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 one of the vehicles’ license plate. Battered and dirty, torn from its fastening on the rear of one of the cars, the white background and blue California state name was still clearly visible.
Kneeling down Jim picked up the piece of twisted metal and examined it as though he held some ancient scroll or religious relic, as though it held the key to his very existence. In a way he supposed it did hold an answer of sorts. Here he was wondering where he was when the solution was all around him, fastened to the hundreds of cars and trucks left in the mall’s parking lot, 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 vehicles he knew where he was. There were a smattering of out of state license plates — Nevada and Washington, even 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 stretching out above him, he would hazard a guess and narrow it down to Southern California.
The sun was past its zenith and easing toward the western horizon across the cloudless canvass of the sky. But in the distance, beyond the rows of waiting cars, a 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 a bountiful honey-pot. But there was nothing in the air. Nothing on the ground.
A memory began to tug at his mind and a sense of déjà vu 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 had still lived in California; when they had still lived out in the San Fernando Valley. There was a great little Italian restaurant he and Simone would eat at and a Cineplex they used to visit with… Lark.
His eyes dropped to ground level again and he began to walk towards the low brick wall bordering the building, hedging in a bed of sad flowers that looked wilted and dry under the sweltering sun.
From the corner of his eye, Jim caught a glimpse of movement, his head turned quickly to focus at what had caught 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 door of the mall’s entrance. The face that stared back at him from the door’s mirrored surface was not that of the old man Jim had become.
It was the face of a man in his late thirties.
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 synthahol in his system or jacked-up on the latest designer drug, had forgotten to turn on their car’s AI to get them home and had wound-up smashed into the support of a bridge. It had spread both their car and the drunk driver over eight lanes of the highway. The tailback had stretched all the way back toward Vegas for thirty miles and cost him three hours of his time. He had celebrated New Year sitting in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler.
After that, Byron had not bothered hurrying; he knew the time was passed for him to find anybody suitable for his purposes that night.
But that was all okay. Everything happened for a reason, after all. And so, he had contented himself with abiding by the speed limit and tried not to dwell on the missed opportunity.
He understood, he was protected.
And then suddenly… this.
Night had been substituted for blinding daylight and blue sky. The sparse industrialized outskirts of Los Angeles, shrouded in the comforting shadow of darkness, replaced by the urban sprawl of… where? He had no idea.
Cars were everywhere. His confusion was 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 spinning in all directions by others behind them who could not react quickly enough to the wall of metal 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, then cartwheeled 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, attempting 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, there were too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.