Marked Read online

  I had control though, like a surfer, I could sense and find paths through the shifting Chaos I could drive an 8-cylinder muscle car through. When I concentrated on sliding through the worlds where I wanted to go, I held onto the reality of a solid roadway under the Charger’s tires. Above us, the sky became a pulsing blue-gray twilight while everything fell away around us into the white mists of Chaos.

  But the road remained solid, the one thread of reality knitting together all the worlds we passed through. My confidence rose. As I trembled inside, I gripped the wheel so tight I felt part of the car. I felt the hardness of the road as clearly as I felt Ivan’s touch on my Mark.

  The speedometer hit ninety and stayed there.

  The prolonged drive kept pushing me. Over time, the excitement evolved into discomfort, then began to blossom into pain.

  I had never done this to myself—driven the Mark so hard, so long. As tightly as I held the wheel, I could feel muscles shuddering, and the Mark itself felt scoured raw, and while the surface of my skin felt like a raw open nerve, I couldn’t flinch away from the Mark’s touch. My breath came staccato through clenched teeth, and my eyes watered, and all I wanted was to let go.

  If I didn’t, I was afraid I’d have no choice about it. “We have to stop.”

  I let the indeterminate Chaos around the car collapse into something real and pulled the Charger to the side of a shady macadam country road. I held on until the car came to a complete stop, then I let all the internal barriers go, and everything that had built up crashed over me in an uncontrolled flood. I folded over the wheel and groaned, every muscle in my body shaking as it all hit me.

  I was dimly aware of Jacob’s voice asking if I was all right.

  Yeah, sure, I’m fine.

  I trembled as if I had just suffered a seizure. I pushed myself up from the wheel and said, “I need a break.” I didn’t look at my passengers. I fumbled with the seatbelt, opened the door, and stepped out.

  I had no idea where we were. The road was a tar-bound gravel slash through the woods on either side. The trees were full and green, the afternoon sun shining through the leaves. I walked out, about fifty feet into the trees, and my legs felt so weak that I had to lean against the trunks to keep from toppling over.

  I stood in the middle of the trees and looked up, staring at the sky through the leaves. I felt empty, as if someone had drilled a hole in my life and drained away everything that made me me. I should have been feeling the loss of my old life, fear of the Shadows, some sort of excitement at finally learning something about my Mark. Instead, I was just very tired.

  Jacob’s voice came from behind me. “Dana?”

  I lowered my head and stared at the mulch under my feet.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that for so long.”

  “Does it hurt you?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ll be all right. I just need a break.”

  “I can see that.”

  I licked my lips. “I’m sorry for that display.”

  “Don’t be.” We stood in silence for several moments when he added, “I don’t know exactly how this stuff works, but Ivan says we’re already close to the Empire here.”

  I turned around. “What? How long was I driving?”

  “An hour, give or take.”

  I shook my head. “Even at the speed I was driving . . . It’s at least six hours to DC.”

  Jacob shook his head. “I told you, I don’t really understand how this works, but apparently this . . .” He waved his hand as if he was having trouble with the word. “‘Universe?’” I could hear the quotes he put around the word. “He says it’s something like halfway or two thirds closer to the Empire. I think you impressed him.”

  Made an impression, at least.

  Jacob glanced back to the car. My Charger shone blue through the splatters of mud. At that moment I wouldn’t like anything better than to be back at my townhouse with a garden hose, some rags, and a Sunday afternoon with nothing more urgent to do than make it shine.

  “Anyway,” Jacob said, “We can spend a few hours driving—normal driving—until we get closer to DC. If you’re not up to it, I could drive.”

  “No one else is driving my car,” I told him as I walked back to my Charger.

  * * *

  —

  AS onerous and exhausting as my explosive drive through the universes between the 1975 where we lost Whedon, and wherever here was, I actually found driving at a normal pace, without recourse to the Mark, relaxing. My body had finally run out of adrenaline, and now that there seemed no immediate threat to life, limb, or sanity, I felt as if every muscle in my body was slowly unconstricting.

  The Charger’s Hemi purred even though I had almost literally driven it through hell. The tires crunched across the archaic country road at a more sedate thirty-five. I slowed, because now that the world was static around me, the road wove around, went up and down hills, and I didn’t want to drive any faster than I could see. I couldn’t imagine the levels of pissed I would reach if I’d driven my car into another universe only to hit a deer.

  Beyond that, it was pretty country to drive through. I rolled down the windows to let in the fresh air and fished out my iPhone and put it on the cradle and hit shuffle. The first band to come on was Slipknot.

  Ivan gave me a horrified look and said, “What is that?”

  “Just some traveling music,” I told him. I think I was smiling for the first time today.

  He muttered something in Russian, but I left the music on. The tortured vocals were a perfect match for my day. And it was my car, damn it.

  We rolled by farms, and I saw pastures with horses or cows. In the distance I saw bearded men with broad hats, black pants, and light blue shirts tending the land. We’d passed the third farm, when I realized that I hadn’t seen any modern farm machinery at all.

  I wondered if we were driving around some version of the nineteenth century. As we continued southeast, I passed three or four horse-drawn buggies that would have been familiar to anyone who’d passed through Amish country, though these were lacking the orange reflective triangles on the back. And, almost disastrously, they were driven by horses that seemed unfamiliar with automotive traffic. The first buggy we came to, despite my pulling over as far as I could, caused the horse to spook, roll eyes, and rear, and almost manage to spin around in its harness. Fortunately, the driver was able to gain control, whipping the animal and shouting German harsher than the Korn lyrics growling through my speaker system.

  With the next two, I pulled over and stopped. And both times, my Charger received evil stares. I don’t know if they reacted to my vehicle, my clothing, the music leaking from the car, or just the fact that I was a woman driving two men around.

  I couldn’t have been more out of place if I tried.

  It was another hour before I saw any signs. I drove through miles of more farmland until I came to a T-intersection with two signs, one pointing right to East Palestine, the other pointing left toward Beaver Falls. The road was paved, rather than tar-bound gravel. Since I was pointed south, I took a left toward Beaver Falls.

  Less than a mile down the blacktop I got the first real indication of how different this world was from my own. It was a large sign in black, yellow, and red. The text was bilingual in English and German. The English portion read: “Warning! You are leaving the Amish Zone!”

  I slowed as I approached the sign until I came to a complete stop.

  “Tell me that is not a swastika,” I muttered.

  Neither Jacob nor Ivan obliged me.

  Below the scare text on the sign was a little graphic emblem for some federal agency or other. It was circular and featured an eagle prominently in a seal a little too detailed to be contemporary but streamlined enough to be post Art Deco. The eagle bore a shield th
at was familiar enough in the federal iconography, at least the lower portion with the vertical stripes. The upper portion, though, instead of a collection of stars, bore a circular badge with the Nazi symbol on it.

  I’d always seen the Department of the Interior as a relatively innocuous federal agency. But with that kind of seal, it took on some really ominous overtones.

  “I guess World War II went a little differently here,” Jacob said.

  “World War II?” Ivan said.

  I looked at him and said, “World War II? Nazis? Hitler? Germany—”

  Ivan just gave me a blank look.

  “—and I guess you never had a World War I.” Not by that name, anyway.

  Despite my reservations, I started the Charger again and began driving down the blacktop away from the Amish reservation. The small road fed into another road, and I finally saw other vehicle traffic. Until I merged, I could still pretend that I was driving in some remote corner of the Pennsylvania I knew.

  Even with light traffic, I couldn’t pretend anymore. If anything, my Charger was more out of place along this stretch of highway than it had been in the midst of the Amish. The four-lane highway was the province of truck after truck, and all of them seemed to have been built in the forties at the latest. The diesel-belching cabs pulled trailers of every description—and not one trailer gave any hint of its contents. Like railroad cars, there were only logos for freight lines and cryptic serial numbers. I didn’t realize how much a part of the normal roadway landscape the ads on the side of semitrailers actually were, until they were gone.

  Even though the trucks were all different makes and models, and the trailers were various colors, the fact that the sides were mostly blank gave everything an ominously uniform mechanistic feel.

  At least the road was in decent shape, so I could make good time weaving past the trucks. The signage was strange looking, but it directed me toward the Pennsylvania Autobahn, where I got to safely open up the Hemi and make up the time I lost driving around the Amish.

  Along the Autobahn were billboards showing images that wouldn’t have been out of place in any totalitarian state of the twentieth century. Idealized workers labored in the soil, or in the factory, or in the office. Slogans hovered over the heroic portraits, things like “The right to earn enough” and “The right to a decent home” and “The right to a good education,” and—disturbingly when I thought about it—each bore the legend beneath them: Out of Many, One: The National Progressive Party USA.

  “So we lost the war?” I whispered as we passed one of the billboards where smiling white women happily tended a massive hunk of textile machinery that was busy weaving a recognizable American flag.

  “I don’t think so,” Jacob said as we passed it.

  “It looks like we lost.”

  “Not the war,” Jacob said. “The Germans, for all their military buildup, couldn’t crack England, or push very far into Russia. There would be no way they could take the US by force—with an ocean in the way.”

  “There are swastikas on our road signs.”

  “By force,” Jacob said. “Before the war there were plenty of folks who thought the Fascists and the Nazis had good ideas how to handle the economy. Look at these signs—those aren’t Nazi slogans. They’re lifted from FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.”

  Ivan shook his head. “These details do not matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter that Nazis won?” I snapped.

  “This is just one world that’s solidified out of boiling Chaos. It will vanish back into Chaos when we leave.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around that. “Hundreds of millions of people are under some totalitarian regime, and it doesn’t matter?”

  “They’re Stationary,” Ivan said, as if that could explain his disinterest.

  I wanted to believe that he just wasn’t aware of the particular evil Nazism was. He was from an Empire that grew out of the Napoleonic era, far removed from the genocidal impulses of the twentieth century.

  But he Walked through worlds like this. That was his job. He was just as likely to have seen things worse than the history of my own universe.

  I was about to argue that the people trapped in this world were just as important as the people in my world or in the Empire, when the sound of a siren cut through our conversation.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing?” Ivan asked.

  I hadn’t even realized that I was in the process of pulling over until he said something. Reflex, I guess. However, something in his tone irritated me. “That’s a cop,” I said. “I’m pulling over like a good little citizen.”

  “You can push the car—”

  I cut him off. “When I’m ready, Ivan. I’ve had enough of jumping into your Chaos without any preparation.”

  “Is this a good idea?” Jacob asked. “We don’t know anything about this place.”

  I pulled the Charger to a stop beneath a billboard that showed heroic portraits from the branches of the military—though the Air Force seemed conspicuously absent. Below the soldier, sailor, and marine were smaller, more human-sized portraits of a policeman, a fireman, and a doctor. “Security abroad. Security at home,” went the motto on this billboard.

  Jacob, I already know too much about this place.

  The police car behind us was black and white, with a dome light on top the size of a bowling ball. It looked like a Ford from the 1950s, though it was a 50s where automotive design had sanded off all the frills and unnecessary details. The side panels were smooth metal, and any little flourishes or chrome accents were gone, until it was little more than a functional brick.

  It made sense in a police car, but after seeing all those trucks, I thought that the design I saw probably went beyond just police cars.

  The police car pulled up behind me, giant flasher going, and the driver got out. He started walking slowly up toward us on the driver’s side. The uniform he wore resembled a paramilitary outfit from South Africa circa 1965 more than it did the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol circa 1950-something. All of it black. Black fabric, black leather, shiny black boots, black sunglasses clipped to his breast pocket, and matte black grip for a machine pistol sticking out of the holster on his hip.

  Ivan turned and started at the approaching cop and started muttering unpleasant Russian.

  I flexed my hands on the wheel. The engine still purred as I watched the officer walk up behind the Charger. He was giving my car the once-over, I could see the kind of combination of confusion and wariness that you never want to see on the face of someone with a gun. His hand went to his holster.

  Great.

  “Dana,” Jacob said.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  The cop straightened up and started to walk up along the driver’s side. I eased my foot off the brake and allowed the Charger to roll quietly forward at idle speed. As the cop jumped back, drawing his weapon, I gave a small push with my Mark, and he vanished. It was a short jolt, a less than gentle friction against a part of myself already rubbed raw.

  I rolled to a stop again, under a nighttime sky of stars and a full moon. The highway still sprawled empty alongside us, but I noticed the billboard was gone.

  Also gone was the tension I’d felt rising in the car. I could hear Jacob exhale slowly, as if he’d been holding his breath.

  I looked over at Ivan and said, “I pulled over because I didn’t want to do that at 70 miles per hour. I’m still feeling the effort from before.”

  “Apologies, my Lady.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “accepted.”

  I pulled out onto the road again.

  * * *

  —

  THE universe hopping had completely destroyed my sense of time. I felt as if I had been awake for days. I checked my watch, and it was only about fourteen hours since I had woken up this morning. Less than a day s
ince Jacob had stormed into my apartment and everything started disintegrating around me.

  The Mark throbbed on my back, a raw pulse reminding me that I had never used it so hard, or for so long.

  I’d even lost track of how long I’d been driving. It had been long enough. “We need to stop,” I said, “I need some sleep.”

  Jacob yawned. “You want me to spot you at the wheel?”

  “Still trying to drive my car, huh?”

  “No,” Ivan said.

  I looked at him and said, “That’s presumptuous. This is my car.”

  “And you need to drive in the event we must avoid some danger.”

  Yeah—

  “I guess you have a point,” Jacob said. “I guess you can’t drive it like she does, can you?”

  It was a not so subtle dig against Ivan, and from his expression, Ivan felt it. Whatever deference he gave me due to status, he was still someone who resented being outperformed by a woman.

  This was not going to go well.

  “We are all going to stop and get some rest. I think we’ve put more than enough distance between us and the Shadows.”

  Ivan frowned. “We will not be safe until we’re back in the Empire.”

  “And I’m not chancing putting my car in a ditch.”

  “So,” Jacob asked, “you’re going to start looking for a Day’s Inn?”

  Yeah, there was that. I could pull the Charger over somewhere, but as much as I loved my car, I wasn’t up to sleeping in it. Also, where I was driving now was only a few steps removed from the Fascist police state we’d been pulled over in. Not the place to just randomly find a place to crash for the night.

  Nighttime Pennsylvania slid by us, dark and somewhat ominous.