Chapter 1: Down the Street (no sex)

Sonja already hated California with all passion she could muster. She despised the fake grass and winding mountain roads that looked more like car commercials than anything normal people would use. As she stared out the window of her mother's BMW, she couldn't help thinking of California as a country in itself, something foreign to the comfort of her home in Illinois. She watched unfamiliar stores and restaurants blur past the car windows. The national chains were the sole reminder that she was still in the United States, but there were too many places she never heard of it. She slumped back into her seat and sighed dramatically.

Her mother didn't respond. Instead, she drove with her concentration alternating between the road and a printed map on her right thigh. The GPS had died getting them through Colorado.

Sonja glared at her for a moment before shuffling through well-worn magazines and empty candy wrappers in the back seat. Nothing caught her interest. With a silent snarl, she kicked at the MP3 player on the floor. It bounced off the door, then off her thigh before it skidded around on the floor mat. The kick did nothing to help the growing frustration.

Next to her, her mother made a soft grunting noise before she said, "Don't do that, honey."

Sonja grunted in response and folded her arms across her chest. Her breasts squeezed inside her t-shirt and pulled the front of her shirt from her jean shorts.

Outside, the stores stopped between one street and another. On the other side were houses, hundreds of houses in cookie-cutter shapes. Each slightly different: a different shade of color or some different way of framing the windows. But, somehow the same house over and over again. A sense of despair grew and she lashed out with her foot, slamming into the floor of the car.

Her mother grunted and spoke in a painfully patient voice, "Now honey, don't break that. It was expensive."

For a moment, Sonja didn't know if her mother talked about the MP3 player or the car. After a second, she decided her mother valued the car more, but didn't attempt to kick the player again. Once she got fresh batteries for it, it would live again. With a disgusted grunt, Sonja looked down at the dozen drained batteries on the ground and shook her head.

The nearly identical houses faded away into older homes. As the blocks flew by, the houses grew larger and moved further back from the road, disappearing behind trees and gardens. Sonja could almost see the history, but it didn't mean anything to her besides reminding her how foreign everything looked. Houses were houses, but she wasn't home.

Sonja spotted the street name she remembered from the map. "Mom?"

"Not now, honey."

"But, we just passed the street." She peered over her shoulder to her mother.

"No, we didn't," declared her mother as she brandished the map. "I know exactly where I am. Now, shut up and let me drive."

"But-"

"Not... now."

Sonja returned her gaze to the window and focused on her reflection. Faint and translucent, the ghost-like image looked back with the buildings passing through it. Her dark eyes were almost a sea-green except for darker streaks. Black mascara gave her a deep look, which matched well with the dark red hair that covered her shoulders. She had a few darker strands and sighed again, her natural black streaks were showing through the hair color. Tugging on one of them, she twisted it around while staring out at the houses that passed.

She considered reminding her mother about the passed road, but one look at her mother's concentration changed her mind.

The houses disappeared after fifteen minutes and soon only trees and clearings were visible. The asphalt turned to broken, poorly maintained road. The car shook and bounced as her mother raced along it. For a brief moment, it looked like Illinois again, with its ragged potholes and abandoned roads.

Her mother grunted and slowed down the car. "What the fuck is this?"

Pulling herself away from the window, Sonja saw an immense bridge ahead. A score of flashing road barriers and cones blocked the road and her mother pulled in front of them, turning the car so she could get a better view. Sonja unbuckled her seat belt to peer past her mother at the bridge beyond.

Her mother grumbled as she pulled out the map. "How did I miss...?"

Her voice trailed off as she spoke. Sonja waited for her mother to finish the sentence, but then the shrill ring of a cell phone filled the car before the words came out. Groaning, Sonja yanked open the door as her mother fished it out from her jacket pocket and answered it.

"Gwen here."

Sonja managed to get out of the car before her mother started up with a building tirade. "No! I said that you needed to kick the servers over to the San Diego data center and get them working there! No... no... no! I said move them, don't order new ones. I don't care if they want to charge us. We own those boxen," her mother always used that word to describe computers, "and they are damn-"

The noise muted when Sonja slammed the door shut. Turning around from her mother's car, she tugged her t-shirt down over her taut belly and tucked it into her shorts. She padded away from the car. Her sandals slapped against the road, audible even over the sounds of birds screaming at each other and the buzz of insects. She kept walking until her mother's voice faded into incomprehensibility.

A warm wind, smelling almost fruity, brushed across her and Sonja focused her attention on the bridge: a wooden suspension bridge from an earlier century. Curiosity growing, she shuffled over to the old construction.

Up close, she could almost feel the age of the bridge. Immense timbers were barely held together with rusted brackets and wooden dowels. A faded caution sign stood in the middle, a few yards away from the ragged end of the bridge. She walked around the sign to inspect the blackened ends of the bridge. Grabbing on to one, she leaned over the edge and peered into the valley below.

A deep gouge in the earth plunged in shadows. Sonja saw ragged rocks on both sides of the valley. Briefly, she wondered if she could climb down, but as she thought about it, a rock broke off and bounced into the darkness, crunching for a few seconds before growing silent. Beyond the valley, she could see the other side of the bridge. It flashed with road barriers and they looked newer than the ones on this side. Even though the valley stretched a few hundred feet away, it was worlds apart.

A battered metal sign bolted to the side of the bridge caught her attention. Brown with mud, road dust, and rust, she couldn't read it. The breeze rocked it and she couldn't resist. Walking over, she scraped at the dust and mud with a stick. It was blackened from the same fire that ruined the bridge. Only a few letters were visible: an "o" and "tt." Shaking her head, she wiped her fingers on her jean shorts.

Turning around, she jumped when she saw someone standing by the bridge. It was a man, slightly on the portly side, but not quite fat. He had a graying beard with a slight swarthy look to him. In the right light, he almost looked like a terrorist or a hermit in the middle of the woods. The leather bomber jacket a few decades short of a wash didn't help the wild look. He looked like a stalker or a murderer. That thought worried her and she stepped away from him, circling around.

He smiled warmly and dug into his pocket for something. "You seem to be a tad lost."

He spoke with a warm, rumbling voice, not what she expected him to sound like. Part of her expected to hear him sound like a hillbilly, rough voice from smoking and moonshine. Instead, he sounded cultured or at least educated. Sonja's concern faded minutely but she still confirmed that her mother sat in the BMW only twenty feet away.

"Yeah... my mother took a wrong turn."

As she spoke, he lifted his hand in sight and held a thick cigar to his lips. The smells of tobacco wafted across her as the tip glowed cherry for a moment. Grinning, he exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke and gestured to the bridge with smoking cigar. "Obviously. Where are you trying to go?"

Relaxing, Sonja took a step to the side and leaned against the side of the bridge. For a moment, she waited for him to look at her teenage body---like most men did---but his eyes didn't even twitch away from her face. She decided he must be gay or too old to appreciate teenage girls.

Then, she remembered his question and answered, "Talhoma Drive."

"Oh, in the old district. I know the area."

Pointing back the way they came, he gave her directions that would lead back to the turn she saw before. Sonja nodded in the right places and thanked him. When he finished, she asked, "Where did this bridge go?"

To her surprise, he frowned and shook his head. "You don't want to think about that."

"Why?"

One finger pointed out across the valley, "All that is private property. Part of Dolcett County, those folks are very," he shook his head, "peculiar about their privacy."

"How do they get over there? The bridge is out."

"A different bridge, of course. Not like they can fly over this valley."

Sonja blushed and glanced across the valley for a moment, trying not to dwell on the obvious answer to her question. The other side seemed to be still in a different world from her but it took on a sinister appearance. She shivered despite the heat. A strange, morbid sense of longing filled her.

As if reading her mind, the older man grunted. "And I wouldn't consider going over there yourself."

"Oh? Why?"

"Well," he said exhaling cigar smoke, "I said they value their privacy. And that includes shooting trespassers. There is also the valley down there," he gestured with a flick of the cigar, "A lot of teenagers end up dying when they get drunk and cross it. Between the rock falls and flash floods, this area loses a few teens a year."

"That's horrible!"

"There are signs for a reason. Kids about your age think you are immortal, immune to anything and this is a dangerous place. I bet you're barely old enough to smoke, aren't you?"

He gave her a hard look and Sonja felt a blush rising again. It felt like he was appraising her as a hunk of meat. She turned eighteen only a few short weeks before and was used to admiring looks, but the stranger's inspection had none of the creepy overtones of dirty old men. It was functional, efficient, like being a cattle in a state fair. She cleared her throat to distract him. "W-Why doesn't anyone do something?"

"What? Besides put up signs, tell everyone, and basically make it clear that it's dangerous? I guess they got tired of wasting their money on kids too stupid to read."

"Is there a lot of trespassing?"