Zack Trillinger had earned enough screaming condemnation in his life to know that his wisecracks weren’t always appreciated. His mother had called it a “cheek problem.” He couldn’t help himself. Serious people brought out the Bugs Bunny in him, and no amount of blowback could get him to temper his snark. On a day like today, when taxis flew through the air and actresses moved at the speed of missiles, it seemed especially important to embrace the scathing absurdity of the universe, no matter who it bothered.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t prepared for the wrath of Amanda Given, a woman who was uptight even on good days, and who was still reeling from the white-specked lunacy on her skin. It took only twenty-nine seconds of mutual acquaintance for her hand problem to meet his cheek problem. She slapped him hard enough to turn his whole body.
“You shut your mouth,” she hissed, her voice wavering between fury and tears. “I don’t need that from you. You hear me?”
Shell-shocked, Zack held his red and stinging face. “Okay.”
“I don’t need that.”
“I understand.”
“Not today.”
“I know,” he said. “It was a bad joke. It was in poor taste. I’m sorry.”
The moment Erin and Beatrice left him alone with his three fellow refugees, Zack had finally revealed his name. He’d introduced himself to them one by one, signing each handshake with an appropriately stupid gag, a half witticism. Upon hearing David’s accent, he said. “G’day, mate.” To Mia, he proposed that OMGWTF?! should be their new default greeting.
With Amanda, his first impulse was to offer some wordplay bouquet about how she looked pretty intense and intensely pretty, but then bashfully nixed the idea. The moment he spotted her golden cross necklace, his comedy writers jumped to plan B.
“Where’s your messiah now?” he’d brayed, in a passable Edward G. Robinson impression.
Before either of them knew what was happening, her right hand sprung like a cobra and struck him. Amanda didn’t need to see the gaping horror on Mia’s face to know that she’d overreacted. Worse, she realized she might have infected Zack with whatever disease she now carried.
David rose from his chair and raised his palms in nervous diplomacy. “Okay, look, we’re all in a state of disarray right now . . .”
“South California,” Zack uttered.
“What?”
Zack resumed his stance in the doorway, hugging his sketchbook with vacant anguish. “We’re in the state of South California. It split in 1940 when the population got too big for Senate representation. They cut the line right below San Jose. I learned this downtown, in a bookstore called Scribbles.”
When Erin Salgado had traced the final signal to Zack, he’d been standing in the reference section, eliciting curious stares from his fellow browsers. It was odd enough to see a grown man gawk in stupor at the pages of a children’s atlas, but this man wore a gaping tear on his left shoulder and a woman’s handbag on his right. Both the bag and the tear were the personal effects of one Hannah Given.
“Zack!”
The shout came from the hallway. Zack turned around just in time to feel wet hair, soft flesh, and terry cloth pressed against him.
He awkwardly returned Hannah’s hug. “Hey, there you are. Speedy McLeave-a-Guy. You know, I’m used to women running away from me, but not at ninety miles an hour.”
She pulled away from him. “What are you talking about?”
Amanda blinked at them in bafflement. “Wait. How do you two know each other?”
“This is the guy I was telling you about. We met at the marina.” Hannah turned back to Zack. “What do you mean ninety miles an hour?”
“You don’t remember what happened?”
“I remember everything going all blue and super-slow.”
“No, you went all red and super-fast. You buzzed around the bench like a hornet on crack, talking so quickly I couldn’t understand you. You ripped my sleeve, then ran away. And I don’t mean Benny Hill speed. I mean you were a freaking blur.” He eyed her sling. “What happened? Did you break your arm?”
“No.” Hannah shook her head, dumbfounded. “That can’t be right. That’s not possible.”
“Yeah, that was the consensus at the marina.”
David matched Hannah’s befuddled look. “Forgive me, Zack, but even after everything that’s happened today, I have a hard time accepting what you’re saying.”
Zack shut the parlor door, then addressed the others in a furtive half whisper.
“I don’t want to upset anyone more than I already have, but I think there’s more than one kind of weirdness going on here. Beyond the flying cars and new state lines, I think something might be . . . different with us. Hannah’s not the only one doing strange stuff. Look.”
He opened his drawing pad, flipping through a series of crisp white pages. “Last night, I only had three blank sheets left in this thing. Now I have eight. My last five drawings disappeared like I never did them. And then there’s this one . . .”
He turned to a rough sketch of a nerdy couple, the two lead characters of his comic strip.
“This used to be finished. Now it’s not. I lost about a half hour of pencil work. That’s the kind of glitch that happens on computers, not paper.”
“What makes you think you caused it?” David asked.