Nathan chuckled.
The floor indicator counted down from three to two.
My hands were full, and I didn’t dare let go of anything I had. Nathan had already dropped his suitcase, and the mere fact that he would prioritize my dog—our dog—over the only personal possessions he had been able to save made me even more certain that marrying him was the right course of action. He didn’t care that I was a tapeworm in a human skin, but he cared about proper leash etiquette. I was never going to find a more perfect man.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
The counter reached one with a soft “ding,” and the elevator doors opened to reveal an anticlimactically empty lobby. I blinked, unable to believe what my eyes were seeing. Only Minnie tugging on the leash as she eagerly tried to pull me out of the elevator to the walkies she assumed were waiting for her snapped me out of my fugue.
“Run,” said Nathan, stuffing the knife back into his waistband and grabbing his previously discarded suitcase.
We ran.
The street outside the apartment building was eerily deserted, as if all of San Francisco had suddenly realized they had better things to do than their afternoon commute. Two people, both bloody, running with suitcases and dogs out of a private building and into an equally private parking lot, should have attracted some attention of the police persuasion. We saw no one, and if anyone saw us, they didn’t bother contacting the authorities—or maybe they did, and the systems had already reached the point of overload. That was a question that would never be answered, because there wasn’t time to stop and ask, and there were more important things for us to do. Like escaping the prison that San Francisco was about to become.
We threw our suitcases into the trunk, placing the terrarium with only slightly more care, and loaded the excited, overstimulated dogs into the backseat before getting into the front. Nathan waited for me to buckle myself in before he hit the gas, but only barely. For once, my phobias were going to have to take second place on the list of priorities, and even as I swallowed the rising tide of panic—and the rising bile in my throat—I agreed with this decision. I could have hysterics when we got out of this.
The drums were back in my ears, pounding steadily and reassuringly. I wondered what my tendency to freak out in cars meant for my “Sal passes out before the chemicals can make her panic” theory, and decided that since this particular strain of panic was psychological, not triggered by physiological reactions, it ran according to a different set of rules, even though the actual biochemistry probably wasn’t all that different. This question kept me occupied for almost six blocks, which made it worth the contemplation. Anything to distract me from the way that Nathan was driving.
Then I glanced up, and frowned as I recognized the neighborhood around us. “Nathan, where are you going? This isn’t the way to the Bay Bridge.”
“That’s because we’re taking another route,” he said. “There were too many sleepwalkers there, and that was hours ago. By now the area has either completely devolved into chaos, or the authorities have it locked down. We’d be lucky if they let us onto the bridge at all. If we were particularly unlucky, they’d take one look at us and haul us off for medical testing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t escape from that apartment building just so I could go into quarantine.”
“I don’t want that either,” I assured him. “So where are we going?”
“Down the coast to the San Mateo Bridge. It’s going to be a longer drive, and I’m really sorry about that. I should be able to slow down once we’re past the airport.”
I forced myself to nod as if I was okay with this plan, as if it didn’t make me want to fling myself screaming from the car. “I may try to sleep, if that’s all right with you. I don’t know if I can, but it would give me something else to focus on.”
The corner of Nathan’s mouth that I could see twisted downward in obvious displeasure. “If you really need to, okay. Just, I may wake you up if your breathing seems shallow, all right? I don’t know how much blood you lost back there, but between that and the shocks you’ve had today, I want to keep an eye on you.”
“All right,” I agreed, and closed my eyes.
The San Francisco Bay Area sounds like it should be small, cozy even, the sort of place you can see in a day if you really enjoy spending time in a car. But just like San Francisco itself is deceptively small, the Bay Area is deceptively large. It’s too big for any one transit system, bridge, or highway to accommodate, and the only way someone could see the whole thing in a single day would be to start at midnight and never stop the car. Twenty-four hours might be enough time to drive through all the major cities, as long as you were quick and not overly concerned with actually seeing anything.
My car issues and reliance on buses and BART trains meant I was mostly familiar with San Francisco proper, and some parts of the East Bay—the ones with good farmer’s markets or interesting local attractions, like Solano Avenue and their annual street fair, or the big animal shelter out in Oakland. Caltrain ran between San Francisco and the South Bay, but since I’d never had a pressing reason to spend time down there, I really didn’t know much about the geography beyond “every time they try to put in a BART extension, San Jose comes up with another way to block it.” I got the feeling the residents of Silicon Valley didn’t like being lumped into the San Francisco family of cities, and the feeling was pretty much mutual.
Most California biotech had started in Silicon Valley, eschewing San Francisco’s high rents and prohibitive restrictions on keeping livestock. But money, as they say, talks, and the biotech industry didn’t want to spend forever in the shadow of the computer revolution. Bit by bit the big firms had oozed their way into the seaside communities, setting up shop in Santa Cruz, Monterey, and yes, San Francisco, home of SymboGen, the biggest biotech monster of them all. Dr. Banks had tried to explain the reasoning to me a few times, focusing on the substantial hydroelectric potential of the Pacific Ocean, as well as the availability of marine biomass. He’d dodged my questions about overfishing and conservation, responding to them with one of those warm, paternal smiles that always sent shivers running up and down my spine.
“Besides, Sally, an ocean view says you’ve got the money to afford it, and that makes investors feel better about opening their wallets for you. The more money we have, the better the care we’ll be able to provide—now, and for the rest of your life. It’s a win-win situation, don’t you think?”
Those had been his exact words. As I sank down into the darkness behind my eyelids, trying to focus on the drums pounding in my ears, I wondered what he was saying now. Did he still think the ocean view was worth it when it came with geographic isolation and possible captivity in a city that was about to become a living hell?
I didn’t know, and there was no way for me to ask him.
The drums were erratic at first—soothing, but irregular, thanks to my lingering upset over Nathan’s driving. They smoothed out as I sank deeper into my own mind, retreating down into the hot warm dark that was the first thing I remembered. My old therapist, Dr. Morrison, used to tell me that the hot warm dark was a representation of the womb, a result of my damaged psyche trying to regress to a time when it experienced absolute safety. He’d been very, very wrong, but he’d been right in a way, too, because he’d been claiming that I was trying to go back to a simpler time, and well…