"Come on, kid," Tommy Hill says, lighting a new cigarette. "There is nothing here. Lets get back. I gotta be somewhere."
There's nowhere you gotta be, she thinks. That's like your whole thing. You can be anywhere you damn want at any point in time.
She scans the stretch of the railroad for the hundredth time, stubbornly.
But he's right.
There is nothing here.
Just an old empty cabin full of trash, a ruin of a mill and a normal, run of the mill, working railroad.
Then what the fuck was that vision? Chloe with her foot stuck in the points, a train, a giant owl thing? Was it just that stupid new drug Tommy brought from somewhere?
Fucking asshole.
But what about the knife? Chloe's knife, covered in blood, in the junk shack? That wasn't the drug.
Where the fuck is she?
She pulls out her phone. Nothing new on it. Her bracelet is not on her wrist.
Now where is that fucking bracelet?
She catches movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns to look, there is just Tommy, astride his Indian. But then something moves again, in the trees behind the hut, it seems, though as soon as she tries to see what it is, there is nothing there.
What the fuck?
Shaking her head, she takes a step towards it, then another, and here it is again, except this time it isn't something in the woods, it's the emptiness, the air, the space between her and the woods that's moving, stretching, sloping, and suddenly loses her balance and falls forward, towards it and into it, down, down, spiraling into a deafening darkness.
A crack of thunder wakes her.
She is on the ground, in the darkness, soaking wet, shivering. It's raining buckets.
She doesn't know where she is, how she got there. She gets up, looks down at her hands, as if to make sure it's her hands. They are her hands, but her bracelet is missing.
Memories fade in, blurry, like paintings running in the rain.
Tommy and his bike, railroad tracks veering off towards the water, abandoned cabin.
Did that just happen or was it a year ago? Better yet, was it a dream?
She can't tell.
She tries to remember more, some detail that she's missing that will clear everything up, but there is only dark fog between her and those memories, with shadowy shapes moving in it. She recalls a dark place, empty. A place where she could not see her hands even as they touched her face.
Then thunder cracks again, and she remembers Chloe.
Chloe in danger.
She spins around, inside a circle of tree trunks hanging from a ceiling of dark water, and sees it.
Fire.
It looks like a campfire nearby. She has no idea how it's managing to stay aflame in this downpour.
She runs towards it.
Tries to, anyway. You can't really run in the dark woods, not unless you want to put an eye out or break an ankle. So she advances. Makes her way, slipping in mud, while trying to puzzle out what exactly happened to her.
For a time, she's neither getting closer to the answers nor to the fire.
Drugs?
It's like she's running in place. She almost stops.
But then she realizes that the fire is farther away than she thought.
And that it's much larger than a campfire.
Soon she recognizes what it is: a barn on fire.
As she gets close, it becomes so bright that she misses the short wooden fence encircling the property, until she runs straight into it. Something cracks, either the old plank or her rib. Her rib is the one that hurts like a bastard. Wincing, she wraps herself over the obstacle, falling into dirt and groaning.
There is a muscle car parked in front of the barn. Too close to it, in fact. Next to the car, a man is sitting in a puddle with his head in his hands.
"Hello?" she calls, rising to her feet. "Hey."
He lifts his head and turns towards her. She can't see his face in the shadow of the fire, but she recognizes him when she hears, "Whateverthefuck? R-Rachel?"
"Nathan?"
He jumps to his feet.
"Jesus Christ."
In the light of the fire, she suddenly sees that there is a gun in his right hand.
"What are you doing with that? What's going on?"
He looks down at it.
"Huh? Oh fuck."
He drops it into the puddle, then looks as though he's about to reach for it again.
"Is it really you?" he asks, narrowing his eyes.
"Yeah, it's me. Who did you expect?"
"Not you. I thought you were… Look. Shit's been crazy. I don't know what happened. They were here, and Stella, and then the shooting started, and the fire, and I think she's in there still."
"What? Who's in there? Stella? Stella Hill?"
A roof beam crashes inside, setting off a shower of sparks and making the whole building groan.
"No. Price. I told her… It wasn't my..."
"Price? Chloe Price is in there?" She points.
And then she's running towards the doors, not waiting for his answer. He does shout something behind her, but she doesn't hear. The door is about the only thing left that's not actively on fire. There is an old wagon wheel wedged against it, which she flings away with barely a pause. As she pulls the door open and runs inside, the heat hits her like liquid, and after being soaked by the cold rain it feels almost good. No, not almost, she realizes curiously. It actually feels good. Reviving. Like she's been freezing for a year. No time to enjoy it, though.
"Chloe!" she screams.
There is no sign of her. There is very little sign of anything, because everything is on fire. In the middle, there is a carcass of a pickup truck, on fire. On the left, there is a tractor or something, on fire. All of the pillars are on fire. The collapsed beam is lying across the floor on the right, and on the other side of it, she spots what looks like a hole in the middle of the floor that is on fire.
Taking two steps back, she vaults over the burning beam, through a wall of flame. Her sneaker doesn't quite clear it, so she tumbles over, scuffing her knees and rolling over the floor covered with burning straw. Some of it gets on her clothes.
"Shit. Chloe!"
Something else falls nearby. She reaches the hole in the floor, hoping her fall didn't set off the collapse of the whole building. There is a stairway leading down, into a smoke-filled tunnel, at the end of which she can see two figures curled up on the floor on either side of a locked metal door.
"Chloe!" She screams again, filled with a weird, though not altogether unfamiliar happiness. "Nope! We're not doing the Pompeii thing. Get up!"
Chloe is unresponsive, but she's moveable, like a mannequin. She pulls her up, then looks at the other girl, in a beanie and a windbreaker.
Take Chloe out first, her mind says, then come back for the girl.
But no, she won't. It won't work.
How about the door? Anybody home?
She pulls on it, then slaps it a few times, halfheartedly.
Fuck. What do I do?
She leans Chloe against the wall and lifts the other girl, realizing with shock that the other girl is Steph Gingrich.
Chloe and Steph, huh? When did this happen?
She didn't even know Steph was in town.
"Fuck. What am I doing?"
She wraps one arm from either of them around her neck, grabs them both around the waist and starts to move them back towards the stair. It's getting harder to breathe, and they're barely moving, but somehow they are moving. Their bodies seem to be moving their feet occasionally, though mostly it feels like she's carrying, dragging both of them along.
It gets much harder on the stair.
She has to take them up one at a time, which takes almost everything she has. There is no straw left on the floor outside the hatch, just ash.
Where it got harder on the stairs, it becomes impossible back in the barn. The beam that was blocking her way is still there, and stuff on fire keeps raining down from the ceiling.
There is no way she vaults over the beam with even one of the girls in tow. She tries to rouse Chloe, slapping her face, but it's not happening. The sleeve of Chloe's jacket catches fire, then her pants.
Rachel screams in frustration, slapping the fire away with her bare hands.
There is a gust of wind.
Another beam, bigger than the last one, crashes from the roof right above them. It lands, exploding into sparks, on one burning end, then tumbles like a chopped down tree into the barn wall, opening a hole to the outside.
"Oh shit. That's our cue. Come on, Price!"
She drags both of them out through the hole into the yard, past the muscle car, collapsing near the fence, just as the building folds inward behind them.
"Fuck. That was too close."
Lying on her back, she realizes with shock that it's daylight. It was middle of the night a minute ago and now it looks like early fucking evening. It's not raining, either.
What the fuck is going on here.
She lies there, panting, until she realizes that the girls probably need help.
Where is Nathan? She looks around, but there is no sign of him.
Scrambling up, she gets to Chloe first, who is not moving.
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No fucking way, Price. You wake up."
She looks for pulse and finds it, though weak. She listens for her heart and it's there in the distance, but her breath she can't hear. Pinching her nose with her fingers, she envelopes her lips with her own and blows.
"Come on, Chloe. Wake up. Wake up, Price."
Inhaling deeply, she does it again. There is a sound, and a shudder, and she pulls away just in time to dodge vomit rising out of Chloe's throat. She throws up and rolls to her side and throws up again.
"You bitch," Rachel whispers, grinning. She remembers Steph with a jolt, but Steph is moving on her own.
She kneels next to Chloe again, whose eyes are off on adventure around the world, until finally they converge on her position.
"Rachel," Chloe declares. "Rachel Amber."
"Hello, Chloe Price. Figures that when I finally found you it'd be in a burning building."
Chloe stares up at her in shock, then curls up into a big blue-haired punk fetus shaking with laughter.