“Ma’am, I—”
Skylar grabbed his hand and raised her sunglasses.
“Thomas, please.”
He stared at her for a moment, considering his answer, and then turned back to the woman.
“Get in. Do it fast.”
Skylar opened the door and used a lever beneath the seat to scoot it forward. The woman lifted her daughter into the back and climbed in behind her.
Other people were approaching. Skylar fell into her seat and shut the door.
“Excuse me,” a woman cried out. “Excuse me! Can you take, me, too? Please?”
Thomas hit the accelerator and the car shot forward.
“Asshole!” the woman yelled.
“We can’t take everyone,” Thomas muttered.
“Thank you,” the woman said from the back seat. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s up on the right,” the woman said after they’d been driving for a moment. “We’re in Grayhawk on Bruschetta Drive. Do you know where that is?”
“No. Just tell me when to turn.”
The friendly and accommodating Thomas Skylar had met at the airport was noticeably absent since the pulse. But honestly she had no idea who Thomas was or what he was really like. Everything she knew about him she’d gleaned from the trades, from his scripts, from a feature in Entertainment Weekly. He’d become a Hollywood darling after the success of Thomas World, which was one of those cross-cultural juggernauts that pulled viewers from nearly every demographic. On its surface the film was science fiction, following a man whose life turns out to exist in a computer-simulated world of his own creation, but at heart it was a love story. And the film had come armed with a built-in marketing gimmick, because Thomas the protagonist was essentially the screenwriter Thomas. This blending of worlds caused fans of the movie to wonder just how much of its story was true, eventually spawning a subreddit dedicated to tracking down Sophia, the unrequited love from his college years, as well as his ex-wife, Gloria. After the divorce, Thomas had fallen into depression, only to rise from the ashes of his failed life by selling his story to a major Hollywood producer. And when his next project sold for twice that of the first, he became the industry’s hottest screenwriter.
Considering the struggles Thomas had overcome, she expected him to demonstrate a little more empathy for the less fortunate around them. Instead, the appearance of the new star had turned him surly and selfish.
“What’s your name, honey?” Skylar said, turning to face the little girl.
After a moment of eye contact, the girl wiped tears from her cheeks and turned away.
“Come on, darling,” said the mom. “It’s okay.”
“Hey,” Skylar said to her, “did you ever see the show ‘Jeffrey’s Special Friends’ on Nickelodeon?”
The girl was still ignoring her, or pretending to, but recognition flickered in her guarded eyes.
“Do you remember Milou? The girl who made friends with the tiny people in her dollhouse?”
Now the little girl looked up again. Skylar pushed her sunglasses back and smiled.
“So, do you recognize me?”
The girl flashed a brilliant smile.
“Oh my gosh! You’re Milou! What are you doing here?”
“Well, honey, I’m an actress. Milou is a character I used to play. I came to Dallas to talk to Thomas, this guy next to me. He writes movies.” Skylar had learned about Thomas’ new project three months earlier. By the time she called her agent, she’d already been placed on the short list of possible leads, and after some negotiation and two weeks of waiting became attached to the project. That was when she requested an in-person meeting with the screenwriter. It was an unusual request and she expected Thomas to understand this.
For a short while, after her first breakout film, Skylar had relished the luxury of being universally desired, and this had led her to date a variety of actors. Intellectually she was drawn to gaunt men who didn’t shave much and who looked for projects outside the Hollywood bubble. With these guys she never wanted for attention or intellectual stimulation, but there was a hollowness to her attraction for them, a missing sense of security and sexual satiety that she fulfilled by dating another kind of man—less thoughtful, more clean-shaven, perfectly-groomed stars of thrillers and action-oriented pictures who considered the term “art film” an oxymoron. And when she finally found someone who embodied both archetypes, she impulse-married him after two months of dating. Skylar and Roark had been mocked by celebrity magazines and cable entertainment programs and late-night talk show hosts (Us Weekly had bestowed them with the portmanteau “Skylark”) but she hadn’t minded because she knew exactly what she was doing. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman sitting on $75 million in career earnings. Her life bore no resemblance to reality the way most humans understood it, and this made her feel obligated to behave in absurd ways. Like run off to Milan where she married Roark in a ten-minute ceremony. Like celebrating their nuptials with ring finger tattoos followed by cinematic sex in a dark alley amidst the pouring rain. It was no surprise the marriage survived only two years, but Skylar was caught off guard by how depressed she’d been over the divorce. Which was why, when news of The Pulse had come along (just three months after Roark retrieved the last of his things from the house in Beverly Hills) she jumped at the chance to star in the film.
Skylar had flown to Dallas to discover which qualities the real Thomas shared with Thomas the screenwriter. Thomas the screenwriter adored women, and he believed in the power of romantic love even in a social media world where relationships were often untraditional. But now her plan was pointless. Now, the world felt like it was ending and her reason for coming here seemed ridiculous.
Except it was also the only reason she was alive.
“You’re Skylar Stover,” the girl’s mother said in a small voice. “My name is Chanda. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you before. I was so freaked out about the car and having to walk home that I didn’t really look at you.”
Skylar smiled awkwardly. She looked at the little girl again.
“I still don’t know your name.”
“It’s Amanda. Well, Louise if you include my middle name.”
“Pleased to meet you, Amanda Louise. I’m Skylar Inez.”
“Inez is your middle name?”
“Yes, ma’am. I have one just like you.”
When Amanda smiled again, Skylar’s heart ached. What would happen to this girl and her mom after Thomas dropped them off?
“Where should I turn?” he asked.
“Up here on Grayhawk. Make a right and a right and then a left. I’ll show you.”
Amanda was still smiling broadly and sneaking furtive glances at Skylar, but Chanda looked like she might throw up.
“So what are we supposed to do? I mean when we get home? What are y’all going to do?”
“I just flew in from New York,” Skylar said. “I landed twenty minutes before this happened. We barely got out of the airport.”
“I can’t believe it,” Chanda said. “I was in my car when it stopped working. Just stopped. I thought it was something with the alternator again, ‘cause I only had that worked on three weeks ago. But then I looked around and saw all the cars were stopped. Pretty soon people were getting out and walking around, looking confused, and that’s when we saw the light in the sky. We all knew it came from that, but no one knew what it was. Some guy said aliens. He said a spaceship could look just like that, a point of light, and maybe they’re launching an attack, killing all our cars and power so we can’t fight back.”