I was lucky enough that everyone was in the living room when I darted into the kitchen. I picked up the plate and silverware Pel had left out for me and took it with me into the car. I nearly wept at the deliciousness of the chocolate-cinnamon-banana pancakes she’d made for us, like she always did whenever the weekend came rolling around. I’d gone into the garage without so much as saying a word goodbye. The single sector of the chocolate-drizzled glory on my allotted plate was a potent reminder of what I’d have to deny myself these next few days, especially if I ended up spending a night or two at the hospital until I got a better understanding of my condition and the threats it posed.

I stuffed the food down my gullet while sitting in my car. I found that I was strangely hungry. I quite literally licked the plate clean. I set it down on the floor of the front passenger seat; I could return it when I got back from work. I revved up the engine with a wave of my hand over the ignition scanner. Even though my dead stomach was a gangrenous scrotum putrefying inside my bell, I was still able to bear the full weight of foreboding settling at its bottom.

Objectively—in my professional neuropsychiatric opinion—I was in no position to drive. Honestly, I probably wasn’t even cut out for work, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Well, I did, but there weren’t any good ones. Working the weekend shift was the price I’d paid for freeing up the necessary room in my schedule to go see Rayph’s play. Also, since I was almost surely infected by the same contagion afflicting Merritt and Kurt, being at the hospital where I could be treated if push came to shove was as much in my family’s interest as it was in my own. Besides… I needed to be at the hospital, for Merritt’s sake…

And Kurt’s…

And Letty’s…

And Heggy’s…

…And… I gulped, my own.

I drove out onto Angeltoe Street, trying not to think about it all. The air was thick with morning fog that had rolled in from off the bay. It clung to the hills and valleys in and around Elpeck like the smoke and incense from a censer at morning Convocation.

Speak of the Church…

I’d gotten into the habit of driving past ours on the weekends. Holy Moon on the Hill was the centerpiece of our suburban Angelical parish. The streamlined building sat on a plateau in the hills. It had a topiary garden on one side and an asphalt parking lot on the other. Its spire was more like a silver surfboard than a traditional church spire, equipped with a minimalist clock-face above a stylized icon of the Angel. Of the four of us, Pel was the only member of our nuclear family who attended church to any degree of regularity. I had no doubt she was there now, partaking in the liturgy and the pastor’s Testament sermon. As for myself, as Father Mothman put it, I was the most regular irregular he’d ever seen. I’d disappear for months at a time, only to show up unexpectedly, when I felt the pull of the Angel’s call from the depths of my despair.

If faith was struggle, as the famous saying went, I might have been the most devout Lassedile of all time.

Yeah, right. I sighed, and kept on driving.

But, as I drove past, I noticed something was off. The lot was half-empty; that was utterly unheard of. The side-streets were similarly bereft of parked cars. There was barely anyone here. Normally, they would be packed tight with the cars of all the parishioners who hadn’t won the raffle and gotten the privilege of a space in the church lot. I counted only one couple making their way toward the church. The wife was in her weekend best: a Republic blue dress with a feathered hat and a veil of black beads. After parking in the church lot, the fineness of one’s clothes was the next best means of demonstrating piety to one’s Luminer and to one’s fellow parishioners.

Needless to say, as uneasy as I already felt, our church’s eerie emptiness did not make things any better. I turned on the radio with a tap of the dashboard console. I had many channel presets; I hit the one that set the radio to NPR.

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“With infections emerging even in the cloistered villages of Transdalusia, the Arakan authorities and the Biyadi insurgents have begun to make overtures for a ceasefire.”

They were still on their morning news time block.

I turned the knob to raise the volume.

“Though neither the Arakan government nor the insurgents have shown any inclination of ceding their claims of justified ownership of the mountains of Transdalusia, it seems that for the time being, fears of an impending outbreak have brought disquieted peace to the war-torn region, though for how long, only time can tell.”

I turned onto Seacrest Boulevard. The city and its spires of glass and steel came into view as I rounded the side of the hill. They stuck out above cypresses’ twining branches, rising through the fog like islands in the gray-hued sea. The trees looked frailer than I remembered them. Stray branches had broken off here and there, littering the roadside. To my shock and horror, the bodies of Seacrest parrots were scattered among them like shattered turquoise. The birds were popular pets, and over the years, escapees had established flocks in the hills. They were gregarious, intelligent, and tended to look out for one another. You hardly ever saw them as roadkill.

“In other news,” NPR continued, “in the Costranaks, anxiety reigns in downtown Vaneppo. Spontaneous protests continue to rage in the aftermath of last week’s heinous killing of black Costranak protestors by President Fuantanto’s private guards.”

The Expressway onramp was dead ahead.

“Local sources detail a growing rift in the Diamondback movement. In the past four hours alone, protest organizers have been fraught with division over whether or not to continue their demonstrations in light of DAISHU’s declaration of the global NFP-20 pandemic earlier this morning.”

NFP-20? Is that what they’re calling it?

I had to wait for the light to change before I could drive onto the onramp. I hovered my finger over the wheel-tuck icon. Yes, the wheels were supposed to tuck in automatically as they passed over the sensor in the onramp, but given all the insanity that had been coming my way, I didn’t feel like leaving that up to chance.

Yes, my lucky bowtie was powerful, but tempting fate was never wise.

I pushed my foot down on the pedal as the light changed, and my dead, beating heart leapt out of my chest as a car vroomed past me in an egregiously illegal turn, startling me enough that my emotions got the better of me.

I shook my fist at the discourteous driver, and then yelled “Jerk!” as pointedly as I could.

In that moment, the unease that had been building in me all morning long raged, frothed, and finally spilled over.

Over, and out.

As the rude man’s car passed by, something leapt out of me. It was like I was having a daydream and then that daydream went mad, leapt out of my head and off my skull and straight through the windshield, leaving me with recoil in the form of a minor headache. The angry thought was like a fabric woven from sound. But I didn't see it with my eyes, nor did I hear it with my ears. What I saw, I “saw” in the same way that you saw your parents’ younger selves beneath the sags and wrinkles of their faces in old age. I “heard” it the way I heard the notes of an old etude playing from memory between my ears.

The thought hit the car and made the car move. Wheels and driver screeched as an invisible force thrust the vehicle a couple feet back toward the intersection. As my car’s wheels tucked beneath the chassis, I watched the jerk’s car bash into the front bumper of the vehicle coming out from behind it. Recoil dominoed down the line of waiting cars. Fenders got bent. Airbags discharged. Horns honked and brayed.

The sights zipped upside down and then right-side up again as my car levitated, loop-de-looping along the magnetic current. Then my car leveled out onto the mag-lev road, and the g-forces ebbed. I was literally floating on air, but I was shivering in terror.

Nothing made sense anymore.

I felt numb. Numb and dead.

This has to be a dream.

Locking eyes with my reflection in the rear-view mirror, for a frozen instant, I saw something dark slither across my irises. Panicking, I yelped and lost hold of the steering wheel, and my car yawed from side to side in a wide berth while other hovercars zoomed by.

It was yesterday’s drive home all over again.

I grabbed hold of the steering wheel, squeezed hard and held fast, my dead heart racing in my chest as I wrestled with physics to get the car back under my control. Finally, I did, and I shuddered with relief. Still, blood thrummed through my temples, and every fiber of my being told me it wasn’t mine.

“Mr. Genneth?” Andalon said.

I did a double take, and my eyes settled on the front passenger seat.

Oh God…

“Mr. Genneth?”

She’s baaa-aack.