. A spider web of blood-splattered fractures radiated out from the spot where her head connected with the car’s windshield. Jim was sure she was dead but he stretched a cautious hand through the open window and checked for a pulse against her throat.

Nothing. She was gone.

Jim stepped back from the destroyed vehicle and its dead driver. His left foot trod on something metallic and he almost lost his footing as the object slid out from beneath him. He blurted an expletive as he barely managed to regain his balance then looked down at what had caused him to slip. It was the crushed car’s license plate, battered and dirty, torn from its fastening on the rear of the car but the white background and blue California state name was still visible. Kneeling down he picked up the piece of twisted metal examining it as though he held some ancient scroll or religious relic, as though it held the key to his very existence. In a way it did, he realized. Here he was wondering where he was when the answer was all around him, fastened to the hundreds of abandoned cars that sat patiently waiting for their owners to return.

Still holding the warped piece of metal in his hand, he walked across to the nearest row of parked cars. Moving from one car to the next, he checked the license plate of each in turn. By the time he reached the end of the first row of parked vehicles he knew where he was. There were a smattering of out of state license plates — Nevada and Washington, one from Idaho — but the majority had the same blue on white plates as the one he held in his hand.

California.

And judging from the blue expanse that stretched out above him, it could only be California. The sun was past its zenith and easing towards the western horizon across the cloudless canvass of the sky, but in the distance, beyond the rows of abandoned cars in the foreground, an evil black plume of smoke spiked high into the upper atmosphere, as hard and expressionless as gunmetal. At its base, Jim thought he could make out the orange flicker of flames leaping high into the air. A faint smell of burning rubber reached his nostrils.

It looked like a big fire. Jim expected to hear the sound of emergency vehicles screaming along the roads towards the inferno. There should be helicopters and camera drones buzzing around the scene of the distant disaster like worker bees buzzing around the bountiful honeypot of disaster. Nothing in the air. Nothing on the ground.

A memory began to tug at his mind. A sense of déjà vu that descended like a mist, confusing him even further. Everything looked so familiar; no that was wrong, everything was familiar.

He knew this place. He was sure of it.

Taking a step out onto the black top he craned his neck to read the name of the mall fixed over its recessed entrance: FALLBROOK MALL, in giant white letters.

The name rang a bell somewhere in his memory. He repeated the name of the shopping center over in his head a couple of times.

Fallbrook Mall, Fallbrook Mall.

“Got it,” he said, with a snap of his fingers. It was the name of the mall he used to shop at when he still lived in California; when they had still lived out in the San Fernando Valley. There was a great little Italian restaurant that he and Simone would eat at and a Cineplex that they used to take… Lark.

His eyes dropped to ground level again and he began to walk towards the low brick wall bordering the building, hedging in a perimeter of sad looking flowers, wilted and dry under the sweltering sun.

From the corner of his eye, he caught movement, his head turned quickly to focus at what had drawn his attention. Someone was watching him.

On the other side of the doors, standing in the foyer of the mall, a man stared intently at Jim. Dressed in khaki pants, a white open collared shirt and a black leather jacket, the stranger looked to be in his thirties, brown hair swept back over his forehead, eyes locked solidly with his own.

Jim took a step back in surprise. The figure took a step back too. Astonishment crossed both their faces. Jim raised his left hand; the stranger mimicked his gesture. “Christ,” Jim whispered as he stepped forward and placed his hand flat against the doors of the mall, reaching out he touched the face of himself echoed in its mirrored surface. The face of Jim Baston when he was thirty-eight years old.

Eight

I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.

That was all Byron Portia had time to think before the road in front of him turned into a sea of shimmering red as drivers thumped brake pedals to the floor, their vehicles’ brake lights suddenly glowing like hot coals.

This was all wrong. An instant ago he was a half hour outside of LA, his earlier plan of reaching the city by midnight delayed by an unexpected accident outside of Baker. Some fool kid with too much synth-ahol in his system or jacked-up on the latest designer drug had forgotten to turn on their car’s AI, smashed into the support of a bridge and spread both their car and themselves over eight lanes of the highway. The tailback had stretched all the way back towards Vegas for thirty miles and cost him three hours of his time. He had celebrated New Year sitting in in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. He had not bothered hurrying after that. The time was past for him to find anybody suitable for his purposes that night.

But that was all okay. Everything happened for a reason, he knew.

And so, he had contented himself with the speed limit and tried not to dwell on the missed opportunity. He understood, he was protected.

And then suddenly… this.

Night was replaced by blinding daylight and blue sky. The sparse industrialized outskirts of Los Angeles, shrouded in the comforting shadow of darkness, supplanted by the urban sprawl of… where? He had no idea. Cars everywhere. Confusion followed by a strange sick sensation of abruptly arrested motion in his stomach.

He sucked in an instinctive gulp of air and held it as all around him vehicles began careening and skidding across the unfamiliar freeway in a slow motion ballet of chaos. Clouds of smoke erupted from tires as panicked drivers brought their vehicles rapidly down to zero and stopped dead in their tracks only to be sent careening off by others behind them who could not react quickly enough to the wall of metal that was thrown up in front of them.

He saw one car lurch awkwardly into the air, corkscrewing gracelessly over the concrete median dividing his side of the freeway from oncoming traffic. The face of its terrified driver plainly visible for a moment as the driver’s side window of the airborne sedan passed in front of Byron’s windshield before disappearing in a massive ball of flame as it ripped through a stalled RV, before cartwheeling away out of his view.

Byron had no chance of stopping as his foot smashed into the brake-pedal; it was instinctive, it was automatic and intuitive but it was also stupid. The big-rig he was riding wasn’t a car: it took time to slow down. Gentle caressing of the hydraulic breaks was all that would bring one of these metal leviathans of the freeway to a safe stop. Hammering the breaks could only lead to one result and even as the thought slipped through his mind, he felt the dynamics of his vehicle begin to change.

The forty feet of trailer hitched behind his rig began to slide forward and his cab begin to slip off to the left, centrifugal force trying to push the two pieces of machinery together. He tried to compensate by turning the wheel into the skid, trying to avert the oncoming jackknifing of his rig but he could already feel it was too late. He was going too fast and he had hit the brakes too hard. It wasn’t going to matter anyway, too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.

It was gradual, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds, but it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretched out for him by the sudden dumping of the contents of his adrenal glands into his system. He felt the potential energy building in his vehicle, the cabin begin to strum and squeal as the tension resonated through the tortured metal. Energy built furiously in those… long… drawn… out… seconds… before… the rig detonated.

His steering wheel whipped out of his hands and Byron catapulted from his seat, exploding toward the roof of the cab. An empty Coke can flew past him as he smashed into the ceiling, knocking the stored air from his straining lungs. The windshield imploded into the interior of the cabin with the sound of a million shattered bottles, broken glass showering the leather driver’s seat with diamond hailstones.

Through the newly punctured eye of his cab, he felt the numbing rush of freezing air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.

He was heading down again, back towards the warped dashboard and the strangely possessed steering wheel that thrashed and turned as if the driver’s seat now belonged to some invisible, deranged demon-driver.

Byron Portia: truck driver and the most successful serial killer the world had yet known, plummeted towards the floor of his cab. His head smashed against the steering wheel with a sharp crack and consciousness fled from him like rainwater down a storm drain.

Nine

The store he was looking for — according to the mall map he had consulted earlier — should be on the ground floor, on the opposite side of the mall to the exit. He found it just as the sign had said, nestled between a Sears and Radio Shack. Dillon’s Bookstore the sign above the entrance announced. Jim picked his way through the literary rubble of spilled fiction, true crime, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses. The occasional dropped briefcase or dumped school satchel was the only indication that the cause of the destruction both within and outside the bookstore was rooted in human panic, and not some strange weather anomaly that had run its destructive course throughout the mall.

Against the far wall of the bookstore, Jim found what he was looking for. He reached for a copy of the LA Times from the rack, not bothering to read the headline or open the broadsheet. Instead, he quickly scanned the top of the front page looking for the date: Saturday June 13^th 2017. Tossing the paper aside, he grabbed a New York Times: same date, same year. One after another, he checked the remaining newspapers. All of them read the same.

There was no way in hell this could be right. He had, until only minutes earlier been over two thousand miles away in New Orleans, safely hidden away from the world in a cramped but comfortable hotel room in 2042.

Yet, now, somehow he found himself standing in a bookstore twenty-five years in the past. And, judging from the commotion and confusion he had witnessed since his arrival, he wasn’t the only one who had made the journey, either.

Goosebumps cascaded down the length of his arms as a dizzying feeling of unreality washed over him. He leaned against a rack of books waiting for the queasiness to pass; hoping he would not throw up while sucking in deep gulps of air.

Although he had not been aware of it at the time, from the moment he had found himself standing in the luggage store Jim had been panicking. It crept up on him without him noticing, driven all of his actions and pushed all of his buttons. More than the regular fight-or-flight reaction, Jim had been on autopilot, his conscious mind pushed into the background while his survival instincts had taken over. Now, as the adrenaline was finally dissipating from his body his thoughts became clearer and his personality regained some control.

He began to count off possibilities of just what was going on here.

“Think,” he said aloud. “Think.”

He didn’t do drugs, so, unless someone had slipped him something at the bar last night? No, he had bought his own drinks and never left them unattended, so this was not a drug-induced hallucination.

He wasn’t tripping.

It wasn’t a dream; the experience was too visceral and the throbbing in his bruised fingers removed all doubt that this was anything other than real. This was actually happening.

The possibility that he was suffering some kind of mental breakdown had crossed his mind too, but that would not account for the panic and death that he had witnessed all around him. Others were sharing his psychosis? Doubtful.

There were some very realistic virtual-reality simulations available — he’d tried a few — but they could not come close to the feeling that you were truly there. Although incredibly realistic, there was still an unrealistic jerkiness to the scenery, the virtual-population a little unreal in their responses when you talked with them. The kind of processing power to create a scenario as real as what he had already experienced was still years out of reach.

So, that left what? That he and God-knew how many others somehow had been transported back in time into the bodies of their earlier selves.

Unbelievable! Inconceivable! Impossible!

But, how did that old quote go?

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The only remaining answer he had was that he was truly experiencing this. That for some unknown reason, he and at the very least the rest of the people in this shopping center had been thrust back through time. Twenty-five years into the past.

The next question was: Am I stuck here? And, if he was, then for how long?

Maybe it was a localized phenomenon. Perhaps even now emergency services were sealing off the perimeter and attempting to assess the situation. Maybe somebody out there actually knew what the hell had happened. And, if somebody knew what was going on then maybe they could reverse it.

That’s an awful lot of maybes, he thought as he headed back towards the mall’s exit.

Ten

Byron Portia could smell something burning. Not just smell it, he realized, he could taste it. Thick, acrid and cloying, it seared his throat with every breath he took as he struggled towards consciousness.

If there’s smoke, then there’s fire. That’s what his daddy used to say. Daddy was always right. And you never argued with daddy, not if you valued your hide.

Portia’s eyes flickered open and he tried to get his befuddled brain to assess exactly what had happened. There was a large gap in his memory. He had been on his way to Los Angeles, he remembered that much. It had been nighttime and then, suddenly, it had been day and he could not remember what had happened in the blank space between dark and light. Of course, that was the least of his problems, he realized.

His world had turned upside down — literally. He was laying on his back on the ceiling of his cab, staring up at the floor. Where the windshield had been there was now nothing but a few loose pieces of shattered glass hanging from the windshield’s surround like rotten teeth in an ancient mouth. He could feel a cool breeze flowing through the space into the cabin. The breeze was pulling in smoke with it too — it was starting to fill the wrecked cab. Grey-black fumes that snaked over the inverted dashboard and flowed towards him like morning mist down a hillside.

There was little sound. He could hear a creaking, squeaking noise that sounded like a rusty weather-vain or the unoiled wheel of an old bicycle. There was another sound too; a crackling, popping noise and it was getting louder. As the crackling grew, so too did the smoke; becoming thicker and blacker, slowly filling the cab.

Fire!

Byron’s short-circuited brain finally made the connection, realization shot through him. He was going to burn to death — or choke to death, if he was lucky — if he didn’t get out of this cab.

Tendrils of fear wrapped themselves around his heart and he sucked in a deep lungful of the choking black smoke. His eyes itched painfully; tears welled up in response to the smoke, blurring his vision even further.

He had to get out.

Byron reached his arms out, placed his hands palms up against the body of the cab and pushed. Pain coursed up his left side and struck his heart, paralyzing him with its intensity. A mewling whimper crawled from between his lips and he collapsed back onto the ceiling, sucking in great puffs of stinking air between clenched teeth that made him choke and want to vomit.

The air was becoming less and less breathable by the second, and through the swirling smoke that now filled most of the cabin he could make out yellow flames flickering. He could hear the flames growing in intesity. Terror sent adrenaline coursing through his body — he was not going to let himself die here, not like this — and with a snarl, he pulled himself up into a sitting position.

The pain was horrendous. His vision swirled and darkened and the urge to vomit was almost unstoppable this time, but if he blacked out now he knew that that would be all-she-wrote; it would all be over for him, he would lose consciousness and choke to death on his own vomit.

“But I’m chosen,” he whispered.

With an almost super-human exertion of will he fought back the darkness, pushed it away from him until finally the interior of the overturned truck swam back into view.

He was upright, his left hand braced against the inverted back of his driver’s seat and his right hand holding the rim of the shattered windshield. His right foot was jammed in what was left of his trucks steering wheel. It had snagged through the gap between two of the wheel’s spokes and was caught up against the dashboard and the steering column. The steering wheel had folded over on itself in the impact and trapped his foot in a clam-like vice. His foot, bent at a right angle to the ankle, felt numb, and as he strained his neck to get a better look at it, he could make out white bone jutting through the skin of his ankle. The ragged point of bone protruded through the bloody torn skin, an amateur carver’s attempt at whittling a spear point.

Portia strained to reach his foot but the angle was too obtuse and the pain from his ruined ankle too intense. His stomach muscles began to twinge and shudder with the strain of holding himself in this awkward position, until finally and with a frustrated yell of despair, his body collapsed back to the floor.

The shroud of smoke swallowed him, leaking into his nostrils, draining down his throat into his lungs. Oxygen depleted, his brain struggled vainly to remain alive but succeeded only in ordering his lungs to suck in even more of the poisonous fumes that were killing him.

Finally, consciousness began to leave him and he knew he was going to die.

A hand thrust through the empty space where the windshield once was, groping blindly through the smoke. It grabbed Portia’s trapped foot and wrenched it free of the buckled steering wheel. The pain was incredible, overwhelming his nervous system, paralyzing every nerve to the point he couldn’t even scream,

The last thing that Byron Portia’s dying mind registered, was the hand of God as it reached down through the swiftly approaching blackness to claim him.

Eleven

Jim Baston exited the mall and stepped into the car park.

There was no police cordon or sudden rush of emergency personnel hurrying to greet him with thermal emergency blankets in hand, concern stitched across their faces and a thousand questions about his well-being waiting on their lips. No cadre of reporters thrusting microphones at him, asking if he had any idea what had happened, the lights from their cameras blinding him.

Instead, greeting him was what he first took to be snow. Holding out a hand, he allowed a flake to settle gently onto his palm. It was ash. Gray evanescent ash, falling in a flurry from the leaden sky, settling lightly on the hot concrete and bringing with it a reek of burning rubber laced with the campfire smell of wood and turpentine. Together they produced a sickly, syrupy odor that clogged his nostrils like tar, burning the back of his throat with each intake of breath.

Rummaging through the pockets of his jeans and jacket, he found nothing that he could use to block the choking smoke. Placing his hand over his mouth, Jim jogged back inside the mall, headed for a kid’s clothing store near the exit.

The doors shushed efficiently open as he entered the air-conditioned shop, the clean air a soothing relief to his already raw throat. Child shaped mannequins showed off the season’s latest styles, scattered around the store in various frozen poses. The place seemed eerie without the presence of human staff and customers — as though he had stumbled into the lair of the medusa and that at any moment he might catch a glimpse of her snake-tressed hair and be instantly turned to stone.

If this were one of those old horror movies he grew up with, he’d be hearing single piano notes right about now. Unable to control his irrational fear any longer, Jim grabbed a handful of pre-teen dresses from the nearest rack and ran out of the store.

There was an oiliness to the air. It stuck to his skin making it slick and dirty.

Jim’s eyes smarted painfully. He resisted rubbing them lest he get more of the crap in his eyes. The torn strip of summer dress he now wore over his mouth and nose provided a modicum of protection against the pollution but he could still smell the stench of burning rubber and felt its chemical tingle in his throat and tasted the acidic sourness in his mouth.

The thick plume of smoke that he had seen rising into the air earlier now filled most of the southern horizon. Vast clouds of smoke roiled and billowed; angry, black and purple bruises forming against the skin of the abused sky. Most of the western skyline was gone, buried beneath a black shroud of smoke, the sun a barely visible afterimage and, he realized with horror, the buildings visible earlier had disappeared behind the thick bank of smoke that rolled and crept towards his location. Jim could see unruly spires of flame leaping high into the air: the source of the Pompeian snowstorm that now fell on the city. Tendrils of smoke drifted free from the main body of the massive fire and hung overhead the mall, the advance guard of the rapidly approaching firestorm, blown by the high altitude winds.

“Christ!” he said aloud.

The sense of disquiet he felt in the empty clothes store had not entirely dissipated and as he watched the rapidly approaching storm of smoke, his uneasiness returned with a vengeance, teetering on the verge of panic.

“Get a grip,” his voice muffled by the bandana over his lower face, surprised by the trace of nervousness he detected in his own voice. He just needed to reason this out, not let the panic blind him to his situation. “I must have got here somehow. There has to be a car parked somewhere out here.”

Pushing his hand into his jeans’ pocket, he pulled out a six-inch rectangle of green plastic, blank on one side. He flipped the piece of plastic over. On the reverse side, he saw the glittering laser etched hologram of the Ford Company.

What car had he been driving back then — back now, he corrected himself, staring at the plastic ignition key in his hand as if it might be able to answer him. Of course, it was the Ford Phoenix. He’d only ever owned the one Ford; the great-granddaddy of all motor vehicle companies had gone belly-up in the late thirties, swallowed up by Nissan who immediately laid off all the subsumed company’s employees and closed down all the plants.

The Ford Phoenix was a great little car — if ironically labeled, having been the last vehicle to roll off the Ford production line. It was one of the first vehicles to switch from the gas-electric hybrid system to a hydrogen fuel cell. Simone had bought this one for him for — when was that?

His thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth birthday? They had still been living in California back then. He was still working for J.P.L. and they had that place in the San Fernando Valley. Their first home.

They were still been together back then too. They were still a family, back before everything had fallen apart, back before the accident that had taken Lark and destroyed their marriage.

Jim froze. Simone! He hadn’t dreamed that she might be caught up in all this, but if this event was as widespread as he suspected it might be, then they still lived in the house in the valley at this point in time. They wouldn’t put it on the market for another two years and Simone would be there. God knows what she might be going through.

They hadn’t talked in years but, if there was even a slight chance that what was going on was as widespread as he suspected then he was not going to leave her alone. He had to get to her.

Now, where the hell was the damn car parked?

The key-card had two raised studs; press one to unlock the vehicle and the other to switch the anti-theft protocols on or off. The alarm system would give an electronic warble and flash the car lights when activated or disarmed. If he were within fifty feet or so of the car, the system would pick up the transmission from his key-card.

He was just going to have to walk the rows of parked vehicles until he found his car, hopefully before the rapidly advancing inferno reached him.

It took him nearly half an hour before Jim finally found his Ford. He was beginning to worry that the little power cell that drove the key-card would exhaust itself if he had to carry on much longer and had rationed himself to pushing the button every ten cars to conserve its charge.

The boop-boop of the alarm sounded off to his left but he didn’t catch the flashing lights. He pressed the button again and turned to face the direction of the alarm, he squeezed past an ancient SUV and into the next row of parked vehicles. This time, when he depressed the stud, he spotted the flashing red taillights of his blue Ford Phoenix through the swirling mist of smoke, one row across from where he stood.

A cellphone lay on the passenger seat; tossed there he guessed when he parked the car. Jim grabbed it and flipped it open as he climbed into the car. It had power, the screen glowed a reassuring blue. Scrolling through the list of saved telephone numbers, he found the number for the house landline and hit the call button with his index finger. The phone beeped the tone for each of the numbers rapidly in his ear then… nothing. Not even an engaged tone. The LCD screen flashed NO SIGNAL repeatedly at him.

“God damn it,” he hissed, tossing the useless phone onto the back passenger seat before he pushed the key-card into the starting slot on the dash, engaging the car’s power source.

A low mechanical thrum filled the cabin of the car as the elctric-powered engine hummed efficiently into life. The dashboard computer glowed with electronic luminescence and a synthesized voice swam unexpectedly from the car’s concealed dashboard speakers. “Hello James, please fasten your safety restraint,” it said in a husky female contralto. Jim pulled the safety strap into place, knowing that this would be the only way to mollify the eternally persistent onboard Artificial Intelligence of the car. Besides, if he didn’t comply with the AI it would not allow him to engage the drive and he would be stuck here until the fire reached him. “Thank you, James,“ the disembodied voice said as the clasp of the seat belt clicked into place.

The Phoenix came equipped with an onboard navigation system as standard. Its display was set into the dashboard, within easy reach and view of both the driver and passenger.

“Computer, display my present location,” he said. Immediately the display flickered into life. Jim tilted the screen toward him to get a better view, saw it had already computed the location of the car, displaying it as a red pulsing triangle in the center of the screen. The surrounding streets and roads along with places of interest were all illustrated and labeled. At the bottom of the screen, a row of icons allowed for manipulation of the system: activation of the voice mode, omni-directional scrolling, zoom in and out and half-a-dozen other options. Jim tapped the icon labeled Current Location. Instantly a box popped up with the information, Nearest Traceable Location: 21207 Topanga Canyon, California, 91614.

Quickly, Jim navigated through the menu system until he found the Directions button. He was relatively sure he knew the general direction of the house but it had been a quarter of a century since he had last made this drive and he did not want to get lost out here. He was going to need a little help from the computer.

Choosing Current Location as the point of origin for the trip, he pressed the Home button as the termination point and instructed the car’s computer system to calculate the fastest route to get him there. Instantly the display showed a step-by-step list of the route from the store straight to the front door. According to the navigation computer, the house was twelve miles away. If he were lucky, he would make the trip in less than thirty minutes.

Activating the voice mode on the navigation system, Jim slipped the car into drive and edged out of the parking spot.

Twelve

His eyes opened to blue sky overhead and pain throughout his entire body; a relentless sharp throb that made his hands spasm and clench involuntarily.

Grass; his hands had grabbed a palm full of grass, his fingers digging deep into cool loose dirt.

Byron Portia sucked in a lungful of clean air and coughed violently, the wave of pain that washed over him so intense he willingly accepted the black sheet of unconsciousness that rippled across his mind, longing for the painless embrace of oblivion. Instead, the pain subsided a little and with it the darkness, replaced by a glow filtering through his tightly clenched eyelids. Light motes swayed and eddied across his vision.

His eyes fluttered open. He was alive.

Overhead the sky stretched limitlessly, filling his vision, summer-blue and still, undisturbed by either cloud or aircraft. Carefully, with no wish to experience another nauseating bout of agony, he raised his head from the soft earth.

He found himself on the grass verge running alongside the freeway. Thirty feet away he could see the burning wreck of his big-rig, jackknifed diagonally across most of the lanes of the freeway. It lay on its roof, wheels pointing into the sky, looking like a giant dinosaur, dead under a Jurassic sun. Surrounding his decimated truck a fortification of mangled metal jutted out in a chaotic display of torn steel and plastic, tattered flesh and splintered bone. The cab of his truck erupted suddenly in a brilliant ball of flame that sent a pillar of flame, smoke, and debris skyward.

A gentle cooling breeze swept the smoke from the burning vehicles away from Byron’s side of the embankment, exposing the destruction in all its glory.

It was a magnificent sight. An earthly manifestation of the power of God. The evil and unclean, sinners one and all he was sure, struck down in one lightning act of might. It was truly beautiful in its power and terrible in its swiftness.

And he had been spared.

“Beautiful,” he whispered. “Beautiful.” The word slipping from him as though he were seeing his newborn child for the first time.

His pain all but forgotten now, Byron tilted his head leisurely to the left, scanning the full extent of the destruction that had just taken place, absorbing the grandeur of the mass of destroyed vehicles that stretched off into the distance. It was horrifyingly arousing. That heap of twisted burning metal, of smashed, burnt and crushed lives. It made him feel alive. The pain in his leg began to fade, inconsequential when compared to the ecstatic excitement that coursed through his blood. He felt giddy, this time with pleasure. A giggle of wicked pleasure rose to his lips.

“How are you feeling,” said a voice off to his right. He whipped his head in the direction of the sound.

Nearby, a man in his forties, stocky with a mass of disheveled hair, stood staring out at the concrete river of devastation, his arms folded across his chest. When he spoke, he did not turn his head to look at Byron, instead he calmly continued to watch the freeway.

“I have been given a sign—” the stranger continued before Portia could answer him. The stranger turned to face the injured killer, the white clerical collar of a priest clearly visible now around his throat. Regarding the exhausted Byron Portia with cool, piercing, intelligent eyes he raised his right arm and extended a long well-manicured forefinger directly at him. “—and you, you will be my first disciple.”

“Who are you?” Portia asked, his voice a barely audible croak over the crackling of the freeway fire.

“My name,” the stranger said, “is Father Joseph Pike.”

Thirteen

It did not take long for Jim Baston to realize that it was going to take a lot longer than the thirty minutes he had originally estimated to get home. He had managed just over two miles and that had already taken him over twenty minutes.

The city was a battleground.

Car’s littered the road. Some smashed beyond recognition, just smoking heaps or burned out wrecks. The majority just abandoned as though the drivers had suddenly vaporized into thin air, forcing Jim to pull off the road and onto the sidewalk.

Pedestrians were everywhere, walking dazed in the street, screaming at each other over collisions, stepping in front of his car as if he did not exist. Most had a stunned, uncomprehending look and it seemed like all they could manage just to put one foot in front of the other. He saw a couple of cops looking just as confused as the rest. Others seemed to have grasped the situation quickly and more than once he saw the smashed windows of stores, their merchandise scattered across the pavement as looters quickly grasped opportunity from the confusion. The store alarms ringing shrilly in an attempt to alert emergency services that either didn’t care or no longer existed.

He had passed several bodies laying in the street, sprawled in twisted poses, congealed blood pooling around them, flies already buzzing expectantly. Those unlucky enough to have found themselves crossing the street at the time they had found themselves back here, he guessed.

Further on, he passed a European style sidewalk café, the kind where the patrons could sit under the large umbrellas on the sidewalk sipping cappuccinos and lattes. A large tow truck had plowed through the sea of umbrellas cutting a swathe of destruction, sending them and the people sitting in their shade in all directions. The truck had continued on its deadly journey right into the café interior, until, finally, it had come to rest against the interior wall, its rear end jutting obscenely from the café’s front, the tail-hook still swinging gently back and forth. Jim counted nine bodies laying in the heat, scattered like pins in a bowling alley.

Several other vehicles were trying to make their way through the crowds but it was like trying to drive a truck through a middle-eastern bazaar — painfully slow and ultimately futile.

The throng of humanity became worse and he slowed the car to a crawl and eventually to a standstill. If he kept on trying to edge the car through the crowd, he would hit someone for sure and anyway, at the rate he was traveling, he would do better off on foot. It might not be safer but he would make quicker time, and Jim had a nagging feeling that time was definitely of the essence today.

Pulling the car as close to the sidewalk as he could he grabbed the cell phone from the back seat, stuffed it in his trouser pocket and checked his position with the navigation comp one final time. Making a mental note of the roads he would need to take to get to the house he killed the engine and stepped out of the car.

Rising high above the stores and tree line, the plume of smoke snaked ominously into the air, a dark harbinger of doom. Jim felt a growing unease creep insidiously over him, setting his skin tingling and his pulse throbbing as he realized that the smoke and fire emanated from ahead of him, directly in his path. The closer he got to the spiraling plume the less breathable the air became and once again, he pulled out his makeshift bandanna pushing it to his mouth.

Outside a deserted Ralph’s food store on Roscoe Boulevard a soft drinks machine thrummed in the burgeoning heat. In the shade of the stores overhang, he fished through his pockets until he found what he was looking for. Dropped the three coins into the machine and selected a bottle of spring water, listening as the plastic bottle of H₂O rumbled through the machines metal innards before dropping into the dispensing slot at the base of the refrigerated machine. He took a long swig from the icy bottle and felt the water ease the stinging sensation in his throat.

The air was thick and heavy, the sun now just a dim light shrouded in the blackness of the cloud. The temperature was rising and in the near distance, Jim could now clearly see the flames of multiple fires. Houses and trees burned brightly and intensely, the flames dancing like crazy imps at the gates of hell, free to run rampant with no fire service to check their spread.

The crowds began to dissipate as he made his way out of the commercial area and into the residential section of the San Fernando Valley before finally evaporating all together as he drew closer to the smoke plume, driven away by the poisonous air and the treacherous flames. Jim did not miss the panicked eyes and the thousand-yard stares of his fellow humans. He was glad to be alone, happy to be making headway without the hindrance of the unwelcome zombies that the majority of the human race seemed to have become.

He made good time and his confidence surged as he began to recognize certain streets. There was a cigar store on the junction of Fallbrook and Saticoy, its large walk-in humidor a regular hangout for Jim, and across from there, a Taco Bell; Lark’s favorite fast food joint. He had passed by both as he made his way down Saticoy and he knew he was less than a mile from his home as he finally crossed over Woodlake.

There had been a strip-mall set back from the street at the junction of Saticoy and Woodlake. It had contained the usual smattering of convenience stores: a large supermarket, hair-salon and discount liquor shop, and a gas station.

That was all gone.

In its place, a smoking gash ran diagonally across Saticoy, slashing through Woodlake; a smoldering pit thirty-foot deep and at least that distance across, and extending into the flaming ruins of what had once been a gated-housing community. Now it was so much rubble and broken timber.

The tail fin of a Boeing 787 jutted incongruously out of the remains of the food-store, its charred skin blackened and smoking. Jim guessed from the devastated housing estate and fields of fire he could see in the distance, that the jet had collided with the ground right here, tearing away the tail section and sending the body of the plane careening off before finally coming to rest somewhere west of the housing community that now lay in ruins.

If he wanted to reach his home, he was going to have to get across the massive trench that ran between him and his destination. He could walk around it but that would add too much time to his trip and the fire was spreading rapidly. If he didn’t get to the house soon then there might not be a house left — assuming it hadn’t already been consumed by the fire.

His decision made, Jim moved to the edge of the pit and peered cautiously over the edge. A chunk of tarmac broke free under his weight and slipped into the hole escorted to the bottom by a cascade of gravel. He stumbled back, barely in time to save himself from following the rubble into the crevice.

“Shit!” he said, scuttling away from the lip of the crevice on all fours. Heart thumping audibly in his chest, Jim waited until his pulse began to slow before flipping over onto his belly and sliding carefully towards the lip of the crevice until he was able to look safely down into the pit.

On the opposite wall of the pit, halfway down the wall of dirt, a broken water-main gushed a torrent of water the ten remaining feet to the base of the pit. Below, a muddy lagoon had formed and a river of brown mud sluiced off downstream. The action of the water against the dirt walls was rapidly eating away at the soft earth, forming an overhang in the rut that did not look like it would support the weight of the ground above it for much longer. As Jim watched, assessing his next move, a six-foot long piece of the overhang collapsed with a giant splash into the water below, sending waves rolling downstream and splashing him with dirty droplets of muddy water. The gash was gradually increasing in width as the water eroded the sides. If he was going to get across, he was going to have to do it now before the gap became too large.

Pushing himself a little further over the edge, Jim looked down at the wall of mud and clotted earth on his side of the pit. He could make out the sister piece of fractured piping on his side of the pit. It jutted out from the wall of earth about a foot, enough for him to get at least one of his feet onto. A slight incline in the pit wall would allow him to slide down and onto the exposed piece of plastic piping.

Jim said a quiet prayer that the pipe would hold his weight and swung himself around until his legs dangled over the edge of the pit, flipped himself onto his belly and began to inch out. When his midriff reached the lip, he dropped his legs until he felt his toes rubbing against the loose soil. He kicked a couple of times until he had created tears in the wall he was confident would allow him to place some of his weight while he shifted his torso out far enough to see whether he was positioned over the pipe.

Pebbles of gravel sliced at him as he slid his upper body cautiously over the edge; he glanced down, his left foot positioned directly over the pipe, about four or five feet above it. This next part was the difficult bit, his nerves were singing their discomfort as he slowly allowed his body to drop down, his elbows taking the majority of his weight until his arms were fully extended and the only thing stopping him from falling the remaining ten feet to the floor of the gully was his tenuous finger hold on the thin crust of road above him.

Less than a few hours ago, he was talking on the phone to his literary agent. If someone had told him back then he would soon be attempting the equivalent of a rock climb while trying to avoid a fiery death, he would have laughed in their face. But with his newly regained vigor Jim felt as though he could achieve virtually anything; he let go of his handhold.

His knees scraped painfully against the sides of the pit as he slid downwards, he felt a nail on his right hand fray and break as he tried to grab at the wall to slow his slide and then, he felt his right foot connect with something solid and his downward slide stopped abruptly and jarringly.

Jim’s breathing came in quick ragged bursts. He buried his face into the cool soil and a bitter laugh escaped him. He was halfway down. Glancing down to his right he could see that the wall of the gully curved down at a much steeper angle towards its base. He maneuvered cautiously around, balanced precariously on his piece of piping, until he faced the opposite wall. Crouching as carefully as he could, Jim swung his foot off the pipe and allowed his hands to take the weight of his body as he lowered himself to a sitting position. Then, slipping himself off the pipe, he slid the remaining few feet to the bottom of the scree-strewn slope.

At the bottom of the massive furrow, the walls looked a great deal higher than the thirty feet he had estimated. Looking up at the sky, filigreed with gray strings of smoke, he imagined that this was what it would look like to gaze up from ones grave. Dismissing the morbid thought from his mind, he turned his attention to escaping from the gully.

The lagoon of water from the fractured water pipe was growing rapidly; fed by the waterfall that cascaded down the side of the furrow from the broken water pipe. The ground was sodden, water logged, and his shoes sank deep into the muck up to his ankles.

Jim stopped to catch his breath and he felt the mud sucking at his feet, pulling him deeper. This quagmire would suck him down until he couldn’t escape if he didn’t keep moving, and then this really would become his grave.

His foot came free with an obscene slurp as he pulled it out of the mud. If he headed upstream away from the water, he would eventually reach dry ground. Trying to stay as far up the crumbling bank of earth as he could, Jim edged his way along the margin of the growing pool of water.

In the minute or so he had been at the bottom of the pit the water level had increased by over two inches, eating away at the thin vein of flat ground that he had expected to be able to use to move freely upstream. Now the water was lapping at his knees and with each step his foot slipped down the loose scrabble of earth and deeper into the water.

Finally, he stepped onto firmer ground. His feet and lower legs were frozen, his sodden trousers flapping like rain soaked flags as he rubbed furiously, trying to get some feeling back into the blocks of ice that had once been his lower legs.

As feeling returned Jim began moving further upstream, away from the cataract of water. Up ahead, he could make out a feature he spotted when he first reconnoitered the fissure from up top. A large piece of the road had collapsed, due he surmised to some underground geological abnormality, exposed when the jet had carved out the land. The collapsed road had formed a steep ramp from the bottom of the pit and standing at its base, he could see that it reached all the way up to ground level and the newly formed corniche.

The giant chunk of tarmacadam and bituminous solids had broken into three pieces, and now formed a set of giant steps that Jim was sure he could use to climb up to the road. Reaching one mud splattered hand towards the first handhold he could see, he began to pull himself skywards.

A billowing gust of wind almost knocked Jim back down over the precipice as he tried to pull himself up onto the safety of the road, but with a final effort, he threw one leg up onto the road and pulled the rest of his body after it.

He was exhausted, and for a couple of minutes he just lay at the side of the precipice, feeling the cold concrete beneath his back. The wind was beginning to pick up and smoke from the fire swirled and eddied through the disturbed air.

A sickening sense of urgency spurred Jim on. The wind would drive the fire with even greater ferocity. If the house was still standing then he had to get to it quickly. He was sure he had very little time left.

Gathering what was left of his strength; Jim pulled himself to his feet and began jogging the remaining distance to the house.

The crash had spared his home — barely.

The plane had come down a hundred yards south of their cul-de-sac and, as he turned onto the road, he could see the house was still standing. It had not escaped scot-free however; the big oak that had for years stood in the front garden had toppled over, smashing into the front part of the house where the upstairs den had been, removing a portion of the roof in the process and exposing the interior of the room to the elements. The trunk of the tree lay diagonally across the house blocking both the garage and front door.

Glowing ash floated on the currents of warmed air like deadly orange fireflies. Jim could see smoke rising from many places on the shingle roof of his home but there didn’t seem to be any fires burning from within. He offered a silent thank you to whatever God was watching over him.

His neighbors’ homes had not been so lucky and they now burned fiercely, adding to the smoke that hung heavy as London morning fog in the air. The heat was incredible, the air virtually unbreathable.

He soaked the now soot caked bandanna in his remaining water, tossing the empty bottle aside. Pushing the wet cloth to his mouth, he dashed down the street towards the house.

A heat induced current of hot air wailed down the cul-de-sac. It turned the narrow street into a wind tunnel, dragging twirling eddies of smoke twirling over the road. A bright-yellow inflatable emergency life-raft had caught on the lamppost outside his house. It danced and jittered like a hanged man as the wind whipped against it.

A first-class passenger seat from the downed aircraft had come to rest in the middle of the street. Upright and incongruous, the seat’s decapitated business-suited occupant was still strapped securely to it, but Jim barely registered the body as he jogged towards the house, swiping ineffectively at the burning ash that smoldered in his hair.

Standing on the concrete driveway leading up to the three-car garage Jim yelled, “Simone. Are you in there?” His voice hoarse, brittle, and barely audible over the crackle of the flames from the blazing homes of his neighbors.

No reply.

The trunk of the fallen oak tree completely obscured the front door to the house. He would have to either climb over it or go around the back and get into the house that way. If the back door was locked then he would lose time that he did not have. Deciding that a direct approach was the best he pushed his arms through the thicket of branches, forcing them aside as best he could. Grabbing a thick protruding branch, Jim used it to pull himself up and onto the trunk of the tree. Trying not to poke an eye out on one of the innumerable tiny spiked twigs and branches that protruded at every conceivable angle, he tucked his chin against his chest and pushed through the remaining web of tangled branches until he could finally squeeze himself onto the porch.

The door was ajar, knocked open by an eight-foot long tree limb that jutted into the brown marbled entranceway of the house. Easing between the doorframe and branch, he stepped over the threshold and into the house.

The thing he had always loved about California style homes was their openness. It created a spacious, airy atmosphere that he had found enlightening. If it hadn’t been for the tragedy then he imagined he, Simone… and Lark would still have been living here well into their old age.

Don’t delude yourself, his inner voice said, but he ignored it, choosing instead the familiar deception that everything had been fine between him and Simone.

The foyer, lined by a teak banister, led into a living room that swept back towards the swing-door that in turn led into the expansive kitchen. From the kitchen you could step through into the family room. A generous stairwell curved up to the second floor and the master bedroom, den, office… and Lark’s room.

Spacious and light in his memory, today the house seemed coffin-like and dark. The smoke filtering in through the open front door gave the house a gray, unreal feel.

“Hello?” Jim yelled, as he walked into the living room. “Is there anybody in here?”

Silence was his only answer.

“Simone! Are you here?” and then after a pause he added, “It’s Jim.”

Nothing.

Moving quickly from room to room, he checked each for signs that Simone had been in the house when the event had happened. The lower floor was empty except for a few magazines scattered carelessly on the glass coffee table of the living room, so he made his way up the stairs to the top landing.

Jim checked the office first, then the master bedroom. Both were empty with no obvious signs that anyone had recently occupied them.

The den was a wreck. The felled tree had smashed away the majority of the right side of the room, opening up a gaping hole in the floor and exposing the garage below. The L-shaped sofa they had used to watch movies on the giant plasma screen on the opposite wall had tipped into the hole, one end pointing up towards the exposed sky through the hole in the roof and the other resting on the concrete garage floor below.

Jim warily edged towards the lip of the hole in an attempt to peer down into the garage but the fractured floorboards squeaked in protest, sagging as he applied weight to them. Wary of his earlier experience on the street he hastily backed away.

That left just one final room.

He did not want to have to look in that last room. The thought of viewing his child’s bedroom was the first thing he could honestly say frightened him on this strangest of days. But he had to check, had to make sure that Simone was not in there. Mentally bracing himself as best he could, Jim opened the door to his dead child’s bedroom.

Fourteen

They were arguing again. Simone had started as soon as he told her that he had to go to the lab.

“But, it’s Saturday for God’s sake. Can’t it wait until Monday?” Her voice sounded whiny to him but he knew that it was really pleading.

“We hardly see you as it is. Please… Just for today; can’t we be a family?” she continued, as tears began to run down her cheeks.

Jim had almost agreed.

Almost.

How different his life would have turned out if he had just shrugged, taken off his jacket, and said “Sure, love. You’re right” and parked his ass on the sofa for the rest of the weekend.

But of course, he hadn’t. Day late and a dollar short.

Instead, he mumbled an excuse about the lab needing him and headed towards the door. Towards his mistress — his profession.

And that’s when she got up in his face. Screaming at him that he was tearing their family apart, that he cared more about the lab than he did his own wife and child. What about Lark? She was growing up without a Father. Didn’t he realize what he was doing to them both?

He had protested… weakly, his excuses melting under the intensity of her words. Finally, he yelled some dumb response back at her and stormed off into the garage.

His Ford Phoenix was sitting patiently in the garage and he angrily got behind the wheel.

What the Hell gave her the right to get on him like that? Who did she think she was? Didn’t she realize he had responsibilities for Christ’s sake?

He started the car, pressed the garage door opener button and waited until he heard the metallic thunk of the roller door locking into place overhead. He slammed the car into reverse, so angry he didn’t even bother to check his rear view mirror.

There was a dull soft THUD! and rattle of metal. The car bucked as the rear left tire rolled over something substantial.

“Jesus Christ,” he shouted angrily, banging his clenched fists against the steering wheel.

Now he was pissed. Lark had left her bike in the drive again, how many times did he have to tell the kid not to leave the Goddamn bike in the Goddamn drive?

The door from the garage into the laundry room flew open. Simone stood in the doorway, her face a mask of anger — she always had liked to get in the last word — bracing himself for the torrent of abuse at this, his latest screw-up, he saw instead her eyes move from him to the car and finally, down to the ground, the stream of vitriol left unspoken.

Her face had paled in an instant. One second flushed and ruddy with anger the next she was white as a winter morning. Her facial muscles lost all elasticity as her jaw fell open leaving her mouth sagging in a frozen ‘O’.

Her scream was silent but it was there.

“Lark,” she had finally choked, her hands flying to cover her mouth, as if she could pluck her child’s name from the air and cancel what she saw.

Jim looked slowly towards the driver’s side-mirror. He could see the handlebars of Lark’s bike protruding from under the tire, twisted and bent, the pink tassels he had fixed to each end still swinging gently back and forth.

A little arm protruded from the mangled remains of his daughter’s bike, pale and twisted at an awful angle. A large pool of blood spread slowly across the gray, leaf strewn, concrete floor.

He looked away then, tore his eyes from his child to stare instead at his wife. Her eyes were blank but a quizzical expression moved over her face like molten wax.

“What did you do to my baby?” she asked, her voice hushed to a whisper.

The question had haunted him for the rest of his life.

What did you do, James? What did you do?

There was an inquest of course. Both parents exonerated of any blame.

However, Jim knew the truth. He saw compassion in everybody’s eyes but when he looked into his own all he saw was guilt.

Before the accident, he and Simone had been teetering on a slippery slope that would surely sweep them into the abyss of inevitable separation and eventual divorce, but for a while, strangely, the death of Lark brought them closer. But when the tears finally dried up and he still could not assuage the burning sense of guilt that throbbed in his heart, he started to drink. He found that the bottle gave him some solace, and as each day passed, he realized that he no longer needed his wife; his newfound friend would do him just fine.

Yup! With the help of his namesake Dr. James Beam, he could anaesthetize himself against the pain, and finally, against all of life itself.

Six months after the accident he didn’t go home. Instead, he moved into their cabin at Shadow Mountain Lake and hired an attorney to file for divorce.

At the hearing, Simone had pleaded with him not to go through with it. She told him she knew it was an accident; as much her fault as his and that she knew how much stress he was under. If it wasn’t for her insisting on him staying, the accident would never have happened; did he see what that meant? That it was as much her fault as it was his. He ignored her plea to give it one last try and, just like that, they were divorced.

Fifteen

Jim stood outside the door to his daughter’s room; his hand was shaking visibly as he reached for the knob. The guilt of almost twenty years came rushing back to him. As he eased the door open, he half expected to see his daughter sitting on her bed, dead eyes peering out from behind a matted curtain of blood encrusted blond hair, to hear her say through a mouth clogged and matted with gore, “Daddy, why did you kill me?”

But Lark’s room was empty.

After the accident, they had cleared the room out. Donated most of her toys and clothes to a charity, the rest had gone to family and friends as mementos. Simone had objected at first but eventually she had submitted to him and they had removed all that had made the room Lark’s. He scrubbed it clean of any memory of her in a vain hope that removing the constant reminders of his little girl might in turn, help him overcome his grief and self-loathing.

Standing here now, her room restored and the accident still so far away yet so keenly remembered, brought back the ache of absence for his daughter. Her bed neatly made, a cuddle of soft-toys collected on the pillows. Her books and DVD’s resting in racks against one wall. A boom box sat high on a shelf; below it, her TV.

It was all so… pristine, so untouched — it was Lark’s.

He slammed the door shut unable to face this particular ghost from his past. Now was not the time, he told himself. The voice in the back of his mind whispered back, when will it ever be time, Jim-boy?

He pushed that thought aside. What he had to concentrate on now — what was important — was finding Simone. She wasn’t at the house, so, where would she most likely be? She would try to get to some place safe.

If she had been anywhere near their home then she would have seen the devastation and gone elsewhere, unless of course she was so close that she had become a victim of the crash herself, engulfed by the fireball that had surely accompanied the unscheduled landing of the massive airliner in the middle of their housing development.

He could not allow himself to think that. She had to be alive and he had to find her.

Simone’s parents! Of course.

They lived in Thousand Oaks. Maybe she was visiting them? She used to hop over there most weekends when they were still married. Perhaps she had made it there. It made sense. It would be the logical place for her to go, he supposed. After all, he and Simone were divorced, would be divorced, or whatever. This flip-flop of time was confusing enough without having to think about present and future tense.

On the off chance that the phone might be working again, he flipped open his cell and hit the send button but he got the same NO SERVICE message as before. In the master bedroom, he tried the receiver to the phone next to their bed — nothing. It was dead, too.

Thousand Oaks was over eighteen miles away. It would probably take him a day or more to walk it and with the current state of madness, there was no guarantee that he would make it alive. He needed transportation and he knew exactly where to find it.

They bought the bikes the previous year and had planned to take rides on the weekend up into the nearby San Fernando Mountains. There were so many great trails lacing through the San Fernando’s and surrounding hills, but for some reason the weekend excursions never materialized. Jim knew why, he was just too busy at the lab and the bikes had stayed in their racks. Simone had talked about selling them but he had promised her that they would use them — someday they would.

The bikes were stored in metal overhead racks attached to the ceiling of the garage. When the tree had fallen into the den above, part of the upper floor had collapsed down into the garage below, burying the three bikes under a six-foot high mound of splintered wood, stucco and furniture.

Grabbing a pair of leather gloves from the shelf Simone kept her gardening tools and rose food, Jim started pulling and shifting the debris.

The heat was beginning to take its toll. His muscles ached with each piece of debris he moved from the pile to the clear side of the garage. Covered in grime and dirt, dust had crusted inside his nostrils and scoured his eyes. He was exhausted, but within minutes a glint of dust-covered chrome rewarded his toil. Kneeling down on the pile of rubble Jim hurriedly threw the remaining covering of debris aside, uncovering Simone’s bike still attached to its rack, its four fastening pins locked to the remnants of the plasterboard that had been the ceiling.

With a final tug, he pulled the bike free of the mangled storage rack and hefted the scratched and bent bicycle over to the opposite side of the garage.

A broken floorboard had punched through the spokes of the bike’s badly buckled rear wheel ripping them from the exterior rim.

Now they protruded outwards like the staked ribs of a vampire. The front tire was flat and with the back wheel so badly damaged, the bike was unridable. He would just have to hope for better luck with his own bicycle. Leaning the useless machine against his workbench, Jim headed back over to the pile of debris.

His bike was in little better condition and by the time he pulled it free of the remaining debris he could see that the front tire had ragged gashes in several places and the front fork, instead of jutting forward as it should, now slanted back towards the pedals. Other than that, the bike looked to be in working condition. Between the two damaged bikes, Jim realized he had one working one; it would just take a little cannibalization. Rummaging through his toolbox he pulled out a couple of spanners that would fit the locking nuts keeping the wheels fixed in place. He released the front wheel from Simone’s bike and used it to replace his bike’s wheel. Next, he grabbed the hand pump and started inflating the flat tire.

Ten minutes later, and much to his relief, the tire remained inflated.

The fastest route to Thousand Oaks from the Valley would be via the 101 freeway west, and as Jim Baston headed onto the slip road that fed off Valley Circle Drive and led onto the 101, he could see that it wasn’t going to be an easy ride. Jim guessed he had probably about an hour of light left. The first hint of dusk was already discoloring the sky, turning the blue to a deep purple.

Completely blocked by abandoned cars that snaked around the curling on-ramp and down to the freeway below, Jim left the road and pedaled his bike up onto the grass verge running alongside the road, skirting around the crush of vehicles.

Things were worse on the freeway.

Cresting the gentle rise of the slip road, he brought the bike to a hasty stop, gazing out over a sea of glittering quicksilver.

The ghostly light of the setting sun glinted off the roofs of thousands of crushed, burnt-out and abandoned cars, trucks and big-rigs, lending an eerie orange cast to the terrible panorama that shimmered and stirred in the heat haze floating above the river of destruction. The smell of burnt plastic — like toy soldiers left too long under the mid-day sun — wafted to him on the early evening breeze.

“Jesus wept.”

It was the most terrifying thing Jim had ever laid eyes on; this total annihilation of thousands of vehicles spoke more poignantly to him of the frailty of human life than all the bodies and devastation he had seen that day. It reminded him of newsreels he’d seen when he was a kid during the first Persian Gulf War, of the road to Basra after the Iraqi army, routed from Kuwait city, had tried to make their way back to their homeland. Miles of crushed, burned and broken vehicles, the charred blackened bodies barely distinguishable as having once been a walking, talking human, capable of laughter and love.

The 101 freeway had become a road straight to Hell.

Drivers had found themselves suddenly and inexplicably behind the wheel of a vehicle speeding along some long forgotten highway on a trip that was almost a quarter century distant, for reasons that had become ancient history. Only an instant earlier they had been busy getting on with their everyday lives twenty-four years into the future. Caught utterly by surprise — and with the advances in vehicle AI safety protocols that would virtually eliminate highway accidents, still a distant invention — those unfortunate enough to find themselves in their vehicle on this fateful day had attempted to avoid other cars and trucks. Most had probably instinctively hit the brakes or simply waited for the vehicle’s nonexistent AI to kick-in and bring them to a safe stop. Instead, they had careened across each other’s lanes and this… this carnage was the result. Fires had erupted and swept rapidly over the vehicles, with many of their occupants trapped inside and unable to escape from the oncoming firestorm.

Maybe Simone is in one of these tin can coffins?

No! He could not contemplate that. If she were, he would never know.

It had taken years of pain and denial, of the mental equivalent of self-flagellation throughout those years, but finally he realized that Simone had been right. Consumed by his own anguish and self-pity he had used that as a wedge to drive them apart.

Youth is wasted on the young. That was correct, but now he had a second chance to prove that he was wrong and he knew that she was not one of the dead who lay in this vast, metal, tomb.

If she was alive, then he was going to find her.

Whispers!

The mass of twisted metal had found a voice, and now it murmured constantly to Jim as he rode his bike between overturned campers and the shells of burned-out cars.

Beneath the lavender California sky, the cars had begun to finally cool. As they surrendered their heat to the cooling air, their metal bodies began to creak, squeak and crack. Each expansion and contraction of the day-long heated metal sent a million vowels and consonants soughing and sighing into the air like dying butterflies.

It was an uncanny sound. To Jim Baston’s exhausted mind, it sounded as though the occupants of the cars were chattering in their metal coffins, an eerie susurration of which he was certain he was the subject.

Who are you? — Help us! — Why did you live?

The questions skittered through the air to him; a mirror of his own exhausted mind’s thoughts of why he had survived when so many had not.

He avoided looking into the brutalized wrecks after the first few, the seared bodies of the occupants were mostly unrecognizable, the fire having thoroughly removed any trace of humanity from its victims. The remains were cloth less, sexless lumps of charcoal resting on beds of springs or melted into dashboards… for the most part. But here and there a glimpse of an unburned arm jutting through a window space or the half burned torso of a victim clawing their way across the freeway illustrated the fact that not all of the day’s victims had died quickly or quietly in their vehicles.

The stench was truly awful, detectable even through his muck-caked nostrils, his olfactory receptors seared by the chemical pollution he had inhaled throughout most of the day. The pungent, reeking miasma of dead humans and dead machines hung in the noxious air, overwhelming his senses. It seemed that in death the fusion of burnt human flesh and boiled bodily fluids had comingled with the oil and gasoline, melted plastic and seared metal to form a smell that had never before existed on this planet; it was the stench of defeat, of the destruction of mankind and its servile machine culture.

The sun had dipped finally below the horizon. A pair of sundogs stretched skywards on either side of it like lopsided rainbow guardians of that diming orb. Jim watched as it sank without a trace, replaced now by the crescent of a skull-white new moon and the setting sun’s distant orange glow replaced by the cadmium lambency of the freeway gantry lights.

Littering the freeway were vehicles of every size and description, scattered haphazardly across the lanes at every conceivable angle. Sedans, tankers, coupes, pickups, vans, SUV’s, car carriers, motor homes; packed so tightly together in places it was impossible to tell what the original vehicles had been.

It was also impossible to pedal in a straight line because of the sheer number of vehicles that blanketed the road. The machines had spilled over into the central reservation, crashing through the separating barriers. They had overturned in the breakdown lane that skirted the edge of the freeway, many even lurching over onto the grass verges and through the fences designed to block the daily noise of traffic from the businesses that lined the freeway shoulder.

Jim found himself zigzagging through the maze of metal as though it were an obstacle course. The road was littered with small pieces of detritus, sharp pieces of metal that ranged in size from tiny slivers to parts of engines and other things he tried to avoid looking to closely at. In the past few hours, since leaving the house in the valley, he had dismounted several times and carried the bike rather than risk a puncture.

All its going to take is one of those pieces in a tire, and I’m walking the rest of the way, he thought, as he applied his brakes, slowing the bike to a crawl to negotiate a particularly hazardous stretch of road. Once clear, Jim remounted the bike and began pedaling.

The road ahead became suddenly and completely blocked by a burned-out jack-knifed big-rig, its trailer lay on its back, wheels pointing into the air. Littering the road around the truck was a wall of decimated cars concertinaed into so much scrap metal. The hill of vehicles blocked all of the lanes ahead and other drivers, not caught in the initial carnage had swerved left and right in an effort to avoid the barrier, their vehicles blocked both the breakdown lane and grass verge as well as the median, so he couldn’t simply maneuver around it.

It was no problem. He’d already encountered similar accident induced barriers, all he had to do was dismount, shoulder the bike, and climb over the truck as carefully as he could. In the twilight darkness cast by the freeway lighting, he was going to have to be extra careful. He didn’t want to fall and break anything out here. Help would never arrive.

Jim glanced at his wristwatch as he jumped off the bike and prepared to climb. The display glowed 20:35. He had made good time, considering the circumstances; helped by a strangely deserted stretch of freeway along the Agoura Hills section of the freeway. The last freeway sign he had passed had indicated that he was only a mile or so from the Greenwich Village turnoff, which put him close to three miles away from his destination.

Simone’s parents lived a few blocks down on El Dorado Drive. If he took the East Janss Road exit, he would be there in an hour or so.

It was when Jim glanced up that he saw the man waiting for him. He looked to be in his twenties, dressed in a business suit that fit his linebacker-sized frame just a little too tightly. The suit was expensive looking but torn in several places along one arm and covered in spots of dirt and oil and blood. The man had fashioned a tourniquet out of his equally expensive looking silk tie and fastened it around his left calf just above a large black stain of dried blood.

The man held a baseball bat.

Jim lowered the bike cautiously from his shoulder as they stared at each other across the ten feet of asphalt that separated them.

Jim broke the silence. “Are you okay, buddy?” he asked with as much concern to his voice as he could muster.

The suit looked hard at Jim, summing him up.

Gauging my threat level, Jim thought

When the man spoke it was in a voice thick with southern syllables. “Give me the bike,” he drawled making the word bike sound more like bark.

Jim shook his head. “Can’t do that. I have to get to my wife. I’d be happy to…” Jim barely had time to duck as the stranger covered the distance between them with lightening speed, savagely swinging the baseball bat through the air that his head had just occupied.

Christ! This guy is going to kill me, Jim thought as he ducked the blow. Well, Duh! Ya’ don’t say, Einstein.

The momentum of the missed strike propelled the stranger forward past Jim. The guy had put all his energy into a one-shot deal to get hold of some transport, he guessed. The assailant now stood panting and gasping from the exertion of the attack, his blood-shot eyes lupine in their wariness of him.

Jim had dropped the bike instinctively when he avoided the incoming bat and now the attacker stood between him and it. He could just leave the bike, give it over to this stranger and avoid anybody getting hurt, but who knew where he would be able to lay his hands on another? Bikes would be like gold dust for as long as the freeways and roads were blocked.

“I don’t want to have to hurt you,” Jim said, and then added “but I will if I have too.”

The suit must have thought this was funny because he grinned insanely, raised the bat to his shoulder, and stepped up to the bike. He spread his feet wide and waited in a stance that clearly said, try it.

The guy easily had fifty pounds on Jim, plus he had a weapon. Of course, it looked like his attacker was injured but he couldn’t be sure how debilitating that might be.

Jim scanned the ground around him searching for anything he might be able to use to defend himself.

The remains of a VW Beetle rested beneath the overturned body of an SUV, its domed roof crushed beyond recognition, its neo-hippy owner now surely nothing more than pulp behind the compacted steering wheel. The Beetle had collided with the upturned truck that blocked most of the lanes but it had been in a skid when it hit because the car had come to rest sideways against the truck, the chrome front bumper torn from one of its mountings by the impact. The bumper lay glinting in the gloom, beckoning to Jim.

Jim took a step sideways. The thug in the suit matched him but didn’t move away from the bike. Certain that he wasn’t going to be suddenly battered Jim backed the few remaining feet to the VW. The suit didn’t move, guarding his prize like a lion who had just stolen a kill from a hyena.

Casting a nervous glance over his shoulder. Jim turned his attention to the bumper. The impact of the crash had torn one of the metal L-brackets holding the bumper to the car’s chassis free, that side now rested loosely against the ground, but the second bracket was still fixed firmly by its welded joint. It was going to take the application of some brute force to separate it.

With a final look over his shoulder to make sure his attacker wasn’t going to jump on the bike and attempt to ride off into the darkness, Jim braced his foot against the hood of the Beetle, grabbed the bumper, and pulled. The already stressed and twisted metal of the mounting squealed and screeched its resistance, but Jim felt the ancient rusted metal give somewhat. He was going to have to twist the joint to get more torque and that meant pushing the bumper upwards and leaving no question in his assailant’s mind that he was trying to obtain a weapon.

Squatting down Jim spread his legs wide for better leverage, took the free end of the fender in his hands, resting it uncomfortably against his shoulder. Pushing from his knees, he wrestled the length of chromed steel towards the sky. As he heaved, he felt the resistance increase until finally, as it reached the one o’clock position, he had to set his feet back a step and lean into the upright piece of metal, his entire body weight now pushing against it. With a squeal that began to increase in frequency the bumper slowly began moving towards its apex until, with a final effort from Jim, the metal fixing snapped.

Jim hurtled forward, his right knee catching the curved hood of the destroyed beetle, momentum sending him sprawling onto his back and the now free bumper clattering and clanging to the ground beside him. Scrambling hastily onto his knees, Jim reached out and hefted the chrome bumper to his chest, testing its weight. Using the remainder of the bracket fixings as handles, he held the bumper in front of him like a staff.

A guttural roar alerted Jim to the oncoming stranger as he charged full force towards Jim, the baseball bat in position for a devastating upwards strike at Jim’s head. Instead, the bat connected with the bumper as Jim thrust it out in front of him. The metal fender rang violently in his hands as the bat smashed into it, the energy of the impact reverberating painfully through his fingers and up through his elbows to his shoulders.

A gasp escaped Jim as pain spiked through his hand.

Dear God, this guy is strong, he thought.

Afraid that his traumatized fingers would drop his only protection, Jim switched his grip from the stubby remains of the fixing brackets and took an overhand grip of the curved chrome of the bumper, exposing his fingers to his assailants bat but assuring his grip.

The suit raised his bat for another attempt, this time an overhead swing. Jim saw the man’s eyes flick to his exposed fingers and instinctively knew that the next strike would target them. He would be no use in a fight once his protection was gone and with his fingers broken or crushed, the fight would be over and he would be at the mercy of this psychopath.

It was now or never, Jim realized, spying his only chance to end this uneven fight. He feinted a blow towards the man’s exposed crotch, and as his attacker instinctively dropped his guard, Jim brought his metal staff around in a powerful sweeping strike to the side of his head. The makeshift weapon sang in Jim’s hands as it connected with a thrumming twang against the attacker’s cheekbone. The man’s eyes glazed over for a second as he staggered back. Unbelievably, the big man regained his senses almost immediately and, with a shake of his bloodied head, began advancing on Jim once more.

Jim smashed the bumper into his head again, this time sending the dazed man to his knees. Still conscious but swaying like a willow in a breeze, he tried to use the bat as a crutch to push himself back to his feet.

What is this guy made of?

Jim hit him once more with all the remaining strength his arms had. This time the man went down and, with a final groan stayed down.

A panting, sweating, Jim Baston kicked the aluminum bat clanking and echoing away into the wreckage of cars. Gasping for breath, he tossed the dented and bloodied VW bumper to the ground, well out of reach of the felled giant.

Jim tentatively reached out two fingers to touch the unconscious man’s neck. Good, there was a pulse. At least he hadn’t killed the idiot. There was a lump of purple broken skin on the man’s forehead and blood trickled from a cut across the bridge of his nose.

Reassured that the disabled man wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon, Jim forced his own battered body over to where his bike waited and gave it a cursory once-over. It looked okay.

What kind of a world lay ahead of him where someone would be willing to beat-in a stranger’s head for a bike?, he wondered.

And with that thought, Jim Baston hefted the bicycle onto his bruised shoulder and began to climb over the ruined truck that lay between him and the remainder of his journey.

Sixteen

Thousand Oaks was oddly untouched by the events of the day. As Jim Baston pedaled his bike onto his ex-wife’s parents street, it struck him how normal it all seemed here. The fires and chaos were distant, no smashed cars littered the road, and no bodies lay bloated in the heat.

The streetlights’ luminescence pushed back the darkness of the road ahead of Jim, and here and there, garden lights buzzing with moths and bugs cast their meager glow over deserted driveways and empty garden paths.

Not one light was visible behind the drawn curtains of the houses lining both sides of the cul-de-sac, but Jim knew people were home, he could see the occasional twitch of a drape or curtain as the occupants of the single-story homes watched him make his way down El Dorado Drive.

Eerily quiet, a sudden sound and blur of movement sent Jim swerving on unsteady wheels out into the middle of the road. He let out an embarrassed laugh when he realized it was just a lawn sprinkler spurting and spluttering into life in a nearby garden. It took all his control not to allow the laughter to disintegrate into tears, his frayed nerves pushed well beyond their braking point by the events of the past few hours.

Thomas and Jessica Shane lived in an alabaster-white bungalow on a quarter acre of landscaped property towards the end of the little street. Jim pulled to a stop outside their home with a squeal of objecting brakes. Resting with one foot on a pedal and the other against the raised curb, he could see that the house was just as he remembered it. Its green lawn so well manicured it looked sprayed into place rather than planted. The drive leading to the two-car garage was spotless, the rose bushes and flower beds glowed in luxurious color accenting the crazy-paved path that led up to their front door.

Jessica Shane had always loved her roses. Her death had left a vacuum in all their lives. When she died, Thomas had been heart-broken but he had taken-on caring for her flowers. He had told Jim in one uncharacteristic moment of vulnerability that it made him feel close to his wife, to be able to continue to do something for her, to continue to raise the flowers she had thought of as her surrogate children.

Jessica had been a truly wonderful woman. When first introduced to her Jim felt an instant rapport with this gentle, caring woman. He could see where Simone got her beauty. When he heard the news of her death back in ’33 it had hit him hard.

Standing on the porch of their home, he could not help but remember the great times they had all shared here before everything went to Hell. Jim counted himself lucky; it wasn’t every man who could truly call his wife’s parents friends.

Thomas had carried on his life. But after his wife’s passing he had always seemed less than whole, uncompleted, and Jim had the impression that life no longer held any sparkle for Thomas Shane. Simone had tried to fill the void but her father had taken her aside one spring day and gently told her that he appreciated her kindness and that he loved her very much but she could not replace the woman he had spent the last thirty-eight years with and that she shouldn’t try. Simone had been upset but Thomas hugged her close knowing that the emptiness he felt was as great for his child as it was for him.

Casting those memories aside, Jim rapped gently on the front door and waited, illuminated in the dull glow of the twin lamps fixed to either side of the entranceway. There was no sound or sign of movement from inside the house and Jim knocked once more, this time a little harder. His hand raised to try one more time; he caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his right eye. The blinds that hung in the front room window had moved, he was sure of it and he turned to face whoever might be watching, stepping a little further into the light so they would have a clearer view of him.

“Thomas. It’s Jim… Jim Baston,” he hissed. His voice barely above a whisper.

The slats of the blinds parted, two fingers pushing them apart. There was a pause while whoever stood on the other side of the window took a good look at him, then the fingers disappeared and Jim heard footsteps coming to the door.

“Step back from the door,” demanded a stern voice.

“Thomas, it’s Jim,” he reiterated.

“I don’t care who the Hell you say you are. Step back from the door.”

Jim did as the voice demanded. Stepping off the porch and back slightly into the shadows. He heard the sound of deadbolts sliding back on the other side of the door. It opened with a slight creak of unoiled hinges.

Thomas Shane stood in the doorway — at least Jim assumed the dark silhouette was Thomas — an efficient looking pistol in his hand, leveled at Jim’s chest.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the figure demanded, the usually gentle mid-western voice now sharp and commanding.

Thomas Shane had been a big man in his prime. He stood six-two and had the build of a professional athlete. When Jim had last seen him he was in his late seventies and time had taken its toll on the man. But, as his ex-father-in-law stepped out of the shadow and into the meager light cast by the exterior lamps, Jim could see that the same strangeness that had returned his youth had also worked its bizarre magic on Simone’s Father.

Here stood a much younger Thomas than the one Jim had last seen all those years ago. All signs of decrepitness had evaporated. Blue eyes peered at him from beneath a full head of gray hair. He was still muscular but had a slight paunch that hung over his belt.

Thomas had been a cop in LA for most of his life; he had a quick intelligence and a sharpness of insight that allowed him to sum up people’s character with a single glance. Jim could feel that intuitive skill now as Thomas’ gaze swept over him.

Jim caught sight of his own hands. They were black with soot and grime, a cut on his left hand — he couldn’t even remember where he had gotten it — had congealed into an ugly looking scab. His clothes he realized were in no better state, dirty and torn, and Jim guessed that his face was just as messed up. He figured he probably looked like a collier who’d just left the coalface.

“Thomas. It’s James,” he said.

Apart from his vehicle’s AI, Jim’s father-in-law was the only other person who called him James. Thomas was a stickler for using full names, he hated anyone calling him Tom, or Tommy or any other contraction of his own name, and he believed in affording others the same courtesy that he demanded. So, from the first day they had met, no matter how often he had hinted that his father-in-law should call him by his preferred moniker, he had remained James.

Thomas took a step forward and scrutinized Jim even more closely. A smile of recognition spread across his face as he closed the gap between them, throwing his arms around him in a fatherly hug.

“Boy, you look like shit,” said the big man. “Come on into the house, let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Is Simone here,” asked Jim as he stepped into the Shane’s home.

Thomas regarded Jim with barely hidden distress before answering. “I had hoped that she was with you when—” he seemed to be searching for the right word “—the miracle happened.”

“No. I found myself in a store. I thought — hoped — that I would find her here.”

Jim knew that his Father-in-law was not an overly religious man. He attended church on all the right holidays, had raised his daughter with a respect for religion but encouraged her to find her own path to God. The use of the word ‘miracle’ did not jive with the horror and cataclysm that he had just experienced on his bike trip.

Thousand Oaks seemed to be an oasis in a sea of destruction; perhaps Thomas had not ventured very far from the house and had not seen the awfulness of the highways or the distant pillars of smoke rising from the burning city of Los Angeles.

Thomas rested his hand reassuringly on Jim’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Simone’s tough. If she’s caught up in all this, she will find a way to get to us.”

“I wish I had your optimism. If you had seen what I have today you might think a little differently,” he said, unable to keep the weariness from his voice.

“Come with me. I need to show you something.” Thomas laid a gentle hand on Jim’s shoulder and led him down the hallway, past the kitchen area and into their comfortable living room.

“Hello Jim, Dear,” said a familiar female voice.

Sitting pensively on her favorite easy chair was Jessica Shane, pale but most definitely alive, despite the fact that she had been dead for the past twelve years.

Seventeen

Jessica Shane was strikingly beautiful. As Jim looked disbelievingly at his resurrected mother-in-law, it struck him just how much she resembled Simone. Same high cheek bones; an oyster-white complexion that needed no blusher or foundation; blond hair streaming to her shoulders, a streak of gray adding an elegant look to her already exquisitely chiseled features. Her soft blue eyes able to delve deeply into the soul of those she observed.

Her hug almost crushed his vertebrae to powder. “But…” he said, “But—”

“I know. I know,” said Jessica, her voice a soothing lullaby as she led a shocked Jim over to the sofa next to her chair. Leaning on the arm of her chair, she grasped Jim’s hands in her own and looked deeply into his eyes.

“I know you must have questions Jim, and I know that you are as confused as we are, so why don’t we just let Thomas explain what happened?” she said gently. “Okay?”

Of all the Kafkaesque events Jim had experienced during his first day in the past, this was the most bizarre, the most personal for him, overwhelming in its emotion. Afraid that if he opened his mouth his brain would simply stall and refuse ever to start again, he contented himself with a simple nod of acquiescence, and Thomas took that as his cue to begin explaining exactly what had happened.

“I was at my brother Jed’s in Miami.” An eddy of emotion rippled beneath the surface of Thomas Shane’s crisp accounting of the couple’s day and the resurrection of his long dead wife. A smile from Jessica allowed him to gather his emotions before continuing.

“He asks me every year, so this year I figured I’d take him up on the invite. The family was all there, we’d seen in the New Year and I was on my way upstairs to bed.”

Thomas paused before continuing. Jim knew he was rerunning that split second before the event through his mind. “Next thing I know, I’m in our back garden; it’s the middle of the damn day and I’ve got the water hose in my hand and I’m watering Jessie’s roses. I always loved to do that, ’cause of that look she’d give me when she saw me doing it. I thought I was dreaming. Thought maybe I’d had a stroke or some mental problem: something snapped inside here,” Jim tapped his forehead with a finger.

“Anyway, I had no idea how I got back home, but the sun was shining and the bees were buzzing and it was too real for it all to be a dream. And then here she comes, like nothing ever happened, like she’d never… never…” His words trailed away to nothing and Jessica reached out her hand, grasping her husband’s hand in her own and giving it a tight squeeze to accompany her reassuring smile.

Thomas squeezed his wife’s hand back and wiped the wetness away from his eyes. “Anyway, here she comes walking down the path towards her roses like she hadn’t been gone more than a minute. I guess that’s all it’s been for her after all, just a minute. She had this confused, odd expression on her face.”

“She just walks up the path and stands in front of me, looking straight into my eyes and I can’t say a damn thing.”

“His mouth was hanging so far open it about touched the ground,” Jessica interjected with a wry smile. “I swear, for a man who has so much to say he’s been pretty damn quiet today.”

Thomas continued as if he hadn’t heard the fun that his wife just poked at him. “Next thing I know my leg is freezing cold and soaking wet from the damn hose; that snapped me out of my dumbness and I just grabbed her.”

“You about broke my back you hugged me so hard you big brute you,” said Jessica throwing a playful punch at her husband’s arm.

“Jessica kept asking me what was wrong, over and over. I couldn’t speak a damn word — mouth kept moving but no sound came out. She was saying that she didn’t remember how she got home. That she might have had a blackout and all I could do was hug her and cry my eyes out like some big old baby.”

Jim’s father-in-law’s voice became sober; “But James, I knew that any second I was going to wake up, that I’d find out this was just a dream. But it’s not James, it’s a miracle.” Thomas’s jaw quivered, on the verge of tears again. “A miracle.”

Jessica took over: “The last thing that I remember before finding myself back at the house was taking the car to do some shopping. It was raining and I stopped at an intersection about to turn into the lot of the Albertson’s out in the village. There was a bang and I remember being jerked against my seatbelt and this… screaming sound. Next thing I know I’m standing in the kitchen peeling carrots and I don’t have a clue how I got there.”

Jim could still remember the Sheriff’s account of the accident that killed Jessica Shane; the driver of an SUV lost control as he approached the lights where Jessica had pulled to a stop. The SUV aquaplaned on the rain drenched surface right into the back of her Toyota with so much force that he slammed Jessica’s smaller car into the center of the intersection. She was hit drivers-side on by an eighteen-wheeler doing fifty plus — at least ten miles over the legal limit the Sheriff had explained — she didn’t stand a chance.

Died instantly, the Sheriff had assured them.

Jim went with Thomas to identify her body. He volunteered to make the identification himself at the morgue but Thomas said that he had to do it, otherwise he would spend the rest of his life never really knowing if it was her or not. The Deputy had already warned Jim that it might be best for him to make the identification rather than the deceased’s husband and he tried his best to persuade Thomas but the older man was having none of it.

He’d escorted his father-in-law to the viewing gallery and the attendant pulled back the sheet covering the corpse on the gurney. Thomas broke down, collapsing into Jim’s arms at the sight of his wife’s decimated body.

Now here she was. Remade. Looking just as she had years before she had died. It truly did seem to be a miracle.

Jim was still too stunned to comment.

Thomas had walked her into the living room, sat her down, poured them both a drink and insisted she finish hers before he sat down himself to explain what had happened. He explained to her about the accident; how she had been gone for so many years and how, every day he had prayed it would be his last. That he would be able to join her, so the pain that her absence left could end — because he loved her, he loved her more than he could ever possibly say.

“I told her that something wonderful had happened. That God had brought her back to me,” said Thomas.

“I don’t know if it’s a miracle or something else,” Jim replied finally finding his voice. “There’s so much death and destruction out there, that I have to believe that this is probably man-made rather than divine intervention.”

“Of course it’s a miracle. James, don’t you understand? Don’t you realize what this means?” said Thomas, a broad smile rising on his face.

Jim shook his head. “What are you getting at?”

Jessica reached out and took his hand: “Jim, if I’m alive then what about all the others who died between now and 2042?”

“What about Lark?” said Thomas.

The realization hit him like a hammer blow to the chest. “Dear God, almighty,” he whispered. “I’ve got to try and find her. What if she’s out there? What if she’s alone?” Jim was instantly on his feet. The panic that overcame him was total and choking. He was going to fail his kid again. She was out there somewhere in the night and he could do nothing to help her.

Jessica was with him in a second. Her arms enfolded him pulling him to her. “It’s okay — Lark’s okay,” she said, the words spoken with such sincerity and certainty that he found himself believing them too. This event was too big, too huge for it not to hold some kind of cosmic meaning. To be just a random act of an uncaring universe beggared belief. The universe could not be so cruel — could it?

“I have to find her,” he said.

“We know, and we are going to help in any way we can but the best thing you can do right now — the only thing you can do — is wait here,” said Jessica, holding him tightly. Her voice was adamant and strong, a lifeline for him to grasp and hold onto, to ease him back to the shore of sanity away from which he was inexorably drifting.

“But what if she’s out there alone? What if she’s running around those streets lost… or worse,” his voice a panicked bleat.

Thomas joined in, laying a reassuring hand on his back: “James, you know she’s with her mother. It’s Saturday, where would they be? You checked the house; you know she wasn’t there. Was her car in the garage?”

Jim thought back to the garage. “No it was empty.”

“Then you know that Simone was not home when this happened. Would she leave Lark on her own in the house? Would she?”

“No.”

“Lark is with her mother and you know that she will do her best to keep her safe. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” was the best answer he could muster.

“What we need to do is stay calm,” Thomas said. “Stay calm and just wait for her to come to us.”

Jim just looked at him. “But what if—” he started to say.

“No ‘what ifs’. They are going to be just fine.”

Jim did not think that his father-in-law sounded convinced.

It felt good to be clean again. Jim hadn’t realized how disgustingly filthy and smelly he was until he’d caught sight of himself in the mirror of the Shane’s entertainment unit. His face looked like it was painted with camouflage, blotches of black and gray, with streaks of white where sweat had dripped. His clothes stank worse than he did and he felt a pang of shame at having spent the last hour in the company of his ex-wife’s parents in such a state of dishevelment. But when he stepped out of the shower, he found a pair of Thomas’s jeans and a fresh tee shirt neatly laid out for him on the guestroom bed. His own clothes had disappeared but he could make out the faint rumble of the washing machine from elsewhere in the house.

Everything feels so normal, he thought.

Catching sight of his rejuvenated body in the mirror hanging on the back of the bedroom door, he reminded himself of just how abnormal his world had actually become. Gone were the wrinkles and gray hair. Back was the muscle tone and, he noticed approvingly, his hairline.

Slipping into the slightly oversized clothes, Jim made his way downstairs.

“Has anybody tried the TV?” Jim asked as he walked back into the living room.

Surprisingly, they had not.

“You know,” said Thomas, “We hadn’t even thought about trying it. The day has been so… earth-shattering.”

The first few channels they surfed were nothing more than movie channels, reruns of old sitcoms, wildlife documentaries, a pre-recorded infomercial for cutlery, and one that just played cartoons.

“Try one of the local stations,” Thomas said. He told Jim the station’s channel number but when the screen flicked over, an unrecognizable picture filled the screen.

“What’s that?” asked Jessica, tilting her head to her shoulder as if that might give her a better idea. “Looks like some sort of fabric.” The screen had filled with what looked to be fur under magnification. As they tried to understand what they were looking at a low, sobbing filtered from the TV’s speakers.

“Is that someone crying?” Jim said.

Faintly, as if from a distance, Jim could hear what sounded like the sorrowful sobbing of a woman. He reached over and turned the volume up and the woman’s weeping filled the room.

“It’s the back of a chair,” said Jessica suddenly after she had switched her head to the other shoulder. “See?

It’s fallen over on its side and I guess the camera must be zoomed in really close… but it’s definitely a chair. You can just make out the back support up there.” She pointed to the top of the screen but her excitement wilted as another wave of mournful weeping filled the room.

It felt to the three of them gathered around the TV as though they were the unwitting witnesses to a terrible tragedy; it was at once fascinating and repulsive.

“The poor woman,” said Jessica after a minute had passed, and then she reached over and changed the channel.

“Are you hungry,” asked Jessica.

Jim hadn’t even given food a thought. At the mention of it, his stomach gave a low grumble. How long had this day been? Jim gave Jessica a look of thanks. Jessica smiled and headed towards the kitchen shouting back over her shoulder “Ham and cheese sandwiches okay for you two boys?”

“Sounds great,” he replied and as she disappeared into the kitchen he took the time to ask Thomas a question: “How you holding up?”

Thomas took just a second to consider it before answering. “I’m afraid,” he said candidly and continued to scan the channels for signs of life.

Eighteen

Jessica was fetching their sandwiches from the kitchen — thick chunks of sourdough bread with what must have been half a pig packed between each slice — into the living room when they finally found a live broadcast.

On the screen a man in his late forties, his graying hair brushed meticulously across his forehead and the hint of a day’s worth of stubble peppering his jaw, sat behind a horseshoe shaped presenters desk with room for another two people on either side of him. The logo of WWN, the World Wide News network fixed prominently to the front of the desk. The man seemed to be talking to someone off camera as he rearranged papers on his desk, although he was obviously speaking no sound came from the TV. The newscaster looked vaguely familiar and it was Jessica who finally identified him.

“Norm Jones?” she said as she handed Jim his plate of meat.

“Right,” said Jim, drawing the word out to twice its length and snapping his fingers in recognition.

Norm Jones had been an anchor with the local Los Angeles WWN affiliate for as far back as Jim could remember. He had retired a few years back (or a multitude of years from now, depending on how you chose to view it). Now here he was, looking tired, looking confused, but the familiar face was a reassuring sign that normality had not completely disappeared off the face of the earth, the newsman had become an anchor in a much higher sense of the word.

“Did you turn the sound off?” Jessica asked.

“Nope,” Jim said. “They must be having technical problems.”

A sudden burst of static from the television was quickly replaced by a strong, sonorous male voice. “—on yet?… Okay… Apparently, you can now hear me.” The presenter seemed to relax a little, some of the stiffness leaving his stress-lined face as he settled back into his chair.

“I have to apologize for the rough construction of this broadcast but as I am sure you are all aware this is not a normal day. We here at WWN are trying to pull together as much information from around the country and the world as we possibly can. Unfortunately, we are operating with limited staff due to the,” he paused searching for the appropriate word, “…event. I must also apologize for my ability to present this segment, as it’s been ten years since I last sat in this chair and I may be a little rusty.

“We have pulled as many news feeds from the network satellites as possible. In summary: This does not appear to be a localized event. From the limited contact we have had with other news networks — and I must stress that it has been very limited — both here in the US and worldwide, they are experiencing similar, and in some cases far worse circumstances to our own. The consensus of opinion seems to be that there is no current explanation for the event but it does seem clear that an extraordinary occurrence has taken place. We have attempted to contact authorities but have received no reply to our calls. If anybody watching this broadcast is able to explain this situation then we would be most happy to hear from you.”

Norm rifled through a pile of papers on his desk until he found one he was looking for.

“In summary, here is what we have learned so far, and I must repeat that all of this is of course unsubstantiated at the moment: The country is in chaos. Emergency services seem to be non-existent; most telecommunications seem to be down, although some areas do appear to have telephone service. There are reports of several large aircraft crashes throughout the state, including several within Los Angeles Airport and its outlying areas. Fires are burning uncontrolled in most parts of the city. Freeways appear to be impassable due to the large number of vehicular accidents; the same applies to most main streets throughout the city.

“We are receiving similar reports from—”

The newscaster stopped mid-sentence, his left hand moving to his ear as if listening to someone whispering to him.

“—and I’m getting new information… yes… that we are about to receive a special feed from the Whitehouse — are we ready? Do we have the feed lined up? Okay — the Whitehouse.”

Replacing the WWN anchor, another image appeared. A lacquered teak lectern, the presidential seal prominently placed on the wooden upright and echoed in a larger form on the wall of the room in the background.

A door opened and a commotion of people entered the room. One man walked to the lectern escorted by two others, their glances at the few press crowded in front and behind the camera as well as their flat-line expressions immediately betrayed them as secret service.

The man at the lectern shuffled a few papers before pulling the microphone closer to his mouth and then looking directly into the camera.

A shock of black hair highlighted a narrow face watched over by carefully manicured eyebrows. Dressed in a black business suit with a blood-red tie, he looked to be in his fifties. A century before, he would have been described as dapper but tonight he looked drawn and gray: haggard. Pale puffed flesh under his eyes and pink tinged conjunctiva striated with blood.

A white caption appeared in bold letters at the bottom of the screen—VICE PRESIDENT NATHANIAL RODERICK.

“My fellow Americans,” Roderick began, staring deep into the lens of the camera. “I must first inform you that President Sarandon is incapacitated and, that I, as Vice President, have been appointed as President Pro Tem until she is able to resume control.” Roderick’s voice carried a certain lofty tone, bordering on arrogant.

“As you are all by now aware, a major event occurred today, the likes of which no one in the annals of history has ever before faced.

“It appears that the United States has suffered some form of preemptive attack; we do not know who the assailant is or why they have carried out this cowardly assault but you must rest assured that we are already performing the necessary tasks to understand the full impact of the situation.

“We do not know if this is a temporary effect or whether it is permanent, but you must have the utmost confidence that the best American minds are now applying themselves to solving this most disastrous of events.

“Just as you, the people of this great nation are experiencing a time of transition and acclimation, so too are we, your elected leaders. We are all moving through a period of conversion brought about by our present dilemma and it is with that information in mind that — for your safety — I am imposing a state of martial law and a curfew between the hours of six p.m. and ten a.m.

“Please, for your own safety, stay in your homes. This situation will be resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I ask that you all be patient.”

He paused before adding, “God bless America.”

The broadcast from the White House faded, replaced once more with the face of Norm Jones, looking even more confused than he had before the broadcast. “Well,” he said to the camera. “Make of that what you will. But it appears that—”

Thomas pressed the off button on the TV remote and the screen went dead cutting the commentary off in mid-sentence.

They talked about the speech into the small hours of the early morning. It was less of a discussion, and more bringing Jessica up to speed on the events after her death.

The original 2017 had been presided over by the first female president. President Sarandon had been an actor who was vehemently anti-war (some said anti-American) during the early part of the 21st century. She had run for office in ’16 and had gone on to serve two full terms, a respected and strong president who did much to fix the negative image created by her predecessor.

The President’s husband, also an actor, had seemed bemused at being the world’s first first-gentleman, but had taken it all in stride. Sarandon had spent her final days out of the limelight, rumored to be suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

President Sarandon’s VP was a different kettle-of-fish altogether. It was well known that a wide political rift separated the President from her running mate, their two offices often finding themselves in conflict.

A graduate from the Bush school of diplomacy, Roderick allegedly opposed President Sarandon’s light-handed approach to politics and non-confrontational attitude to policing the world’s hot spots. He was a closet megalomaniac who was so incensed by Sarandon’s repealing of numerous laws he had personally shepherded through congress, it was rumored he had come close to demanding an impeachment on several occasions.

In an expose after his retirement, he was portrayed as a dangerous man with expansionist ideals, a potential warmonger who had only been kept in check by the powerful personality of President Sarandon. A biographer would later quote one source as saying… not since Machiavelli has politics seen a more dangerous, cunning, and potentially disastrous politician.

“The man was… is crazy, I shudder to think what he’s up to now,” said Thomas.

Of course, there were other complications to the political scene that had not immediately been apparent.

In 2042, the President had been — would be? Could be? — Jerome Faulkner, the second African American president. He was a well liked man, nothing remarkable to his Presidency, but at least he wasn’t interested in forcing ‘American values’ down the throat of the rest of the world, whether they wanted it or not.

He was the duly elected president, but of course, he was not going to actually be elected for many years yet.

“How the hell will they deal with that situation,” Jim asked.

“It’s beside the point,” Thomas said. “How old was he when he was elected? Forty? Forty-five?”

Jim nodded that the figure was close enough and after a pause while he digested what Thomas was getting at, realized his point. Somewhere out there, in Maine if he remembered correctly, the man who would in the future history of the world, be elected president was now eighteen years old.

“Strange times,” said Thomas as he saw the realization spread over Jim’s face. “Strange times indeed.”

It had been a strange day that had moved into a surreal night. Eventually, exhaustion and fatigue flowed over Jim’s body like a wave, and he excused himself.

“Goodnight James,” said Thomas, as Jessica hugged him and whispered in his ear, “In case all of this is gone in the morning.”

Nineteen

Rebecca was not surprised when her parents had informed her in hushed tones that her nightmare had in fact not been a dream. Even now, as she remembered it she fought the urge to throw-up.

Her mother and father, sitting across the breakfast table in the cramped kitchen of their doublewide, must have realized that her thoughts had strayed again because mom reached out and quickly took her daughter’s hand in her own, toppling the bottle of maple syrup that they had just used with their pancake breakfast.

“Are you okay Becky,” she asked, concern stitched across her face.

Rebecca swallowed hard and managed a weak smile. I probably look like a corpse grinning, she thought to herself.

She pushed the images of the glinting knife out of her head and asked her question again, “Please Dad, tell me what happened. I need to know.”

It had been three days since Becky had found herself so suddenly back in her childhood bedroom: three days of utter confusion, not only for her but also for the entire world.

Nobody really knew what was going on — even though the provisional government would have liked everybody to believe that they had some idea — but at least there was some kind of television coverage now. On the first day, there had been virtually nothing, but now the networks were getting their act together and most of the channels that had been nothing but static or automated broadcasts were broadcasting coverage of the event. Telecasts and news reports from around the world showed humanity in utter chaos.

It was odd to contrast the images beaming into the Lacey home to the peaceful almost tranquil oasis of small town Pahrump, Nevada. A little less than sixty miles west of Las Vegas, this hardscrabble town of forty thousand was isolated on all sides by mountain ranges and desert.

There was no airport to speak of, just a private strip that saw the occasional light aircraft flying in or out. There was a hospital that, according to Dr. Weaver who lived a few doors down from Becky and her family, had seen only a few cases on the day of the event;

a couple of heart attacks (one of those turned out to be just a mild case of angina) and a car wreck or two. Amazingly, there were no fatalities and certainly nothing to compare to the devastation that the other metropolitan areas of the U.S. had suffered. Becky had also learned from Doc Weaver that she wasn’t the only resurectee in town. There were others who had ‘passed away’ as the gentle doctor put it, only to find themselves alive again. For some reason unknown to Becky this news relieved a stress she hadn’t known was there until it was gone.

Looking south through the kitchen window of her parents double-wide, past the backyard towards Mount Charleston she could still see the cloud of smoke that had gathered in the sky over Las Vegas.

The city of sin had been hit hard. McCarran International had been devastated and most of the hotels that lined the strip close by had been destroyed when an incoming jet had cart-wheeled through the main terminus and over into the nearest casino. The resulting fire had swept through the town taking most of the classic landmarks and reducing them to ashes and skeletal beams that jutted into the sky, the fire so voracious it had quickly overwhelmed the confused and lost L.V. Fire department.

Then had come three days of her parents avoiding her questions.

Now she pushed the question home, “Mom. Dad. Please? I need to know,” she repeated. Her parents regarded each other across the breakfast table. Finally, after a long moment of speechless communication, a pale Kimberly Lacey nodded faintly to her husband and he turned and explained what had happened to his daughter.

As her father spoke, Rebecca confirmed most of what the cops had pieced together by themselves: the night out with friends, the club where she and her friends met for the evening, talking and laughing. And when the night was over, Rebecca had hailed a cab outside the bar and taken it home to her modest apartment. Her last memory before she found herself immersed in her nightmare had been pushing the key into the lock that would open the security gate that kept out unwanted visitors from the grounds of the apartment building. Everything after that was a confused mess of images and thoughts.

The very last thing she remembered with any clarity was laying on her kitchen table… and the man. And the knife. She remembered the knife.

Her Father filled in the blanks while her mother sat stone-faced, tears slipping down her pale cheeks.

“The police think that he followed you home,” her father said choking back a sob before continuing. “From the autopsy report they think that he hit you with something while you were trying to get through the security gate. They found some of your blood on the ground near the gate and you had a blunt-force trauma to the back of your head.” He reached up and tapped the corresponding spot on the back of his own head.

“The officer from LAPD said that whoever had done this to you had carried you to your room. They thought that he had been watching you for weeks, that it might even be somebody that you knew.”

“I didn’t know him,” Becky interjected, “I saw his face. I didn’t recognize him.”

Becky watched her father take a deep gulp of air and hold it before continuing his account.

“Somebody from the apartment called the police because… because… it was five days before anybody knew you were missing and…” Mr. Lacey scrambled to find the right words, “There were complaints from your neighbors. They thought that maybe the sewers had backed up. When the apartment manager opened up your door, that’s when they found you and called the police.

“That was ten years ago, sweetheart. Not one day has gone by that we haven’t talked about you. We were, are so proud of you.”

“We missed you so much baby. And now you have been brought back,” said Mrs. Lacey reaching out to touch her resurrected daughters cheek. “It’s a miracle,” she added in a tight whisper. “A miracle.”

Rebecca Lacey did not believe that her resurrection was a miracle. Her parents were good people; salt of the earth would have been a descriptive cliché if it were not for the fact that it applied to her parents one-hundred percent.

Her father was a lineman for the local power company; her mom drove one of the school buses that ferried children from the north end of the valley to the high schools in the south. They led a below-average lifestyle on a below-average income.

Bringing up a child was a hardship for anybody, it was doubly so in this small, poor town. But this hard-working couple soon learned that their young daughter was anything but below average.

She had aced her aptitude tests from the first grade up and it wasn’t long before her parents received a call from the school. Informed that their daughter was special, bright beyond her years; the school councilor had recommended that Becky be placed on the academic fast track. It was the councilor’s recommendation that she move from the public school to one that would challenge her intellectually, a private school with personal educators. They recommended a school where her full potential could develop and where the very best teachers would coach her, allowing her nascent intelligence to flourish and grow.

She would receive the best education that money could buy, the councilor had said with a smile.

Her father had quietly informed the councilor that they could not afford to do that but the woman had looked at him sympathetically over the rims of her glasses and said don’t worry about the funding, there were scholarships available for individuals in their financial situation and she would be happy to give them the forms. With their daughter’s, test score averages they would have no problem. Money would not be a consideration.

Rebecca had not wanted to leave her school and her friends. The other children liked her and, unlike most geniuses, she had the social graces to match her intelligence. She had spent many years being brilliant at not showing that she was brilliant. However, even at the age of ten she heard the call of something else: numbers, figures, formula. Mathematics.

While other kids watched MTV and read the umpteenth Harry Potter, she was watching Nova on her local PBS channel and reading Sagan and Hawking, devouring anything by Gian-Carlo Rota and Julian Barbour.

She appreciated mathematics as others loved poetry: she could hear the meter in a constant, feel the rhyme in an integer, and sense the prose hidden in quantum foam. It combined to create a stunning sense of wonder in her, a wonder that never diminished. With the wonder came an awareness of something intangible, of something beneath mathematics something just outside intelligibility that, just as a molecule consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons, made mathematics something more. Gave to it a rhythm and a meaning.

To Rebecca, it was a sense of God.

No formula could express what she was experiencing. Like a woman who lived in a two dimensional world trying to grasp a third new dimension of reality, she did not possess the senses needed to interpret the undercurrent that she felt rippling through each and every equation. Its ineffableness at once frustrated, terrified and excited her.

And now, in this reconstituted world, here it was again, the same sense that something was at work behind the scenes of her life, an undercurrent pulling at her mind again, catching it in its tow and sweeping it out into a sea of uncertainty and mystery.

No. She did not believe that this was a miracle at all.

Twenty

If you didn’t know the path was there, you could easily drive right past it. It was just a dirt track, not even a gravel road, which led through the forest to the lake. Simone had asked Jim several times to get the path paved, but he had steadfastly refused, he liked the fact that the place was off the beaten track — literally. Instead he had agreed to spread gravel the last hundred yards or so to the house so that they wouldn’t track mud inside when the ground was wet.

As Jim turned off the main road and onto the rough dirt track that led to the lakeside cabin, he truly felt that he was leaving his everyday life behind. It was a boundary between work and relaxation, a living fence of birch and oak that separated him from reality.

Safe. Secluded.

Of course, Simone was not with him this time. She most likely had been dead for the past year or so since the Slip — the event had finally gained its own sobriquet as civilization had re-exerted its hold. She and lark were undoubtedly one of the estimated five million people who had lost their lives in the U.S. alone on that day.

As the days had passed with no word from his ex-wife or his daughter, Jim had volunteered for clean-up duty, in the hope that he might find some clue to whether Simone and Lark had survived. With each body that he pulled from the burned out shell of a vehicle, he wondered if it was maybe his Simone or his daughter.

It took eight months to clear the freeways and streets of Los Angeles, to remove the bodies from the cars and trucks and bury them in mass graves. It fell to the operators of the mobile cranes and heavy-lifters to clear the tin-can-corpses of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles from the roads and freeways.

The work had been soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and horrible… but… it was also a test of fire for Jim; a bridge from the old reality to the new and Jim had made his way through it and come out the other side more complete than when he entered.

He pulled his truck in front of the log cabin, half expecting it to be occupied by some down and out or one of the many transients that the Slip had created in its wake.

Instead, he found it empty and just as he remembered it, sitting on the shores of Shadow Lake, the water lapping at the supports of the old wooden dock, their paddleboat bobbing languidly on the waters ebb and flow, just as it always had.

Surrounded by thick woods on all sides save for the lake, they had bought this colonial style log cabin within a year of getting married and escaped to its tranquility every chance they could.

After Lark’s death, it had become his hide-away for a year. It was also his bar and his confessional, but mostly Jim liked to think of it as his pupae where he had entered as a broken, disheartened, self-hating child-killer and emerged as an almost-whole human and critically acknowledged novelist.

Right now, it was just somewhere to be.

Its creosote stained logs looked welcoming and familiar after all the disquiet and horror he had experienced in the months after the Slip. With the smell of sap and dry leaves redolent in the air, he pushed the key into the lock and opened the front door. Finally, he felt at ease

“Home,” he said as he stepped over the threshold to the accompanying Brak-rak-rak of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the surrounding forest.

Dust sheets covered the furniture and the scent of undisturbed air hung heavy in every room. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed patiently.

Well, at least the electricity is on, he thought as he carried his bags into the front room. Tomorrow, he’d need to take a trip down to the store and grab some supplies.

There is an odd emptiness to a house that has been vacant for a long period of time, an echoic air that goes far beyond the empty rooms and silence. It’s temporal, as though the very walls have gone into hibernation, waiting for the owners to return but at the same time, all events that have ever taken place seem frozen and available, as though one could reach out and pluck a single experience from the stillness. Jim felt that melancholia now as he moved from room to room checking the lights and windows, making sure all were working and intact. The place had a stillness that seemed more appropriate for a church than a home.

“Welcome home,” he said to himself.

And at that moment, the phone in the hallway began to ring, demanding his attention.

“Hello?” said Jim, into the phone’s receiver.

“James Baston?” a man’s voice questioned.

“Who is this?”

At the other end of the phone line, the voice paused for a second before continuing. “My name is Doctor Mitchell Lorentz, and I have an offer that, I hope, you will not want to refuse.”