Thin Air Page 0,68

car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference. Past the hood, the road glimmered flat black, sparking with little explosions of light-tiny creatures, maybe, living and dying in their own little dramas?-and in the distance the sky was a rolling, strange landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks. More like fluid than air. The orange was pushing its way through. I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was some kind of warm front, and it was creating all kinds of swirls and eddies and muted flashing chains of energy. Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water.

I'd gotten so engrossed in the strange view that I'd backed off on speed. Eamon growled in frustration. "Are we on a sightseeing tour, pet, or do you actually want to get there?" he snapped. I jammed the accelerator down and checked the rearview mirror. It made me light-headed to look at the world this way, but it was weirdly compelling. The van behind me looked like a scarred battlewagon. Whoever was driving that thing had an intimate knowledge of being in the thick of things. I couldn't get more than a shadowy glimpse of the interior.

Sarah sat up and yawned, and I nearly yelped. In Oversight she looked horribly distorted-puffy, sick, surrounded by a flickering black cloud edged in red.

I didn't dare look at Eamon. Some things I just didn't want to know.

I blinked, and the visions were gone. It was just a road, and those were just cars, and in the mirror my sister looked grumpy, tired, and ill. "I need a bathroom," she said.

"You'll have to hold it," Eamon said. "Nothing out here, love. Nothing but sand and things that sting."

He wasn't wrong. We'd taken 372 out of Pahrump, and although there was some traffic, there were no towns. A few clusters of sun-rotted buildings, but nothing that deserved the name of town. We'd seen one Nevada state trooper cruising slowly in the opposite direction, but I'd held our speed to just under the legal limit. No sense in tempting fate, when fate included jail time and possibly even a death sentence.

Clouds boiled up in the west by the time we'd crossed the border into California. Sarah had whined periodically about a need for bathroom, water, and food; I felt the same needs, but I knew better than to encourage her. We raided the polyunsaturated goodness of the snack aisle of a Quik Stop on the outskirts of Tecopa, which was more or less the last call for calories, gas, and restroom facilities.

Night closed in early, and with it came rain. Blinding, silvery waves of it, glittering in the car's headlights like a downpour of diamonds. In a strange way it felt comforting. I've done this before, I thought. I could sense that, although I couldn't really touch the memory of it. I could sense the energy up there in the sky, feel it rippling through me in ways that I couldn't begin to understand or explain. It was soothing.

Eamon fell asleep. I kept driving.

And the white van stayed in the rearview mirror all night.

Ever driven all night through a rainstorm?

Tiring.

I stopped the car about dawn, or what would have been dawn if the sun had been able to pierce the cloud cover, and switched places with Eamon. We ate convenience store food, drank stale coffee, and after a while I dropped off to sleep, or at least an uneasy approximation of it, lulled by the steady drum of raindrops on the roof of the car.

I dreamed there was something staring at me from outside of the car window, something that looked like me but wasn't me, something with my smile and eyes as black and empty as space. I can see you, she mouthed, and grinned with razor-edged teeth. You can't run. You don't belong here. I woke up feeling sick and afraid and lost, and it didn't get any better when reality set in. I was sick and afraid and lost. I couldn't trust Eamon. I couldn't trust my sister. And I had no way of contacting anyone who might have had my best interests at heart.

Sometimes you've got to save yourself, I told myself. It didn't make me any less afraid, but I did feel a significant improvement in my ability to keep a stiff upper lip about it.

"Where are we?" I asked. We were in the burbs of a major metropolitan area, and the landscape