Marked Page 15

  “We came to an understanding,” I told him.

  Whedon walked up to me. “I would like an explanation, Detective Rohan.”

  I’m sure you would.

  “Who were those . . .” Whedon asked. “What were they?”

  I sighed. This was a mess several orders of magnitude beyond what I’d been expecting when my secret finally unraveled.

  “We have another dead body in there,” Jacob added. “One you shot.”

  I shook my head. It was becoming too much. “Look, can we do this somewhere else? It’s a long story, and I don’t know how—”

  I was shocked when Whedon pushed by me and slipped into the open door and took the passenger seat. She looked up at me, “We can have the conversation wherever you want, but we’re having it now.”

  I felt the urge to grab her and tell her to get the hell out of my car, but I restrained myself. Instead, I opened the back door and told Jacob and Ivan to get in.

  I slammed both doors and, as I walked around my car, I had another impulse—to push with my Mark and just abandon everything. I could escape to 1986 and start over—leave my Charger, Jacob, and everything.

  I’m just going to talk to them. It won’t change anything, it’s all done already.

  I pulled open the door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  As I pulled away from the curb, Whedon asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I originally intended to go to my house, but I wasn’t going to do that with Whedon tagging along. It had been hard enough letting Jacob into that part of my life.

  I drove toward downtown. I could drop Whedon back at the station when this was over with.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said. There was a different character to her voice, as if this wasn’t the same woman who’d come to harass us from the Justice Department. Her voice was steady, but very far away, as if she wasn’t completely in the car with us.

  I glanced across at her. She stared intently out the windshield, at the late afternoon traffic down Chagrin Boulevard. Her skin was still a colorless shade of near-terror, and her body language was so tense that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she just spontaneously began screaming.

  I looked back where I was driving, suddenly surprised to discover how petty my irritation with her actually was. Had been. She had been in the right. I had been going around the rules of police procedure to produce the statistics that brought her here. I just wasn’t bending the rules in the way she had expected.

  After what she had just been through, she deserved an explanation.

  “I can explain,” I told her, “but it’s a little hard to believe.”

  “Harder than teleporting zombie cannibals?”

  NINETEEN

  THE DRIVE TO the station was way too short for me to tell the whole story as I knew it. So when I got downtown, I got on I-71 south, toward the airport. The more I spoke, the more words came out, way beyond the thumbnail cosmology that Ivan had granted me—and I was thankful he didn’t interrupt—but I confessed to her about how I had used my Mark to become a trans-universal vigilante. I even started talking about my childhood, and how I could never talk to my parents—my adoptive parents—about this.

  The only thing that stopped my manic confessional was the touch of a corpselike hand along my Mark.

  Oh, shit.

  “What’s the matter?” Whedon asked me.

  “They’re here,” I whispered.

  “Who’s here?” Jacob said from behind me.

  We had just exited the freeway, and I was driving past the airport on the surface streets, intending to turn around at a gas station ahead. But the corpselike touches multiplied, and the traffic ahead of us was slowing to a stop.

  “Who’s here?” Whedon asked, a slightly more intense note to her voice than had been in Jacob’s.

  I slowed the Charger as I rolled toward a sea of brake lights. I saw signs of a commotion up ahead, a possible accident. Then I saw figures moving between the cars, running in our direction.

  I slammed on the brakes with a screech and—not having the space to turn around—shifted the Charger into reverse and backed up, accelerating across the double yellow line. Horns blared at me as a small horde of Shadows ran toward my car, weaving through the ranks of stopped traffic.

  Whedon gripped the dash and stared at the Shadows with widening eyes. “My God.”

  I spun the car around in a move that I’d only ever attempted in an offensive driving course where the other traffic was a rank of orange cones. The rear fishtailed with a screech of burning rubber and the nose of the Charger pivoted to point back toward the freeway. Cars blared horns and swerved to miss us—but the northbound lanes had much lighter traffic than the Shadow-clogged southbound ones.

  I floored it back toward the on-ramp for I-480. As the Charger flew up the on ramp I yelled, “How did they—”

  I never finished the question. A wrecked Ford F150 on its side blocked both lanes of the on ramp. I could just see Shadows emerging from behind the wreck.

  “Fuck!”

  I slammed on the brakes and did something I’d never done behind the wheel of a car.

  As the Charger sped up the ramp toward the underside of the pickup truck, I pushed with my Mark.

  A panic reaction—the jolt rammed through my body hit before I had any time to consider what I was doing.

  The world around the on ramp went blurry, and the Charger flew through the space where the wrecked pickup had been. The sky went dark and, when I’d stopped pushing, a nighttime rain sheeted down across the windshield. I brought the Charger to a skidding stop in the breakdown lane of a near-deserted I-480.

  I gasped, body shaken from the sudden effort. This time it was more than the touch of the Mark, it was a deep visceral fear over what I had attempted. I’d never tried using the Mark from a moving vehicle because, if it worked at all without me moving under my own power, I’d always suspected I would have appeared in the next universe three feet above the road, flying through the air at sixty-five miles per hour, leaving a runaway vehicle behind me. My heart pounded, and I clutched the wheel in a death grip because my body was not convinced that hadn’t happened.

  Whedon hyperventilated next to me, gasping, “What. Was. That?”

  “I . . .” I trailed off. Everything was still sinking in. As the panic receded, I realized that in the few moments I had pushed the Mark, I had gone farther through worlds in a shorter time than I had even during my panicked run into Chaos. It was as if, for a brief moment, I had become the Charger, racing down the road.

  “I can do that?” I finished.

  From the back seat, Ivan said, “A truly powerful Prince can lead an army into—”

  “What was that?” The level tone in Whedon’s voice had cracked completely, the hysteria breaking through in full force. I turned toward her. Not only had her skin become pale and waxy, she had broken out into a sweat. In the sudden darkness, she looked nearly as corpselike as one of the Shadows.

  “It’s what I was telling you.” I tried to put a calm, commanding tone into my voice, even though the magnitude of what I’d just done was freaking me out as well. “I moved us into another—”

  “Why does it hurt?” Her voice was breathless, and her eyes were wide. She looked at me as if I was one of the Shadows about to attack her.

  “Hurt? What’s the matter?” I glanced back at Ivan, but in the shadowed back seat I couldn’t read his expression and he didn’t volunteer anything that might explain what her reaction might mean.

  She grabbed her arm and turned away from me. “Take me back,” she whispered.

  “Your arm?” Jacob asked from the back seat. He leaned over and said, “You’re injured?”

  “I-it’s nothing.” She shook her head.

  I reached over and put a hand on her
shoulder. She winced. “If you’re hurt, you need us to take a look at—”

  She screamed as a figure slammed itself against the passenger window.

  “Shit!” The empty lanes of I-480 were suddenly clogged with converging Shadows. My initial panic, followed by worry over Whedon, had distracted me from the fact that the feeling of the Shadows along my Mark had not gone completely away. I floored the Charger at a cluster of three of them, but they blurred out of existence as my car passed through them.

  “Ivan! How do I get rid of these things?”

  “I don’t know!”

  I rushed down a rainy stretch of I-480, leaving the Shadows behind by the shoulder, but the feeling of the Shadows on my Mark was not receding. Crap, did one of them grab onto my car?

  Ahead, in the westbound lanes, I saw a pair of headlights approaching. They were about a mile away and rushing forward. A moment later, I could also see the yellow lights framing the silhouette of a semi with a double trailer going way too fast for this weather. I was pushing the Charger at nearly ninety myself, so it came up on the left a second or two after I had noticed it.

  I wasn’t completely surprised at what happened because I could feel the Shadows’ grip on my Mark intensify.

  When the semi was barely two hundred yards away from us, it swerved into the median with enough momentum to half destroy the concrete barrier, and half climb over it. The cab kept moving into our lanes, dragging a trailer that started disintegrating and rolling toward us at the same time.

  I skidded to avoid the wreck of the semi tumbling toward us, and if I hadn’t already primed myself to push again with the Mark, we would have been chewed up like a bicycle thrown into the path of a combine.

  My windshield filled with a cascade of tumbling metal that almost kissed the front bumper when it blurred out of existence. I floored the Charger and pushed with my Mark as hard as I could, away from the touch of the Shadows. The world blurred around me, gripped quickly by the white fog of Chaos. I strained hard, everything inside me gripped by the effort, a pulsing throb in me, pulled forward in a nearly unstoppable cascade.

  I barely heard Whedon screaming.

  I drove the Charger, pushing the speedometer toward ninety, pushing myself until I was pulled as tight as a piano wire. My entire body vibrated with the power of the Mark slamming into me, the pressure cascading through me with such intensity that it took me several seconds to realize that the vibrations I felt were resonating through the whole car. I slowed the car down, forcing my awareness outside myself and the throbbing pressure of my Mark.

  The shaking got worse, and I slowed to just under ten miles an hour. I felt no more touches from the Shadows, so I released myself from the Mark and fell back into the world with a gasping shudder as the aftershocks from my effort wracked my body. I held the wheel in a white-knuckled grip as the Charger rolled to a stop in front of the blade of a large bulldozer. I gritted my teeth to keep from groaning.

  The rain and the Shadows were long gone, and daylight streamed down from a cloudless blue sky.

  Whedon sobbed next to me.

  “Are you all right?” Jacob asked.

  “N-No,” Whedon said. “It hurts.”

  I barely felt in control of myself enough to release the wheel and say, “Show me where you’re hurt.”

  She looked worse in the daylight. In addition to the sweat and the white skin, she was shivering. Whatever was wrong, she had all the appearance of someone going into shock. I’d already decided she needed to go to the hospital before she rolled up her sleeve.

  “Oh, God,” Jacob groaned. I didn’t know if he was reacting to the sight, or the smell.

  On Whedon’s left forearm, just short of the elbow, was a bite mark. Two crescent marks where the individual teeth could be just made out. The wound seemed to have eroded the flesh around it, the edges of the wound a blood-tinted white, the depths of it an impenetrable featureless black that stank of rotting meat.

  That would have been bad enough, but black threads traced up and down from the wound, etching the flesh from beneath, and in a few cases erupted through the surface of the skin so the flesh pulled back from a slash of black carved into the skin.

  Like the pattern carved into the flesh of the Shadows.

  Someone pounded on the driver’s side window and I almost jumped out of my own skin. Fortunately, I felt no touch from the Shadows, and when I turned to face the window, I saw a face that bore a reassuringly human expression.

  Even so, the guy looked pissed.

  I rolled down the window, letting in the guy’s speech mid-sentence. “—the fuck you think you’re doing. This area’s restricted, ain’t even a goddamn road here yet. You wanna wreck your shiny new car, or you just trying to get yourself killed?”

  The man was in his late forties, early fifties, wearing mud-spattered overalls and a hard hat. Those could have marked him as a foreman anywhere. However, I couldn’t help but stare at his anachronistic hair style. A pair of almost comically long sideburns emerged from under the scuffed yellow of his hard hat. That, combined with the porn mustache, made it hard to take the guy seriously.

  “Sorry,” I told him, “wrong turn.”

  “You fucking kidding me? Are you stoned? We haven’t built the goddamned on ramp yet.”

  “Just tell us how to get off the—”

  “Fuck that, sister. You staying right there until the cops show to lock up your hippie ass. I’m fucking tired of—”

  I think I muttered, “Sorry” as I shifted the Charger into reverse. It wasn’t an off-road vehicle, and it threw up a sheet of mud and gravel as the rear wheels tried to get a grip on the ground beneath us. It splattered Mr. Porn-stache chest-high as the Charger lurched backward. I didn’t use my Mark again. My body was crying enough, and I had plenty to concentrate on, just keeping control of the Charger.

  More construction crew ran toward us from behind the bulldozer, jumping down from other earth-moving equipment ahead of us.

  Luckily the proto-road was mostly clear behind us—even if it was mostly compacted earth slashing across the landscape. I kept the Charger going backward, craning my neck behind me to navigate.

  I drove that way until we were out of sight of the construction crew, because I didn’t want to bog my car down trying to turn around. I backed until I passed a muddy track that was an obvious construction entrance. I went slowly forward down the trail, avoiding the worst ruts, and passed a white trailer, several parked items of Caterpillar equipment, and stacks of rebar, and stopped in front of a closed chain-link gate. Beyond the fence was a residential neighborhood across the street.

  Whedon groaned next to me.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “We’ll get you to a hospital.” I looked behind me at Jacob. “Can you open that?”

  “Yeah.” He stepped out and ran to the gate.

  In the rearview mirror, I saw the door open on the trailer and three people got out. They all wore hard hats, but theirs were white. Instead of overalls, the one in the lead wore a gray suit and tie. That guy carried a bricklike walkie-talkie.

  I felt a hand on my arm, and I turned to look at Whedon. I could see pleading in her eyes. “Please, d-don’t do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “You drove away from those things. When you do, it hurts. It’s eating into me.”

  She was talking about me using the Mark.

  Did I do this to her?

  I looked into the back and asked Ivan, “Do you know what’s happening to her?”

  He shook his head. “Before this day, I had never even seen a Shadow.”

  “Don’t your legends tell of how to treat a wound by them?”

  “No. In the legend, no one survives contact with them.”

  “So who’s left to record the legend?”

  Ivan didn’t respond.

  The t
rio from the trailer had converged on Jacob, and I returned my attention forward. I found myself bracing to run the gate, but it was the adrenaline speaking. I took a few deep breaths and told myself that the concern right now was getting Whedon to a hospital, and there wasn’t any reason that the construction crew wouldn’t call an ambulance—even if we were stoned trespassing hippies. It took an effort, but I unclenched my fingers from the steering wheel as I watched Jacob talking to the trio of men.

  He gestured at the car a few times, and eventually he showed them his badge. Whatever he told them, it was effective. The guy in the suit started talking on his walkie-talkie and walking back to the trailer. The others went and started opening the gate for us.

  Jacob walked back to the car and got back into the seat behind Whedon. “Okay, we’re good to go.”

  I started rolling forward, through the gate. “What did you tell them?”

  “Police investigation of an exotic car smuggling ring.”

  “What?”

  “You realize the weirdest thing about us is that you’re driving a 2016 Dodge Charger? They started building 480 in the 1970s.”

  “The 70s?” I said, half-disbelieving even though I was recently in 1986. But I only had to drive half a block before the cars made it obvious what era we were in. VW Beetles, first-generation Datsuns, Plymouth muscle cars, and Oldsmobile land yachts. As I drove through the neighborhood bisected by the interstate construction, people with scary 70s hair turned to watch us pass.

  I was getting the kind of looks one would expect driving a Lamborghini through Parma Heights. Exotic car, check.

  “Okay,” I said, “we need to find a hospital.”

  TWENTY

  I PULLED THE Charger into the parking lot outside of St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital circa 1975. I didn’t like taking Whedon to a hospital that was over thirty years out of date, but if my pulling her along with the Mark was worsening things for her, I had no choice. My only consolation was that these doctors would have just as much experience with this as a more contemporary team.