It only took Dan and Jennifer about twenty minutes to find the nearest road, but that hardly helped. The road itself was a winding gravel affair that stretched endlessly through the woods. The snow covering the road itself was unmarred by tire tracks as far as Dan could see. He didn’t really know where he was or how much time had passed since the snow had fallen, but standing around wouldn’t get them any closer to Jennifer’s father.
At first they walked in silence, the only sound the snow crunching under their feet as their breath clouded the air. Even the trees seemed to hold their breath as the two of them padded through the brisk winter air. Finally, Jennifer broke the silence.
“Now that we’re here, I don’t even really know what to say to him,” she whispered to herself, staring ahead at the empty road.
“I know how that is.” Dan chuckled. “It’s the same story every time I go home to visit. My mom always wants to know if I’m dating a new girl. Whether grandkids are in the cards. As soon as I say no, she won’t stop talking about how I should move home. Apparently, my cousin Andrew has an engineering firm that’s hiring just one town over from mom. Never mind that it’s a civil engineering firm, she’ll just hound me for a resume until I fly back to the coast. I never feel like I’m actually talking to her. The only question that requires my participation is whether or not I’m going to give her grandkids. After that, you could replace me with a tortoise and the conversation would run exactly the same.”
“That wasn’t exactly how dad and I worked.” Jennifer smiled slightly. “He’d tell me about his plans for my future, and I’d tell him what he could do with those plans. Mom would try and mediate things, but usually it would end with a shouting match and me going for a walk. I don’t think he approved of video games as a concept, let alone me making a living from it. My brother could never pass a physical, so dad had all of his hopes on me joining the army to ‘fulfill the family legacy.’ Whatever the hell that meant.”
“Yet, here we are,” Dan replied. The conversation lapsed into silence for almost ten minutes before Jennifer spoke up once again.
“Maybe we’re just too alike.” Jennifer dragged her toe through the snow as she walked. “Mom would keep the peace, but both of us were fighters. Maybe I even would have joined the army if he hadn’t been such an asshole about it. The minute I stepped foot in highschool, he made me join ROTC and track. There was never any doubt in his mind about me enlisting, and that just rubbed me the wrong way.”
“But, he’s your dad.” Dan finished her unspoken line of reasoning.
“But, he’s my dad,” Jennifer agreed, a wistful smile on her face.
They walked for another two hours in silence before coming upon a small town. Really, town was a bit of an overstatement. It was more a handful of one-story houses with the paint peeling from their walls clustered around a Dollar General, two bars, and a gas station. Even in the best of times, it was hardly a bustling metropolis, but today, the town was dead. Of the four commercial buildings, only the gas station had its lights on.
Dan pushed the door open to the gentle jingle of the bells. Inside, a bored clerk looked at him and frowned. Belatedly, Dan realized that wandering into a rural gas station wearing chainmail and wielding a sword probably wasn’t the best way to escape notice. Steeling himself, he walked up to the counter, trying to ignore the clerk’s steadily-widening eyes.
“Hey,” Dan nodded to the man, trying to ignore the clerk’s eyes glued on the sword at his hip. “We’re from out of town and our car broke down. Would it be possible for us to call a cab or something?”
“Why don’t you just use an app?” the man asked nervously. “We don’t really have cabs out here, but you could try your luck with ridesharing.”
“Look,” Jennifer walked up behind Dan and put a hand on his shoulder. “We just need to get moving here. How much to buy your car and have you delete the footage of us walking in here? I can pay you in cryptocurrency right now, and then you’ll never see us again.”
The man looked back and forth between the two of them. His tongue darted nervously from behind his teeth and wet his lips.
“Are you on the run from the law or something?” His eyes were glued to Dan’s sword. “I don’t want any trouble from you guys, but I don’t want to get arrested for aiding a fugitive.”
“Name a number.” Jennifer put a hand on Dan’s arm to prevent him from responding. “Give me a number and your keys, and we just walk out of here.”
“Fifty thousand.” Regret immediately clouded the man’s face. He opened his mouth to add something but closed it without speaking.
“Give me your phone and a wallet number,” Jennifer responded immediately, fishing a card from her pocket with her left hand while she extended her right to the clerk. “Remember. We never saw you. You dropped your car keys on the ground when walking to work today. You have no idea who took your car or what happened.
He looked at her uncertainly for a moment, obviously weighing his options. Then his eyes strayed to the sword at Dan’s side, and the nervous worker gulped.
“I suppose if you rob me, it only makes sense.” He chuckled nervously, unlocking his cellphone and passing it to Jennifer. “Two strange people walk into my store with a sword and ask for my phone. At least it isn’t as bad as some of the addicts we have around here. I had a shirtless guy hand me a note saying that he had a rifle once. I just asked him where it was, and he freaked and ran.”
Jennifer cocked her head to the side, squinting at the clerk as she stopped tapping her card’s information into the banking app she had just downloaded.
“Sorry.” The other man wilted under her glare. “I just talk when I get nervous. Makes me bad at poker, but uh. Not gonna lie, the two of you are making me really nervous right now.”
Jennifer returned her attention to the phone, tapping some more buttons in silence to confirm the transaction before deleting the app altogether. She handed the phone back to the clerk.
He checked his bank balance on the phone before gulping and nodding. He briefly glanced at the camera behind the counter before tossing a set of keys onto the counter and walking toward a door marked “employees only.”
“I’m the red hatchback out front.” His voice was muted as he spoke away from them. “The video cameras are supposed to be backed up offsite, but corporate never got around to it. I guess I’m lucky that no one bothered to rob me, because it wouldn’t be that hard to just force me to delete them at gunpoint. One of the perks of working in the ass end of nowhere, I suppose.”
“Remember,” Dan called out to him as they turned to leave. “Forget you ever saw us. If they found out you took that money, there’s no way you’re going to escape an accessory charge. You’ll be in the jail cell right next to us, and we won’t be happy to see you.”
“Who the fuck is ‘they?’” The clerk squeaked in alarm, his hand on the doorknob to the back room.
“Anyone who asks,” Dan replied over his shoulder. “Especially if there are a lot of large, muscular men in suits wearing earpieces involved. Those guys are very much ‘they.’”
Jennifer picked up the keys from the counter, and with a jingle from the door, both of them were back out on the street. Sure enough, there was a beat-up red hatchback nearby. The back bumper was covered with decals for what looked like local bands, and as soon as Jennifer opened the door into its cluttered interior, both of them were assaulted by the musty smell of weed. Dan wrinkled his nose and brushed aside some fast food wrappers before flopping down in the passenger seat.
As soon as they sat down in the beat-up car, Jennifer threw Dan one of the first smiles he’d seen from her since they landed on Earth.
“You were having fun back there with that clerk.” She chuckled accusingly. “The poor guy is probably pissing his pants as he inspects every passing car, hoping it isn’t the feds.”
“Maybe a little.” Dan smiled back, picking up an empty plastic bag with what looked like flakes of oregano in it. “If he smokes this much, the paranoia certainly won’t help. Maybe that’s why he was so jumpy.”
“We’d better not get pulled over.” Jennifer wrinkled her nose at the smell as she got the car started with a sputter on her second try. “No cop in the world is going to believe that we aren’t flying sky high right now.”
“You bought a car from a gas station clerk,” Dan replied, slipping his seatbelt on. “Did you expect a BMW or something? Plus, where the hell did that fifty thousand in cryptocurrency come from? You didn’t tell me you were rich when we were hiding out in the tree.”
“I made pretty good money as a streamer near the end.” Jennifer shrugged as she pulled the car onto a country road in the general direction of a highway. “Before Henry grabbed us, I had about 25,000 subscribers. Between them and prize money from tournaments, I was clearing well over a half million a year. I mean, $50,000 is still a lot of money, but I didn’t have time to argue with that guy until he called the cops on us.”
“A half million?” Dan’s eyebrows went straight up. “Even when I thought I was rich working for Thoth, I made less than half of that. Hell, when I worked for the government, I barely made a tenth of that annually, and I had to live in Washington DC.”
“I think that’s part of what pissed Dad off,” Jennifer replied with a chuckle. “He wouldn’t shut up about how video games were a fad, and that I was ruining my life. We got into a shouting match, and I let it slip that I made twice what he did. He turned white as a sheet and just started sputtering for a full minute.
“I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for one-upping him like that.” She shook her head wistfully. “I know it’s silly beyond belief, but that’s just the sort of person he is. He just spent the rest of the weekend brooding until I flew home.”
“I think I could do with a little more brooding from my mom.” Dan snorted. “It sounds like she has about as many opinions as your dad, but she’s significantly more immune to facts. Even when I was doing well financially working at the Thoth Foundation, she would demand that I get a job closer to home because she ‘could just tell’ that my job was stressing me out too much.”
“And moving closer to home was supposed to help?” Jennifer asked, the corners of her lips curved upward in the barest of smiles.
“Apparently.” Dan rolled his eyes.
They lapsed into an easy silence, Jennifer focusing on driving while Dan watched the road for speed traps. After all, they would have a very hard time explaining why they were in someone else’s car and why they smelled like they should be solving mysteries with a talking dog companion.
After an hour or so of driving, they hit the highway and headed south. Dan fiddled with the radio, finding a station that was covering the news so he could catch up on current events. They were still almost 7 hours from DC, but the reports coming from the capital weren’t great. The defenders had managed to cordon off the capital, but the army still wasn’t moving. Worse, there were sporadic reports that the CHT had started deploying armored suits to the skirmish. The only positive news was that some of the army’s Starshield candidates had filtered up from Brazil. Dan was pretty sure he had seen Abe’s force chains holding down a CHT truck in the corner of some helicopter footage of a firefight.
At the moment, the CHT was reluctant to make a final push into the White House and capital, but Dan didn’t see how the defenders would be able to hold them off. Even with their magic activated, the Starshield candidates just didn’t have enough training to do anything too impressive. Each of them would have a magical trick or two, but the armored suits looked ominously hard to take down with only rifles and swords.
Halfway down the coast, they stopped for gas and switched drivers. The tension in Washington DC and around the world only ramped up further. Dan’s fingers dug into the cheap plastic of the steering wheel as Jennifer filled him in on London and Paris falling. Already, the internet was playing videos of mid-level politicians admitting to their governments’ misdeeds and pledging their loyalty to the CHT. Although their speeches sounded rehearsed, in a matter of hours, both the UK and France were consolidated into the burgeoning multinational entity. Whatever the CHT was doing, the pieces were slotting into place too smoothly for it to be anything but carefully planned.
They arrived in the capital just as the sun was setting. The city was still burning, abandoned vehicles littered the road, and none of the nearby buildings sported a single light in their windows. Sporadically, gunfire sounded in the distance, the only real noise disturbing the otherwise silent city. As Dan exited the car to navigate through the graveyard of discarded vehicles he couldn’t help but wonder whether the lack of lighting was due to the conflict cutting power to the neighborhood or the residents fleeing. Either way, the city itself was an eerie shadow of itself, dimly lit in flickering reds and oranges.
“Just before the last commercial break, the lady on the radio was reporting a big buildup of CHT forces.” Jennifer broke the silence from next to him.
“Do we have any idea if that’s reliable?” Dan asked before cocking his head. “Hell, do we have any idea if that means anything? I’m pretty sure the last day or so have been nothing but the CHT building up their forces.”
“Multiple people are reporting it on a couple different channels, but who knows what’s actually happening?” Jennifer turned back to him, her face grim. “That said, this sounds different. It’s not forces trickling in from the countryside. CHT forces are all gathering together and they have vehicles. One twitter user was able to grab a photo of a column of armored personnel carriers guarded by even more of those armored suits that have started popping up.”
“So, this is it?” Dan questioned worriedly, glancing over the dark and burning city.
“This is it,” Jennifer agreed.
