The Car I
Skipping every other stair, Damian glided toward the car in a way Ash had only seen from one or two other guys. I can run faster than all of them, she thought, but I will never figure out how they go down stairs like that.
Damian slid into the car and closed the door, tossing his pack into the back and pointedly handing her a water. “Ready?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said. Ash drove, crossing into the oncoming lane to get around the tiny canyon forming in front of the 7-Eleven. She locked eyes with the clerk as he left the store. They each saw their own fear reflected back, then exchanged expressions that wordlessly said shit, dude and I know, right?
Ash blew out a little air bubble of stress. “So. I’m thinking Granny’s cabin, yeah? Should be far enough East?” Ash asked.
“Yeah,” Damian agreed.
“Granny’s Cabin” didn’t belong to anyone’s Granny, at least not as far as Ash knew. It may have, once, but that area was long abandoned. They had discovered the little abode during an outing back in their school days, in the deserted eastern fields. No one had lived there since the first Unraveling, so it made for a good place to experiment with the kind of magic you didn’t want anyone else to see. Or hear. Or smell.
Ash took two lefts and a right and merged onto the freeway. The drive would take about an hour, so she flipped on cruise control and settled back into her seat.
“It was early,” Damian said after a time, breaking the silence. “We weren’t due for a new crack for, what, at least another day, right? Maybe two?”
“Yeah,” Ash agreed. “And I haven’t seen that degree of destruction before. Last time I was that close to one, stuff just kind of cracked. I could still use them. This … it like, infinity-stoned my owl. There was nothing left.”
“Gauntlet,” Damian said.
“What?” Ash asked.
“Gauntlet. The Gauntlet is what let Thanos destroy stuff. The stones were like batteries for the glove.”
“Really? We’re going to do this now?” Ash sighed, and laughed. He could be sucking his last breath and he would use it to argue about a movie detail, she thought.
Damian smirked. “But yeah, I know what you mean. I was holding that little gargoyle that I use all the time. Or used to use. It basically blew away in the wind.” He made a little pfff sound to demonstrate. “What do you think, do you think it’s getting stronger? Or were we a whole lot closer to another crack that we couldn’t see?”
The implication — that there might be a crack under the apartment building — made Ash shudder. “Hooo. I hope not. We’ve never been directly over one before. If we were, don’t you think we would have kept feeling the effects? Or … shouldn’t we have seen some sign of the crack in the building? The cracks always run straight up, too, they’ve never just gone under something.”
“That we know of,” Damian said. “But yeah, I think that’s pretty unlikely. So it’s getting stronger.” Damian cringed. “Fuck. Bob keeps saying ‘Unraveling is unpredictable,” but I had hoped that at least the basics would stay consistent.”
Damian grabbed the side of his head, wincing for a moment.
“You okay?” Ash asked. “Here I’ll pull over—“
“No, I’m okay,” Damian said. “Bob is … angry.”
Uncertain of what to say, they let the hum of the pavement fill the air for a while.
