Beth scanned her rescuers. The older man sat across from her, scratching his beard as he peered out of the window. He sat beside a thin black man with the sides shaved off of his hairdo. He was watching out the opposite window, his hand gripped on a gun she hadn’t noticed at first. Another man sat in the passenger seat. He was white with blond hair and a short beard that covered the entirety of his lower jaw. The woman in the driver’s seat had medium-length blue hair, but that was all Beth could see from behind her.
“Who are you?” she managed to ask after five minutes of driving and swerving in silence.
The older man looked back at her, not too concerned with what he saw outside the window. He smiled as warmly as he could manage, but it was clear that adrenaline still ran strong through his veins.
“We’re friends,” he replied.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe.”
Beth didn’t ask for any elaboration. “Somewhere safe” was the only place she wanted to be, and she didn’t care too much about the particulars. After the scene at the Fog house, she wanted to crawl away anywhere dark and warm and cry herself to sleep. She wanted to vanish from the world while it carried on with its petty squabbles without her. Nothing felt safe anymore. She felt like every corner held another enemy, and every dark shadow concealed another struggle.
The older man read her face as they drove on.
“I promise we’ll tell you more when we get there,” he told the detective. “I’m sure you have all kinds of questions.”
Beth looked at the small key-sized device the older man still pinched onto. He saw where her eyes led and seemed a little surprised himself, like he forgot it was even there.
“How did you do that to Tarov?” Beth asked. She indicated the device with a raise of her eyebrows.
“This thing?” the older man said, like she asked about a casual knick-knack on his mantle place. “It’s a frequency-specific E.M.P. emitter. It’s tuned to Tarov and nothing else, but is capable of stunning his processes — or, as you saw — shutting them down altogether. It’s been a useful device in our fight against him.”
“Did you kill him?” Beth said.
The older man seemed amused. “Oh, no. If only,” he answered. “We just overloaded the shells he was in and made them inoperable. His backups still all exist, and are probably on their way to the Fog house with new bodyshells this moment.”
Beth didn’t say anything in response. She was still under the slight impression that she was in a dream and she would wake up at one point, still on the dirty Fog house floor.
Do you trust them? Beth asked, remembering the digital passenger she carried along in her brain.
“They managed to save us from Tarov,” Simon replied. “I don’t know what they want, but I trust them further than I would anyone else at this point. Just be careful, okay?”
I’ll try.
The van fell silent again, so Beth took to watching out the window. The buildings they drove past were getting smaller and more spaced apart. She didn’t recognize the area, but she could tell that they were driving out of the city and into the ruinous wilds that made up most of the non-urban parts of the country. As they drove on, the buildings started falling into worse and worse disrepair. Bricks spilled out onto cracked and pitted streets while streetlamps that nearly fell out of their bases watched from above. The paint used on the outsides of houses or on the signs of small businesses was faded and chipped.
They drove through a few patches of undeveloped land between the empty shells of ghost towns. It had been years since Beth had seen a field of grass or a patch of forest, so she looked at the spectacles with the eyes of childhood wonder.
Eventually, they arrived in an abandoned town a few hours away from the city. The woman driving started decelerating as they made their way through the ruined streets, around sundered houses and those that had become overgrown with weeds and vines. Before long, the vehicle pulled into park and the engine turned off.
“We’re here,” the older man told Beth.
She looked out the window. They were in front of a somewhat large corner building that had a sun-faded sign declaring it as the Monarch Urgent Care. The whole front was made up of large glass windows and doors, but most of these were boarded up with some basic plywood and left to collect dust.
Beth followed the others out of the vehicle after they slid the door open. It felt almost like they were jumping from a helicopter in succession. She stared at the front of the building for a moment while the two younger men and the woman who drove the van walked up to its entrance.
“It’s pre-Universal Connectivity,” the older man said, the last out of the van. He noticed the detective studying the health clinic, scowling as if she didn’t trust the building itself. “Abandoned before it could even open for business. They didn’t see a single patient in here, but they built the place up like they were going to treat millions. We’ve found it to be a comfortable and secure place to lie low while out here in the boonies. Someplace with the comforts of home — at least, almost.”
Beth noticed how a couple of barricades were set up on the side streets that ran beside the health clinic. They were strategically placed to keep anyone from sneaking up on them, but made of such random junk and placed in such a haphazard manner that no one would think it to be a deliberate security measure to protect something of value. There was more reinforcement on the side windows that Beth could see, which she imagined let light into the numerous examination rooms. The
