Excerpt

A dream had driven me here, from the rolling hills of California’s wine country, across the brash peaks of the Rockies, to the softer, gentler grace of the Appalachians. I’d avoided the buses and trains. They wouldn’t have gotten me here anyway. The passenger rail and bus lines ended miles away, in larger towns where their services were needed. Public transportation wasn’t even a thing in this empty space between sprawling Ohio metropolises. Hitchhiking was.

My bouts with anxiety made mass transportation difficult anyway.

I slid out of the aging F150’s passenger seat and let my booted feet drop onto the concrete, wincing as the left one hit too hard and pain reverberated up my bad leg. The truck’s driver, a woman with kind green eyes in a freckled face and streaks of white in her fiery hair, leaned across the console and patted a work-roughened hand against the worn seat.

“You be careful out there, hon,” she said. “And just holler if you need me. You got my number now, right?”

I smiled as I swung my backpack onto my shoulder over a thick canvas coat. “Yes, ma’am. Thanks for bringing me this far.”

“Anytime, hon.”

I closed the door and stepped back, lifting a gloved hand in a half-hearted wave as the woman beeped and drove away. To pick up her grandkids from school, then back to the horse farm she ran with her husband. Her name was Lou Unger. She was a good woman, a kind woman. Church going, PTA volunteer. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, she bought extra food at the local grocery store and dropped it into the collection box at the entrance, and on the following Friday at precisely five thirty-eight in the evening, her aging F150 would be rear-ended and pushed off the road by a black sedan with tinted windows.

It didn’t always work like that, the seeing. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. But this time, Lou had laughed and touched her fingers to my arm, and bits and pieces of her future flashed through me. The sedan speeding toward the F150, the shock on her face as the steering wheel jerked under her hands. The truck’s tires bouncing over the grassy verge, and stark terror as shadowy faces surrounded her.

Then darkness and the thready beat of Lou’s heart, and bone chilling emptiness.

Anxiety squeezed my own heart into a patter, and I breathed through it. The future was so uncertain, so fragile. When it came, it came in flashes of light and emotion, like a memory eroded by time. I never knew when it would touch me, or what I’d see, or even when those wisps of the future would occur.

I’d long ago stopped asking why.

Discerning Lou’s character? That had been easy. I’d known the minute the F150 pulled over outside of Columbus that the driver was safe, solely by the feel of her. That was something I always knew. This time I’d just gotten more, seen more, than I’d expected.

Once Lou’s truck was out of sight, I turned toward the convenience store outlined by the mountains beyond. Snow later, if the chill in the air meant anything here, snow and a bitter wind. A rusted sign advertising Standard Oil flapped against a metal post and neon lights flickered in the store’s window, buzzing loud enough for me to hear all the way across the parking lot.

Something stirred in the back of my mind, attempting to align indistinct images with the view. I narrowed my gaze on the two modern gas pumps, waiting for that click, knowing better than to push. Maybe this store would be the one from the dream. Maybe here I’d find the faces that had woken me in the dead of night, screaming because I couldn’t help them. Screaming because I could only foresee their fate, not keep them from it.

A breeze brushed across the parking lot, lifting the Standard Oil sign in a creak of rusted hinges, and the vision dissipated into the ether.

This wasn’t the place. Damn it.

Sighing, I shrugged under the backpack and started walking toward the store, trying not to limp. The winter sun had already touched the bare mountaintops, bringing with it the cold of night. If I wanted to find shelter for the evening, I needed to get back on the road, let the dream push me farther along.

South, maybe. That’s where the pull came from this time.

I glanced at the mountains framing the building and the pinkening sky above. There was just enough time to find food before night fell. If a good driver came along, maybe they could take me to the next town over before I was completely worn down.

Lou’s face popped into my mind, not the smiling empathy of her goodbye, but the one I’d seen when she’d touched me, and I stopped dead in my tracks five feet from the welcoming warmth of the store’s interior. I couldn’t do anything about her, couldn’t intervene in a way that would keep her from harm. The visions weren’t a warning. They were just…there. What happened to Lou with her kind heart and steady eyes and a husband and their horse farm and three school-aged grandchildren she was raising because her daughter had fallen in with the wrong crowd and abandoned her kids…

I swore under my breath and reached for the door. Whatever was waiting for me south of here could wait another few days. Just until I figured out what to do about Lou.