Jack dropped Rita beside the baggage drop-off outside the terminal building. Dazed, she handed her suitcase over, then shifted her handbag up her shoulder and walked into the check-in area. Her head was spinning. I need to talk to someone, she realized. She instinctively reached for her phone, then stopped. Wait. More of Gramps’s stories came back to her. Not here, not on my phone.
Security was the usual heaving human zoo, with people being called out for random DNA checks on either side of her and explosive sniffers buzzing around overhead. Miraculously, Rita didn’t attract any unusual attention, despite the itching implants that had triggered the body scanners on the way out. She paid no attention to the cameras that tracked her across the concourse, the Segway-riding robocops, the whole panoply of national security displayed around her. With increasing confidence she walked toward her departure gate, knees weakening with relief at the realization that in another ten hours she’d be home.
The day passed in a blur of airplane seats and security checkpoints. There was incoming e-mail on her traitor phone: she didn’t dare reply to any of it. There was a Call me when you get in from Clive-the-bastard, the boss who’d sell her out as soon as look at her. An Are you okay? from her roomie Alice, to her surprise. A note about furnace repairs from her landlord. Nothing from her most recent ex. Irrelevant yatter and babble on the social side, pleas for support from her theatrical group’s manager, marketing junk from bands she’d followed years ago. Normally the knowledge that the feds could snoop on all network traffic didn’t bother her: but having seen her phone rooted right in front of her, she felt frozen, gagged by the knowledge of an intrusive presence. And all because they thought she might be carrying the virus of the paranormal around in her genes.
They think I’ve got world-walker connections? A hysterical laugh tried to bubble up. She took hasty shallow breaths to drive it back down again before someone noticed. World-walkers were shadowy nightmare figures, twenty-first-century reds under the bed. Terrorists who could flicker in and out of reality from other worlds where history had taken a different path, bearing stolen nukes or suitcases full of heroin. The ultimate enemy, the last president but two had declared them. She just about remembered her parents and grandparents gathered around the TV, red-eyed, trying to follow the news on their PCs as well. They killed the president in 2003, back before the government had built working para-time machines to go after them. Not to mention strip-mining fossil fuels from the neighboring uninhabited parallels. Back before they canceled the War on Drugs and replaced it with the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Before the gig with HaptoTech, Rita had been too busy working to notice how her social life was shrinking and her days were sharpening to a bright workplace focus surrounded by a penumbra of exhaustion. But now, sitting on a plane with nothing else to do, all she could think about was how much of a mess her life was. She didn’t have a job anymore, let alone a career. The outside world had decided to take an unfriendly interest in her, and she felt isolated and fragile, her existence liminal. So—the DHS having bought her a first-class ticket—she drank all the wine the cabin crew would bring her, and did her best to lose herself in the stack of tired romcoms that passed for in-flight entertainment.
At least the old and shabby planes had seatback video: she didn’t know what she’d have done on a modern airliner, with nothing but a power outlet for her phone. She couldn’t have forced herself to watch movies on it knowing its front-facing camera might be watching her right back, analyzing her face for micro-expressions indicative of terrorist sympathies.
Rita passed through the Minneapolis–Saint Paul airport like a ghost and made it to her connecting flight with time to spare. It was late evening by the time she spotted her suitcase on the baggage belt at Logan, dragged it off the line with a grunt of effort, and trundled it out to the exit and thence to the Silver Line, then the Red Line all the way south.
By the time she arrived at the parking lot where she’d warehoused her auto for the past week, she was exhausted. Cumulative sleep deprivation was catching up with her as she fumbled for the key fob. Her car was a ’14 Acura hybrid her father had given her after running it for years, its battery pack halfway dead of old age and beyond her means to replace with a refurb. Hybrids were a dead-end technology anyway, killed when gas dropped below a dollar a gallon: but she loved it for its quiet start and creature comforts. Dragging her suitcase behind her, she hit the unlock button, saw the flash of her headlights reflecting off a concrete pillar, and hit the tailgate latch button.
As she did so she saw a bright blue flash—and felt a sudden breathtaking pain in her belly that doubled her over, retching. She collapsed to the parking lot floor. The pain was savage, as if she’d been clubbed, with additional cramps in her right knee and shoulder. A moment of panic. Footsteps coming toward her, then another stunning burst of pain in her stomach.
“Is she down?” someone asked.
Another voice, from a shadow bending over her: “Yup.” Hands grabbed her and lifted: two strong men frog-marched her to her car as she retched. They pushed her headfirst into the open, emptied-out trunk and she began to struggle, terrified. Kidnappers! There were two of them, both bigger and stronger than she was, and the pain from the taser was dizzying. Resistance was difficult: it was all she could do to get breath into her lungs.
A click. Darkness and pressure. She gasped for air, tried to stretch, and found herself up against the ends of the trunk. It was cold and none too clean, and still smelled faintly of dog. Something dug into her midriff. She brought up her left hand, felt a wire and something sharp sticking into her. She pulled it free, shuddering and hyperventilating in fear.
The car bounced on its suspension twice, then the doors thudded shut. Rita felt the pressure change in her ears. Her abductors seemed to be having a muffled, distant conversation, but she couldn’t make out any distinct words. She tried to roll on her back, banged her sore knee against the trunk lid with a flash of pain, and tried to remember which side the emergency tailgate release toggle was on. It was pitch black inside the trunk. Where was her handbag? They’d taken it: it contained her phone, her purse, and her ID card. Whimpering with fear, she twisted around, trying to untangle herself. The car shuddered and rocked, then began to move backward.